TikTok’s Sticky Algorithm Plus Games Equals Success? - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] is the US government just going to randomly ban Tick Tock you see every other platform currently trying to copy Tick Tock as much as possible so I think whatever is going on with Tick Tock is something that is very closely watched by everybody else [Music] hi friends welcome to the metacast Roundtable by navic today I'm joined by Aaron Bush co-founder of navic and Neil Des Gupta co-founder and CPO of First Light games and Lars to say co-founder of level up Labs hi everyone hey hey howdy howdy everyone doing okay during the summer doing all right only got sick twice yeah I'm a little under the weather today but how was uh how was your Norway trip Lars

that's pretty good I mean I mostly stayed with my family in rural areas so I didn't really get out to see the big cities but um strawberries are in season which is amazing so it was good nice do you eat your strawberries with something yeah sugar and cream just Norwegians are pretty insane about about their strawberries um some pretty intense experience it's like if you're not eating strawberries then you will be eating them shortly I've heard strawberries with sugar and then strawberries with cream but sugar and cream that sounds great yeah Anil the last Royal Vita is out how's that going it's going great as the game's developer when people actually get to play your game that you spent sort of months years working on that's always the greatest feeling it's really good to see people giving us like live feedback and something that I really like about kind of doing games this way is that rather than taking sort of two or three years to develop your game in silence and then releasing it and hoping people will like

it is that this time around we've released our game quite early and we have like a community that's already actively engaged in it and they're telling us what they like and what they don't like and then we can make a quick change and then we can improve it and I'm finding it as like a games developer like a very rewarding experience it's actually like the most excited I've been to work on the game in quite a long time and I think it's as much the process as much as the game so hopefully we'll be able to keep that momentum but it's going great just because of that it's like you know imagine it was a game that you were really excited about and you actually got to have like direct input into the development team and help shape it into a better product that's what we're trying to do with our title and um yeah it's great I mean sometimes they let you know like things that they think suck about the game but then you've just got to take those L's right and you've got to turn them into W's and I like it both ways and we actually just did the stream earlier today we do it once a week where we play people in the community and we have like a tournament and they often get prizes like for killing me which means that as soon as the match starts there's like 20 people right on my ass it's just kind of hilarious but yeah I'm really enjoying

it and I the one thing like I say is I really hope that might come from this is that I guess it's a bit of like a kind of like a matrix moment of like what if everything we knew was wrong and the correct way to make games is actually to be more inclusive with your audience instead of like second guessing them and it would be nice if there's like a room for that to kind of work but hey that could maybe be another topic for today cool I'm really glad it's going well and you're seeing benefits from the process we'll just be waiting for the when game on don't pressure you to answer now oh I'm not going to give it away unfortunately you have to subscribe to another premium if you want to get that information all right so for today's topics we're going to do a quick hitting earnings update Google's new interstitution interstitial ads rules and we're going to be looking at tick tocks games and also Google stadia may be shutting down who knows so we're going to dive into that all right Aaron we've been having some

little recording issues um but Erin I hope you can get through your topic with success all right well wish me luck so today I want to recap some recent earnings news um we'll talk about Activision Blizzard Ubisoft and how Xbox and Sony are doing maybe another time we can do a part two with other companies because you know even just yesterday EA and Nintendo reported but since there's quite a bit here we'll have to move pretty quickly through each of these but let's go ahead and start with Activision which is probably the least interesting from the standpoint that not a whole lot has changed as everyone knows the company has faced pretty troubling cultural issues which not only led to some lack of productivity in certain parts of the org but it caused employee turnover including leadership and these factors have led to delays of games like OverWatch 2 and Diablo 4 among other things it's also been tough because the latest Call of Duty missed the mark and has been seriously underperforming and the company had to recently buy

proletariat to get more Developers for World of Warcraft because that team couldn't keep up with the needed uh content treadmill and lost market share so even though mobile results were actually quite okay both King did relatively well and obviously Diablo Immortal had a pretty good launch even if you have some questions about its long-term scale uh it wasn't enough to really make up for slowdowns and a loss of players elsewhere the company will be fine they'll rebound from this the so-called Call of Duty strategy of taking a killer IP and building a larger ecosystem around it that'll continue to play out even though I saw it today actually that their World of Warcraft mobile game or at least one of them that they're partnered with neti's for that's been developed for the past couple years Zone got canceled so so that's not awesome but wow but anyways all of that is kind of secondary to the the larger part of the story which is um that they're still waiting for the acquisition from Microsoft to get approved and really based on logic

there's no real reason Regulators should say no and it really makes more sense for the rules if there needs to be needs to be made around how exclusives work rather than blocking a deal altogether but even though um yeah which I we'll see how it goes because you know we saw recently also with meta which tried to buy a VR Fitness Company you know even though the FTC staff in the US recommended that the deal should be allowed because it's all super nascent the FTC commissioner Lena Khan said no because she doesn't want meta to own the metaverse which anyone paying attention knows that isn't happening and often Europe makes even less sense and it's and it's decision making with regulation so who knows exactly how this will really shake out but that's that's what we're waiting for um so yeah I just I guess I'll pause for a moment and ask does anyone have thoughts on

you know whether the deal will get approved or not or am I being overly cynical in my take about the incompetence and bias of of regulators well I think there's kind of an appetite in the current regulatory environment that has kind of taken a historical change from previous ones that have been pretty kind of rubber Stampy when it comes to mergers to take kind of a much more aggressive uh anti-consolidation stance you know it seems you're very much in the you know what's what's the big deal with with that that kind of Camp um which would be kind of interesting to hear a reason behind it but I mean I think Lena Khan has shown every indication that she's kind of against um these kind of big mergers what's interesting but just in terms of like what's going to happen I actually have a manifold Market that's uh prediction Market on whether Lena Khan will allow the Activision um thing to go forward so let's see what the what what the fake money um markets are so there's currently a 46

chance that Activision Blizzard will solve its reputational problems the end of 22 and Bettors are saying 58 chance that Lena Khan will block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard uh so whether you think it's good or not currently people on this random website who are huge nerds uh about 60 of them think that she'll make a move but I don't think she has made any public statement on Activision Blizzard yet has she no no okay are there any other um Indica I mean there was the recent meta um block but has there been any other um FTC moves in the gaming space this year not that I really know of I mean all the other Acquisitions like Sony buying Bungie and and stuff like that has or take to acquiring Zynga like everything else has been let through and yeah it doesn't really make sense to block this because you know just based on the console Market Xbox is you know still a lot smaller than Sony um you know it doesn't really have much

to do with their Core Business it's not like this deal will really give them like super outsized market share it's just kind of the risk around like something like Call of Duty if it is only allowed on Xbox so not PlayStation is that good for consumers but I don't think you have to block a full deal to make that happen but it seems like to me like and I don't personally really like this trend although I understand where it's coming from it seems like Regulators are more trying to stop um deals from happening that might harm consumers in the future such as like looking back and like not having allowed Instagram to be acquired by Facebook back in the day instead of maybe you know trying to force something 10 years into the future and that's kind of the vibe I get from you know why they said meta can't acquire this you know VR Fitness Company even though it's all like a tiny market and uh you know like I just doesn't fully make sense to me like I get where they're coming from but I feel like it makes more sense to let it happen and then if um it just

happens to um create Anti-Trust issues in the future then you can take action instead of probably being wrong and taking premature action um at least in gaming that seems to make sense but anyways well I've I've no idea what what Lena Khan will do especially since she went against her own staff for the for that meta deal but that's the big question it's the the 95 dollar per share question um that um you know this is a big deal Activision will be fine if the deal doesn't go through but um I have nothing to add really to your stance about this on the nascent Technologies being acquired for example by meta it it does feel like it needs some kind of Regulation because if assume something's being born in in a in the innovation of the market if a big company can just buy up all of these small competitors well companies that could become competitors or building

innovations that they can use doesn't that lead to even more consolidation and stifling competition from growing I guess so I know we're going a bit off topic I mean like it could um but I guess like saying like stopping a deal because they don't want meta to own the metaverse like that's just so misleading uh yeah yeah and so you could say you don't want them owning VR um and dominating everything on VR maybe that's a bit more plausible um and you know a better better line of reasoning but even that is still all super nascent they're not the only only players there um and yeah it's just hard to like really make a Firm Stance on how you think the market will play out to really start impeding companies that are trying to innovate and are trying to turn a market that is small into something bigger um but anyways yeah it is a little a little off topic uh so we'll see how that goes and I'll go ahead and shift gears to um Ubisoft quickly I'm curious what you

you all will think about this too so those paying pretty close attention um know that Ubisoft has had a relatively hard time in the past couple of years obviously they have awesome franchises like Far Cry Assassin's Creed Tom Clancy but they've had difficulty and execution and being able to not just outperform expectations but really just meet them in the first place and if you look at the company's stock it's you know at the same price it was five and a half years ago um so um you know the value creation and building like a growing sustainable business has been a bit of a challenge the first major yellow flag that I noticed when I started paying attention was actually when Ghost Recon breakpoint came out in 2019 and the the company really whiffed on liveops of that game and it snowballed into into restructurings that also were plagued by harassment issues which some people still claim aren't fully fixed and they might not be I don't really know as an

outsider but around that that sign too they started pushing more into Mobile and that wasn't really working either and there wasn't a clear strategy um then and since then investors really have been skeptical and and waiting for the pieces to click together waiting to be shown that live hops can be consistently performed well across games that mobile has a clear strategy with actual positive results to point to and that you know even though delays are natural that they still can be contained to a large degree and to the team's credit they're trying live Ops for games like Assassin's Creed did improve and I'm I'm genuinely excited to see how they're going to to reorient this franchise for the future um which will be unveiled next month and they also have three or four Tom Clancy mobile games in the pipeline and I guess we'll see how those do although I'm I think I'm skeptical on most of those but you know even this latest quarter we saw more delays like the avatar game that

um is now going to miss the movie launch time frame which is not great and some cancellations of other projects and we all know that even something like their first foray into nfts enormously flopped and as a result of all of this we have to lower our expectations for the year again and that isn't to say everything is bad it's not I genuinely like Ubisoft but nothing here and these results really helps reduce any ongoing skepticism about the company's quality of execution um so I'm curious what what you all think am I being too harsh in my assessment and if you have any thoughts on what they should do to kind of break this underperforming cycle I'm curious um what ideas you have and I know there's always rumors around M A and private equity which had a five billion dollar market cap or so isn't crazy but um where do you think they should look to you next um I'll chime in here if it's okay a

very interesting company I feel that Ubisoft maybe they try too many things about really having like a focus strategy on maybe fundamentals for me personally I feel that they've been in kind of I wouldn't say well yeah maybe I would say it's the climb since uh the release of Watchdogs I feel like with Assassin's Creed that was really like a mass stroke where he got in early on the new console generation the first game was kind of just really an engine not really a good game but they turned it into this incredible multi-year multi-game franchise that was huge really expanded the value of the company and they tried to repeat exactly the same trick again with Watchdogs when that title came out getting in early I think it was some PS4 but the game wasn't really a hit and therefore they couldn't really turn it into sort of like you know a really big colossal game that could be proven for sort of returning revenue and so Assassin's Creed still kind of remains the cash cow so I feel they're kind of like still reliable Reliance upon yesteryears um positive games and sites that they have and they haven't really got anything

since then to really sort of push the boat out and so you know you ask the question what they should do I think they should go back to sort of try and make something great again I guess rather than sort of I feel they've got too many fires in you know too many places but maybe that's a bit of a generalist statement that's of my stance and where I feel they've maybe I wouldn't say they've missed the mark but they're just not executing as well as they were previously any other thoughts I've never worked I've never worked in such a huge company so my my thoughts are limited um the only thing I can you know fathom is that that's why you have weights how much weight you can put on a car because you get so much weight you try to turn and it's very hard to turn so I can only imagine if you're trying to turn the ship around on Ubisoft you're trying to turn a behemoth in its direction and thus end times more difficult than trying to do that in a smaller company

I don't know if they're a way to go around it is doing something like Square Enix where you sell parts of your business to become leaner and you can then focus on improving them there's still some rumors that you know maybe Square Enix did that to make to become more appealing for a potential acquisition it could be something that we see from Ubisoft instead of a buyout for example yeah maybe maybe they need I don't know how they operate internally if the teams have the freedom to explore for example liveops techniques that are you utilize on mobile if they have experts from running live games on on mobile or other console live games bringing that in-house mm-hmm yeah well I think they're trying you know I mentioned the Call of Duty strategy where you take a killer IP and then build an ecosystem around it they're definitely trying this um with the you know the Tom Clancy IP first and foremost um and yeah I'm curious to see how that goes but yeah Ubisoft has the problem of

just being much more inefficiently run compared to like the other big Publishers like Activision and EA and maybe some of that has to do with um I don't know being in France and not being able to um just having like stricter rules around like how you can lay people off and things like that when you need to um not saying they they should although if private Equity or someone were to come in to to make Ubisoft a better business that probably is one of the one of the first things they would look at and I just don't know how feasible that is um in France but um yeah I don't know if they would sell off part of their business maybe but yeah I think Anil you're probably right that they just kind of need to focus more on maybe a bit less experimentation on a bunch of different games and especially being like last movers to to certain trends like Battle Royale with their like hyperscape

game like a year ago or so which um which completely bombed and some other things but um I I was gonna say I think oh go ahead oh sorry I was gonna say they they remind me a bit actually of EA where EA was doing great with FIFA then they got to a point where FIFA was actually not doing very well and pro Evo kind of overtook it and then Pizza Moore came in and he took over like the sports teams and it took them a few years but he really like rebooted the sports division massively and then FIFA completely overtook and it eventually buried Pro Evo and they had like a real kind of going back to basics they focused on like real game quality they did everything for much higher standard almost like a cultural reboot and that included even moving where the development Studio of that game was done it previously was done in Canada believe it or not and was moved to the UK and they kind of rebooted it that way and I feel like yeah you've mentioned some of the franchises that Ubisoft have been working on those franchises have been going on for a very long time it's very

hard to sustain success in one franchise for a long time it's natural that it starts with the client they haven't replaced it and maybe go going back and trying to remember what was special about those franchises in the first place and getting back to that could be the way but it's very easy to criticize from an external standpoint of things like this yeah yeah well let me let me wrap up my my earnings section just by talking um super quickly about the console market I'll have to be very quick Aaron yeah I know I will so I wrote about this phenomic digest last week you can take a look there to get more detail but in short usually predicted the console Market for games would be down this year and based on recent negative year over year performance from performance data from Xbox and Sony and even Nintendo which reported yesterday um it makes sense I think that's right and so for starters lots of companies are still seeing uh post covid normalization and we're probably at or near the end of those difficult comps at this point but more importantly there's been a relative lack of AAA games

recently and there's still been supply chain shortages for next-gen consoles primarily driven by semiconductor shortages and so a solid down right now makes sense but I end my piece basically by saying that it's not all bad because the Slowdown is Supply driven it's not demand driven and so there's still a huge appetite for these new consoles new releases and as we've seen in previous recessions demand for these new consoles and games um can still be high even in harder times so I expect the market will come uh roaring back over the next year or so despite a lot of the the negative numbers that we see right now so um yeah I just wanted to get that in but we can end my my section there and move on unless someone has anything else to say about that all right we'll dive into Google's new interstitial ads rules this is to get me to say interstitial a lot of times and then just messing it up all right so just a quick definition um interstitial ads are the ones that are full screen and they cover the

interface of the app so the user must watch them or wait until they can skip to go back to interacting with the app the new as guidelines are going to come into effect on September 30th um with the aim I quote ensure a high quality experiences for users when they try using Google Play apps the guidelines are inspired by the better ads standards mobile apps experience guidelines whose goal is to I could again identify the ad experiences that fall beneath a threshold of consumer acceptability and are most likely to drive consumers to install ad blockers so get this gives us some initial insights as to what Google is aiming for this so what they're regulating is a full screen interstitial ads of any kind of format that shows up unexpectedly for example if the user is trying to do something and then it unexpectedly pops up and your you are unable to continue your action until it goes away they are not allowed so for example as that

appear during gameplay of a level or at the beginning of a level after you've pressed to try to play it you can still have full screen interstitial ads that are not unexpected but you can still have them if they are closable after 15 seconds so you cannot have a full screen ad for example for 30 seconds that will be unallowed and the policy does not apply to rewarded as which are explicitly opted in by users so things like banner ads rewarded ads because the banner ads don't cover the full screen those are all okay um my first thought is sounds like Google is trying to protect their long-term ad Revenue by creating good experiences so that users don't install ad blockers um so having everyone in the industry using ads in a healthy user experience way is also good for them longer term Keen to hear your thoughts on that and then the second point is that Eric

suffer I'm very sorry if I pronounced your name incorrectly claim that the new rules will kill the hyper casual genre you hear that Android accounts for around 75 percent of hyper casual installs so this created a bit of buzz in the industry there have been a lot of write-ups opposing this because currently hyper casual is already a mix of banner interstitial and rewarded ads and if you move fast enough you can change your monetization um yeah Keen to hear your thoughts on this uh I mean I can I can start I'm probably not the best qualified to have a strong opinion but I'm pretty sure that's exaggeration um I mean there will be near-term consequences um lower revenues and a reset for certain games and Studios and there might be um you know just the nature of these platforms there still might be some arbitrary approvals denials at the end like uh of games uh that the industry needs to work through to better understand the Nuance of what Google is really trying to put forward but hyper

casual isn't purely defined by interstitial ads and Hyper casual as a genre has already proven its ability to dramatically evolve many times over and so this will just be one of those times and so um yeah I mean I think we'll see these teams lean into other types of ads or you know you know now that they have new rules to go by they'll game the system uh another way um and you know even if we look at how hyper casual is evolving which you know more recently with the rise of a game like stumble guys it seems like more like multiplayer hyper casual games or gaining popularity and that in and of itself opens up other avenues for for monetization um and we might you know we'll just continue to see the industry or the genre excuse me um evolve but yeah I have a feeling it's a it's a bit of exaggeration although we'll still see some pretty real effects for a lot of games in the the near term yeah I mostly agree with Aaron um I have

less experience in Mobile than my business partner Anthony who appears here sometimes um so he could probably give you more specific answer than I could but one thing we definitely see with any rules like this is that the the games in the business models immediate are always co-evolving with with the outlines of the platforms and Google is an advertisement company at heart so a move like this from Google you need to interpret differently than a move like this from Apple which isn't fundamentally an advertisement company so like when Apple changes the advertisement rules on the iTunes Store that's coming from a different motivational place than Google I feel like because advertisement is Google's own bread and butter um and so I mean cynically you can be like okay they're they're trying to protect their own their own business in some sort of way you know you would like to think that you know this is being done in a pro-social way because they understand that it's better for long-term value of not driving everyone towards ad blockers which are easier to install on the less closed Android system than on other

platforms I think that's a thesis that makes sense but I think also um you know just it's also a possibility that um they're they're trying to you know just exert a little more control you know um because any advertisement is this kind of wild spigot that kind of um bids up the price of user acquisition and it's a Channel of user acquisition that if Google doesn't own it then that user acquisition is happening on the terms of whoever controls the ad ecosystem rather than the Play Store itself but um you know I think that generally speaking I mean I'm not inclined to not take them at face value here you know where they're saying where these interstitial ads seem particularly obtrusive compared to other things and I'm pretty sure they've done the calculus of we don't think this is going to completely wreck the industry I mean things will evolve but you know that's kind of my general

take on I think it's very different than when iTunes changed like your ability your ability um not iTunes but Apple changed the ability to like track that unique device thing it was pretty clear what they were doing there you know where they were like suck at Facebook you know and among other things yeah I think maybe it was part of the knee-jerk reaction of some analysis thinking it's going to be the next ATT disaster I think if you're dialed into exactly the current market conditions it probably is a disaster for you if you're completely dependent on the current configuration of things um you know there's some little species of hyper casual game that has perfectly evolved for today's ecosystem that you know but there's there's other subspecies that'll do just fine and adapt yeah hearing from game devs working in the hyper casual space it seems that they already have diversification and the there might be a a small bump in the revenue but they will find other ways to to monetize

um and just last note there was a round table in the Toronto poker gamer connect there is a panel of Zynga Gameloft App 11 and more where they were discussing about seamless ads being essential to user attention for the future so all in all I believe that these new rules might actually lead to some positive changes in the future it's on that note and nil Tick Tock games yeah so this one I find quite interesting mainly because it shows a continued sort of Rise of tick tock and how it's destroying the world that's a personal opinion so Tick Tock and bite dance you know absolute Juggernaut come not really from nowhere but in last couple of years you know the most popular app and social media app on the planets and they've moved into games and okay that's kind of not that unheard of but they've kind of put it in you know while no one is looking and already testing it but I think some of the things that they're doing with this is very interesting and I think the wider ramifications it has is maybe more

interesting too so first and foremost like these games appear seamlessly in the app it's not like you click on somewhere and you're taken elsewhere although they do obviously advertise including to their own games doing that these are like almost like Snapchat style games built in Tick Tock that is something we have seen before in other platforms easy you know Facebook messenger and Snapchat but I think what's particularly interesting is that the way that these games appear to be designed is that they're almost content creation tools themselves so in playing the game it gives you the option to record the gameplay of something cool you did and put it into Tick Tock straight away to create almost some infinite content maybe kind of not really kind of short so I'm intrigued because well I'd like to get other people's stances on this but firstly like having such a big player going into it is is you know quite um impactful for the industry in terms of where it will go I think sometimes um on podcasts like this we tend to have people from the older crowd then we're maybe not that in touch with like not even you know Generation Z

but the generation below them and how they kind of interact with games and is this sort of like the new horrific future of gaming that we all need to be part of that's going to take over what ramifications has happened in the future I I have more thoughts myself but I'm would like to open it up to the panel here I have a couple thoughts if no one Minds um one thing is that it kind of reminds me it Rhymes a little bit with a wave of what we call streamer bait games um many years ago now oh yeah where it was like people would make games specifically for the idea of kind of aligning you know attacking that one platform for you know getting attention from it and the fundamentals of it is whenever you make a game like this you're really marrying your fate to the whims of that platform which can do very well if it works out for you right but it's a very all your eggs in one basket kind of thing that means that your more conservative game developers are gonna not are going to be late movers into it and you're gonna have these kind of wild-eyed people just jumping straight

in with those feet to see what happens um and I think one of the things is overshadowing Tick Tock specifically is always the Specter of you know you know with Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan recently and everything like that is is the US government just going to randomly ban Tick Tock you see every other platform currently trying to copy Tick Tock as much as possible so I think whatever is going on with Tick Tock is something that is very closely watched by everybody else you know YouTube is quickly turning into Tick Tock Instagram is turning into Tick Tock you know so um that possibility might create like if this becomes a genre of game you might see something like a developer is always going to be more interested in shipping their game on multiple platforms and can be completely devoted to one this has some foreshadowing of what I'm about to say my Google stadia section and so um unless Tick Tock is just throwing money at developers to get this content there long term you know what you might see with everyone copying Tick Tock is

kind of the rise of I mean this is a little speculative like cross-platform like whatever this kind of like little sort of game where it's all about the shareability and being integrated with things like kind of apis that are different but kind of the same and then people finding ways to like ship their game on multiple versions of these things I think is something we might see emerge in the future that's kind of speculative yeah but it's kind of what the password no that's that that's that's really good especially that those twitch games I remember them well that was kind of the thing I was thinking a similar thing how yeah Tick Tock it the way that just everyone copies it makes me laugh and as you say it's like yeah Instagram is just it just ticked off the outside room is it gonna make even the Facebook feed just Tick Tock YouTube reels is just Tick Tock everything is Tick Tock and the thing I always say about them you know like or hate it is that they are extremely good with that algorithm um like the way they've managed to make that thing sticky is is almost terrifying and if they're testing this stuff already whilst they're keeping it quiet they're probably doing the tuning but if they get it right you know it

will really work and therefore the ramifications of it could be huge and I am as I said I think the thing that I find interesting is they have already added like a few things that maybe weren't expected to it already and they wonder if they're going to be the things like they seem pretty brave and pretty clever at what they pull off so um yeah I I just I guess I don't want to live in the world where these games are the future but I I might be contemplating the fact that we're about to enter that well if we're not there already you know well they're not the future they're not the future they could be why why not well they could have a part of the future but I don't think they necessarily are the future I think um oh yeah second yeah um so yeah I mean and on on one hand like none of this is new right like Facebook was one of the earliest social platforms to embrace games in some way on its platform Snapchat's been experimenting with instant games for a while and obviously even 10 cents prior work with games on um QQ and WeChat and China is part of

what led to their their gaming dominance and so um in some ways like a template has already been laid out by by other companies on how to to kind of think about this but um and it makes sense like you you have to look at it from more like a tick tock first perspective not a Games first perspective because the point of these games is not to like make a lot of money um off of like any individual game like you're not looking at the same kinds of metrics that you do for like a like an app based mobile game they exist to keep people on Tick Tock longer to keep engagement with the tick tock app higher and um and that's what you know all of these other companies have sort of you know been thinking about it similarly with Facebook and Snapchat Etc but what makes Tick Tock interesting as Anil said um is is the algorithm and so I could see it actually in some ways working better on Tick Tock partially just because of the the scrolling nature where like each video or interaction is is full screen um but also like if Tick Tock knows you

like basketball you consume basketball content they could probably throw you a basketball game if they know that you like squid games you know content maybe they could send you like a squid games type of game or something like that um and obviously they'd work with more like instant game studios to get more exclusives which again aren't like monetized the same as traditional mobile games it's just kind of a new breed of something but I the other thing that I think is like interesting here just to acknowledge is that social media is just part is of part of the story it's just one angle um but bite dance the parent company has been testing this already in the Chinese version of the app for a couple years I don't know too much about that but beyond that bite dance has a billion dollar Revenue games business mainly because they acquired um moonton and C4 and yeah I was gonna say and mobile Legends Bang Bang the you know the really popular MOBA in the East there's like a third of that Revenue so

it's pretty clear from my lands that they're trying to learn from and take on companies like tencent and Netties um through their own like social channels which like it provides as we saw with tencent from the past like it provides pretty incredible user acquisition advantages if you can you know be smart about how you showcase your own games and your platforms and such um so so yeah I I'm really curious to see how like the entire game story of bite dance evolves putting games on Tick Tock is a part of it but I think their their strategy is about a lot more complex than just that one one thing I I think go ahead Marie I think it's a natural move for tick tock because of what Aaron said they're already testing it on the Chinese version of the app uh sorry I don't know how to speak Japanese okay that is yeah and it all it already allows some users to live stream um games that I played and then Looking

Through The Tick Tock reel I don't I did a little dive into Tick Tock because I was feeling it's so big and I don't know about it so as a product manager I should try it out and you already have mini games people create these minigames for other players to engage with like one of the many games I saw was on this moving background so as if someone's in their Garden just filming the the scenery and they applied a mini game to the front where it was a bit of like a puzzle that you had to figure out and there's this whole section of mini games of people doing this and so why not take it a step further and actually have your own mini games available for users to play and another reason why I think this is a not natural move is this seems that the product the product development practices that Tick Tock have are extremely interesting to experiment see what happens and then take it from there because even the way that they integrated the mini games is

really interesting because when you're making the way that you share the way that you can play them is that when you're creating your Tick Tock video you can add a link that is then anchored to your name and then when your video is showing play sorry the users can click on it and play the game and then if you use it you can also play the game so like even being able to access and play the games is behind this interactivity with the with your feed and yeah I'm I'm extremely curious to see how that goes and I believe even in their announcement they they were just they were quite open notice in experiment like they were they're putting it out there they want to see how the community creates content with it because you can film yourself you can create a video of you playing the game and then share your high score or something else so yeah we'll we'll see how how that develops yeah I think another thing that's just interesting about Tick Tock is that it's already like used by other game platforms for Discovery like it's like

Tick Tock is now a major part of like launching your game on Steam is like making sure you have a good Tick Tock game and so I think the only cautionary tale is that we've seen um like messenger games are nothing new they've been around for since like what 2016. and these are not exactly the same as messenger games but they kind of rhyme with it and then also we've seen cases where a really popular social app has tried to get into games but just like not understood it because they don't um package it right they don't lean into the affordances of their own platform I think Discord was a fabulous example of that and it seems like Tick Tock has gotten that message they're not just like here you can download games from tick tock that's weird you know they seem to be leaning into the natural affordances of the platform which is a good thing um but I think if this becomes something I I kind of take a wait and see approach I think it could carve out a new Niche for itself and I think it will ultimately be in service to tick tock's greater goals which is to you know just maximize time on app and so you know in

so many ways you know you can think of tick tock itself as already a game and I know I'm getting a little discursive here but the whole point is that it's like you know it's thinking of games as like this little like boxed content experience that you get versus just ways to play with your friends you know I think you can really blur the boundaries of what that entails like there's so many Tick Tock games you can play that are just shared rules between people of like how you do a duet Lars was sharing such a good point about what our games and unfortunately before moving into his topic about Google study of potentially shutting down his uh recording account decided to shut down first before we got to discuss it so who knows maybe it's the powers of the cloud didn't want us to talk about it um yeah we're really sorry we're going to we're going to wrap up here and maybe in the future we'll be able to revisit the Google stadia topic when Lars is back

thank you so much for joining us today thanks Danielle Aaron it was lovely to have you on yeah happy to be here sorry that we had had issues I don't know if it was the CCP that was shutting down Lars or from talking to you negatively about Tick Tock or something else but so this is a good conversation I look forward to talking about stadia in the cloud another time you can find us on Discord um so join us if you want to continue the conversation with navic and we'll see you next week bye everyone [Music] thank you [Music]