TWIG 122: PUBG New State, Genshin Impact Dev Costs, Google Stadia Problem, Spotify Remote Work

what's up everybody we're here with twig 122 we've got myself joe kim mishka katkov eric kress and adam telfer today we're going to be talking about four articles first pub g new state is a futuristic new battle royale game for android and ios by the verge second gen chin impact development costs by games industry.biz third google stadia problem a video game unit that's not googly enough by bloomberg and finally spotify says it's letting employees work from anywhere while still paying san francisco and new york salaries by business insider what's up everybody miss guy i know your house renovations continue when's it all going to be done yeah i'm out here in the woods just recording this and um yeah it's um a lot of work to be done we moved into a new place so i'm actually trying to follow express steps and building a little bit of a

home gym uh i'm not trying to hit 25 body fat dude i'm trying to hit like single digits when i first met you dude you were [ __ ] shredded dude i remember that and uh no i don't know what's happened to you i guess the uh the pandemic but now you're like a fat guy in the woods dude what's going on it's a startup life like just straight up ramen noodles and and um you better get in shape before your wife leaves you dude just saying wow wow okay okay right my wife married me fat so she's this is what she she does actually she likes she doesn't like the thin she'd rather have the fat but you know i'm working on it all right truth from eric all right let's uh move on to updates so first just one quick update from me we actually recorded a podcast on the dangers of vertical integration

between ad tech companies and game studios just to address the haters out there part of hater nation but anyway i felt this discussion was really great and an example of the kind of discussion you will never see at any games industry conference anywhere in the world ever so you got to come here to get content like that link in the show notes adam updates yeah so uh for wb i'm actually hiring um for senior product positions here in my central product management group we look over a whole bunch of studios including hd pc console as well as mobile so anybody kind of looking for a broader experience kind of taking on a few different studios and a lot of different strategic problems definitely reach out but that's the end of my wb spiel because now from the rest of it is my own voice that's like that's like two weeks in a row you're doing public service amounts they have to be very paying us let's get these taco articles on me especially with you

around eric i don't want any kataku articles around me all right next one um so last week we covered valhein one thing we didn't cover uh that actually master the meta had an email that i thought was interesting so valheim reports or is published by coffee stain coffee stain is a group with an embracer so i know we've been throwing a lot of um questions uh and critical thoughts at embracer um but they're getting the benefit of volhan somehow right i don't know what percentage who knows what the deals are but still ballheim was built by this five person team and you know irongate studios is published by coffeestain so embracer is getting some benefit from this second update i got is around ea so there was two big news this week one was that anthem next has been cancelled and second was that dragon age four their multiplayer components have been pulled so it basically means that ea is backing away from live service

being bioware's future which makes sense to me but also makes me sad um it makes sense since you know dragon age is a synonym for scope load this game notoriously took seven years to develop in the early 2000s which at the time was absolutely crazy but by today's cyberpunk standards it's probably not like but then kind of multiply in by adding a live service element to dragon age right you look at what happened with anthem which also notoriously had a very long development cycle which ended up still being underbaked by the time was released and panned by critics um so also avengers recently life service ambitions long production very very like struggled on release so you've got live service multiplied by open world rpg multiplied by covid and you've got the recipe for a massive money sync with high risk so overall this makes sense shift to a more cost controlled premium open world rpg

and build a game that can hit that market as effectively as possible don't hyper extend the team and force them to build something that's obviously counter to their culture and bioware so hopefully find ways to grow the revenue of dragon age franchise through units rather than through live servers okay that makes sense to me it's sad because bioware will just not be a future facing studio they'll continue to operate in their lane and do that as effectively as they can um but uh likely will shrink over time rather than grow that's my notes eric i'm gonna offer my thoughts here i'm i'm really torn on this one because i know what dragon age does is they do really well however i think uh bioware itself has not really evolved with the times and they're not really building contemporary games and we're going to talk a little bit later about people can fly building this amazing uh outriders game which may not do well but the fact is that they're actually putting their resources into building the capability of building something like that

like destiny like division and unfortunately it doesn't look like bioware is going to evolve in that way but the purists that love bioware will love the fact that they're just going to make the games that they make and there is a market for that it's just not as good and lucrative for the publishers but as i said many times before is that since laura miele took over um at ea she's really kind of changing the studios not in her image but with in with her perspective so with mobile with with bioware dice helping respawn kind of build out their things so she i think she's doing an exceptional job of of making sure that these studios are are working well but the the two leaders that left bioware recently was a really scary scary thing so you know it's like there's a it's not all like you know roses over there so anyway i guess i'm just kind of rambling but i am a little bit sad that they're not going to make a contemporary game but i am also excited that what they're going to build is going to be true to what they've done in the past

and hopefully better than the last mass effect guys so anthem next was that the anthem refactor out of the texas studio is that what that was and if if so what's happening to the texas studio are they going to shut that down or no no i think it was just a 30-person team that was kind of like tasked with figuring out what it would take in order to redo anthem right i i don't even honestly i mean obviously i'm very relatively cynical i never thought that they would actually do it right it doesn't even make sense to re-release a game it's like the same thing that cd projekt's gonna have to realize is that re-releasing this game is irrelevant right no one cares anymore move on right i mean no one was talking about anthem i think what's you you report on this adam right like the interest i don't know or maybe i read it somewhere but no one cared about anthem like anthony was over like like a month or two after it was released like the memory of of of the audience is so short when it comes to these type of things um they are anticipating the next thing not not not what it's had in the past right

you don't really see many evidence of particularly on the console side of games that reinvent themselves you know like this doesn't happen right so avengers same thing it's like stop throwing money at that build something else you know anyway whatever that's my opinion i don't know about if adam agrees with that but i think it's more about the yearly expansion stuff right like destiny did manage to pivot themselves away tweak themselves away using yearly expansions uh right like destiny 2's launch wasn't ideal still did fine right but in the case of even division two right launch didn't go exceptionally well and then by year two they pivoted with the new york expansion um so with the vendors they could do a major year year one expansion maybe pivot a wave hopefully fix it but i but but both those games i'm sure had far more daus maus right they were playing continue to play the game they were engaged right i just don't think marvel or anthem like was anybody playing anthem i mean no way dude i mean like it was probably in the thousands right like you know 2 000

people like were actively playing anthem there's nothing to do so yeah meanwhile i could look at like whatever the the mau charts for that stuff but it did not yeah yeah i'd be interested in doing it yeah that'd be interesting and in avengers i i bet that's pretty small right now too all right um my piece of coupling small update so since adam is hiring people i'm hiring as well so savage game studios is hiring in berlin in the studio so we're looking for studio id always looking for unreal programmer and looking for an office manager in berlin so if anybody's knows anybody who's interested to become an office manager we definitely want for one and maybe someone that'll fix your freaking internet dude this is actually so that's true anyway a couple of news so game refinery uh was announced today that it sold to vungle congratulations to game refinery and congratulations to bungle i've been an advisor with game refinery for over two years and uh they've done really cool things so we first built the taxonomy with them and and um since then they've been more and

more automating how they research game how they find all these features and and adding more of like personas aspect to it they've they've been doing a great job and it's a really good tool for game developers and it has become a tool for marketers as well so there's uh definitely a synergy between between what fungal is doing and where where they're headed can someone quickly explain me what the synergy is i'm a fan of game refinery i think they make a really cool tool um but why would bungle need game refinery in too short the uh the amount of data that they have on games helps actually with with targeting so what they've been doing what the game refiner has been working with several studios on marketing side they used to work mainly with the studio side just for the game developers but they started working with marketers for i don't know a year year and a half ago as they have more and more data that allows you to not only see what what other games are similar and where do you fall in the taxonomy but also a lot of the data regarding uh regarding

app store optimization how the game's looking but what does that have to do with vungle well avongal is an is an ad network and they are looking naturally with the att they're looking at better their ability to target different players and the better they target the better players they show their video network i mean bungle is primarily a video network uh the better the better service they can provide and if you look at any of the other competitors be it applovin be it iron source be it unity they're all are vertically integrating as jk has done has done the the post on it they are looking at at as many ways to to get get the uh the game developers hooked into their platform so they can do it i don't get it sorry i don't get i think it's probably more from a classification perspective eric probably rather than from you know customer i don't i don't get it i don't get it ad network game refinery gamer let's put it this way just i can simplify it overly so

when you understand the taxonomy and where players are playing certain games you can kind of understand where the players are moving back and forth between which games now you could have done this before if you just use your whatever attribution platform or whatever you can see where the players are coming from but when you take that away you need more theoretical information and quan and qualitative information on how players are moving between different games and then make your ad strategy based on that that would be my take again just let's move on because uh my brain is not all right let's move on to this this is an ipo news so tiny build is a game developer that is ipoint in london aim which is the secondary market now tiny a tiny build is quite tiny on mobile i pulled out their latest data from last year and they had like 17 million downloads with maybe 4 million of gross revenue their main hit is hell hell hello neighbor yeah hello neighbor

game this is on pc it's apparently very popular with kids and their expertise is to scout eastern european studios the ceo is russian but lives in the u.s and they acquire those studios very early again focused on pc now rumor has it this is now i can get it now i can get a tele rumor so rumor has it that there's a lot of interest from investors because of the scarcity of gaming and the take names on the am market of the london stock exchange and valuation for these type of mid caps ai aim is typically several hundred millions this is this is not going to end well man this is certainly not going to end well when companies like this are going public and then these companies in poland like huge and others going public this is going to be a bloodbath dude i i i i'm telling you dude anyway uh what's not huge too much i like the huge guys but these companies have no business being public dude all these companies it's crazy this is

this is crazy talk oh but by the way oh i didn't even say this but the um uh roblox is going public did we talk about this last week i can't remember but presentation was really really interesting i think i think they did a good job dude that guy is halliday like he is holiday from ready player one like the ceo of roblox like you listen to him and he is just out in them out there man it's awesome right i can't wait but uh but they did a good job of explaining the whole pro the products and and what their strategy is geographic expansion whatever i think again their biggest challenge and i'm not going to go into this too much is is uh is a demographic expansion but i think geography they probably have some room to grow but anyway it's really interesting presentation i thought it was really well done um oh the next thing was i swear on cue like a day or two after i put that we talked about this is that the uh zynga was announced as a nominated nomination for gameindustry.biz top 50 developers right

right after that fluff piece on bro uh on braumburg or whatever his name is but i can't seem to find the story but i saw the notification but anyway i guarantee you dollars to donuts that this that they will be top 10 fit game developers in 2021 as if they same as they were they were number one last year because that's the way this business works it's dirty dirty stuff um the other thing that i came kind of was off by radar i still don't understand how this happened but outriders came out and is a demo across all platforms basically that matter uh which does not include nintendo um basically it's a class-based looter shooter excuse me that's exactly what i love um it feels like a really well-designed anthem even though it's not a mech game by any stretch but it's post-apocalyptic it's like this huge story arc et cetera et cetera but it's the way anthem should have been designed from the get-go in terms of now i'm not saying this game is going to be amazing i'm not saying that i'm saying it it ticks all the boxes for me right

um the demo was actually technically very rough i was surprised that you threw out a demo that would have any type of particularly on pc i was having all kinds of hiccups and problems with dialogue et cetera but the game and the game actually comes out in a month so that makes me a little bit worried that it might get delayed or whatever in order to fix some things that were in that thing and and the other thing is we don't really know what the end game is which is actually critical to long-term retention for these type of games as everyone knows um but uh i don't i think it should look i mean i think everyone should take a look and see if they like that kind of game like division and destiny um and what anthem could have been uh this is a great game to look at and i'm i'm excited to find if i have something to play right i'm really playing much except for world of warcraft as i've said so this will give me something to play i'm day one for sure all right cruising into news so first news item pubg new state is a futuristic

new battle royale game for android in ios as reported by the verge and so we are going to see a new pub g mobile game and it's set in 2051 years after the current pub g games and the verge suggests that based on early images the game looks very similar to call of duty black ops 3 and 4 from an art style perspective and pubg new state unlike pubg mobile will actually be developed by pubg studio and that's different because pubg mobile as many of us already know was developed actually by tencent and finally the verge also suggests the game will also differentiate by diving more into the lore of the overall pub g universe and uh kind of surprising i didn't know there was a lot of pubg lore but guess they're going to try and build that out so my take on this is that you know it sounds like a pretty smart move by you know craft on by building it themselves they'll get higher margins on the game by cutting out 10 cent and also i'm not sure when they made the

decision to make this game internally but i would believe that you know i i gotta believe that a lot of the sort of u.s versus china app war stuff as well as what happened between in india where pubg mobile was banned that that probably weighed into their decision to create a game on their own as well any thoughts from you guys yeah i mean i always get so confused with all this because you know the pub g guys where it used to be called blue hole right and then they changed their name to crafton and then i think what people don't realize is that the pc version of the title was built by crafton formerly known as bluehole and the mobile version was built by tencent right and there's g corp too yeah what's the pub g corp is that it was the team corp is within crafton and they're the ones who make pubg so crafton is like anyway what the [ __ ] just make it make it consistent god damn it anyway so just all you have to know is the pc version has been made by bluehole

crafton and the mobile version that exists right now that's an amazing amazing amazing well-built title for mobile um is built by tencent so these guys are basically light speed and quantum right like 10 cent but light speed and quantum shut the [ __ ] up why are you making things versus tinny all right so um so what's interesting is you know tencent owns 11 of of of crafton boohole right and so now they're basically building a game to compete directly with 10 cent which is freaking awesome right it's gangster right but what i don't know is how good they are going to be building a game on mobile because the team from 10 cent that built that thing was amazing right so and whether or not an a separate pub g can exist in the same world as the existing pub g because a lot of people spent a lot of time and effort building up their profiles and their characters and their gear and whatever

moving over to another game without any type of of uh what's the right word yeah like cross progression right progression moving to a brand new game just seems like pretty pretty difficult right and they obviously probably will not have 10 cents support in china right so they're gonna have to publish this on their own i would think you know so it'll be interesting to see it'll be a really great case study in cannibalization generally speaking um i think personally and i'm sorry if mr joseph and mishka have said this before i think the the shooting category is getting 100 way too crowded because it represents like four percent of the overall market and we have like 12 games going after it two that are absolute juggernauts um uh and with with you know with fortnite leaving there is some room there i pers per se but like at the end of the day i don't know how big this genre can be be on p on mobile with all these competitors because we have battlefield coming we have apex coming we have now this new pub g game and then

we have existing pub g and call of duty it's like dude coming to mobile is that good this is coming from a guy who was just going crazy about out writers on pc and and console like listen you're talking about again a smaller game that you're super excited about and all these shooters that you just mentioned actually exist on the platforms that you're playing yeah yeah i gotta say i gotta agree it's super competitive i think everyone should avoid this category yeah everyone stay out of this it's a bloodbath guys um yeah this is actually a very interesting piece of news because yeah because as you said it's it's um it's the fact that pubg is one of the most successful games on mobile ever because even if we look at the the shooter revenues in the west that's what 2.1 billion but if we look at overall revenues for all pubg games to 2.1 billion in net revenues but if we look at the revenues for pubg alone worldwide it made 1.8 billion

last year and the shooter category is growing the downloads are growing significantly the revenues are growing um but what's interesting about the pub g game is like 60 of the revenues are coming from china and quarter of the installs are actually coming from india and i think there was a little bit of uh what a little bit of a challenge where they pulled the game out of india am i correct jk among yeah i got banned out of india yeah yeah government it's still banned yeah and but eric is right the pvp market is getting crazy competitive even without fortnite we've got apex as you mentioned battlefield is rumored only a matter of time before probably like tom clancy comes in like there was already that that chinese version of tom clancy that was successful for like a week and um you can kind of see that there's a there's a persistent demand also because the amount of installs keeps on growing outside the top titles outside the top four the free fire the fortnight the call of duty and the pub g and that creates opportunities for market entry so my prediction

is that that the new entrants that will focus on progression will find those blue spots in the extremely red ocean and the key is finding it is the waste is finding a way to retain and monetize this audience without succumbing to competing to head to head against the top players in the category that's my it's my opinion but i agree with jk that you should really avoid this this category in games it's extremely competitive there's a lot of big entrance and it's a red ocean so just you know i think merge is the way to go uh it's uh it's what is by the way has anybody actually heard of any of the ubisoft ips being brought to mobile by by chinese developers or something have you yes because that makes total sense i know these teams are going after licenses like with reckless abandon i keep hearing about them like approaching this person and that person so i i don't know why this hasn't even been done now by now right because that's just an obvious so so ubisoft has a big

big studio i believe in shenzhen am i correct jk do you know no no okay first of all stop stop ubisoft cannot make a [ __ ] console cannot make a mobile game period forget it forget that that team i mean that team is actually pretty good but no no they're not making mobile i'm saying the 10 cent guys are big 10 cent and nexon and freaking net marble and netties are all like just basically taking their existing games and just you know losing a license and porting it all over and and bringing it to market right so that makes a lot of sense for them to do that with the clancy stuff yeah yeah i mean they already proved that they can do it without the tom clancy i p so maybe yeah it's um it's interesting to see but i would i would presume that tom clancy would be one of the next games to come out from ubisoft made by a chinese company i mean that that's what i would suggest yeah it makes sense yeah uh i don't know i think everyone everything's been said but um i just hope they aren't doing standard battle royale

right they're not just doing pubg but in the future right that they're gonna be going closer to tarkov or vigor right in design because i think that could actually give them a leg up in the space but anything don't get me started on my guard that [ __ ] cottage building game yeah it's uh it's a nice cottage right but like yeah but i don't know how like everything's been said right now right like this is not ten cent building this game so we should not be expecting pubg mobile level success right and like the the stakes of competing in a pvp genre fueled completely by cosmetics is massive so i hopefully i'm assuming they know what they're walking into because they can look at it on pubg mobile but yeah i just hope that they're going to sidestep this by doing something more interesting in their design but yeah let's move forward um so me ho i keep keep messing up their names so i apologize

but me o mihoyo uh and genshin impact so there there was a tweet this week uh which actually came from an address during to the alumni of shanghai university uh the co-founder uh kai haiyou sorry i'm totally gonna botch every name in this whole artist i'm sorry uh revealed some pretty big numbers so the company's revenue is now 774 million for 200 for 2020 and note that's not all gentian impact so before we start triangulating mobile to pc revenue because roughly 375 million was their 2019 revenue from their existing games before genshin and if you remember genshin didn't launch until q4 of 2020. so mihoyo is scaling rapidly due to genji impact and actually increased their headcount 70 to 2 400 people by the end of 2020 which is insane right that's that's a big number man for that much

revenue yeah so that's like ubisoft stuff well even just like the increasing your head count by 70 right um and i'm all for it you know throwing fuel on the fire as soon as you've got an obvious hit like they have with genji and impact but wow so also what came out was it cost them roughly 100 million dollars to create gentian impact on day one but since then they've scaled their live team and their their live team is actually going to cost them 200 million per year to run this thing so like for like a comp here right like they they built breath of the wild for a hundred million dollars as a free to play game and it's gonna cost them two breath of the wilds per year to to run this thing and i think that's just what's at stake when you're talking about a game that has the potential to make more than a billion dollars a year like it's looking like right now right sensor tower has it estimated making 100 million a month

right now on ios and android which doesn't include pc console revenue and doesn't include uncaptured chinese store revenue so wow that's all i can say my takeaways i've got two number one genji impact's path is not going to be easily followed so kenshin impact was not built by a little scrappy form team backed by a little bit of vc investment for one game right this was a studio formed in 2011 who had built successful games like this before in china you look at honkai impact from 2016 this is basically genshin light right they obviously knew how to build these types of games and just gentian impact was the game that obviously performed absolutely the best but still 375 million here is nothing to sneeze at and this one of course is now launch across platform and really refine the experience the genji impact model is not a first game for a scrappy startup this is a game for a scaled team that

are experts at creating aaa content systemic depth for running a gotcha game and live operations like like thinking back to that quick update on bioware right the combinations of these things are not easy right transforming a triple a studio to become like those other two aspects is not feasible transforming a traditional mobile ccrpg studio to become a triple a content studio is not easy right so really huge props to this team for being able to do it and huge execution risk for anybody who assumes they can walk in without those pillars so i hope anyone that's using gentian impact as proof of their game pitch for vc funding in startup slides is listening to this okay number two is that lean liveops doesn't matter the game truly is like building you know breath of the wild twice per year right and i think when you look at this type of game right sometimes there is a inclination when you've got a hit game that you want to lean down your live ops

and build out a structured team that is as small as possible to fund new r d that is the absolute wrong approach always you should be asking yourselves when you look at a game like the success like this how do you throw more fuel on the fire how do you add more people to this how do you invest more into already scaled service and i think it's impressive the live content cadence that they got to they're releasing a new character every three weeks alongside limited time modes that actually drive that character collection as well as nodes etc on that map like what other western aaa developer could actually do that it's very impressive right like it's like valerian violent only launches a new character every two months right warframe isn't near nearly this fast so it's just impressive um anyways i'm just sitting here awestruck about what they've managed to create um there's still plenty of gaps there in terms of their systems but no it's impressive and i wish everyone luck

who's trying to follow in their footsteps uh eric um well i didn't i didn't hear that the employee count part i didn't hear about that so i just did a little bit of back of the envelope calcs here for a moment here that is a [ __ ] ton of employees man that is like like they literally are doing 290 thousand dollars per employee based upon last year's revenue compare that to ea which is like 50 515 000 per employee revenue and an activision which is 915 000 per employee and keep in mind that's only three months of genji and impact revenue right that's only q4 when we're looking at 2020 right all right all right so that should come up over time but still you know even if you double it um and maybe that'll be comparable to uh ea ea's obviously not as nearly as profitable as activision but anyway um what i was gonna say here uh yeah this again and i said this many times it feels like

a really a false positive um in the industry that a game like this can be successful given the amount of risk associated with dedicating 100 to 300 million dollars in a few years to a game um you know i think a lot of people are scrambling to replicate this type of success but i guess given the cost of development and cost of maintenance i think this is going to be a tough road for every anyone and if you look at the market as a whole and you see what's out there i think there's a lot more lower hanging fruit and opportunities to build games on um even cross-platform games that make more sense than this big mastery mmo that requires that much development spend but uh but i have more power to him and the game is amazing it continues to be really people are continually engaged they're delivering the content um so they're doing a great job of managing what they've built so uh you know more power to them so eric you don't think this is going to be

replicated i actually think there are going to be other not western studios but other chinese studios over time that replicate this model now there won't be a lot of hits but i think there will be more sorry i i mis misquoted yes okay i do think there will be some fast followers in asia that may actually find some success but i i think for western developers this idea would be really followed imagine activision hiring two thousand four hundred people yeah exactly in santa monica well hell even seven hundred thousand four hundred is not just gentian in fact i know but even even even hiring 700 to build this and to dedicate you know 150 to 200 million dollars in rd budget no no way man that's not happening couldn't bungee do something like this yeah maybe i mean but that wouldn't be cross-platform they they would focus on pc console i don't think they would ever build a mobile game ever really but let's say let's say in the future when mobile devices are

you know even more capable it's irrelevant it's not capability is not relevant they're about the feel like the the shooting right like that they're all about like that that that i don't hate those words that sort but visceral like experience of of shooting and if you play destiny or the old halos like it's a it's a masterpiece right in terms of control and and you can't get that on mobile devices they're too much purists but i could be wrong i mean they took an investment from nettie's right right exactly that's what i kind of meant and they have gigantic teams and they are good but but nettie's has no control over what they do and and and uh i actually did a panel with bitcraft uh and had the netties guy on and their real strategy is just making investments that they don't really have any exert any type of control over what they're doing i am excited for that project though um uh i think whatever they do is gonna be pretty amazing yeah the next game that people should be looking out for is black myth wukong now i've heard

word on the street and from from from people in china is that the game is actually like the the demo is amazing i i hear there's issues with the game but you gotta imagine another studio whether it's black myth wukong i hope i i hope that game does well but at some point another another chinese studio is going to do this and then you know can again can western studios compete whether it's you know santa monica studios or in santa monica or you know blizzard or other studios in irvine i think just the the talent pool isn't there right just getting i think just just amassing 500 people in any of those cities is challenging so jacob burn by l.a or is it something else you know i i don't know because there is it feels detailed but you like chinese in general are good at free-to-play and free to play monetization right but the way that it the way that

it played it seemed like it was it was you know premium is what it looked like yeah it felt like premium felt like a devil may cry game or something like that right yeah yeah that's what it looked like and so maybe they're doing the randy pitchford gearbox like super amazing vertical slice and the game comes out and it's totally terrible right like that could happen i hope not but yeah that's that's the word on the street right um all right my story i am picking really terrible stories i i you know but there's always morals to these stories that needs to be needs to be told right so i'm doing another google stadius story not because i really want to but just because it actually did trend pretty heavily like it was covered by almost everybody um and again it was jason schreier who i do respect the guy is in the weeds on this stuff man talking to people and really understanding what's going on but i think what he did here if i may be a little bit critical is he found a data point and tried to build a narrative around it as opposed to actually like making sense so anyway here we go so uh basically uh jason he did a piece on

bloomberg about city it was picked up by a lot of different outlets um and uh but jason basically was jason clearly has great access but he brings up i think he brings up something that google actually did right and that this article like was was kind of like portrayed as something that google did wrong right so anyway he points out that google stadia came out with an absolutely massive bang and it was like flashy press releases you know places at conference decision shows and it was these were all pushed by phil harrison right and this was like kind of the old school way of building out a console right and that actu actually set the expectations from the consumer way too high for what was released last year in area 19 right um and where the features from the content they promised really just did not exist and again the players didn't like the business model et cetera and rather than doing that what they should have done is what microsoft and

amazon are maybe doing is rolling it out more gradually the way that they do it at google with all their different uh features whether it be you know gmail and others etc so so i guess maybe and internally i think they felt like the build-up was way too much and that likely they should have pushed the released to next year to really uh execute on the expectation um and that was kind of what the source was saying uh that he was talking to but you know i i don't know if i desperately agree with all that right i don't think you can really slow start a console right i don't even know how that's even possible to be honest um and i think you know even though that his approach probably didn't match like generally google's style like uh harrison's approach didn't match google style which is like think big and start small and build it up i think that's the only way you can really

release a console is what i'm trying to get across here you know and so what they what the data point that they actually he actually got that was supposedly this big like reveal was that take two he paid they paid take two and ubisoft tens of millions of dollars to build their games for their cons their platform and i'm like of course they did like do you know how much money is spent on building out a new platform from nintendo or or sony or microsoft do you know how much like palms are greased and like shit's gone down in order to make these things successful yeah they shell out tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars of development stuff and and marketing guarantees and all this other stuff that's the way the business is right and so when he's saying that this was like a failure on their part no i think this is actually the right way and the only way they could have actually executed better on this if they just delayed it a year you know that they met the expectations of what this thing could be but regardless and i'm not going to go into this anymore um is that i still think they would have

failed right no matter what they did because i don't think it's a product that has a market as we've said many times but um but i i just think that in general like google just it's just a failure of understanding what the console market is and and what the cost who the customer is and what they expect and and they just did again did not have a product that fit the market so i'm not going to go down this rabbit hole again but i just want to point out that like i think that was one thing they did right they did have a good set of content early in this launch relative to something that you can you imagine having a console that had like six games out and then they were just like spoon fed you one game per month i mean that would have been worse if possible right so anyway that's all i wanted to say about this um though right like what's that to challenge you on that right like in terms of if this isn't a real usual console release so i think they could have had a slow and grow mentality here right like if they hadn't set expectations that it was going to be a major release of hardware

in what was it 2019 2018 whatever um instead they went to okay we're going to launch a lot like keep building what they did with assassin's creed they launched demos for console games so they work with console developers to put a demo of cyberpunk and put it online and allow people to play it right make sure they get the tech to the point where at least on your pc you can use any controller and the latency is not bad when you're playing on pc right slowly grow to the point that latency is no longer an issue people are pretty happy with the tech right and then come out with the hardware launch right like i think they could have had a slower approach but it still doesn't solve the problem of content right like they still would have had to have invested in those studios internally building games specifically for the cloud so that when they did this launch maybe it would have been 2021 instead of 2019 or whatever then they could have had amazing content day one had the big splash but at that point their tech would have been built up they would have gotten at least some you

know positive sentiment about their technology does that make sense yeah i hear what you're saying but i think they were kind of their back it was against a wall to some degree because they hadn't made the investment in building out new content for their platform which they should have done four [ __ ] years ago right but um but and so like they had to release something and they probably were kind of pushed to do so um so i don't know if a slow roll would have helped all that much but i mean i hear what you're saying i hear what you're saying like but that i think their window was closing right i think they had a four year window they were in year two or maybe even year three and they had to release it right and then see what happened like and then they're gonna shut it down by the end of this year done by over right so i don't know it's just a tough situation for them i don't know if they're gonna shut it down eric i i i'm seeing nintendo stadia in 2022

all right let's go to the next article let's don't don't take the bait don't take them back not take the bait so last article spotify says it's letting employees work from anywhere while still paying san francisco and new york salaries this is from business insiders so a number of major companies have shifted to shift it to more permanent reward remote work policies since the coronavirus pandemic appended traditional work work culture [ __ ] i'm losing my words all right spotify is one of the latest ones it announced its work from home program which lets its six and a half thousand global employees choose how they want to work at the company in an office remotely or at a co-working space that the company will pay a subscription for facebook announced that employees who are experienced can work from home if their manager allows it twitter said the workers who don't have to work in an office to perform their job functions can work remotely so that's just as a reference anyway i'm

quoting spotify's travis robinson who's the head of diversity inclusion and belonging said in the article that the move would promote work-life balance employee happiness and inclusion for one it's going to help the company attract talent regardless of location he said he also said that there will be challenges managing hybrid workforce off in-person and virtual workers but that the pandemic has given the streaming service experienced in making sure virtual workers feel included in meetings employee resource groups and company events all right here's my take i agree with travis robinson on offering an opportunity for specialists to move back closer to their families wherever they can work more effectively and our boy telfer is the perfect example of this one so big cities are you know notoriously unattractive for families which may cause these companies to lose a more senior talent as they move out to more family-friendly cities like helsinki

all right stop just stop this is not some public service announcement for freaking finland dude knock it off always always down to the background anyway what i will say the spotify's approach to remove work in is in my humble opinion unrealistic and is based on the interview driven more by ideology than actual business purposes so people in oregon all organizations are in my view dead tired of zooms hangouts and blue jeans there's no informal knowledge sharing as folks are not having lunches or going for beer post work integrating new employees is really difficult and i produce companies that have scaled up by hiring virtual employees will be in a bit of a bind when they come when when the moment come when they actually have to work face to face with us with these people and one once offices open up we'll see a lot of people going back to offices at least two to three days a week so what happens to the remote folk will you know robinson spot if i put in cameras to watch folks in the office and jump in on coffee table kind of

conversation conversations through a speaker or maybe there will be a mandate that folks should report about their candid conversation on slack and apologize for having those without including the workers who work remotely now of course i'm joking and it's crystal clear that a diverse and creative organization needs to be on site to work effectively together and they need to spend time both at work and outside work to to become good colleagues and and the fact that folks can have more flow state when they work when they work at home is great and the fact that the companies are becoming more open to have specialists in remote location is just absolutely fantastic and i do agree with twitter's and facebook's approach which are much more measured you know if you don't have to work in a team you're going to work remotely that's great if you're if you have a specific type of work and your manager allows you to work in a different location that's amazing like you should do that but for everybody to have those

i don't even call them privileges but those ways they're working is is pretty insane so i don't know don't get me don't get it twisted like we had zoom it's not a new invention and we've had it for years we had hangouts for years but every time people have preferred to have physical meetings and it's really important that people can meet meet each other and um yeah i'm i love spotify it's it's definitely it has my favorite podcast 20 of the people are listening to this through the spotify but the fact is that spotify is is not the red cross i mean it's a fantastic audio and video streaming service and it really gets it's it's not by sharing the creation of others so i don't feel that the uh the platform is is sort of above criticism uh regarding this so i don't know the question for you guys is like what are the short mid and long term effects of remote work and how do you think spotify's everywhere can work wherever whenever without a pay cut will work in long term

i don't know you know what my view is i have a very simple view on things everything always reverts back to the normal everything reverts back to the mean right so even this extreme times and people are doing extreme things and you know this work change is very extreme but when things go back to normal it'll be just go right back to where it was before you know and it may take some time right people to get comfortable but ultimately you know the pressures of not of the social of not being around in in corporate life like you're gonna miss out on so much nuance as to what's going on promotions like if you're not there you're not people aren't aware of you you know like facetime is not some kind of invented term it's like the fact is you need to have that kind of uh of exposure to executives and management and they're gonna and ultimately once things are quote unquote safe they're gonna want their people close to them so they can keep an eye on them

right so i think a lot of this is just kind of in because we're in it right now and you know like six months a year from now i think i don't know if this is we're gonna see as much you know i don't know remote work as as not even close to what the remote level work is now so that's kind of my take adam you live remote life yeah i'm i'm fully invested in it right like hopefully wp does not fire me in a year or two because i bought a house here i'm stuck here um no but for for me right like i have i'm not in the usual right like when you're talking about a game studio and a game team i completely agree right like what i felt when i was on a game studio and i could basically just roll my chair back turn around and talk to the developer talk to the art director tart talk to the team right you just can't get that with the work from home that we have right now we've seen it across like many of the projects that i've seen right where productivity obviously has

dropped creativity has obviously dropped right um so that's that's the sacrifice but i'm lucky enough to be in a role where i'm looking over all these different studios and i know when things go back to the normal i've already made you know promises and investment that i'm gonna have to travel right i'm gonna have to travel to san francisco to la to all these different studios to make sure that i've got the face time with people because i completely agree zoom is not a replacement for in-person communication but i've also been a consultant long enough to know that i personally really value working from home i find myself far more effective working from home in my type of role than i am in the studio um even just with the time difference time zone difference that i have now like i have three hours in the morning that i actually can spend building up the documents setting my mind straight that i can't do when i'm barraged by meetings as soon as i walk in the door at the studio

so i understand i understand it but i'm not going to change i'm i'm fully remote deal with it and and and that's why i was in in the same opinion with facebook and twitter because they've said that with roles where it makes sense it's actually very good but but to have the whole company do that i i've again like we have these positive stories and now your story of course about working remotely is is very positive and not only for your family life but also for your effectiveness it's it's been tremendous but then again i hear so many stories of these studios where you know that are not the this that you know the tip of the spear studios where there's a lot of people and i hear about people working for like one hour two hours a day just having their slack open and doing just doing a bunch of other stuff and not really doing work and these people are the ones who are what one to two hours a day yes and these are the same people that have been like who's their managers like what are you measuring their work how it

like if it was a programmer it would be so obvious if like a feature you said would be done in like a week takes you like three weeks right so this is not from my studio so i don't know but i've heard from not from your studio okay from the colleagues i've that this is not this is again only rumors but they're basically saying that there's a lot of people who are working only for a couple hours a day just keeping the slack open and just slacking like literally slacking doing all the other stuff and um and they're the ones who i think i think you gotta you gotta figure out those people you gotta like yeah i have not met anyone that is that has been you know slacking off during work hours right in many ways working from home ends up pushing us to work more hours because more of our time is spent in zoom chat so all i've done is promote the idea that you can have no video on you can do work in some of these stupid meetings adam all i was saying all i was saying that that there's this person who told me about it he said the people who work the least

out of home were the ones who voted the most that let's keep it remote work always so in the company internal studies the ones who work the most i do not want the takeaway from this podcast to be people that promote remote work do not work no that's very hard that's not the takeaway that's not the thing i'm gonna take the i'm gonna take the opposite angle here i think there are a huge slew of women men and women that are like get me the [ __ ] out of the house right and i want to go home and be with adults and have my babysitter or have my school or my preschool whatever take care of my kids so i can actually live and be with adults right they need to pull the rip core to get the hell out of here right no i completely there's definitely people that want to go back to the office right and like feel like they're far more effective i'm lucky that my environment is not but like we're anti-social enough dude this this is not a healthy society thing you know where everyone's still at home like just like you know look at freaking joseph over

there is getting into bitcoin now dude the guy's like going down the rabbit hole man he's like off the reservation dude we don't know where he's going right he's gonna start doing he's doing conspiracy theories he was already there like six months ago now it's bitcoin now it's like who knows man it's like illuminati [ __ ] right you gotta get get back to work get to the office man be with people be normal all right that's my public service announcement let's get back to work i guess i just have a moderate point of view right is that i think this is this there will be permanent change here um that for roles that it makes sense people will be working remote i will be and i think it does give me an advantage for hiring but i think the norm will be that most studios especially people that are running a game need to be back in the office right maybe it'll be two to three days a week maybe it'll be four right um but yeah i guess that's my take it i think they take lessons from this and it will have permanent impact but it's not gonna be everyone working from home all the time

so good luck spotify yeah good luck with that yeah all right guys all right have a good week stay the challenge catch y'all later bye [Applause] [Music] bye [Music] you