TWIG 123 | Fortnite Maker Epic Buys Mediatonic, Ubisoft with Ethereum NFT Game, Dream Games $50M

what's up everybody welcome to twig 123 we've got myself joe kim eric cress adam tuffer and mishka cat cough at the gym working out we gotta add a few more plates to that bar there but anyway so like this background he was so upset about my fat comments last week he had to over index with this [ __ ] weight [ __ ] in the background all right today we're gonna be covering three articles as well as the updates first fortnite developer epic buys fall guy studio mediatonic second gaming giant ubisoft partners with ethereum-based nfv platform solrare and finally dream game secures 50 million series a round what's up guys what is happening i like i like jk's uh video on the um was it making games for women or oh for female audiences yeah female audience yeah that was a

good one king of timing were you really did you record it knowing that there's uh there's yeah i know this was planned like a month ago you guys you're the [ __ ] like a live op operator like looking at the calendar recording good job man it was a thanks and it's and it's an important like honestly it's an important topic to raise um i'm it's um this industry is uh is a little bit too manly and often so i i think it says me who's [ __ ] recording from the gym [Laughter] we'd actually loved it i'm not touching this subject let's move on [Music] uh updates i'll do some quick ones uh so valve has cancelled artifact 2.0 which is the update that they did to artifact their trading card game so effectively the entire game has been shut down now um the previous two versions are now available fully for free marketplace access has all been turned

off um so the interesting thing about this game if you remember is that it was actually the one that released with real money market for cards the marketplace valve's attempt at leveraging their own in-game marketplace system for relying instead of over relying on card packs to monetize that trading card game um it actually was designed by x magic the gather second update riot bungie blizzard veterans have raised 37 and a half million for their game company called theorycraft games it includes the ex-evp of league of legends and the executive producer of halo destiny nettie's led the round obviously very very big and um the the main quote that i'm going to bring about by this company we want to make deep 10 000 hour games that are better when you play with your friends um we want to make games that are worthy of being theory crafted by players

um so usually you know this is a little bit of you know just investor pitch kind of conversations high level lofty goals but overall actually quite like this vision i think it speaks to the core of what actually makes a live service work and i think that ten thousand hour goal is actually speaks to what what it takes to build a a real service of course taken from malcolm gladwell's outlier idea um you know a free-to-play service has to be built around hobbies right hobbies that can be mastered first and foremost so ten thousand hours makes sense to me i'd like to make a comment quickly uh these neck guy net netty's guys are gangsters dude i really like we i have i was on a big craft whatever panel with this guy and uh what's his name simon zoo and so these guys are basically not doing the 10 cent like let's rule the world and acquire everything under the sun they're basically just throwing investments at really good teams and you know it's kind of remarkable at how many of these things he's done because they've done uh the second dinner was their first one um

and then they have a series of other investments and then this one makes sense and then bungie right they just you know they freaking funded the next product from bungie so i i do like what these guys are doing and and simon seems like a really smart guy who's like really into gaming right unlike some of the other people that are in this industry doing m a or just all these bankers or mckenzie guys or whatever so anyway i respect what these guys are neddy's trying to hope they see some success but i think they're they are betting on some really really solid teams so yeah yeah which absolutely makes sense when you're doing these kind of early stage investments you really focus on the team the last thing i just want to say of this but they are [ __ ] cutting blank checks man like these these are people without even a concept necessarily they're throwing up 35 million dollars like on the flip side like that that seems like a lot of money but they i think they have the money to spend and and and and they're trying to grow outside of the west so if everybody thinks that the the growth area is uh free-to-play pc console right yeah

like 37 and a half is not enough right like you're talking about like one not even one game here right like this is getting you to close beta yeah i think they have ton of cash dude they'll just keep throwing it in there as long as there's exact progress perhaps but yeah but great team yeah pretty amazing uh third update so let's get into tencent so tencent has actually started launching standalone cloud versions of pubg mobile or peacekeeper elite in china and honor of kings so now the downloads are actually only 15 megabytes when the you know normal versions are well over two gigabytes so nico partners was reporting this and they were also reporting that the cloud version is actually performing much better than the local version uh specifically for low-end smartphones so that's where they see the value in this the downside of course is that the cloud versions require a very fast and strong network connection at all times so they're hoping that say 5g actually becomes a little bit more prevalent in china so that these additions can actually work well

so next one let's talk about tencent and timmy they actually just started hiring for a new open world cross-platform title so this is fresh off gentian impacts news that they've made close to 900 million gross revenue in roughly about five months since launch which is amazing um and of course timmy who's the developer behind call of duty mobile and honor of kings um he's actually pretty poised to take on this market as well uh i personally i think like tencent is the one publisher that probably looked at the cost of building an impact right 100 million in dev 200 million a year for live costs and said you know only that much you know we could probably make that so i thought they said this i'm like oh my god that is like sheer arrogance right but no it's you said that no no there's no way they must they are like look looking at this and saying wow that's that's a lot of money dude come on even 10 cent did no i don't know i i think 10 cent looks at this space and says you know let's build let's build for this that it's a

defensible space right not a lot of other developers can build at that scale and have the expertise that they have within their studios of building aaa live services right um so i think they actually have a very strong chance to take on the space um yeah and i think no intensity they'll probably even start up a few gentian model games you know like light speed and quantum and timmy will start something up like this and then they'll actually just ask them to fend for themselves so you can win um rumors coming up this week so same stuff as we've heard before nintendo is planning a switch model with a bigger samsung samsung oled display so seven inches 720p screen and that docked it will support 4k so keep in mind this is just rumors but obviously it's been you know there's been enough rumors over the last few years of this happening but this still remains speculation i i have to comment on this one too because i the coverage on this has been so bizarre because it's like a 720p screen is exactly the

same screen they have right now it's only like what an inch bigger or like a half inch bigger so that is not in any way an issue that has that's not even really an upgrade per se right maybe it's a cheat it's cheaper bill of materials right so that they can maybe invest in other things within the the device um docked with 4k support that's the much bigger deal right because the amount of power required and the storage capacity required to run 4k is pretty dramatically different and so therefore they either have to make this a digital only device actually that's the only way that this works because you can't fit a 4k game most games that come in 4k on these cartridges or they would cost an exam amount of money they already cost like 10 per cartridge let's say but if you did a 4k version of like doom or something like you know call of duty dude you would need like it would be like 20 or 30 dollar bill of materials so you have like anyway the point of the story here is like this the 4k thing is a much bigger deal the

the new screen is irrelevant right it's the same exact screen so um i don't think any of these rumors probably these rumors i don't think are untrue i'm just saying like it i don't know the 4k is a bigger deal that's all i wanted to say on that yeah this is all speculation right but um number one i don't think the 720p screen is all that big of a deal um like i don't think a 4k screen would make any sense at all no imagine the size of that device right i could i can't justify a 4k screen for a 15 inch laptop dude it doesn't even make sense even a 1080p screen increase right like you then you'd have to still pretty much increase the size of the device in order to make use of it so 720p still makes sense to me um and then maybe when you get docked like like this is still me just coming up with ideas right maybe the dock is just this massive little unit like much larger than the previous unit which then can offer like has a dedicated gpu within it so it can actually run it and then nintendo's thinking everyone's just gonna be running upscaled 4k right like not

4k textures but actually just doing like what they did with nintendo which is oh sorry what they did with breath of the wild which is just upscaling the best they can with within the end yeah okay so my prediction is this this is what's going to happen this is a 720p screen they're going to be able to do 4k for [ __ ] netflix right but no gaming right and it's going to be a 1080p upres nonsense right and so it's going to be disappointing because people are expecting it to be 4k there's no way there's very little chance that this device is going to run 4k native right no way none of the ports would be able to support 4k you'll be able to get stupid skyrim in 4k because that's like what 12 years old yeah anyways uh next news zynga zynga has acquired extra games which is the led by developers of diablo and torchlight so these are next door neighbors to the zynga office and note that the studio is actually built from the ashes of torchlight so it was previously called runic that was the previous studio that

actually built torchlight 1 and torchlight 2. um so this studio's actual first game was torchlight 3. um and just to be critical of the studio and from the steam charts it really doesn't look like twitch that light 3 moved a lot for the franchise um actually struggled quite a bit and it looks like as a result this this acquisition you know the price is undisclosed and looks much more like an aqua higher than oh shoot i got the story the wrong on uh joseph on our other podcast right because torchlight one was a huge success torchlight two was less of a success and torchlight three was a disaster right but i forgot about the interim step and they must be working on something else but we talked about this the podcast i do think this is a good entry point for zynga right without spending insane amounts of money on a studio that's going to be just a r d burn you know and and more risk so now they have an aquire they have a team that actually can build a capable um potentially capable rpg cross-platform i think

this makes total sense because this is not a big investment so yeah yeah um it looks like it's a support studio for natural motion right because they said in the subtext that you've got they acquired them to work with natural motion on a rpg cross platform give me a really yeah oh for the for the uh star wars game no i don't think unless they have two star wars games right the star wars games the what is called whatever that one looks like a pvp thing unless i'm fully mistaken the way that that trailer came off that looked like a pvp arena thing and then this game sounds like an rpg i don't know man you're doing all the work around here i'm just shooting from the hip so what podcast are you on besides this okay um anyways all i could say for that one is anyone working on that title from natural motion and extra please listen to this podcast about how all the challenges of building a pve focused game as a service for

aaa audiences that is not simple and let's not build gentian impact for a hundred million dollars please um and last one specifically for joe big news a division movie getting made just for netflix just for joe you predicted it and it's got your celebrity crush jake gyllenhaal starring in it so there you go can i throw some salt in this game if anybody from ubisoft is listening to me if you've spent 30 minutes thinking about a division movie stop it stop focusing on this [ __ ] okay this is not what you should be doing there is no flywheel effect for [ __ ] the division right it's all about the core gamer who loves looter shooters but you are wasting time racing resources and spending money on stuff that's nonsense right so if if it's all licensed and you're letting some out third party do it all right more power to you that's the way it should be done but if there's any employee at ubisoft that is spending more than 10 hours working look at this thing

then this is a waste of time and effort okay full stop and i just imagine that these guys at ubisoft are all sitting around a room trying to figure out how to make the best movie with freaking jake jill and [ __ ] hall right get out of there stop it you're spending too much money on nonsense stop it okay division is core game period right you're not going to get more players in the division by putting a movie on netflix you know not happening all right moving on all right that's it that's all i got i don't know i i think the story in the setting is dope so we'll see what happens but the most important i'm excited it's the most standard thing oh my god there's a disease in new york city now dude i'm hiking there is nothing better apocalyptic movies i love that dude those are the best like but i'm not that's not my point i'm i'm excited for this movie i'm totally excited for this movie i'm i'm saying ubisoft spends too much time doing stupid [ __ ] right and their stock is getting destroyed because they can't manage the goddamn company you know and it's

it's awful right and they're just like digging themselves into a grave right now or the chance of getting acquired you know vivendi going after them or someone else but it's it's it's just mismanaged you know what they do over there but go ahead all right all right a few updates from me first update is congrats to crafton pocketgamer is reporting that pubg newstate has hit five million pre-registrations in just one week this is google play only and players who pre-register get an exclusive vehicle scan pubg new state however will be coming to ios but the the launch date is still unannounced second update netmarbles highly anticipated open world mobile rpg blade and soul revolution now available worldwide i think it launched last friday so march 5th so this is based on the popular pc game interestingly the company also announced that they made a number of changes to hunting mechanics player balance and pace of player growth to adapt to western players and i was actually

playing the game yesterday there's a lot of production value there i personally haven't played an mmo in a really long time but to me it was just interesting how everything in that game is like it's almost like not like playing a game it's just like go go go and everything's kind of done for you i don't know eric you should try it and let let me know whether that's like the way that mmos are played now have you not been listening to me for the last year i've been talking about this forever this game is going to fail right fundamentally it's a triple a super high production value game the west doesn't like this stuff you know like lineage 2 was a perfect execution of this and it failed right and so no matter how many times you're going to throw this thing at the market i don't think it's going to be successful right i think it's just it's a tough sell i mean and then gentian you know gentian's like this unique unicorn of a thing that that really did well but these games there's like been like a dozen of these games that come up to the west that just don't do anything and and the numbers so far are pretty terrible right um you know the downloads the revenue but i mean it'll find a small audience and

they'll do a few million you know every month or something for a while but then it's gonna die you know but it is a beautiful game and it's really it does well it did reasonably well in asia um but anyway whatever yeah i don't have much faith in this i love these games though too by the way last update for me is is eric chris petrovick and i actually recorded a discussion on game industry m a we're gonna be publishing that uh this wednesday and we're gonna have kind of like an after session talk on clubhouse this friday at 12 p.m pst so i'll put a link in the show notes but make sure you join us on clubhouse to talk game industry m a and we'll be able to be a lot freer in discussion on clubhouse since it's not recorded so you guys want to make sure to join us i don't know what was that freer than this i think that eric is just dropping bombs no no petrovic kind of calms me down like the guy is so nice right and he's so like

measured in his approach to everything and he said and i say this in the podcast but i'll say this there he says exactly what i say but in such a nicer way it's just like it's remarkable to see the difference like my yin and yang thing going on so i think him and i have a good i think we have a good uh rapport when it comes down to this and then joe's is kind of just you know in the background but i i do think that there are some insights that you'll be able to gain from from this uh from this discussion that haven't been talked about before so again make sure you join us on clubhouse this friday the the the the episode you guys did with petrovik before i said that like eric and had a really good really good like uh dynamic so really happy to see you guys starting this series um all right up to my updates so tiny build this was the company that i talked in the last update uh it was ipoint in the secondary market in london so they finally ipo'd they open up at 33 over the ipo pricing and currently

trading at 630 million market cap now this is a business with 20 million ebitda last year so the market is definitely very uh accepting of game companies right do you even that was like i meant to be a trigger right but like this this company has no business of being public i say it every time right they're too small they may be amazing company but this is going to end badly for everybody involved so sell your stock whenever you can that's my advice to you yeah well the start is the start is good let's put it that way uh anyway so then then there was work from anywhere and this is actually a little bit of a longer update so this is from the previous episode that we did and i and i talked about the the spotify this new you can work from anywhere policy so there was a lot of feedback i got emails and i got people calling me about this now um the the misconception was that there was two extreme views the one that me and eric had and the one

that adam had and i think that is a misconception because we but we all of us agreed that if you're part of a core team working on a game you should be on site that's more that's the most effective way we also agreed that work from home makes sense when you have an individual type of work that you can need to kind of hunker down and go through it and you have the equipment at home that allows to complete this work without traveling to to your workplace so at certain days the sort of a hybrid model where you're staying at home and working focusing makes sense and we also agree that if you're in a specialist position and you're working with multiple different teams usually in multiple different locations of course it makes sense that you work fully remotely because you're you're with with none of the teams anyways but nevertheless it's really important that you have human contact and you actually travel to these different locations and discuss with these different teams so i'm gonna quote one of the people who who sent me this feedback he

is a scopely at scopelypm and this is a quote he said in long term plus 10 10 years the future of game development is going to be remote work as with most industries that don't have a large on-site requirement component my prediction is that most companies will go back to a hybrid model of work with a required on-site component in the near future but that longer term the on-site requirement will be nullified now i kind of think this is a little bit of a wishful thinking i do agree with the hybrid model being the first thing where where there will be more work from home dates and there and then they will be working at the office but i don't believe that that unsight working will be nullified in any kind of a future this is of course my personal opinion and i've actually never heard anybody saying that the current work from home situation is better than it was before in in developing games and it's not have you talked to anybody from l.a

i've talked to people with from la as well and i've i've never been obviously because most of the people that i know from at least the los angeles area right like working from home was a massive improvement right you think about the amount of time that they had to spend commuting um especially people that you know got are just farther away from their office given the cost of rent right like i think even just city by city there's going to be very very different opinions here right like i'm assuming in helsinki where you guys have not had the same type of impact that we've had like in the states or in canada right um where you've actually been able to have on-site in the last you know year and a half or a year the pandemic's been going on right um it makes sense to you but in the case of people specifically in los angeles right like there's definitely a huge benefit of not having an hour plus commute each way going into work okay so i i've actually not had any feedback

from finnish companies so all of my feedback came from around the world and i do i do understand the other the the component of commuting i mean i worked in san francisco before and i've i know what la looks like and i've been there the commuting is absolutely horrible but nevertheless i've like people kind of have this sort of a misconception that that the company wants everybody on place but if it would be more effective to have dice diver like teams dispersed around in different places without actually paying the rent for that big office and having that huge campus of course they would do that and i don't know i i would i would be i would be more than glad to discuss with somebody who would who would come in and explain how the current always working from whole model is better than what they had before whether they're in la or whether they're in i don't know paris or barcelona i i've just i haven't seen this and um i also received a call from uh from

a c suite executive of one of these multi-billion dollar gaming companies and this is his view that he was he was describing to me i like this view this is really interesting uh he said uh yeah well well i'm i'm definitely not mentioning this person uh but anyway we're talking about a big company with with top grossing titles uh he said he was he said that the teams that fought the hardest for permanent work from home were the poorest performing one he said that the teams that were working on current top grossing titles actually sneaked in to the office to work together and um and he he also talked about this the sort of a dream of people thinking that they could move anywhere to these more cheaper locations he said well if you move to those different countries that's tax evasion like we cannot be paying you and you become a contractor at that point and and um just to kind of close this yeah

oh yeah i paid taxes in canada tax evasion like i'm not i'm not evading my taxes i pay taxes well i don't know i think if you if if you're going to if you're going to like bora bora or sure yeah so you become like a digital expat yeah and essentially like in order in order to make this work like us is a different thing like you can move to a different state florida whatever you don't pay taxes but if you're in europe or any other countries like you move a little bit to the left to the right you're in a different country and you need to have even if you're inside of eu you need to have a legal entity in that country in order to pay salary so i can't move from here to sweden and expect to be paid salary no i i need to set up my own company or my company's set up so anyway i was a digital nomad right before yeah so when i was in berlin and when i had i had a and you were a contractor it's not really evasion it's strategic tax planning right okay exactly yeah so so i want to just close this debate yeah let's close it yeah if this is a

better if this if this current model of everybody working in different location or from home is better i'd really want that person to come in on the podcast explain what they have done and what kind of process they use because this is fascinating i'm not against like if somebody can come up and explain this is the way we do it and we are much better this way of course i want to learn about it because it's cheaper yes please come on to this podcast and tell me but my prediction is that things will return back to normal next year but will be more open to remote days and to use of contractor that support the core teams but i do believe that the core teams will stay together in a single location yeah this is one of those topics that's like religious where people are very sensitive about it so people are going to think what they want to think so that's why that's why i invite the person who can tell me that says the guy that wants to talk about nfts next yeah oh my god uh and final one so so i always one piece of news always

coming from finland so i found something interesting rovio wait a minute wait we are not doing a finland freaking news story every goddamn business dude it's not that interesting it's not a huge country okay really i'm just telling you it's bound for pound pound for pound really powerful anyway rovia looking for a chief operating officer and the job description is this person drives the execution of rovio's vision strategy and day-to-day operations essentially what was known before as the head of game's position but now that roe v is concentrated fully on games it makes sense and as the previous head of games has become the ceo he is essentially looking for a person to take over his role so i think there's two options here they hire somebody externally i believe that likely this person would come in from gameloft just based on the current ceo's long history at gameloft i think it's a decade and a half at gameloft and that would definitely shake things up there will be initial friction as always

if you bring a leader from outside organization to into a position as a chief operating officer so basically a person to execute or it could be an internal and then the company will go into more of the optimization path they will probably focus even more on the categories where they're succeeding so that'll be puzzle and i think internally they have plenty of options for for good people to take this position they they have a they have a quite senior team but i wish all the best whoever whoever takes and gets the job first story of the day okay so uh mediatonic a uk outfit um has been acquired by epic for an undisclosed sum um so for me honest like this is great for mediatonic um because i think mediat mediatonic as a company um actually has like a really great history of grit in the industry right um right like you sometimes hear a lot about these stories of companies like

king or say rovio where it's the amount of years it took them you know working through years and years of um web games and mobile games on java phones and all this kind of stuff until they finally got to their hit game in the case of king that's obviously candy crush rovio angry birds in the case of media tonic it's fall guys when you look through their wikipedia page it's pretty crazy right like they're founded in 2005 and they were pretty much a work for hire outfit to build web games for everything they work with pretty much every major major publisher to get paid right like shockwave game house pop cap they built bookworm for for webb bejeweled for web um in 2009 they started playing a little bit on mobile they work with like toy story back to the future fantastic beasts fast and the furious right all of this stuff work from home grit with basically sprinklings of new ip uh their own games throughout as they can make money from work for hire and

actually fund it right um and in 2017 they even work with scopely on yahtzee with buddies come 2020 they launched fall guys and obviously blew up and was not their their their go ahead eric is already pointing at that do you know what's right you know what's really interesting is they got funded see i don't know this company from adam but they got funded in 2019 with like 30 million dollars right and then and then fall guys comes out in 2020. i mean did you did you find out about what the story was in terms of why they transitioned because they basically said they were 50 50 like outsourcing and internal development but they haven't had a hit right and then all of a sudden they get this crazy amount of funding in 19 and maybe during the fervor of all these investments and these type of companies so it seems maybe 2019 they were showing off fall guys and some people yeah i i i i'd love to know that because i think that's actually much more interesting story frankly than this game that came out that didn't do anything for like a year and then all of a sudden it became a cult classic right

you're thinking among us not fall guys oh sorry that's why i'm getting confused all right my bad my bad guys fall guys did take off immediately right because it was part of that ps plus thing yeah sorry i was getting confused but okay so that's interesting so they get get all this million 33 million they invested it then they made an amazing game that blew up and and and yeah all right now it makes sense so obviously whoever like i i wasn't actually aware of the 2019 investment but whoever they were you know hopefully they took a look at fall guys and hopefully you know their predictions are quite on the nose so that's good um but yeah if you haven't played fall guys right obviously captured a lot of the zeitgeist at the moment um launch drink of it when the world needed a break from just another dark depressing survival battle royale game um and you know it was actually really built with streamer content in mind right like that i just remember that first really month of absolutely batshit crazy moments that constantly were being streamed

online within fall guys and of course like among us did take a little bit of that that that wind you know pulled over a lot of those streamers um as well as um phasmaphobia right um because obviously like that type of explosive start based on novelty just can't sustain so looking at the numbers they started at 150 000 ccu on steam which is incredible but right now they're sustaining it roughly closer to 10k which is still within the top 100 on steam um but it's unknown how much this is on say console uh right now um and really when you look at twitch 240k down to about three to four k viewers daily so really like they obviously caught this amazing explosion and similar to apex are now trying to figure out how do they stabilize a core group of fans and drive a live service around that right so from a live service perspective right this this team really needs to fuel up their live content uh and really enter epic we did a great

job with rocket league right shifting that game towards free to play um can obviously you know pass on their learnings light fuel the fire for all of those live content demands and really increase the reach of their games so it all really seems like a really good fit and now you have rocket league fall guys fortnite you know pick up among us or some of these other guys like it seems like a nice demographic fit um shifting around players and very streamer first games so that's great um so obviously a great partner and a great fit for a mediatonic kind of win-win-win all around um and you know without the cost it's really hard to say the value for epic but it all really fits well into their strategy and to their audience so i think this is all pretty good and i really wish them all the best and i'm just going to be watching out and looking through live ops because i'd love to see some of these crazy events and cosmetics that they come up with eric i mean the only comment i have is like look the vcs came in they put in i think 36 million i think was the round now they've catch up cashed

out these guys you know were i think not a struggling developer but when you're doing like work for hire it's it's really like eat or be eaten no that's not the right expression it's like feast or famine type thing where it could really struggle it can be a struggle right um so they come out without their own hit they got the money to actually you know finish it and build it they came out with a hit they sell themselves freaking this is the win-win-win man for everybody dude and uh if only like machine zone and like rovio got the memo right then maybe they'd be in a different position you know but i think hopefully what helps is that they get all the money from epic to build out their next game and so like this this is a great great outcome for them you know and and and they're and they're selling at the top like regardless of what they got i don't know what they got but i think this is kind of probably one of the peaks in the market for a while um and you know i'm i'm happy for them and i'm glad they'll be part of epic but i think epic funds fall guys i don't think they like sure they they obviously bought the

studio and they'll fund internal development but i think like they need to be putting fuel on this fire not you know shifting them off to a new game oh i'm i'm just assuming that they're focusing on building out more content for the for their platform right so if so this is kind of like the microsoft situation with epic right if if they really want to build a platform right which is their goal i think ultimately to build some kind of metaverse type platform then they need internal development to actually support that platform right and so microsoft acquired like a gazillion studios over the last like three or four years to help support their software as a service uh you know microsoft xbox live [ __ ] so i think epic is kind of doing the same thing so yes tall guys will be part of the you know i mean that's a big cross-platform game but i think ultimately they're going to be making console games and and pc games for microsoft right not for sony right or whatever else yeah so

you're talking about this stuff within microsoft because fall guys is not on mobile so when you say cross-platform you mean console pc console called pc no pro yeah pc console for for uh for epic right yeah um anyway so i just think you'll see epic getting more and more aggressive on finding teams that can help that support their longer term vision of what epic is going to become and i think this is just part of that right yep gobble gobble gobble right all right moving on to the next article speaking of religious topics gaming giant ubisoft partners with ethereum-based nfd platform so rare i don't know how you pronounce that anyway according to the publication crypto briefing ubisoft has announced a partnership with an ethereum based nfd platform called solare to build basically an ethereum based free-to-play soccer game or as they say in europe football but we know it's soccer

anyway the the game is called one shot league and apparently winning in the game awards digital sports cards which can then be traded on the blockchain and so each week players select a five-person team in a fantasy style tournament and the highest point winners are awarded limited edition trading cards so it was noted that most of the cards actually trade between 0.1 to 1 ethereum so actually quite a lot of money but one card was actually traded last january for 116 ethereum which is roughly 193 thousand dollars so finally last week based on the success of the game sorari also raised 50 million in venture capital financing so congratulations to those guys and my take on this is that sorry wait wait wait wait before yeah yeah before you go from the 193 000 okay when the thing was traded how much was the 1.1 ethereum worth oh so you're you're basically talking about the money to the

to to the game yeah no this is this is the aftermarket stuff right so that would go to the player no no no but i'm saying it the card that was traded for 193 thousand dollars yeah when it was traded it wasn't ethereum wasn't worth that much money that that the value of ethereum has gone up and that's why it's worth the 193 000. since january i mean it's gone up but not that much right all right all right all right moving on and when when just to confirm too like when you're talking 193 000 for a card or that's that's player to player like does the developer yeah that's right does the developer get any cut there i think contracts could be structured in that way i don't believe they are in in this particular case i think that's the money to the player not to the studio so within like the the 50 million inventor what are they buying in terms of profitable business value well because the the fact that people would be interested in playing this kind of game

and being able to collect these kinds of cards right so even with like top you know like nba top shot which is going crazy right that i mean they've sold over 300 million worth of goods but the aftermarket is also pretty crazy where you know some of those those video moments are selling for tons of money in the after you know on the blockchain afterwards but anyway so my take on this is that nfts are a big deal they're here to stay but i do have a little bit of a different view than both the religious folks on both sides which is that i'm personally very bullish on nfts and digital art in the long term but i also think that there's just a lot of experimentation right now so that many if not most in my opinion of the nf nfts out there are probably going to go to zero but longer term i'm actually very bullish and for people who want to know more about other successful implementations of mst

people really need to check out as i mentioned nba top shot which is again sold close to or over 300 million of these kind of nba video moments as nft although i actually think that some of this stuff is kind of i i personally have to say kind of ridiculous like jack dorsey just auctioned his first tweet on twitter and like the highest bid right now is like two and a half million dollars to own a tweet anyway and on these nfts right like you're talking about nba top shot having nba video moments dorsey's first tweet like digitally you could get that asset i could just go find that asset what's that it's not authenticated by the black it's not authenticated by the blockchain though so it's not the only difference is like it's like okay the the one i can just go look on it on my monitor but then the other one i get to look at it in my monitor with a authenticated by blockchain icon next to it well i mean i assume you own the rights to like if you wanted to

display it or if you wanted to broadcast it or things like that i i assume but that would be interesting to know frankly it's like what rights come come around that yeah and even i'm sure they've contemplated it but whether or not it's yeah the other interesting thing is like a lot of people are fractionalizing this stuff right so like let's say there's a you know like a trading card that you fractionalize and what what is in that's even more complicated right what does it mean to own 150 of you know of a moment or something like that but anyway uh but for me personally i mean i've been a blockchain hater for years and i think people if you go back to earlier podcasts i i've been kind of you know crapping on blockchain but i i i did see the potential for some of the stuff and last year in in full disclosure you know my studio did a partner with galaxy interactive because we were kind of interested in what's happening in that space and for me personally this is the year that i actually am starting to see a lot of the potential there's been a lot of momentum i would say even the last few weeks

there seems to have been a lot more momentum behind blockchain nfts and the potential within gaming and personally as part of my journey to learn more about this and to understand this better i did record a podcast with richard kim who is a partner at galaxy gonna publish that next week so definitely suggest that you guys check that out but it's definitely who's richard kim and why is he important well i mean they they're basically investing a lot of blockchain-based gaming companies so they have a specific focus and and also investing into jk yeah oh i see jam this is like the self-promotion center man i gotta i gotta just start dropping bombs about something i don't know what am i promoting at this point right anyway um actually sorry people may be surprised but i'm actually think that this makes total sense right this makes total sense for blockchain right in particular right i don't really consider blockchain a currency i don't consider blockchain a store of value maybe

but like but in terms of like managing this kind of uh ecosystem it makes total sense right um because the problem with blockchain that i've had in the past is it really doesn't work or makes sense for traditional games you know and i i did a panel with a buddy of mine from forte who is uh the founder of uh kabam's company that does blockchain stuff and they're building exactly kind of this is that fundamentally it's a chicken and egg thing here right it's like blockchain is a real good mechanism of ensuring that you know exactly what you own and you can identify it and i'm not going to use all the terminology because all that makes it really confusing right but if but um but you can't really force a blockchain system into the existing gaming right because gaming already has its traditional tropes and and how things work within like you know world of warcraft or other like rpgs where you own digital assets but in a completely different way than the blockchain can help compel help figure out right so what you need to do is you need to figure out build stuff

that actually takes advantage of what the core blockchain thing is is is enabling which is uh unique identifiers for assets right digital assets right and so i think blockchain in this u in this context is huge because you could basically track individual ownerships of items right and so it's like if you could have like the rookie car the only rookie car in the world for you know i don't know curry right that is like super valuable in in in the in the ecosystem of sports memorabilia right for the card the actual physical card but on a digital asset you could be it could be the same thing so it's all kind of like and that makes sense so in the collection world the collection mechanic or the the idea of collecting it's it's it's a huge thing and people are again are already doing this in the physical world right they have basic baseball card rating systems you know they have fine art authentication they have all these services that are dedicated to making ensure that you have an actual asset

that is is is real and and rare right to some degree um so and i guess the other point the more macro point about why this could be successful is that people are lunatics you know they spend millions and millions of dollars to correct collect unique art right and maybe it's not digital per se but it's still like some some type of insanity like the amount of people will buy whatever they feel like they want to buy because they because and i don't want to get too political on this but there's so much money sloshing around here like trading cards and fine art and comic book art these are becoming absolutely massive industries like in the last like 10 years right or 12 15 years since the you know the oa crash right and so it's not so shocking that people will move to digital because it's actually easier to own those assets than it is to own these like these these hard assets right um so anyway and the other point i would make is that we are already doing this as gamers just in general right it's not

the same mechanism right but i've spent way too many hours hundreds and hundreds of maybe tens of thousands of hours on world of warcraft building my character which is basically a digital asset getting gear with your digital assets and and i've spent thousands and thousands of dollars for that privilege right but it is the same idea but in this way we're actually creating a uniqueness and well as as well as scarcity right um and and the same thing goes for anybody that does star wars galaxy of heroes right collecting those characters right or you know marvel contests of champions or these lunatics that are spending tens of thousands of dollars on social casino for a fake currency right i mean it's insane right so i don't even think this is that big of a that big of a stretch to be honest so anyway i think you know i have a good friend that does this collection he collects comic book art baseball cards concert posters all this crazy [ __ ] right and people are insane for these things as as unique you

know assets right and they're willing to suspend insane amounts of money and i think it's just only inevitable that the digital assets will become part of that type of ecosystem of collection particularly in the west i can't really speak to europeans if there's insane about collecting but uh certainly u.s people are super insane about collecting so that's kind of my shape i just think it should be actually paired to a service that's scaled that actually can have value right like you think of neocats and you have the same thing with nba top top shots whatever it is right if this was associated with fortnite right or roblox and i think it gets really interesting when it's not just like the rookie card of of curry right it has numbers associated with those which have some sort of where amount or like issued number right that's when you start to create these absolutely crazy collection ideas where you don't just have the rookie card of curry you have the first issued blockchain curry rookie card

right the very first issue it's the same thing you see people going nuts for in cs go with the where number right not only do i have the absolute top tier weapon that cosmetic actually has a shader associated with it that has a gradient based on that digital asset number right and then you create these absolutely crazy collection moments right but that's there right so nfts are unique yeah exactly but then you have to have some sort of visual representation and then you associate it with a platform like fortnight where cosmetics and visibility is there right so i'm running around with that digital asset and i think then you can start to get mass appeal and you can get to absolutely crazy um uh things as soon as it as long as it's being kind of segregated to just these kind of odd blockchain games i think it's just tim sweeney has to add it to fortnite right like roblox has to add it to the skilled service we have to get beyond this kind of initial step um and thinking that blockchain has to

be there from the beginning i okay so my i'm sorry i don't think you're wrong i what i'm trying to say is that these games have to be built with that in mind you can't retrofit an existing game with this type of thing now it sounds like valve has tried to do that with some gradient thing with it you're talking about but i'm saying in order to make this like a super compelling ecosystem it has to be kind of built with the idea of scarcity and unique ownership is is is is the critical part is is a critical part of the game itself right i don't know if a cosmetic economy you might be right maybe maybe people are that insane where you know it's like a lighter shade of [ __ ] gold means that you know you bought it first right maybe you're right maybe you're right like you're constantly amazing beyond cosmetics right you start getting into gameplay impacting items then it becomes this whole life content challenge of how do you build a system that's that scalable and then give away that much value out of your damage model right like that's a very very difficult problem to solve

this cosmetics are infinitely solvable and honestly okay but the only the only way that that sorry the only way that that system works though is if you have a way of trading on the back end right trading assets you know as as a marketplace right so that you can trade with other players you know so i guess my point is like i think it has to be new game development and that's why these things take so long to adopt and this was the whole point of my talk with this guy from forte was like look you could do whatever you want to do and say like this blockchain is a great system right but if it's not implemented anywhere it's just it's just a it's it's these super smart engineer types that are like you know you know pontificating and speculating but when you actually build [ __ ] like this collectible thing for the nba or you know these type of executions then it becomes more real and and later games actually i will implement it in more a full way right and you'll and that's what forte wants to do that i just think that we're going to be waiting around for these blockchain companies that are more focused on blockchain than they are about gameplay and i think they have to get past that

first step before we even start talking about value that's the critical thing is right now like a lot of game people don't understand blockchain well enough right and so right but there will be i i predict there will be some company that understands gaming and blockchain well enough to create a billion dollar game but i think it's going to be in the way that eric says you have to think about blockchain from the ground up and integrate it into the game it's just like say the game just like this the game first and then bend the blockchain to work with it right now as most of the games that i'm playing are you and i bending the game you and i disagree then because i think so i'm not articulating this well i can say because what i am saying is that these type of executions that are using nft are going to be the template by which game developers can finally [ __ ] understand what the hell people are talking about with blockchain right and then they will use that and implement it as a complete system within their game like imagine like i don't want to go too much

to deepen this diablo could do this in a heartbeat right like if they wanted to but they'll they would never do that right that's never going to happen right but maybe it's a company like uh the guys who uh that that zynga acquired right they could build this game from the ground up with the idea of having scarcity and and uniqueness of the of the items i just don't think you can retrofit dude i think that's the biggest challenge because it's too it's too much effort there there are better systems to manage assets in fortnite than blockchain right that's and and only when you actually build a whole game around the idea of nft and the blockchain will that make sense retrofitting becomes a cosmetic slayer because it will impact the economy otherwise right so that's that's why it needs to be built from the ground up uh with the economy in mind but anyway moving on right let's bring this home so dream game secures 50 million in series a round hold on hold on before we before we continue i just want to make sure mr katkov are you a shareholder in dream games

uh i wish okay just we share an invite we have to have disclosures now because i have no idea what is like we share an investor oh for christy i knew it i knew it this is always suspect all right now i have to question you every time there has to be a disclosure anyway anyway the turkish mobile startup dream games has raised 50 million in funding despite having only launched its first game today and i don't know if the game's launched globally because when i looked at the sensor tower data it mainly showed canada and uk and ireland so i don't think it's fully globally launched anyway the series a round was led by index ventures a high-profile vc firm known for investing in some of the biggest companies in the game industry like king roblox and supercell previously dream games raised a 7.5 million seed round led by makers fund who also followed in this round

so here's my summary of this top of the food chain investors i mean index holy [ __ ] and makers is no slouch either you got the founding team of xpeak just like with bigger that also got investment from index ventures and they are going after the puzzle market that's the biggest genre on mobile in the west 3.7 billion in revenues in net revenues in the west at 24 year-over-year growth and when you look at the market shares in the puzzle from 2018 to 2021 it's interesting you know as we've talked king has gone down well king has actually been stable as the market has grown around it so before they had over 50 of the revenue currently have 30 and probably end of the year 25 and so forth because they're not really launching these newest games that are able to grow then we got playwrecks growing like like a banshee i mean from 25 to nearly 40 of all the revenues they've

been excellent at scaling but it has been a moment since they launched a game that was able to scale wildscapes was their latest one and since then they have heavily relied on all kind of trends of us like from from um advertising to misleading ads to fake playables to to playables that are added into the core game so they have definitely been innovating as well on the marketability side then we got app loving their portfolio companies like magic tavern pivo will fund belka redemption games applovin has gone from 3 million in net revenues a month to 30 million net revenues a month in two years and with their puzzle games zynga is keeping it pretty steady with their peak and couple of and the uh the other was it it wasn't willy wonka it was the harry potter game and then you have the the rest of the of the pack the jam cities the rovios the tactiles the aristocrats or plarium they're kind of sharing the rest and then there's a lot of smaller companies so if you look at the market it's highly

competitive because the biggest competitors are gigantic but i think this this investment both into dream games that is now 57 million raised bigger games that raised 6 million recently they're all xp guys that have started their companies and peak is known for small teams and what we're seeing most likely is is folks from peak will be maybe leaving to some of these newer startups because there's more upside and overall the gaming startup scene in istanbul is booming like like nowhere else so i my prediction is that that well i have my predictions that the other the puzzle royale or yeah that's the name of the game from dream games that will do really well and we have actually uh so sorry royale match is the game from dream games and that will do really well and we actually have a deconstruction of that coming next week but i think the uh the the other prediction that i have here is as this will will have an effect on peak

i think some of the people from peak will be leaving and joining these these newer startups that are growing making puzzle games and that again will will be detrimental to peaks future i don't think peak will decline but i think it won't be shipping these massive games either since the the top talent is leaving to either start up their own companies or joining these rockets huh i guess my only comment here is uh the game looks really good so far i guess it's like seems like a limited beta in different territories us is like google like that special google deal where you get like a certain amount of installs um so the game the metrics look good now the real issue that i could see with this is idfa potentially limiting their ability to scale this game in any meaningful way now 50 million is a lot of money but it's actually not a whole lot of money for how much these lunatics spent not moving i shouldn't say that because they're not lunatics they're amazing how much these

guys spend like playwrights and stuff etc um but uh it'll be interesting to see if they can scale these games the way that we've seen from peak and playwrights and others in app loving etc it is a very competitive market but as you said it's absolutely massive and the king going from 50 to 30 share is kind of an indication of how they've fallen off in terms of uh of interest from from that audience but uh but yeah they seem like a great team that's gonna make great products uh let's see if the market can take another uh uh puzzle game but there is an insatiable desire for puzzle games these days so yeah we'll see yeah anybody else and wait who's your investor so now that we have full disclosure it's it's all private private non-private solo public i'm just asking who is it maker's fund oh gotcha okay so all right are we done i think that's it guys

till next week catch y'all later make sure you check out the clubhouse this friday 12 p.m pst be there or not and uh that's it everybody or be asleep oh hey hey i got i got a question one more question one question eastern time no i got a question for eric you you said there was like a side comment because you were talking about collection and you were like at least people in the u.s collect i'm not sure if the europeans collect what do you think europeans do like we're practicing no no no no no no sorry sorry i the the baseball card basketball card football card yeah comic book art like all these things seem very u.s centric but i i i don't know i i'm speaking of ignorance right i don't know hockey cards here in finland just like they would do in canada hockey cards are gigantic okay because like there's like these hedge fund guys in new york that are spending 100 000 200 000 for you know comic book art of you know spider-man 1 or whatever like

you know these type of things like are insane right but i mean i get that right i think i have like at least somewhat nerd cred on that stuff where i like like that but um i just don't know how i don't know how big the market is in europe that's all i'm saying i'm sure this is like by real art so that's that's that's the part okay that's that's exactly my point well if they're buying real art then they're not gonna be interested in whatever anyways but we can cut this part out all right all right bye bye [Music]

you