TWIG 127 | 3 New Supercell Clash Games, Tencent Timi $10B in 2020, Manticore $100M for "Multiverse"

provided to you by axola hello what's up everybody welcome to twig 127 you got myself joe kim mishka katkov eric kress and adam telfer today we're going to be talking about four articles first exclusive 10 cents timmy gaming studio generated 10 billion in 2020 sources say by reuters second manticore raises a hundred million for user generated games in the multiverse by venture beat third clash of clans reveals three new games clash quest mini and heroes by screen rant and finally wild rift is league of legends for everyone by polygon how are you guys doing eric you've got a confused look on your face what's going on i'm a little slow this morning i have to admit so luckily i'm not going to be the star

of the show this time all right in that case i guess we could jump straight into updates so i've got two updates from me first pocketgamer.business noting that according to sensor tower data hyper casual games games downloads peaked in q1 of last year in 2020 and has since then decreased every quarter since since then and through the pandemic pocketgamer notes that the big winners in terms of genre was the puzzle category which managed to see an 11 year-over-year increase and simulation grew 13 year-over-year also inner sloths among us was the biggest winner in terms of downloads between q2 through q4 of last year next update from me as a huge final fantasy fan final fantasy creator hironobu sakaguchi has returned with the launch of fantasian an epic rpg on apple arcade last week so as a huge fan i just wanted to call that game out very unique art style looks pretty cool

so if there are any game subscribers out there be sure to check it out okay cool yeah whoever has apple arcade then we all have an apple arcade come on we're just just hiding it um a couple updates on my side so something some news i found so nielsen shuts down super data and there was of course all the time these sort of rumors that we've addressed here not rumors but just issues with their data being inaccurate uh and probably the biggest one was when uh epic ceo came in and kind of gave his data regarding what data superdata was having um in terms of fortnite i don't remember we covered it on this podcast like 50 episodes ago but nevertheless nielsen is shutting super data down and second thing was play ventures so play ventures announced second fund of 135 million dollars so play ventures is uh premier vc focusing purely on gaming

i think they invested in adam did they invest in your studio back in the days yeah yeah so and of course investor in savage games my studio so eric here you have it we have ties congratulations to to play ventures a massive massive second fund well i'm surprised we're not like dedicating half the episode to play ventures given your affiliation i mean we should anyway uh super data i think super data shutting even though it was notoriously inaccurate as you say it still was the only source of information for um a lot of things in the marketplace that that we won't see particularly microtransactions and et cetera that um that it will be missed and so you know as an analyst you know i have to figure out how to like figure out a different way of tracking that to to keep tabs on what's going on so i again i'm surprised that no one picked this thing

up right that someone didn't just say hey yeah we'll take it over you know we'll give you pennies on the dollar for it but instead nielsen just shut the thing down because they did acquire it like only a few years ago so anyway bizarre um all right my update on an update so last year last week we talked about new zoo um and uh new zoo reached out you know they want to clear up the misunderstanding about their cloud gaming forecast all right gotcha um of course their analyst is some like electrical engineer you know with a masters of business from oxford right she is gonna wipe the [ __ ] floor with me just to be clear right i know this is going to happen because i just a bunch of nonsense right she's going to talk methodology and i don't know dude i'm i'm doomed i know i'm doing it are you going to talk to her is she going to go on with michigan chat through this uh their methodology and their output we'll see we'll do whatever

um okay right i'm very interested to see how they came up with that calculation it's only fair that they have a chance to uh to respond and it does sound like from you know from the communications i've had with nuzu that you know they seem like good good people so yeah yeah and then i do want to make a correction because it wasn't new zoo that forecasted vr it was idc basically they said that there was gonna be a 65 million install base by 2020. come on dude i mean we're at like 20 million tops you know but anyway all these all these forecasts i think are overly ambitious uh vr ar esports and of course cloud gaming and so you know i i look forward to talking to new zoo about it and they they have been actually building this report for a while now um and uh she gave me an old version of of of the report so i'll i'll definitely look through it before we

we talk to her um yeah that's all i got okay guys starting the news our first news article is from reuters exclusive 10 cents timmy gaming studio generated 10 billion in 2020 sources say and so in what reuters is calling an exclusive article they state that 10 cents timmy gaming studio generated 10 billion in 2020 according to two unnamed secret squirrel sources so this would make timmy the world's largest developer reuters in suggests that this provides a basis for teami to move beyond mobile and compete directly with global heavyweights in aaa titles on console most interestingly in a recruitment notice last month apparently a timmy engineer wrote that the company is aiming to build a new aaa game that resembles the virtual community from ready player one and will quote compete head to head against big powers from japan korea europe and us further tencent is building studios

overseas including one studio each for timmy and one for lightspeed in quantum which is the other famous tencent own studio and so both of those studios are going to be based in la and despite being based in la apparently these new studios intend on developing original ip so tencent has ambitions to increase its revenue to over half from overseas and at least in q4 of 2019 it generated 23 percent of its revenue from overseas and while tencent doesn't break down its revenue for individual studios apparently these two secret sources say that timmy accounted for 40 of 10 cents overall game revenue of the remaining gaming revenue apparently light speed and quantum contributed 29 of the overall 10 gaming revenue while 26 was proceeds from publishing for other developers such as aurora studios group any thoughts guys yeah this feels like 10 cents end game or

master plan all kind of coming together from my perspective i think timmy and lightspeed are incredible developers and i think now working with western ip and pretty much having like a nearly perfect hit track record right to be basically a billion dollars plus lifetime for really every developer every title they're developing um they're just they're they're incredible right each are focused on pvp cosmetic based live models built from mobile and cross-platform really from the ground up so it's going to be incredibly difficult to out operate these companies without reaching their scale and i think they're right in terms of aaa devs western aaa devs can definitely reach the scale they don't have the talent or the focus to out operate uh these companies in live so i think only me hoyo hopefully got that right keep getting those confused has been able to do this right um and i just like looking at their next game the survival shooter from timmy looks great right it's a great fit for the studio given what's happening with pubg and call of duty and it really makes

sense for the next franchise for them to develop i'm also expecting them to do some sort of a looter shootery thing from tim your or lightspeed as well and will be even more difficult to compete given the content requirements eric yeah i mean these guys have executed flawlessly even even with call of duty when initial results were relatively disappointing from a monetization perspective i think they just doubled down and just threw goddamn tons of bodies at it to create you know more content and and liveops for the game and now it continues to do extremely well beyond our expectations um just as a little bit of a backdrop i know i think i've said this in the podcast before but i remember when i was at kabam we talked to all these guys net marble nettie's uh tencent et cetera and all of them were completely um not dismayed but concerned about growth in china because it's so competitive right and their goal and their strategy and this was about eight years ago was to expand in the west uh by any

means necessary right because they felt that there's a lot more opportunities to grow to take share from the west and i believe i mean it just pretty clear is that tencent was the most aggressive and definitely has been rewarded netmarble has been strong nettie's has made a lot of investments um but again in some ways you could view this as a negative to that you know china is kind of taking over et cetera et cetera but the other thing is it's created a lot of opportunities for investment in western companies um and i'm not gonna go through all of them but um you know they are kind of the the money that's helping fuel this and they were early right and now we have all the vcs coming out and investing in all these you know freaking metaverse companies but um but they were but china was just very very aggressive on the mobile side and have done extremely well yeah maybe you're completely right in terms of these investors moving over and focusing on metaverse style companies instead of all these like you look at the track record at 10 cent who they picked up over the

last few years right like it especially last year with digital extremes and you got grinding gear games before that they've picked up the most amazing feature facing aaa console studios long before anybody was even thinking about this yeah maybe a couple thoughts on tencent for me is that well and timmy in particular i i also have had an opportunity to meet those guys and talk to them they definitely think at massive scale that's just how their their thinking is completely around that i also think though that in terms of being able to develop more share in the west it seems like they're trying to learn it from anecdotally it seems like they've hired every consultant available in the western markets which i think is actually going to hurt them more than help them but uh uh i also think you shouldn't count out um racing so remember you know that their their first huge hit was qq speed so uh you know don't count that out yeah and to be clear i mean part of the reason that they can operate in this way i mean they're unfettered right like ea activision take two all

these big companies in the west are responsible to shareholders on a quarterly basis and and so is 10 cent to some degree but they also have just a lot of other stuff that's going on um and and so they have the ability to make insane investments that that it would not be prudent for most other inve in companies to do right um and it's also an advantage of being from you know a chinese company as well so they have some advantages from the perspective of of resources but also um the capabilities uh and and and not as many checks uh compared to other you know western companies so it is not quite an even playing field to some degree but um anyway i you know they're making some great games and they're doing extremely well and and teaching us you know what what the consumer is willing to do or willing to play and buy and spend all right next manticore my favorite um they raised a hundred

million dollars uh for user generated games in the multiverse i i think actually it's the same multiverse not mega metaverse oh it's just like a no no no that is the name of the article isn't it why is it multiverse i i i think we're gonna ban those two words from the podcast from now on i think we're at least be consistent all right now it's just i don't know it's just so hyped these words they don't even have any meaning anymore but anyway um okay the mountain is huge right uh but rec room just erased 100 million dollars uh at a 1.2 billion valuation dapper labs which does crypto kitties and nba top shops raised 305 million dollars how did i miss that i didn't even see that anyway whatever it's crazy um xn led the round and softbank london venture partners benchmark bitcraft um and uh correlation ventures and also epic participated as well

um they are releasing exclusively on the epic store on april 15th so this is you know right before that happens they have like 20 000 free games uh about 500 000 projects that have started and over 1 million at player accounts and creators so they're basically preparing for the onslaught of releasing on the epic store which should increase their uh penetration significantly they said in the article manacore does about a 50 50 split with creators uh versus uh 70 30 so 30 for developers on roblox and 3070 for most other platforms in the world right so 70 to the creators uh on the app store etc um and he actually put it very succinctly uh desk camps right is that how you pronounce his name anybody know the comps or something like that the con christ there's no way of pronouncing that okay um they may say the demand the demand side the supply side the engine the servers the tech and the

community it's a lot of work to build the quote-unquote i'm going to say community-based gaming how about that um all right so my take i think it's a great team of folks a lot of old ea zynga et cetera they have a huge task ahead of them to compete with the likes of roblox and epics um and you know frederick i'm gonna call him frederick i'm not the pronouncer's last name frederick basically says it very well you know the uh demand supply engine servers tech and community is a very expensive thing to do that's pretty much sums it up right and even though 100 million is a [ __ ] ton of money um and and uh for particularly for a small company like this a relatively small company uh it's it's just basically insane so just to be clear i mean for the demand side they have to track users and and you know retain them with with a with a strong ecosystem of products and services they have a the supply they have to

establish a relationship with developers and provide them tools and technology and and support to help build games from the engine they have to basically have a separate team that actually is building up the engine and the tools and technologies for the developers um and then the back end which is what roblox does extremely well is hosting these uh all on the server side to make it as seamless as possible no matter where you are in the world and then obviously you know community of users and and and creators uh building community systems around that is is just a very herculean task um and again these are the biggest challenges of building these type of social systems right like social games now now i can't even remember my own terminology and it just takes more a lot more investment than traditional gaming and again you need to build and support every aspect of the ecosystem to make it successful uh so i guess my biggest concern right now

if i were to be you know the cynic that i am is the business model right so you know as long as epic has fortnight and other means of generating revenue they don't really need to charge 50 30 or whatever they can charge whatever they want to charge um and they will likely undercut the rest of the competition particularly based upon what sweeney's talked about in the past i'm surprised i wouldn't be surprised if they do like a 15 percent less tax or tax or rev share when they build out their kind of epic universe tool um and this would be a huge draw for developers because it's a really well-funded obviously and and really well known with a huge platform and they charge 15 versus 70 for roadblocks i mean i think that's a huge concern or 50 for uh manticore and um it could be you know just it just seems to be they would draw people away from these other other systems and i don't think manticore could really survive

on a on a 15 split so it's basically the power of the big you know ultimately um but i'm really excited to see what manticore does and how they create as i said in the last time i think they will basically build these tools and technologies and perhaps get acquired ultimately uh but i wanted to give a shout out to patrick beekner who was my boss's boss at ea way back then he joined about a year a year ago um i'm really excited for him and his team and he's definitely building up quite a marketing org over there to help support this so very cool yeah i just want to make an exclusive announcement on this podcast chair for everybody exclusive exclusive exclusive my studio we are now building a ugc nft uh metaverse flywheel shooter game and we're raising a hundred million dollars for that so if anyone's interested just hit me up you only get the money if you keep a straight face while you pitch that

it's called it's called crypto blocks core so anyway hit me up anyway what do you guys think one thing that i'm thinking about here is um do you remember all those narrative uh platform games on mobile i forgot all their names right like episode choices all this stuff there was the first one which was ugc driven was that episodes it was episode it was episodes i think it was and then and then there was another one which came out afterwards i think it was choices which it was pixelberry which was more ip driven more say quality fewer bits of content and actually ended up beating leapfrogging the original which was based on ugc right so what my recommendation is to metacore would be it's kind of a weird analogy right but you look at these two different platforms like roblox is already filled with right like hundreds and thousands of games really a lot of the the engagement gets concentrated in quite a few of them so if you really want to move people over

i'm assuming you're gonna have to try to figure out how do i get the right content elevated to the right people to retain enough of a player base to begin with so seed up that flywheel or whatever the hell we're going to call it right seed right like basically get the right developers into the game building great shooter game modes that could go into this service and actually retain enough of a player base that then could start the whole cycle over and over again right um because i i feel like there's an analogy here of quality versus quantity and i think 20 000 games great on a pitch deck but it's really about how do we get you know 10 to 20 of those game modes into this game uh that can already start retaining those players and then of course partner with those devs to the point that they will stay within your service because i completely agree with eric i think the the risk the manticore really is fortnite um and i think epic will sweep the floor with them if they

actually as soon as they come up with a strong creative mode that has um has the same types of hooks as roblox and this this whole like giant um you know all these modes all these different things that people can jump into i think it's getting very very hard for core to compete i think people are already invested in fortnite let me just clarify what you're suggesting are you suggesting they basically do the hbo model versus the tnt usa where they basically uh you know find developers find ipe and and and build more of a higher end service i don't know who tnt is is do they just like make a bunch of crappy shows yeah basically okay they just aggregate a bunch of [ __ ] i just don't think you're going to be able to compete with roblox and epic if it's we're just going to build a whole bunch of content and hope one sticks right um i think thinking about that analogy of episodes and choices it's going to be about focusing on quality yeah now i actually i might actually go

talk to patrick about that i kind of agree with you actually that's i think i said that to patrick the last time we spoke so you and i think very similarly it's like i don't think you compete with these guys gut you know and and i think the only way is to carve out a niche and and again like we said before i think there could be a gazillion multiverses and then this this uh this fan is not gonna be happy with that statement but um i think there's gonna be many communities that are around social content and and user-generated content so you gotta you gotta pick your niche not try to be everything for everybody right yeah isn't there play basically older roblox like what sure but i feel like an epic i feel like epic will own that like like the whole point of fortnite was aging out minecraft yeah that was largely minecraft um subjectively that's what i believe right so um they might be able to take it in the beginning but you have to be looking over the horizon and seeing epic building out this

creative mode and saying how are you going to compete with that i know it's exciting though i'm excited to see what ends up happening i'm a big believer there's a lot of great people at this company so i can't really knock them but of course the whole purpose of this podcast is to be critical and to ask those tough strategic questions right wait no wait wait i think i have one hold on i have one criticism though is that frederick looks like he is a typical ea employee he's got that bmi he's got that look i've heard he's actually really really smart but that's a warning warning sign right like that you gotta you gotta make sure that he's got something behind behind the uh the good looks and the charisma you know like the mr face man but i've heard good things about him but that's my only that's my only like criticism is that he's handsome he's too good looking that's the thing you can't be that good looking dude it's just it's just it's just sketchy you know i don't know i don't like it

i don't like it well all right talking about good looking let's talk about the uh the um april's full supercell releasing three clash games into well announcing three different clash games so clash of clans reveals three new games clash quest mini clash mini and clash heroes so three games everybody's watched these videos it has like six million views i'm just gonna go one by one the games and and then uh you know talk a bunch of [ __ ] as we always do on this podcast so clash quest is the first one it's an adventurous island-hopping turn based strategy games you create dynamic true combos you take enemies and colossal bosses quest through new islands in last in the clash world so this game actually released today and i've been playing it today even during this podcast as you guys were talking it's a level based single player puzzle game the troops are essentially your turns and when you run out of troops you lose

the match and the the game is trying to destroy your troops it looks fun what i wrote here and actually plays pretty fun it's very close to legends of soul guard that was released by snow print studios and published by king it kind of has a clash twist to it but if you play those two games quite similar the way they tell a story though all the strategies everything is quite similar they're promising that there's going to be more depth through different item builds and the bosses i've encountered one boss and and um i can't i can't really say there's that much depth to the game at least yet but of course i've been playing only for an hour they're kind of a usp is that they're deepening the clash world um you guys will probably play this game i found the narrative uh quite uh kiddish to be honest and then it didn't really at least for me deepen the clash world at all it was more like you know kind of almost like placeholder text so and and then the art style was was

you know very blocky sort of a typical supercell not not the highest quality of art somebody would say maybe in kiddish to to some extent um again my personal opinion it didn't blow my hair back like i played the game it didn't feel like this was something new at least this first game i felt quite familiar there's nice little twists i will be playing this game uh further because it's supercell game but again the expectations are pretty huge and of course this game is made by where the game lead is stoke otaku who's by far one of the smartest designers in the world so the expectations personally uh from my side from this game for this game are super high so if i sound negative it's because i have such mad respect towards the person who's making this game that every time i feel like he's coming with a game it has to kind of blow my air back like it has to be like wow i've never seen this before so that didn't happen to me maybe my

expectations are a little bit too high uh but but um you guys will play it soon probably through and downloaded but you know curious to hear whether this thing game number two so one of the game is out of helsinki and two other games are either their shanghai studio so the second game that they announced was called clash mini it's a strategic board game set within the clash universe where players position their favorite characters and watch them come to life for battle or you could just say it's clash auto chess like let's be honest guys come on like what what are we trying to do here um in in the presentation of this game they avoid word auto chess even though this is an auto chess game i think the audience fit for this game great because it's a strategy pvp game and clash is strategy pvp game so it's kind of like a different take on it weirdly they went with a super simplistic art style uh the whole idea was to kind of imagine this as a board game played by the clash

characters so they have this like almost like uh like uh like these i don't know it sounds like looks like almost like um pop toys like those blitz toys uh anyway maybe yeah yeah maybe exactly so maybe maybe it's good for readability uh they talk a lot about cuteness of this game and i don't know when i when i think about auto chess and strategic games like cute is not the first thing when i think about the art style like i wish i wish this game was more cute but i don't know uh so the kind of like a question is always that that in march 2020 so pretty much a little bit over a year ago both valve and riot launched their auto chess games literally months after the whole auto chess frothy time came along like when people were watching auto chess on twitch these guys these gigantic companies came out with their auto chess games super quickly like tft has been on for for a good year now and then like supercell is coming now a year later over a year later since

riot globally launched their auto chess game and for me it's kind of like hard to fathom because riot like it's a gigantic company a lot of people you know probably a lot of decision making quality bars super high like everything is slower because it's a big company and they're able to do something way faster than supercell so so now like my question is like okay so this game must be you know solved so many issues with auto chess because the auto chess craze ended a year ago like nobody's making auto chases anymore and now supercell is coming so much later so maybe they figured out something that we don't know so it's super interesting to to to play this game i i quite like auto chess games no dude okay oh whoa whoa whoa whoa dude they didn't figure [ __ ] out dude this this [ __ ] genre doesn't make money dude they're not gonna make money at it they're gonna [ __ ] throw a good gajillion users at it is this wait a minute i i thought this was still an april fool's joke this is actually real i i i wasn't paying any attention when i

saw it i'm like i'm not gonna i'm not gonna waste my time looking at this [ __ ] because it's april fool's job it's really nice like i actually wrote my notes this must be an april fool's joke but i played one of the games so clearly nobody would make a game as an april fool's joke but eric i mean to some extent you're right but word on the street is that tft is making money hand over fist yes that well i mean i think that the word on the street is that riot still firmly believes it will be a billion dollar game out of your very it's top 30 on twitch roughly the same as pub g so i guess if you're talking like a billion dollars how many years does it take to get there lifetime lifetime that's that's a that's a typical riot um yeah goddamn minds no like like i'm i'm

we're just we're just we're the messenger this game can't be making money because i would pay for something but there's nothing worth paying and when i heard from credible sources multiple credible sources that this game is on its way to become a billion dollar franchise i was like i don't know [ __ ] so that's good to remember now that i'm talking about this auto chess game that it might be the biggest thing ever and maybe it's the perfect art style and they figure out something about monetization that this game will work actually on mobile but again for me just it feels really weird that this game is so late from the competition everybody like everybody launched these games so much earlier than supercell so i i don't know how this how why why this would happen anyway let's move on to game number three which is the game that i'm really excited about actually so the game number three is you explore the clash world like never before you take your favorite clash characters to undiscovered lands complete epic quests

and become legendary clash heroes now this game [ __ ] like when i was watching a video like it stood out by miles from everything before because it actually looked familiar but it was still fresh it looked new it looked epic it had a great art style it offered multiplayer action rpg it was made in unreal and which is which you know is i think it's a great thing a supercell's engine is really old so them using unreal is interesting interesting point um you know the content pipeline for this kind of game is going to be a little bit of a hellish one but i'm i'm confident that that nan who we actually talked about in this podcast he's the game lead for this game i used to work at riot i think i think this team is going to pull it off like this game looks truly truly new and something that i would expect from supercell so hats off to to the nan's shanghai team [ __ ] badass looking game and um kind of going to the second part of feedback it was kind of funny because

i was watching these videos with sound and then what what eric you're dude it's an action rpg right like it's a dual stick action rpg how many of those have failed in the west like a gajillion right like what the [ __ ] are we talking about i i don't understand like they've basically gone after the three well the first one is the only one that makes somewhat of sense but the other ones have already failed a gazillion times with huge ips they're going to funnel all their users to these games they're not going to monetize they're going to churn out and they're going to be kind of worse the way that than they were before just the same yeah right well arpg's arpg's aren't that great in the west but you got to say globally especially in asia their content's not going to play in japan or even like top 10 south korea then they spent a gajillion dollars to get their name in there you know

like it's not it's not oh dude this okay all right i didn't actually spend a lot of time looking at this and i don't want to be off the coffee here in japan launch so i kind of know the budgets they didn't spend on tv they didn't spend on on yes they didn't spend in in in terms of uh advertising of course there was a couple of housing spend but it wasn't it wasn't anything that would be like absolutely outrageous and and paid to the top there were a whole i referred there was like 20 30 million dollars and they were doing like uh advertising on oh you're thinking about [ __ ] yeah about center stages with korea and so forth like yeah that's a different one dude what i'm saying is that's not replicable and it's not profitable right the amount of money they spend you can't it's just this is just my opinion i think this game looked really good and it played differently than an action i played action rpgs on mobile i played the uh the marvel one that made about 100 million a year it plays a little bit different like this game

looked more like brawl story type of stuff than than the sort of a typical action rpg which is almost like a moba ish dude it doesn't have auto play it's it's a single character i can't tell i'm sorry i should shut up i'll look at it we'll talk about it next week i just there's there's a million of these games and there and then none of them have done well i i gotta agree with mishka though of those of the three that one looks the most it looks cool i would play this game i'm just saying it's not going to make any money that's all i'm saying okay well of the three which would you say has the best chance right maybe number one but even then all right i'll i i'm sorry i should do a little bit more digging on this but but i guess joe what what's what's what's setting your opinion about it like you look at that video it looks like a dual stick single button action game and you have the character running around like what part of that is saying

like oh my god this is going to be another billion dollar hit for supercell well i i didn't say that i didn't i said of the three that looks the most promising but i would say that i do i i think that uh in terms of like user needs and what's missing in the market there are people looking for uh you know fun co-op experiences on mobile that's just a user need that a lot of people how could how many times do i have monetization how many times i was just talking about this in in in in at kabam like eight years ago okay like i i tell i totally 100 agree with you everyone that you if you do if you if you sorry if you do customer research and you [ __ ] through focus groups and you do surveys everyone's going to say that they want an action rpg on mobile right everybody right there's no doubt 100 and they're going to tell you exactly what they want they want a story they want great graphics they want amazing gameplay they want like character progression all these things that we talk about i don't care about

the user research i know and so keep going but the thing is that no one is willing to spend on that stuff in the west like it is it is it is a quagmire of shite that that people are building these games that no one really wants because yes they will download and play them but they'll churn out as quickly as possible there's no re-engagement mechanisms there's no business model going forward they're not investing in single characters the only thing they care about is collecting characters that's what makes money in the west right and so it's all about character collection and upgrade evo and all that other stuff and so i it is a false false positive when you look at ci research to say that this is what people want because yes that's what they want but that's not what they're willing to spend on yeah i i'm not quite sure what you're arguing with me about eric so like is monetization difficult i'm not arguing that i'm saying of those three this one looks the most promising they're gonna have to figure out monetization in a better way uh i personally don't give a [ __ ] if these games make a make zero in the west so long as they make money globally so if there's a way

of making money in other markets that's fine too and uh yeah just disappointed one thing i will say is we were right like predicted supercell would be working on two games an auto chess game and a ccg more like hearthstone i feel like they're probably secretly there's a team probably secretly working on that game as well but i mean what no no i think so i mean this is so there's only a few genres that make a lot of sense for supercell so i i i know and they're not building that that's probably another game in in the works and we'll see if they launch that at some point as well i guess like when you say which games best fit supercell um it's funny it's funny with the action right like when it's a co-op pve focused game as a service that's typically where they're folding but anyways i'll go through my yeah i mean i'm not sure what you guys are arguing with me because it's not like i disagree with the sentiments right i'm just saying

of those three no joe we're only doing this because we enjoy picking on you it's just the funnest thing to do yeah but you know will they have well their biggest challenge will be monetization are they going to be able to figure that out i think their biggest challenge is going to be live content and i think that's the biggest difference in pve it's a similar challenge to league of legends right wild rift which is from a gameplay perspective it's great the the gameplay is there there are people playing that game like you know i mean i've got a bunch of people in a in a telegram group and those guys are playing until like 2 3 a.m they got jobs and stuff right so the gameplay is there the monetization maybe not quite there right and so that that's they're still making some money now right but uh for supercell if they make a fun game that everyone loves that's great will they be able to solve the monetization challenges i really hope so so good luck to nan i i hope he figures it out i'd love to see that game and i'm just saying of the three that's

the one i would expect to hit if any um i guess my notes on the ones that i've seen the clash quest game uh which is the the puzzle game um one thing that i'll correct the legend of soul guard game was based on clash of heroes might magic which is an old nintendo ds game exactly that game is amazing right did you love that game it worked on the game was incredible it was a mobile yeah dude i put so many hours in that game yeah that game was made toronto canada nice all right got my little plug in there um anyways um but the this game doesn't really look like it's completely the same right so you said it's actually oh so i could actually play it now okay which countries is it it's only it's only in it's only in europe um all right okay i'll have to pull up finland account cool no definitely check it out because i think like all of these games are all going to be based on different models this one is firmly has to be ccrpg and a puzzle combination right

so it has to be built on a number of different progression paths like you look at the difference between empires and puzzles and say smash land like their previous um attempt in this space right um having a full village building component on top of hero collection on top of all of these events that they're running right if you don't have that i think it's going to be incredibly difficult so i will come on man dude thank you thank you dude at least come on at least he's on my side dude he's got the like the words of wisdom going on right now all right but uh of the three games this one's the easiest to monetize the first one if they had all those progression vectors yeah i don't know i honestly love i love this team right like i've got a huge crush on the game lead here right like awesome designer um but well come on you're the one who you just had a crush on the ceo of manticore i said he's handsome i don't have a crush on him i just think he's handsome he's got the pmi to make things worse crush okay i could

have a professional i'm more jealous of him not not i don't have a crush on him i'm trying to be him you know i want to get to that bmi you know like i'm working on it okay anyways um but yeah they they need the economic depth right they need all these progression paths they need these ways um they have all these different modes like what i'd love to see here um in both either the clash mini or this mostly clash quest is like a roguelike mode like they had in afk arena um as well as like going very very deep on these modes like um conquest where you just bring in a huge team and there's a huge benefit to having a large collection they need these things they don't do okay see adam and i speak the same language but he says it much more eloquently than i do they don't have the depth because i respect the team you just don't respect the team no i don't it's not it's not about respect it's what's possible what what's capable of making money right and i don't think any of these things are capable of making any type of

serious money and uh and for the reasons that adam said okay good um on auto chess i'm fine with them being this late because honestly the space like everybody rushed to that auto chess model and it was fundamentally broken i think we all can agree on that now right um tft even though it's sustaining at a low level obviously needs a lot of live content in order to maintain that and monetization is incredibly weak so if they come in and say look we're going to learn from what happened on clash royale in terms of their economic scale issues when they get into the further years right we're going to build a strategic game based on auto chess that actually has proper monetization through progression where their audience is absolutely fine with that they could win this genre right still you're competing as tft it's not a massive genre but still they could definitely win the strategy space in there um clash heroes that's the one where um i also have a lot of respect for nam and i think action rpg is a very

interesting genre but i think a co-op dungeon crawler in this space the gameplay from the video looks very very simple my my biggest question is does it actually have the depth necessary to correct all the mistakes from all of these eight action rpg attempts like future fight and like reseal from from eddie's so one thing that was was interesting was when you looked at the characters right is it actually a single character rpg which to me is kind of dead on arrival or is it a character collection game where you're trying to work your way through these levels and then it becomes a content treadmill right and it's not ready for that action characters no all right well we'll have to look into it anyways we've already gone too deep on this i want to say a couple things it's it's not it's it's not a squad game based game though it's a single player game even if you have to collect if you're not using them on a regular basis then

that's not we'll see about the same so all right moving on let's let's move on all right moving on uh rift um so i was hoping to do this segment this week and then joe got lazy and eric just forgot about it let me just let me correct this joseph is super freaking busy eric is being lazy okay oh yeah no there's a huge difference that joe is up until two in the morning playing league of legends no so far okay um but anyway league of legends is now out in open beta um so it currently feels like a global launch i'm not really sure exactly how this is all going to run but anyways starting march 28th they had their global launch it's released in the united states and sorry did you guys hear the background noise yeah what is it like is canada getting bombed or something is

that like a that's my nickname like a nuclear attack warning you know maybe you should uh get off the podcast and go like find your family anyways wild rift is out yeah i guess we'll cover it next week um because we've already gone through in depth here and i guess you guys need to come prepared with your actual um estimates but the prediction at least we'll set that in stone the prediction that we'll be making next week so tune in next time is how much revenue will league of legends make in its first year post open beta launch in the west so that will be march 8th 2021 to march 27th 2022 ios and android no china no korea no japan and no taiwan to focus solely on western non-asian revenue um and that's a prediction to see how much revenue they'll make in that first year you guys all agreed everyone ready i agree

i agree i it's it's a bloodbath out there dude there's so many corpses on that on that hill yeah we'll see what we'll see what these guys can do with their we're not reach no you know what i was actually using we're not doing that now we're not throwing any numbers no no no if half the people in the podcast didn't even prepare well after after failing relatively hard on call of duty i'm going to give this a little bit more thought but you know what scares me a little bit is that the team fight tactics game that riot put out didn't get even that many downloads it was 50 million downloads for that and roon terra which was apple's game of the year got 13 million installs yeah it's like these type of games do not scale the way you'd hope like back back to clash of the clash whatever the [ __ ] clash of clans games they're doing that quest game the the rpg will do a lot more downloads than than this type of game so uh anyway all right i don't know why i'm i'm tipping my hat here but um

basically you can't make money on a game unless it gets that type of scale right like this so uh so that that's kind of where i'm leading anyway but we'll talk about it next week and how much of that call of duty mobile launch actually just came from like organic interest in the game versus user acquisition during launch well they spent a [ __ ] ton of money at launch to get this thing out there like whatever you're looking at the peaks here right like we had what was it three million one day from uh league of legends at launch versus call of duty mobile had 16 million in one day yeah it was massive so so think about this think about the previous launch you think about brawl stars launching and think about league of legends launching like they had their first peak that came in last year and that was like 8 million and then they cut off ua and now they came for the second peak and that second peak which was sort of like a global launch where they did a little pr was even smaller than the first peak so the fact that they're not going all in right is kind of worrisome here like there's no like league of legends

is here everybody play let's get like 40 million downloads in the first first week no there's nothing yeah i think they're they're probably making the argument that they they have a better content plan later that that they want to make sure that people are engaged when the content is fully this is going to be like this is wrong i don't know man i'm telling you like they're already thinking about i already made this predict by the way dude i made this prediction like four weeks ago i said look this is good roon terra was the biggest biggest disaster in 2020 and this is going to be the biggest disaster in 2021 in terms of disappointment no no disappointment this disappointment now didn't i say do you remember me saying this disappointment okay okay all right i'm gonna have to go get the audio god damn it i i have to say i played this game over the weekend i played it both on iphone and ipad and i'll be you know we're all fans of riot here at least everybody except eric but um honor

i'm too old and slow to play league of legends man and i just don't have that twitch dude my fingers can't move that fast it's not even about that like i didn't feel like there was anything new like i played um reno valor before i played vainglory when it came like rain glory at least had different output but but this is like a good 5v5 mobile mobile um you know they made a little bit of accessibility things but even the accessibility that they talked about like when the game starts it it shoots that league of legend legends mobile moba jargon on you like jungler ganking laning like i understand what these mean but i remember when i heard it for the first time i need to have a tutor next to me explaining what these words mean but in this game there's none of that it just shows you here how you move this is the uh the touch controls all right so they've got a tutorial for all that there yeah like they they yeah they did i feel like this game actually has the best on-boarding experience for a moba did i say

i'm a dummy sorry i think i skipped the tutorial the the pre-screen kind of sucks that it will be pre-screened like before you go into yeah yeah that's good but it's not new i actually think the gameplay is good yeah the gameplay is good they're social sucks they don't have plans there's some other parts that aren't as great right yeah it's not critical but they could that's an area of growth but i feel like the crux of it has to be can they actually sustain this audience dude one thing people aren't talking about is that their chat is a lot better right because right now any anyone who's like 13 or younger cannot play aov without seeing you know racist homophobic really graphically disturbing

chat happened but you don't graphically disturbing chat is it like an ascii thing well no no no no just like the way they describe some of the text like i'm gonna x you in the you know whatever you you don't want to see that for your kids that's all over aov the key reason why aov is one of the biggest mobile games in the world is because of that no no i'm saying that wild like wild rift could get a younger western audience not not that that makes i'm not saying that makes a meaningful difference but you will you're definitely not going to see younger kids in aov if their parents have anything to do with it that's one issue that that tencent's gonna have to clean up with the forest through the trees here is that a moba is not gonna work in the west on mobile no matter how well it's designed so you could talk about

[ __ ] language filters and whatever content cadence or whatever it doesn't matter it's like this type of gameplay is not gonna work and that's the way it's been for the last decade well i think it depends on how you define work like i i think there will definitely at some point i don't know if it's like today there will be a top 100 grossing game in in the west top 100 legends yeah i don't know if it's today but it'll happen mobile legends was top 100. yeah you mobile legends was top 100 globally was it top 100 like us west okay we're already there it's eric is just depressed mobas will have an increasing part of the market now will it be top ten that's that's debatable but like it'll definitely have a pretty decent market i think you know okay it's gonna do relatively well but it's going to be disappointing numbers for riot because their expectations are super high

yeah that's a consistent theme yeah which game do you say is is mobile legends oh you mean mobile mobile legends bing bang all right yeah bought by bike dance no yeah all right by the way eric you playing outriders oh yeah shoot i meant to do that in the uh in the review i mean in the in the uh updates um yeah i got through the uh to level 30. i mean i got the level cap so

i'm at the end game really it's so the story is so bad the corner hey hey dude this is like heart of darkness [ __ ] dude that's like the same [ __ ] storyline ever dude i mean i i actually don't mind the story i don't mind the story i don't mind the gameplay i think the the the the systems are good in terms of of character uh uh the guns are really cool because they are a little bit differentiated and and definitely the skills are super cool so all the pieces are there right and if i were to um uh oh my god i just had a i was thinking about the anyway nonetheless the game is really good but the end game it just [ __ ] blows up for me because for me personally i cannot stand time-based stuff when i have time pressure it's just so stressful it's not fun right like i wanna i want things i can go completion and take my time if i need it right but if you're racing against the clock that kind of pulls me out completely and that's like the entire elder game is

based upon that not not the entire elder game but the the main components of actually progressing and getting gear is like that and if it wasn't for that i think i'd be in but now i'm a little bit yeah from an rpg's designer's perspective they did that because they needed to have those dps checks on your gear yeah i know the easiest way to do it is with time i know why they did it and yeah i i have to play it a little bit more to see if the more gear i get the easier so much easier it becomes that it becomes a little bit more progressive but still the stress of time just sucks but what i really wanted to say was that this was what anthem should have been like you know like maybe i'm very simplistic in my thinking here is that this is what anthem was meant to be really right post-apocalyptic characters i mean i know it's not mechs and stuff but like the same idea looter shooter and more of in this kind of universe with like towns and and and and you know moving from location to location going through the story

like i honestly just think they took [ __ ] anthem and fixed it you know that's what people can fly did with this game and i thought they did a really good job for a relatively smaller team i mean i think it's an exceptional achievement i think the end game still needs work as all these games end up being but i'll play it and then for the super core that have literally been playing the game for a week they're all legendaries out i don't know what they do now right and and that's they're going to lose that audience pretty quickly if there's nowhere else no else to do and this is a thing it's only been out a week you know and you go look on youtube and you see these guys like with just super like tricked out gear at the highest levels you know so um anyway i i it was a good game it was really i it's worth playing i think and as particularly as a um any type of designer or in the business of like of creating a game like this i think it is a good comp right [Laughter] yeah all right let's let's call it a

wrap here guys [Music] [Music]