TWIG 131 | Apex Legends Mobile, Fortnite Leaks and $9B Rev, Activision Q1 Results, JK Final Episode!

hey what's up everybody welcome to twig 131 we've got myself joe kim eric kress mishka katkov and our new regular co-host eric seufert welcome eric how's it going thanks for having me yeah i'm doing well how are you doing doing all right so today we're going to cover four topics first respawn reveals details on apex legends mobile by gamesindustry.biz second fortnight made more than nine billion dollars in revenue in its first two years from the verge third johanna ferries named new call of duty general manager and finally activision released q1 results and just so everyone knows this will be my last twig at least for a while unless i come back and guest host but but it's great to be doing twig and i'm absolutely going to be looking forward to new episodes from the eric's eric squared i'm still in denial i think you're uh

yeah you're going to be back next week all right so should we roll into updates or do you guys have any other anything else going on in your lives that we should be talking about dude san francisco's moving down to yellow tier which basically means i could go back and do my old man triathlon the hot tub steam room sauna so i'm looking forward to that today as a matter of fact after this podcast i am going to go swim and do my little triathlon so [ __ ] yes finally so good so good for king newsome to let you do stuff very happy for he's gonna get recalled california yeah i i can't wait they're going to vote them out dude miss jenner's going to be in the in the in the governor's said this place is going to hell in the handbasket that's all i'm saying in california talking about going down like eric you bought some map loving chairs i think at ipo

wow way to call them out right on the first first five minutes of the podcast so if you got we were talking about this before we started and basically i don't know what happened that app level evidently had all these extra shares laying around and they basically went out to almost everyone in industry saying oh i got a special deal for you of getting the shares at the ipo price of 80 right and of course now the stock's at 60 right so anybody who bought those stairs just lost their freaking ass right and so that's not a good look you know like they didn't go out to friends and family they went out to partners and friends of the company and people that work with them and stuff and so like everyone just got [ __ ] burned you know like definitely backfired on them i think and eric happens to be one of the victims of of of the share price no right so it's a long long-term hold i just can't i still can't believe that you would actually buy shares at a

company that is literally an advertising company that's trading at 20 times revenue it just seems completely contrarian to my my uh understanding of your thought process around the world so and maybe i just don't know you well enough and my assumptions are are failing me you haven't read a mobile dev memo content fortress yeah that's true it's kind of weird like eric was just selling this to himself it's like content photos app store inside app store it's like going through everything and just like buy i'm gonna get it this is only going up from here he also says that we're in a world in which valuation doesn't matter so i guess that's the uh the real real the real thing all right but i i do think it it has bounced back the the stock share has bounced back no no it has not no i think it's going to be down it should be trading at five times revenue right because they're they're they're a game company right so they should be trading at what zynga trades at and uh idfa will probably do that to them yeah

they are one of the more strategically well-positioned companies out there so i mean dude yeah they're still there their ad tech company like with with 85 game revenue right it's gonna change but i'm not bullish about the company but not just that not quite that valuation but anyway they're a great company i'm not saying they're not a great company but they're not worth 20 times revenue they're worth five times revenue so that's a quarter so the stock should be fifteen dollars perhaps all right let's talk about the uh hit the update so um first one from my my side uh light heart raises 6.8 million dollars in series a funding led by the uh the powerful makers fund so lightheart entertainment or lighthearted games i'm not sure which one is it but i'm sure that they are neighbors like literally their door is next to savage's door so shout out to to the team they're growing uh their first game did pretty well and i'm hoping that their future games will do even better so that we're not neighbors anymore and

they can move somewhere else uh but but anyways um yeah good company good people and i think we're going to have one of the one of the founders in the podcast talk a little bit later so they're focusing on hybrid casual games uh they i think they call them hyper core games but um they're hyper casual games hybrid casual games mr katkov do you like have some kind of position in the department of commerce for finland or something like you don't have to literally support and shill every [ __ ] company that works in that is in finland i'm not you know enough's enough dude great there's some like lots of companies in finland you know all right moving on good good for them well this one isn't so epic games acquires art station to foster uh so an art station is the way i understand our station's linkedin for artists that's where all the portfolios are that's how we do all the hiring for all the artists always have been doing i don't know what the strategic element here is to acquire our station i think it has something to do

actually i i don't want to even say anything but i just don't see the other strategic component here there must be and um i just don't know it so if somebody who's listening to this knows what the strategic element in acquiring our station is please do let me know and because you know anyways um but we do know that after acquisition they did two changes first off there was a 30 platform fee on our station and of course epic is against the high platform fees and they drop it from 30 to 12 and so did good for the folks on our station and secondly uh they're talking about making art station learning streaming video service free for art station subscribers for remainder of the year again i don't know these are these are good things that they're doing without station i just don't know why they acquired it um another update the game fund has raised 50 million to invest in games in u.s and

europe the founders of the games fund are maria maria cochemola and ilya yeremeyev they both worked at gaming investment division of mail.ru group and they they they are clearly focused on eastern europe so russia ukraine belarusia baltic countries so uh i would assume that their portfolio will be heavily russian speaking uh and and that's good because there's not a lot of vcs in that in that area and they have also acquired some really powerful lps like the founders of plarium there's investment bank arium there's all kind of great um great uh great lps who are very knowledgeable in the um in the market over there so will be interesting to see how this fund acquires more more companies under them but it's clear there's there's a lot of gaming companies in those eastern european countries and this will infuse much needed capital to to grow them a couple of more ironsource has released master classes

so if you go to is.com slash level up dash academy there's uh there's really good um really really good masterclasses i was actually sorry i was just joking the other day about why is everything a master class now you know i'm saying like everyone's releasing a master class i mean aren't some of these just like primers or just like you i was actually going through these like these are these are quite legit like i i'm i haven't been looking at a lot of mastery like there's of course the master class app or or the other web page that has like really really good master classes yeah i just think there should be a higher bar to qualify as a math or master class you know but here all right go go go online all right well if you're looking for a real master class i uh run my go use the discount modern mobile marketing at scale is uh

is my eight hour uh course that you can uh that you can uh you can enroll in it's a learn dash mobile dash marketing.com okay so so two master classes mobile dev memo and iron source and then uh finally uh so on the newsletter we had uh the the uh the job page from jam city so looking from people to la san francisco toronto san diego artists product people engineers designers so just go to jamcity.com slash careers all right i have a quick update or actually question so i was talking to this guy simi from israel he's an investor and he basically the question he has is that why are we only at around six to ten percent penetration for the opt-in message for apps out there why is this idea faithing like slow rolling why is it just happening right anybody have any idea yeah well i have a theory which is i think pretty substantiated but so there was there's a bug basically they they have a bug in in ios

14.5 where there's a setting which is kind of the equivalent of the limit ad tracking setting that existed before which is allow apps to request to track so basically if you turn if you turn this setting off it should be on by default but if you would turn it off then apps can't even pop the pop-up so like there's just no access to the idfa and that was grayed out for a lot of phones so like you couldn't it was it was turned off and you couldn't turn it on um which is so basically like you know that would just restrict even an app's ability to show you the pop-up there would just be no access to the idfa and so that's that so it was designed so that that's that setting is not um can't be changed for like certain classes of users so like if you're under 18 it was supposed to be turned off by default and grayed out um or there's other there's other qualifications for that too but like there was just a bug in who qualified for that and it was a pretty it was a pretty significant proportion of of iphone owners so basically like the setting was turned off apps couldn't even show you the pop-up um and then you couldn't change it and so i think what apple's doing is it's

fixing that bug it's going to push that in an update and then it'll start driving adoption because usually what they do is they'll they'll send you a pop-up or they'll have the big red icon on your settings that kind of that that drives a lot of people to update and and then that that kind of drives that jump in the s curve but they haven't done that yet and i think it's because they're waiting to fix that bug before they do it okay so we'll probably see it in the next version of ios right 14.5.1 and then maybe it will roll out more aggressively and eric suffered is there anything else with respect to i'd say deprecation rollout that we have learned or anything else that people should be aware of well i mean there's a lot of things like you know first of all facebook basically just isn't read wasn't ready and enough so that they're not sending events to mmps uh they're doing it in a different level of aggregation and so the mmps haven't really been able to uh integrate yet um so that's just first of all just not working yeah so i just i was saying it uh it's basically been a worst-case scenario

it's like almost like a comedy of errors like basically everything that could have gone wrong went wrong got it i really like eric i you know like it just says it how it is you know all right [ __ ] apple dude apple just a bunch of beasts just beasts dirty dirty beasts all right a few updates from me first of all shout out to mike sherrell who did a really cool interview on brett novak's creators at work podcast recounting mz's founding story as one of the company's co-founders so check it out hear about mz's very interesting origin story there are also a number of stories behind the story which mike didn't go into but if you ever see me at a conference and buy me a drink maybe i'll tell you guys some of those stories and in full disclosure mike is a good friend of one of my co-founders an investor in the company i founded second update sony announced they will integrate discord chat into playstation so this comes on the heels of rejecting an

acquisition offer from microsoft for 12 billion dollars and part of sony contributing to a 100 million dollar investment round for discord and finally since it's my last twig i also want to pit my investment podcast which is kind of like a fun project i do with steve pally from pixelberry check it out super stonk brothers not super stock brothers stonk brothers and the latest uh topic that we covered was actually skills so if anyone skills watches that don't get mad sorry i actually i i listened to i listened to the first half of that i i think you guys are on to something like it's a criminal organization you know um they are they're in deep trouble right it's just a matter of time and it's so funny like the ceo gets up there on cnbc like three or four days before his [ __ ] earnings call in the quiet period saying everything's okay everything's okay it's like dude the fact that you're on cnbc and everything's saying everything's okay everything's not okay we know we know

exactly what's happening and then your friend uh from ark investments is the one that like pumped this thing up you know like got everyone all hot and bothered on it right what the [ __ ] she doesn't know what she's doing investing in a company like this like how is that even a thing that she's involved in this she's like one of the biggest shareholders now yeah i think 12 there's something like 10th or 12th this thing's going this thing's going to zero i don't know but yeah i mean the valuation is challenged it's not a valuation issue it's like they have no business model right they they literally are it is a the definition of a ponzi scheme in which they're basically recirculating money that they're giving to their audience calculating i didn't go that far but i i will say this like it's i mean they've gotten some traction in terms of solitaire i mean it's possible right now the the big question marks around their unitary economics around their round-tripping of revenue and how they treat revenue recognition

for bonus cash and things like that but anyway for you guys that are interested watch the podcast it's uh but yeah yeah i mean i think there's always a you know one of the things that matthew contreraman says is you know it's always about pricing risk i just don't think it's properly priced there's probably a right price for it but but the current price zero okay moving on activision yeah um activision just uh just announced earnings and uh some i think some interesting uh tidbits there call of duty is just doing amazingly well across all platforms mau is up sequentially in-game bookings are up 60 year and uh season three is apparently sustaining the strong run rate so uh really impressive results from from call of duty uh they have al also uh activision revealed that call of duty mobile has crossed 500 million downloads which compares to 100 million players in warzone and 400 million paid sales for the traditional call of duty games as a whole

and call of duty mobile also surpassed 1 billion in player spending since it released in october 2019 so just kind of like really amazing results there um i thought one interesting uh piece of information that came out of the earnings was that the gap is closing between their mobile and console share of revenue so mobile is at roughly 45 percent console is just under 50. um and that they had they had sort of diverged a little bit um during covid but that mobile is sort of like now catching up which means pretty interesting and speaking of mobile um king segment revenue uh reached a new record and it grew 20 22 year-over-year for the quarter driven by strong growth for candy crush uh king had 258 million maus in the first quarter which is which is pretty impressive um king delivered 70 year-over-year growth in advertising net bookings in the first quarter with increases across direct uh and uh direct brand advertisers and partner networks so advertising obviously an important revenue segment for king we'll see how that changes with uh with att um

but you know that's been very important for them for a while um and then crash bandicoot one one kind of i don't know maybe i interpret it as not being as positive as the rest of the news but crash bandicoot uh was released on march 25th and and only really had 30 million installs maybe i'm just being overly negative there but that seems low to me i would have figured you know given the promotion um and just the you know the scale of kings network and also the the brand involved i would have expected more um given that you know we're on like a month and a half but maybe i don't know maybe i'm being uh overly critical what do other people think it's a [ __ ] really critical about girlfriend right oh and then the bobby co-takes uh hit his his comp right like then he has got rid of the transformational change clause and so clearly like a lot of people have been upset by his his compensation package so i thought that was interesting

yeah i don't i don't usually talk about the publicly traded names all that much particularly on quarterly calls stuff but um they are absolutely freaking destroying it right now with call of duty this is like ridiculous right but there's like rumors out there that the next version of call of duty is not going to be ready that they're going to have to maybe transition without a new game which hasn't happened in the last 15 20 years i find that [ __ ] hard to believe like they will move heaven and earth and all all but they have like sledgehammer which basically lost all its people you know running this new call of duty this year supposedly it's world war ii if that game doesn't come out and then we have a new great battlefield game like you know their their era could get take a hit you know and potentially so i don't know it's really kind of interesting times because they are just firing on all cylinders right now uh with call of duty but everything else seems to be kind of you know crumbling in the background whether it's blizzard whether it's the studio org even for call of duty um so uh i don't know we'll see what

happens with them but uh bobby is just crushing it so for call of duty is it back to three by three now is that what happened in terms of the pipeline model okay yeah so like but but to be fair next year is the hero skew right because it's gonna be from uh treyarch right um but this year it looks like a really bad at best it's gonna be a really terrible version of call of duty um like last year's version was awful too it was like didn't say that but it was like all their internal studios are not making content for call of duty or in somehow are involved in college development like even toys for bob was involved with call of duty i mean good for them yeah because because the whole no because the whole studio work is is is in disarray you know so it's yeah all right they're executing despite themselves but anyway moving on they're killing it right well this this podcast is going to be all about shooters because we're going to talk about respawn revealing details on apex

legends mobile so the company said that the free-to-play title is a is designed specifically for mobile devices and will not feature cross-play first regional beta in india and the philippines and there's actually gameplay already released on youtube so you can go and check it out apex legends mobile and then respawn previous attempt to bring apex legends to a new platform did actually not go so well last month they launched the uh the nintendo switch version and the metacritic average was 54 percent but i don't know i've played actually shooters on switch it doesn't matter what type of shooter you're playing it's a horrible experience so i think it's it's more on the on the platform i've played multiple different type of shooters on on switch it's just not a good platform for that so i'll forgive you it's freaking dude it is unplayable on the switch it is like it's a ridiculous skew it should have never been made yeah i don't know what the hell they're thinking it's just they're just damages the brand yeah well listen there's warframe on on

switch is unplayable there's the um v gore that i've been playing it's really like it's it's really difficult tonight's unplayable fortnite's a terrible experience on this yeah by the way it's vigor not the glory listen i'm gonna call it like we have we have some some some some uh norway some some vikings from norway actually listening to this you tell us every time you say voodoo i wanna just like throw up come on come on all right so let's talk about this um so last week we discussed battlefield mobile it was done like as we said done internally by industrial toys and we discussed that the content might be a challenge because of the uh well the size of the internal organization compared to call of duty mobile that is done out of china with the publishing team in la so totally different type of structure well apex another game another shooter from ea is actually done in china by netease so a powerful

partner and it seems to have us pretty much the same structures with cod mobile so they got product and publishing in la and development in china i watched the videos i haven't played this game i watched the videos and it feels that this game is done on the badlanders engine uh it looks and sounds and you know i haven't played it but it feels probably the same and if you haven't played badlanders you can download it it's out there it's a third-person shooter sort of an escape from tarkov version it got three million installs and about 130 000 in revenue so it was a novel experience but was pretty much crushed by the market very quickly and my personal opinion as a person who plays a lot of shooters on mobile it was a pretty poor experience it i liked the idea but it didn't play well and the fact that this game is you know it looks like it it sounds like badlanders is is a little bit worrisome in terms of core gameplay but the good part might be

that it plays on low-end devices so i think this will be downloaded by by larger public but um but yeah like how does it fare on mobile so the challenges are as as with battlefield like direct competition against call of duty pub g garina fortnite the new pub g the new battlefield uh what worries me probably the most is like the visibly low production values versus the expectations that usually come with this type of an ip i mean after all apex is pretty big in the west and it's it's a you know console pc game so my expectations initially were the sort of a call of duty mobile type of an experience and um and of course the other challenge is how they can tap to the existing player base since it's not cross-platform so probably you know will they play this and how they can tap with laps players because those are probably the ones that they're interested in on the opportunity side i mean this again same as with battlefield so ea is not probably the best at performance

marketing but this being a big ip it was the biggest launch before call of duty mobile and before war zone so probably they're you know they're excellent at marketing these type of uh these type of games and um i don't think the idfa or att will have major impact on their ability to grow this game um opportunities as well that apex has tons of content they've done multiple seasons some seasons didn't do too well some seasons did really well so they have all this content that can just you know of course refactored and and um we optimized for for mobile but they can basically bring it in and they have that gigantic team in china that can churn out content so content shouldn't be a problem and finally you know it's a shooter and shooter is we did an episode so i released it on monday with facebook and and facebook was talking about how big of a genre shooter is and how much it's growing with new audience coming in uh and um and you know in 2020 we got almost 40 percent grow year of growth

year over year just in the west in terms of installs 30 growth in revenue and um yeah you know it's um 95 also of all shooter revenue is coming in from shooters with a realistic style which apex legends has so a lot of things fall together that that that feel correct in terms of product market fit again the only thing i'm a little bit worried if if it looks and feels and plays exactly like badlanders i i wasn't impressed by that game so you know considering that it came from netease that that should have resources to do whatever they want so what do you think press yeah i don't know like the first video that i see out out there on the youtube is basically it doesn't look like a high fidelity game the way it should the apex game in particular right so um i'm a little bit confused because i thought i would expect them to do a lot better in terms of of building a game like that like i expected the same kind of like polish is something that teami would do but but we'll see what it comes out with

it's still not in beta or alpha that i can see um in in in the philippines or anything so we'll see if it improves over time we also have a buddy right a buddy of the deconstructor fun what's his name he has a crazy name what's his name ducati yeah ducati wait wait what's his last name though like the whole name is like that's his last name giovanni ducati dude that's going to be the best [ __ ] name is that is that public fellowship oh i don't know yeah of course it is anyway he's working on it so we'll see what happens um and then as for battlefield i i think i said this last time is that like i'm a little bit worried like industrial choice is i'm sure they're a great team but ex-destiny guys but like can they actually execute compared to someone like [ __ ] nettie's and teami and all these other guys and and build the right experience for that game so yeah we'll we'll we'll see um but the shooter category is getting really crowded and then if you look at the the stats on

fortnite which we're going to get to it's like uh retention is horrid horrible for these ios and android uh uh for for a game like that so yeah but you fortnite has to be taken with a grain of salt like a lot of you a lot of a lot of research done on fortnite mobile was that the players who play on on on console or playstation or xbox we were using the mobile sku just to drop in and purchase something or just do like a quick task so they weren't you know inherently playing on mobile they would be playing on different device and then going back once a while on mobile so they they weren't using it as much right isn't that what i just said like it's not a very viable viable market on mobile uh yeah again it was just a different habit of using it because of the cross play that was at least the market research that i've seen uh and and you have call of duty mobile that is doing extremely well so that's still it's still a very small

market a lot of games chasing four percent of the overall market so yeah i think that's that's the risk of caught all across all these games and the games that you guys are making [Laughter] all right moving to the next article so fortnite made more than nine billion in revenue in its first two years from the verge and so the verge is reporting a number of details that have been publicly disclosed about epic and apple due to the current trial between the two companies and if you guys haven't been seeing the tweets and hearing all the chatter about this you should a lot of great information has been coming out but the biggest headline however has to do with fortnite generating more than 9 billion in total for epic in 2018 and 2019 that's gross also made more than five and a half billion in profit from that two-year period in addition to linking a finance board presentation as i mentioned a huge amount of data was disclosed and a lot of interesting insights especially for us as games industry people

some of the highlights um from the there was a slide in that presentation from their uh ebitda puts and takes chart it showed that in 2019 epic spent 34 million in counter programming against apex that year also that they overestimated their opportunity for esports by 154 million and rocket league contributed 72 million in net revenue that year as well from some of the files shared by the washington post we also see in other docs that revenue split by platform for fortnight between 2018 and 2019 to some of the points that you were mentioning earlier aircress um that actually 46.8 percent of revenue came from playstation 27.5 from xbox pc was 9.6 and ios 7. and then android 0.5 and i think that probably goes back to remember what they did with uh their own store on

yeah on amazon right right i think that really really was a negative experience actually let me take a step back here for a second i am actually what i'm really more surprised about this is how much is on playstation like almost 50 of the revenue is on one big platform like a console versus like pc i thought pc would be a little bit a lot bigger than that yeah and then the ios the ios number is is abysmal that is abysmal right a game like that of that scale even if it's you know i mean android is the best model well android's that's for a reason right so yeah you know but like the fact that ios which was such a big lauded like launch with gazillion downloads and everyone talking about how great it's doing like only seven percent of revenue that's not good you know that's not good and and and it goes back to the research that we did with stan quan a while back is that [ __ ] ios is a gateway drug right and so you get in on ios and you're like [ __ ] this this sucks i'm gonna go play on the playstation right because it's [ __ ] a hundred times better experience right

and so i think um these numbers kind of prove that out even even more extreme but again i think that there is a little bit of a synergistic effect to you when you see like the gameplay mode by kids so you know you might have three kids going over to bobby's house who's playing on the playstation but they're they're playing on their tablets that they bring i guess i mean you say keep saying that but obviously you know it doesn't look good right and and i you know i the pc thing is still kind of like vexing to me i don't know why i think you know given the epic launcher and how big that was and how many people are you know uh interfacing with that like i'm a little bit surprised that the console revenue is so much significant yeah the other interesting thing too is that uh for anyone who follows the farlight 84 twitter channel they ran a survey in terms of where their audience would like to see farlight 84 and it's the exact opposite of this right like android and then playstation was the smallest so that that was kind of interesting

but you also you left out switch right so switch is 50 more revenue than pc right switch switch no which is like oh yeah focus no no look i mean switch was uh 40 million uh against 82 by xbox 148 by playstation so in terms of percentages uh you know it's just half of xbox this is like 14 switch oh right right right sorry there that's crazy so maybe not so terrible yeah all right anyway these were average numbers because in the average number so the average numbers for gross revenues are fortnite from the court documents per month so monthly average gross revenue was playstation xbox 80 switch half of the xbox 40 pc was about 30. ios was 23 but you have to account that this is an average and the game went out of the out of the ios store in august so half the year like did they calculate it till then

or was it just a whole year and then average of that so is it divided by 12 or divided by seven that's a question mark and then android two million like it's insane like where's the android revenue like there's no android revenue another couple of interesting data points in terms of retention for fortnite so d1730 retention metrics of 41 13 6 and then on android 35 d1 11 d7 four percent d30 and then also they they showed d180 rp numbers of 3.59 for ios 1.13 for android 1162 for pc and over 25 for xbox and playstation and eric suffered i know you've been following the trial and looking at some of this data any other interesting data points we should be aware of from the trial well i mean i think i mean part of the motivation for this trial was just to get a lot of this info out here right because i mean they knew all this stuff would go public and discovery all

the discovery documents would go out and so you're just getting an amazing level of insight into a very secretive company right like there's some emails i was just looking at today that talk about their uh kind of calculus around doing ads in the app store and talking about how you know well if developers are just basically manipulating app store rankings or chart rankings anyway we should be making money from that right if they're just using these you know this was back in the day when you could use like bots to drive installs but if they're just using bots why don't we just sell them those positions instead of you know because people don't really discover they don't use the chart position as a discovery mechanic anyway um so part of me thinks that like epic just you know especially when you look at the revenue numbers right like android and ios combined are about the same as pc right and so like how meaningful and which is you know much much lower than even switch and then xbox and playstation so like let's just let's just blow up apple's you know relationships let's get all these special deals out in the open um and let all of their partners start complaining and maybe that gets us um you know because i don't i don't

think the lawsuit's gonna be successful in terms of changing apple's um you know kind of status with respect to the app store but like maybe just if it angers all of the you know development community plus a lot of their partners maybe that does eventually force their hand a little bit but it's just like an amazing treasure trope of data right like you had uh the origin of the no app stores in the app store rule was that big fish uh published a game subscription app and apple had no they had no like uh you know uh concrete rule against that but they just booted it out and then and then they sort of like made that a rule um so there's just a lot of interesting insight you know from apple which you don't normally get you know to appear behind the curtain there yeah i was well sorry i was looking at the the uh the retention numbers were actually telling as well um that chart was actually really interesting i thought anyway was that you know date day 30 is like 4 for android and pc and 6 for ios versus 16 day 30 for ps4 that's crazy

and xbox one was trailing i don't really get that as much and then but look at switch look at switch yeah yeah okay the switch data is is contrarian to my negative nelly but the game is sucks on switch i played it it's terrible i just these kids have nothing else to play on that's kind of what the what the message is it seems but anyway what do i do we need to make our game if you put your game on switch i am going to shoot both of you okay stupid idea all right definitely that switch i'm coming for you [Laughter] but anyway i don't know it's uh it is a treasure trove of data that we haven't seen before i mean they had the full p ls in there they had email correspondence like you could spend days you could download the whole freaking thing and spend days like looking through it it was it was really interesting and and eye-opening uh one of my clients is an investor and he didn't he didn't have this data yeah he's invested in the companies he's

still he had never seen any of this stuff so uh so it's it is not easy to find so it's very cool one of my favorite exchanges was tim sweeney emailed uh i think steve jobs and was like hey you know he was this is like a long time ago obviously he was complaining about you know apple's take rate and saying you know apple was such an inspirational company can't believe that you're you know kind of monopolizing access to the app store in this way and it's bad for devs it's bad for consumers and this long kind of like you know ranty soapbox email and then tim i think steve jobs just responded to some other guy some other people on the thread and was like was this the guy that came to our developer summer like they didn't even even know tim sweeney was yeah he was yeah jobs was known as being super ruthless about stuff like that like uh any type of leaks about products or anything like he would he would call people specifically like call them out and say we're gonna put you out of business if you don't shut the [ __ ] up about our new ipads or whatever all that kind of thing so anyway he was ruthless he's ruthless um i don't

know what else anything else about wasn't there some like profitability stat that they had there that made apple look really bad you know in terms of how much money they're making on the app store yeah 78 78 operating margin with the app store it's like free money yeah they don't even you can't even justify the 30 when you're making 78 margins oh yeah we have engineers that work on this i'm like how many engineers [ __ ] work on the store give me a break right um but the other thing that to your point earlier eric seifert the smart eric is that um the pr hit on this will be bad enough and then we're already seeing things happen in europe that that that is more likely to pass and and something to happen quickly and and more strongly than it would be in the u.s because u.s is like much more notoriously challenging to get any of this [ __ ] done so that may be the ultimate thing is that something happens in europe that then will be adopted in

the u.s right similar to the uh um what were those rules that were released a few years ago anyway gdpr gpr so um so anyway yeah well we'll see if that starts to take phone because again i think we've said this in the podcast before is that spotify and any music services and those type of services have a case right because they're using their monopolistic power to have unfair advantage in the marketplace and you may not be able to prove that in the u.s but you can certainly do that in europe right in certain countries in europe um so we'll see hey guys i'll take this moment i gotta bail i got a hard stop and uh i gotta i gotta hop on to the next one before we jump into the next topic all right thanks for coming yeah take care guys all right all right the last story this is just a quick rant because i really have no effing idea what is going on over at activision right now because besides the blizzard stuff like there is lots of drama going on on the call of duty side despite all the success they're having sledgehammer you know they let go of

their founders uh the the going from one engine to another the treyarch and infinity war like that's been big drama right and and so even though they are like firing on all cylinders and killing it there there's [ __ ] that's going on that i i i can't compre understand exactly what's happening so there's this article about this woman johanna who is the new gm of call of duty franchise and she's replacing this guy named byron bead who i don't know either of these people clearly so but she will oversee this like multi-billion dollar ip it's like the only thing that is going well for for uh activision right now king is actually doing okay too i suppose um but she comes from being the commissioner of the esports league for overwatch and call of duty which obviously did not do very well so so the track record of success is not quite there right but let me what i really want to do is compare the backgrounds of these two people that are supposedly leading the charge of call of duty so

byron had 20 years at activision six years as a brand manager three years as product manager of call of duty vp of strategy for the call of duty franchise for two years he was a senior vp of destiny for five years and the evp and gm of call of duty for two years so basically he had 20 years of experience leading shooters right that that's that's his that was his whole mo right and 10 years on call of duty itself like being understanding the franchise understanding the players developers etc right johanna on the other hand had 11 years with the nfl and 12 months as as call of duty commissioner right and now she is the gm of all of call of duty i mean what the [ __ ] is going on in activision this makes no sense it is not possible to get a less qualified person to put in such a position it it's like the biggest ip in video games and we're talking about a woman that has had less than like a year's worth of

experience on call of duty it's like it makes no sense i i think bobby is going nuts or something like something is happening out there you know i i i don't so what what the problem with this is is that if she's gonna be the gm then why then then the heads of sledgehammer the heads of treyarch the heads of infinity war have to interface with her like they're gonna have to but how can they take her seriously when they don't even she's never actually worked at a in it in the games business like she has no development experience she has no product management experience and and and then there's other people within the organizations are getting elevated too you know um this guy dennis durkin who is a cfo i worked with him at alex brown way back when my first job out of college that guy's the nicest guy in the world i think he's the only nice guy in the entire c-suite at activision and yet they're replacing it with this guy named armin zerza right who literally i think is the most hated executive in in video games that i've heard of and so

now he's becoming this chief commercial officer of activision blizzard right i i don't know what is going on like all the success that they're having with call of duty is not predicated on the fact that they're hiring the right people that people like right this is like it is like the complete opposite of what you would expect the results are not matching the operations and with this new person in charge of call of duty which still blows my mind i really would love someone to explain to me how that is even a possible thing yeah well maybe maybe they have so much experience in like like everybody thinks the same way in the call of duty franchise organization and she's bringing a a new look because the franchise has grown so tremendously over the last couple of years so she's able to to look at the market in a little bit a different way and make it more accessible because if you consider that everybody in your organization has been you know call of duty for the last 20 years like how can they bring that to new audience and then when you bring somebody who's

you know still super senior in the company and well connected like she may be able to open up the eyes like hey we have all these new players like i'm playing call of duty for the first time for real and that came in through the mobile like i knew call of duty since forever i've tried it but i've never really played it so i'm part of that new audience and i think the new audience is massive when it comes to call of duty or maybe they're betting that esports is gonna since she was c commissioner of esports but i know it doesn't seem like esports is is i guess i don't know i i need to get caught up on what's happening with these it doesn't seem like it i guess nothing's happening at esports i don't know i get the point eric i get the point but but sometimes you know it depends it depends how strong their you know the leadership team and call of duty is like i assume that everybody there is like byron like everybody is just a monster and have been doing this forever and this is just a new look a new way of thinking uh regarding the new audience

because you know the other way is to do what you know no like no offense i quit playing league of legends on the mobile because it was just so punishing and it brought that same pc experience where you know i was being punished for afk like being banned on my account and it was just a mobile game and i assume that those type of decisions happen when you're in an organization where everybody has been playing league for the last 10 years and if somebody says like hey should we ban player like nobody would even bring that as a discussion point of banning players out of their first session if they accidentally you know disconnect or afk we're gonna close their account and tell them they're they're pieces of [ __ ] because this is league of legends and this is and you're ruining the experience for other players in your team but if you bring new player new people who are kind of looking at the different platform new players they might be you know asking a lot of good why questions okay but i guess back to the point my point is that byron has been gm for a while but he's been responsible

for the success of this game over the last 20 years i mean partially responsible obviously not he's not obviously what was he was he replaced or did he yeah he was replaced he's replaced that i don't know where he's going it's like he was but then this could be more political right this might be like yes well that's the whole point like like the studio heads may not like him and they're like okay we're gonna we're gonna overthrow him and put in somebody else oh no no no it has less power and that we can just kind of run over you know what i'm saying oh i assume okay it could be i i need to know this i need to know so if anybody has any insights here please reach out because i this is just blowing my mind right byron he may be a big jerk i have no idea but the guy is like in og right and so like and sometimes some of these high level execs they don't really do much you know what i'm saying if you're the general manager of a business if you're a studio head and you want to be able to run over

somebody or speak in development language and not have them understand you're being someone who doesn't have that background oh see my i was thinking of the flip side i feel like it could be like we're just speculating it could be mishka's point too that they they're looking for a fresh perspective maybe they believe in esports in the future who knows yeah and my imagine is i just think bobby is just basically plucking people from one place and putting them out to places without any type of idea what what what how what ramifications that would be on the overall organization right that's kind of my thought process but like uh you know like this guy uh whatever his name is the are armin guy you know like he was the i think he was like his chief of staff or something the guy he just got drop shipped into blizzard and wreath freaking havoc for years right and then now he's back up to the corporate offices and freaking in in la you know like now he's like i don't know chief [ __ ] commercial officer whatever the [ __ ] that means but he's replacing dennis as a cfo but this happens all the time too right where

this guy is bobby's buddy and even if they have no relevant background and this stuff is a lot of companies it's like i trust this person so i'm going to put them in charge of this group yeah and that's not normal exactly so that's kind of what i'm pointing out but i think within creative organizations that does not work that that ends up backfiring big time i'll give you a few good examples after we end this podcast no but but armin is armin is part of the reason that everyone left that blizzard is kind of my understanding i worry about activision and blizzard's future right at this point this seems scary as hell okay so on that positive note and the way to end my career here making more enemies oh my god i think that's it for this week see you all later or you guys will see them all later next week we'll see you back we'll see you again yeah i'll come back to pimp something so bye everybody

[Music] [Music]