TWIG #175 Bored Ape Yacht Club raises $450M for an MMO 🤯

[Music] welcome everybody to this week in games episode 175 the gdc episode because none of us three are at gdc uh eric suffered is there hey chris is kind of there like you could i was at gdc what are you talking about yeah but but what time it is right now nursing their hangover dude because they're all out like two in the morning last night without [ __ ] crypto parties dude [ __ ] i've been hearing insane [ __ ] about these crypto parties and listen guys i'm technically a crypto bro like we already have a crypto segment we just recorded we were talking like i need an invite to these parties so come come at me uh regarding parties by the way uh istanbul

event as we've said the constructor event on 31st where eric cress will be there suffered will be there uh chris petrovick sophie you name it everybody's there so the capacity was only 500. it's uh it's triple booked so we can only take 500 the tickets have been issued still if you don't have a ticket and you really need one and and you know anyways dm me we'll we'll figure things out maybe not promising anything uh but i would still encourage everybody to register for the event the link is in the description because through that you will be able to watch the the live feed we have some amazing talks um just event is looking really cool we actually already talked about it that that with google that we will be doing this event uh next year and bigger because uh because so many signed up and we didn't really even promote this so thanks everybody for for signing up so next next year adam is coming as well he already promised

nothing yeah and uh and and final like like one thing that i noticed notice hold on eric chris this is really important in spotify you're listening this on spotify everybody who's listening on this spot if i there's this thing there's this star thing apparently if you just tap it it gives us a star if you could do that that would be amazing we're now at 4.8 stars so if we can get to 4.9 if you think that this is a good podcast you're listening to this you're having fun all we ask is just find that button it's on the top like right below the image and just tap it on at once and that said please continue listening to the podcast on spotify eric chris you were saying something i haven't even done that okay yeah i know i just noticed it and i noticed that we are at 4.8 and we have like 50 reviews like wow we'll see how good this podcast is we'll see how this episode is first no what about my star [Laughter] well adam why don't you why don't you let us let everybody down what's going on let's start out i know um i do want to

give a shout out to my old bosses steve chang and sean faust as well as my old colleague kelvin lau they just announced funding for their startup fortis uh it was raised by las vegas sands this is just going to be a very very powerful team i actually really enjoyed working with these guys incredibly candid um discussions especially on product strategy um i i think i'm sure they're going to do great things so big shout out to them what does fortis do games honestly like publishing or development or i think it's they set it up as a publisher but uh they're going to be focusing on it sounds like um online multiplayer games um they talked a lot about kind of like typical raising language of like the most social the most um um including doesn't have blockchain no it doesn't have blockchain thank god i would not rule that out dude but sean has said no nft so i'm no i i can

imagine sean saying that like really kind of like feverishly but we'll see where where everybody these guys could raise money regardless right they didn't need to sprinkle in some blockchain to make some money yeah and i i sorry i wanted to say one thing about these guys so i actually met with steve a few months ago when he was trying to raise money for this thing and try to help him out in any way i could because because i i think when we talk about consolidators like uh sorry still front and embracer it's like you know they come at it from a banking perspective and bringing in assets and putting them together in like some kind of quantitative way um but what i think the difference here and i think steve is trying to do this is that they're trying to do similar thing but again these guys are actually experts in managing video game companies and video game processes so this has in my opinion a far better chance of a success than something like embracer and still front over the long

term having said that i think their biggest challenge is that there's everything's been picked clean at this point and i think and i keep talking to everybody at gdc about this is like it's a there is a certain level of zero-sum game right there's just not that many people left you know when when people are getting 500 000 offers you know for for engineers like it's like i don't know how you actually build gaming studios in this environment when there's so many people going after it so i think that will be a big challenge and also finding you know teams but these guys are super well connected they've been in this business a long time i'm sure they have a set of groups that they're already looking at so i wish them the best um and uh excited to see what they do that makes sense yeah yeah absolutely um sony interactive entertainment is to acquire haven entertainment studios that was a big headline this week so this is jade raymond's studio um is now actually officially coming under the sony umbrella we were talking about them a long time ago they worked for on an unannounced project for stadia

um as first party but then were sold off to sony when stadia first party collapsed it's noted that the title is a original aaa multiplayer game which is implying that this is not you know like an assassin's creed like or aaa single player action adventure game that i think we predicted and assumed at this point um this to me feels pretty out of jade's wheelhouse um but regardless they are acquired now working under sony uh fully funded now so they have plenty of runway to figure this out you know i'll open it up this this is the whole jade thing is very vexing to me okay like we talked about this a year ago right a year ago she she got she left uh google and started her own studio with the same group that was making the game for google right and so what i said a year ago it still says the same thing she has not made a game since 2013 and it was

splinter cell and she has not made a successful game since 2009 which was assassin's creed 2. i mean that's like 13 years you know 13 years without a success yet she's moving from one place to another um and i i i i i wish her the best but what what doesn't make sense to me is that why is sony hiring a team that has no track record in live services that is building a live services game to help drive their live services strategy right it's like you know like is i i think it's very very very unlikely that they are successful in their first go or it's going to take them a long time and a lot of challenges because they just don't have the experience of doing that and so i i it kind of just blows me away uh that that that that this is like this is like where they go for this um but i i guess you know sarcastically i'm just gonna say sarcastically because i don't know if i could say this it's like i guess they all have bungie to kind of

help them navigate through the the choppy waters of of software as a service but anyway i you know i i hope she's successful but i i i just don't understand exactly you know what the expectation is here you know to some degree so why why sarcastically about bungie like why couldn't bungie help them i mean i'm just asking because there's no okay i've been talking to people about this for a while there is no [ __ ] way that bungie is gonna divert resources to help jade raymond's team or any other [ __ ] team at sony to build software as a service like that is not happening that is just not it doesn't even make sense it doesn't make sense how many engineers how many like designers how many people whoever like they're not going to dedicate resources to [ __ ] to level up sony like this just doesn't it it doesn't make any logical sense to me that that is going to be a thing they're going to be fiercely independent do their own thing and and and that's it maybe they'll have a few like slack channel like

you know like comments or something but they're just not going to be dedicating resources so that that's why i'm being sarcastic um well bungie is doing a great lunch and learn at gdc so all of sony could go to that word that's right about how they learn that's the extent of their learning right they could go where everyone else can go publicly and watch watch them teach how to do it and that i'm sorry i'm not suggesting that bungie doesn't know what they're doing i'm suggesting that they're just not willing to be do what's necessary to share it with the rest of the studio that's what i'm saying bungie's hiring pretty hard like i've seen i mean on not not on the oaf channel but but just overall like i've seen a lot of messages and now that and that they're hiring a gdc and that kind of reminded me so last gdc where i went onside well when was that 20 19 was 2019 the last one that was happening physically 20 20 and 20 yeah exactly so i remember when epic was hiring at that point hard

and they um they rented out the full like san francisco what's the what's the plane coin museum or the the coin like the big like uh neo-classical building uh just in the downtown and that was like the full epic recruitment center so you had to go into this like almost looking like municipal center and they had like uh i don't know i just got an invite so i had to go i had to just talk to people and uh i feel like i feel like you're really missing gdc right now you're like yeah man of these goggles that are happening but that was the craziest recruitment um recruitment place i've ever been i remember going into this room that was like gigantic from like 1800s whatever and there was this one guy who was from texas i remember because he had a texas sticker on his mac and they were basically saying like hey welcome to epic what do you want to do it was amazing you have money here you go yeah i was like i i i told him like i actually didn't know that there was this was an interview i thought you guys

wanted to just chat and they were just basically hiring everybody that was in 2019 so good times i hope i hope bungie is doing something similar uh other than the uh luncheon i don't know if they're just hiring anybody off the street that was that was what epic was doing but now they can i mean they're fully resourced and they're growing big and it's already a big studio so why not but i guess for eric's point right like the the amount of effort um on an ongoing basis that has to happen in order to train a studio to be effective at live services and still how those those studios can fall down um and have to learn from those mistakes over you know a number of games is the reality of many of these teams so um nothing against jade raymond right it's just it takes a long time for premium developers to figure out how to do this so even just asking you know single people at bungie to kind of share their knowledge while they're still trying to live operate destiny it's just going to be infeasible it's just it's not going to be an overnight switch

it's not even going to be you know one or two years it's going to take a long ass time yeah exactly that that's actually my point it's going to take a long time it may happen eventually but you know i think i'll i'll be retired and like an old folk song by the time that happens wait you're like oh i thought you were retired now oh okay yeah i like that in the in the notes for this particular subject that was said like how like you made the reference for me like i was laughing because like because he was just saying like how is she moving from all these great companies from one another it's like without shipping he said like that's like mishka that was in the notes and two to be fair on the on on like on the uh on the external side you're absolutely right but i have placed a lot of games in soft launch they just never passed it so i'm kind of shipping uh but uh but yes that was a fair comparison so thank you for that [Laughter] you kind of missed the context of that but yeah i was just laughing i was just

looking through the note yeah that was mean i apologize ahead of time all right no no i actually i left it it was it was really good it was really good it was but let's talk about it okay moving on moving on moving on let's talk about our boy jk so joseph kim his company leela games has raised 10 million round for free-to-play mobile game studio in india shout out to jk i've been following his instagram he's out there i've been just actually just texting him like dude please stay alive because he's posting these instagram pics where he's writing these rickshaws and he's like riding behind somebody's scooter and i don't know guys like i don't know where he is he's in like he's not in bangalore with something with a b uh but i mean i was insane dude i did a panel with him on monday night at the f annie event and and him and i are just completely aligned on everything it was actually a relatively uneventful like there was no discussion or debate he even like talked a little bit of trash about arc

investments so i don't know it was it was good to see him though uh yeah mellow as ever he's doing fine he's doing fine this is a great race this was also done by uh crafton right was it actually like crafting themselves yeah i think kraft and india invested something into it uh there was bitcraft who and galaxy which were his previous investors and i think there was somebody else somebody from from um from sf not maybe sequoia maybe somebody else i kind of forgot sorry jk about that but nevertheless uh congratulations for the raise and i think he was saying that he's gonna move to india or at least spend significant amount of time in india like i have to ask how he handles that because he has three kids and wife and everything in sf but anyways uh kudos to him and hopefully um you know they they get to build the team and they're clearly building a new studio and it's rocking and you know all the best to him uh

sorry about that yeah project has now confirmed that um they're gonna be working on the next witcher game um because of course i don't think it's a surprise to anybody um but yeah all i can say is i hope they pick up from the ashes of cyberpunk and focus on just creating a great uh witcher game um let's not inflate expectations this one of like a 20 million sold gta online service this is going to be a great winter game go ahead this is this is kind of a big deal in a way because first of all like aren't they making the same mistake that they made before like announcing this game so freaking early when they literally had said it i think they actually said that they are barely starting it right um so this could be cyberpunk's announcement was like e3 like on the main stage here comes the logo okay [ __ ] this thing all right so your point is this is it more of a subtle announcement but but the bigger issue here is that they are moving on from their uh engine that was

really broken on console um that caused a lot of the issues that they were having to unreal five and so from a technical perspective as i've said many times i'm not a game developer so i don't really quite understand how this all [ __ ] works but like i mean isn't that like a herculean task to move from an engine they've been using for the last like 20 years to unreal and rebuilding all the tools and technology and getting all the assets and all the other things that require and so i've been asking around about that and i'm kind of getting mixed a sense here but it does add layers of complexity and the second thing that i'm kind of trying to understand is like if you have these two engines right they're mutually exclusive so if you have teams that are working on supporting the old games in the old engine they are dedicated to that and then you have to actually reallocate resources to the new engine to build the tools and technology and transfer things over and start actually building a game and and doing that and building a game at the same time seems

relatively herculean right and so some people are saying oh no no big deal it's unreal there's lots of tools out there and like it's it's a really well-known engine of course unreal 5 is still in beta by the way just to be clear and the second thing is that um uh uh i forgot the second thing what's the second thing um oh but on the on the other hand this game oh yeah the on the other hand this this game's not coming out until 2029 that's like the gamut of like it's three years and and ten years type thing you know it's like it's pretty pretty pretty wide so what do you think mr adam i don't want to get your kind of expert opinion so it's it's unreal five then do you know what did they just have a proprietary engine before or what was their engine for oh it's a proprietary engine right so it's yeah home built completely like you know put together with tape and and straw and that type of thing over the years you know like as all engines are you know after all clearly very pc focused engine yeah i mean it was amazing on pc like i

i don't i'm not i'm not throwing i'm throwing not throw it like it was amazing pc engine it just was terrible on consoles right i mean it just i think it was a memory thing or something like that i can't remember but like at the end of the day it's you know yeah so it just freezes your resources right like your tech team is gonna be so focused on building all the tools rebuilding from scratch all those tools like yes unreal gives a lot of that stuff out of the box but all the stuff that they need to build for a rpg game a single-player rpg game is substantial for world building requests for all of the stuff to even just build up to a point that they have a sandbox that designers can do something in the game right so during that time you're going to have designers and artists and all that kind of stuff not necessarily sitting on their hands but working in theory instead of in practice in the engine versus before where when you when you kind of jump from game to game keeping on that same engine keeping on that same thing you can you know leverage a lot of the tech and tools that you had before and you give those designers and artists technical artists like a sandbox to play in almost

immediately you can get stuff playing on the screen um so yeah whenever you change engines engines especially substantially like not even just like unreal forward unreal five but now we're talking like proprietary to unreal five it's gonna be a substantial amount of work so yeah yeah yeah that's kind of my instinct and then and then the other thing that's always like the death knell of development um process is like while you're building the engine while building the game right so like you're building the tools and technologies while you're building the game so it creates lots of reworks and all this other [ __ ] that you have to do that makes it really hard so let's do an over under and then we'll move on from this conversation so uh over under 2028. wow okay so you're saying it's not gonna come out until over 2020 i think it'll be 2028 i think it'll be 2028. all right i'll take the over

because i'm i'm that negative all right moving on okay so that will be five years from now yeah yeah and by that time the stock the stock will be like five bucks because you can't survive without releasing a game for five years you know sorry sorry sorry poland but anyway moving on all right um okay so forever raises uh forever meaning fr vr by the way not the greatest name for for a company that doesn't do vr anyways forever raises 76 million dollars to expand casual games platform the company's catalog of html games can be played from a browser and on mobile the platform has reached 1.5 billion players since launch the announcement said now adam did you try to make html games back in the days like this could be you so well no uh frvr was there well before even we did right like they they had the tech the interesting thing

um when we when we chatted with them was like we're talking about like facebook instant games whatsapp games um we were using like cocos 2d for html5 stuff because we weren't engine developers we just want to make fun games and see if we could spin something up on facebook instant frvr did the right thing which is they built a proprietary engine which absolutely optimized for load time so as soon as html5 kicked in you got that link to that game it would load up in milliseconds even on low-end devices um and that that really drove a lot of their success at least in my opinion um they were the the top games on facebook instant right they made a successful business when most companies including myself were not successful so if you were at like i think we've talked about them before if you are going to invest in instant games and believing in a post app store world frvr is a great company to do it um so you know whether whether it's worth 76 million and 1.5 billion

valuation or sorry what's the what's the actual valuation i don't they didn't mention the actual evaluation but i'm sure everybody's worth a billion nowadays that's yes if you're going to invest in instant games uh frvo is a good company to do it yeah yeah yeah it's a again bad name for uh for a company that makes instant games to be called frvr what's fervor great company maybe maybe a name change just just throwing it out there you don't have to do it but if you make instant let's go on to yourself let's go to the greatest name which is born yacht club creator raises 450 million dollars to build an nft metaverse what else would you expect so yoga labs the owner of the three of the biggest nft brands on the market has raised 450 million funding at a four

billion valuation the company announced today that the team behind board a yup yacht club plans to use the money to build media empire around nfts starting with games and its own metaverse project now i could talk a lot about this and i actually have it's in the tokenomics episode that will be airing probably aired before this one so we ethan and anthon and i actually discussed this um it's craziness like uh they did you know that that board apiac club actually released a game before it was called apes versus mutants yeah and to my research do you know how many players that game got over the lifetime because this is the biggest brand so everybody knows board eight yacht club guess a million thirty thousand oh haha actually i guess i won that one yeah so if i would ship a game that would have 30 000 players you would kill me like over the lifetime and um you wouldn't give me 450 million

to build a metaverse being like you know what this looks great let's let's build more around this so anyways but but nevertheless like on the positive side like like essentially they are you know on the actually i don't want to go deeper like you can recently listen to the tokenomics episode we talk about their pitch deck uh i don't know like the pitch deck was most outrageous thing i've ever read like it was tongue-in-cheek it was like we don't give a [ __ ] because we're gonna raise gazillion dollars and whatever we put in so we're going to talk about we we talked about that in the tokenomics episode so please listen to that if you're interested in how to raise 450 million dollars on gpegs of with apes um should we talk about if i had 400 million dollars 450 million dollars i would just go out and try to find a good mmo studio to do this like there were concepts in that pitch deck and the the extent of the mmo is is i mean

it's essentially land sales like they make same type of jpegs with now land plots and then there's the uh the new type of a character that could be in those land plots and there's like about 100 000 of those and it's it's just it's a crypto broad cryptosys auction place uh but i really just said a studio that has at least experience with managing the macro economics of an mmo don't need that you don't need that just g-pegs dude just jeep bags i think i think you do need that and i would go out and try to find that talent i think raise this much money go find the talent that is at least you had the battle scars of running in mmo this company adam this company has 46 employees and two presidents two presidents not ceos two presidents i have no idea i'm aware of like the the craziness of the crypto bros of this thing but i just would not be that naive that i could assume that i could walk into an mmo world and dominate even with the leverage that they have around these avatars

yeah maybe uh i'm sure they will do great i think that this their mmo will will make gets a zillion dollars and they'll be going to be super successful and it's absolutely non-repeatable that's the most important part this is the lightning in the bottle uh and then final update 49 raised 36 million dollars for ukraine in a single day just a shout out of good stuff from epic parrot christ oh is it my turn uh it's your turn all right gdc update um first of all uh thank you guys all for the support and enthusiasm it was quite humbling that uh you know everyone was relatively nice and supportive uh so you have to understand like this is like the first time like i've been out at a conference since we started the podcast so you know and it's been over two years and what i quickly realized is that i've been actually screaming in this microphone for two years speaking about nonsense right without any type of direct feedback right over all this time

right and then sitting in front of like 60 people at the app any event it was a little [ __ ] intimidating you know it's kind of like when you're driving your car and someone cuts you off and you start cursing at them and conquering your heart and [ __ ] and you're just super bold right and then all of a sudden like a few blocks later you're at the stop sign and this guy is right next to you right he's like a 300 pound [ __ ] wrestler you know and you're just like slinking down in your chair that's kind of how i felt on stage at the app handy event um but uh nonetheless uh it all went relatively well i mean there was some positives and there was some negatives so i think i'll focus on the negatives first um the first one this guy that fanny introduced himself to me and he's like yeah you know i do casual games i do hyper casual games and i know you hate hyper casual games but i know all i do is mice nuts but my name is this and i'm like i felt pretty bad and i tried to backpedal i'm like hey no no you do solitary you're good man i like her i

just don't like the voodoo stuff you know like that but anyway so and then like right next to him as the voodoo guy being yeah exactly [ __ ] off uh the second experience was a little bit annoying i wasn't gonna share this because i feel really guilty about it to some degree but i'm but you know i'm gonna do it anyway right um so just to be clear here if you have an mba from harvard and you've worked at mckenzie that does not give you the license to have an opinion on everything okay i that that's like that that is the fundamental point that i want to get across right and and i should probably leave it at that but i'm not right is that i don't mind you can have an opinion but when we're discussing things that happened when you were in middle school you know let the adults talk okay and and shut the [ __ ] up right it's quite annoying right that that the opinions of people that just just have no experience whatsoever and i think mackenzie bain investment bankers all breed this kind of like

you know insane levels of of ego that that that they can come in and make judgments on things they can't possibly understand or have any experience to understand all right on a side note along these lines as i am hearing very scary scary things about ea these days is that uh the strategy group is getting inundated with mackenzie and bain people um and these people are like fungus dude you know you get them in and they multiply in the organization right and they create absolute chaos right because they don't know what they're doing when it comes to this sort of thing anyway and so what they do is they hire these guys in the senior levels and they like they need to surround themselves with like-minded people that they can marvel at their [ __ ] pedigrees and and and spout this [ __ ] industrial psych jargon [ __ ] with each other so they can feel good about themselves but they it is a potential disaster for ea to be having like these

legions of people typically you know like laura miele who's ones have been doing strategy for a long time like she's og man she came from westwood right and so she's always hired people that were gamers as far as i could tell and so if that's changing i i worry for the future of ea and i think it's my duty to to a point to and just talk about this and make sure that this doesn't happen none of this like you know spread of the fungus all right okay anyway so you know most of the part so that was the negative but for the most part everything was was really really positive and everyone was super nice like this this woman from big fish was like super sweet like she's she's she's a fan i guess um that was really nice to hear from her but out of all the people that talk to me like over a dozen right um more than half of them basically said the same thing right there's actually this one guy from novik who's obviously brilliant like the guys must be spectrum that he was like in his in his own world but anyway he said it the best i'm not going to really

replicate how he said it but what what what they really like is that that they they love the fact that i express my views that are against the current narrative from the companies and from the press right so that i have an alternative narrative that that that brings up the discussion or keeps discussion and so they are ex what they say is they were exhausted and having to listen to the same type of [ __ ] over and over again both of the companies as well as in the press and it's good to have someone out there that's actually just calling [ __ ] out right and so i think this is more indicative of what's going on in the broader world right whether it's politics or whatever right but in this in this in this narrow like in in this one lane you know of gaming i could do that without getting canceled i should post but i probably will get canceled but i but i said i promised everyone that i talked to that i was going to stay in this pocket i was i'm not going to go down the ukraine road like mr mishka or start talking about other political issues or freaking the death penalty or

religion right we are going to focus on games i'm going to stay in the pocket and keep like giving alternative views about what's going on there and and and feel valued out there so anyway so so congratulations this consultant from navic you have now just emboldened eric to become more of an [ __ ] for the next few years him him as well as the rest of the people that we're saying the basically the same thing yes yes i am i definitely emboldened and i i and and more importantly i feel like i'm adding value right for the first time in my life right so you know it's good i'm i'm scared what will happen after next week because you're like if you are now in front of 60 people you'll be in front of 500 next week oh yeah yeah i i just people are kind of like half worshipping you so and you travel on the other side of the world i'm in front of this giant audience i'm gonna disappear into the uh into the mountains of uh of turkey or something

all right um oh a couple clarifications though just to be clear because i get these comments i got a lot of comments with first of all i don't hate ethan actually i don't hate ethan at all he may hate me i don't know but we are totally kidding around about about this crypto stuff right just generally speaking um the second thing is yes mishka talks way too much and really talks off topic constantly like we try to reign him in but it's impossible right he's he's forced to be a force of nature right it's impossible to create him in but we keep trying um and then finally yeah yes eric seifert does look like a child molester with that asian mustache and uh we've had numerous requests for him to remove it but he will not um he lost his bet and he's keeping it on just to annoy everybody his wife his family and the people in the podcast so those are those are the clarifications but keep the feedback coming and uh and anyway uh moving on oh updates all right yes okay quick updates one ea play is skipping uh their live event

in 2022 so this is a really simple update they are [ __ ] all the show so they're not doing it right so let's wait till next year and they'll be back i don't think there's any like indication of e3 not happening or people doing events around that time frame it's just the fact that he has nothing to show they have no games this year and and that's it right so so don't worry about it i ethi will be back in some capacity or promotions around e3 will be back um that was my one update oh and that's it that's it right that's it okay and then we're gonna talk about apex legends afterwards yeah uh so uh there was not a lot of news naturally because everybody's at gdc um not everybody but half of the people are gdc so i wanted to bring back the topic that i casually quickly mentioned in the updates of last week i just i think we talked about light forge games and i was just take making a remark of them being fully remote and just said couple of notes and that created conversations on

the um on the dof slack channel people are apparently very opinionated about this and then of course when people are having conversations i tend to start writing so i wrote a i wrote a newsletter piece a few thousand of you have already read it so if you're not by the way subscribe to dof newsletter please do there's a lot of cool content anyway so what i wrote was i wrote about the benefits and some of the challenges with it and of course with benefits when it comes to fully remote is ability to recruit people from multiple locations um you know being just very employer friendly because there's no commuting uh it's cost effective because you don't have to have your your office you don't also have to hire the people from the uh if you happen to be in a gaming hub you don't have to hire the people from the uh from the most expensive locations um you know not to mention that remote work can be quite productive when you're left alone like adam telfer silently in his lodge into next to toronto he's just extremely effectively

working uh unlike he would be in the the party town of la but there are also some problems when it comes to it first of all there's a challenge in communication that's that's real i've been talking to a lot of ceos who have been not see not only ceos but a lot of people who have been running companies before uh before covet and during covet and during the lockdowns and what what was what one particular person mentioned uh was that he feels like he's being um a diplomat constantly in between people who are who are having um some kind of misunderstanding and that in my opinion really leads from a fact that a written word from an avatar is really not the same thing as a discussion face to face and because there's this lack of human interaction it easily leads to all kinds of loss of nuance and people arguing and and that escalates so so the need for communication is actually much larger you know in a fully remote setup uh number two uh you're missing from those ad-hoc

conversations between co-workers you're having lunch you're having coffee you start talking some people might say you're you're wasting time but sometimes good ideas come from that and those are really important the other they are the coffee machine water cooler talks um then something that i've been hearing i don't know this is fact or not so curious to hear if there's any kind of study around this but lack of loyalty and this is actually joshua wilson mentioned this and in the last podcast that we did uh from from sciplay uh ceo of sciplay and um lack of loyalty in the sense that you're joining a company you're at home and you might as well join any company as long as the pay is good and the project is interesting and and you're working reasonable hours and then people are respecting your your your uh work life balance and then things are good like like you can you can just change the company because you don't have any any kind of attachment to it of course if it's a great brand for that company then then perhaps but in the end it's about the money in the project so um that may in my opinion as well lead to uh

lack of loyalty long term because when you're working with certain people you you build relationships you don't want to leave you you're having fun time you're you're enjoying uh their company you're you're building friendships and and that and that that's a strong thing uh something that i another challenging part something that i have noticed is the tax and legal nightmares uh especially with the uh with the current crisis going on in in a nut crisis a war going on in ukraine uh we got the belarus like of course we as a company my company uses people who worked in ukraine worked in belarus those are hotbeds for for game development um extremely challenging uh but but also with the belarusian studios right now with the uh swift disappearing and all the payments even before that it was just challenging and when you have people in a lot of different countries in u.s it's different everybody is in the same country so it's easy to hire people around it but in europe it's it's much harder you have different legislations different tax codes it's expensive it's it's it's a lot of work um then

remote work also mentions something that it can burn people um it's you don't essentially have a break uh you're constantly working you're at your workplace and finally something that that i personally think is very challenging is building an engaging and outstanding company culture in a fully remote setup i i don't know how to do that i don't know how companies do that i understand how they're being extremely efficient and those are the values and how they appreciate everybody's work-life balance and and and things like that but that's not you know culture per se it's uh it's it's a anyways um i wanted to mention a couple of things that that again were were came after this uh this this newsletter so uh one part what dylan mentioned from dylan from crazylab mentioned that um the first visible impact of remote work will be the death of many studios who aren't located in game dev hubs smaller studios outside the hubs have relied on

underpaying their talent that is coming to an end with the remote work that democrat democratizes the salary so i think there's an interesting notion and i think uh this this could be true now that that developers everywhere have have more opportunities than before uh people mentioned that remote jobs will continue but they will likely see some salary limit on remote jobs due to international arbitrage highest paying jobs will likely be on site as i mentioned uh some of the ultra bullish people some of the some of the people on the slack channel are extremely bullish on remote work one person wrote that after spending the last two years working on a plus 100 people dev team in full remote it's actually made me think that non-remote work is the thing that is more likely to go out of style though i have to mention this particular person who was extremely bullish on it was working on a top grossing title uh but this title is almost a decade old so i understand that in in in a in a team that is operating like

like a train essentially like they've been running it for such a long time it's probably easier to get into it than a team that is a little bit new or is working on a new game and then finally there was a good point in that on-site is important for juniors who are the hardest to fit into remote work uh in-person membership observation adds much to the growth and it's harder to replace remotely now to finalize this i want to give a shout out to annette stelloy from dirty bit uh she summarized this extremely well this this whole topic that i was trying to cover uh when she was giving me feedback on on my newsletter draft and what i'm kind of paraphrasing but [ __ ] she's basically said that people who are not in management position very often lack the ability to see the challenges with remote working and over focus on the advantages of working from home brings to them on an individual level it seems very easy to focus on what works best for me not what works best for my team the project the company while the

while in a management position it seems to be easier to see the challenges related to a company culture lack of communication or even miscommunication that may lead to frustration and overall performance so i i wanted to cover this topic because this is something that i've i've noticed has been extremely challenging trying to figure out not how to work remotely but how to build a culture how to how to keep people happy when when not in when in a fully remote setup and and our company is is a hybrid with with two studios so what i've noticed is that when we get together when people get together in each of the studio they like spending time together you get you get a good feeling you know you leave the the day happier and and when everybody gets into one location people don't even want to leave the studio they're there you know i'm leaving early so there there are merits to being on side there are marriages to being hybrid and and i think we're kind of over over emphasizing the remote work as this is the new thing but in the long run i

think this will be more of um of curiosity and something that is left for studios that don't have as much prestige that they could request people to work on side and and most of the people most of the studios will be most most procedure studios will be working in a hybrid setup with specialists um in remote locations or or people who don't need to be on site possibly a remote location adam you're working remotely like what do you think uh yeah obviously i'm very biased here right like i have a very vested interest in staying remote for the rest of my life yeah um like i at the beginning of the pandemic i moved back to canada to be close to family and attend like bought a house and i intend to stay here um it would be really unfortunate if i get to a situation where um i can't continue to have an impact on the industry because people don't want remote work right yeah um so yeah i have a vested interest

in keeping remote work effective right so what i do is i think as we transition to kind of more of a stable of normalcy with with office work right i have to go out of my way to make sure that i'm traveling as often as i can to build up the relationships um that i need right because i um as much as i'm a huge proponent of remote work um i think there is still a lot to be gained by seeing people in person right and being right there um um and building up the relationships that you can't have over a zoom chat but at least in the position that i'm in which is not the majority of the gaming industry where like my boss works in san francisco i'm based in la i work with studios all the way around the world it doesn't make sense for my role to be you know like it doesn't really give me much of an advantage if you're working on a new game right and you've never worked with the people that you work with before

that's a scary proposition to put together a remote team in order to do that you you know you'll be less effective you'll be iterating um at a disadvantage right um and you have to over communicate and i think in those situations you're more likely to at least lean back towards your maximum of a hybrid work environment make sure everybody's within the same time zones all this type of thing um i guess like it's difficult for me to say like you put together like a good list of like the pros and cons which i think are obvious to everybody who's worked remotely for the last two years and we'll see how much you know people go into the office and do a hybrid environment but it's difficult to say like are you saying that remote work will no longer be or are you saying that that no like it my sense is that for new game teams you probably should be going with hybrid if not fully on-site if you're talking about live game teams with established practices then you can go to a more remote style i think that can be effective

and then to be honest new new game studios you know being remote can be one thing that you use to kind of get the best talent because for me when i'm making decisions about talent i'm much more likely to say you know i don't care where you live i want the best talent because even if i only get you you know working 70 effectively because you're remote i'd rather have the smartest person at 70 percent than somebody that i have to be actively training um to be clear i wasn't i would like i didn't try to make up like it's weird everybody wants to make a point like this works and this sucks i wasn't trying to make that type of point i was making a point that at the moment everybody considers that remote work is the only way forward and you're not almost even allowed to talk about the problems of remote work and the challenges of remote work and i was just trying to say that that there are a lot of challenges that we're not talking about and that in the long run there will be hybrid but with this remote work i think it's great that a we can do hybrid now because everybody understands

how to how to work remotely more effectively and b we're much more okay with having specialists or people who don't need that much face time being located in different if in different places like this this person is really good and we're fine with that person just traveling maybe once a week or every second week here that's good enough we don't need him or her here all the time and i think that's a great great element that that has changed uh when it comes to recruiting like you don't have to relocate but on the long run i think hybrid is is is the um is the prevailing option i think my favorite thing of all this remote work has been the amount of [ __ ] meetings that i've been in um and i probably shouldn't say this publicly but like everybody's in [ __ ] meetings of course and being able to just it's like listening to a podcast you just put the meeting on in the background you listen through it i'm ripping through so many more emails i'm getting through way better communication because of this stuff right um

and with hybrid work look i'm i'm looking forward to being able to like fly down to the stages and go to a meeting and see people in person um but then having like a condensed time of now is the time that we actually want to work effectively and look at each other and then when i go back i'm going to be able to work on the decks work on the communications figure ways to get alignment um and also there's been a lot more focus on do we actually need to meet about this or can we just you know hash this out on a document hash this out exactly right like so many so much time is wasted that now we we figured out how to do it asynchronously and it's so much more effective yeah and i love the fact that now when you're seeing somebody when you actually travel on site you can focus on relationship building like i'm here to build a relationship i don't need to try to get all these things done because i can do on my flight here and there and i have now is the time that we're gonna drink beer and just exactly [ __ ] about the industry exactly i don't care if it's eight a.m exactly right so it makes the onsite even better and like you know even in my case when i go

to the the studio a couple times a week like i don't expect to be as effective as i am at home but nevertheless i find it extremely useful that we have lunches together that would sit down and people talk to me about something that wasn't on my calendar and i you know i noticed that i'm missing on my my things that i was supposed to do but nevertheless i'm having a very important conversations uh with with people not you know not important but important for for folks to just talk yeah anyway i'm not gonna ask chris he uh like it's so long it's like three decades since he worked last time so you're commuted also yeah okay yeah also there was there was way too many words i i can't even i didn't even follow the conversation to be honest okay no i did hear one guy flippantly say something along the lines of like once we go through one cycle of promotions then everyone's gonna start working from office again it's like that's what i kind of think but but what the [ __ ] do i know dude i don't know i i i i personally i i couldn't stand it

i would love to work in an office again i'm going to go back to order as soon as i can right one day a week anyway all right um ea mobile okay so ea uh released apex mobile in beta it's open to pre-registration on the google play store but it's not on the ios store and this is what i found out about the ios store i i am blown the [ __ ] away right is that you cannot do pre-registration on ios more than 60 days before because of some technical glitch on their system is apple really that clueless right like don't they have engineers that they can fix this i mean there must be another reason besides some technical problem but it just continues to amaze me about how little apple cares about publishers it is like blows me away that this can't be fixed and this has been going on for years evidently how i didn't know this is another thing that i should i should know but anyway all right apex legend is a huge deal for ea really this year because for the most part they have [ __ ] all right they have no games coming out

this year except for their traditional games that they release every year um so this game is important for them to do well um and from what i can gather from you know coverage on youtube the youtube and stuff is that uh the game looks phenomenal right it looks like they've been able to replicate the visuals pretty well on mobile um and the frame rates look really solid and people are saying that even on low spec devices it's actually performing reasonably well so that's good of course it is a beta or an alpha beta right yeah um the controls and shootings seem to be really good um although you're still playing with the touchscreen which sucks sucks badly but whatever um and uh and i think the big plus here is i didn't try to sync it up with pc and console i think that that causes lots of issues and and some people think maybe that may be a missed opportunity right they should have a way of crop cross-platform like that buzzword but uh but then again you can optimize on mobile the way call of duty and pub g have done over the years

which i think is frankly the smarter move um and so far the network tech looks solid but again i don't know how many people are actually playing at any given time so that may change when the launch happens right um on the negative side uh this seems again much more niche than call of duty right so as a game it is more niche by definition almost um based upon apex on console mobile um there's i i believe a lack of bots and i don't need to confirm this but it doesn't look like it's all player-based right so that could get frustrating for new players that may be a missed opportunity i'm actually interested in what adam has to say because he's better at this um and then uh oh and then for such a core game this is my biggest concern is for such a core game um it makes sense to it makes more sense to play on better controls with you know console and pc but that may be just me uh maybe just you know people like to play this stuff on mobile i just don't get it

really personally but um so my gut is telling me and this is probably another over ender but for me and adam adam and i or whatever uh is that this is gonna be more like a core select audience and it should lead to potentially lower downloads but better monetization um so i think it could do better than call of duty in the first six months because call of duty had a rough start but it really feels kind of hard to predict at this stage uh any thoughts at all from your your and adam or yeah i do agree on the bots thing um especially early on when they just don't have matchmaking figured out fully right geo yeah yeah and just like obviously call of duty and pubg mobile really lean on those for to get that early retention right um yeah to make you feel like a badass i mean maybe it's just me like i'm terrible right so but i want to go into kill fools right and if i'm automatically against like these really [ __ ] sweaty tryhards i mean it's not

fun right yeah but this is for a younger audience like like usually these are geared towards the other 20 year olds and so so i don't know i've been looking actually well surprisingly i've been looking a lot of mobile shooters in that and some of the retention and arp down numbers like call of duty and garina free fire max are are the outliers their retention numbers are absolutely insane like we're talking about day one retention for a big big shooter game at 60 and they get up to d 30 at 20 so these are these are like you know supercell retention numbers nah and um the monetization uh are you getting method like app annie or sensor tower or something yeah sensor tower yeah the uh the and i'm talking about us so i'm you know focusing on android and ios and the monetization like it's it's not crazy with these games we're talking about our dial like 10 cents but with with the retention

numbers like that it's it's it's fantastic so if that is an incorrect statement you can say the retention numbers are good but if the arc dial is that low that's not good right you you can have one and not the other i don't know adam you can make a business case out of it i've been putting them into into um into my um excels and and it's actually a pretty healthy business case like i've been trying to put in these type of numbers and and build out uh what it could look like and how much they're making so it looks pretty healthy like even even with a low low revenue because you have to assume that the k factor is incredibly high and that the cpi is quite low uh that's the only only way it makes sense so i was actually asking suffered about this yesterday because i was just putting these numbers in and i was asking him and another another guy um

actually filippo who's been he's probably been on this podcast so both of those guys are growth i was asking if is it possible for the k factor to be over two because when i was putting these numbers in i couldn't make it work and unless i got a really high virality so really high amount of organic traffic and and they said yeah it's it's fully possible that they're they have the the k factor of over two now if if that works if your cpi is low enough we're talking about like a dollar to dollar fifty and a k factor is over one then then you can make a pretty healthy business case and then retention numbers like that you can make an extremely incredibly uh healthy business case of billion dollar game without with an arp dial at that low so what's your question eric like that the one part about like whether to sync up with pc console i think in this case is is a technical decision like there's just no way they could convince respawn to make the apex legends pc console game also work on mobile

um the advantage there is like with fortnite when you have an event in fortnight then it can carry over to mobile but that only worked when they actually had mobile versions um the disadvantage here is that you have to scale an entirely different service with its own thing right like call of duty mobile and call of duty warzone are two completely different live services that have to scale completely separately and i think when you work with somebody like 10 cent in this case um that works out for them right it makes it makes it much more feasible to develop so the big pro that i have here is that they're working with light speed and quantum right they're working with the guys who have built pubg mobile um to build this game all right so there's just like a huge advantage there of people that already understand what cosmetics work um how to kind of figure this the retention out early and get the game moving um but in terms of my predictions before it's still it's going to be slow growth i think um so if you're like it's going to be more it will probably get lower

downloads if you just think about the brand power of call of duty versus apex legends um and potentially better monetization i don't know about that especially not in the first year i think just based on this model based on what we've seen in terms of rpi curve growth in mobile shooters and the fact this is a very cosmetic driven game with a lot of different characters um i don't know if you could you can expect better bonutization no no again my assumption is that you get lower downloads so maybe higher levels of conversion because of yeah which is core yeah and so the rpi is it improves relative to the others so higher rpi lower downloads leading to either similar revenue as as call of duty or or higher potentially i mean that's just my gut and then like the the one pushback i got at the app annie event was that and i maybe i'm wrong about this and i'm gonna do some work and get back to you guys next week is that maybe maybe shooters are not doing as

well as i thought i thought they were kind of i i was thinking of the way the lines of what nibishko said like they're still heavily organic and they have like lots of broad interest and you don't need to hide it's low cpi's but this guy was actually i kind of made that comment and he was he called me out and he's like are you sure about that and i'm like no i'm not i'm not sure you know like that was like one of those feedback moments where i'm like oh my god i just can't spew this [ __ ] i have to actually look at this data so i'll look at it and i'll come back to you next week but but um but if that's not the case if you can't get the organics you can't get the k factor and all that crap k factor you're just meaning multiple of yeah multiple with an acquisition okay but um um i just you know we'll see right there's a lot of [ __ ] shooters out there right and grina we talked about this last week karina is dying right now and we don't really know why right and so and and and maybe this is part of it maybe there's a certain level of fatigue or some people are saying that people are

[ __ ] not playing video games anymore they're going outside and frolicking the sunshine i don't know all these kids but um so anyway it's something i will look at the the organics are are high like there are games like a look at frago frag arena that's a good example there's a critical ops there's a bunch of shooters that that when you start looking at when have they updated their um their ads the last time some of them have updated like a year ago so meaning that they're not really running any ad campaigns like critical ops is a good example with 100 million downloads and still getting a million a month look for the [ __ ] record okay i i i this is mind-boggling to me this whole thing and i didn't want to go on this rant today because i didn't prepare but it is ua armageddon out there right i don't give a [ __ ] what unity says what applovin says what ironsource says it is a [ __ ] disaster out there right and it's getting worse and it's gonna get much worse over this next year app loving unity and iron source are [ __ ] right and so

i i think it impacts everything it doesn't just impact puzzle or [ __ ] social casino of which it does and social casino is completely doomed right but it's like everything is getting more expensive to to to acquire for right and that shouldn't shooters are not eliminated from that notion right and so this is so what happened like three months ago or six and months ago is [ __ ] irrelevant right it's what the new situation now they remove idfa they remove google's identification they move fingerprinting how in the [ __ ] are you gonna find your audience of people that actually spend money on this [ __ ] you know it's gonna be like shooting blanks out there you know and that's why broad approach like broader games are most likely to succeed better uh i know an ips but anyways uh to conclude the episode stop dead naming app annie it's data ai so that's a one no no i i got permission to use whatever the [ __ ] i wanted to use okay because i'm never calling them data ai

because that's a stupid [ __ ] name and apparently is what i've known and i'm old and i can't they were probably looking at facebook turning into meta and they were like let us call us then data no actually he what is it yeah i forgot the blank on his name yan uh but he actually went through the reason but the pocket it makes sense right they want to like become to be honest after annie made no sense in the name apparently made zero sense it was the stupidest name ever but they had the cutest logo though right yeah well i don't know about that but okay so eric will continue dead naming and um and to conclude this also give us that goddamn star it's the spawn if you're listening this one's modified you haven't decided you don't have to you don't have to but but check find a podcast that you like and give that podcast a star i'll give several podcasts to star it's free and and also register for the live twig by following the link in the description and we love you guys and we appreciate

you guys and appreciate all the feedback so on that note next week is going to be live twig that's it and i'm not awesome i don't have to do anything next week you don't have to do anything we're relying on the sound and all this feedback that i got is unleash the beast is at least the beast i'm going i'm going hog wild right now it's in my legs it's going to be so bad because eric is going to be high on love in istanbul doing this live tweak so i'm afraid so that's why you have to you have to sign up for the uh for the registration and um tickets are out there's there's no more tickets but if you are see suit somewhere then ping me uh but pretty much that's the uh that's the only way to get in anymore so on that note catch you guys next week bye bye [Music]

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