TWIG #287 Trouble in Paradise: Squad Busters and Netflix Games

[Music] hello and welcome to this weekend game 287 where we read into still all the weekly game industry news so you don't have to you get your fix from us here's what we're going over today amongst a lot of stuff Phil is so excited to throw up on the voodoo be real acquisition actually I think he's excited about it I thought you were going to throw up on it and then you surprised me by saying you think this is brilliant so we're going to get so many angles all right hold on hold on we'll get there been brewing this prge announcements and marketing are a thing now so we've got a lot of talk going on with prge today Mishka breaks a rule and talks about both embracer and Netflix so this is a no rules rule that's that's the book right yes that is the Netflix book and then

Crest gets triggered from all of this we we promis to try to keep it to new information on these topics only and not revisit the past although there there might be a touch might be a touch of that so hi I am Jen donaho strategic marketing consultant at bet hat and Jaden Inferno and today we have Philip black game Economist at game Economist Consulting hey hey Eric Crest principle at gossimer Consulting Group what up punks and Mishka kov king of Spain because he's still in Spain and deconstructor of fun uh hola actually I don't know I don't know a lick of Spanish because my wife speaks such a fluent Spanish that I just walk around and look pretty that's my role here and just just carry the uh the stuff oh that's funny um well did you or your wife happen to watch WWDC or dubdub as if you're one of the in people you call it dubdub so as an AI fan I thought this was pretty interesting they also an announced iOS 18's game mode and I

thought I just had to bring this up cuz I thought it would trigger Crest that they announced that basically this allows you to play more HD games or full console games on your phone and that's what Apple's really going after in all their announcements yeah they they're super friendly to The Gaming Community and game Publishers of all ilks now this continuing they just don't give a [ __ ] about games they just want to continue the upgrade cycle and push which is great good business for them obviously AI is the latest thing holy crap like you need a 15 Pro to play to even use apple AI I actually have a 15 Pro I'm actually a little bit excited about the integration like it feels far more practical if it's actually integrated with a device that you use on a daily basis as opposed to like kind of a one-off even though chat GPT is amazing and that stuff and then maybe they fix Siri I don't know I'm I am actually a little bit excited about this this actually and the stock has been up

dramatically in anticipation of this announcement and this announcement but I guess the one thing that I'm concerned about that seems to be concerned for most people is that the privacy issues around this like creating like an llm or some kind of model based upon your usage of your actual device on a regular basis seems a little sketchy right like you know like all that information available in some form I don't know that seems like a pretty big hurdle for them but they don't see here's the thing and this is the same rant I always give Apple doesn't give a [ __ ] right all they want to do is sell phones privacy was the last strategy right they clearly don't give a [ __ ] about privacy they're letting everyone use fingerprinting now like it's everywhere right everyone's tracking IP addresses identifying individual users we're back we're back in it dude they don't care you know that whole privacy message was just a [ __ ] marketing Ploy and so same thing here you know this is going to enable potentially some amazing features on the phone and and it'll help push obsolescence and make people upgrade

phones good done business yeah it's it's literally the first time that people are going to feel the need to upgrade in like three or four phones yeah on the Privacy stuff I think they haven't abandoned them yet they did talk about the reason why you need the powerful phone is a lot of the compute that happens for the AI is going to happen on the phone and they're not sharing that information back to the cloud apparently they're not training your data on it they say but I thought of you because I was like as much as a Vision Pro was a fail this apple intelligence is that much more of a win yeah totally they just announced that they're not going after a big upgrade path for the uh The Vision Pro yeah they're going to focus on a lower-end device or something like that yeah okay I mean wasn't that obvious from the GetGo that $3,500 device makes no [ __ ] sense yeah um stock is up by over 12% after the announcement so that's in MoneyWise that's a lot I can't even like what that three trillion doll company and when

that goes up by 12% or not as much as leather daddy Jensen who went on stage that's true with HP and Nvidia is now the largest company in the world bers because I told my wife who who day trades and she does like options and stuff I'm like go get his speaking schedule Jensen's from Nvidia the Nvidia CEO and just by calls before any speaking engagement he has in the next couple of months she did it yesterday actually and she like look I'm I made money yeah none of whatever is said on this podcast is not investment advice by the way but I do have to say like his interviews are how would I put it they're like so sobering when he talks about how hard it is to be like I would never do this again even if I knew the outcome like he goes to Stanford and just just like like makes a reality check to all these young kids how incredibly hard it is so this guy is a is a f fascinating speaker talking about

authenticity we never got to that Discord article but like this is one of the probably most authentic speaker in business at the moment yeah totally agree all right let's keep going uh shill Mishka uh yes uh shill so episode from this Monday uh we had an episode come out with clang founder so their CEO and CTO odur and Mundi uh Icelandic powerhouses came in on the podcast so the company has been live for for 11 years and they've released one game in I think in 2016 that was the other date and it's a fascinating story because they're based out of Berlin and they've raised $77 million over six rounds and every time they raise and it's like tens of millions that they raise they still haven't shipped the game so it's a super fun chat Mundi is a very charismatic CEO and as a CEO of a startup he has done excellent because his main job is to raise funding and boy oh boy does he do that

the conversation goes everywhere he talks at one point where where they did a pitch so bad I think it was to lvp that they got sued afterwards like it's an insane insane conversation and um you know clearly what they're doing resonates with the venture capitalist or they just really want to hang out with Mundy it's either or probably both so but it's a fun conversation yeah yeah how about making a game or making a product what about that um have you th heard about web 3 never release and that's true just keep the keep it alive the good part about the story is is that his grandfather was the first person to kind of bankroll them when they were you know living the life in Berlin and his grandfather got out so when he theyed the series a his grandfather made like Millions out of it CU he got to sell in stock already so if somebody made it it's grandfather vundi is a is a millionaire now of clang so so you know good investor all right so

check that out Phil I give you the floor to Voodoo on Voodoo all right so I think I think we got to start I guess maybe not with a correction but with an update we finally have confirmation from multiple news outlets that 500 Milli was in fact not the acquisition price for be but instead that represents a performance-based maximum and so the actual price paid looks like I think it was around 100 to 120 million uh in cash and stock so that is a very very different deal than 500 million acquisition there is so many freaking angles to this I don't even know where to start so I think the first one that seems to be overlooked is the Anti-Trust angle so the fact that this thing sold I would argue for peanuts at 100 million at 500 million that's ridiculous and we'll talk why 500 million was ridiculous but 100 million that's like nothing and so why would it sell for so little Beyond just the kpis and the inability to raise another round it's the fact that the United States cannot bid on a company like this because the

antitrust Department would be uh would be all up over them there'd be lawsuits they would drag it out it is not a friendly environment for Acquisitions Zuck Zuck would have loved this I mean even the dark horses for Tik Tok right now that get mentioned like Amazon and Walmart I'm sure they'd be interested in this but the justice department won't allow it or at least they'll drag it out so it's painful for everyone and that ultimately harms everyone it harms us companies it harms a French company that could have gotten a bigger out for those VCS and ultimately it lowers the amount of capital that is is going to flow into Venture if you do not have reasonable outs so it's super it's super disappointing to see this um I think there could have been a much better outcome for everyone if the justice department was not on an ideological tear right now so I think that's that's been missing in these takes I think there's the media angle because everyone was rushing rushing to report this $500 million headline and the defense given was that if you read the pr release from Voodoo they start with the statement that it was going to be for 500 they do not go into more specifics but if you

read another line they kind of cast a little bit of Doubt on this and everyone was running with this headline I've seen very few Corrections by the way to this $500 million headline and there's only one person that seemed to raise a couple questions about this and that was Eric seaer former host of the C oh oh oh oh wait I was first I was first on the podcast what are you talking about he might have beat you on the tweets he might have beat you on the tweets he had it very quickly on the tweets he was highlighting the second line of the press release that seemed to cast a little bit of smoke on the $500 million number but leave it leave it to the analysts to be able to call this into question there was also a Business Insider article that came out with the CEO of voodo I believe which also cast more cold water on the 500 million that was very close to the original press release that didn't get a lot of pickup so I would say that's the second angle is that I think the media failed this a little bit in being able to cover this or at least raise some questions or at least even give us the update and it was the analysts that seem to have won the fourth estate kind of let us down it was The Fifth Estate that seems to be winning right now to be clear as I said

in my post with Eric cord's thing is that this was PR Brilliance right I mean they put out a press release that was so misleading that everyone believed it right on their blog right so this was PR doing what they do in order to make something feel bigger and better than it was to save face for the valuation and make a bigger Splash so I mean I they did their job good job whoever the our guy Voodoo is good good for you man you did it I certainly I don't know if I want to blame them but I would say that was a very misleading opening line in their press release they did not cast like pretty much any doubt about the 500 million so I mean I don't know if I want to credit for that so I would say there's the third angle which is the link fluenc angle so this thing gets announced there's a rush rush of takes and this happens whenever there's an ironic acquisition by an ironic acquire is we got to have the rush the rush of takes and everyone was going bananas this is genius it is a games company

buying a social media company they're going to use all these cool gamification techniques there's going to be cross promotion I mean come on Zinga called it wants its what 2010 Farmville strategy back like who who who's doing this anymore and if you run some of the back of the envelope math and you say okay it's going to be 500 million you know we have around 40 million Dau you start to think about okay what would the LTV be it's around $13 okay let's look at some comparables for this Facebook reports their arpo Facebook has reported their arpu for a really long time and so we can see what Best in Class arpo looks like so again I I want to remind you that like Facebook is one of you know God's greatest monetization engines ever created and if you go back to at least let's say 2019 you're looking at about six bucks a user so they could probably recoup this you know 2019 Facebook could recoup this probably in two quarters you got to remember like what it takes to get an arpo like this so not only do you need to have the aptech down which we can come back to but the other thing you need to do is you need get the Turn Style right and the Turn Style is about

increasing engagement because the arpo that they get is tied to that you can show more ads and you're going to hit ads more frequently the more time you spend on Facebook so you need to grow what people do on the platform so this has been like the move to subscribing to Pages subscribing to artists getting outside your local network is how you increase engagement Instagram did a brilliant job at doing this this is how they get more people to go through their monetization Turn Style which is super effective and this is B's problem right now I'm I'm a frequent B user user and they're struggling to get people outside of your local network so I have about four or five friends that are on B I do use it pretty consistently there isn't a lot of gamification techniques But ultimately like how are they going to get me into other profiles how are they going to increase the size of my network that is the big challenge that b real as had they've tried to throw me Brands but it's just not the same you can't plan Co posts it kind of goes against the app which is supposed to be spontaneous it's supposed to be kind of lame most of my friends are just you know they're work from home so what do I get I get a bunch of keyboards and screens that's that's

what I get every day but yet somehow there's there's this addictiveness to it because you can't see other users posts until you post your own so there's kind of this if then statement they've created so if you start to think about it like okay they don't have ads they got to get this Turn Style up who could be a good pair for this Voodoo makes a lot of sense Voodoo makes a lot of sense because they have B whiz or excuse me whiz which is their social network that is pretty big in France which from sources I've talked to at Voodoo tell me that they grew that social network almost exclusively through user acquisition so it was not kind of this organic K Factor you usually get with social networks it was doing what Voodoo does best which is being a publisher which I think is the direction they want to go they want to be a publisher not necessarily A games publisher but a publisher in of itself you saw scopely a long time ago with a press release about the scopely OS brilliant brand from Javier they want to be a publisher that they can take anything that is an app whether it be a game or not and be able to grow this thing and they can slap on an ad Network on top of this which they've announced they're going to do there's another interview with their CEO that came out recently I believe it was on the verge they also talked about that the fact this isn't going to be a cross

promotion they confirm this I wrap all this up and I would say I think this is a brilliant acquisition I think that being able to get this for $100 million at the user scale they did being able to say hey look it let's take a real shot whether or not we can move from games publisher to publisher and ultimately who doesn't want a social network this is an advertiser's dream this is an advertiser's dream we know some of those valuable companies in the world are social networks let's take a shot at this $100 million I think that is a brilliant iic decision I wish them the best let's keep an eye on this let's see if they can grow it let's see if they can grow it they can slap an ad Network on it let's see what they can do but this is a bet I want to take we don't do Financial advice but let's look at that Voodoo stock oh my Lord not a public stock though I mean thanks Phil it's good that you got you know a week to marinate this and come up with the thesis because you started off with weak arguments around that 500 the LTV kind of like the normal Playbook and now you had a week and you became like a financial analyst over here you want us over we're here cheering for Voodoo this is it like personally I would say

talking to the people there it feels to me even more product focused organization than the zingas and scop Le that are you know often saying that we are the product people our product managers go to metas and the Pinterest and Googles and so forth but in that company they were so focused inside of it not to only grow games they grow any apps and I think this fits perfectly and they have a app division already well functioning they got their games going on and social network it's a true as you said a publishing platform a product driven company as product as I've ever seen that's all you got that's all I got I'm just supporting Phil I'm giving the um Edge to give us and be real oh God I'm going to be real right now they're buying a social network with no revenue and no advertising whatsoever right so it's like in its infancy and so this is what we know as pure multiple Arbitrage which is on the slide today right now if you're watching the YouTube thing is

they are a company that trades at like three times Revenue according to the comps and they're buying a company that will in theory trade at nine times revenue and so what they're hoping for is that their revenue that they make now will now trade at nine times revenue or be valued at nine times Revenue instead of the three right because they are now a social network as opposed to a gaming thing so this is complete like kind of [ __ ] in a way right because they have no business right now on the social side and they have to build a business from scratch but in theory it could work I think these Voodoo guys are actually relatively brilliant in terms of uh positioning and and and and selling themselves and so this may work but ultimately this is the same setup as what happened with unity right because Unity positioned themselves as something completely different than they were and it blew up on them and I'm not going to go over that rant again and so they have a lot of execution to do in order to get where they need to go and not screw over

every shareholder that buys their stock in the next like you know 6 to 12 months so we'll see if they can pull it off and actually make a go of this and actually build something here but I'm uh skeptical at best for these type of big moves or transitions for companies $1 million you're telling me you wouldn't take a swing at this you just described upside to me when I look at these multiples what here's what I think is gonna happen if if you got into my head I think Voodoo wins and shareholders lose how about that like I think they actually can position this in a way that makes them very wealthy by selling the dream but I don't think the dream will become a reality for investors that's what I think is going to happen similar to what happened with unity right so if woodoo wins some of the investors always win as well like the early investors right because you said investors woodo wins investors lose but you mean like the investors W and Voodoo goes public yeah if they went public or they get a acquired by someone else or whatever

those are the investors that lose all right let's keep going sandbox yeah so so sandbox news last week got reached out by a couple of people CEO actually as well of sandbox so he's coming the podcast well you know people do listen to this so anyways this is not from the the CEO I actually just rent the email but the correction here is headquarters on paper is Hong Kong so we talked about the headquarters but according to this person there are no people there partly due to regulation but mainly because animoca Brands is being based there real headquarters is actually in Buenos areas that's interesting but this is the most important new much better I I would have left that one on the table Yeah n Argentina great again yeah make it make a correction that's actually makes you look better not worse this is this is not coming from SBX so anyway this is from do slack Channel but this is the most important correction so they never actually rais series C but it was leaked

that they are looking to raise 400 million at 4 billion valuations so when Prest was saying that they raised on 400 billion oh my God it's almost worse it's almost worse that this thing leaked and they couldn't get it done I I can't seem to go through a Sandbox no because Corrections are making everything much worse it's like you're digging a hole I'm just reading what was sent to me the series C was supposed to happen and in fact series B end of 20 21 which was $93 million at an undisclosed valuation L by Soft Bank according to this email it was 93.5 million on a 500 million valuation so this news comes in saying that they have crossed a unicorn valuation they actually doubled in the pr that we got they did not mention this so it was incredibly confusing whoever is doing PR for them is doing a disservice right now they need to talk to Voodoo yes yeah yeah so I I think they're based out of friends I think they need to connect

like listen whoever you're using for PR is a disaster like talk to woodoo let's make a three camera shoot and get this over with remember the poor PR people PR people aren't the ones who drive the core message let's just remember it usually comes from an executive team that wants to get their message out there the poor PR people are generally the ones that are like not listened to how ever I get what you're saying the pr strategy on this was a huge Miss I asked about this actually from a person and he told me that the goal with this publication with this PR were to say like hey by the way we've crossed a unicorn valuation but the way we received it was like what the hell like you came in at a quarter of the previous so it felt like that whoever was in charge of this PR strategy this communication this this press release did not look at what has happened till this point and just came out with this convertible Note news okay

anyways we're gonna have the CEO on the podcast just just give us the daily active user chart they can shut everyone up with that and they won't because there is no daily active users this thing has been [ __ ] on relentlessly even by crypto like when you've lost the crypto Community you've really lost you've really lost everything I have some numbers here but I'm not going to say them but yeah actually the only real correction here which I will take is that they didn't spend $400 million in the last three years so I'll accept that as a correction which is actually the best news ever because if they had blown that much money in that period of time it would be I don't even that think that's [ __ ] possible to be honest so they only blew 93 million right in the last three years which is great right better right or somebody was able to invest at a very favorable valuation for 20 million I don't know we'll see look $20 million like convert is is limping I it's just limping along and that that's not a good raise for any company really

after doing 93 million right and the billion dollar valuation is seems to be [ __ ] anyway with a $20 million convert I don't believe any of this [ __ ] really to be honest and the reason that this [ __ ] leaks for four billion is they're trying to get fomo and get all these VC tourists out there bidding this thing up to4 Billion Dollar during like the most insane time period ever in investment in gaming right that you'll ever see In Our Lifetime right so anyway this continues to feel very desperate I'm sure you'll talk to him and he'll paint a Rosy picture but I don't think this is go things are not going well at Mr sandbox let's just say that for almost certainty okay so I wish them the best but like yeah this is not look not a good look yeah I think the key takeaway is having PR for a convertible note is never a good strategy you know those sand timr that you flip I why didn't they just s's coming down it's running out I wish they would just do yeah you're funny okay I wish just do why didn't they just do this on the

under like like I said last week there must be a reason why they had to do this the valuation that was it they wanted to say that they are now valued at a unicorn valuation that was to my understanding the reason Absol unicorn value so sorry like you're valued a billion like listen if you're a Founder it's nice to say like hey I got a billion dollar business like officially I know but okay all moving on officially get bottom of this uh elevate your game development with heroic Labs The Cutting Edge platform for building multiplayer games and you need an edge to be successful in today's gaming landscape their scalable Nama server empowers you to create compelling real-time multiplayer experiences effortlessly benefit from features like in-game chat leaderboards matchmaking and more all designed to enhance engagement and retention whether you're developing for mobile console or PC heroic Labs gives you the tools to bring your community together unleash the full

potential of your game with heroic Labs where every developer is a [Music] hero this podcast is brought to you by sensor Tower sensor tower has acquired mobile analytics company data AI formerly known as we all know and love app Annie four things you should know significant advancement number one this acquisition represents a major step step forward for sensor Tower it expands its customer base mobile marketing and app intelligence products and Global presence number two Undisputed leadership position sensor Tower strengthened its position as the leader in digital marketing and mobile app intelligence through this acquisition number three combined insights this merger with data AI allows sensor Tower to offer customers even stronger and more detailed insights on the Digital customer journey and last consumer Trends with increasing time spent on

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Google kind of down on both spend and on downloads Phil would like to point out that with inflation the overall increase in spend on mobile is about flat because of uh the impact of inflation right Phil I hope to cover Matthew Ball's update he did an update to his state of the gaming piece and lo and behold he makes a lot of inflation adjustments and everything looks flat and again if you if you bring back inflation or looking pretty flat and more on this we'll have an episode and a write up next Monday on the censor Towers report so we have Lexie CTO she was on the podcast we discussed all these matters apps games trans media you name it and then went through all these numbers so both podcast and the newsletter piece coming in next Monday oh nice okay sorry I did a little uh a little primer for Lex teaser teaser if you will teaser all right um I'm also seeing a new trend which is to relase Milestone download numbers on company

social channels so uh we were just kind of making fun of PR a little bit so I think companies are actually going to their own social channels to announce things likely because there's a lot of inaccurate numbers that are out there so attention marketing and PR folks it seems like this is a musthave strategy and mobile gamer. Biz our friend Neil will give you free press for it because what he does is goes and scrapes all those social updates and then he pulls them into articles and promote your stuff so here's a few that he called out that I saw you know also just remember that scle did their whole PR tour around Monopoly go and they got so much PR in fact they were featured in Time Magazine as like one of the 100 top companies in Tech so supercell Squad Buster pre Reds was announced there wethering wave passed 30 million downloads Pizza Ready which is I think it's a hyper casual game hit 100 million downloads like we

talk a lot about Squad Busters in those bigger games like 30 40 million prees these games are getting download numbers that are in that Phil has a lot more of those to talk about later but just wanted to call out that's a new strategy Nintendo Direct wow Nintendo doesn't really give you much warning that these are coming I saw it like the day before like hey everybody Nintendo Direct is tomorrow so a few notable announcements that I saw that I was kind of interested in there's a new Zelda game called Echoes of wisdom for the very first time you get to play a Zelda and of course they don't let her use a sword because you know why would we allow a woman to wield a sword but she does get a special power it's an echo power so basically anytime you encounter an object you copy and paste it into the world like if you encounter a table you can copy the table paste it use it to climb up stuff so it was kind of a cute new top down version of that a new Mario Party for this fall you get to play with

20 friends I didn't even know you could play on a switch with 20 other people and then for many people Metroid Prime 4 is exciting I think they announced that back in 2017 and so it launches next year with the original developer gorilla tag has topped 100 million in Revenue making it one of vr's most successful games did you want to troll me and troll Crest with this post CR most likely no it this is this has Crest all over it so yeah I I just saw the news they made 100 million in revenue on a VR game talk about unicorn yeah yeah that's a unicorn one game does not a platform make is what I would say but yeah this game's actually done quite well according to the press release so you know VR it's here to stay yeah I mean beat saber probably was the other one to get up there but I haven't heard anything else about VR I've been hearing a lot about that Batman game theyve paying a lot of money to get Arkham

Shadow or something like that where everything that you see about the game has nothing to do with VR it's pretty funny I think people are like oh it's the next Rock Steady like Arkham series because it's called Arkham Shadow I I would have to imagine the consumer confusion is really high on that anyway and then the final one Phil you sent me this email thank you Roblox has rolled out video ads to all advertisers enabling seamless integration within immersive experience experiences to reach our 13-year-old plus Community because God forbid you know we can't go against the law and uh advertise to kids under 13 so more on that if you want to go check that out I highly recommend it if you want to reach kids send your advertising videos to our nine-year-olds that are saying they're 15 so that they can use certain features on Roblox it's like the Sur compliant we're Copa CA Copa comping

let's go hold on there is an angle here let's let's see how this turns up in the quarterly earnings this is one of their big plays to advertising Eric has [ __ ] on in-game Advertising forever we all have and we should because it's been tried a million times but maybe this is the exception that that proves the rule I don't know but let's see how this performs I actually think this is a pretty big deal I agree with you for the record I'm hearing absolutely horror stories from a development perspective on how ads are being integrated they can't sell the inventory and it just is not working yet I not that it won't work in the future but it's a [ __ ] show over there the tech is difficult right the tech is very difficult to get that set up once they get get it set up I think there's a lot to come from them for sure if that doesn't work let's go back to Native marketing and again the uh the Gucci Roblox shops and whatever they did AB it was so absurd the the Netflix metaverse and and but let's talk about something equally fun fun embracer group has closed the

deal to divest US based game developer gearbox entertainment to us-based gaming holding take to interactive software for $460 million final part of transaction nobody cares but there's an interesting point that they have to settle additional remuneration obligations for lost voice interactive so that comes as a caveat as a part of the deal of closing that studio us-based gam tech company Astro Cade has raised 12 million in a seed funding round from Nvidia Ventures and from other investors the fund will fuel the development of an AI based platform casual games currently enclosed Alpha Testing that enables users to create ugc games and share them with other users so this sounds like hype hype if you are familiar with that game it's backed by Supercell and I think Benchmark if I'm correct out of fin but this is uh most likely not mobile or maybe it's a

crossplatform but anyways ugc casual games AI so that seems to be a a holy combination to get some cash and final investment news I can't go any of these without web 3 so I found this one Hong Kong based web 3 gaming platform uliv verse has raised 4 million in a pre-series a funding so another pre series a AKA seed extension because they failed to reach traction till date and there was a link so I had to go on the site I was like what is Erse and on the on the main page like when you open up it says s final airdrop farming and it start with like a dollar s a t i don't know what's going on but it's it's ludicrous and I love all of this web3 stuff this is this is my favorite stuff so yeah sounds legit company so there was a little bit of news last week that Mike Fue who is the head of Netflix games is moving on to a

different role in the company leaving the lead position open and Crest immediately was everywhere taking a Victory lap so we give you the floor to take your public Victory lap please go well again I have to do some hats off to the pr of this industry where Elin lemons yeah I mean it's like so so this was the quote Mike bdue leaves company ramps up its Ambitions in the video game space I mean what a Croc of [ __ ] okay like I mean look I love Mike RDO I think he's a great guy he he is actually amazing leader I think he is one of those people that has like one of the best reputations in this industry and and I'm not pooping on him at all and even though I'm doing a bit of a Victory lap because I think I was right in the sense that something was a foot in Netflix gaming like things are not going well when your leader is let go without a replacement right if there's no succession plan internally or externally

or whatever then this was a shock some kind of like event has occurred that is signs that things are not going well which is exactly what I said like two weeks ago all right whatever right but what we really don't know is why Verdu is leaving and I still don't really know for sure Mr Chris I had heard that so he didn't leave the company he's moving to a different project inside of Netflix leading like a new team or leading development or so it is trans media probably trans media you know we don't know for sure but it's not the typical like he was fired or he's leaving the company he is moving to something else inside of the gaming group to lead another game team so that that's perhaps what is going on however it doesn't necessarily change what you're saying no and I think it's more it is more PR and more fluff as well my guess is that

he'll probably be out in the next 6 to 12 months if I were to guess why do they need to make an announcement at all I don't get this just fire them and move on I don't understand Netflix has never been shy about this what wh why why are they why are they [ __ ] footing around this no I think bdue was gonna leave and then then they they wanted to make make nice nice okay so his noce basically why didn't they fire him then like why didn't they fire him like they don't want to make it what's crazy about this Netflix thing is that I I go out there and put this [ __ ] out there and I get there is no response from Netflix like they don't give they don't give a [ __ ] about anything there is no PR or messaging around gaming that's going on right like there is no PR department for Netflix gaming it seems and so they want to control the message that everything is fine right and that Verdu is doing something else in the business and you know we're we're just doing what we do right that SS confusing because in the in the like Phil like even in the book like I love the no rules rules they

always talk about like how you have to be very truthful and transparent and if somebody's being let go like in that culture let go is not always negative it's like you've completed your mission the company is now going to this direction thank you so much for your service till this point you know let's shake hands and best of luck and like in this case it's kind of confusing because they're saying that like hey thank you for getting us to this point we're going to head out we're going to you know ramp up but you're still like you're going to go to a position that we're not going to announce we're not going to say who's the next person it's like so not Netflix this sounds like know Disney so I I think one of the things I would mention and this is something that happened at Amazon games is that the games org really started to become more and more disconnected from the mainstream corporate culture at Amazon the worse the performance was the annex got bigger and bigger and I start to wonder if this is the case at Netflix games that they understand from the beginning that games are very different and so they've given them leeway to run their own shop and these are the results yeah and again

what we don't know and where I would have an absolute Victory lap is if you know the gaming group is getting sunsetted right in the next 12 months we just don't know that or are they willing to get a new leader and figure out a strategy that manifests itself over the next three years right is that the next thing right then I'd be wrong right I'm that's not what I think is happening but I could be yeah I I really have no idea I'll be honest yeah we're just speculating I if I made the since I wrote the article that came out was it a Monday yeah I I wrote an article that came out on Monday thanks Phil for helping on that about the uh the Netflix strategy so just to summarize it like my my whole point was around three things that was going not maybe so well at Netflix games and of course I gave a ton of kudos to Verdu as as he has a great reputation but the three things that are challenging for them is like the first of all is product Market fit it has the same fallacy that Apple arcade had which is assuming that mobile games that we have now in the market they will be better if you just remove the ads and the inapp purchases and that's not true

and then like you see Netflix games acquiring these games like the SpongeBob game that that the tilting Point published they have that exact same game they just take away the ads and the inapp purchases and does way less downloads and like what's the point when you can take that game and have been able to take that game for years off the app store for free watch ads progress faster as we're making that purchases so weird sort of a product Market fit not even talking about all the Niche Steam games that they have been releasing that are like four five six years old the second one is is the sort of a the ROI aspect so the way I see it and I don't think this is controversial every single business invests into activities that either grow revenue or gross profitability and those are achieved either directly or indirectly through the Investments that it makes and so in Netflix games perspective I don't think they currently bring any new subscribers there's no sort of like a house of car version of games where you're like I must play this one you can only get it through Netflix

games they don't monetize directly there's no ads there's no in purchases and based on the public data again they haven't rebed this in the pr the CBS article was talking about at least in 2022 that only 1% of Netflix subscribers were playing these games and and people are of course debunking this that it's an old thing since then so many downloads have happened etc etc but you could say okay maybe they've triped the amount of players okay now it's 3% that have been playing once a month like that's still not enough when we know that the latest live roast of um Tom Tom Hardy Tom Brady Tom Brady Tom Hardy that's the next one but the Tom Brady that like I I think it had like 260 million views so good like so good the goat delivers and and and now they're now they're bringing in SmackDown Monday Night Raw are they going to bring NFL or is that Amazon like like they are bringing NFL so like this is a whole yes

life Sports is a strategy cuz it is the only appointment viewing that really matters anymore except for HBO Sunday night House of the Dragon season 1 or season 2 episode one very good if you haven't seen it but no no these things are but you know I think your point is that um how do you create the got to have app from Netflix that isn't too hot to handle or too hot to handle too yeah keep going and and and especially since it's a company and it invests in different things so it invests into these other the live sports live shows aspect and it sees immediate massive return on that and then you see games like oh you know the traction is pretty nice like we've gone from like x amount of downloads to the x amount of downloads it's like uncomparable and this is an aggressive culture aggressive company that needs hyper growth not like year-over-year 20% growth and then finally is I used a quote from spry Fox so spry Fox is a Indie developer triple something I remember they had uh

this where you match three that was their was their first I don't remember but they were bought by Netflix yeah and then they were it's an indie developer they made really cute games and they were bought by Indie developer and and in the uh in the quote that basically the CEO was saying like oh my God like it's so great to finally just focus on like fun and and just you know fulfilling the dreams of the players and not worry about the business at all and to me that sounded kind of crazy like you're you're you're no connection yeah you have no connection to business even as an India developer you have to think about like you're having some kind of impact if you're not thinking about impact you know I kind of describe it as like a Wily Wonka's chocolate factory of game development where you can get like a six seven figure salary just to make fun games of course all of us would sign up any moment if we don't have to actually you know have any type of a business impact so it's an interesting case and kind of like you know we talked about what happens to Verdo but what I wanted

to ask the crew here is like if you were in a position in like a Corp Dev or or advising Netflix would you still continue internal development or kind of pull back where you were before and just go to licensing go to like Disney like here all the licenses dude the games look I was like the biggest bull on this thing when it first came out because I thought they would be able to create new experiences that would bring in new audiences right but they haven't done that at all like their biggest win is a GTA Trilogy that that downloads a gajillion times that they spent insane 50 million for what the [ __ ] those stats should be just removed from the entire calculus right and it's so like they're just stumbling along and they're not doing anything unique and that doesn't make it interesting and what you guys are pointing to is the same idea is like they got other fish to fry that are actually generating significant upticks like yeah like the roast and sports and all this other stuff these are what gaming is competing with internally at Netflix Netflix doesn't give a [ __ ] okay

they want results right and they're they're getting results from these Investments and not these and this is exactly why I said the last time why the Marketing Group feels [ __ ] super fine with building out the [ __ ] experiences on Roblox with no input at all from the gaming group it's like yeah go ahead who gives a [ __ ] this is our biggest competitor on the same exact platforms that we're going to deliver this shitty content right yeah great marketing 101 type [ __ ] you know and this is this is what happens right and so this is where I was right right now again what I don't know is what's going to happen the next six to 12 months I have my guess but we will see and then I will do a real Victory lap and I will be dancing in my basement office here so moving on all right step into the future of game monetization with exola the premier partner for game developers seeking to expand their reach in Revenue exola provides a robust Suite of tools designed to enhance user acquisition

demanded subscriptions and streamlined Payment Solutions worldwide unlock new markets and maximize profitability through their customized secure payment architecture and dedicated support team exola powering game developers to achieve Global success this podcast is brought to you by apps flyer in today's Digital World understanding your apps Journey from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps fer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar Works Smarter with apps fer that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they'll interact with your app app flyer where your apps potential meets performance let's get into games we did

a lot of business shop talk let's actually talk about games lightning hits rolls on uh zenist Zone zero has exceeded 40 million pre-registrations holy [ __ ] that is massive I think that's that's the number one of all time and the thing I keep getting on Instagram is I get a lot of ads for pre-registration for this game they're spending a lot of marketing dollars on this Jen I I can't figure out what is the model that makes this worth spending marketing dollars on cuz just intuitively there's a percent chance of actually downloading the game on iOS that gets introduced if you pre-register and I think you mentioned Google is auto why even introduce that into the funnel why not just wait and save your marketing dollars for when this thing is actually ready to launch what's the theory here I love the skepticism so I actually did pre- campaigns in my past and you know with anything there's pros and cons and with anything it depends on the kpis that you're seeing but there's a lot of Pros so number one is the cpis for prge tend

to be much much lower than when you actually launch especially on Google UAC especially if you're a really big game and you can talk to Google and maybe work out some deals right because they want to do that with certain games they have a specific product in UA that is built for this it's really cheap it's really frictionless it's really player forward and so if you have a larger game call your Google people and be like talk to me about a pre- campaign and how that works it also allows you to build audiences in countries that you might want to run Clos beta test in so how we used it was really interesting we did pre-re campaigns we brought people in once you are pre-registered you can move those players into closed beta tests and you know you've got like a really good dedicated player that's going to give you good results in the testing and so there's actually a game component to that that is a benefit by having people pre-registered for your game so you can get you know like really good kpis there

it's also just a really good way to start to build the buzz so you are doing in a sense awareness driving getting people to know about the game so that you're leading into your launch and making your launch a little bit better uh it's a way to get data earlier this is why I was so surprised when Squad Busters only did a month in soft launch so typically in the world of UA too especially with pre- campaigns or even just regular U UA campaigns you need the time to get the data how are those users performing how is paid versus organic actually performing giving us more time to kind of track through on retention for those players on monetization for those players it's nice to get that data which Squad Busters didn't really do we'll talk about that in a little bit like what did that hurt them or not so remember that UA channels need this time to train their data so with machine learning with everything going on you at least least have to have a couple of weeks in there for all of your UA

channels to like learn and optimize so if you're doing that at launch it just delays everything and it doesn't allow you to get all of that going and you know as you as you know golden cohort's still a thing my friend and so having all of your best players in there right when it launches is typically an amazing thing on many of my games the golden core was still playing the game two or three years later it's like super crazy however cons unclear conversion as we know if sofon drags on they just might lose interest and be like ah something's wrong with this game like I think that happened a little bit with war zone remember they were like they kept pushing and pushing so if you pre- too early it could be against you and then obviously war zone had a little bit of issue with tech when it launched and so if you've got an issue at launch those are your most valuable people and if you you know as we all know in Mobile you get you get like five minutes with someone not even you get like a minute with someone if you lose them like

they're gone forever so I don't know does that help one one more angle that I think is really interesting here is that when you hit the pre-registration on the Instagram ads you head to the website you don't head to the store Pages they want you to make a Hoover verse account and I think they want to establish you having a relationship with them over email they want direct to Consumer because they're going to push web stores on you and not only that they can push all the different angles of the game so remember this one's not going to just be on iOS or Android this has an epic gam store and a steam distribution coming at least I think there's a steam distribution coming so I I think there might be another case here that goes back to a lot of the regulation we're hearing like you can now do this you can send emails to people directly with web store offers you can circumvent the store entirely so it'll be interesting to see if we see more of this as we go forward not using the store but using your own personal account and email I mean that's her choice to do that right like you can send people directly to the store for a frictionless experience that's pretty smart if they want to collect the consumer data though so no I

I hear you on that and I think Jen you wanted to talk about a brand marketing campaign that has gone ay I don't I don't know you you tell me yes yes so the returns are in so I game Refinery does like a monthly recap and and they they talk about all kinds of events and so we had talked about this creative which was Holland who is the kind of the world's best footballer right now did The Clash of Clans partnership where where he was in live action and they turned him into a character in the game and so in this game Refinery article they talked about the event that happened actually didn't drive more revenue or downloads than past seasonal updates and so I think we had heard this was probably around a $5 million creative asset just for the asset not even for any of the other promotional materials or the media or the ation costs um there are many many times I would go I mean Phil you're you're

probably you were the recipient of this I come to you as the marketer and be like hey I got you got to make Holland a character in the game you got to make a whole event and you guys are like oh that costs us so much it takes us so much time and so to not see an impact it could be a lot of things you can't just point to to Holland as not being a good fit you have to also look at you know what was the event what was the Skins what was all the other things but oof this is kind of uh not good news Phil what do you think it's down over the period there was a little bit of a bump I think they did some prehype that this was coming to the game but basically looks like zero impact yeah I'm bumed for them it always hurts right cuz when you're a marketer and you've got like hey I have this great idea let's do this and it doesn't work everyone like takes out the guns and starts pointing at you like oh marketer it's all your fault so oh save that save that when we talk about Squad Busters uh um other news coming down this week Paradox interactive has cancelled potential Sims

arrival Life by you I heard this is a$2 million write-off and the devs were informed weeks before launch they missed a bunch of release dates for this game I think it was around three I'm I'm just really bummed about this because my my predominant thesis is that the Sims is fat and you know as bezo said your margin is my opportunity and there's a lot of opportunity this life Sim game that no one seems to go after except for Lilith games which announced project party this week which I'm super excited about Lilith continues to surprise me this is apparently going to be a Sims competitor from the sound of it it says in the press release the full game will include activities like going on an island vacation crafting and social features numerous mini gamess as well as the ability to create ugc content including a comprehensive game edit so I'm super excited for Lilith to tear into this they continue to surprise and Delight we'll have an update in FK journey in future weeks which doesn't look that great right now but this seems very exciting I'm super Jazz that

someone is still trying to play this thesis out but there's also Enzo remember we talked about this oh the the the South Korean one yeah it's a very unfortunate name but but they are definitely coming out again to go after this Market as well so another small update I want to provide on Marvel snap it is in freef Fall it is in complete and utter freeall ever since they announced that that funding if you look at where they were on let's say December 1st of this year and and you compare it to where we are right now in terms of daily active users when we're looking at sensor cow data we went from around 900,000 da to around 600,000 Dau it is not looking pretty I remember a lot of people are coming out talking about potentially the sticky core of this game where are they because we haven't hit rock bottom on this game yet and it does not look good they're shaving the off which is not on Multiverse they ra 100 million right yep publisher was a part of this and live oping a game is a core part of being a publisher and it looks like this is not going well right now speaking of live operations uh quick

update on multiverses and the finals the finals launched season 3 which had a small uptick but this still does not look good for the finals this uptick for season 3 was lower than the uptick they had for season 2 multiverses on the other hand doesn't look that great either I thought there was a relatively slower decline than we've seen in previous games Adam teler pointed out that's probably not the case and it doesn't look like it's the case here the only piece of counterveiling evidence I've seen for multiverses when you know at least you look at steam data it doesn't look great and that's what we see because steam reports actuals but we look at ciron data uh multiverses looks a lot better and you got to remember this is weekly active users only in the United States if you look at where they are in the ranks on Playstation multiverses is still in fifth sixth position from last week so it hasn't fallen it's falling off Xbox it's Fallen a little bit on Steam and again this is just steam us we looked at Global numbers previously but I still think there might be a life to this game on Console let's continue see what the sarana updates say this is again a very

particular slice of data but it didn't look that awful yet um one other note here no hell divers on Playstation which is very strange to see uh only only on Steam for a particular audience uh moving on quick update I we have we have to mention it which is the banana game uh for anyone who wants to and I I'll make a quick the banana scam the banana scam I will do a quick 411 on this cuz it it deserves to be talked about the banana the game is on Steam is a clicker game you lug into the game uh there's a banana you click on it and randomly you get another banana as a drop rate and that's it that is the game and you might be wondering why is this blown up why is this now the number one game on Steam well the bananas are usable on the steam Marketplace so you can trade them the developer gets a 10% cut and I think they're doing around 100 million in volume so probably around 10 million for these developers you don't know by the way if the developers are listing bananas directly on the store we have we have no way to identify that everything's Anonymous this is pure web 3 [ __ ] this is nothing new this I'm surprised it took this long this played earned there's actually another clicker

that's blown up this hamster game for web 3 which is the same idea this this is all Bots we know there's a lot of Russian and Chinese players when you look at the reviews um this is pure speculation why would you want to sell a banana because other people value bananas this thing's going to blow up and you know this this thing will go to zero pretty quickly there's already copycats you can play cucumber um yep there's there's a whole lot that's interesting here people like to speculate what else is new it it happens when you have a Marketplace Squad Busters uh quick quick update there I think there's two pieces to this one is the kpi update and I think the second is the uh the in business or excuse me uh game industry Insider game industry Biz uh update that they had there there was an interview with ano who is the leader of the product and there's also an interview with Rob as well they're in one interview he's the head of marketing and I I feel like they're already doing damage control on this game I hope to have a squad Busters one month later piece I'm going to eat a ton of CW on this game it looks like get in the [ __ ] right now to be honest with you I wanted to wait a month to look at the kpis and see how it's going but every

indication looks like it's not going well and I would say the interview was not a good look either from Mr Rob low he was saying that in an Ideal World you know we would have liked to had a longer period in soft launch what are you talking about you make these decisions in an Ideal World you get to make that world and not only that it feels like like marketing made the decision on a launch date for this game he spends a lot of time talking about the launch strategy and the analysis that they did but it looks like marketing was making it as ision for launch on this game which looks like a shift of power inside of supercell normally I would say that the teams make this sort of decision this feels like hey we hired all these new people we hired a lot of brand marketers let's let them make this call and the first time the brand marketers make a call on this it looks like they screwed the pooch on this he already looks like he's defending himself he talks about profitability they're already heading towards profitability on that ad we were mentioning the one with Chris Helmsworth and let's call mat and Joseph what do you mean by profitability uh you know on the ad on the UA what are we talking about here it is looking Grim for Squad Busters I would say the most damning thing we could probably look at with this game is that the daily active

users for Squad Busters is far below either the launch of brawl star it is below the launch of Clash of Clans it is below the launch of sing almost every one of their games their daily active users look comparable to Heyday and look at I love Heyday congratulations to them for keeping this thing going for so long but you need to grow daily active users if you want to make money and right now they don't seem to be able to do that it is very troubling right now there could be a huge series of damage control over the coming weeks depending on how this thing turns and it looks like it's starting to turn yeah this is Fant like I don't know so first of all I don't doubt Rob Rob is the golden twig winner from 2023 with the uh with the collaboration of Lego and fortnite but yeah it was a confusing interview about the game like I've been playing every day I'm not forcing myself I think of the phone core is fun but there's absolutely no sense of progress to be honest there's no incentive to pay at least I haven't felt that and when I looked at the sensor Tower numbers so

Phil you have those graphs and and everybody watching on YouTube will see this or Spotify downloads have been 3x what brawlstars did in the beginning when I was comparing this the revenue per download is of course a fraction because you have so many downloads coming in but what has been worrisome is since the beginning the revenue itself has been about 40% less than what braw did at lounge and then when looking at the sensor Tower numbers again these are uh estimates but the active user base is just collapsing it is going down really really fast and that is a big problem since this has been what the biggest launch in supercell history at least that was the impetus that they wanted have the biggest like the most invested into a launch and I believe it is in terms of like how many downloads they got during the first month I think this is the record and they had an update this week was it yesterday or a day before there was a new map new characters you know I'm playing but it it didn't like blow my socks off there

wasn't any competitive features it still to me feels like this is what where I've been feeling for a few weeks now like a high quality super high quality hybrid casual game without ad monetization like it is very marketable it is super engaging and in incredibly accessible because you know a couple of fingers and you you can play in one finger there's very very limited progression that the characters are not that deep and then there's very limited social that's where I'm at right now playing every day and waiting that's good tell me why this so This the biggest thing that I've shifted my priors on with this game's launch is that the super cell IP isn't worth much this is a game that cramp horrible yep I I think it is and you know it's interesting Rob mentions you know the Barbarian being one of the few recognizable characters and you go back to them paying for the um you know the summer game Fest trailer and trying to I think expand their brand to a traditional demo but you're telling me they got you know 39 million maybe 40 downloads you know life to date for the game and they did 40 million in

pre-registrations and we saw most of the downloads are in tier three or tier 2 countries you're kidding me I mean that's a that's a joke I mean the supercell IP should be doing way better than that should be doing way way better than that they're not able to push volume into this game that is a huge problem I think it's I to me it's a top of funnel problem right now and I am extremely troubled extremely troubled and they're not pushing higher downloads that is sad to see wait wait hold on okay okay let me just there are two points here one the beta thing that he said makes no [ __ ] sense right this is not like a difference between one-ear beta and two-year beta this is a difference between thre Monon beta right like the beta process on this thing didn't make sense from the get-go and what I said early during the beta process is it wasn't monetizing and that's exactly what's happened at launch it's like 50 cents per download well well hold on hold on AR arow is actually high is actually historically high in the portfolio it's around 14 cents it's actually clob the other games now now I think to play the math because it's survivorship bias you only have the most

interested users yes but I would say I think arow is better measure here than Revenue per download but your point stands yeah but I don't understand what your point is about downloads they have 44 million downloads in like a few months that's not terrible that's like a power of the brand tier two and tier three downloads and all that pre-registration ammo that seem that's sad to me fluff so that's the same point right the quality is [ __ ] right when you have something that makes 50 per download or even a120 in the US something like that then like you can't spend against that profitably like it's impossible right that's the main problem and so like why would you ever do a three-month beta for a product that was monetizing in this shitty way you know and this whole thing didn't make sense this is what we said before it's like you wouldn't why are you publishing this so fast just like figure out the long-term monetization correct especially if you look at downloads right now which are under brawl starss and brawl stars is also doing UA and UA effectively in fact

they have an ad right now that is caters to every eight-year-old boy and all of us it is an ad with a poop emoji that comes on and you you can play the poop emoji in the game is what it it looks like it's taking up all of the Freshman share of voice on brawlstar ads but with Squad Busters coming in under the downloads so basically it's like a big giant poop emoji that becomes a playable character inside of brawl stars and so you're running around shooting people as the poop emoji and and so this is like listen we know that brawl Stars appeals to you know teens and and kids uh you couldn't have a better piece of creative that's been running for the last two months and I just have to think that you know is there cannibalization like Squad Busters is well under the downloads of brawl Star right now now that that we are in past the launch window for the last couple of weeks we are seeing Squad

Busters not being able to compete on downloads so that's troubling on the UA front right so UA is not converting which you can also to my earlier Point go back and say well you probably didn't give yourself enough time to train your UA to make sure that you could actually bring people in the top of the funnel of pill to your point and then you look at revenue and revenue is like way under it's like a quarter of the brawlstar revenue right now I'm just worried for them I think Rob also might have been doing some damage control okay again what didn't make sense is that they already had brawl Stars crushing it they didn't need this game like they didn't need to sell the story why wouldn't they just wait what happened agree M dude you're the one that's connected out there in the middle of [ __ ] nowhere going on this is a hypothesis somebody in the higher up makes a call and sets a date for a launch which is is very unique and it should never be done with free-to-play games and they started executing because

based on the article they he's saying that the date was set and preferably they wanted to have more time so somebody set that date was it the summer games Fest cuz Rob also talked a lot about convincing the summer gamefest folks to buy the commercial which by the way was over a half million dollar to get the placement I was like no not worth it so so so there there has to be like like you said said like it was marketing Le which is very unique because normally it's gameel and somehow something happened where marketing took over and started leading like in traditional publishing companies and I think there is a come to Jesus moment coming in to the marketing organization if this game flops because it was their call to set up all these dates to create all this hype to deliver on the biggest launch that the company ever had and going before the product so I think there will be like this is just hypothesis this is just me thinking about it but if the hypothesis that marketing took the lead then it's the

marketing's head that's going to roll oh I feel so sad because I always in freeto playay games always say product comes first you can never ever Market your way out of a leaky bucket I lived this in my past on FarmVille they they were like Jen go do this TV I joined fville and they're like we had they had developed a TV commercial and we were in test market and I looked at the numbers on retention I'm like we are canceling this TV campaign cuz we have a leaky bucket like this is the dumbest thing ever to put all of this money into TV if all people are going to do is flow out so perhaps that's the case here I don't know it's what it's looking like and I just don't want to say on Rob because the way I understand that Rob sits on the game team and he's the marketing team like marketing lead on that team and if these type of decision have to be have been made then they have to be made at the leadership level and so we know supercell has a new CMO this has to be coming in from the highest up where the

the leadership was convinced to go this way this route to launch it big and to do the biggest Louch they've ever done and the game team as well as the game marketing executed against the will of the leadership this is my hypothesis we'll see in a matter of months how this is going to play out got it no I I like your crystal ball your magic eightball on if somebody's head could roll is it going to be the CMO the head of the games no they'll go lead the Innovation group they'll lead a new group at supercell yeah but but yeah they're the spark Labs but the way supercell is is is a very Netflix you know they love the Netflix culture it's it's a very much if you want to take the shot you take the shot but then you take the responsibility if you make the shot you're going to you're going to win the magical price and if you miss the shot you're out you get exactly exactly that's the Netflix game you play so all right all right everyone thanks for hanging in there and see you next week

laters later you did it you made it to the end of the episode as a fan of the show it would help us out if you subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice more importantly are you a member of the deconstructor fund slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fun.com slack and apply to join join the games industry's best professional community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fund content creators thanks for listening [Music]