TWIG #289 King's AI, Amazon's games strategy, Netflix's problems solved

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to deconstructor of fun this week in Games 289 where we read into still all the weekly game industry news so you don't have to here's what we're talking about today wrapping up some of the summer show coverage I'm glad I was able to say that all and not mix up my words we're going to dig into to why Singularity 6 was acquired you guys have a lot on this so we're going to dig in there some big games have some big anniversaries and King has found maybe the first example of uh good use of AI in Game Dev so we're going to talk through that hi everyone I'm Jen donaho strategic marketing consultant at beta hat and Jaden Inferno and today we have Philip black game Economist at gatum Economist Consulting hey hey Eric Crest principal at gossamer Consulting Group

yo yo Mishka kov king of Spain founder of deconstructor of fun vacation Master how many Tinto donos have you had are you diving in you don't how many what tto de veranos this is the Spanish hack is to put wine with usually like an orange soda and they have it for really long drinking sessions if You' not been having entos then you you're missing out sria right no sangria is a separate category sangri is more tsty okay I have kids I'm not boozing all day responsible you're you're on European vation that's what you're supposed to do you do have like a Savage Tan right now dude you are looking very dark that's amazing European this is this is purely genetics because after one week I was having some calls with with some people be like how long have you been in Spain I was like I I came here like three days ago it's like really Jesus I just tan really quickly I'm I'm super jealous dude it's just like look at me

I get so dark it's great my kids are I know Chris and I same whenever I go in the sun I just get a darker Shade of Pale you know yeah Chris and I rep the vampire Club of all of us here we are pasty pasty white okay oh I wanted to talk a little bit about football since we have a mainly European audience so in the world of football and I don't mean the Dallas Cowboys I mean real football the euro is going on and the Copa America of which I am proud to say we have a great women's team but our men's team for the US is freaking embarrassing they didn't even make it out of the group stage so people call just console me because soccer is just not it's not a men's sport however the women kick ass you guys watching at all don't care which one I did watch yesterday with the Brazil and uh the turkey Australian Austria game oh that so good that was amazing the end with the those guys are just amazing athletes they are unbelievable

like what they can I was crazy you watch turkey play Austria how how did you pick out of all the games you pick turkey and Austria you know what I don't I think maybe it was some kind of social media feed or something it's like some algo that got me because it was like they hyped it up I kept on seeing it I'm like oh my God I gotta watch this for no particular reason I don't watch soccer but I'm like I gotta watch this particular game I don't know what you know it's like the the influence that they have on you but it was actually ended up being a really good game maybe it knows that we as instructor of fun love turkey cuz we do our IST Events maybe well turkeyy is our second largest audience out the US so go shout out to Turkey winning the game turkey up which by the way if they they were saying that on the pronunciation they change the way they want to be pronounced yeah turai yeah I was really interesting to hear that I was like yeah yeah turai yeah yeah they updated the name y like even everywhere where it is like Auto corre do still work we got to stop this [ __ ] right

you cannot do that to old people right you can't change names and change how you pronounce things you know it's like is changing it name too not allowed I'm gonna call it what I know of it to be I'm not changing my M ways I'm too old for that [ __ ] all right moving on all right what are we Shilling Mishka all right we're Shilling a couple of different events so I I'm I'm hoping that we can put in the links soon so we're finalizing the whiskey tasting part the game night with ex solo so whiskey tasting will be a small event just like last year then we're going to have the game night night which is similar just like with last year with exola uh we get a supper club that's being finalized that's going to be with newu and couple other the sponsors that are just being finalized so everything is coming last minute but please sign up to the newsletter or be active on the slack on the events page and we'll let you know when those things are happening but I'm hearing something in La is happening as well oh so this was all for Gamescom right in August yeah games yes yes so in La since we're jealous just kidding uh so there is is a happy hour

being sponsored by Planet play from stash on July 17th we talked about it last week the sign up link is hopefully we'll put that in the show notes or also go to the deconstructor of fun slack channel in the events channel the link is there as well if you aren't on the deconstructor of fun slack please go to the website and apply to join we'd love to have you we have about 3,000 of the leaders of the game industry on that slack Channel and it also will sign you up for the newsletter that Mishka just mentioned so you can stay involved we we haven't asked this in a while but we have a lot of really faithful listeners we'd love to get the podcast and the newsletter in front of more people so if you don't mind go tell your coworker about us and have them listen in and then you guys can argue about what we argue about that's actually pretty fun too so spread the word Corrections all right I got to make one addition to this whole kid investment from uh light speed in B6 z Oh K Chris k

whatever anyway I have to mention this isy I I noticed that on the press release from both light speed and a16z both of them failed to mention each other as a co-investor in in this company right like come on guys like how douchy can you really be you know like how Petty can you be that you don't acknowledge the fact that you have another huge investor in this company it's like both of you guys got to clean this stuff up and I'm sure I'll hear from a16z and from Mr bit at light speed but seriously clean it up let's go let's play nice out there and stop being douchy sounds like a fun board already yeah right it's going to be like a battle a battle between these big investors it's I listened to the podcast that Mishka did with Moritz and I forgot CEO Founder's name really cool guy cool background what was his name Mishka Kieran Donovan yes and you did pull out of it that boat both a16z and and light

speed were on there so in the podcast they mentioned it I think Mor was quiet during that point you had good topics on it but the podcast was recorded before The Twig last week so I would have had better questions if I had a little bit of your inside so for the type of questions you asked it came in really quickly so yeah no those guys are like legit like management team no doubt I heard really good things about that whole team and even the tech and the company and everything I still question what I wish you to ask ask is like the not invented here thing and like the platform plays and like how are they actually going to get into the big accounts right when they don't want to give up that kind of control over something that's so Mission critical for the company and maintaining relationships with your customers are so important so basically don't let Moritz talk like the whole point is to have the company talk why was morit in the podcast to begin with right was he did he insist on being no I'm not going to I'm not going to share any secrets but more because belong on that we wanted to

hear about kid we don't give a [ __ ] about what light speed's doing I mean like we want to hear about the company right I was a little interested in the you know why the funding but there was a couple times where morit was I I thought work for the company he was so impassioned about the product where I would have rather have heard from the company I am also the publisher piece is interesting I'm also interested in the adoption piece from kids and families to my rant segment about how my kids are deviants and criminals last week I'm just kidding they just will work themselves around this and so that's the piece I was really interested in digging into I wish I had heard the podcast before I recorded this one cuz you had really great points about your kid especially yeah that was a like how they circumvent everything so so 100% the last point of thing that I have to mention is that light speed he did suggest that he came into the round really late in theory almost doubled the round potentially right so and which

basically implies that double the valuation so if it's a valuation of around $200 to $250 million that is insane by the way like again great for the company and great for the team because they probably deserve it in the sense that they'll probably build something amazing but in terms of like actually getting returns when you have S billion doll fund and you're investing at this level at this round it's like there's just no way you're ever going to see a return on that money that they spent right so I would love him to counter that like at a $250 million valuation exactly when does this thing make sense for them as an investor 10 times five times I don't know dude it's like also if somebody's coming in at late and it's over subscribed that usually also means that there's secondaries involved so the founders might have made some good money as well let's hope that's very limited on an a round but yes maybe all right super cell so supercell Squad Busters lot just a

lot going on Squad Busters we will have a piece probably in the next week a very interesting research project of twists and turns one of the twists I think we can talk about we have multiple sources on this I will just say Cunningham's law Reigns true uh fastest way to get the right answer on the Internet is to be wrong no one individual is responsible for the soft La decision on Squad Busters I think we can say that is the case multiple parties were involved in this and I think the story the story of Squad Busters both how it got out the door why it got out the door the things that influenced it and and what it's going to look like going forward is going to be really interesting to talk about in a week perhaps external parties also were rather excited about supercell's new game and talk to scopely people you know Phil and I know this from working at scopely which is all you do is just look at your numbers and your numbers tell you when you launch not anybody else it's numbers so I guess

it's like that easy that's really fair I think what you have to do is you have to put yourselves in the shoes of supercell and I think that's that's what I want to do I've been living in this company's head for like a month now you know they they've had a lot of frustration they really want to move forward a lot of pieces of information I think you can be like oh I get it I get why they just wanted to hit the launch button doesn't make it the right decision it clearly wasn't the right decision now going over just like the hole that they put themselves in O it is a big hole that they have to climb out of you know we let's figure out how they got there in the first place do you want to do like a whole podcast on it I think that would be fun just to dedicate should follow maybe I don't know let's do a let's do a special I I want to be part of the eat crow podcast from Phil I really do please yeah invite me yeah me too I love to I just I just pile on on this [ __ ] dude oh like I can come in I can look at a little bit of the marketing stuff you know there is the article from yast in his newsletter that talked about cannibalism ation of the other games I think is a great point for

us to talk about he had this graph that showed just how supercell's overall Revenue just tanked when Squad Buster is launched because of potential cannibalization I can get some quotes from some other folks who had been giving their own Impressions about how this is going so yeah let's do it just not next week since we're Crest and I are out next week all right let's get into Quick hits all right so the I I Just Praise their football abilities but the EU government body is is spreading out its hands slapping and it's not just hands slapping apple as we talked about last week it's also hands slapping meta and Facebook who is now getting fined as well Regulators found in their investigation that meta gives users a binary choice that forces them to either choose a pay monthly subscription fee to get the adree version of Facebook and Instagram or consent to the ad supported version

where meta runs a foul of the rules it says is by not letting users opt for a free version that uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the personalized ads based version and by not allowing them to exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data all the big guys are getting in trouble there so speaking of Apple their biggest fan epic just kidding announced in a post on X that they have submitted to Apple for approval and notorized it hopes to launch their epic store in the U in the next couple of months so keep an eye out for that soon to follow with a store of their own is Xbox remember they said at some point this month they're they're launching their their quote store hold on a minute yeah okay this a different different animal all together like epic is actual store on the app on the on the iPhone

this is just a web store that Sony or Microsoft is putting out there it's a completely different thing correct you you are correct I I grouped them together a little bit of a joke of because that's what the news is picking up and they're calling Xbox in a store where you're right it's a it seems to be from what we have heard a glorified web shop but we'll see so keep an eye out over the next few weeks during the month of July for now Xbox has announced a partnership with Amazon to deliver Xbox cloud gaming Through Fire TV devices Crest can we just can we just stop with this [ __ ] like no one gives a [ __ ] okay no one is doing cloud gaming okay stop I mean Nvidia maybe but like no one cares it's a shitty experience it's just a a feature stop it stop it all right so Nintendo president aims to avoid switch to scalping by making enough consoles so this was in VGC so I I think I read that they're

going to flood the market with switch twos next holiday is that what I I mean it's kind of a brilliant strategy right flood the market the key here is that like if they have less component issues then they should be able to make as many switches as required for launch right so that they can satiate demand so they don't have some black market you know scalping going on which is hurts customers just in general but it actually helps the Zeitgeist right so what it's ironic is like when the switch comes out and if there's no like super prices on eBay people will think that the launch is unsuccessful but yeah the reality is the more Hardware they have the better it is for Nintendo so do you think they're saying that because of the shortages that we saw with PS5 and Xbox s x and S and the switch all had shortages oh that's true back then opponent related and you know obviously supply chain related because of the pandemic again they're in good shape and since it's like a lower-end device like all these chips and the screens and all

the major components are probably pretty really off the shelf and they've had a lot of time to actually get the supply chain in order right because this thing was supposed to come out like two years ago yeah so again that's good news I think it's also trying to make sure that investors feel comfortable that they can get to their targets for next year yeah I actually thought it was pretty smart on all those fronts so just a few of the summer game shows that are wrapping up um it was the first year that there was an event called Gamescom latam and so this was June 26 to 30th in Brazil it was actually the first big Latin America show that combined the Gamescom branding obviously we know Gamescom takes place in Germany in August so they're using that branding along with the big Festival uh big so the big Festival is a consumer show it's the largest game Festival in Latin America and there are some devs and Publishers that went down there like CD project red and skybound you know it didn't seem like the bigger

guys went but some smaller devs and they did some Hands-On play of a bunch of games so it was nice to see that Latin americaas having their moment with a bigger show and then the final publisher to do a kind of their own show was Capcom next this was July 1st so for us it was yesterday or two days ago and I'm not sure why was so far away from all the other Summer Games Fest events I I actually almost missed this except for the fact that I think you know like you guys I get 10,000 game industry emails and newsletters that I parse through and and one of them happened to mention this the biggest news coming out of it was that Resident Evil 9 was softly confirmed to be in development it was kind of an aside that they mentioned on stage the other things um I didn't it sounded like oo a remake of dead by daylight or something or another game that I'm messing up the name I'm not dead RIS that was a beautiful franchise let's let's give it its proper place

again I I I I am sorry I I'm just not that much of a all I know Capcom is like Street Fighter and like that that's kind of it and Resident Evil obviously all right Mishka Investments let's let's talk Singularity 6 so Singularity 6 this was I mean it's not a big deal but nevertheless it was talked about especially on the slack Channel a lot and so what happened was Singularity 6 which is a startup was acquired by Daybreak and Daybreak is known for it was an embracer company I think they went private again and their game was Daz am I correct yeah so not a very big publisher but you know kind of like a midsize and they acquired Singularity 6 and of course there's the normal PR which is long- winded and everybody's happy you know Singularity 6 is buzzing with excitement energy and fresh ideas as they quote but I think before we start congratulating everybody for joining a new family as they like to put it I think it's important to go through

the background and kind of zoom out this case so Singularity 6 is a startup by xri games co-founder with a venture that is less focused on building a button mashing competitive shooter than it is on a virtual Society where users can develop relationships with in-game characters powered by complex AI in other words these are XR employees that set up a startup that was building an MMO and as they are X riot their background gave them it's a good team gave them three funding rounds as of what we know of so in 2018 they started the company they raised 2 and a half million from London Venture Partners uh very known investor in a year later a16z came along and they brought in 16.5 million this is a very sizable round a and in 21 when the heat was on fun plus a game publisher came in and leted the investment of a third million fund and

so now we're in 2024 and it looks like they technically ran out of money or were running out of money because they had earlier they had already layoffs we know of that the acquisition price was not announced and Pia which was their game wasn't really a hit it's a free-to-play PC game and according to the steam's data it had about 12,000 daily players and it's very hard to run a successful free-to-play business on an MMO with 12 th000 players so the takeaways here is it was an aqua hire the team put everything into one game which was an MMO they launched the raised money to scale they failed to scale they were losing money they had to cut staff and they were saved essentially by Daybreak games I think another key takeaway here is that if you build it they won't come to have a free- toplay game you have to have publishing Excellence a good game with poor publishing is same as a dead game and I think they were kind of in this situation where they did not know how to

scale and honestly user acquisition on PC games is very very difficult like mobile is really hard nowadays but PC almost impossible if not impossible so they were kind of in that spot then another takeaway when it comes to X Riot X blizzard X epic X you name that company that is clearly a high premium for investors you have to pay a lot to get these these Founders and these companies also tend to have a very high burn rate so they're usually based out of California so they're quite expensive and they also command High salaries and they want to keep those High salaries even though they would cut their salaries in half after Riot they're still making a lot of cheddar so compared to a lot of different other companies from different regions the burn rate will be high so they have to raise more and having the experience of a big scaleup like blizzard or like rot is not the same experience as working at a small startup and you might be even ill prepared to that bloody grind of a startup where you have to wear multiple

hats and everybody does kind of many things and team Siz is smaller and so forth and and if we consider these companies that have this x blizzard X Riot background I think the only sort of a success case is second dinner till date and a lot of these companies have have raised and you know marvel snap was actually published by bite dance so they didn't do their own publishing they did make the game but they didn't publish it they raised 100 million in the last round so they're valued probably close to 500 million at this point and Marvel snap is actually on a pretty sustained decline ever since bike dance new verse their publishing arm kind of stopped publishing this game so one can even argue that they should have rather sold the the studio instead of raising 100 million so my kind of like the way I would like to end is like I expect more of these news coming in in in 2025 uh there are plenty of these big EXC Corp teams that are making a shooter or a MOA or an MMO and they don't have particularly low cuss structures than

the big corporations but what they really don't have is an IP and the publishing power so as their games are done even if they're good games it's kind of hard to breake through the Zeitgeist especially on PC and and in this case unfortunately I think the Biggest Loser will be fun plus because they bet almost 30 million for the last round and with these type of liquidation preferences like we don't know how much they got paid by Daybreak but it could be like few millions and definitely if you were the last investors you're not going to see a penny of that so a16z lost money but they don't care they have billions upon billions upon billions so this is kind of a small thing and last takeway from this I don't think investors will learn anything I think there will be a next boom cycle and once again they will pay high premium for people coming in from Riot and blizzard and epic and you name it so this is just the normal core Loop of Investments but very interesting case and and nevertheless the moral of the story is I think that the the guys who founded Paia learned a lot shipped a nice game and

they can keep their Studio together as they've joined an existing studio so I think you know they've at least learned a lot and and are probably even better team than than before that so kudos to day break what do you think Chris yeah my quick take I'm hearing that this was like a $5 million deal with an earnout so this is an absolute D disaster of Epic Proportions we have no official numbers so I'm just speculating here but that's kind of my understanding we've been talking about this for a while like these AAA Studios that funded during this time frame you know it's going to be really really tough to create a successful AAA game and this was a Dream Team you know with I think a great idea for a game and the game was actually released and marketed and and they got it to Market and it's a good game you know it's like it's not a terrible game but the execution just fell short and I think the monetization was way way way too light and again cosmetic economies are really [ __ ] tough you know similar outcomes for dauntless spell breaks split gate ascendant like there's

a lot of like dead bodies out there you know of AAA game developers trying to do freeo playay it's tough business right maybe what I would have done differently you know from the cheap seats I I probably would have ditched the fantasy theme I would have probably gone straight for more of a modern theme and compete directly Against The Sims because certainly The Sims ain't doing [ __ ] right like we haven't seen a new Sims game for years now I can see why they would try to venture out of that theme but I think it probably made more sense to do that obviously I would have been far more aggressive on monetization of the audience they have loot boxes but like not all based on Cosmetics but again I'm not really close to this game I don't know too much about it but what the goal here is that Daybreak is probably going to take this company and take this game try to fix it and make designed decisions that the company wasn't comfortable with and see if they can make a go of it and make it profitable and more of a longer term game and if not it doesn't work in six to 12 months they'll probably just dump it right that is their model that it's taking taking MMOs and trying to see what you can do with them cuz you can

you do find MMOs with these like Niche audiences that can survive for like a really long time but like to your point Eric this is everything you've been saying that's not a venture-backed business like this is a studio that should have just signed a publisher and and could have had like a great life as just a game Studio making a nich MMO they exist like I've been following Albin online which has been really interesting that's how to rebound um I think we're going to be talking about some other MOS today but like you can find an audience and make this work yeah monetization wasn't there but like if you had a publisher to help guide you and put you in the right you know the right direction you know these are the things that Publishers help do and I I agree on the marketing point this had a female audience this was on the switch too and it's it's hard to find I think particularly The Sims audience they built up such a strong relationship with their customers and I've I've always been a really big fan of going after the Sims and trying to find the thesis that like takes them down because Maxis is fat and they deserve they deserve competition we were talking about Paradox they just dropped out and you have Lilith which is developing another one but it's it's hard to figure out how do I reach the Sims audience with a direct distribution strategy that EA has

developed I I think it's tough yeah wow I just I'm so honored that all of you mention the value of publishing and marketing in this conversation and I'm going to sit back and just bask in the glow of of that statement and just say I I I think you're right it is very very difficult to self-publish in this day and age and it's very difficult if you have a product that leans or skews a little bit female how do you most devs don't know how to go after that audience and how to build for that audience and how to Market to that audience and I'm not even sure a lot of Publishers know how to do that you are seeing more and more go in that direction these days but it's an opportunity all of the data coming from nuu and from sensor Tower are telling us that female Gamers and cozy gamers are on the rise and that's that's an opportunity and I think the next thing that Publishers and marketers need to be aware of is how do you go after that audience so anyway yeah all right moving on all right moving on step

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debut title Metal Storm in November 23 so this is a company led by L fulo he was he was the CEO of the Z2 people have forgotten but Z2 was the first Studio acquired by King that was doing midcore game this was was King was pushing out to different genres before King was acquired by Activision and we actually have a podcast about all of this because Lou was the CEO of that company uh if you search deconstructor fond life post acquisition you'll find did so I love Lou I think Lou is great by the way yeah so he tells everything of what happens when a corporation swallows an independent studio and then of course web 3 news so web 3 gaming platform redacted has raised $10 million in a funding round coolled by I'm not going to even mention these these uh these it's animoca Brands and everybody else this is what happens every year the funds will support the development of company's gamification ecosystem actually just before we started recording Argie reached out and said he

wants to do breakdowns of these Archie of stash he sent us a message so hopefully he does because these are fun news arie's on fire these days dude he keeps blasting he's been un yeah he's been released so he can now talk about this but yes that was the web 3 news and I think there's something else add a digital advertising firm and game publisher cyber agent has struck a deal to acquire visual Noble games developer Nitro plus for $6.7 billion yens oh this is $100 million I have no idea what this is about PR developer these are the the developers excuse me the Publishers of pretty Derby the horse racing game we were covering last week I don't know I think there's there's interesting stuff happening in this storytelling genre that's kind of seen like life through Netflix stories we've been talking about that love island is actually doing fairly well in the App Store the game version of it has actually been rising my wife is watching the show and it's like rotting my brain I go down there every night she's like it was a Moore Island and I was like what is that

oh and and I'm like I don't want to know I don't want to but again female genre right like there is this crazy opportunity you're right Phil with interactive story and what's the evolution in gaming there so sorry I had to no I couldn't agree more it's it's a thesis I've been I've been like pedaling for a while there's one particular game I'm following really closely uh we'll see the tax a thesis I'm really into but I've seen like more of this ual novel stuff we just we haven't figured out how to take the storytelling Persona and really like serve them in an age of live service like The Telltale model like completely flopped episodes was ugc that was around for a while it like had some pickup it did okay we haven't really figured out the monetization model and the content pipelines but it feels like the demand is still still there so it's it's something to keep tabs on yeah it absolutely is it's transitioned into this like fake dating it's like you're on a dating app except you're you're like interacting with AI is the new version of that so that dating category in simulation I was looking into this

for a project and that is experiencing the fastest growth in the simulation category off of a very small base so it's something to keep an eye it's very um you know Eastern it's very Japanese a lot of anime so Phils you should check that out as if if you're Ventures uh I remember they made an investment recently in a very interesting startup what was it Arya Misha AI conier for the relationship game oh that one yeah I know the founder um offer is the founder it's not even a relationship it's much more about sexual relationship that actual relationship do 18 plus yeah I'm I'm not going to say if we're if I'm in the the play test group or not but it is it is not about it's not about like uh like hey let's talk about it like let's do about it that's what about what's crazy is this stuff isn't ageg gated right so I think I told you for this project I was working on I had to like play some

of these dating Sim games and these interactive stories and it's a little bit behind a pay wall but if you pay a little bit of money it's like skinx that's a dated term but it's it's like softcore porn and I was a little bit I guess as a parent I was a little bit shocked that this stuff is like not ageg gated and anyone can go and download this and you pay a little bit of money and next thing you know it's like adult content rated are rated X so anyway there's a huge section of steam which has really taken off since they lowered some of the age Gates which gets very little coverage um I would love to see what a revenue estimate would look like from let's say video game insights on a lot of those titles I know we make fun of Ethan and the skin suits for anime but perhaps that's not even the worst of it out there to your point Phil okay yeah quickly uh you layoffs employment closures Ubisoft announced layoffs in Toronto Studio 33 people due to redundance what's the percentage of Ubisoft that is

nothing they got to go deeper but that's like half of Toronto game development though which is really sad no really uh there's just there's nothing out there there's I mean just in general I hope Toronto will turn it around but there's nothing developer perfect world lays off thousands of employees and these are all in China and Beijing Shanghai and changju um and then be real hits by layoffs from the voodoo acquisition so half the staff basically got canned in the first day from B real which again this acquisition is questionable at best just saying that's it that's all we got all right let's go to games yeah this is now all of us like you Phil me so with games I had an interesting I don't know if this is news but you remember the game everdale from Super solo was in soft launch people kind of played it it was like a like a Heyday Derby yeah well I don't know it was like a Heyday Derby that was turned into a game it's like a competitive farming game essentially so

that was in soft launch they kind of couldn't get it really that was actually back when super was doing soft launch and back then they actually saw the numbers weren't good enough for for Global launch and decided to give it away to metacore and metacore took the game over in January 2023 and metacore is the the developer of uh merge Mansion it's also a Helsinki Bay studio and it's pretty much owned by Supercell so metacore hired a game lead from EA Helsinki a person who was a GM on Sim City Mobile at one point and now that person has left metacore and joined Netflix games or next games which is a Netflix Studio as a product director so all we can read from this is that apparently maybe this game is not anymore in development at least we haven't heard anything about everdale so it might not actually ever see a day so never ever never ever no no ever Dale so

so that was that was there but it was an interesting take and um yeah anyway uh they could have just actually just released it globally right away why not anyway so uh the other piece of news is um Bandai Namco Barcelona so this is an interesting Studio not only because it's band damco not because it's Barcelona which is filled with games talent but this head of Studio was actually on our podcast and it's the famous supercell in the Sun Studio and it has actually released its first title into soft launch so they do soft launches called Buck Busters which essentially looks like a hybrid casual RPG shooter with an original Ip and 3.3 Stars off the bat so it's going to be a pretty rough uh climb for them and I think this is interesting of course like every Studio can release a game that it might not be the next big hit but what's interesting about this studio is not only that they've been on a podcast but it was established in 2020 so it's been four years that they've been working on

a game and this is the first game that is coming out of the studio and they have been very very famous about their 4-day work week and the thesis was that if you work hard for four days together on site and then you recharge with a long weekend in Barcelona then of course he'll be more creative and more productive well you know of course I asked around or not actually didn't even ask around people just ping me like actually you know the days pretty much start at 10:00 a.m. sometimes they have 2hour lunches which is normal in Spain and I condone that I think that is a great thing 2hour lunches and of course people leave around 600 p.m. because they have kids and a lot of people who join a studio like this will join because they only have 4-day work week and they're in Barcelona and it's very much work life balance and yes they apparently do play soccer during lunch breaks at least twice a week so it is a very very great Studio to work with but it doesn't you know seem to be that effective as they maybe originally thought and I think if you build a studio around you know putting the perks

first of that four-day work week of Barcelona of of you know a pretty high pay and and hiring a lot of people with that Focus you end up having a studio that is just you know not maybe that effective as your competitors and the way I understood again like I haven't asked any of this people just ping me about this and the way I understood is the studio when it was established had a 5-year run according to the uh to the main sources and that five year run is coming to the end in 2025 and giving the success it's kind of hard to imagine that the Japanese will be continuing a 4-day work week supercell in the sun if they release one hybrid casual game every four years with you know not maybe the the strongest start I'm gonna keep my mouth shut on this one in so I don't like pissed off their entire European listener Pace but come on four day work week what are you talking about rather m it was an interesting podcast that that was my take and and I think

the hypothesis was there but you know if you work only four days that means you have to work 10 hours a day be really you know effective so too bad it was a beautiful dream all right I dropped in a few bullet points a few anniversaries greina of freef fire celebrates its seventh anniversary with 4 billion in lifetime Revenue it's pretty interesting I was reading a little bit into greina freef fire did you notice that and I had no idea they have a different skew called freef fire Max and apparently the Mac skew is more of an HD skew that has better graphics for better phones and it also has like I think a mode where you can create your own map and what when I was reading about it was weird it was like that the max version is doing better in India than it was doing than the regular version that the graen of free fire with its number one Revenue driver was in the US I really crazy to see the difference

and I had no idea they had different SKS but what's fantastic is seeing some of the games in Mobile last as long as they're lasting so that was interesting Phil has a chart up on screen showing downloads and revenue over time which looks like it's doing pretty good all right so World of Tanks celebrates its 10th anniversary with 1 billion in Revenue so this is their mobile skew so looking at the chart over time it looks like they've done pretty good what what what's dipped recently Phil I can't see this so we we're looking at revenue on the um the left axis and we're looking at meu on the right Axis and we're starting I think wow this is back in 2014 this is a game that's been going on for a really long time and you can see like it's largely you know not only maintain Revenue but also their player base over the Long Haul and they've managed to actually see a lot of increases in Revenue at least from when they started so like credit to the team uh usually you don't pull back a Time series for 10 years and see this level of consistency but it does look like me

dropped recently I think there's another story here which is interesting I believe they stopped selling in Russia and that was obviously a huge part of this game and then you see this this uptick in Ukrainian I AP Revenue both on a percentage and nominal basis so I suspect a lot of people are switching app stores that might be factor into some of the the active user dip I think you know IP based on location is a little little bit more stable yeah wargaming exited Russian market and they I think they sold the assets or like moved to a different company I don't remember the details but they had most of their development in bellarus and Russia and surprise Russian loves tanks who would have thought I yeah I know that they they have had that audience pretty tapped in all right so another one I got the the pre-re announcement from Apple that Zena Zone zero is out so the pre hit me on July 2nd the game doesn't turn on until July 4th

which is tomorrow for us and so as a player I was a little bit annoyed I was like oh let me check this out and then it's like do you want to play a demo and I was like or do you want to download the whole thing I'm like well let me play the demo this is interesting and then I go in and it's like no you can't play the demo because it's not available yet and so as a player in Western markets I was really [ __ ] annoyed by this because you just did this to me and then so I was talking to folks in the slack and they I said this is really common in the Eastern Market because the game download it's like 30 gigs or something just massive and so the philosophy is that you get players to download the entire thing and so that you're ready to come back when the game actually the servers actually turn on but mainly I wanted to talk about this Phil because this is hoyo verse that does honai and ginin predictions on cannibalization we saw cannibalization I think for hanai and ginin does this

make it worse or better are we going to see a squad Buster supercell cannibalization here so remember I do I do think the gench and honkai story is more complicated like they did Stack users but they didn't stack Revenue this is in a different genre so we have that going on I to be honest with you I need to play this to really figure out what this is I wasn't able to join the earlier play tests let's see the thing with hoyo verse is that they spend so much money on marketing and they're they're in so deep and the expect I mean it's you know it's almost a franchises that are too big to fail it feels like you know they're these giant Marvel movies almost and that just raises the stakes and I'm curious whether or not they've adjusted their expectations when it comes to a title like this one of their older titles third impact I believe has actually been popping up in the revenue charts too as well so they they've had some back hot at log pops but you know I I don't know enough on this one I don't know if uh Eric you or Mishka have have some more no okay I got nothing I downloaded the game both for mobile and PC so I I am going to try my gut tells me that this is not going to

be additive but you know I really don't know all right well let's keep an eye on this one since the hoo ver they're just crushing it they're absolutely crushing it ginin and honai are still doing well yes there could be Revenue cannibalization but you know if there's somebody that has figured out how to especially on crossplatform and web stores like I think what they are doing I don't think we're giving them enough credit for how they are really innovating in the games space with cross platform and web payments and everything that they're doing to drive the business uh Phil what else you got uh playable worlds has unveiled Raph Cosner's new Sandbox MMO Stars reach and if you remember Raph is one of the leads of Ultima Online he was also the creative director of Star Wars Galaxies um he wrote etheria fund which has been a super influential book and this has been his Studio that's raised around $40 million they've been working on the game since 2019 they're about 40 head count uh it did not look that good uh which

was kind of surprising the art looked pretty outdated uh the color palette wasn't that great you know I wasn't a fan of the art style he's going for sandbox MMO which is kind of his bread and butter and he has this very particular quote we know the temperature and the humidity for every cubic meter of the game we know what materials are present in every cubic meter we support states of matter so everything can melt everything can evaporate into gas we support chemical reactions between things so they're they're clearly going going for a huge sandbox here that will hopefully generate a lot of content right like that's one of the theories I think of of sandbox games is that you can have these kind of unexpected content Generations when you have all these interaction effects all these things that can happen you're constantly having player Discovery so that might be one way to win if you only have 43 people uh best of luck to them let's see how it goes we're talking about MMOs later later in the episode but um I know this this is a lot of money this is another VC back Studio it's a lot of money there's just you have to have big outcomes I'm not quite sure how you have big outcome here some Market updates uh the first

one is actually at a platform level uh let's just check back in on the peak number of steam users and this is courtesy of video game insights um this has been up and to the right for a while and we've been covering a lot of these steam breakout hits we've been covering these indie games which seem to come out of nowhere and sell you know a million two million copies and there's another one we're covering today if you're looking for an explanation it's that steam has just continued to grow and grow and grow and that hasn't seemed to have slow down I mean there's a little bit of slowdown that we see that's seasonality based but let's see when it comes winter time whether or not they're able to set new CCU records which they've been doing basically every single year for the last I think decade the majority of this growth is all from China right yeah I was just going to say n Partners Nico just released a press release today actually I was reading through it and it said in China 80% of PC Gamers play on Steam through VPN and that the PC market and their revenue is growing dramatically from China so it

would be interesting to see that right and there's also different price points so every China user is not as valuable as every us user like by a long shot right so they have their own Regional pricing in China and in technical terms this [ __ ] is illegal in China yeah I think I've said this on the podcast before they could [ __ ] shut this thing down at any moment right and so imagine if they went from like 50% of that traffic was like just dropped in a day you know so again this is why the stat is misleading great they are doing well in China and they're selling Us games in China and and it's good for the Publishers I there's no doubt but it's not the same as having 10 million us users right on the platform yeah just the stats from Nico from this press release PC gaming is seeing the largest increase in individual spending this year with 62% of PC game Spenders saying they spent more this year than they did last year 19% claim they spent at least 30 % more than they did the year before steam maintained its number one PC game

distribution platform in China with Gamers primarily assessing its International Version without a VPN nearly 80% of PC Gamers that play premium games use steam then they said this so can you help me with this the miname segment has emerged as a major growth area within Mobile gaming and apparently 650 million Gamers playing them according to Nico partner survey two-thirds of mobile gamers are playing playing Min games daily or several times a week I didn't know what that Sor is that the the games that's on U YouTu there's that too there's YouTube playables it could be a lot of things yeah yeah I I I didn't anyway so sorry to derail on that point but just supporting your steam growth I think a lot of it's the Chinese market the first descendant has launched this is a third person looter shooter from Nexon uh which is getting some mixed reviews on Steam I think due to its eastern monetization style this just launched on July 3rd so let's check back in and see

where this one lands you know I was thinking about it and I know Eric you are big fan of the division which surpris and delights me every time I I think about the fact you love a Ubisoft franchise but I haven't seen like a lot of Eastern looter Shooters and I guess it would be the markets just sucked into other RPG MMOs but I was kind of surprised at that yeah me too that this game was not on my radar even though I'm bullish on Nexon because of dungeon fighter I didn't even know they were coming out this game but this is the type of game that I would actually recommend to make right lutter shooter like different theme I I actually just downloaded it today so I'm going to play it it's free to play too so kind of a bigger bet I don't know exactly the history of this game whether it's a third party or it's actually internally developed but it is being published by nexxon there's another Indie hit that has risen up the steam charts this one got to number eight it is called chain together and this is one of the more bizarre games to be successful on steam so the goal of the game is to escape

from the pits of hell and it's you and a bunch of other friends are chained together so it has a very interesting I would say kind of user experience but hey look at another game that's kind of come out of nowhere with kind of low production values I'm sure by a very small team that is going to make millions of dollars uh you know congrats to them so it's like this podcast I'm just kidding I'm I'm choking I'm choking um one more update on FK Journey this is one we were covering at the beginning of the year it has stabilized in terms of daily active users but Revenue has been on the decline quite troublingly uh which is not a good sign um this happens a lot in Squad RPGs or gotcha games that you can have these spikes which are character-driven and there can be a lot of inflation early on or there isn't enough content um but this isn't what you want to see both in the fact that it's starting to stabilize I would argue at a pretty low constant and also like yeah Revenue going down is not a good shape to have and when you compare it to where they are with AFK Arena the

downloads are actually pretty neck and neck so it looks like they might actually run both of these titles concurrently but that's not I'm sure the outcome that they wanted from launching FK JY I'm sure they had outsize expectations now we don't know what's happening on the web store side it's hard for me to believe that like these Trends are not parallelized like you know it' be hard for me to imagine that a lot of the decline in revenue is explained by people just converting to the web store that would be bizarre to me but we do know that PC and we store on mobile do drive a significant share of this game's Revenue my previous intern is working on AFK Journey so without giving away any information I do know that they are still excited about what's going on with this and actively marketing this in the west they still really believe in this the potential of this game so that was interesting to hear from him this podcast is brought to you by data AI now you're asking didn't they get acquired by sensor Tower they did

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with your app apps sler where your app's potential meets performance topics okay moving on to topics um so I uh I only picked this up because I was actually talking to a buddy of mine who kind of walked through this with me on how AI can be actually implemented in games effectively and so the article was basically how King is using AI to speed up development of new Candy Crush and generally I hate these kind of Articles because it's total PR fluff but it makes a really good point about AI tools that I think is interesting so anyway King is basically using AI play testing to speed up development of Candy Crush levels and they say by 50% whatever I don't get and it's basically the AI is assisting designers and giving them insights as to how to refine the gameplay for each level that quote unquote the designers can focus on Creative aspects but they want to re reaffirm that they actually absolutely need a designers but it's again a co-pilot so an assistant you

know obviously shifting skills it's creating a more scale in terms of level production etc etc and then they go on and talk about you know the AI Labs is all work working on better on player Behavior Etc and enhance gaming experience so this what it brings up this really interesting point that this my my friend made my friend worked at BioWare and blizzard and EA he's basically Been Everywhere um there are certain advantages that these big companies are going to have because they have data sets of not only level design but also player Behavior around those levels that can inform in building these type of models to help fulfill development so there's an advantage that someone like King is going to have in terms of building these tools and Technologies and these models for AI that can generate and and help make production more efficient versus the idea of having co-pilots that are more broadly based that are going to inform and help people do production you can

create these type of things internally to help make your development process more efficient and that gives a lot more Advantage for the big that actually have access to this sort of data versus more of a generic kind of model that people are using you know in chat gbt Etc so anyway so I thought this was a good case study in terms of how you can see AI implemented within a bigger uh development team to help facilitate game development and and content development yeah I love hearing more case studies of how game devs are actually using AI because I think we made a joke a long time ago that everyone's talking about it but but no one's really talking about it in specifics so one of my clients is working on a PVP strategy game and then so they've been using AI to really hone in on training the Bots to your skill level so that each game is like really close so that you get to the end of the

game and and you feel like you've had a competitive game this is very different so when I was growth on League of Legends a few years ago I actually was leading like a small Dev team I know they they let a marketer actually talk to engineers and designers and so I was actually leading that team and one of the things that we were trying to do in the growth area was to improve the Bots because when you play league in the beginning what we found is if you got to like a certain like 10 days in the chance of you staying and retaining was drastically better and so we were trying to figure out how to make that gameplay experience and how you could learn to play better cuz the Bots don't play correctly they don't play the game as real Gamers do and so when you're learning to play the game you actually learn incorrectly because the Bots are [ __ ] stupid and so what what we were trying to do back then it was you know obviously was called machine learning it's you know now it's AI but we didn't have the tech back then to actually train the Bots better or you know

actually the the ability just to to spend the time on doing that and so I I think that my advice to my new My Friend and Friend of the Pod Paul bza who is now the EP on League of Legends he is like employee six at Riot like he was an intern when Riot started and now he has grown up through the ranks he's worked on everything and now he's the EP so congratulations to him number one but I hope he hears this and I hope he takes this Insight that we had of hey if AI is now better and can better train the Bots from a growth perspective from League of Legends and a training perspective that could really be an opportunity to onboard people into more complicated games is to use AI in that manner this is interesting because like play testing Bots and simulation is now called it like we've used this regularly for at least a decade I remember when Jen when you talked about balancing a strategy game I remember Clash of Clans being balanced with Place testing Bots back in 2013 where before addition of every new

unit there would be like tons of simulation run with with that unit and win and loss was you know the goal was to get to that 50% Etc it's kind of like starting off point for the balancing and in 2018 I remember at roio where the puzzle division was was you know really bringing forward of how they're using machine learning to balance these puzzle levels for them to become so great and better than the competitors etc etc this kind of feels like a rehash things to be honest but now with a new title which is an AI and I understand the the point of efficiency because that's that's at the end of everything and and there is a a puzzle game company called Cosmic lounge and these guys are former King and former seriously so seriously is the company that was acquired by plka and they're they had a puzzle game called best fiend actually a series of puzzle titles but one of them was big and everything else was small anyways the whole thesis of that compan company is like AI plus puzzle like you get the puzzle guys or gals and professionals

and Ai and together they will build the best possible puzzle games that can compete with the incumbents with smaller teams that company was found found in 2022 the CEO was talking actually at our last uh Ean B event they've collected all the Innovation prizes uh but they don't have a product out there as of yet right and if they're so efficient it's kind of puzzling since I'm you know relatively close as this crest everybody with a Turkish ecosystem for example they don't flaun AI but God damn it when they start a company they got a product out in about eight months it's in the market so so there's been a lot of talk and I think in this piece I was reading it more from like the pr perspective because it is a tough PR tough communication to do around this because most companies simple don't talk about AI there's three reasons there's internal turmoil every time you mention AI there's arguably people are be like oh my god there the executives are bringing AI now everybody's going to lose their jobs Etc so that's a legit

reason the second one is that there's really no tangible results from AI maybe here and there but nobody can really say we used Ai and now we're you know this much better these guys are saying 50% but uh maybe and if there is a tangible Advantage a a a smart company wouldn't talk about it they' be just doing it and not exposing their their their strengths maybe so in this piece I especially love the uh that cold co-pilot for designers AI is a co-pilot but the fact is you know based on this article it reduces the demand for level designers especially the junior level designer so AI is coming and it's taking jobs that's how I read it and I think these are scary things to read if you're a level designer I'm glad on the same wave length on this Mich I can't believe Eric got baited into this PR press release I'm shocked I'm shocked there's machine learning machine learning Forever This is the great rebranding this is AI now it's not machine learning it's AI it was then it was machine Lear God damn it I am as skeptical as you are about this [ __ ] what I'm trying to say is that

the big companies have an advantage because they actually have data that they can put into a model that can actually effectively design levels right for for their games right the Asm toope on that is very low though like the amount of benefit you get when you have the scale that King has relative to someone who's let's say a much smaller Match 3 game is really really small like the gains you get in a lot of these ml models are increasing over a certain range but like excuse me you have diminishing returns as you add the N plus1 observation so like you don't get these crazy scale effects like EA for instance like EA deleted data which was crazy as an analyst working there like a lot of these old data warehouses suck and they're irrelevant because there have been so many changes it's just not that much of an advantage all right well that's not what I'm hearing out in The Ether about these proprietary databases that like yeah anyway I just wanted to make that point that has been made a couple developers have told me is that like having your own proprietary AI model is going to be potentially an

advantage and it's going to raise the bar in terms of uh game development and efficiencies and to your point like Cosmic Lounge right which is Tommy you can't talk trash about Tommy because he's the great Viking right liking God he looks like Odin he's like he's like 66 you know he's he's a monster um he's literally looks like Odin but yeah but it's like they have they don't have such Advantage right so they're they're starting from scratch you know and trying to like build these things out and I agree I think the fact that they don't have a product out and they have all their AI first they should be like crushing right now you know but maybe maybe they will here's the simple way to shut everyone up though is like they should have just provided a line graph that's the number of levels they release weekly and show me that that line has doubled or tripled that is that is the data point they need to show we can then argue about the retentive effects of like you know the the uplift in those levels the marginal levels are they driving the same retention that's it they can shut everyone up with that single line and that's what I want to see from all these companies is show me production and now show me production with AI like that that is the revolution

when we get that graph yeah Dam good levels too much cynicism too much cynicism speaking of cynicism are we G to do Netflix again oh my God we we we're trying to get out of it but suur just just dropped a Netflix article and then Netflix came out with two PR pieces last week one was by the co-ceo Greg Peters and then the other one was by their VP of external games lean lombe if I pronounced that correctly she's Og man she's been doing this [ __ ] a long time I'll give her that I'll give her credit I would I would assume but both of them are awesome my point was mainly that the way I understood it I could be wrong is the the CEO article was of course more about Netflix as a whole it was The Verge article and it was talking about the Netflix future he talked about AI of course what else you would talk about and all these other elements but one of them was games and in games you know I'm quoting him he said ultimately to give fans the most compelling immersive experiences eventually will go to

something that looks like Triple A model I would definitely not rule that out so the CEO is saying we're going to AAA I want people to play on TV essentially what was that Google product that failed stadia stadia stadia yeah like I was envisioning that he's talking about stadia but with Netflix IPS got it great we're going to play Rebel Moon AAA and enjoy that was in the works though that's a joke that was in the works it was that's actually still in the works it's a it's a phenomenal phenomenal show damn it they're out of their minds they're out of their minds all of them so that was the article and he gave a glimpse of what the future would look like and it's inspiring it's new it's something that other people are not doing but then when Leon was giving her interview I don't call these interviews they they wrote you know questions and then they the pr wrote answers but on Pocket Gamer she was stating that they're really happy with the shape of the portfolio has taken and that the games are longterm for Netflix well well and then she had this

this fallacy that that they keep on saying is that our audience doesn't have to deal with ads or microtransactions to disrupt the gameplay experience and the developers can work with us without worrying about monetization and can focus on the best player experience possible so you know these these same valencies but we know what has been happening they've been buying debt games and basically removing microtransactions from them and removing ads and these games are not really that much downloaded except that if they pay a lot of money for old GTA games and then those are downloaded etc etc and after spending about $3 billion doar they've learned two key lessons one is games with IP are more popular surprise and creating games based on members favorite series and films is one of the biggest opportunities that Netflix has so using their own IPS is actually a good idea that's also a great learning only took them two years but then they created shitty experiences on Roblox with those that doesn't make sense well the experiences were not good like a lot I've played several of these games and

they were ported from PC games and it was they just weren't great user experience nevertheless Seer put it in his article this strategy is called spaghetti strategy so throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks and at the moment doesn't seem that really many things stick except their original IPS that I think they've gotten over 20 [ __ ] done that which is so crazy like Ethan's right where is myg Match 3 where the [ __ ] is my Emily and Paris game it's so obvious my takeaway I think Jen is going to disagree with this but my takea away from reading these two articles one was behind pay wall is that I feel like the CEO and head of external games who I feel like is now the spokesperson for Netflix games are telling a little bit of a different story I understand that the CEO might be looking 5 years ahead and she's talking about yesterday today and tomorrow neither of them talk about the Ry for the games business but suer has a great article with mobile Dev memo

and he kind of goes into this where he shows the graphs of churn and the effect of games and whether it had any effect and what is the big reason and essentially he's making a case that no there's there's none of that happening but to end this my own segment is I think that I know that Netflix games coms has been looking to get in touch with us and correct some of the facts not some of the facts but some of the statements we've made and we welcome we do corrections at we would love to have them on a podcast we just operate with the information we're given I'll tell them specifically if you guys don't say anything people are going to speculate right so now you're finally coming out and actually doing PR and trying to like tell the story without a story it's going to be rumors and speculation fundamentally I I guess I didn't understand why you said they were saying different things because you know there is triaa games in development because she's only over half the business so Netflix is organized with an internal team and an external

team and she heads up the external team so she works with people who uh are external basically doing licensing agreements kind of exactly like what Apple arcade is and so I don't think she is over the AAA business and and so in her view what she is doing for what her purview is it is more of the hey we are you know we've noticed IP is important we've noticed you know we want to do those things and I think that makes sense and I think you know the CEO is talking about long-term Vision that includes triaa that includes what Lan is doing and so I didn't think they were necessarily saying different things I think she was speaking to a little bit more to her her view and I think we're looking for a strategy and neither one of them is really giving that to us yet and I think again I think they don't know what their strategy is because you're right I think their strategy has been to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks and I think they are starting to find some of these things now I I think we think that the not no

monetization no ads model isn't actually helping I think we're probably right on that because to Phil's Point sometimes as a player you need to have some skin in the game to want to stay with these these games I I do think that the challenge is just like with Amazon which I we may not get to today but we might talk about next week is just because an IP is is on Netflix doesn't mean that that team has the rights so with Bridgerton with Emily and Paris maybe not that one they might not have the rights to do some of these IPS or the IP holder might be you know a challenging IP holder you know we all know Harry Potter right we all know that JK rling is a [ __ ] pain in the ass to work with and so I just speculating that they might not have rights they might have difficult IP holders they might not have prioritized it because it's a female audience and they have not thought that that was open-minded as I I agree with

you I you know the first thing when I've pitched them is like Bridgerton give me Bridgerton holy [ __ ] like what I'll I'll make any genre you want with that IP anyway that that's just my quick take yeah okay I want to just kind of update my my my thinking on this is that I I think I might have been completely wrong about my assessment about here about what's going on in Netflix gaming I'll have to capitulate right my assessment was basically that licensing their best content to Roblox is a sign that of an patient org and that the gaming and and impatient with the gaming contribution and that potentially decided that Netflix is going to stop the gaming strategy right I think I'm wrong about that what I was right about was that there's dissension in the ranks right it's more of a sign that Netflix was perhaps unhappy with the current leadership at games or that the current leadership was unhappy with Netflix corporate which is I think what likely is probably the problem right but from this PR you have to kind of read between the nonsense and [ __ ] right is that the Netflix is in it for the long term right what is critical is the next hiring for the gaming group exec right

if they hire an experienced game maker or exuse publishing person mobile otherwise whatever I think that bodess well for the long-term potential of this particular area of business if they hire a mother fing Tech bro you know with no gaming series whatsoever and I go on LinkedIn and we have like three Mutual connections this is [ __ ] over this is [ __ ] over this just going to be a [ __ ] godamn money pit in which they are gonna throw billions at this [ __ ] and ultimately fail [ __ ] miserably right no more Tech Bros no more Tech Bros we don't need these guys okay doing this [ __ ] if it's a McKenzie guy that has been doing nothing but [ __ ] for [ __ ] 20 years it's [ __ ] over all right so this is my warning to Netflix and you can correct that okay don't do that do not do that please I'm begging you all right that's it what if it's Bernard Kim like we always suggest it whenever there's there's somebody we just like just bring on Bernard Kim no I Bernard makes sense

dude the guy right the guy's the face man right he'd be good he's far better than being at match you know what the [ __ ] is he doing at match you know like it's crazy right yeah Bernard Kim is perfect for this role dude well there you have it we' we've solved it solved it all problems Netflix but let's bring the pr people on let's do that let's just finish Amazon since these two kind go together well I mean you know you know that Meme of the guy getting hanged uh you know the other guy looks out and says first time bro this is right now Amazon games Netflix Studios like they've had it for a long time and this actually speaks to Eric's Point they've had a change in leadership so there was a piece out uh I think it was this week with Amazon games' Chief Kristoff right Jen you got it all right so let me do a quick recap uh this is from game developer and also variety so they're kind of two sources Netflix recently discussed it long-term game plans and Amazon has now followed suit with an interview with variety so Amazon games

VP Kristoff Hartman spoke with the outlet about the retail Giants goals for the medium which effectively boiled down to being a reverse of Netflix where their streamer is taking its steps into games with mobile titles Amazon is diving first into PC and console another part of Amazon game strategy keeping things in house rather than buying thirdparty developers like Netflix has done Hartman revealed the publisher is expanding heavily with its internal studios in Montreal Bucharest and other locations they finally have some games coming in September they release it's freeto play MMO RPG thrown in Liberty and the October launch of the action RPG New World both of which will be available on PC PlayStation 5 and Xbox series X and S so new or all coming to console it was it was pretty big the other thing that was was pretty funny there was a quote on mobile this is from Kristoff if the company would say Kristoff let's do

mobile games I would have to hire someone he continued but I still believe it's really really about AAA games because otherwise it's a very hard Market to get into and then trans media since we we love trans media and we just I just brought up the IP comment for Netflix so he did talk about trans media but how to downplay it since so many of the shows on Amazon Prime they don't have the writes for so Tomb Raider is basically the one that he talked about that is going to be big for them and they have a game in development he won't say when it's coming he also talked about Fallout because the you know the interviewer didn't know this you know they were like well what about Fallout what are you doing he's like well actually that's all Microsoft and Bethesda but it's doing great for us because it's on Luna and our Luna numbers are kicking ass and I thought to myself what the hell is Luna uh so fail take it from here uh so I I am a former Amazon games Studio employee I have nothing but great things to say about

them I think they're doing everything in their power to make a success and I was like you mentioned like they have so many things that are in the fire right now uh they announced a partnership with glow made which is a lot of um XDS that were on Little Big Planet that was the game I worked on I'm really really excited when that's going to be announced there's a lot of fun to be had there Maverick games they're doing a racing game the Bucharest Studio they got the crystal Dynamics deal and this Montreal Studio is topnotch there's a lot of the X Rainbow 6 devs so they've been doing a lot of things um properly I would argue in the last couple years like lar came out it made a lot of money new world did okay and they have as you know a lot of MMOs in the pipeline maybe too much MMOs by the way that's that's not a strategy that just sort of AWS is at cost so there isn't you know these big savings you're going to have by you know running all these MMO servers but I think the thing that Amazon has done right that you're starting to see in the Netflix story is that the games org has become more and more of an an Annex inside of the Amazon organization they've gotten a progressively longer leash they did get rid of one of the

former Executives that was running the division that was not in a games background and Kristoff is is really the guy who runs the organization of course Christof used to run 2K and the thing that happens when you hire a senior game executive and I think a lot of people struggle to understand the value of Executives sometimes is that they bring their immigration networks with them so the first thing they're going to do is like okay I want to I want to have my people in place you know it's a new Administration I want to have my people in place and so you get this I'm going to offer you more money so you get this chain migration that keeps happening and you can kind of create these you know little Talent pools and I think that is the the the thing that Amazon game or Amazon games has done you know the best is establishing these Talent pools of experienced devs and that that's honestly why I have a lot of faith in them besides the fact that like they have gotten things out there that I think they they had a lot of crimes that they committed um at some point that have started to clear off the balance sheet you know a lot of engine crimes that seem to have gone away so I've got a lot of faith in them they did have a mobile game by the way at some point he was in development when I was there but I don't think it's it's no longer in development from the sounds of it you know I I don't know if this is a model

of how to do it in Tech but like you can't count them on in the L category yet they they've got a lot more to to come out and a lot more to to kind of hit their their stride all right Phil they've been doing this for [ __ ] 15 years dude they've had one success right which was a third party game and they have six MMOs in development right that's not a strategy dude the M Market is Tiny dude I mean I I'm I'm actually really excited for throne of Liberty and and the Lord of the Rings out so I'm Their audience right I'm going to play these games but I don't think they really contemplated a real strategy here from a game I guess yeah the Tomb Raider is not you know is the only thing that's not an MMO right so I don't know dude they're not making in your words chachki games um that's true they are making very high quality High they're trying to do something that matters and I think I think the tough part about being at these organizations is that you know the tech side of the organization makes so much money and Netflix the subscriptions make so much money like your mission is to like be visible you know on the P you

know even sometimes in the minus column you know can can you make an impact can you can you turn heads they've been you know given a Long Leash to to try to pull that off but you're looking you're looking for big big impact you want to matter yeah I I wanted to ask who's going to win Netflix or Amazon in the games like if you let's cook guess let's cook Amazon in my what's win take yeah Amazon for sure because they're gonna make the games I want to play but Netflix we'll see we'll see well it's just it's like comparing apples and oranges right because Amazon is out there making games that are designed to make money and Netflix what they said basically is you know these games are here for engagement and to reduce turn and and so it's it's almost impossible and plus it's like mobile games that are going to attract you know a broader audience from Netflix maybe a couple AAA games but but Amazon is just a game publisher and some of them will leverage Amazon IP and some of them won't so I

don't know I I don't even think you can compare them I think you have to compare Amazon to like a regular game publisher yeah maybe the question would be who who's still here 5 years from now oh I think I think the better comparison is Netflix and apple arcade and you know what's going you want to be looking up not down I didn't say it was a good business comparison I just said like who is more apples to apples like using your platform to authenticate in with a subscription you know those two are more equal in business model and plan and and I think you know everyone knows that we follow both of those and don't think it's you know the future just like how we talk about Xbox game pass that subscription while it could be interesting for for gamers and players as a value as a business model is is a little bit of a doomed business model so maybe Amazon's going to win if you look at it like that okay thank you guys Chris and I are out next week so you are stuck with Phil

Mishka and Laura so have fun and we'll see you the following week California free episode coming 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 de instructor 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]