TWIG #292 Matthew Ball’s Metaverse 2.0 / Top Game License IPs Unveiled

[Music] hello and welcome to this weekend games 292 where we read and distill all of the weekly game industry news so you don't have to here's what we got going on today tons of closures in the industry so we'll hit that and a few key hires Matthew ball and the metaverse 2.0 ation that he has with the creator of snow Pierce snower snow piercer is a different that's a different Snow Crash snow crash what's wrong crash God damn it I I don't know what I why I was thinking the one where they fight on the trains to death oh that's that's right that's what yeah digital toys and experiences lots to go on there Monopoly go goes meta there's a board game that becomes a video game that becomes a board game it's really fun that FTC is pissed at Microsoft for

raising prices on Game Pass and much much more Google you know goes ATT which is a whole fun thing I'll get to okay so hi I'm Jen donaho strategic marketing consultant at beta hat and Jan Inferno today we have Philip black game Economist at game Economist Consulting what up punks oh sorry wrong character um hey what's up hey hey took my line Eric R principal at gossamer consult Consulting Group hey hey hey good to see your a fellow method actor oh it's going to be one of those days it is just the three of us Mishka is on vacation and Laura unfortunately has had um kind of a a challenging situation so hopefully sending good thoughts to her and she'll be back next week all right so a little banter for us we had a happy hour last week in La it was really fun so thanks to Brett leing from stash for

basically letting us take over the event while he paid for everything was pretty awesome so Crest came out and we hung out all day so first off how was the car the electric BMW was it okay well I it's a it's a beautiful car amazing Tech but it's still electric and she didn't let me drive it by I think intentionally oh well I just forgot like honestly I I should have by the time I thought about it we were in the city and and you wouldn't been able to do anything so that was my fail well yeah it's also La it's not really fun to drive in La anywhere period so it's like that is part of the problem that is part of the problem so at the event I was really impressed so many great folks people from JM City Netflix Warner Brothers Amazon games scopely a few of the PMS came up to us and a few of the marketing folks who they were so lovely and complimentary and wanted to just you know talk Monopoly go and geek out also a super fan of us Grace who does m&a for

scop Le was there as well she I always see her at these events and hi to her cuz she's just such a baller I love seeing women doing like m&a stuff it was like super cool so chis thank you for coming out it was awesome no problem I did I see a couple guys from EA one of my old guys from cabam was there it was a really good turnout at least for me I was cool for one day with my 15-year-old son for attending a 100 thieves event evidently that was a big brand in the world of teenagers and I got my first tour of the blizzard campus dude that's checklist [ __ ] you know I've been subscribing for a while for [ __ ] 20 years I finally get to see it and do that iconic shot of the big statue in the middle of the campus which was very cool oh and then I saw one of my old buddies from cabam there as well when we were there but I you know I have to admit even though the blizzard probably was the highlight the biggest surprise was this this [ __ ] Google office holy [ __ ] this La Google

office is ridiculous absolutely ridiculous it is by far the nicest office I've ever seen in my entire life it was an aircraft hanger for [ __ ] the Spruce Goose which is a wooden [ __ ] you know plane back in the day right they they completely retrofitted rebuilt this thing absolutely massive ceilings huge wide open feel to the whole thing they had like themed conference rooms or whatever it is the most profound waste of space I've ever seen in an office like only these absolutely insanely wealthy [ __ ] type companies could put pull this off right in this day and age right but it was absolutely beautiful and uh I've never seen anything like it so yeah I know I agree it might be my most favorite Campus of I've ever seen of any of the companies in our space you just you feel like you're working outside when you're inside it was so beautiful yeah exactly it's ridiculous I want that for us as a

gaming industry like I want our own hangar like even Hangar 13 doesn't have doesn't work in a hangar like we we deserve that I don't think the gaming industry will ever have the kind of money that's just [ __ ] throwing out there like Google you know well wasn't there like Zing money back in the day didn't they like they yeah they had like Kanye at like the giant Stadium I know I always hear [ __ ] like there was an actual deer at their Christmas party I hear some stories I worked at the old San Francisco office and can I just say the cafeteria was amazing I mean that was is probably my second favorite cafeteria R's cafeteria is number one by the way but the Zenga cafeteria there was like an on-site butcher everything was prepared like from like farm to table so the old Zinga campus was not bad but but 10x Above This is the cool one it's crazy but you got some feedback right like people gave us a lot of like nice Kudos it was nice to get that in person that your podcast doesn't suck guys and you guys aren't dumb I I enjoy hearing that two separate people I think

maybe three even came up to me and said kind of the same thing it's like thank you for what you do it really helped me kind of prepare for my interviews and I help me get my job type thing and I was like holy [ __ ] dude we're [ __ ] doing God's work right now you know what I'm saying we got this on point you know anyway it was very good to hear a few people said that they make our podcast mandatory listening for any new hires especially if they come in to gaming from another industry help them I know I was like oh my God what torture we're mandatory listening imagine a worst punishment I know so for all of you new folks thank you for for putting up with us and our newsletter and everything join the slack Channel we haven't said that in a while so go to deconstructor fund.com apply to join the slack Channel follow the newsletter and yeah give us a nice rating all right what else oh I wanted to say Phillip uh Halo so Halo the TV show got

cancelled if you listen to us you know that Phil and I watched the show and there's 100% less sex with Master Chief and anyone else now because the Show is canceled although was it a rumor that Christopher Nolan wanted to pick it up and do something with the series what's going on there I think it's going to get picked up by Netflix I I have a feeling that Netflix is g to pick this [ __ ] up yep really no the budget is going to be insane there's all this IP baggage this is this is a toxic problem property there's no upside oh this is bad this is we were talking about this like last week like this is Microsoft's big [ __ ] up on game passes that they didn't tend to their core franchises thanks Phil Spencer thank you we need to make the trans media point no one no one is going back and citing Halo infinite numbers when the Halo TV show comes out like where are all those pieces when I talked about Fallout in the context of trans media I posted the image of That World War II example of the planes who keep coming back and they reinforce where they get shot of course they weren't looking at

the planes that were down and where they had been shot and so like when you look at trans media you can't just look at the most prestigious example you need to look at okay what's the expected outcome what's the average outcome what is the bulk of this evidence suggesting so I'm just saying this is another n in that category you got to look at these two all right okay I don't see any shills although Gamescom is coming up I don't know I'm not going Crush you're not going Phil are you going to game no all right oh wow oh wow Mishka can't go because he's getting called up thank you for your service Mishka for those who don't know he's in the Finnish Army Reserves is that is that correct right no corrections as well we it's not we're perfect we're perfect well whatever all right so quick hits really quick on ads Google announced yesterday that it's no longer intends to deprecate third party cookies in the Chrome browser this is kind of like Apple's ATT policy for the web

which is basically going to pass on the responsibility of the opin to the consumer instead of them having to deal with it so this just got announced I'm sure Eric seert already has a ton of posts about this this is web this is not mobile so if you are a web- based marketer just kind of keep an eye on what's going on with that so moving on to the FTC and Xbox game pass the FTC called The Game Pass standard tier a degraded product that could harm consumers Microsoft is raising the price for Game Pass ultimate product to $16.99 a month from $699 to1 1999 a month a 177% year onye increase additionally Microsoft is discontinuing the $ 1099 a month console Game Pass product users of that product must pay 81% more to switch to Game Pass ultimate for for consumers unwilling to pay 81%

more Microsoft is introducing a degraded product Game Pass standard at $4.99 a month this product costs 36% more than the console Game Pass and withholds Day One releases woo so this was the FTC going back to the judge because the the merger I I guess is on appeal the merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard so lenina Khan's team is kind of saying excuse me this kind kind of sucks there's a chart that we have if you're watching just the show the the price increases over the last few years it's pretty crazy Crest yeah I mean I I actually talked to a bunch of people about this over the last couple weeks and I want to be really crystal clear here because I think basically what's happening is that leadership of Microsoft is saying if you don't have the letters AI in your division you must be profitable ASAP and the only way to get profitable at Xbox is to raise prices on this dumb subscription right for your faithful and go back to like

traditional like full game downloads like the the PlayStation model for the rest of your looky loose people on Xbox at this point right and so micro Microsoft's goal was to get to a 100 million Subs which makes sense you scale it up and then start raising prices but they did barely got to 30 you know and so now like raising prices is complete departure from that goal at the end of the day Microsoft cannot lose this AI War because they lost mobile social search browser hell even like Cloud they're kind of lost to you know Amazon and and Google to a lesser degree so basically every dollar is going towards winning the AI race and that means that Xbox somehow has to get profitable and of course the subscription thing which never made sense to begin with is getting deemphasized and now they're going back to traditional but at the end of the day I think it's a little too late this strategy kind of sunk them to some degree and a lot of people that I talk to basically agree that probably after the next Hardware cycle Xbox will likely get shut down or spun out but you

know we'll see you know they're going to limp along right and try to make a play at it they have a lot of smart people there so maybe they can figure something out that I don't see but it looks pretty tough I'm waiting for the ad tier to show up U maybe I mean you laugh however everyone that's what everyone realizes if you do want scale add an ad tier I mean that's what n Netflix has done that's not the type of scale we want though you with all due respect they do not have the content to oh agre do a broad subscription they certainly do not have the content to do a ad tier type [ __ ] right it's like it's a completely different product and a different service and a different audience and this is why the subscriptions never made sense to begin with right it's a [ __ ] allar business it's not a subscription business it always has been and it likely always will be at least on the console side oh that is a correction by the way I did miss last last week I think I said the

opposite last week but I think people understood what I meant based my tone but uh it's an all aart business it is not a subscription business all right cool all right so moving on from game industry. Biz sag aftera is ready to strike if game companies don't come to the table with a deal to protect jobs against Ai and this is for voice actors so the board has unanimously agreed to permit its Chief NE negotiator to call an immediate strike at will the bargaining has been ongoing since October of 22 with you know all of the big players Activision EA epic Insomniac WB and the members actually approved to strike N9 months ago during the whole ryer strike issue that was going on so just keep an eye on that as well there could be a voice actor strike in gaming Cress we are old after all so Stephen totillo from game file he posted that the game industry's

Workforce is getting older so there he put this chart in his newsletter that I get according to game files check of publicly available data from Ubisoft Capcom Nintendo and the international game developers Association you know it's only old people who make games now so the average age of employees at Nintendo has cracked 40 this year for the first time since the company began reporting the stat so I just thought this was interesting of like how do we get younger people to making games I guess they're all off doing the Sixers ufn Studio or something like that and we're not hiring them into big game companies I guess because we're laying everybody off so how do they get a job I I don't know about this data like he's showing that the average age of the Nintendo employee is increasing sure but this just follows like demographic Trends in Japan that the populace is aging so he doesn't really control for that so you don't know if this is like a Nintendo effect or game industry effect or Japanese effect like I would take this with a grain of salt sometimes all right my data nerd I

should have consulted with you before I put it in there yeah because mobile mobile would likely skew this down quite a bit you know all three people working in the Nintendo mobile Department no no if it wasn't nint sorry I was arguing your point if it wasn't Nintendo I know if it was if it was a more broad-based Sor right shut the [ __ ] up no he he cites Ubisoft Capcom Nintendo right so you're right it isn't a broad kind of cross-section of the industry mainly I just wanted to make an old joke cuz of us okay let's move on to investments in m&a absolutely so us-based video game Commerce company exola friends over at exola has acquired uk-based social gaming platform lf. group for an undisclosed price exilla will use lf. groups technological stack to create solutions for developers and gaming communities this is an interesting vertical we also have news

that us-based games Development Fund platform dusk has raised 8 million in funding led by makers fund oh interesting do we do we any more about this you know maybe we can get someone from makers talk about this very interesting the funds will support the development of the company's platform which allows developers to build social games interesting so maybe another ugc play this one was surprising Warner Brothers games has acquired the multivers developer player first games I was surprised usually you want to see uptick in the product and then you acquire the studio this is another Aqua hire this is like but why do you want to buy this asset that just went down you know that wasn't it wasn't a good I'm assuming they're building building something else for them at this point but I don't know yeah you would have to imagine there's a longer term play here than just that game interesting okay Sweden based PC and console games developer blue Scarab entertainment has raised 7 million in seed round funding LED by netes while they are really

getting out in the west and making a ton of Investments I keep hearing about a lot of these nety Studios which have been started or at least backed the funds will be used to develop their debut MMO RPG title it's back the studio is backed by a bunch of genre veterans and the CTO and CEO of the company were responsible for Anarchy Online along with the rest of the team who are responsible for other projects such as hell divers 2 which is by Arrowhead it's actually out here in Sweden and some ex blizzard team members all right all right Chris there's a lot going on with closures and new hires what do you got yeah well first nether realm confirms it's shutting down Mortal Kombat Onslaught which is their mobile game and basically removing that group just pulled up CU I was like oh Mortal Kombat on on mobile seems like that's a good idea 4 million downloads and 2.2 million Revenue there's another game a little less than a year there there was another game that was Mortal Kombat on mobile that did much better that died out I I I can't forget the name of it Eric again too close to this one I can't really comment

on it so I'll keep going Forte shuts down it's mobile developer Rumble entertainment that was Again part of the other team that was shut down last week right so is this the blockchain developer the blockchain company that ra like a bajillion dollars and then was never heard from again again can't he can't okay there's so many few things I can't comment on and that's these are two of them one two perfect world CEO and co-ceo resign after Mass layoffs yeah there was a huge off at perfect world in the US I think and so I guess these guys got got dumped blizzards John height and former Bungie coo Holly barbacovi barbacovi they are joining Hasbro part of a huge restructuring of the org keep in mind that Owen Mahoney and Frank chbo joined the board a few months ago it seems that they are attracting you know big names to fill out the leadership team at Hasbro there was some rumors that the CEO was going to get removed but replaced by maybe

Owen or Frank maybe not I don't know yeah I saw that the CEO Chris Cox had just in May signed a A Renewed a three-year contract extension so I don't know enough about employment law in Rhode Island but that seems difficult to know where they're going I I do know that they are publicly out there saying that they are a digital game company which was ironic because under Brian goldner who sadly passed away a few years ago Hasbro used to goow out and say we're a Content company they used to compete with Hollywood you know with all of the Transformers movies and everything that they were doing in Hollywood so it's no longer the message they've gone back to Hollywood and said never mind actually we're digital game company we've got you know all of the watsi products we've got Monopoly go but isn't this the play though if they're hiring all these people isn't this the play to own the means of production now all these guarantees from all these other companies so how right now market cap around 8 89 billion scopely sold a

Savvy for 4.9 billion Hasbro is the house that built scle in many ways right and it wasn't just Monopoly Go I mean the dice franchise was huge that was a profit Center for scop for a very long time and by the way no one's talked about that I think it's done what 500 million in lifetime Revenue more than 500 million I don't know what the last press release was but those have been enormous suful yatsi With Buddies like and Scrabble you know there's there's a lot of licensed IP out here why not take a chunk of that for yourself Boulders gate I mean it's not just on the mobile side that's that's Dungeons and Dragons why are we just getting these flat rate checks like I want to share I want upside are we really going to rehash this [ __ ] again like I mean how many times do these companies need to fail before people realize that it's not a viable option having said that to your point they are basically hiring the bench to potentially manage teams and build product right and they do have a group of developers in housee that could develop games in theory but so far far they've done [ __ ] and all right with the

exception of the magic the Gathering game which I think is part of their team but they're doing both and so I think this is a smart strategy which is they do have some studios and some of those Studios do mobile and some of them are doing HD products that are in the works and then they all sold license and again I think you everyone knows I've talked about this a hundred times I love the licensing model when you've got great IP so I think they're going to take some big swings on developing games and elves and then they're going to continue with the licensing model and they built the team to do both of those things which is incredibly smart and that way you don't have to go through what when you have a publicly traded company and your game slips like that kind of [ __ ] you and so they're going to you know reduce their Risk by doing licensing and internal development as their strategy I want to be crystal clear as far as I understand it and I I looked at this company really closely like maybe six months ago they do not have the internal cap ability of building Monopoly go they just don't

they just don't have a team like scopely in house that could actually build a game like that no matter how much they want it to happen they don't have that right and if that's not hard hard enough they certainly don't have the ability to build a Baler gate game like absolutely not right like that is a completely you know huge team with like deep experience of AAA development right they do not have those type of teams at Hasbro they have a team in North Carolina I don't know enough about them I looked into it and no okay okay I don't know that background I agree with you that if you want to be a top 10 leader in Mobile you know they should just continue to license their brands to experts in that space if they want to compete at the balers gate level they have a lot of work to do to staff up the internal teams to be able to compete at that level otherwise they're going to have double A games with their brands and again I I want to reiterate the fact is that before they were a toy company with

a digital business now they are digital company with a toy business like that is how their positioning themselves stop and so all this movement is for that all right the next one Netflix Taps epic games elain tasin as president of games he was part of the he was like I think he was like the part of the development team for epic where he kind of all oversaw the first party game development of both fortnite Lego fortnite rocket League Fall Guys Etc in this new role taskin will report directly to co-ceo Greg Peters thank the [ __ ] Gods it was not a tech bro or some McKenzie douche right they actually hired a gaming person that's good news that good news for all my friends that work at Netflix your $600,000 salaries are [ __ ] secure don't worry about it at least for the next couple years man you guys are good you guys are good I'm glad and for for once I'm glad I was wrong about something this this is all good you know

don't worry keep buying houses and paying for these fancy cars dude your salary is is safe all right generally speaking so I think that's really good news no every anybody other have comments no I listen they they elevated the position so Verdo was a VP and now the position as a president level reports to the co-ceo I think this is a signal like hey everybody actually we are serious about this I hope we we start to hear a strategy and we start to really understand what that means you know the signal is we're serious so tell us how you're serious instead of the hey we had some GTA downloads and we have 80 games in development let's hear some real strategy there's been a you know three years of throw in spaghetti at the wall let's get serious I can't wait and I I hope they reach out to Mishka and I hope they come to us when Elaine is ready to do his first kind of tour and talk about what he wants to to do I I will say as a side note

completely unrelated to some degree is that you know the EA exec BMI thing seems to be still in effect right all these leadership changes have some glaring glaring similarities right so Chris Cox definitely hits that Mark you know of that sub 2520 BMI that you need to be an executive in the business John height definitely getting there he may need some work and Elaine taskin for certain right Owen Mahoney Frank Jabo like all these guys have that EA BMI so public service announcement to anybody that wants to be at exact levels at these publicly traded companies you know put down the donuts and get on the treadmill because you got to be sub20 you know to get to even get like even consider these type of roles these days so I'm glad EA has made it stamp on the business of video games and exec level performance um anyway yeah sorry just just Public Service little little Fitness call out okay got

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20th and it's generated 5 million in Revenue Eric do you want to do the line or should I I'll do it I'll do it there there was a press release that they said that they did 50 million downloads so I just want to be clear on that right outside of China which I which obviously did not translate well to the sensor Tower data for some reason I don't know why but the regardless they've only done five million in [ __ ] Revenue can we please just stop making mobas for the West just stop just everyone just stop again I I I don't know how many times I'm going to say this just stop done yeah I mean I have talked about the cazum I think people know I I worked on uh wild drift League of Legends wild drift I was at Riot when we launched mobile games and know a lot about honor of Kings in China in China it is it is incredibly massive and I think the challenge is when wild Rift wasn't as successful in the west 10cent was like okay well [ __ ] you guys we think we can do it better and clearly it's still the the fact as Crush says that mobas don't

work outside of China that's not how the the story that I have been told is that Riot didn't want to put league on mobile because they didn't want to degrade the experience and so tenset said all right do whatever you want we're making this I didn't go as far back in time yes so way back in the way back machine tensent went to Riot and said please put league on mobile for China and Riot said no so honor of Kings was developed as a China only skue and that was immensely successful in China then Riot was like oh [ __ ] Mobile's a thing we should make wild Rift so then they made wild Rift and wild Rift was designed to go not only in China which it doesn't suck in China and then go out to the entire Market where it didn't necessarily work in the west then with that not working as well 10 cent said well [ __ ] you guys we're going to take honor of Kings Global which is what they have done and now we all know that mobas don't work in the west so that's that's the full like

thread of the story of why honor of Kings even launched outside where it was going to compete with wild drift does that make sense I I just I still don't really understand how Arena Valor fits into this which was the Rebrand of this which was launched in the west correct that was launched first before wild Rift and and I mean as someone working on I was like oh God I mean just stop you know yeah just stop yeah yeah speaking of starting college football 25 is back and it is topped PlayStation's best seller list days after its release so I guess it's out selling Madden then 2.21 million copies of the $100 Premium Edition have sold love it and this is the first time College athletes have been paid for their likeness to appear in game with EA offering 600 to over 11,000 players $600 that's not a lot actually it's like a couple textbooks Ubisoft today put out its earnings report for the first quarter of

the fiscal year 2025 and they are up they report that is because high level of Engagement from X defiant [ __ ] yeah 10 million players in the first two weeks uh X going to give it to you similarly they noted the success of rainbow six's sieg's Marketplace which blew my mind I didn't know they had done this I don't know if you guys had seen this but they launched a peer-to-peer Marketplace very similar to steam's Marketplace for Rainbow Six Siege items I logged into it today I had no idea this was out this is incredible news I think this you know this could be driven by the web 3 team they have in there now I don't think they're using web3 Tech but I assume that group influenced this but you can trade items that are cosmetic based on that Marketplace and Ubisoft will take 10% cut of the transaction fee so this is what a lot of web 3 companies are trying to do is to live off transaction fees and it's very difficult to do so if you want just like 10 million in monthly Revenue you need to do 100 million in market value at a 10% right transaction and so you just run this math and you're like there are very few games that can pull this off

but nonetheless it's super interesting to see this be developed they also attributed year n Season 1 Revenue as being the highest on record as well so it's not just the marketplace there was looks like some core things that happened in the game but I'm curious to see if they will roll this out to other games if they'll scale this Tech at all if this backs into web 3 strategy but I was really surprised to hear about this I just went under my radar H very tough to pull this off doesn't it mess with your economy it does huge things to your economy like huge implications okay you need a team to manage this I mean you're competing with people that you know already already have the you know the asset yourself you know you struggle around price discrimination so you can't offer one country Less in one country more in terms of hard currency because then the people will V in and buy the cheap one and Export it to the you know the high price country like there's a bunch of implications when you get into peer-to-peer marketplaces you get paid to earn economics if you can earn these items for free so now you might have a spike of people in India or the Philippines logging in like there's just a ton of consequences that come with the

marketplace and there is one more Marketplace I wanted to cover and is a web three game that is finally launching their three metaverse titles they're called Lum they raised a billion dollars oh boy or they had a market cap of a billion dollars and they've taken various forms of funding usually it's been token sales and they're one of the I say I would argue key projects to look at in terms of you know how web 3 is being developed and whether or not they're making progress and one of the things they do in their token is they give you dividends which is super illegal and I've always been curious how they pull this off but they're launching three of their web 3 games that are based on a common set of assets so we talk about interoperability and we talk a lot about these web 3 features they're at least building some part of it and and let's see how the games are let's see what the quality is I think one of them is like an autochess game they have an MMO one and they have like a meta collection game as well it's funny in the beginning of that intro you said metaverse I think you meant web 3 it's pretty funny oh I I think the metaverse the metaverse stuff gets thrown on quite bit in web 3 too oh interesting more

news Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is finally coming to game pass on July 24th you were just mentioning this part of the some of the FTC Shenanigans is interesting is we're we're finally seeing a lot of the acquisition titles come to Game Pass I don't know if this will do anything to ma probably not no no you think there's GNA be zero Eric none none oh interesting all right we should place a bet I mean I think we're all going to bet the same way so it's not really a bet but I I you can't say zero it's going to have impact but shortterm and not sustainable and not interesting and one last piece of news Monopoly go goes full circle as scop and Hasbro are launching a new Monopoly go board game based on the bo based on based on I mean this is great this is brilliant yeah as I said on LinkedIn you know a board game based upon a game based upon a board game it's very meta and very strange oh no it's brilliant I mean absolutely brilliant so one of the

things as an IP holder when you have a lensee who creates a version of your brand whether it be art or characters or gameplay the lur owns that and so they are able to take that interation and do whatever the [ __ ] they want with it so sculle is probably not going to get anything out of the revenue of that board game sale they will however get the halo effect get that board game bump exactly but what's interesting in the world of Licensing though is if you are the person who really helps to grow the license sometimes you may not be able to capitalize on that when the Lor goes and does other things with it so a little interesting licensing fact for you so what else we got first descendant only one other market update I'm continuing to track the first descendant in terms of PSU it's been you know on a downward decline as you would expect but usually for HD games that that kind of have this large large Spike there's a quick descent but this has decayed I would

argue at a slower rate let's see where it steadies out they peaked at around 250,000 CCU and they're down to about 150 but it's largely maintained when you look at it compared to other releases we looked at against the finals and multi verus I'm very curious to see how this one will perform in let's say three or six months from now and when you look at the player distribution a lot of the times this is estimated from reviews I'm not quite sure how video game insights is doing it the player mix from different regions is pretty healthy around 50% of the players are from Europe or North America and I expected to see more of a Chinese presence here but this is a pretty healthy mix I would argue for the long term of this game it's a pretty diverse Global audience all right that's all I got all right so here we're going to go into deeper into some topics Professor Crest has a whole evaluation on Matthew Ball's latest interview but Phil why don't you like tell us a little bit about what that interview was about what the content was before we we get the C Professor standing up and yelling at him

it's happening topics so Matthew ball is coming out with a new version of his metaverse book and as part of the press tour he got Tim Sweeney of course who's the founder and CE of epic games to do an interview as well as Neil Stevenson who is the bestselling author and coin the term metaverse from the bestseller book that he crafted called snow crash now now I didn't know this he's a co-founder of a blockchain startup and an AI storytelling platform called when when went air so he he had something to sell on this podcast and so there's there's no audio unfortunately so this is all in text it's been it's been transcribed and edited by Matthew ball and I think there's some very interesting quotes and I think the first one has always been what is the definition of a metaverse and so ball will get to this in his book and he does it by chapter 3 and so just to clarify what he when he talks about a metaverse Matthew ball when he defines it it is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real time rendered 3D virtual worlds and Environ ments which can be experienced synchronously and

persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence and with the continuity of data such as identity history entitlements objects Communications and payments and I think Tim Sweeney by the way is a brilliant individual in this interview he says things that you know have stuck with me already he says the word metaverse is like a stock price and that you know sometimes when something good comes out the price goes up when something bad comes out the price goes down but Tim Sweeney also mentions that when he's referring to metaverse he's talking about users going into a real-time 3D environment with their friends they're engaging in a variety of different experiences well I think that the point too that that Tim Sweeney is making is it doesn't have to be a VR world and that that's why he considers fortnite and actually Roblox and Minecraft and some others as metaverse experiences is that you know when you when you think back to the the OG game of Doom like that was the first kind of you felt like you're moving through a a 3D world even though you're on a 2d screen with a

mouse and keyboard and so I think that's where a lot of the where a lot of people kind of misconstrue their vision of the metaverse is that it had to be a thing where you strap a VR headset on well he he dunks on this and he's he's a fun CEO to watch and and to listen to he says well I think that particular version when he's referring to Facebook and meta's version of the metaverse with people putting on VR headsets and going to the office and working with their co-workers in their Silicon Valley chick art style that was just totally lame and that was never going to succeed wow love it Tim well you're right I mean he is right how anyone would have been able to know that like that was you know this is why consumer insights is a thing and I know not everyone is like you can't research everything but just ask people you know how they react to some of these experiences do you want to go every day and put a headset on and talk to you know people with no leg in a in a virtual environment [ __ ] no like we're

already talking to people on Zoom like why would that even have the what would be better about that so I think as tech people we sometimes forget that what what do humans how do humans behave and what is interesting to them in in terms of does it make it better for me to do that no and versus can the tech do that and is that magical and I think that's what happened to meta is that they got sucked into the the vision and the Tech versus the does somebody want to do this yeah but I think Matthew ball was the part of the reason that people started going down this absurd Direction you know like he got so caught up in the fervor of this nonsense that he put out this book that was completely obsede absurd that that the things that would never happen in in in a million years you know and so like anyway I think he was part of the Zeitgeist that got this metaverse turned to mean something that never was meant to mean you know so anyway but what I I

don't understand about Ball's writing sometimes is whether or not he's arguing that the metaverse is like a prediction that he think is going to come true or whether or not it's something he wants to come true I'm I'm never quite sure what this term is supposed to mean like does m like it's very hard for me to understand what he's trying to argue here which is which is why I feel like this conversation always becomes gobbly G and people end up saying well I mean is it roox I mean why isn't roox fit his exact definition that's always really confused me but I would say like he has falsifiable elements in his theory like the thing that I keep going back to and I think you might agree with this Eric is that they keep talking about this 3D aspect as being part of the metaverse that it's an interconnected 3D World and that's a really shitty ux to interface with so many different parts of the world like sometimes menus are easier or Sometimes using chat is easier and so if that's the case you can I mean the internet is the metaverse like I log into Discord I log into steam and so at that point you log into Facebook you log into Instagram yeah it's it's gobbly like this this means nothing and if you think it's a 3D world that's a really

shitty user input and that's I would argue a lot why VR stuff hasn't taken off I want menus give me menus I want Forks you know like give me real utensils that's why I think Tim Sweeney argues that the 3D immersive world is fortnite where you've got menu screens on a 2d screen but you know we we are faking the 3D experience because we've been able to do that through what you feel on 2D so I I would think Tim is actually arguing that fortnite is a metaverse I call them manyi metaverses because the other thing that they talk about that Matthew ball talks about is that there's one you know it's like the one metaverse to Ru them all where everyone's in this one decentralized experience and and just the way that capitalism works and the way that our economy works is that just is never going to happen the internet is not a utility it's not one thing and everyone is creating their bespoked walled Gardens and so it's just the economics aren't going to be there or the incentives aren't going to be there and this was my criticism like two years ago

when the first book came out right is that I think he got the basics right he got you know user generated content immersive experiences social interaction crossplatform accessibility those were like table Stakes back in 20122 you know like that that's that was already happening right but what he got wrong was all the expectations around it you know this ubiquitous metaverse of shared standards across multiple vendors like it's it was absurd you know persistent virtual worlds like connected worlds between multiple different vendors interoperability you know where assets and identities are going across different platforms I mean no like that's not happening decentralization Hold Up Hold there is a grain of Truth here like we have seen crossplay exist like that is something becoming closer like I can play as an Xbox user on fortnite with my friend who is in PlayStation my identity does not go across but they kind of have a super count but there there's something there I agree with you I don't think it's what he's referring to no it's really not

well it's like taking your fortnite gun into Halo right like so yes and you're right interoperability in terms of crossplatform play has been kind of the next level the cool thing and persistent World by the way is they make a joke actually in in the interview they call it a you know we would call this a Save State like you can save your [ __ ] game I that's pretty you know obvious which ironically fortnite didn't have for the longest time fortnite creative like that was a big issue oh okay fair point and and that's why they you know they're they're constantly progressing but yeah I don't think we're ever going to get to the point where you know you can take your fortnite gun into Minecraft or you go across games and I I would actually kind of argue like why do you even want to as a consumer and as a consumer Behavior you enter a lot of these experiences understanding what you're going to get from the experiences so Roblox I think might be probably the best example or maybe even you know fortnite with ufn is there are all these worlds that you can go and explore that

are built off of that one kind of tech foundation and experience in robloxs you can go into the Barbie Dreamhouse world or you can go into some world that some kid made and you know and it's a crappy experience and you can have that option again that's like one execution like all those assets are never going to be interoperable with anything else like it wouldn't even make sense for Roblox to do that like he just completely lost me with that part and then the third thing was that the decentralization thing you know so like the notion that they were going to have some ubiquitous world that was completely without centralized control like there's no control over this ecosystem that's just crazy talk right like all these creators can have complete tabul laasa and can build whatever the [ __ ] they want to build in this virtual world like that's never going to happen there's always going to be centralized control on these type of ecosystems like Roblox or fortnite or whatever right

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new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they'll interact with your app apps sler where your app's potential meets performance so on the topic of fortnite monetization there's another piece of the interview and I thought this was revealing from Tim he says there's no reason that this Creator economy 2.0 couldn't be extended into a Creator economy 3 .0 where any company could participate however they choose that is antithesis to what we had understood beforehand that fortnite was going to try to live off Cosmetics as the monetization that funnels Revenue to these individual Islands these creators and having more flexibility in how creators choose to monetize their Islands we've been talking about super important part of getting the flywheel going and I heard that their current Revenue model where they make attribution to different islands and they try to divide up the Cosmetic Revenue was the share that was going to to developers was decided very last minute by Tim before GDC so I'm also

sure like he can change his mind on things I think he he's a man of reason as well but I I think there's there's a bash atness about him that's that's really admiring so maybe maybe this is a turn of Direction too or maybe this he he always thought about it evolving in this way oh mishka's got a podcast out actually came out this week with two guys brilliant cast yeah both had like experience at EA and now they have like six or 10 person ufn Deb teams that are making games and playing in the space and I think you know both have had a little bit of success or you know are still trying to figure it out but I think in in the world of hey let's try some new things and like let's try to explore does that work it was great to know how it kind of works from a team that's doing that to take a step back too while listen I I'm a Sci-Fi nerd I love this type of talk and I think the challenge is is that when people are out there trying to express new ideas and trying to be

Visionaries they often don't have the idea like when I work with teams I often you know I'm like what about this or this I'm like please don't just take what I say because I am often never right that's probably fun for me to say on a podcast however I spark other people to come up with the thing because they have the expertise and the discipline to do that so I look at these type of things by Matthew ball or Stevenson and say okay what is it that we can pull from it to spark the next best idea because they probably don't have it right and is that how you look at these types of things or do you think people took this too much as like gospel and I'm going to follow this line for line I think a cottage industry formed around the term who used it to exploit it for natural resources called Venture Capital that's that's what oh my God I wish I had prepared this rant I mean like no I think I think he set the stage for something that was so absurd and that so much money was spent because the

fourth thing that he actually said that makes no [ __ ] sense was that the new economic Frontier where digital currencies and blockchain technologies will play significant roles enabling new forms of Commerce and value exchange right so he was basically suggesting that blockchain was going to be the center of this economy right like during the Heyday of all these Investments so he was part of the Ze guys of all these insane investments from venture capital and LPS that spent gajillions of dollars on complete [ __ ] [ __ ] right so no I mean I think he is somewhat responsible like making these predictions going out there on the road and like presenting at conferences and and he has some sole responsibilities and I think part of the reason that he's starting to use the word spatial internet is because he knows his definition of metaverse was ridiculous right from the Geto right he's rebranding yeah he's he's rebranding it right people need to think pragmatically about this stuff before you know all

these big a16z and Galaxy and [ __ ] Griffin all these guys are shelling out all their [ __ ] all this money on nonsense you know speaking of trend speaking of trains Trends there's an AI Tak in here from Sweeney he says I think generative AI will lead to dramatic productivity gains because the ease of creation of objects that will meet your specific needs also like all other technological improvements this will increase opportunities for creators and employment Industries opportunities in the industry as a whole love it love it Tim like he gets it like this is the stock Economist take like AI is going to make people more productive we know when people become more productive wages increase that's the long run correlation we've seen forever this is one of the main determin of wages is increases in productivity and if you lower the price of making content you get a lot more of it this is an awesome outcome I'm really excited about this we're going to get more content we're going to get more opportunities we're going to get more games and productivity is going to rise

you don't hear these takes coming out a lot and I actually agree with that I I I think the fundamental problem and I I did listen to the podcast with the the guys who were doing ufn stuff um including you know the founder of Halo or Bungie I mean but the biggest challenge that they have is that they don't have alternative monetization models within ufn it's like a pure cosmetic Economy based upon engagement right that can't scale like the more I think about it the more I talk to people about it like that is absurd assumption that you can scale cosmetic economies even with AI and with AI building stuff because it then becomes completely commoditized at the end of the day so people if they're going to basically build successful games on ufn they need to be the ability to do what you do in roadblock which is create your own type of monetization method and that seems to be not part of the plan for U hold on we just just missed what we talked about earlier he talks about Creator economy 3.0 I know I don't think the Creator economy 3.0 is going to include like gotcha loot boxes more

aggressive forms and exploitive forms of monetization that we but it's just about tools though right it's just about giving developers those tools they don't need to go out and say that developers can do that I don't think they'll be implemented you think they won't even allow it no like randomization mechanics wow that would be interesting way to paint robloxs into a PR Corner they haven't gotten enough Flack I would argue for a lot of different things oh my God Ro is on the dude this this paa [ __ ] is going on Roblox right he's like own problems yeah I saw an article I didn't get a chance to read the whole thing that there were like tens of thousands of complaints for of children getting harassed by disgusting old men or something yeah anyway that's a that side note that's a whole a whole other thing all right are you ready to uh close out on that one anything else I just want to summarize this quickly because I do think Matthew ball does an exceptional job of articulating the history of gaming and where it's come

from and where we are I think that's why the book was really good I said that before you know one of the few books I've actually read in the last 10 years so anyway but the notion that with persistent roles with interoperability and decentralization using blockchain as a significant role was Preposterous then and it's even more Preposterous now right so that was at the Crux of what he thought that this new metaverse would be and I just I just just think there's way too much competition for consumers attention and building some kind of centralized metaverse ubiquitous is just obscene and absurd right it's just never going to happen so I don't know what the new book's all about I I do know that he's like you know kind of redefining spacial internet versus metaverse which you know [ __ ] I don't know what that even means but I I doubt I doubt he's spending any time apologizing for his his mistakes the first time so I don't know why he would be a what what's the point of the new book but besides actually the the last two years of history of how he was

wrong that let let's read it we can do a little book club we do a little do up I'm sure AI is in it yeah yeah I'm surprised AI is not on the title somewhere right yeah he's not going to be his contemporary with the VC community and doing his like you know speech tour right but anyway the first book is definitely worth to read if you want to like understand the history of the gaming space he's good at that all right so the next article we wanted to go into is one of my favorite newsletters that I get if you just spell it it's super Juiced but actually how you say his name is yast van drunen so he is an NYU professor and if you don't get that newsletter you should and this topic is one that I can't wait to talk about digital toys at play so Phil can you can you take us through some of the key points yeah just briefly the article talks about the fact that digital spaces have become the new social playground and the shift isn't merely about translating physical toys or media franchises into digital formats instead

it's about creating immersive interactive experiences that allow fans to live within their favorite branded worlds and he has two great examples or excuse me two great tables in the piece one of them is a rank of consumer spending on licensed toy media and entertainment IP and gaming and we get to see how much revenue each of these license ores brings in in terms of their revenue on licensing for toys media and entertainment gaming I or entertainment IP and gaming and number one is Hasbro and their best performing IP is of course Monopoly go he is estimating these himself but I was surprised to see that Monopoly Go I mean it's just so overwhelmingly successful that Hasbro is by far in a way the number one licensor and Disney is actually number two I mean we're taking a dunk on Disney but they're they're number two here 1.7 billion yeah last week last week we Ted talked about Disney but Disney core IP and I specifically excluded Marvel and

Spider-Man and Star Wars which are the bulk of their Gaming revenue comes from those and and that listen that that makes total sense right it aligns with the core consumer I think what we were talking about I can't believe I forgot susum in that whole analogy was they they have a more difficult time with the more casual female driven younger audience my point was that most of the core IP goes too young for it to be kind of mly successful in games there's also another table that talks about the top 15 toin entertainment franchises based on Gaming revenue and of course Monopoly is the number one driven almost entirely by Monopoly go number two is Harry Potter and I assume this was driven by Legacy yeah the by HD SK last year HD skew although Harry Potter has I think two or three mobile games that aren't awful but the number was from the HD game the thing that surprises me most about going through this list is how small the

revenue is like a lot of these these gaming franchises when you summon them all up is are not generating a lot of Revenue like the top of the market is Monopoly and that's just because of Monopoly go yeah for sure Harry Potter is driven is seasonal by one HD game Pokemon is all Pokemon go Dragon Ball is interesting that's probably a 50-50 mix of the HD games the HD fighting games and some mobile games D and D is probably one time boulders gate yep Spider-Man is probably one time one piece I'm interest to see how one piece generates Revenue Star Wars is Galaxy of Heroes I'm just surprised like this this list in terms of the revenue they generate per year I mean it it declines rather rapidly like Snap is 12 12 oh Marvel snap yeah like I mean if if that's even getting ranked well they didn't add so contest of Champions is Marvel snap Strike Force is Marvel so there's three Marvel titles on there if you group those all together yeah they they should be grouped to be honest with

you no got it so the thing that I loved about the topic of this article is is you know what I talk about all the time it's the intersection of Ip toys games and social spaces and immersive experiences so for the two of you who have never heard me talk on this podcast I have half of my career wasin the toy industry at hro and Mattel where I did action figure marketing and made toys and then I did toy licensing at Disney the other half was obviously in making licensed and unlicensed games so licensed games were Hasbro I made hundred not hundreds tens of Monopoly games WWE Walking Dead and then non-licensed games like league and TFT and so I've seen all of this from all of the different perspectives but in the way back machine why I left the toy industry and this goes back to what we're talking about earlier with Hasbro is you know back in the early 2000s around 2006 I was like oh my God I grew up loving games and kids were were leaving Toys much earlier in life than

ever before so I used to make action figures targeting like an 8 to 10 year old boy and even in the early 2000s it was becoming like a four to five-year-old boy and just going down and down and down because that the idea of that plastic toy just wasn't as attractive as you know what you see in these you know mobile games and and what's funny is even back then there was no such thing as a mobile game I was only competing with you know like DS and Wii and and 360 and now you've got you know it's a thousand times worse 80% of kids watch YouTube 94% of kids and this is kids under 12 play games well over 60% of those kids so almost every kid plays a game 60% plus of those kids play on a mobile or tablet the the interesting stat that I saw is only 25% of kids go to a movie theater anymore so we used to think that movies drive an interest in content or IP and you know that it's just not the case anymore so

why on Earth would a kid want a little plastic thing and their imagination when they can get a dopa hit from a free game on a tablet and that's what you know the toy industry is competing with these days how do they get their new brands and their new IPS in front of a kid and so you know yast kind of attempted to answer that with what Phil talked about earlier which is about creating immersive interactive experiences allow fans to live within their favorite branded world and having places where they can have self-expression a shared experience with their friend and hang out so let me talk about my silly marketing attempt to Brand what I call the Shelf to screen core Loop and what I think if you really still want to engage with a toy product and a video game product and grow your brand this is what you have to do so imagine you're creating an action figure or a doll or some new brand that has a plastic thing and what you can do is put put a visually distinct theme and like a mission on it so it's not just Barbie

but it's you know Barbie who's going to space or it's not just you know an action figure Like a Star Wars guy or a Batman guy or any other character but it's like they have a specific theme that makes them differentiated so then you know imagine you go to the shelf and you get the toy and you open the toy you scan a QR code and it takes you to this free app and in that app you get a checklist and you get videos and you get your mini games all of which tell you how to take that toy and really deepen that experience with that play pattern so you in a sense are using digital to tell the kid how to play Don't isn't this the Nintendo thing we have we have the Disney Infinity how isn't this toys to life stuff or isn't this the has already been played out a million different times so it's not toys to life so correct and and this isn't new correct so what what's different is you are using this to teach people and teach kids why they should should care about the plastic object you're telling me that's not the revenue generating Center

anymore so I remember you were talking on an earlier cast you said most of the people who buy toys are actually adults the age has shifted and you know it' be interesting to see whether or not the nominal amount of Revenue that's being spent on digital toys is decreasing but when you describe this article to me everything is about the game right that's the digital experience that's the that's the primary way that they interact with the IP or with the brand so like why would you want to drive people back to the thing that's making less and less Revenue like the you want the toys to go to the games right I mean this is similar to what we talking about Hasbro yes so this is why I call it the Shelf to screen loop loop because if you can drive people to the game and in the game so imagine then you take this a step further and then you collaborate with brawl stars or stumble guys or Minecraft or you have game fam make a Roblox experience of this that becomes a marketing tool where kids learn about this IP they learn about these missions they want to play with the toy they play with the toy they get another toy then they go back to the game and so it becomes this Loop in a marketing tool

where you've got in in a sense if you partner with brawl Stars that's 50 million da in most cases that a game company actually can make some money off of they can not the game company but the IP holder can actually make a REV share if they put that into their their game and create this marketing Loop everyone makes a little bit of money off of that the kids get to deepen their IP with that so the example that I use is so brawl Stars again so back in April and May they did a deal with Godzilla so there was a Godzilla movie so trans media Phil your favorite thing ever so with that brawl Stars event which was actually very successful for brawl Stars I just saw JK did a whole like episode going deep into the specific event so if the game company can take the IP and that kind of mission and leverage it into something cool for the game what also happens is as the kids are playing with that event they get interested in these characters they go back to the shelf so in May the number one and two

toy industry items sales for Action Figures were Godzilla and so what's crazy is in the world of the toy industry Godzilla has never been a top selling action figure item ever and so is it coincidence I don't have the exact one toone attribution data to prove this however you can say if 50 million da had a chance to experience Godzilla and then Godzilla toy sales in that month were the best ever because it's never been driven by a movie in the past is this idea of a shelf to screen Loop actually coming true and so this is I'm going to trade market but this is my new hypothesis of how you can be successful in creating this entire experience it's not just plastic it's not just game but it's an immersive experience that takes you all the way through it am I crazy yes I think you're you're absolutely crazy so here here's the thing though if this is true and if you're if you're thinking about brawl Star as a distribution channel for your IP your Hasbro IP your

Godzilla IP why would you just pay supercell why shouldn't supercell just auction off that space or if you're an IP holder pay them because you're trying to get the upside on the toy Revenue no no no no why why not why aren't people bidding this down like if this is a marketing play for you and super celles providing a benefit to you you should lower your price you shouldn't charge for that I want more of that like I want to license my IP to everyone it's a marketing benefit for them as well they had success by taking the IP and creating an experience it is a win-win so the my point is that it's a win-win because the game the game company gets an IP they get to do something really cool and fun for their consumers in it it draws them in it's a UA acquisition tool that lowers the cost of cpis because they can go and Market you know the fact that this now the game company has to make something cool out of it you can't label slap I mean that's why we are seeing all of these collaborations happen in inside of all of these games is that fans and players

are really enjoying this what we're also seeing is that it can benefit people outside of the game experience the IP holder who can take that and by the way if you create this like Mission and this theme you can go and put it on t-shirts you can go and put it on other cpg products cpg is cons consumer package Goods so imagine you can get bedding you can get stationer you can get you know you know shoes for the kid to engage in this so what it does is allows IP holders and all of their lenses to rise in the the amount of marketing awareness and the sales that they get by doing that and everyone benefits I'm just going to leave the trans media thesis alone I'm just going to leave it alone for this episode it's not necessarily trans media in the sense that it is how you Market your IP and in today's New World by leveraging these immersive experiences by tapping into places that attract more people than doing a TV commercial on Cartoon Network and and that makes sense to me the only the only

thing I'm really trying to argue for here is I think there's a large Contracting space in between the fee that is paid to the lens or having the IP distributed within this particular game I'm not quite sure that the economic power is in the IP holder hand I actually think the people who own these distribution channels like fortnite and brawlstar that have these 50 million diu that are going to these platforms you can call them platforms every single day I think they have a lot of economic power and that economic power should be displayed in how these Agreements are made and I think they should get a higher share of Revenue or they should get the IP for free because it's basically just featuring for them so you don't think they paid Godzilla any amount of money for this they did I mean I I certainly know this by having done this in the past is that there is a REV share agreement because you can't just put any IP into your game and not expect to pay for that IP but we were just talking about that a Tesla cyber truck right like this is a great example the Tesla cyber truck is now going to be in fortnite I have a hard time imagining

that epic games paid Elon Musk some amount of money for that I think that's a marketing you think they paid for that I think Elon did it for free I don't think they paid a nickel for the [ __ ] cybertruck yeah think emotional vehicle I think it goes the other way well they absolutely pay they absolutely pay something in fact it's you know for fortnite I imag imine it would be you know you can do flat fee and because they work with everyone they could say we pay x no matter who you are we pay X so that they don't have to go and negotiate every single license fortnite can probably command that and say you're going to get X other games give percentages of IAP some of them now include percentages of AD Revenue plus I AP like stumble guys right some guys they have to figure out some sort of Engagement model because it's mostly an ad driven game braw stars is probably a percentage of Ip they're differentiated models but there is no way that an IP

holder would put something inside of a game and pay for that experience today because that's not how licensing works I mean this is exactly what they do on Roblox I don't think that's true at all like this is exactly the Barbie Dreamhouse example he goes through like that that is paying they are paying to have branded experiences on Roblox right that so that is different that's going the other way they're providing a benefit to Roblox they're paying for Roblox engagement to go up Roblox won that deal yeah I don't know how Roblox has done that because what happens is you have to pay somebody to create the experience so the money isn't going to Roblox for just a licensing deal the money is going to company to build an experience to put inside of Roblox I'm just saying Roblox gets Barbie Roblox gets Gucci Roblox get all these Brands and they don't pay a single dime and they they properly exploit the power of their platform because they want to get to these kids vans all these Grand you about them every other week they want to get to this this great they built the engine this is how the engine should uh

that topic for next week all right all right see you next week every guys 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 of 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 fun content creators thanks for listening [Music]