TWiG #296: THE RETURN OF LONG LOST HOST + Black Myth Wukong Goes Ape Shit and Stormgate Flops

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and then a little deeper dive into nuu so that's what we have up and a lot of game talk a lot of game talk so hi I'm Jen donaho strategic marketing consultant at beta hat and J Inferno and today we have Philip black game Economist at game Economist Consulting let's let's cook we got a bunch of [ __ ] on tap today it's a big week Eric Crest principal at gossomer Consulting Group yo yo yo and everyone drum roll please thank you thank you Adam Telfer the OG twig podcaster is coming back hey hey how's it going wo life he's so excited yeah yeah have not had make coffee this morning so yeah I'm slow all right first of all he's he's not OG oh he was a second Stringer second string for sure definitely on the bench while JK and Eric were definitely the original the original but the

quality level of the podcast is up at least 30 or 40% with him involved thanks for quantifying that I appreciate yeah so sorry I forgot to do your intro which is X flash developer xea x wuga xwb x buong what a ro Gallery that's the news yeah yeah I actually don't think most people know what I my background I don't think I even did an intro on the podcast before but the weird thing is yeah was in the mid 2000s I was a flash developer that's how I got my start as in an indie flash developer on new grounds and e-bombs world that's how you get your start in the games industry and now you've been tossed around by every publisher in the Free World it seems thrown around thrown to the Wolves it was good it's good can you say where you're at now no I will in the full okay so just to keep everyone in suspense and I'm sure Phil will just poke at it like try to slip in little cues throughout this entire episode yeah well we all we all know that he did go to Bungie and he

was locked to a radiator in the basement for the last few years unable to do any type of podcasting for the fear of the pr henchman there so hopefully with the new spot he'll be uh less restricted yeah now that you're free what's the hottest take you've had listening to the cast what you got on what you got on tap what have you been holding in internalizing Hell divers the finals you'll hear it through the you'll hear it through the episodes no no we're we're covering stuff like newo we're talking about black myth and I think we're talking about things like stormgate so yeah there's a ton of learnings from PC console and I have like one built-in burning which is just how live Services launch on PC console and like how highly risky it is versus what we have on mobile and just since you're coming back you're a product guy right or a game design like what's your discipline like my background was programming but like I went through economy design and then was product lead for a while let's go with product yeah let's say product stuff in the court balance is changing yeah boy pack there's two of you against cres and I

all right we're going to have to fight it'll be fun all right so Phil you have some Shilling you want to do yeah last week Mish and I were at the play Ventures Summit and they also gave me sweet swag they gave me this hat Awesome event incredible job by the play Ventures team deru showed up if you don't know deru Sandstorm I'm sure yeah it was great it was great I wish the fins I wish their hips would move a little bit more but that was [ __ ] fantastic people are taking selfies with him he's finished he's finished it's like what are you doing on a Wednesday night come hang out and DJ for us we also did sauna of course and the thing I love about the fins is it's not a sauna it's not the sauna you just do SAA I feel like it has like a capital S it's an institution that was a bunch of fun the play Venture staff was fantastic they spent a lot of time trying to connect their portfolio companies together I got to talk to a bunch of the portfolio companies they were working the floors they're out there earning that paycheck earning that brand name connecting people together that was really cool to see the other thing I was encouraged by is I've always wanted to put a Digital Chocolate podcast together

if you're not familiar with Digital Chocolate this was like the PayPal Mafia of games which very few people have talked about and I got a bunch of inside info about this I think I talked to like five 5x Digital Chocolate employees but roio supercell like all these companies have Roots back to Digital Chocolate trip Hawkins of course there's so many cool story lines I would love to cover this in the future and I would say just coming out of the talks and talking to a bunch of different companies same thing we've been talking about this podcast we talked about a couple episodes ago distribution distribution distribution every on is trying to figure out the angle of attack to get their games into the hands of players whether that be messaging apps which we haven't talked a lot about on telegram whether that be brand marketing you know thinking about hey how can you create really high quality narrative and story web 3 web 3 always hangs around and then hey how could we build more Innovative ad platforms so like the theme is the same distribution distribution distribution dude I've been going deep into these rewards programs you know offerall 2.0 missplay and all these other ones and that's really fascinating space I think

it's definitely something well that's kind of up and coming there's also the Epic store that just launched actually in the US I was able to I have a pixel so I downloaded the the Epic store on my on my pixel and was going to play fall guys but it took like 15 minutes to download so of course I never opened it because you know you set it aside and you forget but that's coming up now and who knows what's what's going to happen there with the what does Tim say 15 Steps that you have to to go through to download these things I'm not sure it's quite that bad although I didn't obviously I couldn't do it on my iOS cuz I'm US based so you can download the Epic store on iOS in Europe I think the main storyline there is honestly what it does to fortnite diu numbers like again we talk about it fortnite needs to grow it is it is desperate to grow and before they yanked It Mobile was doing a pretty significant portion of Dau for fortnite and so by yanking this Tim really hampered fortnite's ability to compete in the ugc wars and and this is another

moment for them to see if they can't you know gain back some territory got it so one week since we've had a correction nothing to correct everybody super smart perfect perfect absolutely perfect oh it's Unique for us okay so let's go into a couple headlines uh so Gamescom is going on right now Mishka is there and here is what I'm taking away from the opening night live so Jeff key now he's just the Ambassador for games at all of these different events so there's summer game Fest Opening Night Live and then the game awards which happens so Crest World of Warcraft the war within will have Early Access beta in two days are you like going to see your family when this opens up no it's early access in two days like it's the actual launch in two days for Early Access not beta but yes dude I've cleared the decks I'm uh I will not be reachable don't even bother talk calling me it has been like crack addict type [ __ ] I have like eight level

like 70 characters all decked out in the best gear and I'm ready and of course all I'm going to do is play one of them so it's like I don't know what I was thinking I just got as I said I got really into it so um yeah no I'm really excited looks looks like it's gonna be a good expansion all right let's see Borderlands 4 had this announcement trailer that was kind of weird it didn't feel like Borderlands to me and then also a lot of people were in our slack Channel were talking about how there was apparent lack of marketing sites so typically you know when you spend all the money to get on to these events you want to at least have a place for players to go as a call to action and I think the call to action on the trailer was go wish list now and apparently at the time the steam page wasn't up in time for it to collect those wish lists so a little bit of a marketing fail but one thing that was interesting when I checked Google Trends in the US it was a top 10 trending topic JLo of course wins out and had 10x more searches than that okay just just to be clear Randy Pitchford is notorious for over

promising and under delivering the chance of this thing coming out next year in 2025 is slim to none just to be clear like and particularly when they come out with this kind of marketing with no marketing basically they don't even have a splash page or website I mean some scen right it's actually helping take two stock which is good for me generally but like because I'm bullish on take two but it's like yeah I I'll believe it when I see it how about that got it Marvel Rivals is going to launch December 6 so I think it's a little earlier than anticipated ginin is coming to Xbox on November 20th is this the first of the mihoyo games on Xbox like I think they're on Playstation all of them okay is the first one yep yeah who cares honestly not Material Microsoft's way too slow on this [ __ ] right no for sure anything else from Opening Night Live that you guys thought was

interesting that I mean that that was my take I mean there's a ton of stuff but the other one was the Indiana Jones thing right that they announced that it would be coming to PlayStation 5 I think about four months after launch so obviously we've already covered things like the crossplatform strategy for Microsoft but now that that finalizes it all those rumors were were true oh I didn't even see that that's yep that's horrific absolutely horrific really yeah yeah so gamescon is a little bit of a disappointment this year because the biggest Platforms in Europe are not there right so if Nintendo and Sony are not at gamescon like those are the platforms that matter right so it's like seemingly going the way of e3 except that I think Gamescom is a better like consumer show but it's a it's a bad bad look that only Xbox is there and they have absolutely zero share in in Europe Continental Europe so it's like why is even Xbox even there you know so they're doing their best I suppose I guess

they're trying yeah they have a bunch of streams I think I saw the next 3 days they have like streams every day or something like that I don't know I don't know there's like I feel like there's a bunch of [ __ ] that got announced like uh king of meat which is a game I worked on from Amazon game studios finally got announced really excited for them to knock it out of the park was it enoy this is like the South Korean Sims Challenger we've been following Eric for a little bit that got a new trailer I'm really excited to see where that shows up that looks utterly ridiculous I don't know I I felt like there was quite a bit Borderlands we just talked about Call of Duty showed up Call of Duty 6 I mean these are huge titles Goat Simulator remastered I mean wait are you you're joking talking about large titles here right like talking about enoy wait what the [ __ ] are we talking Amazon like the eth MMO from Amazon you can't say that [ __ ] with the straight face Phil no I was like I couldn't tell I'm like he's joking right saying this all right so we'll get more into games later including black myth which actually had a pretty cool trailer as well so just a quick ad update something

was really interesting about Roblox that came out they just launched search ads so of course this is only for 13 plus and this launch last week on August 14th so the idea of this it's similar to Google search or ASA Apple search ads so search ads currently work for exact match versus a broad match so which means that they're going to show you ads for your short terms that have the exact spelling as the keyword that you bid on so you have to be like pretty particular so the ad system is going to prioritize ads that are the most compelling and relevant for a user and their search query this is likely a big game Cher for discovery on Roblox so Discovery is a pain in the ass like it's usually top charts this is the first time that you're going to be able to really kind of game the system in terms of search but Phil you don't agree no I kind of poo this uh search is just not a big part of Roblox Discovery there just isn't a lot of intent that's usually not players discover games on the platform

and I had a trusted source to suggest to me that it's really only around 5% of visits are from searches with the remaining from what your friends are playing and the algorithm so it doesn't look like this type of feature has like a lot of Leverage I'm still waiting to see how the in World portals perform so if you remember they announced an ad unit where if you're in a particular playground or experience you can go through a portal that connects to another experience in the 3D world that to me is a really interesting ad unit and I'd love to hear more about how that's performing but I don't think search is going to get them over the hump or solve some of the acquisition problems on the platform okay I think it's a long-term bet but well we'll see so staying on the ads train apps flyer has also a new free report there were like so many reports this last week so in their report they actually contradicted the singular report on cpis and I covered that last week so from App Flyers cpis jumped almost 50% on Android as iOS saw a 17%

drop so singular actually actually had a little bit of the reverse on that ironically so from q123 to q224 iOS CPI dropped significantly signaling increased market efficiency and improved ad targeting iOS CPI was still three and a half times higher than Android on average their Global averages were actually a lot higher than what singular had so it might just be the countries that they're using so iOS was you know $546 to Androids 217 and that's a global average across all genres obviously as you break out genres you get into much different prices so and the report doesn't break that out yeah I ironically I've been using both these guys to help me out kind of triangulate this for a client and and I I didn't see much differences between them but my cuts were a little bit more granular so I think we're probably comparing apples to oranges I I think that's the challenge is as a highle takeaway when they aggregate

everything it it comes out a little bit differently and then when you get in the weeds when you go look at different genres in different countries I think that's where it kind of evens out yeah you just got to tier one English countries that's the combin that's what matters and you got to really like just focus on those that that's what my yeah I know they give me you know the report has Global averages which is yeah Global averages are yeah I know I know and and I just try to go for Trends but but I know that in the apps flyer online report you can I think select by country which was more than the singular report I think just had Global so check out the Apper one okay let's go to investments in m&a Gerard Griffin is joining supercell as a new CFO that's kind of a big news because Gerard has been I mean he was at EA when I was there he's been here around forever and he was the CFO of Zinga for a while you know made his gajillions right at Zinga and now is

moving over to supercell friend of the cast Mr canterman from Joe Kims pixels and profit which I listen to all the time it's really good they are they seem to be up to something yeah it is pretty good like pixeles and profit in particular those guys are all really really [ __ ] smart but given his experience they basically are saying the same thing I am given his experience is like it seems very likely that they're on the path of doing an IPO prep because that's why you hire someone like right because there's no reason for Gerard to go to another another private company unless they're going public because he's too big for that you know certainly you don't hire him if you're going to get sold which has been somewhat rumored by people like Mishka yeah you don't need a publicly traded CFO to get sold like any schmuck can do that so anyway looks like something's going on something's going on at supercell interesting let's keep an eye on that yeah there's also rorate riot they Consolidated publishing in Esports

under the Esports leader John NM who is promoted to president they've introduced two new Studios to oversee television film and development projects one studio will focus on animation the other will do live action guy named Brian Wright that's interesting I have no real insights into what's happening over at Riot but yeah I mean anybody got anything on that you know with the success of Arcane which actually I think arcane what success they just announced that the second season is the last season cuz it's so expensive it's so expensive yeah exactly the point don't get well okay all right let me define success wait wait wait wait hold on hold on hold on we just said last week trans media is dead right border but Borderlands and like it's over we don't need to talk about it anymore reach through the the video and smack you in the head all right I can't actually I can't say those things anymore no it's not dead so the when I say success of Arcane it was critically a claim players

love it it is not a I would probably say it's not a financial success it is it's forti is the animation studio and it's insanely insanely expensive so while it is lovely for the brand and the Halo and all of those things you just cannot pour that money into it that's my guess as to why it's going to end at season 2 and then clearly they're creating two new business units live action and animation to do more of this probably in a more business minded and profitable way so I think they are seeing that this can help I mean listen they have to figure out the League of Legends audience is aging they got to figure out how they attract new people and perhaps one of the ways they looking to do is through entertainment I don't know are you even listening to yourself did you just hear what you just said you said they're discontinuing this game because it's the show too expensive and unprofitable and not leading to more Revenue for the franchise right so it's

like why would you keep doing that right why would you keep banging your head against the wall with transmedia [ __ ] no it's if it's too expensive and it's not doing enough to justify its existence in terms of making the game itself more profitable right you can make media and trans media profitable if you do it and and actually spend the right amount of money on it they basically were creating the highest quality animation as a series and and just giving it to Netflix because quality has always mattered to Riot above everything else do you mean just like straight licensing and just watching for uplift in your kpis based on that like Fort or like follow why was Riot spending money on a TV show that benefited Netflix that was the way that they thought back then their marketing trailers were millions and millions of dollars they are Love Letters to the players they had so much money they didn't care now they're getting to the

point where they're like oh [ __ ] we actually have to like pay attention to how much we're spending okay you're killing me here Jen you're killing me here because you're basically ex you're proving exactly what I've been saying all along like if you have to spend gajillions of dollars on [ __ ] [ __ ] that is beautiful and amazing but it doesn't do anything for your franchise how does that make it work it doesn't work it doesn't work I'm telling you and now you're pulling it back and you're GNA create a bunch of [ __ ] like just what Adam said [ __ ] license this [ __ ] out to people that know what they're doing and let them deal with the p&l right then maybe you can give some overhang but building the [ __ ] out yourself makes no [ __ ] sense at all I am just explaining to you where where Riot was coming from you're justifying it no no you're not explaining you're justifying it's driving me insane I want I want I want I'm gonna scream in a minute stop dude it's a stupid stupid waste of money because it didn't help the franchise to justify it period we need like a

trans media Coliseum just a battle out specific podcast on trans media but yeah this this again will just spiral for another that franchise the trans game Pet we can ballot out there in Nevada ET Atari ET yes let's do it let's start talking about games there has been an announcement that Age of Empires mobile is launching globally on October 17th now normally I wouldn't cover this because it's not significant enough but the thing is this is from Timmy Timmy was actually on this and I'm been trying to figure out what this game is it has only had about a month in soft launch in the Philippines it is forx this is not RTS we're not going back to command and Conquer thesis the other thing that's really interesting is that 10cent via level infinite which is one of their other Studios is also working on a 4X Command and Conquer game called Command and Conquer Legions this is interesting I'm not quite sure what they see in these IPS they're HD IPS I feel like hdp have really struggled on mobile to get

organic traffic I think that was really the story of command and conqueror RTS I'm not quite sure what they see here other than Forex is really hot as we were talking about last week and the week beforeand Forex is really hot so I guess this is maybe just more coal into that fire that's my bet is it just how do we take any IP and give us any leverage in the forx space yep that makes sense that's it but yeah the problem with that though is that the the Age of Empires people just [ __ ] hate the mechanics associated with like forx games on mobile you know it's like kind of a mismatch it's more about finding your Niche and sticking with it right like finding that small group of players that you can be able to stick with for a while looking at the broader audience who has ever played Age of Empire is not the predictor for this yeah so an update on zenist Zone zero so it's been a little while since this game launched uh Ethan challenged me a little beforehand when I had some depression in my voice talking about the game's numbers despite

the fact that on a nominal basis it's grossed quite a bit of money but when we start to look at the canalization questions and start to look at what zenet zone zero has done to mihoyo's portfolio you know about two months after launch it's not that impressive it is only around 11% of Da portfolio Dau is coming from this title and when we abstract it out a little bit and we look at total portfolio da we blend all these things together it only looks like there was a very small bump during zenis Zone Zero's launch and that it's returned to its Baseline so it looks like this is not additive to mihoyo's portfolio which is troubling for a game that seems to have cost so much money so so so much money and is rumored to have a very large marketing budget similar to honai Star Rail and genin impact yeah I just looked at T1 you know channeling cruss who's always is like hey I only care about that I don't know if you did T1 or worldwide but basically I saw the same thing right mihoyo doesn't appear to be

doing better you know when they just had two games and so this is the numbers kind of stacking purple you know is ginin I think and green is is endless Zone zero the thing that I noticed that was a little bit interesting is on the next chart like I pulled them apart and and just showed them kind of separately and I do think they they do something smart which is that they stagger any of the updates right so Peaks come from any update that they do and between the three games games they must be on some sort of like death march to make sure that any update doesn't launch within the close window to the other game and so you can start to see like the multiple Peaks that are coming once all three games are are live but all of the Peaks are smaller now than they were in the past and so to me that says cannibalization is the thing it says you know are they finally hitting a wall with their strategy their strategy is hey we have the same overarching meta system the way that Goa works the way that the meta system works and we're

changing a little bit about the game play whether it's you know full Squad battle or some of the other features that they have have they have hit a limit what do you guys think this is like a case study for business school for calization like it is crazy it's like a poster child it's not great right I I don't think it's so weird because it's hitting a different genre too Eric like I thought this would move a little bit away from the other mechanic one was turnbas one was real time yeah and you know what the only data point that's really contradicting my whole kind of thesis on this is the the one that we were looking at before where they it showed that the user base actually doubled with the second game and now I'm starting to really question whether that's true because it feels like it's the same [ __ ] players going from one game to the other it doesn't seem like they're expanding the universe the player base at all even though the data suggests otherwise so the data is saying that the da is actually stacking with this but the revenue is not for the second game yes right yeah so like in theory they've grown the audience but

the population is just not spending as much cuz there is other things that can drive cannibalization looks including things like diverting marketing spend and diverting resources right you have the same marketing budget chasing three games instead of two so like you know there's there's a counterfactual that each one each one would have declined it's compensating differentials look at me just like throwing crazy [ __ ] into this PO well it just incredibly I I don't think we really know based on the the surface level data we can get from from sensor Tower but like it is concerning as a portfolio that you go from two to three and you hit the same amount of Revenue especially given the new game is pretty substantially different than the previous two yeah again it feels like the audience is moving from one to the other and not expanding the audience so what I was thinking about like is that maybe they need to actually build a game with licens to attract a broader audience

right because it is these are relatively small download numbers particularly in tier one English countries we covered this I think a couple weeks ago that they've applied for a license for an animal crossing type game as their next iteration so that is going to be their biggest separation from these kind of combat Focus RPGs and that one I'd bet big on I think they've got stuff up their sleeve my whole premise here is that the mechanic itself that they are building is actually perfect for mobile like it is really really welld designed like collection mechanics upgrade Evo like that's like [ __ ] gold you know do you know what they're doing on PC PC console is that a significant portion I was just going to bring that up which is PC and console aren't featured here right this is just mobile I know I've heard specifically that the PlayStation in particular is terrible like it's just it's not even it's not meaningful but my information is really old so if anybody knows let me know okay and I don't know anything about PC okay well what else we got AFK Journey yes so AFK Journey remember we were covering it when it launched in the

United States almost a couple months ago back in April but it had not launched in China it's finally launched in China so we have a chance to check back in on how this game is doing from developer Lilith who has actually been killing it really in forx more than anything else and so when you look at the daily active users for the China launch and this was at the beginning of August it hit a peak da according to sensor Tower estimates and again just to just to clarify here I'm only looking at iOS and I'm only looking at us and China here for comparisons just because it's hard to track Android in China and it's much easier to do iOS because it runs through a single App Store so if we just look at iOS between the United States and China in China it hit a peak Dau of around 800,000 whereas in the United States it never really exceeded 150,000 da so you're looking at like maybe 5x 8X the scale of launch in China versus the United States but when you start to look at the cumulative Revenue you can kind of see that scale impact how much money they've made in terms of cumulative Revenue it's been a

very very big launch it's almost equal to where the United States is in terms of cumulative Revenue so the United States is sitting about 16 cumulative Revenue earned whereas in China you know after about a month they're already passed looks like 11 to 12 million but the thing that is troubling right now is that when you look at Revenue per download for both the United States and China they roughly track with one another China's a little bit lower now normally that would be impressive because they've added so much more scale and they've been able to maintain Revenue per download they have these constant returns to scale which are normally exciting to see but the problem is it's still just not enough it's it's still just not enough I still spell High trouble for this game you know let's see whether or not they abandon it after a year there was that interview with one of their developers I believe it was in Pocket Gamer where he talks about sticking with games that's L strategy they've sticked with dlite for quite some time if you remember that was their hipop collection Squad RPG that never really did much so let's see whether or not they stick around with this one but I'm starting to think this might be a l

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go to data. a or sensor to.com and get on board with undeniably the best data partner in the business now back to the episode okay let's get into stormgate so stormgate if you remember is the spiritual successor to Starcraft 2 it's built by the X blizzard team and it was finally released unfortunately the launch numbers have just come in and they're not great peaked at about 4 and a2k CCU can you repeat that again % 4 and a half K yeah so like you and a couple buddies logged in to play is that was it early access or did it launch it's early access but we can we should get into this this is one of the things which is Early Access is your launch right like you look at something like a power world and they're not going to get that Peak again what they got in January Early

Access you need to come out strong it's the same thing with even Hades 2 and you look at their curve their Early Access is their launch so unfortunately the 4 a half kccu which is extremely low for a free-to-play game on Steam came in extremely low it's going to be a really large struggle for them to reach the scale that they they wanted to hit what's been incredibly odd about this is that I think when we're comparing this against the story of like black myth where wishless this was one of the most wishless games on Steam a ton of hype a ton of growth on this half a million um there's a [ __ ] yeah there's a news article from like half a million in February 2024 and that's roughly that's against like black myths like 650k that I've seen but you're showing some of the numbers from like vgi I don't know like I'd have to double check some of these numbers a vgi you got to fix your y-axis like come on man zero yxes like what what no don't do this but anyways it says that right now it's roughly about 500K wish list which I I don't really agree with because

there's so much dissonance here between the number of wish lists and the number of people playing this game and in terms of digging into the response the reviews are pointing that this it's just feeling like it's too early for Early Access where the visuals campaign sounds are all pretty rough especially around the edges and the community is speculating that this is because they were running out of money from both their VC investment roughly 35 million and their Kickstarter campaigns on top of the they've been doing a lot of sort of squirrly walk back of comms where promises made during Kickstarter were then adjusted the warning for things like content offered and driving players to be upset about sort of day one DLC offered in the game overall my takeaways here is that this just showcases kind of three key perils like one is the Perils of kickstarting your game mixed with VC backing also The Perils of launching too early in Early Access when this is effectively your launch and lastly The Perils of a blizzard team with a significantly smaller team trying

to match player expectations against Starcraft 2 and what that product is currently offering but in general what I'm seeing is like it is really odd to me this level of mixed sentiment typically doesn't drive this much impact on player count that wish list ratio to first day CCU is such a crazy outlier in this game which I'd love to dig into because I think for Jen I think it's even talking through like marketing kpis like why did Borderlands push people to wish list is wish list the new Big kpi pre-launch to drive your go to market strategy or is followers or is pre-orders and my sense is right now like wish list has been hyped up as the right kpi for drying go to market and pre-launch success but this type of ratio is insane to me doesn't show a strong predictor of launch success does that make sense game discover.co doeses this great steam based email where they talk about wish lists are in fact the new kpi on Steam on PC and that there is

a conversion rate that you can expect from wish list to download and I think it's like 20 or 30% I actually have to go look that up while you know when Phil's talking I'll go see if I can pull that up but at least it is driving you to something it's it's kind of like a pre-registration which is a whole other topic that Phil loves to talk about about conversion from pre- to an actual download but this at least is from a marketing perspective a way to drive people to do something now you're right I don't know what's going on in this particular case and should they have done a closed beta a closed Alpha versus Early Access I think the answer is clearly yes is they like they they did it and there was the closed beta earlier in the year there was a ton of feedback already at that point but like wouldn't the numbers have told them like I don't know like why would you continue to I mean the only reason I guess is if you are running out of money I guess you just you throw it at the wall and see if you can get something back I don't know like Phil what do you think well I first

want to defend the wish lists so the wish lists were actually I believe the 500,000 wish lists were actually reported when they did a fundraising round so I believe there's a first-party source for that we can double check on that next week if that number really is true half a million wish lists and they were only able to get to 4,000 Peak CCU and this is a free-to-play game that is like an unmitigated disaster of like Epic Proportions that we should study and again like I feel bad for the team like Tim seems like a great CEO so I'd love to check on that I think the other thing that's interesting here is that they launched as a paid skew to begin with for Early Access so you could you could basically I think pre- purchase some of the DLC and that would get you in a couple days early before they went free to play and so I wonder what happened when you wish list the game what you were notified so you could have sent a notification out to half a million people when the game was paid versus when it was free to play so that might have been a Miss but even then I still just can't fathom that a game that had this much ground swell before it was only able to do 4,000 CCU it just it

just doesn't pass the sniff test despite the fact like this is first party CCU we know this is right this is reported by Valve putting all that aside the writing's been on the wall forever the writing's been on the wall forever I mean company Heroes 3 Age of Empires 4 like these are most recent RTS is like this is dead it's gone it's gone it's not coming back and I think it's very hard to get out of those genre constraints yeah as somebody who worked on sales in first party on valve it really did strike me as really really uted and complex how they set up their free-to-play base like going from a Early Access pack paid only to freet topl in such quick order and now switching to a free playay base with these I understood why they came with this saying like hey we have the expectations of Starcraft we need to kind of follow through but I think all of this would have actually been significantly simpler if they literally just went with a basic premium game with three tiers of skew strategy cleaned up all the comms and even on first party the purchase BS was would have been significantly simpler I tried to even purchase the game on Startup here and

trying to figure out like what are the additions what can I buy and first parties are set up to do this when you sell as a premium game I I spoke to him on a podcast a couple years ago and I just I I was for a niche game like this which realtime strategy unfortunately is now a niche game on PC much to my chagrins but point is I should have been a premium skew from the get-go right the fundamental problem with the game now that I can see is that the quality is not there I assume that the quality was going to be there but it evidently is not it's not a finished product by many of the reviewers and even the faithful right yeah that's the unfortunate part and I think they can get there but the difficulty here is you've kind of lost your your launch window like if I compare mobile to PC console PC console the impact and the window of that launch really sets up your trajectory so getting this back to where it need needs to be will be an incredibly help uphill

challenge for this team I would love to have him on the podcast talking through those ratios because I think especially in the case of like black myth and now stormgate two kind of opposite ends of the spectrum talking through that data point cool anyways let's move forward with PC console games so there are a ton of interesting games now launching so we're going to try to like chop this up over the next while so we can kind of dive in deep especially Phil and I on some of these games but the rush you know hasn't really slowed for live services and I think on the newu report they talked a lot about the bearishness the bleakness of launching freeo playay on PC console these days but uh Shining Light here would be valerant console so it went to open beta and on the cira leaderboards here you can watch it being tracked roughly at rank eight on PlayStation and rank seven on Xbox the thing that we're watching here is stability so Phil in terms of like the numbers here I haven't used sir so I'm

not sure exactly how to translate this what how does this look versus other PC console launches I I think we still need more time I mean the be the best we can do is really track stability but I've seen a lot of new games come on to the ciron charts at these ranks and then just slip I mean the the first descendant is another example of a game that came on here and just like wasn't sticky enough hell divers has stuck on PC but like slipped on both of the consoles the other thing to keep in mind this is us only which I think gives you another Peak into like us interests for something like The Descendant which was an Eastern lucher shooter which I think was another interesting thing to come out of this so I would say like I'm definitely working on trying to like get some more long run time series on ranks so we canare it against something like the finals but I would say by and large like it look at it got into the charts it's a game that's been out for a while and got into the charts on console and that's something to be proud of let's just see if it can maintain like that's how this thing wins the other thing I think is really interesting is Sana has also released the July ranking for the US top 20 bestselling games and EA

Sports college football 25 is on there this is the franchise that EA has revived this is the first year I think I I forget how long the drought has been but not only has it done really well Andrew Wilson called it out in their quarterly earnings report it was doing around 1.8 million uniques in its first week if you subtract out the trial players they cited the other thing that's really exciting here is that they have this EA MVP Sports bundle which is number two in the July sales so this was Madden and and EA college football being combined into one skew for a price increase which is a brilliant a brilliant spell of marketing strategy and it feels like the obvious play but sometimes these things can get drowned out in large corporations so like props the EA team for executing against this and it looks like the proof is in the pudding it charted by itself it charted by itself and EA college sports is on a separate line item so it holds both the number one and the number two spots oh wow that's crazy super smart yeah it's the first time that it's been back because the NCAA finally put through the rule that college athletes

get reimbursed for their likeness so I've read a little bit that you know some of these athletes get like 500 bucks or something like that from what this is so but the good news is that the skew is back and they get a little bit of reimbursement I don't think it's en tied to engagement or anything like that so if you're like a more popular athlete I don't know if you get more or not unless you negotiate that the reason that the game was canceled 10 years ago was because they got a class action lawsuit against them by by players in in in in college right so it became insane but now they've Consolidated the rights for NCA players and now they can license it legally correct that's why it's back is this change in the ruling which looks to be great you know to actually get players something they deserve well that's debat well yeah like I said it's 500 bucks is worth it but no no no it's more of a political thing but

like is it good for the sport is it good for the players correct yes got it navigate the sport all right what else we got um yeah so I wanted to cover first descendant and once human um so these are both PVE live service looter Shooters Phil just mentioned about first descendant here both actually started pretty strong I've comped these both to the finals launch on Steam but first descendant looks like it's near in line with final CCU Decay and we kind of know where that trajectory ends up in terms of finals versus once human actually interestingly has been able to sustain significantly better and so I'm looking at things like once human what's been interesting is like the two approaches in terms of once human first descendant we're almost like Polar Opposites about what they get right and what they get wrong about the PV shooter space is just looking at PC is this merger with conso yeah this is just Peak CCU for S okay because the only reason is that it's interesting to see the first ascendant has still charted on Console us for both

Xbox and Playstation but but seems to have a much worse trajectory on PC I prefer to use CCU in Dow right like the cir ratings are just going to wash out any sort of learnings about retention especially because every game's going to be fluctua that's fair enough and not to mention this is period there's like no games coming out so like June July August you know it's all Madden and and NCA now but Shak charts are relevant right yep and then the last one that I want to talk about was deadlock so an unannounced game from valve enclosed beta but the game has already surpassed 40K CCU and has been growing throughout the beta which has been insane which is crazy like it doesn't even have a store Page it hasn't been announced and the only way to get to the beta is if you know someone that has already been invited so proving yet again that valve can do whatever the hell they

want and reach scale like they just have such a baked in advantage of being able to build this out Phil you've actually been able to play this game you T I'm KN deep this is not good I'm I'm KN deep in this game like 80 hours in already three I am I just like that one more match feeling oh I I hate how [ __ ] good valve is at making games like it's not just the core gameplay that they get right here it's also the IP it's got this steampunk IP that they execute to a really high level and remember you know Eric we've kind of like [ __ ] on valve as like being a research institution previously and you know as we'll talk about with black myth but also with this game it it's just incredible to me that they can have this game under development it was only like 183 developers and they're split between TFT DOTA CSO so there's all these things that valve is split between including the platform and yet even with that headcount they're able to ship a game like this H now I I don't know like they've definitely spending way more way too much time in mobas like I mean that's that's what Gabe is always rumored to do is just dota's office all day he's been kind of like disconnected from the company but you know I I can't

help myself like this is good this is a good game I don't I don't know what else to say what is it exactly it's similar to paladins and it's a third third person action MOA I mean you could also compare it to Smite too it kind of fits fits somewhere in between there there are creeps there is in round progression so we've we've seen like a small implementation of this thesis but it's so much better than those games for a variety of reasons we could talk about it seems a little bit Niche but it 40K CCU on a beta is not bad though right like when you control the spigot you cannot count valve out this is probably going to grow we should take a rain check to discuss the distribution strategy with how steam did it how how they did it with deadlock and then how stormgate did it I think I think there's a contrast in a story that would be very interesting correct although valve owns the distribution channel on that and so they can cheated true valves cheating well why can't you emplo that same one is a launch versus one is a beta right yeah like maybe they do deadlock where like eventually just rolls into an open beta and then rolls

into a launch like valerant did that that's a viable strategy for testing out retention and growing over time but in the case of stormgate they did this Clos beta they launched that was their launch strategy speaking of launch strategies this thing is cooking blacksmith wukan now has the second highest PCU on Steam of all time Peak PSU so it got to 2.3 Mill ion Peak PSU that is enough for second place pubg back in I think it was 2017 did 3.3 million that's never going to be surpassed in my book they did as a paid game too so black myth wukan has surpassed po world it's above Counter-Strike 2 it's above lostar it's above DOTA it is absolutely [ __ ] killing it right now I've heard very specifically like 80% of that 2 million concurrent is in China yes right and it is at a lower price point at around 35 bucks us it was delayed on the Xbox series X for weird reasons I don't know

I guess they just get didn't get the sht or whatever but it seems to be playing well on PS5 so I'll be curious to see how well it does on Console it's like a false flag when something is doing really well in China that is a Chinese developer that is a Chinese theme like is that replicable is from a US perspective and that's what the danger and the risk is associating success with something like blackm having said that these are real units it's doing well the game is amazing it's a real testimony to the fact that Chinese game developers are coming to Tria and that that's kind of the real story but it still needs to do well in the west to be a legitimate competitor so and has to do well in console I think that is the exact wrong takeaway to have from this I don't think I I think that's the exact wrong takeaway to have for this when you look into game science's origin one of the things that they said when they pivoted away from the two mobile games they had produced into making black with wukan and I I think this was back in 2018 2017 they said that the Insight came from realizing that steam has more users who

are in China than users that are in the United States and Eric you've been talking about this this is one of the things that's been responsible for steam's growth over the last you know five years has been the massive increase in Chinese it's the only thing but it's the only thing just that's still like a very valid insight and that to me is the story here is that steam has like somehow gained control of distribution a game PC distribution in China so there's one more platform that this came out on that we're not seeing which is 10 cents gaming distribution platform called wi game that also offered this game and when you look at the ma they last reported it in 2020 or 2022 excuse me that was around 70 million and if you look at where steam ma is it's around probably 150 to 200 million when you look at that when they last reported it and kind of how they've grown since then so steam has like somehow reluctantly gained control of distribution in China like that's [ __ ] incredible that to me is the story is that steam has W in China they beat 10 cent at their own game no the problem is this is the steam is [ __ ] illegal it's not legally

operating in China right now even the more impressive the problem even more impressive well I mean yes and no it could go away at any moment you know what I mean like and then what right so that's my concern is it's borrowed time you know I I I'm shocked that they're still allowing it at this point literally they could block it at any what's crazy to me is that tensent wouldn't use their connection of the to block Ste that's totally the supposed to be gangsters and yet like they haven't shown up with their guns yet and and steam hasn't made like any effort to be in China right have they done anything no they just win by by ignorance as always that's not true I mean I'm sure they beefed up the Hong Kong servers right but I mean look at the end of the day it's a viable Market just buy or beware right like it could go away at any moment you know um I just want to be clear here this is really really good for Western developers in general because they are selling more things on steam pc is is a much more

viable platform and you make you know pure [ __ ] margin on this [ __ ] right because it's like after the 30% it's like all PC margins so this is good for them I'm just saying that it's really [ __ ] risky you know giving geopolitical [ __ ] going on [ __ ] what could happen in China at any moment and to your point yeah 10cent could go postal on them and get the CCP to get rid of it this whole thing you know at any moment so anyway Adam let's talk a little bit more about newo you I think you actually did a podcast with them that is going to come out soon yeah it's ready to go so um new's August 2024 report has come out I want to touch base on some of the headline insights so obviously there'll be a podcast which will'll go in detail with Devin Brennan who's the senior analyst there that goes through all the details there was a number of good headlines good takeaways and insights from the report and I wanted to kind of single in on one in particular so if they talked about things like PC market growth they talked

about things like the risk of live services on free to-play PC console they also talked about premium single player games should be shorter in length so I wanted to open up some debate on this specifically so premium single player games as we know it costs continue to explode especially when it cames to recent leaks obviously the cost is exploding I think um Spider-Man 2 was something like triple the dev budget of the previous one AAA as a model is broken has been sort of a headline for over a decade at this point and I think the data right now in terms of the market is showing that Revenue has been roughly flat there's clear player interest in these titles this has been resilient through live services on PC console it's just that this level of interest and spend has stayed flat which is not growing in line with the costs which are exploding so what do you do if you're building single player games right now so new's thesis or they

stipulate it's the time to beat that's the culprit that devs are bloating their playtime with content that players do not value rather than delivering sort of a 20-hour golden path that would be sufficient for players spending $70 so my take here is that in the 2010s there was thesis that to reach kind of 10 million plus units and you weren't Cod or FIFA or first party you're kind of in that like Skyrim and GTA 5 territory that the mass Market wants these massive open world games that roughly correlate game time to player value and devs responded with games like Assassin's Creed where they were exploding in scope continually growing those open worlds bigger and bigger and bigger bigger Maps but then cost obviously exploded creting bigger and bigger open world games that increased in Fidelity that have been sort of stagnant in terms of performance so my question here is is culprit playtime because I think it's

easy to point out at franchises like Assassin's Creed but Assassin's Creed drives margins through DLC MTX where lowered playtime means lowered outcomes because now fewer and fewer players are playing it so are the cost savings worth actually losing that later Revenue are the cost savings on all of those extren activities actually meaning that the lowered outcome is actually Ry positive positive and my other question here is around even with like the 20 hours like 20 hour golden path that's actually a massive golden path for many games like for example Spider-Man 2 which is the obvious re recent example of very very high Dev cost that was 18 hours for similar units outcome from Spider-Man 1 so could the game have been that much more affordable if they just cut out a bunch of the weird side activities or since those activities are actually mostly systemic within the engine was the real culprit the 11 massive setpiece bosses that Spider-Man 2 had right like

those were incredible bosses that's what made the game so special but then you're starting to think like what parts could we have cut from Spider-Man 2 that would have kept that same units outcome and then made the margin significantly better that's I think the question that a lot of single player devs have to ask themselves right now what are the things you can cut from a single player experience to make profitability is it playtime or is it the golden path Eric I don't know what the answer here is really honestly but I've heard these like kind of Snippets of like God of War Ragnarok had 50 million sales but was unprofitable at Sony which is crazy you know Spider-Man 2 similarly but at $10 million when you're generating like 400 to$ 500 million in Revenue if you can't make a profitable game it's [ __ ] scary or something like even Harry poter Hogwarts which went years over budget probably cost 4 or 500

million to get to Market if they didn't knock it out of the park the way they did that would have been unprofitable right but clearly they did so like so I guess my whole point here is that the expectations are set so it is at this level of quality by the customer and if you deliver anything below that you're not even going to get close to those unit sales right so you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't but with what you're suggesting is you put out like less than 12 hours of experience I just don't think that's going to fly right I I'm not suggesting that either because then you see things like what is it hellblade senu a sacrifice too yeah oh my God right which a mediately right or Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 obviously you're going to get eviscerated if you've got a very very low playtime for your golden path right and you're not creating enough experiences I don't really have a solution here and this is something that I've just been like constantly racking my brain about I know what are the things you could cut as single player games in in this market are completion rates changing are people falling off at points that are much sooner than they

used to in the past there was an analysis on RS Technica a while back when steam achievements were public looking at the completion rate for Call of Duty single player and you could see in each successive entry the number of players who had got the achievement that suggested they had completed single player was declining now that is a franchise that like has so many different legs to it so I mean you could argue multiplayer just got better and that diverted player attention but there's some evidence of that that play time have been decreasing or at least completion times there's just so much to choose from it's like the streaming Wars right now like the amount of content the amount of games that are available Phil I remember a long time ago you talked about how Assassin's Creed was like bloating and bloating and bloating in in the amount of time and then they finally were like all right let's just start to cut this back because they found that players weren't actually consuming all of the content that they made so Adam I think you're bringing up something something interesting is like what's the right number to be shooting for to deliver now what is a $70 value and it used to be a

$60 value not that long ago for players and how do you Roi that you know how do you get to that magical time but do it in a way that makes the most sense I I guess that's the the magic question of our industry but to Adam's Point like that's Assassin's Creed solved they they figured out how to monetize the additional time that comes with open World gameplay which is like to sell DLC right because if you have an open World gameplay like you're going to have a longer engagement tale like you can have a pretty substantial PSU base even without new content because when you're an open world game there's this idea of kind of productivity of content like what you know for every hour of Labor that you invest into the game how much game playay or engagement do you get in response to that you know what what is the return on your investment when you scale up you know headcount on a particular game and I think for open world games that ratio is rather good and so that gets you this consistent base of players who continue to have this long engage ta like cyber Punk like like Witcher or balers gate is another game that still has a really strong PSU

share even you know a year after it's released without any particular new content and so then you can sell DLC to them right and that you're kind of back to like the live service monetization angle but you have to monetize the tail to justify the cost but then there's also the question of like can you actually afford that cost right that would be the easy answer if we just look at the revenue side but on the cost side those additional DLC units don't just come in cheap it's not like all of a sudden we've perfected the game and that's why many games have chosen not to do the DLC Road or those DLS are significantly delayed because they can't afford to build it I also see on the on the other side too with like Final Fantasy rebirth right like why did that not work it's a tried andrue you know IP that many people would love and you know you have to imagine that in some cases having a massive amount of gameplay is actually a deterrent for people of like well I can like I can't even start that

series or get into that series because it's just there's no way I'm going to you know actually complete that so it might be a world that we're living where we need to figure out what are the consumer motivations for playing games again and it it's not I want to immerse myself for 80 hours anymore it's going to be like maybe some different motivations okay I I want to bring up two points that are really important to understand first of all from a hardware perspective we are at a much lower active install base I would argue right people have not transferred over to the new consoles we're starting to see a slower adoption rate part of that's because Sony's been a little bit slow but most of it's primarily because Microsoft is totally [ __ ] up this generation and and and their subscription thing is not helping in terms of engagement on the platforms and it's scary it's really scary what's happening with Xbox so again I'm hoping that GTA is going to pick up the pace from for next year both on adoption on Xbox and Playstation so we'll see a higher level people that are engaged

with you know nextg boxes which will help sell through right that'll help kind of the unit sell through but if we continue to see decline in active install base that will be a little bit scary and I think a little bit of work probably I should do on that the other thing is I hate I can't believe I'm making this argument but the expectations of these next generation of kids is such that you're playing one experience for years you know my son is been playing [ __ ] fortnite forever so their expectations are a lot different than they used to be and so like with that kind of player expectations and that player Behavior it's going to be really hard to convince them to pay you know $70 for even a 20 hour comad are you joining the freeo playay revolution yes yeah obviously your freet to-play Revolution is not working but I think you can't really ignore that from a from a young player base of coming into the space in terms of what their player expectations are and I think that's part of of a big challenge that needs to be overcome as well of course we're all about challenges we're not about

Solutions right now but I don't know but I guess like that The Optimist to me goes towards what gen is saying which I think that players tastes are changing and that if we think about the strategy 10 years ago of playtime equals value yep it's a lot more Nuance than that you can have much better examples in the market when we look at some of the outliers of success of like what are you going to lean into the challenge that I see is like when it comes to player value there's also Fidelity so you look at something like black myth Wukong and you say why did so many people hype up about that game even outside of China it's because of the Fidelity of that game it looks incredible like it is the top end of everything they managed to do that by keeping it to a very tight path of an action RPG it's more like a god of war than it is to a Elden ring or to an open world but at the same time the Fidelity of that is insane so if you were to make another black myth Wukong in the west it would probably equal the budgets of a Spider-Man or a God of War you would still end up in the same

challenge here so my question here is like what else do players value besides Fidelity that we could lean into I think that points at what you could cut that is a great consumer insights Challenge and I think it depends on genre and platform and and Crest I think you bring up great things which is if we can make assumptions that you know sadly in the next year we're not going to see a lot of growth in some of these Mark and on some of these platforms you know then what is that and and how do we ask about that and then hopefully if we do make the assumption that GTA changes that we get Revival in growth on these platforms and then how does that you know continue to evolve sounds like we should call Stan at beta head and have him do some CI work all right well I think is that it for tonight this time dude it's good to have Adam back a adult in the room hopefully I didn't put people to sleep with my monotone voice definitely not

not as active as you guys you guys really like add a whole bunch of energy to this podcast I need to drink like three coffees before I start this pod we do Red Bull shots before yeah you weren't you weren you're not invite Main Line in the red like sponsored Red Bull things giv you wings you gota just load up the speedball dude make it happen no no not doing that all right well we will see you in a couple weeks Adam I know you're going to be in and out of the Pod as as we continue to go it's great to have you and we'll pick some great product ideas for you to talk about next time you're here all right everybody sounds good see you next week peace out you did it you made it to the end of the episode is 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 fun slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fun.com /s 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]