TWIG #298 Spectre Divide, Supercell IPO and the Crypto Czar's Farewell

this podcast is brought to you by apps flyer in today's Digital World understanding your apps Journey from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps fer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar work smarter with apps flyer that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they'll interact with your app apps sler where your app's potential meets performance hello everyone and welcome to this weekend games 298 week away from 300a we got to do something talk about this oh so much pressure so much pressure for the the big anniversary all right here's what we

have on the show today Spectre divide is launched and Adam is with us and has some takes on what to expect zingo zingo zinga's cryptar is leaving and taking the crypto project Sugar Town with him and a few others then the guys are going to do some basis speculation on what a supercell IPO could or would mean if it were to happen it is some crystal ball looking into and should be fun so hi I'm Jen donaho strategic marketing consultant at beta hat and Jaden Inferno and today we have from Japan Philip black game Economist at game Economist Consulting Eric Crest principal at gossamer Consulting Group what up punks Mishka katov founder of deconstructor of fun hello hello and Adam teler from his office in Canada cuz we we're not saying

what you're up to yet hey wait it's September 4th we're supposed to be able to say it no no not yet September 9 you all right all right that's I should have teased that tuned that's like the big thing to tease so Phil what's going on with your travels through the East um I don't know I feel like I'm about to lead Consulting and just become a crane Master I've spent many many dollars on mastering a crane system I think I think I'm positive I'm you know you know want G impossible infucking who whoa whoa whoa you're not getting there there's no [ __ ] way you are [ __ ] positive on those things dude you've lost tons of get out of here there are methods there are methods sure Phil is just going like crane machine to crane machine with all of the super weird anime yeah great Phil pretty much that's been a ton of fun arcades have gone down kill I've just see a lot the r games everywhere drum games this one where like a circle and people tap half the cirle very rapidly

that's been kind of disappointing to see it's just called the drum the circle that you tap rap different you tap a screen we screen there's no drumsticks the other thing that's been kind of disappointing there is that like I'm still not seeing a lot of like a mobile IP first action figures you know I expected to be able to buy a lot of go of Victor stuff not seeing it you know it's still the old anime franchises OBD domate and that just makes me really sad and I really love to see global ipu do something at all you know all we have is Gand Crush TV show that seems to be the biggest win and maybe like some Robo t-shirts for like five-year-old kids you know that ago but it'd be really cool if mobile IP actually existed outside of mobile all right well I'll get you a contact at Bandy Namco and see if they'll make some toys for you yeah license to lose money go ahead all right who wants to talk about the Epic store me I tried to install it like Jen you you said you installed theepic store I had so many issues with

it because the ads are running everywhere at least in Europe on YouTube on any channel you can find on YouTube like they're covering the whole YouTube with the ads and the installation process is not that simple no because like when you tap on the ad it takes you on a site and then there's constantly error messages and you're like what the [ __ ] is going on and apparently I figured out it's like I was using Chrome and not Safari so you have to copy the link then open up Safari and then go to Safari and then it will say again error no you cannot do that because you have to approve the developer and then you have to open up your settings and then approve epic and only then you go back to the safari page if you don't use Safari all the time like I don't to then install the app store Page like it's not impossible like this is not super difficult but that's a lot of Hoops to jump and when you think about like how much they're spending on ads and the Hoops there are before you actually get to install from the point of you like hey I like this ad I would like to have fortnite on my phone

that's not good for their marketing camp we should have a like a battle royale of which is harder getting money out of a web 3 token which Phil and I just did together or installing the Epic gamees store so I installed it on an Android because I'm in the US and I can't obviously do it on an iOS phone here they make these videos which are very nice and so I had to do the one for one like watch the video pause it to download it but I think I would have messed up too because when I use my iPhone I use Chrome as well so that's that's a that's a good thing to know it's interesting to watch how they perform and especially like if Microsoft is learning anything from it because I believe they're launching their store next but apple is making it diff store isn't that though there's there's no choice it's Apple and Google that are creating all this this friction by on purpose you know in order to protect their customers which is total [ __ ] [ __ ] right it's so clearly on purpose like like the fact that he cannot download it on Chrome like why it's just it's so weird anyways if people are trying to it would be

interesting to hear in the slack or in the comments how people are you know getting their epic store accounts because like it took me days because I I I quit on one point and I was seeing so many ads that I'm like all right let me try this again all right so Mishka what else are we uh Shilling oh uh a couple of uh pieces that we have so we have um podcast dropped this Monday with Dima demov who's the VP of live operations at Gameloft and this is about crossplatform live operations so he's running Disney speed storm and as Legends so we so a lot of this was just a conversation about like how do they approach live operations and especially on on the game d live Ops I thought really yeah let let me look at some of their games let's see what they their at some of the the Disney Castle game like I forgot what was Spider-Man Runner game that's Spider-Man R Spider-Man Runner game was yeah I didn't know you could make 160 Spider-Man characters and they did so I remember that game really well like without ing to Venom like before they

went to Venom there was 160 spidies anyway like I'm I'm really fascinated about how to run live Ops on multiple platform and with the team size being so big and so forth it was just interesting conversation so thanks for demo for hopping on and then on the blog side we got Amic KH writing about time blast Laura was involved with this one as the main reviewer of anything casual so he wrote about a puzzle game launched by Wildlife studio and I think this is interesting not only because of the puzzle games but the setup of wildlife if people people don't know it's quite unique so when they chased growth for the second time they open up a lot of these like super Studios you know super cells some might call them and they are all around the world and they would have like the main creative like they would chase down like who made merge dragons and they were like this guy made bur like all right here you go just a massive life minimum guarantee if you will and they can build their studio just a team of creatives wild love handles all the publishing they set up I think like 12 of these

type of Studios like X you name it and really focus on the creatives not the big bosses and so this is one of the games that come out out of this approach so interesting to see how this strategy performs but till this point we haven't seen like a big hit but they've hired you know the best of the best creatives around the world all right um let's go on Corrections so I messed up and said that palor was a Chinese developer they are a jaese developer sorry I read that wrong somewhere so my bad um know it yeah no I [ __ ] up I yeah this is why we do corrections sometimes we're on a podcast and we say stupid stuff and then we usually not me usually it's Crest I'm just kidding so Adam what do you have on the correction yeah I I've got a quick one two weeks ago on the podcast I mentioned wish list numbers for Wukong and for stormgate and they were wrong I use numbers actually from two different sources and because wish lists are private the numbers are actually indexed

according to rank differently on different sources so the difference between stormgate and Wukong was actually far greater so Wukong was well over four million stormgate roughly about 600k but the point that I made in terms of the discrepancy between wish list for stormgate versus their performance Still Remains and so we've talked now to vgi for press access so they've been really kind and actually given us access to consistent estimates for wish list going forward so I've gone absolutely Bonkers and pulled a bunch of for this for podcasts but it was interesting looking at something like black myth and their ratio in terms of 15x unit sales versus wishless versus stormgate roughly 0.5x unit sales to wish list in that first week just shows you that discrepancy in terms of wishlist as that predictive power and what that ratio look like between a free-to-play game and that premium go viral type of experience so kudos to vgi for providing the data and looking forward to adding this in the future so we'll talk about Spectre divide in a bit but that's another comp they had 900k wish lists

going into their launch so we'll look at their performance in a bit cool let's move forward to headlines all right so just a couple things for me Roblox developer conference is coming up in a few days later this week September 6th and 7th so let us know if you go and what your takeaways are last year there was there were some interesting things about ads and Ai and they actually had some drama I think there was like somebody brought a gun to the show so hopefully they're not going to have drama at the conference this year so let us know what happens there my other thing is you know because we like to talk about franchises anap Perna has partnered with remedy to turn the control and Allen Awake video game franchises in two film TV series and other projects an a perno will also work with remedy as a co-production and co- Finance partner to adapt the upcoming game control 2 Chris are you excited come on Allan Wake TV show that sounds fun oh yeah such a successful franchise this time around let's just put it on TV that makes a lot of

sense adding spice to [ __ ] you know they had a Max Bay movie before like remedy with uh Marky Mark remember that one oh God yeah that should be [Laughter] forgotten oh man all right so in our slack I think there was a really fun topic around Ubisoft and valuation and bung this is for Crest this is like agitating Crest but somebody posted like I can just do the summary so so we can get let cres off it's basically somebody posted I forgot who it was but it posted that Ubisoft is currently valued to two billions on the French stock market and kind of made a reference like hey Sony bought Bungie for 3.6 billions and basically trying to to compare those two but that's a totally different different years and times so CR why don't you give your take it's actually not an unreasonable care comparison really right because like what is you know

Ubisoft really worth given how terribly mismanaged they've been over the last decade you know I was actually in a pretty good mood until I started reading some of these [ __ ] posts you guys are putting up here and making me react to this Ubisoft is really bothering me because I'm actually pretty bullish on what they have coming but they're mix Mis executing across the board like this Outlaws game was mis executed from a marketing perspective I'm hoping Assassin's Creed will game will do well but the fundamental problem with Ubisoft and we've talked about this in the podcast before they are the most mismanaged video game company on the market right they Contin continue not to execute against their amazing franchises and the fundamental reason is that they have way too many [ __ ] employees and they are not executing and they have an outdated strategy and an incompetent management team and that is the fundamental problem with this company the gilan family is just not the right leadership for this era of games they

have failed almost every step of the way for the last decade all the major companies in the space have Consolidated amongst a few IPS Ubisoft continues to chase stupid [ __ ] licenses IP that does not align with the market genres that doesn't make sense pet projects and trans media that are a waste of [ __ ] money and a waste of their attention the second thing is that French labor law is [ __ ] ridiculous in this modern era it makes it absolutely impossible to rightsize this company mechanics are super complicated but I will just say to sum it up firing employees in France is impossible and it's a long process and really expensive and just not worth doing the third thing that is really irritating is that because of this deal they did with tenset they secured more of their ownership and voting rights and given the structure and how it works they basically maintained this ability to block any type of transaction or management change in the company which is [ __ ] archaic and terrible and oh yo so he put together a chart

that basically said you know Revenue per employee and this is the fundamental problem is that they're at $96,000 per employee verus EA and take two are $500,000 per employee this is why the valuation is at $2 billion like fundamentally they are just not worth [ __ ] in this current structure unless they scale Revenue which they are not so conclusion in any other country in the Free World this company would have been acquired or management replaced at this point due to negligence and incompetence but because it's France and the gilmont family I've been smart about one thing taking advantage of these absolute archaic old European labor laws and corporate governance the gilmont family they've been able to maintain this control and ownership and manage this company to the [ __ ] ground that is the fundamental problem is that France is Old Europe and because of the rules and regulations there it creates a much more challenging

environment to actually manage a public company to the benefit of the shareholders not and not to the family right so I'm gonna end on a positive note because I actually do believe in the long-term possibilities of the [ __ ] usoft thing is that they have the best IP in the business I mean better than EA in many ways and take two for that matter in terms of breadth they have Assassin's Creed Ghost Recon Far Cry division Rainbow Six Prince of pers Just Dance Raymond a great franchises and the family should get a lot of credit for building these things up right but the problem is is that this new environment this new world order that we are in in this game business is just not right for Eve and his family like Eve is a nice guy I've met him a few times he's brilliant person but the market has changed and they need really new leadership to focus this organization on the current market conditions so which is worse embracer or with this has done no embracer was far

worse because it was almost criminal what he was doing because he knew that eventually things would start to fall apart right that the the music would stop and they'd be [ __ ] screwed right it was only a matter of time I do believe Eve thinks he's doing the right thing by his employees and any push back I would get from that is that you know their employee first right but then again with all the the dirty ass scandals that went on in that company maybe not but like yeah no embracer is far worse I'm curious you said on Outlaws you didn't think it was marketed correctly what do you mean it just didn't seem like they had a long lead time of good marketing beats right so we didn't have as much you know play tests with Outlets or assets or kind of like the typical type of long marketing lead for a new game I've been told that the team massive is not very good at

providing materials for marketing teams to actually Market their games uh their focus is on development they're amazing development team division is one of my all-time favorites but yeah I don't think they did a very good job of getting this game marketed the way it should have given the high level of quality and and the scope of it they've misfired a little bit on the quality and some of the issues there's some issues around the game and I think the Star Wars license is actually not helping right now I think Disney's managing that [ __ ] license into the ground right now with what they're doing with it so I think I said this last week but I I I just think Ubisoft should have never made a [ __ ] Star Wars game they should just kept making the division like that's the power play these days is focusing on franchises that you own focusing on franchises that are good and expanding upon that and doubling down on those franchises and stop [ __ ] around with [ __ ] right goddamn Avatar are you out of your goddamn mind you know stop it stop this stuff you know and so it's like one mistake after another the

last decade with these guys but I I really want to make the main point they should have been acquired years ago like if they were acquired years ago these franchises would have been alive and kicking you know but do you really knock them for pausing division three given division 2's performance I would have tried to innovate around division because like they also had Ghost Recon which hasn't yeah like break point was a low point for that franchise as well like they they've got a lot of franchise that that could got to reinvigorate and make the necessary investments in right correct but they should be doing that instead of building Avatar or building a Star Wars game they did try to launch all these franchises on mobile you you remember they launched at least I remember playing division on mobile I remember that they were supposed to do the Rainbow Six on mobile that was like the 12 Studios working together they had that they had the metaverse squad RPG where you could play as characters from the different universes of U rest in peace [ __ ] mobile dude [ __ ] mobile for these

guys was around that was fun for a while it was a catchup they they went he yeah ketchup ketchup did did a Prince of Persia hyper casual version I remember even playing that they were really proud of that yeah no that was the only thing smart they did I talked about this in the podcast they licensing it out to Asia or Chinese whatever [ __ ] it that's brilliant right get the cash now because they they wouldn't be able to execute against a mobile at all that'd be another distraction right along with their [ __ ] movie things and like shorts and all this other [ __ ] [ __ ] transmedia garbage you know like stop it just [ __ ] stop well we got the happy areic going on this you podcast you the bear with the this Ubisoft thing that's like yeah Ubisoft is like the golden thing I wanted to just so we're not going to go through a lot of investment news only one thing that I wanted to bring forward and by the way before I move to that so what I heard I talked to a pretty big French publisher because I I mentioned this thing that Eric keeps saying that firing people is practically impossible in friends and they said that not really and they you know shave off

people constantly of that company based on the high performance expectations so according to them it wasn't like that but anyways so it might be more of a choice than a than a legality lies lies I don't know I don't know the only investment news that I wanted to bring forward was the most absurd ones and we're going to talk about web 3 absurdity but this is new a us-based mobile web3 games developer gameplay galaxy has secured a24 million dollars so this is dollars not tokens in seed funding the funds will support the development of company's web three game Trial Extreme Freedom a multiplayer motorcycle racing game currently in technical testing in India and Philippines I don't know what kind of a numbers they're seeing in India and Philippines but $24 million seed is like un this is Spike games race $55 million seed this is like you know in that Realm who in the [ __ ] is investing $23 million

in this [ __ ] right now probably anim mocha like who else crazy all right yes layoff news yeah first of all rock steady unsurprisingly reported layoffs following the suicide squad disaster at Warner that is not at all surprising most of them were QA and other things but other other members of the team uh tilting Point another amazing mobile game company they're reducing count by 20% 90 staff across all of their franchises I think right so I think they're really struggling which is not too surprising frankly but yeah those are the two big layoffs that are happening right now I don't want to be too negative Nelly but like even the challenges in Mobile and PC console right now I think it's going to be a little bit grueling for the next you know 18 to 24 months terms of you know people falling off it's a tough time right now thanks to Apple all right games Phil s is launching into the

United States on September 9th and I could not be more excited I have been trying to sign a game like this for the better half of my career whenever I've onon CI servants a particularly Miss women don't thing and and honestly when I talk to all of my female friends who are getting married there a lot of them at this age the thing that always pops up is they have a fantasy of wanting to plan a wedding like that is one of the attractions and so someone finally went out and B game about planning a wedding and so it's not just a wedding it's about planning multiple things since the name vual but I could not be more excited for this game I am an investor in the team called Super Bloom Emily is their cgo she's awesome this thing is gonna go out and absolutely kill it I so excited to get ready to shake up I guess I don't know I call it the design this in the shill category I was just about to say this this should be in shill now the shill of the shills I I I I have kbis SP I have receipts I have receipts from this they

they'll be receipts to update everyone where but have they actually done a beta like do we actually know what this game is done I don't want to share anything to beond Let's your Tower share the let's be let's be [ __ ] like honest about it right we can invite Emily on the podcast we we don't no no no hold on a minute I'm not I'm not I'm not letting this one go wait what is the game called let's come back to this other got so many topics we should not go in beta I don't even see it on sensor tower that can't be good dude all right we'll talk about the launch afterwards I'm not letting this one go moving on all right keep going update on love and deep space Ur mobile back we cover this this is the husband do game RPG that has wild features like doing photo shoots with your boyfriend with action RPG elements it is doing over 25 million [ __ ] dollars a month on iOS alone and again this is just in China right now we

don't know what it's doing on Android so that's putting it at a $330 billion doll run rate on iOS alone I think this thing will probably hit over half a billion dollars this year alone this genre is super interesting some to keep track of so congratulations to them and along those lines Infinity nck is Du to launch later this year as the series goes crossplatform and just say buckle and ladies and gentlemen love Mick was the game that was on I for a really long time which was a Asian dress up game and if you have a if you have a chance this is the thing I think people are missing when we cover a lot of these Eastern games is they're actually pretty successful in the west and so we look at the cumul of rabbiter for love Nikki who do you think is number one none other than the United States with 29.9% of gross cumulative revenue for a game that has done over 400 million in Revenue we combin it with China we're probably looking at over 500 million in Revenue so I cannot be more excited for this Infinity Missy game it is going to

be an HD AAA game so it's a huge jump for this franchise but this is stuff we continue to ignore and is doing game Busters we have a deconstruction of this game on blog have have had it for like three four years we were not ignoring it yes speaking up something that has been ignored for a really long time Pokemon's Trading Card Game pocket Launches on October 31st and pre-registrations are now open you know I thought marel snap has killed ccgs on mobile but Pokemon has actually never had atiz ccg on mobile which may shock people there was a TCG a while back on mobile for Pokemon but it basically was a edenal app that imported your physical pods and actually didn't monetize it in any direct way on mobile which is Criminal have you seen the App Store page for this it looks like a knockoff from 10 years ago this looks like a piece of [ __ ] I don't understand it does come from the Pokemon company but it looks like IP theft is

basically what's going they launched a trading card game like 10 years ago and it also looked like it was made in the 90s like it was old it's awful and and by the way they don't even talk about it being a game until the very last screenshot and the very end of the video It's All About opening digital cards that look a hundred times worse than what Marvel snap does with their trading cards uh this is a travesty for the brand yeah I don't know if this is true or not but I think there's some limitations in what they can do with the Pokemon brand on interactive because of their deal with Nintendo and this may be part of the problem is that they can't really do a real Pokemon game so in the contract Nintendo says specifically you have to make yeah a crappy game no the only games you can make no you can you can't make games you only can make trading cards things like this is the way around this is all pure speculation I don't know if this is true or not I'm just saying there could be a reason why Pokemon's not on mobile it should be on

[ __ ] mobile it doesn't make any sense like it's like it is perfect there there is trading card games on the original game boy right like there is Pokemon Trading Card I guess to his point outside of Nintendo but then why isn't Nintendo doing this they don't do mobile there's plenty of Pokemon games on mobile everything from Pokemon quest to Pokemon unite to mob's point is about maybe the core play pattern of oh yeah something there there but if anybody knows let us know okay yeah all right Phil one more newu yeah we don't normally cover users that data but it's usually stronger than cir so I'd love to make an effort to do more coverage of it the difference between the two is that newu covers Western tier one region regions so Spain United States UK Germany etc etc while cir is only United States and so there's some things that we don't normally see when we talk about new da which is that we get things off the steam of course

courts first party daa so what are the things that we don't normally see that we see here one of them is just Minecraft you know it's a franchise that's we don't talk a lot about on theast mostly because it's hard to get updates on what the numbers are but according to new we you to look at July 2024 by month active users on PC number one is Minecraft and number two is Roblox another game that we don't get a lot of coverage about when it comes to their PC that graphic and I was pretty surprised to see this cool all right Spectre divide has launched so it was released on Tuesday September 3rd which was the day before this recording so context on this Spector divide is an amazing developer so Lee horn who's the game director is a legend I would say EX valer Team he's an apex developer it's been marketed as shroud's Tac shooter where shroud is a gameplay adviser and has been actively evangelizing the game so I've been tracking this for the last you know month and the hype was real because as bigname streamers say things

like Tim the tapman all jumped on board during the beta saying that this would be the next big thing and I have a tendency to get pretty OV excited during these hype Cycles but typically I have to gut check myself because I'm having a bit of deja vu if we look back at things like finals or X defined they all went through similar hype Cycles so for example Spectre had about 80,000 viewers during their beta versus finals had about 120k so both of them were able to create a lot of hype and then it launch both X Define and finals faded away due to retention issues despite that initial interest so Spectre divide is focusing on high skill tactical shooter players so that's valerant csgo style players and making sure that they get that high skill right their differentiation with players is being able to control two characters at once but the real question is whether this differentiation will actually create a real lift like if we compare this now to finals finals went up front with saying that destructible

environments would be that differentiation but that didn't really give them much retention maybe downloads but not the retention so data is coming in from launch day one CCU Spectre is about 31k versus finals 200k and note Spectre is steam only versus finals head console twitch viewership 32k versus 64k of finals and what's actually interesting is that both Spectre and finals suffered from lower viewership at launch versus betas that beta viewership versus launch was cut by about half so reviews have started out Mixed for Spectre divide about 50% this is largely due to technical issues and lack of content specifically calling out ranked mode for high skill game as well as cosmetic pricing versus their value on day one and the two character aspect being reviewed as kind of not enough to be differentiated from valer and CS note these are all single day data points we'll see what the actual weekend brings

but now it just depends on kind of word of mouth and verality so CCU can grow we're watching it today we've seen it with things like once human and Hell divers where CCU climbed through the first few weeks but the mix reviews signal weakness so I'm hoping they can tackle the technical issues up front and then Leverage The streamer coverage to grow CC from here no it's really interesting I think there's so much going on now in the world of game launches where there's this massive kind of interest in something and it seems like players are you know really hype about something and then they move on really quickly and I know that Spectra divide is a TX shooter and that you know with the cancellation of Concord we didn't really mention this but it came out actually yesterday that Sony is giving refunds to everyone and shutting down Concord after a week or two weeks like something very very short and I know they're a hero shooter but I'm just heing a lot of chatter and a lot of people are talking about like okay

what's the future of Shooters and what kinds of Shooters are shooters that can live in the market is it tax shooter is it extraction shooter so Phil you'll love to hear about extraction shooter so I I just I don't know I called up Stan who's at beta hat market research he does a lot of shooter genre work and I was like hey what's going on with Shooters where are people seeing opportunity and I was I was asking a little bit more about extraction Shooters because you know that seems to be as I talk to people everyone's like oo extraction shooter and I was like whoa whoa whoa like why don't we just hold on a a little bit so he gave me three insights around extraction Shooters and three things about extraction Shooters uh they're still super Niche and it's really defined by tarov as Ethan always likes to talk about you know when he found that game Hunt is still super small in comparison cheating is a huge problem know all PVP games have problems with cheaters but it's even worse for extraction Shooters

because losing your loot progression to cheaters hurts more than other games and then there's the churn and so the data is there that churn is higher for extraction versus other shooter genres because players don't really know what they're getting themselves into they think oh this is really going to be really accessible and it's popular and it's really not easy to teach your friends which is you know obviously how many people get in to new games is bringing your friends and it has a really deep learning curve so maybe what we should do at some point is just do a little bit of a deeper dive in like what's the future of Shooters and you know where are opportunities because you know I I just wanted to let people know that hey extraction isn't the Holy Grail that everyone should be going forward and making a game on but Mishka I think you wanted to talk about how surprisingly you and not me uh how influencers are are really helping games become more popular yeah I I mean you gave a good overview of the shooter market so like all right then I'm going to talk what you what you normally talk

about I'm going to talk about go to market then so what's interesting about this one was their go to market strategy especially the way they use influencers now of course using influencers there's no nothing new everybody used them the bigger the company the bigger the checks and you get the influencers to play the biggest influencers to play your game for a month Non-Stop and and say all kinds of things but what usually happens is is that these influencers whether it's I don't know too many but let's say ninja I remember he was playing certain game the launch maybe it was war zone back in the days no it was the one of the Call of Duty ones and you could clearly see in their feed that they would play that game for a certain period of a launch period and then just go back to fortnite and whatever they were streaming before and that is the typical way that companies and kind of when they want to launch they call up marketing like hey let's put everything like all guns blazing and one of them is influencers so there's a check and you give it to the influencers and that's part of your launch campaign and it kind of dies up what in this game was particularly interesting is that many small titles have grown in a way that they brought the influencers early on

and kind of made them feel part of the team part of the development of this game and so when they are promoting it They are promoting it as something they had influenced over so they are truly influencer both towards the game team and towards Their audience and I think like this was done in a really smart way and I believe that there's a stake I think there are investors also in this company so they own a part of the success so of course the way they promote this game is going to be totally different and they are in contact with a game team not just a channel you're paying for a specific amount of time to shill like Phil dead a certain game that they they are affiliated with and and I just want to give a shout out here to a16z games I believe that this is part of their strategy their go to market I was in one of the webinars back in the days for a16z and they were they're very in tune I think one of the partners is X YouTube ahead or somebody important in the YouTube concept and and he he really talked about this this sort of a

longtail and like well structured influencer strategy and also since they are a6z company I I looked up their total funding at this point as they're entering their launch is $86 million so so that's that's a hefty check like Chris what do you what do you reckon is the valuation with $86 million raised but if we go to the influencer point here right like I also agree with you pre-launch I was like no this is strategy the right Hail Mary to get shroud to be your evangelist right and it looked like it was working in the beta but then you look at these metrics and you say like they didn't get the viewership and actually even shroud himself is spending more time on deadlock than he is on Spector divide right now because ultimately shroud is also influenced and incentivized based on where viewership patterns are right now yeah and a lot more people are moving on to deadlock than Spectre So eventually he's going to have to say financially for himself it's going to be a better choice to go to deadlock right you're absolutely right Adam and and in

this case the force majour or the Black Swan event is the deadlock like yeah no one saw that coming and yeah like like imagine the world which they probably imagined without Val [ __ ] releasing a new game which is the normal world and shoot her in exact same category if that wasn't there I think they would be playing this much more but then like this gets into like go to market strategy stuff but when you can't command your share of boy in this window do you then choose them to delay right if you watch a deadlock growing do you then say like look we've got good beta metrics but do we then have to delay because you just don't get this window you don't get this spark anytime in the future now the way I I would have done the way they did like push it out as soon as possible because there's a risk like there's not a risk I mean it's a positive thing but deadlock might be the next big game so it's only growing from this point on and if you release later it will be already too big and it's the new hot nest and everybody's playing what do you think Jee you can't wait to

Q4 I mean they're about to run into Call of Duty right like so everyone usually avoids Q4 because of the AAA console Madness and Call of Duty everyone's playing Call of Duty so they kind of have to [ __ ] get off the pot so to speak uh they got to go and yeah I mean Deadlocks like early early access not even a launch it's just a new and shiny but it's 14 4K shiny like that's a big shiny it is it is but then you got to wait till q1 and maybe you know maybe they're 86 million lets them wait till q1 until a softer time who knows you've heard of heroic Labs by now and we keep talking about them because in today's mature Market you need every Edge to be successful rather than spending those precious company dollars on building game Tech focus on building your game and shipping it getting to your play hands faster and grow your community heroic Labs is Battle tested

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secure payment architecture and dedicated support team exola powering game developers to achieve Global [Music] success let's get to the next topic because you know we haven't heard cres go off enough today let's talk about Zing's web three project Sugar Town is going to move on to a new home with with its existing leaders quickly on Spectre divide I mean the reality of it is it's like a 60 rated game right now they didn't deliver a quality game right so that's like table St it's been out for less than 24 hours Steam Reviews can shift it's out for less than 24 hours that's give let's give in a little bit of time before we jump and like if you look at the reviews it's a lot of technical issues they solve the technical issues they can grow that percentage that's not written in stone all right so that's that's overcomable right is that what you're saying what's more difficult to overcome is the 30k peak on day one and the lower twitch

viewership that's harder to overcome because typically this is your Peak and you're going to Decay from hold up hold up we don't I don't think we know that yet I don't think we know what the marketing budget is I don't think we know how they're allocating I mean this was a quick jump and them having the beta to having a global launch and the question will be to your point Adam like will da you be able to stack because this is not a AAA launch this is not a paid product this is not conquered they can put a little bit less pressure on themselves they have a little bit more time I do agree this is a little bit lower than 24hour period than you like to see but let's give a week let's give it we can see if they can stack to you or not I agree there's no business model here either they didn't have a prepack to buy it's a DLC model the [ __ ] is going on they have a Founders pack and they also D they did exactly what you said not to do Mr Phillip right they'd have no like pre- buing of of the most interested buyers of anything besides a DLC pack which is stupid transactions they have one founder pack that looks

like a Content pack is Phil an investor in this let's let's make that one clear this is you got to be intellectually honest you rip people to shreds for this [ __ ] D so first it was a quick launch from their beta period to their Global bnch so I think it's very hard to sell in our relx back although yes I agree they probably should have done it but I think for the monetization of this game you got to look at the fundamentals which is that you have two characters which have two different sets of weapons which means you have a much wider based cellular Cosmetics you have to equip more things so the matric of mization is much higher so now I got to I got to buy skins for not only my primary gun my primary character but also for my secondary character as well because remember you're utilizing both of them in the match so I think a lot of those fundamentals are pretty positive and I'm sure we war is GNA this is the guy this is the guy who put the boxes in Apex Legends post Battlefront 2 do not count this guy out all right that's positive do they have loot boxes in this game I do not

want look into this kind holes in this [ __ ] Phil this is not well researched the poor guy try to become machine master all right speaking of [ __ ] to refresh the listeners out there in November 2021 Matt wolf was put in charge of web 3 at zingga after a long career at cocacola mark one of the signs of the coming Apocalypse of crypto gaming and at the time we called him the crypto Zar well the time has come the crypto Zar has been dethroned usurped Aku daa the fall reverberates through the industry leaving a legacy of borrow and reflection on the impermanence of power Matt Wolf the first anointed crypto Zar is no more he has moved on to join D20 a spin out of his group at Zinga as the CEO and now is chasing the world of

rewarded play the next shiny penny in the world of mobile gaming we will see if he can regain the title of SAR at awarded play but unfortunately he is much behind the curve here there are many more established players out there building these rewarded Play Systems and frankly it doesn't seem very easy to differentiate yourself this world so we will see if he can regain his title but this is from the forward Zar himself long live the cryptar rewarded play is on the cutting age of innovation is our only focus let us be the first to reassure our holders that our execution will only get better from here we have assembled a team of some top Minds in Web Two web 3 cocacola marketing pepsy other package Goods product that have nothing to do with interactive and we are more than ready to embark on this chapter more soon and this is a

great quote from our friends that Chad gbt we honor you as a sovereign whose wisdom and Leadership have guided our people through times of both prosperity and challenge your vision of the crypto from the exec ranks of Coca-Cola have left an indelible mark on history and your dedication to the well-being of your subject is a testament to your greatness of your Reign may your legacy continue to inspire and shap the future of our land thank you I feel like there needs to be coronation music or some sort matf you know what's really funny is that evidently Matt wolf is one of the coolest [ __ ] you've ever met dude like he's like one of those guys that you want to get a drink with I give him a hard time and I'm talking a lot of [ __ ] but at the end of the day Matt wolf had no business running a web 3 at a publicly traded company like zingga and this is what the result is ultimately he's moving on to the next shiny penny good luck Mr wolf on the next thing that is a hot business right

now I've been talking to a lot of people about it I wish you the best and you can leave all this web 3 nonsense but I thought they were taking it I thought they were taking the Sugar Town IP with them no they are taking it no he's taking this team IP all the assets announced in the Tweet draw for what though like how is that how does that translate to rewarded play dude like it doesn't make sense I think he's just taking his team no no it was it was in the thread like you got to remember like this this is also a good reminder that web3 is fundamentally just marketing firms at this point because there's no product you know here here was it it's been two years three years four years after they announced this thing and they have no product to show again no product to show because he worked at Coca-Cola he's not a product guy I just can't even believe it still still not that I mean this is the web three meta right now for anyone that's interested is that a lot of the platforms have figured out that these tokens these entities they have value when the you all tradeability you allow people speculate these things have have

real value people are willing to speculate on and so okay maybe we shouldn't just give this stuff away for free randomly which was the air drop system maybe maybe we should make people sweat a little bit so everyone is building these Quest platforms where you can go out and you can do certain tasks within a particular game and then you'll be rewarded with the token that you might actually care about there might be platform token or maybe there's a token for a hot game if you go and play this other game and you get to say like level seven level and they all give you a token for the other gam it's very similar to overing with plats like missplay a lot of the web two stuff it's being mured in web3 so you know it is what it is and I know that like we are seeing this on Steam that's the thing that's TR to blow my mind banana pH a top five Ste performer the newest one to be blowing up is called cats and if you look at the PSU chart for any of these games you may notice that there's an odd sheet they almost seem to be flat and normally when you look at a PSU curve there's a lot of variation shers you know crests and shops which are PSU

Peaks when players seem to log on in certain regions and so that tells you that they're all bot Farms they're all bot farms and whenever there's a drop that you power outage nothing has changed in web three it still is web three and I wish the T the best in I just wanted to add one other little wrench in this system that happened this week it could be regulation so openc has received a Wells letter from the SEC in the US this letter according to the openc chief CEO alleges that the nfts sold on its platform are securities the letter is basically a warning that an investigation is happening and apparently 70 to 80% of Wells letters turn into lawsuits of the SEC suing them so this means that there's a little bit more added uncertainty in the web 3 market now targeting nfts specifically with an Open Seas one of the largest platforms so this whole web 3 thing is rough it's rough all right yeah final

thing what would happen in an alternate world if supercell went IPO or maybe it's a world that we live in in a couple of weeks because we were speculating with some of the the recent hires of the new CFOs yeah this is basically Continuum this is now the third episode because in the first one I wasn't on that episode and Chris mentioned about new CFO at supercell Gerard Griffin nothing much to look at here just like the post basically said on the supercell page like a new member of the clan cool dude get back to work but then Chris said like oh Gerard Griffin yeah he's and then he kind of thought it out loud that this is a person that might take a company public and has that sort of experience to take a company public and this has been uh a sort of a word on the street speculation in Helsinki that that supercell might go public at some point sometimes it has been you know discussed for a period of time sometimes less sometimes more but now with hiring of this new CFO I thought it would be very interesting to hear a hypothesis of what

an IPO would look like for a company like supercell so chis what do you think all right I want to be clear here like I've heard jack [ __ ] on this right this is all based on speculation based upon Gerard joining and then some yeah some chatter around the campfire about them having desires to go public but generally you don't hire a public company CFO like Gerard unless you're planning to go public and generally public CFOs don't generally downgrade to private companies unless they're going public right it's that's the kind of way it works right for the CFO people is that maybe Gerard is wants to [ __ ] retire and he wants to chill out I don't know but at the end of the day it seems valuation perspective you know brawl strs have kind of changed the equation a bit here because it's insanely growing the company right so it's almost up 100% year-over-year according to sensor Tower which is huge because they've been on the decline for the last decade but the question obviously this house is sustainable that is shareholders are generally looking for longer term

catalyst and growth and this squad Buster thing is a absolute [ __ ] disaster in the idea of going public right that doesn't give investors confidence at all that they can execute on new releases which is key to longer term growth they blew tens and tens of millions of dollars on a [ __ ] launch that was in beta for less than a month or something like that and the game can't monetize this is not a good look right for the idea of going public anyway so I don't know generally speaking the IPO Market is starting to come back a bit but there's been almost 130 this year versus 480 in 2020 and 1,35 in 2021 so it's like you we're far off those numbers but we we're getting there but it is very weak for the US generally speaking it's even worse because it's not just Squad Busters right The Clash Royale is still light the thing that has hurt their portfolio the most because that's fell from such dramatic height and they failed to pick it up and not only that like Clash of Clans was the

other game that they were supposed to be employing the scale strategy that they employed on for all stars and honestly it look a little soft it not a good month last month in August for cl is actually what sck this month theyve had on the record and again it's hard to know if web stores and I would suspect web stores are pretty big for Clash of Clans but when you look at this portfolio it's not a company that's hitting its stride and that's where you want to be if you wanted IPO maybe hitting your stride having a lot of grow grow opportunities May been arriving this braw Star Story almost ad nauseum and honestly I'm getting a little sick of it and I I start to wonder how much UA is a part of the broad Star Story you know we've heard a lot about the game design side but you know I started to ask a little bit more questions about the broad Star Story we talked about it was a combination of both yeah they're doing UA on it and that's F marketing is putting a big effort there one of the interesting part about this is what you Crest mention is the valuation of game companies like at play Venture summit we're going through some of the other valuation numbers and and they're really low for gaming right now and I think it was like between 1 to 0.8 which is

significantly lower than what it would be for a SAS company or even an app company and so that is one of the key kind of challenges so Chris do you think that let's say a stock like this would go public and it is a very profitable company that's what definitely is going for them maybe not the growth but definitely the eida is there do you think it would have a positive impact like do you think it will be well received and do do you think it would have a positive impact on other gaming stock should it go live should should it IPO no well it doesn't work that way it generally works the other way right so gaming stocks and gaming companies are just not sexy right now anymore because of fundamental problems in the business generally speaking in terms of it's a very anemic growth relative to other sectors including like AI obviously I'm hoping that there'll be more attention and more sexiness brought back when the switch to launches in GTA next year but mobile is still a [ __ ] train wreck

mainly due to Apple's horrific privacy policies you know like they basically suck the growth out of the market right and without that the interest level is going to be relatively low so that's in the US at least right from a publicly traded like you know NASDAQ NYSE type exchange listing right and then it's possibly to go public in Europe but dude that has not ended well folks like Robo stillfront Ubisoft embracer devolver Team 17 even [ __ ] CD project is trading like 60% of its eyes you know like not to mention all these like [ __ ] companies in Poland and Sweden that went public that had no business being publicly traded companies so it's like are those markets really opportunistic to go public anyway I can't claim to be an expert in the European exchanges but liquidity seems to be an issue there's not no [ __ ] shareholders the coverage of the banks [ __ ] terrible like they just don't have enough like kind of

liquidity and interest to drive publicly traded stocks in Europe at least on the gaming side I don't know about other sectors so anyway it's a tough Market out there right now last question just last question what do you think that 10 cents involvement of course like they own supercell like you know 98% of what was it considering increasingly stringent regulations on gaming in China and the regulations that might be coming towards the Chinese companies like we've seen what happens to Russian companies you know God forbid anything happens with Taiwan we could see the similar type of a hammer come in on the Chinese companies and that puts these companies under a threat if there's a geopolitical crisis do you think that plays any kind of a role in your risk scenarios I mean somewhat I think they're a little bit insulated from that because they're own and operated in Europe and not the US that kind of helps them eliminate that kind of risk but potentially but still it's always the geopolitical risk with being owned by a Chinese company yeah

we've seen what sanctions can do that would be very difficult for a lot of companies where 10 cent is a significant owner if that would happen yeah I mean and valuation like I think you mentioned that you know the last valuation was in 2021 at10 billion so they must be worth 15 to2 billion dollar now you're out of your goddamn [ __ ] mind right like even to multiples like they are so profitable yeah dude and and so is King dude they got bought for like 10 time no they got to bought for six or seven times that was a great acquisition for ma no because they weren't growing it was the [ __ ] meager growth right so that's the difference though is that these guys are growing because of one game right so yeah but the squad Buster thing is absolutely such a train wreck for them in terms of telling the story because that's the opposite of the gross story when you release a game and spend gillions of dollars on [ __ ] [ __ ] and and and fail miserably that just

makes you look horrific it's horrific right the side note here I have is like look the squad cluster Fiasco makes it even less sense for them to go public right how could they possibly think it was a good idea to release something that was so clearly not [ __ ] ready right for the for the market so when you're publicly traded company the level of scrutiny is like insane right it requires maturity and disci in terms of what you do yeah in investors are going to throw up over the squad Busters launch this is exactly the type of thing they [ __ ] hate right that keeps people away from the space is because it's a hit driven business and it's unpredictable right those are the two things that make this industry very very challenging right so if they had gone into a publicly trade market showing how they've grown brawl stars and potentially how they can grow other franchises that are live right that's a great story and then they pitch the idea of coming out with new games to continue their growth that's a compelling story

but to release a Half Baked title with a less than a b month for [ __ ] beta spending a gajillion dollars on triaa actors on a TV campaign of all things for mobile it's just [ __ ] foolish and embarrassing frankly right and investors hate that [ __ ] they [ __ ] hate that stuff and so it's like maybe Gerard needs a little bit more control over that company right or like maybe they need to hire some more like more leadership that actually can stop this nonsense right so I that's the thing that just drives me insane it's like if they were trying to go public they would have never released Quad Squad Busters in that state that's kind of my take all right well let's end it there thanks guys and see you next week 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

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