TWIG #299 Product Strategy, Market Insights & Marketing Challenges

hello everyone and welcome to this weekend games number 299 where we are going to go over a bunch of game industry news with three people we don't normally have on a podcast together so this is going to be fun so hi I'm Jen donaho strategic marketing consultant at beta hat and Jaden Inferno today we have Laura Toranto senior director of product at Big Fish Games hello hello and Adam Telfer product guy extraordinaire with an announcement I I do have an announcement so I can actually announce where I'm going now so I started a new role started Monday actually so I'll be VP of product slate strategy at scopely so I'm pretty excited scope's product culture is second to none so I do have a caveat before I go into more podcasts and come back to the podcast in the future is that I don't represent

scopely when I'm on the podcast this is my own views and I will not be covering their games I will not be covering their perspectives I'm just going to recuse myself from any topic that relates to scop Le and its games but I'm still able to join as long as I'm representing myself awesome all right so we'll be sure to Pepper you about Monopoly go further SC anything else and then I'm just going to like go off camera and scream into a pillow on the side while you do that yeah thank you oh it's so funny the the hilarious thing is the three of us all used to work for scopely in our past I guess for you and present so yeah no everything goes through scopely yeah as Laura you were there when were you there I was there in the pandemic years I think it was a 20120 is maybe 2019 going into 2020 so you guys know where all the dead bodies are buried and you can tell me yeah oh yeah okay good all right excited excited well my time was like 16 to 18 you know

early 16 to late 18 and I think the bodies are buried in the old office I think you're going to go into the new well actually you're you're remote right yeah I'm remote so I'll go into all the offices whenever I travel there um and yeah I'll look for those bodies in awesome well congratulations they are so lucky to have you I know that I mean what a great opportunity they're on fire and they are incredibly lucky to have you thanks appreciate it all right so here is what we're going to cover to day on the podcast uh new technology from new iPhones to new PlayStation 5 pros we're going to go into the details not really because actually no one really cares Ubisoft gets a nasty activist letter Crest isn't here today so I'm just gonna do a quick update on that and I'm sure Crest is going to have thoughts on that he's probably like jumping for joy in Asia where he's traveling right now that this letter actually went through we're going to Deep dive into whether or not we're seeing saturation

in the game industry from a core perspective from a casual perspective so that'll be interesting and if there's time I have just a few quick updates on Roblox developer conference a few interesting things came out of it but since the three of us are not deep into the Roblox lore we're just going to hit some highlights after that all right a few quick shills I just did a podcast and a YouTube video since we are now in both feeds I I did a panel interview with some VC folks the purpose was just since I'm a little bit newer to the world of VC you know like what are some of the basics and then what are some tips and tricks and what are some Secrets if you're looking for funding that you know you could get from these different folks so I just wanted to say thanks to Year from cisu cander from transcend and Anton from play Ventures for sharing all their Yoda knowledge on the podcast let us know what you think about it and if you want to do a kind of VC 202 since that was VC 101 and go a

little bit deeper and hear a little bit more from them so Laura what else we got we got one more so one of our sponsors heroic labs they achieved a milestone they conducted a public scale test and as a reminder what they offer are services for social multiplayer so looking at having lots of players playing at the same time and making sure everything feels super fast super quick so they did they had a public scale test with a code Wizards group and they achieved 2ill million concurrent users with no issues so if you're looking for any sort of social multiplayer Solutions look to heroic Labs oh and in done in the ad voice too well done well done Laura all right let's talk about some things going on in the industry so the Super Bowl event or the World Cup event if you're European for apple is always this September event this is where they make the big updates the big moments for new hardware uh usually there's a really big game

announcement too um back in the day we got wild Rift onto one of them when I was at EA I know that we used to like send a group of people who would be in some secret lair for a week present you know getting everything ready to get up on stage and present at these Big Apple events so this one was a 10-cent game so I don't know if you saw it but they're doing an open world RPG based on honor of Kings so it's called honor of Kings world so it came out with a trailer at the event and so what was fascinating is that the game isn't actually shipping until next year I'd have to believe that's a delay usually it's kind of a day and date hey there's new hardware go play this new game on this new hardware I'm trying to sell you so that seemed like a little bit of a Miss coming out of that event but the game looks beautiful as it should coming from a 10cent game on that IP and other news which was pretty funny the EU is forcing Apple to pay about 14 billion dollar like 13 billion euros and back taxes to

Ireland because of the sweetheart deal that happened kind of like eight or 10 years ago Ironically neither Ireland or apple are happy about it uh Ireland has been like a tax Haven for apple and so now it's going to be one of the few countries in Europe to have a surplus in taxes so I'll take that check if you need anything to spend it on my my my people are from the cork region if anyone wants to like send me there to go say hi to my people my dad's that is like hardcore Irish and so yeah the rest of it is Eastern European Jew but you know so anyway let's go to the other Hardware yeah let's talk about PlayStation Pro so there was a announcement this week a technical presentation by Mark cery the PlayStation 5 Pro launches November 7th for 700 us I think also they gave some International pricing so it's things like 700 pounds as well the PS5 with a disc as a comp launched at about $500 and the PS5 Pro boasts roughly 45%

faster GPU Advanced rate tracing Aid driven upscaling this was all covered in the presentation in great detail and mostly in terms of the feature set the way that they phrased it is that it'll effectively allow players to play PS5 games existing play PlayStation 5 games in High Fidelity mode but now at 60fps if you're M with PlayStation you're allowed to choose between performance mode or Fidelity mode where performance mode runs at 60 fidelity mode prioritizes graphical Fidelity and what was interesting is that Cy reported players actually preferred 60fps mode over Fidelity by a ratio of 3 to one overall when you look at this and saying like Okay now you're able to play High Fidelity games at 60 FPS for about $700 there is definitely some negative response to this on pricing and obviously this is just what players are saying we'll see what they do come November but $700 without a disc drive with just sort of meager visual performance upgrades they did a lot of

like visual representations where they show the two games next to each other and I always enjoy it watching influencers being like going at it with like a microscope and being like wait a second oh wait you can see inside of the building inside of Last of Us wow the one on the horizon that you're running past and then never looking at again so it's just interesting to kind of look at like how what players value do they actually value 60 FPS yes clearly do they actually value looking inside of buildings probably not so it'll be interesting to see the performance we'll talk about this I think closer to the launch but I do want to show ree Elliot's good article on the impact of this change we'll link it in the description it's from Mia research talks about the PS5 media okay let's go with that one but yeah it basically talks about the impact of the PS5 Pro mainly being for super fans and that it won't really grow PlayStation's player I don't know it just feels like it it happens so quickly do you know what I mean I feel like I was I just pre-ordered or just

like was waiting for my PS5 delivery and all of a sudden there's another version I don't know it feels like it's too soon yeah you're getting old Laur four years ago I know like life seems to go faster now that we're older but no I I remember the day that I got my PS5 and yeah it was about four years ago yeah now so like in terms of console Cycles yeah we're still on a pretty long console cycle yeah it's a really long one so the cool thing at Riot was because we were thinking about making console games yes back in 2020 valerant finally out on Console so I guess it was back then one of the things that Riot did was everyone got to choose a console it was funny you got to choose uh the Xbox series XRS PS5 or a switch and everyone was like how about I take the new consoles that are who bought who got the Xbox series s who was like no that's the console for you got the S why did you get the s oh no no no x x no no

no that that you're right that is dumb but you yes if if you're dumb you you could have picked that one but no I I got that one and so on this I was reading a little bit and I saw our friend Matt piscatella from cir was looking back at the last pro version and said that from a percentage of overall Revenue the pro is only like 15 to 18% of the total revenue it's it's very small and how it impacts things I mean I'm not an expert and maybe when Crest comes back I think last time he was like this is this is stupid but I I'm not even sure why they why they do it and $700 is like you're on your way to building a PC like I guess I'm just this is what the player response was I think we can go into more detail um I don't think it's worth like ding into too much no it just it's interesting all right so who wants to do the sad news oh the sad news there was some news this

morning Microsoft will lay off approximately 650 people further from its gaming team Phil Spencer told employees this in an email to team members this morning of our recording so truthfully this is very hot off the press we're stitching together the quick articles that we have but I expect this to cover in more detail if there's sort of like debate Topics in the future the quote here is as part of aligning our post-acquisition team structure managing our business we've made the difficult decision to eliminate approxim 650 roles across Microsoft gaming mostly corporate and supporting functions to organize our business for the long-term success I've heard this mostly impacts Activision Blizzard I've heard this may have impacted one project at blizzard but we will confirm both those details again this is hot off the press and we'll cover in future weeks if there's sort of debate driving details that we want to go into all right so I'll just read a little bit of this article from game industry. Biz so so we had talked before

a couple weeks ago mainly around Star Wars Outlaws cruss was talking about how the stock was taking a hit and I think we all thought it was a little bit unfair how much hate they were getting over the performance of Star Wars Outlaws which again like a 76 Metacritic game is I don't know where it is now like that's not a bad game and and so the price has continued to kind of fall so Ubisoft share price has fallen more than 50% over the last year taking it to a 10-year low and so the Wall Street Journal reports that one of the investors of AJ Investments and partners has written an open letter to the board outlining its deep dissatisfaction with current performance and strategic direction of the company the hedge fund is calling for CEO EES and the board to take Ubisoft private or allow it to sell to strategic investor it feels that Ubisoft is a great undervalued company these are all quotes by the way not me

giving my own opinion I think Crest might agree with this Ubisoft at current state is mismanaged and shareholders are hostages of the family members and tensent who take advantage of them management is focused on pleasing investors and beating quarterly results and not focusing on long-term strategy to provide exceptional experience for gamers so I think this just kind of comes at a time where we're seeing a lot more activist investors I don't know if you all follow Disney what was happening with Disney at the time is there was also a activist investor kind of going after Bob Iger and uh they ended up getting into basically if you watch the the show succession it was kind of like a fight to take over the board seats and Bob Iger won and so we'll see what happens in this case Crest will have a lot more coming back but it's really interesting to see this happen a little like succession game industry drama I'm sure this would make for a great TV show that I would love to watch I have a quick update just more for Sony stuff so

one is Astro Boy which just had an incredible launch and got roughly a 94 Metacritic I've been playing it with my daughters and it's been a ton of fun it's basically like Mario Galaxy Mario Mario Odyssey but for PlayStation five and Sony dipped it into a ton of nostalgia in terms of bringing in a whole bunch of Astro boyes characters from all of their different IPs over history including like going all the way back to PlayStation one PlayStation 2 some interesting videos online of like even some of the deeper Cuts Like Dark Cloud going way back in the day of PlayStation there's some free DLC coming out later this year also on the PC console side the interesting launch to watch is Space Marine 2 which just launched and again we've been talking a lot about the impact and predictability of wish list this is one of those titles that had a pretty incredible wish list number going into launch so it'll be interesting to watch effectively saber worked on world War Zed or World War Z

for Americans and was like a excellent you know Left for Dead esque four player shooter this is now Warhammer Space Marine Co-op shooter so it's really interesting to kind of look at the performance differences look at the attitudes of just how the market has changed versus when they launched World War versus now when they're watching 4K and like how the IP of 4K is has changed yeah that the Space Marine 2 is it's kind of all over it's getting a lot of high a lot of good ratings a lot of influencer coverage so what you know we'll talk about this a little later with saturation I'll make a comment about like is our industry add or ADHD whichever is the new way to say hyperactive I'm a little worried that this is going to see so you know what Laura likes to say a pop and drop where everyone's like on it for five minutes and then kind of moves on it is a premium game so it will pop and drop like there's it's inevitable this isn't going to be like even hell divers right like there'll be a growth and then a

decline like the question then becomes like now does everybody jump on building Co-op Shooters like are we all like trying to build Left 4 Deads again in this St I hope so but then you think of like all of like just the pendulum keeps swinging right right and so what do we take from this what's the real takeaway from the market we we talked a little bit about extraction Shooters it's the same thing we talked about that last week and yeah Devon from newu kind of heard us talking about that and he wrote a piece on LinkedIn where he you know did a deeper dive into extraction Shooters the same way is everyone's kind of chasing that one and like I think we all have to be really careful about chasing the next thing but we'll let's get into that a little bit later sorry about that so Laura do you want to just walk through the top games games by Revenue in North America August I mean we could play a guessing game and I think everyone would get it I mean it'd be like what do you who do you think's the top well Monopoly go clearly I mean candy crushes is up there Royal match is

up there roblox actually what is interesting and I can't take credit for this actually Joseph Kim in his most recent one of his newsletters they actually he had a guest writer talk about last war survival because on that list is last war survival as well as white out survival and he they actually broke down why they think last war is doing as well as it is and why it's on this list so it was a very interesting read and for our breakdown of out survival we talked about how the onboarding experience was very very good easy made for people that like Forex games but don't know they like Forex games yet so they kind of get you in slowly it sounds like just as a summary last war does that white don't does it a little bit last war does it to a greater degree I would even wager a guess that's probably very likely reason it is it looks like from sensor Tower it is actually it's a from a revenue standpoint it's actually going past white out survival so yeah it was

interesting because we obviously you and I covered white out survival and it's kind of flattened out in terms of its Revenue in North America and this the chart we're looking at is in North America and then back in March last war P them and it looks like in August they're starting to widen the Gap and you know I think both of them follow the similar strategy of that you know hyper casual fake ad which actually isn't fake because that is that is the gameplay that you come in and experience and last war if you I'm sure you've everyone you've seen this ad you're running into the Horizon you got the little guy and you've got to pick do I twox my guys or 10x my guys and then you kind of pick up weapons along the way and almost like vampire Survivor or Survivor iio more and more enemies come at you and that's kind of the game play and so white out survival was a little bit different because that one actually they were fake ads they were completely like I'm going to run around a Frozen tund and collect stuff on my back kind of

like a Township ad but that wasn't actually the gameplay that you had and so I think the difference here is that they with last war is they took a legitimate hyper casual ad turned it into the onboarding of the game play slowly slowly introduced you into the forx kind of like a bait and switch or you know if you want to make a drug analogy you know it's like there's like a gateway drug into getting you addicted to heroin um for sure I think that's what's happened here and and they did it in a you know in an incredible way and I think what we can all learn from that is you know where you can help players really ease into a more complex experience that monetizes really well like that seems to be what's really resonating and leading to these top Revenue franchises like I mean I I think you could also argue that many of them are all casual right like a lot of these top games from you know the monopolies Royal match Candy Crush Township coin Master Pokemon go and then

what's the last one Cod mobile Cod mobile Cod mobile is still up there shooter shooter Adam are you excited off air we were talking about how um we got casual girl and hardcore guy on the podcast like please you got the two extremes but no to be honest I love that strategy especially like on paper in theory like when talking about games thinking about like how do you connect the explosiveness of like a hyper casual game and like the amount of downloads the CPI efficiency to an endgame and like I think about mobile design you know five seven years ago when we were thinking about these problems and how many dead bodies there were like there was tons of attempts of games trying to like hybridize two different genres and like hey we'll take an endless runner up front and then we'll turn it into a super deep RPG on the back end and then it never worked right and then everyone

said oh there's an uncanny valley endless Runner players want to play an endless Runner game RPG players want to play an RPG game and then that was the sentiment like that you couldn't figure this out at that point and now you're looking at it being like no we're in a mature Market if you do this right you can effectively bridge between a survival game right like to up to a 4X back end up to a hyper deep ccpg back end and you're seeing it with Idol you're seeing with whole bunch of different game plays so I would love to dive deeper into like what are the hooks like what has to go right what are the things that have to be successful in order for that onboarding funnel to work because obviously there's hypers success stories let's not just look at those let's look at some of those failures and say like what's really has to be true in order for that funnel to work so this is like my strategy muscle like going at it being like like we can't just look at the the one success story we've got to figure out like what really drives this onboarding strategy to work yeah no that'd be interesting to do that deeper dive because it's not even just forx I

think the character collector aspect of it happens too and both white out survival and last war it's not even just two hybrids like it's multiple hybrids of of genres that are really leveraging like the best of and so you're right it's like what are those things so I just remember like 10 years ago we were like all making fun of a daa game of that was trying to do like three games at once and I was like no you can't do that you can't create three games at once and now I was like no you again the whole Market loves it actually you should be doing five yeah you should do five now that's how we get it right now we need to start adding five new games casual front end shooter backend let's get it done 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 flyer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you

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so I'm just going to like warn everyone the types of articles that I like to pick up for podcasting are going to be less like news articles and more like philosophy articles about product strategy and really just generally strategy about the market so there was an article written by Paul kilduff Taylor and we should link to it I think he's an excellent writer there's a ton of really great content on his Blog the title is saturation doesn't exist with kind of the tagline being like ERS really have too much fun or too much of a good thing or are we just making excuses to fail so when I'm thinking about this it's like say we've all seen it a game launches it doesn't succeed and then the predominant reason we point to say this game was a failure is it's because competitor X dominates this genre that genre is all tied up you can't touch it and so for example like where we covered Concord in the previous twig and I think this is like we can go

right into this recency bias right Concord taken down after about two weeks estimated about a million Revenue 25k units I feel absolutely terrible for the devs by the way like yeah after eight years of working on this game I know it's being trod through the mud so I don't I don't want this to be another article that just kind of trods them through the mud even more that was a difficult decision by Sony but the right one at the same time like this is a signal of like hey does saturation exist in this market because when we think of things like okay Concord versus OverWatch the immediate sentiment is well it's because hero Shooters are PL out you can't compete in hero Shooters anymore so then you look at games like Marvel Rivals and Deadlock and are we saying that they're Dead on Arrival probably not but what's the difference like like how much does Market saturation matter and I think there's also sentiment of like things that this holds so Pokémon go World of Warcraft

League of Legends Clash Royale are all kind of sub genres that everybody uses as common examples of like hey genres get locked up by an incumbent and then no one else should try because it's just impossible and then there's examples where that's not true so valerant going at Counter-Strike everyone's like counter- strike's got it no one can go after TX Shooters valerant did it right coin Master no one should go after coin Master it's the only game that can dominate that space Monopoly go sorry I'm already talking about Monopoly go I apologize oh no um Candy Crush right you can't go after match three you can't go after I'm gonna use okay let's go with switcher I keep calling it beel let's go with switcher but then there's Garden Scapes and then there's Royal match right there's always more room for that Galaxy of furos there's no more oh wait Marvel Strike Force oh wait AFK oh wait raid Shadow Legends there's always a new ccpg and now we're talking about forx and I remember like five years ago talking

about strategy and people in the Forex genre telling me no machine Zone you can't do Forex Forex is done right there's no more room for forx games and now we're looking at it being like no there was definitely room so you look back at that and be like is there room for mobas on mobile is there room for hero Shooters on PC console is there room for MMOs where you're like is it actually just that no one's built a good enough game and I'm intentionally being like inflammatory about this SP conversation because like on this podcast we are typically quick to point out to those external factors so things like stormgate as an RTS has a genre ceiling Souls games or an nich audience Monopoly go can't ever Dent coin Master however the outcomes are a lot more about execution then product Market fit so I'll start here with like my general perspective and sorry for the rant here the article here focuses a lot more on premium games and indie games which I don't believe suffer from saturation so I I do strongly agree with this article players finish a game a premium game and

then they're hungry for more after I play Elden ring and balers gate I want to play more games like that and and look forward to the next one right and because those games have a start and end that hunger increases the one butt here is that there's impact of competitive windows so you can't just launch an Elden ring competitor on top of Elden ring obviously there share of voice and share of wallet in your launch window that matters life services are different sub genres can reach saturation the only way to beat league in Dota is to build it for a different audience that you can retain and grow and I think deadlock is that kind of MOA in shooter clothing that is a strategy to find that kind of blue spot in a red ocean that's the way to go after it instead of saying like go directly at the king now we're going to try to find that blue spot so in general what I'm finding is that product Market fit matters more than saturation so to win a genre you have to understand your competition have to find a product thesis that resonates with what players

actually value and separates you from the competition so if we Loop that back to my initial point on Concord like I don't think Concord failed because it was a hero shooter it failed because it was a generic hero shooter that didn't have meaningful differentiation and didn't spark an emotional response and create a differentiator that people were drawn to and I think that's what drew the go to market down that's what made the marketing worse and unfortunately that's the key reason for Concord I don't think it actually has to do with the genre so on Concord you think it wasn't differentiated at launch or at the conception sadly the conception was eight years ago was it Innovative back then or it just took too long I don't know what do you think I think in general my experience with these things has been that a lot of projects in development when it comes to the pitch phase we'll talk about differentiators and on paper they sound really good and then production realities hit and then

the slow degradation and erosion of what that differentiator is hits and then you have all these differentiators which we thought we would do and then they get kicked down the road so like my favorite example is what I call like social jazz hands where like in every pitch deck I've seen there's always like and then we'll add social social yes I've seen a ton of them yeah I know right like we've seen this we're GNA reinvent how players interact with each other like but then ultimately social is always added super late in development and then you slowly get like a road that as your real true differentiator and then you get to the realities of production you're like we can't add it just throw guilds and now you're left with a a generic thing right you're left with something that the differentiator is no longer there I don't know what happened with this game I know there's a lot of talented people that work on it and I'm sure they internally were trying really really hard to add as much differentiation as they could but ultimately right from that announcement the player response was the player response and just to show

user research right like we've got to be able to find earlier signals of players being able to look at these games understand enough about them and then being able to signal to us like hey is this a real meaningful differentiator is this something that aligns player values or are we actually headed right towards direct competition I called it like a hangover but when you play a really good game and this has happened to me recently with tears of the Kingdom Zelda's tears of the kingdom and a Remastered game a jrpg called live aive when I finished those games all I wanted to do is play like I wanted that same feeling same experience and I couldn't have it and it actually made me hate games that I felt were subpar compared to that experience more I was sitting with my partner Mark we played them together he does all the battle stuff and you know we finished here's the kingdom and he's like what do you want to play next let's let's try this indie game I'm like absolutely not the the

production quality is going to be nowhere near as good as the game we just finished I'm going to get angry at it because I'm going to be like why can't they just make as good of an experience as the one I just played I agree I think it's about product Market fit I think there's always a space you have to carve it out and we get into the issue of I can't tell you how many like clones games that are just not very good and then like and they're like well why is it doing well because it's not very good it's just not very good and I'll I'll speak to match three the quality of your switch is not good your levels are not good The Meta is not differentiate I played 5,000 games just like this like when we talk about differentiation there's a huge difference between what players feel is different and a different experience and what we when we design on paper saying that this is a USP that players will understand and I feel like there's not enough understanding that overlap is not always clear and what we want to design for and we think is huge and different lot players don't they're not even going to notice there's still going to say it feels the same and I mean some companies

do this well some don't that early product insights testing where a lot of times players will tell you that they'll be like it feels similar and I can't tell you how many times I've seen developers and you know myself at times included they don't understand it yet or they'll cling to the little positive bits but when players give us feedback we cling to a lot of the positive and not kind of the well what are they actually saying do they feel like it's different if it reminds them of this game yeah you had that in your like little slide it's like Pixar meets Royal match meets something like oh great it feels like Royal match yeah that's not always a good thing like it's going to feel similar and it's are are you giving them something different that's literally nothing what I wrote the only thing I wanted to add for this piece was there's a little bit of I think also that we don't do enough of and it's partly you get it from playing competitor games and but I feel like an underrepresented skill that at least when it comes to product and picking out

what game like you're going to invest you know $10 million into making new game what do you do there something in fashion called Trend forecasting that's needed when you start approaching saturated markets and that's how you desaturate them is that you start to not only look at what players value but what players are going to Value it's kind of like last war like we know you're going to like this Forex game we know you have to eat your brocc we're going to give you little bits of it until you know but it's a little bit trying to predict what we think is coming next some people say they think they know that's what we're all betting on right when we make a game we're betting on what we think players want next but it's very difficult and also something I think is not as valued as as it should be especially in product and approaching a busy Market I want to go back to something you said about insights and I was going to do a huge plug for two things one is one team one dream and so at this stage when you are trying to figure out and and forecast you know what's next and what things are going and develop a positioning or USP

unique selling points and differentiation working with your marketing partner who understands audience and the market and Market fit is the perfect time to have a marketing partner it's also the perfect time to have a consumer insights partner because you know what I love doing just in my my day job now and my career is like this is the part of games that is the hardest thing we ever do but it's also the most fun because you come up with something you do consumer or play testing and you figure out like are we getting there or not and there are ways to do this at a very early stage and I feel like the poor Concord folks might not have done this or maybe they did and it was in development for so long that they you know they either didn't do it or they ignored the warning signs and I always tell people and sorry I'm going to do a scopely thing here this isn't the past Adam though is one of the things that I respected most about my scopely time is he covers his eyes and his ears like the monkey who like see no evil is that we cut games you know Phil and I talk all

about cutting Breaking Bad or there are so many games and IPS and things that we did that we threw out there and didn't work and we cut it and the balls to do that is something you don't always see and I think the learning from a Concord or from this is that you need to do a couple of those things so the other thing that we don't often talk about and we don't think about as much is how do you break through the Clutter and how do you get eyeballs on something new there are 15,000 plus new games on Steam every year imagine the App Store is times a hundred on that like AR aren't there like hundreds of thousands of new games so it's incredibly expensive to launch a new game you know especially if there's an IP then you have you're paying for the IP but what was interesting is we just talked about last war white out survival and I'll bring up match Factory you know one that I got wrong you know really really early on because we were like oh my God it's another one of those

freaking like you know pull the off and put it on the bench you know three 3D matching games right so these all have had success on mobile so I'll talk mobile for a second here and and how do these non Brands they're not even leveraging an IP how do they have success in a crowded space like all of those Forex and puzzle are saturated markets and a lot of it goes back to what we were just talking about earlier which were fake Hy casual ads kind of kidding but but kind of not kidding right like so it does seem like there's a lowest common denominator kind of working in some areas of gaming right now especially on mobile you know not as much on HD PC console so this simple gam play that you utilize in your ad with a very early onboarding that you know is there it baits you in and then it switches you to something a little bit more complex all three of these what also they have is that massive bank account so that when they do hit their kpis the bucket isn't leaky you know

they're they're retaining folks their LTV is there LTV is higher than their cpis then they know they can start scaling and so you know for on mobile I think Gand the days Laura of your shark fin or the pop and drop and what we're seeing now I think are these launches you know kind of grow over time like slow and steady wins the race and on the HD side it you know it does feel like it looks a little bit different like to me again it feels ADHD players are jumping on the hype train of some of these things and you're right Adam maybe it's because they're more premium you don't have as much live service but I feel like an HD player is remember the Pixar movie up with the little dog and it was like squirrel and he was like squirrel and like honestly it's how I feel every day now that I'm older and I can't pay attention to anything but like if you think about finals and like how oh my God it was going to be the next biggest thing and then po world oh my God that one too and I even black myth I

think we're going to get out of that and and the window of that people hold their interest is like just a couple of weeks and they're on to the next thing because there's so much content that's where I feel like the saturation piece kind of is hitting us a little bit I don't know if you guys agree or not but but I do see like this difference in Mobile and PC is that how you all are seeing it like on PC console like the Slate this year is weaker than last year so when I think of what we were thinking of last year when it was like Diablo 4 balter's gate Starfield dropping armored Core six happening all the same time right yeah we had we had ADHD this year you're like oh there's not a lot of things coming out wait power world what is this right hell divers dropping in a relatively open window in February and even this month like there's Star Wars Outlaws sorry M be soft but like it made space for Space Marine too as a player I'm relatively bored of PC

console games so now I'm picking up Space Marine I'm picking up indie games on Steam because I don't really have a lot of other things to play right now oh interesting I'm having that problem on mobile too I am running out of interesting games I normally like just standard puzzle games and I've started playing the kind of the lightweight you take that hyper casual gameplay and match it with like a polished version try to get like more puzzle players so sorting the liquids Texas sort all that stuff I started to play more because I feel like my usual rotation is starting to feel stale and I don't know what else to play got it okay makes sense so maybe they're just not breaking through the Clutter to you maybe you guys aren't watching ads it's too expensive to Market these things let me just do a quick wrap up on Roblox just to get these a few quick announcements out number one is the CEO came out with some really bold goals uh to reach 10% of the global

gaming Market's revenue and a billion daily active users it sounds like a lot so three key areas communities and party features so they're rebranding groups to communities and adding you know to our whole social jazz hands like they have the figured out if you want to know what social is and the future of social you got to watch what Roblox is doing they're going to add voice chat they're going to have all kinds of things coming this is what the next generation is getting used to and I think as developers I'll sh a podcast I'm doing maybe next week I'm going to pull in three developers in the game industry that are 30ish and under and ask them what is it like to make games for the Next Generation like how are you approaching this because we're all dinosaurs now and I want to make sure that as a dinosaur making games like I'm in touch with what the next generation wants from gaming all right so the other one was this affiliate program so this was pretty interesting you're going to be able to like incorporate op at Shopify and sell real world stuff and

then the final one which I do think is interesting to developers here is that you're going to be able to sell your experience for real dollars $10 $30 or $50 and receive 50 60 and 70% rev share so they're upping the Rev share they're allowing for real dollars not just Robo Robux to purchase and so this might be a little bit of a game changer for people to want to develop experiences because rev share has sucked so badly them giving a better rev share might be actually interesting uh some AI stuff to follow as well so that's just Roblox update from the developer conference I'm sure many other people W it look like fun anything there guys before we sign off for the week I was just going to joke reading this Discord and Tik Tok were too expensive to buy so they're basically building similar experiences in the game themselves I don't doubt it I mean it is becoming a social media Network for you know gen Alpha basically you just

happen to be able to play some games you know poor snap if they hadn't killed all of their gaming you know a couple years ago maybe and poor snap is in just strug they're on the struggle bus right now like app Lov is doing better than snap as a social network it's pretty crazy all right everybody uh we will see you next week next week we'll have a bunch of the cast back and oh and it's our 300th and we'll probably do nothing because everyone's on you know you know out this week so we'll see what happens great all right see you guys bye 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 fun slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fun.com slack and apply to join join the games industry's best professional Community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun

content creators thanks for listening