TWIG #324: Netflix Games Build Back Better Plan, Launch of DC Dark Legion and Death of Fragpunk

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have so black monetization star Priya Cyprus. I'm Eric Crest, strategy and investing. And Adam, product, just product. Low energy today. Jen, did you actually get sick from GDC or is it just like remnants of your Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I I got sick on actually the Thursday, the day that we recorded. I didn't make it to some of the events because I would just I was so awful. Lost my voice and I was in bed all weekend and so I've been on the struggle bus coming back. It's not as bad as last year. It's good. Yeah. I've heard quite a bit if people got COVID or a lot of sickness. I've been okay actually. Knock on wood. My strong German constitution protected me yet again. Your deflector shields were at full strength, right? Unlike mine. I get sick every time I go to one of these. This is why everyone's like, "Why don't you do more conferences?" And I'm like, "I can't have the downtime of being sick from your nasty germs and your hugging and the shaking hands and the talking in my

face all week." Anyway, here's what we got on this podcast today. Post GDGC chatter, our live podcast went out this morning. We're recording on Wednesday, so we'll probably start to get feedback from that. This podcast will probably go out on Friday. That way, we give a little bit of space. So, what have we heard since our time at GDC? Game journalism is back from the dead. Two great stories. I'm excited for positive news for us. We're sorry, not sorry to A16Z about speedrun. I'll do that in the corrections. Frag Punk versus Marvel Rivals update. Adam and Phil are going to go back and forth. They pulled a bunch of data. Lots to talk about. But first, actually the night that we recorded the podcast was the Severance season finale, which was amazing. The best show on TV, Crest, I just want you to know at GDC, everyone came up to me and was like, "Jen, I so agree with you about that severance event. [ __ ] Chris. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Dude, I've already eaten crow on this one. What? But what more can I do? Like, do you want like a public apology? Like broadcast on the internet? Yes. I [ __ ] up. It was in the moment. I was being mean. I said I was being mean. Oh, no. It was also about the show and about how amazing the show is. thing. I watched it myself. Oh, you did? The Let's spoil it all because Adam, right? Yeah. Don't spoil it. I haven't watched the last episode. It's not available in Canada yet. Right. delay is just some of us have to work. But I do have to say like everyone's like, "Oh my god, this season's amazing." I'm like, "The mid-season was pretty boring this season." So I feel like all has been forgiven. The final episode was so amazing that everyone's just willing to forget all of those weird mid-season episodes. I disagree with that. I completely disagree. I thought the whole season was really well put together, dude. But whatever. Anyway, that's matter of taste. I wanted to do a little speaking of Canada. I didn't realize not to be political but a little

bit political how many Canadians were a little bit fearful of coming to GDC or people from other countries coming to GDC. I don't know if on LinkedIn you saw this but like people were worried about getting back over the border and getting out and getting in. And you know, as a shitty American, I am sorry to all of our international friends and hope GDC went well for everybody. On a different note, the Heathrow [ __ ] shut down the day after GDC on Friday. Yeah, that was crazy. Like they were just stuck. I didn't hear anybody that suffered through that, but Jesus, that's like a huge airport. Like just shut down for a whole day. That's crazy. Actually, the journalist that we're gonna talk about in a minute was impacted by that, but we'll get there. All right. So, any other post GDC insights from you guys? I think the thing that I saw is everyone has a GDC take on LinkedIn. My feed was littered with the what did I think about like everyone's a thought leader now. It's I mean I guess we're four people on

a podcast. So, I think you spend too much time on LinkedIn. It's just I find so little value in LinkedIn these days. Yeah, that that's part of the problem. I have not seen too many GDC takes that have been super surprising. So, I'm on the look for that if we can figure that out. I'm still on the look for something positive. I mean, I really as the negative Nelly, generally speaking, like I think it was overwhelmingly like kind of negative sentiments coming out of GDC that you just don't see that very often. It's like usually lots of hope and lots of It was that it was that the last couple years, was it not? This year, I would say like the one was AI that was positive. I think people were underplaying it were underplaying the impact of AI and I think it was huge. I mean, it was the whole conference was focused on it. Like, this is our bet, right? This is what we're betting on for growth. Okay. But what I think though this time, I think people were a little bit more sober on the AI story than they were last year, right? Like, we haven't really seen anything really material happen with the exception of the

advertising. This is just on the hype life cycle, right? Like last year was all of the web 3 and metaverse people moving over to AI and saying that it's going to be the greatest thing on earth and now that bubble has popped and now you're seeing actually like real game makers looking at the technology and saying like hey there's some real good implementations here and trying to figure out how to integrate into their pipelines and yeah but it has not been cracked yet but I think versus where we've seen the hype train of web 3 and metaverse this still feels like there's real tangible path towards some real value here. Okay, I agree with that. I think Eric, I actually think the push back you had during the EA in investor day. Remember one of the feedback pieces you got was that maybe they're downplaying it because they're concerned about employee push back, right? There's still some concerns over employment. So, people are afraid to kind of shout AI for fear of push back. I think that's a reasonable objection to why people aren't hammering their hands on a fist on the table about AI right now. Yep.

No, that's definitely possible. The one area that I actually got a ton of flack on and more like feedback on was me hating on vibe coding was number one like I just hate the word so much. Yeah, I don't right. Like I hate the word so much and like I look I code with AI right now. Like it's super valuable but I would never call myself vibe coding when I do it. Yeah. Don't mess with their vibe, dude. They got to be able to use their words, you know? Like I'm bullish on AI but not on vibe coding the word. All right, we're going to cancel vibe coding. Got it. The branding of it. Let's do a new branding. So just a quick shill section. We are not shilling GDC. Praise cure. So excited about that. So the light shilling is I just did a deep dive podcast that is on influencers and podcast marketing. So it's in the podcast feed. It's also in the newsletter. I had two great guests. One of the guests actually, Maryanne, she

contributed an article for the newsletter. So, if you really want to go into a little bit more around kind of influencer marketing and podcast marketing 2.0 and how that can still be data driven, so that was really helpful. One of the guests, Sarah, was a growth marketer at some of the game companies and so she went to the light or the dark side, whichever you care about. So, it's nice to kind of talk to folks that are inside of that sphere. Just how do we go beyond traditional UA and performance? Phil, I know you love the attribution and there is some attribution in influencer and podcast marketing. Okay, corrections. Not exactly a correction, but a clarification. I was chatting with some of the A16Z folks who shared with me their blog post about the program overhaul. Let me just read a quick quote. Today, we reintroduced A16Z speedrun with the same ethos, which is, you know, we want to make cool [ __ ] We continue to honor our roots in gaming. Our DNA is inseparable from the spirit of play, but we expanded our horizons. We believe the future belongs to

founders who defy categories and invent new possibilities. So now A16Z speedrun stands as a beacon for technology and entertainment startups alike. So they let me know they had eight game teams at speedrun. Mishko was like I think he said he saw two. There you go. So just letting you all know but they are expanding it and rebranding it. Chris, I think your vibe is going to be the same. But oh my god, like just [ __ ] spin baby spin. You know what I mean? Like let's be clear. Let's be clear. We are proud to bring founders building experiences, products, and platforms shaping tomorrow's AI and creative landscape. So basically, there's not one gaming word in the entire pitch for this [ __ ] thing now, right? So, as I said the last time, $600 million gaming fund that is not a gaming fund. Like, it's just not, right? And just to be clear, let's rewind to what they said last year. This was only a year ago, folks.

Only a year ago. This is from Mr. Jonathan Lie, right? Who I do like. I think he's a good guy, but whatever. We're excited to share we've raised the A16Z Games Fund 2. Our second $600 million fund is investing in the best earlystage founders in games. This brings our 16 games asset under management to 1.2 million. That's a lot of [ __ ] games. Where the [ __ ] is the games now, Mr. A16Z, right? And I quote from Mr. Jonathan Lie again. There has never been a better time to build a game startup than today. There are more players and platforms than ever before, more tools and tech to help build games than ever before, more funding for game startups than ever before. No, there is not, Mr. Jonathan Lie. According to your own press release, that is no longer investing in games. like we believe games will play a pivoted role defining how we socialize, play, and work over the next century. Again, I will let his own words speak for themselves, right? This is not a gaming fund anymore,

right? And it was just a gaming fund a [ __ ] year ago. Bait and switch, rope a dope, whatever you want to call it. Az is no longer investing in games with their gaming fund. That is the new direction of these guys. So, there you go. But do you think it's a full dry spell like speedrun this fund is no longer doing any games or do you think they're still doing some? Cuz it says like doing games. We know they are. They've sent it. It's just less. They clearly are doing games. We know they are. Yeah, they've sent it. It's just less opening. Of course I'm exaggerating. They're doing games, but that's not their focus anymore. Their focus is on AI tech [ __ ] robots, dude. Like which I don't think any of us blame them given them. No. No. And I want to be clear. We just blame them for the spin. I'm blaming bait. They are honest. I mean, they This is not honesty. This is not honesty. Even a a spark of honesty. I'm with Eric 130% on this one. Infuriating to read this press release. They're moving away from games. They're going broader. They're adding

the spin to make that palatable. And I agree with Philip L. Dude, they have the best PR people in the [ __ ] business, dude. Crafting this [ __ ] to spin the message, right? This is what you're going to say. This is their job. This is all these guys. It's all about [ __ ] spin, right? So, it's like, you know, fine, you know, like that's this is what you're doing. But I'm just want to tell people that their focus is not on games like anymore. This is what scares me the most is they're going to abandon all the gaming things on the A rounds and the subsequent rounds. This is what they're not saying, right? This is what where the spin becomes a problem, right? So that they do not participate anymore because their strategy has changed. So I want to be clear like this is what this is. So anyway, okay, fair point. No, I Moving on. Moving on. All right, so speaking of people who try to say things in the right way. So game journalism everybody, it's the revival this week. So two big pieces of news. One is we're excited to see Christopher Ding, former game industry.biz leader. He was the

host of the microcast. I don't know if you all listen to that lovely British voice giving all the game journalism news each week. So he has a new platform called the game business. This is backed by Jeff Keley who is obviously the game show awards. You know, we all love what he does there. So, it's great to have like, you know, these highquality journalist veterans back supporting going out and doing all of like the hard-hitting real journalistic news. Chris has a bunch of guest hosts. Any one of us would probably love to sit in that guest chair. So, super fun. He's got a Substack. I don't know if you guys subscribed or I'm kind of halfway through the first podcast. Out of all like the Enthusiast Press podcast, this was what one of my favorites when they were running theirs. However, he does not have a lot of business experience in gaming. He's just a he's been a journalist his whole career. So, that's his angle. So, we'll see. I'm going to go listen to it and see see how it see how it Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that we all have our lanes and you people might be like, why are you supporting other people's podcasts on your podcast?

Everyone has a lane. He's a journalist. He goes and talks to these people and writes it up and does it for real. We live in inside and all we do is give our takes from the inside on like how we see things. And so I think everyone's got a different lane and role that they play in the ecosystem. And I got a lot of my news like I I don't know how I would talk about things on this podcast if I didn't have people like him out there doing those conversations. So the other one that is back is Game Informer. So they are back from the dead and with their entire team. So a little history, GameStop owned them. They shut down the site in August of 24. Since then, the rights to Game of Former were acquired by Gunzilla Games. Phil loves them. It's the company behind Off the Grid, which is a shooter with a web 3 kind of backing to it. The great news is that Gunzilla has committed to being a hands-off boss. So, Game Informer is completely independent and separate and won't be like a web 3 shill or anything like that. And I know

a lot of people were freaked out about that, but you know, hey, go play off the grid to thank Godzilla for, you know, being great industry supporters and bringing these guys back. So, you know, as non-journalists, we're cheering all of this on. Happy to see this back. It's kind of weird though, right? Like Gunzilla, a web 3 company running this. I mean, again, not to be political, but you know, Bezos owns the Washington Post, right? Like, but Bezos has some extra money. Does Godzilla have a ton of extra money? No. There you go. Thank you. Apparently, I mean, I don't know. I I don't think it disclosed how much they paid for it. I don't know how off the grid is doing. I haven't seen it. I mean, it's hard to know because remember in web 3, all we get is wallets, active wallets. So, there can be wash trading associated with that. So, it doesn't actually mean active players. And then remember, you have to filter for not being in the Philippines or India. So if we do all those things, I would take a wild guess that they are on the rapid decline would beat my estimation. That's one hell of a

guess. Okay, I got to go look down Twitch tracker while we move on. Not on the first page yet. Okay, really quick. Coming out of GDC, just some Nintendo news. Nintendo Direct live stream is coming on April 2nd. So, this has been rumored to likely have the launch date for the Switch to actually in May or June is what people are saying. So, it's coming a little bit earlier than we thought. A lot of rumors around like what title is coming. I think Mario Kart is for sure, you know, one of the leading rumors there. Interesting. You know, Crush, you called it like all of the titles coming at the first wave are first party and so third part is probably not coming until, you know, the holiday season. Not surprising. So, April 2nd, check it out. Yeah, Nintendo is absolutely the worst when it comes to dealing with third parties. I mean, there was something in one of these press releases that said that the companies are not going to get dev kits until this June.

Oh, wow. Really? I mean, they had the spec. I mean, I'm sure they know the spec and all the, but like not having dev kits and stuff. I hope that's not true, but because that's ridiculous. They must have dev kits before that point. Like maybe you're talking about like release kits. No, no, no, no. The someone claimed that they weren't going to have dev kits until June, which timing doesn't make sense because the implication was that they were not going to release games from third party until holiday, right? So, the only games that would be released during the release window would be first party, right? What's funny is that that doesn't shock me given Nintendo, right? But that can't be true because I know people that are making games like right out of the gate. So that doesn't sound right. Okay. All right. Moving on to yet another Moa Crest can [ __ ] on. Again, one of these big A16Z joints was The Secrets of Skyail, the Elo Games, right? That is now shutting down because they can't get additional funding, right? So, it sucks, you know, but like first of all, I don't

know why they're making a freetoplay MOA to begin with. As I've said many times, mobile, let's not forget that adjective. That's true. That's true. They threw a lot of words at it description. So, anyway, I just wanted to point that out as one of the potential, you know, victims of the the shifting strategies over at A16Z. So, let's see. Freeto-play mobile extraction game Seekers of Sky Veil shut down 18 days after launch. and they had raised 32.5 million. Eric, I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit here, right? Because this is the second after Spectre Divide. And I just wonder if we're going to continue to see more and more dominoes fall from these direct to consumer, no publisher VC funded AAA games. I mean, there hasn't been one successful company in this group that I can think of anyway. And I'm not throwing Second Dinner in there yet because they have to make another game. Did you see the Dream Haven announcement? Kind of lackluster. Yeah. So, for those who don't know, Dream

Haven did a live stream that was, you know, speaking of Jeff Keelley, it was a it was on the Game Awards channel. I saw that during the live stream, I think it only had 5,000 people watching, but when I looked up the video, it had 50,000 views for the VOD. You know, Dream Haven is ex Morheim, is it ex Blizzard founder if I have that right? And the product is really quirky. I'll say it's like a very deep strategy game, but you have to like play on your phone and also I don't know. Anyone want to explain the game better than There were a couple games they announced, right? Cuz they have a bunch of different studios underneath their belt. If you remember, this is ex Blizzard. This is Mike Moore. We founded Blizzard. thought they were going to do something much bigger than what we've seen so far because they were spinning up studio after studio and they're doing the traditional publishing that we talked about on the live GDC podcast like there hasn't been a lot of like true third party publishing it feels like it's almost evaporated and so they have linked which has been already out in early access which is from X Dice LA people I really love that game it's

Animal Crossing with rogike elements super interesting it's coming to console it's going to have its version 1.0 you know about. So they announced that cute IP and the other one they announced I've seen it described as Wildstar which was this old MMO from NCOFT meets Sea of Thieves and it looks not beautiful but I the IP did not look great for my estimation but no one's really gone after the Sea of Thieves thesis I would argue in a more deliberate way and this one they really are emphasizing the role of ships and co-op. So let's see how they do. They said they went through a huge funneling process to get to these concepts to actually launch these games. I find it hard to believe that ex Blizzard people, especially Mike [ __ ] would just launch absolute stinkers. I mean, this is a publisher to watch for sure. This just seemed like a lackluster announcement. I think they may have overplayed their hand on how strong they thought their brand was going into this. Yeah. The thing that was interesting for me is how much they leaned into Morheim as a I guess as a personality and a draw

for people. like let's see what the founder of Blizzard did. I mean do you know as a marketer I'm like do players know and care? Like are you following him? I that's kind of my you know did you talk about Sunder Folk? So Sunderf Folk was the one that was kind of weird. The tactical RPG inspired by a love of board and tabletop games. This was like you have to like use your phone to play on other devices. That was the one that I thought that the IP looked weird. I think for that audience was very like natury and tree folk and cozy with a hardcore Starfield like hexbased RPG. Okay. Anyway, sorry for the impromptu side quest that we didn't prepare for. Phil, you want to do Party Club? Yeah, very quickly. I just wanted to review Party Club. You know, this isn't a game that did gang busters in terms of revenue or in terms of units. It's described as Gang Beasts meets Overcooked, but I think what's interesting here is the 100% free

giveaway they do for the first 24 hours. So, this is very similar to Content Warning. They give the game away for free and then they end up charging after the first 24 hours. I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Right now, it's starting with a lot of indies who are just trying to get distribution, but I expect AAA developers to start adopting a strategy to get some initial burst of downloads. And the reason for that is because I think we've seen something similar when it comes to the PlayStation subscription PS+. I mean, if you go back, you remember Fall Guys, this is how they initially got distribution, which is being on PS+. You go back even further, you look at Rocket League, this is something that they also credit to their success. We're looking for distribution channels or ways that we can get games into the hands of players. And I think if you're a paid game, it's a lot more of a struggle. And I think this is one opportunity we're going to see more devs take advantage of in the future. and I think it's going to work its way up to bigger and bigger titles. The other thing I just want to quickly point out here is this is a Turkish stat and mostly Turkey has been match games, but it's good to see them start to take some of that experience in games and expand other vectors in HD. So

again, it's a very small title, but I think we're going to see more and more of the strategy. But if you're a AAA diff, then why wouldn't you just use PS+ or Game Pass on day one? You can. I mean, remember that's just one service that you have on PlayStation. Now, this gets you Steam distribution. And remember that PS+ is limited to the extent of the subscribers. I can buy this strategy like percolating up towards the AA type of thing and maybe low-end double A, but all the way to AAA when you can negotiate a pretty strong deal already with Sony or Microsoft on any of those subscription services feels like why would they go this route versus that? Well, so if you can get money from those subscription services, go for it. From what I've heard, it's very hard to get money out of those subscription services. Like from what I understand about Fall Guys, like they only got their servers paid for. That was it. They didn't get any actual money from those services. Yeah. But I think as a triple AAA, you typically can add a bit more weight to those negotiations. Go for it. You know, if you can get more money, go for it. But I think if you want to maximize the distribution of

your product, especially if you're live service game, you got to get into the hands of as many players as possible. Yep. That makes sense. Your skepticism is warranted. I think it'll be incremental. I think. Okay, next big game tries this. Next big game tries this. Okay, is this continuing to work or not? Yeah, Dark Legion. Let's get into it. Okay, let's talk about this. One came out, you know, I think two weeks ago. This was from Fun Plus. If you remember Fun Plus, Chinese founders, they originally in Beijing. They've expanded globally, but the thing that I think is uniquely interesting about this company is that the overwhelming majority of revenue comes from the West. About 80 to 90% of the revenue comes to the West. I'm very confused about what the long run strategy of Fund Plus is. They haven't really been talked about as an acquisition target. They're a privately held company. I'm not quite sure what the long run strategy for them is. And they've had a rough go of it the last couple years. So, if you remember, they kind of peaked around the pandemic with State of Survival. That game came out and absolutely crushed it. Before then, they had two Forex games that have done I think they announced they had done over a billion in lifetime revenue.

So, they had been in a good place, but in the last 2 to 3 years, they've had a lot of declines. And I really want to ast web store adoption. And so, sometimes when you look at these declines, okay, are people just converting to web store? And not only that, they've been very good at making sure that they now have PC versions of all their games, including for the Dark Legion DC game, which is about the DC superheroes. And so, what is this game about? What are they trying to do here? So, it's a bizarre combination of having a Fallout shelter style base building element, which is kind of like your core homepage, but they're also going to merge this with squad RPG elements. So, you're going to collect DC characters, you're going to have your, you know, star system, you're going to have your gear, you're going to have your artifacts, you're going to have all the things that you would expect from a typical squad RPG. Then, we're going to add in 4X. And the 4X element is strange in my opinion. Now I'm about 4 days into the game. So

maybe the 4X element is going to evolve. But normally in a Forex game, you're fighting for the seed of power, which is something in the center of the server map or the shard map that gives you influence over the server. Sometimes you're able to set a tax policy. Other times you might be able to get more resources by just holding the seat of power. This one has a very strange world map in that it doesn't seem to be concurrently shared with other players. So right now if you're watching the YouTube version you can see a nice little picture of Batman here which is their map but it doesn't look like this map is shared with others. Instead when you zoom into a particular section that is when the 4X style map appears and you see your normal ships with your marches towards the center resource and the center resource is where you can gain additional material or currencies that help upgrade your base. And it's there where you can have PvP conflict. So, I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to get out of the Forex piece. Like, normally what drives a lot of Forex activity is control for territory. And this

territory is only once you go into a particular space or a particular shard. So, I'm I'm really confused on what the situation is here with the 4x1. There doesn't seem to be things like peace shields, which are really common. So the best I can come up with is that this is really starting to play on Star Trek Fleet Commands thesis which in really Breaking Bad, you know, going back to that game rest in peace where we started to add a lot more squad RPG elements to 4X. So we're adding the ideas that you had characters, you had stars, you put them in vehicles. It was a lot more depth in terms of sync than I think a lot of Forex games had previously. I still haven't seen a lot of game developers in the West go after something similar. So maybe we could position a thesis something closer to, hey, let's add a little bit more squad RPG to Forex in the vein of Star Trek Fleet Command, but tone things down. The unfortunate reality though is this is not where like the Forex meta is. The Forex meta is about acquisition, right? And how are you going to be able to acquire users with a squad RPG style front end or even a Fallout style front

end is really confusing to me. And we look at the initial performance of the game. I'm benchmarking against two other titles. One of which is Sea of Conquest, which is another game that Fun Plus launched earlier last year, and we haven't really had a chance to talk about it. It seems to have done okay, and the other one is Age of Empires. This is the Timmy game based on the RTS. This one seems to have just fallen off a cliff extremely rapidly. So, if we go to the next graph, you can see that precipitous decline in revenue from Age of Empires. I mean, the thing we don't know is how much the Chinese have just burst marketed this game, whether they dumped, you know, a truckload of UA and okay, the UA is starting to taper off. Okay, is the game going to decline into nothingness. Whereas with Dark Legion, it looks like they pumped UA into this to begin with, as we know, it's starting to decline pretty rapidly. And without a sustained UA strategy or without a clear thesis, I really struggle to see how this one's going to win in the long run. Their creative is really emphasizing the Fallout Shelter style elements. They've

been having your normal fake Forex ads, but like again, the Forex meta is about extending that experience into, you know, at least the day one through day three experience, if not further than that. I'm a little confused on what the thesis of this game is or how this thesis fits into like the current Forex meta paradigms. I you know what I was shocked about? Like they're like down like 50% from 21, right? Like revenue run rate. And yes, maybe some of that will be offset by web stores and stuff, but it looks like the Chinese are eating their own. I mean, like the all the other companies like Lilith and, you know, all these other games coming up the pipe have just completely just annihilated them. Yeah. A little scary. And they haven't come out with any new releases and I think that's kind of the big thing that like I think they've had a couple failed new releases, but this is like the first like big swing. So, you know, we'll see if they can actually pull it up. But this game doesn't look like it's something that's going to be able to be material relative to something like State of Survival. Yeah. My super early impression, Phil, I played probably 10 minutes of it. We

spent a lot of time with some Warner Brothers folks at GDC, which was really fun. And I think you guys know, I'll mention it. I made a lot of DC and Batman toys in my career. My uncle is a huge DC comic book collector. I've read those comic books. In my office is prototypes of all of these DC characters. I love it. I actually don't know [ __ ] about Marvel. So, the challenge, as much as I love DC, is it is a brand, it's almost like Star Trek until recently, that often doesn't have a lot of success in gaming, sadly, right? Like some of the biggest failures ever. Remember the EA Superman game that like completely failed like horribly. It's even more direct here, Jen. There already was a failed Squad RPG about DC characters that we talked about a while ago that went Yeah. No, there there's that. There's even when you collab and you know many of the MOBAs have put the DC characters inside although I think in Fortnite there's nothing better than seeing Batman and Captain America running around inside of Fortnite which is the coolest thing. So, in any event,

from the gameplay standpoint, I felt like I was in a time machine to like eight years ago where the gameplay just felt so incredibly dated to me, like you were saying with the shelter thing and all of the dialogue, like they have not taken any of the notes from what is making Forex incredibly successful today, which is that super easy onboarding directly into the play. you know, having that kind of easy experience that you want to, you know, come in at, you know, almost like that hyper casual gameplay onboarding. So, for me, I just felt like I was like retro, like this feels like it's not going to work in what I've seen be successful in today's 4X kind of strategy market with what players are expecting with an IP and a brand that has no reason for being right now. The new Superman title is coming this summer, but you know, like it's not lined up with anything about the IP. So, I'm I'm worried for them would be my assessment. Did you tell that to WB when

you were in the meeting? I did. I Yeah, actually. Make Batman relevant again. I'm not sure if you know this, but I often hold back on all of my opinions when talking to people because I've never heard that. I've never heard that. Yeah. No, I would have appreciated being in that meeting. One way to wrap it up is it's kind of a [ __ ] sandwich in the sense that like the beginning isn't so great and the end isn't so great either. Like if we go back to like Ethan's Tower of Want, it's very clear in 4X what's at the top of the Tower of Want, which is the seat of power or territory control. And I didn't see that here. And they don't have that on the Squad RPG style side either, right? There's only one version of batling, right? And I'm sure they're going to come out with more versions. But like we solved this in Breaking Bad, you know, one of the PMs, Chris McCabe, shout out, came up with Moments in Time. So rather than having just like one Walter, you know, we can have 18 different Walters. Okay, we give him Heisenberg. We have him in season one. We have him in season two. I was just surprised they didn't launch with like five versions of Batman. Like give me Batman from Superman versus Batman. Give

me that version when he has the armor on. Give me all these iconic moments from DC. This is where I connect with this franchise is give me the moments in time from the Squatter Peach element. So, they don't have a high Tower of Want and the beginning doesn't sound good either. It just kind of seems like a [ __ ] sandwich here. I actually don't think the middle's that bad, but you got to get me in and you got to give me something to strive towards in the long run. This is a whole other podcast, but the only two characters people care about in DC is Batman and Superman. And Batman is the best character in the entire history of action figures cuz he can be anything. The answer is Spider-Man, but that's okay. I'll let you continue with your longness on this one. Yeah, I I may argue with you on that one. I'll go back and pull some toy industry data, but um Spider-Man will destroy you. Spider-Man is the most popular comic book character of all time and the best one. But sorry, continue. Uh-huh. Uh you're wrong, but that's fine. You know, I'll that that's for tomorrow's next week's podcast is I'll come and give you all the data. Defend the boogeois. I'll defend the proletariat. Peter Parker is a working class man. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire.

billionaires for the win. One last point, I just want to put numbers behind it because I'm looking at this real time. Is that fun plus was like 15% of the strategy market in their heyday, right, in 2020, 2021, right? They are now like close to 7% last year and 5% this year. And who's eaten their lunch? Century Games. Century Games First Fun are basically that's it. Like it's like the two the other Chinese companies just as Jen said, the model has shifted in forex, right? We all said that 4X would not survive post the IDFA and it's thriving and it's mainly because of the Century Games model. Well, yeah. The casual gameplay deep monetization design notion. Yeah. Casual fun. But anybody that doesn't know this business like this has happened like three times now, four times maybe, right? Like because initially it was all Kabam and then Kabam got destroyed by Machine Zone. Then Machine Zone got destroyed by everybody because they just like burnt the ships, right? But the that's when

Fun Plus started doing their thing in Lilith, right? And now FunPlus and Lilith are getting destroyed by the other Chinese companies. So it's like this complete transition. And ironically, it's exactly the same [ __ ] game, you know? It's exactly the goddamn same game under the hood with with a different rapper, right? And so to be honest, I like this though, right? Like these cycles of innovation create opportunity for new developers to go after, which so now it becomes not let's go after copying century games. It's what's the next model in Forex? because obviously innovation matters here. So let's go after it. I thought about it from an acquisition standpoint to Phil's point is you've got the core game that people want. You know the seat of power. You keep changing the rapper to make it accessible or interesting. You can add an IP whatever that is but it is an interesting play pattern. You have UA that can bring you in with that interesting play pattern. And then the other thing that we're seeing too and I think gamer I think we talked about this before. Gamer Finery did a study that for these fake ads, 50% of those fake ads are becoming inside of the games in

the top 200 games in the top 200 revenue games. This is from maybe, you know, 6 months ago. But so the idea is to make sure that the fake ads aren't completely fake, that you're actually putting them inside the game. It's a miniame, it's an event, or it's something so that it all ties together. Okay, let's go to the next comic book IP because Adam and Phil, I think you want to do Frag Punk and Marvel Rivals and check in on how those two are doing, right? Yeah. Apologies for the small text. So, the big thing here is the green line is Marvel Rivals and the teal line in the bottom left is Frag Punk. So, first let's talk about Frag Punk. Frag Punk is a tactical shooter with heroes and sort of their big differentiation is powerful round modifiers that are in the form of cards. On top of this, unlike Marvel, this is a fully new IP kind of stylized punk. The differentiation here is cards meaningfully change the round. So like each time you're playing, think of it

like Valerant, but now bullets heal you, enemies slow down on hit, heads are large, headed are small. this type of craziness in terms of modifiers and heroes in terms of their design have stronger than normal abilities. Like their abilities are even stronger than I would say some of the valorant ones. On top of it, in terms of how they applied it to Counterstrike and Valerant, they went to simpler round progression, much faster and more dynamic movement. As well, they right at launch included a number of additional modes to aid in onboarding. So that's things like high respawn, team deathmatch, free-for-all, kill confirmed types of modes. But the result though is underwhelming. So it reached a similar CCU peak as Delta Force did at launch, but has been dropping in CCU, similar to finals and super arrive, suggesting that the retention just isn't there. And unfortunately, they will start having matchmaking issues pretty soon. So overall, I think if we go back to like Phil and I's conversation in the fall on PVP shooters, right? Like we were

talking about like, hey, you have to have meaningful differentiation. You have to have best-in-class shooter fill. And I think like on paper, yeah, these guys had a differentiator. It created meaningful challenges, you know, changes into the mastery curve. It had heroes that mechanically change up t shooter, but I don't think this is actually what t shooter players want. Like if you think of tooting players who enjoy Counter-Strike, who enjoy Valerant, this level of change I don't think is actually what they wanted. So the differentiation that they created, unfortunately, I think it's stuck in the same bucket that Spectre Divide had where it just fails to drive players or retention. The other question that I have here is like why did NEI push this out? Because like this is the same publisher that did Marvel Rivals is doing very well and they had signals internally comparing Frag Punk to Marvel Rivals that one was going to be bigger than the other. So why launch it, right? Like I I feel like NI should have had the patience to make this, you know,

ready to go before launching since really this genre has zero tolerance for mid-tier performance. And it just feels like this was marketed and launched almost by a whole different team without the same insights. I don't know. Phil, do you have any thoughts here? What do people keep seeing in the tax shooter market? I mean, CS:GO just hit all-time highs, which we didn't mention two weeks ago. I mean, it had been hitting all-time highs two or three years ago, and it looks like it's back to hitting new all-time highs now. And Valerant seems to have grown the market, right? Valorant doesn't seem to have taken market share from CS:GO. It seems to have grown tax shooters, but you've got two players who dominate the market. You need to have a really strong thesis about how these games are not serving their current audiences. And it's not clear to me that they had this here. It's interesting that they described it as a hero shooter rather than an attack shooter or use any of those tactical elements. You know, I'm someone who's a big Call of Duty player. I really love the in round progression you get in tack shooters. Like I love the idea of being able to buy weapons. I really thought Apex Legends, by the way, was going to take a bigger shot at this. You remember Apex Legends actually launched a mode

that was similar to tack shooters that was more for the Call of Duty audience, but it wasn't really able to gain traction away from the battle royale mode. But I just struggle to see what the thesis was here in terms of serving a demand. I'm with you on this one, Adam. Although I'm not as negative on the player numbers. I think we need to give it a little bit more time. I guess I'm curious, Adam, like how do you define success, right? Because a game declining after launch isn't surprising, particularly if they frontloaded with marketing, which is I'm assuming what they did here with Frog Punks and Spectre just didn't have any marketing to get off, right? What do we expect? So you can see from the CCU charts here, right? Like the dominant way that these PVP games are going to come, they're going to spike at launch. They're going to climb down because launch moment unlike mobile is your best moment for marketing efficiency. And if you've got that kind of community fervor, like Marvel rivals did at launch, especially with crossplatform, like squads form. So I think like in shooters, it's very much around your friend group of a few

people. Hey everybody, let's go and play this game. and that wolf pack sticks together on the game that's their main. So if you can create that critical mass, you create that initial spike and then it's about sustaining it as much as possible. My issue is when it's a PCON game and it's at that 100k CCU level and it starts to decline, the clock is ticking for how long their matchmaking is going to start to detriment. Their D1 is going to start to follow, their D7's going to follow. And the same thing with Supervive where Supervive like had a moment there where that first week we're all like, "Oh, maybe they could take this up, but because they didn't have any live ops in the chamber because they weren't able to make big swings in terms of performance, then it started to decline. Matchmaking was gone. And now there's no huge win back moment that they could do to bring that up other than a full pretty much like a relaunch moment, right? Like a 1.0 release. And then you're basically restarting all your marketing engines at the same time. So in the case of Frag Punk like I think the decline here means that the only

chance for them to get out of this is to create that major win back moment in the future. And in terms of like why I think the less than 50k CCU is not feasible. It just becomes more about the math of converting CCU up to DAO up to what the typical ARPA ranges are for shooters. spread that over the year and my guess is that Netis, Finals, Marvel Rivals, all of these guys are aiming for well over 100 million annual run rate to make these products successful, right? Nobody's aiming lower than that. And below 50K, you're not getting that. That seems very reasonable. Given what Netti is doing right now, this does not look good for Frag Bunk, right? Yeah. Yeah, like given NE's like complete like removal of themselves from the west. I'm assuming Frag Punker is a US team. No, no, it has one US developer I believe, but it is in China. Oh, never mind. Yeah. Oh, one single developer like one person or you

mean like one studio? They do have someone one team in the US working on this, but it is predominantly Chinese from what I understand. Yeah. I mean, Adam, one other thing is a lot of these companies the teams are very independent. I agree with you that the challenge I think I've seen with some of like the Tencents and the Netises of the world is they are completely separate teams are completely siloed. They often are competitive and don't even share information amongst each other. So I am sadly not shocked to see this but you know you would hope that somebody at the top would be kind of like range planning and pulling the strings to make sure that there are ways that they could potentially learn from each other. I think what would be interesting is I I haven't checked in with Overwatch lately versus all of these other shooters and the impact it's been having. I think they just announced a couple of big new heroes and then their new stadium feature is coming in the next I don't know couple of weeks too. So it'll be interesting to check back in on that one

to see how they all are bouncing around each other. But Marvel Rivals looks like it's declining. Yeah, touch on that one. The big green line here, season 1, I think, has been kind of PvP live service as usual for Marvel Rivals here. So, obviously, they had a massive spike when season 1 came out, but since then, CCU has been dropping and is now to me it's more of a question of where they stabilize. And to be honest, like yes, this looks dire, but like Phil and I were talking like this is kind of business as usual for PvP live services. So, it becomes more of a question of where they're going to sustain. So, for example, here like season 2 is going to launch April 11th. So, two weeksish from now, we're going to see another big spike similar to that midpoint there to bring them back up again. And then it becomes more of a question of similar to Overwatch where about 6 months out from that launch, you started to see a real stabilization of their MAU. That's what

we're really looking for here. Are they able to sustain at that level? because my sense here is that they should be able to sustain similar level as a Overwatch 2 as a Rainbow 6 in terms of being able to keep up that MA level and then that becomes a pretty viable business for them. So yes, this looks dire but I think now is the real question of where it sustains to. And if that doesn't happen, you know, you look at the red line here, which is Delta Force. Does Delta Force actually surpass rivals in CCU after all? I still don't believe that number. It still looks so weird to me that because every signal I have underneath is that it's a dying game. The retention isn't there. But the CCU keeps doing its like weird horizontal line thing. And I'm like, I don't understand that. Bots. Bots. Call the bots. Is that Are they to be honest? If they figure that out, if they did bots, then everyone's going to use it. Everyone should be using it. Hack the charts.

hack the charts and then all of a sudden we can't do the podcast anymore. That sucks. Now we're just reporting on bots like web 3. We got bots to listen to the podcast will be more popular than ever. Oh, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. This podcast is brought to you by Appsflyer. In today's digital world, understanding your app's journey from discovery to download is more than just insightful. It's essential. Enter Appslier, 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 Flyier, that's your new reality. Dive deep into datadriven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they'll interact with your app. Appslier, where your app's potential meets performance. Hey game devs, are you tired of dealing with complicated payment processes all over the world? Well, Exola's got your back with Exola Paystation. It has a

simple userfriendly interface that makes it easy for players to pay for your games and in-game content however they want. And because the Exola Paystation user interface is adaptive and accessible on smartphones, tablets, and PCs, your players will have a seamless experience no matter their preferred device. Players can save their favorite payment methods for future purchases and on mobile even charge purchases directly to their phone carrier bill. On the back end, you can customize your checkout with game specific integration options like sidebars and iframes as well as change colors, fonts, and images to make PStation look and feel like a natural part of your game. Ready to see Exola's PlayStation in action? Visit exola.pro/payments-doof or visit the link in this podcast description. [Music] Phil, you want to talk about Enzo again? One more time. It's Carmen, baby. Next week, we're going to have wallto-wall Enzo coverage. You just buckle in. It is. Jen, I think you looked at the Tik Tok numbers. I looked at the wish list numbers last week and it's only

continued to grow. It's the number one wishlisted game on Steam. I think it's sitting at 1.2 million wish lists and the Tik Tok numbers look impressive, Jack. Yeah. So, LinkedIn, Adam, I actually do find interesting things on my feed. Maybe you should join my feed. You just send me the better people to follow. I just get a lot of people complaining. Well, I get Oh, believe me, I get that, too. Wait, by the way, no one likes a grouchy Canadian. Okay, just just clean it up, Adam. Jesus. What? You're supposed to be all positive, all like roses and I don't know, [ __ ] universal health. You've been dragging me down every week I'm on this podcast. Crest drags me down. There we go. So, for my LinkedIn, I forgot who posted this. Sorry, I'll give you credit somewhere. So, they basically pulled like a bunch of different video games on Tik Tok. Total views, total video views, and views per video. And some of these games are big, like Elder Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Cyber Punk. And so, those are kind of in the top total videos. Obviously, they've actually been out for a really long time. So, for Enzoy, the

views per video are like the highest of all of these different games, like 30,000 views per video. I actually, you know, went and started to watch some because I was like, "Oh, what am I doing? What am I missing?" You know, just do a a quick little Google search and influencers are they're not even paid from what I can tell. Some of the top ones are already in millions of these views. It's just people playing and just like in Sims, right? It's like, what crazy [ __ ] can you do with your character? I saw one guy was like, "Oh my god, I can drive a car." And this other woman was like, you know, running her characters around and bumping into people. It looks really good. A lot of the comments are about Sims. And so, if I'm on the Sims marketing team, I don't know. I would be really thinking about how do you leverage that? How do you do a campaign to go against? should be a [ __ ] call to action for the Sims team to get off their [ __ ] ass and actually build something that's [ __ ] contemporary, right? Hell with the

existing game. Let's move the [ __ ] on, right? I hope this thing crushes them because they need to like get something like something in to get them moving, you know? So annoying. Completely agree with you. All right, this is why I've like been banging the table on this one is that the Sims and Maxis have just been collecting fat checks for basically 15 years building DLC packs. Fat checks. And if you actually are at EA, you should look at those numbers because they are mind-boggling. No one talks about them and they have built a very I actually think we're undervaluing the relationship that EA has built with the consumer base because the Sims have a very direct relationship with EA. And I actually think this is one of the biggest problems Enzo is going to face is that it's very much a Steam distribution. It looks more unreal and more realistic in terms of graphics versus The Sims, which is, I think, a little bit more colorful, a little bit more poppy, a little bit more, I think, has an affinity with female players, which The Sims overwhelmingly are. But I think marketing is going to be this game's biggest challenge if they can't speak to that audience and find how to

connect with them. But I completely agree with you. Like, let's [ __ ] go. Let's see some competition, right? We talked about Paradox. They canceled their Sims competitor earlier last year which was just on the verge of launching. This is why I'm so excited for this. And if you haven't seen the create the investor day, I believe it is with Craftton. They have the creative director of Enzoy on stage and this is where I became a true believer. He's insane about simulation. You can tell he spent his whole life thinking about simulation, the problems with this genre. And as soon as I saw that video, I was like, where do I write the check? I'm like a true believer. This creative director, I've got a lot of faith in him. It's almost too eastern. It felt a little Eastern, but the look was fantastic. The customization of your characters, like I said, I was watching the guy drive the car and it looked like GT. Like, it was very high quality, very well done. By the way, just I I can't I can't just let this go. The name is so unfortunate, too. When you're competing against The Sims, like, which is the most obvious [ __ ] name ever known to man for a game like this, and you say

Enzo. I mean, yeah, that's been the most difficult part about like spreading the word about this game is like what is the game? What what is their name? And I think even the spelling Oh, right. Yeah, I can easily spell that. The one thing though, Jen, on your table, the video games on Tik Tok video thing. One thing that I'm actually looking forward to with this launch is we've heard amazing wish list numbers. We're looking at like total video views. You're showing like multiple metrics there. I'm trying to get a sense of like what are the right pre-launch metrics for PC console games because everything feels like a vanity metric until you can show that it's pretty predictive. And like I think we looked at that when Rivals came out too and Rivals was very strong on Tik Tok but actually weaker on wish lists. Rivals obviously beat out Delta Force on that comparison. Right. So in this case you're looking at pretty low in terms of total views. Is views per video actually the right metric to center around or is it total videos and

like the fact that it's a tenth of the size of Monster Hunter Wilds versus wish list where it's much closer. What's the signal that's going to say sales for this game? Oh my god. Yeah. This was our dinner conversation that one night Adam which is our side quest that we should do one day. But yes, so engagement, right? Just like in games, it's in marketing. When you have like a super engaged user base and maybe in the beginning it's smaller, it just shows you the potential of where it could go. So I spoke to this woman who wor in Crest. Hold on with me for a second. It's a VR game. It's like the number one VR game right now. It's called Animal Company. And so, you know, young woman like was lovely. She's like, "How can I think about growing?" and she gave me some of the numbers that they have. I don't want to give them out publicly, but they're probably bigger than some of the games that we're talking about on VR, which was insane. And then she said, "I don't pay anybody to do influencer marketing because the Gen Alpha people

playing this game have been posting their own content. the influencers are coming to her to get like you know a little bit of like inside information because it's making them money because they have a highly engaged and alpha audience. So Adam I think to answer your question is yes I think these deeper kind of conversion metrics about the engagement on these types of social posts within your core bullseye target is going to be the real way to understand the potential of the growth. Did that whole rant make sense? Kind of like to to me there's so many of these different KPIs and I think there's some stitching together of them that gives you the signal that you need. And I think right now unfortunately a lot of marketing teams end up focusing too much on one the one that's doing well and then ignoring the others and then you end up in this situation of like we don't actually know whether we're on track or not to build up that fervor. There is no holy grail marketing KPI in my experience. You know, again, like one

of the things I wish we could do is an algorithm that takes in a bunch of these signals across these different channels and kind of puts them together maybe into an overall score, but which is the the game discovery co thing, right? Like that's the hype score that he stitches things together, but then it ends up being much more for indie games, like more predictive there, less predictive for some of the others. So, yeah. No, for sure. Chris, do you want to do I I want to make I want to make relatively positive announcement on Netflix. So like Elaine Tuscan, who's now the leader of Netflix, did a interview at JDC and the interview actually [ __ ] made sense. You know what didn't make sense was the title of the article that was written about the interview because this is not what he said, by the way. He said Netflix wants its answer to Fortnite. No, it doesn't. That's not ex that is exactly not what he said. So, but we'll go through it. But what the fundamental point here is that they want to focus on kids mainstream narrative and party games. All of that makes [ __ ] sense

to me, right? No more console. I love that. I want to go back I want to go back in time to like a year ago when I said Netflix needs to go after kids and everyone was like, "Oh, stupid Jen, stupid." I'm going to go find that clip because I was [ __ ] right. Anyway. Oh, no. It's still dumb. No, I still disagree. It's just they have an actual strategy they can fail at. My whole point is like a strategy articulated is a strategy that could be achieved, right? You know, like at least they have a strategy. You know what I'm saying? Like before Netflix was all over the place, you know, they were doing AAA and I've gone through this many to many times. Chachki apps, GTA for downloads, spending insane amounts of money, but they have an articulated path to move forward, which I think is awesome. And he's actually articulating it, right? Like I think this is the other problem is we didn't hear what they were doing. We just saw all this really disjointed [ __ ] that was going on. So but in the article when they talked about this

they're in early stages to build the question was what are you doing about Fortnite Minecraft and Roblox and the ambition for them is not to create another UGC platform. It's only to allow a social layer for interaction and recommendation, which that makes total sense, right? Trying to compete against a UGC platform seems impossible given the model. It just doesn't make any sense to actually even think about that. And so the article was really misrepresenting what they actually had said. So anyway, that's very smart. And the other thing he says is like Netflix has the grit and resilience quote unquote to do with games long term. Yes, I've heard this many times about the execs at Netflix that they will keep going, right? But I still think this is a reset and he probably has three, maybe four years to get this [ __ ] material for Netflix. We'll see if they want to stick with this thing, right? It's still a very small amount of the overall dollars, maybe a couple billion of the 20 billion dollars that they're spending on content. So, which I almost choke in my vomit when I

think about that, but all right, they're still looking to buy studios, which is good. We need that. They are going to do more freeto-play games like Squid Games. That makes sense. Deeper integration between shows. Makes sense, right? Like everything he's saying actually [ __ ] makes sense. Finally, they want Netflix wants players to be able to launch games directly from the app and not get taxed by Apple and Google. That makes sense as well. The one thing that doesn't make sense is this Rebel Moon game is actually incoming. Like, why would you do that? Like this is what the type of things that you cancel because Rebel Moon is a piece of [ __ ] IP, right? This is the type of thing that the gaming company should game group should be pushing back on because this is a stupid idea because no one gives a [ __ ] right? However, maybe Rebel Moon game can be a better experience than the actual show. I couldn't even get through whatever. Moving on. So hopefully they're going to find their voice in 2025 and I will be excited to see that. So, I'm so far so

good with this guy. He seems [ __ ] reasonable, logical, he's articulate, but they still have to execute and we'll see if they can actually pull that out. Yeah. The thing that was interesting too was them basically saying they were kind of backing away from console. It was like, we want our games to be where people engage with the platform, which is, you know, they said TV and mobile. I mean, I guess maybe people don't watch on their computers that much. So, this is why Rebel Moon I was scratching my head. If they canled the Halo Guys AAA thing, why would you? Or maybe Rebel Moon's on mobile. Maybe it's I don't know what it would be, but that was the one I was like I think in in in the article we read, the PR person like said something at that point and didn't want him to say too much because there's no way that could like make it finally. It just seems weird. I really honestly feel like personally I just did Mike Verdue a lot really dirty like over the last you know few a year or so. I should have

been talking about is not the fact that Mike Verdue made mistakes in terms of strategy. It's that the Netflix management and the structure of that organization is so catered towards TV and movies that they have no [ __ ] idea what a game strategy looks like. So anything that Mike really wanted to accomplish was probably thwarted by these like ingrained media people, right? These strategy people, these hundreds and hundreds of people in LA that are dictating how the platform is run, etc., etc. I wasn't really clear on that point. So this is like a last remnant of that is that they're holding on for dear life for this piece of [ __ ] IP that did nothing because the movie was terrible and yet they're still forcing it down the gaming group's throat, right? the gaming group should have ultimate authority about whether or not they make games on what IPs based upon what they think will be successful in the marketplace, not because they're like, you know, spent a gajillion dollars doing the movie version of this. So, I think this is kind of one of those remnants of that type of like push back. That's a fair point. It could be contractual with director guy Zack. It

at least action cut. Yeah. Wait, speaking of DC earlier in Justice League, yeah, I worked on that movie. So that was fascinating to be in that in the Zack Snider verse. Was left by the way. I think we should add that. Remember he transitioned to the gym a role which I don't understand why they just didn't let him go. I was very confusing to me why we need to like transition and say we're going to spend more time with family. It's just saving. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing I do want to say and I'm going to come up with a t-shirt and a hat next time is I can't for the [ __ ] life of me understand why they don't buy Jackbox games. Jackbox has been for sale for the last three to four years. They're trying to get out of that business. It perfectly aligns with the strategy that was just outlined. It scales to both TV and mobile. It is the most obvious play that you could imagine. I just I can't for the life of me figure out why this hasn't been done yet. This should have been done at the dawn of Netflix games.

It is the perfect fit. Buy Jackbox Games. Please integrate it with your IP. There's a million things you can do with Jackbox games. You can easily integrate into the Netflix library because they can exist in the platform that you've already created. It's very easy to put a Jackbox game next to another title inside of the core Netflix UI. You can put on mobile. It is just absolutely baffling to me. Even beyond not making an Emily and Paris dressup game or a match three Bridgeten game. Thank you, Ethan. Shout out. Buy Jackbox games, please. Almighty God, I'll take you one further. And number one, I agree with you. Well done. Number two is why not be a strategic partner to Hasbro and Mattel to do family game night on Netflix. Easy, Jeff. Love it. Love it. Like these are the experiments. These are the experiments they should be running, right? And then, you know, you have the best library of family games on the planet. And Hasbro, by the way, is just has Oh, we didn't talk about this. They

have a new VP of digital. And that VP of digital did an interview at GDC2 where he kind of teased Boulders Gate 4 because I think they just laid off a Dungeons and Dragons team. So they were kind of like look over here. Do you want to talk about this, Chris? This is a good one, dude. They did Eugene dirty, dude. Hasbro and Mattel, dude. Like Mattel like got rid of like Dant, right? Like for no [ __ ] reason, right? And now Eugene who built that thing from [ __ ] nothing. They just let him go. Like he had his best year ever. And I'm sure it had to do with comps, right? Like he couldn't continue the growth because he had the most record year possible with Balders's Gate and Monopoly Go. Like it's impossible for them to replicate that. And so they let him go. And he was like OG, dude. The guy has been there forever. And he built this thing from nothing, you know? And like [ __ ] those guys. I thought Hasbro like that. Yeah. Yeah. They brought in someone new. I didn't look him up, but there there's a couple articles out there because he was speaking at GDC again. Like this is the Baldersgate news

that I had. Yeah. And I don't know Eugene at all. I've met him a couple times and I saw him at GDC this time. I'm But this just seems seems dirty as [ __ ] for Hasbro. Put a negative column on Hasbro in my book. It's one thing to let people go and have a plan, right? and like a mutual like agreement to transition out to replace this seemed like a straight like you're done type thing like unexpected right so that's what I don't like I think that's dirty I think it's because Hasbro even though they have a CEO who knows gaming I don't think as a company they really understand how gaming works so it might be worth talking about they're going through a lot right now as you know with what's going on with gaming what's going on with the toy side of things they're trying to figure out their way forward and I think they are looking for folks to help them grow. All right, everyone. Great to see you at GDC. It was such a pleasure to do that live podcast and see you guys in person. And I will see you again next week. You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of

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