TWIG #326 Supercell Goes VC while Minecraft Kills at the Box Office

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insightful. It's essential. Enter Appsfllier, 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. Apps flyier, where your app's potential meets performance. Hello everyone and welcome to this week in games number 326. Game industry news by game industry insiders. Can't wait. I am Jen Dano. I fill the marketing chicken jockey role on the podcast and today we have actually a lot of the cast outs. It's a very special episode. So, Mishka, hello. I'm the founder of Whisperer. Nice to meet y'all. And I'm Laura Torto, puzzle product queen and special guest star. Wow, I

should have came up with a better name. Yeah, my name's Chris Sides. I've been on a couple of Deconstructor Fund podcasts, mainly on shooters. Sorry Adam and Philip aren't here. I think I'm kind of trying to take their spot for right now. It's it's hard to fill. You know, Adam's a hard guy to backfill. I've been in the industry for about 15 years. EA was nine years of it all in mobile, all with mainly all within product management and data analytics. And the last four years, I was director of product on Marathon at Bungie. I left Bungie about June of last year and started consulting. And I met a bunch of deconstructor fund folks and now I'm here. You know, we should really try to get somebody with a bit more shooter experience to show up on the podcast. So, the best we could do was was this guy. Yeah. Sorry. I've played I've played some of them, you know, a little bit here. I dabble in Tarov sometimes. All right. So, let me talk about what we're going to talk about. And one of those things is going to be a shooter because you don't have someone like this on the podcast and don't do that. But before that, I am going to talk all about trans media and pop culture because Crest is not here. Minecraft.

The Minecraft movie has had the biggest opening ever for a video game, and it's become basically the gamer version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for kids and tween. If you don't know what Rocky Horror Picture Show is, you are not Gen X. Look it up. It is like the best possible thing you could ever have done going to a movie theater back in the day. Okay, I'm millennial and I know what it is. And I would argue against that point. I wouldn't say it was the best. Oh, come on. on like going to a movie theater and throwing like toilet paper at the screen. Like it was such a good time. It was a very American experience. We did it once on a Halloween. It was a It was a very American experience. I suggest Europeans try it once and be like, "Huh, okay. Interesting." Well, apparently now you just need to go to the Minecraft movie and wait for the chicken jockey scene, then throw your popcorn and then have police come and get you. Anyway, Netflix kills another app. Uh, Supercell is acting like a VC. I so wish we had crush for this conversation, but Mishka, we'll let you do it. Blueprints surprises

everyone, garnering the best ratings of the year so far. Mishka dissects Aim's industry update and Chris breaks down Steel Hunters. That's the shooter we want to talk about. So, first, Chris isn't here, everybody. What What can we do? Well, Crest is out there in Latan Venture Summit in Turkey and Istanbul. I know this because like when he went on stage, people were DMing me with photos and I was like, "Yes, I'm equally excited as you are." So, so he's definitely the star of the show over there. It's interesting because I thought I had like a pretty high overunder on him being detained once he enters the country. You know, there's a little bit of a turmoil going on and then Crest arrives. A, he looks like a classic CIA operative. He always like wears like super American clothing, the Brook shoes, the straight pants, the everything like a baseball cap. He was, you know, there's a little bit of turmoil going on. They were like, "Okay, CIA sent a guy. Let's pick him up

from the airport." But no, he made it. Uh, let's see if he makes it out. But it looks like a great show and and he'll be listening to this podcast flying back from Istanbul. Nice. Nice. I think you were going to make fun of the fact that he's in the land of the puffer vest. Yeah. Well, it was funny because like Aare sent their report ahead of of this recording kind of like, hey, do you want to cover this under an embargo and I know Crest this is the episode where Chris needed to be on. We got Supercell launching investments and then we got ARM launching a report and a when they sent the report they're like is Crest going to rip us a new one? And if you don't know what ARM is, ARM is an investment bank that is basically on either seller or buyer side of all these deals that are going through. Whether Microsoft is buying Call of Duty, whether Scopi is buying um Niantic, anybody Niantic, but but like you name it, they're always there. And you're like, who are these bankers? Like, well, when you go to GDC or any event and you're wondering, who's that guy with an

Oxford shirt and a puffer vest? I'm like, that is a banker. And those are the guys who are making the real deals. And so it's very interesting to hear when they drop a report because they are interacting with buyers and sellers. They're meeting founders. They're meeting board members. They're meeting executives. So they have a very interesting and very realistic perspective on what's going on in the market. So I'm going to dissect it a little bit, but if you want to go deeper, sign up to the newsletter and it will be there. So awesome. Well, actually at GDC, I ran into So Misha like was lovely. So, I I saw him in a in a Oxford, you know, button-down shirt and the puffer jet, and I was like, Kareem, and we were at this event, and he's like, I don't know what I'm doing here. And so, we actually got a car over to the supper club and he's the guy who got Crest, I don't know if you want to do a call back to like a year ago, who sent Crest a puffer jacket with Gossamer on it. Gossamer Consulting Group. Yes. Yeah. Like, so that was like it was

like, oh my god, you were the guy that did that for Crest. That's so nice. Anyway, so Misha was super lovely. Anyway, let's continue on shilling. Yeah. What other podcasts have you done recently? And then when are mine coming out? Your came out today. So you need to show that one as well. So we have one dropped in on Monday. This was really interesting. We we had a podcast with Google's head of partnerships, Toby. No. Tobias is a really interesting cat. He was a game journalist actually in the beginning. Then he worked on Google Play, then YouTube, and now on Google side. He had a super interesting presentation about Gen Z in the event I was in in Abu Dhabi last November and I was kind of in the mix like being miked up and I didn't hear the full presentation. I'm like this sounds amazing. So I so I went to him like would you be able to come on a podcast and do this presentation just for me. He was kind enough so I was able to hear but I think it's very interesting. There's a lot of slides. So, I suggest you check it out on either Spotify or YouTube to see how what's up with Gen Z and and the hook is is that Gen Z this

year will become the largest spending group in mobile games. That's why all these games are launching their Gen Z. Like Mo is Diablo Immortal for Gen Z. That's basically it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then the one I did is on uh the UGC space and brand partnerships. And so my conversation was with the CEO of Super League and the head of an agency called Geek. And we talked about brand partnerships going into whether it's Minecraft or Fortnite or some of the others and how that is like a really booming industry for brands to do brand advertising. Crest's, you know, favorite topic of of all time, but super super helpful for a lot of game devs to actually make money and go directly with brands and put them inside of games. All right, so let's go to corrections. This is for Crest and everyone luckily was chiming in on Slack. Worlds Collide. So I think this is DC Worlds Collide is not Net Ease. It was Bite Dance or Newverse before it was

shut down. And so Warner Brothers San Francisco is working on getting this to market. Enzoy has done over 1 million units. They actually released that on their social media which is double the VGI estimates. Phil has this in all caps, all hail Enzo because, as we know, he is a huge fan of this. So, there's a couple corrections. All right, so let's go into the first story, which is Minecraft. So, hang with me. There's a bunch I want to update you on because this is actually some this is actually big news. And if you're like me, this really wasn't in my my social media feed, but it apparently was in every teen and tween social media feed. So according to Variety, the film earned 163 million domestically and 313 globally, making it the biggest debut of 2025 for all movies. All movies. So it is now the biggest movie release of the year. And so it is also the biggest video game adaptation opening in box

office history. It beat Mario. So Mario, which launched in April of 2023, so two years ago. I can't even believe that. So, the Super Mario movie was 146 million and so this is like surpassed it. So, April is going to be the new video game movie month. Everybody watch out and just mark that on your calendar. So, going into the weekend, analysts had projected that Minecraft was going to hit 80 million. Instead, it it nearly doubled that figure. It's the third biggest opening for Warner Brothers of all time of all of their movies. And remember, one of those movies was Barbie. So, you got Barbie and you got Minecraft as two of Warner Brothers biggest movie releases of all times. Critics are mixed, you know, as expected. The audience gave it a B. Cinema score, four out of five stars in post track. It's a 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. I think if you're an adult, you you look at this and you just like,

you know, you do a a palm slap on your head like, what is this? So about 62% of the audience are under 25. 64% were under the age of 25. Shocking. Wow. Right. Like you know like this is not a movie for us. Dinosaurs awareness was off the charts according to the com score. Comore is like one of those marketing agencies and I'm just pulling this in as a marketer because again like I didn't see a lot about this and you know we're in the video game industry. We are not the target and that's okay. Warner Brothers left no stone unturned in terms of getting Minecraft on the radar of movie goers. The promotional campaign resulted in the largest third-party partnership in the company's history. And that's significant considering this is again the studio behind Barbie. So it was McDonald's, Doritos, Oreos, Poppy Soda. I don't even know what Poppy soda is. Perhaps that's It's delicious. You're missing out. It's so good. Yeah. It has like probiotics in it. Really? Mhm. Tell me. Oh my. Okay.

All right. Healthy soda. I'm a Dr. Pepper lover. So Oh, so I'm not familiar. Need to get rid of that stuff. Poppy so much better for you. Says Laura, who's way vaping all the time. They should have partnered with a with a vape company because of all the teens. Oh god, I can't believe I said that. So, and then there were the memes and the absolute attention to detail and nerd focus that the movie had. So, let me explain chicken jockey. So, it's a thing. So, if you are familiar with the game, this is actually something that happens in the game, but it's extremely extremely rare to get like the little baby zombie to show up on top of one of the chickens. And so, in the movie, Jack Black shouts this out. And so, what's happening is all of the kids in the audience, whenever a meme like this happens, they go nuts. They throw popcorn. They yell and they scream. And

in many cases, like the police are getting called in because everyone's kind of they're having a good time, but they're like making a huge mess. This is the why I'm referencing Rocky Horror Picture Show is it is now going to the movie is an interactive experience for kids and tweets. So, this is actually why we're probably going to see I don't know if you guys remember Titanic back in the day where teens like kept going and going to the theaters. They're going to keep going. So this is why the numbers are up there so far. So my take and my message, dear stumble guys, dear Brawl Stars, Subway Surfers, Hill Climb Racers, if you don't have a movie in development right now, you're going to be missing out. Any game that has a large teen audience has the opportunity to capitalize on this moment. I am sure any movie studio, especially Warner Brothers, is going to take your call and will likely option you for millions and millions of dollars. Go find an agent and get your movie made and get it made

for April of next year. That that is my message. AI do AI will do that movie if it's so fast. Was AI can probably in fact like Laura isn't one of your favorites coming to theaters soon? Think about Zelda. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I can't. Yeah. So, well, soon is a relative term, but with the liveaction Legend of Zelda supposed to be coming in 2027. Oh, wait. We waits to wait. But I was trying to think like what my takes for this cuz I haven't seen the movie. To be honest, I felt a little ashamed saying this and you're like, you're saying, "Jen, it's not on my my social media feeds." I'm like, "It's all over mine." So, clearly they think I'm like Gen Z. But that aside, I was like kind of combing through all these list of franchises and I had the weirdest thought. I was like, you know what they should do? They should do like a Love is Blind or Real World. And then I was like, Animal Crossing characters. Like that's like the best mashup I could possibly think of.

So, Love is Blind meets Animal Crossing. Yeah, why not? Or in real world, stick them in a house. Hold on. I haven't watched Love is Blind. Is that the one where you're dating somebody without not seeing them? And then you have to like go on a holiday with that somebody love in the pod. Well, you get to see them before the holiday. You have to propose, you have to commit to getting married and then you get to go on a holiday with them because I remember this. My wife was explaining this and I'm like, "And you watch this?" And then I figured this thing out accidentally in a client dinner and all these like very senior women like one of them was a CEO and they all watched like really really bad shows and I'm like why? And they were like well this is not even escape. It's like I need to rest my mind. I have a I have a challenging work and it's busy times and I watch absolute horseshit and like sometimes they're like even when I'm flying like this marketing VP, she's like people probably think that I'm cuz like when I'm flying and the type of that I'm watching they're like who is this crazy lady?

She's like no but I need to kind of like unwind like this is my way of watching this utter garbage. Like my wife, she's she's a pretty smart lady and she watches like she's on a Swedish version of a Love Island or whatever Love BL. She's like on the bottom of the barrel. She's gone through the UK, the US. She's like, "Go Sweden. What do you got?" She has watched every single version of Love is Blind. And she what's actually interesting god it's actually a bit educational because culturally the cultures are so different in how they date like the Japanese version and how they Anyway I actually don't watch a lot of those shows. I watch people dress up in costumes and are mean to each other like I like Handmaid's I was watching the you know season premiere of Handsmaid's Tale last night. Like that's like for me I can't wait for you know death and destruction and dystopian futures. I had a question about this is like why do we think their estimates are so poor? Like I do feel like in general

we're kind of bad at estimating Gen Z's interactions with things. I feel and I this is kind of just like a reminder that like I mean off being off by this much means like what research were you doing or like well I don't understand. No, it's a fair point. The movie got a lot of really really bad reviews when the trailers were coming out and and so that's why I think it happened. I remember we covered it actually I covered it that the trailers were like looked looked really awful and I think that's where they were leaning from. But what's funny is as adults like we don't understand that what we feel is awful is amazing. Like Skibbidity Toilet, right? Like I don't know if you guys know what that is. Or Roblox. Yeah. like, you know, any of the things that we think are cringe or awful, they're like, "Yes, you know." And so, to me, you're right. Like, we don't have a good handle on how to estimate that. Yeah. I think that's the weird part is like I agree. Like, I mean, when I saw the trailers, like, and

this was not in my feeds at all. Like, I didn't even know it was coming. The only reason why I knew it existed is cuz my sister has three kids and they went and saw it. But, yeah, then it it pops off like this. And I noticed myself when forecasting on games is like when you try to forecast for like Gen Z behavior because historically we have just always been forecasting for essentially millennials. Like forecasting for Gen Z is a relatively new thing. We're terrible at it. Everything I've seen is like we are so bad at estimating Gen Z. And I'm wondering like there's got to be some data point or some information that we as either millennials or older who are doing these types of forecasting don't yet realize as an indicator. Ironically, Adam brought this up last week. See, I'm I'm supposed to I'm his replacement. Perfect. Yeah, you're you're you're filling you're filling the seat perfectly. And you know, we were talking about was it Enzoy or is it two weeks ago we were talking about Enzoy and like what are the social media KPIs from a marketing perspective that we should be looking at that actually means something. And I think that we're all trying to figure that out. And you know, is it more engagement metrics in social,

not just, you know, old school likes, you know, likes and subscribes, but getting down into shares or time spent or some of these other KPIs to make again make a prediction or recommendation. A company needs to go figure that out and how can you use AI to scrape, you know, social and the internet to find those like holy grail metrics. You know, game discover code tries to do it with some of their metrics. I think we just we're just not quite there yet. Who do you think Roblox the TV show is already in production for Amazon? Well, so the problem with Roblox is there is no Roblox. It's a platform. It's a platform. Hollywood can make Roblox. They don't worry about Oh, they will. Don't ask couple executives. There definitely is a Roblox. Well, I I do think it's it's a larger challenge than converting Minecraft. Minecraft at least has characters already baked in. They don't have there's no narrative. There's no story. They have to create a plot, but the characters already exist and they have little bits of personality. I

would say with Roblox, you got to create everything from scratch. You don't really have much. You have the worlds, but there's nothing else in it. And there's not there's no characters that are going to be pushing plots forward or developing over time or creating some sort of emotional attachment like from the audience. So, Roblox I think would be more of a challenge. Yeah. Like the narrative of a Roblox movie I feel like would be more from the players perspective rather than in world. There is no Steve of Roblox, you know, like that doesn't at least I don't maybe I could be wrong. Roblox Steve. Yeah. We have to invinc. Yeah. So it's like is Steve the player and then the player is, you know, going into these different worlds within Roblox or something. I don't know. I'm feeling Robert Downey is going to get a call and that movie is going to be made. He's going to get a lot of money. Yeah, he can play any character. The best good guy or the best villain. Well, we'll see. Just just pay the man. Let's talk about Netflix. Now, so speaking of Love is Blind, Netflix has cancelled its Netflix stories. It was its overall app

that was holding a lot of their interactive fiction game titles. So, you'd open it, you'd have games like Perfect Couple. Great show, by the way. Emily Paris had Emily and Paris had had a story in there, Love is Blind, Perfect Match, Virgin River. I redownloaded it to my phone yesterday just to remind myself what it was because it is still available. You can still play it. It's just you're going to be playing at everything that's already released, which so you're not getting anything new. And my initial like thought was, "Oh my gosh, it's a little rough around the edges." You look at it and you don't think it's it's not really this polished, amazing, beautiful experience that we're kind of used to with games today. It felt very much like it was a quickly put this together. Here's the content. We're just going to focus more on content than how the content is held and presented. So, the app itself had, I think it was 6.9 million total installs. But if you compare that to, if you show the other slide, the other Netflix titles, it actually sits relatively low in the ranking of how these Netflix games are performing. Yeah, Too Hot to

Handle was 8.2 million. Not too bad, I think. Yeah, if you look at the Grand Theft Auto, which is just not a fair comparison. So, this is the this we're looking right now at the download charts, and you'll have a look. Yeah, GTA has the highest downloads of the Netflix games and it's not by just a little bit of a margin. It's by quite a bit and then you everything else is kind of grouped together. What I did here, I zoomed in a little bit because Squid Game had a massive spike when it came out. Massive spike and then it kind of petered off into this and then you have too hot to handle Netflix stories and then too hot to handle again. So yeah, this is a this was a pretty big twin game spike, but it kind of makes sense. I think what was interesting here is Netflix kind of came out recently at GDC and they did all the interviews and we covered that that they had they're changing their strategy, right? Four pillars. Narrative, party games, destination for kids and attracting mainstream audiences. And what's weird is like this is a narrative app. It's

their narrative super app and they're killing it. And so, you know, killing it in a bad way. Yeah. Well, yes. I'm surprised at the Yeah. But but I'm not surprised, right? Like it's it's a super app. It's not giving them, you know, a presence around like Love is Blind, which is a huge, you know, like we just talked about a huge IP for them. And so, do you think, Laura, are they moving more towards like a licensing strategy or like an outsourcing strategy? Like, what are you thinking? So, I still love interactive fiction for them. I think it makes sense. The one thing that doesn't make sense is looking back like you look up Netflix stories, what does that mean? And now I see if they're going to if they're going to take Netflix stories and not make that the whole hub for all of their content. You look at that then you look at Too Hot to Handle. What on earth are you downloading? That's one question mark I had. And two, are they doing a licensing deal? I don't know. But what I was going to try to lop over to you was the partnership with Series Entertainment. And I had a look at who they are. It looks like they're doing gaming and AI. So to me this makes

sense. If they're going to continue, you know, looking at the narrative games, partying, etc., why not partner with a studio that works in AI now? You can make content 10 times faster. And what what is also here, I think they acquired Pixelberry Studios. Yes. Yeah, David. And for anyone Yeah. That needs a refresher. Pixelberry Studios made choices, which was hands down, besides episodes, one of my favorite one of great interactive fiction app. So they're now it looks like Netflix is kind of leaning into the pros like they built the games before they built successful interactive active games before. Why not chuck this out, have them redo it, take the content, the stories that work, put them into a nicer experience, and then have a way to pump out content much faster than they probably could do before. Yeah. Yeah. My thought is there's a new boss in town and that means anything that was done before the new boss is trash and everything new is hot. So even even if they're making a too hot, it's too hot to handle. So even

whatever it is, they're just going to, you know, change it. Maybe the deal wasn't right. Maybe, you know, it just doesn't like it. So new thing. Yeah. I think it's about money. I think it's they found a lowcost solution to pump out narrative and likely you know if it was me too you know individual apps that you can actually drive people to based on the show and not a super app called Netflix stories that has no brand awareness which is really difficult for you know UA ASO to to drive people towards that. Maybe instead of low cost it's smart cost. Yeah, Jen, I disagree with the cost question because again, I heard last EDC I heard some of the salaries they would fund a studio with for a year with what one person makes at Netflix. Well, Netflix salaries are very high, but they don't give any bonus or salary or any of that stuff. That's that's their Okay, I I'll take cash. That's fine. Yeah. No, like I think when I looked up director of product role, they have to give the range. They have to give the range in

California and Washington and it was like 300 to 1.2 million salary. That was the range. I'm like I don't even know what that means. It means that you're going to get paid over a million. So that's what it means. 1.2. Yeah. Like the difference here is the company confirmed that it's partnered with Series Entertainment. They did not buy them. And so this is what triggered in me is this like kind of like licensing model or a different kind of model that avoids what you're talking about what what they've done in the past which is buying those studios and then paying their folks lots of money. This is as we all know a content you know treadmill and if you don't figure out through AI and lower cost solutions narrative as a category and a genre just cannot work. But it sounds like they have figured that that out and the AIAR is out too now. though, like what what's going to happen? Yeah, that different story. Yeah, I don't understand like I actually know of

series. I know of a guy that works there. I was talking to him, oddly enough, just a couple weeks ago, but I feel like using AI for narrative is like, can't anyone do that? Like, do you need a whole company to type in to to prompt chat GBT about narrative? Like, I feel like AI for sure is going to help in some ways in these areas. I don't know yet if it's on the production side or the actual content side. I'm sure it's a mix of both, but I don't know. I feel like an AI company for narrative is just like I don't know. It feels very very weak as like a business proposition. Yeah. As because the game the content of the games are already very light. Like of course it takes work and narrative and story, but like relative to larger games, the amount of content is is nothing. I mean, come on. These are like 2D narrative driven games. Like it's very All right, let's not all over it. It This is a lucrative category. I'm not saying it's not lucrative or successful. I remember choices. I remember they're not my genre, but I remember when those games were popping off. I'm just saying feels like a weird place to partner with an AI

company when that feels like the most basic use of AI like I've ever heard of. This is I feel like you're coming in from your shooters. All these are all compl you and your little like silly little narrative games. I want to I worked it briefly with the narrative. The branching narrative and the amount of content you need and to keep that all organized is actually it exponentially gets more complicated especially if we don't have I don't doubt that it's super complicated and that AI can benefit but if you look at any sector of dev you'll find the same issues like everything is complicated at the end of the day I don't know it just feels weird to partner over narrative when that just feels so straightforward of a of a problem to solve I think it's brilliant I think it's brilliant too that's fine all right well let's go on and keep going what else is in the news Mishka uh speedrun zero 00 SR00005. They have now new names. That's a cool name. So, A6Z is launching their new speedrun, a 12week speedrunning initiative set to begin late of July 25 and in early

October 25. Applications for the program will close in early May 25. So, pretty soon. Before you go on, I have been chatting with them. Games are still a part of Speedun. Games are a part of Speedrun. That's why it's part of this podcast. So, A6Z will clamp to invest up to 1 million to selected participants. In the previous accelerator cycle, the firm selected 42 companies from a pool of 6,000 applicants. So, not very easy to get in. I definitely suggest applying to speedrun. I found the last one to be most exciting. And that's not only because of the defense drones. There are all kinds of companies there. And I just think it it makes it more exciting when it's not just, you know, everybody's making an RPG or puzzle game, but there's like all kind of different companies. If you want to know how to apply, I'm sure they have a bunch of stuff on their website, but they also did a podcast with us. Just Google Deconstructor of Fun Speedrun and you'll find a 30-minute episode what we're

chatting about like what is this about and how to apply. But that's when it was exclusively for games. Now it's just for fun. It's it's open. It's open. So, it's going to be even harder to get in if you're a games company. But nevertheless, you should try 12 weeks. I believe you can do it on site or you can just come in and in the beginning in the end and it's awesome. You'll end up presenting to hundreds of VCs at the end of the speedrun that will help you to get, you know, funding for your seed essentially. talking about funding. So, Supercell launched officially, I mean, they've had this investment arm for a long time, but they kind of officially launched Supercell Investments. And for those who are watching, your head game is our endgame. We invest in creative independent studios and game tech teams striving to make truly great games that are played by millions of people for years to come. probably sounds very familiar since this is sort of a

derivative of Supercell's mission and it's interesting. I was today kind of going through their site and and like what is this about? By the way, here's Supercell's mission which is our dream is to create great games that as many people as possible play for years that are remembered forever. Anyways, so Supercell Investments, I think the most important question is not what, but why they are doing this. Is it that they're acquiring genre expertise? Not sure. Doesn't seem like it. Are they, you know, getting talent in through these investments? M. Not. Probably the one. Is it a topline revenue play? Definitely not that one. Is it for profitability? For sure not. So, it was interesting to kind of understand why they're doing this. And they even had a full like a three paragraph section of why does Supercell make investments? And you can just summarize it to this one sentence. They want to help more teams to create games that are play for years and remembered forever. They love this. They

love this sentence. They keep they keep like throwing this around like it's a like like they came up. No offense, but it's like the biggest I call it these things no does like do we all? I mean I I want to make really shitty games that people on on Deconstructor of Fun. Like I I I we chime in in a moment, but but I was kind of wondering like isn't this spark like they have this incubator program where they you can apply you get into a team and you're coming up with new ideas and that's one isn't the stuff that they've been doing with offices like they do have offices in Shanghai that is making games that are probably you know going to be remembered forever when they eventually ship. They have a studio in Seoul. They have studio now in London. So it's not that they need investments per se to help game teams to make these unique games because they would don't want to move to Helsinki. Like they are opening up studios everywhere. And also I was I was thinking about like they launched this site now. It's 2025 but they started investing actually I believe in 2016 and

the thesis was pretty much the same. It was Supercell's thesis. We're gonna find teams that look like us, like smell like us, like talk like us, and we're going to invest into them, and they will become like us. And they did not. There was no luck. Like the biggest investments till date, if I'm correct, is Space Ape, and that's currently not active. Now it's called Supercell London. And then there's Metacor that got the credit line. Metacor is doing fine, but it's not category winner if I'm correct. I think it's the fourth now in its category. And the real takeaway is not what investment Supercell has made. I think the real takeaway looking at nine years of investing is what they have not invested into because the past decade has been incredible bull run for gaming. Now we're not talking about the the last couple of years but but before that like think about the companies that got acquired that that Supercell had dibs on Peak Games. Yeah, they they they

were in that small giant here out of Helsinki that was a billion dollar exit. No, they supercell didn't grab that. You know, I've heard all kinds of stuff about other companies that are, you know, pretty prominent. I'm not going to name it, but Supercell investment team was part of all those conversations and instead it made a lot of investments into, you know, tiny little startups. And you know, kind of going back on that, it hasn't been that successful of an investment arm given how rich VCs and corporate venture capital has become during the last decade. So to conclude on that, I'd say Supercell Investments is definitely net positive for the industry because they're giving money for startups. But to me like especially looking at this site supercellinvestments.com it feels like it's a investment club for supercell employees. You have a very small team actually that is operating it. I think just a handful of people you know great people smart people talented people but

it's a very small team and several of them are actually interns and that team is smaller than most of the VC funds have. Then you have a lot of investments that are coming at preed and seed stages. So as the company is starting they're putting like the first money ins. So those are very very very early stage startups. A lot of them have actually you know died just like normally startups do and the goal of this investment it says on one point that their goal is not to build a portfolio but a community. And so in the end at the moment Supercell has a very interesting offering but I don't know if it really comes through. they don't really have that big of a team that can actually give you that information and also being a great game maker does not make you a great game investor and looking at that team that is making the investments like they're not people who have worked on games like they're I think the person that is heading it is X gold wins X which makes total sense but it's a little bit weird to say like you can access now the the full Supercell

knowledge and when they're talking about building this community I actually made you know a couple of calls to people who have investment from supercell and I was asking like you know how is And of course all of them enjoy having Supercell as their investor. But I asked about the community perspective and they said they do have these events where they bring all the portfolio company in. But interestingly enough, at least in those limited conversations, they said that it was rare, at least for them, that employees from Supercell were present at these community events. So essentially, it's the startups that are meeting each other, but you're not sitting there next to, you know, head of marketing of Brawl Stars. And they did say that there were points where they're able to interact with Supercell employees about certain, you know, tactics and strategies, but some of these studios just said that that the advice that they got was just not applicable when you're a small studio versus if you're goddamn Brawl Stars. Like, it's it's a totally different playbook. and what they're using, the

agencies that they're using, the strategies they're using, the tactics. Like, not anybody can just go in and do a Transformers and John Cena campaign. You know what? This month, WWE, because why not? That's great, but you're in an absolutely different, you know, league. So, my hope is that that Supercell Investments builds a strong strategy rather than a website full of visions and that they start making more real bets because I think this could be powerful, especially how the market is looking. There's a lot of distressed assets or assets looking to get some growth capital. Supercell has tons of capital. And if they can build this into a type of an engine where the people can actually interact and be a part of Supercell and not this auxiliary force on the side that can meet with each other and create their little side community and eventually, you know, get absorbed partly to be part of Supercell. I think that would be a very interesting value proposition. But in the end, this is not Supercell's business. Supercell's business is to actually make those games

that no people remember forever, make $10 billion and are played and so forth. Their business is not to run a VC fund on the side. And I think the size of the team kind of correlates with that. So Jen, what do you think? Yeah. No, I I you know, I this is where I wish Crest was here because this is his his area. He's going to he's going to all over this. But from my perspective, it's like, is this really net positive for the industry? I mean, I sometimes we look at past results to predict future benefits and Space Ape doesn't exist anymore. And you know, Supercell London is now what it is, but like what happened to all of that? And then Metacor, I think, is is actually has had some success, but didn't they have success? I don't know when they got investment from Supercell on that type of example. You've got in a sense, you're right. You have a company that is known for making games, not new games lately, and they're not having a lot of

success in making new games lately, putting a lot of money into companies. Like, what is the benefit of taking money from Supercell versus a VC? And you're right, like exactly what you said, which is it's like the teams that are successful at Supercell cannot give actional advice to these other teams that are up and coming because the life cycle and the stage of development is so incredibly different. I mean, I often say this about myself is, you know, when someone calls me up and they're like, "Hey, how do you do this like grassroots community effort for a Steam launch?" I'm like, "Oo, I don't know. My expertise is like AAA, you know, very different, you know, you know, getting the John Cena and the WWE and like I work with WWE making toys and making games. Like I can call them up today and do a deal, but if you want me to like get a bunch of like grassroots efforts going for community. Yeah. I mean I mean

obviously I would know the agency to call to do that, but yeah. I mean it's it's an expertise thing. So I don't know. I'm just kind of like more money in our industry is great and helping more teams, but I think more money without like a strategy and a vision and a support structure feels questionable to me. Yeah, it's in this case like there's for example Sony has a corporate PlayStation has Sony corporate venture capital but that mainly invests into different tools and tech that then enables their studios to produce interesting titles and games and and kind of you know the the picks and shovels and they get the first view and can see how how that is developing how that element because that helps their core business. I don't know. It would be very interesting to get an like yes, there is that long form answer of why they're making these investments, but it's still it's like you're making investments so that there are more cool games in the world and because you want to create a community. Okay, so it's a hobby. All right, that's that sounds great. That's cool. Like you can do

corporate responsibility stuff like we're building wells in Africa. That's not your core business, but it would be really good and it's net beneficial. That's how I see it. So this is kind of like the building wells in Africa initiative from Supercell because in the end like it's such a small, you know, drip in the bucket of of of the money that they're investing into this and how much they're making and and it doesn't really stress their game makers because none of them are part of the investment teams. All right. Well, we will get Crest's opinion on that when we're back. Game devs, here at Heroic Labs, we know that great gameplay is what players love. But integrating metagame features like challenges, progression, and rewards is crucial for retention and monetization. But coding them is a tedious and timeconuming process. That's why top studios have turned to Hero from Heroic Clouds. Hero provides a complete suite of battle tested metagame features that are quick to implement, letting you spend more time on the core gameplay experience. Ready to ship fully

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sensortowwer.com. That is sensortow.com. Let's keep going. We have a couple more big stories to hit. One is this game called Blueprints. Blueprints. And so if you haven't heard of it, let me just give you a little bit of a background. It is only the best rated game of 2025. And yes, I know it's only April, but I think sometimes we have to pay attention to this. It's developed by, help me out, Doug Bomb, published by Raw Flurry. Did I say the developer? I think the developer is just a couple of folks. So Blueprints is an upcoming firsterson puzzle strategy adventure set in a mysterious mansion. And so I read a couple of great review articles that say actually don't find out a lot more about this. I'll tell you a little bit more because it is so unique and different. You actually want to be surprised. It's releasing on April 10th on PC and

console. Sadly not mobile. I'm so bummed. The game I play everything on mobile these days. I just firing up my console behind me is such a pain in the ass. So, the game play uniquely combines elements of rogue light mechanics, puzzle solving, deck building. Each day, players draft rooms to create a new layout of the mansion with each room offering specific configurations, bonuses, and challenges. Movement is limited by a step counter, adding strategic layer to the exploration. Some rooms feature logic or math-based puzzles, and players may need to keep physical notes to track clues and progress. So, a very very unique kind of game that is coming in and getting this really high praise critical acclaim. I personally love the trailer on Steam. So, the creator is doing this like almost like an ASMR relaxing VO as you walk through the mansion, you know, like it was it just was very different and very unique. And they actually show him

on a microphone talking at one point during the trailer. And I was like, I've loved this. I love that this trailer. We all the time about things aren't unique and innovative and different. And this checks those boxes. Like this is why I want to give them all of these kudos. I'm a sucker personally for these kinds of games. If you've ever played the Room series, which is on mobile, like so amazing. It reminds me of that just in a in a different vein. anything from Glitch Games, which is this like twoerson like UK studio that makes all of these like adventure atmospheric puzzle games. Huge kudos. So, just a PSA again, public service announcement for something different. Laura, Chris, what are your thoughts? Who wants to go first? Yeah, I mean I'll I'll kind of jump in. I have similar thoughts. Big fan of The Room House of Da Vinci. I just pulled this out. My mist notebook that I die hard I mean they're they're made in Washington actually. But yeah, I mean, Mist, Riven, all of that stuff. So, I'm really excited about this and

yeah, I agree on the innovation side. I like that indie games are kind of taking these like crazy genres and mashing them together and seeing what happens, which is fun. However, I have like an inherent negative bias towards rogike elements existing like period. Not because I hate rogue likes, like there are amazing ones like Batro and Slay the Spire, but they come out like once every five years and they sit on top of like a hund,000 dead indie games that all were rogue likes. Yeah, because I think like Rogike when done correctly is truly like an amazing experience. I mean, Batro, Slay the Spire, Binding of Isaac Back, there are like top tier games, but the thing about them is that they make it look so easy. And so then you get a million other indie devs doing rogue likes and they they're making them and they're so bad. They're so terrible. And so when you see a good one, it stands out, right? Like a bow stands out even though it's on top of like a billion other indie ones. So anyways, this is a minor rant about rogue likes, but I am excited to play the game. And my last point is what would happen if you combine a rogike and

an FPS? Yes, do it. You would maybe get extraction shooters. I don't know. Maybe that's where that genre can come from. But if FPS and Rogike had a baby, it's a it's an extraction shooter. It's extraction. I'm sure there's other elements too that don't exist yet. But extraction, like in my head, I was always like a rogike FPS. The other day offline, you and I were talking, getting to know each other, and I was fascinated. You were like, I hate that extraction shooter is a mechanic that is named the genre. I hate the genre name. Yeah. I mean, you hate the genre name. So FPS Rogike. Yeah. Yeah. There's got to be a cool name. I don't know. I feel like shooters need to have a cool name. You know, battle royale just like hits. All right. All right. It's a marketing challenge. Laura, what do you think? Well, one thing I'm a little jealous. You're watching these trailers that sound really nice. I was watching the reviews and like a lot of the reviewers were like, "Hey guys, so we're going to talk about this game." And I'm like, I would have preferred the calming, relaxing

experience of the the voice over that you had over the videos that I watched. Oh, yeah. Go to the Steam Yeah. Go to the Steam store and watch the developers trailer. And he has this microphone. Wait, can you find the 46th room in 9x5 layout? And it's just this whole like ASMR. Like that dude needs to do an ASMR video. That sounded much better. I love the idea of it and I I mean my brain works in weird ways. The f there's two things I thought of I was like you know what this reminds me of Alice in Borderland when they have to figure out how to get it out of that nine room square except you're trying to figure out which room to go to except now the added thing where you have to create the room but like you're picking the room that's created next getting whatever points or damage or whatever it is. I don't like rogue lights. I don't like losing things. I hate having to start over. Art row is probably the most I could do because I think it eased the

blow of having to start from the beginning. You get to keep some of your progress. It sounded like you keep some of your progress, but I hate losing everything. Absolutely hate it, but there is a market for this. So, I'm curious. I would play it. Oh, that's how I'll summarize it. I would play it. Awesome. All right. All right. Let's go to Mishka. You want to do your recap of Am's latest deck? So, the deck is quite long. It has a lot of graphs. It's a ream and invest game kind of Matthew Bald presentation. So they they took a lot of information from newsu data etc etc. And in short the shortest way is subscribe to the newsletter and you get like a two-page write up about it. But in short the PC and console are surging attracting users and capital being rewarded with high valuations. Meanwhile our dear mobile is consolidating and struggling to attract investments. So a quite of the dichotomy that is happening currently in the market. The capital is overall returning

to quality. That means that the investors are becoming more selective and are now putting money into companies that have strong fundamentals. And let me tell you about a company that has strong fundamentals. This is going to blow everybody's mind. Profitable business model. Number one. Wow. Number two established IP. Number three consistent user retention. meaning you're not, you know, paying your ass for UA and and showing, you know, nice numbers. Number four, scalable operations. And number five, so this is in case you're not return on an investment positive, you have a very clear path to get ROI positive. So to summarize this whole long deck to summarize what the prediction is that it's going to be another really rough year if you're not operating with a hit IP high retention and real profitability. That's that's the summary like 2025 2026 you can name these

numbers but that's the fact and I'll just show a couple of images that I pulled from it. It's quite the read and I definitely suggest it's not as long as Matthew Ball. I think this is like 35 pages. I think that's the extent of it, but has a lot of interesting stuff here. So, for example, it talks about Steam audiences reaching new highs. So, basically showing that good gameplay is good and and innovative and people are playing it. You're we're talking about mobile spend stabilizing and really Asian publishers kind of pushing and being on the forefront of the growth while Western publishers are challenged. There's M&A and public activity rebounding. So private financing is continuing to slide, but private financing mean venture capital. Meanwhile, public funding is much more active. We see the equity and depth capital markets rebounding in 2025 financing overall when looking at this graph, it shows that it's it's at multi-year low and later stage activity.

So, meaning that once you've gotten your speedrun check and then once you got the next check from the VCs you met at the speedrun event, that following check, that's going to be a tough one. That funding is almost non-existent at the moment. So, we're talking about series A and growth and profitability are drivers from premier valuation and it really shows the valuations of like, you know, the Seal fronts of the world and the Capcom of the world. One is $10 billion company and one isn't. And then of course the evergreen IPs continue to dominate player engagement as we talked in the beginning. Minecraft is on everybody's laps and and there's a reason for it and that's why these IPs are also so valuable cuz only a small percentage of players time is actually going outside of them. So really interesting document, interesting PDF, interesting presentation if you're into understanding how the market moves explained by bankers and our friends at invest game. So suggest you check it out

or just read the summary on data structure on website. So that's the end of it. All right. Like super cool. I think the vibe coming out of GDC is still like it's really difficult to raise and find funds. And I think it's looking backwards and it's saying, "Oh, it's getting better." But I think getting better is still a relative term towards it's not like the heyday from a few years ago where money was just kind of flying. Yeah. Yeah. Damn. Cool. All right, let's hit our last topic. Chris, let's give it to you. Yeah. So, a pretty quick update here on again called Steel Hunters. It's made by Wargaming. They went to early access last week and it's a PvPVE mech shooter. Again, PvPVE. There's extraction elements. Again, the genre names suck. Like, we have not figured out a right way to call these games, but it's a PVP PVE mech shooter. It's made in Unreal Engine 5, which I'll talk about a little bit later. The only interesting thing that I've noticed so far is like one it has a four-week early

access. So something I want to talk about is like having a four-week early access and like what is the goal here? The next one is like they have a lot of currencies. So it feels like they are going to go down a free-to-play mobile monetization strategy which would be interesting on Steam PC and console. There's no real like that type of microtransactions but I could see Wargaming doing this based on their history. They have a three- tiered battle pass, which is really what you see like with the Black Cell in Call of Duty. They have a three- tier one called the Pro version. You can't actually access it in the early access, but I thought that was interesting to see three tier. Still a linear battle pass. Still pretty boring, still pretty basic. The last thing I was going to say is like it's a 4-week early access. And whenever I see games like this go into early access, you have to ask like what is the goal of this early access? And I cannot figure out what the goal here is. typically in an early access, at least from my perspective, is that you're either going to use it from a data like bug fixing perspective or you're going to use it from like a marketing hype perspective. Those are kind of like the

basic ways you would use it. And whenever you have a four-week alpha, you remove kind of that marketing hype element. The goal of the early access at the end is that players want more. That's the goal of the early access from a marketing perspective in my opinion. And for having four weeks with like one hour of gameplay makes zero sense. The second is like if they're just testing out like bugs and stuff, I just feel like this is a weak way to do it and it doesn't need to be four weeks. It should just be a weekend. I'm very confused by the goal here. The last thing is around Unreal Engine. This is not necessarily against Steel Hunters. This is a shooter aspect as a whole as I play a lot of shooters. Whenever you play any of these like Unreal Engine shooters, they all feel the same. They're all like using whatever Unreal's like default ballistics are. They all feel the same and it is very frustrating because I think on the dev side it logically makes sense like oh we get all this stuff for free when we use the Unreal Engine so it saves on dev cost it saves all this stuff which is all true and that's like what the entire industry feels like it's like narrative has been these games

release and they feel all the same and generic and I think there's like this issue where regardless of what you put on top of that like from a system standpoint even an art standpoint IP is a different argument But regardless of what you put on there, they feel the same. And I think that feeling is something that like we are not really able to kind of like predict or argue is going to be good for a a product or or whatever. And so you're seeing these games come out and they just feel all the same and all bland. And I you just see like all these games like there's no way in the world this game is successful in its current state. Oh wow. It makes zero sense. So, I I love Chris's analysis because he's like, "If you guys watch the car YouTube videos, I watch them all the time." When they like test the car and they're like, "The chassis, they talk about the chassis." I'm like, "I never feel the chassis, but you can feel the chassis." And that's what Chris is saying, like how it feels different. And that's like the next level of understanding. It looks quite generic.

First of all, Seal Hunters is the most coolest name you can find. Yeah. Great name. Yeah. You got the mech dog, you got the mech guy. It's it's like they're not like very polished. They're more like, you know, dystopian bit of a looking little rusty and so forth. It's much faster than typical wargaming games because like wargaming shooters are shooters for old men. That's why I love them. Like I play World of Warships. Oh my god. Like it takes forever. It takes a minute to load the guns and you you know it's like but that's the whole thing is like you're in that real battle. You make your shot. You just don't run around and blast around. That's for kids. That's for Gen Z. This is for millennials. And this shooter doesn't look for millennials. So, they're also going for a much younger audience. I mean, it looks amazing, but it also looks kind of generic to be honest. Now that you said it, you can take a screenshot and you know it's unreal. Yeah. Like I like you could just tell like looking at it, you know it's unreal. And I think that like that's

like a broad problem that like has not really been discussed or like manifested or like had an impact. I mean, at the end of the day, if you were to make your own gaming engine, that's insanely complicated. Like, I totally understand the reason for going with these off-the-shelf engines, but I think there's something in how they're being used on the dev side that is translating to this like generic feeling when you play them. Such an interesting interesting point that you're making about, you know, is UEIE causing a number one is it democratizes the ability to make a shooter. However, it also makes it generic and how do people get around that feeling to to be something different. I wanted to talk a little bit about your early access point and yet again to quote Adam, Adam believes early access is a launch and I think what they perhaps mistakenly did here I again offline you told me it was about an hour of gameplay but they have a four-week kind of early access window.

I think you really have to follow a closed beta or a beta system that allows you to number one is have specific goals to your point. What are your goals? Is it tech? Is it retention? Is it monetization? What are you trying to do? How do you want to build hype getting to there? And then also making sure that you have the right content for the right moment. What Marvel Rivals did incredibly well, and I know it's not exactly the same type of thing, was each one of their betas was a certain amount of time with a certain goal with a driver for players to go and they would collect a skin. they would get something for that for participating that felt like it was the right amount of time. You would also see when you looked at their Twitch or streaming numbers or any of the other kind of social numbers is it would peak the first couple of days and because players were checking it out and then they were leaving. So, I think what people have to really do is think about these moments in time that you're marketing instead of these bigger

windows. Especially as we talk about younger audiences, people aren't going to come and stick around for a very long time if you are in an early stage or a pre. So you really don't have to do maybe an hour of content. Maybe you need to do a little bit of less content, make it playable, but give people like a real reason for doing these things. So anyway, I thought that was interesting. And then one other thing I wanted to point out too is New Zoo actually this week just released their 2025 PC and console gaming report and it's just a light Matthew Ball. It's it's a half a Matthew Ball. So it's 94 pages of free content. So it's not half a Matthew Ball because they have original research. Well, I I meant the length. I meant the length. Okay. Meant the length. Al although I think he was 230 pages if I remember correctly because we we talked about that. The one thing about shooters that I thought was interesting I looked at play time right so share of time which is a metric I think is super

important for us and they had this chart that was 2021 to 2024 and as a group shooters and battle royale have stayed constant. So what this means is it's a fight for share. It's a fight to take share from each other and the pie isn't necessarily growing in the shooter market. And so what I do like here is like, hey, it's something different. It's mechs. The mechs have a bit of a hero shooter element to it where, you know, you do maybe want to like have an expertise in a certain mech. They're trying something different. However, to the very astute Chris's point, this isn't necessarily the right thing. But if you're going to make a shooter, you have to know going into it, you're taking share from somebody else and you're not necessarily growing the total pie, which makes me super super nervous. The other thing that I noticed as well from the research is PC is the number one platform for shooters. Shooters are much much lower on console. So other

genres, battle royale, Fortnite basically takes a bit more of the cake. Sports games take more of the cake. But you got to make sure you're optimizing for PC if you are going after like the shooter category. Chris, do you find that to be the case? You got to like optimize for PC back when it was like mobile first and then like you know the rest later. Now it's like PC first and the rest later. I mean mobile is kind of still its own different thing. But a a point you made there about like the early access and what is the goal of all of this. There could be a point that this is just meant to be for a smaller niche audience and that's their goal. And if that's their goal, then like I think that that's a fine goal. I've said before that, you know, when I said like I don't think it'll be successful, that's coming from the big AAA mindset. That's not necessarily coming from, you know, hey, we want to make this for 100,000 people. We're going to have 10,000 DAU and they're going to spend like crazy and that's going to be our sustainable business. I definitely think that could be something that Steel Hunters does here. But from a broader shooter perspective, the problems I brought up are more what I'm just

talking about from the market itself. I was about to show you War Robots Frontiers gameplay which is also PC and console and it kind of gets to a point where like what are we doing? Like we're launching two games at the same time that are essentially you know essentially the same. Well, yeah. It's like which which robot do you want? Like like this is this is more like spacey. But here's what I like about the Frontiers. It actually is feels slower. So an old guy like me can actually jump into it. And I haven't played either one, but the Frontiers came in earlier into early testing. I don't think it's launched fully. And what War Robots has done is like they they'll do a lot of this like suboptimization like with different guns have different elements and so forth. So it's like super sci-fi, but it's still like more true to the Mech Warrior roots than the new Steel Hunters because Steel Hunters to me doesn't feel like a wargaming game at all. like it's straight up action game

versus war robots feels to me more like what I would expect from a mech game from war gaming. So interesting stuff here. But both of these are having this tough competition and who's the killer in vehicular shooters on mobile and now the war robots is is coming on PC console and then Wargaming is striking back with their version of robots fighting each other to death. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Where's Mech Warriors? Isn't that the IP? RIP. Exactly. They lost the game a long time ago. So, yeah. And War Robots just collected over a billion dollars in in revenue on mobile. So, I think they're they're doing pretty well. So, interesting to see how this evolves. But based on the videos that we've been looking at, I'm I'm actually more into War Robots, dear. I say, uhoh. Uh oh. Yeah. This if I would have to play either one of this, and I would actually like to play War Robots. Looks pretty cool. The other one looked cool but generic. All right. Well, we will wrap

up here. Chris, thank you for joining us for a very special episode. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for shooting. Have you? Yeah, no worries. You should get together with Black Adam and do the vehicular shooter episode. Oh, yeah. We should do that. That'd be fun. Yeah, I can come on that. That one I know shooter is my jam. Old man shooter games. Oh, that's so funny. Well, and then I think you all are going to do more shooter episodes. It's awesome to get, you know, your expertise in that and we'll fill in here and there as well. Laura, good to see you again. It's been a while. And all right, everyone. We'll see you next week and Crest will come back and on everything that we said. I cannot wait. If they let him out of All right, see you guys next week. Bye-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'd subscribe and leave us a review on the

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