TWIG #330 The App Store Endgame, Roblox’s Growth Playbook and GTA 6 Trailer Dissected

[Music] 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 featured engaging games? Check out Hero today at heroiclabs.com. Today's podcast is brought to you by Appsfly, inviting you to dive into their new firstofits-kind report, the state of creative optimization 2025 edition. It's not about how to make creatives. It's about understanding what makes users actually stop scrolling and what emotional and psychological triggers drive performance. Based on over a million

creative variations and nearly 2.5 billion dollars in ad spend, the insights in the report will help you develop a winning creative strategy. Check out the link in the podcast description below or go to appslier.com and search the state of creative optimization. That's appslire.com. Hello everyone and welcome to Deconstructor of Fun Twig 330 game industry news by industry insiders. I'm Jen Dano. I fill the marketing and publishing role on the podcast. Today we have from lovely Canada and Starlink. Uh Tim Sweeny's number three or four fan. I don't know where I rank right now. Philip Black. Who's number one? Um oh boy. Maybe Tim himself. Maybe Tim Cook. just for a while. Uh I I'm not I'm not sure that's true. Well, there's Exola CEO, Stash CEO, the VCs that have invested in Exola. Are there any left? That's

probably many rounds ago. How about app charge? Yeah. Eric Crest, strategy and investing. Mishkatkov, friend of founders. All right. So, uh lot going on. Here's what we have for you today. Oh, May the Fourth be with you. A little late. It was this weekend. So today, here's what we're talking about. May the Fourth be with you. It's a little bit late, but if you're playing Monopoly Go or Fortnite, you can't miss it. Trans Media Win. If you didn't see this, you could have watched the first episodes of Tales of the Underworld in Fortnite two days before it appeared on Disney Plus. So very cool integration there. John, trans media. Trans media. You know, crest is like sound effect every time I say that word. Giant bomb is no more. And kind of basically the same is true for Polygon, who was sold to game rant owner Valnet. GTA has a new trailer

to cover up the fact that they have a new launch date on May 26th of 26 for PS5 and Xbox and S. No PC date yet. dream changes in all of its investors. Like you guys got a whole rant on that. There's an epic win in an epic battle with Apple. So obviously we'll talk about that. And then finally, Mishka has pissed off Supercell and is getting kicked out of Finland. Mishka, no. I this, you know, I told you there's a price, so I'm being excommunicated. No, no, I don't think I pissed anybody off, but if I may have, then that is it. I'm back from Athens. So, we were yet last week there checking out houses, checking out schools, potentially moving to Greece. Don't ask me why, but it was just interesting because like many of us Europeans, it might be, you know, different for Americans. We've been on the Greek islands, so it's not a it sounds, you know, more interesting than it is. It's quite normal place to visit,

but the islands are pretty nice. When Americans travel to the Mknas or Santorini, you'd be like, "Oh, this is really cool. Greece is so awesome. I could be a digital nomad on the islands. But when you go to capital, you will see what it looks like when the country runs out of money. Like it's a it's a pretty dystopian place in many sense. They have like parks that have been closed maybe 10 to 15 years ago. So it's overgrown. It's like a what's that movie with Will Smith? I am Legend. Yes, correct. It it looks a little bit like that. The country is bouncing back. There's a lot of people moving back. They have very nice tax incentives and so forth and so forth. But I do have to say Athens is not what you would imagine from if you've ever been on the Greek islands. But I do have to say Greek food probably what second best in the Mediterranean. Like you only lose to Italians. Of course, Italian number one. Much better than Spanish. And the other thing that is very nice if you visit Greece is people are nice. Like they're really happy to have you there. It's so weird

because like when you go to France, when you go to Spain, first of all, they don't speak English and also they don't want you there. But in Greece, everybody speaks English. They do the survey and everything like, "Welcome to Athens. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Greece." It's like, is this a commercial? Like, but it is like that in real life. So, shout out to Greece. I might be there later this year. I might not. Let's see. You're shopping uh your new home base, it sounds like. Yes. Yes. All right. Let's chill. Go for it, Mishka. Couple of podcasts. So, we had the um emergency podcast with Appcharge Marissan. So, that was about the latest Epic and Apple ruling. A lot of stuff on how to capitalize. It's a short episode, just 20 minutes kind of getting into it on more tactical things. Then we did another sort of a 20inut episode that is called do it better creative production with AI with the CEO Alex CEO of pool day AI Jen taking your role and doing

content around marketing and ad production and so forth. And to get deeper into ads we also had a really interesting blog post on apploving called apploving the apex predator. This was written by Josh Chanley who's the COO of wildcard. It really underlines like why Applo is so [ __ ] good. Basically, that's it. Mishka, you got to lay off the [ __ ] chat GPT, dude. Like, these titles are ridiculous, right? Apex Predator. No, no, me and Chat GPT. I was like, I couldn't have thought about this. Like, whenever it promotes these titles, so yes, people might have seen our little bit of a clickbaity clips. We're evolving our relationship with Chad GPT. So, boy, it makes me more spicier. I think it takes Crest something from you. Oh god. So Chris, Josh is the guy that you love who said [ __ ] on the stage all the time. He's awesome. Yeah, he's pretty good. Yeah. No, he's great. Here's the event situation. A lot going on. So MAU is

coming up May 20th to 22nd. It's a mobile marketing conference. And so today I'm allowed to announce this. Okay. On Wednesday, May 21st, very first thing, 8:25 in the morning, I'm going to be doing a fireside chat with Scopely CMO, my friend and the best British person on the planet, Ben Webb, who will finally tell the story of how they launched Monopoly Go. So, they get to take this victory lap because it is the number one game of all time and it finally hit 5 billion. We have a little bit of charts on that later and how they've done that. So very honored to have been asked to do this. So please on the Wednesday, the very first keynote speech on the main stage, come see us. We only have 25 minutes. We're going to record that and actually get to release it for everyone to hear and then Mishka, I think, you know, you want to like also pick a fight with Scopi and release other content or something. Yeah. Yeah. So just before this this recording, I was thinking about because you know Scopi hit the five billion. We got the the messages of like, hey, do you want

to talk about maybe how [ __ ] awesome we are? just just like any PR publication. And at the same time, I'm looking at my desktop and I have an episode with Javier Ferrer, their co-CEO. This was recorded late last year. And we released the podcast. The podcast was about 40 minutes and I have a 90minute version on my desk. And I'm thinking that, you know, since they're doing so well, why don't we just release the uncut version? I mean, maybe Ben will not do the thing with you, but you want to give it a try still? I Yeah, go for it. Let's piss him off. It sounds fun. Yeah, let's try. All right. So, also at MAU on Thursday, May 22nd from 2:20 to 3, we're going to do a gaming gathering meetup. So, if you're a fan of the podcast or just in, you know, gaming and you want to see other gaming folk and you want to network, it will be at the MAU Plaza right in the center of the expo hall, come and hang out. We'd love to just bring all of the marketing folks together. Okay. One other event that's coming up on June 10th in LA is the off

therecord event which is deconstructor fun and mobile gamer.biz. It's going to be at the Google Venice headquarters, unfiltered discussions, the state of mobile. So this will be after all of that great PC console stuff with summer gamefest in LA. Come and hang out. There's a link to apply to attend in the Slack or go to mobilegamer.biz. It'll be there. Cool. All right. Corrections, Chris. All right. I think we are going to start a weekly update on the Dream Games TV campaign. So, here goes the first update. Update number I would say number three at this point, but for the last 21 days, downloads are up 365%. Yay. Yay. Yay. Revenue is up 20% to 1.4 million. Uh, and assuming the campaign is $50 million, which I think is low, that is a return on ad spend of 3%.

Da. So, we will keep updating this as we go and when the ads stop, which they may have already stopped for all I know, we will stop calculating it. But this is not worth the money spent pure and simple. I can't I can't even think of an argument otherwise. So that is the update this week. We will get back to you next week. Quick clarification question. Is this US only? No, this is worldwide. I'm giving them benefit. I'm giving them benefit of the doubt because it's going to be far worse if it's just the US and Europe, right? Because the revenue number is going to be even lower, right? Regardless, it is lower, but it's also because it's not a worldwide campaign. I would have pulled it US numbers. It doesn't matter. It's going to be worse. So yes, it's gonna be a lot worse because it is it's a it's a dumb idea. Full stop. Amazing. Dumb idea. Jimmy Fallon, not big in Europe. Fallon, whatever his first name is, not big in Europe. The other thing is that Royal Match, no uplift in downloads.

That was one of the things I was talking about yesterday is maybe Royal Match caught some of the upwind from the campaign. Nothing. Yeah, I've actually been I'm playing this new game from Homa called I'll give them a shout out. All in hole. It's super addictive. Love it. That was my twig nomination. Thank you, Jen, for finally coming around a year too late. Yeah. No, I I Well, it's because it's because it has all the stuff that's like in it now. And like really really well done. So, I've been sucking it up and watching the ads just to get a flavor of what's going on. And I got served the Jimmy Kimmel Royal Kingdom royal match ad like 100 times. So, Jimmy Kimmel, I'm sorry. Fallon. Fallon. Oh, I thought they did Fallon and Kimmel. No, no, no. Uh, wrong Jimmy. Please forgive me because I'm, you know, super friends with them. So, I know it's in new way. All right. What else we got? Crest. Yeah, look, I got a lot of feedback on the last episode, uh, regarding like the publishing issues, right? Even I got on a call with Blake from Game Changers

podcast. I think net, you know, the duopoly and distribution are part of the overall equation as to why we are where we are on mobile. I think actually Jen said it well and I will paraphrase for distribution attribution is the main cause for concentration of high LTV games in the market from a distribution perspective like that is basically well the cost of it is the fact that we have now we do have a retriution so with attribution you can hyperarget spenders and optimize UA arbitrage what's really ironic about this after thinking about it and talking to a bunch of people is that discord actually could bring attribution to the PC which is notoriously bad generally speaking for PC and very challenging on the PC platform in general. So basically, Discord could create the same problem on PC as we see on mobile, right? Where the biggest companies with the biggest budgets and the games with the highest LTVs will win in Discord's adtech ecosystem. So Discord could be part of the problem for PC going forward. So, nonetheless, I think it was a

interesting discussion, you know, and I think it'll keep coming back as we continue to think about the 30% at Apple and all these other things that are going on in the market. Like, this is kind of the question that needs to be asked, I think, as to how much is this really changing the market and we'll talk about that in a bit. Yep. Okay, back to you, Chris. Yeah, there's some really kind of sad headlines. We know that media in gaming is really under fire in terms of a viable business model at this point in time. The one major one that I listened to forever and ever was Giant Bomb was first by Jeff Gershman, right, who was amazing host who got pushed out. He's a personality, let's say say the least. But nonetheless, Jeff Grub has been taking over for a while and he is no longer with Giant Bomb. So the owner fandom asked him to change the content guidelines to basically tone it down. And Jeff went on podcast and started mocking them and making fun of the rules that these guys set aside. And the guidelines were insane, right? I

mean, they actually are against the entire brand of Giant Bomb where it's like no swearing, no discussion of substance use, no sexual content, like all these things that they do to stay edgy and interesting, right? And so it basically wanted to make them a PG-13 rating thing and I think Jeff Grub said [ __ ] off and that's it. So sad day for the industry that the giant bomb podcast is likely no more. They may continue it but it will be not be what it used to be. And the other one that's really bad is that Polygon unlike Kotaku is a really good place to get news. They were acquired by Valnet and they're announcing numerous layoffs including Chris Plant, Michael Mcuarter, Matthew Reynolds and Nicole Carpenter. huge fan of their content and unfortunately it looks like they are no more as well or something much smaller than they used to be. So kind of sad day again for you know the media in gaming but there's new media popping up all the time like the game speed went independent and then there's the games industry biz guys went independent as well. Would the same

happen to Giant Bomb you know the originals like they just start a new one? No, there's just no place for them anymore. It's really hard. You know the kind of funny games are still going. I think they're probably the best now out there in terms of creating entertaining and engaging and and intelligent commentary on the market. We're going to talk about this later, but Monopoly Go surpasses 5 billion in two years and they did it profitably. So, if you look at the charts, like it almost looks like it started to be a shark fin, but it looks like they're kind of stabilizing, you know, at this hundred million dollars, I think a month range. Yeah. and we don't want to see this keep going down. But overall, it's absolutely an amazing accomplishment for the guys at Scopely. There's more going on here because we get some notes from Scopely. So remember, this was a Scoply press release where they said 5 billion gross. So we go to Sensor Tower. We see three billion in cumulative lifetime revenue. And remember, Sensor Tower is reporting after that 30% platform fee. So we can do a little bit of backward math to kind of get a web store number which Scooby

has been extremely forward and thoughtful with. So, I think that puts that web store number maybe around a billion dollars. And before this Apple v epic world, which we'll be talking about, one of the things that I was curious about is playing Monopoly Go is how easily they were linking out to their web store. So, if you play Monopoly Go, one of the things you can do is you can press their sidebar and then you can go into what they call the Tycoon Club. And what that did is it linked to their web store which I thought was definitely illegal that they weren't allowed to do this without paying Apple's 27% entitlement which we'll be again be talking about a little bit later. Now one of the push backs was that the first landing page when you go to the tycoon club is the news feed and the web store is in a different section which I found a little bit skeptical. I find it hard to believe that, you know, a web store reviewer didn't look at this skeptically. And as we know, Scopi has very good relationships with Apple, going way back to this employee named Dorothy, who I think was like half of Skully's enterprise value for the first 5 to 10 years driving organic traffic.

She actually ended up, you know, being employed at Apple. And so what I think is really unique about this web flow and should be studied, especially now that the gates have fallen, is that they have Exolo web integration. And so when you go to the web store and you want to make a payment in the Tycoon Club. So again, you're you're Monopoly Go app, you've you've clicked the Tycoon Club, you're in the web section, you're reloading a web page, you can actually pay with Apple Pay on the web. So this is, I think, one of the ultimate sweet revenge stories that we can give to Apple to slap them in the face. Why do you keep hitting yourself, Apple? Is that we can integrate Apple Pay, not pay them the 30% via the web stores. I couldn't imagine a better revenge. This to me is the direction I would advocate people go because of course you're going to have Apple Pay set up if you're on an iOS device. So congrats to Exola at getting this in there. I'm sure every other web shop has this as well. There's PayPal, there's Google Pay, but I think this is brilliant way to to have our own revenge story. This is the shop option like whenever you want to buy it just links out to this automatically. Like I just saw this sort of a basically short video that Appch charge was

putting out. I think that was in dream games and you're going through the payment and you you pay like more moves and it opens up this one like choose however you want to pay and it's not going to go through app store. This is huge change and Apple must be pissed. Yeah, I imagine. All right, let's keep going. So GTA 6, so GTA announced a new launch date like four or five days ago. So they changed their date from the end of 25 to May 26 of 26. I guess they just wanted to be cute and pick 26. So sadly it is just for PlayStation 5 and Xbox and S. PC timing still unknown. Typically for Rockstar it comes like almost a year later. So we'll see what happens there. Not shocking there is not a Nintendo Switch 2 logo on the trailer. I don't think I expected that, but some folks have been saying some of the other kind of core games have been showing up on Switch 2. But what I think is a brilliant move and a brilliant marketing

move, a mere, you know, a few days later, they launched their second major trailer. If you're watching on YouTube or Spotify video, I'm just playing a little bit of that trailer now. I just love the like look over here strategy. So, we changed our date. our stock probably took a little bit of a hit and now we put out a a super cool trailer to distract everyone with, you know, what is probably a fantastic beer commercial as as I w or a a gun, you know, ammunition commercial. So only Rockstar can do this and they can only do a trailer that is absolutely nothing to do with the game and feels like more of a movie or a of a TV show. I can only imagine that most of the game industry is either jumping for joy or crying knowing that some people like shifted all of their dates to the same window that now GTA is going to launch with. All of the data folks are like, "Oh [ __ ] we have to change our outlook for 25 with the move of this game." But

first, I wanted to give you my very, very favorite part of the video. And so it's right here at 208 where look welcome to Phil's ammunition. Is that you? I mean, you know, just All right. Only if there's MTX. Only if the bullets What was that? Remember that old Blake quote, EA CEO, that we should sell bullets at Battlefield? Only if there's that. Wow. And this is really not that surprising. I was actually hoping it was going to come out this year because we really need do need something for 2025, but actually May is a much better launch window for the industry as a whole because people now have to clear the decks during holiday. What's ironic is that every other company in the space is probably increasing their forecast for the holiday by 20% because GTA is not coming. And that's why like EA gets on the call yesterday and it's all confident in their, you know, in Battlefield and the rest of their holiday lineups because GTA is not there. This is the way they think anyway. So, we could see some

underperformance based upon these crazy forecasts that they probably threw out there. But anyway, this is really bad news for 2025 though overall because mobile likely will be down because of tough comp with Monopoly Go and not any big releases last year besides Pokemon. And then console, even though the Switch is coming, I don't think it's going to be enough to basically grow the overall market, both hardware and software. So, this is not necessarily good news for 2025, but it is good news for 2026 in the back half of the cycle. Frankly, huge kudos to the Take 2 executives. I mean, they play this game correctly. Like, the biggest game is late. So, they're like, roll out the trailer. And even though the trailer is not for the Wall Street, but I looked at it like just a couple hours ago, it already had like what 57 million views in like a day or so. And the interesting part is like they have done this. This playbook is now being implemented for the third time because GTA 5 was delayed twice. Red Dead Redemption was delayed twice. And

so they have this sort of a secrecy approach with Rockstar. They don't tell anything. And when they tell you, they always show these beautiful trailers and at the same time they're always late, but it's surprising that they're late. They put the trailer and then in the end, just like with the two previous games, they've beat all the records beforehand. It feels like Wall Street is kind of accustomed to it because the share price dropped when they said that it's going to be late. Then they put out the trailer and look at that. Just in a matter of couple of days, we're back in business. So, one trailer and like what's the value of this drop and it goes back. I didn't calculate it, but this must be a lot. It must be like, you know, couple hundred million worth of stock price when it bounces back. So, beautiful. The bankers who lead this company are phenomenal and yeah just kudos to them. I just looked it was 76 million views as of today you know morning of Wednesday May 7th. So on track to be again another huge thing. So speaking of bankers I think this leads

nicely into Dream. Go for it Mishka. Yeah so investments in M&A. Now this deal like I mean we've been talking a lot about this. So this is the investment into Dream Games out of Turkey. So in short, the investment combines both equity and depth financing with CVC becoming the sole equity partner of Dream Games. Debt financing was led by the beautiful Blackstone and other investors and the RA proceeds will be used to buy out existing investors, meaning VCs and angel investors. And the deal represents one of the largest VC exits in mobile gaming history, valuing the company at roughly at 4.5 billion. Now, if you're watching this, you can see that the company has raised funding over five rounds. So, starting in November 19, they got makers fund and Boulderton Capital investing to them. And what you can see there is that in the series A, you got index ventures jumping in, Boulderton makers double down. Then you got series B makers

Boulderton index double down. Then you got series C Boulderton makers index double down. So you kind of see that the early investors and this is a great cap table when you look at this. The early investors were seeing the traction were believing and was just doubling down with every investment and through that have probably returned the funds. I would assume that both Makers and Boulderton with this single deal probably made enough to return their multiund million funds. And what's interesting about this is again this is an an exit for venture capitalist. It's not for the founders. Founders are still there. They didn't sell anything. It's only the VCs. And I was thinking about like why would they do that? And the thing is if they would keep it as it is the VCs need an exit like they need to get their money back because usually those funds are between 5 to 10 years and they are not there to get dividends even though dream is you know highly profitable company most likely they're not for that they need those big returns

now one way to return the funds to the investors is of course to IPO and if you are a founder or a company that changes drastically the way you oper operate like you become a corporation overnight. That's probably not fun. Then if you sell your company, you know, you get a boss essentially because now the acquirer will be your boss whoever that is. That could be great. You might have great relationship with the acquirer. There are plenty of companies like Tencent portfolio companies that are perfectly happy to be a part of that family being very autonomous. But it also could get bad because they might be not you know the greatest boss or the boss may change. Let's say the CEO of that public company changes and your relationship kind of changes with that and also you get acquired often by a public company where you face pretty much similar problems that you would have IPOed and there there's always the question of like well how about the money like you can make so much money if you're a founder if you would just sell

the company and I think discussing with these very successful founders like one thing that is not thought about is that usually at this point they've already are financially well off. They might have taken secondaries. So they might have tens of millions by this time and changing their life, the company that they build, giving it to somebody else and and you know, reporting, getting a boss. It's like everything that they didn't want to do. And for what? To get more money to do what? They're already doing what they wanted. I think what I've heard most from the founders, these successful founders in the recent days is they all reference to the plays model being the dream. is like still owning the company, still being in the weeds, still operating and being well off through the dividends and the success of your company. So I think Dream kind of saw this, they they are X peak, they saw how this could be and chose this sort of a path, but I we covered this before. What I really wanted to kind of hypothesize is like what does this mean

for the Turkey ecosystem? Because when we look at the investments in Turkey, it's still mostly content, mostly game companies. It's still mostly mobile gaming companies. It's still mostly puzzle gaming or hybrid casual puzzle gaming companies. And when I play games coming out of Turkey or even early versions, they kind of start looking the same. Everything looks like Dream made it. Like the art style is is very similar. The aesthetics, the the UI is very similar to Dream Games. And when we look at the investments coming in, it feels like PCs are not investing into content unless that content is made out of Turkey. And you kind of get into these positions where companies might get, you know, overvalued a little bit. Like we've seen seed rounds like early investments of 55 million with Spike and so forth. And new venture capitals are raising like right now Revo Capital has just raised a $86 million fund to invest into Turkish gaming companies. And at the same time, the market has the same

problems that it has had, but it's now even more aggravated, meaning that there's insane competition for talent. There's very little influx of new people in like nobody's moving to Turkey to work in Turkish companies. These companies tend to be just 100% Turkish. They do very little outsourcing and they are also highly competitive, which means that there's not a lot of knowledge sharing. So, it's interesting to see how this evolves. Chris, you were recently in Turkey. Like what's your take? These guys just keep making hit after hit and there's an insatiable demand for puzzle games and they are the best at it, right? Building games for UA arbitrage, right? So they're just a very pragmatic approach to making games and that's what wins, I guess, in this type of market. For me, like this deal is a little interesting in the sense it is kind of a win-win-win. You know, management retains control. I'm sure they got some liquidity in this event. I just can't imagine that they got nothing, right? The VCs desperately need any type of win

right now, you know, in to get liquidity. LPS finally may get some of their money back, right, out of this like debacle that has been gaming over the last three or four years led by A16Z and and Lightseed. So, it makes sense. But what I really don't understand is exactly what's is in it for CBC. And I need someone to call me and and explain to me what CBC's angle is on this. Are they using it for dividends? They expect a a big not IPO, I would say a big sale later on. That's just not seems to be I don't really understand exactly what they're doing. You the debt holders obviously they're going to get paid back on the on the cash flows. So that's another win there. So all good. Now from a valuation perspective, this seems like a very reasonable valuation to me because it looks like they're like at a $2 billion roughly run rate, let's say. So that's a 2x revenue which is basically the exact two to 2.5 is where I've kind of been thinking that these companies are worth and then 1x for Plarium which seemed like a discount but Pllearium also was a declining asset.

This is definitely an increasing asset. So they should get some premium to what Plarian got. Yeah. Overall this seems a very reasonable deal and a good outcome for all involved. I just need to understand exactly what's in it for CBC. Well, well, like having interacted with, you know, we both work with with hedge funds and and others, like they tend to just look at the future earnings. They don't look at the event of an exit or increase in the current revenue projections. Those are always pluses, but they're just like on the dividend train. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like cuz these are really good businesses. And regarding this, private equity is about good businesses. I kind of started thinking about this and I was like that must be the reason why they ran this insane celebrity campaign just now because no private equity would would green light this. They'll be like, "Okay, let's do some back of the napkin calculations before you invest $50 million in this." And so I feel like this is kind of like the last type of a

VC move is to just burn some money on a stake and kind of celebrate with celebrities and now they're are going to be just, you know, methodical business machines. So this is basically the last harrah before they have to have financial responsibility. That's what you're going to say. That's the only reason I would find for this type of a company that is so smart, so methodical, so so you know, focus. This is like the fanfare of the exit of the VC. This is just all ego from some marketing guru at Dream. Oh god. Just just just for fun. Just for fun. Just for fun. It's like a It's like you do fireworks, you know, like you basically shoot money into the sky to make everybody else happy. This is how I feel. This must been planned for a year or so. Yeah. Like I mean, you make it seem like there was no hope of this ever working. There wasn't. Exactly. There was no absolutely no hope that this would ever work. It has never worked before. It has never worked now. It's not going to work ever. Right. And it doesn't matter. It's It's

chunk change for this company. It doesn't matter. They just made four billion. Yeah. The VCs VCs were going to shoot some money into the sky. They're like, "Do it." How much downloads? Triple the downloads. Go for it. Oh god. Growth over revenue. That's VC. So, not anymore. Private equity is here. All right. The next one. All right. So, this is Roblox stuff. US-based UGC games publisher, Super League, has acquired another US-based Roblox platform game developer, Superocial, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition is part of Super League strategy to expand partnerships and scale branded worldbuilding capabilities for advertisers, Trans Media, Hello. Together, the two companies have achieved over 390 million visits. We're in Roblox world. and 3 billion advertising impressions across 49 Roblox games. This deal marks the second acquisition of Roblox related company in 2025 with the most recent prior deal

being the acquisition of Brook Haven by Voldex in February 25. So my takeaways consolidation maybe has begun in the Roblox world and looks like the branded content is the way to monetize. We're having Roblox tomorrow on the podcast. Like actual Roblox is coming in and stay tuned. Gonna talk about this and more. Wait, let's be crystal clear here. This is an aqua hire at best. This is not an exit that VCs are looking for. This is not like them at strength getting these peak premiums. This is just basically an acquire. They had layoffs earlier and they they've been struggling and they are fans of the fans of the podcast. Yeah, that's the reason why I feel like not a lot of VC money is going into Roblox games. I think Boldex has an investment from A6Z, so they're consolidator. There's GameFam that has investment from Play, and I'm not sure about Super League. I'm sure they have good investors as well, but seems like most of these companies are not specifically VC backed. From a Roblox

standpoint, I'm sure Roblox folks will talk about this. They just had their earnings report and they're continuing to crush it. They're on the same positive trend. Almost all of their major KPIs are up 25 30%. DAU has climbed up to like 97.8. DAUs by region. One of the stats that I saw was that US and Canada DAU was up 22%. So Crest, we always talk about like are they just growing international? Like actually they are continuing to grow here. They had a major event called the Hunt Mega Edition that was in Q1 that was like a you know one of the big draws for for folks over 13. Let's well one we got to talk about that. That's always been the narrative for them is like are they going to be able to retain users as they start to age up on the platform. And so when you look at the under and over 13, which is how they choose to report it, the under 13 has remained relatively stable.

There's still some growth there, but most of their growth has come from the over 13 demo. And so that suggests to me that they're retaining users as they start to age up on the platform and their acquisition of users under 13 is pretty stable. I still think there's a question about whether or not they're retaining users who are over 13 or whether or not they're able to acquire users who are over 13 who haven't had experiences with the Roblox platform. Don't think that's splitting hairs. I think that's really important if they're able to acquire users who are over 13. I think it's far more impressive than retaining users aging up. But still, I I just who is left to on this platform? Like where where do these DA coming from? Like they're about to hit 100 million DAU this summer. Remember summer, they're a seasonal business. A lot of seasonality because of the age demo they're in. This summer, they're absolutely going to hit over 100 million DAU. We're talking about what is it, half the kids in the US, you know, between some age demo or playing Roblox. I just it's a mind-blowing to me how big the impact is. And the reason we keep

reporting on Roblox is because it's really important as a growth driver for this whole industry. When we've been talking about all these things which haven't really played out, whether it be crypto, whether it be AI isn't looking as good as we want it to be. Roblox is a bright spot and we need them to get people into the gaming funnel, not just the Roblox funnel. So, I think this is something we should continue to keep track of. Yeah. Who's left? Turkey is left. The other thing that we talked about is that if Fortnite comes back into the marketplace, like how is that going to impact the age demo for Roblox? Like, how many of the Roblox people are going to go do the mobile version of Fortnite in the US? That could be a headwind for them potentially. And people forget like in that Epic v Apple case, they remember they had leaked DAU numbers by each platform and mobile for iOS and Android was a significant portion of their DAU. I think it was something around, you know, a fifth of their users. So when Tim took Fortnite off those mobile app stores, there was a huge financial hit and I would argue like strategy

imperative that Epic took, like they had skin in the game when this happened. It wasn't as though that you know, oh, who who plays Fortnite on a mobile phone? a [ __ ] ton of people do, particularly in this age demo. In one of the podcasts I was listening to, Tim said, you know, they basically were foregoing $300 million. That was the revenue they had uh on mobile in the I think they were on one or two years before they were taken off. So, primarily they are not a mobile platform, but you're right like they did forgo a lot. No, I was going to say like and we did research back then with Stan. I think I've said this on the podcast before is that it it was kind of the gateway drug to PC console, right, was mobile where people played it on mobile and it wasn't it was a terrible experience on mobile to be clear as it was on Switch, but then they upgraded them to PC console. That was kind of the increase the funnel by putting it on mobile. A couple other notes like stockbased compensation is another thing that's been a big narrative with Roblox. It's still up this quarter. Employees are still growing. They add another 100

headcount. Free cash flow, however, is way, way up. And remember, Roblox has some revenue recognition shenanigans based on how Roblox are depreciated. Again, they have a really great slide in their quarterly earnings where they explain how this happens in a beautiful graphic. But when we look at free cash flow, which I think is a better metric right now, it's looking pretty positive. Like they got cash in the bank, which is great to see. They got money flowing. The other thing I want to point out from their transcript was two big growth drivers. So, one we've been talking about on the podcast, which has been ads. And so, one of the things that the CEO mentioned is that they're not going to talk about ads right now just because they feel like it's not big enough. So, at least that tells us something on how the ad units are doing. Remember, you can walk into a particular portal within Roblox or a particular experience and you get it transported to a sponsored ad location, whether you know it could be vans, it could be whatever it, you know, whatever the sponsor wants. So, it'll be interesting to see, you know, quarter over quarter how this works. One of the other things that they attributed to growth was price discrimination. The nice word for this is price

personalization. But they have two things that are really interesting on the platform. One is they have a price optimizer. So you can basically just put in prices into this little algorithm and it'll spit out new recommended prices. And the way the economics team at Roblox, which they do have, talked about it is that what developers were doing previously is exactly what you would observe in a market, which is that people were looking at prices for other items in games. they were trying to set prices comparable to those. This algorithm just does that same process but a little bit more efficiently. And so they've been able to squeak up some of the average selling prices for some of the items. The other thing that they have is regional pricing. So they can do hey India is going to cost less than let's say the United States which is really important because they have a ton of tier 2 and tier three now. And the final thing that they're doing on the price side this economics team by the way is cranking right now is that they have price floors for items in their avatar marketplace. So rather than setting an individual price, what you're going to do is you're going to set a ratio above or below a price floor to set a particular item in the

marketplace. And the reason this is really important particularly for avatars and cosmetic economies is that there's a lot of negative externalities. So for instance, if you make like a really cool, let's say cosmetic, someone else, particularly in a UGC environment, is going to come in and make a very similar cosmetic. And someone having another cosmetic that's extravagant as the one you have decreases the value of the cosmetic you have. Right? There are these negative externalities which are not born. So they implemented these price floors which are dynamic for each of the avatar slots. And this is what we're looking at right now if you're on the YouTube version how they've set these price floors up. So this economics team is cranking. They're squeaking out a little bit more uh bookings per user. Keep the headcount for the econ team growing. Roblox. Hey, are you building a game, launching an app, or considering an acquisition? Well, in that case, Deconstructive Fund Consulting is here to help you out. We do everything from market research to go to market strategies to live ops optimization and

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need to make smarter, faster decisions. Thousands of app and game studios from indie creators to global giants trust Sensor Tower to help them win. So why not you? Start your free trial today at sensortowwer.com. That is sensortow.com. [Music] Phil, you want to talk about the Expedition 33? I've been hearing such lovely things about this game. Well, I think first of all, Crest, I think you wanted to give an apology to the people of France for Oblivion. You're [ __ ] on Oblivion Virtuous and Claire Expedition 33 is slaying right now. It's 100 million gross. 100 million gross. By the way, this is an HD game on console on PC. It's a turn-based RPG built in Unreal 5. The other thing to point out is that there's only around 20 to 30 employees at this company, which I think is another really great narrative. Remember, we're talking about Astrobot a

while back, which was a small platformer on PlayStation. We ended up knocking it out of the park. This is another example of a small team doing really great things. 100 million gross in 12 days, 2 million copies sold. I'd ballpark it at a, you know, 50 $53 ASP. They have a deluxe edition that's 60 and they have a standard skew that's 50. When we look at the country distribution, still the same narratives we continue to talk about. China was a big part of this game success. Video Game Insights pinned China as 27% of their player base. Squad RPG turnbased China makes sense. So that back door continues to breed success. And just congrats to them. Congrats to them. Again, 20 to 30 employees, China success. Awesome for France. The prime minister of France actually hopped on Instagram and gave him a shout out as well. Why? They need good news. You got to huddle together for warmth, Mishka. Oh my god. Oh my god. I know. Is this bringing

back some of the magic of the old Final Fantasy, you know, turn-based RPGs? I think, you know, anecdotally, people are talking about how their partners or their girlfriends are really enjoying the game because of the storydriven nature. I don't know like is this showing that there's life in that kind of a genre? What was the budget of this game? I think they talked about openly was like 30 million or 40 million or something like that. This is double A game, right? Phil, I mean the lines are blurred. There's there's no there's no organization that designates this anymore. Exactly. But but like it's a well people say like oh it's a small team that make this game. It's like yes it is comparatively small team and it is comparatively small budget but we're still talking about 40 million. That's money at least. And they outsourced it wasn't 30 people. They outsourced it outside of France. like you can't develop a game like this in France or Europe or North America for less than that. I think the game is amazing. I looked at it. I actually almost downloaded it myself. It's it's a beautiful game and they've done an exceptional job of building something

that's taken off, but there's a lot more detail around this that is probably interesting to know. always take with a huge grain of salt when company tells you how they made the game because they always make it sound that it was so quick and with so little amount of people and then when you hear the actual stories, well yeah, there was like two pivots before that and we did work on it for two years and all the else and all this and then we got our [ __ ] together and did it in only two years. It be like okay and and to be clear this is not because they are from France. This is despite the fact they are from France, they had the success. So this is not any proof positive of developing games in [ __ ] France. Okay, don't do it. Capture that video and tag the French PM and see what happens. All in hole made in France as as far as I understand. All in a hole, folks. Yeah. All right, let's keep going. Stadium. Overwatch stadium. Look, I' I've wanted to talk about Overwatch for a long time and we we haven't really had a chance to kind of talk about it in

in any sort of formal setting. So, they recently launched a new season and one of the things in the season was a mode called stadium. And so, if you remember, there's other things that they've been shipping which have been really significant. So, one of them was perks, which is in round progression that you get in the standard mode of Overwatch. So, you'll be playing the game, you'll level up within a round and you get to select one perk, you level up again, you'll be able to select a major perk. So this is an entirely new mode which takes a lot of that in round progression very similar to what you might see in CS GO and I would say put puts it on coke so to speak and the gameplay itself is absolutely fantastic. One of the things that we've talked about on this podcast is this idea of productivity of content. So trying to make sure that you invest in content vectors which have high ROI. And one of the things that has a really high productivity of content is statsbased modifications because it's just a number change on a spreadsheet. And this is an incredible example of them executing against that because Stadium is really built around these

stat changes. So they're taking existing things which they have in their spreadsheet and buying one of these abilities in round just changes your stats. The other thing they do is they have this special stats system that they're calling power. The way the power works is something that I work with a lot of my clients on when we try to maximize productivity of content, which is that they're conditional stat changes. So you can say, "Oh, you get a 100 extra health or you get 200 extra health." But when you have conditional stat changes, it's something that's based on you having some sort of action. So let's say I shoot from behind, I get, you know, 50 extra damage or if I do this, then this happens. It's these conditional statements which activate the statbased measure. And what that does is it changes your strategy and your strategic options and your approach to the game. Which is why I think kind of these conditional stat changes have really high productivity of content. And it's really great to see the Overwatch team take advantage of them here. So one of the things that you're doing when you're forming your strategies, you're thinking about these powers and you're thinking about when they trigger and you're trying to change your gameplay

style or maybe that's just your natural gameplay style to make sure that these conditional triggers activate. So I think that was a brilliant addition by the team. The change in DAOU hasn't been significant right now. Remember, they're still neck andneck with Marvel rivals, I think, for the same pool of users. So, we haven't seen crazy changes in their DAU, but sentiment is at an all-time high. The reviewers are talking about the fact that like this is the best Overwatch has ever been. And I think for a studio that's been through a lot of [ __ ] in the last couple years, when you see these exoduses happen, you know, I saw it at DICE, you see at Boware, you see a lot of these old studios, people have been there for 10, 15 years. You know, we cry and you know, we say memorial when these employees leave. But I think the flip side is is that you do get new blood into the studio. You get new blood, you get new ideas, you get new approaches and new ways of doing things. And I think Stadium is one of the first really results we're seeing from this new Overwatch team. And I give them all the success in the world for getting this feature shipped. I'm sure it was, you know, a mammoth task to get the whole thing done. And I hope they

continue to have higher and higher velocity because they're in a dog fight right now with Marvel Rivals and one of the big decreases at least in the Steam numbers we're seeing. Remember, they're still on BlizzNet, which we don't have access to, so we can only look at the Steam numbers, but they've taken a hit since Marvel Rivals has come out and they need all the can get and I think this is one of the key pieces to get them back on track. Cool. All right, let's get to finally the big Epic announcement is all right. Epic Games versus Apple. So, if you're watching, we have a little bit of a timeline up. So, let me just do a quick table setting of some of the facts just to catch you up and then Crest obviously has thoughts. So, first is a federal judge determined that Apple violated a 2021 injunction by imposing the 27% commission on purchases made outside of the app store and restricting developers from directing users to alternative payment methods. Now, we just talked a little bit about

how some folks have been able to kind of maneuver around that being a little bit sneaky, but overall that is now gone. The judge labeled Apple's actions as a willful violation and referred the case to federal prosecutors for potential criminal contempt charges and Phil has some comments on that a little bit later. He's been digging into the entire ruling and so a lot of interesting and nuggets in there. Effective immediately, Apple is prohibited from collecting fees on external purchases and from limiting how developers guide users to third-party payment options. It is payment palooa on Apple everybody like party time. So Epic Games also announced plans to relaunch Fortnite on the US iOS app store in the coming week. Tim Sweeney has indicated if Apple extends these changes globally because right now this is just in the US. Epic would consider dropping all of the ongoing

litigation. To hear more from Tim himself, he's been on a podcast frenzy. So on May 6th he was on the channels podcast with Peter Kofka and then also on a Lex Freedman podcast like super deep dive there. So that kind of catches you up on on where we are which is of course Apple is appealing but there are no limitations while this is on appeal. If you love your ex Solas and your you know your different web stores call them up because you know you can get going on this. All right Chris to you. I obviously think that Apple's freaking evil, right? And they deserve everything they get. But having said that, they are trying to protect their own, right? They're doing everything that they can in order to do that. And it is very clear to anybody that's in the ecosystem that they did not respect the court's decision. And the court is basically saying they did not respect the decision, right? And in the court battle, and I and Phil might go in this a little bit, they were discussing the meetings because I was part of discovery. They were actually talking

about the meetings and it was [ __ ] evil. like they wanted to scare the scare screens. Like they really like were going ramping this thing up to a level that like is is just ridiculous, right? Clearly not at all abiding by the court's decision, right? And then charging the 27% commission was absolutely ridiculous. Like we all know this, right? We all know that they are dirty birdies and they're just trying to protect their own, right? And this discrepancy with this communication is actually again lead to Alex Roman, the VP of finance lying under oath, right? This may be actually a criminal court violation. So what will actually ultimately happen is that this is going to allow developers to offer external payments, right? And it looks like the cat's out of the bag. It's going to happen no matter what. But I actually really agree with what this Andrew Green guy who's a good friend of mine who put this out on LinkedIn and I kind of took his stuff and like edited a little bit. But but ultimately I don't think this is the real boon that people think it's going

to be. And back to what we were talking about before in terms of distribution being you know the biggest challenge in this industry or more of like the games and the big companies is that this is actually a benefit for the big not necessarily a benefit for the small. This is not going to open up the market to brand new innovations and new genres. And it's just not right because ultimately any money that's saved is going to get blown right back into [ __ ] UA, right? This is not going to be a saving for the consumer, right? This is not going to be some like kind of like windfall of margin improvements for the publishers and developers. This is going to go right back into UA. And you know who's going to win? Apploving, Facebook, Google. not Unity because they're trash, but like the ecosystem is going to perpetuate itself and we're going to be right back where we were before, right? So, this is a good news for the industry as a whole, but I want to be clear, this is not like a wide open door here to new new games and smaller publishers. Sure, on the margin

there could be some successes here and there, but ultimately this is remains a battle of the big and again all this money is going to go right back into the established games and the established players and the big will be able to execute on this far more quickly and flawlessly than the small. And I think this just leads us to a more UA arbitrage environment, right? Just with more money able to spend. So this is kind of my take on it. Hopefully I'm wrong, but but again, I guess this brings me back to the whole distribution thing. It's like regardless of whether or not you get 30% savings, if you're basically back to where you were like within six months, then you know, I don't know if it's Apple and Google have really caused, you know, the dominance of a few players in a few games. So, any other thoughts out there? Apple's revenue from App Store is quite significant. I actually did not know that. So it's services make 25% of Apple's overall $400 billion annual revenue. Now I don't know what all is part of services but for sure app store is part of services and there's a rumor

that 15% of Apple's overall ebida is actually coming from app stores. So that's a significant portion and you would assume that they will fight tooth and nails to keep it. And I'm just thinking about that and like what's the likelihood of this ruling to uphold in the future because you know Apple has been a good boy the uh with the emperor of America Tim Cook took the knee at the inauguration event. So you never know. You never know with the current establishment. I'm not going to touch that one. Um what I do want to touch on is is this the Berlin Wall moment for the digital world? like, you know, did Tim grab a big giant Fortnite pickaxe and, you know, start to take down the, you know, in a sense of what the wall is that Apple has built and Google, by the way, and a lot of companies are going to kind of pick up the hammer and start, you know, making what the new digital world looks like.

So Chris, I think you make a really great point about like, hey, this is going to funnel back into UA to drive more people in, but it's a modern-day gold rush of companies who are going to try to chase that margin. That margin is now going from, in a sense, Apple to somebody else. And you're right, it might not necessarily go to the small game developers, but I think there's a whole host of web shops that are trying to chase what that is. And by the way, speaking of web shops, Epic just actually announced that they're going to do a web shop as well. So to further capitalize on the moment, Epic is going to launch web shops for devs. The web shops will be hosted by the Epic Game Store and enable developers to offer out app purchases and they've updated their revshare. So developers will now pay a 0% share on the first 1 million in revenue per app per year followed by the usual 12% revenue share once they earn

above that amount. So that's what I think. But Phil, you had so much I mean you were you know Sherlock Holmes in that ruling. What else did you see? So when I when I follow Tim Sweeney on Twitter and you hear him talk about his battle with Apple I mean he sounds unhinged. I thought it was like almost inappropriate. So I went through this 80page ruling and remember double spaced. So it's not actually 80 pages. It's a it's much more manageable. And I would highly suggest people go through the raw PDF. I finished that 80page document being radicalized. I was ready to get Tim Sweeney shirts. [ __ ] Apple. I was ready to return my iPhone. It wasn't that Apple is protecting the interests. It's the lies. And those lies were directly called out in this court case. So one example would be at the beginning of the 80page ruling where they talk about the discovery process. So as a part of you know any sort of legal proceeding the plaintiff or the defendant can ask for documents related to X Y or Z internally. And one of the

things that Apple did is that they claim something like you know all these documents were what they call privileged documents. So, if a lawyer is in an email chain, you can call it privileged, client attorney privilege, which means that you wouldn't have to hand over those documents as part of the search process. And what ended up happening is when they got challenged around a lot of those privileged moments, they ended up retracting a lot of the things that they said were privileged. Why were they doing this? Because they were pulling [ __ ] where you just add lawyers to irrelevant email threads to claim it's under client attorney privileged. And we're talking about thousands of documents that they were doing this for. Now, there's always a little bit of shenanigans in these cases, but the scale at which Apple was doing this was breathtaking. That's one thing that immediately my engines were starting to get fueled. The next part was when Apple executives lied under oath. And this is why the case is being recommended for criminal proceedings. Now, the court of California may or may not choose to pursue this, but they have direct testimony from one of the Apple

executives when they were considering this 27% change, and he said that they had only considered, you know, the this particular form of the entitlement program where if he did have a link out, you have to apply for it, and they would take 27%. He lied under oath because we have written documents internally at Apple that they were discussing this far beforehand that they actually ended up implementing it. It is a direct lie. He perjured himself under oath. And not only that, it looks like there was a conspiracy with Tim Cook and the chief financial officer to implement this lie. It is documented. It is documented in this court case. The third thing that really pissed me off was the scarecreen stuff. So they have direct quote from the UX designers who was giving feedback to the scarecreens. And so he's going through and you can see in the court document different scarecreens that they considered. And one of the things that this UX designer had mentioned when he was considering one of the scare screens, he says, "If we want to scare users a bit, I like the addition of out, which is one of the text symbols on the

scare screen that he was considering because it raises questions and hesitancy. Haha. Out. Out where? Oh my god, what do I do?" That is sabotaging a ruling. That is dirty, dirty [ __ ] Is incredibly disrespectful to this industry. One of the things that Eric Seaffort, I think, correctly pointed out almost a year or two ago in his blog was that the app store is the game store. For the vast majority of time, the cumulative amount of revenue that the games industry has forked over to Apple is in the billions. And Mishka, as you pointed out, like that's almost all margin, right? And not only that, the what we've gotten in return isn't just them trying to protect their monopoly or the 30%. It's the disrespect, right? This is why I I really hate Nantac and I hate Roblox. It's the disrespect to the medium of games. And this is what it always bothered me about Apple 2 is it felt like they were being disrespectful to what we do despite the fact that we're the ones giving them all this margin. And so there's some other tidbits that I thought was really interesting. If you go through the court

documents, if you were ever interested in what Apple pays their lawyers, it turns out was about 80 million for this case, which to me actually seems like a low number considering what's at stake here. I mean, I would have instantly tripled that if I was Tim Cook. I mean, you're kidding me. Like, you're you're fighting you're fighting for like one of your biggest, you know, Iba growth margins here. Yeah. Well, Phil, like sadly, they did triple that. Well, they're doubling it because Epic spent a hundred million on Project Liberty, which was the code name, and now Apple has to pay those fees. Yeah. Love to see it. Okay. So, so the real question that people are asking me anyway is what's going to happen from here? What's likely to happen from here? It looks like Apple's kind of [ __ ] like overall like just generally speaking clearly. But what some people think is that they'll reduce it to 15% and see if they can move forward with that and see if that eliminates the need for the majority of people to move off of the app store. Like that's definitely possible, right? 15 to 20%, like you know, then switching costs get a little bit more questionable. That's possible, right? The other thing is that we should see is

more crazy [ __ ] going on with the hacks of the, you know, the early inapp purchase days with like these like, you know, artificial [ __ ] and like just crazy marketing and campaigns and stuff like that. Lots of like bad things for consumers that publishers did back then without Apple kind of like protecting the consumer from that perspective. That could get bad. But it could lead and this is the argument that Exola is trying to make and others is that it could lead because you have more flexibility in terms of promotion and doing dirty tricks and stuff like that. It actually could lead to better monetization overall because the tactics you couldn't do on Apple you could now do outside of the Apple ecosystem. That's definitely possible. I mean certainly we talked about it like Exola Stash App charge all these guys are going to be you know the hot chick at the bar. Sorry for the the expression, but that's exactly what everyone's going to want to partner with them and make sure that that they have the opportunity to do so and to optimize as much as possible around offstore payments. Your

analysis is completely right, Eric. Like this I think this is GDP enhancing for Meta and Apploving and what happened to their stock on this announcement. They're both up because everyone knows where the gains are going to go. UA is going to get bit up again, right? Because now a lot of that that LTV number is more internalized. We're basically just shifting the GDP share of gaming away from Apple towards us and towards advertisers. And Eric Seaffort had tried to be making all these arguments around personalization that there's functional things that you get in the web store that you weren't allowed to do in the app store. And a lot of those barriers came down. So for instance, there was limits on how many SKs you could have in the app store. They expanded that last year to like something like 10,000. It's a ton of SKs. There was limits on what the max price could be. They increased that. So, a lot of those benefits that we had in terms of like increasing monetization rather than just the web share, like being able to use new tactics, I I don't really see materialized. I'd love to hear from, you know, our app charge partners, Exola or Stash on like what they think are like the unique ways that you can increase monetization rather

than just getting the 30%. You're spot on on this one. There's no changes in innovation here. This is just us getting GDP back. Yeah. And the other big thing though, this has got to come to Europe, right? If it happens in the US like Europe will follow because they usually lead the charge, right? So yeah, it's very likely that that Europe will follow really quickly UK and then EU and other bodies out there. But we've talked about this before, which is consumers are dumb and we have to figure out a way to be as frictionless as possible with all of these new systems. And I think in your emergency podcast, if you can just so elegantly and easily make sure that a consumer who, you know, a six-year-old grandma who's spending, you know, the $9.99 on a Royal Match, you know, battle pass, gets in there and makes that purchase without even realizing that she has skipped over Apple's payment system with just I double click and it scans my face and I'm in.

Not every single piece of this margin is going to a web shop. So, I want to make sure people understand that, especially for games where, you know, consumers are a little bit less tech knowledgeable. They aren't trusting of linking out or all of those different things or they just don't care and they just want it to be easy. So, Chris, what do you think about that element of things? With this kind of flexibility, I think they'll be able to make it as seamless as possible. Like if you're integrating Google Pay, Apple Pay, and all the other different payment systems that they're already accessing. Sure, on the margin there's some people that are never ever going to move over, but those are likely not the people that you give a [ __ ] about anyway because all we're really talking about, as I said million times, is a a percent of the overall population that spends ludicrous amounts of money on the mobile, you know, on the app store, right? And so it's converting those people and all of them will do it. The other thing again that obviously the third party services keep talking about is that now they actually can do differentiated pricing. They can

actually do promos that are much more aggressive in terms of bringing people over to do it. Right? before they were severely limited by Apple by providing from my understanding the same type of offers on store and inapp right so anyway they just have much more flexibility to convert those people that matter right and that's probably what ultimately they'll target first you know well you remember project liberty that that was exactly what project liberty was when epic first came out with project liberty when they updated the Fortnite app they had sidebyside pricing where they crossed out the AP price and they had the web price. You can do that legally now. Like Project Liberty is is alive and well. Tim realized the vision. Like they can reship that. That was a real liberation day. Anyways, uh let's talk about the uh uh let's talk about the uh the like who is this good for? So you're basically Chris, you're saying that this is good for the incumbent. So if you have games out there with existing audience, suddenly your EBIT goes up and you can bit higher and now

you become even more of an incumbent. Is that the case? Yeah. Basically, you can do rather than two-year paybacks, you can do fiveyear paybacks and be all good. And so, nobody who's basically coming to a to a market like if you're trying to compete in these categories with high level of concentration now, they're just raking in 20% higher ebida. So, you are even more [ __ ] than you were before. So, hello concentration and goodbye new [ __ ] dude. Right. When Monopoly Go is spending [ __ ] $500 million in marketing in six months, do you think anybody can compete with that besides the big and even the big EA, Zingga, they don't they're not spending that kind of money, you know, like they have the the public company, you know, guidelines for that spending. They can't just, you know, take celebrities and just [ __ ] blast it in the sky. No, they did. I mean, well, wait, Monopoly Go, they did some celebrity ads this this weekend. If you didn't see, Anakin Skywalker himself was in a few more ads

for May the Fourth Be With You. So anyway, yeah, just blowing money, dude. Just [ __ ] blowing money, dude. Abandoned. Just throw that Saudi money out there, dude. It's like a sand in the desert. Who cares? All right. Any any final epic thoughts? Well, hold on. We need to say a thanks to Tim. like this guy this guy prevailed and took a huge hit personally personally to the company as we were talking about like mobile was a significant part of their DAU it was a significant part of their UFN strategy by the way that's going to be interesting to to kind of revisit and he prevailed at the end and and at the end of the day we all benefited from it and so I'm going to personally put a me memorandum on myself never saying anything negative about Epic Epic Game Store is [ __ ] awesome let it rip baby like you're killing it Epic You're great. Go public. Tim, you're my hero. Love you guys. Honestly, thank you. Thank you. You You defeated Goliath. I think we owe you guys a big thanks. Come

back on the podcast. Tim is a former podcast of Deconstructor Fund. Yeah. Bring Joe Kim got it on a while ago. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we have the episode. He put us on the Welcome back. Welcome back. He's doing the rounds right now. So, Mishka, reach out. Like maybe maybe you'll get him. We're we're we're like the 10,000 11th on the list. Oh, for sure. All right, everybody. Thank you, Epic. And we will see you next week. 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 podcast service of your choice. Those stars and likes, while small action on your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fund Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructorof fun.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry best professional

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