TWIG #332 Finland’s Game Industry Woes, Supercell's Transmedia Moves and Roblox's Commercialization

[Music] 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 due diligence. We're trusted by some of the most beloved game development companies, makers of tools and tech, as well as some of the most renowned investors. Now, if you are building, launching, or buying, don't do it alone. Do it with us. Connect by emailing to consulting at the constructorof.com. Level up your game's revenue with AppCharge, the ultimate inapp purchase platform built for mobile game developers. With seamless integration, global payment solutions, and powerful analytics, AppCharge helps you unlock new monetization potential without

compromising player experience. Power your game with AppCharge, where performance meets play. 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 Clabs. 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 heroto today at heroiclabs.com. [Music] Welcome everybody to the deconstructor of fun this week in games segment. We deconstruct the industry news and cut through the PR fluff delivering you pure alpha. Every Thursday, I'm your MC Mishka Casco, self-appointed friend of the founders. And with me today are Eric

Crest, head of strategy and investing. I'm Laura Torrento, former puzzle product queen, slowly to announce new new adventures soon. And I am Ethan Levy, the backup to the backup host. I'm here again, ex gotcha master, current UGC Vanguard. This is going to be a rough ride. We don't have Jen here running the show, and we got two kids with training wheels on. So, Chris, I don't know how we're going to do it, but in today's episode, we got Epic Games alleging Apple blocked Fortnite on iOS, alleging. We got Wugga's layoffs and the Solitary Dreams. We got Activision pulling the plug on Call of Duty War Zone, also known as Call of Duty EU. I don't know if it's also known, that's how I knew it. Uh, and then Roblox unlocks e-commerce and Supercell goes AI and trans media. So, that's Yeah, that's the pieces. Yeah, you're you're a step behind, dude. Yeah,

Fortnite is now on the app store. It is live right now. Ready to go. Yes, it got in today. But but that was the news when we were adding it here. So, uh we're going to cover it to some extent and you know, either way, let's just jump into it. A little bit tired. Came back to Manchester today that we had a little event there and I just want to tell about this because Chris's cyber bullying has gone on the next level. So, one of the guests was a managing director from MIM. Shout out to Anjan. And I wouldn't have known it because he came in wearing a car hard jacket. And he came in and he said, "I was about to wear the puff vest." And then I switched up. So, so congratulations Chris for bullying bankers to wearing car hard. I I I am so happy that I am making an impact in the world positively to get rid of the douchy puffy vests. But I am clearly joking. You can wear your vest

all day long. It doesn't bother him. Didn't they send you a vest at one point last year? Yeah, they sent me a gossamer vest. It was very sweet though. If you can't beat him, join him. Let's get Crest on the dark side of the I love Crest to come in on one of those ARM events. the one that they host at their office during PGC London wearing his vest. It'll be meta. Speaking of meta, I thought I would since I haven't been on in months, I'd try and bait Crest right up front. So, over at GameFam, I've been put in charge of Meta Horizon's World where we've got some very exciting. Yeah. What are you going to do next? Magic Leap. Yeah, I've got Look, look, I want to speak truthfully for a minute. Meta Horizon's World as a development platform is capable than more than you would think by looking at what's available in the app. I'm actually having a lot of fun with it recently with these two projects we're working on right now. And honestly, like in the world where not a lot of people are funding a lot of stuff, Meta's got $50 million to splash around. So, I suggest if you're looking for something to do,

Meta Horizon World's mobile first development. Pretty [ __ ] fun. I love Ethan because he is like the king of lost causes. He just goes down that [ __ ] rabbit hole more better than anyone else, dude. It doesn't matter what what's happening. It's it's it's unbelievable. Oh god. All right, that's good. Good on you, Ethan. Let us know how it goes for you. So, let's chill a little bit before we jump into the episode. So, this week we had a podcast and a blog post. So, it was very appheavy because, you know, there's a little bit of a job loss going on and it's tough to find a new spot. And so we had both my friend Vinn who's also running consulting for Deconstructive Fund. So he wrote a piece on I left gaming and joined Reddit. These were my five superpowers. So basically talking about how to succeed as a game developer in the app business. And then on the podcast side we had a executive head hunter Gerard Miles from Mission One talking about what gaming taught them and why app companies are hiring. So a

little bit of a different angle but basically coming from positivity that app companies are hiring. So, if you're looking and you have gaming talent, these are worth checking out. One quick show for me on on my other platform I oversee. By the time this episode comes out, Prison Break Tycoon, the latest from GameFam, will be available inside of Fortnite. I've got some really great devs who've been working on that very hard for about 6 weeks. Really excited to see it out there. So, pretty cool. If you're playing Fortnite, that's like a hyper casual game. Yeah, except it's kind of a rogike thirdp person shooter that was done in six weeks. Yeah. And also doesn't monetize and has way less users. Well, we'll see. No, I mean, if it gets users, it'll monetize. If it doesn't get users, it doesn't. It's a very, very difficult platform. I'll I'll pull no punches about that. Our last game, Billionaire Simulator, peaked at 200 concurrent users. You know, that game's not making its money back, unfortunately. But really excited about this new one coming out. I think it's gonna be great. All right, our ongoing

weekly update on Dreams profound waste of money on their TV campaign. For the last 35 days, we've had 8.7 million incremental downloads, which sounds absolutely amazing. That's a 300% increase. Yay, Dream. But we've only had a 44% increase in revenue, which may sound like a lot on a percentage terms, but it's only $5 million. So if you do the quick calculation for a $50 million campaign that is a 10% rorowaz right which is pathetic absolutely pathetic and of course this doesn't even include the traditional UA which I do support from the perspective of what those ads are quite good and that's good great ad creative right but I do you know because I continually want to give them credit for a great advertising product but using TV is dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb And we are starting to see downloads decline. So I think the biggest big push is probably over at this point, but we

will keep tracking until that impact is no longer felt and they go back to traditional UAS, which is where they should have started from the beginning. So Laura, what's your take on these two games? Like how similar are they? I mean, when I play them, they're they're pretty much the same. Other one has just these animations and and a little bit of a like new types of levels, but you wrote about both of them. I wrote about both of them. Keep in mind I wrote about them maybe like what 6 months ago. So I don't know how much it's changed. The games are similar but not similar. The economy was a bit different. It's a little bit more complex. The biggest thing are the uh kingdom levels which happened every 10 levels last time I checked. I mean it is closer to I wanted to give a talk about it's called match valley. I'd say it has it's similar to that where you're adding this battle mechanic. Actually it seems to be a popular trend now. Everyone's copying that. So you make matches and either the matches attack whatever's coming at you like these little monsters that spawn. That is the main mechanic I would say of the game like empires and puzzles. Yes.

And actually you know who also has it tactile Simon's cat match. They also mechanic but that's the big differentiator between the two. There's similarities but I I do not think they're going for that casual audience because also the the difficulty of the game. Last I checked, last balancing I checked, I would say it was almost 1.5 times twice as hard as the original world match. All right, thank you for the update headlines. So, let's talk about some of the news. And I have a this was last week. I didn't talk about it, but then last week I had several calls from bunch of people and I think I I need to talk about it even though this is very close to home. And this is the Finnish Game Awards 2025. So, it's a gala event. people dress up really nicely like in the nines. There's great speeches like in this one there's a speech from Kaban and so founder CEO of Supercell who deservedly won the lifetime award, the LTV MVP award. That's how what they

should call it actually. Uh but it's a lifetime achievement award. And I wanted to point out really the elephant in the room. So the three top games from Finland from last year, this was the award ceremony and everybody was clapping. So number one was the best game from Finland in 2025. It's the A16Z funded MMO PAX day. It's done by Mainframe Industries. It's in beta. And a week before this gala happened, the studio had layoffs. Now, I don't know how you want to read that, but to me, it doesn't sound like the most positive thing. And again, this game has not shipped. They're having layoffs. It's a startup. It's an early access. I own it on Steam. It's It's an Adventure Craft game, so it's out there generating revenue, but Okay. But the studio is having layoffs. Yeah. So, not enough. Every studio now, I feel like every time I open an article, someone has had layoffs. Yeah. So, there's one. And basically for that, it was like, it looks so pretty and it's done by a smaller team. And I'm like, well, that's

okay. Well, I didn't know that that's a criteria how we're going to give like an underdog reward. Then the second game who came in as a close second, Makia Games was the company and their game was called Super Moves. It's a parkour game on on PC and and Steam, I think Xbox, and um the studio had already closed down. So, they ran out of money because the game didn't sell and the investor didn't see it as an investable studio. And that's the second best game from Finland in 2024. And the third one, close third, was of course Squadbusters, who's on track to be Supercell's biggest learning since they pivoted from MMOs on browsers in 2012. So this is just a a fact and no one at the event really came out and said kind of the truth that that the industry is underwater in Finland. Like pretty deep. Like we used to be the number one undeniable number one. You had to just say your area code and you got funded. Oh, you're from Finland Helsinki. Great. But what happened? Like where's the new talent? Where are the

startup? Where's the drive? Why have investors abandoned Finland before they walked away from gaming? Like we've been on a dry streak for a while already. And I don't know, maybe they should invite me to a keynote. I I will come through talk about that that you know, maybe the time for tapping each other on the back is kind of done. Let's focus on the future and not the past success and and be very clear that that our industry is pretty much in shambles. Like we're couple of studio closures away of being a supercell town where that is the only game in town. And you know, I'm not being mean and I didn't want to talk about it, but I think it's really important that we do talk about it because I'm getting messages from, you know, from Istanbul, from other countries and places where like, what the [ __ ] is going out there? Like, how are you rewarding each other for failed games in a gala and saying that that's the best game of the year? I'm not mocking these people for for shipping a game that wasn't success. But if we're having an award ceremony, I think it's

important to raise the topic that we're rewarding games that haven't achieved the reward that they were supposed to. So, sorry to be negative, but I think it's sometimes really important that we wake up and really talk about what went wrong and why Eastston Bull is now the place to be. the obvious gaslighting nonsense that's going on at these awards ceremonies, which is always the case generally speaking. Paxtay has like 200 unique users on a regular basis, right? That's their number one game. And Squadbusters, the biggest disaster of all time for a big publisher is the third best. I mean, this is ridiculous. So, on more positive news, like, all right, Fortnite is back. Fortnite is back after five years. a huge win for publishers against the evil that is Apple. The evil dictator has now been squashed. You know, they have been acting at odds with mobile game publishers since the [ __ ] very beginning, right? And I believe that the

publishers are the ones that helped built this [ __ ] platform. Now, to be clear, and I want to clarify my view on this because I've said this a million times, the publishers owe Apple and Google a huge, huge debt by creating this ecosystem because before that, it was jammed at on like a gajillion phones. Every [ __ ] manufacturer had their own OS. Like, it was not going to be the industry that it is today under that rubric. Just clearly, like, let's just be clear on this point. And so they created a workable platforms and they deserve some credit and also some financial windfalls from that. But Apple abused this goodwill from the very [ __ ] beginning. You know, making discovery at the store was a [ __ ] disaster on the redesign. They put together like these requirements for metal which made no [ __ ] sense in order to like create obsolescence of the hardware. They were absolutely bullies. bullies to the development community for years and years, right? Exercising their

authority in every aspect of this business. And then most recently is at creating this privacy thing that was complete [ __ ] [ __ ] and kicking the publishers in the balls. Okay? Like that is their legacy, right? In terms of how they've dealt with us, right? And the key part of this whole thing is that they never really provided an ongoing service that was justified to 30%. like they didn't make any investments in game center in terms of you know discovery like fixing the [ __ ] store like nothing really nothing besides providing a platform right and so thanks to Epic for their efforts here and the insane financial commitment to making this thing happen for this lawsuit which I think has been going on for 5 years now right you know since since it was pulled from the store over hund00 million in legal legal fees is what I saw. I mean, Tim fought the good fight, dude. Like, I

got mad props to him. He set up a whole [ __ ] organization and legal team to [ __ ] fight this thing at Epic. So, good for him. Now, it is possible that Apple wins on appeal and have to pull down Fortnite. But I think that the cat is kind of out of the bag, right? Apple will have to acknowledge they have lost because in essence, they had been a bad actor for over a decade in the space, you know, like just [ __ ] give it up, you know? So for me, I've been doing a lot of analysis around this, talking to a lot of people of what this means for the ecosystem, but I'm not going to go into that right now. But I think what their response is, the power response is just to reduce the fee, right? If they if they do, they may not do this until they see real traction from third parties and and people moving off the store. But I think they could put put a [ __ ] cork in it pretty quickly if they brought it down to like 15 to 20% because then the switching cost will be relatively high, right? And I think they kind of do justify, you know, a premium over, you know, the transaction fee. And that would be in the 12 to 15 to 20%

range, you know. So anyway, I think that would probably be the move here, but we'll we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. But I'm so happy for Epic. I'm I 100% appreciate what he had tried to accomplish. It seemed like an absolutely impossible task, you know, when it first started, but I think he has become victorious. And oh, sorry. And the last point I'll make is that with this ruling, it just gives the power and momentum for the DMA and the UK agencies and Europe agencies to basically initiate these same type of rulings where everyone's going to be able to do this around the world, but we're far away from that. We also have Japan and Korea obviously are in a different situation as well. So these changes are in the US only, right? So this Fortnite is only available in the US. So this has to move nationwide, worldwide to get the real impact. As a veteran UEFN developer and I guess the the king of rabbit holes as as Crest put it, I'm really excited by the news, right? And really excited that it's going to bring more CCU back to

Fortnite. And just appreciative of Epic for putting up this fight. I mean, they've forgone tens if not hundreds of millions in revenue on iOS and Android over the past couple years on a fight over principle. Basically, not a lot of businesses take that sort of stand. Obviously, they benefit from it, but it's in their long-term interest, but really this was a principled fight. They didn't have to do it. They didn't have to fight this hard. And uh thank you for bringing more users back to Fortnite. The only two things I'll add in terms of my frustrations when I was still working on mobile games. one whenever we would have talked to the editors of the Apple store people behind the scenes I felt like they didn't have a good grasp of the differentiation between games and there was a ton of push back a kind of this almost authority acted as if they unders they would say you're copying this game even though the games are fundamentally different designs so it was this lack of understanding then you wouldn't get featuring granted I don't know about anyone else I mean chime in when we when we launched this episode but the featuring used to be something

that we all wanted we would get these we'd get great users Well, at least better users than we were getting now, but featuring now means nothing. We would be like, "Oh, featuring eh, it might as well have like just give me some randoms. Give me some randoms." Like, we actually saw no major uplift from it. Now, Grant, if you saw uplift, more power to you. Glad for you. But in the games I worked on, we did not. Yeah. You just saw noise in the data and like what the [ __ ] happened? Why am I all the KPIs down? Like, what the hell is going on? Is the game broken? Yeah, pretty much. That's that's featuring Apple's app store is broken, right? [ __ ] the [ __ ] The IGN guys came in there with all that nonsense. But they hired they hired that new head of app store. You remember it was like years ago or something. What happened since then? I don't know. They just they don't know how to run retail. They don't know how to do online retail, I guess. I mean, I don't know how hard it is to hire people that I mean, this is not rocket science, but whatever. Anyway, moving on. Hopefully, they'll figure [ __ ] out. We'll see what Apple's response is. I'm really excited to see what the next

stage is going to be. All right. Well, since I'm here, I had to bring some anime ass gotcha news. That's that's what I'm here for. So, very exciting headline. Dungeon and Fighter Mobile surpasses 1.3 billion in its first year on the Chinese App Store. So, I bring this up every now and then. Dungeon Fighter, probably the most revenue generating game of all time, and it continues its absolute dominance, all while staying exclusive to South Korea and China for mobile. So, if you don't know, Dungeon and Fighter is a longunning free-to-play juggernaut published by Nexon. Started as a PC game, and it's styled after the classic Capcom arcade game Dungeons and Dragons: Shadows Over Mistera, a game that I own multiple copies of, of course, on many different consoles. So, this figure is from June 2023. As of June 2023, lifetime revenue for Dungeon and Fighter surpassed $22 billion. And so with this

massive success in China and on mobile over the past year, I wouldn't be surprised if we're north of 25 billion by now. So congrats Nexon. Please bring Dungeon Fighter mobile stateside so I can finally understand where all this revenue is coming from. That won't work, dude. By the way, that will not work. Just to be clear, we'll have like five users. Ethan being one of them. Yeah, actually two. He'll play on two devices. Don't do that, Nexxon. Don't listen to Ethan. King of rabbit holes. King of Fighter Allstars did pretty well in the US. They can make some money. It's just not worth their time. If you're pulling down a billion in a year, it's just not worth your time. Exactly. Exactly. Talking about billions, let's talk about Supercell Go and Trans Media. So, there was an announcement on LinkedIn, on YouTube, that Supercell were partnering with Netflix to bring the war waging world of Clash to life like never before. A new animated series has been green lit and is currently in

pre-production. That's all for now. More details are coming later, but we just couldn't keep a secret any longer. This is what the next nomination for the Finnish Awards in 2026 is the animation series on Netflix. Like, this is how [ __ ] low they're going to go, dude. Why don't you focus on making some [ __ ] successful games and stop [ __ ] dealing with this [ __ ] dude? Nonsense. All right, Chris, don't worry. There are two different teams working on this. The development team is not working on this, so they can still work on great games. I'm so excited. [ __ ] distraction. It is a distraction from making money. So, hold on. Let's take a positive angle. So, the announcement was cool. The character looks awesome. Netflix is great. Trans Media is superb. And this can invigorate the brand. So back million years ago when I was heading partnership Supercell, everything was a no because everything was about focus and ROI. Like

we had all kinds of cool deals like you wouldn't even imagine thrown around by all kinds of companies. So I wanted to take the same approach here and think about this from ROI perspective. So I took a look at a an animated show that that Clash of Clans actually has been running for eight years. It's called Clasharama. If you haven't seen, it's pretty fun. It's on YouTube and Clash of Clans YouTube channel has 189 million subscribers. So, I took a look at the first Clashama video and the last that was released a year ago and just how many views they have. First Clashama video 8 years ago had 118 million views. That's awesome. That's how you get a TV show green lit. The latest Clasharama video from a year ago had 1.4 million views which is really really nice and absolutely fantastic but it just shows the magnitude maybe of the interest and how much it has over the

years. Then I think it's important before making this type of a decision like we used to back in the days look at what others have done in the sector and what was their success. So, I took a look at Riot's Arcane. Huge success critically accolades like multiple Emmy awards and high viewership on Netflix, which they don't report. But it was not a financial success for Riot Games because their players are in China. that they didn't say. But but uh the $250 million production cost meant that the the show production cost meant that the show did not generate a profit despite its popularity and it didn't significantly boost League of Legends player base or in-game spending. So to conclude, this could be massive success. Like when Angry Bird's movie launched, it was huge boost to the brand and to the business. But this could also be an endeavor that raises everybody's ego and

burns hundreds of millions of dollars, distracts the leadership, and doesn't lead to anything too positive on the business side. So, if I'd be in Supercell's shoes, I'd definitely do this cuz this is so much fun to do this and it's so legacy building and you would get so many people engaged and it's it's just an amazing thing. But if I would be advising Supercell, I would say don't do it because this is a distraction. It's not good for the business. You have to focus on the relevant. So, I think the chance of this being ROI positive are slim, but the chance of this being super [ __ ] fun are really high. Okay, first of all, let me just do a huge correction on your nonsense, dude. First of all, Angry Birds movie was definitely a success on the box office. I will not contest that. But the only result for the company was to sell for peanuts years later to the Japanese, right? The movie [ __ ] was a distraction. It didn't matter what for the business. The business is about making money, long-term profits, and

revenue growth. Every nickel that they spent on that movie should have been dedicated to hiring people in management that could grow the business, right? To improve production and monetization and live ops, right? And so maybe maybe if they made the right investments instead of these stupid [ __ ] movies for Angry Birds, they would have been sold above the IPO price from like 5 years ago. Like that is not a proof positive on the success of a trans media strategy. That's actually the exact opposite. The exact opposite, dude. They sold out 5 years later below the IPO price because they could not grow this business profitably. And it was because of distractions like this and merch and all this other crap that they were doing that they basically squandered the biggest IP in mobile gaming ever. Right. Yeah. And so now Clash of Clans is doing the same [ __ ] thing. You know, Supercell is doing the same thing. Now, I'll concede that they are outsourcing this to Netflix, which is actually pretty [ __ ] smart, right? So, let

them deal with all the money that it costs to build this thing, but this is just a look over here thing, dude. [ __ ] fix Squadbusters, you know? Like, let's see. Actually, we haven't even looked at it. I don't know if it's we're seeing better metrics on this, but if you can't release a game in the last like 5 years that's successful, that's your problem. It's not exposure. Everyone knows Clash of Clans. You don't need to do this, right? You need to build successful games anyway. All right, enough. I have a question. So, first of all, you were partly right because they released the second Angry Birds movie that tanked and then that led to all the bad and prices and everything. The first one actually helped with the IPO, but that's irrelevant. Why do you think they released this news that a show has been green lit? Like that was the question like why the PR? Because when is the show coming out? Two years. Like how long does it take to make an animated show? Probably two years, right? Takes 18 to 24 months. It takes five years from the start to airing episodes in general. Three years a year. I I just had a conversation with someone who like

works on a bunch of the Bento box shows. Actually, my friend Lawrence did at Fox. So like Bob's Burgers, etc. It takes 5 years start to finish to get a new show on the air from like the beginning of the pitch to the first thing. Animation. Animation takes a lot longer than live television. And so like 3 years would be an accelerated schedule. Yeah. It's in pre-production. I was going to say must be like a year and a half away. Yeah. Let's say year and a half to two. Why would you release this news now? Like I always think about when somebody has an publication, I'm like, why are you telling me this? PR has been in the news for Clash of Clans. Yeah. Something to talk about, right? So, I'm just curious. It's It's really weird time to talk about this. It's just I'm just asking questions. Everybody's asking questions. Why are they talking about this Clash of Clans show? That's my terrible Trump impression. But that was really talking about it. That's that's a really bad

impression. Uh stay in games, but let's stay on the Supercell train because they had other publications as well or PR this week, which is about AI and and actually this is something that has been on LinkedIn. Their CEO has been very actively posting about AI initiatives at the company and how excited he is about AI, how they're having these hackathons. And now there's a new job opening announced on LinkedIn. This is forund from Supercell. He's saying, "We are ramping up our AI innovation activities in the Bay Area and looking for an AI innovation lab program leader to help us dream what do future entertainment experiences look and how they're built. Founder and or experience from the wider venture ecosystem considered a plus. come create the future of entertainment with us. Interesting. Any takes on this? Like AI is the new new hot thing. Okay. So, I I know I know it's very on brand for me and we've established that I'm the king

of rabbit holes. We haven't even mentioned that I'm the former crypto kid here, but look, yeah, I am fully converted that AI is the real deal and an incredible aid in the workplace. Of course you are. Of course you are. Of course I am. Of course you are. Let me let me give you a tangible example because again like crypto was all speculative. UFN has. Now you're saying it telling you I've said it a lot. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I've made a culpable many times and given presses flowers for being 100% right. But here here's an example. I told you already that Prison Break Tycoon is launching this week. So we've got a top tier gamefam thumbnail team. Like multiple people dedicated just to thumbnails. But Roblox are the big ticket projects. That's where the money's made. So like my little hyper casual prison break tycoon experiment isn't a top priority. And so this week I skipped six weeks worth of meetings, feedback loops, and internal cost spend

by spending one hour with chat GPT. I got two very solid thumbnails for AB testing that we will be running when we launch this game. I had no need to bother that team with low priority work that may or may not generate any revenue. And so like this is just one of a couple experiences I've had over the past couple weeks where I'm like I'm leaning in. Like I'm going to learn Python. I'm testing new workflows and I'm just excited by like how useful chat GPT4 is. Especially when I compare it to that article I wrote for our friends at Homo magazine two years ago that was like AI is not going to replace your art team. AI just replaced my marketing team. Did you write an article that AI is not going to replace your your It was Yeah, it was for Homa. They they reached out. You got the best. You got the best predictions. It was AI isn't ready to replace your art team yet. And I talked about what it would need to do to get there and we're much closer to what I wrote about. So, like honestly, if

you're not using chat GPT daytoday or something similar like jump on board, future proof your career. This isn't crypto. It can help you with your work dayto-day right now. In fact, my executive assistant agent helped me tighten up this section right here. So, Cassie, you you using chat GPT at all? Is this another shut the [ __ ] up Ethan moment or am I on something? For for once, I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it in this context. I think you're actually absolutely right on this one, Ethan. I will support you 100%. I have actually made a far more This is on a personal level. I made a more concerted effort since Bing's like doom and gloom speech at GDC where he suggested that everyone that has gaming DNA and gaming product knowledge and live ops should go to non-gaming apps. And then he also said that everyone should be using AI every day. And I think I think that he is totally right about that point. Actually, probably both for that matter. And this is going

to sound a bit stupid, I'll be honest. But AI is just much of an easier technology to absorb. You know what I mean? Like it's a really easy thing to use. It's [ __ ] conversational. You know, even like learning computers back in the day or even like online stuff, all that stuff was a lot harder like to actually do to go from one to the other. So, it's like kind of set up well to understand. And so the better you get at conversating with it, right? Or the better like at prompting you are and the more experience you have, just the better you get at it. And it's really easy, right? And to put this in context, when I was at Kabam like 10 years ago, people were telling me, "Oh my god, big data is the future. You need to build analytics. You need to understand SQL. You need to do like scraping and all this other shit." I'm like, "Dude, I'm too old for this [ __ ] I don't want to learn that, dude. That's like too [ __ ] hard, you know? This is not hard, right? This is not hard at all." And so you should be using it every day, right? It's like super powerful, right? And you know, a lot of the deep analytics that still makes the other things so complicated is embedded within

the models themselves. Like this is not crypto, right? This is you don't need a PhD in [ __ ] you know? Like you basically just need to [ __ ] use the technology, right? You don't need to like Yeah, you don't need a [ __ ] like you need understand all these acronyms and all this other crap that no one, you know, unless you're economist can understand. So anyway, I think everyone should be using it to help facilitate understanding on what's going on and get perspective from something that's reasonably objective. Like this is the problem. It's like you start relying it too much and you don't really know exactly what you're getting. But whatever, that's a whole other discussion. But yeah, everyone should be using this every day. If they're not, you're going to get really far behind. I think this is an interesting approach in how different executives talk about AI because what we've seen is there's the stresses of the world and some others who are sort of calming people down that hey you know you know AI is not there it's not going to replace anything it's this and that and we're they're not leaning that heavily into it and then there's the other vector or the other side of the aisle which is the Ilas of

the world these founders who are like we're all in in AI and kind of leading the way and bringing new talent to push the AI into the organization. So, I'm I'm just curious of of like which one is the better strategy to get this transformation because I feel like this one works better because it's so open and it's driven by the leadership versus the one where the leadership is kind of like developing different AI tools almost secretly just not to disturb the artists and the QA that are for sure going to get laid off once it starts properly working. So, it's just interesting and it would be also interesting to hear from folks at Supercell like what's their take on AI. There must be people who are super excited and must be people who are terrified. I mean, if you think about Take 2's history with mobile and how they're a slow follower, right? They wait till it's proven and then they acquire. That's always been their jam. They like poo pooed mobile for what, a decade or more before they're like, "Oh, okay. Social point zinga nom nom nom nom

nom." Right? But like just to talk about how one of the things experiments I'm planning on running right now if you think about a organization as big and with as many products as take two and you think about writing test plans from design documents right that is a non-trivial cost of thankless work right you have design this is something I deal with all the time I have a design document it's done it might be one feature if you're a live ops game it might 70 pages. You have to turn that into test plans so that QA can then execute against it. All right. If I'm a startup with one game, like having one QA person dedicating 25% of their time to it is not a big cost. If I'm take two overall and I could replace all test plan writing with AI, which I'm pretty [ __ ] sure you could as long as you're good at it, right? Like that's a meaningful cost savings. So I think for

someone like Take 2 not to be taking that seriously on an how shits made level like the tools are ready to do that today. But there's a lot of nuance to what I think he's saying about AI like replacing the those type of operational things is I'm sure fine in his book. I think the AI creating content is just what I think he's more objecting to and that I think we are far away from that. So, what I'm trying to suggest is that as a knowledge worker or or whatever the [ __ ] you want to call the professionals out there, you got to be using AI to help facilitate your processes because that's to remain competitive, right? Whether or not AI is going to be able to create games, you know, like the next Call of Duty, I I think you're so far away from that. It's a multiplier on a small number of people who have actual talent as opposed to throwing bodies and money at a situation. So something I'd say like I know we've talked about small peanuts relative to like billion dollars a year from Dungeon Fighter, but if you think about Bellatro

and if you think about the amount of entertainment per hour one developer has been able to create by making rogike games, AI is very similar. If you are a one to five person team making rogike games, you can 10x the depth of your game by intelligently using AI. So where I believe AI innovation is really important is that it is going to make smaller numbers of talented people deliver more value per hour at a lower cost to players. And now when I say that where that should scare people is that's not what's going to lead to the next billion dollar a year super live ops game. What it's going to lead to is a race to the bottom where people like me are going to make a game that someone can spend a thousand hours on. We're going to sell it for $4.99 and suddenly you're going to be like, "Yeah, I mean GTA 6 for $80. It looks really cool and

all, but I'm too busy playing Bleeplorp. I've got 5,000 hours logged on Bleeplorp. Can you believe one person made Bleeplorp? It's $2. You have to buy it today." Like, that's where we're going. No, we're not. No, we're not 100%. I 100% disagree with that. Leaport is gonna destroy. Let's Let's move on. There's just no way. I wish I had better legs, longer legs. Yeah. No. Stop. Just stop. Okay. Shut the [ __ ] up, Ethan. Moving on. Attention app and game developers. Are you ready to unlock the secrets behind the world's top performing apps and games? With Sensor Tower, you get the ultimate competitive edge. Whether it's breaking into new markets, fine-tuning your UA strategies, or boosting monetization. Dive into data like never before. Track global trends across app stores. Analyze market leading inapp purchase and inapp ad strategies and benchmark your performance with realtime insight. The best part, Sensor Tower

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your app. Their platform transform mountains of complex data into clear actionable intelligence that separates winning campaigns from budget- draining experiments. And I know that many of the top game companies leverage Apps Flyier and are a key partner in their success. Appslier, where your app's potential meets performance. All right. Layoffs at Wuggas. Claire Chronicles. Solitaire is canled. So solitire market not that large and not really growing at fast pace. So a few hundred million. We got Playikica's solitary game number one which I forgot the name. I think the tri peaks the scoply version one is the number two. And the third one is recently launched. I think few weeks ago they launched this Disney solitary game. Platique launched it and that has quite successfully scaled up to making about 1.5 million a week in inapp purchase revenue. Now, Wulga, which is also a Playa studio, has essentially shut down

their solitary team. So, apparently they were doing two solitire game at the same time. Kind of like a 10-centent strategy and one of them won, the other one lost and now the one that lost basically lost also the team. Now, the solitire market is not easy to break through. We got plays that tried to do it with Fishum Solitaire and that failed. And I have actually question regarding all the sol. I don't want to go too deep to it, but I remember that Merge Mansion Makers Metacor has been trying to make their second game for a while. And the second game that they're really investing into, and they actually have a studio in Berlin, is called Grandma Solitire Secrets. I know Jen is raving about it. Well, that this is the worst name ever. And now they will likely hire the people who worked on the failed Wuga game to further staff up this grandma's solitire secrets. So what's the over and under on that game breaking into this really tough category? Depends entirely what they do. I covered a little bit of solitary. I think it was like twig like 210 or 215. I want to say

it's like a $50 million a year market. Like it it it depends. Let me take Let's take a look at Sensor Tower. There's not many games that do it and they all are super similar. That's the biggest issue. when um Candy Crush Solitaire you know joined beautiful polished game the gameplay at least when it came out was not so different than what was already in the market. So Scopley's Tiki Play's Grand Harvest they're interesting games but you have one of those games and then you have five more of them unless you're going to like seriously add some innovation to it or diversify it from the offering there's just not much there. So it entirely depends what grandma's secret solitaire decides to do. if they're going to merge it with some other category. So, they're going to take, you know, solitire, combine it with match merge or they're going to come out with hidden object, by all means, give me something interesting to play. But one of the biggest complaints I see from players just across the board, especially in match games, is that the games do not feel different. So, will it do well? Let's see if they can get an interesting offering on on

the board. Yeah. Yeah, and there's overall cannibalization because if you're looking at the graph, so showing it on the screen, but basically this is the Platika's big one and it has lost about 18% of the revenue, but it has been cannibalized because they launched this Disney one and the Disney one is actually cannibalizing way more than they lost. So, it was a positive cannibalization with the launch of the Disney Solitire. But at the same time, the launch of Disney Solitaire has cannibalized pretty much everybody else as well. So we see the scoply solitary kind of going from making 1 million a week to slowly getting to that 750. So nice loss of 25%. And then we have the bottom row. This is the Candy Crush Solitaire. I know the guys were talking about this game makes like half a million a day. I don't know where they got this number. I think it was on Two and a half gamers when they were saying because on on Sensor Tower it's nowhere near half a million a day. This is weekly numbers. So anyways, it's a tough market. tough to break through and even when a new big game launches it actually decreases the revenue from the others. So yeah and then there's the real money

gaming solitire those are the high on the downloads. Well I want to see what happens like every time I open Tik Tok which is quite frequently I'm getting a ton of ads for Disney solitire. So I want to see how it performs once they stop the huge ad campaign they're running. All right we mentioned a couple things about take 2. So they actually had their quarterly results. So overall on a high level their revenue by platform. This is the interesting one. 52% of their revenue at the moment naturally because they haven't launched the GTA. 52% comes from mobile consoles 37 and other PC and other make 11% of their revenue. Their net revenue is almost $3 billion and that was up from 2.7. The total net revenue was 5.6 and it used to be 5.4. So pretty much the same one. But what's interesting is that they reported that they earned, you know, half of the revenue coming from mobile during the financial years and hailed two of the Rolex hits driving the growth. So Color Block Jam and Match Factory both made in Istanbul. In the PR, they talk about these are Zingga

games, which they technically are, but we've been at Rolex Studios. We know where the magic is being made. It's it's over there. And then they also told about another game which is match factory also from Istanbul and that it continues to perform really well and CEO Strauss Selnik was also bullish on Zingga's direct to consumer business aka web shops aka Dom can roll the clip and let people know what the best in the business looks like. Anyways, so Tech 2 did say that they expect mobile revenue to be overall fairly flat. It plans to launch five new games in the next fiscal year, including WWE 2K and that will be launched on Netflix games. So, that's the one that's going to break the bank. Well, also they announced a billion dollar equity financing, a follow on to pay down. But the other thing that was kind of buried in this report is something that I'm clearly focusing on way too much on the negative, but like so they have written down their acquisition of Zinga for the

second time. So, they put together a $3.7 billion impairment charge against or write down of the Zinga acquisition, which is coupled with another $2.5 billion from last year, an impairment charge against this acquisition, which is a whopping $6.21 billion write down of the Zinga acquisition. Right? So almost half of the value of what they did on the acquisition was a $12 billion acquisition was written down over the last two or three years. So it is exactly what I said when this thing was announced that they should have waited like a few months and they would have got this thing for half as much as they purchased it for. So my question to Mr. JP Morgan and Mr. Goldman Sachs, are you going to take half of the fees and bring that back to the shareholders after justifying this [ __ ] valuation for

this company? Right? Their transaction fee should be cut in half because they wrote fairness opinions to the board of directors of each of these companies that this was a fair value for this company when it was clearly not. Now having said that, if I take a step back, I have to acknowledge the fact that since this deal was done, the market cap of Take 2 is up 33%. So they are benefiting somewhat from Zingga's predictable revenue stream and scale. But I think personally it's more related to the GTA thing than anything do with Zinga's business. But this is what the reality of this transaction. It was an absolute disaster. It is the second worst acquisition in the history of video games, which obviously glue was the worst. And I think worst every single piece of value was gone within like 6 months on that deal, right? I mean, it was crazy, dude. That [ __ ] was criminal, dude. That [ __ ] was criminal. Just because I realize I'm not I'm not 100% sure I know what impairment

of goodwill means. Let me see if I'm understanding this right. and crust you can help educate me and through me the audience on what a goodwill impairment is. So they bought Zinga for $12 billion and now you're saying they've done a goodwill impairment of about $6 billion. So what that means is that when they bought Zinga they thought it was justified that it would add $12 billion of value of revenue to their business over some period of time. And now they're saying, "Oh, well, it looks like maybe they'll deliver $6 billion over that period of time, and we're acknowledging now that we lost or we overpaid $6 billion on this transaction." How is that close? That's close enough on the books. Like they are now writing down the value of that acquisition, right? Because things on the ground have changed. The financial performance or market conditions have changed. Clearly, they overpaid for this asset and that's why they're writing it

down, right? And so, it's possible they could continue to write down goodwill. Is there more down to go on this? It's possible. I actually I didn't look into it if they have more on the balance sheet, but I think they're done, you know, like I would hope anyway. I think the glue acquisition was probably too small to justify, you know, writing it down. But maybe they did write it down. I actually don't know. I didn't look at EA. Okay, one more for Turkey. One more for Turkey. So, this is like a little piece of news and then I got curious. So, I feel like if Ethan, you're the king of rabbit holes, I feel like I'm the queen of puzzle rabbit holes. So, there is a mobile developer called Tail Monster and they raised 7 million in a seed round. And granted, I'm not a founder. I don't really understand like the series A, C, B, whatever. It sounded like a big number to me. I was like, "Oh, that's that's a lot of millions. That's pretty good for like a mobile studio." And they had launched a game called Match Valley

and it was, you know, a match three title. And I was like, I'm going to play this. So, I did and I wanted to see maybe Eric after I give this summary of the gaming comment on whether it was a good amount, large amount, small amount, whatever. But when I was complaining earlier about we need to see more innovation in the market, this is more what I'm talking about. So, I played the game. It's very early, you know, it's not huge amount of downloads. I think it was 8,000 downloads since it soft launched in September 2024. It's paid about 10 grand. Small, very small. But the mechanic, they took merch, they took abilities that you find in like Archro, and they took the battles, not exactly as you would find them in a royal kingdom or a Clash Quest or, you know, Simon's cat match, but it was the most interesting game in terms of mechanics I've played in a while. And I thought, you know, if this is what Clash Quest from Supercell had been, I would have been a lot more excited. I think it has

legs. depends what they do with that seven million once they receive it. It still needs a lot of work. But it's something for me that was very very different. So I got a little excited. I hope I hope we see something from it. They must have had decent retention numbers to be able to raise that much money. Unless 7 million is mice nuts and then I take back everything I just said. No, it's a good raise. I I just don't The game is too early really to It's super early. Yeah. So we'll see. 7 million in seed is pretty nice. It's not 55 that Spike raised. It's possible maybe it has a soft launch somewhere under a different title that has bigger numbers and bigger metrics cuz 8,000 downloads is not a lot to prove six month. I mean I've done soft launches with like what500 just to get a retention number from specific countries. I mean you can do 3,000 at least gives you an early indication. I don't know if you can raise on that but I can certainly ask for UA investment on that. Right. And and the question is was that 8,000 over time or 8,000 all concentrated in September basically like

since September. So Aken Babet who's the founder of Triple Dot and he set up the Arcadia Gaming Advisors. Now that we cover the investments I think I see him every week in like five different investments. He raised 100 million if I think he's gone like through 50 million already. Yeah. No. Yeah. He's really been active. Like I I've actually heard people talk about him like independently about like him being everywhere. So yeah, because he was in the dream in like early rounds. Interesting. Money burns a hole in your pocket. That's what I tell myself when I go shopping. Especially if you have 100 mil. Not yet. All right. The last thing we're talking about is Roblox. So Roblox unlocks the next generation commerce with in-game shopping basically. So, they're introducing a significant update to the platform to allow in-game shopping for physical items, which is basically moved from away from their digital only model. The new feature allows purchasing tangible products directly from each

Roblox experience. So, basically real world commerce in a virtual environment. This also includes Shopify integration, amp, which is the approved merchandiser program, Fenty Beauty, which I'm feeling very old because I don't even know what the [ __ ] that is. Um, it's Rihanna's brand. It's okay. Shine like like a broad diamond Rihanna as a brand and and the weekend have launched exclusive products on the platform. Overall like I think we're getting positive reviews on this potential revenue stream for them. You know deeper engagement and all that other stuff accent to Gen Z and and you know get them to be purchasing on the Roblox platform. There's some criticism about the ability to protect kids from this because obviously it's still a kids platform. disruption of the user experience and any regulatory worldwide compliance associated with transacting on platforms. So very cool. Clearly in my view they are expanding revenue opportunities on the platform and that is more of the big news on this and the

big takeaway. I was digging a little bit because I my whole thesis on Roblox was the fact that Cliff Bazooki was never wanted to monetize the audience way that was was required to grow this platform the way it should be from a revenue perspective and profitability perspective. So I did look that up and he did do one of his last like CNN broadcast I think in February of 22 after a huge quarterly miss after a really tough comp from COVID the stock was down like 22%. and he was on Jim Kramer's show, which I'm not a fan of Jim Kramer. I think he is half a [ __ ] but he said basically the stock is a short because he said, you know, where is the monetation going to come from on your platform? And this was Cliff's response to the CEO of Roblox. He says, we have so many opportunities to increase monetization on our platform. We're not touching advertising. We're not touching 3D immersive shopping. We're being very gentle on monetization relative to the quality user growth,

creating a safe and civil platform and driving our DAU numbers. So, we are focused on user and engagement growth. And so, this was the whole negative thesis on [ __ ] Roblox, right? Was that they don't care about revenue growth, they care about the user experience and growing the user base. So I personally think that this was probably the time in which the shareholders revolted like and they basically said look enough of this creative integrity stuff. Let's focus on monetizing the audience right and I think this is also a time in the stock in which people were kind of questioning the core thesis of Roblox to begin with and this included myself and so I obviously was was negative at the time and you could basically see it in the stock price. I mean the stock just [ __ ] collapsed at that point. And so I think this was the beginning of like the transition away from the founder entrepreneurial visionary to the business leaders or as some people would call them the suits right and so this is was the change in the thesis and I don't want to be revisionist history here I

certainly did not make this on the perfect on the timing wise Manuel Bronstein he started to communicate with Wall Street more emphatically and he is the CPO's chief product officer and he came from [ __ ] Google and YouTube for Christ's sakes. And Zingga and Zingga. Yeah. Well, [ __ ] Zingga. But he knows how to make money on on a platform, right? I pulled some of his quotes like we've just scratched the surface of what it means to be a thriving and monetizing economy in this 3D immersive experiences. The demand for brands to connect and engage with our global audience be it through 3D immersive experiences, digital items or new immersive ad products for faster onplatform content discovery continues to grow. So like this is like his whole approach he took over at this point is what I'm trying I'm suggesting here and when he took over they have been more and more focused on actually monetizing the platform which is what I think makes this an interesting platform is the

monetization perspective of it and at least particularly from the Wall Street perspective. So, what's clear to me is that the CEO is no longer in charge of the Roblox economy, right? It is now Manuel that's like really in charge of what's happening on the platform. And this is really, really, really good for the stock. Not necessarily good for the consumer per se or kids for that matter, but time will tell on that fact, but like it is very, very, very good for the stock. On a second and maybe related topic, my buddy Matthew Curtis and Christine Wooten, I don't know her, they left their partnerships division. They were pretty senior people have been there like 6 years and 11 years or something respectively. This may be more of a changing of the guard related to some of these changes with men. I don't know for sure. Or it could be an early soft retirement, which if that's the case, [ __ ] off. Like good for you, but [ __ ] off both of you. Anyway, so there there are things that changing at Roblox is I guess is what I'm saying. So, so

much UGC news for me this week. Obviously, I I can't speak to what we're doing at Gamef Fam, one of, as as we all know, the top Roblox publishers in the world, but I will say that, you know, any new opportunity to deeply engage our players or present more options for monetization, it's a welcome one to us. this is good news and thanks for bringing all this UGC news for me to comment on this week. But at the end of the day, like they are actually going the exact opposite direction of Epic, right? In terms of like increasing the ability for people to monetize as opposed to in Epic's case, decreasing. There's one platform that pays my paycheck and one platform that unfortunately does not. But all I can say is I can't wait to buy the Military Tycoon street wear directly in Roblox. That'll be that'll be awesome. I bet Joe's on it right now. I just realized that we were supposed to have Matthew Curtis on the podcast. I was supposed to interview him and then I said, I I'm too tired. Chris

can come to Roblox offices. Then we got ghosted. I'm going to hang out with them next week. Maybe we'll get him on somehow. I had burgers in front of the Roblox offices. I was close. I keep giving this woman so much credit. I'm not even going to tell you her name, but the Roblox PR department are [ __ ] rock stars, dude. They are so [ __ ] pros at saying nothing, right? It's unbelievable how good they are at it, right? But I imagine they have these guys locked the [ __ ] down, right, for [ __ ] a decade. They can't say [ __ ] about anything. So, I'm not It's a public company, of course. Yeah. No, I mean, no, it's worse, though. I, you know, I think EA and actors, I think they gave up years ago, like really locking people down except for at the highest levels, but I think Roblox is still like in this like imagining that they're still in stealth mode, even though everyone knows everything at this point. But anyway, whatever. So, I just like Roblox PR, Scoply PR, great. Two benchmarks, I do have to say. Anyways, this is the episode. You did it. And

Ethan, you want to take us out because you haven't done an outro in forever. Take us out. Oh my god. Can I remember it? Yes. Okay. Hey, we did it. Thank you for listening to the full episode. As always, join the Slack community, the absolute best community of game developers on the internet. Sign up for our newsletter. Follow Mishka. He writes incredible blogs. The best blog. The best blogs. All right, Ethan is out. This is why he can't do an outro. He goes off the script. Anyways, thank you for listening and have a great 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, well, 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 Fun Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games

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