TWIG #334 The $200,000,000 Greenlight Failures and Activision’s Tone-Deaf In-Game Ads

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sensortowwer.com. That is sensortow.com. [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to Deconstructor of Fun. This week in games 334 game industry news by industry insiders. Hi everyone, I'm Jen Dano. I fill the marketing and publishing Yoda role on this week in games. Today we have first foremost and forever. Thank you for putting me first. Adam Telver, product just product guy. Now you can go Eric. How did how did I get downgraded? This is [ __ ] I I'm calling No. Eric Crest strategy and investing. Well, you're actually you're always second. Usually it's Phil who never takes the queue of when I finish a sentence for him. So yes, I have downgraded Phil just so you know. All right. So it's just the three of us today. Here is what we have. Nintendo

Switch is here. Well, almost. I think it's tomorrow or or something like that where it comes. Epics's Unreal Fest is this week and there's already quite a few announcements. We'll cover some of the highlights. We have updates on Elden Ring and the Jedis are invading Dn D and all right, not exactly, but we'll tell you more. Zinga shuts down Torch Light Studio Dev, etc. games. Philosophy Corner at the end. There was a really interesting blog post called Sympathy for the Devil by Owen Mahoney, who I think all three of us actually know. He was the president of Nexon and he did a bunch of stuff at EA as well back when Crest and I were there. So, we're going to do a little talking about making games. It'll be fun. AAA, whatever. And Happy Pride Month. So, this is going to go into my public service announcement. I did a LinkedIn post that talked about happy Pride Month. And the kind of the thing that I said is it's the first year I've been hesitant to set celebrate

Pride Month because of the potential backlash. For those feeling similarly, here's a reminder that it gets better. It's a video I was honored to be a part of 14 years ago when I was at EA and the LinkedIn post has me looking 14 years younger is very cute with big earrings. And so the thing that I wanted to, I guess, share is, you know, I kind of put that out there and just nervous I was going to get [ __ ] on, especially on LinkedIn. And I got a lot of lovely messages. One message almost made me cry. This meant the world to me, so I'm going to try not to cry. Hey, Jen, I just wanted to thank you for your post about Pride Month. As a trans person, I often felt terrified I won't ever get a job again as soon as I make myself visible. There are so few leaders from our community or at least those who don't make themselves visible that your simple gesture feels like an important signal. Thank you. Wanted to say thank you to all the allies who reached out to me in DMs to show support. I I do greatly appreciate it. My humble ask is

that you say some of these things publicly so others know that it's okay to still be okay with this stuff. So, thanks to everyone. Happy Pride Month. And then let's go to basketball. Basketball update. So, Jacob, my son, turned 16 today. Jesus Christ. He's driving me across the Bay Bridge. It's [ __ ] terrifying. He's off a six-month injury. Of course, he got hurt again after recovering after 6 months. So, he he actually twisted his other ankle, which totally sucks. So, he's out for another few weeks. But anyway, tough for him, but he'll be fine. He's young. He'll heal. I also had my 20th year anniversary. Somebody put up with you for 20 years. Some poor woman has stuck with me for 20 years dealing with my nonsense. But honestly, if you've ever met my wife, she's actually more obnoxious than I am. So, it's like the two of us at a party are [ __ ] insane. Like, we will sit in the corner and just talk [ __ ] about every single person in the room, you know? And like my brother

would say, we feed off each other. So, it was a match made in heaven clearly that we got together. So, anyway, yep, that's the update for me on a personal level. I am no longer doing any updates on the dream game [ __ ] just to be clear. Thank you. It's over like an advertising TV advertising for video games or for mobile games is stupid. Let's just start the pod with that every time. Exactly. Just to remind people. I'll tell you the one thing. Every time I think that I've gotten my message across, I get these notes on LinkedIn that people are clearly not thinking about things in a logical non-emotional manner. There's more work to be done out there in terms of like dispelling these myths about Microsoft's like [ __ ] [ __ ] with their subscription and how much that's failed. Everyone, there are people out there that still believe that this has been a successful business venture. It has not. And so I enjoyed your rant with Chris Heatherly on Fallout. So that was good. Well, um, do

Mimi, what was it? The Fallout like revenue lift that it had. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. People like Heatherly, dude, like I think you honestly need to get off LinkedIn. I feel like it's going to be terrible for your health. And Chris is He's just trolling you. He's just trolling you. You think? Yeah, I know he's smart enough to understand this, but the stuff that he posts on LinkedIn is just so insane. You're right. Maybe he is just trolling. He's just trolling you. He's doing exceptional job. Do you think deep down in inside he really he's messaging me? He is not trolling. So maybe what we do is we have a podcast where you guys just fight on this stuff. I do agree with you, Chris, that I think whatever he was referencing had a lot of percentage increases. And as we all know, a 300% increase off of a low base is still a low base. And I do agree with you that in the short term it is very difficult to look at. I think this was trans media. So, I think the topic was, did Fallout actually improve the game

sales for Fallout games? I think that was kind of like one of the references. They referenced like Minecraft and Mario and some of the other ones as well. Remember, they didn't do any new games around Fallout. So, you had like a mobile game from years ago and I think it was like 200 22% increase, something like this, right? And so, I think it was super small. My point here is not to create a toxic spiral around trans media and it's it's to help Crest get off LinkedIn so he's he's a healthier person. But these influencers, these are actually people changing people's minds about things. And so literally this post there were almost 10 data points and every single data point had absolutely no revenue data in it. It was all percentages all [ __ ] [ __ ] hocus pocus PR nonsense, right, about trans media's lift for these games. And so I called them out on it. And then finally, thank God, Adam provided some data showing how [ __ ] meaningless the fallout thing was for them from a sales

perspective. And that's sales of the product actually move the needle far more than this trans media [ __ ] you know? So discounts, I mean, and anyway, so there are a lot of people out there that still believe this stuff. And so I am put on this earth to dispel these myths about this industry. I mean, I'm happy. I'm happy to do it. Stay the [ __ ] up, LinkedIn. Stop patrolling me, Mr. Hather. I'll save us from fighting. I don't agree exactly. Let's not spiral. I'm not going to spiral. I'm not going to spiral. Let's no spiraling. But we know that we talk about your LA party. Yeah. That you're not coming to. Okay. So, last time to mention this, the off thereord event in LA is June 10th. This is in partnership with Neil from mobilegamer.biz. I didn't realize that it's like all of my friends coming. This is going to be really fun, Chris. It's like it's going to be a fantastic event. around just under 200 people. Sorry to those who couldn't get in. We were weight listing a bunch of people. We're just at a capacity. So, it's executive roundts with most of the LA and San Francisco mobile game companies. All the

licensed source in the area are coming as well. Sponsors include Media Bodies, which is an influencer agency and Apps Flyer. Google Play is hosting us at the Venice office. Sensor Tower is coming. Crest for you. I asked sensor tower to prepare a state of mobile this year with key trends and so they are doing a custom report that only we will see at that meeting and then mobilegamer.biz will be doing a bunch more of these sessions in the EU after this if you want to sponsor. So a little shout out from Neil who is a oneman shop help support him. All right kind of a shill I don't know if you guys saw this but you know both of these are our sponsors. So, Appcharge and App Slier have announced a new strategic partnership to integrate mobile and web store analytics into a single platform. The collaboration enables developers to track player behavior and purchases across both inapp and web environments with a unified view. I thought this was super cool, right? Tracking sounds cool. It's two in the weeds for me, but the tool sounds

really cool. Yeah. and and I read through the article and I was like, "Wow, you can really, you know, from UA in a sense track through to a web store purchase and really understand the LTV of your players through there." I mean, listen, there's all kinds of interesting privacy things going on and you know, the probabilistic determination, but I do think that having that capability with the web shop magic is amazing. All right, corrections? None. We're perfect. Absolutely perfect. Absolutely perfect. probably needed a corre correction. Uh, on a Yeah, on a really sad note, The Sims co-creator Tim Lerno passed away. He was part of the Sims franchise forever and when I was at EA, he was there and then he moved over to Zingga for a while. Yeah, I only met him a couple times actually. I think we were in the bus together at some like E3 event or something and we talked for like an hour or something and he was the sweetest guy I ever met. very kind of thoughtful like given his like position he was just so nice not a lot of ego and

I heard nothing but good things about him over the years and so it's really sad day he died really young right he was not much older than I am frankly so yeah very sad that he is gone so yeah I also worked with him on some Sims projects at EA but mostly he was my kind of studio lead when I was leading Farmville franchise marketing And so we worked together really, really closely from a work and a personal, you know, standpoint. He was incredible. Great leader, great marketing partner, great human. Sending, you know, good thoughts to his friends and family. LinkedIn has a lot of just wonderful remembrances about him. I think it reminds us that making games is hard, but also being a good human is hard. And he did both well. So sorry to get this news. All right, switch two coming, Chris. All right, the Switch 2 launch is this week, which is very exciting. All

indicators are pretty [ __ ] hot red right now in terms of what this launch is going to be like. So, I think we're we're in pretty good shape, at least for the first few months. And then holiday should be huge, too, cuz there's really nothing else to buy this holiday if you want to put something under the tree, you know what I mean? So anyway, it's releasing June 5th, which is tomorrow, $4.49, 500 with the bundle, with the Mario World. Anyway, they're looking at all these midnight launches at different retailers like Target and Best Buy, etc. So, it should be huge. I am very excited for the industry and also excited for Nintendo. And my stock call on Nintendo is working, so that helps too for me. So, you look smart. Yeah, I look I look pretty good right now on that particular one. The bundle is $4.99, I think. So, the base model is $4.49. Bundle $4.99. A lot of midnight openings. Crust be honest. What are you dressing up as when you go to a midnight? Are you Is it Mario? Maybe Princess Peach? No. No.

Okay. I got I got Wario. Warriio, right? Right. You know me better than that, dude. I would never do something like that. And the honest truth is, I did not get a pre-order. I've absolutely failed my family, my son, and my daughter. Shame. Shame. I'm gonna Yeah, I know. It's really embarrassing. Yeah, I actually lucked out. I got one of the pre-orders where they contacted me a few days later after I tried the first day. I couldn't get it the first day. And then like Amazon contacted me like 3 days later and like, "Would you like one?" I was like, "Fuck yeah, I'll have one." Oh man. So, I'm getting mine day one. It's great. I mean, I'm getting the bundle, too, with Mario Kart. Pretty excited to play with my kids. So, yeah. Oh, that's going to be awesome. I listened to the game business podcast. I think we talked about that. This guy Chris kind of does a new podcast. He was a game industry biz guy. Yeah. So he was interviewing someone from Konami and Unity and they have a launch title for Switch 2 called Survival Kids based off of Konami's IP from the 989 era. It's

Unity's first game that they're actually Survival Kids. Is this an IP? Does this exist? I've never heard of this thing. I think it was another name and then they like named it Survival Kids. Basically, it was from the podcast. It was darker and they made it a little bit more lighter and fun cuz it's like Lord of the Flies, basically. I'm just surprised that Unity's first game is a Switch, too. At least they're going to get some learnings for the Unity engine on how you may want to port mobile over or port a different game or be crossplatform. So, thought that was interesting, but it was really weird. I was like, "Wait, this is like a It's like a Game Boy Color game from 1998." Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. A lot of a lot of IP value there. Sorry. Okay. No, no. I was like, you know, so the people on the podcast were like, you know, hey, they they wanted to go mine some of the old Konami IP. And I'm like, well, okay. I'm not sure that's really going to like there's people clamoring for that, but you know,

I mean, dude, if you're going to do it, do it. But don't just [ __ ] butts around with this [ __ ] you know? Like, if you want to make games, make games, but stop. I don't know. It's so weird that like they decided these type of things and they got some press for it too. Like they did, right? Yeah. I mean, like I listen to this podcast and I'm talking about it. And so, personally, from my family, I didn't pre-order one. Switch 2 is not my thing, but my wife loves Animal Crossing. Probably I think she looked at her hours. She has 3,000 hours in Animal Crossing, but she hacked her Switch One to be able to give herself unlimited Animal Crossing stuff. And so we don't even want to switch to because then she can't hack it. So anyway, I have to get one. It's my duty as a game analyst to have like every [ __ ] platform. But I won't play it that much, but my kids play it occasionally anyway. Yeah. Yeah. They Dude, they're so into Pokemon now. It's like I am embarrassed. My kids are into Pokemon, too. It's good. I'm I'm

embarrassed at how much money I spent on Pokemon cards for my son for his 16th birthday. Like what a loser, right? What a [ __ ] loser, you know? I mean, hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Pokemon cards, dude. He's 16 for Christ's sake. He is 6'3, 200 lb, and he's b out there buying Pokemon cards with a nerd. So, the basketball the bench and basketball trade, dude. He's got to start playing basketball again. Enough is enough. Is it the game or is it the collectibility? He doesn't even know how to play the game. He was collecting this [ __ ] Yeah. No, the same thing happened. So when Zach, who is now 19, but when he was, you know, 12, 13, he was in a Pokemon phase, but it was all like, you know, value based. He didn't play the game. He just wanted the collectibility, the collect them all aspect of the cards. Yeah. But they're worthless. They're [ __ ] worthless. No, they aren't. It's worth money if someone else is willing to pay for it. And someone else is willing to pay for it. Emotionally depressed. They are worthless. Let's move forward. Believe

me, as a as a professional investor and analyst for other investors, the amount of money that I've spent on Pokemon cards and the amount of return I'm going to get is definitely negative. It's absolutely just like Dream Games investment in TV advertising. Let's move forward. Oh my god. I feel like Okay, I feel I feel their pain. You know, $2,000 in Fortnite skins for Zach that I can never get back except for his love. Anyway, Epic Games. Next. Yeah, Epic Games. Epic Games hosted its annual State of Unreal keynote yesterday and they provided some updates on a few things primarily like the Fortnite update, Unreal Engine, and the Epic Game Store update. And obviously, we saw some partners including Disney, CD Project as well. So actually this was really kind of uneventful to some degree like as far as these things go but like they had AI

tools for UFN which were quite cool which I think we'll come online and see what people do with that. They gave an update on the Epic Store. You know, they paid like $2.1 billion to devs and publishers and UFN has generated like 722 million for third party creators. And just to be clear, UFN is a [ __ ] train wreck disaster right now. Like there's no mincing words on this. This is not working and people are are very frustrated. So like all the PR and fluff around this is complete [ __ ] Um to the best thing on UEFN is that they've given access to all the data so we can see it clearly. You can watch, you can see it, especially even for the first party. You can see Fortnite's retention right now. You can look see Fortnite's base mode CCU versus UFM. Yeah. So anyway, so I don't want to I don't want to actually broadcast the fact that this has been successful. 722 million of [ __ ] right? But the coolest thing and the best thing about this whole [ __ ] thing was this Witcher 4 demo, right? Unbelievably beautiful like in terms of like what they showed that was possible

with the engine. Now, of course, all the fans remember Cyberpunk and their false flags about how well that thing was going to look and perform. And so, people were are calling foul on this demo. But they were first to admit that this is a tech demo. This is not gameplay. This is not the way the game and the game is going to be. This is literally a tech demo that they do all the time to showcase the new technologies that are unreal. And it was actually unbelievable. Like absolutely unbelievable. It always is. Like they do a really good job of these tech demo. So that was kind of the biggest thing that came out of it that people are talking about. Well, one is like this Unreal 5.6 bundles all of this together that you just said. There's also the metahuman creation tools, which is like this realistic NPCs that you can do in the large scale open worlds. The AI tools that were cool, they help you write the verse code in UFN, which is great for more non-gaming folk to, you know, help figure out verse or even if you're transitioning over. So, I thought some of this Epic Game Store stuff was cool.

Crest, I wanted to get your thoughts. So, it is going to include preloading, so you can that's coming in September. You can do game gifting for the holiday season. Self-publishing tools for Android and iOS in also in Q3. The revenue share model is updated to 0% for the first million in revenue and 12% web shops coming in July. And then I thought this was kind of interesting, especially given the Apple's upcoming announcement around whatever the game center thing is. So Epic has revamped social features that will connect its PC and mobile players with game independent voice chat, text chat, parties along with robust game invites for third party games. Seemed kind of interesting. Anything in here sound good to you? This has come up a lot like whether or not a third party store can actually be successful from the consumer perspective. And so like to the extent that they do cool things for discovery and user acquisition like I think that would be really interesting. The question is are consumers really going to adopt third party stores no matter

what. Right? So there was some announcement that they did 44 million downloads of the store. Again that's a total vanity metric right because it's not a question of actually downloading the store and using it for a launcher for [ __ ] Fortnite. It's a question of how many people are engaged with the store to actually purchase other [ __ ] right? And so it's like I just have my doubts that consumers are going to be moving to something like this on a Apple or Google devices because the store is so integrated and their usage patterns are so set that I don't know it's going to be hard. And what's the differentiated offering here? Like what are they offering that's going to be different than the app store? Well, what I liked was the last bullet, the revamped social features because that is starting to be something that players are going to care about and I think that's going in the right. And this gifting idea, I can give I can give something. Okay, like listen, they are trying they are going in the right direction. They are giving players things that are differentiated from the other stores. It is unclear if these

will actually move the needle to your point. But isn't this the right thing to be thinking about and doing if you are going to try to compete? Question mark. Yeah. So my problem is I want them to be successful because I want I want Apple to eat it every day. I think they should die. I hope they generate no more revenue from the app store. I I want them to be successful, but from a consumer perspective, I just think it's gonna be very very challenging to justify it. Like I remember Origin was like really hot. They were spending a gajillion dollar. I'm not exaggerating. Hundreds of millions of dollars they were spending on building out the Origin platform and it became a launcher for Battlefield, right? That's what it would became. And so like if you looked at the social features they had, you could argue that it was actually in some ways superior to other platforms, not Steam necessarily, but others, they had like 0.5 friends per customer, right? Like that no one was using it for the social features that they were creating. So they were blowing spending all this money to try to build it out, but it

wasn't getting any traction because that's not what people do, right? That's not what consumers do. They don't want another social platform, right? They have their social platforms. they have their game launchers and so it's like just really hard to convince them and I think actually mobile may be harder than PC like in that way. Absolutely. PC console is a squad-based ecosystem, right? Like Elder Ring Night Reign is successful cuz I play it with my friends, right? But my mobile I'm not going to like, oh my god, we got to get on and play Kingshot together. Wow, it's a new game that's coming to this new store. No, that's a really good point. Like my 65-year-old grandma is not going to like hang out with her buddies online, you know, on Game Center, right? Or [ __ ] go to the store and start chitchatting about Bridge the night before. They will like in casual games there are end games with guilds. Yes. But then that is an endgame thing, right? They have started off as a solo player and eventually transition to that solo play and they're not going to want to use another app to do that. Game developers are going to want to keep

that in their own ecosystem. Yeah. Uh, and I'm not even sure that would be the immediate target audience for EGS, but you know. Anyway, let's keep going. So, Star Wars Jedi Director is now on a D&D video game. All right, so other news was that this Star Wars Jedi director guy spun out his own company to make a D&D style video game, which I think is super cool because I think Dn D has been completely underutilized as a license, an IP for what it's known for is RPGs. They had the MMO ages ago that did not do well. I think they tried to tie it too closely to the D&D rule set. But anyway, so we're going to get more details on this in the Summerfest Gamef Fest on June 9th. But this seems really exciting because a game like Jedi Survivor merged with Dn D could be very very very very cool and something I would get excited about. So anyway, like but Balders's Gate 3 was massive, right? Which leaned into the rule set and was a

turn-based RPG which definitely tapped in the real D&D audience, right? But this is an action adventure game. So you're saying like, hey, this audience actually wants to take that like they're in love with the stories, the IP. They want to be able to play that in a action combat, not a turnbased Yes. D&D. I hear the notes of cynicism in your voice there, Mr. There's an underlying concern there. Yes, there's an underlying concern. I'm just suggesting that I am excited about it right now. Whether it's successful or not, we'll see. But like at least this is the guy who has done it well for Star Wars. Totally. Maybe he could do it well for Dn D. That's why I put it this way. You want more action adventure games? Yep. Absolutely. In in the fantasy. Yes. Action adventure. Fantasy. Yes. In D and D. Yes. Yes. I just want like the D and D quiz that helps me understand am I chaotic good or like what's my D and D personality?

That's the game that I want. What I want supposed to be fun is a co-op roglike Elder Ring. So I got it. Nice transition. Yeah. Yeah. So Elder Ring, Night Ring launched actually. Really, really strong CCU. I don't know what the units numbers are yet, but based on this, it looks pretty strong. This is actually another $40 PvE game that's had pretty strong success. Actually has very lightweight progression and pretty variable gameplay. So, the comp here actually is closer to hell divers and we should watch the CCU here. Watch the retention. But this is all about units and I think they're off to a really strong start. I've been playing this over the weekend every night with my group of friends and it's tough as nails but amazing. The problem is I tried it again last night solo and then with randoms and it's impossible. So, like you kind of need two friends. When you have two friends, it's an amazing game. when you don't don't even try. There's a caveat here.

Your friends have to be good, too. Like, if they're trash, you're never going to get anything done, right? Like, they have to be good players. So, one of my friends is not a huge Fromoft fan. We've dragged him through a few of these rounds, and it was pretty funny. I haven't giggled that many times since like Rust, but no, it was funny. And then, but being able to like three good people from Formoft Games, we've been able to get through some bosses here. It's been good. My son has been playing with his cousins and they are all like expert like Elden Ring players. Like they played hundreds of hours between them, you know, on this game. And so they get in there and they're having the time of their lives, right? Because they all take it a little bit too seriously almost. Like I don't know how much joy is there. It's just like, you know, frustration and like banging their head against the wall, but it's really really challenging. Do they swear as often as Call of Duty or more or less? I think that's like the test, right? Frustration. I there's a lot of fbombs going on, right? I can't believe my wife is allowing it. But um but anyway, they

were playing for hours and hours and hours. I think they only got through the first four bosses. I think there's like maybe a total of eight if I'm not mistaken. It's really hard. Like it's really hard. But the only thing that's weird about is like the progression from round to round is not all that serious, right? You don't really get as much advantage. You get three gem slots per hero that have random gems that have random little abilities and you can earn some set ones along the progression. There's two heroes you can earn. It's about it. Okay. Like it is very lightweight. And the the one problem that I actually have with it is that it feels like we've kind of solved the rogike element already. Like we're already getting to the final bosses in every round. We kind of know what the strategy is. Like if you think of like FTL and and Slay the Spire, you should be feeling like every single time you make it to the final boss is a real challenge. Like solving the puzzle is not that easy. So my sense is actually they didn't add enough variability round. Like the map changing, the bosses changing because there's like what is it like eight different bosses, the mid

boss, day two boss, and final boss are all kind of consistent. It makes it so that you can kind of master each round. And this will be much more like a standard levelbased game, which means retention is not going to be there, which is fine to be honest. They're still going to sell the units, but this isn't the same thing as like a Hell Divers, which has a lot more procedural content. Yeah, this is the point I wanted to make is that like it's not set up for replayability really. It's like, yeah, but I think this paradigm is interesting for premium games. Like if you were like an indie doublea now going after like a co-op thing, there's enough gaps in this execution that you could be like, "No, let's build on this." I think there was like an indie game called Sworn last year that did like Hades as a co-op game. There's a lot of space here for interesting things. All right, 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 Claps. 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 her today at heroiclabs.com. Want to know what's really driving your game's growth? Appsflyer gives you the insights you need to scale smarter. From user acquisition to in-game engagement, their industry-leading attribution and analytics tools help you make datadriven decisions that win. Appsfly because every tap tells a story. All right, Zingga is shutting down torch light developer games. These guys did torch light three, not one and two as far as I understand it. And the genericness of this press release was just grotesque. You know, it's like part of a strategic alignment based on resources and priorities. Zing has made

a difficult decision to cease operations, elective studio, ending the development of future titles, and reducing roles. This decision is part of a strategic alignment of the company's resources and priorities. We will work closely with impacted employees. This is like this is the most generic statement ever. I It's really kind of sad. Anyway, not a really good look for for Singa, but I don't really have any insights here. I don't know the team. I don't know what they were actually working on. They were working on some kind of RPG crossplatform. What I did know is it basically they acquired this and they were working on the natural motion Star Wars game, Star Wars Hunter [ __ ] fiasco, right? To build up this crossplatform strategy, right? And but under Take 2's ownership, that crossplatform strategy no longer even makes sense, right? because they're just a mobile division of a big publisher, right? They have tons of AAA content that they're working on. So clearly they just crossplatform is no longer relevant and frankly I mobile to PC and console didn't seem all that relevant anyway. I mean there's some good successes there but that seemed like kind of a stretch

for them anyway. So I think that's just kind of the move that they're making is just getting out of these smaller games and focusing on huge AAA's and then mobile. Next story. I love the story. I love the story because basically I've been following like Sony and Microsoft. They've been focusing on building up advertising in AAA games. And I may have talked this on the podcast before. I don't even remember. But the fact of the matter is I [ __ ] hate the idea of advertising in You said it many times. Shocking. You don't want your ads in console games. Okay. I'm shocked. For premium games, there should be no [ __ ] advertising, right? Like full stop. like that that just like seems but they were going down this road like whatever. And so anyway, Activision in Call of Duty basically put out this update and these ads started coming up during the loadout level. So you're actually loading out and changing your gun and these ads

started popping up for microtransactions within Call of Duty and the [ __ ] audience went berserk. They went absolutely nutso on these guys, right? And so then Activision comes out with this absolute [ __ ] PR response suggesting that AI was like the cause of this and this was a mistake. Completely gaslighting the entire industry. And so like everyone just went nuts on this thing and basically shut it down. They pulled it completely. But they are planning on doing this. Like maybe it was a mistake in terms of roll out, but this is like part of the strategy. Ads just don't pop the [ __ ] up in the middle of a [ __ ] screen. You know, this is this is like the best use case for AI just blaming your PR. Oh, AI went rogue. It went rogue. I'm sorry. Oh god. And so anyway, I I I just found it so funny. So, my only hope is that the outrage that we heard from from the audience will keep this stupid advertising stuff

at bay and they'll stop thinking about doing this stuff and all these companies that are being built up to advertising on consoles, you can [ __ ] die a quick death because this is too much for me. But anyway, it's coming. It's coming, I guess. Oh, yeah. This is probably good for everyone to hear that ads in this format don't work for the community. Shocking. All right, Adam, we've saved 20 minutes for you for our philosophy corner. Here we go. Philosophy corner. Okay, so the topic here is around the problem with AAA greenlights. So, there is an excellent article by Owen Mahoney, ex-president of Nexon called Sympathy for the Devil, which he went through basically the problem with green lights. Also, last week we discussed there was the recent news that EA has canled and shut down the studio working on Black Panther. Jason Shrier came out afterwards and came out and with additional context. Some quotes here from the article. The news came as a shock specifically to the team. Black

Panther had recently passed what EA called a development game. The team had momentum. The project was coalescing and the rumor behind this was that EA executives were frustrated that the game had not left pre-production phase after nearly four years in development. And for context around this four years, this might be a surprise for people coming from mobile. It's not unheard of in AAA to have a 4-year pre-production cycle. 6 to 8year productions are unfortunately becoming more and more the norm for some of these epic scale AAA openw world games. We need to try to find a way to to solve this. six to eight year cycles lead to a lot of bad things, but especially when you've got a new studio, a new engine working through COVID, you've got a recipe for these kind of six to 8year productions. So, this blog post specifically talks through the challenge of making a decision at a green light. And Owen Mahoney, as I

said, president of Nexon from 2014 to 2024, CFO from 2010 to 2014, and then previously was corp dev at EA. The challenge here of like a green light meeting is sitting and putting your head in the the executives's mind here. Do you trust this plan? Right? This plan as presented. Do you believe this game will be fun? Will it sell? Will it cost as much as they're saying it will cost? Or how many delays do you bake into your mind that this thing will actually cost? Really? Do you plus the plan, the team? And unfortunately, can you even say no? And I think this is where we get into a lot of the sunk cost fallacy, but there is a lot more pressure to stay with the default path of saying yes than there is to say no and to cancel. There's tremendous amount of talent risk. There's cost risk, but some cost fallacy is real. And of course, what this translates to is most of these green lights end up never being a full no unless there's a smoking gun. It ends up being more like yes, but with caveats or

yes with additional concerns. So digging into things like is this actually fun, right? The team is presenting the world, the art being pretty, bugs are getting squashed, momentum is good, but unfortunately most of these green lights don't focus on whether it's actually working, if the game is actually fun, if the game will actually sell. It typically focuses a lot more on production momentum than it does on commercial viability. Typically research backs up some of these decisions. So they're bringing in saying hey we got great fun scores players are loving it but the reality is I think much of this research especially presented by the game teams can be bent can be adjusted can have the finger on the scale additionally sort of plans are then built you know maybe it's not fun now maybe the executives don't have full trust yet but hey trust us it will be in x amount of months and then eventually the big decision around a delay can happen and This goes into the article

around like do you kill the game, do you force the date or do you delay? And of course, if you delay, then you're killing credibility with your board. So answering all of this in a 90-minute meeting is just not realistic. The big flaws with this is that most executives assume linear progression of games. When games are jungles, even in production, there's always going to be es and flows in conviction and momentum. big decisions are happening in these meetings with actually pretty limited information. You know, no one in these meetings ever says that there's not enough information. Teams put together decks and decks and decks, tons of spreadsheets of checklists, but ultimately most of these green lights turn into a dog and pony show. This then starts to emphasize more around the schedule than around fun and commercial viability. And this is especially true because burn rates are intense in AAA reaching 30, 40, 100 million yearly burn rates. So the problem then becomes these

green lights frontload the wrong risks. Dex becomes more important than software. A good sounding strategy becomes better than execution. Having amazing pretty artwork becomes more important than real fun. Having those pretty pictures for your decks. tutorials become more important than deep systems to make sure execs have fun in the 15 minutes that they actually play in these green lights and USPS is more important than the game to get your marketing team on your side in these meetings. So this all points towards like clear underlying issues that like the process of which we build out these green lights the way that we kind of coales this decision puts a lot of emphasis on the wrong things as well. He points at things like tools development process and our over focus on graphics as our selling point makes this problem worse and worse. So my take on the article is that I think this is absolutely a discussion that we need to be having. That's why I'd like to bring it up here and I'd like to have even more discussion after

this podcast. What I'm missing from the article is actually a discussion on real solutions since I think in general, yeah, 90-minute meetings with 30 plus executive stakeholders are just never going to be the forum where decisions are really made. Like these will always be dog and pony shows because unfortunately there's too high of a stakes. There's too many stakeholders in the room. The reality is that there's just going to have to be more sort of closed door meetings afterwards where the teams objectively evaluate the momentum. And that's why like most of the stuff will end up being more dog and pony shows as long as everybody's careers and stakes rely on it. It's really hard for any game team to present an objective truth about their own game. And as games become more complex, it's no longer just about the box and about USPS. for executives to have conviction in these investments, it takes a lot more granular checklists and breakouts of objective experts bubbling up a clearer look at the overall game health.

Like especially as we're talking about not just box premium products, we're also talking about live services. It's not just like, hey, the USPS look good. It's the fun, it's the retention, it's everything else. So on top of this, research and forecasts are flawed. Research can be bent. Forecasts can be goal seeking rather than bottoms up reality. Making P&L's typically a pretty useless exercise. So what's better is having a conversation mapping execution against key assumptions in those forecasts, key assumptions in that research to make sure that we're always saying like, hey, we said this game relies on XYZ to exceed. Do we believe we can get there? And constantly having a very objective analysis of that to drive the decision here. That's not simple, but that has to come top down mandate. That that's the way that you make decisions. And in general, you have to embrace the fact that game companies are terrible at killing games in general. Like I did I literally did a GDC talk about this I think 10 years ago. Even though I talked about killing

games, like Wuga was [ __ ] at it to be completely clear. Like we talked about, "Oh my god, we kill games all the time." No, we were pretty [ __ ] at killing games. We're even talking about Supercell. Like Supercell, hey, we kill games all the time. Supercell, you're also [ __ ] at it. I'm sorry. AAA devs never can make a decision quickly. So this is the really hard part. It's like how do you break people out of their human nature? Saying yes, but please fix some things is easy versus fighting against some cost fallacy, objectively looking at the evaluation and understanding when you're really off track. That's a really difficult problem. What I really appreciate about the blog post was that him just calling this out for everything that we all feel every time we go into one of these meetings, no matter what side of the table you're on. If you're on the game side, you're like, "Uh, it's a dog and pony show. I just have to figure out how to tell them what they want so they greenlight me." And if you're on the executive side, you're like, "I know they're bullshitting me and they just want a green light and what I'm really looking at might not actually be true." And so I think there

is a lot of human nature of how do you actually have a real conversation about the real state of the game. And one of the things that you pulled out that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to talk about was research and how difficult research can be and how much of a crutch it can be either way depending on how objective your research team is. In some cases, your research team goes native and then they just support the game team and other times they're too harsh. And other times it is garbage in, garbage out. Adam and you and I were talking about this before the podcast is you can get false positives or false negatives if the assets you're putting into research don't do a good job of reflecting what the product is because players and consumers can never ever tell you what they want. they can only react to the stimulus that you're showing them. And if your stimulus sucks and you're doing a bad job, then you're going to not get great data coming out at that. And I would say even to that

point, like the executive team can never be worried about that, right? Like I have never met an executive that's going to go like, "Oh, that research, what was the exact asset that you tested with? Is that an unbiased?" Like nobody's going that deep into the research, right? Because they don't have time. It's a 90-minute meeting. The bedrock of our decision is like, hey, this number is green, right? Yep. But the reality is that that number was created in an biased way. Then it becomes, how are we really making good decisions at this point? Yeah. Every research deck, you know, I either read or work on has 50 pages. And you're right. So, it's like all of these different insights. I mean, the time and energy I put into creating the assets. I was on a project last year where I spent so much time going into and creating what is the paragraph that we show people first. How do we talk about the USPS and different features? How do we talk about what we want to understand? And then what is like a visual asset that we're creating that

showcases the game play when the game team only has like gray box stuff to show. What do I make up and put in there? How do I tell the story? What's the voice over? like those assets are crucial and then how do I make sure the game team isn't like going to [ __ ] all over the assets that we know we jointly created together so that they then [ __ ] on the results and say oh well that's not actually true about the game and so to me one of the places I think we should all put more attention and focus on is in that early stage play testing consumer research so I wanted to ask you actually you know a lot of what we you know we talk about mobile all the time should AAA They start taking learnings from, this is going to sound crazy, from hyper casual studios who prototype things more quickly, who get to things more quickly just in terms of like finding the fun and the play without worrying about, you know, the beautiful crazy graphics and the beautiful art in a sense. Do we care as much about that

in finding the fun? I know it's not a perfect one for one and you're not going to like take a shitty hyper casual game and be like this is the next Witcher 4 with a tech demo that's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen but are there learnings? Am I crazy? The only point I was going to make is that these decisions get so complicated because they're mired in a bunch of other decisions that have been made whether you know Laura Mielli is on the hot seat right now because she got the Star Wars licenses, she got these Marvel licenses and they have to make use of them, right? So there are financial considerations about how much money they spent for these licenses and and what their contract is required to, right? With the Star Wars license, for instance, they never hit the milestones that they were required to. So they canceled projects and whatever else. So, this is actually Laura is like really in in a tough spot here because any she was in charge of those two licenses as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, the cancellation fee is like tens of millions of do I mean I'm guessing. I actually don't know but I would imagine and they have to have a certain amount of projects in development or whatever. So, they still

have these these things going, right? They evidently still have Iron Man and maybe one other Marvel game, but they definitely have another Star Wars game. So, those are part of the considerations that have nothing to do with the actual assets and the and the development process or whatever. The other thing that like a little bit of context for this is that EA has been trying to build an action game since the 2000s, dude. I think since the '9s, right? They've been trying to be competitive. They had Action Girl for a while. I think in Montreal they built that Superman game in Tibrron that was [ __ ] terrible, right? Like they made those Lord of the Rings movie games. Remember those? Those were good. Those were good. Those were good. Those were good. But they really wanted like a single character action game and they finally made one with the Star Wars game, right? The Star Wars game was like kind of their first success in that genre, material success. So they've been trying to build this stuff for a long time. So there's that as well that they're like trying to be competitive in that space and they're using these licenses to do so. So there's political pressure there. So what I'm trying to say is that these green light processes are far more

complex because there are other business considerations that are not part of what the game is. there's other things that are going on that needs to be, you know, Laura needs to prove that these licenses were worth getting, right? And so, like, you can't cancel a project like that, you know, after signing these big licenses. You know what I'm saying? So, like there's political pressure there, you know? Like, I don't know. There's all kinds of considerations. I'm not close to this one at all, so I don't really know exactly what's going on, but it's just something to keep in mind. I'm sure that like slowed down any decision-m process, right? Like the weight of you signed up for this license. You're telling me 4 years after pre-production that we're now going to cancel that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like that. Yeah. But I guess to your point on like hyper casual, that is insanely tough. Let's think of this as like AAA single player action adventure games. I don't think there's a lot of learnings you can apply from hyper casual given like how much time it would take to get to a testable state for these games that would apply in any sort of hyper casual style test. the way that they think

about it, right? You've got small teams prototyping different kinds of play patterns rapidly getting to a playable thing. It feels like, yeah, I listen, I get it. Like, you know, can you mock that up to be the next Jedi Survivor or the next whatever? I get that's tough. But are AAA teams so stuck to the point of this article in the old ways, in the old best practices that people aren't taking a step back and saying, "Hey, could we prototype differently? Could we mock something up in a different way?" I I guess that's just my challenge. And maybe I I was in going extreme and saying like, hey, the voodoo method of prototyping 2,000 things like I'm just going to extreme just to say that AAA is stuck in the other extreme, which nothing has changed in the way that you make a AAA game in 20 years. And I find that concerning. Yep. Absolutely. So there is a part of this around getting faster to a faster to fun, faster to a testable state, better benchmarks for

really really early in production. So it can gives you the signal. But like the issue with hyper casual is hyper casual lives or dies based on CPI and D1 retention and they actually don't care so much about D30. They don't care so much about some of those longerterm metrics. Yeah. So that's why like even hyper casual doesn't always apply directly to normal mobile games, right? like you still do CPI tests, you still do as many of these things, but because hyper casual could frontload so much of their risk in terms of those early signal metrics, that meant that those iteration cycles could be that fast, which is great for them. For AAA, you're we're still talking about like can we get 8 million, 10 million, 15 million people to pay 70 bucks, 80 bucks for this game. That is a lot harder problem. Absolutely. No, I I I hear you. I just in the world of solutions, how do you teach, you know, 300 person AAA team how

to get unstuck from the ways that they've been doing things? I think we need better objective tools to break teams out of that earlier in production. I just don't know what those are yet. All right. Well, well done. We're not solving the world's problems here on today's podcast. We are only surfacing them. I like the fact that Owen Mahoney after being CEO for a while and CFO of Nexon's out there just philosophizing, you know, like he's out there writing LinkedIn article like article like just throwing grenades like getting the discussion going. I think that's good. I love it. Yeah. All right, everyone. That wraps it up for this week. We will see you next week. 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 Fun Slack group? If you have 5 years or more

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