TWIG #340 Scopely Goes to War, Roblox Gambles on IP and Turkey Rises

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aircraft strategy investing. 10 years 10 years of my gossamer consulting. I hit my anniversary. Yeah.
Congrats.
I actually I forgot about it. I started in August after my stint at Cabum and have been doing it ever since.
And Gossamer comes from the tentacles of the spider, right?

No, Gossamer was my character in World of Warcraft. So, what is it like? Blizzard gives you a a sword at 10 years or a shield or some [ __ ] What do you get? What do you get at your company?
I guess I get a plushy of customers.
I think you can finally wear the vest now. The puffer.
Oh, that's true. I should get a puffer vest. So,
what do you mean you should? Aim sent you one.
Yeah.
All right, let's keep going. Phil.
Phil monetization zar.
Where does the zar come from?
Well, you remember like it was like the Obama administration. Everyone was getting like this Zar title and like everyone was embracing it and I was like [ __ ] who doesn't want to be a Zar.
That sounds awesome. Like a there's always like a drugar in the United States for some reason.
Really?
Yeah.
I remember Cryptozar. That was the uh the best side character we had on the show.
King of Spain. Come on.
King of Spain. I like that one. So uh the founder whisperer. Let's go. Let's start the podcast. Nobody is interested in us. Everybody's interested in the news.
We have a lot. So, first Crest is going to go full 60 minutes and be

investigative reporter on the Craftton Subnotica 2 drama. I'm so excited for this one. It's like Real Housewives of the game industry going on. Roblox announces a new IP licensing platform. European mobile game makers are still able to raise money, especially Turkish ones. And a surprising French dev, too. Crest is going to lose his mind. Moon Active takes a direct shot at Scopi. Maybe AI really is taking all of our jobs. It just asked the folks at King London about this. And apparently I have no power over Mishka to uphold my supercell ban.
[ __ ] You missed the the most important news that came out today. I was just playing Rebel Moon Bloodline on Netflix. It's the quintessential Super Evil Mega Corp stuff through and through. superdetailed, dark environments, realistic proportion in an isometric game, sci-fi that it's hard to understand. Very well done, beautiful BFX's, beautiful, you know, story line. I haven't played it too much, but I

think I'll be playing this for the next week. Any um guesses on how many downloads this does. After all, it's one of the worst franchises Netflix has. So, uh what is the overunder on this couple? Wow, that's really low, Phil. It's all just rounding errors. There's nothing for anyone to add except fulfilling a contract obligation. Like, everyone's just going through the motions at this point. Like, the fact that they're still using this engine is incredible. Like, they're just dragging this thing. Like, I've known a lot of developers who have basically lived off like someone subsidizing their engine and then just using that for every single IP they can throw at it for like mouth-to-mouth jobs to survive. It's incredible. Let's let's let's banter it up. We actually watched the the Minecraft movie as a family for the first time in four years we've been able to watch. So our daughter is our youngest is four years so she can actually sit through it.
Eldest is eight. She absolutely loved

it. And the next day we had to go to the toy store to get the chicken jockey Lego set. And now she's like she's, you know, finishing it up. She didn't want to go to Taekwond do today to get the camp because she just wants to build this finish up the set. And next she wants to Dennis the wolf. And interestingly enough, like we do have Minecraft and she didn't even ask to play Minecraft. Like it didn't even pop to her head that this is an actual game. So I'm asking Jen, is this the trans media as its finest? Like have we has the family cat been transmediated? This is as old school as it gets. This is my entire first part of my career.
Oh man, I want to do Can I do an impression?
Yeah, do it. Do it.
No, no. I I mean like look, let me just whip out my funnel. Like you got understand marketing is a funnel and at the top of the funnel is like brand awareness and then that converts. Like how does it

go? Like there's a funnel. You're always coming to this funnel. No, you're awful. Okay. All right. All right. Here, let me do let me do my Here's my short version of franchise management.
[ __ ] this trans media stuff. It's franchise management. Kid goes to see content. Kid bugs the [ __ ] out of parents for toys and consumer products. That is like the tale of as old as time to also repeat Disney. So, what's the same is like it movies and TV used to be the thing that you would go see and then go want the toy. And by the way, you big boys do the same thing when you see that like car ad and you're like, "Oo, I really want to go get that Porsche." Perhaps somebody on the podcast might relate to that. The new school is that YouTube shorts, games, and Roblox are becoming the sources. So, welcome to my world of franchise moneymaking, which is what I used to do at Disney. So, we're actually in a resurgence of this. So, PG movies are on fire. So, Comcore data has found that PG- related films have

collectively grossed 1.72 billion in North America the first six months of the year, which is about 42% of the box office revenue. That's up from 31% last year. And last year, full year, actually had Inside Out 2, Moana, Live Lion King. And so this year, what we're seeing is that like kids content and PG or family content is back. Superman lightened its tone. Did you see it? Actually, it was okay. I didn't love it. and I'm a DC fan. So, this year it's been Minecraft, How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo and Stitch. Fun fact, I actually worked on Lilo and Stitch.
Oh, kids love it. Well, I don't know what's going on with Lilo and Stitch, but it's like it's huge.
Yeah. Anyway,
it's been huge since the beginning. I got to work with the director who is the voice of Stitch and he reprised his role in the new one. It is like the most adorable that this should be your next one. It is a boy character. Disney doesn't have a lot of boys characters. Ignore Marvel and Star Wars. And so Stitch became one of the leading and only boys character because he's kind of naughty. I didn't even go to my

awareness funnel. Anyway, let's keep going. Shill Mishka quick show. So Gamescom, we got two events finally. Links to both of them. The links are in description 19th and the 20th. We got the whiskey water tasting. We got the heroic big party. So I think heroic party has already 400 signups. So drop your name there. Going to get to 800. It's going to be a big party. Other show is I did an episode about Pakistan the gaming ecosystem growing. I had Sad Hamid from Game District. He came on the podcast. I actually met Sad in Abu Dhabi last year. Super nice guy and has a pretty interesting operation like 17 studios. I think 3 to 400 employees. Their biggest game did 125 million in downloads. They got 50 games at over 10 million downloads each. Most interestingly, no VC funding. So imagine what this guy can do with some growth capital actually. It's really interesting. Got a lot of requests on LinkedIn from Pakistanis to connect after the episode.

So and just just for information, I'm not accepting if I don't know you, I'm not accepting you. Anyways, that's that one. I suggest you listen to it because I think this is kind of like one of those up and cominging areas just like Vietnam was a couple of years ago. I think Pakistan is next. I got message even from Google is like let's go champ like let's do Google stuff. So that's my and then we also released Jen your episode.
Yeah. So I interviewed Scopely CMO Ben Webbley at MAU back in May. We have a kind of an shorter version of that that we just posted. Goes into a lot of, you know, cool topics around creative testing. So check that out. It was really, really fun. He's a great guy. I've known him at my Zinga time, my EA time. And so
Meta Time.
Oh, he worked at Meta. didn't. But yes, I mean, he's just
like number one is just a great human. And so any chance to talk to him about what Scopley's up to was great. So check that out.

And hopefully we can release the unedited version again. Scopely, please. The one is 10 minutes. The real conversation was 30. It's okay. He didn't say anything wrong. Let's go with the full one. Let's go unedited.
Yeah. I mean, you know, they they like to leave a little bit hanging for people to come in in real life.
Cover their six. You know,
I will tease it starts with a really fun Monopoly fact, so just buckle in.
Oh,
the opening segment. I've I've listened to the podcast.
Oh, thank you. Oh, that's so nice.
Eric, you doing okay over there?
I'm still upset with the Circon guy who put together some [ __ ] analysis on April. And the more I think about it, the more I'm just like, it's like seems so political what he was doing. It had nothing to do with reality. I feel like apparently we didn't push back hard enough against the Gen Z point and I will push back against Jen on the Gen Z point about disposable income. So if you remember last week
there was Sconoid data saying Gen Z's spending on
video games was down right and the

source was prior year. So like listen I don't know I just want to say that's what the chart said
exactly. So I think what's important here is to weight that evidence by the strength of the evidence the strength of that and so right now we have like basically you're comparing one month over one month which Eric pointed out right could be affected by one game we don't know the source of the data how it was collected right it was appeared in the Wall Street Journal so is it credit card panel data is it server data who knows how many players it was collected from who knows and then what we have is we have a Federal Reserve working paper which looks at the amount of income in the United States after taxes and transfers Gen Z have on a cohorted basis. So like by age 20 comparing Gen Z to Gen X, Boomers, Silent, all of the different generations, Gen Z is the best off in terms of median income after taxes and transfers adjusted for inflation. And I think that is important

data that is more important than a random Circon survey.
Yeah, exactly. All right, moving on. I just profoundly disappointed in that analysis. All right, moving on. I'm I this is a long diet tribe. I apologize, but it is kind of a complicated situation given the fact that there's huge two sides of this thing. So, Craftton is delaying Subnotica 2 ahead of a $250 million payout that was promised to the developers based upon performance, right? So the story fundamentally is that Craftton is postponing Subnotica 2 to 2026 for a lot of reason but one is that the co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max Magcguire along with the CEO Ted Gil were recently removed and replaced by Steve Paputsis of Striking Distance Studios. So the delay basically came right before they were potentially going to be able to earn a $250 million earnout in 2025. And so the allegations is that the postpone is a strategic move to basically eliminate the ability for them to pay this out. But Craftton is publicly claiming that the game simply

isn't ready and needs more polish. And then Unknown World's ousted leadership is obviously insisting the game was ready and the staff had expected substantial bonuses. I guess to start this thing off, we have to understand the background here. So Craftton acquired Unknown Worlds after the success of the original Subnotica in 2021 for 500 million. Since then, they've only had one release, which was Moonbreaker, which is an absolute disaster of epic proportions. Like, it didn't do anything, right? So, to be clear, similar to what they did with Zinga, they put an impairment charge, a loss of 190 million in 2023 related to this acquisition. So, clearly, this acquisition has not gone well for them to date by any measure that I can see, right? But the absolutely critical part of this is the release of the sequel to their huge hit of Subnotica. And by the way, Subnotica was an absolutely amazing game, a game before its time, built by a small team. It took the world by storm and it is a very, very fun and great game. All right, so here's Craftton's

argument. Craftton is saying they're delaying the game for quality. The content was missing in the game. The leadership was not managing this process and they had other commitments and other things that they were doing. and they are claiming that they were basing it on project status, not the $250 million earnout for the executives. And Craftton is basically suggesting that they want to make sure that this game is ready and that they get a long-term success, not just like a one-shot like revenue hit, revenue bump in the year. Unknown Worlds is basically saying the game was ready and argues that it was ready for early access. That they are accusing Craftton of basically delaying the game to avoid this $250 million playout. There's a breach of trust and they're they were unjustly dismissed by the company and now they are filing an legal action against the company
that is sealed. Yes.
What
the lawsuit is sealed which was interesting.
Oh really? Oh because there's a lot of information thrown around about this thing. That's why it's so complicated because it's just
Yeah. I read up on it like before like

the latest this morning and that was like oh I'm like oh that's kind of fascinating that you all are complaining and but the lawsuit is sealed anyway continue on.
So okay so so here's my take on this right fundamentally right and and this is tough because obviously we don't know all the information but like there's two key questions that doesn't seem to be asked by anybody. I don't know why, but one question was asked. The second question was not asked. But the first question is, is the game ready for release? Right? Like that's actually a fundamental question. Is it ready for release? And by these leaked quote unquote documents that suggested what they anticipated for the early access launch to what they are planning on releasing for the early access launch, it is really relatively clear, if you believe these documents, that the title was not ready. Right? The title was not content complete to release. And I played this game enough to know that what they were releasing was not enough to keep players engaged and to create a service that would generate significant amounts of revenue for them going forward. Right? It's just 50% of the

game was not ready for release based upon what they originally assumed that they would do. So it I don't know. They seem to be offtarget. Right.
Yeah. These slides have been verified by Craftton that they are real from the milestone meeting. Just that's the latest,
right?
So these are legit slides that we're looking at.
I know. But it's so gross that these were leaked. Clearly they were leaked for a reason, right? they were. Anyway, so but I think the more important thing here that no one seems to be asking and I did read it on a Slack channel thing, but like given the performance of Moonbreaker, which would also be included in this calculation, like is there any way they would have gotten to the earnout bonus, right? Like if they're going to get a $250 million earnout bonus, they have to make more money than $250 million, right? And Moonbreaker made nothing, right? So, can you tell me for certainty that like in the next like in the back half of this month, like the last three months of this year, that they would been able to recoup the $250 million and above that

in order to earn it?
That's not how earnout works. Like, they might have had different triggers for the earnout. It could be production related. It could be review related. It's not necessarily how much they generate. Usually, it's earnout is some kind of a milestones that you achieve and then out of what you generate, you get a percentage. So above of 250 they would have gotten percentage from sales I think. Like that's typically I've seen,
right? But everyone keeps throwing this $250 million number out here like they were going to get a [ __ ] check.
Like it's guaranteed. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, that that's how it works. Like the way I understand and the way I've seen earnouts being structured. So they already got the 500. So the founders I think got 90% of 500 or something like that and then the rest was left of 250 of the total earnout. And there were milestones like one must have been the release of this game and then usually there's no
first of all that is dumb, right? Like there was no way that anybody would ever structure a deal in which it's just based upon release.

Yeah.
It's based upon performance.
No.
Like no no
I've never seen an earnout structure in my life.
Are you being sarcastic?
Yes.
Oh,
I've never seen one, never signed one. never worked at a at a big publisher and they would for sure not pay for reaching certain milestones.
But look, if you're a financially motivated company, a publicly traded company, you're not giving a $250 million check for releasing a game. You're getting it from performance on revenue. Like that there's no way that doesn't even make sense. Okay, so I'm not going to comment more, but let's say I have seen different and I you're coming from the right perspective of how structures should be, but the way I'm telling you is often times there are other metrics that are tied to the earnout and then on top of that there's usually a revenue share that comes from so that component is like these are crazy contracts. We're talking about 2021 contract. It is absolutely ludicrous. But I would assume that the

release of this game would have triggered a big portion of the earnout.
Yeah, it just seems like half of their purchase price at 250 seems like a lot. And then the way that the 250 allocation works, 90% went to the three founders and then the last 10% goes to the company to the employees. The argument is that the three founders said that they were planning on distributing some of their earnout money to the team, but contractually that's not listed in anything that we've read. So that's a little bit of the disagreement as well that Craftton is saying that the founders didn't intend to distribute that. Whether that was going to happen or not and how that was going to happen, I think we don't know.
Just saying Chris, it could be it could be much crazier than you think. I see here the likely scenario is that the team was just not on track, right, to hit the earnout, right? And Moonbreaker like literally was like a big part of the calculus here and they just it was a

disaster. It was just an absolute bomb. I don't think it generated more than like three or four million dollars, right? So again, if you're talking about a $250 million earnout and they want to be whole and cash flow positive on this thing, they have to hit significant amounts of revenue on this game. And frankly, Subnotica, despite its success, did not do that much revenue. Like over its life, it certainly did, but certainly not initially. So anyway, it doesn't seem very likely that they were on track to earn the earnout. So what I think is that Craftton is delayed Subnotica so that they would be able to recoup as much money as possible from this acquisition that's gone sideways, right? And management said, "No [ __ ] way. We want a shot at earnout." Or maybe you're right, maybe part of the earnout at least. But realistically, I mean, this wasn't likely going to happen. And again, based upon performance to date, like it didn't make sense for Craftton to release something now, but it makes much more sense to release it later when it was actually ready for prime time and it could generate significance amounts of revenue and deliver on the promise of the game

itself for that matter, right? And so like the cynical part of me basically says that basically Craftton's claimed that management kind of checked out and was working on other projects and wasn't really focused on this game development and this is why it was delayed and why they didn't have any of the content that they promised, etc. that they weren't being leaders in the company. My my cynical side is basically saying, well, look, if they didn't believe they were going to hit this earnout, then maybe they did as creative people focus on other things, right? But the reality is I don't think they would have abandoned their child, right, of this game. I think they would want to get this thing done in effective way. So, I think that's a little bit like cynical to think that they would have have done that and abandoned their baby type thing. On the flip side, like releasing a game like Subnotica with the level of content that they were suggesting just doesn't make sense like logically, right? Because the part of the engagement is the amount of you the biomes and and all the content that they you need to get through like the Subnautica fans of this game would get through this content in like less than like 24 hours, you know? I was like that

doesn't work for a game like this. So, I didn't know that they actually closed the lawsuit, but um I I imagine we'll get more and more details as they go through discovery, but if they're trying to keep it on the hush hush, which I'm a little bit shocked given how much information was thrown out there. Anyway, that's all I got.
Yeah, really good breakdown. Thank you, Eric. For my point, just three things like I I think you're absolutely correct. I think, you know, even based on the reports, it's quite typical for the founders to check out. And I think they were doing other projects. I think they earned 500 million already and took 90% of that to the founders. So each of them was doing quite well. Uh probably traveling between Vegas and Honolulu on the regular. I don't know. I'm just just throwing out there. But you know any of us could imagine how their life would change if you go from grinding on this development studio to having 70 million in your bank account. There was interesting off-topic comment on LinkedIn from a person who used to work at Garina Corpdev. I

couldn't find it. I tried to look at it, but he basically commented that um yeah, I looked at this case and some sort of like we passed because of the founders or something like that. I'm paraphrasing, but I remember seeing that comment on maybe it was your LinkedIn was full of this news, but I remember seeing that it was weirdly open comment on it kind of like signing that there is an issue with the founders and that's why the Karina passed on it and I do believe that Craftton did pull the plug to avoid the earnouts and I think that the earnouts were milestone based in this case and that's why they pulled the plug. If they weren't, if it was about generating 250 mil, then I think there wouldn't be any kind of a rush of pulling the plug because this game that is not ready clearly wouldn't make that money. And yes, there would be bad PR just like with the Minds Eye type of a thing, but that would have just, you know, killed the studio. So, in this case, if they knew that they would have to pay significant amount, then it they saved $250 million by essentially

escalating this this case into a lawsuit.
I'm not going to let you go on that one. That doesn't make any sense. Like,
oh, the milestone based earnouts.
These are smart people that know how to like negotiate terms. They're not giving away money on a release. Like, that's really that's just doesn't even make sense.
I'm not going to comment on that. What we could do is we could talk to the smart folks at ARM who deal with with sales and earnouts a lot or any of the VCs who see earnout sheets and they can comment if they have seen if you're a VC or an investment banker and you have seen earnouts where it's tied to release and production milestones, holla at us DM. We will not tell who it is. We will just say you're from reputable company or if we're wrong on this then also DM us. So, um,
I'm not suggesting that there aren't payouts based upon
milestones. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that a $250 million payout,
holy is not based upon mileston. Yeah. I mean, that seems extreme.

So, in this case, it could be something like 50 mil is unlocked when they pass pre-production. 50 mil is passed when they pass production and then there could be like 100 mil when they reach. But there are elements that are tied to actually launching a game. In some companies that have live operations, it could be passing the test launch phases. So I've seen those with different companies.
I think we agree.
They are significant. They're like 30% of the earnout when you pass the milestone.
All right. So the one thing I wanted to mention is I have never seen a statement like this from a big company on their website going into this dirty laundry. I was absolutely shocked. Listen, I kind of applaud it. I applaud the transparency, but holy [ __ ] was it like, you know, get your popcorn out moment. The second thing I wanted to get Phil's perspective on really quick is early access means a lot more now than it did in 2021. When you early access a game,

it is almost like a launch. And so, do you think, Phil, that had anything to do with this? I think people just want more money for enzoy development crafting. Jesus Christ. Yeah,
thank you for answering my question.
What a troll. What a troll.
I actually I I actually did forget to mention that like I think they're feeling a bit burned too, right? Inzo was a disaster. Calisto Protocol was an absolute train wreck.
PUBG New State, how about that?
PUBG is [ __ ] delivering by the way. We haven't covered that. PUBG is doing a ton of crazy awesome [ __ ] right now. PUBG or PC PUBG.
The PC PUBG.
No, that's a Jacob. I Philip, that has nothing to do with this. This is all about
Did you just like mix up your son's name with Phil?
Yeah, I do that all the time. Um,
we should call Phil. We're having all these deals that they signed since the success of PUBG and just have not worked out, right? Particularly for the Western developers. Like, they're having their NetIs moment where they're just

basically pulling back on all things, right? And so, you know, Kalisto Protocol was a train wreck of epic proportions in terms of money spent and dollars earned. And so, I think this is like actually part of that as well. I'm sure management was just not happy with these investments.
All right. So, I'm going to cover Roblox's new IP licensing platform. Get ready for what looks like their new Upwork or Fiverr for the Roblox platform. So, they announced this yesterday on July 15th. It's a new licensing platform including license manager and the licenses catalog. So with this launch creators can build experiences with popular IP. So if you know anyone can kind of apply to work with different IP rights holders get a new self-s serve. So I thought this was interesting part of it. There's self-s serve IP management tools making it easy to provide licenses to their IP at scale for use at Roblox. So the two big components here is one is if you're like an IP holder, you register, you can

create a new IP. You can customize the terms that govern it. You can proactively scan experiences for IP usage. So this will become important later on. Offer license uses directly to creators and automatically collect revenue. Hopefully the revenue is not in Robux, which is a pain in the ass, but you can do that automatically. So the other piece of it that it does is you can offer license use of IP to creators by identifying experiences that might qualify for the use listing your IP that's available and then creators can browse and apply for use of the IP. So through the platform the IP holder can actually approve or not approve people to use different things. So here's what they're launching with which as you know someone who knows licenses I was a little bit embarrassed for them. Can we get a drum roll for like the premiere lices to kill it with go slay genen? What a rip.
Yeah. Yeah. So, the four studios are

Lionsgate, Netflix, Sega, and Kadanchu. Like, I actually don't even know how to say this. So, Like a Drag. Here are some of the IP they're launching with some of this. I'm like, what is this? Like a Dragon. Don't know this. Now you See Me. Oh my god. This is like the a card poker movie from 10 years ago.
Jesse. Jesse Eisenberg or something. Remember there mystical elements.
It's like uh Oceans 11 with
Yeah. There's there's weird [ __ ] at the end of that movie.
Oh, all right. Oh, that's right. Spoiler alert. Yeah. Squid Game, which by the way is done. Stranger Things. The Divergent series. Oh my god. Flashback to something.
But only
Twilight.
Only the movie right only based that are based on a young adult
book series. Twilight series, Go Team Bella from 20 years ago and the extremely kid-friendly Saw series. If you don't know the Saw series, it is the big rated R gory like the guy with the

mask like puts people in a room and makes them kill each other. So like really appropriate for the Roblox kid audience. They say longterm they're going to open it up. So these are the test subjects for this. So, just for a little context and comparison, it's extremely similar to what happens with Epic, Fortnite's UFN licensed IP platform. So, they have Lego, Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Walking Dead. They actually have Squid Game as well. Uh, all of that's live now. And so, you can imagine with Disney, the Disney deal that they're going to have Disney IP coming later. So, when you look at Fortnite.gg, you can see that some of these games using this IP have done well. the ones that get made by the platform experts that know how to make on UEA make games for UFN, those are the ones that end up doing well. And so remember that typically in licensing there's about a 15% rev share that goes to the lensur. So here's where I wanted to break this down. This is not the holy grail that you know this isn't the licensing model that you're looking for.

You know, in the words of the great Obi-Wan, these aren't the droids you're looking for. So, the biggest win isn't actually going to be what you would expect. I would say it is going to be the ability for brands to police and take down people infringing on their IP and all of the knockoffs. So, ask any anime game and they'll tell you knockoffs are out of control. So, you know, One Piece as an example of, you know, just take a big IP. One of the biggest games on Roblox is a ripoff of the One Piece IP, which was Blox Fruits. they actually had to change their name from block piece to blocks fruits and they had to change some things in the game to uh comply. And so when you look at this, you know, sadly too, the IP games actually don't even perform that well. And so IP in a sense doesn't always matter to kids. What matters is making a great freaking game on the platform that kids want to play. So they actually, you know, like the licensing may or actually not be the most important thing. So on revenue, this also might not be the answer that you

would expect. You're like, Jen, there's so many more ways, you know, people can make games with an IP. So remember that when you make money, if you're a developer, you only get 21% of gross to net because of all the platform fees, all the Roblox fees. So imagine then you've got 21%. Now if you're a developer, you're going to pay 15% to a license. So for lensur this is like collecting pennies from the bottom of you know a fountain like the revenue is not even going to really matter that much. The big win for you is going to be you know maybe one of these games actually takes off but it's like playing the lottery on that. So this is also really disruptive. It's going to piss off a number of these agencies out there that specialize in IP and brand based games. You know our friend Ethan made a Lego game for somebody that he worked for. So those people are going to be super pissed off because, you know, those brand people aren't going to be needed as much if there's now a platform that you can go to. On the flip side,

this actually democratizes the ability for a teenager next door to go make an official Squid Game, Roblox game. He's probably made a fake one, so now he can do an official one. The one thing I can think of on the plus side is time to market will dramatically shrink, meaning more franchise opportunities, formerly called trans media. So maybe now there can be some IP that gets out in time. We always complain about like why didn't Fallout have more new products? Well, maybe this will allow it, assuming they can upload all the assets in time, which also like never really happens. So in short, brands, you know, they'll probably need to be there, you know, but they're going to need to be there to play defense, not offense. So that's my update for everyone. And if you care about licensing,
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full disclosure, we've left the show

section.
Yeah.
This is big news.
Yeah. So, good good for them.
Yeah. Well, staying on the uh on the turkey topic. I mean, there was a news that mobile game developer Circle Games has secured over $7 million in seed funding led by BigCraft with backing from A16Z speedrun, E2VC, Play Ventures, API Ventures, and so forth. These funds will go towards blah blah blah blah blah. And they're making a puzzle game. Anyway, so so just to cut this short,
dude. All I have to say is Bitcraft and A16Z is the tail wagon. The Laton Ventures dog, dude, these guys are just following the lead of Laton Ventures and Mr. Gorkum, you know, eat our dust.
Yeah. Well, and they are crap.
First of all, they're very differentized funds and they do work together. So, let's let's be clear.
They're following a trend, you know, they're just like way behind the eightball, you know, like always. just,

you know,
let let me open open this up before before you put your Laton t-shirt on. So,
pretty big raises in the market in the East Bowl market as of late. So, Bigger Games just recently raised $25 million series A. I think Rain led that. Good job Games raised $23 million. I think it was Seed or Ser, it doesn't matter. $23 million and that company was quite established. Grand Games, which was that's Laton venture company, actually raised $30 million series A. So they have been very big early stage raises in the market, much bigger than we've seen in other areas. I don't think we really see these big of a rounds in other markets at the moment, especially on mobile. And so why I think this is happening is is kind of four things. So what Turks are really good at is that they focus on business and not what they like to play and would like to play. So they don't make a MOA because they and they do love MOBAs. They really focus on what's good business and good business

is casual games at the moment. The second thing is that I've noticed is that they have this relentless attention on details when it comes to both product and marketing. Like it's crazy how deep these guys go into making the puzzle levels and and really polishing the pixels and polishing the gameplay and polishing individual creative assets. like it's you know down to a science or a craft however you want to put it. The third thing that in my opinion separates this market from many other ones is how talented and super hardworking people are talented in the sense of the top talent from universities chooses gaming which is very not typical in US they would go to finance or or AI or whatnot but in Turkey they actually do go to gaming and the second part with hardworking is like when I'm in Istanbul like it's hard to have a dinner with people at 7 or 8:00 p.m. because everybody's at work and it's quite normal to be from 10:00 a.m. till like 11:00 p.m. That's a pretty normal

working day at a startup. So, they do work really really hard. And then finally, the reason why A16Z, BitCraft, and everybody except Lighteed is investing into these one is that they have the traction. So, Graham started with the exits. Peak kind of sealed the deal with that 1.2 1.6 $6 billion exit and then Dream converted essentially everybody who was on the fence. They they could say, "Well, mobile's kind of dead and we're not going to do it." And then what Dream took 5 years for a $5.5 billion essentially exit to private equity. So those are the reasons why the Turkish market is so hot and why bigger funds are also trying to get in and getting in at pretty high valuation. But I think there's a lot of limiting factors when it comes to this market as well. One limitation is talent. there's only 90 million something Turks and these companies only hire Turks like some of these companies do have an office in London maybe but that's only marketing the second part is because they're attracting through these exits these big VCs they're getting a little

bit overpriced everybody wants a piece and then so you're able to raise like what Spike raised $55 million seed like I think that's been the record so that increases the valuation and um you know they're not overpriced yet but that moment can And I think it's going to be very interesting what happens to these big VCs who are following, who are not leading, who are not on the ground level, what they're going to do when some of their bets go south, like when they have invested tens of millions at later rounds to some of these companies that are bound to fail like it is normally in venture capital. So that's going to be interesting. And will they move capital elsewhere or how long they will, you know, support this ecosystem and continue to raise the prices. So
dude, A16Z will just go chase the next like
Well, A6 Well, let's be clear that A16Z check came through speedrun. So they came in super early. That's a speed check.
They weren't even involved in the second round.
No, I'm sure they did the uh Pro Rada,

but they were actually really really early. So it's Bitcraft that put in the uh the bigger check at a higher valuation. It's A6Z that that got moved around on Light Speed's moved on like
Yeah. Light speed's doing. So I think I think overall just talking about the future of Turkish market for what little I know about it. I think we're expecting kind of expansion to other platforms. I think PC makes a lot of sense. Maybe different type of games but no you're saying no PC. Okay. So let me tell you no way. No [ __ ] way they do AAA double A.
No not AAA. Not I'm not saying AAA I'm saying they have success on PC when it comes to Steam games. Bit battle bit is out of Turkey. layer of liars is out of Turkey. So, they have some really good like kind of 1A 2A hits coming in already. I've heard from some of the founders who have moved from
the crazy mobile gaming grind where they're saying, hey, we can do a cool game and get $15 million. And they've actually succeeded in getting that. And they're like, I'd rather make a fun game

once, kind of put all my effort into it.
Let dude, this is [ __ ] There's just no way that as a collective can move on to like AAA, double A,
not move on. And I think opening up new avenues and I believe that will happen more and more. I think they will expand to tools, tech and platforms. They are spending so much money on adtech. Why isn't there a Turkish adtech company? There are few but I think there makes sense. And finally global expansion like these teams that are growing and they're competing so hard for talent and I think at some point they have to unlock studios in other location and it will be interesting to see how that works. Can we hear from the Turkish VC adviser on what he's seeing in the market?
Yeah, Mr. Crest, put your puffer vest on. Let me
Well, I mean, tell it like it is, man. Like, don't don't make funny faces. Like, let's Come on, man. This isn't Wario. Let's go. What you got?
Show up. Show up to the club.
The Turkish group has a very specific expertise in which they are leveraging to the [ __ ] hilt. But the idea that

they're going up end up higher and putting studios in different locations that might be they want might want to dream the dream, but I don't think that's a realistic expectation, right? Is that they can move upstream or something like that. They're crushing it where they are. That's been their focus and that's their expertise.
Yeah.
But it's a bottle.
This is the same tide thing. It's like, you know, why has King made puzzle games for the last [ __ ] 30 years, right? Because that's all they [ __ ] know how to do, you know? like they tried other things. It's not a function of not trying. I'm not suggesting go go for it. But like I mean obviously very cynical way of looking at things. Just no way that this is going to happen. So look, if you see some big data points that suggest that they're actually making some headway there, fine. But like a small like Rinky Think game on Steam, that's
Battle Bed was pretty big. Like yeah, it was done by four people. They couldn't run it.
Okay. So there's Stumble Guys, there's Turkish Stumble Guys. What does that say about Finland? you know, not not much, right? But speaking of rinky dink games

though with data points and a country that is growing and diversifying, airrest's favorite, uh, Mishko, would you like to talk about French developer Million Victories?
So, we have to just drop this here just because it's a French company.
So, French mobile game developer Million Victories has completed a funding round raising almost 40 million, more than any of the Turks. Exactly. to be used in expanding operations and global presence. This funding comes from Havlli Investments and to be clear, Havlli is private equity.
Equity. Yeah.
Yeah. And it says from Austin, Texas, which will partner with Million Victories to focus on recruiting talent and accelerating investment in production, marketing, and user acquisition. So, super operational role. It's not we're backing them. It's like no, we're helping you to operate. They have a flagship title forex strategy title called Million LS World of Conquest. I believe this is a title which has human animals like you know like a like a lion with with a human

torso. I [ __ ] hate that [ __ ] the most. If you have human if you have a mandal is a rhino and then there's like a girl that is a fox. I'm not [ __ ] downloading or touching it with a long stick. But Phil, talk to me about the uh the numbers.
All right. So, oh man, 40 million is crazy. So, they made a 4X game. We'll talk about the 4X game in a moment cuz it's a fascinating 4X game. But that being said, you're looking at a game that's only done 20 million life to date is slowing down in terms of monthly active users. It's just slowing down in terms of downloads. I think the thing that I would point to is it looks like downloads started falling off after they may have secured the deal. I'll leave it to like better judges than myself, but like if you look at downloads really around February, they start to peak. And I am curious based on the timing of the deal when this gets signed. So I don't have any inside information, but I'm like damn like goo who's the UA
Phil based on like little I know talking to private equity maybe they do a proper

due diligence because they are coming in as operational partners. This is not DC who is following it in.
Yeah. Yeah. That that's cool. That all right makes sense. Just something that was interesting. The thesis behind the game is fascinating because they were trying to take on 4X with no base building.
Huh.
It was all combat. And so they have a very clear thesis. They're still using timers to generate troops, but the thing that really matters is XP, which is earned through combat. There's so many things that reloop you back to the combat loop. And so you get this huge bonus from beating players that are targeted on the map. So they can kind of influence things and just run live ops, but it's all about combat. And don't me wrong, they're like they're still loot boxes. They're just more limited. I would say the Gotacha is much weaker. Peace shields are not, you know, to the same degree. But the thing that they'll also do on the monetization side, which I which I absolutely love, is they'll have SKs that are up to $900 for like full legendary items or all gold items.
You know, I wanted to just take a moment cuz Forex is so hot right now. What

people don't understand about systems like this and especially in games like Game of War is that they would constantly talk about inflation and you would see complaints on player forums saying like, "Oh my god, now I pay a dollar and I get like 10 million coins when I used to pay a dollar and I would get 5 million coins." And there's a very specific reason for this, which is that you have servers which have a certain number of players. And those shards or those servers start to die out in terms of active populations once you seed them with a certain amount of players just by natural retention. And so if you pump new players into the shard, they're going to be at a different power score and a different layer of progression. And not only that, your track is moving out, right? You are adding more things to the Elder game. And so like the reason you see these things particularly in Forex game is that there's planned inflation that essentially functions as like an XP boost to move people along the progression curve. And that I think this game, you know, at least executed against that, I would say to a really healthy degree, which is wonderful to see. But by and large, like when you just look at the Forex market, it's

still just a very small drop in the bucket. There's almost nothing going on here. Yeah. So, I mean, I hats off to them.
Are you 4x if you don't have base building?
Like, what?
Expand, explode.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can still do the X's.
Explore, exterminate. Yeah.
Yeah. French don't have time to build no bases.
Let me my my commentary is on this. This game is tiny, right? Like $40 million. I am hoping to God that Hav, who is doing UA financing, by the way, that a big portion of this is UA financing and not direct investment because $40 million in investment on a game that's barely like making any money is ridiculous, right? I I don't think my buddy would do that. So, I'm hoping that this is actually UA financing and not an equity investment. I think again this probably is partially UA financing, which is just more of like a debt vehicle on cohorts and stuff. So, we shall see if they can scale this game. But, if we track this like funding

round,
funding round,
I know, but it was I I read the press release, it seems a little bit
since they're the only ones right there. There's no one else in this round as far as as the pest,
but that's that's typical with private equity. They do take the other full round.
Well, can we look at the next investment to shed some light on this?
Let's stay on the other Forex. Yeah. Global Worldwide closes funding round bum bum bum. Let me just go through this oversubscribed funding round led by who else than big ventures. Bitcraft is throwing money. So, this was very confusing press release. It had some jokes that people probably did not get. It was talking about like how the founders were building agricultural products and whatnot and now they're into games. Anyway, it was really confusing. Global Worldwide has made a game called Kingdom Maker. It's a Forex game that was kind of like accessible. It had this interesting looking graphics. It was picked up after uh what

test marketing phase or or beta phase by Scopi and Scopi essentially published it to a larger audience and it tanked. Uh it could not scale. Didn't have the IP. This was before Fleet Command I believe.
No, it was after Fleet Command. That is incorrect.
It was after Fleet Command. Interesting. So they had they had the success of Fleet Command. They were like let's double down. Kingdom Maker looks really cool. Yeah. Well, well, well, I'm thinking that they had the learnings and so nothing to do with with Fleet Command then, but nevertheless, so they looked at this game. Apparently, they had good early numbers. They couldn't scale it. I think there were layoffs regarding this particular studio that was working on Kingdom Maker. What makes Kingdom Maker and Global Worldwide so interesting is it's because it's led by the CEO and founder, Will Harbin. And Will Harbin for the old dogs is the CEO of Kicksai. that was for a brief moment the king of Facebook games and they had this recruitment video. Just go to YouTube

Kicksai recruitment video and it is [ __ ] on the industry. Like they made this this this toxic masculinity promo piece which by the way I loved. Uh, it was all about like they had Mark Pinkis as this little boy throw throwing money at a company called Jenka with two dogs shagging each other as a logo. It had EA shown as E A RP games with like this old scenile person. Then they made fun of product managers with like the Asian dude
at Kabam by the way.
Yeah, Kabam. Yeah, that's true. Kam is the quintessential PM company.
They called it Kerploop.
Yeah.
And then it ends with with Will Harbin being himself at [ __ ] like there's a Spartan helmet in his in his office and essentially he leaves the office on a helicopter in this video. Then it's all about like just you know be cool, make cool games and work for Kicks. And

Kicksai was making some of the most awesome games on Facebook. And then the platform shifted. Games moved to mobile. Cakes size stayed on web. They actually doubled down on web and their own platform. They couldn't pivot in time. Uh they made a mobile that was there. At some point they were like you know what I think what we need in our portfolio is not mobile is mobile. And they got absolutely ravaged by Supercell. So if you ever played Backyard Monsters and you play Clash of Clans, you can kind of see the evolution that is happening from one platform in one game to another. The end of Kicksai was not, you know, beautiful. They had a fire sale. They were acquired by Stillfront and naturally that two ended up with litigations with Stillfront about earnouts by the way just like the Subnotica and they lost that. So I just checked it recently. That was the end of Cakes. You know, good to add probably before like I'm not mocking Will in any way, like good to add that before actually his gaming career. He was in

another kid-friendly industry known as Energy Drinks and and and sold the company to Monster. So, I think this is his fourth company. So, he's been quite successful as an entrepreneur. Anyhow, I think it's great and I congratulate them on the race. It's very difficult and he had a LinkedIn post about how difficult it is to raise in this era of AI and hype. I am very hopeful that they ship good game and I'm certain that the journey will be very entertaining to follow whatever happens because Mr. Harbin is at the forefront of this venture. I can't let this go. This one too because Will, it wasn't that they missed the boat in terms of moving from canvas to mobile is that Will was like so arrogant in his assumptions that mobile was nothing and that you know PC and his own platform was the way to go despite all the evidence to the contrary. He kept that strategy going for years after mobile was like a [ __ ] rocket ship. you know, like he mismanaged the entire company based on the arrogance that he

was right about this particular part of the business, which didn't even make sense. Like I was living it through it with all these people that were working at Kicksai and they were just like befuddled at the situation, you know, and so it's like, you know, buyer beware, dude. Like this guy is is is alone, you know? He's like he's a little bit nutty.
I wouldn't go that far. I can say I've met Will and I met I think I met him in 200 14. So this was right about the time where mobile was really crushing it. Like from my perspective, I think the the recruitment video, he wasn't playing a character that's as well. He's very confident person. Let's put it that way.
Yeah, you could tell from the video which was iconic and amazing and you know, if you talk about building culture to, you know, everything you talked about last week, that certainly built a culture.
Yeah, he wore that suit. Like he looked exactly like that when I met him. like he had the button up open in San Francisco. Nobody wears this in San Francisco. So I can just say

Yeah. What's interesting is Copley doesn't have many failures and sadly this was this uh this was one of them.
Yeah. They they really put their back against it.
Well Well I don't think we know that at all. What do you mean? I think there's
Well, if they launch it and goes to like like
No, I mean look at look at the scale of DAU here. We're looking at maybe 150,000 active users. This isn't like a, you know, what one Scoply GM referred to as a scorched earth launch to number one. This is something much more moderate that was moved on from at some point. And I don't think this entire graph by the way is under Scopy's tenure. I think they picked it up for as a publisher later into it. The thing I also want to point out similar to million victories is like they did some fascinating things to like the 4X core and so Will had spoke at the Play Adventures conference and one of the things he points out about Kingdom Maker is like where is the freaking sex in games? Like you look at Game of Thrones like half of that is about lineage, half of that is about creating dynasties. There is none of that like player storytelling in 4X. And

what if we brought that and they did that in Kingdom Maker? Hence the maker part is like you making your kingdom and so like you can make it baby, right? Those are things you can do. You can create
there is still a fascinating core here that I feel like has been underexplored and I think makes sense in a 4X context.
It was a fun game. Like it it was a standout game and Kicksai was known to make really standout games in in this category. Yeah. I don't know. It's I think they have a as good of a shot as anybody but Chinese are kind of [ __ ] crushing this game like 4x Chinese circuit. Yeah. the game of Forex. They're, you know, they own it. So, I don't know. Should we talk about other kings?
Yes. So, from Neil at mobilegamer.biz, anonymous sources within the mobile developer king have said that the staff have been laid off. So, if you might remember, as part of the Microsoft layoffs that happened, about 200 people were reportedly laid off from the King ecosystem. So, speaking to mobile gamer.biz, is one staff member at the

Candy Crush Saga Maker said that many of the level designers had been let go after spending months creating tools that would build levels more quickly. So in a sense these teams were getting replaced by the AI tools that they helped train. Ouch. If that is true,
Zinga had similar thing where where I remember people were training their counterparts in India and then
then they got let go. Yeah. Then and in some case it was even transparent like go and train this team in India and they will end up taking your job and and maybe you move on to the next project or maybe you move on to the next company.
Yeah,
it's pretty pretty brutal.
I've read this among the people laid off who are also narrative designers and that kind of stuck with me cuz I was like who are the plural narrative designers working on the Candy Crush franchise? I I maybe I'm missing the uh the narrative of the Candy Crush.
There's an absolutely deep plot with the

Candy Crush for sure.
Yeah, my wife plays Candy Crush like crazy. I need to ask her like how's the story?
The other part in the article was interesting. 50 people were laid off from Farm Heroes Saga. Oh my. I was like, "Oh, I totally forgot about that game." And so, not all of the 200 or directly on Candy Crush. Just kind of another FYI.
Yeah.
Um,
MPO go with KO.
What the [ __ ]
This is Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Moonactive takes on MPO Go with Komas Co.
So, Monopoly Go with Coin Master Board.
All right. Moon Active is going after Scop in a big way. They have launched in a sense. It's like a take on a take on a take. So you had Coin Master, then you had Monopoly Go, which kind of used those systems. Now Moonactive is doing a version of Monopoly Go with the original

kind of version that they came up with.
And Coin Master was a take on another game, the pirate something. Pirates
No, no, it was a pirate something. Uh
oh. Board Kings. Yes.
No, no, no. Those are both. It was a pirate kings or something like that. It was another jelly button game that played. Anyways, everybody's stealing from everybody just to be
everyone. Uh, inspired by is what we'd like to say.
I what I love about all of this is that this is like industrial espionage in open in the [ __ ] open, dude. This is like what's good for the goose is good for the gander, dude. You know, [ __ ] Scopely copies Moon Active completely, right? and [ __ ] layers on some [ __ ] amazing IP, right now Moon's copying them right the [ __ ] back right in their wheelhouse with their [ __ ] IP as the headline, right, of the coin master, right? So, it's actually [ __ ] brilliant, dude. It's absolutely brilliant, right? So,
I love it. Yeah,
I don't know. I don't know if this is going to be successful. We'll see. But having the Coin Master brand is huge

here. But, dude, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. You know, you want to [ __ ] with them, they're going to [ __ ] with you. Okay. So, don't think about them, you know.
Hold up. You think the brand matters here? The Coin Master brand.
I don't know if it does. The search is going to I mean, they might cannibalize their existing game, but maybe they don't care. Maybe they're hoping OnePlus 3. My understanding is that the feeling is and I and I talk to these guys once in a while is that in some ways Scoply you know grew the addressable audience like probably moving people away from traditional casino games and putting them in these type of games which is more compelling you know like I don't know there's like all kinds of ideas here so perhaps I think what I would think is that they're just going after straight after scopely share right so they want to maintain their share on their game and then just go after and start stripping share away from Scopely, right, to build their business overall. They're going for the jugular. They're not [ __ ] around, right? And so Monopoly Go better, you know, get back

on track with terms of features and stuff like that because I think what'll likely happen, I haven't looked at the game too closely, is that they're just going to be better version of the Monopoly game to some degree would be my guess. I don't know. We'll see.
The IP is a beach head, right? I feel like we've spent so much time talking about this though. It's the unique combination of Monopoly which was already successful in gambling environments like the McDonald's game or Vegas slots licensing. Like that is a beach head. Like that is a CPI effect that like that is your TAM. That is Jen's fun fact you will see in the first five minutes of her YouTube video which you can catch with Ben Webb. Link link in the description. But like that that was an important part of like this isn't like this isn't Empire Strike Back. Are you kidding me? like
this Monopoly goes genre. Like this is small potatoes.
All right. So, I'm actually leading towards your point of view on this. So, I'm just kind of talking on both sides of my mouth right here. But like at the end of the day, Monopoly Go is at a point in which they are doing insane

levels of TV advertising, which we all know is [ __ ] [ __ ] right? And their revenue is completely deteriorating, right?
No. No. So, they Scopy's team pulled it out of the ass this quarter. Like, you can look at it. Downloads flattened, but revenue went up. I mean, don't get me wrong, the long run trend is still there downward sloping. But you can clearly see Javier just like
over over them
and they have a web shop and they have a web shop called I don't care about the web shop. I don't understand why we don't care about the [ __ ] web shop. It's money.
What actually what Moon Active likely will do because these guys are [ __ ] ruthless, right? Is they are going to UA the [ __ ] [ __ ] out of this thing, right? They are going to go after every single [ __ ] person that's playing Monopoly Go to get into their game and they're going to spend whatever it takes to get there, dude. And so like,
yeah, it's an arms race.
Yeah, it's a [ __ ] arms race. And I think I think the Israelis are going to win this one. I mean, I think they potentially could win this one. They
Israeli Saudi showdown now.

Well, I don't mean to be political, but these guys are kind of ruthless about getting that what they need done. I have my faith in Moon Active to get this get this done.
Can't they both win?
I mean, they're kind of growing together. I I honestly don't think that's the goal. I don't think that's the goal
for both to win, right? But they kind of grow the category together. Like it seemed like
I mean puzzle I mean you think about the puzzle category and how many match three players there are now. I guess can they grow the pie for this kind of a new genre? this like I think they call it coin looter as a sub coin battler.
Oh, interesting.
And by the way, love the art style. They would have done a different execution if they were trying to expand the market, right? Like they wouldn't have done exactly what Monopoly is.
They should have done that though. Like this this is what I don't understand, Eric, is like you'll admit that Monopoly Go is at the edge of user acquisition and so they're like turning to TV ads

because CPIs are so high. And now you're telling me that the Israelis are going to show up with Coin Master board and they're going to spend a bunch more against the same pool of users. Like this market is filling up. This is not what we should be paying attention to. Like to give you an example, like this market is already getting clones. Like just as an example, Peggy Go Clash of Coin is like [ __ ] that appears on this list.
It's been for a while that this game has been for a while. It's like a love and stake.
And this has also already beenified. So, the other thing that we haven't covered is something that has like a hyper casual loop to bring people in, which is Carnival Tycoon, which is basically an idler, which is dripped off from another idol game called Idol Theme Park, which builds in a slot machine. Like, there's a lot happening in the subg genre, but like this is not a good strategy to get there. And you know, what are you going to do on the CPI side? That's interesting here. It's like what's happening in Forex? Brand matters, but it's like what's happening

in Forex. How Forex started to take in RPG components, gotcha character, collector, these coin looters or coin battlers are now combining all of these different hyper casual things together. I do think that brand matters and you know back when I was on the Hasbro business at EA back in when Facebook started that's when Zingga came out with a ripoff of Scrabble called Words with Friends and there actually was room in a sense for both because of like a little bit of the innovation that they did there. The interesting thing here is going to be, you know, how close can they get and not infringe on the monopoly trademark, which by the way is it's only limited to a few different things. It's limited to like the four corners of the board like the chance and community square things. So I I think they can still go after it, but brand matters.
Okay. I think I think we're focusing on the wrong things right now, right? We're talking about like these peripheral like design choices and casual games and all

this other stuff. We're talking about a UA war, right? We're not talking about like product. We're not talking about features, right? We're we're talking about the fact that this is like UA arbitrage at its finest, right? In terms of how companies are going after So like when you talk about Puzzle for instance, the only reason Puzzle continues to grow is because Dream Games is spending insane amounts of money with 24-month paybacks, right? like insane CPIs, right? And so that's where the battle is being
Yeah, but isn't this the entire mobile industry? Like it
No, I know. But but you guys are bringing up these [ __ ] chachki games that aren't even making a dent in the industry. These are irrelevant, right? These are absolute mice nuts, right? What I'm saying is that these are the big boys with the biggest budgets that are private. They don't give a [ __ ] about profitability really and they're going for the jugular, right? And Dream Games has the same idea. Like even though they're private, like they were just basically spending with reckless abandon in order to gain as much share as possible, right? Like it's a different world, right? Than when we

were back in canvas days or the early days of mobile. This is like just a [ __ ] gunfight, you know, and and and these guys are ruthless, right? And so and so is Scopway. Scope was absolutely ruthless with their game when they came out against you topping coin coin master and then completely just like burying them on the UA side. That's not what we're because what we're what we're arguing is not necessarily what the intent is. Like maybe they'll have the big war chest, maybe they won't. But even if they do, I'm just arguing that it's very silly because we're already seeing Monopoly go hit a wall. There's also the IP as a moat. So you got to consider those two things which I think make it a poor strategy. I mean, look at it's only going to be x number of dollars in development cost and they are going to have a rorowaz number, right? I have a hard time imagining, Eric, that they're going to continue to shove coal into a rorowaz number that's declining. That can continue infinitely. And the reason I'm bringing up these quote chachki games is because I'm trying to show you that in this UA game for coin battlers, we're starting to see the

frozen city white out survival playbook emerge in Carnival Tycoon, which is what I'm trying to point out to you, is an idol game that turns into a
game that has a Monopoly go. Same thing with [ __ ] Fish of Fortune, which I I want to talk about at some point cuz it's such a fascinating game, but again, you're seeing other people go after this in a bigger strategy. No, they're not scaled right now, but these are the real attempts.
They're bringing like plushies to a gunfight, right? They don't have the means. They don't have a hundred or $200 million to throw a user acquisition. These like Chachki games can't even compete. They're not even in the discussion because they don't have the money to go after it, right? Plenty of match three games. There are plenty of match three games that compete at all levels. No.
Like just because King exists.
No, absolutely not.
What are you talking about? Like Tactile Games, Lily's Garden, one example.
Dude, those guys
spent all kinds of money like
sure they spent money, but I'm saying they exist at all sizes.
Look it. Yeah. Again, like again, that

is a completely different market, right? We're talking about the big boys going after each other right now. But Lily's Garden survived in the wake of, let's say, the UA war between Royal Match and, you know, another big match three titan, which by the way, Candy Crush continues to like drive crazy downloads. So, I'm just saying like you can survive in this market at different equilibriums. So yes, there are the big boys and yes, there are people there's the whales and the and a little bit of like the minnows that can still exist and make money as a smaller company, but you said that, you know, people like Kavali are coming in and doing UA financing. there's the opportunity for these games to get acquired by one of the bigger companies who then want to invest in a game that has great KPIs are you know rorowaz positive and maybe their goal isn't to do it on their own but is to wave their ham and say by me cuz I have a product that can be scaled is is that like a strategy worth it for some of the smaller ones I mean I think to Phil's

point which was astute which is this the new what's working in forex you know it's it's Voltron it's like all of these parts coming together make something bigger. Is that in a sense the strategy that we're now seeing in coin battlers showing up is what was successful in Forex. The second part I would say is that yes, like we're seeing a more casual approach to these social casino style games
that are attracting a broader audience but also extracting from the existing games like you know all the big fish casino and all those rest of the games are continued to deteriorate right so yes I mean I think in essence like these big guys are capturing not only expanding the market but capturing lots of share in the market at the same time so that's great but it's again a battle of the big, right? Like the companies that are gaining all the share are basically, you know, scopely and moonactive, right? Like
Yeah. And post IDFA, it's it when the market is not growing, when these big

ones grow, they actually take it from the small ones.
Animals and coins, which was now bought by Blade Tikka, that was a one game. They did what like I I forget, but that was acquired. They are right here number two on this list in terms of downloads in the last year in the United States.
Okay. The part of the reason I was thinking about this is that Frank Jabbo was on a podcast recently and he
it was really
Christopher Driggs
and so Frank is the most pragmatic person I've ever met. Like he's just brilliant. And what he said and it really resonates with me is that you don't care if it's a red ocean if you're a shark, right? And that's my whole point, right? There's just a bunch of sharks going after this in a [ __ ] completely red ocean and they are destroying everybody, right? Like it's so hard to compete, you know? And that's why I love like this like battle of the huge, you know, that are going after this market with games that are almost identical to each other. And it again, it is industrial espionage right in our faces, you know, it's like it's brilliant, right? And so that's where the market is right now or that's the

biggest part of the market. Sure, people are maybe winning on on the smaller side here and there, but like can you compete with a 24 year payback? That's not a rorowaz that you can actually bank on, you know? Like that's crazy. I want to just add two comments. I think the the art style is beautiful with the latest Moon Active game.
That's 100%
the art style.
Yes, I I do have to say it is it is really beautiful compared to the previous one. It's really cute. And then I want to give a kudos for not doing any press releases or celebrity campaigns at least yet.
It's in tech testing. It's in the Philippines. I I'm not surprised that they do it and I will be equally as dismissive with Moon Active as I was with Scopely and Dream. So,
I bet they will not do press releases though. That's one thing that they will not do.
They're going to do a brand campaign. Paul Lebron Kardashian, let's go.
Courtney Cox, Lisa Quudro, you still there?

Oh, we got a game for you, right? But I got to go.
Bye everybody.
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