TWIG #341 Ubisoft Tries “Succession” while Battlefield Attempts a Comeback

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Adam Teler. Glad to be first and in product. Yes, Eric.
Eric's strategy in investing
uh Phil Black Monization Zar.
I think you were corrected on the uh on Slack on the very first use of Zar even besides the Russian emperors, but anyway. All right. So, here's what we got going on. More crafting Subnotica

drama. Maybe a little bit, not as much. I think I saw a bunch of articles dropped today that I haven't had a chance to check in on. Our big one will be the Ubisoft family drama and their below expectations earnings that released this week. Webshop data from an app charge report. Battlefield 6 is announced. Oh crap, I didn't watch the trailer. We'll pull that up during the show.
Damn, another one. It's happening. Wow.
I know it it released this morning at 8:00 a.m. our time, but I didn't I was on a call. So, Battlefield 6 is announced. Let's get everyone's take. I'm excited. Supervive sets to launch and Splitgate 2 sets to unlaunch. So, lots going on. Adam, good to see you back. It's been a while. What are you up to?
Yeah, it's summer in Canada, so it's good. As you can tell, I have a tan now. Really?
You're off white.
I'm off white now. No, it's great. Going up to cottages all the time. So, we've got a family cottage. My wife's got a family cottage.

So, what's great is next week going out for a while. have been going up regularly on weekends. Oh, it's it's good time to be in Canada right now.
Oh, so that's your vibe. Cottage core. Get it.
Cottage core. Lots of board games. It's good. It's good. Also a really good time to have a Switch, too, and to bring that up to the cottage and play some games up there. But yeah,
I hear Donkey Kong is kicking ass on the
It is. Really, really good game. If you guys haven't played it yet, definitely pick it up. Really interesting. Really good game. What else are you guys playing besides obviously Bonanza?
Mobile games.
Mobile games. I want to be clear. I've been playing Game of Thrones Kings Road like a crack addict for like months and there is no one else on the planet that is playing this [ __ ] game and it like
watching those numbers. Yeah. Yeah.
It is so good though for me. It's like the perfect game for me. I'm over 120 130 hours at this point is it's just nutty, dude.
Yeah.
But you're playing on mobile.
No, I am not. Certainly not. That's impossible. But I am checking in on mobile. Like it is [ __ ] to play that

on mobile. I don't know what people were thinking there, but it is it is actually a pretty good game on console. PC, I mean. Sorry.
PC. Oh,
okay. But you're done with Kingshot? No more Kingshot?
Oh, yeah. No, Kingshot's got me by the short hairs as well. So, I I'm I'm in an addictive mode with games right now. So, I also went to Vegas, speaking of addictions, uh with my son. You're supposed to play basketball, but he's injured. So, we just did it like kind of a bro time. We went to see the basketball summer league. We went to the Sphere, which is definitely very cool. who I highly recommend. Just a video, not like a concert. The concerts are supposedly insane. We watched some UFC and did a little bit of gambling on that. But the best and the highlight was we shot guns at one of the gun ranges out there and uh
we shot like I think he shot a AK-47, a Desert Eagle, and then a 50 cal. Dude, we both took a couple shots on the 50 cal, and it was insane. Very, very cool time.
Europeans are horrified at what they're hearing. That is like the most American thing

I've ever heard.
You got to take my son to the shooting range. Sure.
After he was injured at basketball at Vegas.
May as well take him gambling.
We know he he's not allowed on the floor for gambling.
Yeah, he's too still too young for that. We actually purchased that UFC pay-per-view. It was a good fight.
It was a really good All the fights were really good, actually. Yeah.
Yeah, we we enjoy the UFC in our household. Anyway, all right. So, that's fun.
Uh, it's time to say a prayer. Time to say a prayer, Jen. It is the 8th anniversary. Only the OGs will know of the Mario Lopez CBS Candy Crush TV show, and I don't want any King employee to ever forget this existed. I don't want any CMO to forget this existed. Nine glorious episodes of Product Placement. May she rest in peace. And like I post online, next month we can do Dice with Ellen. Uh, rest in peace, my sweet

child. That's coming up on the 8th anniversary. Let us forget this uh piece of gaming lore. Maybe maybe we shouldn't stop. Uh, maybe we should stop doing anniversaries. But check out the clips online. It's a beautiful thing.
Another great fail in trans media world. Is that what this is?
The trans media world is littered with really bad shows for the few breakout hits that happen. Maybe Dream Games is going to be next and then Scopely, you know, like they'll come out with some kind of [ __ ] game show [ __ ]
Oh my god, there was a good one. Family Game Night was actually really good on Hasbro's channel back in the day. The Lego show was pretty good on Fox. You ever watched the Lego? It wasn't digital, but it was like people building Lego things. That was pretty good with the voice of Batman was the
Just stop wilderness.
Anyway, all right.
So, corrections. So, last week I mentioned Love and Pies was the OG merge game. I didn't exactly mean that. I should clarify that. What I learned from Laura was that Love and Pies was the

early merge game that had like a really distinct differentiation with narrative. Of course, things like Merge Mansion, things like Travel Town, Adam, you'll probably correct me and go further back. I wasn't looking for the the OG, but yes, I should.
Jen read ahead. Come on. You got to go back even further. The OG I I credit is Merge Town by Graham Games, which was a hyper casual game way back in the day, even on Deconstructive Fun. We had an article on it and was talking about it as like a very interesting new mechanic. And I would say even go back even further, then you look at Sprite Fox with Triple Town, which was the OG OG, but it was a very small game. That one already people were talking about it in casual studios. I remember talking about it when I was at Wuga saying how interesting merge was going to be.
Oh, cool. All right,
there you go. What else we got, Crest?
All right. Well, I wanted to make a correction based upon the text of the complaint that we saw from Unknown Worlds and the Subnotica fiasco with

Craftton, but I think I'm actually feeling kind of good about what I said last week. Of course, Mishka is not here, so I would never freaking ever make an apology directly to him. Is that I will concede that Mishka was right and I was wrong about the idea that there are other things besides financial performance that can drive earnouts. like he was correct about that. Having said that, in this particular case, it is pretty clear that Subnotica was it was based upon revenue targets in 2025 or to date from the acquisition is what it seems like. And if you look at the complaint, it does seem like it's completely tied to this performance and not other mechanisms that Mr. Mishka was trying was was
just like milestone related, right?
Yeah. Exactly. delivery of
and it also does imply that it's based upon total performance, not just performance of Subnotica. They just say Subnotica 2 is going to be the biggest part of that, right? So overall, it just feels like the questions remain, right?

One, was the product ready? And based upon the evidence that's been put out there so far, no. Two, even if the game come out, could they have hitten the targets to hit an earnout or a portion of that earnout, which is also implied in the complaint as well. So anyway, I feel pretty good about where I'm at with this so far, but we'll see how this thing drudges on. We'll get an update later. I say the one fuzziness here is like I think you're right. It's mostly about the total revenue and given that they had the flop of the previous game before that, hitting that total revenue number is going to be pretty difficult unless they launched fully. The one thing that's weird for me here is whether the founders thought that they were going to go into like an early access and that it was okay to have a bunch of rough edges and they felt like they were going to hit that mark. But Craftton has seen the market and said early access as a strategy doesn't really work. Doesn't get the big splash you want. So it would be better to launch as a major product later on down the line.
I imagine they're going to settle this thing pretty quickly. I don't think they

want to drag this through the mud, but we'll see. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see.
Got it. All right. There was an interview that dropped. You know, Gamesbeat has their new subscription VIP thing. And I didn't get a chance to read the article. I think they interviewed one of the founders and I'm like, how can he talk if he has a complaint out there, which is actually it's unsealed now. So, last week I said it was sealed and then I guess either what I read was wrong or it's unsealed. So, you can actually read the comp the full complaint online if you would like to do that. crest as you have it sounds like you read the whole thing
more or less. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. All right. So, uh the first topic I wanted to get to is we have a new sponsor called Appch charge. And if you don't know them, they are a mobile focused direct to consumer monetization platform and web store. I think they are more mobile focused. The report that they just released, it's on what processing 500 million in transactions taught us about DTOC web stores. And

primarily they talk a little bit about mobile here which was you know really interesting. We talk about this topic all the time. Lots of great data in here. So I wanted to do three takeaways. The first one there kind of no does but some of the data was interesting. So payments are local not global. So meaning that there's not a onesizefits-all payment solution. So I'm not sure I realize this but globally credit cards account for only 35% of web store transactions. So being a US person, you know, it's all about credit cards here. But the Netherlands and Poland, only six or 7% of transactions are credit cards. So I thought that was pretty interesting. Players really expect localized payment methods. So it's ideal in Netherlands, Blick in Poland, and PayPal in Germany. And Mishka dropped in a line. He's like, "Please help me understand PayPal in Germany because every time he goes to the gym, he has to figure out how to pay with PayPal." So that's his big contribution to today

even though he's not here. So everyone at Gamescom, go do some homework so we can answer Mishka's question. So the next chart is on firsttime purchases. This was kind of interesting. First- time purchases aren't necessarily, you know, an instant purchase and you don't necessarily do it right away. So, the medium time to first purchase after a player's first store visit is 2.6 days. So, it takes a little while. And then 80% of firsttime visitors return within 30 days. However, you have to do retargeting, you have to do reminders, you have to have welcome offers for that. And so finally, the last chart I thought was kind of interesting is these are interesting stats on repeat buyers. Uh this is our favorite dolphins or whales. I'm I'm one of these people, so I I guess I know the feeling. 50% of first-time buyers return for a second purchase. 63% of two-time buyers make a third purchase within a week. Within a

week. more times than uh I've been going to the gym lately sadly is I admit I make more purchases than I go to the gym. So as a publisher developer you need to focus on post-purchase timing, personalized offers and you know recognize that seasonality can also drive repeat conversion momentum. So all of this is just new for me to hear about webshot data. Phil, I mean I know you live this every day. I'm trying to cosplay a monetization person. How did I do? Does this all make sense from your
The flow stuff is the thing people should pay the most attention to from app charge and some of the other web shops is how close the stuff is starting to feel like a native experience. It doesn't feel as clunky as it used to. You know, the pop-ups you get with iOS when you need to confirm a payment, they're able to mirror some of those flows just using web UI elements. And this is, you know, what Eric and I have disagreed with on previous casts is how close based on that experience they can get to your normal in-app purchase conversion number. How seamless can they

make that experience? You know, can they save information? And they're getting closer and closer to that. So, I'm interested to see how close they can get in terms of convergence.
The MMPs are really starting to be able to connect and give you data throughout the flow on those things. So, it's starting to behave a little bit more like mobile native payments. And so I I just think we're coming, you know, really into the future on the idea of web shops and mobile and if you don't already have conversations with these folks going on and you're especially a medium to bigger studios, you should definitely be doing that with one of the many providers if not our friends at App Charge. All right, Chris, I am I'm really Let me get my popcorn ready. I am super excited. Oh, actually first let me just do a quick update on Ubisoft's first quarter earnings report just to set you up for your rant. So sadly for them, their earnings were below expectations. I'm not sure we're shocked by this. They attributed this to lower than expected performance for Rainbow Six Siege. I think there was some issue

with payments that they have since figured out. They also blamed an unfavorable foreign exchange rate. Oh, shocking. You know, they always do that. And good for them. Its back catalog and net bookings were up 4% versus the same period a year ago. And then this is the part I kick it to you. A partnership that is now expected to materialize in Q2. Chris, tell me more about the partnership.
It's ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. The biggest thing that they just did not really cover on this as much and they did a little bit on the earnings is that Assassin's Creed did well, but it didn't do well. So, I mean, they said 5 million concurrence, like that's not a good number for a game that big. And part of it obviously because they moved it out of holiday, which cut it by 40% just from the get-go, right? But also, there's a little bit of fatigue on the same game over and over again. So, anyway, they also announced this. Oh my god, I I I literally lost my

goddamn mind. And so I had to post almost immediately to LinkedIn on this thing because this is exactly what I was talking about. This deal with 10 cent gives them absolute cart blanc to do whatever the [ __ ] they want. And so what they did was they put his son and his cousin in charge of some of the three biggest IPs in the world, right? And his son was a discredited, disgraced. He was kicked out of the company like and he's never made a successful game in his goddamn life, right? And now he's in charge of three of the biggest IPs in the world. It is insane. It is insane. And this is exactly what I've been talking about this whole time. And I don't like to say I told you so, but this is [ __ ] up, right? Like he's maintaining his family power by doing these deals. And it's not good for shareholders. It's not good for employees. It's not good for their franchises. It's just not good for the industry as a whole. It's like this absolute uncheck control. So, I wrote an article on LinkedIn responding to this

[ __ ] PR thing with a bunch of smiley [ __ ] faces that they all have a job that's getting subsidized by the Chinese and that they are still being run by the same [ __ ] up family that has been [ __ ] up for like a decade, right? And so, here is the article. At what point does family led just mean family destroyed? Ubisoft has spent the past decade in continuous decline while the Gilimont family clings to power like it's 2007. Here is the highlight reel that investors could not stand. Right. Creative decay, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, once AAA now Formulaic. Noble new IPs have stuck in years. Cultural rot. Multiple executives ousted in 2020 amid serious abuse allegations which were true. The company promised change. Very little has actually changed. Operational chaos. projects endlessly rebooted or shelves. Skull and Bones has had more lives than the Ubisoft and NFTTS. Strategy roulette, VR, web 3, battle

royale, mo mobile, toys life. Ubisoft had dabbled in every [ __ ] trend without ever succeeding or committing to any for that matter. Ultimately, all this resulted in financial underperformance, declining margins, weak pipeline, and talent exodus. And now the 2025 kicker is that 10 cent invests in this new Ubisoft adjacent studio which is now run by the CEO Eve's son and cousin. Nepotism meets shareholder delilution. This isn't innovation. It's entrenchment. This isn't a turnaround story. It's a case study in why unchecked family control erodess long-term value. There is a real talent buried inside Ubisoft and absolutely amazing IP. But as long as governance is a family affair, investors should expect more of the same. Missed trends, missed earnings, and missed opportunities, it's time for Eve Gilamont to let go and for a season independent operator to rebuild this once great publisher before it becomes entirely irrelevant. All right, that was the post. So,

after a bit of uh soularching and trying to calm the [ __ ] down and talking to a few bunch of people, so here's what I think is going to happen. All right, this is this is why I was so in in sense, right? First, choosing Charlie to head this new company is so wrong in so many ways. First of all, he's 33 [ __ ] years old, right? He's a [ __ ] child. All right, first of all, right? He's barely out of diapers, right? He's never released a successful game in his life, right? He has no experience running big teams. He's been working on small projects since the beginning. But the big thing here is that you have to keep in mind that having him in charge, there is no self-respecting studio lead or GM that would ever work for this guy, right? So that's the type of people that they need, but they can't get people like that because they're not working for some baby that's like put up there because of [ __ ] nepotism, right? So likely what they're going to have is these like French yesmen in charge, right? They're gonna put them in place because they're the only people that

will actually cowtow to a 33 year old child, right? Or a hire more family, right? But ultimately, they're not going to have the right people in charge to actually get [ __ ] done, right? So, anybody that's talented with ambition or drive within this company is not going to be rewarded. And this is like the culture that they've created by all this [ __ ] [ __ ] nepotism, right? And second, you know, obviously Christopher, who's his cousin, right, who's been there for 25 years, probably has never actually ever like pushed anything against Eve, right? So, he was probably put there as co-CEO because they wanted an adult in the room, right? But he doesn't help at all either, right? Because he's still part of the family that's [ __ ] up this company for the last decade, right? I'm sure Tenset was part of the reason that they have Christopher up there as well. And the big challenge that they have, and this is like from my understanding, is that they don't have any big games until 2027, dude. They have nothing this year. They have nothing next year, dude. Assassin's Creed is out to lunch. Ghost

Recon is really far behind. Far Cry, I think, is rebooted. Like, there's a lot of things that are going on in this company that are really [ __ ] up. So, we will they basically will have one more shot on goal in like the 2027, maybe 2028 time frame and that's it. And so what I think the big thing here that Tencent is doing is that they are basically giving them enough rope to hang themselves, right? And they're going to pick up the pieces in three to four years and get these IPs for a [ __ ] discount, right? Because there's just no way they're going to be able to execute on this with this type of leadership team. And so this is again really really bad obviously for Ubisoft, for any of the employees that are still remaining that still are stuck in this quagmire. And it's also bad for the industry. We want more independent publishers that are making great content. It's just really, really, really, really, really, really sad that this is where we're at. And that is the rant for this one.
Wow.
100% agree with you. This just feels sad. And just weeks ago, you were talking about Xbox with the same tone and the same rant.

It's Yeah.
It's just a sad state of the industry when we're looking at these Western publishers crumble and like all the signals are they're not pulling it together.
I want to make something clear here. I think this is self-inflicted, right? I think Activision managed themselves really well up to the point in which they did the dumb acquisition with Microsoft.
EA has managed themselves very well despite all the criticism people put out there. Certainly Take 2 is in really good shape. Capcom is in good shape, you know, like there's ways of doing this, right? This is self-inflicted. This is not like, oh, blame the environment, blame the industry. This is not that,
which was obviously in all of the financial calls. They tried to make it about that, right?
It's not. Let's move forward to like a company that's got [ __ ] together. They've got a game.
Big bet coming out.
Okay, so Battlefield 6. Has everybody actually watched the trailer? I watched it while Eric was ranting.
Oh, it was a good time to do it.
TLDDR, it's it's just the campaign trailer. There's There's nothing there. So,
there [ __ ]
I have to admit, I was a little bit

disappointed because you're right. It It's just a traditional campaign.
It is a cool campaign trailer. looking forward to gameplay trailers. They've al obviously been running Battlefield Labs all along the side here, which has been a ton of play testing, which has gotten some pretty I I think pretty positive feedback coming out of it. So, I think there's a lot of momentum coming um behind this. I think the call outs that I've got here is just this is a [ __ ] massive bet. Uh this is a lot of studios all working together. I think this is Vince pushing as hard as he can, and I think they have the right strategy in terms of rebuilding player trust, focusing on the basics, really showing that they can execute on the core gameplay. The questions that I've got here is like some of the changes that they've been making, especially on things like movements, bringing it closer towards Call of Duty. It feels like they're bringing it closer towards Call of Duty rather than creating that kind of distinct Battlefield identity. They're still going to retain things obviously like disruptive environments, but the things that I'm watching out for is like they're going to be going up against COD. It's still going to be very much trying to pull that market share.

This year feels like a pretty good year to go against Black Ops 7 given this is Treyarch going at it for like the second year in a row, right?
Rumors all saying Black Ops 7, Treyarch has to pull out two games in two years.
Feels like it's the right environment to do it and they're doing the right things in terms of core gameplay. It's just that this is a [ __ ] massive bet and they're going to have to they're this whole potential war zone strategy of having the freetoplay battle royale all coming out at the same launch. There's just a lot of things happening all at once. So, godspeed to the team. I think this is the right bets to make. It's just the size of the bet is my big red flag here.
The only couple things I wanted to say was that Yeah, right. This is a huge bet. I They must have spent over four or 500 million on this. Like easy, dude. Like I I've heard even numbers that were even higher than that from people that might know. But
the timing is good in a sense because I think the interest in Call of Duty is in a lull right now. First of all, Call of Duty tech is really far behind. Like it

it's starting to get some tech debt in general like in terms of visuals. So, I think what this trailer is definitely articulating is that the destructible environments idea that that Battlefield has been kind of known for. And so, that was kind of like in the entire trailer was just things like just getting destroyed.
It is good for them to just go like point blank like we are fixing what you're saying is wrong in Call of Duty Black Ops 6, right? So, things even like high tick rate servers, really strong server technology,
all that kind of stuff should happen. Now, of course, the last alpha that was supposedly coming out last week was cancelled because of tech problems on the server side. You know, let's let's hope that the alpha and open beta
they they should not do the alpha if it's going to show bad, right? This is going to be a really critical moment for them to shift the narrative on the game and get people excited. So,
yeah.
So, I'm actually relatively bullish. I I I do think they're doing a great job on the marketing side. I think it's early enough to build up the buzz for I think

what's probably in October. Did they actually announce?
Yeah, I I was going to say I also really like the buzz building to this. Um there were some LinkedIn posts like I saw Laura Melli's post who's the president of EA, you know, saying, "Hey, the trailer is dropping on Thursday. You know, they know how to build buzz." And I think the naming Battlefield 6, awesome. Keep it clean. Like we understand what we're getting. We're getting the next iteration of this franchise. So, as I was researching all of this, there were some leaks as as there will be. So, the release date and pricing were both leaked. So, it is uh Xbox, PlayStation, and PC all on October 10th. Call of Duty tends to be in that same zone. So, I wonder if they're coming out before. And then, of course, I pulled this for Phil because I know he loves his deluxe editions. Quote, "The game will be available in standard edition as well as Phantom edition. Contrary to some rumors, the Phantom Edition is not a collector's edition. It is rather a deluxe edition, exclusively digital, including additional in-game

content. No early access will be granted. Both editions will be available simultaneously on October 10th. So, this is from a leaked report. And then the pricing, I guess it was leaked in Europe. All this is in euros. Uh, so it is $79.99 with the Phantom Edition coming in at $29.99. That's kind of weird. So this should make it a $70ish price point. So this is interesting timing because I don't know if you saw the the pricing change that Microsoft did on Unknown Worlds 2 where they actually moved the price from 80 down to 70. Um, Microsoft came out and said, "We're focused on bringing players Incredible Worlds to explore, and we'll keep our fullpriced holiday releases, including Outer Worlds 2, to $69.99 in line with current market conditions." So, there's a question on whether they're going to Microsoft is backing down some of the releases to $70. The way that they wrote this phrase is that

you could think that this was going beyond just that. And we'll keep our full price holiday releases including Outer Worlds 2 to 70. So there is some thought that this could extend to other titles, not just Outer Worlds.
Outer Worlds was never worth 80 bucks to begin with. Hell, it's worth 70 bucks. I think
the first one came out at 50, dude. I don't I Microsoft is so over their skis right now. They have no [ __ ] idea what they're doing at that company, right? So like mixed messages [ __ ] Anyway, back to back to something that's relevant is Battlefield. I think both of you are wrong about this. I I I get on the face of it that yeah, there's a lot of capital that's been invested here, but that to me is derisking this, not increasing the risk here. Like EA's mistake has been underinvesting in Battlefield. Like the house that Bobby built for Call of Duty was built on the three rotating studios that all had three-year dev cycles to go out and make their game. It was brilliant, right? He got yearly releases, but each studio still had three years to make the game.

DICE was stretched way, way too thin after Battlefield 4. You remember they had Battlefront one, Battlefront 2, Mirror's Edge was hanging out the tail end of that and there was Battlefield 5. EA did a lot of damage to DICE and they have admitted that. They admitted that to the studio, but they never took corrective action. And apparently corrective action is now taking this franchise away from DICE.com. I will tell you, people here are very demoralized about what's happened. Byron, who's the VP they hired from Call of Duty, is now under Vince. They're running this game out of LA. And I think that's pretty depressing for Sweden. But I think EA took way too long to get this to the right amount of capital investment to compete. And I think to your point, Eric, this is the right timing, right? Because the one year that Battlefield beat Call of Duty in terms of sales was when Call of Duty was the weakest and Battlefield was the strongest. That was Battlefield 1, which had a novel setting as well. And that was when Advanced Warfare came out, and that was one of the weakest Call of Duties of all time. I think there's a real shot that they can pull this off here as well. Like Vince is competent.

Like every time, you know, there's an investor call, Andrew Wilson is always trying to like name drop Vince. Investors are always asking about it. Like what, you know, is Vince on the project? What's Vince doing? What's I've heard Vince Vince has been involved. I mean, this is still Byron's game by and large. But I would say the only other concern I have about this game is whether or not, first of all, there'll be a live service. I don't think Respawn is actually as talented as you might expect at executing against live services. Apex was a [ __ ] show and don't remember, don't forget they hired Lee Horn to do the monetization because they still didn't understand that. And I do wonder if they're going to [ __ ] up the monetization for this one. I haven't heard amazing things. And I've also heard in terms of competency that the single player is in is an absolute [ __ ] show. And I've been surprised that they led with that trailer. I've been curious whether or not this thing was even going to make it to launch and they were going to do the Delta Force. Let's do it afterwards.
But that's a pretty bold bet to do the trailer for the single player first.
Well, they always do that though. They always showcase the tech and showcase the visuals and then the multiplayer comes
later, which I think is exactly what's happening.
But if if there was slippage risk on the

single player, I wouldn't have started with a narrative focused trailer. I would have shuffled the multiplayer one.
Right. Right. I mean, I'm not contesting the idea that the single player is going to be terrible. Like, it's always been terrible. Like, there's never been really good. Well, that's not true. Bad Company was good, but like Battlefield's never really nailed the single player stuff. But I don't think people give a [ __ ]
Yeah. And you remember 2042 didn't have that. And I think it part of that is getting back to justifying the box price, especially with a higher entry box price. I think you need this on the back of the box for sure. I think they'll [ __ ] up the live service themselves. But I still think there's been this growing category of large scale warfare FPS games on Steam. Hell Loose being a really good example, which has a decent TAU. Right now we're looking at Steam, Xbox, and PlayStations hovering around 100K. The war for Battlefield in terms of live service is always for the crusty Germans because that's like half the audience. And a lot of crusty Germans are like on Steam and they're playing these more realistic military sims. And so I do wonder as like more of these kind of like double A large scale Battlefield games start to take up share where DICE has kind of

fallen down. I have no doubt that Battlefield 6 is going to sell a [ __ ] ton of copies and make a lot of money. And I think it's a real threat to Call of Duty. I just still wonder if they've solved any of the live service problems. And I think it's slipping farther and farther away from them. But if they go to this war zone model and they try to do it day and date, isn't that adding risk to that? I think it will sell well and I think it will show against well against Call of Duty especially. But then does the adding the war zone kicker here now mean that now we've added risk to that upfront big unic?
You mean the the battle royale free to play mode that's unconfirmed?
That's unconfirmed. Let's just say maybe it's a thing. You mean in terms of execution risk or in terms of like reducing the the sales of the box game?
Yeah. Like War Zone didn't do it until what, like 6 months after launch?
I think that's a fair concern. I mean, look, it you still kind of can back into the shareware model where you can still up upsell people on the base skew through that mode, which is what DMZ did, I think, did pretty effectively, right? Like they basically used it as a

Call of Duty portal to upsell you not only on just like the most recent entitlement but all the entitlements by six, by five, by four.
Yeah. No, I'm just saying like if you're like, "Hey, that I think it'll sell well, but the live service component is the thing where I'm I'm shining the most risk." They've just upped that risk by saying, "Okay, now we're going to be free to play at launch." Speculating speculating.
This free to play thing might come later, right? Is that
If it does, then I think that's the right strategy. Especially if the risk
surprised it was day and date.
Yeah. Just to be clear, like back to what Jen was asking. So, generally Call of Duty comes out later. So, they're intentionally trying to get this thing out before Call of Duty. Like that's pretty obvious, right?
Yep.
And the beauty behind that is that they could double dip in the sense they could go for the launch and get as much revenue as possible and then during holiday in November, you can actually reduce price and try to push it there and perhaps maybe release War Zone or something like that. So, I mean, all that [ __ ] is
feels like the right strategy is like you launch early in October, you hit Black Friday, you get the sale during when Call of Duty is hitting its hype. You're now a better game than them, and

then you've got a freetoplay version coming in January is a big deal.
Yeah, exactly. So, like this is all it seems very, very contrived and part of the plan. And so, yeah, more power to them. I mean, they know they know what they're doing. Hell, I mean, these guys have been doing this [ __ ] for a long time. Philip, I I actually do that is a really really good good take in the sense that you're right, they made the right investment. They threw everything at this [ __ ] thing finally, right? It's not underinvested at all. So,
yeah. Yep.
The question was has always been is that you have all these teams working simultaneously on one product. Can they actually pull it together in a meaningful way all the different like disparate teams? And it looks like it is coming together. Maybe
that's a better articulation of the risk which like I haven't played the game yet so I don't know how it feels. I've seen a campaign trailer and I've heard good things from these labs, but let's see the beta. Let's play it. Let's see have they been able to pull all those pieces together.
They're not going to innovate on anything. They're like, this is going to be very safe execution. Like even the modern setting is a very safe
I'm just like I want to feel I want to

feel these five studios have actually pulled it all together and it's going to be ready for an October launch.
Well, according to the internet, Call of Duty Black Ops 7 is rumored to be releasing on November 14th. So, wow, that's way late. Actually, last year was October. That's really not good.
That smells trouble,
I tell you. Dude, look, I'm not bagging on Microsoft like constantly. I am bagging on them constantly, but like they're off their goddamn game right now, dude. They're like, this is bad news bears if they come out that late, you know?
Yeah, that seems really just ridiculously late from what they normally do. And especially if maybe do you think that was because of um originally with GTA 6
most years it's late October so like 25th 28th and then Modern Warfare 3 was November 10th Vanguard was November 5th
Black Ops Cold War was November 13th
it's within the range but it's always the
Yeah.
Unfortunately the Sledgehammer games

that are typically later in November. Yeah.
Yeah. Not when you have a real competitor for once coming out you know.
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appcharge.com. [Music] So, let's talk about Supervive. So, Supervive is going to its full launch. It's 1.0. It'll come out uh today and will be available globally, including launching in China for the first time. So I think when we first talked about this like Bill you you were talking about this being the kicker that like hey even if this thing doesn't find traction in the west they've got the partnership with Netis they will be able to launch in China that's where the real mobile market's going to come in rearview mirror now we can see like there is really zero western traction and at least from my experience with relaunching games you can create a spike but will they have actually fixed the retention issues? Can they actually get to a meaningful size? No, this is 5K.
Just a reminder, Supervive is a MOA done by a bunch of ex League of Legend leadership team.
VC backed. Yes. Yes. But yeah, like

5K so far. Obviously, we'll see how this trends throughout the day.
It's already rising. I will say that to be fair.
Yeah. And and like with time zones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll track. But like I don't think this is going to be a massive relaunch that they can get the scale that matchmaking is going to be in a good state that now all of a sudden there's going to be real western trajection. I just think relaunches don't really effectively work unless you can really launch the game completely new. It feels like a full 1.0 launch.
Is it a re a relaunch or or just like a full launch going from early access to full launch?
It's a full launch. Everybody thinks of this thing as a full launch, right? Like the reality is when you first launch is your launch. I'm sorry. Like even if you try to hide it as like a beta yada yada people treat it like it's your first launch and it's your best lever to grow. This is why PC console is [ __ ] hard because the reality is your first launch is your real launch and you got to get that right.
I agree that be beautiful Adam.

Well done Phil. Thank you.
All right. I got the Phil seal of approval. I'm feeling good today. Um, next one, Splitgate 2. So, after the surprise launch in June, Splitgate already is now unlaunching. I think we covered this in the past. They did that kind of leadup open beta that would go right into launch. They did not get any sort of sizable scale in terms of CCU. This is the DIU coming right from their launch. They didn't reach any real scale and then immediately started shark fitting down because especially things like matchmaking liquidity. So unfortunately this is just going to be another one of those cases similar to a supervise, similar to a Spectre Divide and this studio is just making that call as quickly as possible. When it relaunches, this will be the third Splitgate launch, ladies and gentlemen. You have the original Splitgate launch. You have the Splitgate 2 original early access launch. Then what? You got that you got to got to redo. This is the redo battle royale one. So oh my god, what are you even doing here? Uh this is I think this is embarrassing because again we we got

to go back to like what the bar is for success. You know what does it mean to be successful and right now we're looking at a run rate monization engagement matrix. So you know let's take some average DAOU numbers. Let's take some ARPD down numbers. Let's multiply them together and let's get a run rate. And so you need to have 300,000 DAU at a 10-centent ARP out to do 10 million in revenue per year.
Yeah, but that's [ __ ] nothing. Like 10 million in revenue [ __ ] [ __ ] nothing. Right. You can't even afford a certain servers at that point.
Exactly. Exactly. And right, cosmetic economies can hover around that 10 to 20 cent mark. And so this is the lift we're talking about in terms of the trade-off between monetization and engagement. And Eric, this is something you and I have agreed on this podcast multiple times is that HD is searching for the alternative to cosmetic based economies that get them out of that ARPdow range into healthier ARP Dows that can support lower DAU numbers that they can sustain on and build businesses and they haven't figured that out. That is the main

barrier for even games like this. Like the fact that you can't win with 100,000 DAU in HD to me is heartbreaking. We have to figure out how we're going to build a model to solve that. And I just haven't seen anyone try.
Pay to win. Pay to win. Pay to win. You know, like if you're talking about at the 100k Dow scale, like you just cannot do it with cosmetics. Even if you could pull off the Valorant level of monetization unit metrics, you're still not at a viable scale. The other thing here is matchmaking. You're mostly looking at PvP games. They live or die based on matchmaking health. Bots and stuff like that can help, but it doesn't solve the issue. So even at that like 200 300k DAU proper matchmaking that's skill-based that's getting the right players together keeping that win rate that is impossible at that scale which is why you just see anything that can't get that immediate scale up front loses that matchmaking retention decays quickly over time because matchmaking just gets worse and worse and worse.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.
All right, the next one, Phil. The next depressing story,
man. God, we're we're on HD these days. Mobile's coming back, ladies and gentlemen. Don't worry. But we have to cover Wildgate. This is from Moonshot Games, which is one of Dream Haven's studios. And if you know Dream Haven, remember that's Mike Mooreheim Studio, the founder of Blizzard. And they had released Linked, which was a game they published from Fuzzybot. So that was third party, but this is one of their first party studios. From what I understand, there's around 50 employees on this, and it had around a five to four year dev cycle. So again, they've shipped a game. Congratulations. Thank god. The pros can actually ship a game. And what is Wildgate? Well, it's a PvPVE extraction royale fourman teams. And normally I would blow this off, but from everything I understand about the game right now is there's actually a lot here, which is where I think extraction should actually go, which is combining a lot of Sea of Thieves elements, having clear win conditions. So, for example, when you enter a Wildgate experience, similar to Battle Royale, you're starting the session concurrently with

everyone else. There aren't people that are already in the servers. The objectives are much clearer. The social integration is much tighter. It's focusing on the ship. This is already out and I'm really excited to play. The only problem is that there's only around 5,000 CCU, which is an embarrassing number. And I'm not quite sure what's going on with Dream Haven. I thought they were going to come out and raise like an ungodly amount of money. And that doesn't seem to be the case. It looks like Mike Morheim is like bootstrapping this. Like where's the marketing push?
No, no, no, no. Some people were saying that they basically just raised privately on their own, right? Without any fanfare.
He's not he's not controlling this whole thing.
But there is Sunderfolk before there is Wildgate. I know Stormgate is whole different thing, right? Like Stormgate was the Starcraft team. They got their own separate funding, not within Dream Haven. They also kind of hit this kind of 5K to 10K CCU scale when they launched. I don't know like these Blizzard teams are just not executing on being able to get that initial pop. And like the big

thing I'd be looking at if I was Dream Haven is your go to market strategy. This game actually had a pretty unique selling point was really differentiated was pretty exciting from the trailers but you can't rally the troops to get above 5K CCU that this is a big wakeup call for Dream Maven.
I don't know that's rough. Let's see. Like Blizzard is good at staying with products, not well well as we learned yesterday still have 100 people on [ __ ] mobile game, but they're they're good at sticking with products. I I wouldn't rule this one out.
Sure. But like again PC console like does not have this like slow and grow install curve that just does not exist.
What about Viger? I think Viger has something similar to that
like tiny tiny scale.
Philip, you just keep bringing up these like really small
Yeah. I'm like, what are you even talking about? Yeah. Well, like look, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe over the weekend all of a sudden this thing has a big push, but GTM curves don't work like this. So, I'm like, this is an immediate signal to me

like come on guys, you have a really differentiated product that people were excited about right from the trailer, only 5K coming up. Like, you've got to be able to jump up your marketing. And like, maybe they just haven't spent yet, but already you're losing your biggest and best window. I don't understand this. I'm sorry if I'm like coming across as an ass here, but this is a a red flag for me.
Still interesting things on the game design side, not just on the core gameplay we're just talking about, but I'm seeing a little bit more kind of the battle pass. How do we kind of like tweak it a little bit? And so, one of the ways they're doing progression in the game is that you have chapters and then you have various characters within those chapters. And each of those characters have their own progression track, but you can only set one active at a time. So, you don't need to be playing a character even to level up their lane, which I think is pretty interesting. But like, yeah, it's it's all going to be buried to your point, Adam, which is sad if it doesn't get any scale.
Yeah.
Speaking of scale, let's talk about the Emoji Movie. Nope. It's the Apple new

emoji based puzzle game. It's adding it to its Apple Plus news lineup. Why do we give a [ __ ] about this? I think there's been this trend. We've talked about LinkedIn having games, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, all of these different tech platforms have games, and I'm not quite sure what's going on here. Like, what what is this? You know, is is this just like trying to meet an underserved audience? Like, does anyone understand what the thesis is of LinkedIn adding games? Like, all of these different platforms adding games
engagement. No, I actually am an Apple 1 subscriber and I get Apple News and so I actually had the popup come up to me yesterday and I was like what? I did the same thing you just did. I'm like what is this emoji on news? I'm like it's just the wrong use case. Like I this is people trying to shove games in front of people who don't want games in this experience. I'm here in this mindset to read a news article. I am not here to do something with

emojis and play some sort of game experience. I think new, you know, everyone's like looking at Wordle in the New York Times and they forget that that was completely separate. It's like you're not engaging in the paper and then reading an article and then oh, I'm going to also do Wordle. Like it's a different experience. So
my only concern is that this satiates this satiates the match three crowd and the truckar crowd and the you know the chrome valley customs crowd. Like they get put out to pasture with this stuff. enough for them and they don't convert to like the high monetizing, high spend app stuff we need them to.
I don't think so because I think it's difficult to get the first time trial because you're not in the mindset of engaging in the game experience.
And yet that's one of the best parts of the New York Times,
but it was a separate company that who bought Wordle. Like it's not integrated into I'm reading an article and then Wordle pops up and wants me to engage inside of a news article. It's separate.
That's fair enough. So you're just arguing this is a poor product market fit.
Correct.
Okay. That's
use case fit. Yeah. They want to do something different. Like you're not in

the Apple News platform looking to engage. I'm not looking for that moment. I'm looking for something completely different. So LinkedIn is the same thing. I'm not looking to play a game with my work friends when I'm looking for Crest's latest rant.
Yeah, but I mean look at Telegram has God Telegram instantaps that just has so many goddamn users. Not only WeChat games, so many goddamn users. I don't
Facebook Instant Messenger before it was banned had a sizable DAU as well. YouTube did did some hyper casual stuff recently, too. There's just I'm not quite sure what to make of all this.
Yeah, I know. I think everyone's trying to add gaming, but people aren't necessarily in those mindsets. All right, everyone. Thanks. That's it for the week. See you next week.
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