TWIG #343: Match Villains' Monster Raise, Roblox's New Numbers, and the Lost A of AAA

Someone shoot me. Is there is there anyone have any precision of language in this [ __ ] podcast? [Music]
Web stores, you see what good looks like, but have you experienced great? App charge is the direct to consumer platform that powers over half a billion dollars in transactions each year for top studios. They're not just another vendor. They're backed by Supercell and built by monetization veterans from Moonactive, Plague Tikica, and other industry giants who understand the difference between merely functional and the truly exceptional. What sets them apart? Deeply personalized web stores with custom design offers, industry-leading monetization features, seamless in-game payment integration, and a robust SDK. While 70% of top grossing games already have web stores, the ones scaling the fastest are doing it with app charge. Ready to transform

good into great? Learn more at appcharge.com.
Hey, are you building a game, launching an app, or considering an acquisition? Well, in that case, Destructor Fund Consulting is here to help you out. We do everything from market research to go to market strategies to live ops optimization and due diligence. We're trusted by some of the most beloved game development companies, makers of tools and tech as well as some of the most renowned investors. Now, if you are building, launching, or buying, don't do it alone. Do it with us. Connect by emailing to consulting dagstructorof.com. [Music] Hey everyone and welcome to Twig 343. I'm Jen Dano. I fill the marketing and publishing role on today's lovely podcast. Lot to cover. First we have

Eric Crest, strategy and investing.
Phil Black, Mandization Zar,
Mishna Katkov. I'm filling in the uh founder grifter role here then
an Oakland Raiders fan. I mean I guess Vegas fan definitely not Oakland fan. Raiders not Oakland as a whole. I'm sorry for everybody who lived in Oakland. I felt very scary every time I visited. So
do you have a New York Yankees cap too? Somewhere in there? Like European?
I I don't I I kind of like I I have Dodgers caps because I like LA. Yeah, you know I I do like LA. It's I like spots in especially where Jen lives. That's my Oh, yeah. One of the favorite spots in the world, not just LA. It's
The Swedes know nothing about Los Angeles or being a
Jen lives where all the Swedish hockey players live. So, they do know.
Yeah, they all live in. All right, here's what we got going on the episode today. A lot of US regulatory changes

and it's never been more fascinating. Google loses again to Epic in the Epic v Google lawsuit. We'll dissect that. Crest, thank you for pulling that in. How probably monsters downscales from AAA to double A. A lot of they're in the news a little bit this week. Lilith Games portfolio review. Thank you, Phil, for doing that. Roblox continues to crush it, hitting peak CCU records in July overall and especially with Grow a Garden. EA's College Football is back for year two and seems to be topping the list of PlayStation games. Not sure that we're going to have time, but I saw this this morning. There's a new esports celebrity gaming league called the GGL, Global Gaming League. They are touting it as the NFL meets WWE with quote celebrities and you know it's like Tay and is running it and
yeah, he he did a thing on Twitch.
Yeah. Well, that's why I'm saying quote celebrities. It's like, you know, my

life on the
list. It's like a no offense to T pay, but he was cool when I was like 18 and I'm far away from being 18.
What is this, Jen? This is like brand marketing AI sloth back in the day.
Is this Global Gaming League? Like this this hits every single brand button.
Oh, this is a monster. So, like a lot of the big publishers just signed on because they're going to compete in games like, get ready, Tetris, Trackmania, Call of Duty. Okay, fine. COD. They have their own thing. Tony Hawk, Pros Skater, Brawhalla, Tekken, and Rocket League. And I just Ooh, you know what? Those Tetris matches. Ooh, they're going to be like so riveting. Can you not wait to watch celebrities battle it out in Tetris,
which is pain? Yes. I think he had song called Booty Love or something like that. Like this is what we're talking about.

Oh gosh. Anyway. All right. So, the first thing I wanted to just touch on really quick was Sensor Tower did a little LinkedIn post and in the US we have this kind of partnership that's a little bit of a buzz. It's a celebrity partnership with Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle. It's a little bit controversial. I'm not going to get into that aspect, but Center Tower had this lovely little in a graphic that had some fun stats that because of this controversy, there's an 18% increase in installs week, also accompanied by what they say is a 14% increase in ad spend, but 60% of those installs were onestar reviews. So, people were just coming in and like reviewbombing what is in a sense this campaign. So, you know, I just thought it was kind of an interesting thing. You know, if you're doing a a celebrity partnership, we'd love to discuss those here. Be a little careful if you go edgy. Review bombing is still a thing. Phil, is it does it matter though? I don't know. Does who cares?
I just think we have to from a

historical perspective give proper credit. Like we talk about gaming being the forefront of all these technologies. Like the first best use case is often what you hear for web 3, right? It's not so much the case with AI. I would also say the origin of like online activism has not been properly traced back to gaming and like review bombing is like one of the first tactics that like gaming invented. The online gaming agenda exists and they know how to rally and this is one of their like agenda tools is to review bomb. If you remember Steam had to introduce those bar charts. So now you can see the ratio of positive and negative for a Steam game over time and you can examine where people started to like dog pile on. So there'll be people with, you know, the meme is always a thousand hours of game time, thumbs down. You know, game is trash, hate it. So I would say, you know, I don't think you can take that stuff too seriously. I would say the only key, right, is if your stars go below a certain level is sometimes that can affect featuring. Y
and that's where I think this becomes an

issue is if there's, you know, harm in the algorithm. And I would push that back to the platforms on whether or not they can control for that.
Yeah. Do you remember uh Crest back in the day? I think when you and I were at at EA and Mass Effect had like like I don't know did they they they killed the the main guy I guess spoiler for Mass Effect and then they all of the fans went and raided EA the worst place to work and this was like the same year of like the Exxon Valdes like
killing all of the wildlife with the oil spill. Do you remember that? Or you know ahead of like cable it was like 2008
Bank of America who was like extracting money out of accounts and like all this other stuff and EA was and Comcast was also like the devil back then.
So yeah. No, that was ridiculous.
Yeah, I Yeah, Phil, you're right. Like gamers love to have been review bombing since 2008. But anyway, it looked like the the stock price took a like a really big increase too from all of this.

Okay, shill Mishka.
One more, no, two more weeks or one more week before Gamescom. So, quick shill on the events and then we can talk about the other content. Gamescom heroic party. So, I think we're closing to 1,000 people signed up for that one. We're going to start letting more people in to the event, but it's going to be really cool. we went through today with the floor planning. There's two levels, there's the rooftops, there's casino tables, there's going to be arcade machines. So, definitely if you haven't signed up, sign up. And then we're probably going to do two sets of invites. We're trying to figure out how to get max amount of people in. And then whiskey tasting. It's not going to be 150 people like you said in the last time. It's going to be exclusive. We had 100 people signed up. Now about 200. We're going to let a smaller amount of people in so we can enjoy adult or water beverages together before all the other mixes start. This is at 400 p.m. So, you can get nice and cruisy by by 5:00 p.m. and you'll just breeze through all your dinners and I I guarantee you'll close a

lot of a lot of investments and whatnot with like four shots in or maybe six shots. So, come to both of our events 19th and the 20th.
Can I shield something for you, Mishka?
Please do.
Well, this doesn't doesn't happen very often.
That's why I love it. It's a it's a rare love.
You you've had some good hits recently. I thought your podcast with Medicica was interesting because Medicica the company is really interesting and these multi-armmed bandits you talk about right and this isn't a new concept like the super scale guys I remember were singing its praises on a podcast a while ago but this is something that I don't see when I work with a lot of different clients and I work with clients like at all different sizes and I'm just surprised I don't see this more or the way that I've seen multi-arm bandits even at the bigger boys still hasn't been done very well but the whole idea is to set up experimentation as a service. And so the idea is like you can pick a variable and then you can throw in new variants and what it does is it tries to optimize amongst the variants you have. And so the original analogy

for this is that if you're at Vegas, you're trying to figure out which slot machine has the highest ROI, you pull off them, observe the returns, and then reinvest your portfolio after observing the return returns chasing the winners and cutting the losers. And you can do this with a multi-arm bandit at scale. And the other thing you can do is you can like choose things like an exposure arm. So when you add a new variant into the pool, you can immediately expose it to a large share of your installs to see whether or not as pickup. And the thing that is really cool about metica is that you can also do partial equilibriums. So you may find that like for one group of users, this is the equilibrium that they retain best at. It's this particular value. It's this particular variant rather than trying to converge to one winner, which is really freaking cool. So like a really practical example, match three, you're working on seeds, which is how you configure the initial board. There may be a segment that optimizes on difficulty. It might be another one that segizes on like being lower attempts per success. But there's so much you can do if you combine game design with tools like this that I still haven't seen developers get properly

done and exposed even in mobile at the scale I thought it would be by now.
Yeah, just two words about Medica. Like I'm super impressed by these founders. I think properly met for the first time. at plays at summit. The one that you were on in the villages of Finland, these guys are no slouches. Like they build data analytics companies. This is what they do. Like built first one that acquired by King. So they were there scaling King from midsize to a goddamn giant. Then they build another data analytics company that gets acquired by Apple. So they are running through the whole growth loop under the privacy network. And now this is their third one. So super impressive guys.
What the [ __ ] are you guys talking about? Can you like
so
can you start with something like who are these guys?
So have you used this analogy and they said this is okay this is how I understand cuz I'm Phil is smart I'm dumb. So you have an ice cream kiosk and let's say if you're running an AB test you would be testing like you have three flavors you got your strawberry you got your chocolate you got your vanilla and the AB test would say like most of the

people like vanilla hence let's go with the best variant. Now, this ice cream kiosk is only going to serve vanilla because in the AB test, what came out first was vanilla. And with the multi-arm bandit, or as I call it, the personalization means that now you can serve all hundred of different flavors and you just personalize to everybody's need rather than trying to find what is the best for most.
So, it's an experimentation company. All right. Okay.
There's a little bit more to the analogy. what what you're trying to do, you're adding flavors to the truck and you're removing flavors that aren't selling well and so over time you can just continue to test new flavors which is great.
Jen, there's a marketing component because it ties into your MMP. So basically it modifies personalized directly as it comes through different channels. So now based on the creators and based on the channels you're using, they are automatically segmented and personalized the experience to them. So it's looks like he has painful someone shoot me. Is there is anyone have any precision of language in this [ __ ]

podcast?
We've been talking for five 10 minutes about this [ __ ] dude. Okay, fine. We got it. This is a personalization engine for [ __ ] game development. Great company to start with.
Let's go. Move on.
Jesus Christ. FIFA.
Quick correction. Quick correction. FIFA online is actually made in Korea, not China. I actually knew this. I don't know why I said what I said, but it's called EA Spearhead. And also what I really didn't know is I think a lot of the revenue is actually driven out of Korea, not necessarily China. Although it is in China and Southeast Asia, but the majority of the revenue is in Korea, right? So this was mistaken. I was corrected there. Um, but my conclusion still applies. Get freeto play the [ __ ] away from Andrew and Redwood Shores and Vancouver and put it where it actually [ __ ] they actually know what they're doing, right? That's that's the moral of the story regardless of whether it's made in China or Korea. So that is the

the conclusion to draw. Well, hold on. I think there's there's more going on here. So like that skew does a substantial amount of money. Like a substantial amount of money. Like it definitely isn't a lion share. Don't get me wrong. Like if we think about FC whatever the three different components like box sales, Western FUT, and then we think about FIFA online. Like FIFA online, I would argue is probably doing a really healthy share there. Maybe a third. You think? You think a third? A third. A third between those three breakdowns. I think it's [ __ ] mind, dude.
You were out of your [ __ ] mind, dude. This thing. No, dude. It does like 20 25 million units, dude. Of
play. It's not It's the online is like 600 to a billion dollars.
It's free to play. It's free to play. What are you talking about? It's not about units. FIFA online is free to play. No, you are arguing the buckets, Phil. And Chris is saying that you are underestimating the boxed product
unit sales. I would say maybe 1015 on a

realistic basis. What you think? 600 million a year maybe. FIFA online?
No way. No, no, no. This doesn't do that kind of money, dude. 600 million for the FIFA online.
Yeah, I think so. Plus, it's net and there's lots of distribution fees and like you're dealing with Nexon and Tencent as distribution partners in Asia. Like, it's not as profitable. The revenue might be significant, but it's not as profitable as [ __ ] FIFA, dude.
That being said, do you think there's there's anything to this this freeto-play skew being interesting as like some sort of endgame solution for the West?
No. Like FIFA since I was there. No, it plays a role. It's awesome, but you know, like PC freeto play is not a thing. I was in the group called Play for Free at EA that got shut down. Like
Battlefield Heroes made a lot of money. Rest in peace.
I know. I worked on Battlefield Heroes. It was awesome. But no one does that in in the West. Like PC free to play is not
a billion dollars in revenue from

packaged goods, you know, on a yearly basis. It's like they're not never giving that up.
I think you've got to think about this like in different stages, though. Like, okay, what happens if you turn on the free to pray spigot? Like let's say when the game's trailing off, what happens if you do more free weekends? What happens if you do more shareware versions? Like there's a lot of middle grounds here, too.
They're doing that. I think they had like a $5 skew for FIFA like later earlier this year, right?
Yeah, don't me wrong. I agree with you. I agree with you. There's no way you give up that box revenue. It's insane. I just think it's first of all interesting that this does exist that they have made an economy version that's this compelling. It does well in the East. And I think there's there's something there when you start to think about where the box skew goes in the long run.
Okay.
All right. Next.
Next.
All right. Let's let's talk about the new approaches to AAA development. So, this was an article from Game Industry Biz. And this was actually pretty hard to read. I stopped it at one point. I had to take a walk and then came back and read through it. So, this is about probably monsters, aka also known as the

Limpy Donkey winner from the Twig Awards earlier this year.
Golden Twig.
Golden Twig.
If you're going to say our branding, you got to do it right.
Golden Twig limping donkey nominee. So, if you forgot what Probably Monsters is, here are some facts. The company was founded in 2016 by a former Bungee head, Harold Ryan, with an aim of transforming AAA development. Makes all the sense. till date they raised just merely $220 million. They built multiple studios and you've actually heard and they have scaled for 400 people. You've actually heard of one of their studios. It was called Firewalk. They made a game called Concord that PlayStation published. Anyways, so 9 years since their founding. It's time to release two of their games and they also changed their strategy. So now they are not transforming in AAA development according to this article, but they are rather using a shotgun approach, throwing out relatively small and quick

to make games, then seeing which ones stick.
No, Mishka, I don't believe any of what you're saying is real. I can't believe no.
Who said this? Was this a reporter? Was this a press release?
I'm quoting Ryan on this one. We'll be shipping games every year from here on forward with multiple different genres. And basically, he's talking about there's, you know, screenshot of their latest game that's coming out. Again, looks like four people out of Ukraine made this in two months.
Sidescrolling shooter.
Exactly. It's like $200 million. It looks like an Eastern European, you know, weekend project. So, so I just want to go through this. It was hard to read because in a way this is kind of like like a disaster PR. I was asking myself a question. Why is this interview being done? If usually interview is done because of funding, but this company will never raise a dime. Let's be honest. like 20 220 million and no games shipped in 9 years. No. Are they hiring? That's another reason for PR. Well, they have let go half of their staff by now. So, there are 200 people actually at this company at the moment. And they've

had multiple redundancy. So, probably not hiring. And so, the only reason they're doing this is to promote a new game. But this gametorm lancers that they're promoting image shown here. Again, it's it's not probably the best channel to promote a new game you're launching on Steam to promote it on games industry biz. Like that's not the target audience.
But he also did an interview with Christopher Ding on the game business podcast. I didn't listen to it, but I saw it in my feed.
I might tour right now.
Yeah. So, so he goes on this PR tour and this would be very interesting if he would be self-reflecting of what were the challenges and how come like the way I'm seeing it they were too slow uh clearly they were too ambitious you know sitting up four AAA studios is you know ambition and they are too expensive like the headcounts are you know based out of the US or North America that is too expensive and now they're trying to survive by throwing spaghetti at the wall everybody who sees the image it might be a fun game but it is not the

type of game you would expect from a company that has raised $220 million. Like, if you'd be seeing this as a VC, you'd be like, "What the [ __ ] Like, where did my money go?" And I don't know. I would advise not to do this type of an interview. But Chris, what's your take? I mean, the only thing missing is like an investment from A16Z or Light Speed, right?
Oh [ __ ] Eric. But ironically,
dude,
we're probably investing in no gaming whatsoever. Anyway, the interesting thing is it was like Activision and Blizzard and LKCM Investors, which seems to be the only investment they ever made was in this company, which is kind of goes to show you $250 million. Like absolutely ridiculous. Like this was like
clearly back in the heyday of the VC insanity during COVID. And this is kind of the result. Mismanaged probably from the get-go, hiring, spending hundreds of thousands of if not millions of dollars on game developers and producers,

whatever. Dude, it's like the same story, different thing.
Yeah.
Yeah. No, this never made sense. Anyway, this big VC investments never made sense in gaming and we're just seeing the aftermath of it. Oh, by the way, as an update to Believer, even though they didn't announce anything, evidently they did find some interim funding which was not disclosed in order to keep them alive. So, we'll see where that goes. So,
$100 million, $200 million. That's
don't know.
For nine years.
All right. Just a really quick thing, you know, get your old Switch stuff now because Nintendo has hiked the prices of all of their old Switch console, Switch One and accessories in the US, not impacting Switch 2, luckily. So, uh, price increases for Nintendo stuff. Now, let's do it. Epic versus Google. What's the aftermath? Big week last week.

Crest, take us through it.
Oh, man. I just started playing. Hold on.
Oh, sorry. I'm You know, Crest plays games during the podcast, everyone, just in case you wanted to know because he is so not fascinated when we talk about other [ __ ]
So, do am I vamping enough for you to finish your level in Kingshot or what the what the [ __ ] are you even playing? It's usually
No, don't worry about it. All right. Here we go.
It's not like you have a script. You see, what I'm going to say is like one sentence long.
Okay. All right. Sorry. Anyway, so the US appeals court ruled in favor of Epic once again against Google, forcing Google to open up the Android app distribution and payments. Developers can now use thirdparty billing, link to external payment options, and distribute rival app stores. So in a nutshell, this creates rival app stores on Google Play immediately. You avoid the 30% fee. It

creates like the ability to do direct user acquisition and basically continues to leverage the momentum that Epic was feeling with Apple and it actually pushes even more aggressive reforms on the Google side is kind of what the net of it is from a distribution perspective. So huge win for Sweeney and Epic. I think Sweeney was out there saying that this is an absolute momentous occasion, you know, doing his whole PR thing about this stuff. So my take a huge victory for Epic just generally speaking definitely a watershed moment for the antirust for Google to basically loosen its grip on the Play Store for both billing and distribution so stores as well as being able to do direct payments for customers. However, the full effects of this probably won't be visible for another couple years because Google is going to mount like a resistance against it and delay these changes or even overturn these changes potentially in the courts. So, we're not done done, but

this was a big victory for them. Again, I continue to believe and I got some wink wink nod nods from some folks at GDC that what ultimately the reaction is once they've exhausted all legal obstacles is that they're going to reduce the fee. So, you know, and maybe get down to a 20% range and then maybe that it won't change the fact that you'll be able to go off the app store and build your own stores, but it will kind of eliminate the want or need to do so. Right? If it's at 15 to 20%, let's say, why bother, right? In my opinion,
you know, Google is trying to put stays and freezes on hold. Right now, August 15th is the date. And by the way, all of this is in the US. I think, you know, we always say that the EU DMA is a completely separate thing that influences Europe. This is a US only thing. So August 15th is where currently these effects will take place unless Google like you're saying can go and get another freeze. They are out there

saying oh we you know it's it actually doesn't take them that long to unlock some of this. So here are the things that might happen on August 15th. Google is going to be stopped from forcing app developers to use Google Play billing. It's going to let Android devs tell users about other ways to pay from within the store. Lets devs link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store. It's the UAP you were talking about. And then this is kind of interesting, Phil. Like you can set your own prices. Like do we even care about like setting your own prices? You want to do like $35 or something? Is that what that means? Does anyone care?
I still don't know what setting your own prices means. I can set my own price.
Don't you have to do it with a 99 at the end? Isn't everything like $1.99, $2.99?
I actually No, I don't think so. Like, I've gotten things in different Swedish crona, too, that are outside that specific denomination.
Okay. Well, it's just it's one of the things on the list you can

I mean, there were some restrictions on like the maximum you could charge for a skew, but they've greatly loosened so many of those requirements. Like, do you remember we were looking at like the $800 skew that was on Millions and Million Lords,
the 4X game?
Like, that was something that was web only. I forget what the limit is now. I think it's like $10,000. And the amount of SKUs you can have, first-p partyy SKs in the app store has been significantly increased. Like a lot of these benefits kind of I think sometimes get oversold now that they've been loosened. But to Eric's Crest's point, like they only loosen that because I think they started to feel competition and pressure.
Yeah.
I think that's very real. They'll make more money at 20% potentially than 30 with the competition from app stores now. Like that may be the new best price for them.
Yeah,
it makes sense. They should get something for running the platform. I think we all wish they would have just gotten there sooner. Okay, what else we got? Atari. Is that
Atari? Yeah. Well, this is not about Atari. So, when I when I look through the news, I'm trying to find something that triggers crest. So, I believe this is the one. I I found a company. So,

Atari acquires 82% stake in Thunderfall for 5.2 million. That's not an interesting topic. Then I started looking at this. So, Atari is a French-based gaming holding company and they acquire 82% of this Swedishbased public indie games publisher and developer, Thunderfall Group, for a very small amount of money. And then I look at this Thunderfall Group and this is amazing. This is like Swedish financial engineering at its best. So this is in the flow of MTG, Stillfront, EG7, Embracer, and Thunderfall is must be one of those, you know, private equity managed companies. And between 2020 and 2021, this Thunderfall pursued a Thunderful M&A strategy. And they spent $150 million making five acquisitions. And if you look at the charts over here, it shows what are the sales of this group. So in 2020 about it was $330 million. 2021 they go to $370 million.

Then they start collapsing. So a little bit under 300. Then closer to 250. And in 2024 this company made less than $30 million. So what happened? Massive decrease in sale. Decrease in sales followed by absolute collapse in sales. Then there's a fire in sale. And when I was looking at some of these assets that they have sold, for example, they bought this German indie developer headup for $30 million and then literally like a year or a year and a half later, they sell it back to founders for $500,000. So that's a nice pot for the founders and they get their company back after a while. And then as their sales collapsed, the share price collapsed, their eBuck collapsed and I don't know what the future of this company is. Probably not too bright. probably nobody needs this publisher that doesn't seem to publish anymore. But you know, Eric, who do you think is the the next Swedish conglomerator to go under a fire sale?
Well, EG7 and Snowfront are like on the

respirator. Like, you know, EG7's like $120 million and Stillfront's like $260 million. The fundamental problem is that like there's no real value within the companies, you know, like and I've been talking about this for years on the podcast. It's like the aggregator [ __ ] me never made any sense because they weren't acquiring teams that actually could make new games, right? That you could build again organic growth was never ever seemed to be achieved by any of them, right? All of them were basically banking on old games and and that was it. the capability just wasn't there. And so that is kind of the story. The only one that I kind of have hope for is EG7 to some degree because they do have teams in there that are managing some interesting IP like you know EverQuest etc. But like but then again do they have the capability of actually building new [ __ ]
MT MTG I think has been quite
cons Yeah, you're right. They're a little bit

better too. But the point is like there's no value in these companies, right? I don't see how this would be valuable to say like Scople, right, or EA or I mean, hell, they bought Glue, so maybe who the [ __ ] knows, right? Uh, you know, I don't know.
They made glue out of glue. That's what they did.
Yeah. Really? Seriously. So, yeah. I just don't see the value for anybody on this. Atari, I don't even know what Atari is doing right now. They've been restructuring and rejiggering things for a long time. So, maybe they have some master plan. Um, what's interesting is this. This juxtaposed toes the next story. The next story is kind of the future. This is what we're talking about is the past. So, let's go back to Turkey. You know,
Turkey to Turkey. So, good job, Good Job Games for raising $60 million series A. I think this is now the record. I think previous one was 50 maybe. I don't know. So about good job games, this has previously been a hyper casual

publisher.
That that's not fair. They remember they came out of Zen. They came out of Zen match. They sold that company which was more hyper casual match which was I wouldn't call it hyper casual match ad based match adbased puzzle.
This has always been dedicated to match. Good job games.
Okay. Cuz I cuz I
they've only worked on this from what I understand.
Got it. So I looked at their numbers for hyper casual. They had about 50 million installs which is not a lot for hyper casual. you know, dabbled in it, sold the portfolio, moved to match three, and then the story starts. So, the story is relatively short from now on. Like, they made match villains, came to a seed round, raised a $23 million seed, like when people are having hard time raising. Look at this company. $23 million seed. And you're like, when did they do this? Well, in March, this year. This year, March. And now they raised $60 million series 8. So 4 months later, their game against what they're raising is called Match Villains. So if you haven't played it, please download Match Villains. They have according to Sensor about $12 million in net revenue and $3 million in downloads. But that's not the

story. The story is here in an image. If you're watching on Spotify on YouTube, we're looking at revenue per download. And the revenue per download curve has a very promising start. I put in here match villain versus royal kingdom and royal match which is the royal duo from Turkeykey's dream games currently revenue per download already is higher when starting from the launch period higher than royal kingdom latest one and seems to be continuing to increase and looks very promising very fast rise and of course they've they've took all the learnings from from dream games and and you know made an excellent product here's my hypothesis I don't know if this is But this is this is my conspiracy theory. I have to give some. So So we had a a founder of Grand Games on a podcast maybe a half a year ago and Grand Games raised the fastest series A I think in Turkey and his series A was 30 million. The interesting part about this is the founder of and the founders of Grand Games actually left Good Games

and founded their new studio and had a lot of success. And so I was kind of thinking about like are they raising so much of a capital so quickly just to kind of flex on the guys who left them and like look we're actually the true mother ship and true rocket ship here. I don't know this might be just totally my thinking but it's really around that that I feel like they're raising too much capital too quickly based on the fact that there are other sources that you can use to scale your game. So if you're raising only 60 million in equity, I think you could have raised a little bit less, given less from your company and used other source of non-dilutive funding like I know General Catalyst who actually was on a podcast recently. We haven't launched that. They talked about how they have been funding companies like Superplay that Playa acquired for 2 billion in how they scale their games. So anyways, I'm going in a tangent, but overall seems like good job games is a phenomenal company. They have

an absolutely monster of a hit. They're raising really fast. They're scaling really fast and hope they do. Dreamy numbers. Chris, what's your take on this?
Well, just just a little bit more context here. Match Villains has been around for a while. You remember it's a pivot from an earlier brand they had that was more familycentric. That I actually worked with them a while back on that one.
They pivoted. This is their new version. It's taken a long time to get to this point. It's in the United States now. It is scaling in terms of downloads. I think it's around 2 million a month, $2.5 million a month in revenue. So that's still pretty small. What is that maybe $50 million run rate, but you're completely on point. Like if you have the ability to take lines of credit, which everyone is in on, I don't know why you give away your company. If you're buying profitable traffic, if you're profitable rorowaz, I think this has been a really big invention for founders in and mobile freeto play. I'm surprised we we aren't seeing more of this this spreading just in terms of everyone's starting to offer it, but I just expect this would radically change some of the VC founding landscape too and funding. Like now now you're

crowding out VC, right?
There's less demand for VC.
Well, it's not less demand. You still need capital to grow your organization to hire people to
but at the margin.
Yes, but but I wouldn't probably take all the money for my UA as equity funding. I would use other sources for that. But of course, equity funding makes sense when you're building out your organization, hiring people, your capabilities, your infrastructure, all of that, yes, you need funding for that. But to fund your cohorts, if they're looking as promising as they look here on on the chart, then I would assume UA funding, whether it's smaller at a scale like in the beginning like the PVX partners and or larger one like General Catalyst that literally, you know, funds biggest consumer SAS company, customer acquisition, medical, but those are still relatively small. But all I'm saying is there are very very big funds that offer almost infinite money if you have a cohort for it.
Okay. All right. First of all,

I was waiting for you, Chris. I was like, "Oh my god, please stop this.
Stop the marketing talk."
I I actually don't know anything specific about this deal, although I do talk to these guys, Anthos and Menllo, once in a while. So, these two big bucking huge funds are making the investment. So clearly they're are very very sophisticated people there. This is not like you know Lightseed or A16Z investing in [ __ ] right?
My god, dude.
Wow.
Eric, just to be clear, the partner from Menllo is former partner of Lightseed. So
anyway, we know what we're talking about. We know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I would imagine there's like either two scenarios here. one is first of all I think these guys want to get involved in the market in Turkey so they're probably offering relatively favorable terms the second thing I would imagine and I don't know is that either early investors or insiders like cashed out you know because you can't do that

if you're trying to you know get it from general catalyst for UA spending so there's a possibility that some equity was sold as well during this round right potentially I don't know
secondaries Yeah.
Yeah. So, secondaries for existing shareholders. So, there's other reasons why you would take VC money at this stage even though they probably don't need to because most I bet 99% of the capital that they raise for UA. So, anyway, people want to get in because this is the only place in gaming that makes sense right now. So, for an investment perspective, unless you're light speeded.
So, yeah. I mean, that that's it. What What else is there? This market is really hot in Turkey.
Lots of investment going on.
Overheated. What do you think? This is kind of getting to a kind of expensive area.
Yeah, you know, it's they're still the only ones scaling revenue consistently, it seems, with these puzzle games, right? So,
these paybacks are getting brutal. Like, they're going to face like I mean, I'm hearing what is it now? The rumor is 24 month paybacks.

Like, man, that's crazy. They they they got to be competing for the same CPIs with this art style, too.
Yeah. And remember, Royal Kingdom hasn't scaled quite as much. Yeah, that data point is actually really really frightening.
How many celebrities can you get for 60 million? Like let's let's start.
Well, you get eight eight for 25. So,
what's Kevin Hart doing?
Can we do like a love actually situation?
Hey, where's Sydney Sweeney? How much is
New Year's Eve?
How much is she?
Games. She's coming. She's coming to mobile games.
She is. What? Well, who's going to take her? Machine Zone is out of the business. though that would have been my
There are a lot of Forex companies looking for some downloads.
Will Harbor's new game company. He wanted
Kingdom Maker. That's a good candidate. Moving on. Moving on to games.
In today's hyperco competitive digital landscape, understanding your app's journey from discovery to download isn't just insightful. It's the difference

between scaling and stagnating. Enter Apps Flyier, the undisputed leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics. They've mastered the science of making every ad dollar work harder by revealing exactly where your players come from and how they interact with your app. Their platform transform mountains of complex data into clear actionable intelligence that separates winning campaigns from budget- draining experiments. And I know that many of the top game companies leverage Appslier and a are a key partner in their success. Appslier, where your app's potential meets performance. Stay ahead of the competition with Sensor Tower, the trusted source for mobile marketing intelligence. Whether you're tracking trends, benchmarking performance, or scouting the next big hit, Sensor Tower delivers the data that drives strategy. Dominate the charts with Sensor Tower. Game devs, here at Heroic Labs, we know that great gameplay is what players love. But integrating metagame features

like challenges, progression, and rewards is crucial for retention and monetization. But coding them is a tedious and timeconuming process. That's why top studios have turned to Hero from Heroic Claps. Hero provides a complete suite of battle tested metagame features that are quick to implement, letting you spend more time on the core gameplay experience. Ready to ship fully featured engaging games? Check out her today at heroiclabs.com. [Music]
One game stumbling, another charging ahead. Eric, I think you have news to say on this one.
This is a really quick one, right? The next Bioshock, which I've heard mixed things for years now about that game development. supposedly it suffered some huge setbacks because as they missed like a gate or something and and they basically a failed executive review and so that may be going back to the drawing board which is really sad cuz evidently it's like supposedly in like underwater like I don't know just some crazy environments

3. Jesus can you just stay on [ __ ] track here? Jesus Christ. Anyway, so anyway, we're not going to see the next Bioshock anytime soon, which is really, really sad. But on the good news is along with an amazing Pokemon game this holiday, we should see the next Metroid Prime. Evidently, it's still planning on launching this year on the Switch 2, which will be a great product for holiday, particularly for the core. I don't, you know, it's obviously not as big as something like Mario Kart, but anyway, Metroid Prime 4 will be supposedly coming out this year. Nintendo is continuing to do really good numbers. It's very, very, very strong. I imagine this holiday will set the world on fire when, you know, all these games release and for gift giving, right? Yes. Moving on. Farlight.
This seems like a never- ending story. This Farlight 84. So, we had the Farlight relaunch re or launch of a launch of a launch. So, I was curious about this game. They came out with a

new global relaunch that is happening on August 7th. And now this is a pet catching battle royale that receives a major update effectively rebooting and relaunching the game. The version two introduces a new first-person mode, upgraded graphics, redesigned gameplay systems, and fresh mechanics. Now, if Farlight 84, as it's in Chinese set, I'm just kidding. I'm not going to pronounce it. If you're kind of remembering this name, it's because they announced this in 2021. It looked really great. It was the Unreal shooter game for mobile coming in from Lilith, which was an absolutely on fire. They had a AFK journey. They had that 4X game, Rise of Kingdom. So, this was like a moment. This was the Chinese company to watch for. And so, they were introducing the shooter. Everybody was super excited. The trailer looked amazing. It looked like this will take over Fortnite. Well, it didn't. It was a well-made shooter. It felt super

generic. I'll be honest. Didn't really stand out. Came in so late after the uh trailers. Felt kind of like same old. Didn't even experience the mechanics later on. And as you can see from the graphs, big launch, almost 6 million downloads in May 2023. And an absolute shark fin. As you're looking both on downloads, they kind of tried to keep the downloads. You can see the spikes coming in on the months kind of like like the shocks of a of a dead body that is being dragged out of the ocean. The the pulse never returned and so we went to obscurity and now they seem to be relaunching and I remember they actually even tried to crossplatform play on this one. So, uh monetization was awful. Clearly didn't have the retention. I was thinking about like how would they do it? And I would never think that rebranding would be by introducing new mechanics. I thought that rebranding would be like hey we made an awesome looking shooters. We have an excellent team. Maybe we can put in another brand like Jen, like Star Wars, something something that would make sense. Sell it to one of those

Hollywood big houses. But apparently they're trying with with the same looks and the same vibe, but with more mechanics. So, Phil, is this like just not being able to abandon a sunken cost?
Well, I mean, I totally hear you on the hype for this. I mean, I just remember like Love was just so hot coming into this launch. And not only that, like Supercell of China, these games are original. These were not derivatives. This did have like an Apex Legends core, but I thought there was a lot of really great ideas in the original game. Like if you remember, there was this in round hero skill progression, which was something that I think they were even ahead of Apex on. Remember, there was a vehicular combat that was pretty new. The jetpack system was huge for movement. They did a ton of interesting things. And to your point, they had that PC skew which did okay on Steam. I was disappointed in the level of optimization. If you weren't from China, like if you're a Western player, you totally missed on all expectations. This game is really confusing that they're choosing to relaunch it. And if you remember, like Lilith has a lot of weird things. So, if you remember, they give their employees shares of a subsidiary that is where the game is

actually owned by. And so, I'm curious if like some of their incentive systems are actually getting the best of them and like maybe that's preventing people from moving on or moving projects. I don't necessarily know, but I feel like that's been a very peculiar aspect of their culture, and I'm curious how it interacts here. This new launch is bizarre. So, they're adding a buddy system, which is like you essentially capture Pokemon in round, and they become like basically a grenade that you can use a tactical. I mean, this was in the original one, but now it's going to be expanded. So, now they're super powerful buddies, which are even more important, and they're building a meta around these in round buddies. And so I'm just like utterly utterly confused on what's going on here. And I think I found it when we started to look at Lilith at the portfolio level. So this is a portfolio scorecard very similar to when we looked at Scopely. We're looking at year-to- date metrics
across all of Lilith's games for the last 3 years. And it has been a dramatic decrease like we've seen with Scopely.

So they are down in terms of revenue about 30% across the portfolio year to date between 24 and 25. MAU is only down 6%. But I would say the curious thing about MAU for Lilith
is that Sensor Tower only has them at around like an 8 to 10 million MAU portfolio, which is really small. Now I want to triple check that number, but like I I did some spot checks and like that was way smaller than I thought. They're really banging on an art mount here and their downloads are down a little bit in a softer uh rate. The entire portfolio is basically Rise of Kingdoms. AFK Journey I think did not do well. I consider it a flop. But the other one that's really curious here is if you see line item number six, you see Palmon Survival. Now, what is Palmon Survival? We haven't really covered this a ton and I want to spend more time with it in the future, but Palmon Survival is where they should be spending I think almost all of their resources abandoning AFK Journey. They have added a Pokemon core into Forex Baby.
Oh.
And so right now this is scaling. It's in the United States. It's not in any

crazy numbers yet. You can see here they're only 3 million downloads in 2025. They've only done 7 million in revenue life to date. But this is still the thesis I expected Squad RPG to go after. And I think is why AFK Journey failed is that they went in the wrong direction.
And so this to me is what I expected Western developers to do to modify Squad RPG and we haven't done a lot of it. And we we'll talk about DC Worlds Collide in a moment here, but I think this is what I I think the West really needs to wake up to. Like China is moving on this [ __ ] fake ad. I would even call it fake ad. Like it's it's it's now a merged gameplay. It's not fake in my opinion. It's becoming closer and closer to the core. Like Kingshot does have real squad RPG mechanics. Like squad RPG is a real part of Star Trek Fleet Command as we've been covering. It's not just fake [ __ ] anymore.
4X strategy survival game. Jesus.
Yeah. Yeah. It's you can you can see Jen like if you go to the character collectors we can see some of the Palmons. You've got your star system, your leveling. You're

looking at a world map here which is completely irrelevant. It's not a world map, excuse me. This is your exploring map. But you can see that there's also the 4X style map if you click around your usual one.
Insane amount of buttons.
There you go, Jen. That's a good one that you've got your squad. You've got your normal attack system.
Oh my god, it looks like white out survival. This is white out survival.
Mhm. It's with a Pokemon core. And this this is just the start of this. Like there's I I'm sure there is more of these in the hopper.
When are we going to have match three 4x survival game?
Well, I mean well look at Age of Empires, right? Like that was the Tensson attempt was like, "Fuck it. Let's do RTS." Was the old EA one?
Command and Conquer.
Command and Conquer. They were that was floating around.
They did Red Alert right out of China, which is funny. Uh, but very on the nose, but they probably don't get the sarcasm.
Boy. Yeah. I mean, in the little bit that, you know, it's been a while since I played White Out Survival, but what

they did was incorporate like hero collection, squad RPG, hero upgrading into the 4X system. It looks like they're doing that here with, you know, Pokemon style characters versus
humanoid characters. in in White Out Survival. I don't know looking at this on the fly, but
it looks super cute.
Yeah. All right.
It's a cute Forex game.
So, the other game we haven't had really a chance to spend any time with, but I'm sure Eric is playing right now as he's on his cell phone during Twig.
He's probably buying a car.
He's negotiating a deal. Is DC Worlds Collide? And there is a reason we haven't covered this one extensively. So, this is another attempt at a squad RPG for DC characters. If you remember, there was one that was a while ago. I think it was around the time of Marvel Strikeforce coming out. Do you remember that one, Mishka, by any chance?
I forget.
And and but this is this is from the Swiss publisher, right?
No, no, no. You're thinking of Dark

Legion. That was the recent Forax Squad RPG. This is a just pure Squad RPG that is coming out at the same time.
This was by Warner Brothers, I believe, an internal studio. Just hearing that, I I bet that this is not going to end well.
So, right now we're looking at daily active users and downloads since its launch, which was in mid June, and it looks like it's settled into a steady state of around 40k DAU.
It's a good hobby project.
Yeah, it's I I just don't understand how you get to a place of of kind of launching these games. And when we look at it on a broader monthly Squad RPG report, which is really kind of where I wanted to situate this, we had Mystic Mayhem, if you remember that, that is number 19 on the United States top grossing list for July, but it still is not at a decent enough scale. DC Worlds Collide debuted it at number 12, but again, it's already slipping. Like, the real winner here has been Pretty Derby. Like Pretty Derby is something we don't spend a lot of time talking about since

our our first cast talking about it, but it has killed in the recent months. Like it did 16 million in revenue this month and is on a $200 million run rate in the United States alone. And the number two game I think shocks a lot of people. It's Dragon Ball Z. Like we were talking about anime being mainstream. Dragon Ball Z Dokan Battle is not only the number two grossing Squad RPG in the United States for July, it is actually the number one by lifetime revenue, which very few people have picked up on, myself included, until I started looking it up.
I mean, that game's been around for years. And they have been around for years.
Yeah, there's a new Dragon Ball coming, I think. Is it on Netflix? I think some of these are getting a little bit of like content revival, too.
Jen, how does this work? there's like two DC RPG games on the list at the same time. Like does isn't it usually that you have some kind of a grace period before you can sell the IP in the same genre to a different publisher?
I've been curious about this too as we get genre blending is how do you word

these contracts?
Oh, very carefully. Right.
I'd be mad. Everyone be like, "What the fuck?"
Yeah. There's a term called slicensing which is Marvel is famous for this which is I'm going to give you the squad RPG cartoon art style only in the US
only featuring yeah I don't know what's going on in this situation but yes you can have what's called licensing which is very specific areas where you can allow publishers or developers to make games. The DC Worlds Collides. It's published by Warner Brothers. I see that.
Yeah. So that's the internal.
I don't know what the other one was.
So DC Dark Legion is is that the fun plus version?
That is the fun plus one. Now that actually when we look at these other games though, it's more clear what Dark Legion's thesis was. And remember, we did do an update or correction on it. It hasn't faded quite yet. It It's holding on tight. I don't think it's over for Dark Legion, I would argue. Like right now we're looking at 3.7, but this is

only United States, which puts at a $50 million run rate. You know, you probably gross that up in terms of Worldwide. You know, that's probably a game I think they'll at least continue operating. I don't think they'll abandon it.
Yeah. It's not over for DC Dark Legend, but it didn't even start for Worlds Collide.
No. And Mystic Mayhem, I don't think, isn't a better place either.
Oh, that that was the beautiful looking game.
Yes.
Damn. It's pretty much doing as any superhero movie nowadays, just bombing at the box office.
No, Superman did okay. Super fantastic. I might read too much of Chris Heatherly's uh LinkedIn post because I haven't watched it. But but he I think he he saw something that the box office just collapsed after the first week of
Fantastic 4. That's true. That was the week off.
Fantastic 4 box office dive is a bad omen for Marvel's future.
It was super frontloaded with all hardcore fans.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, speaking of hardcore fans, I think it's time to talk about Eric's

favorite topic, which is our quarterly torture of
Roblox earnings report, which slayed once again. We are past 100 million DAU. I thought this would be the case in the summer. They reported, everyone sit down for this. Brace yourself, 112 million DAU. They're up 41% Jesus.
Year-over-year. 41% year-over-year in DA.
And CPO left. By the way, I don't know if this is in in your news because everybody is ready to to sell their first born to be a CPO of Roblox. The
the other thing that was interesting is we have our usual DAOU by age and DAOU by region. On the region side, we're seeing growth across a lot of different regions. So, it's not just tier three. And on the age group, I think we still have the same hypothesis. Is it people who are under 13 aging into over 13? But regardless, the over 13 is the one that's growing the largest. 71

million DAU are over 13 and about 40 million DAU are under 13. That's a very important statistic. So, so roughly 2/3 of their users are over the age of 13. I think that's another really important observation from them. By the way, it's also completely untrue.
Why do you think it's untrue? Why do you think it's untrue? The tracking. The tracking.
How do you track when you don't track on mobile?
Yeah. You don't have age verification. All you do is that you have an opt-in and you tell them what age you are and they're using it to get access to certain features on games. Period. End of sentence. Right. And
the question is, Eric is like, why is that growing as a relative share? Why is the relative amount of over 13s growing? Have they done a change to have they restricted or allowed access to certain things based on age that would make people more likely to lie over time?
Yeah. I mean, there's certain content that people want to get access to and so they put the age gate on, but they know it won't impact them. So, yeah, I'm sure

that's part of it, right?
The true age is on the platform then, Eric? Do you think it's getting older? What do you think the true age on the platform is?
Oh, I think it's like I think it's like the other way around like 66, 33, probably if I were to guess. I do think that the older age is going to games like Dress to Impress, Brook Haven, the more female oriented games are able to sustain some of the older players. That's where I think it's going. But I agree, Chris, that it a lot of that's [ __ ] because with 80% of the audience on mobile and we all know mobile doesn't track things and how difficult it is for mobile to track that that is very very difficult for them to continue to understand with accuracy those numbers.
Look, I I also want to say like I don't really care about engagement numbers like these numbers, this matters to Wall Street a lot, right? But the bull thesis really on roadblocks was all about men well and unlocking revenue and unlocking revenue from those audiences that actually generate revenue which is

basically tier one English countries right so if the CCUs are growing and all this other stuff that's great but it's really about monetization right and that that's what is more bullish for Roblox and that's why when Manuel kind of took over like I think it was last June like a year ago he took over basically monetization that was exciting I mean he's working on it for a while, but he was actually more officially put in charge of lots of different aspects of them monetizing. So, that's what was bullish. And him leaving is scary, right, to some degree. And so, the fact that he's leaving makes me a little bit worried after about four and a half years he's been there. And just to just to be clear, he did kind of the the evolution of the creator economy in 2021-22, but in mid 2024 is when he really started to like actually make real big significant changes. The virtual billboard ads inside the experiences, which I think is stupid, but that was like the initial part of it. The launch of rewarded video ads, which is absolutely huge, right? Huge,

right? That would happen in early 2025. July creative awards, daily engagements and audience expansions and then most recent thing was the licensing manager and IP license platform stuff that he's done. So
anyway, so he basically became in charge in partnership as I've said earlier with David and the CEO and that was actually kind of I think what's driving lots of the new changes there. So look, I love the CCU all that stuff is a great story but that's not as relevant as what the monetization part of it in my opinion. So, let me help you there. Let me help you there because you you're you're right here. We're looking at average bookings per DAU. And if you look at US and Canada, $40 average bookings per DAU. You look at APAC, $5. Yeah.
You look at row, $5. You look at Europe, $10. So, a US and Canadian user is worth 4x a European user, which is the second highest.
Right. And if you take out the UK out of Europe,

it will probably be a lot worse. You put I think they're poor. Oh, I think they're poor. Yeah, I don't think they're anything to write home about.
Sweden, different story. But that being said, 18% 18% growth in year-over-year bookings for US and Canadian players as they've scaled the N2. They should be adding lower margin users. And maybe they are, but they've lifted the average so much that they're up 18%. That's still impressive. And I still don't think those initiatives, Eric, have come online fully too and advertising initiatives.
Exactly.
Yeah. Rewarded ads, as I've been talking to people. Everyone's excited about it, but everyone's taking very much a wait and see because, you know, the tech is still kind of coming into place. The partnerships, I mean, Google is a major partner on this. The attribution needs to come into place for this to fully happen. I think we'll know more soon.
But this is where I think Eric is wrong about the engagement numbers because engagement now matters when you have ads. So like for instance taking hours

engaged in DAOU like you you should multiply those things together that becomes relevant because that's more time on the platform is more ads you can watch again I still think monetization will dictate ECPMs but I don't think it's irrelevant anymore it definitely matters to some
right that that's a good point you're right with that with ads now ma that does matter particularly engagement in the US right which clearly this grow your garden thing has been a huge hit in the US and tier one go countries so
does grow your garden even do in ad [ __ ]
I don't know yet. I haven't checked in on ads yet, but it's a really good point. So, this is a chart that shows peak CCUs. And so, what happens every Saturday at like 7 a.m. Pacific time, they update the game with new, you know, plants and all that stuff. And a lot of it is
they do restocking, too. I think there's so much in the game economy we should talk about, too. It's I was wrong in my first assessment of this. I was completely and utterly wrong. Like I was like, "Oh man, what what could we learn from this?" The game economy is very

deep. There is a live op strategy. There is a [ __ ] ton going on this game. This is not just some random game by a teenager. It's a machine.
It is the most egregious, gross example of monetization design ever concocted by man, okay? It's like it is like every [ __ ] trap and like extraction mechanism for the customer. I mean, it's [ __ ] beautiful like in its deprevity, you know? That's just ridiculous.
If you could give an award for freeto play, what did you used to call it? Like the egregious money grabbing of freeto play of just
diabolic. I think he used
Oh, what did you used to call it? You used to argue with Phil all the time of like the dark arts of freeto play monet. Like this game does all of it. All of it. So the thing I wanted to hit just just on the number side is Roblox itself hit a peak CCU of 33 million in mid July which is very much driven to these

peaks. So Grow a garden peaks in CCU on their weekends in the 20 to 22 million player range. And when you look at the number of visits, and I know visits in Roblox is a little bit of a vanity metric, but they've had 23 billion visits since the game launched, and the game only really launched in like Aprilish. And so, I've been following the growth of this. And when the kind of like influencer publisher guy like took it over and started posting, like his Tik Toks got like 30 million views and that's how they really launched and like really grew the game. And so what he does is he gets out and basically shills the hell out of this each week telling people what to be excited for. This game has not fallen off. You know, look at those peak. You know, we saw those peaks. One, two, three, four, five, like six peaks of 20 to 22 million. TCU shows that it's not dying down yet. Like they're managing to keep live going.

Travis Kelsey live ops event.
No go. We got some brand coming in to grow a garden.
Now you know we're cooking. It's real, baby. That's a good influencer, but but it feels like totally out of the
vend diagram of of a Roblox player. Travis Kelce
maybe.
Uh football player, podcast, personality, Taylor Swift, boyfriend.
I mean,
like he's an influencer now. And I think that's a whole other topic I want to do soon is I I saw this data point that Gen Z and below are more influenced by influencers and content creators than actors and celebrities. So if you're a marketer, like stop wasting your time on LeBron James and go find, you know, the next like creator who these kids care about. Like even on this WWE documentary on Netflix, which was amazing, it was the first time they ever like tell you how wrestling works. They had a creator enter the Royal Rumble, which is one of their like flagship events. Speed,

poor guy like broke his leg or something. But
got crushed.
But like, spoiler alert,
something amazing, fascinating is they did this whole storyline. They didn't even have the cameras on it because they knew that the fans outside of the arena were going to film it and post it online to keep things going. Like we do not understand how much the influencer and creator landscape is really generating more news and action than like our traditional like it's just so fascinating how it's changing. Okay, see you guys next week.
See you next week. Later. You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice.