TWIG #345 Clash Royale’s BIG Comeback and LEGO’s Digital Gamble

Yeah, guys. We're getting Matty Light. We're ordering Papa John's. Get me three extra garlic butter cups. We are playing Call of Duty all night long, baby. [Music] 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 Clabs. Hero provides a complete suite of battle tested metagame features that are quick to implement, letting you spend more time on the core gameplay experience. Ready to ship fully featured

engaging games? Check out her today at heroiclabs.com. [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to this weekend games 345. I'm Jen Dano. the marketing and publishing oh and hosting role and bringing back some OGs today. Super super super excited because Crest is off taking his daughter to Penn and Mishka is gallivanting and partying in Gamescom. So here's who we have back today. Well,
Phil Black, first chair again. Yes, I'm first chair.
President Cat Dad.
New new title. First chair.
First chair. First chair violinist. What was Did you play string instrument, Phil? You look like you did.
Oh, no. Like violinet violin for, you know, as long as long as I could suffer for.
Yeah, I did violin 14 years.
Oh, massive. You seem like you play the cello. Like this. You're You seem like a band kid.

Aren't Weren't we all band kids? I played
Oh, god. No.
Trombone.
No, I was You were one of the cool kids, Phil.
No. No. Well, hold on. Jen, you played I thought you played you played soccer, too.
I did.
Yeah. Okay. Okay.
You can do both.
Yeah. You can't be put into a box.
Yeah. No, not this one. Not this one.
All right, Laura.
All right. I
Introduce yourself.
Yeah. Still puzzle product queen on the inside and then, you know, working with blocks on the outside.
Oh, okay. Well, we I guess we'll get to that in a second when we ask you how you're doing, Ethan.
And then I'm back. the backup to the backup host. We're both here, Laura. We're both here because Crest and Mishka were too busy doing cool things. Yeah, I guess I don't have I haven't established myself as the AI expert yet. I will. It's coming.
Oh, is this your new one?
Yeah, sure. Why not? That's my mo, new products. But yeah, production gotcha

UGC AI and of course handhelds. Handhelds. I've got great handheld news today.
Okay. All right. First, let me just do a quick episode summary. Here's what we got coming up. Gamescom opening night announcements. So, we're going to do a little Call of Duty Black Ops 7 versus Battlefield. The New York Times Games hopes that they have the next whle with a new game called Pips. Pips. It's a domino puzzle game. Like I said, I'm surrounded by puzzle folks today. So, I'm going to trigger them. I mean, I'm going to nerd out on how streaks can help and hurt. It actually is very relevant to marketers and so and it's relevant to a game that I just dropped playing because of a streak. So, I wanted to bring that up. If we can get to it, hopefully we Phil, you had your Clash Royale changes that are really helping it take off. But first, let's hear what Ethan and Laura have been up to. Ethan.
Okay, so the long-term Ethan fans, I know there are three of them out there and they've been waiting, literally

waiting on Pins and Needles. I have a PlayStation Portal. They were on sale for Prime Day refurbished for $130 and it was worth every penny. Yes, I know I could just use PlayStation Remote Play on my Steam Deck, but it's lighter. The screen is brighter. The battery life is longer. It's great. It's great. I love it. I love it.
Congratulations to you and 10 of your friends who own this device.
Yes, it's awesome.
It is so awesome. But actually, the funnier one is Laura, how's how's the corn update coming? So, okay. So, for context, I joined Minecraft about
a little gra a little game you might have known called Minecraft.
Some people may have heard of it, some people not. No big deal. I joined like three months ago, going on four months ago, and I get very kindly, you know, sometimes it's really difficult to come up with back backlog items. So, Ethan's daughter has been sending me ideas and I've been like, "Oh my god." And I've just been forwarding them on to the team. So, I feel like I should like give her part of my salary for her.
All right. They're only getting 1/4th of

the total requests to send Miss Laura a message. So, first they all requested a corn update. This is their number one Minecraft request is that they want to be able to harvest corn and then make popcorn and feed popcorn to the mobs. But my kids go beyond just asking Laura to like add things to the game. They love making Minecraft pixel art 2D and 3D using Plar beads. And so like I had to send, not had, it was actually a highlight of my day to send Laura a Plar bead piece of corn that I couldn't find and be like,
Laura, they're making concept art for the corn update. They are obsessed with it. But like every day they're like, "Can you tell Miss Laura this? Can you tell Miss Lauren this?
I love it so much. I forward it to the team so the team is seeing it.
Awesome.
Oh, that's adorable. I love that. Ethan, we're already like five minutes in and you have all these visual aids. For

anyone watching on Spotify video or on YouTube, there are visual aids to this presentation.
Can't teach an old dog new tricks.
Laura, so Laura, can you talk about like what it is you are doing at the world of Minecraft in You're in Seattle, right?
You're in Seattle. Anyone who doesn't know, I'm from New York City. lived in London, then I moved to Seattle.
That's why you know how to pronounce Mario, right?
Mario. It's Mario. This is the first time in my life I've had to commute by car. And it is a weird experience. So, I drive like 25 minutes. I avoid traffic. And it's it's so weird just like you don't get into the tube. You don't get into a bus. You drive you get into your car and you drive yourself to an office and you park.
That's called being an American.
I know. It's so different. And then
you don't have to smell other people's body odor.
No, but look what I bought from my car. And I got one of these like Stanley inspired water bottles. I feel like I fully converted. I am now half suburban

American now. It's It's been an experience. Welcome.
I was going to say you should come to Sweden. I don't know anymore.
No, Phil. I'll bring you one. They're amazing.
Oh, trust me. There are many around my house. Are they Are they cat-sized, Phil? There's little cat water bottles.
Ethan, that's a that's a wonderful idea.
Let's become billionaires. Cats in the bottom of like a a cat fountain.
Eric needs to come back on the show immediately.
Oh, he he is like fast forwarding as fast as he can to get through this update right now. He is so annoying.
This is why we kicked Ethan off the show. All these nonsequittors.
No, but Laura. Okay. Like what what's your job?
I'm working on product for the post sale game. So you have Minecraft. You you buy it, you love it, you play it, and then you can go into the marketplace and you can buy additional content made by creators. You can sign up for a subscription and, you know, create your

own realms. That's that side that after the sale side is I'm working on products from them. It's amazing. It's really fun. I never thought I'd join Xbox, but I'm glad I did. And I mean, I think the car, as much as I love it, the car thing still gets me every day. I feel like I' I've slotted very well into, okay, I understand how this product works. I understand how the gears are going. There's elements that you take from freetoplay mobile that work, the production side works, how you prioritize it, all it all applies. But that just driving, man, that's just the new thing for me.
I love that her number one complaint about her job
is is driving. And so H. All right.
Well, complaint just different. I've been working from home now for like six or seven years. If I had to return to driving every day, I might I might have the same.
But yeah, my kids have been asking me to teach them how to make mods. They ask me if I know how to program. And so maybe I'll um
I you know, I've done UFM. I've done Meta Horizon World. You know, Roblox and

Minecraft are next. So maybe I'll make the corn mod myself and sell it on the store and see what happens.
There you go.
I think that's a great idea. I know someone that can help you.
Awesome.
There you go, my friend. All right. So, let's get to
speaking of Lego.
Uh, yes. Yes. Uh, I would like to shill a podcast that I just did with my friend Aaron Loe, who is the president of Lego Digital Play. And so that exclusive interview I he was so nice. He they they wanted to do their very first interview with us at Deconstructor of Funds. So, I was kind of honored to have that opportunity. So, Lego Digital Play is a brand new company. It's a brand new company inside of LEGO Holding Group. So, if you think about the Lego Holding Group as like the biggest entity, he's got a new version of Digital Play. It's based in London, Laura. You know, you can call, you know, Aaron and be one of the founding, I think they have 15 people currently working for them. So, his group is kind of like First party, which is like going to do their own thing and they're going to, you know,

create a whole initiative there. Then there's the Lego group which does all the TT games that I know and love like we'll tease Lego Batman that's coming out a little bit later. So there's actually kind of two groups within LEGO that was really interesting and how they're doing it. And then we geeked out a little bit on older stuff and our history and one of my favorite insights from our chat was that in his kabam days on contents of champions the best predictor of LTV was consecutive daily login. And so this will be interesting as we get to our streak discussion. Uh that's my my podcast show. It was a great episode, Laura. Sorry, Jen. I am rusty.
Oh, wait. We have editing. It was a great episode. Don't edit this out. Just let him know how rusty I am. This was a great episode, Jen. My former partner and friend of the show, IS, who you met. We worked on a Lego game together. And uh we were texting about this all day Monday. when you go to Billand and go to the headquarters, it's like really easy to get inspired by the Lego mission and the earnestness of the mission and the focus on children and imaginative play.

And so like listening to this episode helped rekindle those feelings and that's what we were texting about all day. So we uh we both really enjoyed it.
Thank you. Thank you.
I want to go back and do a few other shows. So because it's Gamescom, Pocket Game Connect is doing some awards. So, congrats to Appcharge who won best payment service provider at PGC. Good job, Appcharge. And then our friends at Heroic Labs celebrated 10 years announcing that they support 6 billion AP in revenue and 600 million installs and have asked Crest to upgrade them from the mice nuts status. Only Crest can do that. So, we'll see if he'll do that next week for those guys. I had uh two really quick shills and these are both fan requests, community requests, so DM me on the Deconstructor Fund Slack or reach out on LinkedIn if either of these are of interest to you. I'll be in San Francisco in September for Meta Developer Connect. I was thinking about throwing together a um

DUF drinkup meetup Thursday night, September 18th, just a casual hang somewhere downtown. So, if that is of interest to you, if you want to go from being my virtual friend to my real life friend, and we can try and get Crest to come out and tell me I'm drinking too much, that would be September 18th. Let me know if you're interested. If not, no worries. I will play my PlayStation Portal in the hotel that evening. Um, the other thing is I have a lecture that I made on running great standups. Misha and I were talking about turning it into doof content. So, I'm thinking of running a free DOF webinar would be 30 to 45 minutes on running standup specifically and we would record that and then maybe use audience questions or discussion as part of the video content.
If that is of interest to you, again, DM me on the doof Slack and we'll see if we can make this hairbrain scheme a reality or not. But very passionate about standups, surprisingly so, and so I'd

love to teach you all my tips and tricks.
Awesome. All right, so a few corrections. So last week, we always try to really source the content that we're talking about. We are a news show, so we pick articles in the news and try to give credit to to the sources. Sometimes the flow, we say it a little bit later. And so last week we had a few little like mixups on sourcing. So one is uh Reselli from Alenia Analytics. We were showing a graph, but the branding got cut off. Apologies for that. We're trying to fix our screen sharing. We didn't intend to do that. And then uh Mishka [ __ ] up and so he was covering Neil Long mobile gamer.biz is article and forgot to say thanks to Neil. It was the moonactive one. So thanks to you guys. We really love all the news and the work that you you do. So we'll give you credit where we can. Crest has two remote corrections. Next beat was not an aqua hire. They got a decent amount of money for the company and he apologizes to Mr. Jasper from Bitcraft. Evidently,

Bitcraft supported Frost Giant to the end, and this definitely fits Jasper's brand. The nicest VC Cr has ever met. I can second that. Jasper is a lovely lovely gentleman. So,
ju just on on because of the wording to the end. As far as we know, the game is still live and Frost Shine is still running. I don't think the studio is closing. So, I think that means Jasper is going to support them to the end should the end come. But they did just, as you guys talked about last week, they did just do a big update to Stormgate. Maybe they went from early access to 10 or similar. So, you know, they're still alive and kicking. We're not we're not calling them dead.
There's also a Star Wars game, which we were talking about. We misspoke when we mentioned that Star Wars game. The MMO we talked about that generates a nice little amount of cash that I believe has run out of Austin, although I'm not 100% on that one was Knights of the Old Republic.
Yeah.
Ethan, did you did you work on this?

I didn't work on this, but I know many people who did. I was there at the time. It was in development and it launched, if you remember, as a paid product with subscription as a World of Warcraft and then actually found really massive and kind of under reportported live op success in the turnaround in the transition to freeto play.
I need to check, but I believe that they sold operations on this to the dark age of Camelot the original mythical guys who are also running. They retook over all their legacy MMOs that still have fans in them. And I need to check, but I think they might have taken over Knights of the Old Republic as well, but like, okay,
Knights of the Old Republic is a really amazing live op success story and turnaround story.
The people who worked on that Boware Austin, who had previously done the Warhammer MMO, really did an amazing job sticking with that game and turning it into a financial juggernaut.
Cool. All right, let's get to headlines. So, it's Gamescom week everybody. We are

obviously not there. Doesn't mean that we can't be there virtually. So, Jeep Keely does something called OL, which is opening night live. And so, it's not quite as big as what you get with Summer GameFest or the Game Awards that happens in December. So, a lot of this is like game announcements and moments where they're coming out with a lot of trailers. I'm not going to do everything, but just a couple of key highlights for me. One is I'm super bummed that Crest wasn't here to give his thoughts on the World of Warcraft midnight expansion reveal. It's another reason that he's not going to pay attention to us during a podcast cuz his new thing is that he just plays games when he's bored with whatever the topic is. It's pretty funny. And then sign me up for Lego Batman. Holy [ __ ] And my buddy actually works on that game. But uh the whole TT Lego series is just one of my most favorite things. And so I was really loving that. That was a highlight. Let me talk about a low light is Call of Duty Black Ops 7. So, first of all, this is just me. The people, the

talking heads were completely cringe-worthy. I don't know why you do an interview on stage, you know, in this kind of an event, but the trailer itself, so I am a huge, huge, huge Metallica fan. Master of Puppets like is one of my favorites of all time. It was incredibly wellused in Stranger Things. Stranger Things, is that the name of that Netflix show that I love that's coming back?
Oh, the the biggest show in the world. Yes, Stranger Things.
Oh my god, it was, you know, the dude on. It was just so well done here. So, they used master of puppets in the trailer because I guess the theme of this is like you're kind of like on psychedelic acid because the villain I think the villain is a master of puppets organizing orchestrating global events is what it looked like.
In any event, it was like it was the first use of music that was more distracting than it was additive. And then the visuals to me didn't look like they were at a at a level that even compared remotely to what Call of Duty should be at and where Battlefield is. So the theme felt like repetitive, it felt dated. And so while the the trailer

had 14.5 million views, it's Call of Duty so it's going to get a lot. What I saw was it has 135,000 down votes. So I am not the shooter expert. Mr. Phil, what did you think in our Battlefield versus Call of Duty war that we're kind of having on the pod the last few weeks?
Buy your Battlefield bonds, ladies and gentlemen. We are cooking. This is a good sign. This is This could not have been worse for Call of Duty. If you just think of this grand strategy,
this is Infinite Warfare all over again, which is exactly the I would say similar similar setting. There's kind of this like sci-fi aesthetic. The screenshot we're looking at right now, this is from that game that had one of the strongest dislikes on YouTube in YouTube history. So, there was a lot of negative reaction to the sci-fi that they had strayed from the genre roots. And I think you're starting to see that pop up here. Now, I think it's really important to look at the numbers for some sanity and sobriety

when we start to evaluate the race between these two games. the original gameplay trailer that Call of Duty released 17 hours in, 12 million views. If you look at the Battlefield trailer, 9.8 million views 3 weeks in. So huge disparity. Of course, there's a million asterisks we could put on that. Like, okay, there's a PlayStation posts one, you know, how do we aggregate the trailer views? But like, still the size and scale of these franchises are much different. But Battlefield is gaining ground. like the lines are moving and I think it's getting closer and closer to Battlefield potentially being able to pull this off. I am very excited to see how Battlefield will respond and how Call of Duty will will try to like win back mind share again.
I'm glad I'm here to take the the counter on this argument. So, one, okay, I'm going to respond to actually the um the multimedia parts of it because I thought the visuals were pretty amazing. They really got me juiced up. But the I agree on the music and on the camera work of editor flythroughs. So, there

were two things I really noticed and I've been working on trailers for stuff a lot lately. So, maybe I'm being like super um in the weeds here. The master of puppets, they did a custom edit of the song to make it like match up to the key moments, which is a common tactic, especially like you know everything since Jen, were you there? Do you remember Army of Two? I feel like that was one of the first trailer. They had a great trailer where it was like timing up the doo with like music like custom edit of the song with drum hits and that every trailer does that now. So, the problem was that they kept mixing that with Snider moments of like slow-mo action shots where they pull the music. So, what was happening was they kept going off beat. They weren't keeping the beat that you feel silently. So, when you got back to the music, you were off rhythm. And that's why it felt so halting, especially if you're so familiar.
Well, since we're all Orcors or band nerds, that that really makes sense that

we're all feeling that. Yeah.
Being off. And then the other thing that I noticed with the visuals was like the environments look amazing, but I'm pretty sure that the flythroughs were captured in engine with a controller and not with someone setting up a spline with custom um camera motion and then recording their screen. And if you've done that, and I've done that plenty of times, I mean, in UEFN especially, you can't get smooth crane shots and drone shots when you're operating the camera with your controller. And so that I think made it look a little lowfi was like those flythroughs of these amazing environments, it just detracted from it a little bit because the camera work wasn't great. So that's what I think happened. But I had actually the opposite reaction to you. I was like, "Man, this trailer is hot." Like, it got my juices flowing. I was like, "Yeah, guys, we're getting Natty Light. We're ordering Papa John's. Get me three extra

garlic butter cups. We are playing Call of Duty all night long, baby."
So, it like made me feel like ready for college again. And I didn't even play Call of Duty with my friends in college, but
I was ready ready to be 20 again. So, I really liked the trailer. I thought it looked very Tom Clansancy, very cinematic, very like in the pocket. I think Battlefield is gonna sell very well, but Call of Duty is going to be the number one non-sports title by unit numbers this year. That's my prediction.
Is that your bet? Okay.
Podcast coming soon. Keep keep your ears and eyes peeled. It was an awesome conversation.
I'll show it later.
Awesome. All right, Phil, we should do two different bets. One would be on unit sales and then one is like nine months, 12 months later concurrence. It wouldn't surprise me if Battlefield pulls off the long tail, but COD wins the unit sales award.
Interesting. Any any particular reason that jumps out at you?
I think that the last couple entries of

COD have been underwhelming on the live ops front on just like innovation, the install files too big. Like there's a lot of like little things that chip away. And I think Battlefield the beta went well like the physics it the destruction it looks like it's really made for streaming which is similar to what they were trying to do with 2042. So it's basically like if it's stable at launch and has a great postlaunch live support plan I think it's going to do really well on the longtail.
There's blood in the water. I love it. I love it.
Is there blood in the water with Dead by Daylight?
There may be so much blood. This was one of the announcements. This was a game called Project Spectrum. They released a trailer at Gamescom. And by they I mean NEIS, who by the way is just [ __ ] out shooters at a pace I don't think anyone is keeping track of.
The the Destiny mobile games coming soon.
Destiny mobile games. So they have this whole mobile line.
Wait, is that them or Net Marble? Am I

[ __ ] it up?
I think it's NEI. I have a
70% NIS for Destiny. Then you have the battle royale, by the way, that's also released on Steam. I think it's called like Blood Royale or Bloodstrike or something. I have that sitting on my Steam. There's Frag Punks, which is a tactical shooter we talked about. They have Once Human, which has been successful. And remember, we covered that they had a mobile version of it out. This is another shooter from them, AAA, and it looks like they're going to go after Dead by Daylight with asymmetrical horror based combat. The trailer looks like it performed pretty well. I'm just really excited to see this thesis be explored more. Dead by Daylight has been a Steam mainstay for almost a decade now. I think, you know, approaching over a decade.
They do dating spin-off games, but it's like secured its place. And I'm very curious to see if anyone can challenge that game for the throne.
Very unique, asymmetrical, you know, 4v1.

Yeah.
Yeah. Destiny Rising is Net Ease.
Got it. I got my net companies right, my Asian net companies. I had four quick stories to highlight from Gamescom.
One, Hollow Night Silk Song. It lives. It lives. The number one wishlisted game on Steam. The most anticipated indie game maybe of all time. Years and years of silence from the developer. Lots of Reddit drama if you're on Reddit all the time like me. It's real. It's playable. It's playable on the floor. And they launched. They announced a release date because it's one of the bestselling indie games of all time. I think even Crest can't call it mice nuts like this game's gonna do massive massive numbers from a beloved team and a beloved IP. Second thing, Holy RTS, Age of Empires 4 and Dawn of War 4. I'm as a weird niche gamer, like I'm a Dawn of War person, so I'm even though I don't really do a lot of Warhammer, like Dawn of War 2, killer game. Very excited for this. And we know

our friends at Stormgate are struggling with the RTS genre, but that doesn't mean other devs are throwing in the towel. So, I'm excited. I'm excited for Dawn of War 4. Pretty exciting. Okay, in kind of gag humor, I can't believe this is an announcement, but it is. Not only is Atari alive and making nonb blockchain games because they have so many different weird offshoots, Atari does, but they announced that Bugsy is alive and they're making Bugsy 4D and it looks I mean it's like for the LS it seems like I I'm looking forward to this being my children's number one game of 2027 and can't believe nobody mentioned the Fallout season 2 trailer. Holy
I need to watch that. Walton Gogggins. Complete dominance of Hollywood continues. Invincible. White Lotus. Fallout season 2. Righteous gemstones. Can Walton Gogggins be stopped? He cannot.
Not even his hairline. Stop.

You know, I wish my hairline receded as gracefully as that man's. That is a handsome, charming, hilarious man. Maybe my number one man crush. Well, I think a man crush from last week, Crest, we we talked about this with Rob Ferguson was leaving the Diablo franchise and so this week we see where he landed, which is leading the Bioshock franchise at 2K. They had a few little layoffs, but wanted to just hit that story really quick,
which so one of the best pieces of content I did for DOF was an interview about production with Rod Ferguson. I actually relisten to that every now and then when I'm like doldrums of production when I'm having like real trouble. So, go back and listen to that one. He is I mean he loves the craft of game production and there's a lot of insight in that one. So, congrats Rod on going back to this franchise and continuing to be the closer. Uh I can't wait and uh yeah

that's awesome. I love Bioshock.
Hey, are you building a game, launching an app or considering an acquisition? Well, in that case, Deestructor 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 diggestructor.com.
Web stores, you've seen 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. Guessing where your users come from? That's so 2010. Appsfly is like having a cheat code for mobile marketing. Pinpoint attribution, real-time insights, and analytics that actually make sense. Stop flying blind and start flying smart. Appsflyer because your data is your best co-op partner.

[Music] I'm I'm taking us completely out of console and shooters and looking a little bit back in mobile which is my jam. So before I joined Microsoft I was at Big Fish. Worked with well I would mostly want to call out when I worked at Bigfish there we had a little publishing division. The division was no longer a division anymore. Everyone went out and did their own things. Some of them actually got together and formed their own studio called Plan A Games. And what they're looking to do is provide funding to mobile casual mobile games and casual midcore and social casino. And I thought of this that cool little like slogan for them. When you have a plan A, you don't need a plan B. I thought that was really good. Anyway, so Plan A Games is being led by CEO Gary Rosenfeld, who I used to work with. Super super smart guy. His background is PD, legal, a little bit of everything. He's awesome. And their chief data officer is Hiwim. He was the head of kind of the performance and data when I was at Bigfish. And then the board member was Mike Lang. So Mike Lang was one of the presidents of Pixel

United, which was the parent company of Bigfish when I was there. So what they're doing is one-stop solution for first worldclass developers who need who need UA marketing capital to grow. Our datadriven approach also includes proprietary tech that will identify fast growing mobile games provide developers with real-time performance monitoring that integrate seamlessly into their own backend systems. Why I think this is interesting is one there's lots of publishing studios but what I have seen them do that I haven't seen necessarily other publishers do is the amount that they put into their forecasting model. So at a time when you have you know you're making a game it's really hard to get funding you have really good early metrics. what what I've seen them when I've worked with them, what I've seen them do is be able to go in assess and use kind of pretty advanced modeling techniques to predict with certain levels of investment how far this game could grow. So, I thought it was really cool. I think our background covered this nicely and I do hope this gives a lot of, you know, developers that are

trying to make a game get it out a chance to launch it if they can't get, you know, if normally if other, you know, traditional techniques would not necessarily get them that money. So, wanted to cover that a little bit.
Yeah. Lots of this popping up in my newsfeed. A lot of funding of the UA.
Cool. All right. Do you want to intro us to our our next deep dive into PIPS from New York Times games?
Yes. So, PIPS, I don't know what how often this has been covered, but there's like a miniame war or maybe a race is a better term between New York Times and LinkedIn. So they both had been creating these maybe these quick snappy two to eight minute games that can be shared either proudfully or shamefully with your network. LinkedIn started with Pinpoint Cross and Queens. All of those are actually quite fun. They launched Zip Tango and a mini sudoku. New York Times has which we all love and I still play. Spelling be connection strands

letter box and tiles. And as you've announced, they've just launched pips, which if I remember correctly from my British living in England, a pip is a stone inside a of a fruit. Like it's like a seed. So I thought it was a cute little name. Probably not not connected, but
Well, maybe that's what does that translate visually to what a domino is? I guess.
I mean, it's kind of a dot, right? That was
I think the dots are pips also.
Oh, is that what it is?
I I don't know why I think that, but I do think that. Okay, I am not a Domino's player, but here's the the story. New York Times Games just launched a new logic game called Pips. It's a puzzlebased take on Domino's. They think it's going to and they hope it's going to overtake Wordle. So, and Laura will kind of walk us through like the gameplay in just a second, but just a couple of numbers like on the average day, tens of millions of people visit New York Times games to keep their Wordle streak alive. So now I'm I want to talk a little bit about this game in

and how it relates to streaks. Twothirds of the site's weekly visitors play two or more games. Half play four or more. So the thing that I want to focus on was the streaks idea. And since you know I'm surrounded by PMs here and who listen, you guys are going to tell me this is like noob 101 level PMing, but hang on everybody else and let's just, you know, dive in for those who might not think about this. This popped up for me because I love podcasts and I was listening to one called Choiceology, which is a bit of like the psychology of like investing and different topics. And so, one of the podcasts was called Hooked on Streaks. How streaks can be mo both motivating and demotivating. And so, as a marketer, I was like, "Huh, like let's see what the overlap is to like what I do every day." So, this is just so we're kind of talking the same streak language. This is how they define streaks. three or more consecutive actions of the same behavior that happens within a defined interval

typically daily. So, you know, like it's kind of if you think about like a a daily check-in or what you do with Wordle and there's two states. One is like you you have a streak and the other state is it's a broken streak and then there's a gap. And so for Wordle, this is very much around, you know, the consecutive days that you solve the daily puzzle. If you miss or fail to solve it, you have to reset your streak. And you know, I've seen a lot of people just talking about doing everything possible to keep their streaks going. So Laura, like tell us a little bit about this game and what you saw with pips. Okay. So pips, it's looks like Domino's, but it's not Domino's. When I first opened it, it reminded me initially of New York Times as Tango where you're trying to you have a set of logical requirements that you have to meet and that's where you take these kind of these what the dominoes are and you put them in the right placements to satisfy those requirements. And it's very similar to Tango, which is you have a you have a basically a a grid and you have to put

down symbols to meet specific logical requirements in the same way. So, there's a little bit of similarity on there. What I think is interesting, and this is where kind of leaning into the whole streaks information that you you went through, but streaks are only as good as the gameplay is sticky. And what I what I feel like now is you can put as many streaks as you want in this. What I feel like they should work on first is the what I call the balancing. I played all three. There's three levels of pips. There's easy, medium, and hard. And right now, I feel like they're all too easy. There wasn't enough of a challenge. And I think that what New York Times look game should look at next is making sure those are balanced so that people come back. If I'm going to play hard, I want it to be the right level of difficulty where I feel like I have some level of skill I'm gaining or some mastery over this where it's not so hard that I I'll fail the level or I can't complete it at all, but not so easy that I can complete it within a couple minutes and it feels like it should have been placed in like kind of like a medium level. So, if they can get that, then yes, I think the streaks will

be super interesting for them.
Whoa, where's our match playbook? Where's Where's HLL?
We got to Oh, we got to open with hard level labeling.
Well, it's already level. It's labeled. It literally you pick
lame.
Labeled correctly.
So,
well,
I don't know why, but I was right. I looked it up. Pips are the names of dots in dominoes.
Oh, well, good for you. And then just one other thing to add to the intro before I I give it back to you Jen is we've seen streaks work really successfully in a lot of games where you know we've talked about in tomb blast and the blast games what a great motivator for spend it is duolingo probably one of the most famous gamification uses of streaks outside of a game and I would also highlight Snapchat friend streaks is one of the killer features very well known but like
as you said like a streak is only as good as the inherent motivation of the actual app or game like friend streaks wouldn't have saved Google+ for

instance.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
It's an enhancement of metrics that are already strong.
But you also have to remember what's at stake with the streak in a match three game. What that gives you is you have leveled up bonuses that make it easier to complete the next level, right? So you lose your streak, you lose those. You have to start over and then your difficulty for the next match level is going to get infinitely harder than if you had had those boosts, right? What I can't figure out here is what is the benefit of a streak? And with the friends, I mean, yeah, I mean, you might lose your entire friendship if you're not Snapchatting every day. I mean, I don't use Snapchat, but that's what I feel like it might be like. But there's
Oh my god, you haven't been getting all those snaps I've been sending you of of of Plar Beads. Every day, every day I'm hitting I'm blowing up your snap.
Let me set the stage here. Okay. So, so from the science and from the podcast, here's why they think streaks are motivating. And yes, there is a gameplay aspect, but this is just purely from the streak aspect. So, number one is it's a goal. And the goal is to keep that

alive. Number two is the messaging and the way that you frame it's like framing this behavior of an intact streak versus a broken streak that makes you want to continue it because we're just we're telling you that this is what you want to do. The anticipation of loss. So loss aversion, you know, it's one of the most motivating things in the world. So that's there. And then once a behavior hits three or more consecutive actions, it's cognitively coded as a streak, which strengthens the momentum and the commitment because your brain wants you to do it. Okay, so here is when it becomes demotivating, which was incredibly interesting to me because I think when I play games, I see so many people do this incorrectly and they message incorrectly when they break a streak and and it's, you know, many of them like punish you. So a broken streak is a goal failure. So when you when it breaks, people experience that as a fail, which is really demot like no one wants to fail at their goal. And so it's actually it's worse than just missing a day is when you kind of see that that

goal was missed. Lost aversion post missing it. The pain of losing that streak depresses re-engagement because you don't want to go back to the thing that just told you that you suck.
Now in in the podcast, was this evidence-based or was this conjecture? Because I'm sure a PM from Duolingo would tell you that they make a ridiculous amount of revenue on streak repair because of that shaming and that these academics have no idea what they're talking about.
They claim that it's evidence-based, but they do reference Dualingo actually is part of the podcast, which is why I have we're looking at the sad owl right now and why Dolingo actually changed a lot of its behavior in how they treated streaks. Uh the last like motivating factor is all or nothing trap. The streak frame can trigger perfectionism after a break. Many think it's ruined and they quit entirely. So, the reason why I wanted to talk about this is it this kind of happened to me on all hole and and it was a very very simple one. It was just a daily login and like I was starting to not play as much because

when you sit down to play one of those matches, it's like a three-minute commitment and you can't be interrupted and or else like every time I come back like I miss my game and I lose my boost and it's like this whole thing. And so what it was doing, it actually just kind of made me not want to play anymore. Once I broke the streak, I was like, I'm done and I haven't gone back. And so the thing that I found most interesting is how you brand and message these streaks can be crucial to avoid the demotivating impact. And so they actually gave you a list of like dos and don'ts. And so the first one in the don'ts category is, you know, what the podcast talked about was the sad using like a a sad mascot to make you really feel guilty and shame. And the sad owl was infamous for doing this. I think they've actually retired the sad owl in a in a bunch of different places. The other dump that they had is don't make it all or nothing. A single mess should not reset everything. I think this is where we're going to go into the dos and what Duolingo started to do differently which was number one downplay the brakes. They offer streak

freezes or repairs. They help you prevent a miss streak. And then they look at friend streaks that you guys talked about. And so I think that where you're going, Ethan, is the yes, they did all of those things, but then they started to add in all of these monetization boosts to allow you to keep your streak going. I think they're streak pauses, too. Like if you're going on vacation, you can hit a pause because so many people's identity is on the thousand, you know, streak thing that they have on their language building.
A good streak, too. Hey, this is this is all funny because okay, first of all, if you quit a game because you lost the streak, then I feel like there was not a connection with the actual game mechanic,
right? The whole purpose of the streak is not the streak itself. It's to get you to continuously play the game,
right? So, if I dropped this entirely because of the streak, then I feel like I wasn't then the game mechanic wasn't that appealing to begin with. Yeah,
there is a team here that's screaming at this podcast right now, which is the Squadbusters team because if you remember, they removed streaks from

Squadbusters. That was a core component of that game where they built the whole game around that match framework of streak preservation. Remember, they had the badge that showed what your streaks were. Now, when they updated that game, they had, I think, a developer interview or there was funding on Reddit, might have been a community manager saying that they removed it because they thought it was demotivating. Like, people were not engaging with the game because they feared losing their streak. And there was a probability that could happen.
And that is, I think, a fair notion to have, but there are also ways of course to address that.
Psychologists are awful. Please don't listen to them. No reproducibility. Ethan, Ethan, we should [ __ ] on them. Like, why why are they defining this as like three plus activities? Like, why are they No one asked for this definition. This is just [ __ ] Whatever the designer
definition of it is ridiculous,
craziness. And I but but I would disagree with also Laura and Ethan on like streaks are conditional on improving already good metrics. Like streaks also work on things that are crap too. Like they have a marginal

effect. They won't save a product.
Well done. It's the same thing with daily login. A daily login is not going to save your product.
Exactly. So that's my point. It's a streak will not save a product.
And I agree with you like the way match has integrated streaks and the way we integrate streaks is far more utilitarian than even Dolingo. And then the the degree of which a streak is powerful correlates to a degree with which it holds utility. I I completely agree with that. I think the thing that streaks do that the psychologists I will give credit for acknowledge that I think is the core driver of streaks because we can take away all these other things and it's the core driver of hard level labeling too, right? Like that is the big experiment result from hard level labeling is not just that hard levels increase monization. It's that if you remember that test, it's all the levels had more monetization. And the argument that team at the experimentation group will make is that it was about goal setting, right? Streaks are about goal setting. This is all about goal setting. That's a very like game design insight. And so that's why I think this is such an interesting result is streaks really

do hold across all these applications no matter how utilitarian they are because they help players set goals for themselves instantly. Like it's a really cheap way to set goals and then you can wrap it in all this other stuff. Yeah, I think the takeaway for me as a marketer in working with you as PMS is that how you message it, the language that you use is incredibly important. That can turn something from a motivating feature to something completely demotivating so much so that it might even make you quit. So if you are going to do this, you really have to be careful about the words that you use and the ability to, you know, freeze or pause or make up for a misstreak.
Yeah. I guess I mean my feeling when I when I hear you describe this and I Phil knows of my pop science psychology and behavioral economics love and how I get things wrong all the time but like I have a problem with applying this level of blanket academic

conclusions to this type of real world use case because game development and games and player behavior is not physics. It is not perfectly reproducible results. And so what works for one player base might not work for a different player base even within the same genre. Like even if you're looking at two different match games with streaks, different implementations will work in different ways. And then they're also very multifactor. So a blanket statement like shaming the player doesn't work. Well, it depends what your goals are, right? It might churn 10% of players who the signal was saying we're going to churn anyways, but at the benefit of getting 30% of non-spenders to make their first spend. It's not as simple and isolated. And
are you making the like dick's last resort like mobile game where they just come and it just yells at you and it's like the shame bell from like Game of Thrones is going behind you. Like you

just want to treat a player like [ __ ] and see if they like
I mean I can tell you that one of the key
motivators of spend within the midcore games that I worked on is guild member shaming when someone is not doing their part within events.
That is a massive motivator.
That's not streak related though.
I know. I'm just talking about shame as a factor in motivation. And that was one that, you know, we don't have to, all we have to do is put the leaderboard up and put a popup that announces the winners once a week. We don't have to do the shame. The players do the work for us of shaming other people into spending money and signing in every day. But it's just like I'm I'm very allergic to a blanket statement like shame does not
that I toast my Stanley to you. I agree. Well, I I Okay, so I I think you make a point of solo versus social shaming that that's a thing. I'm I'm trying to relate it to streaks in that these are some watch outs as you message things that

you should consider like
Yeah. Yeah. I It's just like you have to test it in the context of your game and your overall metrics and and business goals, right, Bill?
And so just don't, you know, don't just do what the academic said because of a
of course
poorly messaged study. Oh no. So you do a lot of academic research. Am I non-csychologists accurately or unfairly?
Oh, not enough. Certainly. Certainly not enough. We gone for many many hours. They couldn't reproduce their way out of a box. The other thing the other thing I'm just going to throw in here because it annoys me and I need to make this point. Loss aversion is a thing. That totally is a thing. But the question is is like what is it that leads us to have this insight of loss aversion? What does it actually mean? Yeah.
And so the thing I think people miss out is like loss aversion is a natural function not of some weird behavioral insight about like losses and gains and framing and like prospecting theory and all this weird like instrumentation. It's a neocclassical result that if you have a diminishing utility kern that you

lose more by going one step back than by going one step forward because your utility curve is curved inward like an arpoo curve you might have. more by going back than going forward.
Weren't they probably using this in the behavioral economics way like loss aversion losses hurt more than gains feel good?
Yeah.
No, I agree with that conclusion. My only disagreement is what is the theory that lends itself to that insight and then how do we make that a testable hypothesis
to your point Ethan? Under what context are there external validity? All of those things. I think sometimes it gets misclassified as this kooky interesting behavioral result that's cutting edge and like we've known this forever and it fits into the natural paradigm we've been talking about.
Yeah. Let me test my hypothesis with you which is when an app or a game becomes part of someone's identity that is when streaks are powerful. So, an example would be if my partner IBS tells me, "Hey man, I've got to go hit the Pelon. I have my 455day streak." Or someone at

work posts, "I've got a thou, you know, I've seen on a resume like a thousand-day Japanese Duolingo streak." Or Jen, you talking about your performance in in match games and match game events and same with you, Laura, and like what level you're on. Like once you start taking pride in something that means that this experience has become part of your core identity and this is when a streak becomes a very powerful motivator of behavior. Whereas like a good example would be I'm playing Dynasty Warriors Origins right now. Like I'm going to play that game for two weeks. Like it's not going to change my identity. And so like a streak in Dynasty Warriors origins wouldn't get me to participate in a battle every day.
But you were on the thread of a really interesting insight, right? Which is what I think the psychologists in the situation missed out on, which is what you have game design brain, which is always the most valuable for experimentation, which is like how do we take streaks and then like how do we light it on fire? And like you were

talking about shame and fame. Okay, Duolingo has elements of this, right? That's how you like increase the incentive around this. How many streaks have you had going every single day? How can I show that in front of a community? How can I emphasize the bottom five clan mates in a 4X game if they don't hit the help button? Oh boy, that'd be an interesting experiment to run. And there's other things that like Super Lightning Ball, we didn't even talk about that, right? That was like in the last couple years that every game implemented this, which by the way, it it did work across games. There were changes to your point, Ethan, you have to make to fit it in a particular game economy, but like that exploded. There's clearly something here and no one is testing the bounds of it. And again, it took match what, Laura? 10 years to figure this out that we should do a tier four win streak. I mean, that's just insane to me. It took us a lot longer.
Phil longer, but Jewel Bejeweled 2 is like over 25 years old.
Think about like the original Candy Crush where we draw the starting line, but 25 years that looks even worse.
We need the Dave Nelson call.
Dave Nelson, come back.

Why do we want him to come back? Tell me because he did a lot of the experimentation for when when we worked with King together. He did a ton of the experimentation for these types of features. Most of the features that became playbook features,
streaks, winning an offer, piggy bank, all of these. He's like the father of I would say playbook features.
Oh, nice.
I'm ready personally to continue our streak of talking about Supercell games on the podcast.
Oh, shoot me. That was so good. That was so good. I forgot to add in so Comic- Con was a couple weeks ago and we had a bit of a ban on Supercell Talk too, but did you guys see all of the fun like life-sized Brawl Star characters show up at Comic-Con? It was just it was like the perfect, you know, you guys I hate the word trans media, but it was Brawl Stars at Comic- Con. I I had never really seen a mobile game show up there, so that was a lot of fun. I didn't see that. But I would say I'm surprised by the amount of teens and tween wearing Brawl Stars clothing and Brawl Stars

backpack and like Brawl Stars branding that I see here in Charleston. Like that's I would expect I mean Minecraft, Sonic, Mario that I all expect, but like
too young.
What I Brawl Stars is a teen game is a is a tween and teen game. Let's talk about that.
Right. But I'm just I'm surprised by seeing that it's popular enough that I'm seeing the branding in clothing in street wear and you know school wear and stuff.
Yes. Because in franchise management, you know, games can actually go outside of the game universe and expand into other franchises. Well, let's talk about that later. So, Clash Royale, Phil, I know that you wanted to do this last week. Thank you for being patient and waiting for this week.
We have been wanting to cover Clash Royale for a really long time. If you remember, even back when I wrote the original Squadbusters piece, one of the things I really tried to caution that piece is that like getting rail back on track needs to be a priority for Supercell. And right now, we're looking at year-to- date revenue for when the game launched in 2016 all the way up

until 2025. And so, if you look at 2023, where things were really in the [ __ ] I mean, their run rate at this point was $151 million a year. That is down from $700 million in 2017, its heightened. So, it is a dramatic fall for the game. But if you fast forward to 2025, they're in a much better place. They are up 39% year-over-year year to date. They've already made 198 million, and that's not counting any Supercell web store revenue. So, they've really gotten this game back on track. And the reason they've needed to do that is because Brawl Stars is now returning to KPI Earth. And so when we look at the portfolio, you can see that Brawl Stars has shrunk quite a bit. It's not really where it was in May 24 when you were hearing LinkedIn post after LinkedIn post deconstructing what they were doing. You know, their live ops events, you know, it's in a much more moderate place. And Clash Royale is actually making the lion share of revenue for Supercell right now. It's completely replacing what Brawl Stars had done a

year ago. And so I I think it demands a level of attention given the size and scale of this this game right now. Clash Royale is the single thing keeping the Supercell IPO dream alive. Without this, they have no narrative and no story. And I've been shocked this hasn't been getting more coverage. And I've been trying to get back into the game. And I want to really thank someone at Supercell for helping get my account back. That was actually one of the reasons we did not have good twig coverage on this or Clash of Clans or Brawl Stars is because I didn't have my account saved. So, thank you for that. But the game has changed dramatically and I think you can like just tell the story of Supercell when I've gone back and I visited this game. So, if you look at the home screen here, things have changed dramatically. There are no longer these time chests. That mechanic has been ripped out. I don't want to do a full review here. I know Yaka from Two and a Half Gamers is working on an episode. I think it might be released by now, which I'm really keen to listen to. I'm also going to write a piece later. But if you look at the lefth hand side, do you see those little circular icons on the left and on the right?
It's those UI elements you see on match

games. It's those UI elements you see on RPGs. It's those little live ops or information boxes. I never thought I would see this in a Supercell game. And it kind of just speaks to them running the normal playbook that we expected them to, the normal live ops playbook. When you go to the store, you see a [ __ ] ton of direct offers, more offers than you've ever seen in your life. They're all priced in real world currency, which I was really confused by, but they clearly have an offer game and a personalization game. I mean, we've seen this across their other titles, but again, just speaks to the size and scale that they have. They've introduced evolutions. I mean, when we look at this game and if you dive a little bit deeper, the re the way they've grown the product is really just adding more and more gotcha to the game, which I've been shocked by. I really thought when the game launched it'd be more in a CCC direction. Instead, it's vertical progression. This evolution feature has been huge. I don't want to go into a ton of detail now, but I would say it'll be interesting to see how they continue to expand the game. They've talked about building it as a platform. And so they looped in Clash Mini or Auto Chess into the game, which makes sense when you

look at the numbers for this genre, which no one has basically followed this 1 v one kind of real-time genre. The way Sensor Tower categorizes it, the number two game in this genre is actually Team Fight Tactics, the way again Sensor Tower defines it. And so that makes a little bit more sense of like, hey, let's pull in Clash Mini. I don't think the results have been great so far from when the revenue bump happened. that they're adding separate progression monization. It's tied in in a really clever way. The UI isn't it's a little bit rough right now, but again, we're starting to see the strategy of like, hey, we're going to be a platform. Let's add all these different modes in. Let's use these characters in a variety of way and let's try to eat more of the market. It's a strategy that you can only have if you have a lot of headcount.
And I'm not quite sure this one has like spread its wings yet, but they're still up in terms of revenue. Didn't they cancel Clash Mini because it was only on
track to make 700 million a year only in quotes? Wasn't that the thing that it was below the billion dollar threshold and so the team decided to cancel it and

throw it into Clash Royale because it was only going to make 700 million.
Oh, I don't know if that's the case. Be dumb if that was the case. I would I would do 700 million a year.
Well, that's what I'm thinking. Like if I'm right on that number, I mean obviously it's impossible to know how much Clash Mini Worldwide launch would have cannibalized Clash Royale revenue. You can only guess. But I suspect that somewhere in Supercell there is deep regret of cancelling Clash Mini as a standalone product given the challenges they've had launching new IP in recent years.
Why not just revive it? What What do you think would hold them back? Why not just like I mean it was in a long I haven't played I haven't played Royale enough to know how it's integrated into the game. So,
it's not a control C controlV at all. All the assets have been changed. The the framework is kind of there, but it's it's really different.
Yeah.
I wonder if if I were them, I would I would have at least one team take Clash Mini, redo the art with Boom Beach,

which is similar enough in terms of style, and see if a Boom Beach mini has the key though. That's their dead game,
right? I mean, that's why it's a a really lowrisk experiment.
I see what you mean.
Yeah. Hey, on the super, have you been paying attention to Moco at all? Like, ever since other than that LinkedIn viral thing,
I mean, I mean, my question is to to Jen. I have no idea what's going on that product. I don't really understand the launch. I'm confused. The numbers don't look great. They're not pressing the UA button.
I mean, look at I'm all for experimentation. I just don't get what the thesis is. Like, invite only velvet row scale over time. Is this like the inverse squadbusters?
No, they opened it. I thought they opened it.
It's worldwide now. Yeah.
Okay. I was say when we were at GDC was when the invites are going out. If it was still Velvet Rope, I'd be very surprised.
So, this is the anti-brand marketing launch.
Wait, are you serious? This is free for anyone to download?
It was like number one for at least a week on the free downloads US. I didn't
Well, let's let's look it up. Let's let Laura tell us about her life in Nintendo

World because she's got to bust out in a second. Yeah, because I got to get I got to take my Stanley Cup and my car and I gotta vroom vroom all the way. So, all right. So, I want to just cover a little bit. I joining Microsoft, I I bought an Xbox and I realized I actually prioritize the Xbox over a Switch 2. But I was like, what's going on with Switch 2? And one of the things that I think that's made it very difficult for me to kind of get on the Switch 2 bandwagon is I don't really have many games for it yet that I want to play. A lot of the games are still available on Switch One and so I have a nose around. What it seems like they're trying to do is one beef up their catalog because right now I think they have the new Mario Kart, the new Donkey Kong, and now for what looks like going to be the holiday drop is going to be a remastered or re-imagined. It was called Kirby Air Ride and now it's going to be Kirby Air Riders. And there was a 45minute video from Masahiro Sakurai who talks about this game from concepts to the release kind of as a buildup because it's going to be coming out in November 20th for

the holiday season. And frankly, I mean, it's August. If you haven't started thinking about what what your drops are going to be for for the holidays, you're just going to be too late for it. But there's a couple things I wanted to share. So, I think one interesting bit about this is we've seen a Nintendo basically take a lot of old first-party games from the Gamecube, N64, all these, and remaster them. And what I feel the difficulty they run into is, are you remastering it to have the same experience or are you remastering it to have a new experience? And so, with this one, what it sounds like is they took something that was kind of like Mario Kart for Kirby and they decided to make it now into a whole new experience. I'll be completely transparent. Once I was about 25 minutes in that video, I was like, "Okay, I can't. This is too much. I can't watch this anymore." Reason I brought this up is more for the take that Nintendo get needs to get their button gear and they need to start releasing more games for the Switch 2. There are people buying it. People are excited about it, but they're still going to have to make new content for it. There's just there has to be more

games coming out.
I mean, are they or am I going to buy my third copy of Zelda Skyward Sword when they finally remaster it again? like,
well, thank you for keeping Nintendo's economy afloat.
Unwrapped Zelda Skyward Sword along with four other unwrapped Zelda games. It's interesting just again the aneata of of having the kids like I don't they don't watch TV with commercials. So, they only hear about Nintendo Switch 2 from word of mouth and from YouTubers. And like look, man, Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong, they don't even need the games. Just the sheer existence of the Switch 2, I get asked about it every day. Um, and I have to say, put it on your list for Hanukkah or Christmas and we'll see you then. But like, I know that I'm buying it and I know that when I buy it, they're just going to play Minecraft and Hello Kitty Adventure Island, two games that they already own and play on the iPads and on the Switch

One. And so I can't wait to spend $600 to play it on a new machine. But yeah, like I don't know. Nintendo's got the thing. Nintendo's got the the cradle to grave family appeal
that is, you know, I know I'm going to buy it.
It's the kid. It's the kid.
You know, you're going to buy it. We're both going to buy Pikmin 5 when it comes out in 2029. I do find Kirby Air Raiders, like a remaster of a 60 Metacritic rated GameCube game that even Ethan Levy forgot about
kind of a seems like it was probably whatever was really being made slipped and this was the only thing they could pull in for the holidays. That's my guess. Jen, does that sound right to you? Is that a good hypothesis here?
Or yeah, like somebody bribed somebody to let them like remaster that game. That seems like a weird one to pick.
I mean, I love Kirby, but you know, Kirby's not lighting up the Hanukkah Monora. That's all I'm saying.
They're probably getting character

diversity. They are the kids console. I have an argument that I think PlayStation could really challenge Nintendo on that with Astrobot. And then how much Roblox is really accelerating in the play time on the PlayStation? PlayStation is missing out because they don't have anything. Everyone always asks me, you know, what games can I have my kids play? And then I'm like AAstrobot and Roblox and I don't
give me more than one Raption Clank per console generation. It's ridiculous.
Yeah. No, for sure. All right, I think that wraps it up for the episode.
You don't want to talk about baby Mario.
Now that Laura's gone, we can call him Mario and not Mario.
Yeah, it's it it's it's Mario. It is Mario. All right, everyone. And Mario, we will see you next week.
You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. Those stars and likes, while small action on your part, mean a

lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fun Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructorofund.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry best professional community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun content creators. Thanks for listening.