TWIG #346: EU Wants to Ban Free-to-Play as Supercell Introduces a New Boss

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Hello everyone and welcome to Twe 346.

I'm Jen Dano. I fill the publishing and marketing role on the podcast. Today we have
Phil Black Monetization are first chair as always.
First first chair. I don't know what first chair means, but congratulations.
Clearly you didn't listen to last week's banter.
I listened to it and he said first chair and I don't know what that mean. means if you die, I get to assume responsibilities of doof.
No, it means you're the lead.
Any day now is how I'm feeling today. Not the conductor.
The first violinist doesn't take over for the conductor, Phil.
Okay.
In Star Trek, first officer does.
God damn it. Oh god. Not this again,
kids. Mishkatkov, friend of the founders. Ethan, go.
Oh, hey, it's me, Ethan. I'm back. Two weeks in a row, baby. I guess everybody's busy. I'm uh VP of new platforms at Gamef Fam. I mentioned that because Joe is a fan of the show, my boss and CEO, and he said, "What were you saying about GameFam last week?" So,

hey Joe,
it was all bad.
Joe, I hope you're burning burning calories at the gym right now.
All right, we have a lot to cover on the podcast. We're going to go over what happened at Gamescom. Mishka's got some news about Europe trying to kill freetoplay gaming. That should be fascinating. You know, we're gonna apologize to Scopi as always. Pretty fun. And then
I have nothing to apologize for like absolutely nothing.
Okay. Well, hold on. This is We'll get there. Rage Shadow Legends has a a pretty fun Turtles Teenage Mut Ninja Turtles collab. Oh, Supercell because we can't go a week without Mishka saying something about Supercell. So, we will get there. So,
I tried not to. I tried not to. So,
lot lots to come. Do you really want to talk about your portal?
I do. I do because this is my second week in a row and I brought up the PlayStation Portal last week and I had two DOF fans reach out to me. Zero

reached out about the offer for the free webinar on Running Great Standups, but Andrew Patrick on the Slack and my friend Michael Bills texted me about how much they also love the PlayStation Portal. There are dozens of us. It's a great device. How did you get to dozens from three? That's okay. That's fine. Got it.
I'm just I'm just multiplying this sample across the entire gaming population. If I take our sample of this many people from our listeners, there might be hundreds or thousands.
God, no.
I want to say something interesting. The How about them cowboys? Like this show America's team on Netflix is so freaking good. It is so good. Like I'm on this crazy run of American football and guys I don't know what first down means just to be clear. I have no idea.
This would be like me talk about a cricket documentary.
No, no, I watched the quarterbacks. That was phenomenal. Then I watched SEC. I know everything about Arkansas and

[ __ ] apparently every second team is named Tigers even though there's zero Tigers in the US. Hello. And then now this America's team like oh my god. Jerry Jones is a hero and a villain. Such a great guy.
Since you're watching American sports documentaries, have you watched the Bulls documentary about
course? Let's forget about Everybody knows that. But Jen, you're from Dallas, right?
Yes. I have a freaking Dallas Cowboy helmet in my office signed by the great EMTT Smith.
When you grow up in Texas, you are born and they literally hand you a football and they say, "Welcome to being a Dallas Cowboy fan."
So, yes, this I know all of these things. I became a fan. Now I am a fan of Las Vegas Raiders, not to be confused with Oakland Raiders and and now Dallas Cowboys, the America's team.
Welcome to the club. We we are happy to have you even though you don't know what a first down.
Is this like Real Madrid?
Me and the Pope know who to Real Madrid.

Real Madrid wins.
This is like an evil team in the United States. So people know like no one likes these people
at all.
Yeah,
that's not true.
They're like the It would be the It would be the Bayern Munich.
Okay.
No, Manu. Ma Man Manchester United is the equivalent.
South of Germany, Bayern is Texas of Germany. So, technically that would be true
for the Swedes. It's the Yankees. All right.
Yeah. Anyways, quick show. So, we have two podcasts that you should watch. One is about deconstruction of gamification mechanics. Dolingo, Crypto.com, Be Real, Tinder, DraftKings, Apps is all the craze. And we had guys from App Refinery, new company by the people from Game Refinery, same still same old company but a new product from Game Refinery came in, talked about it and deconstructed those. And then we have a podcast with Philip Black and his shooter buddies talking about Battlefield Phil that came out today. You want to say a couple of words about it?
Great podcast. So Chris Anjos, who you

might know from LinkedIn, incredible rap sheet, has worked everywhere, has basically touched every major shooter in the last decade, and Chris Sides, who's also been on the podcast beforehand, and of course worked on Marathon and was at Bungie. All of us getting together trying to figure out what is going on with Battlefield, answering the big questions about like where does this franchise go from here? How do you position it? What is the one thing we want Byron, who is that Call of Duty VP who came over and is now really running the franchise out of LA and Vince, what do we want them to pivot on? You know, can it actually beat Call of Duty this year? It was a ton of fun. I'm super proud of it. And we'll see what happens when this game releases. But the hype, the hype train rolls on.
Fun.
And then the last shell. So, DOF Talent Network, we've been getting a bunch of people sign up, hundreds. So, thank you so much for that. And I've been now going through our fir like I'm not running it. We have a partner there, but I am going through the first calls with bunch of companies, pees and big

corporations. So, it's been fun to talk about people's need of leadership. And I have to say this, a lot of companies are hiring leaders, which is very good. And we're hoping to get more jobs to to people in our network. So, that's it. That's great because I've been hearing it's still challenging out there
just actually seeing like actually being in interviews and talking about what type of leadership is being sought after. There's plenty of positions. So make sure to go to deconstructor fun/talent and at least we'll get your name there. But I mean we have a head hunter and he goes through his rolodex and analyst and so forth. So that's all about.
Okay, great. I love those gamer finery guys. Great product. Happy to see them with a new product. They did not pay me to say that. I just love those guys. All right, so corrections. So Scopley called you and yelled at you, Mishka, Philill, right?
No, no, no, no. They did not yell at me. They said that they are not they don't agree with what Phil has been saying about their portfolio and that Phil is

perhaps not seeing all the numbers. Not perhaps he Phil is not seeing all the numbers. I assume this is web shop revenues and yeah, did not appreciate what Phil said. So
I would say thank you for the compliment, Scopely. I could care less about how you feel. I am interested in the evidence and the facts.
And
Phil never wants to get hired again by anybody.
Look, I tried to address the claims ahead of time. I try to be careful with my analysis. The deeper we go, doesn't always work out. But in this case, if you remember, MAU and downloads are down. And so if web shop revenue is real, which it is, and I'm sure they have high numbers, I would expect it to be reflected in LTVs, which means that you should be getting more downloads or more meu not happening. All of these metrics are moving together. If there's evidence to the contrary, I'd love to see it. But right now, I think we can make a pretty safe assumption that they have a declining portfolio and they've got some real challenges ahead of them. But Monopoly Go and Pokémon Go, huge bets for them and they need to see increases in those products to grow. I

don't want to be the I told you so, but I told you so. On the revenue side, every time you do this, I'm like, webshops, dude. When I talk to people, 20 to 50% of their revenue is coming in from web shops. However, to your point, you know, here's the challenge. All the margin that you're saving, the 20 to 30% you're saving goes right back into UA in many of the cases. And so, it's a one for one kind of wash. I don't think that you're going to see a direct increase in MAU and downloads because what happens you're you fi you start to find your audience. You can't keep the scale of your downloads in MAU just growing, you know, like crazy. You're going to get to your core audience that is going to be a higher LTV and monetizers. Like I think there's a lot of symptoms in the patient and I think you you may be going too far. That's just me. I haven't looked at this before, but look at this Pikmin Bloom at number eight with 15 million. Like, I'm a big Pikmin booster. I would never have guessed a freetoplay Pikmin

game is doing over a million a month in app store revenue. Way to go, Pikmin team.
Oh, man. If only if only Eric were here. Only Eric were here.
You know what, Mice?
Yeah, I think Eric and I on this one too. It's I'm just for for like a niche for such a niche property to be going toe-to-toe with Monster Hunter, which is like one of the biggest most revenue generating game franchises in the world. Like, come on, go Pikmin. That's all I'm saying. My little flower guys.
Okay, let's go to breaking news after that.
All right. All right. So, breaking news. I I've received a couple of calls around this interesting thing happening with EU. So there's a new EU regulation that might or may not be coming from CPC which is consumer protection council. EU has many councils I believe and this new council essentially wants all the games to show

euro value on all screens. So for example, let's say I'm watching an ad and it would say you earn 0.0000 00006 on watching this ad. That would be one thing. But also, when you're using soft currency, so let's say I am upgrading a vehicle in CSR racing, it would tell me the price in euros of that soft currency that I'm using to upgrade my vehicle. And before each of the upgrade, what would happen is there would be three scare screens that I would have to accept as I'm using soft currency. So of course this is a very hostile proposal and it is purely EU's or some of the regulators way to basically attack free-to-play games and not just attack but kind of remove them from EU. So somebody had this bright idea and without naming any of the companies but all the big companies in the world are currently heads down with their legal councils

figuring out how to tackle this and how to basically push their influence to remove this because this would destroy the whole EU's gaming market on freeto play and pretty much 25% of the revenues for all the big players. Is this one of those things where you know so in the US we've got like you know these early proposals that are usually pretty extreme and then that when they work their way through the system they get kind of watered down. Is this
that's a similar story or is this further along?
Correct. This hopefully gets watered down. The problem is when you talk to legal counselors like in this case is that for them everything is a possibility and they always tend to assess it in the worst possible outcome. They've been working really hard and again we're talking about the biggest companies in the world that are currently tackling this. There will be much more news about this in I would say between one to two weeks. So, we're kind of breaking news a little bit, but
I don't want to name the companies, but you will see the biggest CEOs talking

against this regulation and enforcing what the effect will be on the job market and and so forth. So, so I'm just kind of saying as you're going to start seeing these talks, this is what's happening and the examples that they've shown are not just ridiculous, but just clearly anti-free to play games.
Got it.
Just purposely.
This has floated around as like these very vague guidelines. To your point, it goes through different stages in the EU. I don't have that process in front of me, but like this has floated around for a year or two. You can see the specific proposals. They have this like weird legal status called guidance here, which isn't quite law. It's very strange, but this has flowed around. You get a taste of it. When I read it, it was obviously ridiculous, far-fetched, complete misunderstanding of the industry. Of course, like don't don't cower away is what I would say to free to play. I've seen us carow away every single time we get challenged. We're quiet. We have a voice now. Use it. Like don't be silent on this. We're a part of the economies, particularly in the EU. Like time to go

out there and flex.
This is going to be pretty serious. So because the repercussions if this goes through are severe. So yeah, everybody on the fence and support any of these large companies that are making the case of not destroying freetoplay gaming in Europe.
Great. Okay. Well, thank you for breaking news. Look at us. Dom, enter some sort of like breaking news thing. This is cool. Like we're we're getting exclusives. I got a lot of great great feedback from my Aaron Loe, the president of LEGO Digital Play that exclusive interview. So look at us like Games Beat, watch out. I'm just kidding.
Never need to watch out for
All right. So let's move on to Gamescom. I didn't go. A bunch of us didn't go, but Mishka, you were there. I have a bunch of thoughts watching from afar, but I want you to have the man on the ground vibe check. So, what did you see?
Yeah. Yeah. So, I didn't come to Gamescom in the best possible condition.

So, we sold the house and it was kind of like, you know, the family two weeks of kind of like packing after selling the house and and going through. So, that was pretty stressful. And then just the weekend before Gamescom, I ended up in IA. It was an offsite with a company that I've invested and work with. It was quite
tax invite my friend Ethan.
It was it was incredibly fun. I told my wife like, "Hey, this is a work trip." She's like, "Where?" She's like, "What the [ __ ] dude?" Anyways, I got out. It was really fun. But as I arrived, like I have this, you know, this ring that looks at your recovery. So, like a day one Gamescom and I'm already on red, like running on fume. So, I can tell you like before we came in, we got the uh you know, cold plunge, of course, cryotherapy naturally. I even got the IV and I was in the reds. So, essentially, I got resurrected. I got I respawned at Gamescom

with with like zero zero stuff. Not a good idea. Do not recommend. And then, of course, we did two events. Luckily, this time only two unlike what, seven at last. Yeah,
genius that was stupid. Anyway, so two events. So my gamescom is like you know prepare for the two events and also I am working there. So I was working with one of my large entity as their head of partnerships. So I was doing a lot of meetings and kind of guiding the team of four in addition to myself on arranging all the meetings. So so that's that. So hence I'm going to use Grace and her beautiful LinkedIn post of what actually was happening on on Gamescom and kind of piggyback of what she said. So Graceu who's at Scopley I think she's running something AI related but previously I think she ran M&A. So yeah
based on her post one of the things was about funding. So I think like based on what I was hearing VC funding for AAA double AAA PC console anything really is

not a thing anymore. So Eric has of course beating the drum on how stupid it is to fund these companies and now everybody kind of agrees. There are some private equities that are doing some of this funding but again mainly if the game is free to play but other ones don't exist. On the other hand there was indie publishers spawning everywhere. So a lot of them are very good ones and there's a lot of new ones who are a little bit snake oil salesmany like. So we've had previously episode with Parardex Arc and we have a new one coming in with Playstack who actually published Bellatro. We're going to bring in more of these legit indie publishers so that people can hear of what is a legit and then maybe assess these other ones that they would be working with. But a lot of them spawning right now. There was a word on the street that turkeys overheated. I've been kind of saying that but definitely the latest rounds feel very overpriced and even heard these things where because the rounds were so expensive some of the founders are actually miscommunicating

how much they raised so that it it doesn't look smaller than the like Turkish founders live in dick measurement contest pardon my French but it is true like nobody can dispute that and so some of these funds like you know if you're coming in at like 18 million. You'd say it was 25 maybe. Anyways, not going to out anybody.
A little overinflation to compensate for smaller,
you know, little salt bay on top of it.
Smaller very little DA investments.
Yeah, exactly. So, just a sprinkle of that sold bay on on top of your funding round just to make it more juicy.
UA financing is the new web shop. Everybody's doing UA financing. It could be funds. It could be UA finance years. It could be private equity. It could be, you know, anything.
My email and newsletters are lit up with
Yeah.
UA financing. You're right. Like this is the new everyone's new gold rush. U this

is like 5 years ago, 6 years ago, like homogeneous good baby capital.
It makes sense because
there's not a lot of EC money coming in and the cohorts are getting old enough. And so once you have cores that are older than a year, you're essentially able to get financing to grow semi-profitably. But anyways, UA financing, we have episodes on that. We actually have general catalyst and PVX partners coming and talking about that. So like UA financing on a crazy scale.
Then we have a former palenter anyways now a UA funding person. Interesting. Indie publish Oh, sorry. AI is not delivering. So, I had a conversations with some of the AI folks, AI founders, and they're basically saying like their turn rates are about 90%.
What do you mean AI is not delivering value to VC investors?
AI is not delivering value to anybody. We're talking about these like different AI tool tech companies, not you know, chat GBTs. We're talking about a lot of these startups and what they are saying

is they have very high churn rates of users or companies. Oh, so these these products are [ __ ] is what you're saying.
Yeah. So like let's say I'm starting a startup, it's AI for X, AI for Y, AI for marketing assets, AI for QA, those kind of things. And so they are having some challenges and like one founder told me everybody's pivoting to serious B which is interesting. Like you start with something and you're actually making totally different thing and then you're actually making again a totally different thing.
Okay. So what's happening here? It sounds like because I think saying AI is not delivering is quite misleading because I use AI and I expect everybody on my game team to use AI every day to get more done with their working hours and they are. So what you're saying is people attempting to build specialized companies cannot out compete correct claw cursor and open AI.
Correct. Correct. So very well put. So these smaller startups that have set their AI companies are not able to find

their footsteps immediately and they're doing a lot of pivots. Reason being there's no modes. It's very easy to build. The dominant players making everybody obsolete. Race to the bottom pricing blah blah bl everything. This is what Grace said. I'm going to just quote her directly. More projects are re relying on external development. Stay flexible scale efficiently at low and lower costs. Many developers have put their own titles on the back burner in exchange for stability and extended runway. So everybody is using external development and funny enough there are some VC funded companies that have turned out to external development companies and I don't think they're going to return because you know the multiples are not that high. And then finally apps are everywhere. Even at our events we'd have people coming in from you know the likes of Dualingo. So they're definitely looking at gaming space which is good because they have a lot of jobs and gaming has had less jobs. So there are interesting jobs in apps overall. Just to summarize it, I think Gamescom is much better than GDC.

You don't have to be scared of zombies. That's always a plus. But just the vibe is much better. It's like you're coming into a gaming event. Like you can actually go to a hall and be like, "Holy [ __ ] there are new games here and this is actually game industry." and not like a BD on steroids and meth.
Well, first is kudos to Grace Joe from Scopely. She's the best. She is so incredibly wellconed and so that summary that you just stole was amazing. That's why I'm extra giving her credit for that. So, a few things that I heard in talking to people that were there or just articles that I was reading. first is it felt like to your point that these were the best vibes that Gamescom has had over the last couple of years. A lot of people were saying, you know, that that E3 vibe was kind of there. Some publishers are kind of back in the game like Kabam, you know, who's just kind of running live services might actually be doing some new stuff. I heard that the money was flowing for mobile. I mean, it

sounds like she heard it wasn't flowing for PC console. So, you know, a couple of the smaller folks that I know that are trying to raise money had some some nibbles on perhaps raising some money. And the other thing that was kind of interesting, I mean, we we've been talking about this. I think there was also an article from frost giant/stormsgate is that, you know, as they're kind of struggling, the people with the pedigree of those bigname companies trying to raise money isn't actually working anymore as many of those are struggling. I think, didn't the Frost Giant folks say that they maybe found a little nibble at Gamescom? I don't know. I was trying to remember what his Tim's LinkedIn post was, but I know that RTS got a lot of good vibes. It's Germany for God's sake. Of course RTS gets good vibes.
Tim's post was a little bit challenging. It's kind of or not, I don't know how to put it, but he was basically saying that, you know, they raised 40 million, which is just a fraction of what Blizzard would have used for Starcraft development. And then people kind of got

stuck with that like wait a minute you spent 40 million on this game and so rest was history.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just think we we live in a different era everybody like
you've been in the industry a long time. I mean Ethan love to get your perspective on this. It just doesn't feel like
we can do things like we used to do things. We can't spend like we used to spend. I'll say that a little differently actually because my perspective as someone who has basically only worked at startups and even like my EA stint was very much like an internal startup and not a big well-resourced effort. My frustration as a startup founder has been over these past couple years watching these ex-Riot teams, ex Blizzard teams, like all the people I'm super jealous of getting these massive checks and then you talk to them or you listen to them and these are people who have been so isolated as leaders that they don't do their own marketing, they

don't build their own community. That's like the internal enemy is those pe is the gens of the world that they're constantly fighting against. And so then they raise these giant checks because all the VCs played World of Warcraft and League of Legends. And so they fund, you know, person number 467, the director who did the 12th year of Starcraft 2 and, you know, ignore people who've actually had 0ero to one mobile success. And then these people do not understand what it takes to market their game. They don't understand the cost, the time commitment, and that you literally day zero. The first thing I worry about when I'm starting a new game, unless it's a passion project, is what is the marketing angle? If I do not have a marketing angle, if I do not have a unique marketing hypothesis, it is not worth developing that game unless I'm developing it out of pure joy. And so my personal perspective is like saw these people spend all this money undisiplined

on development budgets because they're used to unlimited development budgets. So like they spend huge amounts of money. They limp to market because they're running out of money. You know, they were planning on VCs to come in for their next publisher milestone and they didn't. And so then they limp to market without a good marketing plan and then they like crash and burn. Like if you expected the fame and fan adilation you got at a League of Legends event when you got on stage and you were representing League of Legends to carry you past week one of your soft launch on Steam. Like sorry people are not fans of you. They are fans of League of Legends, right? Like I think I'd put in the who did it right would be Marvel Snap, right? Second Dinner had a lot of that like people are fans of Ben Broad. We know what we're do. Like they had a lot of that, but then they also signed up with

a partner who spent a [ __ ] ton of money. Ethan, you're oversimplifying to be honest. Like these people raised a lot of money and yes, some of them didn't have zero to one experience. Some of them did, but the problem is they weren't able to raise more money as they assumed. No, that's not the problem. Not being able to raise more money is their fault for bad planning.
If you raised 40 million, but you need another 40 million to get to market, that is not entrepreneurial thinking. That is big company, infinite budget, infinite timeline.
Got it. Okay,
speaking of infinite money, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Turtles Count it off. I
I want to talk about something real. So, Raid: Shadow Legends acquired by MTG some time ago. They're doing actually record revenues right now, I believe. So, their latest campaign is with none other than my favorite cartoon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I can't believe that this is still a thing, cuz this was a thing when I was a kid. And Jen, I don't know what's your take on this, but apparently people still love Teenage

Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Well, first off, I just looked at your image that we're showing on YouTube or Spotify video, and I just realized it was downloads. It wasn't revenue. So hard to say how much this really helps. Collabs are great as we know. And you know I I guess if Turtles helped it helped. We can see what I see on the on the highway which is Turtles is a great collab partner. You know they are having a lot of success in you know Epics UBFN. I've heard it doing great in other places as well as it's a great collab partner.
We've done great stuff with turtles on Roblox over.
Yeah. No, it it is an IP that spans a lot of consumer segments. It has nostalgia, you know, as you just mentioned. But let me disclose first that my supreme expertise is what I'm about to [ __ ] on. So, please recall my gold medal status in and making action figures and collectibles. So, I was driving down the highway in LA and there's this billboard. It's an Apple/

iPhone visual intelligence ad and it has a picture of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure with the phrase on the ad that says, "Is this a collectible?" So, the idea is that you take your phone and you scan it and visual intelligence tells you. And as an iPhone user, I can tell you that any AI, Apple intelligence stuff is like the worst thing ever. And I've never used it because it sucks. But in any event, so first let me just say that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is not a collectible. It's not even a retro turtle in the picture like Mishka. When you look at that, that's not the one that you played with when you were a kid. This is like from last week. Dear wooden one,
it was made out of paper and I carved it myself.
This is so long time ago.
Oh my god. So So dear Paramount friends, I I I guys, I love you. I love turtles. It's the greatest franchise. It's actually the only one of the kids IP I didn't actually work on. I've worked on everything else. But turtles are not

collectibles. Call me when you do a Star Wars action figure. You want to take one from my shelf here that's worth hundreds of dollars? Let's do that. Wait, hold on. Mishko, what what do we what do we care about this? They ran a live ops event. There was a small bump in revenue. Downloads is up by a similar amount. They probably just spent more on user acquisition. Okay, great. Let's move on. I mean, they Rita has been doing this, right? They did Alice in Wonderland, I think, uh, recently.
He-Man like, okay, great. Like, props to them. Okay, cool.
Everyone's doing it, you know.
I don't think everybody's doing it as well as they are. I feel like they are in kind of like that's fair. That hold in Michigan that now that is fair. What I would ask though is I want to see that data because what they've got to do right now, they've got licensing agreements which may mean an exchange of of revenue. So, like you have to shave off some of those gotcha banner heights with that extra margin they got to pay cuz this this is regular for them, right? I I agree with you. Like they they also push this heavily in user acquisition. So, I'm curious to see what the CPIs are like. That to me has always been the curious thing is like what

happens when you do the brand collabs on Instagram, which is what I see, and gets me into the experience.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's the exchange. I I I can't say too much, but ba basically what you learn is some brands work for your audience and some don't. Some raise CPI costs, some
Here's the thing, though. If Jen is telling us that, hey, a Teenage Mut Ninja Turtles collectibles, I'm a Squad RPG. I need collectibility. Okay, so what what am I looking for then?
You have to think about who your audience is, what they love, and what IP has the biggest overlap with that. To Ethan's point, you'll find out that you may love something, but does your audience love that IP? And is it worth the 15%ish that you need to shave off to pay an IP holder to then bring that into your game? And does it make sense? Does it make sense with the fantasy? Does it make sense for the audience? Um,
two ways it can hit you, right? One is that you can, you know, hopefully you bring your existing user like lapsed

users back when they see this talk about it in the community. But sometimes that doesn't work. Sometimes they don't like the IP and sometimes the wrong IP can lower your CPI cost significantly, but then those users are a poor match for your game and their LTVs are low and so the math doesn't work out in the long run. Anyways,
why isn't this a fake ad though? What could could we just run the fake ad playbook against this? Why not?
No, cuz you you can't. And we'll talk about it a little bit later on when we get to your claw game where I saw that they had Disney, Nintendo, and Pokemon inside of their ASO images. And I would have to wonder, are they actually paying for that? If those companies knew, they might be like, no [ __ ] way are you putting me in your ASO images. A licenser would never agree to that. They do not want their brand on someone else's product used in that way unless it is a legitimate partnership. Like this is brand. That's what I mean though. That's what I'm saying though. Like we're trying to describe this as

what the brand gets you is the character in the game. You got a revenue split on the character in the game. You got to shave off those revenue heights. What I'm suggesting is that you're leveraging the brand basically as a fake ad play and opening up the install funnel, which is what Raid has done, right? Like that's the playbook. I don't know how much you could consider those fake ads. They do feel like RPGs. Usually they're they're cinematics they've been using, but that would be another way to explore using an IP that I'm curious about.
If you're doing your IP collabs properly, not only will it have an effect on the CPI, but by making those limited time gotcha characters, it will also increase revenue if you match the IP properly to your audience. So, like, you know, if we put Pikmin in Legendary Game Heroes, it's not going to move gotcha. But if we put the boys in Legendary Game Heroes, it will move.
I don't know, man. Nicki Minaj sold a lot of units in Call of Duty. Snoop.
Like, not not every IP overlap is obvious.
That's fair. Okay.
Just because you wouldn't necessarily bet on Nicki Minaj skins taking over

Call of Duty, they did. It worked really well. Whoever did the research knew what they were doing. If I'm a brand, I will not let you do a fake ad with my brand and your game because I don't want to be associated with a fake ad.
Yeah.
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thestructor.com. [Music]
Talking about fake ads. This has nothing to do with fake ads. So this is inside king layoffs, lawsuits, toxic leaders, toothless something. So we got the full grievance update from mobile gamer biz this time around. As I said, toxic managers check. Legal actions over severance packages. Check. Management requesting to use AI daily like Ethan. Check. Just kidding, Ethan.
I mean I mean that's like a legitimate ask, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm also like who doesn't use AI daily? That's kind of weird. Anyways, I'm just going to summarize the four core roots of the problem that King seems to be having. So number one is Microsoft is bleeding when it comes to gaming. I think they kind of overspent themselves into games industry and now they have to get more efficient. King objectively speaking, not to offend

anybody working at King, you guys are wonderful, but the company is massively bloated. Like when you look at Dream, which is about the same size in terms of revenue, has about 350 employees and King has 6,000. Like what are we doing, guys? And I've also heard some of the other people saying this is just direct codes. They said they don't have rooms big enough to hold a leads meeting for games like Candy. So they have to take it online now. Everyways the word cuddling comes from Phil in our upcoming podcast. I'm going to use it more. King has had for a very long time.
Cuddling or coddling?
Cuddling. Yeah. I think you mean coddling. not coddling like like holding a baby like nicely and saying to the baby, you're the most like and daddy and mommy love you or mommy and mommy or daddy and daddy, however you want to put it.
It's not it's not like careless people where Cheryl Sandberg is accused of cuddling employees.
So there's a countless stories of toxic

positivity making effective management impossible at the company. Again, just using a quote of one of the countless stories that I've heard about the the company where a leader said to the team, "Hey guys, I have an idea." And he had a talk with HR afterwards where the HR said, "You can't say you have an idea." You have to say, "Hey, what would you think if X Y and Z?" So basically like this kind of crazy word policing. Anyways, and then final issue that is coming here is EU labor laws and US executives. This is like matches and gasoline. Just a matter of time before it blows up and it's blowing up with the latest round of layoffs. And for all of this, there's a pretty radical solution. They can continue this way. They will probably have more rounds of layoffs that are kind of arbitrary and we'll hear more stories like this. Or if Microsoft does it the most effective way, they just close down their king's biggest studios and open one big one, a

few hundred people in Istanbul. and all the problem are solved. These people will never complain. They will work super hard and they will make the best puzzle games in the world. I know it's a radical solution, but it is a solution that will work. What do you think, Jen?
Oh my god. Shut down all the European sites and go to Istanbul.
I'm just talking Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin, and London. Nothing more. I think you're highlighting a culture issue and it's very very difficult for companies to change their cultures. Your proposed idea is a solution. I'm not sure if that's the right one, but what else did Neil say though about this? It feels like he's the new, you know, like investigative. I think people like to call him and just [ __ ] right?
Yeah. I I've got a look I've got a question here Mishka for you because you've started companies in Europe so I don't I've only started companies in the US so I don't know what the laws are like over there but the very first bullet point in the article is people

are suing over their severance packages
and let me tell you why that's a big trigger for me or like a big confusion point for me as a US-based entrepreneur business leader boss etc and an employee right I've run two startups I've worked at seven and I'm always surprised when people are taking legal action over their severance packages because two things. One, every contract I've ever signed is an at will contract. I can leave at any time. The company can make me leave at any time with no cause. Right? I have never had the words severance package in any of my contracts. This is something that companies are not obligated to do in the US. This is something they do out of, I would say, like kindness and covering their ass and good business practices. The minmax of it is they're trying to pay the minimum amount that it'll take you to not
get embroiled in lawsuits that will then exceed the cost of the severance package. But this is not a requirement,

right? This is just something they do to make their lives easier. I'm really lucky. I've only been laid off once from a QA job as a contractor. So, I've never had a severance package, but like severance isn't a right, it's a privilege. And I don't know what they're suing over. And like my personal viewpoint, and again, like don't hate me, I didn't make the rules of capitalism, but like we live in a hyper capitalist society. Capitalism is war. You have to acknowledge that capitalism is war. No one is your parent. Governments are not responsible for your well-being. Your boss is not responsible for your well-being. Your company is not responsible for your well-being. You are. It is your job if you work in the games industry to make sure that you are ready to be laid off at any moment. I could be laid off right now.
Sorry, Ethan, before you go on a tangent, when did you become this right-wing Republican? Like,
I'm not a right-wing Republican. This is the world you live. If you cannot acknowledge the realism of the world you live in, then you're going to waste

million dollars getting a tactical shooter.
Things are a little different in Europe. We there are six weeks mandated vacation. Things are a little bit different over here.
Minimum. Yeah.
Not in the UK, in Sweden, in Finland.
This is actually important to talk about, I think, particularly cuz people have misunderstandings of like how the Swedish system works cuz they hear about these unions and they're like, "Oh my god, does that mean like I live in a fairyland?" And the unions and the sectoral bargaining does basically nothing for you. They basically take care of benefits. They're basically a benefits provider. And so there are some stipulations like there's first in first out which is something that I think Neil actually missed in his article which is that you're actually mandated by law sometimes to try to rehire employees to first seek out the ones you laid off which is why they talk about oh my god it was insanity they were letting people go and then rehiring them months later. That was a legal requirement they had to follow. There's some tenure requirements but by and large there is no reason to let you go. I mean they have to state that there's economic redundancy but they can still operate freely. The whole

point of the welfare state is that these people have income pension like there are other things that are provided that make this possible right because you don't have your healthcare tied to your employment. So things are different but the whole point is to grease the market. King is particularly painful by the way. I just want to call them out for having the non-compete clauses and also having the gardening leave [ __ ] And they should be called out more for that because it really harms the industry. But by and large like the Swedish system doesn't do that much.
Yeah. It's it's it's almost identical. So one thing that it mentioned like in this article they were like oh some people got fired and then they got hired immediately back. Yeah that is by law. This is our law and the challenges come in because King is a profitable company and when they're doing layoffs like let me say an example. In Finland you can't run a round of layoffs. You start a collective bargaining procedure that lasts at least I remember 6 weeks. So for six weeks you are negotiating with your employees about possible reduction and employees can come up with various

methods of saying hey we will take an unpaid leave rather than see some of our colleagues go. I know Ethan for a hardcore capitalist it sounds like a goddamn communism but but bear with us there are different ways of organizing your society so but again we don't have carriers so or strike groups anyway so the limitation on unemployment is quite strict and for the longest time now Finland actually is changing the laws a little bit but for the longest time it was very difficult to fire people even a reason is not enough and What you're describing actually is CEO contracts and leadership contracts. EU we do have these at will employment and actually sever packages are part of that but those are only for the CEOs of the company. So had those as well. So employee and leadership is different
from the lowest QA position to executive positions. Every US contract has a

I've had Yep. So, so it's very different and hence, hence it's a it's a challenge as I said having US leadership and European labor laws which are complicated and different in every country as well.
All right, next story.
Okay, so a hiring story. I didn't want to kind of jump in too big into the supercell stories and Phil wants me to move super fast, but I'm going to cover this because I got a lot of questions about this, a lot of headscratching at Gamescom asking what is this new head of games at Supercell? and it's fair to cover it's a plus10 billion company and they have a new leader. So just in a summary, I don't think this is a typical type of a role based on the text feels like an admin role where Drusilla Holland who resumes as the head of first ever head of new games will resume a sort of a admin role where she has her hands full of sort of aligning Supercell's different silos. And by silos I mean their internal teams making new games. Spark, which is teams built out of people outside of Supercell,

working in outside of Supercell, building nearby, building a new game. And then they also have now AI labs that are building various AI tools and solutions for new games and existing games. So I feel like based on the text, Dracilla has kind of taken over this and I think this is a very important role. What we have here is graph of Supercell's latest game, Mo. And there was the launch. Then there was the long decline when they haven't pushed anything out. And then they tried again to grow it. I've seen tons of ads, but doesn't seem the game is ready for prime time. Reference to the beautiful Dallas show. Anyway, anybody of you watches it, Dion Sander. Anyways,
and so they really need a person like that to take ownership because the way Supercell has been making games has been objectively broken since 2018. They've tried different multiple processes, organizations. All I want to say is is Drusilla Holland. I know her personally. She's a very smart lady. So, I don't want it to come off in a wrong way or not to make this about a person. Just

want to give the background. So, she's a former game lead of Heyday back in 2013. Before that, she actually hired Adam Teler to Wooga. And she worked at Supercell as a game lead. Then, she had her new game. Then, she was a PM at Spooky Pop. Then she went on to build a coding school that was funded by Supercell. It's still ongoing. A very interesting type of a project. Then she had her own startup kind of micro gaming startup with few people. And then she went back to Supercell helping with Spark, helping with the coding school. So it's kind of a full loop. And if you look at her background, it's not what you typically would assume a person like this would have. It's not like a Supercell hired somebody who shipped multiple franchises or, you know, big franchises. nor is it a person who's been on a publishing side and really know how to bring people together to kind of get that new franchise, new game out of the door. But what she has is more than any of these type of people. And what she has is is the trust of the CEO. And so she has all the tools needed

to shape the organization to be effective at launching new games. So there's a lot to do and so hope hopefully she can get all the silos working as one.
I don't see it as an admin role. I see it as a very strategic role to get everyone back on track and get processes put in place to help them figure out,
you know, they they haven't had success in a new launch. So having someone internal who understands the culture across a bunch of different teams helping to guide new people seems like while maybe not on paper what you would be looking for. You know they've tried to bring other people in from the outside and that doesn't seem to work. Supercell not knowing them seems to have a very specific culture. So kudos for them to do something different because what they have been doing isn't working.
Yes. And I didn't mean admin as a dimminitive term. I meant more like it's not that it's her role to influence directly what type of games are being made or make those type of decisions of

what type of portfolio is being building but more administrating this large organization that is being built around new technologies and new games and new ways of working new ways of shipping. So that type of a yeah
there's one game I want to share which has been near and dear to my heart and when you see this game I just got really angry at myself for not thinking of this sooner. It's a game called Claw. There's a couple of them. We'll talk about what is them in a moment. They are a mobile game and what you do is you control a real life claw machine. They they spin up a streaming video of a unoccupied machine and then you use the virtual controls to control the physical machine located somewhere in China. And it's just like you would imagine you play a claw game. And not only that, they've added some progression systems in. You can watch other people play. You have star systems. The question now is like, okay, well, if I want something physical, how do I actually get it? And they have a subscription service which you can sign up for that cover shipping.

I think this is an absolutely brilliant game. And don't get me wrong, it is in very rough state, but when we think about validating ideas, this is exactly what Ethan was talking about as well. Like, you want to validate ideas despite polish, not because of it. And you know, a lot of this game's interface is gross and disgusting, but I think this is a great example of like, hey, could I spin up something very quick? Solve the toughest problem first, though. Is there something here? Is there a heartbeat? And I'm not quite sure about this one. This is Chinese.
I got to ask you, why are we talking about a game that's nearly 10 years old at this point? I mean, the success of this game, this game has been charting for a long time. Has it been doing something new recently? No, it charts in the US. Like I remember when I was watching the charts every day,
there's no American equivalent. Like this is an extremely Chinese-based game. There's been almost no iteration on the product. It's sitting there just as an opportunity.
It charts in top grossing in the US. It did 8 years ago. And I always kind of

like, is this a money laundering thing? Part of what I wonder, but this isn't new. So why why did this pop on your radar recently? I've been working with a client who like sent me this and I I can't believe I mean I had never seen this before.
I mean this is this is
you're pumping your bag.
I'm pumping my bag. I'm pumping my bag.
Okay.
That was my joke on this is like Phil's new client.
Yeah. I mean the the thing that I just saw that was I didn't know Ethan that it was trending.
Oh yeah. Like when I lived in San Francisco this was a top grossing game, right? I've been out of San Francisco for a long time. Oh, interesting. All right. I saw the license piece of this and I was mortified for licenseors. It looks to me like they're skipping licenseors because because you're going into a physical game somewhere that is pulling licensed Pokemon or Disney products, they are using that to promote the game, thereby what seems to be not paying a license. But I don't know. I I don't know for

sure. That was my Red Alert licenseor vibe going off. All right. So during the Gamescom piece, I forgot to mention Tencent. The other thing that I heard non-stop, especially when, you know, Neil was doing his recap and he's like talking about the size of booths. Tencent seem to have so many games. Fate Trigger, Honor of Kings, Project Spectrum, Interstellar Utopia, Russ Mobile, Terminal Brigade Brigade, and then Delta Force. Phil, tell us about Delta Force. What was the news?
Mishka, you tell us about Delta Force. Oh, the man on the floor.
Yeah,
somebody had [ __ ] put in their name on top of this, I would have known who to send it to.
Well, Delta Force is kind of like Phil's game since it's kind of it's it's the Battlefield from China. They got downloaded 2 million times on console last week. So, they had a very nice launch. This comes week after the beautiful Battlefield 6 open beta weekend that saw massive engagement. So there's clear appetite for these large

stage warfares and now the whole military shooter space is hotly contested between Call of Duty, the Black Ops 7, we got the Battlefield 6, the Delta Force of this year. So will be interesting how this all plays out. But it just shows the graph here in the magnitude of Delta Force compared to Peak, Mortal Kombat 1, Madden 26, and Day Z. So,
I know what drove the day Z downloads because it was a free PS+ game, but what's driving like Mortal Kombat 1 isn't new.
Oh, just to be clear, the source here is Sensor Tower. So, two of these these graphs are coming in from Sensor Tower and their video subsidiary.
Yes, correct. Not sure what droves others. I'm just looking at Delta Force and how positive it has been taken. I've actually played the mobile version of Delta Force. I wasn't a fan. I like the premise, but actually the shooter core gameplay I feel like COD Mobile is better. But anyway, they're just me know

if you guys played it.
I mean, the problem on Battlefield though is you need really long draw distances because you're you're 64 player map. There's a lot of dead space and it's hard to render that or see that properly on a mobile skew, which is something that Battlefield Mobile, I think, struggles with, too, or or did. Rest in peace.
Yeah. And in other news, Valerant Mobile, Phil, you've been talking about this game being dead for like Yeah. Well,
it's only in China. It's dead in It's dead in the West. It It is only in China.
Yeah. Just like anything Riot puts out should be just based on where they're getting the revenue from. Not not just saying that they
Oh man, so many people have disputed that number in private messages to me and I keep hanging to get real data. But
yeah, based on the information we have, most of the users are coming in from China. We might be totally wrong, but seems like Riot is serving Chinese audience. Nothing back to it. Anyways, so now they're serving the Chinese audience again by launching Valerant Mobile in China to a huge success and a

steady week one. Valerant came out and then Sony and Netis are launching Destiny mobile version called Destiny Rising
out today.
It's out today.
Yeah, my uh my prerege downloaded overnight.
Yeah. So, it's sher galore. We got Delta Force, we got Valerant Mobile in China, and then we got the Destiny launching on mobiles as well done by Netis. So, all Chinese companies just shooting at the targets.
I wanted to cover this cuz Bill, I think it moderately leads into what you're about to talk about. I think if you're a marketer or anyone working with Twitch streamers, you need to know what's going on here. So, this is news from si.com and Zach Busussy on I think this is an expost, but one of my friends on our Slack posted this for us. Thanks, Will. In attempt to put an end to the constant battle against view botting, Twitch recently announced that it would update its code to detect bloated viewer counts. And so, what Zach says in his

expost is Twitch's crackdown on view botting has intensified. Many top 5,000 streamers are experiencing their lowest performing concurrent views of 2025 and sitewide viewership is down 5 to 22% depending on the hour. So if you're working with a streamer, just check into this because you might be paying less money now because streams seem to be down. So does this make games harder to find? Well, at least this is a discovery point, but Phil, I think you want to do something a little bit differently.
Okay. I wrote a piece this week called New Game Ideas Are Getting Harder to Find. And I've wanted to write this for a really long time. It's something that's happening in science right now. It's been a key question of this gentleman named Matt Clancy who runs Under the Sun, which is a great website where he tries to corral a lot of these evidences evidence together. What is the productivity of science? How are things evolving? You know, is it harming economic growth? And what he's finding is that all of these things are starting to slow down. It's taking more and more

researchers to have breakthroughs. We're finding teams are becoming increasingly specialized and we're seeing that like a lot of teams when they start to operate on this frontier of knowledge, it takes a lot more of them to be able to cross into new domains. So when you look at for instance the number of co-authors on papers, it's more than it's ever been. You look at the number of patents. So any one of these metrics in and of themselves are something that you know I would view skeptically, but together I think he's marshaled quite a bit of evidence. And I think we see the same thing in games. And the evidence I would point to is really match. I think match is a very interesting idea here. And what's happened is like it's been 31 years since one of the original iterations of match by a Russian programmer. And then we started to think about like okay what how's the genre developed? How have the new mechanics been added? Candy Crush added win streaks eight years ago. And then I started to think about like okay we knew that winstreaks were such an important driver of revenue and match. You know, it took so long for Royal Match 2023 to introduce that extra wind tier, to introduce the fourth wind tier streak

that had super light ball. And as a great Navic piece pointed out, you know, that increased baseline revenue by 1.5x. That is an innovation that's unlocked like billions of dollars and match GDP. And so I would simply argue here that ideas function like technology. They're recipes. We see that all the time and match games. And one of the ways that we can combat the stagflation that we have in this industry is to treat game ideas like technology. And I think we severely underestimate in R&D to help explore what are the valuable recipes like we just saw with Super Lightball. It took that long to figure that out.
Phil, come on. This has to be your worst take of all time. I'm sorry to be soative, but you're like, "Oh my god, Candy Crush had win streaks eight years ago, and there was no innovation in match gaming until Royal Match did this next Street Timer. What about the release of Royal Match or the release of Toon Blast or the release of Tile Match just to stay in that genre or merge?"

Like, this is a a bad take, right? New game ideas.
I just want to clarify. I don't I I don't claim that, just to be clear. I'm not claiming there's been no innovation. All I'm claiming is that what feels like an obvious incremental step, a fourth tier win streak, took 8 years to figure out. I think we could have solved that much quicker with more investment.
You can't take that one feature and broaden it out to the entire industry and saying new game ideas are harder to find. Right? I've purchased at least 50 indie games in the last year, each of them having new innovative ideas in them. I have notebooks filled with innovative game ideas and mechanics that would take me more than a lifetime to build and I'm sure every game designer in the audience does. Right. And like I think you're trying to say new hit commercial ideas that are applied to existing successes and generate tens to hundreds of millions of new dollars in these very competitive cutthroat segments are getting harder to find. Yes. Obviously. Obviously. When you're competing against Candy Crush and Royal

Match and Tomb Blast and Tile Blast and Merge Mansion and whatever, it is very hard to find the new Zingga PM playbook tweak that suddenly raises revenue $10 million. But like innovation is happening everywhere, right? Like Peak, the game Peak that was the number two most downloaded in the chart we showed earlier is an excellent example of indie innovation, right? And like let's just look at mobile freeto-play, right? The butt centric marketing of Nik Goddess of War nearing a billion dollars, right? The husband centric gameplay of what is it? Love and spaceime, a billion dollars. That is an innovation, right? Taking something that people think is niche and like women focused romance with like K-pop boys, billion dollar innovation right there, right? Archerro, Survivor.io, O taking the one finger bullet hell gameplay turning it on to mobile and finding new tens to you know hundred of millions of dollars per year.

And then again, like if we broaden outside a match, like just think about White Out Survival, a game that like never gets talked out here, and how the combination of the nuclear reactor and how satisfying the cleaning the snow that's part of the onboarding and part of the ad funnel is like, dude, you're like an amateur journalist here, and you're like, "Oh, this one segment of the industry I'm covering, Match, hasn't innovated in the PM playbook the way that ZingDI used to 15 years ago." Like, dude, just like broaden your view. This is
I will I will help you with probably maybe some misinterpretations or straw men. I'm not quite sure. That's not my claim at all.
Your your article is called new game ideas are getting harder to find.
And if you only read the title, I can see how you might come to some of your conclusions. So I think it's important to make sure that we take that context into account. But I'm happy to clarify anything that there may be a misunderstanding around. So I'm not claiming that there's been no innovation. All I'm claiming is that when we think about a lot of these genres, productivity starts to slow down

in them. Do we think relative to the amount of capital that's been pushed into match? I don't think so. I think match 3 is absolutely slow down in terms of innovation. And I would say the way we define productivity though is out.
Do oil fields have less oil in them as you continue to pump oil out of them? Yes. Does that mean there's not new oil fields elsewhere in the world to be discovered? Like you're just looking at but that's that's actually a great example because fracking has been in this incredible innovation that like totally rediscovered a whole new supply of oil. Where is the fracking for match 3? I'm saying that was super light. We need more super light bulbs. We need more of this. I want to accelerate this innovation. We need to counteract declines in revenue with more research and R&D budget experimentation and game ideas.
So King 6,000 people couldn't figure it out.
So they had an experimentation group. They had an experimentation group, right? I mean, this is the whole point though that their playbook is used everywhere, right? Hard level labeling is used everywhere. Winstreams,
your article should have been called, I am unhappy with the rate of monetization

feature innovation in the math shop.
Do you want your wages to go up or down? Let's put it this way. Do you want the industry to grow or shrink?
The industry is growing. It's just the industry higher rate than it's growing right now. Do you want to beat them?
I've worked on enough. I've I've done like over hundreds of millions of dollars of Match 3 revenue. I never need to make a Match 3 game again.
I don't know what you guys are even talking about. Like like just stop. Like you guys are talking about two different things. Phil is making a great point of hey there needs to be more experimentation and this is a business focused podcast. So of course revenue is the most important thing. And Ethan you're making a point that Steam is full-on innovation and gameplay. Cool. these things can happen at the same time and there's no point in continuing with fracking conversation like what the [ __ ]
Yeah. No, I also think that Phil is trying to say we need more innovation that hits these bigger payouts.
Yeah.
And that a lot of the innovation that we

are seeing in indies is awesome, but they're at a they're coming.
It's about finding the recipes. That's the important part about making this a technology.
Let's go back to the math genre, right? Like Toon Blast is an innovation that created hundreds of millions of dollars of new match revenue. Merge was an innovation that created hundreds of millions of dollars of new match revenue. So if you're looking at King and Candy Crush, like you're not looking at the whole picture.
Understood. All right, I'm going to end the boxing match that we had today. Thank you, Ethan, for coming in. Like spicy Ethan, like dark evil Ethan showed up today. This was awesome. Like
it was Bizarro Ethan on the table to watch the match over.
This is real Ethan. This is I'm sorry guys. You invited me on two weeks in a row. You better bring good takes.
I think we're going to take a break then. Like we like we like kind people to be honest.
All right,
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