TWIG #347 Call of Duty Movie, Google's New Court Case, De-Monetization of Real-Money Gaming

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sensortowwer.com. That is sensortow.com. [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to this week in games 347. I'm Jen Dano. I fill the marketing and publishing role on the podcast. Today, there's only three of us. In the first chair, who consistently messes up the idea of what first chair is? Is
investing. No, no, no, no. I'm in the first chair, dude. I'm the first on the list. I'm here. I'm back. Thank you very much.
This is not how it works. The best ability is availability.
Oh, jeez. All right. All right. Here's what we got. we got going on. Folks are creating new KPIs and it's like psycho history and foundation. Very good season 3 if you're watching that show. Call of Duty gets a green light for liveaction movies and people want Crescent to fight about it. So, we'll do that later. Google Play announces they're creating a Steamlike public gamer profile. Rec Room

reduces half its staff. Hell has frozen over as Sony and Microsoft do a firstofits-kind collab with Hell Divers 2 and Halo 3 ODST. Crest wishes his phone adds a controller to play Destiny Rising on mobile. Roblox has a new hit game driving peak CCU yet again. Steal a brain rot versus grow a garden. And if we get to it, revisionist history on Cyberpunk's 2077 launch. something about physical events which was just stupid. Anyway, I hope we get there so I can also agree with you that it's stupid. Crest, welcome back. Two weeks out. We missed you dearly. How was Penn?
Oh, bittersweet. You know, the daughter is now gone forever.
To college.
Yes. To college.
Come back.
Yes. Yes. Uh so anyway, we went with the whole family. It was really fun, you know, but it was over a twoe period, so

it was dragged the [ __ ] out, right? So there was no emotional endgame thing. Uh, but you know, fundamentally like I did all my my sobbing in the sauna for some reason. Like every time I got in the sauna, I started reflecting on things and that's when I got upset, right? But when I actually dropped my daughter off, it was actually very antilimactic because we had been hanging out for like two weeks. I spent more time with her in the last two weeks than I have in the last three years. You know what I'm saying? So, we did what we we do, right? Because Natalie and I are very very similar, right? We're very stoic and almost autistic people, right? In some ways. And so, we knew that if one of us started crying, both of us were going to be crying like crazy. So, we intentionally avoided eye contact the entire night with dinner, right? And then when I dropped her off, we hugged each other like two parking meters and we she walked to campus and I walked the other way and that was it. That was it. That was the big goodbye, you know. And

then we cried probably on the way home, right? So anyway, that was it. She is gone. We miss her already. Um yeah, her presence is missed, but she's in good shape. She seems to be adjusting very well.
Well, I'm I'm very proud of you. I didn't know you could cry. So, thank you for letting us know that that is possible.
Yeah, with all the old men in in the uh in the saunas.
I was at this college. What's going on?
I I was at the raetball club in in downtown Philadelphia because they have a affiliation with the club that I have and it was [ __ ] empty, dude. It was crazy how empty this place was. Just this old school and yeah, I was in this. It's really funny actually. But anyway,
I would like to shill Phil's podcast for him since he didn't write anything. I listened to it and I gave you a note in Slack and
in our deconstructor fun slack channel and it was Phil Chrisides and other guy who is other guy
Chris Anjos who is a brilliant individual. I can't say enough great

things about him.
I like Chris.
Yeah. So listen, I played shooters. I know shooters. I don't know shooters to the depth that three of you did. And what I found fascinating was not only was it okay, what's going on, but Battlefield versus Call of Duty right now, but a lot of the history that you guys talked about. So, well done, dude. Crest, I think you listened as well.
I actually, you know, I thought it was brilliant. I mean, you guys really nerded out about the shooter category and I was it was really deep. I think that guy's been on every goddamn shooter known to man, you know, like he's OG. So yeah, it was really good episode
and don't don't forget Chrises who was awesome as well. I would say stay tuned. Stay tuned. There might be a shooter monthly coming. Shooter monthly may be a thing.
We're about to cover two shooters now. But like look at this is the number one genre.
Number one genre. So maybe it deserves its own cast.
I of course unfortunately had to listen to the last two weeks of TW and uh I have to say first off uh I

thought Dan Levy was way out of line. So, just to be clear,
Dan Levy. Who's Dan Levy?
Sorry. That's sorry. God damn it. There's someone from EA that Dan Levy, and I every time I think of him. Anyway, way out of line. Only I can yell at Philip. Okay. Only I can make fun of Phillip, not you. All right. Anyway, moving on. But his comment about Star Wars: The Old Republic always [ __ ] chaps my high, right? To characterize that as a successful game is just completely false in every single way. Okay. It was an unmititigated disaster for both EA and Boware. So, I want to like set the record straight here, right? Because when it launched, the quality of that game was relatively high, right? And they spent hundreds of millions of dollars building that [ __ ] game, but and they got 2 million units like out of the gate. Like, it it was looking pretty strong. I was at EA at the time, by the way. So, the subs were up to 1.7 million, which was actually really really good. But, man, they fell off a [ __ ] cliff. within like two or three months it was down below 500,000. So it's an absolute

disaster. And a game that cost $250 to $300 million to make that is a [ __ ] epic failure, you know. So I guess when folks like Levy start talking about how it's a success when they went free to play, it's just complete revisionist history. It is absolutely not true. It is true that they brought a lot of audience back, right, during that time, but the only audience they kept was the same audience that was paying for it to begin with and they were just spending more money, right? So, in essence, what they could have done is do a hybrid model of some sort, like a free-to-play premium plus type model. Maybe that would have been a better strategy. So, regardless of the of the free-to-play resurgence, the game was unlimited disaster for three reasons. One, the game would never been made free to play. It would never have been greenlighted for free to play for two reasons. One, because of the insane budget they were spending on this game. And two, Star Wars at the time, Lucas would never have allowed a free-to-play model happen at that time frame. Never. Okay? Because

that would have uh devalued the Star Wars license. Two, the money that they were making when it went free to play was [ __ ] mice nuts for EA. Like that was not the money that they were looking for. They were looking for a wow killer, right? that was it wasn't even close, right? And so that this is a game that was not interesting to EA at all. And three is that this game absolutely destroyed Boware. This is the pinnacle point in in Boware's history where everything went downhill from here. It created a rift between EA and Boware that never went away and they never really recovered from the damage that the whole process caused. And what were the results? The co-founders Ray and Greg left in 2012, right when it went freetoplay. They sidelined the Austin team as like an operating entity, a live service basically caretaker for this product. And Boware never made a critically successful game or even a commercially successful game after the success of Mass Effect 3 in 2012, which was had a lot of controversy around that. But since that time, since those guys left, they have never ever had a

success in the marketplace. So the point here is that you cannot characterize something like that as a success in any way because that is not the facts on the ground, right? It destroyed Bowware's leadership. It eroded their creative reputation. It locked one of their good studios out of into a support role. And it basically set the stage for where we're at with Boware, which they're basically becoming a non- entity out there. So anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight on that.
I just remember Knights of the Old Republic being a game that I love to play and so I always get it confused when you guys talk about the Old Republic.
All right, just a few things. one I I I wanted to do a quick Google update. So just Google legal news because this is you know always happening. So in the US the news came out yesterday. It doesn't actually directly impact games from what I can tell. So and Google will appeal this anyway but it's been almost a year since the US court found Google search engines to be an illegal monopoly. The early remedy ruling did not call for a

breakup or a divevestature as many people thought would happen. And everyone's like, "Oh, Android or Chrome's going to have to get split out." None of that happened. So, the only real ask was that Google must now share some of its search data with competitors. So, what everyone thought was like a big deal coming ended up being a bit of a nothing burger on that front.
Yeah. And they have one more lawsuit outstanding that they have to get through, but this was just a slap on the wrist. The stock is up like 8%. Like, this kind of sets them for
This was a huge win for Google. They don't have to get rid of the browser. I mean, even the search deal they have with Apple, which is basically just
free money for Apple every single year and basically free margin for Google. I mean, once you pay the Apple monopoly tax, wow, what a slam dunk for them. And honestly, you know, we're worse off because of this. We do not want an advertiser to own that level of market share. That's bad for everyone. So, regardless of the legal and economic questions, this is an L for us.
Interesting. I don't know about that.

But yeah,
the judge said something about AI that because AI is coming, it's going to likely disrupt the search business. So, she didn't feel that she had to do as much because of that is something that I read. I don't know if
No, no, no. That makes total sense when you start defining the search with AI like chat, GPT, and others like the competition.
Let's asterisk that. I would say that's that's a Twitter hottake right now. I think the cited text I saw, I'm not quite sure that was a fair conclusion. In terms of the idea that chat GDP was enough of a threat that you could say, okay, well, they don't own the market technologies. I mean, there's there's a lot of ways legally you can justify it if you feel like there's ongoing threats.
Maybe the British Gaming Commission, which slowed down the Microsoft acquisition over cloud gaming, could take a note from that. Um, we'll we'll see if those regulators uh call each other. Doubtful, but
yeah. Yeah. No, it's a good point that this is US only and you know Europe has its own set of battles with the tech giants.

Okay. I have been seeing a few different like I don't know fake KPIs or new KPIs show up in a lot of the things that I follow. So I wanted to bring two of them here. When Adam is on the podcast, we generally talk about, you know, the lack of KPI predictors of, you know, how do you in a sense aggregate what are all the marketing sources out in the world to understand the, you know, the predictability of your potential game success or how your current live service is doing. So, one is our friend Yost friend Jun. He does the super Yoast newsletter. Yoast is J O S T since you know he's Dutch. So this is from Aldora which is new analytics company if you remember Yoast I think founded super data is that right Phil was it super data so they are now tracking what they're calling a ranking called by unique interaction so it's a way to compare IP across interactive and non-interactive content so think about

like toys sports games TV movies so this ranking is called top media sport and entertainment brand owners by creative activity. The unique interactions is a combination of what he calls five dimensions of the gaming ecosystem to measure the combined audience reach. So play is a direct gameplay. Watch is streaming and movie cont and video content. Connect is social interactions. Create is UGC. Spend is obviously money. In-game purchases and merchandise. Oh, and merchandise. That would be like consumer products. So using this, his top IP with the most reach in millions of uniques is One Punch Man. So rounding out the top five, Squid Game, NBA, Marvel, Avengers, like what the hell do they still have going on? And the NFL kind of, you know, get to the top five. So my take is I I love the idea of this,

but it doesn't feel like it's working in real life to me. Like otherwise we would be seeing One Punch Man doing a little bit more in the world of gaming. Maybe it would be a bigger game in the world that doesn't even have a new IP right now. I know it's on Netflix but but nothing really interesting.
It's China. It's China. This entire metric is China for one.
This whole thing is China.
Which is exactly the problem with this chart.
Yeah.
Is that when you have no reproducibility, you have absolutely no information about how this metric is derived. They define reach as unique audience interactions. What the [ __ ] is it? Unique audience interaction across play, watch, connect, create, and spend. You are an academic. You understand the importance of reproducibility. And this is just repeating all of the same crimes that Super Data had. If you remember, every quarter, Super Data would get into a fight with some sort of third party publisher. It was usually Epic Games over the numbers because they were all like, he does this in all his charts, source, my own company. I mean, come on. It's like giving yourself a gold medal. And like, look, I I love him. I love

that someone's trying to do ambitious data like this. If you remember Navic, they had a great piece, although I know a lot of people like to poke holes in it about the size of the video game industry when you include, for instance, things like peripherals. I like these ambitious attempts, even if you can poke holes in them, but this just adds more confusion
rather than adding any sort of clarification in my opinion.
It it's also not actionable, right? Like,
yeah, that's what I was trying. I was like, well, what do I do with this chart? like maybe it's what license I should go get to do a game with but I didn't know what to do with this to your point Chris if you are going to mix in I don't know how you would mix in China because you see NFL and NBA in the top five so that can't be true
well the NBA is huge in China
you you got to pull out Asia all together right like it doesn't even make sense to include it in something like this if you're trying to compare IPs for the west like if that's your if your target his target demo Well, I guarantee you the Chinese are not looking at this chart, right? So, why do we care about

these Chinese? Like, I never understand why people like cross-pollinate these type of IPs where
Yeah.
All right. Well, let's go to the next chart. So, this one is called Mind Share from Mind Game Data. And so, this one, thanks to Hunter on my team who was doing a presentation and I actually had never heard of it before. I just love all of these services that try to do this which is take different points of interest and you know pull it all together. So this one is they have a public tableau that's out there and so what they do is they do a weekly snapshot of the gaming market based on digital behaviors of billions of gamers. They use Google search, YouTube, Twitch cross reference those insights with Steam, Tik Tok and Reddit. I think Tik Tok is going to actually likely move up to like a main source. So they claim that this mind share data point which aggregates all of these inputs can help predict sales. The chart we're looking at shows that the mind share data point across the industry. Roblox is probably

the biggest one. Minecraft Arena Free Fryer is getting the biggest kind of mind share as well. And all this is from the end of July.
It's the same it's the same problem because the game's big in Latin America. That was the whole point of FreeFire. And so this is just like more metric slop. Like what does this even mean? And if this is actually predictive, they should be millionaires by now. Why are you trying to like sell the service? Just go out and invest on it. You'd make millions, right? If it's predictive. I mean, if you go to their website, they are seemingly working with some of the bigger companies. But I think the challenge for them is in a world of AI. I wonder if companies are going to figure out how to do a lot of this themselves. You know, right now,
just get a data scrapper. Just scrap the data. It's not that hard. There's not a lot of value added here. I hate when I see these like metrics that appear out of nowhere. This game's number one. This one's number two. I see this all the time in sports analytics. People just make up these metrics. It's like what? Like your metrics need to be predictive of something. It should be reproducible.

O they say it is predictive. When you get into some of the details of the games that they're tracking, I'd love to know more. Right. And Phil, not everyone can build a scraper. So there are, you know, some smaller companies that need these kinds of sources. The idea of this is great. I love that people are trying to figure out how to use all those social KPIs and like put it together and put it through the sausage grinder and see if something comes out. There's something called an overlap index that you actually did like, right?
What? So, there are I don't want to call them advanced metrics, but there are certain ways to fiddle with metrics to say something interesting like Video Game Insights and shout out video game Insights, great sponsor. Thank you, Video Game Insights. Like one of the things they have is the Steam overlap index. So when you look at any particular game, you can look at what players who play this game are also likely to play, but they represent it as an index or the games they're likely to own rather. And so rather than just saying, oh well, everyone owns Team Fortress 2, which is like 10, you know, 100% of the Steam population, they make

it a ratio of how much more likely are they own above the average Steam user. And you get really interesting insights. You get really big clusters. Okay, you know, the person who plays this cozy MMO is actually into these things. That is really great insight that you can drive actionability around.
Well, maybe we should go build our own and start to sell it and compete with everybody else, Phil. All right, you and me, let's go do it. All right, let's go to the next story, which is Call of Duty. So, Call of Duty is getting a liveaction movie after 22 years and half a billion copies sold globally. So, the new Paramount owners, they're pulling out the checkbook. They are on a spending spree and secured the Call of Duty rights. They also spent a lot of money on South Park which I am enjoying immensely as a fan for 22 years as well. I think or 27 years. So Paramount if you remember also does a lot of other video game movies like the Sonic series that does really well. Phil sadly they also made that Halo TV series that we loved

and then didn't love. And then so Chris, some of the people in Deconstructive Fund, Slack channel apply to join are looking for a trans media fight between you and I. I think they're going to be surprised with this. So I'm going to let you go first. Okay.
Be a gentleman.
I am a broken record on this stuff. Like
clearly these guys are on their ass right now, right? They are losing badly to Battlefield, right? And they should lose significant share this year to EA and Battlefield. They can't execute on a marketing campaign to save their goddamn lives, right? There's chaos in the studios and around Microsoft in general. Their technology is just not up to par anymore. The visuals are just not there compared to Battlefield. But a liveaction movie, yes, check. You know that is the way to the light, right? That's the way to spend all their effort, all their emphasis on building a live action mod that will bring them back to the light, right? So, as they

continue to deteriorate share, let's just make some [ __ ] movies with Paramount, right? Yeah, that'll do it. That'll bring them back, right? So, no, this is dumb.
This is not going to be a fight because I agree with you in this case. So, this shouldn't happen and actually is likely detrimental to the brand. There is no upside for them. They are already where they need to be. I think when you're doing this kind of IP extension and franchise extension where you're going into linear content that has just one storyline, you do that when you're trying to reinvigorate a franchise where you're trying to set up the world building of the franchise. There is so much more downside opportunity on this than upside. Just for a second, think of how easy it is to make a shitty movie. This summer is I had just heard a stat this morning. It is the worst box office summer besides COVID, take that out of it, since 1981. Like, movies are not

driving cultural moments like they used to be. And getting this for Call of Duty isn't going to work. So, also the IP is just doesn't make sense. And the core fantasy, and I know Phil and I are going to argue over this, when you play Call of Duty, the core fantasy is I just want to be a badass military person with the coolest gun. I don't really care anything about the story or the setting. Who are the characters? Like, nobody cares about that when you're playing COD. You want to go in and like what is it? Teaag your, you know, like the the opponent and yell at another 10-year-old on comms. Like, they want to be Seal Team 6. They don't care about Soap or any of these other characters that I barely even remember. And by the way, which one are you going to have? Are you going to have like Modern Warfare or Black Ops? And you're going to have the studios yelling like, "Which one are you doing?" And so another point is back in the day when my buddies, you know, at Hasbro were making Nerf blasters, they actually tried to make Call of Duty Nerf blasters, it was a little tough with like the Mring and everything like that,

but nobody cares about those blasters because there's no personality behind what is just a weapon. That brand doesn't extend into different lines of business because it there is no kind of personality. I think they're painting themselves into a box and are going to make it worse. So harsh take from usually the champion of a franchise strategy. But yeah,
uh th this should have been done ages ago. And this isn't even a troll take. This is the number one franchise in gaming. And don't me wrong, your criticism of the IP gen is totally on point. Like Call of Duty has never been known for narrative. Like there is one character people can name. Do you guys know the one character?
Was it Soap? That was the only guy I know.
Oh, I didn't even know that one. I was going to say Captain Fisher, right? And there's Captain Fisher. And there's one there's one other recognizable IP element in Call of Duty. That's a character. Do you know which one it is? The title image we're looking at right now that not screen sharing.
It was from Modern Warfare. You remember

the skull face?
The the gentleman with the skull face.
And remember there was the picture I think in Afghanistan or Iraq during the war that a soldier had something akin to that and that's what they used as inspiration. That's how deep the franchise goes really in terms of narrative. Don't me wrong, there's a single player. There is narrative there. Don't but it's not known for the internet. That's not carried the franchise. And so I think that's something they got to figure out. Chris Anjou, by the way, on the shooter podcast made exactly the point you're making, Jen. Like the point is for you to be an action hero.
The main character is the gun.
He explicitly says that. But are you kidding me? This is the biggest franchise. Of course you need to take a shot on goal for this. Of course you need to take a shot on this. Like I think it's silly not to give this a shot. And I think just to clarify my trans media position, my trans media position isn't that gaming IP can't be great movies. I mean, that's false. I mean, look at how much money Super Mario and the Sonic franchise has made. I mean, it's it's gobstocking how much money that I mean, it's an incredible amount of money that Sonic has made. We're up to the third Sonic movie, and guess what? They're actually good. I I

just can't even believe they're actually good. And so, of course, you need to take a shot on goal with this. The only thing I disagree with is when you do these trans media projects, people like to put in the P&L that we're going to have all these uplifts across the franchise. That's the thing I disagree with. Not that gaming can't be great trans can't be great media. The fantasy stuff, Jen, I don't know what's the fantasy of Sonic. What's the fantasy of Mario? Be an Italian plumber. Be a blue hedgehog. Run really fast.
They're characters. So, they're characters that have a world. And also, all of the successful video game franchises are for kids. Minecraft, Sonic, Mario are familyfriendly design for kids to take them into the fantasy and help them understand and bring them into this world of where we are today. All of those are, you know, things we grew up with. Like they're all established franchises except for Minecraft, but Minecraft has now been around for 10 plus years or something like that. So I think that where you do see uplift in the P&L is as someone who has done toy business recently, all of

those movie properties done by video games absolutely increase your merchandise and the rest of your franchise sales.
That's fair. That's fair.
So that that is so the franchise grows. I think there is a bump in if they do franchise planning right and there is a game that's available or an updates available. Minecraft did see bumps in a lot of the playership at that time.
No, it did not. No. No. No. Stop. No. No. No. No. We looked at the numbers. It was a small bump in CCU.
Dude, what kid plays on Steam?
There's no Steamcraft. There's no Steamcraft. We're looking at Sensor Tower Mobile.
Let's table that one cuz I don't know if I agree. Now, I don't know how big the bump was or if they sold DLC, if they had DLC, you know, ready because on that game it's a little bit of a different monetization
unlike Riot. Sorry. Continue.
Well, yes, that Yeah, that's a whole other topic.
I think they should have done this ages ago when single player mattered when those characters were actually more interesting to people. But this game is

a multiplayer shooter, right? And as you said, the guns are the heroes, right? And you can't build a [ __ ] movie out of that. Now, I would argue that they do have quite a narrative with their characters, and I think people that are really fans of Call of Duty will argue that, but no one gives a [ __ ] Like, the majority of the people don't care, right? And so, you're basically creating a action game with characters that nobody knows and narrative has gone over like the last 15 years in terms of like the different narratives on the different
Yeah. Which one?
Yeah. How how you couple that together is going to be [ __ ] impossible. I think it is far more likely they make a bad movie and that does not help them at all. It actually hurts them. Yeah. You know, and and that's the challenge and it's not what the audience is going to want, right? The audience does not care. The core Call of Duty audience doesn't want a [ __ ] movie. I would argue.
Yeah. They just want a multiplayer game that is the best multiplayer shooter that they can possibly play. Like there is no benefit from selling a story or a character. Um especially cuz they

refresh it every year, too.
Back but back in the day, the single player was more relevant. But that's not the the relevant part of Call of Duty anymore. Kind of the
point. I mean, when I play COD, I only play single player. That's how I remember Soap cuz I like the Modern Warfare series, I guess, a little bit better than Black Ops. So, anyway, let's keep going. Another Google story. So, uh I just got an email, interesting email from Google Play. So, I looked it up in the Verge as well. Like a lot of press is picking this up. Google Play Games is about to show people what you play. The Steamike update will display your game progress, stats, and achievements to other players. The update will be applied automatically and start rolling out in most global regions on September 23rd and on October 1st for users in the US and UK. There's some data tracking happening here and the email addresses that. But Phil, tell me what you think. What else is going on?
This is very interesting. And so they are making these public play profiles.

So you're going to be able to say, "Okay, there's this individual user. Here's their public profile. Here are the games they play." And the reason this is important is that a lot of data companies, uh, you know, particularly on the Steam side, will scrape public profiles to be able to get a lot of the analytics. That's usually how the back end works. You randomly sample profiles. Almost every analytics company who uses Steam data does something along these lines. And so this could be another lifeline for being able to get good information about what players are playing. If you remember, Steam made a change where they set those public profiles to be private by default, which basically screwed up everyone. I mean, that was the fall of Steam Spy, but then there seems to have been much better advances, not just on the data collection side, but also on the statistical side. This could be good. This could be good. And honestly, I wish Apple gave enough shits about gaming to violate my privacy like this. I wish they would send out an email like this. I'm actually bummed. There's someone in Google who cares.
Well, I think it could be cool if you can have Steamike community behavior happening inside your Android device.

That does feel useful to me.
Yeah. 30 years. I mean, I think that's the theme of this podcast is everyone is doing things, you know, 10 and 20 years too late. But better late than never. All right, let's go to the next story because you do have thoughts on this one. Okay, so recck room update. Uh they made a decision to lay off roughly half of their staff, which is on top of the 15% rift that they did in May. So going from 400 down to 200 employees. Like that is absolutely massive. Just to remind you, Recck Room kind of like aimed to deliver like this multiplatform userenerated PC VR console mobile thing. They raised I think close to what?
$300 million.
Holy [ __ ]
3.5 billion dollar evaluation. Remember Zer money?
Dude, I cannot believe that A16Z and [ __ ] Lightseed were not involved in this thing. But but anyway, that that's

beside the fact. It was basically Sequoia index.
Lay off our friends.
Oh, sorry. Sorry. Um, you know what I read was that while they saw kind of like really decent attraction for PC and VR, the mobile and console effort efforts definitely underperformed and that increased their cost basis and created all kinds of issues with the company moderation etc. And they say anyway that the layoffs were not really about running out of money. They have money, right? They're just about like curbing the spend to preserve their runway. So they're basically able to kind of retrench and could build out on what actually makes sense and so they can extend their runway to 2029 with this. So So here's my take on this. Wow. First of all, they raised a [ __ ] ton of money. Like that is is absolutely crazy. And during the time they definitely won the buzzword bingo, right? That's why I'm show 16Z wasn't involved. They had crossplatform, social, userenerated content, like the whole [ __ ] nine yards of VR.

Oh, and VR, right? Right. Right. Back in that day, I forget.
That's not a buzz word, though.
Well, back then it was in 17.
Anyway.
Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. 17.
This is the fundamental thing. I'm talking about venture capital investment in the gaming space. Like these the two primary reasons that this failed epically was the scope. One, the scope was way too [ __ ] high for a startup, right? Like the crossplatform idea was dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb from the get-go, right? No one's gonna make [ __ ] on the [ __ ] mobile device for a 3D world. Like doesn't even make sense, right? And also the fundamental thing about these people that come from big tech or Riot or you know big companies is they do not know how to deploy capital properly for a startup, right? Like these guys all came from hollow lens of all things, right? which is they might as well [ __ ] burn money like with that [ __ ] right? They come to a startup and are starting to have this absolutely massive scope

and they have 400 [ __ ] people chasing this thing. Like come on, right? Like you need to be appropriate in the salaries that you give people and you know this is the believer thing, right? It's like you cannot spend 500 to 750 to a million dollars per employee, right? No matter how much money you have, right? because that creates the [ __ ] perverse incentives around actually building something. So anyway, scope was out of play thing and then capital deployment was [ __ ] abysmal, right? So they're doing what they should do. And in essence, like I think finally the venture capitalists like Sequoia and Nindex were like, "What the [ __ ] is going on here? Let's just pull it back to what makes sense and what's reasonable and focus on platforms that make sense, which is like PC and VR, right? PC primarily for the development platform and see if they can make a go at it. Right. So, we'll see. We'll see.
The thing is I I can't contrast what you just said against Roblox because you could have just copy and place pasted Recck Room with Roblox. I mean, Roblox was raising what half a billion to 700

million.
It took forever for Roblox to have any single lift. It took 10 years for Roblox to have any single liftoff. It was not game developers.
This is the exact thing C venture capital should go towards. you very long. No, no, that's not the history of Roblox. Roblox was really lowfunded. Like it was not very VC funded. It was
So they did pick up steam to be fair as they went along. They started to raise more and more money. They didn't have that at the beginning. This is a burst start.
Yeah. It built over a long long period of time. Roblox. Yeah. That's a completely
Yeah. Since 12, right? Like didn't it start in 2012?
Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't think it's a good comp for this in terms of
you still need massive amounts of of venture capital to build UGC platforms. There's massive fixed costs in this. Like this to me is a perfect VC vehicle.
Yes, but scope scale and and focus was probably more important than building it out on mobile, right? Like you bring it to mobile later, you know, like like Roblox did, right? After you start making money on PC, right?

Yes. Roblox was on PC first and then went to mobile later and then exploded when it went to mobile. And their strategy of being on low-end devices, I think was another kind of key for them. It could run on anything. Where do they get their money from? Because they don't make any money still. They're losing less money.
I actually wrote about this. I don't even know why totally forgotten, but
I was like, I thought you knew it yet.
Yeah. He he was building tools and technology and and it it it
they were always a technology company before they were an actual
entertainment.
Okay.
It was a long time ago
relative.
Okay. [Music]
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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 Hero today at heroiclabs.com. [Music] Perfect Dark is laid off. I'm going to shed a tear for that. That was one of the first games I purchased on Xbox 360. That was my introduction to the franchise. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft was in talks with our favorite our favorite human being, Mr. Lars over at Embracer. Another point for Swedish Inquisition, which owns Perfect Dark co-development with Crystal Dynamics and was willing to acquire the project from Microsoft with an invisible amount of money. So, if the deal had gone through, the plan would have been for Take 2 to fund and publish Perfect Dark itself. However, there was a lot of disagreements between Microsoft and Take 2 over long-term ownership of the IP. Just sad. Just really, really sad. I just don't

know what the value of Perfect Dark IP is anymore, you know? Like that was the beloved for people that were there at the OG, you know, Xbox, but like there hasn't been I don't know. I don't know if it's actually all that meaningful anymore.
Yeah. All right. So, another story that involves Microsoft and PlayStation is what I'm calling the collab of the week, Halo, ODST, and Hell Divers 2. Here's kind of what's going on. Well, it's not Master Chief. That's one of the things I thought was interesting is I forgot that Halo ODST doesn't have Master Chief. It has all the Space Marine guys. So, anyway, of all the collabs, I didn't see this as being one of the biggest ones to blow up. So, holy [ __ ] Sony just worked and incorporated a Microsoft IP and it's a Halo IP for the first time ever. This is a really big deal. It's a nonmaster chief, so he's not in it, but a lot of the weapons and the music is. And all of this is to support the launch of Hell Diver 2 on

the Xbox. So, if you recall, Hell Diver 2 was only on the PlayStation and PC. Now, it's on the Xbox. This is how they decide to launch it. Brilliant. Brilliant. Ironically, this is the same day that my other famous and favorite franchise, Gears of War, launched on the PlayStation. Sadly, that didn't seem to do as well. I think it's marred with like a lot of technical challenges, at least on the PC skew. So, I was very sad to see that that Gears of War remaster didn't do as well. So, anyway, so for the collab, here's a few highlights. This looks like it paid for itself within like days or hours. I hear it's about a 20 million unit seller. It hit number one on Steam. It's a top seller, number two globally. The community is absolutely loving it. There's memes everywhere. And this one's really funny. the game hit 500k CCU and the Arrowhead CEO came out on his games Discord and said, "This is going to be a bit awkward, but can I ask you to stop

[ __ ] your pants somehow?" Like, you know, from a PR perspective, well done, dude. Like, apparently he talks about [ __ ] and poop a lot in his posts, but this one's a good one. So, there was a screenshot that we're showing here that just showed like half a million players hell diving at the same moment. So, I just think from all of our collab discussions, especially, you know, last week we talked about Raid and Turtles and, you know, frankly, all the other ones that we do, you know, this is a win on player IP overlap. This is a win on platform extension. If you're going to do it, this is how you do your first ever partnership together with an IP uh partnership uh using the weapons, using the music. Uh, you know, maybe this is what Microsoft actually means with the tagline everything is an Xbox. Uh, that that's my little joke. But Crest, does this finally hit your like your nonmice nuts radar as something bigger than just a regular collab? And what do you think this means for, you know, as PlayStation and

Microsoft work together, each of them kind of willing to come together and maybe one day Nintendo will pay attention and, you know, we can finally get Mario and something other than actually, did they show up in Fortnite? I don't even remember. No,
they've been in like a fighting game or something like that is the only time Nintendo actually lets it out. But what do you think, Chris?
All right. First of all, Nintendo is never ever going to do anything like this. They just won't.
And actually, you're right. I think this is actually an amazing collab for Sony, right? And Hell Divers like that really it does really cement that franchise as something bigger
than itself, right? And that I think that's great, but this is a complete devaluation for Halo, right? This is embarrassing. You're putting Halo in a Hell Divers game. Like that's crazy. Like you're leveraging your best asset for Xbox in a Sony IP. Like that's ridiculous, right? I mean, this is just showing like how bad it is over at Microsoft that they're willing to give up their biggest IP to a Sony brand. I

actually don't think this is necessarily good for Halo at all, right? It just devalues it. So,
even though it's not Master Chief and it's like
it doesn't matter. It is Halo. Like, everyone knows what Halo is, right? The sounds, the the gameplay, the what all that stuff, you know, the the visuals.
Yeah. I think this is the sign of desperation that the only way that they can make Microsoft's biggest IP relevant is to a deal with Sony. You know, it's like that that's crazy. That's crazy.
I do think if you're going to launch Hell Divers on Xbox, that at least can make sense to me.
Just to be clear, this happened with Soulcalibur. Just to be clear, Soulcalibur had Master Chief, if you remember, they had Link, if you remember, from Nintendo on the Game version. If you remember, this this happened in Soulcalibur. There was Link there. I think it was Spawn was on the Xbox version. Master Chief, I think it was in Dead or Alive. So, this there's, you know, this is And Dead or Alive, by the way, much lower on the franchise list. Also, Airhead, a Swedish company.

That's my only take.
Yeah, I I don't think this is a good look, right? Honestly.
So,
but great for Hell Divers, bad for Microsoft.
Oh, amazing for Hell Divers. I mean, it definitely it certainly validates that IP, right, where Hell Divers 3 is going to
likely be a much bigger game. And there's a movie coming.
There's not for Hell Divers.
Yes. This got announced.
Really?
Yes.
Oh,
you're making [ __ ] up, dude. You're just like you're just throwing it. I don't know, man. I don't believe you're full. You're full of [ __ ] All right.
Buckle into your seats.
All right. Well, let's talk about another IP that's rising.
Okay. Destiny Rising is out. If you remember, this is the game from NEIS. It is out globally. It is based, of course, on Bungie's fabled franchise, which we have yet to hear much about in the wake of Marathon. And so, what is going on with this game? What is happening? So, I think the first thing you got to do to kind of really understand where this game is at is to figure out where the US

shooter market is. And that means pulling the top games from Sensor Tower. And so, we're looking at that chart right now. And as you can see, in the US gaming market, shooters are irrelevant except for Call of Duty. So, very quick analysis. This game is irrelevant to the west, which is why they ship it out to netis. Call of Duty Mobile, just as a quick refresher, has 7 million MAU in the United States. And the next game is Delta Force at 950. And I'm sure that's still on fumes from the initial launch. And everything else is basically just hyper casual trash except for number nine, which is Warframe, which if you remember was another dual skew product and is also irrelevant because HD Studios don't know how to do user acquisition. So then the question is like why is this game relevant? Why would you go out and make this? Well the answer is very simple. China loves mobile shooters. In fact they love shooters
more than Germany.
Potentially potentially. And so shooters on mobile in China have been on an absolute tear. If you remember PUBG Mobile is one of the biggest games in

the world really run out of China by 10 cent. Delta Force has had a enormous level of success in China. It's hard to understate. It is hard to get good numbers. By the way, again, I want to do our usual asterisk that when we're looking at China numbers, we're only looking at iOS, which does not paint the whole picture even in the slightest. Nico Partners does a lot of further analysis on a lot of these numbers, you can see there's usually pretty big gaps, but we do the best we can. If we do launch over comparisons in China on iOS between these top shooters, looking at Call of Duty Mobile, PUBG Mobile, Delta Force, there's also Valerant Mobile. Remember we were talking about that last week, which is another big launch. You can also compare it to Destiny Rising, and we can see how these games stack up. Well, Call of Duty Mobile has been in a league of its own. I just want to say this is one of the biggest launches of all time, and I don't think we did enough analysis on it. 80 million downloads after 1 month in China on iOS alone. PUBG Mobile was at 23 million, Delta Force at 12, Valerant at 5, which seems very low to me, especially. I

think they reported around 70 million pre-registrations. Pre-registration is just complete [ __ ] [ __ ] number by the way. This has basically become wish lists. People are just pumping up these numbers. And Destiny Rising is in last with 900,000 downloads. Again, it's just one small, you know, part of the picture, but I think this at least gives you a sense of the level of capital that's being invested. Now, Tensa did come out and say they're investing a [ __ ] ton of money into Valerant Mobile, which I think is a very smart play. If you remember Crossfire, right, the Chinese knockoff of CS:GO, which has kind of become its own thing, its own IP, still is really successful on HD and mobile in China. Uh, and so I think this is Valerant's attempt to go after the same thing they did in the US market, which was Counter-Strike Go. And remember, they didn't really take market share from Counter-Strike Go. They increased the share of the pie. And so, I'm really curious if they'll do the same here. But so far, I don't know. It just feels kind of lackluster.
On your first chart, when we when you talk shooters, do you count the BR games, battle royale games? Like, so Fortnite.
Okay. Knives Out, Freef Fire. I mean, I

just didn't see any of those which are this is US.
Remember this is US. Those games are usually big. Like Garina Free Fire is really big in LAM. Although they're making they had a huge ship in crossover. Naruto ship it in crossover. I mean that was another collab we didn't cover that we should probably talk about next week. That was an enormous success. And only that you got to remember Brazil has a small Japanese population. I mean there's a million things we talk about. They love
Where's Where's PUBG on this list though?
Yeah. I thought like PUBG like I even though it's US I thought they still ranked by DU.
Oh by DIO. All right. Well in Fortnite's back maybe it just hasn't come back enough yet. Is that because it's still
Well, in the US it won't be here in the US.
Could have been how it's categorized on sensor tower. We can we can do a double check.
Yeah. No, I'm just I'm just curious.
First person versus third person is also another disambiguation that can happen here. Looking at first person,
although Warframe doesn't really count. Uh there's a lot we could go over with some of this.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know if you guys have downloaded the game. It is absolutely visually stunning. Like it is insane. And

actually the gameplay is really good. Like for a shooter, it's auto fire. I mean, if you choose to. I'll be honest, I only played like the first like 30 minutes, so I I didn't get into it. All I really wanted to do is download it on PC and play it with keyboard mouse. I was like, I love Destiny, dude. I'm a huge huge fan. I just don't think there's a market for this in the West. I think I agree with your assessment that if it does well, it's going to do well in the East and it's so far it's not doing anything. It almost feels like they put this out to die. Like they did not support this the same way they have other shooters in the past and other releases. So, I'm not really quite sure what is going on on this one, but the amount of money and effort and time and manpower to make something like this is insane, right? The fidelity is insane. I mean, it is crazy. So, God, I love Destiny. I wish I wish they were doing better in terms of execution, but yeah, I don't know.
Bungie and Sony wouldn't carve out minimum guarantees
and MG overall or marketing spend.
Minimum marketing spend for a game like

this.
Typically, there would be a marketing spend commitment. People are hearing about it. I mean, when I talk to people, people are talking about. So, that's what I'm saying. Like, there's a little bit of a buzz. And I don't know, I looked at Censor Tower after 4 days, which is nothing, right? But it was was only 840k downloads and I did see crest however 2.3 million in revenue in four days. I was like h
yeah but that
I know it's so difficult when a game first launches for those numbers to be solid. So you agree it's too early you know Phil to your point a 10 million prerege which in today's world prerege actually I haven't been seeing as many people pump prerege like the squadbuster year like uh when was that 2024 2023 when it was like 40 million prerege and we all know that between you know only 10 to 20% of those actually download when you when you get there.
Let me step take a step back when we talked about the Call of Duty mobile launch because we were like really on top of that because we're covering on the podcast. They spent a [ __ ]

gajillion dollars on this game launch and they had no monetization in this game. Like absolutely none. Like the numbers were [ __ ] pathetic, right? And they put it in later, right? That is an example of an Asian launch in which they're super supporting it. Bringing the audience in, they'll come and pay later when we add a bunch of [ __ ] right? Like like that's what happened with Call of Duty and it [ __ ] worked. And I was goddamn dead wrong on that one because I I was seeing the early numbers. I'm like this is terrible, right? This is the exact opposite. They are not supporting this thing at all. The only downloads they're getting are from [ __ ] people that love Destiny. You know, the pre-G people, the people that are fans of Destiny. And that's probably why you see the revenue numbers are a little bit higher than the downloads and and the RPIs look good. But this is a pathetic number in terms of downloads. And that number is relatively accurate because you're comparing it against companies that they have. So this feels like they're leaving it to die, right? Like they just want to get this thing out. It's like part of their devesture out of like all the dames that are being built west for the west type or things.
This was built in the west. Are you sure about this though?
No. No. I mean, sorry. They're devesting

a lot of the the deals that they have put in place over the years unwinding all the work on the net perspective. So, you're right. This definitely build in the east, but they probably want that team to be focused on other things, you know, like
But Chris, is this a case where So, Call of Duty was 2018, 2019, I I was at Riot when that launched and we were planning to launch all of our Riot mobile games and we're like, "Holy [ __ ] how much did they just spend?" And it it was it was difficult to look at what they were spending versus what I had in my pocketbook. But in this case, you know, we've talked many times that the way to launch a game is different now that it's slow and steady wins the race. That you have to make sure you don't have a leaky bucket that you are going to kind of grow over time and you're not going to launch huge. I don't know. You know, the Asian games, the Chinese games launch like that anymore. Are we just seeing a new kind of launch?
Maybe that's it. Blaze it, baby. No, I think this is this is blaze it. I don't

know if this is a new launch strategy. I mean, Scopi was doing soft launch, get the KPIs right into mega, ultra, mega, numero, uno. It is true like it is different, but I think it's it's important to to point out why it's different is that people are going global much earlier. Like all inhole is a really great example where it was launched in the United States in a more immature form and then it grew over time. We're going global in launching things over time rather than keeping them gated in soft launch.
So with Scopley I mean it's a very different strategy. It was soft launch but then when it decided to go US it was hu like it was all guns blazing to hit number one. What I'm saying is people aren't seemingly doing that anymore where even when they launch in the US. Now, let's put squadbusters and everything else aside. You are Monopoly Go. Monopoly Go was slow and steady wins the race, right? Which is we're going to soft launch it. We're going to make sure the KPIs are good. Now, we're going to incrementally launch each country. I didn't look back at, you know, what the beta or the soft launches were for Destiny Rising, but

maybe this is what we just need to come back and check in on is are we seeing a new way that games are launching and that we are seeing slow and steady versus pop and drop. Just a thought. All right.
But the last thing that I'm surprised that Philip didn't mention is that the monetization design on this thing is [ __ ] insane. Like pay to win stuff. Like it is actually really egregious, you know? Like
Nitties, right? So that's to be expected.
I know. It's ironic because like [ __ ] the Destiny guys, the bungee guys are terrible at modernization, right? They don't know how to monetization save their lives. All they are doing is expansion model really. Like the monetization in that game is all cosmetic [ __ ] right? This game is like insanely designed. And what my biggest worry is is that the Destiny guys, the takeaway from this is that oh no, this game didn't didn't succeed because of all the gross monetization things. And that's they're going to in influence how they build the next Destiny, you know. But um
but Adam is screaming at you right now from somewhere in podcast.
Dude, this is the way the game should be

designed. Like dude, this is the way they should be building Destiny, dude. Like anyway, whatever. Actually, this one's interesting. I'm going to keep looking at it. I I hope I'm wrong. I think the game is amazing. I just don't think there's an audience for this type of game in the West. So,
Got it. Yeah. I think, you know, Phil, if you're on shooter watch, you know, Val Mobile in China, this one from a mobile perspective, and then obviously you've got your uh PC console shooter watch, you're going to be a busy dude the next few months. All right, let's talk and shift gears pretty dramatically and go to the lowest shittiest looking games that we could possibly, you know, think of. However, we're old and we don't we shouldn't care. So, Roblox and UGC, what's going on, Phil? Well, I was going to say egregious monetization is a pretty uh pretty good thread here as we'll see. So, I think I wanted to talk about steal a brain rot, right? And I've been trying to do more Roblox coverage just because I want a Chinese water torture Eric. I mean, just the quarterly earnings from Roblox

weren't enough to beat him down. I want to make sure that we we get every single Roblox hype machine going.
Dude, I have been positive on Roblox for over a year now. Like, I'm off my negative train. Like, cuz they are actually I'm going to say this a million times. They are growing revenue per user and growing users. My issue was they were not growing revenue per user. And so with advertising and with more of aggressive monetization and Manuel himself was the one that architected all of this. I've been positive on Roblox for a while and any of my clients will tell you that. So there you go.
They're losing less money. They are showing positive signs. Although they've had a lot of shakeups in personnel the last few months. I'm curious to see what you know what does that mean? like what what's the impact RDC actually so Roblox developer conference is this weekend actually so if you go to RDC crush you should try to go I think it's in San Jose go see what you and go come back and report for us that'd be fun all right so Roblox not only are they

killing it with CCU reaching all-time highs 47.4 4 million users, which again is more than Steam has in game by a significant number. And they're certainly crushing Fortnite, which is still still really struggling to grow. We've talked about that beforehand. No creator monetization. Can't get the UGC flywheel going. And I think this is starting to become a more troubling sign, which is that Roblox is now starting to incubate regular big hits that are sustainable businesses. So, we talked about Grow Garden, which by the way is still doing really well, and we'll look at some numbers in a moment. There was Blade Ball, which was a little while ago, that's still hanging around, although not to the same degree it was previously. And then there's Steel Brain Rot. So, this is the new one that's been blowing up,
and it is based on meme culture. So, it was based on, I believe, a 2024 meme from Tik Tok where you would take animals and then you would basically uh duct tape the animal onto a object. And

so, we're looking at one of the original memes here. It is a shark and the fins are in Nike shoes. There's a cow that's a globe. There's a gator that's a plane. It is pretty much the lowest form of content, but it is being embraced. And so, someone decided to go out and make a game about this. and the game has been dominant in terms of numbers. So, right now we're looking at the top Roblox experiences, the CCU for both Grow a Garden and for Steal a Brain Rot. This is from Row Monitor. Shout out GameFam. Shout out Ethan. Shout out Joe. This is great service. Thank you for this. And not only have these games done really well, you can see the spikes here when there are content updates. That's really important on the Roblox platform. Content updates, it's almost like a, you know, a Facebook feed. They see it, they go, they experience it, you get huge CCU spikes, but they're also able to sustain CCU over time. These are not flashes in the pan. There have been some decreases in Grow a Garden, but they're very marginal. I think by and large, we can see a future for both of these games. And if you're curious about like what

the actual game is, you know, we just talked about the meme. Well, it's probably something that we should talk more about because when we talk about egregious monetization, pay to win, I mean, this thing is a fascinating case study in monetization design. And one of the things we talked about is like hyper casual was this really great testing bed for a lot of ideas in gaming that have been trickling you know to other studios and other platforms either if it you know if it's core gameplay or if it's in the user acquisition side and I still think Roblox is that next frontier of experimentation. And so the way the game works is that you have these characters I was talking about, these weird animals that come down in almost like a runway and you're able to purchase them and then they go to your base and then once they're in your base, they passively generate cash. And then once you have that cash, you can buy resources. And you might be curious, well, what are the things that I can do with the resources? Well, you can buy items and you can raid other people's bases because you're spawned into a server with other players. And so you can steal their

[ __ ] And not only can you steal your [ __ ] the way you can steal their [ __ ] is pretty egregious. So you can buy items that let you hit other players. Like for instance, you can buy something that lets you slap them. You can buy a hammer. You can buy a flying carpet. It is just over-the-top craziness. And these are all things that are priced in Roblox, the hard currency. Not only that, they have a lot of defense mechanics. They have theft. I mean, it's a lot of kind of Clash of Clans, early freeto-play stuff. I mean, obviously not literally. They're taking from 4X. They're taking from Clash of Clans. They're taking from a lot of builders. There's a lot of things that are going on here. These games actually have real design depth. The other thing that they have that may shock and appall some people is that you can actually pay to unlock other players bases in the server and raid their [ __ ] for four bucks. You can also put up key shields just like in 4X. You can buy server luck, which makes everyone better off in the server. I mean, this is like Pokémon Go Lors. I mean, the mechanics here are insane. They sell admin commands for the server

for 50 bucks. So, you can go in and do crazy [ __ ] if you're an admin for 50 bucks. It is crazy what Roblox games are monetizing on. And if this is the next generation of gamers, I couldn't be happier. This is awesome. Start them young, baby.
Oh my god, Crest with You haven't said predatory monetization in weeks or months.
This is as bad as this is worst.
Yeah, I thought grow was bad, dude. This is like egregious. You got to love it though. You got to love it for, you know, audacity, right? Training the next generation of gamers, right, Mr. Phillip?
I think you could say that. There there's not just the monetization and the design piece which I think we need to pay more attention to. There's also some interesting live ops and community events. Like they're doing these admin wars more frequently with the creators of the games. Like the creators themselves are becoming more popular, more influential, and having more of a voice, which I think is really interesting. And I don't think we should ignore that aspect either. I did a trends presentation a couple weeks ago and I called that out as like the developer influencer is one of the

trends especially in Roblox and in the UGC space is the number one way that you market a game for the UGC channels is when you as a developer are part of the development team is also an influencer and you know like the guy that does grow a garden every post you can tie to a major spike in the game. Well, major spikes are now the updates that happen on the weekends, which is basically just a live ops, you know, plan. But you're right that, you know, you have to build this like developer influencer persona in order to help promote your game, especially on UGC. That's how people find this stuff. You know, it's kind of what kicks these things off. But I just think that this combines the worst of the worst of this calls back to me early Facebook games that had a lot of that egregious monetization, everything you just talked about and what, you know, sucks a little bit. I don't know. I can't believe I'm saying this. Like this is I don't know if this is like a kids platform, right? And now we're seeing like the worst of the worst play out with kids. But I don't know. Maybe it's

not kids.
Or you can argue it's the best of the best, right? The best of the best.
I love it.
Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yes. Like which hat do you want me to put on? My I care about kids or I care about my P&L. All right.
One more note on Destiny. We I I actually just looked at it there. There's no Android data right now for Destiny Rising on Sensor Tower for whatever reason. So,
oh,
so we're missing missing a big part of it. And on top of that, I figured out there's a way of emulating it and playing Destiny Rising that's actually supposedly I think officially recommended by Netis uh using this uh I'm sure it's like absolute like sharewware [ __ ] where they're going to steal all my [ __ ] information. But anyway, MMware or something like that, you can do it. Uh, I'm doing it right this as we speak. Let's table this Destiny Rising conversation for in the next couple weeks and see what what actually
Yeah. Give it some time to breathe. Got it. All right. So, we're going to do a story here that shows that Crest is right. So, it's his favorite story. So,

so RMG Gaming in India. So, Real Money Gaming accounted for approximately 63% to 86% of the total gaming market revenue in India. Thanks chart to these charts from Phil who nope. Don't thank me. Let's thank the source Makai which is an Indian VC firm. They're great guys. Um I've talked to them before. They've sent messages. Thank you again to them for providing the setup.
Cool. The total market 4.3 billion in 2024. Revenue generated from real money gambling. Sorry, real money gaming was reported to be between 2.4 billion. I know exactly right. The the G can stand for either. The revenue generated from this was reported to be 2.4 billion and 3.2 billion skill-based games like rummy poker and fantasy sports that involve monetary stakes. So
I absolutely love this [ __ ] right? I love this [ __ ] I said months ago, year ago about the Indian market that it's a

kind of a scam like you have no idea what's going to happen in this market. I said specifically the regulatory uncertainty is the biggest challenge for a market like India, right? Despite the population and the per capita income and all that other stuff, the fact is that it is a [ __ ] wild wild west out there in India. You have no idea where you stand. It is a [ __ ] quicksand like shifting to everything, right? So making significant bets in this region is folly until these type of things are figured out, right? So buyer beware and this is exactly what happens and the result is that they've completely made what drives this market completely illegal like overnight like all these operators are [ __ ] [ __ ] right now. Maybe cooler heads prevail. Maybe they negotiate themselves out of this. I don't know. Now, on the flip side of this, from an analyst perspective, maybe, just maybe, this actually helps

the non-gambling apps in some ways, right? The degenerate gamblers can't gamble anymore now. They may actually go towards more social casino or other things. Maybe there's an opportunity now because there's no other way for them to do real money gambling on mobile. Or maybe they just go on VPNs and [ __ ] circumvent all this [ __ ] Who knows? But as a public service message, US companies should stay the [ __ ] away from India. Okay? Like this is not a good place to do business, right? It is incremental at best. It is very concentrated amongst the big games. If you want to do business in India, be very wary of the shifting sands of regulation and government and whatever else that happens in these countries. Right? So anyway, focus my whole point and as an analyst, as someone that's been doing this for a long time, focus what's works in US and Europe and you'll be okay, right? But you start like going after these [ __ ] emerging markets, you're just going to get burned, you know?

Anyway, that's
all right. Uh, thank you for everyone and that wraps it for today. See you next week.
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