TWIG #354 Google's New Payment-Link Era and Rovio's End of an Era

Kudos to the Football Manager team and their continued success. Love hearing about this stuff.
All right, Mr. [ __ ] Kumbaya. Happy everything's like a happy [laughter] golucky. [music]
Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in Games 354. I'm back. Woo! So excited. I'm Jen Dano. I am your host and no longer a Viking. Uh it's all kind of grown in. I fill the marketing and publishing role in the podcast. Today we have
Mr. Eric Crest, strategy and investing.
And uh since no one wanted to be here for my return episode, I called in a favor and a guest host who is
Hello everyone. This is Stan Quan, managing director at Beta Hat and uh research guy.
Oh, I'm so happy. Thank you for coming for my comeback fill-in spot. And this is going to kind of allow us to tag team against Chris, like the two like pseudo

marketing people coming in and uh beating him up. I love it.
I'm honored to be back for this particular episode, Jen. Of course. Um you are near and dear to my heart and I was thinking about you the entire time you were out and and we we stayed in contact. So this is really nice for me to be a part of this.
Oh, well, thank you. I know you've been on the pod quite a few times, right? You know, it's been a while since I've been on Twig. So, the last time I was on Twig was in the Joe Kim days. Oh, but in between, we've done a couple of episodes that were more CI related and and those are really fun to do. Um, but actually just being on a Twig, it's been a while.
Yeah, that's right. Oh, we did that uh consumer insights. If we say CI that means consumer insights, everyone, we did that episode earlier this year with leaders from Zinga, Blizzard, Riot, and you. And it was great to have your perspective as an agency who works across everyone who works across PC mobile console and I think that episode was like one of the top performers that

I did kind of earlier in the year. So thank you for that uh expertise appreciated.
Yeah, that was a lot of fun.
All right, so here's what we got going on this episode. Battlefield 6 corrections and kudos especially for the marketing team. Now that I'm back, I can start to sing the praises of some of the marketing work I've been seeing out in the world. The era of the Android store linkout begins. And also, Unity has cross-platform payment news that actually came out this morning as we record Wednesday, October 22nd. AI, you know, we can't get an episode in without talking about AI. So, general intuition lands a 134 million seed to teach AI agents spatial reasoning using video game clips. We will dig into what that means a little bit later. ROIO has some restructuring and some drama that we always love to talk about. More industry voices have been weighing in on the EA acquisition and then I we will get a chance to play CEO for the day. Rather

than talk too much about, you know, the takes, I think there's been so many takes on why and what, I want to do the what would I do if somebody gave me the keys to the kingdom. But first, let me just do I guess a little bit of an update. Um, I'll take over banter first. Uh, I can't believe it's been a month since my last stint on the podcast. As a refresher, I had a little brain surgery back uh midepptember, so about tomorrow is 5 weeks ago. It's crazy. The surgery went better than expected and they say they fixed everything. Chris will argue with them and say they didn't fix everything. Just kidding, Chris. I know you I know you love it. I'm doing pretty good. Deflector shields 80%. I should be 100% in about another month. So, as part of all this, I just I really wanted to say thank you to everyone, friends, family, co-workers, you guys. Everyone was so overwhelmingly uh positive and sharing thoughts. Like on LinkedIn, I think I had like a thousand like responses. I had stories

of people sharing their own uh experiences that were really actually encouraging that this wasn't going to be as bad as it was. And uh I was able to get through it, you know. Yeah. not not not unscathed, but it went pretty good. A number of gifts and flowers came in. Some of them without cards. In fact, Stan, I think some of the flowers came from you at the hospital. I was like, "Was this you?" So, if I didn't say thank you, please know that it probably didn't have a card. Apologies.
Sometimes when you fill things out online and you try and send things, there's I think a 50% chance that the card that you write actually makes it onto the actual flowers itself. Well, I that that definitely happened. You know, I get Amazon stuff all the time and I would open a box and I'm like, I didn't order this. Ooh, but this blanket is really lovely. So,
did you have to make any returns while you were there?
No, no returns. And then a bunch of Door Dash gift cards from, you know, various folks, a lot of them, you know,

listeners of the podcast. So, thank you again, you know, for that kind of stuff. But, you know, all of that was great. But my favorite gift, Stan, comes from your daughter, Ellie. And so if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify video, I'm sharing her card that Stan took a picture and sent it to me. And and so it reads, "Jen, I heard you got brain surgery." Spelled S R E Y. Adorable for a seven-year-old. I hope you get better. You can do it. You are brave. Love, Eleanor, who wrote her full name. And I have to say that I pulled this card up right before I was going to go into surgery cuz honestly, I was scared shitless. I was like, "Oh my god, someone's going to, you know, dig around and drill a hole in my head." And I didn't know if I was going to be here. So, like honestly, like really scary [ __ ] So, knowing I couldn't let a seven-year-old down, I pulled this card up. [laughter] So, thank you, Ellie, for giving me the strength and being brave. So, thank you, Stan, for sharing for

sharing the story.
Yeah, I was actually taking it back when she wrote this, too. And I was like, I got to send this over to Jen right away. She she had some experiences in the hospital as well. And I think she just has a feeling of the hospital is a scary place. And when she heard that one of my colleagues and friends was going to the hospital, then she decided to write a you will do okay letter and I was I was proud of her for doing that.
Thank you. Yeah. So besides having the cutest daughter ever, I'm excited to have a tag team partner on today's podcast to outweigh Crest's cynical I hate marketing perspective. What else have you been up to? Because he doesn't know what marketing is. [laughter] That's what I've figured out.
I know enough. I know enough. Come on.
He doesn't know how it works. It's It's like he just thinks that you can release a product and people will just come. But that's just not true, Eric. Sorry. [laughter] Well, what else have you been up to in

the world of your consumer insight stuff? I'm excited for some of your news because it impacts me.
Well, I mean, we've been pretty busy at Beta Hut. Like, this is typically the time of year where things get really busy. End of Q3, beginning of Q4. We're based in the Bay Area, but we're in the middle of opening an office in Santa Monica. So, I've been traveling back and forth between here and Santa Monica. The difference between our San Francisco office and the Santa Monica office is that we are doing some construction down there. We are actually opening up a focus group facility and we are expanding our play test capability. So really expanding upon a lot of our qualitative research offerings. Kind of more exciting thing about that is that we've actually partnered with Team Liquid. So they've been a really great partner of ours, but our office space is going to be shared. So we have a shared office space with Team Liquid in Santa Monica. They've got state-of-the-art facilities in terms of having the highest end PCs. They have a partnership with Alienware. So, whenever we want to do PC like game testing, we are actually

using the highest quality gear. So, it just make things really nice. Also in terms of the scrim rooms, the play tests are happening within the scrim rooms themselves and there are observation rooms where the coaches where typically the coaches will do some video reviews with the athletes, but we get to use those rooms to review video of gameplay of people actually playing, but we're also building out a traditional focus group facility there as well. So, good times. Like, we're really excited.
Oh, the Team Liquid space is topnotch. I got to go and see it in the past. You know, I worked obviously on at Riot on League of Legends and Team Liquid is always the top team. So, please prep a hotel desk for me to swing by. I'm based in LA as many of you know. And I'm excited for you to proper focus group as long as you have the peanut bowl in the back room. You know, peanut M&M's that has to be there. And then this is play testing for PC and mobile, right? Like even though you said PC,
we've run a bunch of pilots within the

past couple of months. and on both PC and mobile. The cool thing about mobile is you can always plug in the mobile phones into the PCs and then stream those out via OBS. So, everyone can actually view what is going on across like 10 different players at the same time. So, it's pretty neat stuff.
Nice. All right. Cool. So, let's keep going. I got a few shills today. One is Mishka interviewed Nikico Partners on top trends from Asia, India, and the MINA markets. A lot of good insights on here. They had the CEO and an analyst. It's really worth checking out. Stan, I think you you took a listen to that one, right?
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. I think the Mino market is an interesting market from a growth perspective. I think Crest, you have mentioned this previously, too. Just the demographics of the Mino market are significantly younger than a lot of the traditional gaming markets right now. We've actually had a lot of our own clients expressing interest in understanding that market more. So it's great that you know partners or firms

like Nico are going deeper into these growth markets and areas. I think it's going to be a growth opportunity in the future.
We did a project with Nico with Foris and they came back with some exceptional work in terms of understanding that market which I can't really go into but nonetheless what what the great thing about Nico and Lisa is that she's been on the ground there for I think 20 years or something insane. And so she has she just has all that the insights of that space with a lot of native speakers out there and and can get really good information as to what's going on in those markets in a in Asia as well as is Mina. So
yeah.
Yeah. I've met her a couple times and just on the podcast she sounds so dialed in to this and I think as you know Chris you and I we talk a lot about the North America, US, Western markets being the markets that we should really focus on. But for those people that do need to grow still and, you know, have kind of like tapped out, you know, the main

market, they had a lot of great information on how you could explore growth opportunities. A lot's going on with China, too. All right. So, also happening, this is from Ethan. He's going to be at Gamesbeat Next, which is in San Francisco on November 12th and 13th. He's going to be interviewing Jonathan Knight. I think Jonathan's former EA if I remember correctly. Jonathan Knight, head of games for the New York Times. So if you've got your Wordle question, get that ready. There's a discount code GBN2 speaker if you want to see it live. I still can't travel postsurgery. So Crest, hopefully you can go.
I I'll be there. I should be there both days.
Nice. I really wanted to be there. I try to always go to the games beat stuff. It's always fun to see the people that go are always top-notch. Podcast is going to drop soon after. So if you do miss it live, Ethan's going to record it. And then Newsu has a Roblox report coming out. So a lot of times they send

us news under embargo. I think the report comes out on the 23rd. I haven't had a chance to dig in yet, but I I might do a podcast with the analyst on that. I just love the space. I, you know,
been doing a lot.
I look through it and I have to be honest, like it's just completely blowing smoke up. Is it up Roblox's Botox? Like it's like seriously, come on.
They partner with GameFam and and they used Ro Monitor, which does access a lot of games, but not all the games. And I think when you're looking at Roblox, you've got to do a triangulation of a lot of the different services to kind of get the gist. I don't know anything about Roblox. I felt like a lot of what I was seeing uh was good if you were, you know, needed the top level stuff. All right,
quickly. I attended the Big Craft event last week in LA with 100 Thieves. Very cool event. Like those guys really know how to throw an event. Full stop. Friend of the podcast, Danny joined Bitcraft. She's like the only lady in the entire organization.
So she's a women of sea of big testosterone men. Well, not really.

[laughter]
Not really at all, actually.
Um, but she's got her work cut out for her for sure, but she's doing more of the tech side, it seems. Not really many takeaways from the event, I'll be honest, and nothing I can repeat. There are a few things that are happening that we got some good information on, but we can't talk about yet. But we'll find out soon. But overall, like general malaise of the industry was very clear across the board. Unfortunately, I did hear a revised pitch from Nico what he's up to and it did sound very very interesting and and unique, but hard to know if it's the skill of the messenger or the message at this point because Nico is the ultimate sales guy. By the way, he told me specifically not to try to explain what he is doing, [laughter] which I should take mad offensive because he doesn't think I'm smart enough to do it, but if you want to learn more, reach out to Nico. And if you don't know who he is, look him up.
Nico, not to be confused, Nico with Nico Partners, Nikko, who we just talked about. That's a lot of Nikos.
Nico was an investor at Bitcraft for a

while. Anyway,
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Stay ahead of the competition with Sensor Tower, the trusted source for mobile marketing intelligence. Whether you're tracking trends, benchmarking performance, or scouting the next big hit, Sensor Tower delivers the data that drives strategy. Dominate the charts with Sensor Tower. All right, one big correction on my part. I was completely wrong about Battlefield. I will admit evidently the

PC share was very very high relative to history and my expectations and it was close to 50% at launch versus like the 20 to 30 which is kind of typical for co COD but battlefield always trends higher on the PC because it's a PC focused skew but 50% is insane. So, just to be clear, Reese Elliot and Alenia Analytics were dead on, not only on the unit side, but also on the platform mix. And so, the good news here is that Elenia, I'm not even pronouncing it right, but I don't care. Seems to have like a really solid methodology to kind of estimate sales at launch, which is really, really good. That's like the holy grail. We've been looking for that for a long time. Very impressive. Now, Reese is completely [ __ ] wrong, 100% [laughter] on this EA thing, so I'm not letting him off the hook on that because they're not going to do mass layoffs. He was one of those talking heads talking about that. But I'm glad that his data set looks really, really strong at forecasting and estimating demand for games.

How far in advance are they publishing?
Dude, he was day of, dude. He was like three days later, dude. He he put together the 6.5 million. I thought it was 65, but he said it was 55% PC, but he was dead on after three days. Like, it was pretty impressive. That ain't easy, you know.
I wish I could pull that up quickly. The thing I do have pulled up is another source, Rockstar Sam from our sponsor, Sensor Tower, dropped in some interesting slides in the DOF Slack channel. So, apply to join if you are not already in the Slack channel. Just go to the website deconstructorfund.com. So, I'm going to flip through just three quick charts. You can see this on YouTube or Spotify video. So, the first one, Battlefield 6 is the third bestselling PC console game of 2025 according to their VGI sensor tower partnership. And this is 10 days after release. On the next slide, they talk about DAU for Battlefield 6 is above COD

and holding steady. COD was down 11% and Delta Force down 4%. So, one of the things I heard and saw on LinkedIn was that Battlefield 6 had some issues with the launcher, and I think Vince was out there just saying, "Go to Steam and download it on Steam." So, I think all of this is even with, you know, some of the bugs that they might have had.
They fixed that really quickly. I think it was EA.com launcher.
Oh, got it. Okay. Yeah. The last slide was the number one market for Steam players was the US for Battlefield 6. And COD has more Steam players in China than in the US. And so apparently this is common on Steam since the lack of console prunitation in China has made PC and Steam the deacto PC console platform for the massive market. So thoughts coming out of, you know, what you were seeing from Mellennia and Ree and what you're seeing from Sam and VGI/Sensor Tower?
Call me being cynical obviously because that's kind of my brand, I guess. But like the only concern I have about PC is

that audience seems to be much more fickle, right? Moving from one thing to another. I played Arc Raiders over the weekend. Dude, that game is insanely sick, dude. like it's so you get a great audience on the PC which I think what I was told was that they were really focusing on PC and trying to build the PC audience. So this is almost intentional from the Battlefield team. But what I'm worried about and what I've been worried about from the beginning is how long if they can retain this audience over time when Call of Duty and Arc Raiders come out in the next few weeks.
But nonetheless, I mean it's an absolutely amazing launch. like we've been talking about this all year and it's met if not exceeded expectations from from what where we were at before. So yeah, the team's done an exceptional job and they made the investments needed to make this a success. And from a technical perspective, it seems to be completely fine. Like there's been no issues at all, which is really hard for a game that sold this many units and had so many people playing the game. So good for them.
Yeah. Impressive. I I actually had a question about the like DAU chart that Sensor Tower had that you showed. That

is Call of Duty as it is today and Battlefield is on top. So, we're anticipating when Call of Duty now launches in in late November that Call of Duty is going to overtake Battlefields. Is Eric, would that be your your prediction?
Oh, of course. Yeah, no doubt. Plus, it's free to play. Like there's a freeto-play mode, right, in battle in Call of Duty.
Yeah. And it's it's a different environment. I remember when we were releasing and number one, I think this is super impressive for Battlefield and that team has been grinding it out for so long, just trying to put out a very compelling product. And ever since Battlefield 4, so Battlefield 5 and Battlefield 1, and I remember during the launch of Battlefield 1, like there was a short period of time, this is when I was at EA when we had launched Battlefield 1 for maybe like a two-month period, we had sold more than Infinite

Warfare. And that was like a huge like success. like everyone was just balloons and you know champagne and it was a real celebration but unfortunately it didn't last long. The World War I theme did not stick well enough and the novelty wore off quite quickly. But I think more importantly one of the more interesting kind of roadblocks that that team ran into was they just could not produce content [clears throat]
fast enough for Battlefield. So, even though they had a lot of great momentum coming out of the launch, they just couldn't keep up with the content needs and the live service needs coming out of it, I think it was like five or 6 months before the first DLC was ever released.
That has been their problem from the get-go, right? And you know, Halo had the same problem as well, right? But it looks like Byron and Vince Sabella have all the teams like [ __ ] they rally

the troops and it's they they have all the the content roadmap looks really really strong. So
hopefully they have the what it takes to take a dead out of Call of Duty and hold the beach head against Arc Raiders and anything else that comes out on PC. So
kudos to that team. I did want to just mention one more thing, which was I did wish that if Battlefield were to do well, they could do it outside of a modern warfare setting.
So, I would I would have really hoped that they just didn't have to copy the modern warfare setting to find any sort of success. And
dude, you're the CI guy. What do you want them to [laughter] do? You
No, that's that's my hope.
Yeah. Let's go back to the Civil War with musketss, right? Or or do you want to go to like oh come on Vietn
I think it just goes to say it just goes to say if you want like fast adoption you want fast sales like the name of the game is you want familiar and better and I think that's what they proved with

Battlefield was familiar and better not just like unique and differentiated. So, you can't have unique and differentiated. I think that can prove to be a success over time. But if you want like quick sales like right out of the gate, and you want the fast sales curves that they just received, you know, it needs to be both familiar and it just needs to be proven to be better than what's out there. I don't know. I'm going to have to
you're going to fight.
I'm [laughter] going to fight on this one. This is what the customer wants. You want to be innovative and sell or sell slowly or do you want to give what the customer wants and sell 7 million in 3 days?
Well, that's what that's what I'm saying, right? It's like what the customer wants now. Like and if they're going to shell out the money now, they want something that's familiar, but they want a better version of what's familiar.
That's what Battlefield 6 is.
But when you have $500 million or whatever it tooks to on the line, like you have to do what's familiar. You can't take a risk with what's unfamiliar and not interesting to the customer.
Yeah. But what fun is that? I [laughter] understand. No, I I understand. Like

from a business perspective, that makes total sense, but it's not fun. Well, it makes the life of marketing easier, which is actually the point that I wanted to touch on is, you know, I don't know if you guys saw the live action trailer that they used to launch the game. I'm I'm kind of running it right now if you're watching, but it has like Zack Efron and a couple other dudes who I'm not cool enough to know who they are, but I just want to take a minute and give a standing ovation to the Battlefield marketing team. Yes, the game is great. Uh, blah blah blah, good job game. No tech issues. Awesome. the marketing team just freaking crushed it and I am not seeing the them getting a ton of kudos. So, I'm going to try to do it here. And I don't even think I know anyone on the team. So, this isn't me kissing ass or shilling. I just think this is like me fanirling out over the work that they did.
So, the trailer for this live action trailer, let me go back. Completely trolls Call of Duty. So they have like the four like talent guys show up and in

like 5 seconds I mean I'm going to spoil this but please know whatever. They like blow them up and then the battlefield like you know grunts come in and they're like who is that? They're like I don't know like let's keep going. It was like so awesome set to the smashing pumpkin song bullet with butterfly wings. So this is world is a vampire. Come on. Sing it with me Chris.
No singing please. No singing. That's not allowed.
Oh jeez. All right. So, it's right now at around three and a half million views across like Battlefields, YouTube, and EA's. And then they also had this like very cool music video with like the orchestral, you know, group that does like kind of the the soundtrack with Limp Biscuit and, you know, RIP to the Limp Biscuit basis who actually just passed away last week. I think you can tell that my geeky genre music of choice is 90s early 2000s alternative. Anyway, so across all of this, from the strategy, from the roll out, everything

that that team has done was absolutely amazing. Like their branding on YouTube, the way that they brought everything to life is just really, really well done. I think all of them are going to get a call from the Activision Call of Duty team if I had to guess. But any thoughts on marketing? I mean, I you guys never pay attention to that stuff. [laughter] Well, actually Stan does, but I don't know if you do, Chris. I would just say like with unlimited budget comes unlimited up [laughter] unlimited potential. Sorry. Unlimited. Yeah, unlimited upside. Yeah, they did a great job. And not only that, they ran everything super well. Like
yeah,
all the beta, all the alphas, everything kind of was really really smooth and they took feedback and like
they listened to some and didn't listen to others. But and the game is amazing. I played it a bunch and then I got into multiplayer and I got my ass handed to me. [laughter] I was like, "Fuck, I got I got to dedicate some time to get this get going." So,
God, man, even in the live action trailer, like the USPS, like how you revive someone, how you set up a shield,

like really came to life in a way that's like, oh, this military game is different.
They hit all those like features and USPS just right on the head. And I think they executed that really well. The big question mark for me was the usage of the talent and the music. So the talent when you have Jimmy Buckets in there and Zack Efron and you're using Smashing Pumpkins like are you targeting Gen X? Are you targeting older millennials like or are you trying to target younger competitive players? cuz none of those names, you know, the Smashing Pumpkins is, you know, artist.
Yeah. It's not an artist that resonates with with a with a younger audience. So, that was a bit questionable. I mean, I think Limp Biscuit has turned more into a meme for Gen Z and for Gen Alpha, but it was a question mark for me on just in terms of who they put and who they cast in that. Uh, I thought it was brilliant

because they are trying to, I thought, get some older folks in while then making fun of that. I thought that's how it could resonate really well with the Gen Z. All right, so let's get on to our next story. So, this is going to be us revisiting the Epic versus Google US lawsuit news because we are coming almost to the era of Android linkout starting. So, this is basically in many cases called payment reforms. So the latest news is a US court has granted Google seven more days extending the deadline from October 22nd to October 29th to comply with the mandated Play Store changes. The changes in question include allowing developers to bypass Google Play billing, enabling external payment links, and permitting rival app stores on Android. And this is why all of the payment partners are out there in full force right now. Google plans to file a full Supreme Court appeal by October 27th, just two days before the

next deadline. Google's argued the changes pose an enormous security and safety risks and would affect over 100 million US Android users and 500,000 developers. The original injunction stems from Epic Games versus Google Antitrust case, which found Google Play's store practices violated competition law. While some provisions won't take effect until mid 2026, full rival store access, the October deadline focuses on building freedom and payment link implementation. Let me give you a visual right now of what we mean when we say that. So, kind of looking like this. This is active in iOS right now. It's just now it's the Android version. So, what's coming? So, these payment reforms give publishers and developers more freedom. Right now, if you're a big guy or a little guy, it's build, buy, or rent solutions that give you access to check out the experience. Reduce the platform fee and go direct. I think I talk about this all the time, and Chris, I think you do as well. In my humble opinion, this isn't margin that just

goes directly to your bottom line. You still have some fees that go to these payment partners or to credit card fees. Much of the savings actually also goes to UA. So, don't think that this 30% magically goes right into your back pocket. It does not. All of the payment providers are prepping solutions including our sponsor Appcharge. So, cue some shilling right now, but they did a blog post today and so because they gave away some good information, I feel good about including this as a news item. So, in the blog post, they've been doing this for iOS with firstparty data with 50 different customers. And so, here's the top three things I thought was really interesting. I wanted to share their slides. So the first slide is that payment links conversion rate can reach up to 92% at scale and it has grown over time. So that's pretty strong to see a high conversion link. Number two, 56%

of payment links players are new and they've never purchased before via direct to consumer. So that's kind of interesting. 25% of these new payment links players started using web store regularly. So I think the point here was not only are they using these payout links, they're also more excited about using your web store. So if you really want to go DTOC and then the final slide was 100% or greater incremental revenue lift for DTOC revenue for players who use this payment links. So you know basically cannibalization isn't there. So you're kind of getting a two for one by implementing some of these. I wish Phil was here. The data set is small on this, but I think a lot of it is, you know, a powerful indicator. It's the first we're seeing of, you know, data coming out of these iOS links. So I wanted to get your thoughts. I know that you might not have as much kind of going on here. Or maybe you do, Chris. [laughter]

I don't know if I have really much incremental thoughts here from what we've said before. I mean, I think they want to prove that these all these purchases are incremental. I mean, I think that was the whole point of this presentation. I kind of have my doubts. [laughter] I mean, I maybe I'm just skeptical by nature.
No, you skeptical. No. Well, they're not including I mean, it I I don't know how you do this. How do you have IAP direct to Apple or Google versus Linkout versus Web? Like that's I think the data that we need to see and a trend over time
and it doesn't feel like we're seeing that any evidence from actual games. You know, Appcharge obviously is trying to get this out there so they you know look like they're adding incremental revenue. Guys, he's going to be so pissed at me. [laughter] So anyway, but what I what I can say is I was hearing that Exola is starting to lose share. So there's been a share shift away from Exola to Appcharge and other competitors, right? And you know they're losing their early moving

advantage. And maybe it's because Exola is like focusing on the wrong things like [ __ ] doing a spack right to [laughter] grow to grow. I don't know. Maybe you let's roll the app charge ad read now. Anyway, so at the end of the day like I think with all these changes in in the regulations then there's a lot more opportunity to gain share against Apple against Google. Is it incremental? I have my doubts. Fundamentally I have my doubts. Is it creating new spenders and new like revenue streams? No. And and to your point earlier, the majority of this is going right back into UA. And so I did get a good estimate as to how much UA has gone up since IDFA. And it's like somewhere like 50 to 60% increases. So a 30% increase on the top line is not is helping fund the 50 to 60% increase on the marketing spend. So I I think I'm sticking with that, right, until I I see like real evidence that's changed. And then again I will say that and this is the other thing I don't think he wants me to say is that like push comes the shove Apple and Google are just going to reduce the fee and then it kind of eliminates the need for all this mumbo

jumbo but
I have something from Unity in a second but Stan I wanted to get your take. Yeah, I mean I don't know a whole lot about like this space at all but you know Eric you said something interesting which is like does all of this effort in terms of making payments easier and you know web shops yada yada what I'm looking at what's important to me is it is it resulting in a higher number of people who are willing to spend in games over time and the data that we collect on a yearly basis where we look at just the number of spenders in both mobile and freeto play on a year-over-year basis. That number has been flatlined and and frankly kind of declining over time since the peak in 2021. So I think like we've gone into a phase in our market today where we're not winning over new spenders and those who are not

spending are more entrenched in their behaviors and they're not willing to spend at all. And so they've also adjusted their own behaviors around that too. So actually this is less of an anecdote, but something that we've seen a bit more of a pattern on is those who we consider to be freeloaders who are playing midcore games, they've figured out sort of hacks and ways to continue engaging with midcore games without having to spend. And one of those is, you know, stacking games on top of each other. So, we've talked to people and we do a ton of interviews with with midcore gamers. It's a really common behavior for them to just play 10 or 12 different games at once. So, they'll play one game, run through energy, stack another game on top of it, then run through that energy, stack another game. By the time they've gone through 10 games, the first game has re-uped their energy and so they can continue to play it. And so, they're playing multiple games all at the same time. And not to say that this

is a highly prevalent behavior, but it's a behavior and just a proof point that these types of hacks and behavioral changes do exist. So those who just like don't want to spend at all, they're going to find ways to continue playing these games and enjoy them without spending.
And this is kind of like, you know, proving the point that I've been making for a long time is that like the biggest challenge with the industry from a freeto-play perspective is that we just don't have enough conversion, right? So we need more conversion. I don't think any of this activity right now is improving conversion, right? web stores,
correct?
Flipping out whatever. All this stuff is just replacing. It's just taking share again away from Apple and Google,
especially. So, Crest, to your point, so if you think about it from a consumer perspective, there is zero friction in making a purchase in a mobile game today, you know, through Apple or through Google. It is incredibly easy and seamless. In fact, some of these solutions ask you to take more steps. The only reason a consumer would do that is seemingly because there's value. I get more for my money and then I really now I've got to do mental math in my

brain and now you're talking to the people who really only pay. So Chris, your point is these solutions aren't consumer-based. these solutions are how do we stop the 30% margin you know detriment and to your point again and you've all of us have been saying this the second that Apple and Google are like yeah how about it's 15 then it's like oh [ __ ] you know then a lot of the smaller players are going to be like is it really worth me adding an SDK or something else for a web shop you know maybe maybe not it I think it really depends on your genre and you know how what percentage of payers do you have in your space and how do you really help you know milk in a sense or add value to your to your whales. One other thing I wanted to get into this this came out this morning from Mr. Bramberg who is the CEO of Unity. So he did a LinkedIn post and it was like to a Bloomberg article and I god damn it I don't have a subscription to Bloomberg. So I just here's his post. Quote vast majority of the 120 billion inapp purchases that

take place annually in mobile games happen in a made with Unity game. Now that's fair. I think we know that like 70 to 80% of mobile games are built on Unity, but crossplatform commerce isn't easy to do well. And we think we can help. That's why we just announced our new native crossplatform. I feel like I'm doing a commercial. That's why we just announced our new native crossplatform commerce management product in limited early access. It puts developers in control of their own success with one single place to manage global commerce with digital cataloges across mobile, web and PC right inside Unity with support for partners programmable financial service company Stripe. So working with stripe freedom to choose flexibility to grow. So what was interesting here is in crest to your point is now you get Epic Games Store who announced their web shop kind of all you know allin-one access now you have Unity. What is your take? I thought this was, you know, like what they should do, right? I
I mean it's Yeah, I mean they should it's getting a bit crowded, right? A lot

of people are coming into the space, right? Which makes it could be more challenging for the established players. Frankly, Unity has a far better chance of being successful than Epic, right? Because they can offer that service to their clients, right? And that that makes a lot of sense, right? I'm just speculating here. So, they're going to white label a solution like Exolo Appch charge and just basically allow customers to run their own shops and etc. using their backend for commerce, right? But of course there's likely strings attached to this, right? And so if you think about their perspective and their communication around the how they're going to affect their ad tech stuff is that this could be their Trojan horse of actually collecting payment information which is the best information possible when it comes to their ad tech side. So if they actually link it up with the ability for them to track it, that actually could be really really smart and and obviously it would depend on adoptions and what customers they get, but they they could be trying to figure out their data issues and clean up their data issues and improve their data set with yeah the ability to access the
While I was out I think didn't applovin have to like shut down one of their apps

because it was basically doing this. It was like their Trojan horse for getting data. Am I remembering that correctly? You know, I did have brain.
Every time I see those things, I just think short sellers are trying to get Apple. [laughter] I I actually don't even really like I don't know. I don't know.
Well, so in this case, what's interesting is you've got, you know, mobile heavy Unity now setting up like full stack payments across platform. You've got PC console heavy Epic doing the same thing that has a mobile store. And so I think you see, you know, people coming at it from both directions. It'd be interesting once they get some of those details out to look at the backend business deals and you know maybe one day we can see what what's going on behind the curtain on that stuff.
Yeah, no doubt.
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right.
Wow. I mean, just wow, dude. That is crazy, right?
Seed.
Yes. So, [snorts] this company Metal is basically a platform for uploading and sharing video clips. Basically, they're spinning this thing out with a Frontier A AI research lab that's using its trove of gaming videos to train and build foundation models and AI agents so they can better track how objects move through space and time. This is their pitch, [laughter] right? A concept known as spatial temporal reasoning. The startup intends to use the funds to grow its team of researchers and engineers to focus on training general agents that can interact with the world around it, aiming for initial applications in gaming and search and rescue drones.
I wish I had the the John Oliver meme of like cool. [laughter]
I know. I honestly when I was reading this, Chris, I had to be I had to like

really research the [ __ ] out of like what what does this mean? And and so the way I understood it is by pumping in game videos, the AI can learn how an object moves in a 3D space because video games, many of them are in a 3D world.
Yes.
And so it's kind of like feeding your data set with 3D information instead of just like a bunch of words or just a bunch of videos. Is that kind of what you took from it?
That's basically it.
Okay. [laughter]
Okay. And so Morits He was knee deep in this [ __ ] Darren Morates the friend of the podcast. So he says the bots can scale to any level of difficulty. I actually did talk to some people at Bitcraft about this and the fact of the matter is that the guy who's running this thing is actually really well respected and it is a treasure trove of data that they have for that they've been collecting for years and years and years. And so in theory, they should be able to use this data and

implement different things, but it's really really unclear based upon this [ __ ] mumbo jumbo [ __ ] press release. Right?
My ask of anyone in AI is use AI and say, "How do I explain my product like to a 5-year-old?" Because they aren't doing that. And all it is, remember when it was met and it was like metverse bingo buzzwords?
The same shit's going on here.
Yeah. Yeah. And remember when it's like spatial when the goggles came out from Apple and it was like spatial reasoning or spatial computing or whatever that it's like stop with the making [ __ ] up and just tell me what you mean. Anyway, sorry Chris, back to you for your take.
Yeah. And so Mors basically says to Techrunch, it's not compelling to create a good bot that beats everyone, but if you can scale gradually and fill in liquidity for any player situation so there's win rate is around 50%. That will maximize their engagement and retention. And it's like,
oh, bots. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'll talk about this later.

How lucrative can it be to build a [ __ ] engine that helps bots. Okay. I mean, come on. I mean, that's like, okay, fine. They're looking way beyond that in terms of like drones and [ __ ] like that, right? I mean, they're looking at military applications for this, right? Again, this is a unique data set. I think it's really, really interesting. I think if Pim Dwit is supposedly an amazing founder and and I think people have a lot of respect to him, but 122 million [ __ ] dollars seed. I mean, it sounds so freaking frothy, but I guess in the world of AI, I think 122 million is mice nuts, right? So,
anyway, I don't know. It remains to be seen how well what they can do, but I think it is actually quite compelling use case of that kind of data using AI could be really interesting going forward. But here's what I want to talk about. What really doesn't make sense is what the [ __ ] is Morates doing in this deal, right? So, he's part of the founding team. Like, he's [ __ ] on the website. His picture is right there, right? But Lightseed didn't even invest in this thing. So, I don't quite understand exactly what he's doing. He

can't possibly being an operating founder, right? Because the conflict of interest with Lightseed because they're not involved. So I think what happened was he was helping to structure this deal with catalyst and rain but it is still very unusual for a partner of a VC firm to be a founder of a company that they do not invest in right and primarily because VCs in general are fiduciaries to their LPs and if you're not investing their money then why are you joining a private company at all right or working on a private any of this stuff so it doesn't really make sense it's like huge conflict interest and alignment issues obviously The optics are really weird and everyone was kind of like shaking their head like what the [ __ ] is going on at Bitcraft more or less. It's a strange look, but I have heard that there is some chaos going over at Lightseed Consumer Group. So perhaps there's some changes to be made over there. I don't know. Um, I'm I don't want to be speculative here at this point, but what I do think and if I were gun to my head, if I if I were Morates and I wanted to get out of the

VC grift, this would be the right opportunity to do so. [laughter] That's what I would say. Like, go for it, Morates, man. That's if that's your next thing, dude. I'm all for it, dude. And it'll be interesting to see what they come up with. Actually, I'm far less cynical on this type of thing because it could be huge. I mean, it could be really, really interesting what they come up with. But the initial press release is complete [ __ ] and just a bunch of words put on paper. I maybe maybe they use their own chat GPTM [laughter] to figure this [ __ ] out. But we'll see.
Yeah. No, I I don't like him laying the groundwork for this is what's next and dipping the toe. I don't know how it is to be at a VC but and do two completely different things. But we know that VCs aren't really, you know, putting bets into content and gaming right now. And so I don't know, maybe he's bored. At any event, like so here's my take on like what this is. And I talked a little bit about like, you know, basically I've heard that AI has run out of humanmade content to adjust for the LLMs. And so

now they're on the video game content. Like that's awesome, right? And and you would think 3D content in space and time that makes sense. It reminds me of the Matrix and it makes me want to take the red pill to like keep going in the tech world, but part of me wants to take the blue pill and just chill out and stay in blissful ignorance. But anyway, so for gaming, you know, I I just wanted to tell a story about bots cuz when I was in charge of League of Legends growth a little while back, and this was singularly one of our biggest challenges were that to play League like a human, it was at the time, this is, I don't know, 2018, it's very difficult to train the bots to play like other people. And so it was very, very difficult to onboard the noobs into the game because our bot AI just sucks so bad. So, for certain games, I do feel like, and I'm sure Riot's already building this if they haven't already, is training their bots to be better. Imagine now maybe some of these PVE experiences can be cheaper and easier. Looking at you, Overwatch, you know, maybe that becomes

easier to execute. Maybe there is a game benefit, but then the real world benefit if this is search and rescue and it can go help, you know, flood victims or whatever that is, like I support that as well. So, I thought that was super cool. All right, let's keep going. From Neil at mobilegamer.biz, Roio is laying off 36 staff, restructuring at studios, and making changes to its management structure. Angry Birch Dream Blast has underperformed, kind of leading to all of this. Reminder, this is important, that Sega acquired ROIO in April 2023. Roio's puzzle studio in Finland will be focusing on fewer games while Roio's Barcelona studio will be taking on more work on new and existing titles. Rumors are that the CEO has, you know, basically moved to London andor spending more time with Sega in other offices versus the Finland studio. There's also been a bunch of changes to the management structure. I didn't see details on what that could be for me. I just wanted to say is like, oh, I've

never heard focus on fewer, bigger, better, you know, like you hear this everywhere, whether it's EA back in the day or today. This is actually, you know, the fallback strategy for everyone in PR right now. Ironically, and I don't I'm sure this is public. I saw this in Variety. This is the same thing going on at Paramount as Paramount merges with Sky Dance and as they get ready for layoffs that are coming in November, you know, basically they're kind of paralyzed right now. is they're only going to focus on fewer, big, or better. Like this is the time in the cycle where this happens. So, welcome to the generic PR playbook. Crest, what are your thoughts?
I mean, I don't know. I'm sad for those people that are impacted. I mean, that kind of sucks, but like I said this when this acquisition happened, it's like two drunks holding each other up, right? Both of them
are [laughter] not that Unity and Iron Force. This is version two. But, but yeah, we'll we'll we'll see what happens. I mean, I think if they all they really need to do is have like one success, but I think the synergies there never made sense to me between the two studios. And yeah,

just to contextualize and this is just just for my own curiosity. Roio has how many employees? Like four or 500?
More than that. I actually don't know.
Dear chat, where's the AI? I don't have my AI pulled up. My guess would be a few thousand. I actually know a few people there. I just haven't talked to them in a while. I guess my question is like in the grand scheme of things when you take the percentage of staff that was impacted by this 36 seems like a pretty small number and I'm just wondering how this makes a headline.
Actually it says they only have 600 which is a lot smaller than I thought they did they are.
Well yeah I I see two reports 466 to 625. So you're right that might be a significant number but also if it's a game that's underperforming it's a game that's underperforming. I mean that is like business is and it's awful for those folks but you know this happens you know although I thought I would have they would have had more people but I guess with the merger with Sega it's

difficult to know like who who's doing what you know you probably had a lot of transitions of central publishing roles that are kind of shared across both. So Stan, let's do some football, not American football like my Dallas Cowboys who are having me on the roller coaster of fandom. Let's talk about real world football.
My Steelers are super exciting right now. It's really interesting.
They are.
I never I never thought I'd see Aaron Rodgers in a Steelers jersey, but somehow it's
Somehow it's working.
Yeah, Go ahead.
It's on. I thought I'd throw a headline in there and I thought this was really interesting. So, this is from games industry, but Sports Interactive secures a multi-year deal with FIFA. So, this is a kind of we're just speaking of Sega. So, speaking more about Sega. So, it looks like FIFA is not dead. FIFA is still alive and kicking in the video game world. It's just now taking the

form of a Forex strategy game instead of a real-time simulation game. But all jokes aside, I think this is interesting from the point of view of, you know, the Sports Interactive Sega and the Football Manager franchise. You know, in full disclosure, you know, our company does work with Sports Interactive and and the Football Manager brand. So, I can't really comment on anything that's not public, but this is really exciting for Football Manager. I think, you know, they've certainly taken the EFC approach before way they worked directly with, you know, the player unions and individual teams to secure the rights to the team names and players. And now with this FIFA deal, they can start to represent the World Cup and the women's World Cup and, you know, the, you know, the FIFA Cup World Cup. I think more importantly for me is just how under the radar and I love these types of success stories. The ones that kind of go under the radar and Football Manager just has

been crushing it year over year over year. And Football Managers doesn't really make the headlines because it is not a US- ccentric game, but the player counts for Football Manager has gone from 2 million in 2020 and now has hit almost 20 million in 2025. And you know, this is across a number of different platforms. But what I also saw, and this is I looked at some data from Game Discover Co., thank you, Simon, for that over at Game Discover Co. also looks like it's a very sticky experience on PC2. So, people who are playing it tend to stick around. And one of the more interesting data points is that we talked about Netflix and its strategies. It's interesting about Football Manager and Netflix is that Football Manager actually gets a lot of its users from Netflix games. And I don't know if there's any other like kind of AAA or

kind of HD brands and crossovers with Netflix that have had any meaningful impact, but this one certainly has had a meaningful impact for the Football Manager brand overall. So kudos to the Football Manager team and their continued success. Love hearing about this stuff. All right, Mr. [ __ ] Kumbaya. Happy everything's like a [laughter] happy golucky. Well, first of all, the the game the Football Manager is a great product, right? It's always been a great product, but they had a huge misstep last year. They [ __ ] canceled the game. Like, that is crazy. They just canceled the entire version of the game after it was supposed to launch in November. They pushed it to February, and then they just canceled it, right? Like
cuz they couldn't port it from Unity or something. It's like, how do you not port it to Unity? Like, that's
I got to imagine the [ __ ] challenges they had with Unity on console and PC that that caused them problems. That's why people typically don't do Unity only for console PC. But it just was not up to snuff evidently. That was their kind of like PR thing when they moved over to Unity. But they're still moving over to

Unity in 2026. It's coming out supposedly supposedly. We don't know, right? It could be delayed again. Who knows, right? It's coming out in November 5th and is using the engine Unity engine, but the mobile version isn't.
Well, maybe they are or aren't with Netflix because Netflix had the rights to mobile per stand. And then, you know, maybe it's expensive because of those $2,000 Xbox dev kits, you know, like maybe that's [laughter]
But to be clear, FIFA integration is not part of the release. It's supposedly continue. It's going to be part of a free update uh during the World Cup. And I have to admit, this is like the most convoluted release schedule I've ever seen on their website. Like, it's basically says the console PC is supposedly coming out November 1st. The the 26th version of the Touch is coming out a later date, unspecified. The mobile version is coming out at a later date unspecified and is not using Unity and it's part of Netflix, right? So, they're doing a deal with Netflix. They're doing a deal with Arcade. And then there's some kind of thing going on with Game Pass, right? That's

unspecified, no, not dated, right? So, it's like it's like,
oh wow,
you got to clean this [ __ ] up, right? Like, I mean, they must been taking money from everybody just trying to get their [ __ ] done or something. I don't know. It's like a really bizarre or bizarre things, but it feels very janky how
this is where my commentary ends. Yeah, I I can I can understand probably.
Didn't EA cancel their management game that they had in soft launch.
Maybe maybe
it feels like there is a gap for management management sim kind of work. You're right. They need to clean this up. If I was the marketer, I would be pulling my hair out on on this one. And
then, you know, I do think though that with FIFA and I think even EA was going back to FIFA to talk about World Cup and specifically because without that license, you cannot do in a sense World Cup branded products. Although back in the day, and Stan, you might remember this from back in the day. I don't think those were they they were sellers, but I don't think they were the biggest selling SKs that they did because then

didn't they used to do like a separate skew for for World Cup? But you can imagine if you're running a live service or content, you would want World Cup.
Dude, they got the Saudis, dude. They got it all to figure it out now, dude. The Saudis are in bed with the FIFA, right? FIFA's back. We'll get Well, that was the World Cup year was just another opportunity to just sell more units of FIFA for that year, which for World Cup years would generate in significantly higher revenue bumps.
Okay.
It gave them more live ops. That's all it really did. And then and more engagement during that time, right, off season. But nonetheless, Beef is back, dude. Beef is back.
All right, everyone. Thank you. It's good to be back. Stan, thank you for coming and joining. Really appreciate it.
You're the man, dude. The best CI guy in the business.
Thanks for having me.
Get that hotel desk ready for me at Team Liquid. Can
Oh, it's ready. It's It's ready to go.
Hell yeah.
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