TWIG #357 Royal Match $200M Splurge, Arc Raiders AI Controversy and AI Duolingo's Broken Streak,

Only thing lower than video games journalism is sports journalism.
It's just the way it's way it's been for for a decade.
Clip it.
There's some still there's some good guys out there. [Music]
Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in Games 357. Hi, I'm Jen Dano. I play the publishing and marketing role on the podcast. Today we have
Eric Crest, strategy and investing, Phil Blackmonization, creative director, Era,
Mishkatkov, friend of the founders.
Awesome. Here's what we have going on today besides a pre-podcast yelling match, which will be fun later on. So, we have no resolution on the Epic versus Google case as the judge doesn't accept the settlement. This will be a fun topic. Dual Lingo stock tumbles down. Square Enix becomes the next eastern publisher with restructuring news. Royal Match 200 million ad spend and scale.

Match is changing. Mishka, I think this is your topic. As a player of Royal Match in Royal Kingdom, I can't wait. Arc Raiders, it's heating up. It's also heating up some AI voice controversy. We're going to revisit what happened with the finals again. And then, you know, if we don't get to it, if we do, just so you know, there's a lot of great games in Soft Launch. Hill Climb Racing 3, Angry Birds Match World, Monopoly, Go Chat in France. Dear French listeners, please write in with your feedback. I want a full report. So, let's just go right into shills. Let's see. I'll do this one. Ethan and Crest, you're at Games Beat today and tomorrow. Have fun. I'll definitely be at GamesB on December 11th, which is before the Game Awards. We'll talk about that in a second. And then, Phil, I wanted to give you some kudos. nice shooter podcast with the boys. You are PM nerds is all I have to say. I don't think I ever learned as much about rewards and extraction shooters as I did in your podcast.
Nice. And we almost got cancelled by

Reddit, too. This got mainstream press coverage. So, congrats to the boys by episode 10. Hopefully, we'll have the full cancellation and swing.
Don't take Twig down with you.
We'll cancel ourselves.
Two M16s holding each other up or something.
Two drunks. Yeah. Wasn't it just that you guys don't want it to be called Extraction Shooter as a genre? Like the naming is bad. I mean, I as a marketer, I was like, "Oh, good job, guys." Like, rebrand your genre. I think that's fair. Is that what they were complaining about?
It's just usual misinformation. I would say the only thing lower than video game journalism is sports journalism. Same thing for the fans, too. So, I wouldn't put too much stock in anything that was said on those websites. In the game of Groved, everyone is looking for that power up. Vibes is exactly that. It's built by industry people, so they actually get the challenges you're dealing with. As a result, they become the fastest growing gamified rewards platform out there. And the results are kind of nuts. With their AI powered targeting, you're not just

buying installs, you're bringing in the right players. And now they've got this new rollass optimization engine, so your campaigns basically level up automatically. Vibes is built different. It's designed for growth and I guess you could say it's powered by good vibes. Check out their DOF exclusive case studies by following the link in the description and go to vbs.co. That's vybs.co. Share your email and join the waitress list. [Music] Stay ahead of the competition with Sensor Tower, the trusted source for mobile marketing intelligence. Whether you're tracking trends, benchmarking performance, or scouting the next big hit, Sensor Tower delivers the data that drives strategy. Dominate the charts with Sensor Tower. We don't exactly have any corrections.

We're perfect. Although, we've got to go through the Epic versus Google settlement again. So, let's go ahead and start there. Let me give you the facts. So, of course, we record every Wednesday morning. So, today's November 12th. All these news items come in at like, you know, 10 o'clock the night before. So, hopefully this is all still accurate. I read a multiple number of news sources and they're all citing Law 360, which is a legal news publication that covers court proceedings. Uh, the US court is currently not satisfied with the settlement between Google and Epic Games. We talked a lot about that last week. We'll get into some of the details again today. Apparently, the judge was just like not buying it. Judge Donado is withholding approval of the proposed settlement, saying he wants to ensure the agreement truly addresses Google's antitrust violations. He made the pointed comment, this is my favorite. The only change circumstance that I can see right now is Epic and Google, two

mortal enemies, have pounded each other relentlessly in this courtroom for many years, are suddenly BFFs. A a that was pretty funny. Then he also suggested that Google's appeals have been designed to drag out the case. So yet another year of harvesting its illgotten games. A hearing is scheduled for December, maybe January to review the matter further. So, as of now, we are not in any place where this is going into effect. However, I think we still want to talk about it because it's the biggest news in mobile gaming. Personally, my take is I appreciate what Google and Epic are trying to do. I think they're trying to find a solution, trying to do what's right. However, I'm really glad that the judge asked for clarification. When we were doing our podcast, I was like, "Oh my god, am I getting this right or wrong?" And then afterwards I realized that thousands of game industry professionals felt like me and couldn't figure out exactly what was going on from the document. So this is just not ready for prime time. There's not a single explanation as you will hear us argue about and as we were

arguing about before the podcast as to what is the 9%, what is the 20%, how do alternative payments work? Where is hard currency calculated? Is it done through an API? Do you have to change the game level? Do you have to make a new app? In my humble opinion, I don't understand why cosmetics and game impacting IAP should be charged at different rates. I mean, that's just like a whole philosophy. I'm like, I don't understand what that is. Crest, please, what are you hearing? Give me your take. I know you've been talking to Archie and a bunch of folks.
Yeah, Archie had a piece on LinkedIn and Andrew Patrick was and I were going back and forth in Slack and so I think, you know, Archie kind of wrote a good piece on this pretty quickly. is like, you know, this is more of a sweetheart deal for Epic and a parachute for Google than a win for devs. And I think that kind of sums up like the whole take on this, but I will admit there are some different interpretations that need to be made in terms of how this thing was brought down. But nonetheless, you know, basically this selective fee reduction based upon the type of transaction it

is, whether it's cosmetic or non-cossmetic or I think what the word that they use specifically is dimminimous gameplay advantage.
Oh,
okay. Dominous gameplay advantage is kind of the big needing defining term needed. So anyway, the way I interpret what was said is that basically the 9% fee is only for benefits Fortnite and in in a lot of ways because there's not many games that are just cosmetic only that do not have non- dimminimous gameplay advantage. So this is a challenge. And then the other part that Archie actually suggested was that it is basically changing the nomenclature from payment fee to distribution fee. And so fundamentally that they will still command the 9 to 20% regardless of whether you're using Google Play pay or not if it's downloaded on the Google app store. So this may actually undermine

the direct to consumer models according to Archie. And the only people that would benefit were those with developed app stores that customers are downloading the game specifically and then those fees are lowered. So for him it's a boon for Epic's platform ambitions, not really necessarily a good deal for the rest of the game developers. And Exola said that kind of a similar thing. While it formalized alternative payments and third party app stores, it does so under Google's continued control and introduces a new service fee of 9 to 20%. For many studios, especially smaller ones, this undermines the independence the industry has been fighting for. So, at the end of the day, this all feels like a huge benefit for to Epic and not necessarily a benefit at all to the rest of the ecosystem.
We talk about what Archie said. What did Henry's kids say about this?
Yeah, exactly.
Let's get them on the cast.
Yeah. I think they understand this as

well as we do to be honest. Like,
no. May maybe the segment is I bring in his kids to explain intro all of the news articles and then we banter about it. But Phil, I think you brought up some of the settlement language here. What do you have for us?
So I'd say first just to reiterate what we talked about last week. The whole idea that you're going to separate gameplay and non gameplay affecting items is completely asinine. And the only thing that I would say is beneficial is that hopefully Google hires an army of monetization consultants. I'm available. Give me a call. We can make a committee a jury to determine this. But it's impossible. And I very confused on Epic's position because literally today we're already seeing V-Bucks in UFN Islands. And again, those V-Bucks can be spent for gameplay affecting items. So what a gameplayaffecting or non-gameplayaffecting item isn't determined at the point of sale. It's determined when you spend hard currency in many games. So that's going to be impossible to disambiguate. So no idea if Tim was involved, the lawyer's involved, Tim knows what's happening inside of his own product. So I say that's point number one is this remains absolutely baffling and confusing. The other thing is I take issue I think a

little bit with Archie's statement here which is whether or not Google is going to be able to crawl back this direct to consumer revenue. The Google spokesperson when they were speaking to the Verge, this gentleman named Jackson mentioned that if a user chooses to pay through an alternative billing system, the developer pays no billing fee to Google. I find it very hard to believe that if I go into Monopoly Go and use the Exola web payment system that suddenly Google's going to want to crawl back all this direct to consumer [ __ ] that's been happening. I find that impossible that's going to happen.
Yeah, but again they'll do that.
But they changed the nomenclature. They changed it from billing fees to service fees, right? So like yes, they're not going to pay any billing fees, but they're going to pay this [ __ ] service fee, you know?
How are they going to enforce that, Eric? How are they going to enforce that? We've been doing web direct to consumer forever. I mean Plato is doing this what 2018 now suddenly it's going to be back on the table for Google. I I just I do you
again the whole controversy around this particular ruling is that this is a ruling for Epic. It's not a ruling for

everybody else, right? This is like making Epic happy but nobody else because in this circumstance it seems like Epic only cares about themselves. And so the only pause I have and the pause that I work with when I was talking with Andrew Patrick is that they just announced that UFN is going to allow these type of purchases, right? This pay to win.
Yes. I'm working on them right now. I'm implementing them. You can do loot boxes in Fortnite again.
Yeah. And so like this seems to be counterintuitive to this agreement that they've signed with Google. Having said that, if you believe what I believe is that they will just basically do it at the product level, right? Like it doesn't matter what you buy for hard currency. It's just you you do it at the product. It's either a one or a zero. You're either doing it or not doing it. They can basically designate whatever game they want anyway they want. Right. And so as part of this agreement, they basically say, "Look, Epic's in the clear for anything that they do." Right. Done. You know?
Yeah. I also read that like you could go and relaunch your app in a sense. So what if they put Fortnite out without

UEFN so that they disentangle those two things and they could be like look clearly this entire app is just 9%. And they take that out. I mean obviously they were working on that path and they didn't think they would get to where they were going to get to but it's going to require a lot of people to go back and rework their apps. But I also I just don't understand because most games to your point Chris aren't cosmetic only especially in the West. So, what does this mean for everybody else? And the key question I think you guys are raising is are webs shops going to be hit by this fee or not? And people are arguing and this is I mean when you have a rule that is going to impact the industry, I think we just need more clarification and they I would love for them to really think through all of these things before it just gets like decided on by one judge in one city. That feels like a lot. If Google and Epic are happy, then together that means everyone else is pretty much [ __ ] That's kind of that seems pretty

obvious. You know,
ironically, I think we're going to agree with Tim. Well, I actually agree with Tim a little bit later when we talk about AI voices, but all right. So, we'll leave this one for now. Likely we'll come back and have a lot more news on there. So, just really quick, the Game Awards are coming. So, this is basically the industry's Academy Awards. It's going to be airing on December 11th. So, new this year is that it's coming to Amazon Prime Video and also Twitch. It's already been on Twitch. I think this is an addition to YouTube. I usually watch it on YouTube. They're doing a big Fallout season 2 collaboration. That was an awesome show. Best trans media, right, Phil? Better than Halo. I think this is also on on TikTok. It just shows you that the big tech companies are they love themselves some media, but they don't love themselves some video game teams amidst all the layoffs we talked about last time. So, Mishka, why don't you talk walk us through Dolingo and tell us why on earth on a games podcast we're talking about a language podcast?

Yeah, well, we're talking about Dualingo because it is a game that is masquerading as a learning app. It hasn't been doing too well. So here on YouTube and Spotify, we're showing the graph and as you can see from their stock performance, the stock is down by 62% over the last 6 months and especially the Q3 earnings last week, they dropped by 29%. So I want to kind of go into this game gaming app. What's going on? And not to knock on Dualingo, they still have a $9 billion market cap despite the 63 62% drop over 6 months. So this is a massive company. So what's going on here? So Dualingo CEO noted that they have an emphasis on lesson quality and here's what he likely meant in the uh call. So the app is not delivering on the core promise or the game is not delivering on the core promise which is learning because Dualingo really masters gamifying. Like it has the saga map. It has the the best notification systems in the game. They

really make you feel good about playing it. You're progressing all the time the progression mechanics. You got the soft currencies, the hard currency, you got inapp ads. But what they are missing is that you're not actually learning.
You're not doing the thing that you're there to do
as you're playing this game. It's a [ __ ] awesome game. And and also what they're seeing is the DAU has the DIU growth has dropped from 40% in Q2 to 36% in Q3. Just missing expectations, still significant. And the company said it's because they paused viral content production. But I think there's more there. And Dolingo might be reaching its limit as a language learning app or game and facing a lot of competition from rival apps that are actually focusing on teaching languages. And that's why they have been adding more games into this game app. So they have chess now. They have added our friends the Beatar team, Next Beat or you know the team that left Space Ape thought it up company and now

are essentially bringing in music content to Dualingo or music games to Dualingo and that's why I'm covering it because this is a games app that has multiple vectors and multiple different gaming experiences from chess to music to words and I think that doubling down on gamification for them will not continue working long term. They've done excellent job like it it really feels good to play this game and adding new verticals like music and chess and whatever fitness they would add next. I think that also limits the upside that they're having. I think they really need to get back to what they're selling which is learning languages and really bring in things like situational learning versus random things. If you ever try to learn language, like let's say you're going to Spain and you would assume that as a person who's starting to learn Spanish, they would teach you how to order coffee and food and say hello. No, they will teach you absolutely random words like what is a

mini market and that kind of stuff. And when looking at their competitor apps, they are taking their gamification playbook, but they are focusing on the content. And this is a great example of kind of promising something that you're not delivering. And it might look really good in the medium term, but in the long term, you'll hit some problems. So, over to Eric. Do you buy? Do you hold? Do you sell?
I I'm not giving recommendations on stocks in this this podcast. Um, I will say this is that the, you know, the ongoing narrative out there, and I'm actually guilty of it as well, is that there's, and you know, Bing Gordon said it at GDC last year, is that there's opportunities for gamification of microtransactions and live ops and all that stuff for non-gaming apps. And Dualingo is definitely the poster child of this and they've done an exceptional job of monetizing the unmonetizable really. I mean this is a primarily historically a subscription type revenue but this seems to be a cautionary tale on maybe going too far and going away from your core goal of actually teaching

languages. But I don't really know enough about it to like make a qualified judgment. But this is this does affect the overall thesis around gamification of game of non gaming apps. And before Phil Phil said Phil I want to say I want to say before you go because this is related to you when we both moved to Greekeaking countries.
I told Phil I sent him the streak invite to my Dualingo and Greek and he replied that's not an what do you say something that's not a you said basically it's a game. I'm not playing games. I'm going to learn the language. So
I'm not interested. Over to you. You knew it already by then.
No, I want to hear from Mr. Wall Street down there because I hear this [ __ ] all the time from you types that like, "Oh my god, subscription revenue such a big premium and yet I'm looking this stock price go off a [ __ ] cliff." Where is the subscription revenue in terms of stability that I keep hearing from? All I see when I hear subscription revenue is price caps. No inapp purchase, no ability to generate $500 whales. I look at as a minus. And I have to hear this all the time from you folk like that

should be the thesis that's being redone here.
This isn't a subscription. This is
Yes, this they make their core amount of money from subscription. It is true that ads is a growing vector and they do have inapp purchases. I forget the exact breakdown they have on their P&L but inapp is what only 10% like their bread and butter is still comes from subscriptions. Dolingo, Dolingo Max, all those things that's how they butter their bread. I can't imagine they're getting this type of valuation from doing just subscriptions alone, right? I mean,
but you told you're the like you Wall Street types are always like you get this crazy multiple when you have subs above other types of monetization.
I think you're talking to the wrong Wall Street guy because that's not what I've been saying my whole career times on this cast.
No, I've been saying consistently that the reason that this [ __ ] works is because it's unlimited upside, right? It's like the spend depth is everything. I mean, how many times have I said this on the podcast?
Sounds good. Look, that's great. I'm just I'm happy we're
I think you and I are in agreement on this, right? And that's the promise is they get away from subscriptions and go towards things that can optimize

revenue, right?
But I think they've taken it too far perhaps with this particular type of this execution maybe. I don't know. So, I have to look into it.
It might be competition as well. I've been hearing a lot of Babel ads, which is one of their core competitors. So, maybe they're facing some competition for the first time. I think it could be a lot of different things.
Yeah. The one last thing I will say is that like if you look at the sensor tower data, it looks really good. Like they're up and to the right still, but their downloads are similar, right? And so maybe they're just spending more on UA and their profitability is coming into question in terms of like they're not acquiring profitably. So all right, we'll move on and maybe we'll come back to this because this is actually a very interesting subject given a lot of venture capitals are kind of like moving on towards these non-gaming apps and we're starting to see some issues there. So all right, Square Enix quickly. They are conducting layoffs in Europe and North America. This is a quote unquote fundamental restructuring of the overseas publishing organization. It was a little bit questionable, but 100

people were being affected in US and UK branches. There's 140 people totally at risk in the UK, but only 100 are supposedly getting let go between US and UK. But this was a little bit unclear, but it doesn't matter. They're still they're reducing the size of the teams. This is following like the western devesures of Crystal Dynamics, Idis Montreal, Square Enix Montreal, which were sold to Embracer way back when and they're expect to only save like $20 million annually. So this is not a big cut like from a numbers perspective honestly. But what what what is interesting is that they're clearly taking more control of the organization, right? First with the development closures and now with the publishing and central teams getting eliminated in North America and Europe. basically just another signal that that some of these Asian developers are trying to bring everything back in house shutting down western operations in effort to bring more control and more of the business to Asia. I personally think the big risk here is that Square is going to lose touch with the Western audience. Like

that is always the issue, right? From a development perspective, a strategy perspective and a taste perspective. You know, the majority of the console business is North America and Europe. It's only around 10% in Asia. And if you take out Nintendo, it's only like 5%. So the lion share of all the console business is out here. And so without representation and understanding of this market and the you know wants and needs and desires it's it makes it more challenging to actually execute out here. So you need kind of boots in the ground to make this hap make things work. Having said that if there's strategies to focus more on the Japanese market which for Final Fantasy and all the IP that Square Enix has is primarily in those countries anyway then perhaps that makes sense. and a lot of their revenue is being generated by mobile stuff which is primarily in Japan as well and Korea. So anyway, maybe they just don't really care as much about North America and European markets, but I do think that's a potential risk.
Yeah, Chris, I really agree with everything you just said and I wanted to add a few other danger signs because I

think we this is just the canary in the coal mine to what's been going on and we've actually been covering it a little bit. So, you know, this is a Japanese developer, but this I think extends out to the eastern developers. So, you know, we hear about Nexon changes, you know, for Korea. We hear Netis pulling back, right? Like the Netis is just decimating all of the Western developers. They've actually cut their western publishing team. Knew a guy working on that team and many of those they're all laid off. And so, while for Square the actual number of jobs isn't a lot, it's what you said. It's the how do we ensure that we are culturalizing the marketing and the publishing of these products for the western market which we are pains in the asses. It is very difficult for a western marketer to market in the east and vice versa. There are so many c cultural nuances. There's media nuances. And so my guess is maybe you know let's I'm not going to totally blame AI but maybe they're thinking let's just use AI

and they can be our western publishers. Please don't do that. Please still have a human. Additionally, I think it's also the declines in the MMOs. Like, if you're not World of Warcraft, are MMOs like working anymore? You know, we saw New World get shut down by Amazon. You know, I can just not really understand what's going on with that market. Crush, you talk about this all the time. That's a genre like MOBAs that just doesn't seem to be resonating in the West as much anymore. So, I don't also want to make this political, but I can't help but think our geopolitics playing a role in this. I feel so awful for a lot of my friends and colleagues who don't hold a US passport, who are just freaked out to be here, not knowing if they're going to get their visas pulled or even get an H-1B visa anymore. And so, I think, you know, is that playing a role in things? I just I bring it up because I it's a factor we haven't talked about in a while. Mishka, what do you think about that? I love geopolitics, but I don't think there's any geopolitical thing going on here. I think this is just basic economics. So, gaming hit a

downturn after the incredible surge of co and what you're seeing is companies are just restructuring their operations like they do, which involves things like consolidation of teams and closing of studios. What we're seeing is overinvestment and overhiring and the recent layoffs or just correction of that expansion. And part of that expansion has been with the Asian companies expanding to the western markets because they have such a saturated markets in Korea and Japan and they're seeing hey let's you know let's try gung-ho or mixie one more time and see how that works in the west maybe we can capture additional market but I think you're absolutely right on the AI. I think that's an element there. I don't I see that as companies are right sizing AI has the impact that maybe there's just less opening especially for more junior employees but I think the uh overall notion that you have to have Americans in order to make games for Americans has been proven false and I think the Chinese have proven this to be absolutely not true by just flooding the

market with made in China games that are just absolutely crushing the charts no matter which platform form you're looking at and you know Japanese Koreans have had quite of a mixed success in the western markets you know despite really awesome games in their own home countries they haven't been hitting whether it's the genre issue or whether it's just their games are so different and their tastes are quite different the same way as we can't penetrate their markets with the games that that we like but ultimately I think this is just an ROI western devs are not essential for building a business in the best and compared to the Asian counterparts, we work less than our Asian counterparts and we cost more. I'm sorry that's the case,
man. Yeah. And then most Asian games are actually not working in the West. So, so there's no problems, but I don't I think there's it's just a right sizing.
You're conflating two different things, right? I'm not disagreeing with you on the development side. Sure. Like
correct.
Developing in the US sucks. It's

expensive. people don't work very hard like in general particularly in Europe etc but like yeah
we're talking about publishing we're talking about the publishing org right now and the publishing or is very specifically region locked right even in Europe it's different than North America like you need expertise in different regions of different countries in order to optimize your marketing messaging for both right and to understand what the tastes and desires and needs and wants of this these customer bases are and I think the Chinese are actually doing a good job of actually doing that type of research CI research and other things that are part of like bringing this stuff in. But by removing the capabilities in these countries, you're going to limit your ability to attract these audiences in the in I think anyway ultimately
make a clip of this. I don't think I've ever been more proud of Eric Crest in what he just said in defense of marketing than right now. Everything you said is right. Amen.
I don't disagree. I don't disagree. But I think it's an impact of like they're doing less development in the west and

so they don't need that many publishing resources in the west because previously there were a lot of games that were made for
but that's not the argument that you were making. See that's the thing you're conflating your own argument now because you're basically suggested that the Chinese have figured out the recipe and are making games and killing everyone in the west with their Chinese games. But again, they need the ability to understand what the Americans or US and Europeans want by having people on the ground out here.
And also, some of those games are Western IP. Marvel Rivals is a western IP that they have taken.
So, so there's that example. Then you have Century Games doing white out survival,
which is basically western design.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Phil,
would you like to move on, Phil? Is that is that your
No, no, no, no. I'm I I agree.
You're agreeing. Yeah. I think Mihoyo has executed fairly well in the United States. I don't know. Do they have huge US publishing operations?
They do. Yeah.
Did Netis for Marvel Rivals to your point, Jen?
If you remember on Marvel Rivals, Marvel

Rivals, they did have a team here and they did have um Western publisher.
No, they had No, no, no, no. They had marketers in I think they were actually in Canada to be honest with you, but they did have people consulting on the publishing in the West. So, if this is a publishing conversation, as Crest eloquently said, you need Western people to help with regionally based publishing. When I was on League of Legends, this was unsustainable, but we had like 19 offices around the world because we would individually publish League of Legends in the country. We would have community teams. We would have localized influencer teams focused on those specific languages and countries. That is part of the secret sauce of League of Legends and what Riot has done. That is not sustainable for everyone but that is how it works
and very specifically like century games for instance like they are not building games for Asia they are building games for the west right they are actually leveraging what the western audience wants and needs by doing research in these countries and probably with local

talent or with it doesn't matter but the thing is that they're focused on building [ __ ] for the west right that's what has created so much success for them the last like four or five years
I mean the other thing they're doing is you know like I know a lot of junior talent who were Chinese who were educated and brought up in the states and the second that you know Tencent or any of the Chinese developers get a hold of them they're like we want you because they are westernized they speak Chinese they're able to help bridge the gap and so that kind of talent is being sought after to do exactly in a sense Mishka what you're saying is they're building up the bench of people who have the western taste but can speak Chinese and come in and like bridge the gap All right.
Okay. Let's go to games. All right. So, Phil, you want to talk about Sensor Tower?
Yes. So, Sensor Tower has released a new quarterly report looking at digital ad spend in the US. We usually don't get data sets like this and I will immediately put very big asterisks about

being able to understand this metric and how it is calculated. I think that is a very reasonable conversation to have. But nonetheless, this is a chance to check back in on match and specifically Royal Kingdom, which as you know launched earlier this year. And so right now we are looking at US digital ad spend in gaming from Q4 2024 to Q3 2025. And what Censors Tower is reporting is that Royal Kingdom has spent $200 million. And remember, that's not any of the celebrity endorsements for the Friends crew or LeBron. And that is also not including our favorite royal match which they are still reporting$ 160 million. So you're looking at $300 million in ad spend. And so if that is the case, what did they get for that $200 million they spent in Royal Kingdom? And if you remember that storyline we've been talking about is that they didn't press the scale button on Royal Match until later into the game's life cycle. And so the question is, are they going to do that here? And so there's some evidence that's the

case. So when we look at daily active users in the United States for Royal Kingdom and Royal Match, we see that Royal Kingdom really took off of May of this year and it's been maintaining basically a steady rate even though downloads for Royal Kingdom are now above Royal Match or very close to it. And so you're starting to see the tables turn a little bit on the revenue piece. Royal Kingdom is still doing well head and shoulders above Royal Match. Royal Kingdom is only doing about 1,800,000 a day relative to Royal Match, which is doing about 2 to 2.5x. And now, just to be clear, that's expected. So, when you have a game, what happens over time is that customers or payers who pay retain at higher rates than players who do not. And so, over time, naturally, your share of DAU that is a customer increases. So if you look at a game like for example Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, you were go to EA's dashboards which has been running for what almost 10 years now. I

guarantee you the share of DAU that are customers is probably 70 plus%. I would expect Royal Match to have a higher share of payers right now which is driving a higher amount of revenue. But that being said, Royal Kingdom does not continue to scale here and I'm actually starting to have real questions about this game and whether or not we can actually just mark this thing a failure. And the huge data point I'd also, you know, bring to the table here is revenue per download. And so when we look at revenue per download on a day since launch basis, Royal Match had this huge acceleration period after it launched. Again, there's still that scaling period we see here when we look at around 200 days, but it continues to grow. When we look at Royal Kingdom, it's been relatively flat over the game's life cycle. And that to me is a big warning sign. And I think that says a lot about where match is. that CPIs have increased dramatically and revenue has gone down. And to me, that means your margins are being squeezed. And so, I'm starting to think that this is basically just a giant miss for Dream Games and they're having a hard time taking the L.

Wow, that's a strong take.
That is an interesting take.
I'm not sure I would say miss. I would say, you know, I they've got a great cash cow if they just manage it properly. So, by the way, I play the [ __ ] out of both of these games. I'm endgame on both of these games. And there is a pretty defined difference between them in the different play pattern, although they are becoming more and more similar in how they add metagame features. And so I don't know. I I I guess I'm a little shocked by your take.
So So here's what I'd say though. I think they're basically stuck in the innovators dilemma and they've been basically caught flatfooted. And so when we look at the overall match market, it has been changing dramatically. And I, you know, I wish Blake and Mitch were here for this, for all their dunks on mobile gaming not having an innovation because there has been a lot of dynamicism really since 2024. And so what we see is that the match swap, which is generally what Censor Tower refers to as match 3, is almost about to be less than 50% of the puzzle market.

The two biggest growing genres, subg genres, excuse me, inside of Puzzle have been what they call merge, which we'll talk about in a moment, and also match pair, which is essentially the 3D match we've been talking about, which essentially comes down to Toy Blast. Not only have they been growing, they've been growing dramatically, and they're now about a fourth of puzzle revenue. These two subg genres, about a fourth of puzzle revenue. So that is like a seismic shift what's going on in puzzle. And so when we compare the top games in those two subg genres, we're talking about Gossip Hardware, we're talking about Toy Blast, we're talking about Travel Town, just those three games alone are basically responsible for the lion share of this shift we're seeing in puzzle.
And when you look at, for example, Gossip Harbor, it has been absolutely exploding in terms of scale. It is it has been on an incredible trajectory. And I put Merge Mansion here just to take a little bit of a dunk because we haven't heard we haven't heard from the Fins in a long time. And it looks like Merge Mansion's dead. Looks like they haven't been able to capitalize on the success. But again, I'd go back to the Innovator's dilemma.

Where is King when it comes to these genres? Remember, they tried to do 3D match and abandoned very quickly. Where is Dream when it comes to these genres? Where's Playex? They're still [ __ ] around with these reskins like homecapes and family stapes, which have been soft launched forever. And so, this to me just looks like classic innovators dilemma. People are missing out in all of this incredible dynamicism that's happening in match and they're going to suffer because of it. And I think Royal Kingdom is a symptom of this. All right, let me let me push back a little bit here because I think I agree with what you're selling here. I want to say again for the record that the ad the ad spend that they did was so [ __ ] stupid that it is clear in the numbers that now they're doing UA like beyond anyone's imagination that every dollar they spent on the TV advertising was a folly at best. Okay. All right. Now, if you look at ARPDOW, it actually looks a little bit stronger. And I'm not the type of person to look at ARPDO, generally speaking, but I what you could think about what's happening here is they are spending insane amounts of

money obviously on getting UA spend, but they're not spending profitably, right? Finally, like I can say with almost certainty that they're not spending profitably on this [ __ ] but they are still capturing an audience that's actually in similar in in scale as from an ARPD perspective as their Royal Match game.
Oh, yeah. Match, sorry.
Right. So, while the revenue per install looks a little terrible, they still are capturing a solid audience to continue to scale this game. But I think they're just overspending on the UA and that's just bringing in a bunch of looks that aren't really spending. So this is tough because spending money at this scale is so ridiculous that like it's just hard to gauge, you know, like if they're actually going to see success. But what I will capitulate is that this is not doing nearly as well as they had hoped.
I would just say that with almost absolute certainty.

Where's Mr. Cannibalization Crest? Where's cannibalization crest? I miss him. Come back. Come back. Opportunity cost. This is This is not This is not real margin.
Opportunity cost. I would not say that this is necessary. Would you say this is cannibalizing? I mean like
I mean revenues are solid for Royal Match
as a deep player of both of these games and I've been witnessing the evolution over time. I think they intended Kingdom to be a very different match experience and then they found out that doesn't work. And so the two games are almost identical these days.
I completely agree with you, Jen. That was Laura's take as well. Remember when you guys looked into it? I think they were trying to go more male. And I looked into the demographic data and they didn't end up being more male.
And I think they abandoned it. And I think it was just like yolo sunk cost fallacy. [ __ ] we got to get something out the door. We got to get this private equity deal done. Let's go.
When I have these conversations in Turkey, when I would say like, oh, these games kind of look the same to me. Like, what are you talking about? You don't understand the product. Like they get so defensive. But I'm so happy that you're

saying this. By the way, the these graphs,
Phil, you got my juices, you know, flowing. I put in so many more graphs. Like, let me talk about Royal Kingdom's launch budget and how much I think it costs because we have some numbers here. Jen, correct me if I'm wrong because we have, according to Sensor Tower, they have made $280 million in net revenue thus far, which is really good. I mean, they've been scaling for a year and a half. They have 80 million installs for since they've launched. And I assume based on my calculations I'm going to open up is they spent between $265 to $300 million on marketing. Here's how I calculated. I think they spend on UA about $225 million. They have 55 million Android users. So that's 70% and 30% on iOS. The paid share according to Sensor tower is 85%. So this goes to Press's point of the brand advertising. Mo almost all of their audience is paid despite over 10 A-list celebrities and I put in blended CPI of six and two for premium western.

So that would put them at the $225 million of UA spends in stage. So could be plus minus. Then the brand budget. So this is Jen. This is all you. So I'd say it's $40 million on brands because you have over 10 celebrities. I think it was 11 or 12 when I was looking at the list. They have multiple different videos and so forth. So that would put in probably 30 million to celebrities direct and then about 10 millions for the multi-shoots, the post-productions, the flights and everything because every one of them had multiple different versions and then they did it at different locations and different times. And then I would put in $1 million in PR because they didn't go as crazy as Supercell with, you know, all of that, nor do they have influencers. So overall, that would put the total cost of the marketing till date at around 265 if we're really being conservative and maybe even closer to 300. What do you think?
We need like that calculator signing.

I didn't get a chance to go in and do my counter tamishka math, but you know, I think we talked a lot about the like even LeBron himself was like super super expensive. I will lightly agree with Crest that the way that they went after the brand marketing campaign was too much in my opinion. I think they did too many celebrities. They spent too much on it. They went too wide and I would have been a little bit more like focused and centralized to not like overly invest before they knew if this thing could scale or not.
I'm going to put that on loop. That's going to be my ringtone now. I'm going to make a sound more.
You're going to do that one just like I did Cres Cresa's Western Publishing earlier.
Just on loop. It's going to It's just soothing music to me. Well, however, what we can see from what some of Monopoly Go has done with some of their campaigns, which are not as crazy as I think what the Royal Kingdom campaign did, is again remember that all

of these assets and everything that you do to create that campaign. Yes, maybe it went on TV. Those assets get used in all of the UA channels that you guys love for your Well, it's probabilistic now. It's not deterministic anymore, but it's a way to create compelling creative that drives down CPI costs that leads to all of these different things. So, I agree they probably spent too much. I think they should still have done something, but I also don't know if the game was ready to scale. And I was a player at that time and I'm like, you guys are not ready to scale. They didn't have like all of the great meta features in that I think that they needed to have. And I'm seeing this a lot. And like even Supercell, we talked about it last. Oh man, I can't believe I said Supercell.
Edit out.
But people, guys, please do not push for go big marketing campaigns if you have a leaky bucket. Your game has to be [ __ ] stellar. Your KPIs have to be there before anyone can do a more advanced and higher budget marketing campaign. Or else what's going to happen

are people like Phil and Crest are going to yell at you and tell you're stupid. And it makes people like me look bad. So please, for the love of all that is holy, wait until your game is ready before you do big marketing campaigns.
They chose the wrong genre. This is not where the growth is happening.
They are definers of the subg genre. If anyone can do it, like the Turks at Dream could do it.
But match swap is done though. Match swap has been crowded out. Lex King and Dream. There's nothing left.
Phil, I have graphs against this. I have the graphs. So just just to conclude on Royal Kingdom, I think like they definitely haven't hit the payback yet and you we can see actually in the graph that they're now slowing down user acquisition and the revenue keeps high. So they're probably going for profitability. I think overall this game has cost like 350 with the development cost and everything and they've made 280. So there's still some way to go but it will be profitable over time unless the revenue starts dropping. And regarding the celebrities, I do have to say one thing is that usage of celebrities that really kind of like a

putting that brand out there makes sense. If you have a new brand, but to me, this was the same game as Royal Match. It's like they're advertising the same game, but it's a different game. And you tell them like, "Guys, this looks to me the same. You don't understand the product. You don't understand puzzle games." Like, "I'm sorry. It literally has the same king, the same graphics, and you just have more videos." Anyways, going back to what
they're literally brothers. The kings are literally
Yeah, it's the same game. I played both and I was like, I'm not playing this cuz this is the same game as the other one.
I have to say about the wrong genre. So, Phil, I put in grass and grass on this and I chose the merge merge genre cuz you dissed Metacor, the makers of Merge Mansion. So, let me show you this.
They're just dead.
They're they've stabilized.
That's No, they're going they're going down. I think they abandoned you.
Hold on. Let's do a couple of graphs. This is Merge Mansion, which when it came out, it sold like hot potatoes. It went to about 10 million in monthly revenue. Basically defined the genre. Then the next graph shows and stabilized

and they're like okay we thought that this is the number one in the genre and it's kind of filled and everything else going to be smaller. Travel town from the Israelis Moon Active came in and what doubles the revenue of Mergetown. So it's kind of like not filled and you feel like okay there was plenty of room in this genre and we really needed to focus on live ops. The second genre is when the Chinese enter the play. Holy [ __ ] When uh Micro Fun, I think the company is behind Gossip Harbor. They launch a game and it's bigger than Merge Mansion and Triple Town combined and just continues to grow. And this company, this micro fund in the next graph actually launched another game just for the [ __ ] of it to fill the number three position as well. And now essentially he's owning the market. And then the final one what I have is like what happens when another Chinese come in with Century Games. Yeah, the Kingshot and White Out Survival. They also made a merge game. And now lo and behold, they actually are making more money than Merge Mansion. You're right,

Phil. Anyways, what this kind of showed is that when you feel that the genre is full, it's unless it has Chinese and Israelis, it's not full yet.
I'm saying match swap is full though. I'm saying match swap is full. Where are the Chinese? Are Chinese in swap? Not yet. It could be three times bigger when a when a Chinese reach
equilibrium. No, we watch we reach we reach equilibrium.
Century games come in with a swap game. That's it.
This is my personal genre and I have been living this genre for a couple of years. So, as an insider, what I would tell you is the first thing that happened in this category is that when Moonactive came to Travel Town, they added social casino monetization in the meta system in the card collection system. They added gotas to be able to get the cards to complete the collection. And so, that change in monetization, Phil, you should go and you would love this [ __ ] Is that's what changed what blew up Travel Town. The

other thing I would tell you is that as a from a consumer perspective and a needs and a motivation perspective, why people play this game is extremely different than why they play a match three or match swap game. There's story elements, there cliffhanger elements, it fulfills a very different need state. And so, Phil, to your point earlier, from a subgenre level, I think people really need to pull apart the subg genres of casual and puzzle and understand that the motivations are completely different between each of these. Some games, you know, in the the 3D match games, those are time based. And so, that's a different play pattern and a different dopamine hit that you get from these. Anyway, that is my nerdy player meets consumer insights take. Are we good on this? Should we go to shooters?
Move on. [Music] In today's hyperco competitive digital landscape, understanding your app's journey from discovery to download isn't just insightful. It's the difference between scaling and stagnating. Enter

Appslier, the undisputed leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics. They've mastered the science of making every ad dollar work harder by revealing exactly where your players come from and how they interact with your app. Their platform transform mountains of complex data into clear actionable intelligence that separates winning campaigns from budget- draining experiments. And I know that many of the top game companies leverage Appslier and are a key partner in their success. Appslier, where your app's potential meets performance.
Web Stores, you've seen what good looks like, but have you seen great? Appch charge is the direct to consumer platform backed by the likes of Supercell and built by monetization pros from Moonactive, Platika, Huge Games and others, people who know the difference. App charge powers over half a billion dollars in transaction a year for top studios optimizing every detail. Deeply

personalized web store offers custommade design, industry-leading monetization features, in-game payments SDK and more. 70% of top grossing games already have a web store, but the ones scaling fastest, they're doing it with AppCharge. Learn more at appcharge.com. [Music] Game devs, here at Heroic Labs, we know that great gameplay is what players love, but integrating metagame features like challenges, progression, and rewards is crucial for retention and monetization. But coding them is a tedious and timeconuming process. That's why top studios have turned to Hero from Heroic Claps. Hero provides a complete suite of battle tested metagame features that are quick to implement, letting you spend more time on the core gameplay experience. Ready to ship fully featured engaging games. Check out Hero today at heroiclabs.com. [Music]
Arc Raiders. Phil, take us away. I mean, look, I think everyone listening this

podcast knows Art Raiders has been an enormous success, and I think now it's time to think about how do we think about this success. So, already we have Video Game Insights reporting that they have made more than hund00 million in revenue. And Embark themselves, I think, has mentioned that they passed four million copies sold. I wouldn't be surprised if they'll do $200 million probably by the end of the year. here. I don't know, Eric, you feel free to tell me if I'm wrong. I think the question here is, you know, what does this mean in terms of live service? So, already they have been growing their Steam PSU. And so, right now we're looking at max daily concurrent players on Steam for Arc Raiders, Delta Force, Battlefield 6, Call of Duty, and I put in PUBG Battlegrounds. We don't talk enough about PUBG, which has had built just an absolutely incredible business on Steam. has kind of almost been, you know, not a part of the conversation, but certainly a part of the player base. And right now, Art Raiders is matching or

exceeding Battlefield. And if you remember, Battlefield also launched their free-to-play skew, Redsack, which we were talking about, which basically came out and didn't do jack [ __ ] And Arc Raiders looks like it's about to overtake it and is just about there. Meanwhile, Delta Force steady as always. Call of Duty seems to have been taking a little bit of a hit, but let's see next month when they come out with their next version. You know, what does this mean? I don't know if this is like the first mainstream success for extraction shooters. I don't know if this going to continue. I think one of the interesting comparison points is comparing Arc Raiders to Hell Divers 2. And it'll be interesting to see if they follow similar trajectories. So Hell Divers 2, very similar Steam story comes out. There's a I think a huge audience on Steam which is price insensitive. They'll throw 40 60 bucks on whatever is popular and blowing up and then what happens is they end up leaving the title. They end up going to their next title. They're tourists almost. And so the question is after the tourists leave, what's left? And I think what Arrowhead was able to do with Hell Divers is build actually an incredibly sustainable business. And if you see the

spikes here, this is when they do their seasonal launches. They've done an incredible job on narrative. They've done an incredible job on monetization. We can talk about and I think this is a potential opportunity for our graders. We're going to check back in it week after week. It'll drop. There's no doubt about it. I think this is the peak. I don't expect any more growth after this. But I think the question is where is bottom for them? And then can they have these upticks that we see in Hell Divers 2 to ultimately build a stable business. I would also point to some potential monetization opportunities in extraction shooters. Let's see what they do. Their extraction mode. They are experimenting with more gameplay based items. Arc Raiders does have MTX, but they are not doing gameplay affecting items. But DMZ started to play with this idea of insurance slots. they started to play with some different mechanics because again the genre isn't super established in the mainstream. So I think they have a lot of room to figure out what those monetization norms are. But I think at the end of the day what I would pose to Mr. Crest, we were talking about Soderland. Sodland being the man

who decided to launch Titanfall 2 in between Battlefield and Call of Duty. It looks like he pulled an inverse Titanfall 2 here. And what the hell does this first of all mean to Call of Duty? It feels like the air's just been sucked out of the room between Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders. It's looking real grim. And also, Nexxon and Embark, like I guess when you see success like this, don't you pull everyone off of the finals and just like fly in resources to the Swedes to like get this thing in a better place, see if you can't pump a live service out of it.
We've been tracking this game for a while and the quality was super high compared to the finals, right? We
However, there's no live service model attached to this, right? Like it's
there is I think that's actually the innovation here and we talk about this on shooter monthly. Frost pointed this out is that you can almost attach this adjacent hyphen adventure extraction adventure where they have a lot of focus on what the seasonal missions are. And to be honest with you, I'd like to come back and play more. Unfortunately, my PC and motherboard snapped on the way to Cypress, so I haven't had the chance to dive into it. Yeah, I just went out and dropped $2,000 on a new PC here nor

there. But I think that there's heartbeats here. And to be honest with you, Ember ran a live service on the finals. They are running a live service on the finals. Actually, I think they prove they can do it. I think Hell Divers is a good benchmark for them. I think that's what I would look towards as a success is that can they create these reoccurring PSU curves when they launch new seasons. And again, remember there is MTX in our graders.
It's cosmetic only right now, but there is MTX.
I know, but you would hope that they would be a little bit more aggressive given the $40 price point, right? I mean, that they lost left a lot of money on the table in theory.
They have a special edition.
Yeah. I don't know. I the fact that they launched in between these two. We'll see if Call of Duty has any impact like and we'll talk about it later. I'm sure
it's this Friday.
I I would have waited, but that's just me, you know, like I probably would have waited till February or March next year, but you know, we'll see. The game is phenomenal. They're doing an exceptional job of executing against it. I think they have to be hitting their revenue targets. 200 million sounds about right.

I don't even know. Did we talk about GTA moving? I guess I can't remember. But with GTA moving crest, to your point, now that GTA is in November, you know, spring looks really good for this game to have launched in that timing. So,
I was just thinking about the the revenue targets and like, yes, the game is beautiful, looks really fun. I would love to play it, but I'm afraid I don't have the time right now. It just gets sucked in. I was just thinking about this from the Nexon perspective because Nexon is not a chump. Like it's a company that generates about $3 billion in revenue every year and I assume that they have invested how much in Embark? Like I think their initial investment was like 250 million and probably more and they're publishing this. So let's put it at like 350 maybe thus far. The company Embark has 250 employees according to LinkedIn plus of course an army of outsourcers that will probably triple this amount. What is the amount of revenue that Arc Writers has to generate for it to be tangible for Nexon?

I would say that it's probably hitting expectations, if not exceeding expectations at this point, but certainly the finals was a huge disappointment, right, from the perspective of the company,
I would think. Right. I'm sure they're happy with it. They should be happy with it. It's just interesting because like when a game is good and it sells a lot and looks like a hit and then you look at the company that shipped it and it's actually not that tangible for them, then you have to kind of ask it what the hell are the expectations. You essentially need to be launching like a PUBG or Apex every time for it to really matter to anything that you're doing and kind of opens up why EA is only launching franchises.
I do think the key to this success is long-term revenue. This has to be at least something like, you know, hell divers or kind of a live service revenue that is recurring, you know, that does like 300 to 400 to$500 million a year. Like I think that would be a huge success for them even on a three billion dollar run rate of their own revenue. But yeah, we'll see if they can pull that off. That's why I think the focus really should be on like ongoing monetization, which you know, we really

don't know exactly what they're going to be doing on a regular basis, it seems. Let's just wrap up one other story about Arc Raiders while we have this up and it has to do with AI. So this is comes from game industry.biz. Eurogamer gave Arc Raiders two out of five stars with their review from Rick Lane criticizing the game's use of AI voice generation. Tim Sweeney responded with a series of tweets that said the reviewer's AI stance was political and quote political opinions should go into oped folks unquote. So as a reminder, you know, Arc Rider is a bark and it's not even a tiny game or a company and he's out there making comments. Arc Raiders, it has a
it pushed Unreal to the max. He seems
true. It's Unreal. Okay. No, fair enough. Okay, fair enough. So, it has a Metacritic score of 84 on PC and it hit an all-time high concurrent players of like almost 500,000 two days ago according to Steam DB. So, personally, I just I I'm an AI neutral person. Like, I

really think AI has a lot of great things to offer and I think we should be using AI wherever we can to create better experiences, be more efficient, but make sure to do it in a way that upholds creative integrity because I work with a lot of creatives. I get it. That being said, don't review bomb some somebody because you don't agree with the philosophy of why someone is doing what they're doing. If the AI voices sucked, if it was a poor experience, yes, I understand that
it's not AI voices. I think this is really important. It's not AI voices. They went out, they signed voice actors, and what they did is they did use text to speech, which by the way, again, EA at Seed was doing this like 10 years ago. So, they paid those voice actors. And so rather than the voice actors having to say every single line item. For instance, you add a new item or you have a new ping, they take those voices and then what they do is they have that voice with AI say what that thing is. But there were still actors that were hired as a part of this.
Okay.
I think this given their consent they've

given their consent to this too asual agreement.
Yeah. And yeah. And so this especially for me is should be okay if the especially if the voice actors going in. They don't have to screen into the microphone 10 times. They can, you know, they if they're paid and compensated for the work and AI takes it to other places. I think Rick Lane or whatever the [ __ ] his name is, this is a ridiculous review for him. You know, it's like I would totally agree if these AI voices impacted his experience or his gameplay or like, you know, that could be a legitimate gripe, you know, and you could mark that off on reviews, right? But like, but if you dis disagree philosophically or politically, you know, you got to get off get over yourself, right yourself, you know, like like that's not your job. Your job is to be an objective reviewer. Like that's that is your role, right? And so
the game is universally loved. It has like 85 Metacritic, which is an amazing score for a new game. And what's really crazy about it is if you actually read his review, it's really positive. It's a

really like if you just take the score out of it, right? And people are making that big hubbub about score versus the actual written review. The written review is positive, but all he really cares about is this self-righteous view that AI and gaming is bad, right? Like, and so, have you seen the title? It's Arc Raiders review. A smartly designed extraction shooter marred by one inexcusable decision. Underline, grass the machine. Jesus, what a comment. Yeah, I think yeah, I think Rick Lane is just being very obtuse about this particular subject. That's what I think. I think and he's getting so much flack right now, right? Because he's like literally the only bad review. I mean, he's like a 40 Metacritic. There's a few 60s, but the majority are 80s and 90s, you know? And so, like he just looks like an idiot, right? I mean, really, he just looks like a pompous ass right now. I'll refer to the comments I made at the beginning of the cast that the only thing lower than video games journalism is sports journalism.

It's just the way it's way it's been for for a decade.
Clip it. There's some still there's some good guys out there.
Awesome. All right, everyone. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next week.
Thank you.
You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. Those stars and likes, while small action on your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fun Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructorofund.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry best professional community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand. Or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun content creators. Thanks for listening.