TWIG #360 The Story of Two Steam Games, Where Winds Meet & The 4X Shake-Up

There's AI in this game, ladies and gentlemen, because when the developers are Chinese, there's no one to yell out by themselves. It's just an echo chamber. They have Gen AI dialogues with the NPCs.
Where's that journalist? Where you at now, son?
Ex Mishka, that's exactly my point. Thank you for bringing that up. Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in Games 360. I'm Jen Dano. I play the marketing and publishing Yoda on the podcast. Today we have
aircraft strategy investor.
You almost had enough delay. Uh Phil Black, monetization. Sorry.
It's the Middle Eastern delay that he has. Uh Mishkatkov, found a whisperer. Hello.
All right, here's what we have on the podcast today. Fortnite's newest chapter just started and it's a killer. It's a pun on Kill Bill. I'll talk to you about that later. or Bite Dance might be selling something and it's not Tik Tok, but maybe it's Moonton. Art Raider is crushing it. It's actually on track for

maybe 10 millionish units this year. And got a call out on South Park. Please watch South Park if you don't watch it. But there's also news on a different arc and that's Arc Games. Crest is going to cover that. There's a new Chinese game, Where Winds Meet. It has a really strong start and mobile is coming on December 12th. There's a tale of two Steam games. Mishka is going to talk about a hit and a miss.
And then Phil is going to do a huge check-in for us on the Forex category and cover a game. I'm excited about that. Uh has to do with male and female gamers and how to target that. Be really interesting. So, let's get into shills. Phil, you want to do shooter monthly?
Yeah, shooter monthly number two. It's out. It was a lot of fun. It continues to be like one of the joys of my month. We talk about skill-based matchmaking. Super important. Not talked about enough in terms of the weeds. We talk about RedSack, how did it perform, Black Ops 7, the biggest flop, and Arc Raiders. We go into more detail than we did here in Twig. And I have a wonderful cast of

shooter hardcore fans there, and I'm just excited for number three. It's been a lot of fun. Check it out.
Yeah, you guys do such a good job.
Yeah, that's a fantastic segment. Thank you, Phil. As a former shooter fan,
new intro music, too, so buckle in. Buckle in for that one.
Thanks. Um, on the podcast we had loyalty platforms 101. So, how to make money and grow your audience through those. And then we got to start shilling London. So, London PGC. Most importantly, Jen is being flown in as a precious cargo to London. We are doing supper club. We got something really interesting for this one. Shortage Soho House. And then we most likely are going to do roundt events. And this is going to be very product focused. and we're gonna invite app companies. So anyways, this is this is gonna be for London.
Can we talk about where it is yet or we
No, we can't we can't we can't talk about where it is, but it's a really cool office of a really fun company that

may or may not be doing games.
Yeah.
Got it.
Got it. All right. Yes, I am excited to be able to travel again and uh be let out of the house for that one.
So, Phil, you also wanted to shill a little bit on Sensor Tower. I saw you I haven't seen you this excited in a while. I I've done reports for clients and I always include weekly and monthly retention which you see maybe a little bit more in like PC console and almost never in mobile. So basically of the installs and let's say week zero, how many of them came back in week one and how many installs on a monthly basis were in M0 came back month one. Sensor tower has this retention data now. They just announced it. It's inside of the product and live and this is data we just haven't had access for forever particularly in mobile and I'm just really excited it's there. So like hats off to Sensor Tower. Ever since they bought App Annie, they are still grinding and still launching real features. So I'm very excited about this.
Nice. Oh, it's retention by Unified. Oh, it was only by individual. Okay, I see what you're saying. I see why you're so

excited. That is exciting. All right, so corrections. Uh the first thing I wanted to just mention was uh we should be back live in uh Apple podcast. Mishka, you know, [ __ ] up and you know, oh, I can't curse. I can't curse in the first 10 minutes of the podcast. I just messed that up. We're back everywhere. So, sorry. And then Mishka, I I I want to ask you about your next point, but talk about Dream Games budget.
Yeah. So, I want to do a correction because this was informed to me by prestigious marketing people during Slush. Uh I kind of ballpar that the launch of Dream Games would have cost $200 million a couple of episodes ago and then got multiple sources telling me that it's close to 500 million that they have spent now on the launch because well when I was doing the CPI assumptions I think I was there in around like $6 or something but what I heard was the CPI started off from 17 and climbed up to$25$26. So that's currently

this is Royal Kingdom. This is Royal Kingdom and this is US audience. So the primary audience and this is kind of reference also to the last episode when we talked about match villains how they have hard time scaling in the US. No [ __ ] with $26 CPIs. Of course you're looking elsewhere to get your users. So that's the one correction. And then also somebody corrected me on YouTube in a comment. I said ano or as the beautiful game from from Ubisoft and it's called Ano because apparently if I say ano that's anus in Italian.
Anyways that game is not anus. That game is you know something better.
That's more of a fitting name for that game frankly.
No it's it's so good. It's if you're a nerd this is the game you play. Ano the Rome edition Pax Romano whatever it is. It's amazing. All the the whole series is amazing. Stop fighting.
99% of the audience that never plays that game has fallen asleep because no one gives a [ __ ] about
90% approval rate of that game. So
my god. Well, I guess the games that each of us actually enjoy to play as

real life people is fascinating to me. I'm a royal kingdom royal match nerd and you love your strategy ancient Rome wacky strategy games. All right.
All right. So, let's get into it. Let's start off with Fortnite. They had their season finale. It was called Zero Hour and it drew 10.5 million live in-game participants. Um, they posted about this on X. They also had three million people who tuned in for the live stream. That's what I typically do is watch it. It's a lot of fun actually to watch what's going on. They hit 16 million CCU for the first chapter launch. So, Phil pulled a couple of screenshots for Fortnite GG that we're looking at just to show the absolute bump that they had going on there. So, the other thing I thought was really interesting is as a huge fan of Kill Bill, Quinton Tarantino has directed an animated Fortnite short called The Lost Chapter, Yuki's Revenge. So, this brings to life a previously unfilmed scene from the Kill Bill script. And it's animated. It's done in

Unreal Engine 5. And this is all tied in because he's re-releasing Kill Bill one and two together in theaters with like some edits and and a little bit different pieces to it. And so you got to see a lot of the characters in that episode of Fortnite during the thing. So I thought that was super cool. And Phil, I think you see this as uh just like a licensing, you know, black hole, so to speak, right?
Well, I I wrote a piece this week calling it almost like the anti-platform. Fortnite is really good at building this incredible licensing empire. And what we're looking at right now is just a series of IPs I pulled. nothing in particular, just a random sampling of IPs, as well as how hard it is for a lot of these games to get these IPs. So, to give you one example, Ferrari has been notoriously hard to be able to secure as a license because there's a lot of requirements that Ferrari requires on, for instance, whether or not the Ferrari could be shown crashed. As one example, James Bond, notoriously hard to be able to get

a hold of. You will see post Amazon how easy it is, but it sounds like James Bond is coming to Fortnite. It also sounds like Harry Potter, by the way, is coming to Fortnite. They've been able to get a lot of top tier IP that other games wouldn't be able to get. They've kind of like sucked up all of these huge IPs. And when you compare it to what we'd normally think of as a platform, it almost is the anti-platform, right? It's not as though these things are standing on top of it, it's sucking everything in around it. And when we go back and look at the Fortnite GD numbers, I think it is just really a testament to this still being the case that they still haven't quite built the platform. So, if you look at this huge spike here, which is the season 6 or excuse me, the the new chapter launch, the chapter 7 launch, they got to around 9 million concurrence, which is way way above their prior high over the last couple months where it was around 2 million has been their daily peak. But when you look at UGC maps and where their CCU are, they are not having the same increase. Of course, that's because the map premiere, the map that all the players

were on is an Epic provided one. But again, they're not seeing all this uplift on the UGC UFN maps, which again speaks to the problem that they're not really building a platform yet. So, they still have the licensing. It's really just pulling this whole kitten kaboodleoodle together, is them continuing to nail all this stuff, but it's not translating to the UFM platform yet. And I think that's kind of been their challenge. What they did do on that point that was super cool was that during the zero hour event, which is basically like Avengers Endgame, there's a moment where all of the collabs show up. So you've got everything from Avengers, Homer Simpson, Godzilla, Mortal Kombat, Squid Game, Power Rangers, Megazord, Superman, Kill Bill, K-Pop Demon Hunters was actually part of this as well. So all these characters um pop in. They also for the first time featured some of the UGC or UEFN creator characters. So I don't know if you guys know FOD, I think that's the future trash team. So some of the most popular UGC islands, they have their own

characters. Those showed up as well. So that was a great nod that Epic and Fortnite were giving to the entire ecosystem saying for the first time like, "Hey, we're all in this together." So I think that's a great sign that they're moving in a direction to really bring all the UGC people into the fold.
This is from the ARM investment banks presentation. They had concurrent users on major UGC platform and the size of Roblox compared to Fortnite and compared to Steam is astonishing. If you're not seeing the graph, you're you're listening to this. Roblox peaked at 21 million concurrent users, whereas Fortnite is peaking somewhere along three million concurrent users. So, this is quite of a interesting graph. Phil, you had some take on this?
I mean, look, I think if I were to play the Eric Crest card, it's like, what's our poo? Where's the money? Roblox still has a [ __ ] ton of users, but again, $20 per month per payer and there aren't many payers. Like, that's always been the problem. I would take three million

Fortnite players over 20 million Roblox players in goddamn day, dude.
Really?
Oh, yeah. Because they're actually spending money. So, like, you know, CCU, MAU, downloads, all this stuff is like total vanity metrics and they only matter when the hype cycle is high, right? When the stock market's going up and everyone's all excited about user base. At the end of the day, when the rubber hits the road is how much money you're making per user, right? And so,
that's Arpdow.
ARPD revenue per user. whatever conversion all these metrics like Roblox is like a third world majority platform right so it's irrelevant how many are playing in India or Pakistan or whatever it's like it's irrelevant right so anyway I
well
yeah yeah I think they make almost 5 billion Roblox in 2024 I I would assume they're over five billion this year add little ads little crazy games into it and they'll be into
I'm not suggesting that Roblox is not a

great platform and it's doing quite well for itself. I'm saying when you're comparing CCUs, you have to actually understand what the revenue is, the nom numerator, not the denominator on these users.
I get your point. I get your point. I agree.
And I don't love CCU. Uh I agree with that. I like DAU a little bit more, but it does show trends. It does show the interesting change in taste that many of the audience have. But absolutely, you know, for what we do from the business side, you also care about
on the positive sides of this big jump in CCUs, it is games like Grow a Garden that actually monetize reasonably well, right? Like these are really egregious like you know monetization methods. So that's actually good because a lot of the games that have high CCUs historically have been games that don't monetize extremely well. Let's be honest, you're tired of chasing installs across the same crowded network. We all are. That's why Vibes build a new playbook. They're the

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better loot. [Music]
All right, let's keep going. Uh, let's talk about Bite Dance, Chris. Yeah. So again, there's just more rumors about Bite Dance, you know, divesting all their mobile investments. And the last thing I think they have is Moonton, which um makes a few games, but mostly Mobile Legends Bang Bang. So they bought the company for like 4 billion back in 2021. They were trying to get rid of it in 2023, but were unsuccessful, but they seem to be in close negotiations with Savvy potentially this time around to sell it. Um, I have a hard time believing that it's worth 4 billion anymore. Uh, given the current conditions in mobile, just in general, also the fact that their overall business is down like 20%. I mean, it would be a good pickup. It's a great game and a good team in Asia.
$200 million mobile game. Damn. Who doesn't want to have a MOA in their portfolio?
Yeah.

I mean, this is the moa. This is number three.
Yeah.
Genre rank with inside of MOBAs. I mean, that's that's not a small game.
It's a deep genre. It's a deep genre.
Yeah. And Southeast Asia. So, this one I remember this one from my Wild Rift League of Legend days is was a massive competitor to when Wild Rift was going to launch and then also against um Honor of Kings, which obviously dominates in China. So these are those are the three kind of mobile MOBAs that dominate and Mobile Legends Bang Bang is predominantly massive in Southeast Asia. But you're right that that is a particular market that only kind of exists there and they can't expand Western. So I think that's the challenge is you're only playing in that small pond.
They've been doing a lot of weird UA stuff. We haven't had a chance to cover Acecraft, but this is where they basically took Cuphead and they decided to transform it into a mobile free-to-play title with a lot of what Cuphead's visual art style is. And if you remember, Cuphead is a Steam indie

success. It's a usual twin stick shooter. And so Acecraft I expect to do far better, but it looks like it's stalling. They did a huge UA push and then they've essentially just dumped it. Right now, we're looking at revenue, and it peaked at $6 million in September, but it looks like October came in at basically less than half than that. And it looks like November is trailing down even more, and downloads didn't look great either. So, this looks like a big miss. And the other misses that they've had are in their squad RPG portfolio. So, they they have Mobile Legends Bang Bang, which is $200 million. And then basically the rest of the portfolio, Squad RPGs. And we've been covering this as a recurring theme, the problems with squad RPGs and how the genre is suffering. This is a great case example in how RPGs have been suffering under them. So, Watcher of the Realms, they did a huge UA push for. They seems to have completely abandoned it now, or at least they're toning it down quite a bit. It's down 41% year-over-year. And of course, like my dear Mobile Legends adventure, which is taking the Mobile Legends Bang Bang mobile IP and

transforming it into an RPG, has been suffering for a really long time. And all the problems in Squad RPGs can be told inside of this game. And I'm someone who has spent $5,000 in Mobile Legends Adventure. Like, this is my game. And we're looking at screenshots right now. And just to give you an idea of the problems, you have your normal gear system,
right? You have your different gear slots you can equip to your character. and they were running out of essentially progression space. So they added what they call orlay cards. Now orlay cards are essentially just another nine set of gear equipments that you have to collect and upgrade. So again, you're not only just collecting the gear pieces, you're also individually upgrading each gear piece. So there's four gear pieces on your character. There's two artifacts on your character. So essentially six base gear slots that you have to individually upgrade. Then you have nine orlay cards. You have to upgrade those. And we're not done, ladies and gentlemen, because they added glory gems. There are 10 different glory gems you have to upgrade. And again, this is just on a per character

basis. And then they added the Wheel of Time. The Wheel of Time is another gear system that you have to upgrade and essentially just gives you HP and defense. And just to top it off, they recently launched companions, which are now individualized animals each of the characters have. It has become almost like RPG slop where they just keep adding more and more gear systems on top of one another and they don't seem to have a clear idea of where to take this genre. And I this to me is a great example of all the problems Squad RPG is having right now. No new ideas beyond we need to increase the power score and let's just throw a bunch of JPEGs in there to help game designers execute against that.
Yikes.
Yeah, that is rough.
I'm I'm watching Acecraft. This is like this game was actually made. Phil likes to say, "What's the thesis behind this?" But now I want to ask, "What's the thesis behind this?" Have you guys seen this?
It's a twin stick shooter, which means it has core IP problems, but you could run the habby playbook, right? Take a Steam IP, slap on some good monization around it, and see how far it goes. But

it's clear to me this one did not work out. This has been falsified. It's hard to make twin stick shooters happen. There's a lot of real-time inputs. There were a lot of mobile games that were trying to do this very early on that were never able to scale. And so, hey, what if we take the Cuphead visual aesthetic, throw on some more modern eastern style modernization? I think that's a good thesis. Just doesn't look like it's playing out.
Yeah.
Cool.
Okay.
All right.
A quick one. Uh, Ark Games is now independent publisher. They are leading publisher for AA and indie titles for PC and console, and they are finally removed the shackles, the yoke of tyranny from Lars at Embracer.
Oh god.
Jason Park, friend of the podcast. Be free, my friend. Be free. Anyway, they're a great publisher of indie games if you ever need a publisher for your portfolio. But anyway, good luck, Jason.
Was embracer kind of like a like a Lissy's Fair type of a ruler that didn't even care just as long as you were acquired?
You know what? You know what, Mr. Mishka, you have been listening to Lars

too much, right? Cuz he you listen to the press releases, you listen to him speak on podcasts, whatever. He's full of [ __ ] He doesn't know what he was doing. He never would knew what he was doing. He was tyrannical, right?
Like would he just say like this game needs to ship tomorrow everybody works 996 or like what do you mean?
The way it's been described to me many times is he was totally schizophrenic, right? Because he didn't have any control or understanding of what was happening. And so the rules and things would be set down, budgets would be cut, the ability to do deals would be shuttered. It was a disaster from the get-go, right? And so why why I was covering this so negatively over the years was because I was constantly hearing these stories of this [ __ ] Right.
Got it.
Sorry.
Thank you for
for the rundown.
All right. Well, let's go to the next topic which is where the winds meet. So I kept seeing this pop up in the top Steam charts and I was like, what is

this game? So, Chinese studio uh Everstone studio which is published by Netis announced that its Wooa openw world ARPG Whereins Meet has reached 9 million players in the two weeks since its official launch out of beta on PS5, Steam, EGS, and it's a free-to-play game. So, last week it was number seven in top Steam charts by units and also by DAU that thanks to VGI for that. Uh, it also has about a 50/50 PlayStation Steam split with almost 4.5 million units sold. And regionally, what's interesting, Crest, I I went ahead and looked at this because I know you would ask, 70% is EU and North America. I think North America was like 42%. So, this is a Chinese-based game and Chinese theme that is seemingly resonating, you know, unless it's VPN stuff as we always talk about.
I think it's distributed outside of Steam in China. I think that's why the distribution is the way it is.

Yeah. PlayStation was it was 50% of like 2 and a half million units on PlayStation.
Consoles don't have a lot of distribution in China. Remember, they've been banned for a long time.
Yeah.
Yeah. It I don't believe this at all.
Yeah.
Oh, you don't believe this?
Okay. Well, let me just finish and then I'll let you go. So, so this is interesting and something to keep an eye on is that mobile's in prerege and it's now launching. I think yesterday they announced it was December 12th. When I was looking yesterday, it was actually December 31st on my uh on my phone, but so December 12th is like next week, and it's crossplay, cross uh progression across mobile, PC, and PlayStation. It's not on Xbox. And visually, it's just absolutely gorgeous and stunning. So, now I will hand it over, Phil.
Uh I mean, look, it's it's a live service MMO. Um it's got 15 million different currencies. Monetization is aggressive. Yes, they don't say pay to win, but they have pay for progression, whatever stupid term people want to tell themselves on how to disambiguate those two. I will say the thing that they're going forward with is Diablo style Path

of Exile resets, seasonal resets. I think that's becoming more and more popular. I'd love to see more games do this. I think it's a solution to the squad RPG problem we talked about. I'm surprised more mobile games don't do it. It is a brutal, brutal system to set up as we know FIFA did it, but it's how you keep a lot of power score economy sustainable. And so it'll be interesting to see if we see more of this pop up, especially with extraction shooters and crossplay, cross progression, dual platform, like all from China. Genshin has like really kicked this off. Delta Force has been killing it. Eric, you're shaking your head. Why are you shaking your head on this?
Amazing.
This is like the Game of Thrones game.
These free-to-play AAA MMOs, Game of Thrones Kings Road is a game that came out that is insanely good, but no one's playing it. And I've been playing it like a crack addict. They're replicating the same idea with a different theme from Netis because the other Game Res is a net marble, but it's free to play. It's crossplatform. Both

of them are console and mobile and PC. So, it's really really interesting. And I'm wondering I I still don't understand why a game like this where the the winds meet is doing better than Game of Thrones. But that's me. So, I'm downloading where the where winds meet. This is my kind of game is what I'm trying to say. And so, I'm going to be playing it. I'll get back to you next week. Yeah,
I work with uh quite a few folks from China and what they're telling me is, you know, this plays right into the myths and the history and these types of games get a lot of promotion and coverage and boost from the Chinese government as well. Plus, it's it's really an untapped market. These types of stories, it's what happened with Wukong, you know, back last year. Now we're seeing it crossplatform and now we're seeing the type of like massive support that Ginchin is getting behind this kind of a category. So it's not squad RPG, it's open world ARPG and it's really starting to take off. By the way, we're looking at a U if you're watching

some of the visuals just it looks it looks like a console quality like highest quality AAA game. You can modify and also there's AI.
There's AI in this game, ladies and gentlemen, because when the developers are Chinese, there's no one to yell out by themselves. It's just an echo chamber. They have Gen AI dialogues with the NPCs.
Where's that journalist? Where's that art journalist?
Where you at?
Yeah. Ex Mishka, that's exactly my point. Thank you for bringing that up. Right. Like, where is the bombing review scores? Guess what? No one gives a [ __ ] No one No one gives a [ __ ] West needs to wake up to this. Well, it's not art. So, the difference in this game, I was reading a little bit about it, is that it's AI NPCs and you send them off on missions and actually people are gaming the system where the characters aren't even going on the missions, but they're getting the rewards. So, it's not that AI art or AI voice. I think the voice the the other topic that was being, you know, discussed was that, oh, we're taking the jobs of voice actors or of artists. So, this is a different AI

implementation.
You could say that for writers. You could say we're taking the jobs All those Mass Effect writers will not be able to have a job anymore. You can make the same complaints here. This is how the wheels technology moves.
What I love is that people are hacking it.
I'm curious, what does it take to make such a game like this? Like what is the size of a team
to to not only make this but to operate it? This is a live operated game on multiple platforms.
There's two things. One, yes, I'm sure this is super expensive to make. There's no doubt just the art itself. However, they are I think they are reusing engines that have been successful in the past and they're basically just reskinning these engines for both mobile and console, right? So, that saves them some way. But like, yeah, I'm sure it's huge team in China that's getting paid nothing relatively. And although those expenses are coming up these days, I've been told, but this is not something that would can be replicated in the US, right? Full stop. Like MMOs are super complicated to develop for the backend

tech and all the other systems that are required.
Chris, you're a huge World of Warcraft fan. I always like I've never played it. Why isn't it on mobile?
World of Warcraft, the inputs are too complicated for mobile, frankly.
Have you played Journey to the West? Uh I mean like you kidding me? Blizzard could have totally sent this off in a net style deal like they did Diablo.
Oh, could they create an experience a World of Warcraft experience on mobile?
Yes. Is the current World of Warcraft playable on mobile? No.
No.
That's what I'm saying.
Well, I think that's the challenge you have with the older games. If you were to create WoW from today's lens of like let's make a crossplatform experience, maybe they could have done something something similar. But I mean, I ran into this again on League of Legends, which is like we had to make TFT crossplatform and we were hamstrung by like 15year-old tech of like how do you actually make these things work together? and we had to make concessions so that we would be able to have the crossplay because you can actually

crossplay TFT um from PC to to mobile. So, I think if they started over they could probably do something different.
I don't want to put words in your mouth a little, but I would say that I think Blizzard completely screwed the pooch by not figuring out a way of making a mobile version of World of Warcraft, right? Like I think a game like this in the with the World of Warcraft theme and all that stuff outside of current World of Warcraft for PC makes total [ __ ] sense, right? Like that should have been done, right? But they they would never do that, right? Ever, right? Because that's not the way they think about their IP and they want, you know, to be the purest that they are, right? But I think it totally makes sense to do this because but it would not be the current World of Warcraft on PC. It would be a different skew. I I guess I guess my question is why haven't they used NEIS to get that done though? I don't expect Blizzard Irvine to do this. Of course, they wouldn't do this. They broke up.
Yeah, they broke up because of because of negotiations around World of Warcraft. Like I think it's far more
You don't think they ever were moving

forward at some point after especially seeing the success of Diablo Immortal with Western product management and eastern developers to put something like this together, specifically a skew for China. I have no doubt it was pitched a gajillion times by Netis, Net Marble, 10-centent, any [ __ ] Asian developer, pitched them a million times on this and they said, "No, no, no, no, no." Yeah.
Right. I mean, I I'm almost 100% certain.
Do you think this is the South Korea deal that's being shopped? I remember Starcraft, remember we covered that a couple twigs ago? A couple twigs ago, probably like a hundred twigs ago. They were they were uh they were shopping um Starcraft to Korean developers. I mean, you could sign us up to somewhere in Korea, right? I mean, Creo very good at MMOs.
Well, I mean, the Netis deal is back on because they kiss and made up after Bobby left, but a lot of the Blizzard folks at the time, it might be different now, didn't think Diablo Immortal was successful. They didn't recognize the value that that skew had. Now, I think all of that is different now because we can clearly see, you know, how they're

still focused on it. I would have to imagine in today's new world that they would be more open to a pitch on Wow from Netis than they were before. or who knows like maybe they actually you know are are having those discussions.
I think World of Warcraft is too sacred for even even now to the even today.
They did rumble, right? Like they were like let's try different genres.
I'm not saying that was right. I'm just saying
we're ignoring the big thing here is the business model is so jack like they they can't get their heads around freeto play and pay to win, right? That's completely against their entire mantra.
They did formortal though. For Immortal, they did.
But for Immortal, they did, but for World of Warcraft, I don't think they would ever do that for World of Warcraft. Like maybe not.
The thing is, by having a Chinese specific skew, you give yourself plausible deniability for Reddit. And you get to hold your head high and say, "I don't know what happens over there in China."
I kind of agree with you, Phil. I kind of agree with you, but that is not the mentality that I've heard from people at Blizzard. Like, you're destroying the

franchise by doing that or you're lessening it. And that's why Diablo people where is Microsoft in their 30% margins like
wow Imortal get in there and say you're doing this like
today twig 360 we say please make wow I immortal go net ease codev make it happen. All right so Mishka let's go through a couple steam games you wanted to cover. Ah, yes. Yes. So, uh, there were a couple of Steam games that launched pretty much at the same time, and I'm just bringing them together because these two companies were set up on the same date and launch the games on the same date and had different results. So, the first one, shout out to Finland. Finally, a piece of good news. The Last Caretaker crossed 100,000 in sales during the first month. So, shout out to also Game Discover Newsletter. If you're not subscribing, subscribe on to that one. They're great.
Yeah. Uh, so The Last Caretaker is a Steam game by Channel 37, a Finnish

veteran, very veteran, meaning old, in the AI native team that was founded in 2021 and backed by Supercell Investments. So, they have crossed 120,000 copies in early access in just under a month, which is about $4.2 million in gross revenue for the first launch month. Now, this game is a survival crafting game. Cost 35 bucks, was launched this month, maxed at about 10,000 CCUs, and is still at about 5,000 CCUs in early access. Probably lifetime they will sell 500,000 copies, which will pretty much get them to like what 15 million in gross after discounts and so forth. Maybe $10 million in net revenue. So it is ROI positive and based on the public information the game cost about $4.5 million till date. So essentially they reached a payback in just 2 months on the whole project and they will have

enough money to self-fund the next game. And I know these production costs because of the absurd Finnish laws that make them disclose financial information and give all this information to competitors. So, so way way to go with transparency Finland. Uh, anyway, uh, I think this is overall a successful game. It's a success for this indie studio with really handful employees, I don't know, two, three, and they said they have eight contractors, so really, really tiny team. My question is more like, Eric, is this a success for investors or is it time to accept that gaming is not really VC compatible anymore?
Of course, this is not a success for investors. This is like a lifestyle business at best. Like, no. I mean, I'm I'm happy for them. I think they did well and this is a good outcome for the team, but like this is not good for an investor. This is just not going to pay back. Even with this success, they still have to like start all over again.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, talk about something

we've been talking about for a long time, which is VCs are pulling back from these kinds of double A, single A PC console opportunities, and all of them are in Turkey right now trying to find the next puzzle game until that starts to become oversaturated. And then I'm sure they're going to like China to invest in Chinese companies is like Vietnam is the next one. You know, it's just like the market. They just go from thing to thing to thing. And so everyone went at the end of COVID to, you know, double A like, hey, let's do, you know, indies are great, Steam. And now they're seeing that that's not working. But I think Crest's point has always been PC is not the place to go to put your money in gaming. It's just not the right match or the right fit.
100%. This is a publishing deal. This is not
a VC deal, right? Yeah.
This should have been done by a publisher. I mean, of course, I knew that you're going to say that and that's why I kind of wanted to bring this up because people are almost angry that they're not getting VC investments to their new games or new game projects. And this is a great

example of a successful indie game with really tiny team. They got the preede investment. Everything went well. They released a game. They're doing well. And it's still, despite all the success, it's still not a good investment case.
Oh my god. Did you see Tim Wharton's LinkedIn? Oh, so so his Oh my god. So his I know his latest one was like, "Hey, I'm looking for $5 million you
just five." Even though he's already spent 40 and he goes through like who he's already already talked to and so the comments are like, "Who else can possibly do that?" I mean, it it's just crazy that asking for $5 million is a no man's land in the world of VC. I mean, even for the the people I'm talking to, you can only go and ask for like$1 or2 million to raise and people aren't even willing to do that. So, it's completely dried up. And, you know, he's got the baggage of I've already spent 40 million. So, who's going to want to put,
you know, five more million into that to

finish something that uh anyway, like that whole topic, I think, is another one that Chris, I can't wait for you to [ __ ] on.
Total funding $36.9 million. Yeah. Uh well talking about funding I want to talk about the second steam game. So Player Unknown
Productions from the PUBG creator Brandon Green
they released their first game. So that was also started on the same year as the the finished channel 37 2021 and they released their first game which is called Prologue Go Way back. So B basically this is the uh the warm-up title from the studio and the studio is fully remote AAA worldbuing studio uh headed by the great and powerful Kiman Nordstrom actually as a CEO and they raised in 2021 $70 million from Craftton 70 million yes it's almost identical same founding date same platform much better funding arguably much better team

bigger team more experienced team more expensive team the difference is also that this is also a fully remote team. So, they released this game which is interesting. It's a survival crafting game just like Channel 37, but in this game, you're not fighting against anybody. It's a single player and you are essentially surviving the environment. So, this is like a normal day in Sweden or uh or another one like there's there's anything is trying to kill you from trees to climate to bad food, bad meatballs, and I love it.
Trees. Yeah, it's you can die from a tree here in this game. So, it's that kind of like a survival game. You're just walking around, you're hungry, you're you're cold, you're this, you're that, and you die, and so you you trying to get out of the map.
Ooh, the compass play. We're looking at the video and it's
guys, you have compass play.
Exactly. It's like super hardcore. There's no map. There's no nothing. There's of course no weapons and and there's no that kind of enemies. It's just it gets dark and you die. It's in early access and it doesn't look very

good. So the uh it peaked at 182 players. Uh there were 14 players at the moment when I was looking
I'm sorry. Can you say that again? Mishka, just to clarify, were you missing a digit?
Okay. No. No. 182.
182.
What is that? Just the friends friends and family build.
So again, early access, but I have to say channel 37 is also early access. And we've talked multiple times that early access is the launch. I mean, it took what Tarov 8 years to exit early access. So, it's quite polished and I don't want to be negative about this game. I just wanted to raise that this is an alternative reality, especially if you put in a lot of funding and you release a game. And I don't know, I wanted to ask Chris like what do you think about the strategy of almost like releasing a prequel and kind of showing what your studio can do and then go in and try to raise funding because I assume they're raising funding because I saw them at Slush. uh they were doing these big keynotes with Brandon. I kind of

accidentally saw that they're in Middle East doing keynotes already at like these investor events. So the only reason a founder is, you know, in Middle East at Slush is that they're raising money. They're, you know, they're not promoting this game. So Chris, what do you think about this strategy?
Well, do you are you sure they raised 70 million? It wasn't in Crunch Page, but uh there was uh a headline that says that Craftton reportedly put in $70 million, but this was 2021. 2021 was different world. And also Brandon Green's metaverse pitch is strong. And this is a guy coming from PUBG.
It's like like he's generated gazillion billion dollars.
And so this is our friend Kim Nordstrom who's in this company.
He's the CEO of this company. So be be gentle. Be gentle.
I love Kim. I I hate to do this, but like
why this genre though, the fact that they use Player Unknown in their name
for their new studio is a little bit

shady.
Shady as [ __ ] right? For Brandon PUBG, right?
When he joined Grafton, like he was Player Unknown, like he was the modder and so he brought the mod and that was Player Unknown Battlegrounds. Like he is Player Unknown. PUBG is Player Unknown Battlegrounds. He's Player Unknown. He he owns the PU out of PUPG.
Okay. So, I think raising $70 million and this is their first entree is a little bit frightening. On the positive side, I think Craftton is a publisher and therefore they will have more flexibility in terms of how they fund this stuff and this makes a little bit more sense than a venture capital investment, right? But so far like obviously this game is not performing well. The fidelity is really high. I I don't think this is a cheap game to make.
But is it a proof of concept?
It's a good team. That's what I mean, Jan, is like this is a strategy to like after four years, this is a proof of concept. This is not what we're intend to build. That's why it's called prologue and we are building something

much bigger. Open world AAA, MMO, cryptocurrency, you name it. I I was listening to the talk. This is a demo of what we will be building.
All right, let me speculate here. This is my speculation, please. Right. If he's out there trying to raise funds outside of Craftton, then it's very likely that Craftton has said, "Fuck no, we're not doing giving you any more money, right?" Like that's a bad place to be, particularly when you've had, according to you, 70 million invested already. So now they built this engine, they built the tech, they built their team. So they move on to the next project and hoping to god they find some other investor to do it. But if Crafter's not doing it, then that they have a tough road ahead of them, I would say. Yeah, especially if if the investor has access to Steam DB. I wonder if Changhan Kim, the the CEO of Craftton, is now like using Chat GPT to figure out how to get out of this deal.
Right. Right. Right.
I just don't know why you would pick

this like single player. I know that survival crafting is a thing, Phil. Right. But
yes,
but single player
Well, hold hold up hold up. Well, we don't we don't know where the the game itself is going. You got to remember that Rust and Ark have been mainstays on the Steam top 10, top 20 PSU charts forever. And so I was just wondering when the survival crafting thesis was going to take over. And I think we've just seen it. Mishka just showed two games that are finally starting to emerge. Remember there's another one. Do you guys remember Robboto Games which got 15 million from A16Z? They announced their game Storge, which is also more of an RPG style survival crafting game. And if you look at extraction shooters, there's definitely a lot of tie-in of how extraction shooters, you can see the same inventory systems, a lot of the same mechanics. You've seen Tarov, you've seen some of these games, too. So, like the the thesis of like doing survival crafting makes sense to me. I don't think this is the right way to approach that thesis. I don't understand what the interesting spin is. I But I I

agree with you. I think this is this is a weird take on the genre, and I'm not quite sure how you would expect to scale a single player game. I I don't see where the money is.
Well, that's why I think it's a pro a proof of concept because even though you have a an established founder, almost no one ever lands the plane on their first game. And so, are they saying, "Hey, let's get something out. Let's show let's try some mechanics. Let's get some early feedback." And and maybe this, you know, we're looking at something that's way too early. Although, I would have kept it under Steam keys then and not put it into early access. Again, you can do regional regional locks on Steam. No one does. It's crazy to me.
But I think what what's happening is people don't understand the new Steam publishing. Like I keep running into veterans like these folks who don't understand that the world has changed. And even though we talk about it on the podcast all the time that early access is a launch, people don't understand you can still utilize. I mean, think about Deadlock. Remember what they did with

you have to bring a friend, you have to have co-op keys. And that still kind of allowed for people to play the game but kept it under wraps. So I think perhaps and again I'm speculating that they didn't they're not playing to the new Steam publishing that you need to do if if the hype my hypothesis of like proof of concept is anything to be you know talked about.
I'll speculate one thing. I think that that Kim Nordstrom has such an experience from mobile and he probably approached this from the perspective let's get the team to ship so that we can build from there rather than building this 10year game like Clang or a Star Citizen type of an approach.
Yeah. And that's what I was asking like is this the like that would be the best way on mobile to kind of throw something out there
but is it the best way on Steam where you're kind of putting something out there and people already have those expectations and it's much more sort of a brand driven. You can't just, you know, put something under a different developer name and kind of get the reps in before the big launch. So that would be my assumption. Again, I don't know

what they were thinking why they were doing this this way, but I feel like they just wanted to get the reps in from launching.
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All right, let's talk about 4X reps.
Yes. So, I want to give an update on DC Dark Legion and also a game we haven't had a chance to talk about, which is Tile Survive. And these are both from Fun Plus. And remember we were talking about Fun Plus when we covered DC Dark Legion, but they've been suffering in terms of their mobile portfolio. Everything looks like it's down. And before we get to each of those games, I think it's really important to talk about Forex in general because beyond

merge, this is the most interesting genre in mobile. It has the most level of dynamicism and honestly, it's a bright spot when it comes to revenue. So right now, we're looking at net revenue for Forex strategy reported by Sensor Tower. This is global. So again, we're going to have our usual asterisk for Android China. And you can see that revenue peaked in 2021 for Forex. And yet, there's another peak this year. It's about to hit all-time highs at about 700 million. And by the way, this is per month. Per month, Forex is doing $700 million. And you can see there was actually a dip in between that 2021 high and that 2025 high around you can see 2024. Does anyone know what's causing a lot of that dip really at the end of 2023 into 2024?
What's causing the dip?
Yeah, we know. We have the answer to this.
The genre got really stale.
Uh, I think we're we're close. Uh, IDFA.
Oh, and IDFA. Sorry. IDFA.

This is where ID
Well, IDFA was impacted by everything. Everything got impacted by IDFA.
But remember, in particular, it was games that have really high LTVs and depend on super targeted advertising. That's what you, Mr. crest have said multiple times and I think you're correct about that. This genre suffered more than a lot of other ones. Midcore in particular.
And so when you look at the increase in 2024 to our all-time highs in 2025, it's driven by two games. What are those two games? Well, we know it's white out survival and Lost War Survival 2 uh have both been enormous contributors to the reemergence of Forex. Now, the other interesting part is a lot of them have really topped off. We're looking at the revenue for both of them on a weekly basis across all regions and they've really hit equilibrium both of those games. The other thing that I think is really important to point out about Forex, this is a US dominated genre. You know, about 25 to 40% of Forex revenue comes from the United States. And I filtered this for just iOS so we can control for the usual Chinese Android

problem. But again, I I think this actually validates a lot of the original fun plus thesis, which is to take eastern talent and makes games for the west. And Forex follows this pattern, too. And I just think that sometimes that's something we lose because Forex have so many deep, you know, RPG or cooperative mechanics, but this is still a western dominated genre. And not only that, China's actually shrinking in terms of a revenue share. So if you go back and look at like 2018, you know, China was doing roughly 30 to 40% of Forex revenue. Now they're only doing around 10 to 15%. And again, we're controlling for iOS here, so we should be capturing all the Chinese revenue on a relative basis. That to me is a very important point that kind of gets lost. But yet, when we look at like the top 4X strategy games, again, we see Last War Survival and White Out Survival, which by the way, 1.5 billion and 1.3 billion year-to- date revenue for both of those titles. Kingshot number three. Number three, the one from Century Games, it

has taken its mantle at number three. Evony has been number four. I didn't even know how far Evony Yeah, Eony. Evony, pretty incredible stuff, right? Not something that I expected to see here. Uh, the other one we haven't spent a lot of time talking about is number eight on the list, which is Total Battle War Strategy, which sounds like sounds like they put into some sort of like stripper name generator.
So, what what I what I kind of want to get to here was uh actually this chart right here, which is the distribution of female players in top strategy forex games. And we'll get to like why this is important. And this is pulled from Sensor Tower. One of my favorite things about Sensor Tower is they have demographic data. And what do we think is the game with the highest share of females in Forex?
White survival.
White survival.
45% females. And that's going to be very important. I think we should talk about that in a moment. But I think the thing I want to stop here and ask you, Jen, so one of the thesises of Chrome Valley, and we also see this with Truckstar, which is the other match three from

Century Games, is to go hyperargeted after a particular, I would argue, gender or sex is really what they're going after with a very strong theme that resonates with them. The other strategy I'm sometimes seeing is let's make something that generally is for one gender and let's try to appeal to another gender and in that way we increase our TAM and we can lower CPIs. Do you think that's a fair thesis for 4X to consider?
So interesting counter like last week you you had the other thesis which was like the husbando game so love and deep space or versus like the K which is like for guys and then was it love and deep space which is the husbando game that's like clearly for women because it's all about the hot guys. So, what's interesting about 4X is that you can find themes that are genderneutral. Like, why do Survival is genderneutral like there isn't necessarily uh anything that leans one way or the other. And the play pattern of 4X, which is I get together with my team to

protect my base, I go do missions and come back. The cooperative and competition based gameplay of 4X, makes sense for everyone. And that's why this genre really works. And I think what people are figuring out is that you don't have to just target men in this genre. As clearly you can see by most of these games are in the 40 to 50%. Remember that in mobile overall more players and payers in many cases are women. Um and that might be the distribution to some of the puzzle and more casual games. But there is an untapped opportunity that you see in in women players. one of my uh the companies that I advise, it's a small game. They have a game called Nebula and it is a Forex kind of strategy game based on political intrigue. They actually found something that was interesting. A lot of women were really interested in that com that the theme or the context of coming in for political intrigue, but they yet didn't kind of stay through and retain to the deep deep

4X gameplay. So I think there is a balance of going after women and then making sure that you've got the gameplay components that you want to keep some of them in the gameplay. So that's what I think people can really leverage is making sure you've got a genderneutral theme. Your play patterns do have both uh I call it cooperition. You compete and you also cooperate together because that tends to be what female gamers want to do. And then you can grow your overall audience. Does that answer
Yes. Mr. Crest, would you like to add something? Can I take a crack at this? I'm not very tread very lightly on this particular subject because I don't want to get myself into trouble.
I would say that when you talk about players, people playing the game is different from people that are spending on the game, right? The power fantasy that makes this game super compelling. I feel is more geared towards men in terms of spending. Now, that that's my sexist remark for the podcast. What is clear about all these games and I if you go

back to the other chart is literally every single top game in forex is Chinese right almost right
oh it's crazy right
versus like 10 years ago and we were talking about game of war we're talking machines we're talking about obviously kame way back in the day like it is crazy like how this market is just dominated by the Chinese first of all right you have these super casual gameplay mechanics that are being advertised luring in these audiences including the women. And I would imagine that is probably why this numbers are so high of people who are playing the game versus who are spending. And that I think is what we're seeing here. Not necessarily that we're seeing a huge uptick in the number of women that are spending on something like, you know, a 4X game.
Hold that thought because it's a great segue to tile survive. That's exactly what I need to hear from you.
I think women are spending, but go ahead.
So, one thing just DC Dark Legion update, no one cares anymore. Game is dead. uh revenue has gone down. DC dark legion is falling off

making a squad RPG core with Fallout Shelter style homebased progression and
DC don't be so dismissive though I think at least it was a good at bat right
oh no no I completely agree I completely agree that it was good that someone went out and said could we do something stronger on the squad RPG side add a little bit of that Fallout trailer like I think they had interesting pieces together it just didn't work out and it's pretty clear to me looking at the weekly active user chart here. It started to crumble. They're down to under 100,000 weekly active users and on the revenue basis, it's basically just downward sloping. It was a great idea. It was a great shot. The interesting part here has been Tile Survive, which is actually continuing to scale. And so, right now, we're looking at monthly revenue. They're hitting around 6 million. It looks like they're going to accelerate beyond that. Let's see. They're starting to taper off a little bit on UA. But the interesting piece is again using this W out style survival life sim. again life sim keyword coming up style fatoule where you're managing

really survival for your home base exactly like you are in white out survival and as you can see like the art style here
is a lot softer
and so I think that ties back exactly what you're saying Mr. Crest which is that this not only entry point in terms of art but also in terms of the actual gameplay is more female ccentric which I think widens your CPI base and goes after an untapped market. The other thing that makes it tile survive, by the way, is that you're you're implementing these uh energy generators which connects to your different tiles and powers them on. So again, you kind of get some of that really simplistic um you know, life sim style economy builder which has kind of like died out largely. But the other part that they end up bringing to the game is our usual squad RPG mechanics. Remember we've been talking about the other thing that Forex has basically done is they've absorbed
Squad RPG faster than Squad RPG could absorb 4X. You can see here you have your roster of characters. They have a star system, gear system, all the things that we've been talking about for a really long time. And the art style looks familiar. Does anyone know where

that we can also have found that art style? This art style right here
looks like white out survival.
It is almost identical. Almost identical. So right now between the both of them and corporate wants you to find the difference between these two pictures.
Yeah.
One of these things is not like the other. probably the same live ops team on both.
Well, so this started so white out survival Phil I love that you are bringing this up. They were the first to casualize the art style in Forex which led to the expansion. Then Kingshot is also extremely casual in its art style. And now you're seeing the I'll call it the dreamification of art style which is every Turkish developer is ripping off the dream style
and now you're seeing the same thing in 4X between the Chinese developers.
It's like it's like fascinating to watch the the absolute ripping off of each other.
And remember it started as a steam remember Kingshot that that core was it from an indie steam game that they kind of took that action RPG look. And right

now we're looking at the standard recruitment page. So, where you do your banner polls in tile survive and this is just a very stark picture in terms of art. If you're on YouTube, I recommend taking a look at it. I mean, it looks like K-pop survivors.
It does.
I mean, you know, look at how much pink K-pop demon
K-pop demon hunters, excuse me. And look at look at how much pink is on this page. Look at the softness of the lines.
Listen, you know what the story I'm really interested in? It's the Century Games story because how like Century Games CEO is the COO of Fun Plus and their office is former Fun Plus office. I've been there. I just realized this and I was like, what happened there? Because Century Games is now the top 4X, but it used to be Fun Plus. Anyways, I think that's an interesting
that's a case study. That's a like can can somebody slide in my DMs and tell me about that story because that sounds,
you know, fishy.
I want the case study on um how Chinese developers are put 2,000 people against

cross play, crossplatform, and then how are Chinese developers like Century Games taking over the Forex genre. These are future topics for us.
We need to go to China to figure these out.
I know somebody invite us. All right, everyone. That wraps it for today and thank you. See you next week.
Bye-bye.
Yep.
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