TWiG #369: Genie 3 Explodes, Game Stores Die, & High Guard Stumbles

You cannot culturally appropriate [laughter] the cultures that you're living in just because you're living there now. You can't assume for a moment that you have anything to do with Greek culture or traditions. Okay. Just
I'm feeling helenic every day.
I've worn Nikes since I was a little boy. Eric, [laughter]
I had a Jirro for lunch. I don't know what you're talking about.
What is the world we're living in where Eric Crest has to talk about cultural appropriation to you two? I I I absolutely love this. Hello everyone and welcome to Deconstructor of Fun. This week in games 369. I'm Jen Dano. I fold the marketing and publishing role on the podcast. Today we have
Phil Black Monetization is our first chair.
Oh, [ __ ]
Eric, strategy and investing. [gasps] Mishki Gatkov, founder whisperer and friends of VC now.
Okay. All right. So, here's where we got talk where we're talking about today. Mobile publishing isn't dead as Aries

Interactive raises glue from the dead along with a $70 million series A insert your put a genie back in the bottle lame joke here as we review the industry's defense against Google DeepMind's new immersive world model Genie 3. RIP to the UK's last game store. Oh, physical retail is dead. I'm going to answer Phil's call to talk highard marketing and pseudo defended. Actually, not exactly, but lots to talk about with that one. And then Ark Knight Enfield launches after a really strong 35 million prerege and a lot of great marketing. Ironically, some of the same marketing that happened with Highguard. So, that is coming up later today. Fallout season finale last night. Amazing. Really good.
Prestige television.
I need to see the last 15 minutes. I'm like,
what's it? What is it on? What is it on?
I got wife aggro. She can't watch that [ __ ]
Oh god. Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime. No.
Yeah. Yeah. Really, really good. You know, trans media at its finest, guys. I know you like to say it. I know. I'm just kidding. All right.
Sales up, baby.
Let's do [laughter] a touch of shilling. I'm going to be at Dice Vegas next week. If anyone wants to swing by the area lobby, Heroic Labs is going to be there. They have an event on the Tuesday. So, if you're interested, reach out. we can get you on the list for heroic labs. And then let's talk a touch about GDC. We have another packed week. Every year Mishka's like, "Let's do less." And then he shows up and is like has 10 things. The thing that I at least want to get on your radar, everyone is that we are going to continue the fourth annual GDC kickoff beta hat sponsors along with Deconstructor of Fun. While we just show up, Stan pays. So that is going to be on Sunday, March 8th. So come early to GDC. Plan ahead because we have 300 people showing up and I think the same place we did last year. Event signups to come.

All the Luma invites are coming and newsletter and but just save the date for right now.
Do you want to tease anything else?
I mean newsletter that's the thing. So everything that is coming out. So we have dinners, we have brunches, we have cycling, we have all kinds of craziness happening. We got Lanzen run happening. So let's see if people will come there but full week as I said even though we try to do less please subscribe to the newsletter just go to deconstructorf funfund.com you'll see the link all the events will be updated there and we'll also add more events that we think are cool even though we're not sponsoring we might be there so newsletter for that
cool and then Phil shooter monthly with an intro song this time halfway through this episode because I wanted to hear what you guys said about high guard before I make a fool of myself and Talk about High Guard. Good job on Shooter Monthly.
Best episode yet.
Best episode yet. I would say
Highguard discussion was riveting on the genre side. We're going to be talking more about the marketing stuff today

with you, Jen. Very curious to get your thoughts. I would say if you are listening to this podcast, imagine in your head what you think is the biggest shooter in the world by revenue and by MAU. The answer may surprise you. Find out. Shooter monthly episode 4. Crossfire. I just threw it out there. [laughter] It has to be something Chinese cuz he's teasing. So, so yeah, fully loaded episode as one might say. Another fully loaded thing that we had was sensor tower state of mobile. So, that's a 100page interactive presentation that they share every year. A lot to go through, but don't you worry, we know that all trends matter, but there's nine trends that matter a little bit more. So, we went through those with Sensor Towers Jonathan who was on the podcast to discuss that. So, take a listen or check out the blog for the full breakdown of the nine most important trends that matter to you, Mr. and Mrs. Game person. [laughter]
All right, no corrections, no one

injured in the recording of the podcast last week. Right, guys? You were perfect. Well done without me. It was good. I listened. You know, you guys always do good. I sometimes it makes me feel like I need some job security cuz it's like uhoh I when you guys up it makes me feel better when I come back. But you guys did good.
Eiffel Tower iconic. Tower of London historic. The two towers simply epic, but none of them tell you anything about mobile app intelligence. Downloads, revenue, active users, and my personal favorite, weekly cohorted retention. Get the real story. Get the real data. Get sensor tower today. Web stores, you've seen what good looks like, but have you experienced great? Appch charge is the direct to consumer platform that powers over half a billion dollars in transactions each year for top studios. They're not just another vendor. They're backed by Supercell and built by monetization veterans from Moonactive, Plague Tikica, and other industry giants who understand the difference between

merely functional and the truly exceptional. What sets them apart? deeply personalized web stores with custom design offers, industry-leading monetization features, seamless in-game payment integration, and a robust SDK. While 70% of top grossing games already have web stores, the ones scaling the fastest are doing it with AppCharge. Ready to transform good into great? Learn more at appcharge.com. Aries Interactive. Crest, why don't you take this one?
All right. Our friends at Aries Interactive CEO Mike Dot, who is an old friend from Kabam, who I've known since those days, and Nicola Damasi, who is the former glue CEO. They secured $70 million in series A funding led by General Catalyst within participation of Damasi himself. This is the headline. The company is based in Austin. They have tons of OG advisers. Matt Fischer,

Kent Wakeford was my old boss at Kabam. Chris Aavon,
he's like Tapjoy probably was the first and then he went to Glue forever and then he he opened up the door of EA and be like, "No thanks." Closed it and went to Magic Eden [laughter] that
after the acquisition,
he hasn't bounced at all. He he has a you know long stint.
Okay. Gotcha. And then I don't know who Andrew Stalbo is, but
Andrew Stalbo seriously was the puzzle company based out of Finland. They had Best Fiends as a hit. He was the coco or CEO based out of LA. So
Okay.
Yeah.
They have a bunch of studios. So I've been talking to Mike about this for a while. So this is like the first time he's ever announced it, but like they have a San Francisco studio called Seventh Inning. And then they have the Berlin Swift games that's doing Heroes and Hordes which is a game that they acquired I suppose that was out before their first game which actually should be relatively successful is the baseball hit 26 which is basically the glue uh

baseball
that EA absolutely [ __ ] annihilated right [laughter] once they acquired it. I mean it was such a total joke how EA handled that just to be clear. Um, so they're trying to pitch their idea of validating their long-term strategy about building nextgen crossplatform free-to-play gaming, you know, and all this stuff and leading blah blah stuff. The challenge here is that this is [ __ ] hard, right? [laughter] This is this is a hard business to get into. You know, they have some great people and I and they seem to have some decent teams, but the challenge is that things that markets change. You know, the Chinese are coming with insane levels of spend, insane levels of game development. you know, you need a hundred million dollar plus in order to compete on the UA front. I imagine that they're going to do UA financing with General Catalyst in order to kind of scale their games, but they're going to have to secure great teams, make amazing products, you know, and raise a ton more money to be

competitive. So, we'll see how it goes. And the other thing that's a little bit concerning for me is Nicola Damasi is a he is the chairman and CEO of ION Q, right? This is a quantum computer. want to talk about this. You're going you're going
so I don't know [ __ ] all about quantum computing. I'll be honest, but like
I don't know how involved he is with this kind of thing if he's [ __ ] the chairman CEO of [laughter] a quantum computing company. So I think
with 600 employees.
Yeah, Mike's on its own, man. Mike's on his own, dude. All right, that's me. That's it. That's all I got.
All right, so let's start with recognitions. So as a representative of the Hellenic Republic of Greece, I want to recognize the name of this company. [laughter] Well, is it Aries Entertainment? Thank you for using the the God of War as the name of your company. So, I want to talk about essentially the founding duo because that was the press release. And starting with Mike. Mike is tier one like from the start off he was the Sprint's head

of games. It's a carrier for those outside the US. Then he's EA's SVP of publishing, SVP at Kabam Licensing. He founds a publishing company called Rogue Games. after three years leaves that goes to Scopi to head essentially their partnership as an SVP. Then he moves on and becomes Mattel's head of digital gaming and now founds his second startup which is Aries. So definitely a super impressive career in publishing licensing partnerships. So pretty much like his resume it would be the perfect resume of somebody to head a publishing or a game publishing company.
Thank you LinkedIn Mishka LinkedIn like well done. Well, something that's not on LinkedIn. So, sorry Mike if I'm ousting you, but I believe you're a huge Chiefs fan
and Star Wars fan. So, that is not on LinkedIn. Little tidbit. And then he's essentially a co-founder. So, Chris, as you said, Nicole Damasi, he's the former CEO of Glue and his strategy was the

Hollywood strategy. So, they had the Kim K as a massive hit and he really doubled, tripled, quadrupled down, moved to Hollywood, started living the good life.
[laughter]
We know what happened with that strategy. He was replaced. But
there were so many stories during that time in which Nicola Damasi was out there and hanging out with like the stars while his company was kind of falling into the toilet. He's like and he's signing up and he signed up Nicki Minaj. Come on, man. Like get a get a grip, right? Like you must be knee deep in this [ __ ] if you're signing up Nicki Minaj for a game, you know? [laughter]
Uh Call of Duty was one of the bestselling skins of all time. Just need to mention that. [laughter]
Yeah. Yeah.
So, Nicola got got sucked in by the Hollywood, which is no surprise. That's a honeypot that that would suck anybody in. And he became, I think, chairman of Glue after that. And he was followed by Eric Cres's best friend, Nick Earl, who eventually led the company into the arms of EA, which was a carnage that that we

shall not talk about. But Nicolo moved on after glue and he became a CEO of uh a phone company. If you guys don't remember, they launched phone called essential. It was something which made phones that are not boring. Quote, I'm not sure what happened with that. And as you said, Chris, today he's the CEO and chairman of Ioni, a company with 600 associated members on LinkedIn and a mission to build world's best quantum computers to solve the world's most complex problems such as game publishing. So [laughter] I don't know Nicola personally and I kind of was confused why why he's part of this press release because yes he's a chairman of the board but really this is essentially Chris as you said Mike's show and Mike has yeah the perfect background for it and also what was confusing as you said like they have very esteemed group of adviserss but these adviserss are more like angel investor type of people because it has been at least half a decade since any of them has been actually in the games business. So if

you bring up playbook from five years ago, it's just not going to work in today's business. So it's kind of interesting what are they advising for. And regarding their studios, I don't know. Seventh Inning sounds like a baseball focused studio. I hope they are doing the baseball game and not the Germans out of Berlin cuz they have [laughter] no clue what baseball is. But what confuses me is that they didn't get the tap sport baseball team which became super team games after the EA acquisition. And now the talent has dispersed, but when they started this, that team was still there. They could have aqua hired them because they were making web 3 sports games. So clearly a strategy that didn't pan out. Anyway, as we see on the chart here, if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, Swift Games is actually pretty successful in Berlin European standards of a studio. It's a great lifestyle business. They started in 21. They made probably between 30 to$50 million since the

inception. 20 people working there. Fantastic lifestyle business. Didn't play the game. I saw the the shots. It wasn't like, you know, the most impressive. It's it's lifestyle. So again, with all due respect, I'm not seeing the angle here, but who am I to say that? All I'm saying is like 60 70 million is both a lot of money and not a lot of money depending what you do. So it's it's kind of like falls in that middle. They do have US execs. They have US studios. So that blows up your development costs at the same and the licences fees. I assume they're going to license baseball for the the baseball game. At the same time, they have Berlin team and I mean those guys run with Fritz Colola. It's uh it's cheap [laughter] and that brings the overall cost perhaps down. And in the end they probably have a valuation of what $350 million after this raise. That's a lot of money. And so even if they knock it out the park as you would say, they kind of have to hit

a hail mary to to you know to get this valuation and over it. But then again we have Deli Interactive. They have like four employees in Beverly Hills and they're going to ship a AAA Bond game and a FIFA game on Netflix. So, who am I to say anything? [laughter] And I'm going to end it with a positive note. I think this is amazing. I think is this is cool. I think they're going to crush it. I really really like Mike and he's more than welcomed on the podcast. So, Mike, if you're listening, you probably are. Please come and educate me on this part because this is interesting. By the way, Aries Interactive and Delelfy, both Greek names. Just saying.
Dude, can I just can I just can I just say something here for both you and Philip? Um, you cannot culturally appropriate the cultures that you're living in just because you're living there now. [laughter] You can't assume for a moment that you have anything to do with Greek culture or traditions. Okay, just
I'm feeling helenic every day.
I've worn Nikes since I was a little

boy, Eric. [laughter]
All right. My god, I love
And you were swimming today? I was swimming today and I had a Greek cap on, by the way. So, [laughter]
I had a Jirro for lunch. I don't know what you're talking about.
Imagine Crest if we would be in Italy. That would be bad.
Oh, that [laughter] would be horrible.
What is the world we're living in where Eric Crest has to talk about cultural appropriation to [laughter] you two? I I I absolutely love this. All right. Well, let's let's go on to a different kind of computing. So, this is going to be the Genie Talk. So last week, Google DeepMind dropped Genie 3, an AI world model that generates photorealistic playable 3D environments from text prompts in real time. The demo showcased users walking, driving, and flying through AI generated worlds that expand as you move. So when this came out, I mean, it really shook things. I tell you guys, my wife is doing day trading, and she was like, "Oh my god, you have to look at all of your game industry." So, Unity fell 24%. Roblox dropped 13. Take

2 lost eight. Capcom was down seven. So, it's about 47 billion in market value wiped out in a day because of this GD3 stuff. So, I wanted to do a quick recap of all the key points of like why this isn't the death of all game engines. I think the market was incredibly wrong and just really kind of shows you how our industry is just really insular and the rest of the world just doesn't understand what we do and how games are made. So, it was actually fun to see all of the game industry leaders mobilize and get the message out and everyone kind of like rowing in the same direction on something for once and not like fighting amongst ourselves. So Unity CEO Matt Bramberg basically said the Genie output is unsuitable on their own for games that require constant repeatable player experiences. He positioned Unity as a place where these AI outputs get converted into structured deterministic and fully controllable simulations. Fun fact, mine is actually trained on Unity. Tim Sweeney came out

and said world models are limited by memory. The ideal evolutionary path is basically that these things all kind of come together which I mean that was kind of my take is like this is just going to all come together and and later on when we get all the models. So Ubisoft's Yanni Diane I don't know Yanni but called out the investor overreaction noting that a 60-second demo influencing billion dollar valuations reflects financial assumptions about AI capabilities rather than the actual risk to game production. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, the world does not understand how to make games. And then finally, I think yesterday this came out in game industry.biz. Take two CEO Strauss Zelnik, his blunt self, artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. There's no such thing. So, you know, basically he goes on to say that, you know, tools are not entertainment experiences. Creators use tools to create great entertainment. Take two has hundreds of AI pilots and imple implementations but emphasize our

worlds remain handcrafted which you know I think is how all of us feel. So my kind of take on this it's an it was an amazing tech demo. It will accelerate ideiation and speed. You still have to have a human creative genius making the game experience like how does that play? How does that feel? So everyone go out and buy the dip especially take two ahead of the GTA release. Okay, this is not financial advice, but you know, maybe. Chris, I think you have another take that was really interest and I saw it on LinkedIn. I love that you're now like a LinkedIn influencer because you're semi-retired. So, are you getting us cancelled from any Google event? Tell us more.
First of all, I don't feel very retired. I had like four hours worth of calls particularly about this subject last. [laughter] Oh, it was so painful. Um, so I just wrote the piece that I didn't want to debate whether or not AI technology is going to be the future of gaming, etc., etc., etc., which is kind of part of the debate that was happening. What I was basically commenting on is the fact that

Google has absolutely no follow through when it comes to interactive projects, right? And so the notion that Google is going to create some kind of platform or, you know, complete technology to build games is absurd on the surface, right? Just because of their track record. And so I mentioned Stadia, YouTube Gaming, Google Plus Games, Daydream VR, Google Game Builder, Google Play Games, Android Instant Games, Chromebook Gaming. All these things are completely dead, right? after gajillions of dollars were spent pushing these technologies and these platforms. And so fundamentally Google lacks the organizational DNA for gaming in general and they basically fundamentally underappreciate what it costs and what kind of long-term effort and commitment is required in order to like support these type of ecosystems versus someone like even epic or obviously Roblox right which is is the exact opposite of Google

when it comes to gaming. And fundamentally the DNA is just not there for gaming at Google. They are a tech company and they're an ad tech company specifically. I do believe that some of these cloud AI technologies will disrupt like UGC platforms for sure. I mean there should be UC UGC platforms that are created out of this type of tech. Those type of platforms should be hurt, right? But again, replacing AAA games like Madden or FIFA or GTA or Elden Ring, it just seems utterly impossible because there is this huge design element to make that makes games fun that I don't know if AI is going to be able to do. They may help facilitate that, but they it's not going to be a replacement in my humble opinion. And at the end of the day, my my whole point on my piece was that, you know, Google's never going to commit beyond, you know, this huge PR cycle that they're getting out of this thing, you know, like that's just not their mo, right? They historically they just never support things long enough to actually

make it a significant platform with the exception of things like YouTube and obviously Google Play and you know Androids.
Do you think that they expected this to be as big as it was? That's the thing is like I think even they would say like dude this is a research group, right? They're just they're just building fun [ __ ] to play with, right? But I would counter that argument with the idea that this is where Stadia came from. You think Stadia was some like strategic focus of the executive branch of Google? No [ __ ] way, dude. It was some guy who said, "Hey, we can make this [ __ ] work. This is where it all comes from. It stems from these research groups that make cool tech and see, you know, what sticks and like, you know, and they're doing cool [ __ ] But you're right. I mean, I don't think that they envision it to have, you know, Unity is almost down 150% right now, you know? Like primarily on this [ __ ] right? It's crazy. I mean, not that they don't deserve it because I don't like Bramberg and Unity, but like
do you remember the launch title with

Stadia?
There was no launch title.
Yeah, there was. There was the one that we're demoing. It was at GDC maybe 2018.
You remember which one they put on the phones as the first one?
Assassin's Creed. [laughter]
Of course.
I saw all the titles.
Yeah. Don't get me started.
It was so hard. It was so hard to play
cuz Google spent gajillion dollars. That's the only way Eve can make any money, right? To pay for his siblings running the company. I I I actually was like, where is Ubisoft in today's podcast? I [laughter] It's not, but there's some fun art in our Slack channel if you want to see the Necopolis. I can't even say it, but it's a great picture.
Oh, Jesus.
All right, so Mishka, what's your
I agree with Crest. I agree with Crest. Like, it was it felt like a really uneducated move for from Wall Street, but you know, they're not known to make uneducated moves. And it was interesting that this same move was really in my

small circles were echoed by some of the prominent VCs. I had, you know, messages come in with quotes like world models are out of the bag, Unity down 30, others down 10, gaming finally woke up to AI. She says,
"Oh god, who said that?"
No, I will never reveal. Never reveal. Never shall I reveal DMs. Anyways, so all I'm saying is is both like the money was bullish whether it's early money, the VC money or the Wall Street money, they were really excited about this.
And I have to like I I read the super yusts newsletter. Very good newsletter. I very much suggest
Yoast.
Yoast, come on. It's a it's a Dutch name. We can we Greeks can pronounce however we want this.
We [laughter] we Greeks. Anyway, the the the the production like all I want to kind of agree with him is that the production is not the battle the bottleneck of gaming. It's the distribution because there's

ton of games on the market and they just don't get to the players and most players just seem to be playing the old same games live games. And the second point on UGC, what Chris you were saying is like there needs to be a platform that has AI. I know there's at least six superfunded companies making Roblox with AI tools. So that's definitely there. But my kind of thinking about this is that UGC is kind of like social media or any creator platform where a very small subset of audience actually creates and out of those creators a tiny tiny fraction creates content that people actually want to consume. And the easier you make the creation, the more creators you get, the more slop you get, the harder it will be to find a content that actually is good. And I think that will lead to a quicker death of the platform. So there's kind of like a happy medium. It's like, how do you make creation easier, but not so easy that everyone can create like 15 games instantly and

then nobody plays, everybody creates, you know, Roblox is easy, but Roblox is probably like at this point harder to use engine than Unity. And talking about challenging [laughter] it.
Yeah, let's let's be honest. It is harder that these creators are better off using Unity. There, I said it. Anyways, so Roblox with their $100 million DAU scale or 150 million DAU scale, they have a tiny fraction that actually monetizes. And I think it was like top, thousand developers out of 25,000 capture what 90% of all the revenue. And then if you look at social media like LinkedIn, which is our favorite or Eric's favorite media where he's influencing, they have 1 billion members, 3 million weekly posters. And out of those, only one to 200 are the ones that garner like that big accelerated audiences. So very very small fractions that can do it. And hence I'm bringing back to a point is like I don't think these creator tools

will have such a massive impact. I think they will definitely make game production cheaper, which is good, faster, cheaper, more effective, but I doubt that that they will replace UGC platforms or engines that exist. Go ahead.
I want to reiterate one point is that we don't need more of the same content that's out there. We have enough of this content. We need like solutions for distribution and we need new content. That's what we really need. And we need new content that appeals to a broader audience. We need creators with these tools to create compelling content that expands the demographic expands the types of content that's interactive content that's consuming like going out on existing like mobile and console right now with the same content just made by AI. That's not going to solve the fundamental problem with gaming as we have it right now. So again, we don't need another Grand Theft Auto. We have Grand Theft Auto or Fortnite. We already

have a Fortnite, right? or or Cosmic Lounge that makes puzzle games with AI that [laughter] we still haven't seen. I just want to like where is that game?
Yeah. I mean, look, we need tools to create something new, right? New platforms that have AI that make something super super interesting and new and that I'm 100% supportive of that. But if you know, Google is just coming out with tools that create the same kind of [ __ ] like we don't need that, you know? Just don't.
That is the right take, Eric. That is the right take. The take here is not what the is Google doing. No one cares what Google is doing. To your point, they're irrelevant. The thing that's interesting is where this technology is, regardless of whether or not it comes from Google or somewhere else, right? So, we know Tencent has Game Gen X. They've been working on things like this. And so, if Google is this far along, that means Tencent is probably very close to them. And that's all the issues that Mish were talking about in terms of distribution. Tencent has that. They are a game maker. They understand these things. And there's another dark horse that no one wants to talk about, which is XAI and Elon Musk. And you know, I know your favorite person is

Benedict Evans. You know, I I had to listen through that slander you had against Mr. Mr. Evans a couple podcasts ago, but Evans said Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. And I think we should be very mindful of what Elon Musk is cooking when it comes to games. But everyone's trying to predict will it replace, will it not replace things? I I think that's completely irrelevant. The point is is this useful and can we imagine a useful application for this? And of course we can of course we can imagine a useful application for making an entire generative world. I mean this is like Ubisoft's entire P&L, right? So everyone keeps trying to predict the future which everyone is very bad at. And so to your point, Eric, what happens when someone with a creative mindset knows how to take these tools as they are right now and apply game design on top of them? What comes out of that? And maybe it's expanding the demo. I don't know. Maybe it's creating new experiences that deepen engagement. whatever it may be. Exactly to your point, right? Your thesis is that new platforms are new opportunities and this is a new platform. Maybe it's not generative AI, maybe it's code. I mean, it can be injected. There's so many

places this can be injected into the pipeline.
The reason I'm picking on Google is because if you think Google is going to build that platform, you are [ __ ] mistaken. Like, they will not do it. They will not support it.
And you need that kind of investment and that kind of like followthrough in order to build that platform. So, you've seen what happened with Meta, right? They spent a gajillion dollars on something that was clearly not going to work cuz Matthew Ball doesn't have any idea what he's talking about, right? And then you saw that go up.
No, no one built this into Google share price, though.
I'm going to see our way a little bit into AI tools and and HD devs. I was just today, this is kind of relevant, kind of isn't, but I was today on a call with a with a friend artist Shelby Unnamed, and he's organizing a thing during GDC for art directors and lead artists, mainly from HD side of gaming. And they had a sponsor drop out. And so I was suggesting him couple of sponsors that could be really good and they're all on the AI side, so you know,

scenarios and layers and whatnot. And I heard from him is that he's like, "Yeah, yeah, of course." like this person is outside the US. He said, "Yes, we all use that and Europeans use it and Asians use it, all the AIs." But he said that if he would put an AI sponsor, and they apparently had one last year for this dinner, even if the representatives of the sponsors wouldn't come and they would just sponsor the dinner, the American [laughter] artists, the art directors would not attend. So that's how against AI tools they are. And it was kind of interesting to see these news and talking about adaptation and they kind of left the human side out of it which what I'm hearing is especially in the HD side where these world models are intended how against AI tooling some folks are and more about world tools by the way general intuitions pimit was on the podcast episode 310. Check that one out.
Cool. Well, just to wrap it up, I want to go back to what Crush was saying about, you know, combining these things and who can make the platform. And I

think some of these people exist today. And I think it's going to be the great Voltron of things coming together. When you've got a Unity or an Unreal or a Roblox and you start to, you know, pair up these different tools together, now you get full stack, you know, with Unity. Now you have the ability to do even user acquisition. Remember that the other great benefit of AI in the world is on, you know, the growth side, on the user acquisition side. So imagine you bring all these tools together into some of these engines. I think that's where the future is is some of those platforms and there's not many of those engines out there. I mean, you've got basically Tim versus Matt building out Unity and Unreal and that type of stuff. All right. So, let's go from like the future of gaming to the history of gaming. [laughter]
Yeah. No, no. I I just put this in there. I just put this in there as like kind of the end of days, right? Like of the old school like retailer. Okay. And

for all the old guys out there, going to GameStop was like such an amazing experience. And game was like the really the only gaming only type uh stores in the UK. So UK ret R ret R ret R ret R ret R ret R ret R ret R ret R ret R retailer game is shuttering the last remaining standalone stores. They still have like 200 like concussion stores I think within different retail outlets but the standalone store is done just gone. And at its peak they had 600 stores around UK which is obviously a very small country but now they have zero. Now CEX is now the UK largest physical gaming stores. They have 390 UK stores and 600 worldwide. But game as a store is now over. End of an era.
Oh,
now GameStop in San Franc in the US had 7,500 stores at its peak and now they're sitting at after the 2026 closures, they

are s going to be sitting at 1,600. Once digital started taking off, I mean it was clear that the game was over for all these companies because their primary means of of profitability was used games and with digital there were no more used games trading. So that kind of eliminated most of their profitability. So that's it. That's all I wanted to say was it is end of an era.
Well, maybe they should have become a crypto bank like GameStop. Wait,
Bitcoin is now in the [ __ ] I think it's in the 70s, which you know, I'm very sad. My crypto account is very sad for this. So maybe they dodged a bullet by not doing that strategy, but RIP game.
Not the biggest worry of UK. My since I've been doing these jokes, my Instagram feed is so antiUK. Like I get these daylight burglary videos and phone snatching. Like my picture of UK is horrendous, which is not true. I know that this is social media distorted, but

now that I'm going to UK end of this month for a week, it's it's really weird to see every day on Instagram like daylight robbing and guys running with machetes. So, anyways, I have a very distorted picture of this fine island. 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 Clouds. 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 her today at heroiclabs.com.
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 Apps Flyier and are a key partner in their success. Appslier, where your app's potential meets performance.
All right, let's go on to a new game. Ark Knight Enfield. Phil,
very excited to talk about this. Very, very excited to talk about this. But before we talk about Ark Knight Enfield, we have to talk about Ark Knights. And if you are listening to this podcast and you make a Squad RPG, you need to have played Ark Knights. And I'll talk about why in a moment, but just to go through

the numbers for Ark Knights. This is a billion dollar game, $1 billion. It launched in 2019. And right now, we're looking at the cumulative revenue for the game. And you'll notice something about its shape. and it's marched towards over a billion dollars in gross revenue. It's almost linear. It is not bowing in. And so when we compare Ark Knight's current revenue against some other squad RPGs, let's say Hawkeye Star Rail, Genchin Impact, Marvel Strikeforce, Solo Leveling Arise, very weird pool of topas. You will notice that Ark Knights is outgrowing most of them. Ark Knights in this month in November 2025 at least outgrowed Genchin Impact. A game that was released in 2019 is outgrossing Genchin Impact. This crazy hoyoverse bajillion dollar game is being outgrossed by Ark Knights. And so it has had just like this incredible incredible run. And there's a lot of things we could point to for what makes Ark Knights really special. So one of them is that it has a huge narrative focus. It has a ton of backstory for the

characters. There's an animated series, comic anthology, merchandise. Like when we go back and talk about Craft and if you remember, they purchased that Japanese anime company, publishing anime company almost. The company that should have purchased it is the Ark Knights publisher because there actually is some really good merchandising opportunity outside of the core gameplay. They've already always focused on that. The core gameplay itself is also remarkably interesting. If you remember, Ark Knights is a tower defense game where you set up your characters in various ways and they thwart oncoming waves of enemies. The meta is really deep. It's not just power scaling. There's a lot of horizontal progression in this game. But the thing that really makes this game stand out, the thing that I think is most important for people that are making Squad RPGs to study is its base building system. All right. So, they actually have a factory system inside of the game where you set up these rooms, kind of similar to Fallout Shelter if you've played that. And each of the

rooms produces certain parts or certain materials that can be refined by other rooms. And so, we're looking at different ways you can set up your room. You can customize how your factory is positioned and organized. And of course, what you do in each of these rooms is you staff your characters. So, right now, we're looking at Mishka's favorite room. This is human resources. Uh, and you can staff your characters inside human resources that give it various stats. And so
I've never never been in a human resource room. [laughter] Never in my life.
Very engaging.
Never in my life have I've seen these rooms. [laughter]
So part of the game is solving these like really fantastical tower defense puzzles and they are puzzles rather than just straight power scaling. Part of it is thinking about these factories and part of it is getting really engaged in the narrative. And the execution is, I would say, just been at a really high level for a really long time. I think that's one of the reasons we see this straight line for Arc Knights. Nay, by the way, also has been fairing fairly well for Squad RPG, but I think this one stands out in

particular for just its remarkable stability, which is something all squad RPGs suffer with. Okay, so that's Ark Knights. Very interesting. Have to study it. So, where does that leave us for Enfield? So, Enfield, where are the numbers right now? So, right now we're looking at category rankings. I think it's a little bit early for some nominal numbers, but category rankings in Japan and the United States for Enfield. Enfield is absolutely slaying in Japan. It's been number one on the most downloaded charts. Congratulations to them. It's falling off on the United States. So, it looks like they're pulling back on some of the UA. When we look at the category rankings, we see that it's still number one in games. It's pulling down or excuse me, it's it's pulling down overall. It's pulling down in role playing. It's pulling down in games a little bit. So, they're still they still got some UA push, but it is kind of that that pre-registration we were talking about. What is it? 35 million gen starting to wear off a little bit.
Yep. This is what we'd expect. You kind of get a burst out of it. So, then the question is like, okay, well, what what is Enfield? What is this game?
How are they going to how are they going to go and top what they've done with Ark Knights. So, I would argue that the

thesis of this game is to really go after what we've been seeing with like 3D RPGs. So, I think that's something Hoyover has been big on. Weathering waves, Soloving Arise we were just talking about like these there there's a cyberpunk one that that Tencent made. And so the idea here is like let's shove a [ __ ] ton of money into a 3D world and see if we can't get console players. Can we make a play that's crossplatform? And Enfield, by the way, is crossplatform. You can play on PlayStation. You can play it on PC. But what they're doing is they're adding all of those elements that I think made Ark Knight successful. So there is base building in this 3D world. You're setting up your factory. Right now, we're looking at a screenshot after 4 hours of Phil playing tutorials of you setting up your factory in this 3D world. It's much more complicated to do it in a 3D world. You also are setting up zip lines to go between all of the different spaces. It is it is something it is a remarkable game. You still have multiple characters, but unlike Genchin Impact, if you remember in Genchin Impact, the way they solved the meta collection problem is that you're hot swapping between your different

character rosters. Here you have AI controlled alternative characters. So again, you can still field multiple characters. You're still upgrading multiple characters, still stinking into them. They also spend more time on weapons. Remember, that's really important to expand your meta collection matricy. So they refine weapons quite a bit. And the thing that I think they do that's very smart is that it's not an open world game. The geographical space on which you're operating is much smaller. And I think this helps keep cost under control. This is not the mainline studio that Ark Knights de developed. This is this is a spin-off studio from. This is almost like a side project. And so my my suspicion is that they've kept the budget for this game in a more reasonable place than Hoyoverse, which just kind of yolos it and like throws money around like no other. And so I have really good things to say about this game. I think it's off to a strong start. I think it'll replicate the formula of Ark Knights potentially in 3D RPG, which I think we can just say is a new catery category at this point. And I'm curious to see how the crossplatform plays out. But I have good things to say. And I think again, if you're in an RPG, particularly in a 3D RPG, you need to be playing this game.

The mechanics are fresh and interesting. This is just is another power scoring game.
Phil, can we do this with Marvel? That's my only question.
Well, I mean, we we there there were attempts at this. Remember, there was a 3D MMO Marvel game on mobile. There's been so many Marvel games that have died. Remember, there was a lot of autoplay. You were autogoing to the next location. There was Net Marble's attempt at this, which is still going Future Fight. I I would love to imagine we can, but the mechanics in Eastern RPGs are just so different than a Western audience. I I I I'm not convinced yet. I'm not convinced we get the factory model.
Can this be the Avengers hall like the one that you're building?
Look at I'd love to see someone take a shot at it. So far, Crystal Dynamics has not has not given me hope.
Okay. All right. All right. All right. Sorry. Sorry if I have to be the [ __ ] here. I mean, I know I play that I play that role on this podcast, but like,
dude, this game is already dying on the vine. Like, there's no market for this. Even in China, this thing is falling. and Japan where it's like 60% of the

revenue is in China and Japan, right?
Did Did you pull us to another Enzo here? [laughter]
I I I I think I would agree that once we're we've been through the pre-registration burst and let's see how they continue to live ops it. But remember, Ark Knights was slow and steady wins the race. Maybe that's the case here.
I don't know, man. Downloads are are next to nothing now and revenue is declining. This is seems like a unsuccessful launch. Give it some time. Give it some time to get its first banners out. Give it some time to start to build up its customer base.
I don't know. It's a little similar to the story we'll talk about on Highguard, which you know the the the similarity. I just pulled some of the marketing activities. So, they also had a launch trailer for the Game Awards that was at the Game Awards. It was kind of like a music hybrid with One Republic. So, it was game footage with the band playing very like 2019. It was pretty funny. They also ran uh the Hypergri, is that the name of the company? They ran a global event tour through all throughout

last year for like Pre-Regge, Anime Expo, Japan Expo, Gamescom, and an Apple event uh where they showed off footage. And then they did this live stream on January 16th and they dropped a couple of trailers again, one with another band called and the song was called We Are Empire. And so that was, you know, music over gameplay footage. So, they went really, really big on the pre-launch and the la. They did all the right things, but to Cres's point, it looks like you can't market your way out of a bad game and a game that doesn't hit with what the player wants. So, marketing did its job, but it doesn't look like it's sticking. I I would say right now we're looking at PlayStation DAU numbers and it's hovering around 250,000. That doesn't look like a massive decrease to me. That looks perfectly fine. That doesn't look like it's falling off a cliff. I think remember you got to remember it's it's crossplatform. There's two angles to look at on both both platforms. And 3D RPGs tend to have a great PC steam a it's not it's not on Steam yet. It's just on PlayStation.

Okay. Well, yeah, we'll keep an eye on it.
You're a doubter on this one, Eric. You're a doubter.
Oh, I mean, no. I mean, we've seen this this story time and time again. Like, I was like a huge fan of Lineage 2 on mobile, and that game was absolutely amazing. The depth and the quality and the I mean, it had everything. It's just that no one wants to play these games in the west, right? It's the Japanese Korean.
Well, I mean, plenty of plenty of people want to play Genchin Impact. I mean, that impact on the United States was enormous.
No, 100%. And Genchin, they're all everyone's trying to chase that that rainbow of Genchin, but Genchin's also, you more of a collection mechanic type thing as as well as compared to like having an individual character uh progression. So,
so, so I agree with you. No one wants to play 3D RPGs in the west because they're primarily are focused on mobile and the western audiences don't do highquality 3D experiences on mobile. I think that's true which is why I think for the west the PC skew when it comes out and the

PlayStation skew and maybe the Xbox SK are the most important because that's what at least the West will play.
What about this theory? you know, are we past these types of deep interactive immersive experiences that really demand all your time because we live in a world of add gamers who squirrel to the squirrel squirrel squirrel to the next game and is, you know, you look at Roblox, you look at the play pattern of younger players, how, you know, they just dabble in things and move on really quickly. Is this type of gaming experience now a dinosaur? Are we moving past it?
I don't know. It's on EP. It's on Epic Game Store, Eric. So, [laughter]
that's why
I don't know if I agree with with with that thesis. Yeah, [clears throat] because like even on Roblox there there are games that have held audiences for six, seven years. So yes, there are games that pop and drop, but to my understanding, Roblox is more focusing on games that have longevity. And these sort of a games like, you know, Brain Rot and others are not actually quite
I guess my point is, okay, maybe that

comparison on the fly wasn't the best comparison, but Phil, you made the joke that you were four hours in and you were like putting a base on a map, like the most basic thing that you would do in a mobile game the first like two minutes of playing. Is it that, you know, the eastern openw world RPG games are just not even applying as much to the eastern audience anymore? And it's definitely not hitting the west. Who doesn't want to invest that amount of time? Short form video content is dominating. People don't have the attention span to make it past a 30-se secondond video anymore.
I would argue just the opposite. I would say when you look at mobile game surveys and what mobile gaming is, it's about and even when we think about our own mobile play patterns, mobile has been about plugging the voids in your life. So when do you whip out your phone and play mobile games? Waiting for a train, waiting in an elevator on an airplane. Remember those royal kingdom ads? Everyone, no Wi-Fi needed. It was about filling the dead space in your life. And now mobile is becoming the first best console for a lot of people and they're

starting to play mobile at home, right? And so I think that changes the type of sessions that you can have. And again, I would argue at the margin, so at a constant level, it's not super high now, but at the margin, I would argue that long session opportunities are increasing even in the west because we're using mobile in a different way.
No. No. Okay. So, I would if you were talking about Japan, Korea, and China, I would 100% agree with you. I think that's that is the fundamental difference between the West and the East is that they do have long session times. They don't have a lot of alternatives. They don't have consoles, right?
PC. Yeah. They go to PC.
They don't have access to PCs as much. Well, we're talking about China here. Japan, Japan and South Korea in their own categories.
True. True. But their cultures are more conducive to long longer form mobile experiences. In the west, I just don't think people consume content that way on mobile devices.
Sensor tower state of mobile actually opened up that there's two type of sessions to focus on like one is those ultra short that Jenny were mentioning and the second one is designing for ultra long sessions and that's where

people are going. But the sort of like falling in the middle would be the most risky session length.
Yes, there sessions have gotten longer likely even in the west. But this is like super super long, super engaged. This is like old school when people used to play Final Fantasy for a 100 hours. Do we really think that those kinds of games are still viable when there's so many choices and so much stuff coming out there? Like I I I I don't know. Like that's the the reason you're saying what you should do.
I I think I I think I understand what you're saying because the games that have those long sessions, there are sort of a long sessions that are multiple shorter sessions back to back. Like you know how you'd be in YouTube and you watch one, you watch the next one, a third one. It's like 35 minutes. I could have watched a YouTube a Netflix show but where your initial intent was to you know kill a couple of minutes. I don't know how this game structure it sessions. If it does structure it in a way that in order to get your first thing done, you have to put in like 90 minutes. But if it's like bite-size and

it gets you up to four hours and and you're feeling that progress, it works. But Phil, how how is the session structured?
Anything else? All right, Phil, do you want to take us through Highguard?
Yeah, there was a fascinating piece that was published by a website called Aftermath. And normally, I think like online writing I read about games is generally pretty much slop, but this one this one was fantastic. And the argument here is that an online ecosystem ruled by cynics, clip farmers, and rage baiters, Highguard never stood had a chance of having a normal launch. And one of the developers of Highguard told Koutaku because the key moment is that they go out and they have the trailer for Highgard at the end of the video game awards and then there's silence. And the developer says, "We stayed silent because we knew that the first time that we had anything to the audience, it would be better if it was the game and let the game speak for itself." And the piece basically argues that in this communication void, conspiracy theories by YouTubers start to appear. There was a variety of

YouTube clips that were used in the article we're looking at them right now about how YouTubers basically took this narrative and said things or created videos like shills run damage control for high guard says we're being too mean as game gets wrecked and ratioed. Just kind of the worst [laughter] the worst the worst of YouTube culture. And one of the things the aftermath piece argued is that the rough outline of the situation was similar to conquered, right? And this is what a lot of YouTubers started to compare it towards is that it was conquered. And then conspiracy theories started to pop up about why this game was on the video game insights
award and and trailer at all. Right? So there was there was a guy who tweeted whether or not Mr. Nightly actually had a financial backing.
Key actually had a financial backing in the game. And so what I'm very curious to hear, Jen, from you is what is your approach to a game like this? Right. So they they How would you approach this as a brand marketer? How did they [ __ ] up? Did they get anything right? This feels like a brand marketing case study about how to do things wrong, how to do things

I'm just very curious. I think there's a lot to learn here.
Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And that article was really great. I thought they hit a bunch of it. You guys hit a bunch of it on the podcast. So let me just try to summarize a little bit. And also, this is important to know that on launch day, they peaked at 97,000 concurrent players on Steam. Four days later, it's down 96% to 4,000 players. The Steam reviews, as you know, are mostly negative at launch. Now, it's a bit more mixed at 40%. And check me on this, it was 3v3, but they're moving to 5v5 because of player feedback. Okay. So, they're showing a little bit of, you know, answering the players and some stabilization, which they would have known if they didn't do this strategy, which is 2019 called and wants their strategy back. All right. So, Jesus,
here here's what happened. Their original plan was to pull Apex because they are all respond Apex people. They're like, "Let's do that again because that's what we did." Except they

actually didn't do that correctly or in the same way. So, they were gonna just completely shadow drop it and just do a surprise launch. And then Jeff Keley, he played it. He loved it. He's just a fan and he's like, "Hey, I'm going to give you the final slot for free. They didn't pay for it." So, if I'm them, I, you know, it's really hard to say no to that. However, with a stellar trailer, I would still have said, "Hey, can I not have that last spot where, you know, for me personally, I was in the audience for this. My fanboys that I was with were like they thought it was gonna be Halfife 3. They're like, "Oh, it's gonna be Halfife." And
of course they did. Of course they did.
You cannot put that type of thing at the very end. If that was the most stellar trailer of all time, it's still the wrong place because of the expectations that people had for that spot. The one more thing. However,
they should have known that their trailer wasn't that great and then I

would have just pulled it. I would have said, "Thank you so much. We're just not going to do it. We, you know, we're going to stick to our current strategy, which is also failed strategy." But so they should have pulled it because the trailer I mean I was there was an audible gasp in the audience of like what the [ __ ] what what did I that was was that cool cuz I'm not sure there's a mount and and no one knew in a sense what it was cuz of this new genre that they're trying to create which is this you know raid shooter or the raid shooter MOA hybrid. So the trailer itself you know just had a lot of of challenges to it. People were confused, didn't have a cohesive positioning. In marketing, we have something called USPS, unique selling points. So old school, remember the back of the P package, you get all the bullet points. Those are unique selling points. So a game is not a list of, you know, unique selling points. So my my quote is a list of USPs a game does not make. If I were
like, they would say, what's the X statement of this game?
Well, at EA, EA actually created the X.

What's the X of the game? What's the core kind of fantasy and positioning?
Give me the oneliner. I'm an executive. I can't listen to a goddamn pitch. I don't need one line.
I know. And in this game, it was a bunch of really innovative and unique ideas like thrown together that didn't have this cohesive kind of like X or positioning to it. The CEO actually came out and said, "We didn't do a great job with the trailer." So, I mean, they at least they acknowledge it. But, you know, at that point, the cat was out of the bag and you can't put the [ __ ] back in the cat. So, sadly, what had happened is after they did that and then they went silent again is, you know, that that was like the worst strategy you could have to fill to your point about like everyone's going to fill the void. So, as as Adam says, as I say, early access is now your new launch. And it could be early access, it could be your first trailer, it doesn't matter. Anytime you start to talk about the game, you can't go away. It is now a

commitment that you have with your community to have an ongoing relationship and bring them in and tell the story of the game up until the launch. So, it was like the most horrific thing that they could possibly have done. And it did work in 2019. By the way, the only reason that Apex actually worked in 2019 is that they had lined up, remember Ninja and all of these streamers, they paid Ninja a million dollars to stream the game on day one. So, what happened is on day one, Twitch completely flipped with all of the top FPS streamers playing Apex. That was the strategy, not it was a surprise. I need people to be like super super clear that that is what happened. So I I think that we cannot repeat tactics that are now six, seven years old and think they're going to work again. We also have this whole trend of the short form shiters who just want to go out and have a viral comment and it's

easier to [ __ ] on something than it is to talk great about something. So when you when you've got, you know, this kind of doubt and this disastrous day one, the community is like, "This is great. I'm going to go get views on my account by [ __ ] on this. So, the thing that they didn't do was build community. They didn't bring in the the haters to try to change things. This is why you do closed betas. This is why your go to market is one of the most important things that you can do. Look at what Battlefield 6 did. Like, again, huge kudos to how they meticulously went through each of the stages. Let me tell you about multiplayer. Let me tell you about single player. Let me tell you about destructible environments meticulously, you know, absolutely done. The one defense of marketing is that almost 100,000 players showed up on day one. Marketing got them eyeballs. The problem was the servers crashed, performance issues, three felt too small, bugs and

tutorials. So, I I actually went and pulled VGI data that we're looking at right now. I just wanted to get a sense for this versus the competitive set. And so I pulled max daily concurrent players for Highguard, Arc Raiders, Apex, The Finals, and Marvel Rivals. All are free to play obviously except Arc Raiders. The huge irony, they had almost the exact same max CCU as Apex at launch. Apex was also around 100,000, but that was also 7 years ago. Finals was 2x. They had like 200,000 when they launched. Arc was two and a half
and had a lot of betas to your point, Jen, which radically pivoted the game. Yeah, absolutely. Marvel Rivals, remember that one? Like we were all like a little bit wrong on that one. That was that was 4.5x more. So the the key sign that a game is, you know, a game fail versus a marketing fail is this dramatic dip in t in day two max ECU unlike any of the other games. So my summary is uh

you can't blame marketing for this one. Exactly. Although it did not help. It absolutely [ __ ] up and didn't help. You got to have long community building, transparent go to market. You just have to do things differently in this day and age. And this also goes to show you everyone marketing assets are crucial. If you do shitty assets, you will get shitty outcomes. So please make sure that you are still investing in your marketing teams giving them good ass even test it. You need to even go out to your community and get feedback before you in a sense go broadly. Phil, did I answer your call? Was that I did a lot of work for you? My
No, no. I I I think I think the thing that really struck me about what they should have done that you mentioned is that now that they were in the [ __ ] storm they were after the trailer, they should have gone out and done dev diaries about each of the features like you just suggested, like putting a name to a face and explaining the USPs. Again, the worst thing they could have done is exactly what they did, which was silence. That is the vacuum. And there's

this social media hive mind and once it aligns on an agenda, it's very dangerous. And so, how do you start to influence that agenda? And to your point, community building, Discord, all of these things, hiring streamers, like in many ways, you're you're you're battling for the hearts and minds of the the social media apparatus before the game has even launched and before they can align around some sort of negative POV.
It's low and slow. Just like how you cook, you know, a really good pot roast. You have to go out with smaller communities. You start to get feedback. you start to grow, let more people in. You know, look at what Deadlock is doing. And you know, Deadlock had the whole you can't get in unless your friend gives you a key to get you in. And so they had early on they've been really minimizing the amount of people that could play the game, could talk about the game. They're taking feedback. It's it's completely underground so that eventually in three years whenever that thing does actually launch, it'll be, you know, a completely different situation. So, you know, and it kind of goes back to even like Aries and Glue

that we're talking about is, you know, we dinosaurs need to evolve with how the world is evolving. I mean, there's even a freaking social media for AI bots. Mol malt book is out, right? Like the world is changing faster than anything we could possibly imagine. We cannot go back to old playbooks and just repeat them. Rinse and repeat doesn't work anymore. and see
it's it's nice how they dug up Concord like the day one they're just like hey [laughter] let's
talk about Concord
it's the [ __ ] right like it's the everyone loves to jump on a bandwagon I think arc raiders had a good bandwagon right and the reason why arc raiders work by the way is everything that they learned on the finals everything they learned on the finals helped them to make sure that when Ark came out they knew how to do it correctly they brought the community along And everyone was like, "Wow, this is actually really fun. This is giving me something different." And it's an accessible extraction

shooter that has, well, if I want to play PvE, it segments me that way. If I want to play PvP, it segments me that way. It's got really easy to gro like, this is why I want to engage in this game. With Highguard, it's like, oo, which of the 10 different things is appealing to me? Do I want to play like capture the flag? Do I want to be in an openw world thing? I don't know. It's too much.
So that is my ill ill lightly informed marketing take. Mr. Black
Black is showing the signal. He wants to he wants to call it.
Oh. All right. Fine. I mean you asked for work. I did work. All right.
Approved. [laughter]
All right everyone, thanks for listening and we will see you next week.
Sign up to the newsletter to get invited to our events during GDGC. Bye. You did it. You made it to the [music] 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. [music] More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fun Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games [music] industry experience, go to deconstructorofund.com/slack and apply [music] 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 [music] from the Deconstructor of Fun content creators. Thanks for listening.