TWIG #396: AppLovin's Q2, Unity's Supersonic Fire Sale and GTA VI's Netflix Trailer Drama

Hello everyone and welcome to Deconstructor of Fun. This week in game 396, I'm Jen Dano. I play the marketing and publishing role in the podcast. Today we have
Phil Black. No [laughter]
Phil Bill Phil's in for share on the list.
Dude, you hesitated, man.
I know. It was a It was a moment of silence and I was like, can I be the first for once? And no, I I lost it. Nope.
Miss Kov, here in flesh in Finland.
Back in Finland where it's plus 16 apparently. The only country to ever say plus in a
correct. I'm I'm on the wall. I'm on the wall. The wildlings are on the other side. So things are good.
We had a lot of House of the Dragon talk before we recorded. Apologies everyone. All right. And special guest star
Josh Chandley, resident growth operator. Awesome. Here's what we have on the

podcast today. Mishka will attempt to talk about Voodoo Castle's Crusher. Nope. We're I can absolutely guarantee you we're not going to get there because we are going to do Apploving uh their earnings explained as well as their stock hit. We're going to go into Unity selling Supersonic Take earnings and what's going on with mobile and that weird Netflix Grand Theft Auto announcement. Blizzard is absolutely crushing it and maybe Crush should apologize to its president. He's not here. He's on jury duty.
This is a disaster. Absolute disaster.
Sorry, but you know, we'll we'll figure that out. Uh Ubisoft Barcelona has some moves and lots of game stuff. I think Phil, you put in a lot of great game updates that we will get to. What else uh Mishka do you have?
Well, I think this is going to be a first episode in a long time that has a PG rating removed because Crest is not here. So there's not going to be ton of fbomb thread. By the way, I feel I see in shorts, we're going to get shadowbanned soon, [laughter] but uh but hopefully he's having a nice

day in in the court.
A BUCK 50 A DOWNLOAD. A BUCK 50 A DOWNLOAD. WHY are you
any movies you've seen lately? Did you see the Spider-Man 2?
Oh my god. So I finally did. Uh I had to drag my wife. I had to put a lot of chips in the karma bank with her because she didn't want to see it. It was really good. More importantly for the world of franchise management, Marvel Spider-Man 2 makes 11 million in 2 weeks was about 316,000 units on the PS5 and Steam. I think this is from Alenia Analytics that they announced this. So all of this going alongside probably the biggest movie of the year and I think it's on track to do some crazy numbers. I think it's like 1.6 billion that it's earned right now. So I think Elenia has said one of the clearest trans media halo effects we've ever measured. So, Phil, you want to yell at me?
Oh, I can't I can't let that go. I can't I cannot I cannot I cannot let this go. This is [laughter] this is fresh fresh meat. You're telling me $11 million in

two weeks for the biggest [ __ ] opening of all time? Or I think it was just a little bit behind the Avengers. I forget how how that got diced up.
The game was like from four years ago. Can you even find the damn thing?
Sure. But I'm just saying if the clearest trans media halo effect is $11 million, that is paper thin trans media effect.
Paperier-mâché crown.
Okay.
Um I I think it's a nice bonus.
Spider-Man so big, Jen. Like you study these you always know. No, like why is Spider-Man number one?
Cuz he's a working class hero.
He's relatable.
Batman is a [ __ ] billionaire.
Superman is from space. Mhm.
Wonder Woman is an Amazonian warrior.
Mhm.
All of these people are weirdos and Peter Parker is just a dude who takes pictures and tries to deliver pizzas and behind on Ren all the time.
That's the whole point of his character character.
I love it.
He's a man of the people.
What about the Odyssey?
We went to see Adisa is a man of the

people. I was like really expecting this movie and I am the target audience like plus 40 European [laughter] male like come on I've listened to all the podcasts like the rest of history where they did like hours upon hours and Iliad notices Adisia it was definitely entertaining but I'll give it like seven out of 10. Maybe the problem was that I knew the stories and the way Nolan depicted was different. And so that kind of let me like, oh, I know what like in every scene I had to be like, this is not how it went down. Well, this is not quite how it went down. Nope, that wasn't it. So that was my problem. I was too studied to enjoy the movie.
Too studied on the fiction that is the Odyssey to
Yeah, I helped myself too much with all the podcast. So I was just there seeing the differences, but it was an entertaining movie. They do have to like I don't know if they do it in US. Do you have breaks? Because here in Finland where we went to see it was like three hours straight. I wanted to piss myself

for two hours straight probably [laughter] just holding it back. Like that was my idea.
Part of the journey man. [laughter]
I'm going to drown the odyssey.
Yeah. How you going to get home, man?
It was a painful experience. I felt like two hours of it.
Yeah. No, it's the same thing here. I haven't seen it yet, but um I hear it's like 3:30 cuz they run all the previews, but
I don't know. I've got to try to get into a 70 70 mm IMAX place to see it.
Um looks cool. All right, let's keep going. So Josh and I along with Cres and Laura were at our Deconstructor of Fund Seattle roundt event and we had between like 80 and 100 people come. It was really fun. So we were at Amazon AWS headquarters in downtown Seattle. Absolutely gorgeous. Beautiful. Thank god we ran an event in August in Seattle. I couldn't have been in a better place. Really, really fun to have everyone there. The Seattle people was so funny, Josh. I think you you would know this. They were like, I can't believe you got this many people from

Seattle to show up to an event and it was downtown. It was It was pretty interesting. So, we had a live
Seattle people don't don't like to go out.
We're antisocial and we're fragmented. There's not that much mobile anymore for instance. So just like all the conferences have died.
Seattle freeze. Seattle freeze is a thing.
It is
maybe
it is they all give you
of Frraasier Mishka. That'll [laughter] train you.
I've seen Frraasier for sure. I've been to Seattle. I you know I just curious interesting because it's not that big of a city like it's not Istanbul where it's like hard to move around.
Stockholm size. Really?
Yeah. that big, but you've got Wizards of the Coast, you've got Xbox, you've got Bungie,
Nintendo, there's a lot of EA people there. I mean, we had a ton of people uh are they still
corpse of popc

heard rumors?
You can actually do a freetoplay mobile ghost tour in downtown Seattle.
Yeah, I don't think Valve people are allowed to leave the [laughter] house.
Wargaming Cells. Do you guys remember that, too?
Ah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Let's get it. Real old school.
Oh. Uh, Paradise Bay. You remember that?
That's true. That's true. Uh, T, what's it? Is this That's 2K something. T2K.
Oh my god, I've lost all
T2. Z2 Z2.
Anyway, live.
All right. All right. That's
In any event, um, we had a lot of fun. So, during the whole presentation, we do like a little bit of a roundup of questions. One of the things that was pretty funny coming out of it is we we asked a question of like what game should we be playing and then someone in the audience said a game called I love you Colonel Sanders a fingerlicking good dating simulator. So Phil immediately I thought of you with all the love and deep space comments that you have. This game looked pretty funny. It's actually been on Steam and it's been out since 2019 and then we figured out it's

actually a brand play. So it was pretty was pretty funny to see this. Go brands. Be edgy.
We had a couple questions going back into some of the other slides that we had. What is the state of the game industry versus last year? We had a chart that was like on the bad end it was like shite. On the good end it was Yeah, people are kind of what was it 75% on the I don't know the state of the industry isn't that great. And then we asked another question by the end of 2027.
This must be Crest question. He hates Roblox. [laughter] Well, we we talked about Roblox in one of the segments we did on the Twig Live. By the end of 2027, Roadblocks will be and a lot of people said u stabilized. Uh it was going to kind of bounce back. Remember that last week we talked about it took that 30% stock hit.
It's challenged with like the safety measures and the algorithm change. And so that was a hot topic last week.
All right, moving on to corrections. This is for Chris and I'll just read

this out. So he said, "Oh, we talked about the engine." So he suggested Capcom used Unreal, but they built their own primary engine called MT Framework during the PS3 generation and then later created RE Engine, which debuted with Resident Evil 7, Biohazard, in 2017. And that's been the engine that has powered most of Capcom major releases. I love that people just tell him when he's wrong. Okay, let's go into Phil trying to tell me that I'm wrong and I'm not. Damn it. I I was going to steal that segue. You
He took it from me. I will say um
not naming any anyone in particular, but I would just say last week there was a discussion about wild cards. It's one of the collection mechanics. You can use wild card to fill any album slot. Progressive metagals. Turns out Royal Match does in fact have this.
It does not.
We have gameplay footage of it right now on the screen. And we're looking at
from
a wild card promo art from Royal Match

and we're also looking at potentially video from the event
showing the wild card existing
showing that this is a mechanic that's existed.
I would say there's a possibility that it was rescended the mechanic. That's certainly something that could happen. And I would say the other thing is maybe maybe Jen as a hardcore player, you could be in a segment that reduces your rewards and the wild card is something that you don't receive in your VIP segment.
I would be very pissed off and annoyed if as a complete elder player at the endame in the emerald section of the end game. I have never seen this feature inside of Royal Match. It is absolutely inside of Royal Kingdom. I think it was a feature that used to be in the game that has been either rescended or is only in Asia in some sort of testing. The video you're showing says it's from Asia and it's from 2024. So, I wish somebody for from Dream would just like let us know. So, we'll see if we can get

a little bit more information, but I as far as a US player, I don't see it. So anyway, we'll continue our fight offline
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and start flying smart. Appsflyer because your data is your best co-op partner. All right, so let's move on to our first story is Apploving. They had their earnings report. The CFO confirmed that on the Q2 call that the SEC closed its year-long inquiry into AppLin's data collection practices with no action taken. This was in regards to all of the bots that they might have used or using information that they shouldn't have used. So there is no action taken there. Shares still fell as much as 29% after hours and closed near 336. And this is down from the 417 raising nearly 27 billion in market value this week. That is even worse than the Roblox. I think Roblox was down 10 billion last week when we talked about their hit. Revenue hit 1.9 billion, up 53% year-onear, but guidance for the next

quarter landed below consensus. So, we brought in the expert, the resident growth guru and nerd, Josh Chanley. Take us through it, my friend.
Aloven, it it posted its softest quarter in years. Last Q2, you know, the year-over-year growth was was 77%. This year, it's 53%. you know, sequentially only grew 4.2% I think down from 8.6 last year and Q3 is pointing towards that year-over-year growth continuing to to slow down. What we heard was management call it timing. So, they had their AI models improve less than usual in Q2 where a model update that may have shipped in Q2 just barely fell into Q3. But here's what concerns me. Their own guidance is kind of the counterargument to that. If they're telling us a fix just shipped in Q3, why no rebound? They're guiding to 8%

sequentially at Q overQ growth, but they did 12% last year, and they're guiding to the year-over-year number continuing to slow down. That doesn't seem like a bounce back yet. So, what's going on? I think that what's happening here is Apploven's growth from gaming is almost certainly slower than the headline growth number. The the fastest growing pieces are consumer segment. So, e-commerce, but the CEO said that new advertisers aren't driving that growth yet. It's scale from existing ecom advertisers. And that's that's not enough. And so for AppL, there's this race happening right now. Can they build a consumer business faster than its gaming business matures? That's the question.
I still believe they can build a a huge consumer business, but timing is a

[ __ ] Gaming people specifically for mobile gaming pubs, you know, here's what matters. You know, product people watch ad revenue. Apple 11 disclosed I think for the first time how fast publishers max earnings were growing and they said they disclosed in Q2 max pubs their earnings it grew double digits quarter over-arter so Apple's telling us ad revenue is up to games over 10% in a single quarter while IP was falling
ads growing double digits Q over Q AP shrinking and so for product people you know make sure your games are exposed to where there's growth for UA people I mean keep perspective you know our our partner had a weak quarter and it still grew over 50%. It's still structurally key to

mobile gaming and they added more revenue in the last year than Unity's entire business does like engine and all. Like app is still your most important inapp ad network. That's not even close.
It's interesting what you said about consumer or e-commerce whatever you know brand whatever we want to call it. So I listen to other podcasts a lot and in podcasts that are not gaming podcasts at all. One of them is one that Crest likes at All-In podcast. I hear ads for Apploven. I have never heard ads for an ad platform in my life and then I've been hearing ads for them on platforms that are attracting brands. So, I think what you're saying is absolutely true is they are trying to seek out and diversify from just pure gaming and go into different places. But it's just so crazy that they can have this level of growth and get dinged this bad for not maintaining like 80% year-on-year

growth. Like it's what do we expect these days? It's crazy.
Yeah, it's tough. I can answer that just as it is.
I can answer that. [laughter]
Okay, go for it.
This is Oh my god, I'm so happy Chris is not here because I can tell you about hedge fund hotels, which is the the one that we like to stay. So it basically it means that you have large number of hedge funds that are all crowded at the same time because of momentum or popular thesis. Everybody kind of jumped in on apploving and once you get a couple of good hedge funds more come in and suddenly you know everybody in your hotel is a hedge fund and then when that momentum changes and it might be a small thing Jen as you said the fundamentals seem right like the company's doing really welling there's like a minor there's like a minor change in the trajectory and suddenly the stock price falls it's because these hedge funds are checking out because the momentum changed the thesis is a little bit different and they all leave at the same time and that is why the price fluctuation of their stock is much more violent than the fundamentals of the

company.
I would also add that it's a more volatile stock. A doesn't own its inventory. Game studios own the inventory. Apps own the inventory. When you look at Meta, if they don't compete, they might have their CPMs flatten. If app doesn't compete, it loses the impression entirely. And so the floor is lower for them. They are on like a treadmill right now where they're stuck in this constant war with every other ad network to out bid. And so the fear is there too. And that's another factor.
Last week we were talking about the sensor tower advertising report that showed that basically Apploven and ADM Mob own all of IAA in gaming. What was it like 70%? Some crazy number.
Google and Apple. And I think we should be asking for competition. So what's going on with Unity?
Yeah. Show the stock price, baby. Another suspense [laughter] fun.

Look at that sweet green line. Just don't zoom out too far. Don't zoom out too far. [laughter]
Yeah, exactly. I think there's a lot a lot of competitors to app where like the key phrase is like don't zoom out too far. App's taken up so much of the market cap in this space. But I mean what Unity has been doing is pure sustained execution. I think everybody I've worked with on the admon side on the UA side is has always been suspect of Vector and it's for a really good reason. You know, I've worked with Unity as a network since 2016 and as a engine since I think 2014. They've always had execution problems, and Vector's whole play was them executing against a chain of like what I call if statements. There are a series of hard things they have to do to succeed. And if they fail at any

of them, that they they really don't have much of a play. And so a year ago, a year and a half ago, when Vector launched, the natural assumption is like, well, this company doesn't do this. This company can't sustain execution. And now a year and a half later, they've they've done everything. They've launched the core model vector. They've modernized a lot of how their campaigns work and their infrastructure works. They've rolled out day 28. It's been under reportported on, but they've rolled out things like the ability to take training in one country like the US and use that to run UA everywhere. And what that all of a sudden means is you can go from testing one little geo because you want to be safe to just spending everywhere straight away. These are great ways to come back, but Apple's had those forever. And so Unity has been just executing consistently. And I think even now people are surprised at the

consistency. The D28 campaigns that they launched have been legit. As we get into Q3 that's becoming more and more obvious.
The reason is fairly simple. They launched them in the middle of early to mid Q2. It takes a month of user acquisition for those models to see a a user hit the 28th day and start to really train and scale. And then it takes at least a month after that for a UA team to see it mature and hit that goal. And so naturally, you're going to be waiting a little bit before you really hit the gas on those campaigns, especially when it might cannibalize a profitable affluent campaign that you're spending in.
I'm super curious because everyone is trained on D7, you know, rorowaz. Are you talking AP or IAA campaigns when you talk about these?
Both. Both. So it doesn't matter. So you're you're doing everyone's like, "Oh, day seven, day seven." I I can't tell you how many companies I know.
Day seven is dead, baby. Day seven is fading away. It's super simple.

It's super simple. What percents of whales convert in 7 days or less?
Okay, that's an impossible question to answer, but it's it's it's substantially less than 100%.
Correct. By 28 days, you get you get you get most of conversion. 28 days, you capture the vast majority. And there are genre differences in terms of conversion movement, which important too.
Yeah. But a good median probably week two anyway or maybe late into week.
I mean if you're staying to 28 days and you're retaining the chance of you becoming a payer. I mean in my past I've I've seen that conversion mark typically is around day 10. Again point yeah 10 to 14. It it depends on the genre and the game and I I I totally get all of those different arguments.
And it's because App launched it and it kicked everybody's ass. And the reason it worked I'll try to make it as simple as possible. So say every the whole world's running on day seven and that means you're you're roughly you're buying two kinds of users. People that hit the day seven rorowass goal and go on to mature really well and hit your long-term goal and then players that hit

your day seven goal and don't. And so if you're the only ad network that launches a day 28 campaign, what you can now do is say, "Hey, Unity, Liftoff, Maloco, Mint integral, everybody. Those users that hit your day seven goal and don't mature, you can have them.
The users that mature really well, we're gonna bid a penny more. Additionally, there are these users that you guys don't even know about because they don't hit the day seven goal, but they mature really well because they're considered buyers or they're retentive. And we're going to buy those users you weren't even bidding on. And so what it does is it enables much higher LTV players to be captured, but it also in a weird way kind of takes the cream off of the top of day seven campaigns in a way that's really really hard to compete against if you don't have that optimization. Like it's almost like on product side if

you were only allowed to run AB tests looking at day seven ARPO not like seeing long-term maturation you have to make a lot more blind guesses
this should reduce
early monetization pressure too
hopefully like this would hopefully get like a more pleasurable experience like when you're hyper casual you have to optimize on
10-second arpoo you know [laughter] 10 so like you have I mean this was always like the Google SEO problem right it's why the web is a mess. Like yeah, got to get people on SEO landing, man.
But I feel like if it's if we pull down the windows, this is like in everyone's interest. Like we always want the the free accurate prediction in the long run.
And what you should be seeing when you move from day 7 to day 28 campaigns is like the so people call it the day 7 to day 28 multiple, but like the percent your arpoo increases from day 7 to day 28 should go up because you're targeting deeper funnel.
Yep.
I want to know one thing. Last time we discussed this and Crest really berided me about the fact that they would use their engine business. Hold on, I'm

going to read the quote. Unity also began incorporating signals from its runtime into Vector's AI models near the end of the second quarter. So what Crest was berating me before is like they would use the I was saying that they have the engine that has so many users and like what is it 3 billion or whatnot and 3 million devices etc. none more. And he says that's not true, but Unity is saying yes, they are bringing those two data points together. Josh, what's this?
Yeah, they are bringing them together. The question is an if statement. Can they use that to improve targeting? They have not proven that yet. They should be proving that this year. Months ago, they enabled developers to start sending those postbacks. They elevated Felix Tay from SVP of product for just vector and AI to he's seuite now. So I would expect he's having more broad impact. I have no idea. But it it seems like they're really internalizing

the idea that a lot of the incremental eida they're going to get from that engine is by supercharging the ad business. Mhm.
So all you're saying is Matthew Bramberg is executing like a mofo over there.
Yes. [laughter]
Absolutely. There's nothing you can really point out as like a major failure on the vector side over the last year. Can complain that they haven't grown faster, I suppose. But in an environment like they have, it's so hard. Apploven's competing ridiculously well. They have more data. They get a discount. So for Unity to win an impression against App 11, they have to pay app a 5% fee to bid into Max and then still beat Apploven.
Oh, that's rough.
Axon 2 is a phenomenal engine and they have all this scale. That's just like a ridiculously hard ask. So, it's interesting to see them growing so much before the engine data is being deployed

because what it means is if they can execute. If they can execute against that really hard thing
that no one's done before,
then there's a lot of upside.
Yeah, I think we're all cheering them on though. We want competition. We don't want, you know, one giant gorilla. But let's go into some other Unity news. So, they just actually sold Supersonic. So, the deal closed on August 4th. Supersonic continues as a standalone brand in Tel Aviv with Unity providing roughly three months of transition support in Unity's second major mobile publishing divevesture this year following Iron Source ads network Sunset that drove 279 million and half one impairment charges alongside the sale. Triple Dot now reports roughly 2 billion in annual gross revenue across 12 studios and gains its first foothold in Israel's mobile talent market. So Josh, give me your take on this one too. This kind of big news for Unity. On the other side,
up until today, whenever we had a studio

with a lot of ad revenue and it was acquired, we had to look at the the AP revenue and then look at the download revenue of downloads and kind of squint and guess.
Yeah. And so when you look at that now, like Supersonic in Q2 downloads were were down 57% year-over-year, but then AP was up like 3,000%. And so you just have these two different numbers pointing in opposite directions. So you you don't really know how the business is really doing because it's totally possible that they're doing poorly and it's totally possible that they're now targeting the players that matter and revenue is exploding. Sensor Tower has now started to release ad revenue data. And so with this new ability, they're able to estimate supersonic revenue as a whole. And we can see how it looks. And what we actually see is that supersonic cratered 36% year-over-year in that same industry

that Appleven said grew 10% just from Q1 to Q2. And that's because their ad revenue dropped by almost half. And so what we're seeing now is that Supersonic has stabilized to around 10 million a month. So you can call it 120 a year in revenue. And when you look at that, the 40 million purchase price is a lot easier to judge. The real take though is it's another amazing acquisition by Triple Dot,
who now own Lion and Supersonic. It comes across as fairly cheap. But Leor, I forget his last name, but Leor was quoted as saying, "Together with Lion Studios, we can now partner with more studios in more markets with better tech behind it." There's a hidden like thing there in plain view. With Lion and Supersonic, every dev pitching a publisher is now pitching the same company twice. That changes like your leverage on terms and that's part of the deal. like no one's talking about that gives them a lot more negotiating power.

What do you mean by that? You're pitching a company twice.
What I mean by that is Lion and Supersonic don't actually really develop games.
They have indie studios. Yeah. They publish for those games. And an amazing publishing contract might be 50 60% goes to the publisher. A strong contract where they have lots of negotiating power could be 70 plus% goes to them. And so if you start to buy up all the publishers, you're taking away other options from indie game developers and you can negotiate stronger terms because you own all the publishing houses.
Okay. So it's a little bit more difficult for these smaller
little guys. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean that's I think a trend we've been talking about is there's not there's not that many publishers out there in mobile anymore. They're all kind of getting scooped up and it's it's harder to find a place to land I think so to speak.
It is. This is another example of that. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean there are still few

like the woodoo and the games and the tab nations and so forth. They're kind of fishing now in Vietnam and in Pakistan, they're kind of looking for fresh meat. But what also happens a lot with these publishers is as they find somebody who's really good at creating the core game experiences, they tend to just be working with them like Castle Crushers. Done. I forgot the [laughter] name of the studio that we will never talk about but they they tend like about you know a handful of studios and then the rest of them is just pitching these core games and then the publishers when we talk about supersonic like it's not just that there are these ad monetization and UA people it's actually there's plenty of live ops people and all the added resources the PMs they're essentially making your game that you made with your really tiny studio live opsable and actually live opsing it. So, so yes, they take the majority of revenue, but they also launch the game and operate it. So, that's the part. But, um, but talking about this deal as its own, like this is the dot on top of

the eye that was the Iron Source versus Apploving drama and saga. Because if you remember, at one point they were competing. Is who is Unity going to take on at the prom date? Is it going to be Iron Sword? Is this going to be Apploven? And [laughter] then that ended up well like Applovin essentially owned the prom after that became the king and the queen of the prom. Anyways, Iron Source is dead. Supersonic was Iron Sourc's hyper casual publisher. It's the same as Lion Studios was for Apploven and essentially now it's under Apploving both of them. Uh but the saddest price of all of this is the sale price. When I read that it was $40 million, I was like, Josh, your graphs, if they're correct, this is horrific. Because when you're showing the revenue graphs, we're talking about a what, 0.26 multiple, maybe 24, maybe 25.
Like, I don't know how Leor is closing these deals, but he must have some [ __ ] crazy handshake. [laughter]

He he grabbed the whole Apploven portfolio for 800 million and the the terms were open. It was like ah you know what Leor just pay what you want and we'll just put in this tiny number. Meanwhile, Applovin was selling it around for 2.4 billion and now a studio or a publisher that generates $150 million a year has over 5 billion downloads, 460 million downloads a year. Ad monetization is clearly on the rise. and he picks it up at 40. Like Jesus, like where are the private equity? Did did anybody like was this the sort of like a tender that that you know like Greeks would do where like you have to have a specific way to tender into this to buy this property and like everybody sent their offers but they never arrived because they were not in the formal way. Like I don't know what's happening here but uh but if anybody's ever negotiating with Leor even if they're selling they better know that they will be paying as well. So that's the moral of this story. Man. Yeah. Fire sale.

What?
All right.
Fire sale with one buyer. What is this? [laughter]
Yeah, that that's true. I mean, didn't we see that though? Like when all of this was going down, like there were not a lot of buyers for these things. Nobody Nobody's looking to have a declining IA driven game developer. Maybe.
Yeah, that's true. And we've seen like Brainium sell for high multiples and that's ad monetized. There's something about the Afflein and Unity portfolios that just didn't get
toxic. Yeah. No one's really wanted them.
Yeah. I I have no idea why.
I know this team really well, too. We did the whole interview series with uh with Supersonic on Hybrid Casual. They're really good. Like, this is a separate lean, mean executing team and probably like cut off from Unity, they will be even better. So, I just don't understand how you can buy this asset for 0.20. Like, you can't buy a kiosk

with this multiple.
Yeah. Under one. Way under one. [laughter]
These are like restaurant sale prices. I don't know. Like, what are we talking about? Anyways,
well, let's let's talk about something uh that was down a little bit. So, Take 2 had and kind of shocking. They had their Q2 earnings. So, their total net bookings hit 1.39 billion, down 3% year-over-year, but above guidance uh on the strength of NBA 2K and obviously GTA pre-sales. Console grew 38% of net bookings, up from 33%. And then mobile, I want to talk a little bit about mobile. Uh recurrent consumer spending fell 7% for the quarter. Zelnic pinned this on a tough comp against Color Block Jam's prior year debut. When I looked at this, it looked like it had come out and really hit in January of 25. So, he blamed it on uh that comp, not on a broader slowdown. Asked directly about mobile slowdown, he said, "No, it's really not what we're seeing." Add

adding only a bit of pressure on user acquisition. Josh, I'm sure you can relate to the a bit of pressure on UA right now. Everyone I talked to is struggling with CPIs on the rise. uh mobile came in at uh 740 million 53% of take 2's Q1 bookings and this was down 7%. I was trying to look in a little bit at the Zingo portfolio and so uh on the screen we're looking at a number of you know just some of their top games and then I kind of pulled some other numbers that we'll go through and I wanted to cheer on the oldies but the goodies from a percentage point in the earnings report they said that these were net booking increases so top 11 obviously with the World Cup magic going on they grew 15% toune blast up 8% words with friends. Oldie up 8% empires and puzzles. They conveniently said something like held steady on a 9th annivers anniversary campaign and these

are all games from respectively 2010 1709 and also 2017. Match factory didn't really get a mention. So that was either flat to down maybe. I don't know. It's hard to tell from how they talk about things. So that that was an uh oh. Um it was interesting to pull the center tower numbers and see the difference in revenue uh versus what they just disclosed and what I pulled that we were looking at all regions and it looks so much worse than the earnings report said and so from those graphs tune blast is flat match factories down 12% empires and publes down 18 words with friends down 48 color block jam down 49% and so I think that words with friends and color block jam are making it up with Admon and Empires and Pu puzzles and Wars with friends have web shops. It was really interesting. I was trying to go find the different web shops. Um, and I wasn't going into all of the games to

play them. You know, getting there from the web, I could see that EMP and Words with Friends have web shops. So channeling my inner crest, I was like, hm, I I think it's clear that the strategy that revolve around breathing life into aging life service games are crucial strategy for them to have a sustainable business. Uh I've worked with those teams in the past and I used to work at Zingga, you know, as you did, Mishka. So it's nice to see a lot of those continuing to hang in there. Comping hits sucks. I've had to I've been on the receiving end of another team of like, hey, we're not comping this other game. So, you know, what what can you guys do? So, Color Block Jam is just like was a hit. Uh, since its launch in January of 25, 78 million downloads versus the next best, which was Match Factory at 27 million. So, over the course of the year, Color Black Champ had 3x more in the same time period. Match factory does about 2x the IAP though um you know color block jams

and IAA so uh Mishka talk a little bit about like what you're seeing here and then then we can get into the GTA of it all with take two
I want to get philosophical here so [laughter] I think uh
I'm an old man I can do that um I think they lack creativity and I think they lack creativity because most of these studios that we're talking about the Zinga and its vassels Peak Graham Small Giant, Nordias, none of them are making new games. Role is the only one shipping anything new. And it's not that these studios don't have the talent to make new games, nor don't if they would have the ideas. I think it's because their their process, their green line must be absolutely impossible to cross. Like back then when Jen, we were at Zinga, like the green light was tough. I can't imagine even what it is right now. And they end up doing franchise sequels if they launch anything new. and the expectations are probably insane for any new game to come out. And what I'm trying to say is like if there's nothing new being developed at your studios,

you're kind of working at a match factory in a way. Like you're just milking existing games and and like what's next? Well, next is next quarter, baby. Like let's get these numbers up. Let's copy another, you know, feature from another puzzle game or something else or whatever central, you know, product team is is telling us is the best monetizing feature or whatever they deconstruct fund or any other channel, whatever is booming. Let's just put that into our game. Let's run a brand campaign, IP collaboration campaign. It's kind of they are creative in a specific sense I guess of kind of incremental innovation but when there's nothing new and it kind of becomes a place where innovation goes to die.
I don't know. I'm going to channel my crest again and be like why is it bad to keep reinvesting in what the consumer wants and is working? Toon Blast, I think over the last two to three years, has seen year-over-year growth as they

breathe life into a game from, I don't know, 2010, 2017. I forgot which which date that was. Nordius has a new game. I think it's called Top Gold. It's in soft launch testing.
I mean, as we all know, it's really hard to make a new game, and a lot of the stuff that they're trying didn't work. Like Raleigh had a Barbie game. Uh there were a couple other games. I absolutely think you should have a dual strategy which is don't ignore the hits. Keep breathe life into them. We saw that with Clash Royale and Brawl Stars getting reignited. You know, somebody voted Clash of Clans the best game ever made on mobile. I don't know, some like small website that's trying to get a name for itself. But
don't discount breathing life into things that people already love today and introducing them to a brand new audience. Remember, so in toys, the reason why you relaunch brands over time is every few years there's a a completely new audience of kids who didn't know about this brand that's brand new to them. And as you reintroduce, like Beyblades, Beyblades

is a toy line that has come out five different times. They just keep relaunching it because every couple of years, like Spider-Man, like this is the third iteration of Spider-Man. I mean, I remember all of them, but to a kid, like, this is their, you know, Tom Holland, their first Spider-Man. They don't know about the other two. So, it's always something new. So, I love this strategy for them. Sure, keep trying for new things, but put your creativity into reinvigorating the hits. Nothing wrong with that.
I 100% agree with you, Jen. And I wasn't saying that, you know, take away resources from Live Operation. To be clear, I don't know if there's new game development happening in Small Giant or Graham or other ones. Actually, I know Graham is I think they launched something, but I just feel like if you have a studio, philosophically speaking, if you have a studio that doesn't do any new games and purely does live operations, there's nothing even in the horizon, there's no not even a width that one day we will ship another game, then that becomes kind of hollow Solless

Studio. Like say what you will of Supercell and how they failed with new games, but at least they're trying all the time. Like what nine years in a row now they're trying pushing stuff out and there's at the same time great in live ops and people can move between live ops, new game development and I think that's also an interesting part and a essential part of your career progression where you can work on both. So nothing against what you said 100% support it but I just believe studios also need to have small starts all the time. Speaking of them, I today just got an email that there's a uh a closed beta for Project Rise uh this weekend actually. So to your Supercell doing a new game. They're still working on Project Rise. The one thing I will say to you is just like in in startups there's like a zero to one and then like a two to 10 and a you know one to 100. There's different kinds of people. Not everyone is built for new game work and not everyone is built for live service maintenance. I think these are different humans. And so I think you can have a

different skill set of people working on different projects. So I don't think it's soulless to be on a 10-year-old game that people love and brands that people love. So I I just I I challenge your soulless.
I'm at the studio, not the people.
Forever [laughter] franchise, man.
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term for sudden enlightenment. That flash where everything clicks. We're told that Heroic Labs team had theirs when they realized that most studios run live ops like a horoscope. Vague, kind of generic, same advice for everyone. So, they built Sattorii. Realtime experimentation, player level personalization, events that actually respond to player behavior. Sayanara to your old live opt and Konichiwa to Sattorii from Heroic Labs. Attention app and game developers. The difference between scaling and failing comes down to one thing, intelligence. Sensor Tower delivers the ultimate competitive edge that separates market leaders from the forgotten. Their [clears throat] platform doesn't just show you what's happening across global app stores. It reveals why it's happening and what to do about it. Need to crack new markets. Track competitor UA performance in real time. Reverse

engineer the monetization strategies powering today's billiondoll games. sensor tower transform impregnable market noise into actionable signals. The platform goes beyond raw data, offering intuitive tools and expert analysis that convert insights into revenue generating decisions. That's why thousands of studios from scrappy indies to global powerhouses rely on Sensor Tower to outmaneuver the competition. Stop flying blind. Start your free trial today at sensortowwer.com. That's sensortowwer.com. All right. Well, let me move on now to something that is so full. Grand Theft Auto 6. So, its pre-order sales obviously were absolutely taking off in the $100 skew was crushing it. I think Phil, you love that. Zelnik separately confirmed GTA 6's $100 Ultimate Edition is pre-selling ahead of the $80 standard edition, though he cautioned that there's no history from which to

extrapolate demand pull forward. So, the trailer thing is uh GTA 6 an extended look premiere on Netflix August 27th at 12:00 p.m. Pacific. You can figure out where that is in your time zone. It's also going to launch on Rockstar Games YouTube channel and the GTA 6 website 6 hours later. So, Netflix has a 6-hour exclusive on like a 20inut quote trailer. And from what we've heard, the trailer is a marketing asset versus a game asset. So, we'll we'll see what's inside of that trailer, but apparently it was more marketing driven than game driven from some folks uh that we heard from in Seattle, actually that had some knowledge of all of this. So, Netflix and Zelnik framed it as an appetizer for the story coming. I'm personally not sure how a 6-hour exclusive window helps Netflix. It's going to be on the internet within 5 seconds of anyway. So, I I don't think that's like, oh, we're going to get all these subscribers

signed up to watch a trailer six hour before it's anywhere else. Uh, they didn't disclose if there were any money changing hands and and if you think back to remember when Netflix had all of the GTA ancient mobile games and they were like, it's our best downloaded items. So maybe there was some sort of like longer term deal play that led into GTA 6 kind of getting you know getting in on it. But uh here's why I think they did it. I think Grand Theft Auto is like how do we get top of funnel new audience reach with a few hundred million DAUs. I I actually don't no one knows how many DAUs Netflix has on that you know imagine on that day on everyone's Netflix screen is Grand Theft Auto like check it out now. As we all know, gamers and everybody else who's already going to buy this game has an alert on their phones for Rockstar social channels and their YouTube. So, the next challenge is how do you get to new players that Netflix, you know, might give them a

chance to do that? That get get them a chance to get somebody into a storydriven game that um these people would never have known about this in, you know, any other way. In an irony, um I think both Netflix and Grand Theft Auto pissed everybody off because as the news cover that like it's behind a payw wall. Although I think we should all know that Netflix does have an advertising skew that you can get that is like a lower cost. But in a PR win, everyone still said go to Netflix on August 27th at noon. And so even though everyone's pissed off, they still covered it. So I think that was a pretty fun win. All right, so let's move on to our next story. So in a world of leaked emails, this is pretty fun. So over the last few weeks, I think I mentioned I heard or thought I heard that Blizzard was doing really well. So we had talked about Overwatch 10th anniversary coming back and reigniting the game. And I was musing that Joanna Fair's might be one

of the few non-gaming board leaders to come in and show some success. Well, there's nothing in the leaked email to help me make your point. So this leaked email said that Blizzard finished FY26 as Xbox top performing studio while Xbox revenue fell 7%. So fairies wrote that in FY26 it was the third highest fiscal year for topline revenue in Blizzard's history and 25 and 206 were Blizzard's first back-to-back growth years since FY17. Uh this was due to Diablo I 4 uh that drove the year and then Overwatch also posted its strongest quarter since 22. So I wanted to cover a few things that uh happened over her tenure. She was able to reopen China. Remember remember like Netflix sorry Netflix and Blizzard broke up during the um previous administration.
You remember they were doing boba they were doing like revenge boba drinks at each other in the corporate offices. They they had like a name in the net's

office for like some some way to [ __ ] on Blizzard. This was this was awesome drama.
This this is how all the the people not all but how so many startups that left Blizzard with the uh with the legendary names got funded because Netis was just funding them like just leave Blizzard here's 20M 30M just walk away from that office and start something of your own. We will fund it just in spite of Blizzard. This is our business goal. So
yeah, and then they all lost their money. But all of them lost their money. All of them lost their money.
It doesn't matter as long as it hurt Blizzard. Apparently didn't.
Well, they came back and they kiss and made up uh the summer of 24. So that's back on track. They also set a cadence of one to two major releases per calendar year. Then hit it in 26 with Midnight and Lord of Hatred inside of 8 weeks. rebranded Overwatch 2 to Overwatch in February for the 10th anniversary. You know, they added all that great stuff. Five heroes, new

progression, new loot box, reset the franchise, and delivered its best quarter in four years. Delivered growth, ending a seven-year streak uh without consecutive growth. So, I think it's a great case study to kind of make an analogy for Asha Sharma to figure out like what has Johanna Ferry's done, right? And what are some of the pitfalls that she faced and that she overcame. So when she started out, remember she had a little bit of experience on Call of Duty Mobile esports, but not necessarily like working on a product or a game team. And I talked about back then, you know, making sure she had support, that she had a system of people that were going to help her understand how do you talk to the creatives? How do you understand and equate the business with the creative side of our industry? It feels like there's been some secret sauce for how she's actually delivered that. And and next time I want Crest to come on and give her some some kudos, maybe even a little apology cuz he was a little harsh when she got the job. And I actually went back and looked. It was February 1st of 24, Twig 268. But I'm

happy. I'm happy to see someone who came in, especially a woman, which is always nice to have, drive some success in the industry that didn't actually feel the archetype that we typically have for a leader. Thoughts? Anyone?
Go Blizzard. Like, American Institution is being saved before our eyes, defeating all this claim about China destroying America. Overwatch for the win.
Take down marble rivals. I am into this rivalry.
Yeah. Super awesome. All right, Mishka, what's going on at Ubisoft Barcelona?
This is mice nuts news to be honest, but it's something that I've covered on this podcast because there was this battle with Ubisoft Barcelona against their employee or the HQ in Paris and that battle was quite public. So the background is that Ubisoft proposed cutting 51 jobs from the Barcelona studio as a part of restructuring plan to downsize and focus this small branch

exclusively on Rainbow 6 franchise. Now the cuts proceeded despite the studios major contribution to Assassin's Creed Black Flag Weinct which launched to a strong commercial success and as this fight got rowdy the workers staged walkouts and limited duration strikes in the summer and they demanded few small things. One was reversal of the layoffs of the 51 layoffs and a 5-year minimum just a minimum shield against future collective dismissal. So no layoffs in 5 years plus more. Uh they also required reinstatement of 60% remote work policy. So that means like three out of five days pushing back against the mandatory 5-day return to office mandate. And finally, immediate compliance with frozen internal promotion, unblocked salary improvement plans, and better severance terms. As anybody know

understands, [clears throat] this ended exactly how [laughter] how you would have expected. Ubisoft eliminated 51 positions at its Barcelona studio. But I think there's a happy ending. Not that the people got eliminated, but what happened when they cut the jobs? Because these workers launched a new studio. They secured funding and they have a game out on wishlist and the game is called Puzzle Mage. They're set for PC release in 2027. They surpassed 1,000 wish lists on Steam. And this warms my heart. uh instead of battling this corporation and staging these walkouts and doing demands and doing essentially anything nonproductive, they just grew this massive chip on their shoulders, got kicked out of the company, went out with their probably severance holding them through bootstrapping and built a company of their own. Like that's capitalism, folks. And I hope they succeed and I hope Puzzle Mage is a

magical hit. Oh, good for them. All right, Hulk Smash. Just kidding. Uh, Royal Smash, what's going on?
All right, so we have a new I don't know if we can call it a genre yet, but it's like the farm system we get from like this hybrid casual puzzle [ __ ] that's like always exploring new venues to really run the playbook. This is the latest one. I actually think there's a lot of potential here and things that are worth talking about it. So, what is it? Well, it's a new hyper casual genre, so there is going to be a lot of clones. The one I'm playing through is Royal Smash. We'll talk about the other big one from Flow Games, but those are the two big competitors. You have a cannon.
Yes.
And shooters, right?
Yes. Yes. And I think there's some very interesting lineage depending on like how far you want to draw back. But I again, just the core gameplay is a cannon. You only have a certain number of shots you have per level and you want to be able to complete whatever the goal is by

shooting the cannon and essentially destroying objects. Royal smash. And what they're going to do is bring on all the things that we know work in a saga based format. So you're going to have hard level labeling. You're going to have your equivalent of lava quest. You're going to have really good ad integration which is key for the genre. You're also going to have I would say a unique set of boosters. ones that I think in-game actually worked really well. I think perhaps they have a little bit of a healthier mix rather than just extra moves at the end of the saga level, which is we know how they monetize. Um, you know, is this is this the next genre that takes off? Like we saw that Pixel Flow crashed actually quite quickly. I don't know if you guys have been following that, but a lot of the downloads have really leveled off. And so the question always is like what from the farm system ends up accelerating? And I do think there is some really interesting lineage when we start to think about where this genre has been. Do you guys remember Crayon Physics at the launch of the iPhone? Do

you guys remember this by any chance?
No.
This was one of the original games to take advantage of the iOS accelerometer. And the idea is that you had like this basically paper sheet and you would have a level where you would have to draw something using crayons on the paper and there was physics that were involved in it. it was really good use of a touchcreen and the um the motion sensor on the iPhone. And so like we've always kind of like played around with this genre. The other thing you'll find on this physics based genre is those save the cat UA ads. Some of you may have seen I usually get dumped into playing a lot of auto chess games via them where you would have to circle for example um a flow of water. But again trying to use physics to do something interesting
and the same could be said by the way I would argue for 3D match. We were just talking about Toy Bust. I think that's a game that uses 3D in a way that really hasn't been appreciated. And so ultimately, like where where do you go with a genre like this? So, first of all, they're going to see where LTV can scale, of course. They're going to see where the churn is. What are the LTVs you can actually pay for a user like

this? Does it have the sort of retention that you see in Royal Match over time? And then, of course, you have the birth of a new genre. I think ultimately what's exciting about this, and this has been kind of my thesis on casual, is that you have the kind of cascade logic games like this. So you can put Toon Blast in that category. I would say the other kind of category we're starting to see is almost like the idle category like merge. I'm starting to think about merge more like an idle game. There's no fail states. And then there's kind of like this other hybrid casual category which has been these solver step logic puzzles. Um if you remember untangled like there's kind of this color jam we were just looking at. And those require a lot of cognitive resources to be able to solve the puzzle [snorts]
versus I would argue match has really become almost like a slot machine. A lot of it is just random variation. We're planning on you having a regular beat of fail states. And so that's why I have some faith in this new farm team is that because the gameplay is so simple and so casual and doesn't involve a lot of cognitive resources. That to me is the

sort of gameplay that retains over a really long period of time that lets you grow those LTVs that hit the one year, the 2-year cycle. So I am very excited to see more 3D stuff. I hope this unlocks more of the genre. Again, it started as UA is always the original farm system and let's see where this goes. Again, there is some bend in the download curve, so maybe this is the peak, but give us another two weeks and we'll see if this takes off or whether or not it kind of stagnates like Pixel Flow.
Yeah, ironically, this exact uh gameplay is a miniame inside of Tomb Blast. That's where I first saw it and then I started to see it like become its own game. So, not sure if it has enough variability in its gameplay to sustain its own game since it's an awesome miniame, but that's where I first saw it. And by farm team, just in case Europeans don't know what the hell we're talking I don't know, Mishka is do you understand when Phil says farm team, what he what he's saying?
Farm theme.
So, Phil, explain farm team because I

don't I think that's an American.
Have you ever have you ever seen uh Bull Durham
Angels in the Outfield? Dude, you're talking baseball. [laughter]
Why would you speak baseball to him?
It's It's the Junior League. It's the Junior League that we uh you you see where your your good players are and you call them up to the the big shot leagues, you know.
Mhm.
It's like
they're going to Real Madrid. [snorts]
Real Madrid.
When you're watch [laughter]
They're going to the Premier League.
Yes.
They're in the academy. We call it academy.
Yes. Academy. Yes.
Academy. Yeah. There's a term. It's a civilized term. Don't come [laughter] up with your own [ __ ]
Josh, what do you see when you when you see all this stuff?
I mean, it's a cool game. Uh there's there's a really good amount of perceived skill. I'm curious to see how long-term retention looks just because I don't when I play it, I'm like maybe level 150 now. I don't feel quite as accomplished as some other puzzlers. That's a key indicator in my mind just because it's it's so simple. There are

some rewards for some things. Like in Pixel Flow, you have this amazing feeling where if you're really close to the edge, you can kind of go a little crazy and be tapping all the time just to get a little bit more on the on the on the board. With this kind of new emerging subg genre, I feel like you're just being more patient and you're stopping playing and letting things slowly fade. And that's kind of the perceived extra skill. And there's a couple other things, too, but there's there's not quite as much. I've been playing it. I enjoy these games. It's really hard for for small teams to to scale it is the way I visualize this soft launch plan is you don't have a gigantic massive AP uh monetization system in yet. You have the the the motivation and and the core things inside to scale it. And so these games, you look at Pixel Flow even, they launch and the revenue per download on AP stays relatively low, but they're already scaling. And the way they're doing that is they're they're using ad

monetization to really lean in there. And that could be 50 55% 60 or more ads revenue. And then they build over time that AP structure and that starts to kind of grow as a share really, really fast. What concerns me a little bit here is like for Royal Smash specifically, the Admon implementation is a little rough. Like I keep seeing ads when I fail on hard levels. That's how you make players churn.
Yeah.
Yeah. That that's really frustrating. And
you mean like a foricial?
Yeah.
Like suck here. That's your real punishment. That's your real punishment. That's what should be about. No ads.
If all you care about is short-term ad monetization, it could kind of work. I would still argue it's too aggressive. But if what you're trying to do is build up your DAO

because, you know, AP is coming, that's that's a very suspect trade-off to me. And so with this game specifically, I would probably even lighten up on the ads, which may cause them to drop down their UA a little bit. But it's because like to scale longterm, this game has to like two to 5x its AP revenue per player cuz like right now, like as I play it, I feel no pressure. There's a lack of systems that are driving me to spend in the game. Is that how you see it, Philip? Mishka Jen. So, so, so like match at least like kind of modern match casual difficulty curve is like really keeping you tight to basically if you're in a fail state like you're looking at 1.1 even less APS attempts per success for the first like 150 levels depending on which game state you're in because you're really you're really about the LTB bet. That's really where like you're making your bread and butter and that's been kind of the direction. And then we kind of settle you into a sigmoid and

then there's one more final state that's kind of like a ramp up in difficulty for the people who tend to be what you could argue are like price insensitive and they're also like difficulty insensitive. I really agree with you on the level design piece. I'm not as far as you. I'm 75 levels in and they've done very little to even just change the slot. Like I think that match three at least changes the slot, right? It changes the goal. changes the surface. I mean, you can go through mastery level blocker design and it feels like they haven't quite unlocked that yet. Like, they don't have the creativity yet. And I'm surprised cuz both of the teams working on this are Turkish teams that have more traditional puzzle experience, but they like don't quite know what to do with the cannon. Like, it only shoots one type of ball by default, and then you just The only thing I've seen, Josh, is that sometimes they rotate the platter in front of you. But again, that just means you have to time your shots. And like the thing that's really cool here is that you can move do your shots very quickly, which means that you can get to fail screens more often. Like there's there's some cool

[ __ ] underneath the surface if they can figure this out. But it's it's boring. [laughter] Like what? It's just boring. They just haven't cracked. They haven't cracked. Yeah,
I've seen multiple iterations of this game. Uh I'm I'm an investor in Syame, so I've seen this evolve through multiple different genres, and this is the latest one. So, I'm really happy that this is working and it's fun and it's cool and we're talking about it. So, I'm not going to talk about the company per se because all I'm going to say is good things. I'm going to talk about the uh the Turkish ecosystem. And I think that Pixlow broke their minds. They were raising a seed round what 4 months after starting the company that ended up with them selling the company for $1 billion. That's generational wealth in few months. Of course, they have been working before. Yes, they they deserve everything that they got. But I'm talking about the industry and that broke everybody's mind. You can build a game that is relatively simple and make

a billion dollars. So I think what we'll be seeing for the next couple of years from Istanbul is just stream of these hybrid casual games. If you are working on puzzle, stop that. Match villains show that market is done. There's no puzzles to solve. Dream solved them all. So just focus on making countless iterations of mini games that you can turn into a full game. And whenever something is working and you have good early numbers, you call a keen or you call Gimm [laughter] and then you call Aim and then he calls the buyer and then you walk away. That seems to be the the playbook now now in the heads. But I I think I think yeah, Bloom games broke everybody's mind.
No, congrats.
I totally agree. Like you can move you can move so fast in this category. It doesn't take much to to tell if you can retain. There's not that much to build to see if you can have good day seven plus retention.

Yeah.
And the fact that you you're able to get out of the problem of not having enough systems to drive AP at least in the short term by using ad revenue. Now, what that actually does is it creates this bootstrapping mechanism where where all of a sudden ads will actually pay for your team to go and build everything else and then that unlocks the next scale of growth. That is just like such a a great scale up play. And it means that all you have to do is just pump out games, look for retention.
Okay, you've got the retention and and acquisition costs and you have kind of a playbook that's very reproducible. I hope this for a billion dollars. Just to be clear, [laughter]
buy this company for a half a billion dollars right now. It's It's worth it.
All right, so Josh, thank you for your guest appearance. Loved having you talking all things UA and Apploving and Unity. Really appreciate it. That wraps

it up for this week and we will see everyone next week. Maybe Crest will be off jury duty and we can hear how he voted guilty and probably sent someone to jail or something. It'll be really
or he's in jail for for [laughter] contemplation. What is it? The uh if you're um
contempt, of course.
Contempt of the court.
[ __ ] guilty.
[ __ ] guilty.
What are weing doing here? [laughter]
All right, everyone. See you next week.
Bye.
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