two & a half gamers session #43 - How to approach new game development & see new trends in gaming

[Music] uh welcome everybody this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gamers session number 43 we're sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day UA game design and AD monetization jobs but also discussing latest industry news from time to time while having so much fun fun again so much [ __ ] fun so let's not forget this 4:00 a.m. conference discussion Vibe let's take it super seriously and today we have special guest Joseph Kim Joe hello welcome here uh thank than for yeah you guys look great especially Jacob yeah yob don't worry I will draw you again oh here you go oh he came back no he's pointing at himself do you have you're very important don't you yeah yeah yeah anything like fall into your eye and

you're trying to get it out I'm not sure I'm not sure okay so as you might might here now it's going to be a lot of fun uh I want to ask JK some questions uh about how uh is the game development working and we lost yob now amazing it's fine let's let's continue we'll see what happens when he joins again so JK like quick intro for sure some people who don't know you I'm think like there's like two of them in the whole world that doesn't know you so I'm not really that famous but okay oh yeah of course come on oh okay sorry I'm sick I'm sick so you want an intro okay so just like two seses okay so I'll say uh let's see uh he been in game development since about 2010 2011 started in Social then I shifted over to

and uh worked for some like big Asian Publishers and then worked at fund plus uh led development on King Of Avalon Forex China uh then shifted over to Sega mobile game publishing uh at Sega NBC Universal then um then have been now trying to start a game Studio here in India I'm in Bangalore and we're trying to we're trying to do something here we're trying to like take team actually very similar to the strategy that I learned at fun plus and so you know fun plus at that time was not like the number one publisher in Forex as it is today uh kind of had early teams that were still learning um had this kind of model where we brought leads from around the world into China trying to do the same thing here in India uh and as I was talking to Felix before we started recording it's tough yeah not easy not easy but uh

development welcome to G development hard it's [ __ ] hard but also okay so why India why not for example Slovakia come on yeah yeah yeah you I I I think that well first of all I I would say that if you were to one of the ways that we approach this uh and um when I say we um my co-founder Paul leaden uh who I met at fun plus working on King of avyon um and I have another co-founder but when we were kind of trying to think about you know building a game Studio we triy to think about it from a blank slate perspective so if we were starting from zero uh what would you do and how would you build long-term competitive Advantage right and so um we we call that structural advantage and it's very similar to the concept that Amazon has I don't know if you guys read Amazon shareholder newsletters but there was a year in which deff basis talked about if you're ever going to compete you never want to compete on a Level Playing Field and so

what are the ways in which if you're starting a new game Studio you can somehow build in structural advantage to your company and so to your point whether it's India or Slovakia but if you think about it there aren't that many places in the world to build right so if you think about there are certain geographies with specific Regional advantages like you know I would say Eastern Europe Russia you've got some hardcore Tech guys out there um a lot of love for hardcore you know military shooter type type of games Latin America has really great artists for example and so there's there's like you know there's also certainly costructure Advantage uh one of the things that I look looked at from like four years ago was when you looked at uh R&D uh R&D has a percentage of bookings across major public companies what you saw was there was a major advantage from the non-western companies and so um when you think about where to go in the world uh Eastern Europe we felt that there was too much geopolitical risk there and some some of

our friends who run Corp deit like EA and other companies like they weren't touching Eastern Europe and um they advised us to to also be be careful and we did China has a lot of uh legal regulatory geopolitical issues as well and I think there are other countries like Germany and Finland um I you know there's there's a cultural cultural difference so uh so that didn't work uh and so you know we kind of looked a lot at um lat lat am which I I do think is still I I hope to build a studio out in somewhere like maybe Colombia or South Paulo or something like that someday Columbia is great oh yeah absolutely amazing country amazing people amazing food amazing basically everything but you know I came out to igdc which is like uh India's biggest game development development um conference a couple years ago U met with an Indian Studio here we kind of try to

work together one thing that I was impressed by was when we were kind of collaborating with the studio out here that it seemed like there were a lot of folks who were really just eager to learn and to improve and so I felt like we could try and do the the fun plus model here and so that was kind of the strategy um and so that was so so the basis of choosing India was both one we had met somebody we thought we could um partner up with to uh who wound up being one of our co-founders avanos P who is our CTO and he had worked on a shooter game before India's number one shooter game and you know the cost structure advantage of course and then basically um we felt that um we would have a a competitive advantage in terms of trying to get talent to our studio um because a lot of the the stuff that that's operated out of India is largely for example like live Ops not new game development a lot of uh you know kind of

hyper casual casual stuff and so we felt like if we were one of the few companies trying to develop a big ambitious project here that hopefully we could find a lot of really great talent that would want to join our studio um and that has been true to some degree but certainly you know it has been just since we're being brutally honest uh you know yeah no [ __ ] no [ __ ] yeah you know like um and I know a number of other Studios so I've talked talked to like five other companies that have set up here or have tried to set up here and you know I would say it's uh people who come here and I know there's a lot coming here because I I've got a number of requests ask for advice about India they're gonna you know they're gonna be in for some pain get ready but I will say this the the like some of the folks that we have hired here are incredible so if you have the ability to to navigate hiring the right people and finding that needle in a hay

stack that needle is absolute gold right so like uh I'm I'm working with a you know like I hired um a couple of PMS that that we trained from from scratch in the sense that they haven't had product management experience I put them against any PM anywhere in the world except I think we're better so so it's possible to build worldclass talent in areas and I I think over time uh it'll probably take us a little while to longer than we thought to get there I do think um you know it was for whatever reason it was a little bit easier in China but uh we're gonna get there or I'm gonna die try it yeah aren't you afraid that those BMS will just leave and join some other companies nope okay perfect okay amazing moving on moving on and and by the way like I I think we're we're going to you know we're

probably we're looking for another producer uh who will eventually convert to a PM so if anyone out there is looking for a job in India hit a brother up and uh you know we can check you out we'll turn you into a worldclass product manager but yeah I mean I I do think that um once we get that third person if one person wanted to leave I think we'd be fine um and I do think though that uh based upon my conversations with with the folks here it it seems like you know like one of the guys says I'm never leaving I was like all right oh well that's great well that's the best that's the best approach to work and uh and great loyalty as well so I mean yeah uh all right but I I guess you you already said uh that like is it only because of the CTO that you started building the the shooter game or like well I don't think that's the only reason right so again I I think if you're looking at different countries or cities there are not that many places right so again not not Eastern Europe not China um and you

know we did look at Latin America which I think is a potentially viable for the future I would love to set up shop in you know Ukraine once uh once [ __ ] settles down out over there yeah uh you know I'd love to do that uh but for right now we're we're all in on India and we're GNA live or die uh based upon you know our success here yeah okay all right but why why should game then because there's like this the the question that is being like on my okay well we are building shter games all good all good yeah okay yeah so so actually even before we came out to India uh when uh Paul Laden and I were first thinking about starting a company we actually started by writing on a board we I call it the billion dollar board basically what are different what are different ideas for games that we think can achieve a billion dollars in life of product Revenue right I mean um and uh and you know kind of our thinking

was we just need to do it one more time so uh so we wrote down a number of five ideas on the board and one of them was shooter and when we looked at the market you know kind of like the Confluence of of of things that we were looking for uh one was um where are market trends heading and where where do we think the market is going uh second is what do we have interest or passion for and third is what are we uniquely qualified to compete in okay and so when we looked at the trends we saw that there was huge organic growth in Shooters and so uh what we saw basically with uh you know it wasn't just for example Battle Royale pubg Etc it was a Confluence of of factors that actually propelled Shooters in the mobile gaming space right and so it was not only um that particular kind of gameplay but we had devices and if you guys remember before when devices weren't as performant or the Sensi ity wasn't as good you had things like

sniper kind kind of shooter games right y but there was a Confluence of device performance of the gaml also backend infrastructure and cost things like net code things like that becoming more widely available so that the ability to deliver a game uh that's economically viable really got unlocked like you know call it three years ago and so we saw that explosive growth and so from our perspective what we thought about was okay when we look at the market um there's a huge amount of um so I I think if you if if I remember the numbers correctly 86 87% of the market was two sub genres it was either um Team Deathmatch or Battle Royale and if you think about uh basically the way that games generally tend to progress or evolve uh in just look at the history of any game is that oftentimes you'll see something that I call subgenre um uh expansion right um and basically like

for example look at match three so you started off with a linear Saga map and then from there you had like you know metab based games like uh play rexes homecapes uh Garden Scapes then you had like you know deeper uh gacha based games like puzzle and dragon then you had like Light Social like tomb blast and so you have like these different sub genres that emerg that may actually be as big as original sub genres from which they uh expanded off of right and so what we were thinking is that if we kind of go into shoter we study it deeply that the trends we're speaking to if we didn't go up head-to-head against Timmy light speed and these other guys in Battle Royale and Team Deathmatch that we felt that we could probably um compete in a new sub genre and again if we were early into the sub genre made the right bet that you know we could potentially win and we would be faster to move into that sub genre and potentially serve specific players looking for a new gameplay shooter

experience so that's the the market side um and then in terms of like our interest uh you know I'm more of a mooba type guy or RPG guy but Paul loves Shooters so from an interest perspective you he's he's the one leading design on the game so it's like all right cool interest Trends and then you know in terms of like what we bring specifically I would say you know we've never made a a shooter game now you know Paul has launched multiple number one top grossing games in 4X I led the development of a number one top grossing game in in 4X and but what we felt was even though we didn't have shooter experience that there were certain characteristics from 4X that we could bring into shooter to create that Unique Kind of experience that would be differentiated from uh you know team death match and from Battle Royale and so that's kind of what we're doing now is we're we're creating a game and I know like and basically we're making an

extraction shooter plus plus some crazy [ __ ] but what we felt is always good what we felt is that crazy [ __ ] would be things that other Studios do not think of in that we are uniquely qualified to to integrate into and provide this different experience based upon not because we're from shooter but because we're not from shter but because we're coming from forx and some of the defining characteristics of forx we could kind of bring into the the shooter genre any any crazy [ __ ] you can you can mention well sure I mean I could kind of articulate at a like from from a high level right one example one example okay well let me put it to you this way so so what what are the top there's just kind of for me three defining characteristics of very successful Forex games so one is deep emotion right and so like if you understand how to design mechanics with high emotion you're very successful in

Forex and so in a Forex game there are players where it's really driven off of emotion and really kind of Revenge mechanics right because in a Forex you could like let's say you invested a thousand $2,000 in into building up your you know your kingdom and all all your stuff and then and then you get essentially what's called being zeroed where you lose everything you may spend $2,000 trying to get revenge okay so not that we're going for Revenge mechanics but this notion of Designing for emotion designing for a specific kind of emotional experience that we're trying to bring players is something that we've kind of perfected in the Forex space and we felt has not been done in the way we felt it could be done in shooter games now Battle Royale for example is is a game that uh provides something that I call High climax okay uh and that's because in the end if you get number one you know you it's it's you know like um

you know I I remember a few years ago I I went to my my my son's friend's birthday party and there was a there was like a kid like a 10-year-old kid who was playing fortnite and he got number two and when he got killed he got so mad it's not even his house he threw the controller across the room and almost broke the TV and I was like oh [ __ ] you know but that that kind of emotional experience right so uh three defining characteristics emot designing for emotion second uh monetization right so in a Forex game uh we are I don't know I would consider us one of the best in terms of how do you drain economies right like how do you design games to take [ __ ] away rather than for example when you look at the top shooter monetization models in the market today uh basically designed around Cosmetics battle pass right and and there are a lot of problems that a lot of um I would even say a lot of top designers don't really understand understand the kind of problems you get from just going for

cosmetics in a battle pass but it's hard un unless you're at pretty big scale to continue to monetize against Cosmetics uh so we uh are better at draining economies consumables based monetization models and we felt that um especially if we were to move to a different kind of gameplay model more of a Stakes Spas extraction shooter type of model that we would be able to enable a monetization model that works for a shooter game that would not be considered um well I mean we may still be considered pay to win but we're gonna like might be considered fair to play or more fair to play than than average and um yeah so emotion uh monetization and social right and so when you look at a lot of games and a lot of like uh mobile game developers designers you know their idea of social

is hey we've got chat we've got you know a guild we're we're a really social game it's like ah you know uh in in forx you you've got you got players on a real-time map moving around it's like okay know you gotta Wonder you've got people trying to teleport into a corner you know you've got enemy alliances you got you have different roles you have a lot of coordination communication that that occurs in a forx game and that level of social I I we're we're going to take social up to 11 you know what I'm saying like uh some some of the crazy [ __ ] because because I I gotta tell you guys Paul Paul's a [ __ ] genius and like so and and actually we we also I'm not sure if we can announce it yet but we got we also have another really great guy um I don't know if he wants me to to to announce this or not but first time anyone's hearing about it from uh from MZ and machine Zone who his basic joined us but I think we're going to keep it on

the download for now but like some of the [ __ ] these guys are designing is crazy now whether we'll be able to execute it or not that's that's part of why you know as I was telling you Felix you know this this [ __ ] is hard right like um you know I was I was I was on a call with my wife this last week and she's like man why is your face all [ __ ] up you know just like dude the amount of stress guys it's it's a little crazy but um you know it's uh it's it's it's uh it's it's good and it's bad is a part of the drw yeah yeah yeah by the way if if you're talking about the monetization and especially the like who's this ghost is that you yeah the the draining the draining ability of Forex economy I mean like for me it's usually the distraction of property and like that's how I see it that this is like the edge that Forex has over other games there so you al already considering something in that manner that you will be using destruction of property uh no well I would say like um well I I think the

most classical examples are destruction of troops right Clash of Clans war like that um property not so much but um I do think that uh we do have so so we do persist a lot more than a typical shooter game right and so a part of what we're doing is we're we're we're taking gameplay experience but we're also innovating a lot on The Meta on the system side and so we've got um here we go system and vector [ __ ] my life yeah yeah multiple hey hey if anyone talks about progression vectors they got it for me okay so we are we are persisting multiple vectors of progression in our systems and yeah we we got again you know this is one of these issues where you know the the the the standard uh Orthodoxy thinking is okay guys you should you should only innovate your 10 to 15% and the rest is the same and we just kind of threw that out the [ __ ] window we're like hey let's go [ __ ] crazy now we're probably gonna have to scale back right but like I I I

I but you know we we're we're we're doing our best to try and figure out what's cool and it's hard as as as you guys probably know and we we'll we'll see what happens but I guess for us we're we're we're we're taking our shot right we're uh we're we're we're going for the home run and we we'll see what happens so another question for me on monetization side just you know the million-- dollar question from my side from admon are you gonna put in-game ads in this game I don't think so I mean we we might but you know it's not yeah so like every study I did back in the day and it's been a while is that um admon cannibalizes I AP now I I don't know if like you can do like I remember there was some controversy around um the ability to do uh various types of segmentation so that you can only truly Target like non-payers with with ads but every other St or like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but um besides that um you know because like you know it comes

down to the value exchange right and so like if I'm getting 01 gems for watching an ad like the players gonna be like [ __ ] that right and so like then if you have to offer 50 gems but then you know the the you know the dollar cost is a lot higher than then it kind of It kind of [ __ ] you on the on the cannibalization so that's true on one side I think like there are some some shooter examples I think uh mainly from Turkey they those guys I think Critical Strike they have uh 5050 displayed in terms of ads versus inaps and it's not only like great for for monetization but it's also great for you but they did they AB test that whether the uh I have no idea I have no idea yeah I mean what I think about when I think about Shooters is like typically like they tend to add ads if a user's been in the game for x amount of time without making a purchase that's kind of yeah the thing behind Shooters I think yeah and and that's that's where you know I I mentioned like we haven't thought about it that much yet I mean I'm sure we'll think about it later but where if I

remember correctly I'm not sure whether you can do or I guess maybe you can do that but if we have the ability to do that stuff we'll certainly look at it but I just I remember the at least during the time that I looked at it last there was some uncertainty whether you could specifically Target um ads only to a select group of players or not if you guys if you guys know better what what the current here is the okay yeah so tell me Felix what should we do you tell you tell you tell me have a really good plan for having rewarded ads but seriously like uh usually what people start testing is they put rewarded ads in on day three or day five uh after like attracting a user and basically seeing how many rewarded ads they actually watch then you can work out the ad LTV based on that and then you can see if it's actually cannibalization or if it's incremental typically what I've seen is uh people tend to have ads in some GEOS and some GEOS they don't or they basically as soon as someone makes an in purchase they take away the ads completely right right and and and then do we like what

what what's your thoughts on then setting up the the the bot Farm to click on all the ads so that we get a lot of um ad Revenue set that up in China or India okay yeah nice okay well what about those those add revenue from the the Bots oh never mind so oh and like one question I also had in mind any anything from the UA perspective that that you've done already at this stage or are you planning to do something no no no yeah I I think that like um and if you want to go into like controversial topics like yes Friday Friday yes let's go into some controversy yeah uh so you know if you talk to any venture capitalist today and especially now the common wisdom is oh you you better be validating your product as

much as you can exactly you know um that that that only works for certain things right if you're if you're working on some crazy [ __ ] really I I've I've seen that I've seen that go so wrong so often so many companies that have wasted so much time and money and then you got these VCS that have never made a game in their life or a top grossing game yeah yeah of course and like okay thank you for the advice but uh I'm going to I'm going to do what I'm going to do now look product validation makes sense but then how do you do that product validation is situationally like you have to understand your situational context right yeah and um and and so uh I would say for us we take more of the oh by by the way so do you guys understand like the primary models of well this is just my own Theory right okay so I I'll explain my theory of product validation and I'm not sure if this is a widely held model or not but it's a model that

that that um I believe in and I I kind of came up with is so I believe that there's three primary models when it comes to product validation okay and there's there's one which is kind of like um it's almost like a pyramid strategy you're either at the top of the bottom and the and and when you're at the top you're kind of like blizzard or say respawn where you believe you are the influencer you are the taste maker you are the design God and what you make for yourself is good for everybody so if you like it everybody's G to like it right and you are the taste maker influencer leader and at the bottom of the pyramid I would call that the um kind of more the bottoms up player driven approach right Riot you know um player first let's get all the feedback from our players and so in that case maybe we would have been doing more more UA and so so you've got like the um like the top of the pyramid or the bottom of the pyramid model and then the the third approach which is um so we're more of of

like the first and the third and the third is more like um you look for market trends and kind of like uh product Market fit in specific areas that you but then you try to map that to what you're doing so you look at Trends you look at you know for example we look at tarof or we look at extraction Shooters and we think okay well if we were to try and map that um to mobile how would we do that what would be the correct translation of that right and so um so we're a little bit of the first and the third but you can't you can't run ads on that or it's it's harder right and I I think the mistake that a lot of companies have done is to rely on uh players opinions for something that's not made yet or that's not well described and so if you can't give uh if you can't give an audience something that they really understand or that's new then you wind up with a lot of weird [ __ ] that happens right and so I've seen

these like Frankenstein games like some crazy crazy [ __ ] because it's like oh we gotta and and I'm gonna tell you guys right this is brutally honest so you want me to be as yeah unhinged as possible it's like you got some guys are basically just uh who are basically cowards right execs at companies who are too cowardly to make a call and they don't want to they don't want they they don't want to have the ability to have the finger pointed at them so they're like oh well we ran this study we hired these Consultants they said we should have done this and so if you're a [ __ ] yeah of course you're gonna go for your your your player validation market research right that's what I always say like hey so if you're if you're afraid of testing like iOS campaigns blame blame that on on me I'm the consultant you can blame yeah so Mon's built a career off of this phenomenon BR me under the bus boys exactly like you would be surprised you would surprise like oh see that's it

okay well easy then because uh these days like everybody's talking about oh well you need to do market research and you need to do all these like Market marketability tests of course I mean it it makes sense but of course like it makes sense to you have to understand the situational context exactly exactly so all right so I guess that's your opinion about market research I like but but I'm just trying to explain why we're not doing any UA right we're in kind of early mid development so no of course of course of course but then then uh you know the question is if you would if you were in the different situation and you know like okay so you're most probably going to build some less crazy would you do it or you would just ah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so like let you know I think this is the who who is it um was it Tom blast I forgot the game but um they basically created they they designed their game by looking at an existing successful game

just going through all the readings and reviews and reading all the comments and trying to fix those and then just testing a lot so that's a I'm not saying that's not a viable strategy but that depends on what what are you going for right what what do you what is your specific product strategy and then you got to fit that with what you're doing but like I I think that's the that's the thing that we see time and time again is whether it's product managers or you know kind of Business Leaders or strategists is that you know everybody with their Hammer tries to hammer everything right so like you know it's um this is a mistake that's going to be made over and over and over and over and over again unfortunately of course and you talked about looking at like Trends but how exactly I like you're looking at into trends like what are what you can expect from the market so okay sit down look into the data AI or sensor to or like looking at top grossing charts like how how do we approach that well you know it helps to be cool like I am of

course yeah because yeah you get all the data yeah all all the data from it just kind of It kind of naturally flows into me right no no but yeah I I think it it it comes from I think it basically just comes from Curiosity and you know what you have interest in right and so like I I do think that like if you are a hardcore you know ccg player and you you're playing a lot of ccg games and you're looking at different kinds of things that um that are interesting for you and you see different things happening in the world and you can tie those together then um I I think that's where you are trying to get insights right where um and I ideally insights that that aren't obvious because that that's where you have the bigger Market opportunities in terms of the non obvious insights okay okay nice uh and we have some I think this is a question for all of us because I've been hearing this from different uh sides which is uh death of uh the freet to play or was cuz all like like you said from the

VC side there are different uh well information flowing in and everybody's talking about like how free topl is dead so Felix do you think uh free tol is dead I've gotten three call requests from random like Financial groups this week and I did two of these calls and both of them asked like is free to play dead is it over I'm like no absolutely not it's not over no it's no near to be over and like none of the data says it is and like everyone's saying oh yeah it's going down from last year and I was like man you got to take out two outliers we had two of the weirdest years ever which was covid if you have a data set you always take out the outliers and if you look at 2019 mobile free to play is still growing nice okay JK is mobile free to play then yeah no yeah I so I agree with Felix I I I do think though that um there there's a little bit of a a misunderstanding though where you know and it's kind of tied

with this this whole concept or discussion around our games uh recession resilient for example right and and the misunderstanding is that actually I I believe games perform well very well in recession but I I I think the misunderstanding comes from the type of spend on games like right now we're seeing um you know steam usage at all-time highs PC games flying off the shelves why because you know during recessions uh you know people shift to Alternatives right and and entertainment in in the form of games provides a highest entertainment value you know on on a on a per hour basis whatever right but I AP spend and and this is this is the the thing that um I will kind of agree not that freeo play is dead but freeo play should be down it should be yeah why because IP spend is you know is discretionary quite easily right you

could still keep playing but like a lot of the the the higher spend as we go like if we go into Global recession do I expect IP spent to be down next year maybe like two years if we're in a recession for two years absolutely yeah 100% is it is it gonna is it is it dead no but you know it's it's you know I mean having being part of like a little bit of a Down cycle to me doesn't doesn't mean anything of course create on the on the opposite side it creates a lot of opportunities I think absolutely um I I will say this that um based upon what has been happening in the market and based upon you know the the fact that you've got these execs who always plan linearly right so so so like I I'm hearing from a bunch of different Studios a bunch of different people that a lot of new game development budgets are you know are are are being slashed are being cut and being shifted to more hey let's let's allocate dollars more to the the safe stuff the live Ops and so th those budgets being down makes sense to me and as an entrepreneur that's not

going to launch for a couple years I mean that's that's great it's like yeah keep taking away those new game budgets clear the space for me guys that's what I said that's what I said like like if if anyone asks me like okay so it's free to play that yes it's de go go away please because then then it's like more room for me and the work yeah I think it's more of a question that you know you now need to put more effort for the same amount of Revenue like a few years ago I would say because the the playing field just got kind of harder and you need to take in more factors into account that are I would say much more important now so a good example would be for instance Survivor IO or something in that matter where like applying hyper casual mechanics in order to widen up the audience seems very very important now as it was I would say not that important few years ago now it seems to me like a must have and yeah it's just because the CPI game is different therefore you need

to you know pick up your CPI game and that's one of the things to to the playing field UA manager over there you need to pick up the CPI again there you go okay what do you know about CPI Mr yob you know listening to you from here and there yeah I know I know yeah we do listen to you quite a lot M you unfortunately I know I know I know we open up fridge and then I'm there looking at you of course no okay uh I think I have like one one segment that I added into the into the dock that nobody uh saw before because I did it like in the in the in the afternoon yesterday so there's well I haven't seen anything anyway don't worry about yeah it's fine it's called like what if segment so it's like what would happen if for example ad monetization disappears of course like Felix would be super sad but what would that mean yeah I know what would that mean for for game design yob

or or JK or maybe I can even talk about that anything that comes into your mind again it will be it will be harder now because lot of games are relying on that come on yeah yeah I know I know I'm just thinking um you will probably need to focus more on conversion then because uh ad monetization was that great kind of alternative Source where you don't really need to go into conversion so I guess special offers and segmentations would need to go on steroids I would guess live Ops on steroids okay okay I think like what what if there is no app store next year it's only Google Play what why would there be no app store are you talking more about alternative app stores or that's like what if yeah what what if uh like apple just canceled the whole store what would happen of course it's that's rephrasing my questions from two paragraphs upwards where I said like

there will be an alternative app store next year of course 100% already there is already Samsung there's already Huawei and what else uh do you think is there's a bunch of Chinese alternative course 100% 100% that's true okay uh I think there is uh Felix there was one uh one interesting uh thing about the iOS in the U EU yeah it got leaked what was it two days ago that uh apple is working on allowing side loading for only in the EU and it's going to be rolled out basically in 2024 and that has quite interesting implications because then essentially that's the first time iOS will be open up to side loading and that means there will be alternative app stores in the EU now the interesting thing is if that follows in the US afterwards I mean us is a bit more friendly towards business compared to the EU but that opens up quite a lot of possibilities I've been thinking about this like I could see all mobile carriers in like the EU making their own app stores and starting to

compete head on with content to kind of keep their subscribers happy so yeah yeah I don't think it's going to be the carriers that win though right it might be more Microsoft with like a Game Pass type thing or I'm sure I'm sure epex ready to like put put their put their stuff out there as well yeah it's good to mobile developers there's going to be a lot of money sloshing around to basically make games for these new like platforms that's for sure but isn't this song thing going to be slapped with like 27% Apple tax cut that wasn't leaked no one knows but knowing Apple it wouldn't surprise me like cuz you know if you're Sid loading you won't be on their payment rails but you know they might charge a QA fee right something like that I think like this this VA Garden approach will take more than this in order to break oh I hate the term wallet Garden oh come on come on guys all right anything anything else interesting it's it's going to happen until the end of the year I mean it's already mid December but I guess not going to happen right any any comments about um any

comments about like um shift in terms of the the current business models uh more skewed towards the Netflix games focused on retention without iips or like game xbo game pay subscriptions I mean I have no idea but I would I would definitely love to hear from that from you guys about it yeah this is this is currently like a trend that I keep seeing even though like everybody is pretty much rolling their eyes on it in the industry if I understand correctly where Netflix is pretty much pushing either old free-to-play games that were not successful on their store without any monetization or ordering directly games that are supposed to be free to play without any monetization so if I understand correctly the whole thing is that make games that only focus on retention to keep people paying the Netflix subscription and that's it and they're hiring like top talent in Finland to do that from freet to play we talked about it so so much already I mean but I haven't seen anyone from the

industry that says oh yeah that makes sense for me like like everybody is just like this doesn't make any sense in my my book and also in my book of course so if anybody is there feel free to write us or you know tell us but I don't think this is viable strategy well I guess it's not but then I have I have one other question since uh and JK already brought it up the um like landscape now with VC and everybody and like funding in these days it's kind of hard or getting funding it's kind of hard right so if if uh it well that's that's what I've been hearing at least from from the some of the guys I I mean I think okay I I would say uh funds are from my perspective from what I'm seeing from what I'm hearing funds are still deploying now I think it's going to be down but they're still deploying and in some places like I think here in India man I I I think I think they're ready to

invest right like it uh so I I think it depends on again this is probably more situational context but okay it does it does seem that you know uh while um I I I from what I'm hearing I I just think valuations are down a little bit which it should have been down right there's there's there's a little bit more due diligence now because of all the all all the news and other things uh and so like you got to be a little little bit more buttoned up but I don't know I'm not I I think um there's a lot of great teams out there that seem to be able to get funding for pretty good valuations and still I I think um in here in India maybe very high valuations so you know I I I think it's still like yeah if you're out there and you're scared of trying to um get funding in this environment was it better six months ago hell yeah yeah you waited too long but yeah yeah but

you can still do it as far as I know I mean I'm not I'm not seeing anyone who should should have gotten funded not get funded okay so of course I it's definitely harder that's yeah the we three buz would stopped working yeah if you put web3 in your pitch deck then you can't slap a blockchain on a game anymore and get a bunch of funding yeah is there going to be a new buzzword uh it's going to be slapped into the pitch decks or well it's all yeah generative AI right oh of course well there's yeah okay generative AI yeah everybody is talking about how the game teams are [ __ ] now because uh like the the new chat g whatever GP GP yeah yeah it's uh can write code and can write like uh design documents and even up store description um it's I would say a little bit exaggerated it was already bad on stack Overflow for him because the code was so wrong okay well but you don't see that

on LinkedIn that much you know so that because you just read the surface titles oh it's just he not that are you gonna change any Developers for AI yeah okay yeah well that's it's not going to happen anytime soon like of course like it's interesting and of course it can help but it's like I I hate it so much like when everybody's like okay well there's new thing and it's going replace everybody no no yeah I I mean I do think like maybe not like the generative I I do think there are smaller Niche applications for generative AI but I do think that uh large language models and other forms of AI like uh we're we're doing stuff with that right now which I think could be pretty exciting we'll see but yeah one of our features is largely a couple of our features uh one shorter term one longer term will have a you know core

basis in in terms of being enabled by a lot of the recent Tech so uh it's not replacing anything but certainly gonna gonna enable some some some cool [ __ ] so yeah yeah 100% 100% although I use I use me Journey for my newsletter and it's working so provide yeah I spend a lot of time like every day almost like trying to to find out what's the what's the best prompt to use it's it's fun it's a lot of fun but that's it I guess okay so let's let's end this uh with one last question which is uhh this so since you've interviewed like millions of people J on the game makers YouTube channel what would you say it's the the best advice you've heard how to approach like building freet to-play mobile games or any anything you you think can help like um entrepreneurs starting the own companies uh I don't no [ __ ] don't

don't foret I I don't I can't think of any advice during a podcast but you know I haven't had that many interviews focused around building a game or a startup but I I would say my own advice would be if you're starting a company uh make sure your co-founder relationships are really good right it it really is I mean you know um it yeah she goes sideways that's the are you really going to be able to stick with your co-founders I I got lucky like the two guys I'm working with are are really good dudes um you know love those guys but like you know I have seen a lot of uh un unhealthy and like dude it's it's stressful enough like look how [ __ ] up my face is right now right like it's stressful enough with with the normal [ __ ] and then if you got if you got co-founder [ __ ] also the top of everything think yeah yeah then it's just it's it's going to be really

really hard to work out so um not not not saying that you know you can't have uh uh relationships in which are you know where you have a lot of conflict that can't work I'm not saying it's not going to work but I'm gonna I'm just gonna say you know life is short and uh so if you can find a group of co-founders that you really want to you know be be in the in trench warfare with then that really helps a lot nice great I someone you can see on camera basically yeah exactly exactly actually see his face actually we just wanted to surprise you Remo is actually AI generated that's not Remo yeah yeah it's a it's Journey right there we pre-recorded the questions and from his end oh man oh I'm going to use M journey to actually draw you for the oh genius yes oh man amazing perfect and with that thank you very much for

for listening please continue subscribing we hit on YouTube 666 subscribers obviously the overall number is close to 1.5k which is amazing thank you very much for the support and uh please share the podcast with your industry friends colleagues dogs and cats special thank you JK for coming good thank you thank you later bye bye right what [Music]