UEFN Magic and Frustrations with Game Industry Legends

[Music] you've heard of heroic Labs by now and we keep talking about them because in today's mature Market you need every Edge to be successful rather than spending those precious company dollars on building game Tech focus on building your game and shipping it get into your players hands faster and grow your community heroic Labs is Battle tested partner and friend of the podcast their Tech enables you to be flexible creative and scale for success heroic Labs has your Tech stack covered whether you're looking for a worldclass back-end game server an amazing game development framework Fantastic live Ops tooling or reliable Mass scalability heroic Labs has solutions for all of these challenges and it's not just us a deconstructor of fun praising heroic Labs the company works with some of the world's biggest Publishers on many of the Beloved games focus on your game save a big chunk of cheese and avoid Tech risks with heroic labs

[Music] welcome everybody to the deconstructor fun podcast I got I got two legends over here so let's start with you Pete uh Pete Holly you have a storied career with leadership positions at 100 thieves EA Zinga lion head Criterion Sony Telltale mythical games you're a very passionate cyclist I remember that at least you were I believe you still are as much as I used to when we work together but yes yeah you're a music afficionado I I believe you're still that very much so and a motor sport Enthusiast yeah here Valentino Rossy watching over me during this podcast too perfect I got I got few few uh few tidbits right uh you were a founder of of R robot game am I was that the name of the lab yeah yeah Pioneers in location based gaming you know it's the you know you got to get startups right in terms of timing and we were three years before Pokémon go so a little little frustra a little bit too early

and that that was your first startup but it it probably isn't your last one because currently you're in a little bit of a stealth mode according LinkedIn yeah well independent and I think you use the word perhaps so yeah we the team's independent we uh left with the team and the software with 100 thieves blessing and really trying to figure out our future and we've got some pretty interesting options here awesome so we're going to talk about the the games you made at hun thieves because one of them or a couple of them were ufn games and then right that's going to be interesting how you continue from there so second guest uh Alex copion founder of Luke North world and the host of fabulous fourth curtain podcast Alex welcome to the uh to the show welcome back to the show you've been here both of you have been here before yes thank you it's great to be back and a little bit about Alex so you were a founder of industrial toys that was acquired by EA were making the battlefield as well as the uh was it morning star um yes that's right

yeah very early FPS on mobile perfect and then you were a founder of WID load games that was acquired by Disney and before that you were a founder of Bungie that got acquired by Microsoft so you were definitely being from startups to Corporation back to a startup to a corporation so that that seems to your core Loop is start sell in a while exploring the world of Entrepreneurship yes all right all right that's so so today we're going to talk about ufn is it magic or is it something else the magic um and both of you have been making ufn games so I think Pete that will be interesting to start with you because um you made you started off by doing um I remember watching these videos with hun thieves you're making a multiplayer shooter and then you kind of pivoted towards ufn because it was faster to get to the uh to the market you get more reps more experience is that correct assumption yeah 100% it was a GDC last year so 2023 you know we had

a small team of six or seven really interesting mix there are some uh people in their early 20s who came from the fortnite creative community and then my lead environment artist joined us from OverWatch one and two so we have this really nice mix extremely talented team it's hard to get funding for a standalone game inside another company um and when we're at GDC epic announced ufn and once we'd figured out what the acronym meant which still confusing um we yeah we went back to base and thought it was a really great idea for a number of reasons one the team small we could move very quickly and it would test a number of thesis that we had at 100 thieves that by working with the likes of you know courage and valky and the overall reach that the company has you know around 150 million gamerss worldwide and this really awesome sort of authentic voice that'd be quite an interesting way to you know get to an audience and help discover the game so it was such a f fantastic would have proved that in in

weeks not years so that's our origal original reason to do it and um yeah we made Bankers in like 8 weeks so really fantastic way to test some thesis on game design but also well can 100 of th launch content and people find it in interested wayse it's like prototyping but the quality is production quality and the Prototype goes out in the market yeah and my one of my engineers said I think he summed it up perfectly he said it's just a really safe place to f when we were at Zing you know we'd often celebrate failing because it's quite frequent and so obviously with a team of six and you take eight weeks you know you you it's okay to fail if you you know your game comes out and it pops and it drops in in 48 hours we we were very lucky it didn't do that and our second game that we launched at uh December that also did really well for us so we've been pretty lucky but espe it was the first one we did but it could like many others I think 92% % of islands are

completely empty they don't have any people in them so it's pretty Frau with risk but you had so so 100 thieves eorts organization gigantic reach so you had that audience you can promote these islands to and that probably helped a lot yeah I think looking back because it you know there's not much data on the dashboard and Alex can attest to that too so you have to draw some some assumptions so you you look on your dashboard you can see how many hours of spent time spent so on and that was very very high for us you can also look at fortnite.gg which is a thirdparty data site and you you can start to do some interesting correlations about how and where and why you were discovered so I think what happened with Andre thieves is you know most islands do get a moment in the spotlight and it you'll be fed a number of users let's say two to 400 players in fortnite and and from that sort of initial cycle I think the system the the you know the the data is looking for something sticky it's looking for a flywheel that it can then start to

promote because engagement is higher or you know the players level and play it longer than maybe many many others and I think from those initial fly wheels you start to see yourself being populated across different Discovery Channels much like it was back on you know Android and iOS in the early days around 2011 you know everyone's fighting for the top left tile it's quite quite similar to that really interesting and then you're still working on those titles or new titles yeah we keep them fresh you because sometimes they'll change policy you got to keep it updated um it's a b like working the web really with you you know you can populate and push code pretty much every single day it's very simple we've changed round structures we've added new game modes and stuff and when new features come along we we jump back in and you know clean it up polish it up keep it live keep it fresh and every now and again you know you'll get a re feature and you know even like last week I think bank heist was running at you know 5,000 da which after a year is like we don't touch it you know it just

sits there and just spins along in these Discovery Channels every now and again so yeah that that one set us up nicely actually and be because the art stood out because it was all custom built H attracted a lot of new interest um from others IP holders and so on so interesting all right um Alex you had a very you had a you know different start to ufn Journey so you did not have 100 thieves behind you um you were coming in from a couple of big Shooters but how how did you end up going for ufn and not kind of a more I don't know custom or however you want to put it like a traditional game development yeah I you know maybe similarly to you Pete um last year at GDC we got the same explanation of the AL uh of the acronym and uh we had just me and and like our my core team at uh EA were just I guess I would say we

were liberated from the the corporate environment and um we were kind of looking for uh what we wanted to do next and it was right when ufn came out and similarly to up we looked at it was like wow this is just a great tool set that we know um a pipeline that's uh s like I agree it's it's a great place to fail because you can go so fast um with you know 200 plus million players a month already there uh so are my initially I looked at this as a place where we could go from having come off a a multi-year project that didn't even come out to an environment where we could be releasing games very quickly and that just scratched a creative itch for me a productive Builder you know I want to make things and put them out in the world and it's been true I mean we've been going for we just had our

one-year anniversary for the company last week we just released our fifth game um we've got a slate of 13 games in production um so just in terms of the throughput productivity and we're not just building a developer we're building a publisher so we're publishing other people's games as well the the ability to learn is just it's so it's so Amplified here it's like a petri dish um where you in the past in Triple A you would spend two three four maybe five years getting to a point where you can release a game and really start to build a flywheel on one product and here you can do that in in a month or two and every time you do that you repeat and you learn stuff and the it is it is super early so all those things that that P was talking about like this the discovery algorithm that drives the storefront and drive discoverability of your games is is still very basic it's kind of one- siiz fits-all so some games that are you know appealing to a wide swath of players that are on fortnite right now which means close to the

fortnite play Paradigm have a little bit of an advantage and those that came up during the original creative days of fortnite also have an advantage but you know as as the tool set gets this is my this is why I'm excited about as a platform as the tool set gets more interesting and as the platform gets more sophisticated in terms of personalized Discovery all the kinds of features like attribution which we take for granted on any other platform as all those things you know become a reality uh it becomes a way more interesting platform to publish on and then you know if you just if you kind of back up high level why I think why I'm doing this you know why I think it's an interesting business to build you look at where epic is going with the technology and how ufn is merging with u unreal 6 and and the Epic store and all all of these deals like Disney coming in putting a lot of money in Sony put a lot of money in Lego put a lot of money in and all of this is to create this inter operable

ecosystem theoretically it sounds amazing on paper and if you fast forward three years it is the metaverse I know we're not allowed to use that word anymore but it's what it is you know will will will it actually come to pass I don't know but I think we're in a moment where it feels to me and this is this is my you know this is my pitch right it feels to me like this is as significant as a change in in how games are made and played and distributed as you know as mobile was you know when the App Store came out we had no idea was going to be as big as it is today and the thing that's really interesting to me is like in that first year I think epic paid out about as much as Apple did in year one of having the store was hundreds of millions of dollars paid out to developers um so yeah that's I mean that's that's a little bit about what we're doing but it's like that's more so I guess why why we're doing it yeah the convergence things an interesting one but I guess like iOS you know it will the curve of expectation from the audience will also go up and as we start

to get new tools like metahuman our own characters our own camera systems and suddenly it won't look or feel or play anything like fortnite and and so that's could to be super interesting especially if you got a good mix on team like to Alex's point you know good strong background in AAA because the expectations go up and you know we'll we'll probably move away from skidy toilet and and have some pretty sort of sophisticated you know multiplayer shoters for example our own interpretations of of battle Ro so super exciting that part I mean even in the first year it's like you just look at the road map that they've delivered on it might not be exactly 100% of what we exactly want but it's it's a lot of stuff I mean the ability to it's funny because some of the things are like so table Stakes like the ability to save players progress and to change the you know when they when they announced the the persistence thing I was like you know in 1989 we used to call that a save game yeah but it is it's wild there's the

assumptions you make having worked at the likes of Zinger attribution or otherwise or Discovery you know we did the um we did the keynote in in um New Orleans last year and uh obviously as Alex was saying we've all dabbled in corporate life at various points in our careers but you soon remember when you go back to do a keynote that for a 10-minute talk you have to do 24 hours of rehearsal so like you know I think I could have made half for gaming this time but during that time in the in the Green Room it was great asked questions of of you know Tim Sweeney said to me is the one thing you want what would you what would you like and I said just give me deep linking I have 160 million Gamers you know and I've got these channels we got Tik Tok we got Twitter we got got X you know we we we've got so many players we could drive and I think we' been put very thoughtful about how they roll these things out so it's not just you know one size fits all for every everybody you you just got to you

know sit out this this year I would suggest anyone who's going to come into ufn with with all the the good creative and and business intentions that we do you're going to need a Runway and a great deal of patience that's for sure yeah yeah that's I think that's entirely true there's a lot of learning to be done like on any platform it's like for us just watching how players interact and what the what sort of the preferences are like and what play patterns work Mechanics Work and balance it's like as much of a learning for me on this platform as it was you know mobile and free to play safe place to fail thing you know going back to bank it was you know two teams attackers Defenders three points very objective very competitive down the streets inside Close Quarters combat you know that could have been a complete and total failure to the fortnite audience who re used to something pretty much entirely different from that and that that was another reason to get it done quickly because it could have just done a 24-hour poping drop which is very common

but actually turns out it has 6 to 7x the engagement time spent in an average Island which I think is about 7 Minutes last count I got a couple of questions so as you said like a lot of the basic things are missing because you guys went you know head first on the frontier just on a on a totally new platform so my question there is like what is the communication like with epic like other than talking to Tim Sweeney in Green Room um what is uh what is you know how do they communicate about their road maps are they very responsive is it like relationship with Google or is it relationship with apple it's it's definitely different than the relationship with apple you know we apple is famously very secretive about anything and you you don't usually learn about it until the uh the developer learns at the same Pace as a customer and I think epic is you know epic is banking a lot at the future their company on this being successful it's a core part of their strategy and uh they've been very open not just with us

you know like or you know professional developers or whatever they've been very open with the community about where the road map is headed and providing updates on when those things will be uh fulfilled they um they do invest in a lot of education for folks that are building on the platform I think there's like last I looked there was 10 or 12,000 people building uh on this platform and yes a lot of them are individuals and a lot of them are in that 92% that have no players uh currently active in the islands but that that is just a lot of activity happening um they do have a developer relations team um so they they do have people that are in you know whose job it is to help make folks that are building on a platform successful um and they they do listen a lot of the things that they've asked uh you know hey what what do you want you know it's like deep linking is it's on there they're trying to figure that out you know it's like some of the other

stuff that's been asked for they they have delivered against um so I would say I don't know how to compare it to Google but it's definitely very different from Apple and I think that's intentional in many ways I don't know P what what's your experience been yeah very similar that you know very very supportive great communicators um whether be developer success or the exec te some really good back and forth you know we run into some really crazy uh challenges uh just two weeks ago um I think somebody was on the moderation side someone in the community just had it in for us and um they just kept sort of complaining about the image that we use as our you know Main Art Tile for Bank hat that it that it was misleading and I think this this bad operator was was hitting us on the community like six times and the Gang get he was just being delisted it's like every other day bankas got delisted I'm like what why are we getting banned

we've been live since July last year same image same product nothing's changed and then one bad actor in the community decides to just start hitting us and complaining us and the system is quite automated turns out and so if you get if people start to complain about the imagery you're using whether it's true or not you know we got delisted five times I was like come on I'm trying to run a studio here six people and you know okay five to 10,000 du ain't much but you know all all of these things help so anyway they were fantastic at resolving that problem we almost had our publishing rights removed so that's just one example that if things get you know heated in communities where because obviously if you go and search for bank heist there's like five of them you like the people just copy paste ideas fairly consistently so yeah that was tough but they were fantastic during that period even on just the developer relations level never mind you know the longer term road map and and strategy and the convergence with onreal 6 all of that's

fascinating but yeah even on the data though they've been they've been really I just wish we had more data it drives me nuts yeah or ability to basically continue where you stopped this podcast is brought to you by data AI now you're asking didn't they get acquired by sensor Tower they did and that's awesome here's why whether you loved using data. a or sensor Tower the combined company will offer customers even stronger and more detailed insights on the full Digital customer Journey exciting times lie ahead a sensor Tower Daya enforces go to data. or sensor to.com and get on board with undeniably the best data partner in the business now back to the episode yeah Alex and I talked about this before you know you've just got to celebrate those shortcomings really you know it's it we we have this joke when we first started building the fortnite

says no it was kind of up on the wall is like every time you try to do something that we to to Alex's point you may take for granted it was like no can't do that what about no my engine D was like what about can we do no what about the no can't do what no I'm just like geez fornite says no again I'm not even going to bother asking but we just kept pushing my favorite story was um on fortnite says no was uh one of our Engineers I said can we give me a soccer prototype I'd just be really interested if we could build you know some kind of five soccer game in uefm that'd be fun it's like biggest sport in the world see what that's like anyway it turns out ball physics and physics generally again coming on the road map this year but just not very good at this time for that sort of interaction but uh one of our Engineers went away after this very frustrating prototype play time and he sent a video later in the afternoon and had this amazing like soccer experience I was like what happened so he went off

into the community on Discord turns out the chicken has really good physics because players kicking around so we put a chicken inside a [Laughter] ball you you can you can hack your way to to like great idea you've just got to celebrate it I I it is so true it's like we you know our the engineers and our team have all been programming games for decades you know so it's like they've kind of gotten used to to being a you know having a clear path to being able to implement whatever feature a designer would come up with but you really got to retrain yourself that moders mindset of like of like okay there may be a right way or an opt you know quote unquote right way or an optimal way to do this but there's probably some tricky way to do this yourself permission to think that way you has any of the team actually this is you don't have to answer this question have any of them given up have you had any people just be like you know what I just I'm a C++ I I just can't do

this have you had any people just think I'm done with this I can't do it because I have not yet not yet no yeah so so another question that I have about this is is really the uh the ROI part because both of your studios are really small Pete you said you were six and Alex you're probably like four or five right uh we're we're about 10 oh wow okay so you're really like a big ufn Studio but anyways like everybody's between 5 to 10 let's put it that way that's not a gigantic team we're not talking about a crazy burn so what is the the ROI like here because you were saying that that epic is given away almost as much as Apple was given away during the first years is it profitable to run one of these small Studios and you're kind of waiting for the tide to rise but while you're waiting you're already profitable or how how does it work it can it absolutely can be the unit economics um are actually very very favorable if you compare it to other um platforms the

cost to build an island is low the and the return on a successful Island top 100 um can be high enough that a successful game on this platform uh can be operated at about a 90% Roi which is Bonkers you know you compare that you know you have to keep in mind also there's zero server costs there's very low operating costs uh on on an island that's successful um and the acquisition costs are also they're very low because fortnite itself is very targetable so you know you can't Target your own game when you when you mark Market a mobile game but you can Target fortnite when you um go out to Market and acquire users in a for a fortnite island you had deep linking it'd be even lower but as it is right now our cpis are under 30 cents which for your listeners who are used to marketing on mobile they they probably just fell out of their chair because that's Bonkers great that said it is still it is definitely a power law here so you have to be able to get

yourself into that position in the top 100 which is it's hard to do right now just because that the tastes are fairly narrow the tools are fairly Young and the mechanics that we have at our fingertips for acquiring and retaining an audience like the the kind of data we get back no attribution no deep links all that it's just very leaky um so the answer is the ROI is great if you are successful finding successful is finding success on an island by Island basis is is still fairly challenging I don't know how you feel about that answer Pete I know we've talked about this before yeah I mean I would say on an individual basis Bank house was profitable if you look at how long it took to make the size of the team and give you some context so at an average play time of about 40 minutes and that's an average so I'd imagine the upper

limit of an island is 4 hours you can't play any longer than 4 hours um that's a server limit that's put in place so I think our top 10% of players were playing for many hours just by we just assume that's the case it's hard to find the actual data other than an average it's had about 8 million players 95 million minutes played um Peak CCU around 6,000 and so over that initial period between July and September and we were operating something of a live service so one example to Alex's p on community we we did a fairly traditional game design job and decided oh it's best of five rounds first of three turns out you know kids just drop in and out of violence so quickly that was kind of a a crazy idea and when we just opened it up to infinite rounds we're doing lots of interesting changes on just on the code and had some problems with memory and stuff blah blah but actually so that you know over that period between you know June July through September it was

pretty profitable for us as a small team sit it's certainly not paying the bills anymore um you know we we're probably going to go back to it actually with some interesting new camera modes and stuff we did something over holiday we did a theme that had some last pickup so as a studio not profitable in the first year but we're very small we don't spend marketing dollars we haven't rais money so we're just been very thoughtful and careful to be honest at this point but certainly initial launch Bank house was great and we've got something really interesting coming up that is quite significant in in its undertaking so our new project with an IP holder is going to take us about six seven months be it's it's pretty big deal and that's going to take huge amount of effort other than you know smaller individual islands that that we've done before kind of going back to this like you had a lot of users and and you're both facing a little bit of a challenges to keep it profitable to my understanding that is not that much about the quality of games but more the

tools the attribution the ability to market the uh the basic things that are missing that are creating these challenges for our Y and for essentially keeping players um what when talking about the challenges with ufn today what are some of those challenges you've encountered while developing so um repeat you can continue since you've live operated or tried to live operate a game successfully like why didn't that take off because you have a long history with free-to-play games you know it's it's not that this is the first free-to-play title you're trying to operate yeah yeah and you know worldclass product management working alongside me too you know um as we would at Zinga for example I just in the end for the timing and for the feature set it really was joking aside persistence I mean if I if I can't pick up and continue when I come back well what's retention in a in a world of of no persistence so that was the real reason

honestly have we when we go back to bank house which we will be doing soon now we have persistent we're actually going to introduce to some more interesting things because it just keeps getting featured every now and again so that's going to be interesting um to to see the impact that has certainly the retention data is it's it's not again m m you and I were at Zing we know what we know very dashboards look like yeah on on the ufn side we have a rolling day one retention I'm not sure I can do much with that you know and other frustrations but really you've just got to dive into the community I think that's one of the questions you you sent before we jumped on the podcast right you've just got to get in and spend time with the community and listen and update based on that really and that that's a really great leading indicator and fortnite.gg is super useful because you can track yourself as a publisher um but yeah we it was for us it was because of the time in which we launch La I think any of our any of our new stuff and certainly when

we go back and update older games is going to be certainly more interesting in near future for sure especially with Discovery and features that are really persistent that that work over very long periods of time with what I would describe as a fairly sophisticated meta game too and and highly deeply social gameplay so I think what what comes next is going to be more fascinating from a live Services perspective that's for sure Alex how about the other challenges that you faced with uh with development especially and and I mean you've had what you said six games that you've launched uh we we've launched five although four four of those are UF and one of those is is uh with overwolf uh in um in Arc but um I think you know what what Pete's talking about I would agree with is that the the the tools that are at the developers fingertips today and developer/publisher are um a little kind of a subset of what you would need to support the business model that exists you know it's an engagement based business model so we

get paid based on usage and it's actually a really smart thing that epic did setting it up that way I think because it it incentivized developers to make things that are engaging and it's also it's very much aligned with what makes fortnite successful the more minutes play the the more healthy the ecosystem is so it's win-win for everybody but you know if you want to make something that's super engaging you have to build things that you know people want to play for a lot of time and come back to so yeah persistence absolutely matters I think one of the things that is is is sort of like the defining limiting factor on what we can create today is you people don't really talk about this so much but there is a um a limit to the size of the content that we can create and that limit is squishy it's basically represented by a thermometer um which is not terribly deterministic it's it's you can you know

when you add things to your Island the thermometer goes up but it's it's not exact science or math so scoping uh you know an experience that you want to build and building something that has a lot of depth and the ability to retain an audience um it has some you know it it's just has some constraints you know it's it's fortnite says no in a lot of cases like people saying so that's I mean for my BV that's why as more and more features come about you know the ability to connect Islands together um and span persistence across multiple Islands will give us the ability to expand on experiences as well that kind of thing that's that's where I think the the tool set and you know on the publishing side all of those things that we were talking about before that a modern game publishing platform has like when those things start to come online then then the tool set will catch up with how the business model uh works and I think we'll start to see

more more sophistication in terms of the experiences that are built and and how Publishers operate as well that's that's the that's the catchup I think that we're all investing in at least that's the catch up that we're we're investing in yeah I mean the other parallel here is is Zinger on Facebook to some extent and you know you you probably hear smaller Studios and companies pitching themselves as the Zinger of ufn um and you know some people are doing that now actually again coming back to hacking the system um you know some of the some of the uh islands that have fairly large audiences in terms of concurrency they are actually creating some hacky portals that you can jump through to their other islands and experiences and that's been interesting to watch and again that's something that epic has supported they're not trying to clim down or stop people from doing that you know in the same way if you want to retain the audience that loves the games and the experiences that you make then you should be able to retain them in in fascinating and interesting ways so I I

think we'll probably see more social hubs appearing too whether that be you know music spaces or otherwise where players can just come hang out form a Lobby and then sort of Hub and spoke into into other things your other experiences and when that happens you're going to start and see these like many sort of ecosystems of players that just love your content and the games aren't quite sophisticated enough to do that right now but I think in the near future that's going to be fun too the the sort of non sweaty fortnite experiences are are going to be interesting because obviously they've had huge success with the with their sort of um music stuff and not just the big sort of Travis Scott concert even more recently with festival and some of the music integration so that's going to be fun too I think this podcast is brought to you by apps flyer in today's Digital World understanding your apps Journey from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps flyer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar

work smarter with apps sler that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they interact with your app app sler where your app's potential meets performance I'm not familiar with ufn so what is um well actually let use Roblox as an example so uh when we had Vu here on the on the podcast they you know the person uh Andrew Rose talked about an interesting thing where he talked about the history of the company and how they try to make a lot of Roblox games and they were quite not quite able to find success with the type of games that they were making with the audience they were making it for because it's a very different audience and and though they have professional game development experience you know Andre is from from Zinga as well they still couldn't quite find what would hit with the players and then they ended up with this publishing

model where they rather acquired some of these games that were successful for somewhat reason and then applied product management uh to those titles like building tutorials and looking at the funnels Etc so uh what's what's your take on this like is it easy cuz you have been developing games for what 30 30 years now at least 30 closing on 40 maybe sometime like I know how early you being rude now I I don't know how early like some people start when they're like 12 like oh yeah I made my first there's a crossover point when you go from veteran to Legendary it was like a video game level yeah actually Roblox is a great example because I remember um being some of my old friends work there from Zinger and I met up with them at GDC at their the drink thing and I was fascinated by again front lines that came out so of met with that team just to hang out and talk about how the hell

they pulled that off because it was just visually from a gameplay perspective and how you do kill cams with Lis script at I mean performing Miracles really and and they said the same thing you know I've been making video games half my life and he's 22 and I'm like yeah so am I slightly long but um yeah they're quite inspiral Roblox is quite unique very different um I've seen a lot of companies doing what you described you know looking at like one and a half to two and a half times e Dar and rolling them up into fairly successful businesses because you know kind of Alex say it's difficult being a like I don't really design fortnite Islands I help build the team the strategy looking for money IP Partnerships whatever it may be me designing a game in UFM would just be a really bad idea because you know the target audience is anything Rock between 12 and 22 I'm not that person you know uh my my kids play fortnite but I'm not that person so it's it's it's I think

Alex said this earlier youve gotta you got to put yourself on the shoes and and the seat of the community because that's really what epic's looking for right where are they spending their time and and spending spending their engagement and um Roblox is even Wilder you know from that perspective so for those of us who can build companies run Studios companies Great cultures hire great people all of that's really really important and to be a good leader in all the things that we've learned over the years and but you know for the content itself take a very very different approach quite often you know it's our verse Engineers that came from the fortnite creative communities they're telling me like what they're working on and when it's coming it's very very different and I I prefer that obviously at this point Alex same type of experience or how would you how would you see it like in terms of like the creativity and what hits in in in the ufn realm like I would say I mean I like I was saying before the the tastes of this audience are different um um as as different from say mobile as mobile was

from Triple A in my experience and it it I think it is a combination of you know it's it's it is a younger audience um but fortnite in itself is I mean it's been around for seven years it's um it was a cultural phenomenon you know it still is you know and it's it's kind of transcended the idea of being a game it's kind of I I'm so you this will date me but like I equate it to like the mall like when I was a kid my the social construct in which I related to my friends and the world was the mall that's what we would go there and there were experiences there to be had you know and fortnite and Roblox I guess to some to the same degree I guess have filled that role for for kids growing up and especially the last four or five years whatever post Pand mic even more so or during the pandemic even even more

so um so there's there's so much in the way of of vocabulary of um just design sensibility of of the shorthand for how people on that you know the the players on in that ecosystem relate to each other and a lot of that you see come to fruition in the kinds of creativity that we see on the platform so yeah for 100 million perc like I'm not the right person like Pete says um to necessarily be designing although I although I am because it's just too much fun um but uh you know the thing one of the things I'm most excited about is is you know part of what we're doing is um uh partnering with individual creators who've been building on the platform and helping to plus up their work you know offer them um you know our our skills basically to work for them um and help them uh finish Islands published them and that I think is super exciting because it is it's

very much just straight out of the community um and it's you know it's in the it's in the native language you know from a design sensibility yeah there's some similarities on con ideas memes I mean Bank house wasn't plucked from thin air we could see the success of kids love Robin Banks I mean you know virtually obviously on on Roblox some so like super scky so you know we did our research on the audience before just plucking an idea out of the air that's really important but I think the thing to remember on the on the sort of daytoday sort of building a business running a studio making software point of view um they're just so wildly different from each other as as platforms I mean obviously fortnite was an enormous success and then became this battle royale game shortly after launch and then was just brute forced into this live service this engine and for friends of mine who worked there that was a really hard difficult but amazing time

for the company and see what it is today but essentially if you think about it fortnite is this absolutely enormous triaa game and it's an enormous claim and I think that does put some restrictions on you know obviously server costs or something we don't bear but that means that our Islands can only be up for four hours at a time the memory limits that Alex mentioned the thermometer like very difficult to manage those memory liit it's when you're working with AAA artists from OverWatch right within half an hour the do it all again just that's right know Al it's interesting it's like yeah you should we kit bash this or should we build it from scratch and in some ways you know the answer to that is does a player want something original or do they want you to make just just put it together with the Legos you got and we've got we've gotten surprising answers to that question from literally um yeah Roblox wildly

different I mean essentially we we've done some stuff on Roblox and you know it's more it feels to me like more like an operating system you know it's like this giant foundational operating system so it feels in very very simple way to describe these things but Roblox feels like this OS that is this foundational thing that you'd push up with 77 million da which is absurd whereas fortnite you know you're you're unraveling what what is this enormous chest of AAA content of the last seven years and and reconstructing it in magical ways but um obviously scripting languages that have some commonality but for what they are and the development there's some crossovers but they're very different things to work in and I think a lot of that is is related to the business model too you know if you on on Roblox there's a lot of monetization is what you know in in basically inapp mon monetization is what drives the economy and and fortnite's completely different you know that how that trickles into how you think about design is is very

different yeah maybe we'll have our own our ability to have our own stores in UF and at some point maybe our own skins in order you start to build your own Revenue business inside your experiences right that be yep step into the future of game monetization with exola exola empowers developers and Publishers to market sell connect and optimize their games globally from payment solution to a full suit of tools designed to grow your games Revenue while fostering a lawyer player base exola is your game's gateway to worldwide success with exola the world is your playground visit exa.com today and find all the solutions that will help you to power your games into success everywhere so talking about monetization like how does the monetization work on ufn oh so you're you're you're okay so it is like apple arcade it's a black box then somebody sends a message from epic

like hey great engagement here's $300 yeah you get a check every 30 days at the end of the month and it's like you know it's like a birthday present you know it's either got 50 bucks in it or 75,000 in it I I just you're never quite sure so it's like opening a present it it like the memory meter it is not 100% deterministic but uh you you are given hints and it's very much related to minutes played it's very much related to CCU so you know you have an island that's got strong CCU and consistent CCU that's a money maker yeah we've had interestingly had two games that are fairly close on CCU right so we Bank to um 6 and a half thousand again we released a holiday with 6,000 ccus completely different payouts because the engagement in terms of average time spent on the island was Far higher in our game and so if it's an average of

seven minutes and we were seeing 40 minutes on average that that paid out more than the other so Alex says you got a you you've got CCU you've got average time you've got you can manufacture and think through da you can go back logally and like get the math we've done the product management job on the revenue but it's some pretty like interesting heavy the uh individual lifting on a per Island per product per team basis because you just don't have the One dashboard or the one set of magical metrics that we use you know especially at Zinger and freet to-play mobile companies for example it really is just correlations and and and learnings actually from the last year having to bring all of that together and create your own data points really that's challenging so you're making an upfront investment though it's not big and then it depends all on the engagement of the the island that you release but at the same time marketing

is almost impossible because there's no attribution or user acquisition is impossible because there's no attribution so essentially uh unless you have a big Community driving users to those games is up I would I wouldn't say that acquisition is impossible it is entirely possible it's just hard to measure you know so um you know you you can and we have run lots of different activities that you look at and you can ma like Pete saying you can ma manually correlate what you're doing to what's happening in your various experiences and you can you can make those correlations and you can further invest in the things that seem to have positive impact it's not measurable you know and that's really it needs to be measurable in order for us to be able to deterministically build a successful um long-term business around it but you can certainly invest in acquisition and you can see those correlations

and you yeah if you're in if you're in a you know 25 30 40 Cent an install you could probably run some interesting programs that way because obviously you when when michig and I were at Zinger you know game of wars in the market and they were spending anything between 40 60120 an install so you know obviously you we do need to figure out your row asard that point clearly goes out saying but I think if it's at that low a cost you can actually run some pretty interesting experimentations and for us obviously what we could do uniquely to some extent but I think more are we doing this in the future we we could watch so at the point at which courage right with his three million people who were watching him that day we could see the impact that had on our CCU when he broadcast and played Bast with some of his friends right and the same when Valkyrie played it and both of them had their voice in the game and we used some of that in the K and we obviously had this huge reach on Twitter to that that was an

interesting one because we did oh he you know courage PR from 11: to 1:30 that's pretty cool it's a two and a half hour window we can now go back to fortnite.gg and you could see how it started to hit CCU but also how it started to push over the following next sort of two to three days how it started to populate across other Discovery Channels and then because of all that pickup it got an epic pick about a week to 10 days later and that that really is that you know like back in the day really hoping for a sort of game of the week you know Apple feature Moment On the App Store so we we could correlate that too because obviously was your original question is that that obviously was was part of our thesis can can our creators these and all followings Drive interest in SS and and game clay for the content we build so that that was an interesting one they paid off and and how do you overall like launch and market a game like now that you're releasing the new new one so without like P you without the

the Hun thieves behind you or I don't know if they will supporting be supporting it in the same way and um and Alex you you've released the the five the four sorry four games to you FN like like how do you approach the launch do you still invest into marketing and without any attribution just call it brand marketing and just put in like 10ks or what's what's the approach so Alex maybe start with you we have been we've been developing a you like a Playbook you know and really it's been as we've been releasing these islands over the last year uh a lot of experimentation around activating streams uh managing our Tik Tok and our Discord um uh we've built some Community engagement tools that run on a our discords that when we are streaming with content creators uh we're able to uh bring some kind of like metagame features but between those streams so like like people were saying you can see a bump but then stream's

over what happens you know um how can we even before persistence how can we bring those players who were uh playing with their whoever they're following whatever streamer they're following how can we bring them along for a ride that lasts for more than you know two hours so all of those things are kind of in our Playbook and we've been jettisoning things that don't seem to have a big impact and retesting things and keeping the things that do have an impact in our playbooks so when we launch a new island now we are investing tens of thousands of dollars I know it's not a huge budget but in in in this ecosystem that that's what we're investing to um activate all the things that have worked for us in the past and to throw new experiments into the mix to find more things that will work for us in the future and and over time because these these Cycles are so fast and we're able to you know do you we hope hope to release a dozen Gam in the next year we'll have a lot of um learning through doing that and be able

to get better and better with each release so the next game that we have coming up uh will be coming out um at the end of this month uh and it will have the benefit of many many launches in advance of it um and it will it will help us learn how to get better for the the ones that come after yeah there's some irony there as well given that um obviously the likes of Vinnie Vinnie hacker who's one of the creators at 100 th I think he has 30 million plus followers on Tik Tok and epic we're telling is that Tik Tok is this really big organic Discovery Channel for them um but then you hit with the irony that the 12 digigit Island code he thinks it's a credit card so you so he just like God damn it yeah every time you turn around he's like wow fornite says no on Tik Tok but it's a a really big sort of organic discovery engine stough and you can go and just see what gets traction there from other

other creators other Island makers and you can see what gets traction on Tik Tok and see that start to correlate and populate to seec you on you know I wouldn't call them competitors Islands I just you on other on other people's content so that's been interesting to to to track that like what is happening in absence of data in absence of being able to drive in stores and and through deep linking or otherwise what are we what are we seeing just organically that you know in the same way we' look at organic list from a featuring on the App Store it's again very similar you know not specific data that you would have in a spreadsheet but you you can make some correlations that are super helpful to decide whether you want to do that again because like to to Alex's point you can't just pop and drop with a Creator you have to play consistently you the friction of okay well there's 20,000 people watching valky and she played for an hour well how many of those people are going to go load fortnite I don't know turn out there's quite a few in the hundreds so that got us from 300 players

CCU up to 700 over a thousand the following and and then you get into the the sort of rediscovery channels for individual players who can play something that they've played before and you start to see some pickup and and some repeat play from that yeah that's been interesting and but it was the that initial spin I think and obviously I learned three months later from Epic that's not of criticism but they said hey your bank house has seven times the average engagement time of of a normal L I was like oh okay well that explains a lot because now I can see why the flywheel worked right I didn't know why the flywheel worked other than our creators and some other activities that one actually in terms of eyeballs time spent is clearly the one that got us Mo most of the discovery and and and you know a reasonable check yeah I I'll I'll I'll add in that you know one thing that um this ecosystem has is I would say it's a huge Advantage is that fortnite is not

just a platform it is a game and epic is a first party you know on this platform so they you know they they're driving growth at the Top Line because they released Lego fortnite at the end of the year and it brings in all these players and it keeps this ecosystem you know it keeps players in this ecosystem and because there are games here the the platform becomes targetable so so there you know you you can have a couple of uh streamers you know but they're not equal you know if you have a streamer that like plays fortnite that is a great way to Target this platform because anybody watching them is they're at least interested in watching somebody play fortnite and they're likely play fortnite too so you get a a much clearer correlation between uh that channel and the potential for uh viewers of that channel to be a customer because fortnite in itself is a

is a game and it's targetable you don't really get that benefit on a you know like a from you know an original game that doesn't have a built audience yet um or I would even argue Roblox is uh is is um is more of a challenge from that perspective as well but it's a it's a really nice thing to to think about making ufn games and and to try and figure out how to how to be smart about acquiring and activating players through the through streamers it's an interesting point now because the the way I would be thinking theoretically again and not much playing fortnite nor ufn ufn islands is that when you Market one of these islands you kind of Market fortnite as a whole and then fortnite has so many engagement Hooks and that big audience that really play fortnite for the fortnite and for the social community and for the seasons and for all the new things that happen so so I understand why the retention would be very limited because even though you're

advertising something that is really cool very much a fortnite game they still come forward and it's like an appetizer and now they go back to the main course which is the fortnite and so it's kind of chall it's on one hand it's very fast to develop fortnite but on the other hand you're just driving users back to fortnite with these different creative appetizers is this uh like out of like is this I think that's a fair way to think about it theoretically but in reality if you look at the actual uh usage of um first party versus third party experiences on ufn which you know including Battle Royale for you know fortnite yeah the it it is fair you know it it it oscillates between 6040 to 4060 and a lot of that has to do with the seasonality of the game when a new season drops new content drops players really come in for that first party content and then you see a migration of usage towards the third party content so it does really act like

a funnel that way but you're right like any anything any advertising that we do has to drive players to fortnite you know and so whether you call it fortnite a platform or fortnite a game either way they're on epic's homepage that's just part of the fun yeah that was a really Brave thing they did you know last year very early into the life cycle of ufn they they basically changed the entire homepage of fortnite to not just be because the friction when it first came out was it wasn't great there's the there's the play button on on the far right and you would select an island from underneath that from a page over to the right and then hit play because you have to go over here and select an island then come back and then within a very short space of time they put the entire sort of create a community right on the landing homepage at fortnite which I thought was a really Brave thing to do um and that paid off so I think it's really about how you know do you believe in Epic are they taking this very seriously right

from a business point of view I would say 100% yes um obviously got to ask those questions fairly directly last year you're going to commit you and your team's lifestyle and livelihoods to to this I you asked some fairly direct questions of the Epic team last year and uh we've been very helpful um so yeah I we're Believers um especially as things get more sophisticated more in as the audience gets more sophisticated and really interesting point that told me recently which kind of made me laugh but it's not really surprising is um they used to have um a fair amount of interest from brands that wanted to be associated with fortnite and maybe you know some joking aside again the the the metaverse but when Facebook changed their name to meta their brand interest went from two a week to 200 a week so it's like you know we joke about the metaverse As game makers but you know it it's real in

terms of where people want to be or where they understand and know the audiences you know whether that's Roblox or or UF ENT the interest levels in just meta generally as a company the metaverse and everyone associated with it just really sort of picked things up which I was quite surprised by it just brought Brands and people interested in that they'd never been interested before so just that just that one moment of ch I'll I'll tell you that that I think the most telling thing that they've said about their commitment to this platform was it it didn't really get picked up so much at GDC but they basically announced that they're going to start building fortnite seasons in ufn which is it's a seismic shift for the platform it's as much as like changing the homepage to being everything instead of just fortnite it's basically saying this is no longer fortnite with some third party content it's saying this is now a platform and fortnite is our first party game which we'll be releasing on this

platform alongside everybody else um and it's it's uh I think that's that's a great sign of their commitment for this long term yeah it's funny because we we joked about UE FN and the acronym and I got it wrong on a couple of occasions early on on a podcast kind of embarrassing but actually it's it's not easy to say either when you put two vowels like that together but it is really a set of development tools cuz actually to the audience it is just fortnite like d this point that landing page that homepage it's fortnite you know you go there to fortnite and oh I got to play you know this game and this game and that game and then I jumped into battle royale that's very true but that that time spent is quite healthy you know if if for example time spent on um islands and and creators content was like 5% I think we'd be like oh God this is this isn't going well but like to ask Point 50/50 6040 it's it's pretty good and then a whole a whole breath of old players came

back when when they released OG last year and that brought in another swear of interest for people who probably didn't recognize the changes in fortnite and what is all this new content so saw some pretty interesting optic from that as well because players who'd lapsed somewhat came back and and discovered all the islands for the first time so it seems like you're you're fully on board you're still convicted convicted convinced in the uh you might depending on how well this goes you're very much convinced in the uh in the success of of the platform the growth of the platform and it seems like it's in very early stages when you're talking about it like some of the super basic things are missing that are limiting your capabilities to really operate the games like launching is easy but operating and scaling is is quite challenging um perhaps like the the sort of takeaways that would be interesting for the audience is like what are the lessons you've learned from launching

these several titles that you're taking into the next one and yeah like like what you should have what should the listeners know before they start developing for ufn so that they don't have to learn the hard way and kind of learn from the uh from the mistakes or trials that you've had maybe starting with Alex um well I mean I think there there are a few basic things like you know just embrace the constraints and design with the tools that you have um there's some slightly deeper but not super deep things like hey it's a little bit more complex than just getting a lot of people to play your Island um you they do need to stick around so I think Pete you said this already but it's like it's um average playtime you know on an island is as important as how many people you have playing with it it's just it's kind of simple arithmetic but the more minutes you generate at the end of the day um the healthier it is for

your game as a business um so that has big implications to how you design and and the winning designs really really are things that kind of come out of the community they don't come from somewhere else in gaming you know and I think that's true to every platform you know it's like you you you build for how people you know live on a platform and we learned that when we got to mobile um you know the play patterns there and the kinds of activities that people like to do are just very different than you would do on a PC or a console and it's same here you know and um that you kind of have to learn by by doing you know I I I've I've I've told many people you know do a couple of violins and learn from it you know before you expect to make something that that's really going to work um and the good news is you can do that in a month yeah I I couldn't agree more with that I mean I've never in the 40 years

apparently that I've been making videos0 was it [Laughter] 50 g off you're g off bro I don't think I've ever worked in in such a speedy inative fun way with brilliant people at that speed before it's just every day you make it better and it's fairly straightforward work other than trying to hit AAA standards of artwork and quality and so on and a great call those things we still have to surprise and Delight people whatever we're learning from the community so that's certainly a huge positive is the fun you have and the speed at which you can you know win and fail it's awesome um I just reemphasize what Alex said you know celebrate what fortnite is today and don't come into this if you're going to be like a caginally AAA developer about it you know and fold your arms and complain about scripting languages and

so on and the things that it can't do because you know's going to set you up culturally to be successful and also as part of that M uh you know leave any ego at the door because this community votes with its feet they don't care who you are what games so you know they vote with their eyeballs and their feet in your Islands if you make great content so you got to leave your ego at the door one example is you know one of one of our Engineers built capture the flag and one of the other artists said why are we doing Capture the Flag it's so boring and I was like well if you're 13 years old right playing Capture the Flag inside fortnite might be the first time you've ever experienced that and it's going to be magical so you got to just re-engineer rethink and 180 a few things because if you come in with sort of old school sort of structures and thoughts and processes about how to do things you could unstuck very quickly I think so leave your EO at the door engage in the community to learn from

them more than anyone and and you know have a ton of fun it's ring building but go back to one of my earlier points have a Runway this is not easy yeah I think like any new platform people get attracted is like here's a place to get super successful super quick and you know we we we had I mean yeah it's not really that it's it's uh it is is absolutely an amazing place to build things quickly um but if you're looking to to make an impactful business it's it's a it's an investment you know I think the long-term the the long-term potential is crazy I'm just think it like they're not even on mobile like just like when they come back to mobile it's going to double the number of people on the platform it's just Bonkers to think about H well I'm happy hear to hear that because I've been hearing a lot of negative things and maybe the negative things about the platform are the ones that that come to the surface the uh the

fastest and I've been hearing about you know some of the studios kind of trying it out doing few games and really pivoting out saying no this is not sustainable and so forth so I'm really glad to hear that that both of you are are not not only have developed for the platform developing in the future and pretty excited about the future of the of the platform rather than thinking about like what next we tried this out and so this is great to hear yeah I mean just think about what's happening in game industry if you looked at new new's latest report it's like 60% of what is it 60% of play time is in seven-year-old games yeah everybody plays yeah and like did you see the number of PlayStation games being bought by people over 50 I was like oh that's scary that that's a little it's not weird or scary but it as a metric on the other side of the spectrum right you got Roblox at 77 million da you saying that oh yeah 75% of 9 to 14 year olds in America are on robblox and you oh my

god when that audience migrates through the improvements in Roblox or Andor moves across fortnite I don't think they're going to want to give you $60 for your console game in three four years it's happening already but that's why it is the older franchises you know the big franchise that's where the money is that's where the people are that's where unfortunately people have been doubling down recently and seen so many layoffs is because it is in the end whether it's you know whether it's epics you know math or not it all of this is about time spent when the Netflix did did their market report you know their number one competitor was robots it's it's time spent and that's what people are fighting for and these communities these viewers these players they vote with their feet so you got to make great content because it's really easy we'll just skip on to the next Island slow friction easy come easy go yeah yeah I I'm really fascinated by by these new platforms also because just

like with with uh with Facebook games and with mobile games as well like the design that worked on the previous platform will not work on the next platform and we always kind of think from that perspective like oh I know I know freeo playay games from mobile I'm just going to come in to to ufn or Roblox and just dominate because these fools don't know what I know but that same thinking was was applied by console developers who came in on Facebook games and they came into mobile games like time to get some real games on this platform guys like like move over the real game makers are here yeah so so I'm very F I did I did and and I feel now I'm in the place where I you know understand what makes good mobile and then I you know look at these new platforms and what I consider good won't even work here and you guys have done through so many re ution so it's it's uh it's uh it's marvelous to see you know you're pushing here well like said he's making

a new playbook you sort of have to you know because some people have a Playbook from 20 years ago right and they just carry this Playbook around with them everywhere they go right exactly throw that out the window it with your e at the door you yeah put it in the bin because it's not going to translate frequently at least and sometimes it does like games like Capture the Flag it's it's a discovery challenge on ufn because no one's ever played it particularly on on that platform so this this some good or bad yeah and and because this is monetization is through engagement I totally understand why things like concerts or or elements were that that bring people together to hang out are so popular because actually that increases your concurrent users uh you can make them into events you can uh tap into community that comes in to to uh to enjoy those together and it monetized the best because you have concurrent users uh in in that place so so very interesting what these games will be and

how they're most likely not going to be kind of like the extensions of the original Fort di but something totally new and unexpected yeah I mean I had to go I had to go to Gary's mod and look at what skidy toilet was when it was number one my son was like I'll show you skib toilet I was like okay you just see Wild wild interesting memes and things that you know most people aren't connected with but this audiences and they surface on on these platforms very very quickly so it's it's pretty uh and those means translate across from you know if you look at the success of bedwars on UFM that originated on Roblox and you see a little bit of that back and forth as well in the community so some of these ideas from Roblox are actually sticking on UF and almost direct copies so and red blue which is just like older than time itself at this point awesome well anything you guys want to anything I did not ask and and you want to mention or

anything you want to tell to the community um floor is yours I would honestly just say that um if anyone's interested just reach out through Linkin or otherwise um it is a very communal place to build there's lots of sharing and lots of openness because everyone trying to learn and help each other whether it be the data or you know the successes or the failures and the wise and there there's tons under that so I found it to be a really positive open place to to hang out so if people have questions I'm always happy to jump on calls and help because you know it it is fraught with some risk but in the end you know the long-term strategy the long-term view we're super excited about so yeah but just openness and good questions always happy to answer them right on likewise I mean uh we we uh we are also publishing games too so always interested to hear from um creators or other people building in this space you know the the health of this ecosystem

benefits everybody who's in it so um always love having conversations about what folks are doing and you know I'm on LinkedIn all the time I'm on Twitter all over the place you know where to find me yeah and and um yeah and the fourth curtain of course on all the the podcast as well that's right if you want if you want to spend an hour if you have had enough enough of me and you want another like hour [Laughter] go check out the four for everybody who listened till the end I mean this is an open invitation to to connect with Pete and Alex that's pretty unique so do so discuss ufn uh a new frontier in in the development a platform On The Rise and uh these gentlemen are are happy and eager developing uh developing their games and developing the platform so super excited to see how how the games will look like in a couple of years where we're the youngsters start making more of these titles and and kind of bringing their crazy ideas into younger generation a

more diverse and Global generation of game makers it's going to be fascinating and and I think really healthy for the yeah like 77 million da robot gets its hands on co-pilots and AI yeah yeah that's why I'm pretty glad I'm you know maybe a decade from from retiring because like it's going to be really something the next few years that's for sure well on that note thank you Pete thank you Alex for for uh for you know really opening up on on ufn I think this is was very interesting conversation a lot of insights for anybody considering to develop and and for those who want to bring their old Playbook don't do it on ufn go to uh go to a similar Studio that you're working in right now on that note thank you very much everybody for listening yeah there there's still there's still plenty of Studios that take old play