Unity & Epic Join Forces. What It Really Means & Apple MiniApps Explained. NO 💩 TL;DR News Navigator

The other big new story of the week is of course uh Unity and Epic becoming best friends instead of D rivals as they were last decades. Hello. Hello dear listeners. This is news navigator by two and a half gamers. We will round out round up the news of [music] the week. Uh specifically, this one will be from the week of 17th of November where we'll really try to go very brief, no fluff. Uh this will be as podcast as it is. Don't expect anything on video on YouTube unless you want to see my face. We'll be switching positions with uh Felix and Mate. So each week uh one of us will be doing their own setup. Maybe a little bit of a flavor. Should [music] be again very brief. give you the latest without needing to kind of go through all the

stuff and noise that's been out there. A few big news with context and then just just the headlines and descriptions. [music] So, yep, let's get to it. So, biggest news this week, uh, Apple launches the mini apps party program, which is basically their take on [music] WeChat mini games. The important parts of this is that there's different commission fee which is 15% instead of the usual 30%. And uh yeah of course you need to in order to qualify we need to follow the Apple's guidelines and have some kind of a technical stuff there such as HTML file and JSON D. This is just another one of those pushes that we've seen there. Nothing really new. Facebook already tried it. I was there. It died horribly. Let's see how this goes. In China, this works. Of course, in WeChat where WeChat mini games are growing like crazy. They're doing billions of revenue a year because

[music] WeChat is the super app, which means all the other apps are there in it. Therefore, the whole [music] Chinese mobile ecosystem is built around it. Whereas here in the west, we have the Silicon Valley apps ecosystem, meaning that there's a separate app for lots of things. Therefore, it's not that easy to kind of get all the users [music] immediately. But yeah, let's see because I'm guessing that at some point because it's so successful in China, somebody will crack it. Maybe this time I don't know. I'm a little bit more skeptical. The other big news story of the week is of course uh Unity and Epic becoming uh best friends instead of D rivals as they were last decades. So there were multitudes of announcements by Unity CEO and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney where they announced a pretty deep collaboration and partnership regarding all of the things ranging from AI uh web stores compatibility and interoperability

between Unity and Epic and basically Unity games going to [music] Unreal Engine and being cross compatible even UFN if I understand correctly. So yeah, [music] I'm guessing that this still needs a little bit of a dust to settle for this to understand like how how this will actually work. But of course it's again it seems that it's broader push that is just a consequence of people going outside of the usual stores which is again coming from China the influence there where there are multitudes of stores multitudes of different models and payment stuff setups where again this could give Epic and Unity the edge over pretty much breaking the usual Apple and Google dual poly [music] that we have lived in for the last pretty much from the onset of the app stores. So, let's see how this goes. Pretty important stuff, but yeah, let's move on. Uh, then we have some uh small headlines. I'll just kind of skim through it. Stash acquires Gallion

to explain Glo to Sash acquires Gallion to kind of again try to be competitive in the D2C race because that's heating very much up. All the guys are [music] again going because of the new rules uh on the market to try to have as much web [music] store revenue as possible and capture as much companies can go there. EPS flyier has presented their new suit of products. Google ruling the one that opens up the third party payments is finally enforced and this is US market only. So yeah, from this point on this is [music] much more like this this is now kind of changes fundamentally but as I said like everybody's expecting this so nothing new. Uh Roblox introduces uh some new verifications to kind of I guess try to mitigate their one of their biggest problem which is just child moderation content because of their whole user base being very very young. Uh the interesting part about

this that users will be uh placed into brackets which will be 9 under, 9 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20 and 21 plus and should be only able to chat with the others in their own bracket unless they are designated as trusted connections.
[music]
So yeah, uh this is in my opinion expected because uh Roblox I think is just one scandal away being hit by I don't know 30% loss in [music] stock because it's very hard to kind of moderate that of a giant platform if I understand they even shut down them forums because there just just [music] couldn't moderate them just too much. So let's see how this goes but definitely I think a step towards a right direction. Um, there was a Google Play competition, the usual annual one where it was announc the the winners already announced and the best game of the year is Pokemon TCG Pocket currently the biggest Pokemon game on the market which already grossed more than 1 billion from

its launch in last year's October. Yeah, I'm still playing it. It's great. And yeah, let's see how this goes forward. Uh, then we have some new announcements. Uh, Vampire Survivors, the PC game is having a deck builder spin-off selected for somewhere [music] next year. Yeah, this just like out of all the news is seems to me quite interesting because [music] we just covered the deck builder uh which is Cow Zero Nightmare the big Korean game and I still think like the mobile world is waiting for a very very good deck builder because that game is very very complex. So, let's see what happens next. Uh Nvidia uh the biggest company the biggest uh company by market capitalization in the world just announced their results which is 57 billion for the quarter which means the AI bubble continues to be the bubble and just go into monstrous proportions. So nothing there. The dark horse news of

the week is of course Ubisoft. Uh by the time you're hearing this maybe we would already know because as you know Ubisoft stopped halted trading basically and didn't release their usual earnings and yeah everybody is thinking that somebody probably bought it in the meantime as it's still halted but the news is that Friday as you're hearing this they should release the earnings and trading should resume. So yeah this is coming from Bloomberg. Let's see if we see either the mysterious buyer or a giant drop in the stock price and basically the acceleration of Ubisoft's fall from grace. Let's see. Anyway, that was the news. Uh, see you next week and stay two steps [music] ahead of the game industry. Ciao.

Heat. Heat. [music]
[music]