When Scale Stops Working: The New Rules Of Mobile Growth

But it's like the day of launch was the day that the entire development team could take a Fortnite off and go and lie on a beach. It's like there is so much content on that platform that would never see the light of day in the proper official games industry because it is other players do following their passion and doing what inspires them. And it's crazy. And in some cases it sucks. In some cases, it still gets millions of players,
but it sucks from every conceivable angle, apart from the fact that millions of people like it. So, I'm in the wrong. But similarly, I absolutely see where you're coming from. It's like when you democratize game development to the point where anybody with the the slightest desire to go and build something can do so simply and for free. It goes in all of these incredibly unexpected ways. Um, and again, as a player, I have seen some of

the most egregious monetization that that you ever you could imagine. It's like there are bits in there where you you look at something and it starts to unlock, you know, or it pops up a a a menu, a dialogue that says, "Okay, you're looking at me. You need to pay Robux." And it's like, "No, no, no, no. This is not a good user experience." So, we have this wild west experience out there, which I I I think is going to mature. You know, my 9-year-old is now learning lore from the early days of ros from the YouTubers who were doing it back in 2008, 910.
Um, and it's great. I know all about um, you know, John Shedletki. I know all about the great Roblox hack of 2012. He wasn't even alive then. it it's crazy. So, we're in uncharted territory,
but I I think this really does start to

I guess ground everything that you've been talking about in terms of um when you give people the capabilities when you have anybody who has the desire to make a game out there able to make a game and then monetize it in a way which makes sense to them and connect with their players. You know, it's like, dude, I've done admin abuses with Jandelle. It's I am on the cutting edge in terms of the games industry. How do we get the rest of the games industry to even pay attention to this? Because at the moment, it seems to be only the people who are either a parents or b um working in areas like you that are are even looking at this, let alone giving it any kind of dedicated
well attention. Everybody in the game industry has to sit down and just understand Roblox. So you don't have a if you have a kid, they'll show you Roblox. They're almost undoubtedly in it. Um so have them show you. And if you

don't have that, figure it out on your own how to how to get in there and just mess around because I think it is important to understand. Um, I think the lesson for the broader game industry is you can make really compelling experiences that are not necessarily hundred million, $200 million production budgets driven by, you know, the most advanced 3D graphics content. I love those games as much as any hardcore gamer. I've been playing them for years, but that's not the thing that defines the entirety of the game industry. Actually, mobile shouldn't it, right? Because mobile is Oh, yeah. for slightly more than half of the game industry's revenue at this point and most of them don't have super advanced 3D graphics. So being able to understand that like there's a lot of opportunities there and that some of those opportunities are being unlocked because individual creators are starting to make things that would not have otherwise be considered commercially viable is part of it. So I think part of that is get

your sizes optimal. get them down to a size that focuses on creativity and the fun factor and you'll actually unlock more possibilities when you do that because now you've got a team that can actually take more risks. Give them give a smaller team more runway so they can take more risks than these massive teams. The other thing that I think is just important for people to think about is how do you unlock I'll I'll just call it co-creation with your player population
and anytime that people can create within the game and share with their friends call this UG I don't really love the term UGC user generated content I think it comes more from like websites than it does games but for better or worse this term UGC like I think if you can incorporate that and make it core to your game and your player community. That's a powerful force multiplier as well. But it comes down to how do you have the social mechanics? How do you

create the kind of content in a game that's sharable and customizable for players? So the more you can do that, that's I think another lesson from Roblox, which is the more you can unlock that, the more you can really open up possibility for you in the market overall. There was this research that was recently put out by Matt Ball just a couple weeks ago. He did a really interesting deck on the whole game industry just showing that kind of Roblox was eating up the growth of the game industry. So we look at the the game industry as a whole is growing but not if you subtract Roblox from it. So, one way to look at that is a lot of the traditional games that you and I built and also grew up with,
those are actually declining overall relative to Roblox being such a big growth driver. Now, I didn't even think about this until this moment in time, but one of the things I want to try to figure out now is okay, but what

if we divide the industry overall between co-creative communities where the players have a role in that versus not? I suspect that if I put Roblox along with Minecraft, Ark Survival, like all these other games that have a lot of like dynamic content creation, I bet that's the growing part of the industry even without Roblox.
We can have all these different type of games and gameplay. They wouldn't have made it as a game, but we're just wanting to see what's possible. You know, what flies, what fails. There's no risk or feeling that failure will be a bad thing because the community is such a big part of it. Yeah. So, it would be co-creation with the community has it maybe over just doing it because you think you know what the community wants.
Yeah, absolutely. That let me just kind of bring it all back together here though, which is like skills and

deemable and what are we trying to do? So it it's ultimately about putting power in the hands of creators and maximizing that creativity, unlocking a lot of the things that were historically complex around monetization, around supercalable social communities in your game. Now, for us, our primary market, like really our only market today is the developers who sit down and think of themselves as quote unquote game developers, meaning they use Unity, they use Unreal, or they use like a HTML-based game engine for the web. We're not targeting Roblox developers like they're doing their own thing and by all accounts doing a really good job at it. So where we can help is people that have a vision for games in that traditional vein, but where they can add to it either the right live ops, live services, social systems, monetization systems, and really have a successful

game that can compete in today's world. So, we kind of see Unity and Unreal and even the web-based engines in a certain way, they've got to compete with Roblox. So, how do we arm all of you, Earth brands, who we have grown up with here as game developers? How do we arm you with those tools that are now so so easy for Roblox builders to access?
Yeah,
we'll give you those same tools. Um, you know, unlike Roblox, we're not going to take 70 or 80%. We don't sit the top line and tap your revenue. Um, great if you're 14-year-old kid who made a game and shipped it, but for a commercial studio, those economics aren't going to work.
So, you know, we're here about maximizing creative output, creative flourishing in a sense. You know, we're co-creating with you the game where you're the creator and we're just a technology provider. We arm you with the platform to make it all possible. And

the first stage of that in the market were the 3D engines, right? Like there was a time at which you mentioned it earlier at the beginning of this program.
You had to build your own 3D engine.
You sit there with DirectX and you'd be like, "Okay, I've got the primitives for graphics and now I build the 3D engine." Or you could even go beyond before that like there was actually a time when there was no even graphics APIs and you had to like write assembly code to do your graphics and rasterization and all of that.
Um but along came 3D engines. Unreal and Unity were the two that kind of won that war. There were others. There are still others but they kind of occupied that place 101 15 years ago where they emerged as as the winners. And that solved an enormous number of problems for developers. Look at the output of 3D graphics games before and after the emergence of 3D engines. Now you had people who could build their creative vision without having to first sit down and invent a 3D engine to even get

there. kind of the same for multi-user online live servicesdriven games where now similar to that emergence of the 3D engine, you have back-end tech that similarly unlocks that same creativity where you don't have to build all of this infrastructure. You can just build your multiplayer game, whether it's immersive, whether it's asynchronous, all of that. It's just at your disposal. And now this year, you know, with everything that's happening in terms of like coding assistance and things that are helping to speed up like a lot of the technical parts of game development, like everything's converging together. And I just really believe that game development is it's already a creative industry, but it is going to become almost exclusively creative in the future. meanings. You bring your imagination and then you just start imagining and going direct to the screen with your idea as opposed to all of these bottlenecks that we've had in the past.

That's the nature of it because of that creativity. It's like an evolution because you said yourself before it was thinking about the back end. Now with something when I think about skills and be mobile together it's like no now we have the platform that takes care of gaming as a business because it is you have to think about live ops monetization you know identity these things and so it becomes a strategic advantage so that everyone can be doing this I think that's what we're talking about here is you put it in a way yourself John the the the democratization of the tools, of the platform, of everything. So that then partnership no longer becomes a tradeoff. You're not losing control if you don't own the stack. You are actually gaining advantage.
Yeah, that's right. You got to you got to focus on creativity. And the other advantage we bring too is like imagine building it yourself. We have the advantage of working with

zillions of developers and learning about the problems that they all face doing pattern recognition and building that into software. I mean that's historically the advantage a software company has over custom development which is you have all of this learning that happens in a marketplace of every developer sharing a common set of problems. And we can incorporate and then crystallize that learning into the software that you build on top of so that you can go off and solve the things that are the differentiators for your game which is the fun.
It just becomes part of the tech stack. You know it it's you don't have to go out and build your own game engine anymore. You don't have to go out and build it's your own um back end anymore. you don't have to worry necessarily about your live operations. You know, we know that AI is coming down the pipeline and at some point is going to be part of your tech stack. It's going to be part of the engine. It's going to be part of the service that you're using, but I I

just want to touch on that um likely if we can, John, which is we can't not mention AI. It's been everywhere. And so, where do you see that impacting live ops? Where do you see that impacting what it is that that Beamable and skills are offering? Can you can you tell us anything?
I think it comes down to it's part of this direct from imagination to the screen era that we're now in.
So AI is helpful in in coding like this is it's called vibe coding a year ago. It's kind of evolved a lot since then. I think a lot of us are now calling it agentic engineering. I just call it English language programming where the language model is essentially becoming what compilers used to be. So the compiler would turn your highle language into machine code. Now we're going to have a threelevel process in which there's English language driving the formation of highle languages that then get compiled. And it's going to change and

accelerate software development a lot in terms of how you code those pieces. But it gets you to a place where a lot of the features are now going to be something that you control through that process and build your game a lot faster. Again, going from that imagination to implementation, going from intention to implementation so much faster. Now, what do you need to do that? Well, you're not going to vibe code your 3D engine from the ground up. You're going to use off-the-shelf technology. Even if you vibe code a web-based game, you're going to use 3JS or something. a 3D engine problem to solve, right? So, similarly for the back end, you're going to use backend components and tech that's proven to scale that you can build on top of. We see that future coming and being infrastructure that supports this direction from imagination era is just is just critical for everybody. So, I just think that there's going to be more and more people who are going to go and

just be extremely creative, get to product much faster, get to try a lot of fun things in their game much more quickly, try a wider variety of things, try it with your audiences. That's where we're going. A much more rapid implementation process and also the ability to experiment a lot more, which is which is very exciting. But there's things you don't want to experiment with. like you don't want to experiment with whether your game backend is going to scale to a a commercially relevant number of customers, right? So that's where you got to build on top of a foundation that you know you can trust so that all of these creative investments and ideation you're doing are not going to waste.
It's the plumbing, you know, it you you don't want, you know, creative and wonderful people necessarily installing the plumbing in in your home. you know, it has to be the infrastructure is the infrastructure because everything else relies upon that. So, yeah, a good point really well made

and it's the differentiation as well, Brian, going ahead. I mean, if we can all make games and maybe that's, you know, me included at some point, the tools are there, the platforms there, then it's really about unlocking that. That's what's important. I'm just curious because I was reading about this and I didn't know if this was news or if this was something that you're going to be building on also at Beamables uh in the backend services because now of course being together with skills you're focused on more AI native tooling. I mean what is that just so our audience can follow here and understand what's a little bit more about what's coming. Yeah, we haven't made any specific announcements about that yet, but I think you can tell from what I shared that we certainly see what's happening in the marketplace. Every software company is and the way software is being coded, developed, orchestrated, that's undergoing an enormous amount of change.

It includes essentially again English becoming the language. English, whether that's how you query systems and learn about them through natural language, but also English as the thing that drives a certain amount of the software engineering or at least feature design and prototyping within a game. So, we see that just like the rest of the world is seeing it, but we also intend to be a big part of it by being the infrastructure that these systems trust. So if you look at who the winners are in the current round of what we'll call agentic engineering, it's the bulletproof infrastructure that Agentic processes then build software around. So who's winning? It's infrastructure companies. It's databases that people can trust. It's a lot of that stuff that's down at the plumbing level and beams have very unique technical architectures because they tend to have 3D engines on the front end. They tend to be real time, synchronous, persistent,

state call as opposed to stateless. So like there's a lot of things that make the technical architecture of games very different than a lot of other things that you see. Which is why also like AI has kind of produced more at the toy level so far on games whereas it's really starting to totally disrupt the software as a service market. for example.
Yeah,
it's going to take longer in games because of the lack of training materials that the AI can train off of and this sort of the unique and weird world of the game developer tech stack that we live in. body will catch up and it's going to change and we're going to be the infrastructure company that helps you get there because you have again you have to have an infrastructure that works
has to scale but has to be trustable especially when you're talking about monetization systems like you got to be able to trust the monetization engines that are present in your game
that you're going to build around. So

that's what we can do at Skills is we can be that trusted partner for everything from the monetization in your game down to what you called the plumbing, the infrastructure, the things that make everything possible and make it possible to build something big. So AI of course is going to affect everything in the world. I mean we're talking about civilizational if not species level change underway here for artificial intelligence.
Yeah. So I would just say everybody take it seriously and be in learning mode. See what these things can do. Just as I am, if you follow me in social media, you see me posting about um AI, aentic technologies every day. Like you better be learning this stuff because it's happening so fast that uh you want to be well equipped with it instead of being disarmed by it.
That's that's exactly it. It is coming whether you like it or not. You just need to be aware of what's going on and

prepared for it. We we hear that so often, Peggy, don't we?
Absolutely.
I mean, the the highest level answer I can give to your question though is it all comes down to this idea of direct from imagination. How do we get you there faster so you have an idea for a game, you get it on the screen fast? Once it's on the screen, you run it as a business. And we let you keep shipping content, engaging your audiences, managing it as a business because games is a business. Now, games isn't just
ship a product and walk away and hope the checks flow in. That's the way it was 30 years ago. Right now, it's a service business.
And that is a very different mindset than it used to be. And and I'm probably preaching the choir. Most game developers know this at this point that like we got to make that easier for you. So get there fast. Get there fast and and run it fast.
We're not teaching this. We're not teaching this. We're teaching people how

to make products, especially here in Scotland and the UK.
We're still focused on the discs in boxes on shelves in stores. You know,
the gold disc the gold.
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I get to take two weeks off. Um, but it it it's absolutely fascinating and it's so refreshing to hear from somebody who's who's working directly at kind of the cutting edge and and and essentially productizing the infrastructure because it it that's what takes us forward.
Mhm.
Yeah.
So, we start
it's a fun time. It's a fun time to be alive and be building these things and and really just multiplying exponential creativity. That that's what I see my job as. by doing the boring piece, by the way. Like,
well, I don't want to make it sound too boring. It's it's really actually very interesting to figure out how to make tech work for like millions of users. Um, but if you're at a game studio,
it's it's kind of the boring piece, especially when you're just ending up

creating things that ultimately becomes continuous tech debt. That's no fun at all. No one wants to do that. So, we're doing the part that would be boring for you. It's fun for us. Um but and it's necessary.
Yes. And empowering. I'm thinking the whole time about it how empowering it is. Now we started with the news. So I like to end with the news again or whatever you're willing to reveal. You know we're in the run up to GDC. I've read it's a phased integration. Updates will be rolling out. So without giving away too much right we know that developers have something to look forward to because they will be able to do more trusted infrastructure strong robust back end but what should they be looking for? Can you maybe just tell me a little bit of what we might see first or what they might or what you're excited about John? I mean this is your baby. What are you excited about? I'm excited about the oneplus 1 equals 3 that that's here. Like

okay,
first of all, Skills has an amazing stable of developers. I actually had one of them on my live stream just last week, Justin from Eplay. Like I think that would give people a real flavor for like the kind of people who are building on skills. And these are really creative people who actually have gone pretty rapidly from imagination of an idea to a successful online business because what skills unlocked was this very unique um cash gaming architecture that other people have tried to copy but they didn't do it fairly right like so I think what skills has done is they made it possible and they did it fair like you can trust the platform which means you as the player can trust it and therefore you as the developer can trust it as well. hard to pull off trust in today's world, especially with technology. So, so they did that well and I'm excited about trying to educate the beamable developer community about incorporating that element into their game or maybe thinking about the next game you build is going to use that vice

versa. We have all this wealth of competitive cooperative content updates like just being able to do more events within sales games. For example, you talked about the power of events and regular updates to your game. Like we make that so easy. You can imagine applying that to many of the games that are running in skills already and suddenly you drive that added level of engagement and re-engagement that we have found so successful over time. So we have all kinds of ideas that we'll share in the future around all kinds of stuff that's like the next level ideas for developers. But you know our intention here is to build the definitive backend live services technology and of course that includes monetization and social systems and whatnot. Um but like the very most immediate thing is how do we bring this collection of capabilities together and unlock it for the widest set of developers and and we're just sprinting to that right now.
It is very exciting John. Absolutely. And we'll be watching that because this

will come out bit by bit. But let's say we're sitting here a year from now, and I would hope we do, right, Brian? We have him back. Absolutely. Without question, if he wants to come back, and I would hope so. What would be something you want to tell me about something that's really really visibly different for studios building on this combined platform? I think that the the joy for me would come from if you look at our population of developers and our average developers and then you compare that to the market at large
that our developers are just killing the competition because they're so creative. They're building sustainable businesses like they've really unlocked the business model within gaming of live services. So we just we just want to equip and arm our developers to be successful. And I want to be able to measure that and show the world how much more successful they are than having done otherwise. And I think that we have a lot of the ingredients in the box

particularly as we combine them. Um still is a very inherently competitive company. It's kind of my place to be now. So this is great. We're gonna we're just going to bring that competition not only to the games people are playing at Skills but to the developers as well. so they can win because this is such a hard business. It's hard to win in this business. So, we can do anything that nudges you towards success. That's what I want and I want to quantify it and prove it.
Excellent. I'll be at GDC so I'll be speaking to some of these developers and I think also Brian bringing a couple back here is not a bad idea because whatever they're doing to win in this competitive and difficult market is is is worth sharing with our audience. You got to hear from the front line.
You got to hear from the front line. So, yes, absolutely. And we'll take you up on that and and as soon as you discover it's like how the the the UGC side of the the the sector is stacking up. John, we want you back on. Absolutely. So, we

could keep going. I wish we could keep going, but sadly we have run out of time. So, before we let you go, we have two questions we asked all of our guests. The first is, what are you playing right now? What you enjoying? What's soaking up more of your time than it perhaps should? And then the second one is really simple ultimate game of all time.
Um, so first of all, when I first started at Skills, I was doing two things. One is I've been experimenting with all of these agented coding platforms the whole time. So I started playing a lot of the skills games and got really hooked on one of their most popular games is a solitire game called Solitaire Cube. So I wanted to like I discovered, by the way, I'm not a very good soliter player. that was very painfully apparent quickly and to play it more competitively was like how do I get better at this? I want to crack the code on the optimal gameplay. So I actually turned it into a project to use I used clog code to build a effectively a clone because I found that by building the game I would learn how to play it.

Then I trained a neural network to to figure out how to play it effectively and teach me how to play better. So anyway, that was a fun project. So, I've been playing a lot of those games, but if you're going to ask me what my favorite game of all time is, I just love Balders's Gate 3. I think it's an absolutely phenomenal game. I'm a Dungeons and Dragons player from the age of nine and uh they really brought Dungeons and Dragons together really well and just beautifully crafted narrative and storytelling. Um, that's my favorite game and I have many favorite games, but that's the favorite of favorites. Oh, listen. It's there is a reason they had to buy a bigger office to accommodate all of the trophies and awards. So, you know, that's that's a good choice. That's a good choice. Well, with that, I think we have to draw things to a close. John, it has been an absolute delight, a total blast, and uh yeah, I I know I've learned a lot, so I'm sure our listeners will have, too. Um Peggy, any last thoughts? just that I'm blown away actually and

I'm looking forward because I have the opportunity to meet John in person next week. Now I am all the more excited about that. Before I was like yeah OG I get it. But no John I really would be my pleasure because you're one of the people we will say you know who unlocked all of this creativity because that's what's happening. This is a creative industry. It's all within us but we need the tools. We need to be empowered. So, yeah, you're a pioneer in that in many ways. I'll be so excited to meet you in person.
Thanks, Sydney. I'm looking forward to it, too.
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