The State of the Video Game Industry w/Adam Boyes - Kinda Funny GamescastThe State of the Video Game Industry w/Adam Boyes - Kinda Funny Gamescast

What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Gamescast for Friday, March 14th, 2025. I'm one of your hosts, Greg Miller, alongside Force 30 Under 30, aka New York Game Awards nominated, aka Leftover Poppy, Blessing, Addy-O-Yay, Junior. Good day, Greg.

Good day. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you doing?

Good. I'm excited to be here. We're both fresh. We were on the first show, so I'm always in rock.

I feel like I'm not warmed up. Oh, yeah. I feel like KT gets me, like, you know, going for Gamescast because I'm already here. I'm going to talk to Gregway, right?

Gregway's got me in the car talking every morning, so I'm ready to go. The other thing that's messed me up is that daylight savings time spring forward happened on Sunday, which has led to me sleeping in and not going to the gym before going to work, which has now fucked me up royally, just not being on. You know what I mean? Like, right now, I'm like, I don't know, the engine's not going in.

We're going to fix that. We're going to fix that. Maybe the founder and CEO, Viverado. Adam, boys, I'll turn you on.

Oh, yeah, sure. I'll turn some massages before we start. Adam, welcome to the show. Hey, Greg, how are you, buddy?

I'm great. How are you? Good. I'm so happy to be here.

I'm happy to have you. Okay. It's like, you've been with us the whole ride. From all the different venues and stages and desks and all the from the thin tie and the little too short, you know, and then to this superhero.

That's a real comment. You know, it's giving me dad vibes. Dad vibes. I mean, this was a COVID beard.

In Canada, when we go to the playoffs, right, you start growing a beard until you either win or lose. And so I grew it until COVID was going to be gone. Yeah. Still here.

Yeah. So I think this is a permanent. I did. It was gnarly.

Yeah, when we were driving around the U.S. and we did 55,000 miles over three years. Yeah, it got super. Yeah.

We're like, you know, when those guys look at you and give you a wink and a nod. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. These aren't the people I need to associate with right now. Our parts are different.

You're all around America. Build you character profiles of many of the attendees. Adam, excited to have you here. If somebody doesn't know, what's the pitch on you?

Who are you? I've been in video games for 29 years. I think many of you might know me for the sharing video. I was different No Glasses now.

I didn't have a beard back then. I was VP of third-party PlayStation. Before that, I was working at Capcom, Midway, EA. Started in 1996 for $5.15 as a QA tester.

In the last eight years, oh, there we go. We're showing the trailer there. In the last eight years, I spent in Iron Galaxy Studios, which was an amazing co-dev studio based in Chicago, Nashville, Orlando, where I was a co-CEO with none other than Chelsea Blasco. Yeah.

And then a couple months ago, I decided to spin out and try my own thing. So I got a new thing rocking and rolling out. Yeah. What is Viverado?

Viverado. So basically, I started about a year ago. Chelsea and I were going to visit with a ton of different studios. We were asking, like, what's the biggest problem in video games?

And I actually started making a list on my phone of just all the different problem sets. And everyone kept giving me different answers. So that kind of freaked me out. So the first 30 people, as I mentioned in the last segment, I asked to give me 30 different answers.

I was like, that's kind of weird. So I started writing all down. Ended up interviewing over 200 executives, leads, studio heads in the industry. And then my list grew to 123 different problems.

And they all stated that that was, like, the number one problem. I was like, okay, what's, something's up here. Like, something's really fundamentally wrong. Top of the list was woke, right?

It was on the list. Really? Dude, everyone had conviction in their answer. It was, yeah, woke as many games.

That was an answer. Another one was men. So it was broad. And then there was, like, discoverability was very popular.

And, you know, the large bunch of games. But actually, what we did with 123 list is we boiled it down to this, which is the top 52. We've actually made a deck of cards here. Deck of Game Industry Challenges.

Yeah, here's, I'll pass that one over because I'm already open. But basically, yeah, here we go. Are you giving these out of GDC next week? Yeah.

That's awesome. Because basically, each one of them really sort of breaks down. You can go through the Jokers first. You can go through the Jokers.

All right, Joker, all your bases are belong to us. Someone set up the bottom. Office in the cloud. No, that's not a Joker.

I can tell you there's no Jokers at the end. There's one Joker again. The other one is crystal ball blindness. No, okay, no.

All right. So I guess that's a special deck. There's only one Joker. But basically, that sort of, I started going back and asking where we're getting all our advice from at the executive level of these companies.

And then a bunch of these big named, there's another other Joker we're selling there. Leroy Jenkins. There we go. A person or thing that causes everything to go wrong for everyone else, usually in some extraordinary fashion.

Yeah, which we call the John Diocchi. But anyway, when I found out that a lot of them are hiring these sort of big label consultants from New York and Boston to help them guide them through these problem areas. I was kind of like, well, they've never really shipped a game. You know, I've worked in development.

I've worked on publishers. I've worked at platforms. And so I was like, I bet I could help out more by building sort of strategic help and support for studios and publishers and platforms. So that is the new gig.

I'm basically now a strategic consultant for the industry to work with many different studios and solve some of these problems. Hell yeah. I want to go through these cars. I want to go through these problems.

I want to talk about the industry. But first, I will remind everyone that this is the Kind of Funny Gamescast. Each and every weekday, we run you through the biggest topics in video games, whether it be reviews, previews, or conversations we need to have. If you like that, we'd love you to pick up the Kind of Funny membership.

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Remember, of course, we are an 11 person business. It's all about live talk shows. You already got kind of funny games daily in the detail. The one, the only, Silent Hill F.

After this, guess what? Game showdown is going down. This is a special episode. You want to tease it?

Yeah, we're doing a little movie kind of beauty. I looked at the main contestants. I said kick rocks. We're getting on Joey.

We're getting on Roger. We're getting on the one only Nick Carpino. I'm going to do movie theme kind of beauty. You know, my mustache brother.

He has to be my team. Your mustache brother. My mustache brother. I'm going to put him on your team.

Thank you very much. That's all I want. Come on. After that, of course, Nick will continue his Nuzlocke Pokemon marathon stream or whatever you want to call it.

He's playing more Pokemon. But more importantly, it's Monday, everybody. Adam is in from Chicago because, of annual rubbing elbows, learning about games, trying to get jobs. Of course, we are always part of it with our friends over at the Indie Mix.

We will be doing the kind of funny cross Indie Mix Spring Game Showcase Monday morning, 9 a.m. Pacific. It will be more than 60 Indie games. You need to see to believe.

Once that wraps up, we, of course, will roll into an all day live stream. That will be us talking to more than 20 video game developers. 30 minute blocks. They play their game.

We talk about it. We hang out. We have a great time. We hope you will, of course, join us.

Like I said, all that live. YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. Twitch.com slash kind of funny games. Of course, you can get it later on YouTube.

But most notably, obviously, you won't be getting the normal shows. So if you're looking for a gamescaster games daily that day, it will just be us talking to developers. So I hope you come hang out and join us. You guys know what I'm saying?

No, I'm waiting to get into the conversation because I'm going through the cards. And these are awesome. Thank you, our Patreon producers, Delaney Twine, Carl Jacobs, and Omega Buster, who will get today's Greg Way. That's 15 minutes of me talking about what video games mean to me.

Today we're brought to you by Bill Rewards and Sash. We'll tell you about that later. For now, let's begin with what is and forever will be. Topic of the show.

Take it away, Buzz. Yeah, no, I love you. So I'm going through the cards. And I think for me and Greg and for all of you that whole skatery, right, there's always a conversation of every day there's at least one new story where the answer to everything is, oh, man, things are fucked, right?

Like, man, there's this problem in the industry. There's that problem. As I'm going through these cards right, like you're talking about a pricey talent pool. You're talking about, you know, the too many cooks in the kitchen.

You're talking about, like, in the telephone game of development, you know, not understanding your audience, you know, executives, right? The idea that CEOs sometimes chase trends and don't understand, like, what the core vision of the product even needs to be. And as I'm going through, I feel like for each of these cards, I can think of a story that we cover on KG where one of these are the answer. And so I guess to start this conversation, right, like, you know, you have an advisory firm here that is trying to tackle the biggest problems.

You can narrow it down to, what's number 50? 52. Yeah, two jokers. I guess where do you start?

Is it the thing of you look at these 52 and go, all right, we're finding a solution to each of these 52 or whoever pays you. Yeah, like, how messy is this process? How are you going about this process? How do you look at 52 big issues and go, all right, we're here for you to help solve these?

Yeah, I think, well, the first thing was making a list, right? Like, the thing that bothered me about all these different answers is that everyone's been chasing that. They think that's the ghost, that's the dragon that they have to play. And when in reality, it's all these narrative issues, right?

So the way I've been sort of talking about it is the entire foundation underneath their feet of the industry has shifted and changed. And so we need to acknowledge that, right? First thing, so only about three people I interviewed gave that answer is everything's different, which is kind of the conclusion I came to. So then it's like, okay, so everything's different.

It's like we just spawned on a brand new planet and we have no map. We don't even know what the biomes are. There is no sort of video on YouTube you can go to watch of how to navigate around. So we have to take little steps forward, right?

The attention economy, how people make games, the size and scope of games. And so it's really about the list breaking down and then starting to build an action plan. How do you take this one problem and build solutions? We did a super fun workshop at DICE in Las Vegas, which is a big video game conference, where we put all, we blew up them all up and we put them on a wall and 30 people came and they voted their top 10 and then we did a March Madness.

And then we got the four biggest issues in that group and then we broke the room into four different groups and each group had 20 minutes to try to solve that problem. Because I think that's the biggest thing our industry, I don't think it's focused on enough is how we actually work towards solutions, like how we build action plans to address these things instead of just like succumbing to the negativity and like, oh, it's all messed up, it's all fucked. And instead of that, let actually, okay, what are the problems? How do we then go step by step by step?

So before we wade into the different problems and what you're seeing, I want to go back to how this game's cast started. You texted me, said I want to come see the studio. And I said, I ignored the text. And then you texted me again, which is very busy.

And I said, email me because I'm better than that. And you emailed me and I didn't get right back to that email, but you got to it. But you had a quote in your email that was this, let's dance on a live show on March 14th about the state of the industry, why we need to work together to fix it and why Johnny V is a huge douche. We'll get to the Johnny V.

We'll get to that part as always. But my question at the top of this, now having gone and talked to so many different people, you have these 52, but in general, if I was asking what is the state of the video game industry, what would you say? Cataclysmic shift. Like it's totally under an absolute massive change.

And that's the part I think that's bad. It's risky. Like if you focus on the ingredients or that, it's one of the things that everyone always focuses on the pain they have instead of the symptoms versus the root cause. So I think we need to just pause the industry and take more time to collaborate.

I think when, and it's ironic that I'm talking about how the console wars are sort of over now, I think it's more important for us to band together cross console, cross publisher, cross even from console, mobile, PC, and we're working more together to solve these problems together. Because when we all grew up, you know, making games in my time, you know, 30 years ago, it was bare enough of boxing in the streets. No one shared anything. It was not about collaboration.

And now we're at a point where there's so much sort of change and evolution that we have to work together. If we don't work together, that's why if you actually, on the deck of cards, if you look under the lip of the lid, um, you open it up, it says, yeah, read that. No, no, on the other side. No, no, no, no.

On the, see? It takes a village. Yeah, that's what it says on the top. Under the lips.

Where the lip comes off of the box. Anyway, um, but that's the sort of philosophy that takes a village for us to work towards these problems. It shouldn't be happening in little boardrooms here and there. We should actually be trying to build a movement to work through these problems.

So long way of answering that it's, it's all sort of shifting and evolving. And either we, I feel like our industry's being hijacked and the bad guys are on the train. So we either can fight back. Let me get that C-suite card out again.

C-suite self-interested ace. Top execs maximize personal payouts leadership and employee wellbeing become afterthoughts. I love the phrasing of shifting and evolving. Cause I think a lot of the time when I'm reading the stories and you look at the last couple of years of the industry, you see a lot of studio closures, uh, live service games shutting down, uh, a lot of layoffs happening in the AAA part of the industry.

And oftentimes it feels like the response for me on the, I'll say on the outside looking in, right, not being on the dev side of the industry is, wow, shit seems fucked. Like everything seems like it's on fire. Everything, everybody's going down. Like, man, it seems like things are over.

Um, while we, I mean, in the downtime between games daily and starting to show, it's been announced that Star Wars Hunters is going to end service on October 1st, right? That's from Zynga. Zynga. Zynga will end service for free to play.

We need to shoot your Star Wars Hunter on October 1st. The publisher announced the game's final content update will come on April 15th. The first launch on iOS, switch via the app store and Google play on June 4th, 2024, followed by PC and Steam early access January 27th, 2025. Yeah.

Zynga, Star Wars. Yeah. Can't make it fucking work. Yeah.

And you're talking about a story that is like many that we've had very recently, right? It feels like at least once a day or maybe a few times a week, we have that story of, oh, wow, this thing that maybe had all the check marks there as far as, oh, you have IP, you have a studio that's proven, you have, um, you know, you're in a genre that works, you have the systems for monetization. Oh, you still can't make it work. Um, I like the phrasing of shifting and evolving cause it implies that, you know, it doesn't imply the doomerism that I like often feel.

Most people do, right? It's like when it's an analogy I was using earlier about spawning a new planet. Like you can just turtle. I guess we'll just hang out here.

Or it's like, let's get flashlights, let's start exploring. I think that's the difference is that we can either just admit defeat now and stop. And I see that sort of, that, you know, it was interesting. There's two groups of people.

There's people that have a glimmer in their eye and they're excited about the future. They're hopeful and optimistic. And then there's everyone else. Yeah.

And I think sometimes we sort of become victims to the surround, uh, the narratives and the headlines and you go, well, I guess I should just quit, you know, or I should give up. And I think the right answer is we need to work through this and understand this stuff. And a lot of, I don't expect any people watching to really truly understand the nuances of what goes into macro and micro economic parts of the game's industry. But the path forward is just understanding evolution.

That kids these days play things different. The way they consume stuff. We don't go to just five websites to get our news about games anymore. We go to a million different places.

So there's a bunch of things we just have to start working through. Can I ask you, and this is a question that I brought up about a week or so ago on KTD, but I'll say that kind of this map is a perfect person to ask of, what does a healthy industry look like? If we're saying that the current place we're in, currently in the industry, right, we're seeing all this stuff happen. For you, pause, are we in a healthy industry right now?

Are we in a healthy industry? Not if you ask developers that are suffering. And the challenge is like, there's never gonna be a point where no one's suffering, but there's so much suffering right now. And there's, and the pathway to the healing is still far away, right?

It's over your way. Yeah, so for you, for where right, post 2025, or even, you know, during 2025, right? What does a healthy industry look like to invoice? Well, I think first of all, it's more capital being deployed.

So more money being spent by a bunch of different sources to fund innovation, right? So what happens a lot of times when you're trying to build a business and show profitability, you're trying to maximize revenue, right? So what that means that you're trying to sell more, put an MTS in your game or put games out earlier or increase the price point, and then you're trying to cut costs. And oftentimes what they do to cut costs is they reduce the staff because that's usually the most expensive part of it.

So we're driving towards that. Usually the first thing to get cut are innovation, R&D, micro teams, right? Just like prototype groups, because the pathway to return on investment is three, four, five, six years. Or nowadays with live games, maybe it comes out and is profitable until you're three of lives.

So maybe that's three plus three years. So that's six years away. So the first thing I think is more deployment of money from new sources. I think one of the reasons why that slowed down a lot is there's a misunderstanding between developers and between investors.

And when I say investors, there's a bunch of different categories. I'm about to spit a bunch of letters that are probably going to make most people realize around. Venture capital firms, right? They have different needs and different KPIs they're trying to achieve.

Private equity firms have different motivations. Independent investors, oil barons, people like that. Then there's the platforms, the publishers. Then there's like the sort of fun indie funds, whether it's like Big Mode or InnerSloth, you know, things like that.

So all of them have their own goals that they're trying to achieve. The product is a developer. If you're at the edge and you're just like, I want to make this thing. Who goes in here?

I'm not me making, I like game, game good, right? Oftentimes when you're pitching, you're not understanding the nuance of where this money comes from. So we're talking past each other a lot as an industry. And so I think the first thing is there is a lot of money that a lot of these people are sitting on that they're just sort of feeling the risk and the pain because it's all this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where the more games that fail get canceled means there's more excuse for me not to move forward to not to blow capital.

But we all know some of the greatest games that have popped off over the last 10 years have been ones from scrappy teams that were it was their last ditch effort or it was their fadeaway jumper or it was just a thing like a lot that just was fun and done because it was a passion project. So I think that's the first part of the answer around how we fund more, but that's challenging. The other part is I think a healthy industry, and I'm going to use a baseball analogy, which is like people are making games of all scale and sizes I think you are making games that are home runs right and triples and doubles and singles. you're making like little games I think a really healthy industry has that whole entire thing covered and isn't all about massive you know monolithic 300 plus million dollar projects or just indies or just I see that a lot of people are saying like the answer is instead of one 300 million dollar game just make you know 100 300 million dollar games like yes and I mean it's an angle but I think that's the thing we're being very prescriptive with solutions when in reality all of these things like a really vibrant um economy and world of great ideas is going to be the best future of the industry because then great opportunities for a lot of people so I want to talk about the first point then we're talking about we need more capital we need more funding we need more money right put in here where is that going to come from you think we talk about and what I talk about in games daily what Wes talks about you know the opinion we usually have is that you see these c-suites you see these stockholders trying to make fortnight trying to chase the trend and that inevitably ends with something like uh here we go we're gonna close up star wars we'll talk about that obviously you were there for that like that didn't do what it needed to get the player in as we see venture capital and these c-suites and stockholders get tighter with the purse strings or walk away in general where do you see this influx of money coming from like I think a lot of them are built to make more money right and if we as development teams can build plans I think the biggest challenge we have in this industry is most people start studio to make a game they don't start to make a business but that's our first feeling right you're just like I want to make something cool with my friends and that's great and I'm saying we should create room for that but if you're not building as a business then how is it investable so to build more trust within that ecosystem you sort of need devs to sort of shift their focus and be like okay I actually have to build games to have a return on my investment over a five-year period because that way you can convince them um so private equity how it works so you know how you put your money in the bank and you get like a half a percent per year garbage you can buy a cd and put some money in and you get 4.95 so what private equity firms do to measure success for their investments they want to return somewhere between 15 to 30 percent IRR which means every year they want to basically be returning 15 to 30 percent on the money um much like companies publicly traded right they're trying to earn more money each year so they can bring more value back um but if developers come along and trying to pitch private equity that needs money now because they're basically like going to grow and grow and grow slowly they're not going to do early stage investment but we still have first time studios trying to pitch that sure so how do we pivot that so a lot of it is just understanding and if you start trying to say I think I build a game that's going to bring 4x so it's going to cost let's say a million dollars to make I'm confident to make five million dollars for your period then let's figure out who the right people are to talk to sure and unlock it but right now everyone's scattershotting and talking to everyone about it talking to the wrong people and then and then they're incoming to a lot of these funds and stuff like that or everyone coming so we create more linear and it also is about um privilege too like people that are very accomplished people that leave big studios studios have the capability to phone any fund or any investor and be like can I have a meeting but think about emerging markets or places that they don't have that access so there's people on linkedin they're not getting the coverage or the feedback either so there's a lot of things that I think start with education and just giving us all a moment as an industry to build a universal translator between what does a successful game look like at the scale of a bunt a single a double a triple a home run and then what does that map to the KPIs of all these different banks investors I'm talking about I'm super excited about this I love this these are the things I want to hear about right these are the questions I think you know us in the audience often has um another question about you is you know is there a studio or a company whether on the triple A level or on the indie level or any level that is doing it right but you look at it and you think oh they're the template for how to make this happen yeah but again that's I think yes there is there's a lot of studios I mean and I think that sort of goes back to their studios right now they're feasting and their studios are famining right there's very few in the middle right they're just sort of getting by um the feast studios I think it's it's one of my favorite people used to work on our galaxy uh a guy named Nate Medford any of these uh he had the lessons for game developers and one was the worst thing that can happen to a first time game dev is their first game successful because it means that they think they have something to do with it I think that's what happens sometimes is that you start if your first game is successful which is quite rare these days then you're like oh I can just replicate that in game 5 what we usually see the pattern is it's game 3 that's successful or 4 or 5 and then by that time the team's been together for 10 years building things so there's so many examples of great studios out there doing great things but then when you are doing great things it it's hard also to evolve because you don't have the downward pressure I think the best thing that can happen to a studio is one other game just shits the bed because then they can learn and pick themselves up if every game is successful are you truly evolving right and there is there's ones like let's take Ed Boone in another room like just an incredible track record that has just made better games year over year incredibly smart team absolutely these days like to have that many games in a row each one was markedly better the team grew and evolved over a 35 year plus period right that's that's outstanding and so it goes back to how our teams and we could break into how our teams develop is it go tour and director driven or is it sort of like a coalition driven there's a bunch of ways we can pack that but there are examples I think the mistake that we do those industries then we go copy the ingredients and paste and then we get fucked like we just get through again because it's like oh we just did these things and this is obviously how you do it and that's just not the other parts of it it's all the nuance and art and culture part of the have to go into a team the chemistry and the history and the mistakes they made together yeah are we gonna get over this hump you think that and tell me if I'm this isn't even a real hump I've just made it up my head where you're not allowed to shit the bed right now it feels like you shit the bed in 2025 2024 and your studio is closed six months later you won't get a chance to actually do it we see these hemorrhaging of teams and then they reform and they're well we're getting somebody who used to work on call duty and somebody who doesn't put it together and they try to make that first game and the first game isn't great and guess what that studio closes everyone away from them I hope so but it takes I think a little bit more sort of fortitude or leadership team to be like this is a 10 year bet it goes back to the ROI if you're trying to make money on the first game yeah right like if you guys can name I've been asking people this a studio where their first game was 85 plus right a newly formed studio first game ever 85 plus the first one maybe yeah yeah but aside from that and there's other well you know or I don't was that their first yes again the board's not like micro that's what I'm saying but like a fully formed you know 30 plus studios didn't do it slash hammer games didn't do it I gotta walk back here so if we all know this and yet we're still betting that the first game is going to be successful we need to do a 10 year bet right and the 10 year bet means in the third game that's going to be their magnum opens are closer to it right so that way they can and by the way respawn did got close title 2 they got in two games right phenomenal game um and now they used to happen more like I feel like in PS3 PS4 generation you get the PS3 then you get the PS3 too it's like that's a banger yeah yeah now it feels like you don't know because I think we're sort of it goes back apart we're chasing all these different things like what is the kernel of that amazing part of it right and so I think we also moved away back in the day there is one game director that is the one you know it's like Kojima or the Abun yeah that's sort of Todd Howard and then we moved in more of the sort of leadership consortium approach and I see some people they're you know students want to go back to the old model what does that mean tighter team 40 people 50 people making something more double A that can become AAA because when you think about like a game like Warframe when that came out that wasn't by anyone's definition AAA but like that was their studio's last ditch effort they spent all their savings trained all their bank accounts to make Warframe which now has been 10 plus years incredibly robust product that makes a ton of money every year and save that studio and built a nice little empire there so but it comes from the constraints I think challenges we see right now a lot of these studios that get a lot of money and they don't have constraints right so if you're building something in sort of a cozy atmosphere and it's cushy and luxurious what's the downward pressure right to achieve the numbers like the reason my Call of Duty got better every year is because there's so much pressure by activism leadership to like eke out more quality more this more that and then it works right but you go back to that first Call of Duty right you see them start to grow and do the thing and learn over time and become it and this has always been my argument with the free to play games that launch and I think again executives shareholders whoever investors expect it to be Fortnite completely forgetting that Fortnite wasn't a battle royale launch it wasn't well received and they did launch a battle royale it was bare bones as hell yeah it wasn't a marvel there's so many examples right I feel like a lot of the games that we have nowadays are in like those talks of oh this is the life service that's doing it right or this is the game that's doing it right like Rocket League started off as that super battle rocket cars game from history and you know blow up and then Rocket League comes out still a small thing belongs on PS Plus and then over time gets acquired by Epic now it is this thing of oh man it has all these collaborations it's a bigger game PUBG's another one where it came out that game was rough as fuck yeah over time you know it builds an audience like over DC where you had to download Arma by then do the mod on yeah absolutely it's different yeah okay I want to talk more about this but first I want to remind you that we're a small independent business that couldn't do this without your support if you love the fact that Kind of Funny Games is all about live talk shows every weekday we'd love you to pick up Kind of Funny Membership of course you pick it up get good comments for supporting small business you get all of our shows ad free and you get a daily dose of me Greg Miller and 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walk me through that because it feels like first hand like iron galaxy when you were there obviously go see yeah living through this of okay we have a number of these kind of problems for me moving more to I would guess the threes it looks like forever games and captivate players right these things whereas how do you get a game that's always going how you do this talking about your retrospective on rumble first in terms of this conversation absolutely no it's it's so whenever you're making a game you want to try to make it as successful as possible so there's a mixture of you want something that you know is going to resonate with the team there's a vision part of it and then there's a market fit part of it and so we kind of felt very strong that if we partner up with epic games uh and they give us a playbook to fortnight then that's going to stack the deck in our favor because we're going to learn and meet with the team and they were incredibly supportive the entire path like they were always being with us weekly meetings talking about metrics talking about goals um and then it's like battle pass conversion and the amount of outfits we should have costumes but it was also like there were our decisions and then we would make some sort of changes in evolutions based on feedback but you know when you make a bet because I remember when we started development of it my feeling was that people would have multiple battle passes like we have you guys probably have hulu and then you also have max and you also have netflix and so in many of our brains we thought people would have multiple battle passes right they'd run four or five at a time that just didn't come to be true right it was like you had one or two and that was it yeah so that was sort of a big thing that we all didn't understand fully and because we were sort of locked into that uh free to play then you're like the battle pass is the solution in converting players the other part that um you know it's easy I remember when bots first came online in fortnight oh my god it's so much more fun now because I can get with bots that I feel like I make progress but a lot of people don't realize is that when you build a a server that's meant for 40 players at the same time to connect that cost let's say whatever a dollar a day just easy math yeah sure when um you put bots in your match you're basically reducing that 40 down to let's say 10 players so now the cost per player goes up dramatically sure if you want it even easier then it's one player per entire server so that whole dollar cost per one player versus the dollar cost you're breaking and so the more you want to make it replayable and then the other problem is that the more success it had the people there's basically sharks that were incredible the game super aware and then and then the problem is sharks want minnows they want to feed on minnows sure and so your role is to try to get as many new players in but if their first experience is getting eaten by sharks you get stomped so what happened from day one to like you know month day 30 is that you know the people were there first got really good they were their play times were high right we sell great sort of player incoming but then if you get murked four times in a row and you're not seeing progress then you sort of spin out right and then you don't convert the other part is because so many other games were sort of getting canceled there's a lot of hesitancy for people to buy battle passes because their perspective is why should I invest in the game it might not be here in two years right so then they're waiting or the outfits weren't you know compelling out for the offering so there's just a lot of players that are coming out of you know they bought minecraft for 20 bucks and that gave them thousands of hours right they're my kids are playing you know they used to play roblox a lot so that's pretty largely for them so why would I invest in that ecosystem so you think about those things the metrics end up being really good we have 10 million downloads really really awesome healthy sort of daily active users but then you sort of map out the map over a two-year period you're like ooh even it breaks even in year one you have to recoup all the money spent by the publisher right so they're basically trying to earn back their money then you've got to get where the flywheel's earning profitably and they just did the math and they're like this isn't going to pencil and so I don't blame them you know obviously it was challenging the team it was emotional when we got a call and had informed the team it's hard to see your baby be turned off luckily we have incredibly we have incredibly have I mean our team was amazing to go through that but there was never any you know there's sour grapes for you know probably 24 48 hours yeah and then you're like it's a business and that's the hard part a lot of people think of like why are you shutting it down well there wasn't a path to profitability and no one's running a charity so but some companies do have either the underpinning where they can invest in evolution and long-term output but it just wasn't in the cards it's a really good card it's a card it's a card um okay I've organized my cards I love that I love that so we can go back and forth I like watching you work so I have this card pulled that is about crowded release schedules because one of the conversations that I have sometimes with friends and like friends who are in game development it almost feels like it almost feels either taboo or insensitive of me to say that there are too many video games that are coming out because I do want to be a space for all the different games to play a indie to come out and shine for people's dreams right like they're babies to be able to come out and be successful but I know anecdotally for myself as a player I look at these things and I don't even have enough time to play all the games I want to play like currently I'm looking at the review codes that Greg sent me and I'm like oh man I want to play this game but also this game is kind of my interest and also I want to play W2K25 yeah and so it's this something of even the games that should get my attention as me one player example can't get my attention I look at all these different games that have all these different ideas all the different like if I go on Steam and look at the newly released all the different Roblox all the different Posey games all the different card games all the different all these different kinds of things Souls likes whatever it is that feel like they're speaking to us in their audience but feel like they're not going to get to shine because there's so many games that are speaking to these audiences um this card right says the market is flooded with new titles visibility and player attention are at a premium for you what's some of your take on that well yeah I think if we look at the amount of games that get released every year and this is a thing that's widely reported to and then how much revenue is being spent by players in the new games I think last year was like only 7% of new games got um or they only new games only got 7% of all spent across the whole ecosystem it was mostly games that were 5 10 years old so it becomes challenging because the amount of games coming out has increased right the amount of players has increased that much and we're at basically not the top of the hill, right?

We can still get more gamers in the ecosystem. This is the thing when Matt Piscatel was on here that blew my mind. He was like, well, remember, like, we used to be a growth market, and now games are a mature market. Like, OBD really was.

If you want to be part of this, you're part of it. So we hit that. There's always room. I mean, but it's not also catastrophically down.

So we're down 20%, you know, in spend, we're down between 1% and 4%. So that means, basically, if we have, and then the other part of it is the attention economy is under attack, right? How we draw people's eyeballs to things, and social media, the evolution of that to short-form content, TikTok reels and shorts. I see how it's reprogramming the young people and how they consume things.

So their attention is going down because they just can get, if I get two hours of free, basically, entertainment, just keep my dopamine flowing, then why do I need to pause that and play something? Do you find that the competition is less between games and other games, and more so between games and TikTok or games and people watching people playing YouTube? It's games, it's movies, it's TV, it's streaming. It's volleyball at 10.30 at night.

Stay home and play a game. Right, it's all of those things. And I think that's the challenge. So if games are coming out, a lot of this investment is being made.

And now it's harder to capture. Like, I think back in the day, when we first met, right? It was like, I think, as a gamer, you're like a dog, and then there's little, you know, little treats you can follow, and then there's a bowl of food, which is the game, because there was five websites we all went to, and that was it. Very linear.

Now it's like players are like mosquitoes. There's a couple around, and there's 50,000 of them, and you're like, where'd they come from? So it's hard to attract them because of that movement and that organic aspect of it, because there's now infinite places for them to find it. Discoverability is challenging.

I don't think our industry has done a great job of capturing the attention of shorts, reels, and TikTok yet. I think every time they do try, it's kind of like, look at this, right? I think there's a way in which we could probably get deeper to that to create more awareness for games, but that's not the only problem. The problem is your time as you grow and get a family, and, you know, it changes, and your attention span changes, and your needs change.

People still want to make old school games, but then they also want to make something that's maybe a gotcha mechanic or a mobile mechanic. So there's more games that are for more platforms, more ways to play content, so it's less of a monolith, right? It's less sort of an, it's still an oldopoly, but like less monolith than it used to be, but it's still very difficult for them to draw you in. So it is a tough challenge, and the analogy I use is that when I was a kid, and I went to the store, a corner store, and you go up to the register, there was just like four extra things to choose from.

Here's a gum, here's a chapstick, whatever. Now, when you walk into like a retail store, there is an entire sort of like line system. Another aisle. Yeah, another aisle.

It's all like weird, gotcha last minute, here's some chocolate, here's some mints, here's some like, you know, whatever it is, little toys and stuff like that. And so that I think is the same analogy for video games. Now there's just more games than before, so it's harder, the shell space hasn't changed, right? The shell space is, I mean, it has with digital storefronts, it's just infinite.

So if you have infinite things, it's like, well, let's make stuff and people come. But it's not like that, it's not the field of dreams anymore, unfortunately. My card I want to pull in is forever games. Okay.

Forever games, ongoing titles, constant updates, and monetization. Shorter, complete experiences can get overlooked. Yeah. My question would be, now that you're out talking to everybody, are you getting a temperature check on, are people over this, are people like who are starting off, are they still trying to make forever games, or are we swinging back to, let's make a, I don't even care how long it is, an experience that has an end, that's finite.

Sure. It depends on their pockets. If their pockets are deep, and they want to capture as much return on investment as easily as possible, they're still chasing those, some big players are still chasing those forever games. It goes back to Africa.

Once they're locked in, and we mentioned Minecraft and Roblox, but Fortnite's the same, Call of Duty, the ecosystem, all different modes you can play. Once you're in that system, drawing people out is very difficult. It's easier for me to bring a friend in to help me play or play with me than just to draw them out. Number three, captivate players, gamers invest time and money into service loops, switching to new titles becomes harder.

Yeah, because all this stuff, remember when we had to choose between, okay, are we going to have a file of our music on Apple, or are we going to have our music on old CDs, or are we in Spotify, or are we in Apple music, and so you kind of have to make a choice because all those things now are locked within that ecosystem. And so, especially with the social pressure to flex visual and unlockables in games, I remember early Fortnite days when my kids would be, some kids go BTs for having just filthy defaults. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that doesn't feel good either.

So then they're like, well, why would I go somewhere else when I have all my cool stuff in this ecosystem? 100%. Yeah, it's hard to pull them away. I got three cards here.

I'm going to read together because I want to ask about how you feel about the relationship between these three things. Basically do D&D. Yeah. The first one I have here is runaway budgets, poor oversight inflates costs, products viral as money to support into unplanned pivots.

The second one I have here is sticker shock. Triple A titles can exceed $70. Many gamers can't afford every big release. And the last one I have here is enough polygons already.

Happy real visuals, no longer guarantee success. High-end graphics may not justify the cost. Those first two might have a bit more of a relationship between each other than each other than each other. I know this last one can fit in there.

But when we're talking about budgets and when we're talking about how games are getting more expensive, what is your view on how that factors in into how we talk about these being some of the major problems right now in the industry? Yeah, all three of them together. I think the polygon hunts, I think it's slowed down. I think people kind of, they're like, I'm good.

You know, I think largely most gamers... No, that's PlayStation. No, that's PlayStation. I got a question.

I'm the guy turning flashlight on at a restaurant. So I can barely notice that stuff. But I do see less of a focus. I think it was a focus when it was visual fidelity.

I think the next generation of consoles will be challenging. Like, how can you... It used to be like, now it's, you know, it's 1080p and it was, you know, beyond a 4K and whatnot. And so now it's like, how do we actually go further from that?

So that one, I didn't hear a lot of people complain about that issue. That's a very sort of minor issue. The other part of the runway budgets, obviously, this is a highlighted topic that gets talked about almost every day in the news. I'm like, oh, I heard...

And by the way, the largely reported budgets, I always have to roll my eyes because they're just like, either not right... I mean, the bottom line is very expensive and they could be less expensive. But when everyone's like, you know, I heard it costs this much because my uncle works at a factory with a friend of... He doesn't work on this massive game.

But it's happening. And it's a multitude of things, right? When we look at... Go back to COVID.

And I don't want to... A lot of people want to blame COVID for a lot of these problems. And that is... I don't think the correct way to look at it.

But during COVID, everyone went remote. So what we did is we sort of like commoditized the workplace because now anyone could go anywhere. There was a massive demand for engineers and for game developers. And so, especially when we look at the West Coast and more expensive areas, so what happened is salaries started to rise in America very quickly, right?

It's the point where people are like, I can 2x my salary. And so that sort of made the core cost of making content now that's like 30 or 40% more expensive. Then it's like, well, we've got to add multiplayer and we've got to have... The map has to be the biggest map you've ever seen in your life.

And it's got to have 5,000 hours of requests and content. And then the teams, I mean, we see the credits list for some of these games. They're just infinite. It's tough to know of like, if it's just them deciding like, we spend a billion, we'll make back 50 billion, right?

Versus a million and make back, you know, 50 billion kind of thing. But it's a hard one to like address because the answer is a bunch of different things. I think some of the solutions. First is we have to be more agile as game developers.

I don't think building a monolithic organization that is like 10,000 people making three games is the right approach anymore because tastes shift and change. We need more agile, right? We think about if you could put as many people in the Titanic versus, okay, there's a yacht, there's a couple of dinghies, there's some jet skis, right? That team can move more quickly and more sort of agile through the marketplace.

And that's why I really strongly feel that the future is going to be very modular in game development and publishing and marketing and bringing stuff to market because let's not have the best group and compile them all together. Obviously, you still need a strong backbone and division, but that's the way to sort of offset some of the cost. Can I jump in with a question? Yeah, absolutely.

You're killing it. Before we get too far away from it, you know, you're talking about this monolith, 10 million people working on three games or whatever. It kind of sounds a little bit like you saw. Are you watching them as a test case right now and seeing, you said it, I'm not saying it like that, but are they the Titanic right now?

Not in terms of we're about to sink, but in terms of like, we can't turn the ship, so what are we going to do with these hostile takeovers or this or trying to sell or whatever? It's tough because if a recipe works and it's been bringing people to the restaurant for 20, 30, 40 years, there's not a lot of incentive to change the recipe, right? And I think that's what they're a victim to is that it worked for a long time and now it's starting to be challenged. Number nine, where's the innovation?

AAA titles often played safe. Sequel after sequel yields diminishing bows. Right, because there's no downward pressure or constraints around what they have to do. And it's like, build a new one but make a different location.

And they got bigger and bigger and bigger over time. I don't think, to the point we were talking about earlier, I don't need a 300 hour game. It's like a solid 30. Sometimes I just want a five hour game, right?

But so it's tough to say, this company made these mistakes because I don't blame any of them for the situation. They just were like, especially when they're publicly traded, it's largely not always up to them to make all decisions. The market's putting pressure on them. But I think the whole concept of a publicly traded video game company where we have to predict the sales outcome of fun is very difficult.

I think that's what's under attack here. I think what's really under attack is the fact that predicting and being publicly traded has been the downfall of many companies in many different industries. And I think we're seeing that happening right now in the games industry. It's funny that UB was the one that came to mind for you because I mentioned the 10,000 people working on three games thing.

I thought PlayStation. As far as, oh man, every year you might have the last list, you might have the God of War, you might have the Spider-Man and it feels like, when we talk about big budgets, like the reporting slash rumors slash all this talk is usually about, oh man, this seems like last list is real expensive to make. I wonder if we're making that money back. I know you probably know more about that.

I don't know how much you can talk about. But that's the one that came to mind for me. Concord being the most recent example, right? And that budget has been kicked around, inflated, talked about it.

But I also get the sense that when you talk about being able to be more agile, I get the sense that PlayStation kind of maybe feels that way too, right? Look at Insomniac is a good example of a studio that seems pretty agile as far as, hey, you put out a lot of games. Like you are putting out games that don't need a balloon as far as being a 30-hour game with a 50-hour platinum or whatever it is. Like, hey, we put out a Spider-Man, we put out a Ratchet, we put out a Team Sobey being another example of a team that feels agile.

I don't know, I'm sensing that shift in terms of the balance of, all right, we can have the glasses but we can have other games that are going to fill the gaps. And meanwhile, Nintendo's over there just doing the same thing that they were doing from the start and we can't really compare them to anyone else. They're on their own island. They're liars in every way.

Do you think there's a reality where, actually, when you're talking about the agile nature of it, when you're talking about the modular nature of it, what does that look like as far as the end products of the games? Do you think we can still get the most AAA games in the world, the games that we boot up and players go, wow, this is everything, wow, the animations are so crisp when we play a game like Space Marine 2 and you're like, that was a great experience, really great, not near a AAA budget, but like Feld Awesome, Helldiver's another great example. Those were on the larger side, we're not talking to little peanuts as far as the budget goes, but those are products that feel to me grand and awesome and fun and I don't really think about how much it costs for people on the team. I love the crap out of that.

It was a great, fantastic experience. Those teams, I think, are both a little bit more. I mean, Arrowhead's been doing this. That was not their first game.

That was their fifth game and their games have been historically very good. Sabres had a bunch of products in their path but they're now figuring it out and they are somewhat modular within their own organization. I think in the world where you're trying to build a Call of Duty-sized game or Battlefield-sized game or an Assassin's Creed-sized game with a modular version would be very difficult because the coordination layer would be 90% of the budget of people going back and forth. But as far as smart and who's in charge and what they tell us to do.

But again, it's because it's usually been top-down and so if we look at it as a peer-based system versus a top-down architecture then I think we can get there because I just want to try something. The other part about it is put something out there, see if it sticks. We talk about games that we love playing, we're going to talk about Monster later on but yet the online aspect of it is so janky, right? But it doesn't, but we love playing.

It's not that hard. I'm almost you at all. You can fix it. You work the capital.

Oh yeah, that's true. It's a time machine. Maybe if you weren't a quarter, maybe you hung out. But I think that's the challenge of how you build something in scope and scale.

I think it's more like at-bats. I'm a big fan of the singles and doubles world versus the triples and home runs as far as scope and scale games because you can turn a singular devil into a home run. And that's good baseball right there. There you go.

I love that. Bear knows the baseball. Keep cooking. You're cooking.

Oh no, I thought about that. Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, you walk over. I think you've already touched on it.

The absent direction card I like a lot is an ace, right? Leaders fail to provide vision. Teams flounder without clarity on goals or priorities. Talk to me about that because I feel like when we talk about these directors that are leading projects, it's not done, they leave after the game shifts, the game is disappointment.

I guess I'm at- I was a very broad brush. But is this the- not the director, but the people above them? A lot of this has been downward pressure we're talking about. So is it the PlayStation or, you know, Publisher X isn't forcing anybody to make a live service game, make a multiplayer game, but they are saying we'd like those and we would like Fortnite.

So that goes down to these directors who say, listen, can I excite you guys about that? They get them excited, but then that's not what they were supposed to make them. Yeah. Very rarely is there a scenario where the executive team, the C-suite at a company at a publisher, tells the team what to do.

They can say, here's what things we're looking for. And I think that's what happened with PlayStation specifically. They talk about we want more live service games publicly. And then a lot of teams are like, oops, clearly that's the reason.

And then the teams interpret that and then they build their vision let's go there. And I think sometimes when we blend those two together, it's like 80% vision, 20% market. And then that sways and are using data to actually back up your decisions. That's where it can get a little bit money.

But it's not usually the executive team. Sometimes it's like, oh, your budget's getting cut. You know, like I remember when I was at Midway and we had a new CEO come in and he's like, we only now hit home runs. And we're like, that's not how many of this works.

So every game had to have open world and it had to be 100 plus million dollars and you only had five games at a time. And that's very declarative because then the team goes, oh, I should probably go do that. But the other part about it is studios that are independent right now, they're also going out and trying to pitch to get money and funding for the game. And they're trying to pick what the publisher wants.

So sometimes that sort of swayed from that vision part to market part because you're trying to do what they want versus my favorite pitchers is like, I want to make this is my favorite game I want to make this is my thousand hour game for me and a bunch of people. And I think that's where Paradox has been extremely successful. And Fred, the CEO, one of my favorite lines he said he wants was there's riches and niches. I think a lot of times building something that's pure vision can bring that out like Blotro and MLM.

One card I like here is locked by the big few, right? Industry power rests with a handful of giants. Smaller players struggle break in. I'll also read that in tandem with this other one which is also number three.

Ignoring the little guys. Publishers chase only blockbuster hits. Smaller innovative titles get left behind. Talking about the first card first, right?

Industry power rests with a handful of giants. Smaller players struggle break in. When you say smaller players, what does that mean? Are you talking about smaller publishers?

Are you talking about indie studios? Short people like Nick. Yeah, Nick Scarpino's. And is there a way of changing that?

Is there a path through if you're a smaller company or a smaller publisher or whatever it is finding your way in? Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the things that I want to do with cards too is make them a bit interpretable. So sometimes within a conversation with a group of people, you're like, oh, let's use this ad.

Let's declare this one to your publishers, right? So then you just sort of look at, okay, if they're trying to spend to get eyeballs, the big huge publishers that have 95% of the market cap as far as earnings are going to spend that commensurately with marketing, right? And because we don't have recommendation engines that are powerful like we do like in TikTok, they reach your mind if you do exactly what you like. If you do games, there's nothing even close, right?

Well, with Xbox's new AI, hopefully I'll have someone carry me through Call of Duty because Johnny ain't helping. But I think that's a big part of it. And so discoverability now becomes in the eye of the beholder. Like whoever has the most amount of time to be able to go search things around.

And because 95% of the spend is coming from the big ones, it's really difficult for that 5% to break out. Now we did go through about a 10 year period where the devolvers and the Team 17s, the Tiny Bills, and there was like an awesome period of time where indies were the darlings and everyone talked about them all the time. I think they're getting crushed and crunched by this sort of changeover right now and the tumult in the industry. So I feel bad for them.

But as far as the solution is, it's difficult. I think stronger discoverability across the board. I don't know what that answer is yet is a big contributing factor. Like if I could just feed all my play activity across all my accounts into an LLM, let's say, and it's just like, hey, dude, you probably love this.

That scene does a little bit with recommendations, but it still isn't as strong as all these other short form content things. So if we have something like that, I think we'll find more things more quickly. And that's part of us the attention economy part. Like if we can actually tap into and try to solve finding shit that we know we're going to love or some maybe language or machine can tell us.

A lot of our people play 30 games a year, 40, 50 games a year, right? Whereas, you know, when we're talking about that discoverability aspect and that being a way for the smaller players to fit in, I guess I wonder about how significant that portion of the audience needs to be of people that are transferring through because when i think of the i guess the normie right that is playing games you know they might play truck simulator and be like yeah but i'm going to be a 2k guy exactly what i was talking about right it's just like 40% they're only playing for comfort food yeah right that's what i call it so i do that too i'll fall into ruts for months um you know during the holiday it was just astroneer call of duty zombies and bellachro that was like my comfort food and every day i was like depending on what i was doing where i was i was playing those three games um you're right though that is that is a big portion and drawing them out of that comfort food if there is live updates of it is harder than ever before but again sometimes are we just doing that just to try to charge them more for something that they already have in their home uh versus trying to innovate and bring them new experiences um it's also yeah there's basically people that are the seekers they're the growth mindset of trying to do things and then there's a fixed mindset and trying to figure out one and with all these cards the challenge i see is a lot of people want one prescriptive path to solution and the reality is there are things could be true and false at the same time right in the solutions path so how do we fix that well do we want to convert all those comfort food eaters into being very like dangerous and risky with their food choices and then they get burnt twice and they'll never do it again or do you want other people to drive into that it's difficult like you almost need to build a bunch of subsets of goals for um for the path for each kind of gamer all right i want to jump back to discoverability in games and how much of a struggle that is uh this doesn't fix it but i don't know if you've heard have you heard of a ludocene ludocent i have yeah this is a i talk about games daily i back right away it's the dating app basically right have you seen this i'm not saying this one uh i sent assets or should have at least yeah uh it's it's just coming out of it got back i backed it whatever but basically you tell it what you like and it starts recommending things you know this looks cool swipe right swipe left and add to your collection stuff and i somebody i was talking about uh you know we know a lot about games we play a lot of games here but i need to talk to the person who's making this and yeah andy robinson uh it's one of those i feel like the screen chart is such a blind spot for me because there's so much every day but i know i'm missing greg ass games so the ability to hop in here and go through this is not ai people who are doing this and building this out yeah i know people probably have backlash on my comment earlier about that but like at some point i just want a better selector than just me going like this one right because it said like if i knew what i was playing what i love what do i love about aster here that why i play it so much and then it's like okay i want games right uh daughter has a super chat around youtube.com slash kind of games and says do we think cross play and play anywhere will solve discoverability for games most of the games are recommended to me or most of the games recommended to me are from games or sorry from friends who play on pc where i'm on ps5 and there's very little overlap i think it's helping you know it helps a little bit with being able to play it on any platform because you know if you're stuck within one ecosystem um but it really goes back down to your friend group and a lot of friends move together they all got this together because there's social pressure like oh we're the playstation crew or the xbox crew um so i think it does solve a little bit of that uh i think the challenge is going to face on the platform side of things then it starts to devalue the benefits of the platform and what value proposition they bring to the table um but i definitely think it helps playing with other people because you don't have to worry about it right that's i think super smart does game pass factor into this what's your take on game pass and playstation plus and all the stuff that they're trying to chase right now yeah i think it's it's tough it goes back to the attention economy right um a lot of times when people ask me what should i buy right for my platform and my question back is what do you like right um what kind of gamers are your kids as often people of course families um and usually it's like okay switch if they're in sort of the age of five you know uh when they start getting their teens they want great value i think game pass does have great value or if you're just a very sort of linear kind of player you want to play the big hits um but that doesn't address what impact it has on the ecosystem and developers that make content and the cannibalism that those can have on your sales and then how you measure success if it's just a portion of play time versus a standalone it's easy for us that game is successful because it has x amount of ccus or sold y amount of units um if something comes out of game that's a lot harder for us so then people often be like it wasn't successful because it was only at this point ccus don't seem like you know something i don't or you have access to dashboards that i don't see uh so i think that could be a challenge but depends who you look that's what all of these things i hate to be a little bit waffling about this isn't easy i mean there's no no there's no right answer um the bottom line is providing value players and there is a value gamer that appreciates that and would probably not be buying a console if there wasn't that kind of access for them sure uh talk about the second card here right ignoring the little guys the publishers and smaller innovative titles get left behind uh a question i'll ask you is what are one to three triple a blockbuster games in the last five years that you look at as this was an innovative title it'd be like most i guess most innovative titles from adam boys the last five years on the triple adam boys top five no i don't honestly i honestly don't think i can because i didn't play everything that's right so it's like what did i play that i enjoyed um you know elden ring comes to mind because it was sort of very transformative for me and uh just captured me in a way that many games hadn't but it didn't you know it did a lot of things differently but it was like it's like all these ingredients you know the thing that people think oftentimes that there's a unique way to do something in reality all the ingredients in all these games are already available at whole foods if you walk into any whole foods all the ingredients that make any dish that you like are right there is how you put them all together how the team interprets these things all that stuff i think is really important um so those are the ones that stand up things like or like you know spider-man um was just amazing for me because i got so into it and it brought me back in time and astrobot as well i mean i'm probably not triple a sort of um size and scope but like when it triggers feelings within me or there's like even playing elden ring with again johnny my online buddy um those moments together just form new memories and get me excited but i'm i realized many years ago that what works for me is not what the market is going to be successful right like if it was just my thing then everything would be a factory game exactly uh i've got a couple more super chats i want to get out here though i'm actually eat some brief food uh i like this card building portions for corolla buyers production costs outpates consumer spending pricey games can't find enough buyers yeah are we getting to are we gonna see people explore the scale obviously the comment that keeps coming up is will gta six cost a hundred dollars because they could get people to buy that right do you see us blowing past 70 soon i think with dlc and the add-ons and stuff i think they'll make packages i think that you know there's sort of a rule in marketing that if you have sort of multiple skews of a product most people don't buy the lowest price version right um oftentimes if they have more disposable income they go for the highest price almost no matter what you're so close right yeah exactly you might as well get it all right so it's like all the bells and whistles so i think that'll migrate so i think the blended cost per game will probably go up but i think they'll still have a thicker price but i think the card is also about are we overstoping products if we had one quarter of that game i'd probably still be happy yeah you know like it'd be okay like if you think about you know talking about monster hunter the fun part i mean there's so many things i think if it was like two-thirds smaller but just a tight loop i'd probably be not just as happy but like you know really excited about it i think that sometimes we i remember once that when i was working midway the nba baller team which john miyaki was the lead designer on and i'm doing something before he summons um but you know they build this whole entire like story mode which which ended up being i think about 60% of the budget and in the end 13% of players play that mode yeah so you go back and go well what's the ry on that should we have never done that so it's very difficult sometimes you want innovation because you want new things you want highlight reels you want like oh what's the back of the box what's all the selling points but then you actually pull those out and you're like it doesn't move the needle and you're like so is that the right thing so do we then do less innovation so that's it it's a trickery slow but i like it where's crawl walk around right if we think about a free game model of my first game is a little bit smaller you know more of an appetizer you know game two main course and then game three is like five course meal let me get you two super chats and get younger right three super chats anyway uh bg2580 super chat and says uh do people like joseph ferris and hayes like have any effect on the industry they are 100 vision driven studio with focused philosophy and the sales have followed with split vision absolutely he's the kind of person and i was uh so i had a chance to be on starbase's board of directors when we signed brothers and so i had some dinners with joseph early on his career when he was transitioning from being a film director to video games well wow this dude's on the planet but absolutely i have now more people that can say because before you'd be like well we're really narrative driven like you know it was like remedy right and now it's like oh i want to really have a super clear point of view like hazelite and i love that we have new models of things that are breaking out and then the sales come from that yeah so i think it's important for us to sort of celebrate things that are taking risks instead of a bit outside of the comfort zone so absolutely he's an innovator and i think we'll see more of those types of games with one sort of vision driven um director behind it uh then i got one here from travelers who says adam kf crew any tips for a first time or at gdc i'm going for my first time this year software engineer by day outside of the industry thanks um first of all yeah introduce yourself to everyone just talk to everyone cold approach people name hey give me a minute i just want to introduce myself um networking is really to me my favorite part about gdc is meeting people you've never met before so you go to any of the hotel lobbies and oftentimes people have their name around their neck so you don't have to sort of guess excuse me uh erin give a minute i just want to introduce myself make it quick though right don't be too sticky and thirsty um make your intro uh don't give people your business cards a lot of people just like they'll make their linkedin um their background on their phone it's just easy way to connect to people um and uh just have great conversations contribute but then also no one walk away uh the other part of it which is a lot of people sort of chase all these big networking events and drinking events stuff like that just be careful there's a lot of bad things and negative things happen with people getting drinks so be very careful and looking out for each other you know if you ever see people that are in trouble and especially downtown sometimes can sometimes be a little bit unsafe um so just making sure we're looking out for each other but yeah be curious chat with as many people as easily possible uh anywhere around the urban gardens you know all those hotels are going to have a ton of people in them you might even spot a celebrity you know like a shoot you a wild dude shoot you a shoot in i'll just spot him out there for sure he's always looking he's always looking he's always looking for a round he's always walking for me yeah he's got a lot he's carefree yeah exactly i'll do that again yeah yeah yeah perfect all right in your final super chat before i let you go professor funkenstein writes in and says so the important question is is vibrato hiring as an account as an account who wants to get into consulting this seems super interesting we're growing uh not hiring currently but uh you know as we grow and as we get more clients as we sort of the impact grows of what we're building reached out to me on linkedin um i've had a lot of people reach out we just do a call and chat about what the future looks like and then i've been sort of created database of all different types of people from different backgrounds because i think right now heavily focused on sort of being strategy and biz dev but i think it goes so much broader of how we can help more of the industry on marketing go-to-market events i mean there's so many aspects we can go into so reach out you sell these sweatshirts this is an awesome sweatshirt i brought one as a gift to the team but no we made them my kids and i made them in our base not the sweatshirt sorry we bought the sweatshirt um but no i i was giving these out to a bunch of the advisory network members but thank you very much uh i could probably make some more and i might maybe that's an idea if there's enough demand uh maybe we can do that get your online shop up there you go we're doing we're doing merch now adam you're an industry icon it was a joy to hang out with you thank you so much thanks for having me this is really awesome how can people help you in vivrata what are you sending them somewhere you just want to go to linkedin you want to go to vivrata.com uh yeah linkedin we got a lot we post actually each of these cards every week and we have a conversation on linkedin it didn't feel like there was other platforms that make a lot of sense if you go actually to our network you can see a bunch of the people in the advisory network uh that we work with which are super super cool but you know your sat back from chelsea donlander yeah elizabeth fantastic marcus who uh is out of city and dave langboom dave langboom uh patty 4d studios did uh minecraft ports uh yeah a lot of people work together on multiple different projects and there's there yeah uh carl yeah a lot of great people that work so basically people have big problems that's all they call us we put together voltron squad and we can basically solve the industry's problems i love that that's amazing thank you for hanging out go to gdc and solve all the problems i'll try it's a big list okay good uh everybody remember gdc is next week it is a crazy time for kind of funny we'll be seeing a gajillion games we're recording a bunch of stuff we're sending any downtown every day to play some new shooter but most importantly on monday there will be no usual games daily and games cast instead we'll kick off at 9 a.m pacific with the mixed cross kind of funny spring game showcase for about 90 minutes i do believe we'll show you 60 video games you won't be able to believe then it'll be an all day long all day long live stream on twitch.tv slash kind of funny games and youtube.com slash kind of funny games as we play said games with the developers themselves ask your questions ask our questions and have a great time celebrating this industry of course if you like that we couldn't do without your support pick up a kind of membership youtube.com slash kind of funny games patreon.com slash kind of funny of course apple and spotify the all of our shows ad free get a daily show for me and feel good about doing something good for this industry that benefits us but guess what the programming day is far from over blessings about the hosting game showdown movie edition be fun nick better get me a star you have confidence i need yeah in a movie thing i do too i'm sure your posts are shenanigans to make it even harder it doesn't matter and that's that uh nick's doing his nuzlocke pokemon stream if you are listening later on a podcast service remember you can get showdown as a podcast you can catch uh the archives of our streams on youtube.com slash kind of funny games but for now thank you adam thank you blessing thank you me and until next time now it's been our pleasure to serve you