Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - 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

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Go to http://shadyrays.com and use code FUNNY to get 35% off polarized sunglasses. Go to http://meundies.com/kindafunny and use code kindafunny to get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping on orders of $75 or more. Go to http://factormeals.com/factorpodcast and use code FACTORPODCAST to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. Thank you for the support! Run of Show - - Start - Housekeeping - What is Wrong with the Video Game Industry? w/ Adam Boyes - Rumbleverse - Are There TOO MANY Games? - Forever Games - Game Budgets and Economy - Downward Pressure? - Smaller Teams Breaking In - The Video Game Dating App - SuperChats Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome to the kind of funny games cast for Friday, March 14th, 2025. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller, alongside Forbes 30 under 30, aka New York Game Awards nominated, AKA leftover poppy blessing at Eo Ye, June. Good day, Greg. Good day. 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 weren't on the first show, so I'm all here. We did rock it. Well, I feel the opposite where I'm not warmed up. Oh, yeah. I feel like Cape T's. gets me like, you know, going for gamescasters. Like, I'm already here. That's the benefit of Gregway, right?

Gregway's got me in the car talking every morning, so I'm ready to go. I will say the other thing. Also Adam boys are here. Hey, Adam. The other thing. Give us a moment. What's up, guys? Give us a moment.

Adam. You got to catch up, right? The other thing that's messed me up is that daylight savings times spring forward happened on Sunday. Yeah. Which has led to me sleeping in and not going to the gym before going to work. Sure. Which is now fucked me up royally of just not being on.

You know what I mean? Like right now I'm like, I don't know. The engine is not going yet. I'm just getting started. We're going to fix that. I was going to fix that. Maybe the founder and CEO Vivarado.

Adam, boys will turn you on. Yeah, sure. That's a choice of the massage is. Where do 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? Because like you've been with us the whole, whole ride of kind of fun. From all the different venues and stages and desks and all of a studio. You've seen that in the thin tie and the two, a little too short, you know, and then to this, this superhero.

That's a real common right here. You know, it's, it's given me dad vibes. Dad bought vibes. Yeah. I mean, this was, 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. Yeah. And so I grew it until COVID was going to be gone.

Yeah. Still here. Yeah. So I think this is a permanent. You tricked it at least. I did. For a while. It was gnarly.

Yeah, when we had the RV and we were driving around the U.S., and we did 55,000 miles over three years. Yeah. Yeah, it got super, yeah. We're like, you know when those guys look at you and give you a wink and a nod? You're like, okay, I've gone too far. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. These aren't the people I need to be associated with right now.

RV parks hit different, you know, all around America. I can build you character profiles of many of the attendees. Adam, we're 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 from the sharing video. A little bit different, no glasses now.

I didn't have a beard back then. Me and Shoo Yushita. Yeah, I was a VP of third party PlayStation. Before that, I was worked at Capcom, Midway, EA, started in 1996 for $5.50 an hour as a QA tester. Yeah. And 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 codev studio based in Chicago, Nashville, and Orlando, where I was a co-CEO with none other than Chelsea Blasco. 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 now. Yeah.

What is Viverato? Viverato. So basically, I started about a year ago, Chelsea and I were going to visit with a ton of different studios and we were asking them, 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. And so that kind of freaked me out. So the first 30 people sort of mentioned in the last segment, I asked, gave me 30 different answers. I was like, that's kind of weird.

So I started writing them all down, ended up interviewing over 200 executives, leads, studio heads in the industry, and my list grew to 123 different problems. God damn. And they all stated that that was like the number one problem. And I was like, okay, something's up here.

Like something's really fundamentally wrong. Top of the list was woke, right? It was on the list. Really? So, dude, everyone had conviction in their answer. It was, yeah, wokeism in games. That was an answer. Yeah.

Another one was men. So it was broad. and then there was like discoverability was a very popular one and, you know, the large budgets of games. But actually what we did with a hundred twenty-three list is we boiled it down to this, which is the top 52. Oh. We actually made a deck of cards here.

Deck of game industry challenges. Yeah, here's, I'll pass that one over because that one's already open. But basically, yeah, here we go. Ready? Yeah, there we go. Are you giving these out of GDC next week? Yeah, yeah, of course. That's awesome. Because basically each one of them really sort of breaks down.

you can go through them. The Jokers first, you gotta start with the Jokers. Which are either in the back. You can read the joke. All your base are belong to us. Someone set up the bomb. Office in the cloud. No, that's not a joker. That's a king. Well, I thought you had one joke. No, there's two jokes. No, there's two jokes. You didn't put it there. Did you?

Yeah, they're both in the end. They aren't. I'm looking at it, Adam. I can tell you there's no jokers at the end. The other one is crystal ball blindness. No, okay. No, okay. All right. So I guess that's a special deck because it only comes with one Joker. Yeah, okay. But basically that sort of, I started going back and asking where we're getting all our advice from at the executive level of many of these companies. And then a bunch of these big named, there's another duck. Other Joker was stuck in there. It's 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 Vignaki of Leroy. It starts. 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, and 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. They're in that list. I want to go through these cars. I want to go through these problems.

I want to talk about the industry. Let's do it. I will remind everyone that this is the kind of funny games cast 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. Of course, over on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny, YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games, Apple and Spotify,

you can pick up the membership for 10 bucks and get all of our shows ad free. That's more than 20 a week. And of course, your daily dose of me, Greg Miller, in a series I call Greg Way. No bucks toss our way, no big deal. Watch live on Twitch.tv.tv.com.com.com.com.com. slash kind of funny games YouTube.com

slash kind of funny games listen on podcast services around the globe like subscribe, share give us your Twitch Prime and of course remember if you're watching live you can super chat

your questions for Adam your comments for Adam your hey what was the real story at giant bomb and the couch questions using YouTube super chats YouTube.com slash kind of funny games while we're live to be part of that remember of course we are an 11 person business

that's all about live talk shows you already got Kind of Funny Games Daily and it detailed the one the only silent hill F. After this, guess what? Game Showdown is going down. This is a special episode. Do you want to tease it? Yeah, we're doing a little movie

kind of feudy. I looked at the main contestants that said, Kick Rocks. We're getting on Joey. We're getting on Roger and we're getting on the one and only Nick Scarpino. I'm a do movie theme kind of few. You know, my mustache brother. He has to be my team. Your mustache brother. He's my mustache brother. I mean, we'll put him on your team. Thank you very much. That's all I want. Come on. And after that, of course, Nick will continue his Nuzzlock Pokemon, marathon stream, or whatever you want to call it. He's playing more

Pokemon. But more importantly is Monday, everybody. Adam is in from Chicago because, of course, there's a little thing called the Game Developers Conference popping off here in San Francisco. The annual Rubbing of elbows, learning about games, trying to get jobs. Of course, we are always part of it

with our friends over at the Indy 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 of that, live, YouTube.com slash kind of funny games, Twitch.d. TV 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'll come hang out and join us. You got something to say? No, I'm waiting to get into the conversation because I'm going to these cards. And these are awesome. Thank you to our Patreon producers, Delaney Twining, 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 brought to you by Built Rewards and Stash, but 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, bless. Yeah, no, I love these. So I'm going through the cards. And I think for me and Greg and for all the people that host Cave-D-D-D-E, right, there's always the conversation of, I feel like every day there's at least one new story where the answer to our, 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, 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 the telephone game of development, you know, not understanding your audience, you know, executive drift, 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've covered on KD 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 narrowed it down to what's the number here? Fifty- 52. 52? Yeah. Two jokers. Where, 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, they identify the one that's their number one. 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 the list, right? Like, the thing that bothered me about all these different answers is that everyone's then chasing that. They think that's the ghost, that's the dragon that they have to slay. And when in reality, it's all these myriad of issues, right?

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

spawn 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 could go to watch of how to navigate around. So it's like we have to take little steps forward, right? Discoverability is different than ever before, the attention economy, how people make games, the size and scope of games. And so it's really

about the list, breaking it 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 them all up and we put them on a wall, and 30 people came in, they voted their top 10, and then we did a March Madness. And in the end, 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 is focused on enough, is how do we actually work towards solutions? Like, how do we build action plans to address these things? Instead of just

succumbing to the negativity and like, oh, it's all messed up, it's all fucked. And you're like, instead of that, let's actually, okay, what are the problems? How do we then go step by step by step? So before we wait into the different problems and what you're seeing, I want to go back to how this games cast started. Sure. You texted me. Yeah. I said, I want to come see the studio. Yep. And I said, I ignore the text. And then you text me again, we're just very busy. And then 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 eventually. 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 John. We sure will. We'll get to that part as always. But my question at the top of this. Now having, you know, gone and talked to so many different people, you have these 52, but in general, if I was to ask you, 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 Is that bad? It's risky. Like if you focus on the ingredients or the, it's, it's one of the things that everyone always

focus on the pains they have instead of the, you know, it's the symptoms versus the root cause. So I think we need to just pause in industry and take more time to collaborate. I think when, 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, 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-knuckle 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, when you open it up, it says it, yeah, read that. No, no, no, the other side of it. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no.

on the, see, blessing sees it. It takes a village. Yeah, that's what it says on the top. He's in under the lips. Sorry, where the lip comes up on the box.

Anyway, but that's the sort of philosophy is it takes a village for us to work towards these problems. It shouldn't be happening in little board rooms 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 all sort of shifting and evolving and either we, I feel like our industry is being hijacked and the bad guys are on the train. And so we either can fight back and take it. Let me get that C-suite card out again. You know what I mean?

C-sweet self-interest. It's ace. Top execs maximize personal payouts, leadership, and employee well-being become afterthoughts. I love the phrasing of shifting and evolving. Because I think a lot of the time when I'm reading these stories and you look at the last couple of years of the games industry and you see a lot of studio closures, live service games shutting down, a lot of layoffs happening in the AAA part of the industry. And oftentimes it feels like the response for me on the, I want to.

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

Zingo ends, I'm reading from Gamatsu, Sal Ramano, of course. Zingle will end service for free to play Arena Shooter Star Wars Hunter on October 1st, the publisher announced. The game's final content update will come on April 15. It first launched on iOS Switch via the App Store and Google Play on June 4th,

2024, followed by PC via Steam Early Access January 27th, 2025. Zinga Star Wars 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 checkmarks, there as far as, oh, you have IP, you have a studio that's proven, you have, you know, you're in a genre that works, you have the systems for monetization, oh, you still can't make it

work. I like the phrasing of shifting and evolving because it implies that, you know, it doesn't imply the dumerism that I, like, often feel where I see these things. Most people do, right? It's like when it's the analogy I was using earlier about spawning a new planet. Like, you can just turtle and be like, 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 at DICE because I said 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, and pessimistic. And then there's everyone else. Yeah. And I think sometimes we sort of become victims to the surround the narratives and the headlines.

And you go, well, I guess there's, 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 the stuff. And a lot of, I don't expect any people watching to really truly understand all the nuances of what goes into the macro and microeconomic parts of the games industry, but the path forward is just understanding this 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 video games anymore. We go to a million different places. So there's a bunch of different things we just have to start working through. Can I ask you, and this is a question that

why brought up about a week or so ago on KGD that I also add that I kind of missed Matt Piscuitel for this question. But Adam Boyes, I think is the 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. Just making sure. And the challenge is like there's never going to be a point where no one's suffering. Yeah. But there's so much suffering right now. And there's, and the pathway to the, the, the healing is still far away, right? It's over a year way. Yeah. So for you, for where we're at, right? Post

2025 or even, you know, possibly during 2025, right? Yeah. What does a healthy industry look like to add in boys? Well, I think first of all, it's more capital being deployed. So more money being spent by a bunch of different sort of 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 is that you're trying to sell more or put an MTCS in your game or put games out earlier

or increase the price point. And then you're trying to cost cuts. And oftentimes what they do to cut costs is they reduce. is they reduce the staff because that's usually the most expensive part of it. So if we're driving towards that, usually the first things that 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 live.

So maybe that's three plus three years. So it'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 is a misunderstanding between developers and between investors. And when I say investors, there's a bunch of categories. I'm about to spit a bunch of letters that are probably going to make most people roll eyes around.

No, no, no. Everybody's locked in if you're listening to this episode. Venture capital firms, right? They have different needs and different KPIs are trying to achieve. Private equity firms have different motivations. Independent investors, oil barons, people like that. Then there's the platforms, the publishes. Then there's like the sort of fun indie funds, whether it's like big mode or inner sloth, you know, things like that.

So all of them have their own goals that they're trying to achieve. The problem is as a developer, if you're at the edge and you're just like, I want to make this thing. Who goes in here? Me make game. I like game. Game good. Oftentimes when you're pitching, you're not understanding the nuance of where this money comes from. So we are 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 are 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 are get canceled means there's more excuses for me not to move forward and not to deploy 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 sure or is their fadeaway jumper or it was just a thing like balatro that just was fun and and done because it was a passion project so i think that so 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 and even buntz if you're making little games and stuff like that. 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 double A. And I see that a lot of people are saying, like, the answer is, instead of one $300 million game or $300 million game, just make, you know, $103 million games. Like, yes, and. I mean, it's an angle. But I think that's the thing is we're being very prescriptive with solutions when in reality, all of these things, like a really vibrant economy and world of great ideas is going

to be the best future of the industry because then you create opportunities for a lot of different people. So I want to circle back to the first point then of where you're talking about we need more capital. We need more funding. and we need more money, right, being put in here. Where is that going to come from, you think? We talk about, and what I talk about on Games Daily, what Bless talks about, you know, the opinion we usually have is that you see these C-sweets,

you see these stockholders trying to make Fortnite, trying to chase a trend, and that inevitably ends with something like, here we go, we're going to close up Star Wars Hunters. This didn't do what we wanted. We didn't catch it. Rumbleverse from Iron Galaxy, right? 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 the C-sweets and stockholders get tighter with the purse strings or walk away in general, where do you see this influx of money coming from? Well, 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 a studio to make a business. Yeah. So that's our first failing, 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 it 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 or eight year. Because that way you can convince them. So private equity, how it works. So you know how you put your money in the bank and you can get like a half a percent per year and your savings a cat. It's 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 their money, much like companies publicly traded, right? They're trying to earn more money each year so they can bring more value back. But if developers come along and trying to pitch something to 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 to understand it, 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 it can make $5 million for your period. Then let's figure out who the right people are to talk to and unlock it. But right now, everyone's scattershotting and talking to everyone about it. Talking to the wrong people. The wrong people. And then they're incoming to a lot of these funds and stuff like that are everyone coming to them. So we create a more linear. And it also is about privilege, too, like people that are very accomplished, people that leave big Estabba studios have the capability 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 hitting people up on LinkedIn. They're not getting the coverage or the feedback either. So there's a lot of things that happen. But I think it starts with education and just giving us all a moment as an industry to build like a universal translator between what is a successful, successful game look like at the scale of a bunt, a single, a double, a triple a home run. And then what is that

map to the KPIs of all these different banks investors? Sorry, I'm talking about, I'm super excited about this. I love it. I love this stuff. These are the things I want to hear about, right? These are the questions I think, you know, us in the audience often has. Another question all throughout you is, you know, is there a studio or a company

whether on the AAA level or on the indie level or any level that is doing it right, that you look at 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 that I meet. And I think that sort of goes back in there are studios right now that are feasting and there are studios that are famine. And there's very few in the middle, right?

They're just sort of getting by. The feast studios, I think it's one of my favorite people I used to work at Iron Galaxy, this guy named Nate Metford. Any of these, he had the lessons for game developers. And one of them 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 had something to do with it. And I think that's what happens sometimes is that you start, if your first game's successful,

which is quite rare these days, then you're like, oh, I can just replicate that in game five. Do it again, do it again. What we usually see the pattern is it's game three that's successful or four or five. 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's hard also to evolve because you don't have the downward pressure. I think the best thing that could happen to studios 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's ones like, let's take Ed Boone and Netherroom.

Like just an incredible track record that has just made better games year over year, incredibly smart team, absolute unicorn 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 outstanding.

And so it goes back to two, how our teams, I mean, we could break into how our teams develop. Is it O-Tur and director-driven, or is it sort of like a coalition-driven? There's a bunch of different ways that we can unpack that. But there are examples. I think the mistake that we do, though, as an industry is then we go copy the ingredients and paste. And then we get fucked. Like, we just get screwed again because it's like, oh, we just did these things and this is obviously how you do it. And that's just not true. Because it's all the other parts of it. It's all the nuance and art and culture part of it that have to go into a team and the chemistry and the history and the mistakes they made

together. Are we going to get over this hump, you think? And tell me if I'm, this isn't even a real hump, I've just made it up in my head, where you're not allowed to shit the bed. Right now it feels like you shit the bed in 2025, 2025, 2024, and your studio gets closed six months later. You don't get a chance to actually do it. And we see these hemorrhaging of teams.

And then they reform and that, well, we're getting somebody who used to work on Call of Duty and somebody who designe were putting them together. And they try to make that first game. And the first game isn't great. And guess what? That's studio closes. Everybody runs away from them. I hope so.

but it takes, I think, a little bit more sort of fortitude for a leadership team to be like, this is a 10-year bet. It goes back to the R-O-I. If you're trying to make money on the first game, right? Like, if you guys could name, I've been asking people this,

a studio where their first game was 85-plus rated. A newly formed studio, first game ever, 85-plus. Super Giant? What did Bastion get? The first one? Maybe, yeah, or John Blow, like, indie, yeah. John Blow, you know, right, for sure.

Out of Wilds is, like, my most recent one I played. Yeah. But aside from that, and there's other animal well, you know, or I don't, was that their first? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And again, but we're talking about like micro-indness. Right.

That's what I'm saying. But like a fully formed, you know, 30 plus studio. Ascendant Studios didn't do it. Sledgehammer games didn't do. Or, yeah, yeah, yeah. Striking distance didn't do it. I got to walk back through Glenn's going to. So if we all know this, then, 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, and the third game, that's going to be their Magnum Open. are closer to it. Right? So that way they have game one. And by the way, respawn did got close. Titanfall 2.

They got it in two games, right? Phenomenal game. That feels like I used to happen more. Like I feel like in PS3, PS4 generation you get the Assassin Creed, but then you get the Assassin Creed too. And it's like that's the banger. Yeah.

Yeah. And now it feels like you don't know because I think we're sort of, it goes back to the cards. We're chasing all these different things of like, what is the kernel of that amazing part of it, right? And so I think we also moved away back in the day. It used to be like there is one game director

that is the one, you know, It's the Kajima or the Ed Boone. Yeah, that sort of the Todd Howard. And then we moved into more of this sort of leadership consortium approach. And I see some people, they're, you know, studios that want to go back to the old model. What does that even mean? Tider team, 40 people, 50 people making something more double A that can become AAA. Because when we 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 of their savings, drained 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. 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 was so much pressure by Activision Leadership to like eke out more quality, more this, more of that, and then it worked, 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 when it launched. It wasn't well-received. And when they did launch the Battle Royale, it was bare bones as hell. It wasn't the 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, this is the live 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 for PS3 that didn't you know blow up and then Rocket League comes out still a small thing but longs it's on PS Plus and then over time gets acquired by Epic right now is this thing of oh man it has all these collaborations this is a bigger game pub G is another one where it came out that game was rough as fuck yeah totally but then over time you know it builds an audience or even were daisy where you had to download ARMA buy that then do the 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 a kind of funny membership. Of course, you'd pick it up, getting good karma for supporting a small business. You'd get all of our shows ad free and you get a daily dose of me, Greg Miller, in a series we call Greg White. But right now you're not using your benefits, so here's a word from our sponsor. This episode's brought to you by Built. y'all already know I'm a big points and rewards guy but here's a PSA for anyone who rents. If you haven't heard of Bilt, you're about to thank me. Earning points on rent is now a reality where you pay your rent through Bilt.

You don't even have to check it with your landlord to start earning points that you can use towards flights, hotel stays, fitness classes, and even your next rent payment. Let me break it down for you. There's no cost to join Bilt and as a member, you'll earn valuable points on rent and on your everyday spending. built points can be transferred to your favorite hotels and airlines and even the ones you haven't heard of there are over 500 airlines and 700,000 hotels and properties around the world you can redeem your built points toward points can also be redeemed towards a future rent payment and unique experiences that only built members can access so if you're not earning points on rent my question is why not start earning points on rent you're already paying by going to join built dot com slash kind of funny that's j-o-i-n-b-b-l-tt dot com slash Kind of Funny. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Join Built.com slash kind of funny to start earning points on your rent payments today. This podcast is brought to you in part by Stash. Saving and investing can feel impossible, but with Stash, it's not just a reality. It's easy. Stash isn't just an investing app. It's a registered investment advisor that combines automated

investing with dependable financial strategies to help you reach your goals faster. They'll provide you with personalized advice on what to invest in based on your goals, or if you just want to sit back and watch your money go to work, you can opt into their award-winning expert-managed portfolio that pick stocks for you. Stash has helped millions of Americans reach their financial goals and start at just $3 per month. Don't let your savings sit around. Make it work harder for you.

Go to get.stash.com slash kind of funny to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock. purchase and to view important disclosures. That's get. dot stash.com slash kind of funny. Paid non-client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor.

Investing involves risk. Offer is subject to T&Cs. And we're back. Adam. Do you like Greek food? Do you want some Nick DeRee? I love Greek food. You want a Euro?

What do you want? Sure. Yeah, yeah. No, sure. Whatever. Blessing you put yours on there too. Yeah, yeah. Oh, hell yeah.

I was hoping you'd say it. Perfect, perfect, perfect. I'll then send, I'll ask Joey to get the order for me out there. Perfect, yeah. We're back, Blessing wanted to crack into his cards, but where I want to start while Blessing starts organizing this is, again, I mentioned it back there. We kind of had a, you've lived this with Rumbleverse. Yeah.

A game, we adored it kind of funny, and we're all about it. I did too. Yeah, yeah. Walk me through that because this feels like firsthand, like Iron Galaxy when you were there, obviously, Co-CEO, 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?

Sure. These things, whereas how do you get a game that's always going? How do you do this? Talk to me about your retrospective on Rumbleverse 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 is the market fit part of it. And so we kind of felt very strong that if we partner up with Epic Games and they give us the playbook to Fortnite, then that's going to stack the deck in our favors because we're going to learn and meet with the teams. And they were incredibly supportive the entire path. Like they were always meeting with us weekly meetings, talking about metrics, talking about goals. And then it's like battle pass conversion and the amount of outfits we should have and 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, we 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. So that was sort of a big thing that we all didn't understandfully. and because we were sort of locked into that free to play, then you're like, oh, the Battle Pass is the solution in converting players. The other part that, you know, it's easy. I remember when bots first came online in Fortnite,

and it was like, oh, my God, it's so much more fun now because I can get with bots that I feel like I'm making progress. But a lot of people don't realize is that when you build a server that's meant for 40 players at the same time to connect, that costs, let's say, whatever, a dollar a day. Just easy math. Yeah, sure. when 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. If you want it even easier than it's one player per entire server. So that whole dollar cost per one player versus the dollar cost you're breaking across the 40 players. Math ain't math. And so the more you wanted to make it replayable, and then the other thing about Rumbleverse is that the more success that it had, the people, there was basically sharks that were incredible at the game,

super amazing. Oh, I'm aware. The amount of times I got down to like number two, number three and then just, I'm like, how are you doing this? Yeah.

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're getting stomped. So what happened from the, from day one to like,

you know, month, day 30 is that, you know, the people like were their first got really good. They were their playtime. are high, right? We sell a 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 a game that might not be here in two years? Right. Yeah. So then they're waiting or the outfits weren't, you know, compelling enough for the offering. And 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. My kids are playing, you know, they used to play Roblox a lot, still playing it. That's free 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 had 10 million downloads, really, really awesome, healthy sort of daily active users. But then you sort of math out the math over a two-year period. You're like, ooh, even if breaks even in year one, you have to recoup all the money that's been spent by the publisher, right? So they're basically trying to earn back their money. Then you've got to get where the flywheels 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 the call and had to inform the team. It's hard to see your baby be turned off. Of course, yeah. Luckily, we have an incredible, we had incredibly, we have. I mean, our Galaxy 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? It's like, well, there wasn't a path to profitability. And no one's running a charity.

And 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 point. Okay, I've organized my cards. I love that. I love that. So we can go back and forth or whatever. No, go for it.

I like watching you work. So I have this card pulled that is about crowded release schedules. Yeah. 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. You're not wrong, though. Because I do want there to be a space for all the different games, AAA, AA, indie,

to come out and shine and 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 am looking at the review codes that Greg has sent me in. I'm like, oh man, I want to play this game, but also this game has kind of piqued my interest.

And also I want to play WW2K25. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so it's this tough thing of even the games that should get my attention as me, one player example, can't get my attention. And 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 roguelikes all the different cozy games all the different card games all the different all of all these different kinds of things souls likes whatever it is that feel like they're speaking to a similar 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 it says the market is flooded with new 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 this 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, or new games only got 7% of all spend across the whole ecosystem. It was mostly games that were 5 to 10 years old. So it becomes challenging because the amount of games coming out is increased, right? Amount of players hasn't increased that much. I mean, we're at basically not the top of the hill, right? We can still get more gamers in the ecosystem.

This is the big thing when Matt Piscuitel 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 COVID really was. If you want to be part of this, you're part of it. And so we've hit that. There's always room. Pato-ish.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but it's not also catastrophically down. It's not like we're down 20% in, 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 and 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 can get two hours of free basically entertainment, they 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 play games on YouTube and Twitter?

It's all of it. It's games, it's movies, it's TV, it's streaming. Yeah. It's volleyball at 10.30 at night. Stay home and play a game. I got to be healthy. Right. It's all of those things. And I think that's the challenge is that. So if games are coming out, a lot of this investments being made, and now it's harder to capture. Like I, I think back of the day when we first met Greg, it was like, I think as a gamer, you're like a dog. And then there's 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 buzz around. You don't know where they're all. There's a couple around. And then there's 50,000 of them. And you're like, where'd they come from? So it's harder to attract them because. of that movement and that organic aspects of it

because there's now infinite places for them to find things. 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 a swing and a miss, 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 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 there for more platforms more ways to play content so it's less of the monolith right it's less sort of an uh still an old goply but like less monolithic than they 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 used 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 the gum here's the the chapstick, whatever. Now, when you walk into like a retail store, there is

an entire sort of like line system. Another aisle. Yeah, there's another aisle. That's all like weird gotcha last minute. Here's some chocolate. Here's some mince. 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 are just more games than ever before. So it's harder. The shelf space

hasn't changed, right? The shell space is, I mean, it has with digital storefronts. It's just infinite. So if you can have infinite things, people like, well, I'll just make stuff and people will come. But it's not like that. It's not the field of dreams anymore, unfortunately. My card I want to pull then is Forever Games. Okay. Forever games. Ongoing titles, demand constant updates and monetization. Shorter, complete experiences can get overlooked. Yeah. My question would be now that you're out talking to everybody. Yeah. 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's 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 humanly possible, they're still chasing those some big players are still chasing those Forever games. It goes back to Appetite though. Once they're locked in and this, you know, we mentioned Minecraft and Roblox, but Fortnite's the same,

Call of Duty, the ecosystem, all the different modes you can play. Once you're in that system, drawing people out is very difficult. Sure. It's easier for me to bring a friend in to help me play or play with me than it is 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 of their stuff, I mean, remember when we had to choose between, okay, are we going to have buy all of our music on Apple? Or we buy our music, you know, old CDs or MB3s or whatever it is? Or are we in Spotify? 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, and especially with the social pressure to flex, you know, visual and unlockables in games. I remember, you know, early Fortnite days when my kids Kids would be some kids at Scobotis for having just filthy defaults, right? Yeah, 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. All right. I'm going to read together because I want to, I want to ask about how you feel about the relationship between these three things. Basically doing D&D. Yeah, exactly. The first one I have here is runaway budgets. Poor oversight inflates costs.

Project spiral as money is poured into unplanned pivots. The second one I have here. here is sticker shock. Triple A titles can exceed $70. Many gamers can't afford every big release. Then the last one I have here is enough polygons already. Hyper real visuals no longer guarantee success. High-end graphics may not justify the cost. I know those first two might have a bit more of a relationship between each other than even this last one, even though 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 hunt, I think, is slowed down. I think people kind of, they're like, I'm good. You know, I think largely most gamers. Don't ask PlayStation that with the PlayStation 5-Pro. I got a question about that. I got a damn way it's slower down.

I mean, now my eyes. I'm the guy turning the flashlight on at a restaurant because I can read the menu. So I can barely notice that stuff. But I do see less of 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 eke out? It used to be like now it's you know it's 1080P and that was you know beyond a 4k and whatnot and so now it's like how do we actually go further from that

um so that one I don't I didn't hear a lot of people complaining about that issue that's a very sort of minor issue the other part the runaway budgets obviously this is a highlighted topic that that gets talked about almost every day in the news of 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 it's just the bottom line is they're 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 in a factory with a friend of, you know, so it worked on this massive game. But it is 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 they're correct we'd look at it. But during COVID, everyone went remote. So what we did is we sort of like commoditize 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?

To the point where people are getting, I can 2x my salary. And so that sort of made the core cost of making content now, let's say, 30 or 40% more expensive. Then it's like, well, we got to add multiplayer and we got to have, you know, 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 quests and content. And then the teams, I mean, we see the credits list for some of these games that are just infinite. It's tough to know of like if it's just them deciding of like, we spend a billion, we'll make back 50 billion, right? Versus a spend a million and a make back, you know, 50 million kind of thing.

But that'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 taste shift and change. I think we need more more agile, right? If 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 like, let's just have the best group and compile them all together. Obviously, you still need a strong backbone. in a vision. But that's a way to sort of offset some of the cost. Can I jump in with a question there? Sorry. You're killing. I want to go. 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. Yeah. It kind of sounds a little bit like Ubisoft. Are you

watching them as a test case right now and seeing like, are, you said it. I'm not saying it like that, but like 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, like, 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? Yeah. 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 play it safe. SQL 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 like make a different location. And they got bigger and bigger and bigger over time And I don't think to the point we were talking about earlier I don't need to 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 there They just sort of like Especially when they're publicly traded It's largely not always up to them

To make all the decisions The market's putting pressure on them But I think the whole construct Of a publicly traded video game company We have to predict the sales outcome of fun is very difficult. And 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, I think the downfall of many companies in many different industries. And I think we're seeing that happening right now

in the games industry. Yeah. It's funny that UB was the one that came to mind for you because as Adam mentioned the 10,000 people were working on a three games thing. I thought a PlayStation.

Just as far as, oh man, you know, every year you might have the last whistle, you might have the Spider-Man, and it feels like, you know, when we talk about big budgets, I feel like the reporting slash rumors slash all this talk is usually about, oh, man, it seems like last was

real expensive to make. I wonder if we're making that money back or whatever. And Adam, I know you probably know way more about the intergoings of that, and 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 nobody here.

But I also get the sense of when you talk about being able to be more agile, I get the sense that PlayStation kind of maybe feels that, way too, right? I look at Ensonmeic as 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, no, we put out a Spider-Man, we put out a ratchet, we put out this. Team of Stobie being another example of a team that feels agile. And it feels like we're trying, I don't know, I'm sensing a shift in terms

of the balance of, all right, we can have the last of us is, but we can have other games. Smaller stuff. Yeah, that are able fill the gaps. Yeah, the jettis of the world. Yeah, the smaller yachts of the world. And meanwhile, Nintendo's just over there

just doing the same thing that they would do it from the start. And we can't even really compare them to anyone else because they're their own island. The outliers in every way. Do you think there's a reality where, actually, let me show us this question, the different one, right?

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, you know, we boot up and players go, wow, this is everything. Wow, like the animations are so crisp and so detailed and all that stuff, while also being able to have studios be in a place where you are able to be agile,

you are able to be healthy, you are able to support this? It depends how you, it's weird because it's like, it depends how you define that, right? 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, right? but like felt awesome hell divers another great example I know those were on the larger side we're not talking to you know

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 how many people on the team I just like I love the crap out of that like 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 different products in their path but like they're now getting figuring it out And they are sort of somewhat modular within their own organization. I think in the world where trying to build a Call of Duty size game or a battlefield size game or an Assassin's Creed size game with a modular approach,

I think it would be very difficult because the coordination layer would be 90% of the budget of people like, you know, going back forth. But as far as like smaller tighter. Too many cuts is the other card then. Yeah. And then who's in charge and then what do they tell us to do? But again, it's because it's usually been topped down. And sort of we look at it as a peer base system versus a top down architecture, than I think we can get there

because I just want to try stuff. The other part about it is put something out there, see if it sticks, right? Like we talk about games that we love playing. We're going to talk about Monster Hunter later on, but yet the online aspect of it is so janky, right? And so, but it doesn't, but we love playing it.

It's not that hard, just figure it out, Adam. Right. You could have fixed it. You worked at Capcom. Oh, yeah, that's true.

It's a time machine and then go, anyway. Maybe if you weren't a quitter, maybe he would have hung out. But the, but I think that's the challenge is that like, how do you build something it's scope and scale. I think it's more of like at-bats.

Like 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 single or double into a home run. And that's a good baseball right there. There you go. Yeah. I love that. Barrett knows his baseball. Keep cooking. You're cooking. Oh, no, that was all I had.

Oh, okay, okay. I mean, yeah, you walk over. I think you've already kind of touched on. The absent direction card I like a lot as an ace, right? Leaders failed 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 leaving projects it's not done they leave after the game ships the game was a disappointment I guess I'm at I was a very broad brush but

is this the not the director but the people above them you're talking you've 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 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

It, 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. Right? They can say here's what things we're looking for, right? And I think that's what happened with PlayStation specifically. They talked about we want more live service games

publicly. And then I think a lot of teams are like, oh, it's clearly that's the reason. We got it. Let's go. We can buy to do that. And then the teams interpret that, and then they build their vision or their perspective on it, and they try to sort of build a cool idea within that. I think it goes back to, though, a lot of people, games to me fall usually into two categories. It's either vision-driven, so a very clear vision from the start of exactly what they're trying to build, exactly where they're trying to go, or market-driven. Hey, this seems popular.

This seems like the taste of the month, let's go there. And I think sometimes when they blend those two together, and it's like 80% vision, 20% market, and then that sways and are you 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 all like that's not how any of this work so every game had to have open world and have to be a hundred plus million dollars and you know we could 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 try to pitch to get money and funding for the game. And they're trying to think what the publisher wants. So sometimes that sort of sways from that vision part to market part because you're trying to do what they want versus my favorite pitches are the ones like, I want to make this. It's 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, their CEO, you know, his one of my favorite lines he said to me once was there's riches and niches. and I think a lot of times building something that is pure vision can bring that out like Balatro and Animal Well and stuff like that One card that I like here is locked by the big few right Industry power rests with a handful of giants Smaller players struggle to 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 giant smaller players struggle to 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 scarpinos um and how do we is there a way of changing that is there is there a path through if you're a smaller company or a smaller publisher 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 lecars 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 being 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, it reads your mind, it feeds you exactly what you like. In video games, there's nothing even close, right? Well, with Xbox's new AI, it's going to be telling you.

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. 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 and 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 and the tiny builds 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, the tumult in the industry. So I feel bad for them. But as far as like the solution is, it's difficult. I think stronger discoverability across the board. And 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 just was like, hey dude, you probably love this, this, that. Steam does that a little bit with recommendations, but it still isn't as strong as all these other short form content things. So if we had 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.

How significant is the piece of the gamer audience that are the gamers that are jumping from game to game to game. I feel like a lot of the audience that listens to kind of funny and reads games media and is like tapped into game releases, right? Like a lot of our people play 30 games a year, 40, 50 games a year, right? Whereas

when we're talking about that discoverability aspect and that being a way for 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, if I was to call them the normie, right?

That is playing games, you know, they might play truck simulator and be like, yeah, but trucks, I'm an NBA 2K guy. This is exactly what Piscitello was talking about, right? Where it's just there's 40% that are only playing for. The comfort foods. Yeah, right? That's what I call it. So I, and I do that too. I'll fall into ruts for months. You know, during the holiday, it was just Astonier,

call duty zombies and belatro. That was like my comfort food and every day I was like depending on what I was doing or where I was, I was playing those three games. You're right though, that is a big portion of it. 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 try to them more for something that they already have in their home versus trying to innovate and bring them to new experiences?

It's also, yeah, there's basically the people that are the seekers. They're the growth mindset of want to try new things. and then there's the fixed mindset people are like, I like my comfort food. And trying to figure out one. And with all of these cards, the challenges I see is a lot of people want one prescriptive path to solution. And the reality of it is there are things can 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 then they'll never do it again? Or do we want other people to drive into that? it's difficult. Like you almost need to build a bunch of subsets of goals for the path for each kind of gamer.

I want to jump back to discoverability in games and how much of a struggle that is. This doesn't fix it. But I don't know if you've heard it. Have you heard of Ludo Scene? Ludo Sent? I have. Yeah. This is a Kickstarter that I talked about in Games Daily.

I backed right away. It's the dating app basically, right? Have you seen this? No, I'm not seeing this. You weren't on the Games Daily with me, this one. I sent it to assets or should have at least. Yeah. It's just coming out of it.

It got back. I backed the wherever, but basically you tell it what you like and then it starts recommending things and you're like, oh, this looks cool. Love it. Swipe right, swipe left, not it. And add it to your collection and stuff. And like, as somebody I was talking about, you know, we know a lot about games and we play a lot of games here. But it's impossible. I need to talk to the person who's making this. Andy, yeah. Andy Robertson. It's one of those. I feel like the Steam chart is such a blind spot for me because there's just so much every day. But I know I'm missing Gregass games. So the ability

to hop in here and go through and this is not AI. It's people who are doing this and building this out. Yeah, and I know people probably have backlash from my comment earlier about that. But at some point, I just want a better selector than just me going like, this one, right? Or like, what's the top this week? Instead, like, if

it knew what I was playing and what I loved? What do I love about Astonier? That why I play it so much? And then it's like, okay, I want games like this. Right? Daughter has a superchat out of rungupeight around YouTube.com slash kind of funny games and says, do we think crossplay and play anywhere will solve discoverability for games. Most of the games are recommended to me,

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 a helping, you know, it helps a little bit with being able to play it

on any platform, because then you don't have to be stuck within one ecosystem. Sure. But it really goes back down to your friend group, and a lot of friend groups move together. They all got this together because there was sort of social pressure, like, oh, we're the PlayStation crew or the Xbox crew. So I think it does solve a little,

little bit of that. 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 at the table. But I definitely think it helps playing with other people because then you don't have to worry about it, right? That's, I think, super smart. Does GamePass 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? 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? It's often people buying

of course, of course. 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 started getting their teens, they want great value. I think GamePass does have great value for 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 do you measure success if it's just a portion of playtime versus the standalone?

Like it's easy for us that a game is successful because it had X amount of CCUs or sold Y amount of units. If something that comes on, GamePas is a lot harder for us. So then people often will be like, it wasn't successful because it was only, at this many CCs don't seem like, do you know something I don't? Do you have access to dashboards that I don't see? So I think that could be a challenge.

it depends who you look. That's what all of these things. I hate to be a little bit waffly about the answer. No, I mean, this isn't an easy, I mean, there's no. No, because there is no right answer. The bottom line is providing value to 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. Talking about the second card I drew here, right, ignoring the little guys, the publishers chase only blockbuster hits and smaller innovative titles get left behind. A question I'll ask you is, what are,

one to three AAA blockbuster games in the last five years that you look at as this was an innovative title. It could be like the most, I guess the most innovative titles from Adam Boys the last five years on the AAA level. Adam Boys top five innovative titles. No, I don't even think I can't ask this. I honestly don't think I can because I didn't play everything. That's for sure. So it's like what did I play that I enjoyed? Um, you know, Eldon Ring comes to mind because it was sort of very transformative for me and, uh, just captured me in a way that, 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 often times that

there's a unique way to do something. And 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 to 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 that those are the ones that stand out. Things that like, or like, you know, I think 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, Ashtrabot

probably not AAA sort of size and scope. But like when it triggers feelings within me or this like even playing Eldring with again, Johnny Vee, my online buddy, those moments together just form new memories and get me excited. But I'm,

I've 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 and then everything would be a factory game. Or a building or a survival game. You and Snowbeck, Mike. That's what it would be.

Exactly. I got a couple more super chats. I want to get you out of here, though, eventually eat some Greek food. I like this card. Building Porsche is for Corolla buyers. Production costs outpaced consumer spending. Pricy games can't find enough buyers. Yeah.

Are we getting to, are we going to see people explore the scale? Obviously, the comment that keeps coming up is will GTA6 cost $100? Because they could get people to buy that. Right. Do you see us blowing past $70 soon? I think with with DLC and the add-ons and the 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. Yeah. Oftentimes if they have more disposable income, they go for the highest price in the month, almost no matter what. Well, you're so close, all right?

Yeah, exactly. You might as well get it all. This is why the Vita with 3G was so successful. Right? So it's like got 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 that we'll still have a sticker price.

But I think that the card is also about, are we over scoping products? Like 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, we think about, you know, we talked again about Monster Hunter.

The fun part, I mean, there's so many things in that game. But if it was like two thirds smaller, but just the tight loop, I'd probably be not just as happy, but I'd be like, you know, really excited about it. And I think that sometimes we, I remember one stat when I was working at Midway, the NBA Ballers team, which John Vinyaki was the lead designer on.

I know I'm doing so many names. How many times can we drop John Vinyaki's name of this before he summoned? But they did. He just like wildly comes out of there. But you know, they built this whole entire like story mode, which ended up being, I think, about 60% of the dev budget. And in the end, 13% of players played that mode.

Yeah. So you go back and go, well, what's the ROI on that? Should we have never done that? So it's very difficult sometimes because you want innovation. because you want new things, you want highlight reels, you want like, oh, what's the back of 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 was that the right thing? So do we then do less innovation? So it's a trickery slow. But I like it where it's crawl, walk, run, right? If we think about a three game model of my first game is a little bit smaller, you know, more of an appetizer, you know, game two, more like a main course and then game three is like a five-course meal.

Let me get you two super chats and get you on your, all right. Three super chats now. way. Three super chats. BG. 2580 super chats and says, do people like Joseph Ferris and Hayslite have any effect on the industry?

They are a 100% vision-driven studio with a focused philosophy and the sales have followed with split fiction. Absolutely. He's the kind of person. And I was, so I had a chance to be on Starbrees's board of directors when we signed brothers. And so I got to have some dinners with Joseph early on his career when he's just transitioning from being a film director to video games.

One of the wildest dudes on the planet. But absolutely. I have now more people that can say, because before you'd be like, well, we want to be really narrative driven. Like, you know, it was like like remedy, right? And now it's like, oh, I want to really have a super clear point of view like hazelight. 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 and stepping 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 director behind it. Then I got one here from Travelis, who says, Adam and KF crew, any tips for a first timer at GDC? I'm going for my first time this year, software engineer by day outside of the industry. Thanks. First of all, yeah, introduce yourself to everyone. Just talk to everyone, cold approach, people. Your name, hey, you have a minute.

Just want to introduce myself. Networking is really, to me, my favorite part about GDC is meeting people you never met before. so you can 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 what the name. Excuse me. Aaron, do you have a minute? I just want to introduce myself. Make it quick though, right? Don't be too sticky

and thirsty. Make your intro. Don't give people your business cards. A lot of people just like they'll make their LinkedIn, their background on their phone. It's just easy way to connect to people. Sure. And just have great conversations, contribute, but then also no one to walk away. the other part of it, which is

a lot of people sort of chase all these big networking events and the drinking events, stuff like that. Just be careful because a lot of sort of bad things and negative things have happened with people getting a spike drinks and stuff like that drink. So being very careful and looking out for each other. You know, if you ever see people that are in trouble and especially downtown San Francisco these days

can sometimes be a little bit unsafe. So just making sure we're looking out for each other. But yeah, be curious. Chat with as many people as humanly possible. anywhere around the Urba Boida gardens you know all those hotels are gonna have a ton of people in them you might even spot a celebrity

you know like a shoe Yoshita wild you'd shoe Yoshita and the bushers spot him out there for sure he's always looking he's always got the furrow brown and he's always walking for me needs to go to term he's got a lot well now he's carefree

I know I just want to do another sharing video with him now yeah exactly oh my god I gotta do that again you're gonna bring that back yeah yeah perfect and then your final super chat before I let you go Professor Funkenstein

writes in and says so the important question is, is Viverado hiring as an accountant who wants to get into consulting? This seems super interesting. We're growing, not hiring currently, but as we grow and as we get more clients and as we serve the impact grows of what we're building, reached out to me on LinkedIn. 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 creating this database of all different types of people from different backgrounds because I think right now heavily focused on sort of gaming strategy and biz dev.

Sure. 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. Do you sell these sweatshirts? Because 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 basement. Not the sweatshirts, sorry. We bought the sweatshirts and pressed them in their basement. But no, I was giving these out to a bunch of the advisory network members. But thank you very much. I could probably make some more and I might, maybe if that's an idea. If there's enough demand, maybe we can do that. Get your online shop up and running.

There you go. Atc. Vivro. We're doing merch now. Adam, you're an industry icon. It was a joy to hang out with you today. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. This is really awesome. Glad you enjoy the cards. How can people help you in Viverado? What do you do? Are you sending them somewhere? You just want them to go to LinkedIn? You want to...

No, they can go to Viverado.com. Yeah, LinkedIn. We post actually each of these cards every week and we have a bunch of 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 on the advisory network that we work with,

which are super, super cool. Scroll down, pass that up in the face. But you know, Amir Satvats on the advisory network group, Chelsea, John Lander, yeah, Elizabeth, Fantastic Marcus, who is that Obsidian? Dave Langboo. Dave Langboom.

Patty, 4J Studios, did Minecraft ports. Yeah, a lot of these people were working together on multiple different projects. Andrew is there, yep. Carl, yeah, a lot of great people that we're working with. So basically, if people have big problems to solve, they call us, we put together Voltron Squad, and then we can basically solve the industry's problems.

That's awesome. that. Adam, you're amazing. Thank you for hanging out. Thanks, guys. Go to GDC and solve all the problems. I'll try, man. It's a big list.

Okay, good. Everybody remember GDC is next week. It is a crazy time for Kind of Funny. We'll be seeing a gazillion games. We're recording a bunch of stuff. We're sending 80 downtown every day to play some new shooter. But most importantly, on Monday, there will be no usual games daily in Games cast.

Instead, we'll kick off at 9 a.m. Pacific with the Mix 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 live stream on Twitch.com 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 Funny membership. YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games. Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny. Of course, Apple and Spotify to get 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 to host a game showdown movie edition. It'll be fun. Nick better get me a star. You have confidence in Nick? I need star. Yeah. In a movie thing? I do too.

Okay. You like it that star. I'm sure you're pulling some shenanigans to make it even hard. It doesn't matter. And then after that, Nick's doing his Nuzlock, Pokemon stream. If you are listening later on a podcast service, remember you can get Showdown as a podcast.

You can catch the archives of all 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, no,

it's been our pleasure to serve you.