Rade: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Player Too Podcast. I'm your co host, Rade Stojsavljevic.

Dave Leary: And I'm your co host David Leary. It's good to be with you, Rade. How are you this week?

Rade: ⁓ man, I I I've been better. lot of depressing news. We'll get into that in a little bit. but also about to ship a product, so that'll be interesting. ⁓ and we'll talk about that. Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit more ⁓ in a bit.

Dave Leary: Well that's always fun. It's always fun to ship shi ship a game. Good. Your your head is obscuring the sign, but I guess we'll live no, you that's okay. It can obscure the sign. It's just kinda fun.

Rade: I have to I I just haven't figured out a good way to remount that where the the layout is. I think I'm gonna put it on that over there on my my left. ⁓ so see how that works. All right. ⁓ news this week. Starting out with one of our favorites we've talked about before, Arc Raiders. They've lost about half of their monthly users month over month.

Dave Leary: Mm. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I mean I did see that headline. I still will ⁓ continue to assert that ⁓ you know, it is a successful game ⁓ by any measure. the game is eight months old now. it's still hitting, you know, forty to fifty thousand concurrent on a daily basis. I think there's no way to classify those kind of numbers as anything other than a success. dwindling to the hardcore base for a game like this, in my opinion, does not mean that the game is doing anything wrong necessarily. they had ⁓ a blow up success at the beginning. I think they've struggled a little to reconcile their their PvP fan base with the PvE fan base. ⁓ they have made a f a few missteps along the way, but on the whole I I'm still a believer in this game. I think it's gonna be around for a while and The fact that it's currently dropping users that meaningful in my opinion.

Rade: Yeah, I agree with that. ⁓ I have a slightly different take on why. ⁓ so like I've done enough live service games where you know you need to look at any kind of change like this and then try to figure out a hypothesis and test it for why it's happening. And there's two things that that I see that are most likely the cause of this. So one, and end of school year, right? people are finishing up school, they're starting to go on vacation, schools are are are are you know. People are doing other stuff. So that might be one thing. There's just people have less time to play games. And I think the other thing, what we've seen with games like this is you're only one really big or really good update away from getting all those people back. So is it a short-term thing? Is it a trend? I don't know. It seems sudden. so it's hard to call it a trend. I don't expect they're gonna lose anything like that again this coming month. and then Yeah, one big update and they're all back.

Dave Leary: Yeah, and and I'll confess I haven't played for a while. I've been playing other stuff. My attention wandered as as it does to other games. But I mean I put in multiple hundreds of hours on this game when it first launched and in the months thereafter. So I I mean I certainly feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of it. And as you say, as soon as they have an update that is exciting, I'm gonna hop back in and check it out and try it out. And I feel like this is a game that'll be in my library for a really long time.

Rade: So I'm gonna use two analogies this week. I'll use one of them here. Both of them come from the the Navy SEALs, the US Navy SEALs. one of them is don't rush to your deaths. And the rationale there is like they have a bias for action ⁓ and they want to run towards gunfire and get into the fight, but they want to do it in a way where they don't just run blindly into it and get mowed down. makes sense. And so ⁓ you know, veteran team would look at numbers and and the embark people behind the game. absolutely are veterans, you from all the battlefield games and everything. You're gonna look at that data and you're not gonna panic and try to react and do something stupid and overcorrect. You're gonna look at it, you're gonna try to figure out why. They're gonna know their player base better than we will ⁓ as fans of the game. ⁓ and they've also got a lot of data that we just don't have. And so they'll they'll take an appropriate response with that. And so like I would just caution any younger teams or teams that are relatively new to operating a live game like this. is you you gotta take your time and understand what you're doing before you just react.

Dave Leary: advice. Don't overreact and don't don't immediately jump to conclusions is is good advice for any team, I think.

Rade: ⁓ Epic Games in the news again this week. You want to talk about that?

Dave Leary: Yeah, I mean it's kind of interesting. Tim Sweeney is making some news, essentially talking about I don't know if you'd describe this as a as a pivot or just a a ⁓ of how they're thinking about it, but Roblox is clearly on Tim Sweeney's mind. ⁓ he's talking a lot about the next generation of Unreal and building an ecosystem of Unreal games that that could go against Roblox ⁓ in months when I think Roblox appears to be dropping a lot of users thanks to some. potential missteps on their side. he may even be behind the curve a little bit. And I and I'm not sure that I I necessarily agree with the strategy, but I kind of understand what hit the thinking is.

Rade: Yeah, I don't think it's they're talking about moving fast enough though. I I think like if they don't if if the strategy is where they want to go, and I think it's it's probably a smart play to make that, I think they need to move a lot quicker ⁓ to get there.

Dave Leary: Yeah, they were talking about this being two to three years out before yeah, way too slow.

Rade: That's too slow. So we'll see what happens on that one. some more news this week. This one from Nuzu. this is the company that aggregates data and does research. So we talked a little bit last week from the the of the industry from SP global gaming. this one's got little bit more nuance. It pegs the global gaming market to for last year at 200 billion. That's up 9.1% year over year. That's slightly. Greater growth than the other group estimated. mobile was 56% ⁓ of even though downloads overall for apps are down. So that's indicating more monetization from existing games, which absolutely tracks. If you've just looked at the charts the past year, they they're calcified. So you know your top titles are still your top titles. They don't, not a lot of movement there. console and PC, about dead even at 22%. Each on that market. where it gets interesting is you start breaking things down ⁓ within that. So console was only up 2.3 percent year over year. That's that's pretty anemic growth. and they attributed a lot of that to just live service revenue, was just weaker than expected, and Nintendo had an okay but not great year. ⁓ might have been related to the hardware costs that we talked about, ⁓ though that was more. At the end of the year. So I don't know how much that affected that. but on PC gaming, almost half, 40% of revenue came from microtransactions, which was up almost 10% year over year. and that's all coming mostly from a resurgence of Counter-Strike 2 and Roblox. So

Dave Leary: Yeah, and I mean I I think to some extent it's it's a misleading statistic, right? Because as you point out, a lot of that growth is on on Roblox and and Counter Strike. So I I I don't know that I take quite the lessons from it that I think ⁓ maybe you do. I I don't know that this means that microtransactions are are the future. ⁓ I I think I just read it as hey, Roblox happens to be particularly dominant right now, and that's being reflected in the charts. the the console Numbers. The Indemic console stuff doesn't super surprise me at this point. consoles are very expensive pieces of hardware right now. We're kind of getting a little late in this particular console generations lifecycle. and with been a lot of churn lately at the triple A level, so you know, I I'm not sure that that surprises me at all. And and the indie market on PC is thriving. So I I think none of that stuff really surprises me that you said.

Rade: Well, I I agree with you. I don't think it means everything moves towards microtransactions. I think this is also an effect of people playing older live service games for longer. And so they're gonna monetize inside of those things. but interesting that what you said ⁓ indie games, because premium game spending was up, and that's about thirty-two percent of all PC gaming revenue. That's up twenty-five percent year over year. ⁓ And

Dave Leary: Did you see any numbers to to indicate whether that's sort of like the mobile game situation you were describing, where there's a smaller number of big winners? Like I imagine the microtransaction numbers on Battlefield Six are probably particularly high. ⁓ but are are how many games are actually winners in this race?

Rade: Well, they attributed a lot of the growth to big releases like Monster Hunter Wilds, Battlefield Six ⁓ Claire Obscure Ex Expedition Thirty Three. So ⁓ I I think we just had a a ⁓ banger year for premium titles last year. and that could certainly skew the numbers. I mean we're gonna have a banger year for premium titles this year, but it's all gonna be thanks to one game or keep saying GTA six. what surprised me was that China is now the number one market for for games. US number two and combined just over half of global revenue are coming from China and the US.

Dave Leary: That is a shift. I think this is the first year China has actually edged out the US, is that right?

Rade: it I believe so. ⁓ I'd have to check the twenty twenty four data, but you know, let let's just ⁓ let's look at trends overall, right? So this would be one explanation why Western developers can see a market growing and still be doing poorly, because Western games for the most part do not sell well in China.

Dave Leary: Yeah, I think that's true. I I mean I I still would have worries about trying to get into China as a Western developer beyond that, e even if you were making something that was well suited to the market. the government has had some periods over there when they have been pretty heavy handed with ⁓ you know, let letting games flourish versus not. And I right now they appear to be letting them flourish, but that could change depending on the political winds over there. So

Rade: Yeah. So, you know, all this kind of leads us into the topic of the week. So the the the industry can be doing well financially. Why the hell are we seeing rumors of more layoffs coming, particularly the the big round that ⁓ is rumored to be coming in a couple of days from Microsoft?

Dave Leary: Yeah, and I I expect you're gonna have words to say about this as MI. And it's a great topic to get into. I know it's kind of a downer, but I I think we need to do it. I mean, you called it out in the news. The the industry, you know, up up nine percent the the rich are getting richer in this business. Games are still huge money. and yet ⁓ so many teams ⁓ and the people that build the Are just feeling pain upon pain upon pain. ⁓ I've seen some people call this, and I think it's a fair analogy, crash comparable with 1983 in terms of how the video game developers feel about the current situation and the current market. But yet the revenue for games is way up.

Rade: Yeah, so I'm gonna start this by stating the business model for games is broken and it's been broken for a long time, but for variety of reasons, that brokenness has been obscured in in the same way that the business model for Hollywood has been broken for a while, and then with when streamers came about and theaters going down, it's just like everything is just. It's completely different. That doesn't mean you still can't make money, but like the traditional ways just don't work. you see a lot of stuff happening with with ⁓ these particularly these bigger companies that just employ a whole lot of people. And they're almost exactly the ⁓ in the worst position to react to that. You know, your small, nimble indies, they see it first and they've they're forced to pivot and and react, but the big guys haven't. and they have organizational and market inertia, but that bill is coming due. And like, look, I get it. If your business isn't growing in corporate America, you're you're you got problems and you have to fix that. But goddamn does it suck ⁓ to to hear about whole studios potentially going away.

Dave Leary: Yeah, a and if if we want to get a little concrete here, ⁓ you know, we are on we we filmed these a few days before we we post them online, so our news may even be out of date, but we are in a situation where we are approaching the end of some big corporation fiscal quarters. ⁓ they are looking to probably get in their their layoffs and cuts before then and And Microsoft ⁓ particularly has had had some rumors over the last week. I th I think you and I have probably heard the buzz and I know I have friends ⁓ within ⁓ the Microsoft Games organization at various studios who are basically just waiting for the shoe to drop to see what gets cut and what gets killed. ⁓ you know, we have heard rumors about rare getting potentially shuttered, obsidian, which is a veteran team. I'm concerned about their survival. Rare has a forty year history in games. there have been talks about cuts even at Xenamax and Bethesda, which of course has some of the bigger bigger franchises Microsoft has. ⁓ it's a scary time out there ⁓ you I I I can't really disagree with anything you've said about the business model being broken.

Rade: So, you know, people I've talked to are like, well, why don't they spin out the studios? And that sounds like a great idea, but let's break that down into how would that work? Right. So without a revenue source for for operating, how do you keep a studio that costs you probably a couple million to several million dollars a month to to keep open? If you're at in one of the larger scales of AAA, it'll be less than that for one of the smaller ones. But let's just say it's a million dollars a month to keep the door open, which is just reasonable for even a a a fairly small studio. that's that's by the way, that's about 50 people or so. when you factor in all the the costs or ⁓ or if you don't have a title that's generating money that's in market that comes along with you, where do you get that money?

Dave Leary: Yeah, I mean that is that has been the traditional in in the last couple of decades, the traditional relationship between publishers and developers. You know, g the games make a ton of money, they end up paying for themselves, but there are lean times at studios where publishers need to kind of float a veteran team along while they build the next thing, and that can take two or three years. I I mean, I I struggle with this a little bit because I You know, the loss of veteran teams is I think one of the biggest things killing this industry and and I'm not sure just cutting a team loose and selling them outright ⁓ fixes the problem.

Rade: Well, I don't think there's anyone to buy ⁓ either, frankly. It's not like you know, that's the other issue. So you know, why did we get here? So we've talked before about cost of production going up every year. ⁓ it's just it's really expensive, even with better tools, to to build a a ⁓ tier to upper tier, so double A to triple A game. very, very expensive to do that. also ⁓ harp on favorite topic, platforms. Platforms are parasitic. So of the 200 billion in revenue made for the industry, they sucked off billion of that right off the top. Siphoned off is probably a better way to put it off. That's 30% of the revenue, $60 billion gone. What the hell have they done for the game development community to warrant $60 billion? That's ridiculous.

Dave Leary: Yeah, a and I've never been been quite as down on platforms as you have been in the past, but I I think that you're not incorrect when you say that's an awful chunk of change, for for maybe not quite the value that it's worth.

Rade: Well, I mean, they used to be subsidizing the hardware for consoles with that. Those days are gone. Nintendo's never done that, which, you know, good for them. but you just not you're not helping the industry by take like you either need to help everybody or stop just siphoning off all the the the profit margin. Like, so that's one issue. The other one, this is self-inflicted. Developers and have moved to live service. Because they could monetize Because you know so much you could charge for a base game, but you could make more money with microtransactions on that as a way to offset the costs ⁓ have been increasing for development. And well, guess what? People only have so many hours a day to play, so they're buying fewer things. And so you're seeing some concentration like that, that's happening in the charts. I don't think that's healthy.

Dave Leary: No, that's not healthy at all. And and you know, we've also talked pretty extensively recently about single player games success over the last few years. So there's certainly a viable strategy there that I think has been ignored for a long time. I think one of the most frustrating things about what you're saying there is that these teams and developers that are all waiting around for the shoe to drop and to see if they still have a job next week, this is absolutely 100% ⁓ their fault. To some extent over the last several years, they have been executing on a strategy that was set by publishers above them, which included things like, hey guys, don't worry about the sales that you have. Don't worry about those kind of things. Worry about supporting Game Pass. Worry about supporting live service. it it it's not about ⁓ building games the traditional way. But now they're getting evaluated, ⁓ in part based on those. Things that they weren't even chasing and and that's really just kind of tragic.

Rade: Well, it's not even just Microsoft. Like this has been a pattern with publishers for a long time. You acquire, acquire, acquire, you get a hiccup and then you're like, ⁓ And then you know, all of a sudden like studios are shut down and teams are laid off because like they're just in this this voracious growth period until they're not. And then the first thing you want to do they they just wind up doing is just disgorging all this. So this kind of gets to my my second analogy. ⁓ that I have also from the Navy SEALs, though it's debatable where this one came from. ⁓ which is yeah, it's I wonder why. maybe, maybe it's I was watching something that had to do with this. But ⁓ the saying is ⁓ slow smooth and smooth is fast. And ⁓ not the to figure out how to ⁓ integrate what they've acquired.

Dave Leary: Very military this week. Very, very

Rade: Building a sustainable business that before they go after the next thing, right? Sort of this growth is prioritized at all costs, sort of thing. And ⁓ rapidly into a wall, bounce off that wall, then realize, crap, we've gone too low, and then go back on another spree. And so it's sort of been like this roller coaster for decades now. And that's just really, ⁓ really bad.

Dave Leary: Yeah, it is really, really bad. What is the what's the solution here? Do we have a solution that we could propose?

Rade: I I think we are in the midst of witnessing the death of traditional publishers and platforms. ⁓ I I think in five years it's gonna look very, very different. and you're gonna see these micro specialized production type of partnerships with ⁓ publishers, probably the wrong word to use because I don't think that you know they're they're working like a traditional publisher. Where you're gonna find somebody that Maybe they can help you get some money, but it's not like, you know, someone's gonna write you a check and you're gonna go build the thing. they could help you with marketing, maybe they could help you with analytics, maybe they could help you with feedback, maybe they could help you with connecting development resources or all of those things, but they're gonna do it and they're gonna specialize on genres and get very, very good at that. I think the same way that you have TV ⁓ and movie studios that kind of tend to specialize in. ⁓ You know, you look at what Blumhouse is doing with horror, right? Huge success in Hollywood right now. And they're micro focused on that genre. And they're doing extremely well. One of the the most profitable studios doing that. I think we're gonna see that for games.

Dave Leary: That that sounds promising in a way. That suggests there's room for for smaller stuff and larger stuff both, ⁓ prov provided there's an audience for it and provided that a path can be seen to make it profitable for somebody.

Rade: Yeah. the fourth reason why we're here, and this is the one I suspect you and I are gonna disagree with. So we've spent a lot of time making the barriers of entry for building a game go down. Still a lot of work and very time consuming and talent exp talent heavy to require or required to build an awesome and great game, but anyone could build a game now, and a of people are. And most of those games should never have been built. and they're just literally flooding the field with garbage. And, you know, we've talked about this ⁓ before about how few Steam games actually even recoup their modest submission fee, which is I don't forget what it was. It's like thirty, forty bucks. Like they make nothing. but they basically flood the zone with content that should never have existed in the first place. And I think we screwed up there.

Dave Leary: I mean I I I think disagree with that maybe less than you might expect me to. I I am never gonna say garbage that should never be there. I think that's a little harsh, you know. If somebody had well d there's some garbage out there for sure, but you know, somebody out there cared about that garbage at one point or another and and they were trying to make something, hopefully that was good. I I'm not talking about just some slop that got shoved out in a week with no thought and built entirely with

Rade: No, there's a lot of garbage, man. You gotta troll down at the bottom.

Dave Leary: with assets that weren't created by human hands. But know, I I think I I would never stand in the way of somebody chasing that dream, right? Of I wanna make a game. Because I think that's where we all started, those of us who have been in the industry for a long time.

Rade: Yeah, and and that's the problem, right? So the the classic argument is like, well, you don't know what's going to be successful. And you're right, I don't. But at some point in time, every signal that you can get before you release the game is telling you this thing is going to be a failure. And with no reason to not put it out there and see, ⁓ well, maybe I'm wrong. People put content out there. So I don't know if the answer is like we make the submission fee like $10,000 or something that's relatively affordable for anyone who's doing this professionally, but like you'd think twice about putting out absolute garbage or something else.

Dave Leary: So let me ask you this though, after all your rants over the last several podcasts about what bloodsuckers the platform holders are, your solution is to have a ten thousand dollar submission fee? ⁓

Rade: Yeah. So I would rather have that than thirty percent of revenue.

Dave Leary: Sure, if that's the trade off, but I don't think that will be the trade off, right? I mean I think that the yeah.

Rade: No, I mean, so I g I had this argument when I was at Meta when we launched Quest, because we had an open platform for for Rift, the PC version of the VR headset. And we had the same problem where like there was so much content out there that was just abysmal. a lot of it made you nauseous because it was just so poorly optimized or just did all sorts of things you just should never do. And I pushed for curation on Quest. based on talking to customers, looking at data and ⁓ own experience. That said, if you don't know what these new things are, you want some sort of pre review badge of quality or something to know that you're not just buying absolute trash. You know, whether it's the the the underwriter labs you get on electronics so you the hairdryer you buy won't burst into flames and burn your house down when you plug it in. consumer reports, wire cutters, five-star review, whatever whatever. Something that says there's too much stuff out here for me to wade through. I'm uninformed, help me. Right. You get around the decision-making choice paradox, which is an economics, behavioral economics problem. And we don't have that. I mean, we we we kind of do with like the big name brands and publishers for the the big, big content, but everything below that. Man, it caveat MTOR. Like there's just a so much bad content.

Dave Leary: Yeah, surfacing and finding the right stuff is is an ongoing challenge in the industry, particularly with with all the stuff out there. But but I I think I don't want to lose of the possibility that there might be a a a diamond out there buried under the heap of of garbage. I you know, I I love big games like like Crimson Desert ⁓ and Battlefield Six and and things that are are really genuinely triple A, like I expect GTA six is going to be. But boy, i in the world you're talking about where a bunch of stuff just gets called out, ⁓ you might also not get a Stardew Valley, right? Which is one of the most successful one man games of all time.

Rade: That's bullshit. That game would have busted through immediately because anyone could look at that thing within five minutes of play and see a game like that and go, there's merit here. There's something good here. Right? So it like.

Dave Leary: I mean I I i maybe but I boy, you're you're assuming that that these things would get time in a world where there's a a a greater barrier to entry, right?

Rade: We need the equivalent of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle for games, right? If you've never read that book, it talks about it's worth looking at, but like early issues with food safety. It's why we have the FDA now and agricultural inspections and things like that. We need something, some amount of standards or or whatever to say, you know what? This thing meets a minimum threshold ⁓ functionality, not ripping you off, ⁓ not stealing your your credit card data or you're, you know, doing things that are untoward. And by the way, it's not a steaming pile of crap that that just doesn't work. and we just don't have that. And I think it's long overdue.

Dave Leary: Like a like a professional reviewer, say at a website like an IGN.

Rade: I think it needs to gate the content that goes on the stores. Like we used to have these gatekeepers in physical retail. And I'm not saying we should go back to physical retail or that system wasn't without its flaws, but at least there was some sort of barrier where you had to prove you met a minimum threshold of quality before you ever got to put it in front of the customer. We still had garbage content there, but we had a lot less.

Dave Leary: but you know, I I'm joking about IGN obviously, but the the obvious question to you, sir, is is who are these gatekeepers and who gets to pick them?

Rade: I don't know. We have to figure it out because what we it's it's

Dave Leary: 'Cause you sh you sure don't like the platform holders, so you don't I don't I'm thinking you're not thinking that Gabe Newell should be the gatekeeper of this.

Rade: I it can't be one person. It's gotta be some sort of of qualitative, quantitative blend of data. And like, you know, consoles did this and they still do this with TRCs. You know, you can't put out a game on on PlayStation or Xbox that runs at five frames a second. you know, like there's there's some guarantee there, and you see less of this type of content on those platforms that I'm talking about. You know, like we're this is primarily Steam, even mobile has some of it, but Man, like they put the the have other sets of issues. There's just a lot of copyright content that it's not great there. But I we have to do something about this because it's not gonna get any better. And I would like to not see the Roblox evocation of PC gaming any more than it already is, where you just have millions of just utterly bad pieces of content.

Dave Leary: Well, I I I'm with you on that and and I'm kind of of poking at you a little bit, but I I don't mean to because I do fundamentally agree that I think there's a lot of a lot of garbage out there to be to be clear. And you know, I I am thinking a lot about people that I know at different studios this week and and I'm just kind of sad and upset that that folks are facing this another round of this stuff again. S some folks I know who have been through this several times before are are facing it again and And it's not their fault. And I I think to any developer out there, I would say, Hey, it's really not your fault. And hold your head up high, ⁓ keep making games, stick with it, stay in the industry, because we boy, we need veteran developers.

Rade: You know what would help? It's going back to what we used to do where we paid developers royalties. You know? Like the you think about like VCs and the venture capital model make no sense for gaming. Like it you wouldn't go write a book and say, you know what, Mr. Venture Capitalist, I need $500,000 of your money to build this business. You wouldn't go, you don't do that for a movie. It makes no sense, right? There's other sources of funding there.

Dave Leary: That would help. That would that would encourage quality for sure.

Rade: ⁓ you don't need to get motif no motivation to have a buyout and get acquired to get your payday. Right. If you build a hit title, you should share on that. More importantly, the rest of the creators on the the team that help build that game, because no one person is ever responsible for it, should get a piece of that. We used to do this.

Dave Leary: Well, boy, th th that was before even your and my time though, I think, right? I I can't recall maybe you've gotten one, but I can't recall ever actually getting a royalty on a game. I have gotten bonuses at the end of a project, but I've never gotten a royalty.

Rade: I worked at one company that did that, but I didn't stay long enough to get one and I kinda kinda regret that. But ⁓ ⁓

Dave Leary: It was done a long time ago for sure on some of the early stuff, right?

Rade: Yeah, I mean look, this is like this is how movies work. you know, you get a piece of the sales and it it it aligns everybody. And particularly with these long tail live products, it's a really good thing and it's it's fantastic retention. I would rather have that than stock options or a cash bonus.

Dave Leary: Hundred percent, I'm with you there based on my experience with stock options and cash bonuses as well.

Rade: ⁓ all right, bit of interesting news then related to this about how things might turn around. ESA published a report, and sixty-seven of American households play games one or more hours per week. That's seven point two million more people this year or last year than the year before, which is crazy. You wanna know how many hours a week they play on average?

Dave Leary: How many?

Rade: 12. 27% of those people play 16 plus hours per week. That's nuts.

Dave Leary: That's a lot. not surprising to either you or I, gaming is mainstream, has been for a while, but those numbers are great. You know, there's an audience out there, the revenue overall for the industry shows it.

Rade: ⁓ the average age is up to 37 years, up from 36 the previous year. And the generational breakdown, this gets depressing towards the end a little bit, is 83% Alpha, 82% Gen Z, 71% ⁓ millennials, 56% ⁓ X. And know who's really close to us Gen Xers? Is Boomers at 50% playing solitaire.

Dave Leary: Good for them. Good for the boomers enjoying their little solitaire games. I I'm happy for them. I'm happy that they're joining us in our hobby.

Rade: We we're Gen X. We grew up with games. That's a disappointing showing at fifty six percent. I'm not happy with that at all.

Dave Leary: I know, we should be we should be better. I I think we still grew up and games were considered a geeky ⁓ hobby, so there were a lot of the the people that used to stuff me into lockers in high school were not were not playing video games like I was.

Rade: I don't know, man. Like may maybe they grew into the like well, it's weird 'cause a lot of people that play like Madden and other sports games are like, Well, I'm not a gamer. I'm like, dude, I'm watch you're doing with that controller. It's like you're absolutely a gamer. Anyway. ⁓

Dave Leary: Ha ha ha. Maybe they're lying on maybe they're lying on the poll. They actually are a gamer playing Madden. They just don't think of themselves as a gamer. That could be too.

Rade: Fair enough. All right. I I think we've got two games of the week this week. You have one, I have one. We'll go really quick.

Dave Leary: I don't have one I wanna I you told me you had one, so I was waiting to hear yours. I'll save mine for another week.

Rade: All right. I have a game that I guarantee you you haven't played yet, which is a good one.

Dave Leary: I will take that challenge, sir, but if it's a a ⁓ mobile thing, you may be right.

Rade: Well, it is a mobile game, but it's also coming to other platforms. it's a game I am currently working on. It's called FIFA Heroes. it is an arcade style soccer game where you get to play with a bunch of team mascots and players ⁓ and play fast paced soccer or football for the rest of the world. we're gonna launch mobile first and we're gonna follow up with other consoles, but I've been I've been consulting and helping this product ship For a wa a while now and and we're about to come out.

Dave Leary: Well, congratulations. It's always fun to ship something, anything. And I I did know that you were working on this. Maybe a little bit of a cheat to to self promote on the game of the week, but but I will take the cheat because I I'm I I think this is a good time for that game to come out. What with the World Cup and the news ⁓ and everything?

Rade: Ha ha ha. Yeah. It's ⁓ we picked up the coverage on YouTube to watch World Cup and man, it's been it's been great to watch and and seeing how people actually come together ⁓ f for this. ⁓ was watching like ⁓ is like South Korea was playing up against Mexico and they're in Mexico and like the South Korean players got kind of surrounded by the Mexican players and they're all partying together, even though one team won and the other lost. it's just a lot of camaraderie around it and people coming together. ⁓ haven't seen the great rivalries yet. Like ⁓ remember several years ago at World Cup when ⁓ Germany defeated ⁓ Brazil. Ooh, people were not happy about that one. but you know, we'll see. I think it's a good thing and it's it's ⁓ it's kind of just the fun to see how it's being embraced by American fans as well.

Dave Leary: Great. So when can we see when can we see the title? When is it available for folks to go and grab it?

Rade: ⁓ so it's gonna it's in test markets now. It's gonna go global next week. ⁓ and then as soon as I have the final date for the other platforms, I'll share that here. I have no compunction self promoting something that we worked on because it's not like you and I are shipping a game every week that we're promoting on here. ⁓ so on the rare occasion we've got one coming out and we've slaved away at at building it. we should talk about it. And I think this this is a fun game.

Dave Leary: That's right. I I may I may too indulge in a couple months and and self-promote something I've been doing a little consulting on ⁓ on on this podcast as well. So I'll I'll forgive you. It's good. I'm excited to try out the FIFA game when it's out. So I maybe we could put a little link to it down where where people are hopefully hopefully mashing that liking and subscribing button down below.

Rade: Hit hit that button. FIFA Heroes. There's there's multiple FIFA games out right now. So ⁓ this one it looks arcadey, looks a little like looks like something you'd play on Nintendo with with cute characters and you just have a lot of fun with it. All right. Well, that's it. Hit that like and subscribe. ⁓ we'll see. ⁓ we are.

Dave Leary: for heroes. We're back with a guest next week, right? ⁓ actually I think we're back with a guest. I've got a I've got a guest I think will line up for an interesting discussion. Hopefully a more cheerful discussion than we had this week.

Rade: Awesome. Yeah, well, you know, whatever winds up happening coming out of the news, I think we'll talk about it and ⁓ lament and and maybe I'll if the weather holds up here in sunny Seattle, I'll bring a frosty beverage with me to either pour one out for my homies or show some solidarity, or just because I'm thirsty.

Dave Leary: Definitely. That's always a good idea. So

Rade: All right. See y'all next week, everyone.

Dave Leary: Later.