Rade Stojsavljevic: Hello everyone and welcome back to the player to podcast I'm your co host Rade Stojsavljevic.

Dave Leary: And I'm your co-host Dave Leary. It is wonderful once again to be back with you, Rade, on this fine afternoon to have a little chat, a little podcast chat.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, this is an interesting week because we've got some funny developments, some good news. Not a lot of terrible stuff happened this week in gaming. ⁓ of terrible stuff in the world, but in the games business hasn't been too bad.

Dave Leary: No, no, no major layoffs to discuss so we can we could take a week off from that. Yeah, let's let's get into the entertaining stuff

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, so going to a quickie. So Electronic Arts just announced they closed their ⁓ fiscal year with record performance. Battlefield 6, we knew that was a great performing game from last year. But ⁓ Apex Legends coming through, still putting up strong numbers for them. And then their sports games across the board were pretty good. So I think that's a good sign for the company.

Dave Leary: For sure, it makes sense all the mainstays for EA just still chugging along as they do. Not necessarily a lot of new IPs in the offering there, but EA has its business and it works for them.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, it does. right. Some other stuff. News in the finance side. We'll save the last bit of good news for last. But man, what is going on with GameStop?

Dave Leary: The purchase of eBay. Yeah, I did want to talk about this. I love everything about this story. Let's get into it. Do you want to give the summary?

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, so GameStop got a new CEO not too long ago and a younger gentleman has done a lot to kind of stabilize it and turn it around. But now he's talking about purchasing eBay.

Dave Leary: He has, and people are asking kind of with what money, I think somewhat justifiably. know, GameStop is worth around 12 billion, or take. eBay is worth around 45 billion. He has recently, as of close to the time we're recording this podcast, gone ⁓ on a show and given an interview that was a bit of a train wreck in a few ways. he was pressed on that point. And all a little vague. They are getting some money from external investors. It is apparently for half stock and half cash, but it is little unclear exactly what the play is here. They're talking about going Amazon, ⁓ and there is some synergy in GameStop having a ton of physical store locations, which eBay does not have right now. but I'm not sure I see the play here, much less how they're actually gonna pay for this.

Rade Stojsavljevic: I don't know. Like it's interesting. It's fueling, some stunts that have been going on and that are fueling rumors that this is not ⁓ a real thing. Hilariously, so Ryan Cohen, the CEO, ⁓ sold ⁓ not socks that you put on your feet on eBay to help fund the acquisition. And he got his eBay account banned and he's talking about it. But you're honestly like in today's world, like This guy's getting attention. Whether this is real or not, we'll have to see. But I think to your point, GameStop had a really lucrative business in the used game trade back in the day. That's sort of gone away as digital has become a thing. But they do have physical locations. People go in there. It's a place to hang out. Do they become the mass market mall pawn shop of 2026? I mean, I don't know. Maybe.

Dave Leary: Boy, it's still a strange play to me. And I think one of the interesting tidbits I read in the last 24 hours, and this is moving very quickly, so by the time the podcast comes out, we may be behind the curve here. the investor ⁓ Michael Burry, who if you've seen the big short, he is the character played by Christian Bale. He actually fairly excited about GameStop for a long time. He had a large position in it. And he giving ⁓ them some about possibly moving into the the acquisition space as they seem to be trying to do now. But of a couple of days ago, he sold his entire position and says he no longer has faith in the company. you know, ⁓ few big investors the company are already kind of questioning this play. And I really see how this works. It would be certainly interesting if it happened. I kind of like the idea of the eBay store down the street that I could go in and unload all my crap in my house, maybe if that's what they're thinking. But I'm just not seeing this right now and I suspect that we'll have more fun stories about this to cover in the weeks ahead.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So when GameSpot was on Reddit with Wall Street bets and everything, became a GameStop shareholder. I own ⁓ share of GameStop ⁓ hey, I'm holding on for dear life. ⁓ here for the ride to the moon.

Dave Leary: Ha I actually was going to ask you that question. mean, how much of GameStop's ability to even entertain this idea is in part due to the short squeeze from a couple of years ago. mean, yeah, they're way off the peak, but I mean, their value is in part still a little bit to all that craziness that went on a couple of years ago with that stock and a more recent 2024 spike that they had. I wonder if they would even be able to entertain this. purchase had that stock not spiked from that short squeeze that happened.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, probably not. So you mentioned developing news ⁓ of the just now they're recording it eBay has permanently banned Ryan Cohen's account so ⁓ can't sell under that name on the store anymore.

Dave Leary: Excellent. you know this this all gets into a little inside baseball stuff if you enjoy financial talk, but you know it is game adjacent and and it'll be an entertaining story. Absolutely. I don't know who I'm rooting for in this if anyone but hopefully it works out for somebody. ⁓

Rade Stojsavljevic: So continuing a little bit of funny news that's game related. So I think we may have touched on this before, but the UK and some other countries are starting to have pretty strict age verification laws. And there's a ton of pushback around all of that. We're starting to see what happened when Discord was talking about doing it and some other platforms. Well, some enterprising young lads and lasses in the UK have managed to circumvent UK privacy checks by drawing fake mustaches on their profiles. About a third of them are getting past the age verification with this.

Dave Leary: You know, I don't know why anyone should be surprised by this story. Kids are the same as they always have been. They're resourceful, they're clever, they're able to circumvent the clumsy fumblings of adults trying to keep them away from content. You know, I'm gonna seriously date myself here, but you know, I remember slipping down stairs late at night to watch R-rated movies on cable. went, I'll really date myself here when my grades in school, would occasionally slip and my parents were trying to figure out how to punish me. They would often take my Dungeons and Dragons manuals away for a while as a punishment, which tells you what kind of kid I was. But had a way of quickly figuring out what the hiding places were around the house and sneaking them back when my parents weren't looking. you know, ⁓ kids be kids. There is age verification that's going to be foolproof here. I think the real difference these days is that now legislatures in various countries are involved. I mean, companies have no choice but to continue to try to figure out what the legal standards of enforcing age verification are and just do the best job they can.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So you're coming out this with the serious questions I'm sitting here wondering like, can I do a Salvador Dali mustache or does it have to be like full on Yosemite Sam? I have no idea. Like what are we talking about here?

Dave Leary: I'm not sure why they're going through the trouble of drawing on mustaches. It feels like you could just get one of those fake ones from my costume shop.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Maybe that's what they're doing too. But man, that like I think I've got somewhere in a box from one of these moves, some Groucho Marx, eyebrows and nose and mustache. So like, I'll bust that out and ⁓ what happens. Yeah. All right. Some more news this time. Good news. But, ⁓ well, mean, I think it's good news. It's probably not for ⁓ for people. What's going on with Roblox?

Dave Leary: That feels like that would be perfect. this is interesting. We are maybe seeing the peak despite this kind of press the thought that Roblox is now, you know, perhaps even more users than Steam, perhaps the future, whereas as ⁓ PC might be declining other than systems like this. They've seen decline in revenue and users in the last couple of quarters. There's various theories around why this might be. Some of it might in fact be increased age verification steps that they're they're requiring users to take. their strategy has started to shift a little bit. They seem to be actively an older audience, going so far as to give developers who are developing for older audiences a little bit of a higher revenue share, which may just simply be a ⁓ side effect of user base starting to up a little bit. But ⁓ it is interesting ⁓ wonder if Hey, have they reached their peak? Is this it for Roblox? Is this as high as they can go?

Rade Stojsavljevic: So a lot of things financial related, like you don't know you're in a bubble when you're in it. Though people will claim they are, but you really can't. You don't know if you're in a recession until you're past ⁓ a certain distance into it. I think we're going to see if these past couple quarters are a blip or a trend. And if are a trend, then it's probably going to be a continuing downward trajectory for it. then they'll be managing a ⁓ glide slope. Is it fast? it slow? Maybe they could turn it around, but usually not with something like this. I just want to be really clear to listeners and viewers, like, I don't like to see games fail, but I have no love for Roblox at all. And it has nothing to do with the type of game that it is or the people that are enjoying their product. I simply don't like a game that's clearly aimed towards kids, that's being bought by kids. when basic privacy protections are not taken by the platform. ⁓ don't know what their excuse is or why they didn't do that. It's not that hard. But when you keep reading story after story about kids getting groomed or abused ⁓ a platform like that, and the developer slash publisher is not taking steps we know work to curb that, I have no respect for the platform. I won't let my kids use it and... that reason alone if they go away I mean I'm not I'm not going to lose any sleep over

Dave Leary: Yeah, I mean, mean, you and I have both been a little bit harsh on Roblox on the podcast in the past. I think maybe you a little more so than me. I would not want to, I think, see them completely go away. I think that there is a pretty large ecosystem there now that is keeping an awful lot of developers fed. So for that reason alone, I wouldn't mind if they hung around. I agree with everything you said about their business model and their age verification practices, though. To be fair, I do think they are starting to take some steps in the right direction now with some of the recent changes they've announced.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, I mean, I would rather have them fix their adult predator problem than go out of business. I'd much rather have that solution. I think it's better for everybody involved, not just the employees and the fans of the game, but for the industry. But like if they're not going to do that, then I just don't want that product around myself or my family.

Dave Leary: Yeah, 100%. Totally fair.

Rade Stojsavljevic: All right, some better news. Let's talk about Hooded Horse ⁓ what they're doing. They just closed a venture round with Griffin Gaming Partners.

Dave Leary: Yeah, kind of a big deal. It's a giant indie dev game fund to the tune of about $100 million, right?

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, and you know, one of the interesting things, this is not equity based venture financing. Like this is like they're doing ⁓ rev which is, that's not common for a fund like this. So that's new.

Dave Leary: And, know, I have been a fan of hooded horse in general for a couple of years now. They are kind of on fire when I look around at all the kind of interesting indie games that they're putting out on Steam lately and backing. They really seem to be making just some fantastic plays with some games that I really enjoy. So, you know, I am optimistic that they are involved with this fund. And I really hope that this is a way to unlock some great new funding for some hopefully fantastic smaller titles going forward.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, I'm a fan of them as well. And just to be clear, I don't think the revenue based investment versus equity was purely egalitarian. I'm not trying to guess their motives here. I think if you're doing equity based financing, in games, you get your money back when there's an exit and there are no exits or almost no exits happening. So if you're looking to invest funds in gaming, you don't know how long that money is gonna get tied up because nobody's buying gaming companies right now, then you can't get your money back and hopefully your return to reinvest in the next thing. Revenue-based makes a lot of sense. And it's nice to see somebody who's developer-focused do that because I think they're gonna make better decisions on what products they're doing. And it should be better for developers too.

Dave Leary: well said. I like ⁓ share as well. think, you what this suggests to me is they're looking to make a lot of small bets really quickly and they won't pay off. They don't need them all to pay off. But if a couple do pay off, they'll do very well out of this process.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, for sure. so like this kind of leads us naturally into the topic to talk about this week. And that's like, how do we measure whether something's successful? Like if you're doing that kind of an equity based or sorry, not equity based revenue based investment, then obviously one of the key metrics you care about is, you know, how much money are you making for the product? Cause that's how you get your return on that. But there's other ways to do that. you know, like there's, there's sayings that have been going around, I mean, for a long time, right? So if you don't have a clear goal, your plan doesn't have a purpose and it's just a wish, right? That's an old aphorism. But more importantly, if can't measure something, you can't improve it. Because we're talking shifting anything about product into the direction that you want it to go, whether it's how the players ⁓ do it. or it gauge with the game how much fun they're having. And like our default has always been like, well, you can't measure fun. I'll know it when you see it, but like that's not necessarily true. And I thought it'd be a good topic to talk about this week.

Dave Leary: Yeah, a fantastic topic. mean, I think everyone from publishers to developers to players all have different criteria for how they measure success. And I think frankly, you know, we talked last week about kind of wanting to help developers be better. I think a lot of developers don't even think about what success means for them when they get started. They have a game idea, they're passionate about it, they're going in, but does success look for them coming out the other side of it? And I think there's a lot to unpack here. There's a lot in how the definition of success and the criteria that you measure a product by has changed over the years. Yeah, great topic.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So let's put the business metrics aside for a bit. Profitability, wish lists for early engagement, all that stuff. Because I think those are pretty evident to most people who are listening to the podcast. But ⁓ if working on a feature for a game and you're in mid-development, what metrics are you using to ⁓ decide this is the right thing for the product and if the players are going to like it?

Dave Leary: Boy, that's tricky, right? Because there are horror stories about the misuse of metrics, know, extremely nitpicky stuff like starting to do A-B testing on whether a particular button should be red or green. There's a time and a place for that stuff, particularly on mobile. you know, is it orange? Excellent. ⁓ I think the...

Rade Stojsavljevic: It's orange by the way if it has to do with making money. It is orange.

Dave Leary: The answer early on has to be that a team needs to define what that means for them. they are making a kind of a hardcore niche game that's targeting a very specific audience, they to bring in the right people to have a look at that. ⁓ And on, the team is going to be the best judge of it. But as time goes on and they start to widen out and think about what is audience going to be when we finally launch this game, I think they've to kind of start to think about what their audience is. is tied to the audience. I think there's no escaping that. I'm not talking about financial success that, as you said, will come if the game works, but more how are going to respond. ⁓ At end of the day, I think that's what developers care about. All of us want our games to be well received. We get excited after a launch when we read forums and ⁓ see talking about the game. know, players and developers feed on each other, right? There's a great cyclical loop that happens when a game is successful and launches to a good reception.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So got some specific examples of things that I've seen. And hard to put a number on it, but these are metrics that you can look at for a product. So if your team doesn't want to play your own game, that is a sure sign you've got a stinker on your hands. And I've worked products where you've ⁓ had mandate dog or playing your own product to borrow the Silicon Valley term on that one. That's never good, right? Like ⁓ ⁓ are just naturally picking it up and ⁓ it, I think that's a pretty good sign. And I'll give you a specific example of one that worked out. We were shipping an expansion pack at Westwood for Red Alert. ⁓ ⁓ of our art directors was leaving the company and were having a goodbye get together for him. And he wouldn't leave. because he was in the middle of a multiplayer match with a couple other people, a LAN match internally with some other folks. So we had a group that just wouldn't go, like, dude, come on, like we're gonna be late, everyone's waiting for you. like, no, no, I have to finish this match. I'm gonna beat him. He just would not put it down. I mean, obviously that was a really successful game, but like we saw metrics like that internally all the time. Like people would just stop working on it, it would wanna play.

Dave Leary: So that's a fantastic one. I do think it's a little bit genre specific. A multiplayer game like you described is obviously easier to get the team excited about and keep them engaged for long time. Something linear or that's a shorter experience like I think about the work that you and I did on Blade Runner. And ⁓ we enjoyed moments of ⁓ that and playing it, it's not a game that after a year and a half of working on it, we were going to continue to enjoy playing it just because of the type of experience it was. certainly do remember similar stories to yours from ensemble days when we're testing Age of Mythology and Age 3. There would be multiplayer matches that had members of the team just shouting with joy as they, and a lot of it was that competitive streak that some of our players had at that studio. But when a team is engaged, it is one of the best metrics you can have.

Rade Stojsavljevic: I think this gets a little bit early or easier if your product is in an early access mode where you can just look at how, like not necessarily just playing the game, but you can look at how people are engaging with your posts and your commentary about what's coming on and like your overall sentiment ⁓ ⁓ that looks like. it's not just the, like a really good community person could separate just the couple loud voices making all the noise. from what everyone else is feeling and give you really good data about like, Hey, how did that go over?

Dave Leary: Early access is a huge tool these days, we know. We've talked about that a ton. I think one of the interesting things about early access is, and this has positives and negatives, it does change perception now. When you go the early access route, it's basically the launch of your game. So I think about something like Valheim as an example, which has been a hugely successful title, but it still has kind of lingered in early access for a really long time. Sometimes games when they take that route and the updates don't come as quickly as they need to, get to the end of that and a 1.0 finally launches and the are like, that's it? That's the 1.0 version? What were we waiting for? And then review scores plummet. There's a way to do that stuff and do it right, but I think you have to be a little careful with that route.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So if you're looking at your game besides just the business stuff, I'm looking at engagement of the product and how people are coming into it. Are they coming back to the How long between return sessions are there? Because ⁓ not every game a game that's designed to be played three, four times a day, right? If you look at a casual mobile game, you might be doing that as little time-wasting thing here or there. You know, might you might not be doing that for a console game or a PC game, but sort of like what does that pattern look like? Is it healthy? How long are the sessions that people are coming into the product gives you a good idea of of like, are they really getting into the depth of the product? But I think it's like it's important to just really instrument your game and look at the right things, because you might have good day seven or day. day 14 retention of your product because you're pumping out content and then you get on that treadmill. like, it doesn't tell you if you've got a deep game that's really resonating with people or not.

Dave Leary: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. like that you and I are having this discussion and it's kind of centered around a player and audience ⁓ of success, not publisher or even developer as much. ⁓ we probably agree that a game that is not enjoyed by its target audience is not one that is successful.

Rade Stojsavljevic: You know, I, yes, now that's a hundred percent true. I think there was a point in time where through really efficient and effective marketing, you could sell a stinker and you would make your money back. thinking back to the era where we saw so many just cheap, uh, IP based games like movie licensed games and why they generally got a bad rep for a long time, but that's done. Like you can't do that anymore.

Dave Leary: Yeah, those days are over. And of the things I wanted to ask you about that's kind of related to that is I do see one bad trend with the way we think about success these days. I the ⁓ allotted for a game to be successful have felt both too short and too long to me. And I'll explain what I mean. If a game and it doesn't immediately have great Steam user reviews and a great Metacritic score, It can quickly be painted a failure and just drop off the radar entirely. And at the same time, if a game doesn't have years of robust post-launch support and additional patches and retain a ridiculously high audience in a world that where there's a million games to choose from, it can also be seen as a failure. I think both those trends are kind ⁓ of poisonous to our industry, right? I ⁓ agree with what you say that it's kind of a good trend that you can no longer launch a stinker and overcome the fact that it's a stinker by good marketing. But I also think we need to give some games a time to find an audience and time to get out there and grow. And I fear that sometimes we're not doing that as well as we could collectively as an industry and also just the audience for games.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So disagreement there, but I put the blame on that ⁓ the stores. Because the way those algorithms work ⁓ is they you if you come out and you don't get traction, particularly the mobile platforms. this is true on all of them. If you have a slow burn launch, it is ⁓ really, ⁓ really hard overcome later. And it's not just all like that's the storefront problem, which is like 90 % of it. But if you go and you put out a game that maybe it's got some graphical issues and it doesn't look great initially, but you're polishing that stuff up. Well, that stuff gets cemented in your Google search results. it's the first thing people can go and look at. And if you made a meaningful change to improve the game, they're not going to see it. And that sucks. And so like you get these, these weird snapshots in time. and ranking algorithms that just punish the kind of behavior that you're describing.

Dave Leary: Yeah, and maybe that's okay when it's a game that is kind of a stinker anyway. Like I think about a Concord, which maybe wasn't given quite the shot it should have been because it wasn't quite as terrible as the press made it out to be, but it was still not a great game. Having that go away quickly, as sad as I am for the developers that worked on it, is not necessarily a bad thing. That's business and game evolution in action, right?

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, and then to your other point about like, needs to have like this really, really long tail. mean, I think that's just a function of it being harder than ever to acquire users or customers for your product. And the natural desire when you do that is once you have a customer, hold onto them for as long as you can. And so that's one of the reasons why everything kind of pushed into this live service update, keep the customer going.

Dave Leary: That part really makes me sad though, because I think there should be room for the fantastic five or six hour one and done experience that comes out, everyone loves it, and it makes back 10 times what it costs. that should be seen as a success. ⁓ I'm not sure why it no longer is. I think it should be, absolutely.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So I can give you, I'm going to put on my business person hat for a minute. I can give you one reason why. Watch out. ⁓ you know, I'll put on my AI suit at some point. Maybe I'll edit that with this. No, think the problem is ⁓ because ⁓ so to get that attention. If you're looking, ⁓ you you did that title and it did great and you made 10 X your initial investment, your odds ⁓ of that.

Dave Leary: ⁓ here comes the suit. Do you have a suit that you can wear for this? Okay.

Rade Stojsavljevic: with a second title that's not a sequel are poor. investors ⁓ publishers, they all know that they're not stupid. so, you unless you could put your own money into it, like you're probably not going to get funding for it. And even if you do put your own money in it, like there's no guarantee that you're going to have success on it. ⁓ Now some breakout examples of this, but that's generally the rule.

Dave Leary: But I mean, if you are, maybe this goes to how we fund games and maybe this is where things like what they're doing with hooded horses is going to change this equation a little bit. if game comes out and made 10x revenue, in theory, got a lot of stuff that comes out of that that's valuable. You've got hopefully a new IP that you can make a sequel from. You've got a developer who's got experience that ⁓ now has name built for themselves. And... ⁓ When you talk about how do you fund the next game that these guys try, well, shoot, you just made 10 times your money. What's the share for the developers here? some point, ⁓ feel like that should be a profitable business if that's really what's happening.

Rade Stojsavljevic: It should be. let's assume that all of that money that they made goes back to that developer and they didn't decide to go and throw wild parties and recruit a posse to burn through their money and have to start with nothing again. Then yeah, they should be able to fund next title. Problem is a lot of times that money is spoken for because like people did put money into it. These worked for next to nothing for a And so It's like, great, you you made, maybe you as a developer made $500,000 profit from this game, but you drew like no salary for the five years that you worked on it before then. Now, suddenly it doesn't look like quite the windfall.

Dave Leary: I mean, sure, that's true, but there are a lot of assumptions baked into your, your supposition there, right?

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, sure. And it's not always the case. Like everyone's going to be a little bit different. But like, I think the challenge there is like, it's still hard to get people to notice a game for the reasons we talked about before. And so like that pushes a lot of folks to be more risk averse and say, well, let's just keep going with this one. Let's sequel it. Let's put in DLC. Let's turn it into a live service. that's fine. I get it. And we've seen great titles that ⁓ do that and I don't mind that at all. But I really do, I think you do as well, lament that we don't just see these one hit wonders come out and just really be bright entertain us and delight us and it just doesn't need a follow up.

Dave Leary: Yeah, that's what I would like. I would like there to be room for the big live service games as well as the small one-offs.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, and maybe we got there at some point, until we see some changes in the way store ranking works and how titles get noticed, ⁓ don't know if there's much power a developer to change that.

Dave Leary: I do like that you have placed all of the blame on the terrible algorithm that everyone hates on storefronts. That is a fine place to blame it. It is a convenient villain.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Well, it's not just one, right? They're all like this because you tune it for a certain type of behavior. man, it isn't tough to ⁓ I mean, we saw this problem when I was working in VR about, we it ranking calcification where your top titles are your top titles because they're your top titles. And you get into this circular logic And I mean, heck, I managed a team that had the number one VR title for years. And I'm like, maybe someday someone's gonna dethrone us. Someone finally did. And I'm glad it was a really good friend of mine and his coworkers. should have him on soon. ⁓ I'll ask But it's not healthy.

Dave Leary: No, not at all.

Rade Stojsavljevic: So let's talk about a specific game this week. As part of this example, this isn't our game of the week, but I think it's interesting example of one of these titles with metrics that And we talk about long tail and all that stuff. Let's go back to our favorite, Arc Raiders.

Dave Leary: Let's make it the game of the week. It's been a while since we re visited our famous game, and I think it's fine to have that be game of the week as well as part of this discussion we've been having. Yeah, so I mean, ⁓ of the noise around Arc Raiders ⁓ the last month or so has been less positive than when they launched. Is that fair to say?

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, I think so. And part of it, I think is fair. Part of it is, ⁓ think, a little unfair. But we'll get into the details.

Dave Leary: Yeah, let's talk about about some of those details. So I'm going to go on the record out of the gate as saying I still think this game is an enormous success, regardless of what the buzz has changed in the last two in the last month or so. know, I looked in their 24 hour peak this weekend. Last weekend was still a hundred thousand users. You they did just launch a fairly substantial update. So that was probably part of it. But bottom line is I'd much rather be in their position than ⁓ in position. ⁓ I also think about the fact that they launched at the end of October. So we are what now six, seven months into the launch of this title and. know, they have retained an audience that's really pretty substantial for all that time. So this is kind of exactly what we were just talking about. I view this as a success. I I'll put the one caveat on this point. And is that. Embark itself has said that they view this as a 10-year game. They want this to be a game that lasts a really long time, that has a long and robust live environment, that really retains an audience in the same way that something like a Rust does or a or some one of those mainstay titles that has stuck around for the long haul. And there are some of the choices they've made recently and that maybe suggest that they're not quite on mission as well as they should be. ⁓ What do you think has caused this sort of change in perception recently?

Rade Stojsavljevic: So know a lot of people were complaining about a map ⁓ addition, ⁓ and a lot of complaints around weapon durability. it's interesting, they had a really good system ⁓ of sinks drains, use an old MMO term about how their economy worked. they changed it, and people got a sense now of I could fire this weapon this many times before it breaks and the cost to repair and consumables. And I get why they did it. And it makes sense why they have that mechanic in it. But after a while, it's just not really fun. Like I don't enjoy repairing my weapon. Just something about the whole way that it does just feels ⁓ work and not in a good way. And I'm wondering if there isn't a different way to present it but kind of achieve the same goal that would just be more entertaining for players.

Dave Leary: Durability is in my experience a fun mechanic. Sometimes that friction is necessary. When look at their last few months, I think I would that their struggles with ⁓ the cheaters been an issue ⁓ that has driven some of their top a little bit. ⁓ Every multiplayer game struggles that problem. They have had a few problems though in general their servers have been fantastic. think one of the design things that they're struggling with a little bit is their expedition concept. In theory, I like the incentive of the idea of incentives to make people do a voluntary character reset rather than wiping a server. But I think they've kind of had to experiment a little bit with exactly what people want there. And it's a problem, right? It's a problem that not a lot of games have really tried to solve where You make somebody want to do a character reset every couple months without making it feel like you're punishing people. that's tricky problem to ⁓ tackle. I think they've struggled a little with that.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Diving into that specific one, so I went through the reset because I wanted to experience what it was like. And I had waited. I missed the first one. I was traveling a little bit and I didn't get a chance to collect all the items to do the reset. So I cut the second one that they did. And by that time, my play style had settled into a very familiar rhythm. I like the anvil. That is my favorite weapon in the game. And resetting it, not having an anvil, and not having a more deterministic, doesn't have to be 100%, but a more deterministic way to get Blueprint so I could get my beloved Anvil back again, really soured me for a while. And I stopped playing for a bit of that. And I don't know if that's unique to me or if a lot of other people did that, but that was one problem I saw with the whole reset expedition mechanic.

Dave Leary: That's an interesting insight. That's not something I think I personally share. I actually kind of enjoy resetting and doing a grind again and trying to seek out the stuff. gives me fresh life on the game when it happens. But ⁓ do wonder how many other people feel that way. ⁓ if everyone is reset, ⁓ some games do, and you're all in the same footing, then that feels a little more fair in some ways.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Well, I tell you, though, I loved the spec reset ⁓ for my character and going down different paths there. That I found thoroughly enjoyable. And that reminds me of playing different classes and specs and Diablo and other RPGs. It's specifically my favorite weapon, my favorite toy, not having a path to get that fast enough. Man, that's just like that irked me in deep way.

Dave Leary: Well, I will say overall, you know, I think they have kept the patches and new content coming. I think their pace of that stuff has been pretty good. It's not the crazy Crimson Desert cadence where they've overhauled that entire game in the span of a month or so, but, you know, they've been pretty frequent and regular and I have personally been taking a break from it. to be fair, I spent a lot of time on this game. In terms of hours, it's in my top five most played games on Steam. So I guess... My thought as we come out of this is I wonder a little bit if they're just a victim of their own success at this point. I put in so many hours into the game early on that I feel like I was bound to burn out on it and want to try some other stuff eventually. And I wonder if to some extent that's what's happening here. People just have fatigue from what is really fundamentally a great game with fantastic mechanics for a lot of time.

Rade Stojsavljevic: Yeah, it's the type of game where you can't, even when you're in it, just always on. Like you can't really play that super casually other than to just play fewer sessions. So that might be part of it. ⁓ will say what gives me hope that this ⁓ a shot at being that 10 year game that Embark wants is they are listening to their community. Like they're rolling out some stuff that looks pretty good and doesn't seem be the really onerous anti-cheat. out there. At some point, I think we should have an engineer on here. And I'd really like to talk through this idea I've had to use AI for anti-cheat. I guess it seems like a ⁓ great way to solve that. That's a separate topic. But yeah, I think if they're going to get to 10 years with this product, they're going to do it by listening to their customers. And they've shown that they're doing that already. ⁓

Dave Leary: Yeah, and I'm rooting for them. Still one of my favorite games and still a game I plan to come back to periodically for the next 10 years, even if they don't add anything else to it.

Rade Stojsavljevic: sure. All right, well hey, as always, ⁓ if you've liked what you've heard, hit your like and subscribe button down below. It helps us out a lot and ⁓ we'll see you next week.

Dave Leary: Later.