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

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The State of the Video Game Industry with Adam Boyes"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast
• Hosts: Tim Gettys, Greg “GameOverGreggy” Miller, Blessing Adeoye, and Andy Cortez
• Episode: The State of the Video Game Industry w/Adam Boyes
• Release Date: March 14, 2025

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1. Introduction and Guest Introduction

The episode features Adam Boyes, founder and CEO of Vivrado, joining hosts Greg Miller and Blessing Adeoye Jr. to discuss the current state of the video game industry. Adam brings nearly three decades of experience, having worked with major companies like Capcom, EA, and Iron Galaxy Studios before venturing into his own consultancy.

Notable Quote:

Adam Boyes [03:19]: "I've been in video games for 29 years. Many of you might know me from the Shiger video. A little bit different. No glasses now. I didn't have a beard back then."

2. Vivrado: Addressing Industry Challenges

Adam outlines the inception of Vivrado, a strategic consultancy aimed at tackling the myriad of problems plaguing the gaming industry. Through extensive interviews with over 200 industry leaders, Adam and his team identified 123 distinct problems, narrowing them down to 52 key issues. These are encapsulated in a "deck of cards" used for discussions and workshops.

Notable Quote:

Adam Boyes [04:35]: "The top of the list was 'woke,' and the list includes broad issues like discoverability and large game budgets."

3. Major Problems in the Video Game Industry

The conversation delves into several critical challenges:

• Discoverability: With an influx of game releases, smaller titles struggle to gain visibility. Only a small percentage of new games capture significant player spending.

• Funding and Capital Deployment: There's a pressing need for more diverse funding sources to support innovation. Traditional investors often have differing KPIs, making it challenging for developers to secure necessary capital.

• Studio Health: The industry faces widespread suffering among developers, with many studios experiencing layoffs and closures. Adam emphasizes the necessity for collaboration across platforms and publishers to address these issues collectively.

• Monetization Pressures: The shift towards live-service models and battle passes has led to increased operational costs without guaranteed returns, exemplified by the closure of games like "Star Wars Hunters."

• Innovation Stagnation: AAA titles frequently play it safe, leading to a lack of innovative releases and an over-reliance on sequels.

Notable Quotes:

Blessing Adeoye Jr. [01:55]: "Daylight savings time spring forward happened on Sunday, which has led to me sleeping in and not going to the gym before going to work."

Adam Boyes [06:38]: "A lot of the big-named companies are hiring big label consultants who haven't actually shipped a game, and I was like, 'I bet I could help out more.'"

4. Case Study: Rumble Verse Closure

Adam shares his firsthand experience with the game's shutdown, highlighting the disconnect between development decisions and profitability. Despite achieving 10 million downloads and healthy daily active users, the game's monetization strategies failed to recoup the publisher's investment, leading to its eventual closure.

Notable Quotes:

Adam Boyes [34:25]: "Whenever you're making a game, you want to try to make it as successful as possible. There's a mixture of vision and market fit."

Greg Miller [35:30]: "How do you get a game that's always going? Talk to me about your retrospective on Rumble Verse in terms of this conversation."

5. Funding and Studio Sustainability

Adam discusses the critical need for increased capital from diverse sources, such as venture capital, private equity, and indie funds. He emphasizes that developers must adopt a business-oriented approach to make their studios investable, focusing on long-term returns rather than immediate profits.

Notable Quote:

Adam Boyes [19:15]: "The problem is as a developer, if you're at the edge and you're just like, I want to make this thing, I'll... Make game. I like game."

6. Innovation and AAA Game Development

The hosts explore the tension between creating high-budget AAA titles and fostering innovation. Adam argues that without downward pressure and constraints, studios become complacent, leading to repetitive sequels and a lack of groundbreaking titles.

Notable Quotes:

Adam Boyes [25:26]: "There are studios like Ed Boone and Another Realm that have made better games year over year, evolving over a 35-year-plus period."

Blessing Adeoye Jr. [44:06]: "Running out of budget inflates costs. Projects spiral as money is poured into unplanned pivots."

7. Discoverability in a Saturated Market

With the explosion of game releases, players struggle to find and commit to new titles. Adam draws parallels to the evolving attention economy, where short-form content like TikTok competes fiercely for player attention, making it harder for games to stand out.

Notable Quotes:

Adam Boyes [40:21]: "Last year, only 7% of new games got 7% of all spend across the whole ecosystem. It was mostly games that were 5 to 10 years old."

Blessing Adeoye Jr. [39:07]: "The market is flooded with new titles. Visibility and player attention are at a premium."

8. Monetization Models and Subscription Services

The discussion touches on the impact of subscription models like Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. While these services offer value to players, they pose challenges for developers in measuring game success and maintaining profitability.

Notable Quotes:

Adam Boyes [64:24]: "Game Pass does have great value for a linear type of player, but it doesn't address the ecosystem's impact on developers."

Greg Miller [66:17]: "What are one to three AAA blockbuster games in the last five years that you look at as this was an innovative title?"

9. Audience Interaction and GDC Tips

Throughout the episode, the hosts engage with audience questions and Super Chats, providing Adam with opportunities to share insights and advice. For instance, Adam offers tips for first-timers attending GDC, emphasizing the importance of networking and safety.

Notable Quotes:

Blessing Adeoye Jr. [65:50]: "What are one to three AAA blockbuster games in the last five years that you look at as this was an innovative title?"

Adam Boyes [71:06]: "Introduce yourself to everyone. Just talk to everyone. Cold approach people. Your name. Hey, do you have a minute?"

10. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, Adam highlights the importance of collaboration and innovation in navigating the industry's challenges. The hosts encourage listeners to support their endeavors, especially with upcoming events like GDC, where they will showcase numerous indie games and engage with developers.

Notable Quote:

Adam Boyes [73:14]: "If you have big problems to solve, they call us. We put together Voltron Squad and solve the industry's problems."

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Key Takeaways:

• The video game industry is undergoing a significant transformation marked by increased competition, funding challenges, and shifting player behavior.
• Discoverability is a major hurdle for new and indie games due to the saturated market and the attention economy's impact.
• Funding strategies need to evolve, with a focus on long-term business sustainability to support innovation.
• The shift towards live-service models has financial implications that can jeopardize game longevity and studio health.
• Collaboration across platforms and publishers is essential to address systemic industry issues.

Recommended For: Gamers, developers, industry analysts, and enthusiasts interested in understanding the current challenges and future directions of the video game industry.

Transcript

[Adam Boys]

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[Greg Miller]

What's up everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast for Friday, March 14, 2025. I'm one of your hosts, Greg Miller alongside Forbes 30 under 30 aka New York Game Awards nominated aka leftover poppy blessing at EOYE Junior.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Good day, Greg.

[Greg Miller]

Good day. How are you?

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I'm doing well. How are you doing?

[Greg Miller]

Good. I'm excited to be here. We're both fresh. We weren't on the first show so now we're all here. We're rocking.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Well, I feel the opposite where I'm not warmed up.

[Greg Miller]

Oh yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I feel like KD gets me like, you know, going for games cash just like I'm already here. I'm ready to talk.

[Greg Miller]

That's the best way to go, Greg way, right? Greg way's got me in the car talking every morning. So I'm ready to go. I'm warmed up.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

The other thing also, Adam boys is here. What's up, Adam?

[Adam Boys]

Hey Adam, Give us a moment. What's up guys?

[Greg Miller]

Give us a moment, Adam.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

We gotta catch up, right? The other thing that's messed me up is that daylight savings time spring forward happened on Sunday, which has led to me sleeping in and not going to the gym before going to work, which is now full 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's not going yet. I'm just getting started.

[Adam Boys]

We're fix that.

[Greg Miller]

I was going to say we're going to fix that. Maybe the founder and CEO of Vivrado, Adam boys will turn you on.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, sure. That's a choice of massages. Where do we start?

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Adam, welcome to the show.

[Adam Boys]

Hey, Greg, how are you buddy?

[Greg Miller]

I'm great. How are you?

[Adam Boys]

Good. I'm so happy to be here I'm.

[Greg Miller]

Happy to have you. Okay. Because like you've been with us the whole whole ride of.

[Adam Boys]

Whole ride from all the different venues and stages and, and desks and you've seen every studio. You've seen every studio from the thin tie and the too little too short, you know, and then to this, this superhero. That's a real common.

[Greg Miller]

Right.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

How do you feel the stash in the 5:00, you know, it's.

[Adam Boys]

It's given me dad vibes, dad bod vibes. 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 or lose. And so I grew it until co was going to be gone.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah. Still here.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. So I think this is a problem. I did for a while.

[Greg Miller]

It was gnarly.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. When we had the RV and we were driving around the US and we did 55,000 miles over three years. Yeah, yeah. It got, 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, like I've gone too far.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. These aren't the people I need to be associated with right now.

[Adam Boys]

My, my army parks hit different, you know, all around America. I could build you character profiles of many of the att.

[Greg Miller]

Adam, we're excited to have you here. If somebody doesn't know what's the pitch on you? Who are you?

[Adam Boys]

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 Shu Yoshida. Yeah. I was VP of third party PlayStation. Before that I was worked at Capcom Midway EA started in 1996 for 550 an hour as a QA tester.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

And then last eight years. Oh, there we go. We're showing, showing the trailer there. In the last eight years I spent in Iron Galaxy Studios which was a amazing code of studio based in Chicago. Chicago, Nashville and Orlando where I was a co CEO with none other than Chelsea Blasco. Yeah. And then a couple months ago I decided to spin out and try my own thing. So I got a new thing. Rocking and rolling now.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah. What is Vivrado Vivarato?

[Adam Boys]

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 like, what's the biggest problem in video games? And I actually started making a list on my phone. Of just all the different problem sets. And everyone kept giving me different answers, and so that kind of freaked me out. So the first 30 people sort of mentioned this 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, what's. Something's up here. Like, something's really fundamentally wrong.

[Greg Miller]

Top of the list was woke, right?

[Adam Boys]

It was on the list, really, Dude. The. Everyone had conviction in their answer. It was, yeah, woke ism and games. That was an answer.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

Another one was men. So. So it was broad, and then there was, like, discoverability was a very popular and, you know, the large budgets of games. But actually, what we did with 123list is we boiled it down to this, which is the top 52. Oh, and we actually made a deck of cards here.

[Greg Miller]

Deck of game. Deck. Deck of game. Industry challenges.

[Adam Boys]

Here's. I'll pass that one over, because that was already open, but basically. Yeah. Here we go. Ready? Yeah. There we go.

[Greg Miller]

Are you giving these out of GDC next week?

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

That's awesome.

[Adam Boys]

Because basically each one of them really sort of breaks down. You can go through them. The jokers first. You got to start with the jokers, which are either the back. You can read the jokers.

[Greg Miller]

All right. Joker. All your base are belong to us. Someone set a. Set up the bomb office in the cloud.

[Adam Boys]

No, that's not a joker. That's a king.

[Greg Miller]

Well, I thought you had one joker. You only had one joke.

[Adam Boys]

No, there's two jokes.

[Greg Miller]

You didn't put it there, did you?

[Adam Boys]

They're both at the end. They should both be.

[Greg Miller]

They aren't. I'm looking at it. Adam. I can tell you there's no jokers at the end. There's one joker at the end. The other one is crystal ball blindness.

[Adam Boys]

No. Okay. No, that's. But each. All right. So I guess that. That the special deck because it only comes with one joker. Yeah. Okay. But basically that sort of. I start going back and asking where we're getting all our advice from at the executive level of many companies. And then a bunch of these big named. There's another duck.

[Greg Miller]

Other joker was stuck in there. It's Leroy Jenkins.

[Adam Boys]

There we go.

[Greg Miller]

A person or thing that causes everything to go wrong for everyone else, usually in some extraordinary fashion.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, which we call the John Vin it starts. But anyway, when I found out that a lot of them are hiring these sor of big label consultants from New York and Boston to help 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.

[Greg Miller]

I want to go through these cards, I want to go through these problems, I want to talk about the industry. But first, I will remind everyone that this is the kind of Funny Games cat each and every weekday we run you through the biggest topics in video games, whether they be reviews, previews or conversations we need to have. If you like that, we'd love you to pick up the Kinda Funny membership. Of course over on patreon.com kinda funny YouTube.com kindafunnygames 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 tossed our way. No big deal. Watch live on Twitch TV kindafunnygames YouTube.com kindafunnygames listen up 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 on the couch questions using YouTube super chats YouTube.com kindafunnygames 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 Kinda 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. You want to tease it?

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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 do movie theme kind of feud.

[Greg Miller]

You know my mustache brother, he has to be my team.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Your mustache brother?

[Greg Miller]

My mustache brother.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I mean we'll put him on your team.

[Greg Miller]

Thank you very much. That's all I want. Come on. And after that, of course, Nick will continue his nuzlocke Pokemon marathon stream or whatever you want to call it. He's playing more Pokemon, but more importantly, it's Monday, everybody. Adam is in from Chicago because of 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 Indie Mix. We will be doing the kinda funny cross Indie Mix spring game Showcase Monday morning, 9am 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 livestream 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 kindafunnygames, Twitch TV kindafunnygames. 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?

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

No, I'm waiting to get into the conversation because I'm going pitch cards. These are awesome.

[Greg Miller]

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're 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.

[Adam Boys]

Take it away.

[Greg Miller]

Bless.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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 kfg, right, there's always the conversation of. I feel like every day there's at least one news 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 KG where one of these are the answer. And so I guess to start this conversation right, like, you know, you have an advisory firm here that is trying to tackle the biggest problems. You narrowed it down to. What's the number here?

[Adam Boys]

50, 52.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

52, yeah.

[Adam Boys]

Two jokers.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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.

[Greg Miller]

You identify the one that's their, their number one.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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?

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, I think, well, the first thing was making the list, right? Like, the thing that bothered me about all these different answers 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, so the, the way I've been sort of talking about it is the entire foundation underneath our feet of the industry has 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 of how do you take this one problem and build solutions. We did a super fun workshop at DICE in Las Vegas, which is a big video game conference where we put all. We blew up them all up and we put them on a wall and 30 people came 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 like 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?

[Greg Miller]

So before we wade into the different problems and what you're seeing, I want to go back to how this gamescast started.

[Adam Boys]

Sure.

[Greg Miller]

You texted me, said, I want to come see the studio.

[Adam Boys]

Yep.

[Greg Miller]

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 14 about the state of the industry, why we need to work together to fix it, and why Johnny V is a huge douche. We'll get to the Johnny John V. Sure will. We'll get to that part, as always. But my question at the top of this, now, having gone and talked to so many different people, you have these 52. But in general, if I was to ask you what is the state of the video game industry, what would you say?

[Adam Boys]

Cataclysmic shift? Like it's totally under an absolute massive change. And that's the part I think, is that bad? It's. Should we, should we be risky? Like, if you focus on the ingredients or the. It's one of the things that everyone always focuses on. The, 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 an 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, cross even from console, mobile, PC, and be 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, on the other side of it. Oh yeah, yeah, no, that side. No, no, no, no, on the. See blessings.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

He said it takes a village.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, that's what it says on the.

[Greg Miller]

Top, under the lips.

[Adam Boys]

I was like, sorry, you know, where the lip comes up on the box. Anyway, but that's the sort of philosophy is it takes a village for us to, to work towards these problems. It shouldn't be happening in little boardrooms here and there. We should actually be trying to build a movement to work through these problems. So long way of answering that. It's. It's all sort of shifting and evolving and either we. I feel like our industry is being hijacked and the bad guys are on the train and so we either can fight back.

[Greg Miller]

Let me get that C suite card out again. You know what I mean? Self interested ace. Top execs maximize personal payouts. Leadership and employee well being become afterthoughts.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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

[Greg Miller]

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 Zynga. Zynga will end. I'm reading from Gematsu, Sao Romano, of course. Zynga 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 15th. 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. Yeah, Zynga. Star wars can't make it fucking work.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah. And you're talking about a story that is like many that we've had very recently.

[Greg Miller]

Right.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

It feels like at least once a day or maybe a few times a week, we have that story of, oh, wow, this thing that maybe had all the check marks there as far as, oh, you have ip, you have a studio that's proven, you have, 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 doomerism that I like, often feel where most people do.

[Adam Boys]

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 optimistic. And then there's everyone else.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

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 this 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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Can I ask you, and this is a question that I brought up about a week or so ago on KTD that I was sad that I kind of missed Matt Piscatello for this question. But Adam Boys, 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 at the. We're in currently in the industry. Right. We're seeing all this stuff happen for you.

[Greg Miller]

Pause. Are we in unhealthy industry right now.

[Adam Boys]

Are we in a healthy industry? Not if you ask developers that are suffering.

[Greg Miller]

Right. Just making sure.

[Adam Boys]

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 healing is still far away. Right? It's over a year away.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah. So for you, for where we're at, right, post 2025 or even, you know, possibly during 2025. Right. What does a healthy industry look like to Adam boys?

[Adam 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 that you're trying to sell more, put an MTX in your game or put games out earlier or increase the price point and then you're trying to cost. Cut, cut costs. And oftentimes what they do to cut costs is they reduce the staff because that's usually the most expensive part of it. So we're driving towards that. Usually the first 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 isn't profitable till year three of lives. 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 different categories. I'm about to spit a bunch of letters that are probably going to make most people roll eyes around.

[Greg Miller]

No, no, no. Everybody's locked in.

[Adam Boys]

If you listen 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 publishers, then there's like the, the, 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, I'll. Food goes in here, I'm not me. Make game. I like game. Game good. Right. Oftentimes when you're pitching, you're not understanding the nuance of where this money comes from. So we 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 get canceled means there's more excuses for me not to move forward, not 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.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

Or is their fadeaway jumper or it was just a thing like Balatro that just was fun and done because it was a passion project. So I think. 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 bunts. If you're making like little games, 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 game or 300 million dollar game, just make, you know, $103 million. Like yes. And I mean that's, 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.

[Greg Miller]

So I want to circle back to the first point then where you're talking about we need more capital, we need more funding, we need more money.

[Adam Boys]

Right.

[Greg Miller]

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 suites, 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 suites and stockholders get tighter with the purse strings or walk away in general, where do you see this influx of money coming from?

[Adam Boys]

Well, I think a lot of them are built to make more money. Right. And if we as development teams can build plans. Because 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 that 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? Build. 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 period. 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? Yeah, 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% IRR, which means every year they want to basically be returning 15 to 30% 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 try to pitch them 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 over four year period. Then let's figure out who the right people are to talk to.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

And unlock it. But right now everyone's scatter shotting and talking to everyone about it talking to the wrong people. The wrong people and then, and then they're incoming to a lot of these funds and stuff like that. Are everyone coming to them? So if we create a more linear. And it also is about privilege to like people that are very accomplished people that leave big established 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 success, successful game look like at the scale of a bunt, A single, a double, a triple A home run.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

And then what does that map to the KPIs of all these different banks, investors. So I'm talking about. I'm super excited about this. I love this.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

These are the, these are the things I want to hear about.

[Adam Boys]

Right.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

These are the questions I think, you know, us in the audience often has.

[Adam Boys]

Sure.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Another question I'll throw at you is, you know, is there a studio or a company, whether on the triple A level or on the indie level or any level that is doing it Right. That you look at and you think, oh, they're the template for how to make this happen.

[Adam Boys]

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's studios right now that are feasting and there are studios that are famine. Right. And there's very few in the middle. Right. They're just sort of getting by the feast studios. I think it's, it's one of my favorite people. I used to work at Iron Galaxy. This guy named Nate Medford. Any of these. He had the, 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.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

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 can happen to studios one of their game just shits the bed because then they can learn and pick themselves up. If every game is successful, are you truly evolving? Right. And there is, there's ones like let's take Ed Boone, Another realm. 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. 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 OTUR and director driven or is it sort of co. 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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

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, 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. Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

Are we going to get over this hump? You think that and tell me if I'm. This is 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, 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 Destiny. We're putting them together and they try to make that first game and the first game isn't great. And guess what? That studio closes. Everybody runs away from them.

[Adam Boys]

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 ROI if you're trying to make money on the first game.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Greg Miller]

What did, what did Bastion get?

[Adam Boys]

The first one maybe. Yeah. Or John Blow, like indie. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Out of Wilds is like my most recent one I played.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. But aside from that and there's other animal. Well, you know, and. Or I don't. Was that their first.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yes.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

And again, but we're talking about like micro.

[Adam Boys]

Right, that's what I'm saying. But like a fully formed, you know.

[Greg Miller]

30 plus studios didn't do it. Sledgehammer games didn't do or. Yeah, no, the striking distance didn't do it. I gotta walk back through Glenn.

[Adam Boys]

So then, 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 tenure bet means in the third game that's going to be their magnum opus or 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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

That used to happen more like I feel like in PS3, PS4 generation, you get the Assassin's Creed, but then you get the Assassin's Creed 2 and it's like that's the banger.

[Adam Boys]

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 Kojima or the Boon. 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, students that want to go back to the old model. What does that even mean? Tighter 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. That makes a ton of money every year and saved that studio and built a nice little empire there. So. But it comes from the Constraints, I think challenges. We see right now a lot of these studios that get a lot of money and they don't have constraints. Right. So if you're building something in sort of a cozy atmosphere and it's cushy and luxurious, what's the downward pressure, Right. To achieve the numbers? Like the reason why Call of Duty get got better every year is because there was so much pressure by Activision leadership to like, eke out more quality, more this, more that, and then it works, right?

[Greg Miller]

Yeah, 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. 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 it did launch the battle royale, it was bare bones as hell.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

It wasn't Marvel.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

There's so many examples. Right. I feel like a lot of the games that we have nowadays that are in like those talks of, oh, 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. Didn't, you know, blow up and then Rocket League comes out. Still a small thing, but launches on PS plus and then over time gets acquired by Epic. Right now is this thing of, oh, man, it has all these collaborations. It's a big bigger game. Pubg is another one where it came out. That game was rough as.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, totally.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

But then over time, you know, it builds an audience.

[Adam Boys]

I remember Dayz where you had to download Arma, buy that, then do that, then do the. The mod on. Yeah, absolutely. It's different.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

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 Kinda Funny Games is all about live talk shows every weekday, we'd love you to pick up a Kinda Funny membership. Of course you pick it up. Get 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.

[D]

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[Greg Miller]

Tncs and we're back. Adam, do you like Greek food? You want us some? Nick, I Love Greek food. You want. You want a hero? What do you want here? You look at this.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, no, sure.

[Greg Miller]

Blessing, you put yours on there, too. I was hoping you'd say that.

[Adam Boys]

Perfect.

[Greg Miller]

Perfect.

[Adam Boys]

Perfect.

[Greg Miller]

I'll then send. I'll ask Joey to get the order from me out there.

[Adam Boys]

Perfect.

[Greg Miller]

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. You've lived this with Rumble Verse.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

A game. We adored it. Kind of funny. And we're all about it, 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.

[Adam Boys]

These things.

[Greg Miller]

Whereas how do you get a game that's always going, how do you do this? Talk to me about your retrospective on Rumble Verse in terms of this conversation.

[Adam Boys]

Absolutely. No, it's. 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 strongly 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. Yeah. But it was also like there were our decisions, and then we would make some sort of changes and evolutions based on feedback. But, you know when you make a bet, because I remember when we started development of it, my feeling was that people would have multiple battle passes. Like we have. You guys probably have Hulu and then you also, of course, 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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

So that was sort of a big thing that we all didn't Understand fully. And because we were sort of locked into that free to play, then you're like, oh, the battle pass is the solution. And converting players. The other part that, you know, it's easy. I remember when bots first came online in Fortnite, it was like, oh, my God. It's so much more fun now because I can get with. 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.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah, sure.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

If you want it even easier, then it's one player per entire server. So that whole dollar cost per one player versus the dollar cost you're breaking 40 players. Math ain't math. And so the more you wanted to make it replayable, and then the other thing about Rumble Verse is that the more success that it had, the people there was basically sharks that were incredible at the game. Super amazing.

[Greg Miller]

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

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. And then, and then the sharks want minnows. They want to feed on minnows.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

And so your. Your role is to try to get as many new players in, but if their first experience is getting eaten by.

[Greg Miller]

Sharks, you're getting stomped.

[Adam Boys]

So what happened from the, from day one to, like, you know, month, the. The day 30 is that, you know, the people were there first, got really good. They were. Their play times were high. Right. We still had great sort of player incoming. But then if you get merked 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?

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

Right.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

So then they. 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 there. 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, 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.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

Then you got to get where the. The flywheels earning profitably and they just did the math and they're like, this isn't going to pencil and 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.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

Luckily we have an incredible. We had incredibly. We have. I mean Iron 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.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

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. Sorry. That is a really good point.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Okay. I've organized my cards.

[Greg Miller]

I love that.

[Adam Boys]

I love that.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

So we can go back and forth or whatever.

[Greg Miller]

No, go for it. I like watching you work.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

So I have this card pulled that is about crowded release schedules.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Because one of the conversations that I have sometimes with friends and like friends who are in game development, it almost feels like. It almost feels either taboo or insensitive of me to say that there are too many video games that are coming out because I wrong though because I do want there to be a space for all the different games. Triple A, Double A, Indie to come out and shine and for dream and for people's dreams. Right. Like their 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.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Like currently I am looking at the review codes that Greg has sent me and 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 WWE 2K25.

[Greg Miller]

Oh yeah, you do?

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

And so it's this tough thing of even the games that should get my attention. As me a 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 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 the shine because there's so many games that are speaking to these audiences. 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?

[Adam Boys]

Well, yeah, I think if we look at the amount of games that get released every year and this is a thing that's widely reported too 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 they only 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.

[Greg Miller]

This is the big thing. When Matt Piscatello 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 but plateau dish. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Adam Boys]

I mean spend. But it's not also catastrophically down. It's not down 20 in you know, in span 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, tick tock reels and, and shorts. I see how it's reprogramming the young people and how they consume things so they, their attention is going down because they just can get, if I can get two hours of free basically entertainment that just keep my dopamine flowing, then why do I need to pause that and play something?

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Do you, do you find that the competition is less between games and other games and more so between games and tick tock or games and people watching people play games on YouTube and Twitter?

[Greg Miller]

It's games, it's movies, it's TV, it's streaming, it's just. Yeah, yeah, it's volleyball at 10:30 at night. Stay home and play a game.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Gotta be healthy, right?

[Adam Boys]

It's all of those things. And I think that's the challenge that. So if games are coming out, a lot of this investment's being made and now there's, it's harder to capture. Like I, I think back in the day when we, when we first met Greg, it was like, I think as a gamer you're like a dog. And then there's little, you know, little treats you can follow and then there's a bowl of food, which is the game. Because there was five websites we all went to.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

And that was it. Very linear now it's like players are like mosquitoes. There's buzzing around, you don't know where they are all. So there's a couple around and there's 50,000 of them and you're like where 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 in Tick Tock 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 into that to create more awareness for games. But that's not the only problem. The problem is your time. As you grow and get a family and you know, it changes and your attention span changes and your needs change. People still want to make old school games, but then they also want to make something that's maybe a gotcha mechanic or a mobile mechanic. So there's more games there before more platforms, more ways to play content. So it's less of the monolith. Right. It's less sort of an. Still an old gobble, but like less monolithic than it used to be. But it's still very difficult for them to draw you in. So it's, it is a tough challenge. And the analogy I use that when I was a kid and I went to the, the store, 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 chapstick, whatever. Now when you walk into, like a retail store, there is an entire sort of like line system, another aisle that's all like, weird. Gotcha last minute. Here's some chocolate, here's some mints, here's some, like, you know, whatever it is, little toys and stuff like that. And so that, I think, is the same analogy for video games now. They're just more games than ever before. So it's harder. The shelf space hasn't changed. Right. The shelf 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.

[Greg Miller]

My card I want to pull then is Forever Games. Hey, Forever Games. Ongoing titles demand constant updates and monetization. Shorter, complete experiences can get overlooked.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

My question would be, now that you're out talking to everybody.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

Are you getting a temperature check on. Are people over this? Are people, like, who are starting off, are they still trying to make Forever Games or are we swinging back to let's make a. I don't even care how long it is an experience that has an end, that's finite.

[Adam Boys]

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. Like, 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.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Greg Miller]

Number three, captivate players. Gamers invest time and money into service loops. Switching to new titles becomes harder.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. Because all this stuff, I mean, remember when we had to choose between, okay, are we going to have buy all of our music on Apple? Are we buying our music, you know, old CDs or MP3s 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 would be some kids at school. Bts for having just filthy defaults, right?

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

Default 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?

[Greg Miller]

100.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. It's harder to pull them away.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I got three cards here. All right, I'm gonna read together because I want to. I want to ask about how you feel about the relationship between these three things.

[Adam Boys]

Basically doing D and D. Yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

The first one I have here is runaway budgets. Poor oversight inflates costs. Projects spiral as money is poured into unplanned pivots. The second one I have here is sticker shock. Triple A titles can exceed $70. Many gamers can't afford every big release. 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?

[Adam Boys]

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 games.

[Greg Miller]

Don'T ask PlayStation that. No, PlayStation 5 Pro.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I got a question about that.

[Greg Miller]

We ain't slowing down.

[Adam Boys]

I mean, now my eyes, I gotta, like, I'm the guy turning the flashlight on at a, at a, at a restaurant because I can't read the menu. So I could barely notice that stuff. But I do see less of a focus. I think it was a focus when we could. It was visual fidelity. I think the next generation of consoles will be challenging. Like, how can you eek out? It used to be like, now it's, you know, it's 1080p. And then it was, you know, beyond a 4K and whatnot. And so now it's like, how do we actually go further from that? So that one, I 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 at a factory with a friend of, you know, someone worked on this massive game. But it's happening and it's a multitude of things, right? When we look at Go back to Covid, and I don't want to. A lot of people want to blame Covid for a lot of these problems, and that is, I don't think, the correct way to look at it. But during COVID everyone went remote. So what we did is we sort of like commoditized the workplace because now anyone could go anywhere. There was a massive demand for engineers and for game developers. And so especially when we look at the west coast and more expensive areas. So what happened is salaries started to rise in America very quickly, right? 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 gotta add multiplayer and we gotta have, you know, the map has to be the biggest map you've ever seen in your life. And it's gotta have 5, 000 hours of con or quests and content. And then the teams, I mean, we see the, 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, like, we spend a billion, we'll make back 50 billion, right? Versus a spend a million and a make back, you know, 50, 50 million kind of thing. But that's a hard one to like, address because the answer is a bunch of different things. 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 to be 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 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 and a vision, but that's a way to sort of offset some of the cost.

[Greg Miller]

Can I jump in with a question?

[Adam Boys]

Absolutely.

[Greg Miller]

You're killing. I want to go.

[Adam Boys]

No, no.

[Greg Miller]

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.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

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 are trying to sell or whatever?

[Adam Boys]

It's tough because like if, if a, if a recipe works and it's been bringing people 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.

[Greg Miller]

Number nine, where's the innovation? AAA titles often play it safe, squeeze sequel after sequel yields diminishing buzz.

[Adam Boys]

Right. Because there's no downward pressure or, 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 were 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 that's what's under attack here. I think what's really under attack is the fact that predicting and being publicly traded is, has been I think the downfall of many companies in many different industries. And I think we're seeing that, that happening right now in the games industry.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah. It's funny that UB was the one that came to mind for you because as Adam mentioned, the 10,000 people working on the game thing, I thought of PlayStation just as far as. Oh man, you know, every year you have the, you might have the last bliss or you might have the God of War, 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 poster is 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 inner goings of that and I don't know how much you can talk about but. But that's the one that came to.

[Greg Miller]

Mind for me and Concord being the most recent example. Right. And that budget has been kicked around, inflated, talked about. Nobody.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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.

[Adam Boys]

Right.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I look at Insomniac 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 to 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 we Astro team. Asobi being another example of a team that feels agile and it feels like we're. I, I don't know, I'm sensing a shift in terms of the balance of. All right, we can have the last of us, but we can have other games that smaller stuff that.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

That fill the gaps. Yeah, the world. Yeah, the smaller yachts of the world.

[Adam Boys]

And meanwhile Nintendo's just over there just like doing the same thing that they've been doing from the start. And we can't even really compare them to anyone else because they are their own island, the outliers. Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

In every way.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Do you think there's a reality where. Actually, let me switch this question to a different one right. When you're talking about the agile nature of it, when you talk about, you know, the modular, 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 triple A games in the world? The games that 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.

[Adam Boys]

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. This is a great experience, right? Really great. Not near a triple A budget. Right. But like felt awesome. Helldivers, another great example. You 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 was 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. Sabers 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 a 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 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 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 top down. And so if we look at it as a peer based system versus a top down architecture, then I think we can get there because I always want to try stuff. The other part about it is put something out there, see if it sticks.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Right.

[Adam Boys]

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. Is so janky. Right. And so, but, but it doesn't. But we love.

[Greg Miller]

It's not that hard. Just figure it out.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I'm on with you, Adam.

[Adam Boys]

Right.

[Greg Miller]

You could have fixed it. You worked at Capcom.

[Adam Boys]

Oh yeah, that's true. It's a time machine. And then go anyway.

[Greg Miller]

Maybe if you weren't a quitter, maybe you would have hung out.

[Adam Boys]

But the, but I think that's the challenge is that like how do you build something in scope and scale? I think it's more of like at bats. Like, I'm a big fan of the, 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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

That's good baseball right there.

[Adam Boys]

There you go.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah, I love that.

[Greg Miller]

Baron knows his baseball. Keep cooking. You're cooking.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Oh, no, that was all I had.

[Greg Miller]

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 fail to provide vision. Teams flounder without clarity on goals or priorities. Talk to me about that because I feel like when we talk about these directors that are leaving projects, it's not done. They leave after the game ships. The game was a disappointment. I guess I'm. Is a very broad brush. But is this the. Not the director, but the people above them. A lot of this has been downward pressure we're talking about. So is it the PlayStation or. You know, Publisher X isn't forcing anybody to make a live service game, make a multiplayer game. But, 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.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, it. I've very rarely is there a scenario where the executive team, the C suite at a company, at a publisher tells a 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, games, you know, publicly. And then I think a lot of teams are like, oh, it's clearly that. That's the reason why I do that.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

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. 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.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

And I think sometimes when they blend those two together and it's like 80 vision, 20% market, and then that sways and are using data to actually back up your decisions. That's where it can get a little bit muddy. 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 100 plus million dollars. And, you know, we get 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, stuff like that.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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 car first, right? Industry power rests with a handful of giants. 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? 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.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the things that I want to do with the cards, too, is make them a bit interpretable. So sometimes within a conversation with a group of people, you're like, oh, let's use this ad. Let's declare this one being publishers, right? So then you just sort of look at, okay, if they're trying to spend to get eyeballs. The big group, the big huge publishers that have 95 of the market cap as far as earnings are going to spend that commensurately with, 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.

[Greg Miller]

So with Xbox's new AI it's going to be time.

[Adam Boys]

Hopefully I'll have someone carry me through Call of Duty because Johnny ain't helping but it, I think that's a big part of it. And so discoverability now becomes in the eye of the beholder of 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, 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 my play, all my play activity across all my accounts into an LLM let's say. And it just was like hey dude, you'd probably love this, this, that Steam does that a little bit with recommendations. Yeah 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 gonna love or some maybe language or machine can tell us.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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 you know when we're talking about that discoverability aspect and that being a way for smaller players to fit in, I, I Guess I wonder about how significant the portion, that portion of the audience needs to be of people that are transferring through. Because when I think of the. I guess the. The normie, if I was to call it 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.

[Greg Miller]

Exactly what Piscatello was talking about.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Right.

[Greg Miller]

Where it's just there's 40 that are.

[Adam Boys]

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 Astroneer, Call of Duty Zombies and Balatro. 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. That is a big portion of it. And drawing them out of that comfort food, if there is live updates, is harder than ever before. But again, sometimes are we just doing that just to try to charge them more for something that they already have in their home 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. And with all of these cards, the challenge that 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. 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. For the path for each kind of gamer.

[Greg Miller]

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. Have you heard of Ludo Scene? Ludo Scent?

[Adam Boys]

I have, yeah.

[Greg Miller]

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?

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

No, I'm not seeing this.

[Greg Miller]

You were on the Games Daily with me. This one I sent it to assets or should have at least. Yeah, it's. It's just coming out of it. It got back, I backed it wherever. But basically you tell it what you like and then it starts recommending things and you're like, oh, this looks cool. Swipe right, swipe left on it and add it to your collection 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 I need to.

[Adam Boys]

Talk to the person who's making this. Andy. Yeah, super cool.

[Greg Miller]

Andy Robertson. It's one of those. I feel like the same chart is such a blind spot for me because there's so much every day that I know I'm missing Greg ass 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.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. And I know people will probably have backlash from my, my comment earlier about that. But like at some point I just want a better selector than just me going like this one.

[Greg Miller]

Right.

[Adam Boys]

Or like this week is instead like if it knew what I was playing and what I love. What do I love about Astroneer? That why I play it so much. And then it's like, okay, I want games. Right.

[Greg Miller]

Daughter has a super chat over on YouTube.com kindafunnygames and says, do we think cross play 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.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

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 social pressure like, oh, we're the PlayStation Crew or the Xbox crew. So I think it does solve a 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 to 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.

[Greg Miller]

Does Game pass factor into this? What's your take on Game Pass and PlayStation plus and all the stuff that they're trying to chase right now?

[Adam Boys]

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. What kind of gamers are your kids? It's often people buying, of course. Of course families. And usually it's like, okay, Switch. If they're in sort of the age of five, you know, when they start to get in their teens, they want great value. I think Game Pass does have great value for if you're just a very sort of linear kind of player if you want to play the big hits. 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 a standalone? Like, it's easy for us. Say a game is successful because it had x amount of CCUs or sold y amount of units. If something comes out of Game Pass a lot harder for us. So then people often will be like, it wasn't successful because it was only at this many cc's and seemed like, you know something I don't. Do you have access to dashboards that I don't see? Yeah. So I think that could be a challenge. But it depends who you look. That's what all of these things. I hate to be a little bit waffly about the answer, but this isn't an easy.

[Greg Miller]

I mean, there's no no, because there.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Talking about the second card I drew here.

[Adam Boys]

Right.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

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 Boyz the last five years on the AAA level.

[Greg Miller]

Adam Boyce top five innovative TITLES No.

[Adam Boys]

I don't even think I can.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

I'm putting you on the spot, honestly.

[Adam Boys]

I honestly don't think I can because I didn't play everything right. So it's like, what did I play that I enjoyed? You know, Elden Ring comes to mind because that was sort of very transformative for me and. And 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. It's how you put them all together, how the team interprets these things. All that stuff I think is really important so that those are the ones that stand out. Things that like I, or like, you know. I think Spider man was just amazing for me because I got so into it and it brought me back in time. An Astrobot as well. I mean that's probably not AAA sort of size and scope, but like when it triggers feelings within me or this like even playing Elder Ring with. With again. Johnny V, 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, if it was just my thing and then everything would be a factory game or a building or a survival game.

[Greg Miller]

You and snow like Mike. That's what it is.

[Adam Boys]

Exactly.

[Greg Miller]

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 Porsches for Corolla buyers. Production costs outpace consumer spending. Pricey games can't find enough buyers.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

Are we getting to. Are, are we going to see people explore the scale? Obviously the comment that keeps coming up is will GTA 6 cost $100? Because they could, they could get people to buy that.

[Adam Boys]

Right.

[Greg Miller]

Do you see us blowing past $70 soon?

[Adam Boys]

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, a rule in marketing that if you have sort of have multiple skus of a product, most people don't buy the lowest price version. Yeah, right. Oftentimes if they have more disposable income, they go for the highest price in the man almost no matter what.

[Greg Miller]

Well, you're so close.

[Adam Boys]

All right. Yeah, exactly. Like you might as well get it all.

[Greg Miller]

This is why The Vita with 3G was so successful.

[Adam Boys]

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 they will still have a sticker price but I think that the, the, 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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

You know, like it'd be okay like if you, we think about, you know, we talked again about Monster Hunter, the, the fun part. I mean there's so many things in that game but if it was like 2/3 smaller, but it's just a 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's. Sometimes we. I remember one stat when I was working at Midway, the NBA Ballers team which John Binyaki was the lead designer on. I know I'm doing so many times.

[Greg Miller]

Can we drop John Binyaki's name in this before he summons just like wildly.

[Adam Boys]

Comes out of there. But you know, they built this whole entire like story mode which, which ended up being I think about 60% of the dev budget and in the end 13% of players played that mode.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

And you're like, so was that the right thing? So do we then do less innovation? So it's a, it's a trickery slope. 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 main course and then game three is like five course meal.

[Greg Miller]

Let me get you two Super Chats and get you on your way.

[Adam Boys]

All right.

[Greg Miller]

Three super chats on your way. Three super chats BG 2580 super chats and says do people like Joseph Ferris and Hayes Light 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.

[Adam Boys]

Absolutely. He's the kind of person and I was so I had a chance to be on Starbreeze'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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Greg Miller]

Then I got one here from Travelous 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.

[Adam Boys]

First of all. Yeah. Introduce yourself to everyone. Just talk to everyone. Cold approach people. Your name. Hey, do you have a minute? Just want to introduce myself. Networking is really to me, my favorite part about GDC is meeting people you've 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 is. 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 spiked drinks and stuff like that drink. So be 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 Herbal Boy to 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 Yoshida Wild.

[Greg Miller]

You'd Shu Yoshida you'll spot him out there for sure.

[Adam Boys]

Like, he's always looking. He's always got the furrow brown he's always walking for.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

He's got meetings to go to.

[Greg Miller]

He's got a lot. Well, now he's carefree.

[Adam Boys]

I know. I just want to do another sharing video with him now.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah. Oh, my God. To do that again. Yeah.

[Adam Boys]

Yeah. Perfect.

[Greg Miller]

And then your final super chat before I let you go, Professor Funkenstein writes in and says, so the important question is, is Vivrado hiring as an accountant? And as an accountant who wants to get into consulting, this seems super interesting.

[Adam Boys]

We're growing. Not hiring currently, but, you know, as we grow and as we get more clients and as we sort of 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.

[Greg Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Boys]

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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

Do you sell these sweatshirts? Because this is an awesome sweatshirt.

[Adam Boys]

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 sweatshirt. Sorry. We bought the sweatshirts and pressed them, 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.

[Greg Miller]

Get your online shop up and running.

[Adam Boys]

There you go.

[Greg Miller]

Etsy.

[Adam Boys]

We're doing. We're doing merch now.

[Greg Miller]

Adam, you're an industry icon. It was a joy to hang out with you today. Thank you so much.

[Adam Boys]

Thanks for having me. This is really awesome. Why do you enjoy the cards?

[Greg Miller]

How can people help you in Vivrado? What do you need? Are you sending them somewhere? You just want them to go to LinkedIn.

[Adam Boys]

You want to know they can go to Vivrado.com. yeah, LinkedIn. We got a lot. 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 in the Advisory network that we work with which are super, super cool. Scroll down past but you know Amir Satvets on the advisory network group. Chelsea. John Lander. Yeah. Elizabeth. Fantastic. Marcus who is at obsidian.

[Greg Miller]

Dave Lang.

[Adam Boys]

Boo. Dave Lang. Boom 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.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

That's awesome.

[Greg Miller]

I love that. Adam, you're amazing. Thank you for hanging out.

[Adam Boys]

Thanks guys.

[Greg Miller]

Go to GDC and solve all the problems.

[Adam Boys]

I'll try, man. It's a big list.

[Greg Miller]

Okay, good. Everybody remember GDC is next week. It is a crazy time for Kind of Funny. We'll be seeing a gajillion games. We're recording a bunch of stuff. We're sending Annie downtown every day to play some new shooter. But most importantly, on Monday there will be no usual Games Daily and Gamescast. Instead we'll kick off at 9am 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 live, all day long live stream on Twitch TV kindafunnygames and YouTube.com kindafunnygames 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 it without your support. Pick up a kinda funny membership YouTube.com kindafunnygames patreon.com kindafunny of course, Apple and Spotify to get all of our shows ad free. Get a daily show from me and feel good about doing something good for this industry that benefits us. But guess what? The programming day is far from over. Blessing's about to host a game Showdown movie edition.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

It'll be fun.

[Greg Miller]

Nick better get me a star.

[Blessing Adeoye Jr.]

You have confidence.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah, in a movie thing I do too. Okay, I'm sure you're pulling some shenanigans to make it even harder. It doesn't matter. And then after that, Nick's doing his Nuzlocke Pokemon stream. If you are listening later on a podcast service, remember you can get Showdown as a podcast. You can catch the archives of our streams on YouTube.com kindafunnungames but for now, thank you, Adam. Thank you, Blessing. Thank you, me, and until next time. No. It's been our pleasure to serve.