In this week's Roundtable, the squad dives into the booming success of Palworld, a game that's been dubbed "Pokemon with guns," and explores why it's capturing everyone's curiosity. We then shift gears to discuss Riot's recent pullback (layoffs and game pivots) and what this could mean for other projects in the works. The conversation then heats up as we dissect Newzoo's 2024 market predictions, sparking a fierce debate about the accuracy and implications of these forecasts. Finally, we offer our own insights, discussing the bullish trends we anticipate for 2024 and beyond, providing a glimmer of hope amidst the current climate of doom and gloom. Join us for all the latest games business news with Aaron Bush, Tammy Levy, Sebastian Park, and host Devin Becker.

We’d like to thank RallyHere for making this episode possible. RallyHere is a proven gaming backend platform and service made specifically for cross-platform live-service games. RallyHere is your one-stop-shop to streamline your development processes, increase speed to market, and optimize your post-launch live services. To learn more or schedule a demo, visit rallyhere.gg 

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Devin: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Naavik round table. I'm your host, Devin Becker. And of course, we've got great panelists as always. We've actually got a full house today, which is nice to see. It's, it's always a little up and down, but, , everyone, I think with some great, , topics and ideas today, but how are you guys doing first and foremost?

Aaron: Awesome.

Tammy: Starting off the year.

Sebastian: In Korea, the word for happy new year is (speaks Korean) which literally translates to like wishing you a good fortune in the new year, effectively. And I feel like you can say that for until you see someone. So you got to say happy new year for a legit, like three straight months in a way that.

I feel like I get crap for saying happy new year after January 2nd in the States. So happy new year to you guys.

Devin: It's like wishing someone good morning in the afternoon. Well, before we get into things, we have a couple of things to talk about. First off, Aaron had something to share a Naavik related.

Aaron: Yeah, so this is super fast. I just wanted to share quickly that Naavik has officially launched its investment support consulting vertical. And so in some sense, this isn't new Naavik, we've successfully worked with investment teams across venture hedge funds, private equity for the past couple of years.

But as we've grown, we thought it made sense to actually package our offerings around this more formally. And so if you , saw our last Naavik digest too. You may have already seen this, but, , in short, we provide reports around market and investment research. We can plug into due diligence projects around major investments or MNA.

 And we also love setting up advisory relationships so that we can help customize to your investing needs. , our team and I personally would love working with you on this. So if you want to learn more or reach out, simply head to naavik.co/consulting, and there'll be a big box for investment support that should give you all the information you need, or you can just email me at [email protected] and I would love to chat.

Sebastian: And if you think Aaron's takes are hot on the podcast, you should listen to when he's on your advisory board.

Aaron: There's some truth to that. Hopefully for the best though.

Devin: The cold truth. It's got to, especially if you're paying for it, right? You got to get it. Well, cool. Hopefully that gets a lot of interest here, especially with the be Kevin newer thing, but definitely make sure to check that out and go to the website as well.

As we've, I think this is. We've introduced a couple of new services recently, so we're continuing to grow and I think that's great. , not everyone's so fortunate. But uh, Sebastian, actually you have a project that's been kind of growing that I think is interesting people would want to know about, share with.

Sebastian: Yeah, so for my full time job, I am the co-founder of Infinite Canvas, which is a user generated gaming meets AI studio publisher. And so we do a lot of things on a lot of different platforms. , I've talked previously about some of our forays into making games inside of like TikTok and discord and some of the other platforms.

We're, we've been launching a couple of games where we've effectively changed the LiveOps and game development of the LiveOps to be powered by GPT, or other types of generative AI via text based LLMs or image generation. And we've been slowly rolling some of them out. And so one of the games that we soft launched finally, once we had enough tokens on GPT was Promptal, which is a Wordle style game where it shows you an image and then you type what you think the image is, and then it generates an image based on your prompt that you put in and it compares the two images against each other to give you a score.

We're, we're really excited at Infinite Canvas about not necessarily the core tech. , there are so many smarter people who are working on really cool core tech. And we're not really a huge fan of tooling because we're just not a tools based company. , we're a content company. We, we love making games.

We love being in games. And so we've been spending a lot of time on effectively using AI to cover some of the life off cots, which are often the largest driver of games dying, right? There are often enough people who love a game. There just may not be enough people to house a team of 100 to work on the game.

And we think that one way to approach this is effectively to use AI in order to continuously generate levels and generate some really interesting stuff for folks. So if you want to check it out, we're at infinitecanvas. gg. You can find Prompto, P R O M P T L E . gg. And you can just follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter and you'll see some of the new games are coming out and I'm really excited about a lot of the game design space we've been working through.

And it's, it's really an exciting time. Reminds me of early mobile.

Aaron: Yeah, I think it's super excited.

Sebastian: Everyone's excited.

Aaron: Yeah. I've just never seen anything like it, , before, right? Like a game is a GPT. I just be curious, Seb, , like what is your thesis for building a game on that? Cause people don't view chat GPT, the open AI world is like a gaming platform, right? Like most consumers don't associate with gaming at all. So I'm just curious, what are you thinking, , building a game there? , what are you hoping to, to learn or, or achieve in doing that?

Sebastian: Yeah, my personal philosophy when it comes to consumer anything, and this is true, not only as an operator, but also as an investor and advisor and everything else is that gaming eats consumer every day of the week. And it doesn't matter if it's Excel sheets, it doesn't matter if it's a TI 83, it doesn't matter if it's chat GPT.

I think the best example of this is some of the most played gaming devices in my youth were on like a TI 83, right? You would find the like Mario clone, you would put it onto your calculator and like play it in class, right? And in a similar vein, we think of GP, like chat GPT, but really the entire library of LLM and computers as a mechanism for more distribution.

Distribution is so hard in gaming, and it's awesome when you have like exit and escape velocity, and you have a platform that helps you get there, but a lot of times you are in a huge red ocean where you're competing against thousands, if not millions of people making games, and you're just trying to be found to try and make something interesting and fun, and to that extent, we think that the ecosystems around , AI are super cool to work with from a game design perspective.

It's just really fun to work on things that are like completely different. And like the constraints are completely different. So on a selfish personal level, it's just been a ton of fun to make games where the constraint is interacting with an LLM as opposed to interacting with other humans.

Aaron: Yeah, when we talk just generally as an industry about the blue oceans in gaming right now, which are sometimes hard to see, , people are talking about like, well, maybe like a Roblox or something, it's just tapping into a new demographic, right?

That isn't, that doesn't really play all of these other games, or maybe there's VR. As a new platform, , it's putting a super computer on your face is, is hard and it takes time for that to, to like really manifest. At scale, but this is the first time that at least I have heard treating an AI platform as a distribution hub that is a potential new blue ocean.

I think that's a really interesting idea, and I guess maybe just one last question for me, like in the spectrum of , TI 83 calculator to the iPhone, , where do you see? This type of distribution hub, like landing long term in terms of it's like scale and impact as a, as a place to actually make an.

Sebastian: Play games. Yeah. Mobile. Almost certainly. Right. One of the cool parts about a lot of these models is that you can ping an API and it gives you an answer and it gives you an answer in a fairly quick amount of time. And so when we think about game design and distribution, obviously you can use HTML5, you can use, , you can create like off the box games for places like Steam.

, but it doesn't actually work in the old school console box model, right? Because you're constantly working online. And so mobile seems to be, in my opinion, the best form factor we'll see. I think the thing that I can't emphasize enough for people who are thinking about game development or thinking about company building, that so many people are obsessed with things that don't exist, right?

Because that's the exciting thing. Like it's the mystery box of things that could be. But often, especially when it comes to successful startups and successful games and successful things, there are things that already work, right? There are things that are in industry, fundamental technology that's been tested or fundamental technology that's evolved.

And so that's, I think, one of the things that I love, which is we are not beholden. To, , open AI. We're not beholden to Google. We're not beholden to any specific person. We're super excited to just test out new models all the time. And we do. , a good example is Prompto ran for, I think a hot minute on Lambdas, Gemini stuff, and then ran on GPT four and then ran on Dolly and then ran on scenario for, I think like.

12 hours, right? And it's just like using different tools and seeing what fits, our ethos of game development, the best.

Aaron: Cool.

Devin: I think, I think a lot of stuff to learn from what you're doing. So I think anyone who's interested in that space should absolutely follow what you're doing. , because even if it doesn't work out, I'm sure there's a lot to learn, but it sounds like you guys have also made like a lot of interesting strides.

And, , I definitely recommend everyone check it out. , if you're looking for his LinkedIn as well, that that's usually linked in the show notes. So if you want to find a way to get a hold of Sebastian that way, you definitely can there, , pretty easily. If not, of course, , like lots of other places, but, , definitely, definitely reach out as well to Sebastian if you're interested, because I think it's, he's doing some really cool stuff.

And I think we want to just make sure to share a little bit of that, , since it's. I think very relevant right now, especially this year. Cool. We also have a, , a bunch of news topics, but the first of which I think is probably the one that's on a lot of people's minds right now, , which is kind of hot topic at the moment as, as of like maybe the last week, which is power world.

Of course.

Aaron: Yeah. I guess I got to talk twice in a row.

Sebastian: So Pallworld, if you haven't heard of it yet, is probably the biggest game in the world at this exact moment. There are a lot of through lines about the game that's worth mentioning the the New York Times headline says Pokemon with guns And then I think the Wired also published something called Pokemon with guns.

But yeah, huge successful game , they built to about seven million dollars five million copies in three days. It's a it's a box game style It's not free to play. You have to pay 30 bucks for it It generated like 125 million in revenue. And it's been really fun. , it's at least for me, I would describe it as like a mix of, Pokemon meets Valheim is probably the closest corollary I've seen.

, and felt personally in the game. , I've talked to some of my friends and colleagues in the world and, and there, and I think the best articulation I've heard is that it's effectively a mashup. Of, , RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress and Fortnite and Satisfactory and Valheim and Pokemon and really trying to find the fun by bringing together a lot of different through lines.

And , depending on if you like that style of game, it may be the perfect game for you. I've quite enjoyed it personally. I, I also love Pokemons.

Aaron: I'm a bit of a biased party for sure.

Devin: Definitely. Yeah. , a little bit of, or on the risky side though, being so close to Pokemon, I think it's something that's been on a lot of people's minds.

Sebastian: Yeah. And I think this is something that is, is worth talking about here, which is that. Uh, first of all, like us trademark and copyright laws are incredibly misunderstood for the most part. Like there are a lot of mechanisms for it. , and I'm sure there's a lot to be said about that, but realistically, the question that people have been saying on Twitter often is effectively, Hey, like this is so close to Pokemon, aren't they going to get sued?

And so there's a question as to whether two Japanese corporations are going to sue each other in the U S courts around us trademark and copyright. Personally, I think they're overblown, but we can get into that in a bit. , it's sort of an interesting spot for sure, because. It does seem like Pokemon plus guns is a, is a real mechanism.

Tammy: Yeah. I think that, um, on the games of side, like there's also like an interesting case here with, with pal world. And I don't know if folks, , have, have gone through the trouble of, if you, if, , of, , reading through the, , CEO's letter and blog posts that he did, it was pretty lengthy, , like three days before the game launch.

And it was like, Oh my God, we don't, we don't know if this is going to work. We, we shall see. But, , he kind of like narrates, like almost move by move, like the ins and outs and like ups and downs that they went through to get, , to be like one step away from launching the game. And it's, it's just such a, like, it was such a good reminder of yes.

Like game dev is a roller coaster. One, two, it's one of those things where we end up like feeling like we, we have like the formula to build games and if someone's not following it, like it won't work. . And like the, the, the last piece to it that really like resonated with me is just like, games have to be fun, man.

, That's like, first and foremost, right. And, you know, we get sometimes, , too caught up in, , our thesis with data and trying to be like data driven and end up like, I, I wrote a, it reminded me, like I wrote a little essay, , at the end of last year. Basically, my take was like, man, it's an industry. We've gotten like data blind instead of like data driven.

And this was kind of like, just resonated with, with that, , thinking as well of, you know, We need to, it's a creative field. It's entertainment. And, , sometimes we get too caught up on trying to maximize our returns instead of like building fun games.

Sebastian: It's, it's so true, Tammy. And, and I think one of the things that makes it so hard, at least for, for most of my colleagues in game development is that.

You just don't know if it's fun until it's fun. And I think that I, I'm sure resonates with everyone here, which is it's like a step function, right? You're, you're working and working and working. And you just don't know if you've just wasted a year or two years or five years on a game. And when it's fun, you can tell it's fun.

Right. And if you can't tell it's fun, you wouldn't have got, got into the industry. Right. Like it's, it's a little bit, it reminds me a lot of, the, it reminds me a lot of just the idea that you just had to put in work in order to get there. What's weird about. Like power of the particular. And I think this is sort of the like list of lists, linear things that we're talking about, like heuristically, it breaks a lot of the known conventions we've talked about in game development in modern days.

So one, you're really not supposed to do paid. 30 game that's triple A for cheap, but at the same time they did that, right? You're not supposed to, you're trying supposed to be original quote unquote, but they're really, there is no necessarily original mechanic in the game, right? It's like certainly a mishmash of some of the most fun mechanics, X, Y, and Z.

You're not supposed to invest into polish and granted they haven't, but , there's a lot of heuristics that are quote unquote broken. And, and certainly I'm biased because I like Pokemon , and I, , and I want there to be a good Pokemon game, but I think the five takeaways, which are interesting are one, always release everything in as early access.

You get so much more leeway when you release something as early access and things are buggy and your characters are getting deleted and things are bad. Two, you can probably charge for some styles of games and get away with it. Like if, if your model's dependent purely on free to play and that type of 30 day, 60 day LTV calc, like it's just not necessarily the biggest thing for everything.

Other things are still true. Multiplayer still super useful. You don't need to be massively online multiplayer, but having multiplayer is still very valuable. . And this is my favorite one, which is that, , if you are doing something that is pets or Pokemon related, like that type of like companion related, it just has great throughput.

We saw this on roadblocks. We saw this in fortnight. And five, none of these heuristics matter, right? If you're making your own game, these are probably not that applicable to you. At this point, this game has hit escape velocity. All your takeaways from this game are probably not relevant to you as a person.

, one of the funnier things I've heard, and this is something that I've seen debated in the West alive. People assume Genshin Impact was miHoYo's first game. People assume that this is somehow Pocket Pair's first game. And it's not right. They had Craftopia. There clearly are a lot of learnings from Craftopia into this.

So as much as we want to say that, Oh, this was 7 million and 18 months of work, and we've shipped this game. You should probably include the five years of time between craftopia and this and everything else that they've worked on. And so, yeah, the biggest takeaway is hybrid games continue to be successful.

People love Pokemon style games. Async multiplayer is awesome and everyone's going to try to replicate it. And you probably can, cause there's a lot of luck involved. There's a lot of RNG of hitting that escape velocity. 

Tammy: The lock piece and like timing, it, it just like such a, such a big piece to games, , hitting at the right time.

That is just something that you can't, can't manufacture whatsoever. And it is always going to be a little bit of a gamble there. , make sure that you're not, , you're at that right place. , one last note for that. , that I wanted to make on what you were saying, Seb, is, , I've also seen a lot of folks either, , be like, Oh, you should replicate this or be like, brush it up and be like, Oh, remember when we were all talking about, um, what was it?

, bid. Crap it, , bid world, I forget. Yeah. Bid world a couple of, a few months ago. And like, it hit like that escape velocity and then it dropped. They're like, watch my words. It'll be, it'll be dropping off. And, , for folks like myself that live in the free to play world, like that's immediately where you go.

It's like, where are you going to stay in like the velocity and installs battle, but yeah. , And, you know, kind of like that, that view, you know, it's a different, it's a different world when you're like releasing a game that is 30 bucks that millions of people already download, like you've already won.

And from here, it's like, what do you do with that? And what that audience that you've already captured, but it, like the, the dynamic there is very different. Like, even if they drop off. , they're probably going to have already, , gathered and captured. An audience that can sustain them for a while.

And then it's like, and then what do they do from there? Right. With that audience. So I think it's also like, it's very, it's a, it's a different dynamic than, a mobile or just like generally like free to play game that hits like super high installs on day one. And then you're like, Oh, it's, if it drops off, that's it.

Right. There's a lot that this, this team can do, , off of this. , initial release, but they'll already gotten like huge success out of the gate just because it's like a, that different dynamic with like a paid game.

Aaron: I just think Pokemon with guns is a hilariously brilliant, , just like catchphrase to, to be able to like throw out and people cling to.

, I just even remember when the game was announced and you know, you see like this Pokemon creature and all of a sudden it's like going crazy with like a machine gun. It's like, Oh my God, this is hilarious. And I just , I know like that was a moment that just captured so many people's attention in a way that just like other, other games haven't.

So I do hope we see other hybrid type of games like you were saying, Seb, that just like think up these. Like hilariously brilliant ways to like mash together things that people love. , clearly there still is so much opportunity for people to come up with original ideas. But I don't have too much more to say about power world.

We have it downloaded in my house, but , haven't quite gotten to it yet. , but I, my, my big observation is just that it's a continuation of so much of what we've talked about, right? Like we talked about how, like over the past. Couple of years, like there's sort of been the barbell effect in the industry where AAA has just gotten bigger, , maybe that'll change, but AAA as it's gotten bigger has taken more share.

And on the other side, just the, whether it's. Like through UGC or just like small teams, single developers have just been able to pop off more, seemingly more, , like lately in the past, we talked about battle pit, there was lethal company recently now power world, which isn't by like one person, but it started as a pretty, still as a pretty small team that, , many would consider still, , Indy to start then turning maybe like double a or something, but, um, it's almost like this new breed of.

Business or, , small team that seems to just constantly be popping off and taking share and seems to be defining will probably define the next few years as well, especially as game development gets more efficient and in different ways, and, , superstar developers are just enabled to, to do more with less.

And so. Yeah, I just think what we're seeing right now is maybe even just the tip of the iceberg for what we could experience over the next decade. And I think that's really exciting.

Sebastian: Yeah, completely agree. And there are two, like Dave the Diver is another game that was such a big hit at the end of last year, small team, sold 3 million copies for 20 bucks each.

That's great. And then I think that's, that is one thing that I will say that is worth rehashing is that original creativity looks like this in a lot of ways, right? Like it's rarely M plus 10. It's basically never M plus 10. Cause if it's M plus 10, no one plays the game. Like what you really want is a slight deviation or derivation of something on top of it.

You're building on top of other people's work. And so as much as people want to say, Fortnite was our original game. It was no, it wasn't an original game. It was just a next iteration of the previous game. And to Aaron's point, we're gonna see a lot of teams that have a lot more effort build on these types of ideas.

And if it works, awesome. And if it fails Oh, well. And then we can move on to the next thing.

Devin: I think there's a couple of things that like, I think you all mentioned at some point or another discussion that I think is worth taking away from this one is that Pokemon, whether you're doing it as a, a sort of knockoff or the legit thing is very strong.

And I think if you look back at Pokemon go versus everything else, Niantic has done, that becomes really obvious, really fast and how crazy fast that grew and that audience in general. And then the other aspect of, , what Aaron was saying about the, the Pokemon with guns, I think having a really obvious hook that like, just breeds curiosity, like if you hear that, you're going to want to see what that is.

And I think having a clear hook like that, that everyone could understand is. Like really helpful and going back to the battle bit one, , it's like, Oh, it's battlefield, but with Minecraft style, like pixels, it's like, Oh, I get what that's , I'm kind of curious why that would be good. Let me try that out.

Or even like stuff like goat simulator or the weird sort of like curiosity. driven like games where there's something you can understand in a single sentence. And I think that does actually do a lot for it as well. , but I mean, we'll see how often we see this sort of thing going on, but I think those kinds of things are important to keep in mind.

If you're trying to like be discovered now, it's like, I mean, obviously latching on to Pokemon and latching on to what would that be like with guns? Even though technically Digimon did that first.

Sebastian: Yeah. Look, the, the thing that's interesting here is that people fail to recognize just how much of a Like a diaspora effectively of gaming.

We have in ourselves, like the fact that we know to you was the, to move on a keyboard, the fact that like the controls for your left stick is movement and right stick is chemical control. These are heuristics that people build and people don't like relearning new things from scratch. Oftentimes, if you were to completely give someone a completely new concept, that's like this, no, this is.

Linear algebra for Pokemon, right? That's just not something that people gravitate towards because you want something familiar in order to enjoy the newness of something. And I think frankly, PowerWorld did an amazing job. It cannot be understated that they did an amazing job of making all these different parts.

From different games, feel good. Granted, I would like to catch more Pokemon faster. So if someone can just send me a bunch of

Aaron: So if someone can just send me a bunch of help, you catch them, just join their, their server and have them give it to you.

Devin: But, , building on actually what you said, I, I, when I looked at some of the, there was like a sort of 2023 review of steam games, like by like the top ones by concurrent players and stuff like that, and I spent all just looking through and building some graphs off the genres.

And one thing that stood out to me is survival. Still being very hot, although a lot of it moved to survival horror, but it's survival in general is still , we kind of felt like maybe it was overplayed, but I think clearly this shows that, , there's still building off a genre that people do feel like there's some room to explore.

And I think that's important to consider, like if you have a new enough angle on it or something interesting to do in it, like it's still worth building off that genre. Obviously, I'm not saying go out and build a survival game. It is starting to get a bit saturated, but you know, like it was clearly.

enough players out there interested in it. As you said, Sebastian, Valheim was a good example. And that was still a game that did still fairly well last year. , something to consider. But in terms of games, , maybe starting to outstay their welcome a little bit. Uh, Riot has, , started to look at scaling back.

Aaron: Yeah, well, it's been a tough week for four riot games, of course, according to a letter that the CEO put out on their website, right, is eliminating about 530 roles globally, which represents about 11%. Of their workforce. , and they say that the biggest impact, , is to teams outside of core development.

And just to read like a short paragraph on why they're doing this. The note says today we're a company without a sharp enough focus and simply put, we have too many things underway. Some of our significant investments we've made are not paying off the way we expected them to. Our costs have grown to the point where they're unsustainable and we've left ourselves with no room for experimentation or failure, which is vital to a creative company like ours, all the, all of this puts the core of our business at risk.

, and , interestingly enough, , we talked about kind of creativity and risk taking, basically is the entire episode so far, , and, . I think that's true. It's also just worth noting that riot kind of through COVID and such as they expanded the scope of their business. , I don't have the specific numbers in front of me, but they just hired, , massively, and so this.

This is, um, even with these layoffs, it still is a much, much larger business than it was years ago, but specifically to the products, , that are affected by, , this reset and the business legends of runeterra, which of course is their card game, , has apparently been running at a loss and so they are shifting it to supposed sustainability by reducing the size of the team and shifting the focus.

To the path of champions, PVE game mode, , which is kind of a curious move for, , a card game to prioritize PVP or PVE over PVP. , usually you see the opposite, , but it'll be interesting to see what they're doing with that. And then the other big move is the closure of riot forge, which is riots publishing unit that has worked with other generally smaller development studios, , to create games.

In and around the the riot universe, right? , and so shutting that down just shows again they are refocusing on fewer projects Directing again most resources internally not being completely closed minded to working with other great developers when When it makes sense to but but really again slimming down their focus to what moves the needle Most so so that's the bulk of the move.

It kind of looks and feels like a off the band aid moment, so I think I would be surprised to see much more big changes to come from Riot. I would hope so, at least. I was a bit surprised to maybe not see like team fight tactics on that list alongside, , Legends of Runeterra, , just given the monetization issues that auto battlers have had over the years, but, , glad that they were able to keep most everything else and intact.

And it seems like they're doing about as well as they can for those they are, they're laying off. So anyways, not, not the funnest of news this week. It's a continuation of much of what we've, we've talked about, and I think at this rate. Already within the first less than a month of the year, we'd seen probably about 4, 000 layoffs, , in the games industry, which is about 40 percent of what we saw last year.

And so it's been a brutal January. And I don't think we need to rehash all of that over again, but I'm curious for everyone else here. , as you saw this news from riot, did you have any other. Thoughts on like other ripple effects it might have on riot, what it might cause for other companies, , in and around the industry, the human cost of a layoff cannot be understated.

Sebastian: I think one thing that I want to make sure that everyone understands is. Especially when we talk about the analysis as, as it relates to the health of a company or the growth of a company, it doesn't change the fact that someone lost a job and that I think there are some great resources for everyone involved, especially if they're in the U.

S. Especially if they are people who, , have been building out their skill sets. I highly recommend following people like Jordan Mazzer as well as Nate Kloss on places like LinkedIn. LinkedIn. There's some of the best recruiters in the gaming space I've ever met. They're really awesome. Brooke Epic craft is another person who I recommend just following along and see what's happening there.

A lot of what we talk about, ripple effects are more industry based. It doesn't change the fact that you had an income yesterday and you don't today. I think that's something that is crazy. That said. Especially when it regards to gaming, to say that this is the norm would be to undersell how gaming has worked historically, right?

Gaming historically has been very good about hiring massively and then laying people off after the conclusion of a game or a title. That is very similar. It's similar in that in the movie entertainment industries. That's just assumed, right? Like when you like finish a movie, you don't assume that you get to continue to work on John wick seven, right?

Like the assumption is that John wick four is over. And if there is going to be a John wick five sometime in the future. We'll get a call. , and, and really it's been the evolution of live ops style games over the last decade that sort of changed that paradigm. Riot in particular, the weird ripple effect that's true across all of these layoffs we've seen, be it Discord, Riot, Twitch, is if you were to compare their team sizes before the pandemic.

So if you were to compare pre like beginning of 2019 to 24. Their teams are so massively larger. So in a lot of ways, , a company like riot had like 2, 500 people. They had about 5, 000. We can work backwards to say if they laid off 11 percent of their staff and it's about 530 people, they had about 5, 000 people.

So they still have 4, 500 people working on really interesting. That ripple effect is that the gaming industry is still growing. It's just going through a contraction. And fortunately, I think there are a lot of great studios and publishing houses that are spawning up and people working on interesting small teams, if they have the resources to do so to be able to handle that.

And I think that's a, that's just like a good thing to think about in general.

Aaron: Do you think, , in three years there will be more or less people working in the video game industry compared to today

Sebastian: compared to today? I mean, we're down, or, , it's a great question. My guess. Is that we'll have a similar number of people working in the gaming industry in four years as we do today.

One of the things that's worth thinking about from a company strategy perspective is revenue as relates to headcount. If you have 2 billion or let's say you have like 2 billion of revenue and you have 2000 people, each employee basically makes about a million bucks, right? And you have a lot of leeway because no one, very few people in the company are making a million bucks a year.

You have a lot of overhead, like you can, you can clear that hurdle. If you have 5, 000 or 10, 000 people for 2 billion, you're, you're now at 200, 000. And so someone's making 250 K they're actually net negative on a per headcount basis, you need someone making 60 K this type of expansion contraction is hard to predict my guess.

Is that there will be a very similar number of people just spread out across more teams in gaming. The other thing to consider is that what we consider working in gaming to be, to be very different in three years time. If you told me five years ago, you would, would you consider people making games on Roblox?

As a person in the gaming industry, I would imagine the majority of listeners would say no, but given that their revenues are fairly substantial and the fact that there are a bunch of these teams working on it, I would say the answer is yes. And so if you were to include a lot of the UGC generating, , game studios and publishers, gaming has basically 20 X in the last like three years in terms of number of headcount.

And I'd imagine that trendline continues. I think the pen, if you're only defining gaming as AAA publisher, W2 employees, 401ks, I think that pool of people after a contraction will probably stay stable for a number of years. But if you include the entire diaspora of gaming, be it indie gamers, UGC creators.

Aaron: Mobile gamers, mobile creators, , my guess is that's only going to go up.

Tammy: And I think that you make, you make a super good point, Seb, in terms of, , looking at it a little bit wider, like a wider timeframe in seeing, there was a mass hiring with the pandemic boom, and we're seeing, , the, the revenue.

, ripple effect pads, like so huge growth, then drop and then starting to stabilize. , and , jobs are following a very similar trend, right? Like it's, , the revenue supports the jobs. Therefore, like there's that adjustment happening as well on, on the employment side. , so I think that there's, , it's not, it's not going to be like an over, like a correction for many years to come.

It's more, as you were saying, savages. It's going to level off, which is still higher probably than pre pandemic levels, because we did see that expansion that was massive.

Sebastian: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think to talk about Riot specifically for a second, one thing that I will say is Aaron made the point that he hopes that this is the last layoff.

I think the executive team and the board is strong enough that this is probably the last layoff for a while. You, the, the best rule of thumb is you always should do overlay people off. You should like fire more than you intend and you should do it once because as it turns out, if you do it once, you can do a pretty like rousing speech about how, Hey, we've contracted, this is for focus and all this other stuff.

If you do it twice, that's just a line. Like you got quit, right? , if there's two rounds of layoffs at your company, you should take a serious look in the mirror and see if you should be going somewhere else. It's often the, the advice I hear for folks in, in, in the space. Cause you just don't know that.

Aaron also brought up an interesting point about Legends of Runeterra versus TFT. I think them focusing on their effectively Slay the Spire version is a great use of Legends of Runeterra. It seems to play to the skill set of the developers and game designers on that team. Always felt to me to be more lore based, they were doing such great things with the language of Runeterra in that game.

And I think the biggest difference we saw between Legends of Runeterra and TFT is whether it adds value to the Riot ecosystem as a whole. TFT seems to be growing the pie in terms of additional players playing the game. Legends of Runeterra didn't seem to hit that exit velocity for, for them as a rule of thumb.

And so I completely agree monetization and autobattlers seems absolute crap. Like what are you going to do, just sell more skins as it turns out, that's exactly what you do, but like the flip side of it, though, does seem that it is a focus on what's growing their pie as a company. As opposed to necessarily what's necessary generating revenues from day one.

And again, there, I actually don't know where those 2, 500 people were hired into. Like, that's the thing that I think is hard for us as outside observers who aren't part of the executive team at Riot to know, which is what, what happened between when they were at 2, 500 people and making a couple billion dollars a year to 2023 when they were at 5, 000 people and still making a couple billion dollars a year.

Like, what were they working on? We can easily point to riot for it. We can easily point to e sports, but that's. I like, I somehow doubt that that's 2, 500 people, right? And then certainly it could be 500 people, but that I think is the question that will further show what ends up happening with Riot over the next couple of years to a decade.

Devin: Wasn't it just a few years ago when Riot announced like 10 new games they were working on or something like that? It's like five or 10. It was a huge amount. And I think this was before Valorant really like kicked off and that included like the fighting game. I think an MMO. All kinds of stuff.

So they had announced like a ton of projects in the works. So I imagine like a lot of those employees are still on some of those, maybe some of those that didn't even haven't even talked about yet, but I mean, it's hard to say, right? That's speculating, but they, they didn't say which games are getting axed in this outside of like a little bit of it.

Right. So I imagine either some are getting silently canceled or some are just continuing to be worked on, but aren't to that point yet. You've got like things like Valorant mobile to come out, , stuff like that.

Sebastian: We talked about this before, right? Finding the fun is so hard and it's a step function, right?

Like it's, you just don't know if a game is , when the games aren't fun, right? I think that's a pretty clear thing. You just don't know when the game is fun until it's fun. And. You only have so much time. , even if you're a massive company like riot games of a massive bank, you, you only get so many years to work on something.

Overwatch is a good example. Overwatch was initially an MMO, right? Like Overwatch was project. Trident was supposed to be Titan was supposed to be this like massive MMO. Overwatch was a mini game in said MMO. They worked on it for a decade. They couldn't make. Parts of it fun. Overwatch was fun or is fun.

And so that became the game, but you just don't know. And I think that is one of the, especially in the world of data and especially in a world where what we do in game development has moved towards data and being more outcome driven. Is always, , refreshing and sad and scary to think about how we just have no idea if it's going to be a success or not.

Devin: At least we probably won't see them in some kind of like the supercell style softwatch hell, right? Where they're just waiting for the numbers to come in. But I, I mean, on, on the positive side, like they've successfully done some transmedia, for example, with the, with the legal legends IP. So there's some strong pull there that they could use on some of these other games.

And I imagine they will try and continue to leverage that. So I guess we'll have to wait and see what they end up coming out with. , as a result of this, I do hope the fight fighting game, for example, is still going to happen. I think they showed it off even at, , evil last year. I wasn't there, so I can't verify that.

But, , I'm sure there's some projects like far enough along that hopefully, as you said, they've been able to find the fun, but we'll see definitely over the next year or two, especially around e sports stuff as well. , but definitely interesting stuff. But in terms of like the broader scope of things and where stuff's going for the rest of the year, we actually did have a new, , report from new zoo.

Tammy: NewZoo, yes, NewZoo released their 2024 market, , report and forecast and it's, it's actually, , there's, I was digging into it and there's not a ton of controversial stuff in there, , last year they, and they've done this a few, a few cycles, but they've notoriously overestimated their revenue growth, , for the last couple of years by a lot, , especially Last year, where they forecasted just crazy growth recovery after 2022, and they had to revise their forecast several times across and throughout the year.

This year, they're taking a more conservative approach with small, 1 percent growth year on year, which I think it's much more prudent based on everything that we're seeing. and their free report focus more on trends. , where they supplemented by an industry survey they ran. So did a little bit of a softer, report.

I think, this time around, they, the way they structure is they ended up calling. Out 10 different trends. so I think we can, we can riff off of some, some of them and, I can call it some that just jumped out at me, but reading through a report, as I said, none of these trends seemed earth shattering or controversial, and it can be bucketed into like just.

Two big themes that we've already been covering for, a, quite a while, right? It's like, first off, , bucket, I would say actually three buckets, , bucket one is, is that, , your, your growth, even in, too optimistic, , based on what they're calling out is like the, the drivers behind that growth, number two is, , a lot of their trends that they're called out is it just goes towards, the industry right now doing this contraction and becoming and focusing more on, , being better for you.

Or more rigorous operators, and then the last one is, similar to what we've mentioned is like finding pockets of opportunity and, , where those pockets of opportunity are so jumping into the first one, , their whole, , number one of market will recover and grow, , the two levers that they're, they're calling one is mobile, quote unquote, likely to recover.

I disagree with that. And, , second one, they called, , growth from Xbox and PS5 releases. And the third piece was, , not sure how this ties exactly into this, but they call significant mergers and acquisitions will happen in 2024, which I also, , disagree with just based on, Even the thesis of being more conservative and cautious operators as a whole.

 Jumping on that first, , theme, what, what are your guys thoughts on kind of this forecast and the whole like recovery and growth?

Aaron: I'm pretty triggered right now. I'm not, I'm not going to lie, , by, by a lot of this, I'll stay calm though. , I think the, the first things recognize is that, , these forecasts are usually wrong.

, Matthew ball. , just publish like a super long, but great piece on the state of gaming, like how it's both like tremendous and troubling at the same time, which echoes, you know, so much of, of what we're, we're saying, like, you get like crazy launches, like power world, but then, , you see layoffs, , the same day.

, and what's interesting is that if you go back to 2020 and what NewZoo was forecasting. For the next three years throughout through 2023, there, there were forecasting essentially a 9%, , compound annual growth rate over that time period. And in fact, in reality, the market just grew a little over 1%, , annually in that time period, which really is negative when you count.

Inflation, right?  and so, , in 2022 new zoo completely whiffed and it's forecasting around mobile, like not forecasting the decline at all that we would, we would see. Um, and also in 2023 was too optimistic. And, there's a tendency to extrapolate out current conditions. And, sometimes that's fair cause you can't see random policy changes or app store changes necessarily years ahead of time.

, and this isn't unique to. forecasting the video game industry, basically like all investment analysts everywhere, just as another example, , usually forecast out great things when everything is going well and forecast out, , negative. , trends when things are going poorly.

, so in general, not even just for forecasting 1 percent this year, but they're forecasting out, it's roughly like 3 percent annualized growth over the next three years. That actually sounds reasonable to me. That's basically like flat. If you count what inflation will be, that's in line with probably what GDP growth around the world is going to be.

So it's like a very conservative. estimate, and they're probably going to be, , off on, on little things like mobile here and there. But, in general, it's okay. But with the caveat that it's been wrong, basically every time over the past few years. But the other thing that triggered me was these trends that you highlighted, Tammy.

Because one, so many of these are not even trends, right? Like saying the Nintendo, like a new Nintendo device is going to launch this year. That's not a trend.

Tammy: Please. Thank you. Thank you. Like, come on. Sorry to interrupt, but yes. Thank you.

Aaron: That had the same reaction. Like, that's just a random, pretty obvious.

conservative prediction, right? , and so there's that, , let me find my notes because I have a bunch of these written out. , they say that, , their trend number one, which you, you noted Tammy is this year promises a significant rebound when they're literally forecasting Anemic growth that's probably going to lose to inflation and is going to lose to just general growth in the economy.

Like it contradicts itself is their trend number one. And then, , I don't need to go on forever about this, but even, , trend number five around the multi game subscriptions will exit their growth phase. I thought that was curious because, , one outside of Xbox and PlayStation, there's never really been a growth phase, really, , to, , Netflix is in the middle of ramping up if that even counts.

And even with something like Xbox, like this is literally the year that they're adding Activision Blizzard games through the catalog, like it's going to grow. Like it's not like forecasting this whole subscription thing, just not growing anymore, or at least for the year, it just feels really off. Even if you don't believe in like that subscriptions are going to take over everything or that there aren't.

, like technical and specific economics to consider. It's just a really weird trend. , it's a call out that I don't think is right. And so, so yeah, I basically am quibbling with everything that I see here. I would just say, Hey, new zoo, maybe next year, if you want to, if you want to reach out, we can collab and make it even better with you.

, but. Anyways, I'll stop there. I too many quibbles on my end.

Tammy: I, sorry, I interrupted a little bit of that, . But I agree as, as I think that you hit the point, really well, where, as I was reading this, , especially as you get a second half of the trends, they're not trends, they're just happenings news.

, Xbox will launch a mobile store and Android is not a trend. It's something that's been talked about and announced. , so it, it, it was definitely like, , hard to like, you and try like bucket these into like, What are we actually trying to say? , and where are they, , it's a little bit contradicting across, across the board.

It's, it felt like a safe play after having like my, my takeaway was like, it felt like a safe play for a 2024 report after having been off, , In 2023 and having to like backtrack so many times.

Aaron: Yeah, and the last thing I will say too that triggered me was I was reading through it. I'm like, all right, where's like AI and it's at the very bottom in a caveat where they don't list it as a trend.

And they're basically like, yeah, this doesn't really matter.

Tammy: No, they do. They do have it as a trend. They have it as trend. Number nine is generative AI will accelerate game production in a few ways.

Aaron: All right. Well, I was looking at a different, different link then where they listed out like five trends and then, , it's like, what about AI?

And they're like, yeah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, man, kind of weird.

Tammy: So the, the, the 10 trends, I'll just do like the quick bullets. Market will continue to recover and growth, but number two, 2024 will be a lean year for gaming companies. , you said subscriptions will slow down. Four companies will return to developing premium games.

Five mobile developers will turn to PC gaming. Six, Nintendo will launch a new console. Seven, Xbox will launch a mobile store. Eight, nostalgia will be a key driver for live service games. Nine, generative AI. And then ten, it's an interesting call out of open, like too specific, like open world , souls like games will take the spotlight.

That is random. If you're not, if you're not watching our recording and you see Devin's face, it's priceless.

Aaron: So yeah, anyways, I, I was triggered by it so much of this, I'll, I'll stop, I'll stop myself from saying more, but. So just curious, any, any reactions from this?

Devin: Yeah, it's, it's weird that they just try and like latch on to kind of whatever, like the easiest low hanging branches are.

And then even like when they're contradictory, , I don't, it doesn't sound like there's anything in there that's really very predictive so much as like. Yeah, this might go this way. This might go that way in terms of like continuing outside of apparently, switch to being a trend other than that, like it was all just either continuing one direction or the other.

As you said, like, this is almost like this idea of, there's just prediction inertia, whichever whichever way it's going, it'll probably keep going that way, which is not super helpful. But I do imagine, there's a lot of different sort of biases or angles that go into reports like this.

But I mean, overall, I actually actually one of the things we Wanted to talk about in general was just then, there's a lot of the negative predictions, which are probably somewhat realistic. And so we just want to kind of talk about, what are some of the sort of positive predictions about 2024, maybe even some of the undiscovered gems.

There's some of the stuff that's maybe a little less obvious than a switch to, that would be worth paying attention to, I think, for people to look for something to be bullish on and not necessarily just, oh, no, more layoffs, which are probably unfortunately a little bit inevitable at the moment.

So anyone want to throw out what you're excited about? Go ahead, Seb.

Sebastian: Yeah, I mean, I'm a broken record. I'm super excited about sort of AI generation as well as its effect on team size. One thing that we've started to see in the greater consumer world is this idea of curated cozy spaces. You've probably seen that buzzword pop off or pop up rather, over the last, , six, 12 months about, instead of having this like massive multiplayer iteration of Twitter's or Facebook's, we're seeing like communities on medium or sub stack, Patreon.

Twitch, et cetera, be very specific and targeted towards their audiences and a little bit curation. There are positives and negatives about this as an assign, but what's really interesting about that is if you assume that groups of people are making games or content for their own audience and that the cost of doing so is sustainable.

You're going to start to see a lot of the fragmentation we saw on YouTube, where actually there is an audience for ASMR dog videos. There might only be a hundred thousand people in the world who want to watch that kind of stuff. Turns out there's a lot more, but, , but like that's a sustainable audience for that crater where they're able to do content like that, they're able to pay the bills that way.

One of the beauties of not necessarily requiring thousand person teams in order to make games. Which we're starting to see in a lot of layoffs is that it does by, by just logical induction also allow for smaller teams to exist and for a smaller teams to be able to afford to build games for specific audiences.

And so we can see a lot more games that may be the ideal game for you, but not for Devin or not for Tamir, not for me or Aaron, right? And so I think that is something that. I'm super excited about it. Super bullish about the industry where we're going to start seeing more fragmented, specific games for prediction.

Aaron: Yeah, I would just add, I mean, honestly, like this isn't even specific to 2024, but I think it's important to zoom out sometimes, and just recognize that. Even if, that whole COVID wave caused a surge that wasn't sustainable in our industry to some degree is paying the consequences of, of that unsustainability right now, if you zoom out, still the demographic and geographic trends are still very favorable to gaming long term.

Like that hasn't really changed. And so on one hand, demographically like younger generations. They keep on coming and they continue to just play, play more games, right? And so there are more and more people on earth every day that are, playing more games or are going to play more games than in the past, such as with older generations where gaming wasn't really a thing.

And , we're just going to continue to see more people spending more time playing games as a pastime. And that's good for the industry. Long term no matter what's going on right now. Also, talk about even with this, like newsy report, it's just like the big number, right. Of, of the industry, like this is the revenue number and it is struggling or not growing as fast as expected.

If you look around even just geographically, like there are corners of the world. Are not that way and are actually like pretty exciting and some are still kind of nascent with large populations, and places like India, like India is going to be a gaming juggernaut, over, over the next many years.

And I think it's going to be really exciting to see what comes out of that country, both, Indian game developers making games for, for, , their fellow Indians, but also just seeing, , what new types of games they bring out to the rest of the world where, , we've seen a lot of maybe like Egyptian mythology or Norse mythology types of games and places, but like, we'll see like really refreshing, , new types of experiences with new types of narratives coming from different places of the world.

And so I'm super bullish on India. also, I mean, you can look at other, other places like, across Africa. There's so many different, emerging hubs that are very nascent in the games industry today. But, population tailwinds, internet tailwinds, mobile tailwinds, increasing, GDP per capita tailwinds.

Are going to make, so many emerging countries more, more important to the gaming industry, across so many different continents. , and that's going to provide opportunity for everyone, opportunity for new entrepreneurs, for new games, but also for a lot of the existing, , businesses that we often often talk about.

, so yeah, I'll. I'll pause there. I think there's other more like specific trends we can be excited about this year, but I think just zooming out sometimes is important.

Tammy: Yeah, I think, for me and riffing off of some of what you both guys said, AI and game dev, that's definitely something that I'm very excited about just.

 Whenever there's like new technology like this, this to me does feel like that next wave of, what is like the evolution of web and games and just how we, how we interact with technology and how we build, um, and whenever there's a wave like that, there's a wave of creativity and, Even things that we can't right now think of because that's that's part of like what creativity is, we we've seen this technology get to, be much more accessible and usable over the last year.

I think we're going to enter now the like. Explosion of creativity. And yeah, some, some games and experiments will work. Some won't, but it's going to be like a new, a new wave of iteration. And what, even like what do we define as games, right? , there was that, , MPC, , experiment simulation that, I forget, it's like Stanford and someone else ran and they published a paper in the summer last year, , just like letting MPCs lose with, , in, in learn and evolve and, , come up with their own personalities and just , there's like such an interesting opportunity here.

And like, how, how does that, end up. Evolving, as it becomes more accessible for, for game development. So I'm super bullish and excited about that. and then I'm really excited to see, and, and also get hands on, right. I'm like, what, what can we build that? It's like that we couldn't do before, in a very creative way.

, so that, that's one of the other piece, to what. you were saying Aaron is new gamers are, are growing up, right? Like the, and, and Matthew will call this and his, report as well. The Roblox generation quote unquote is starting to potentially age out of Roblox or, age into different platforms, different genres.

And that comes with, a whole other set of paradigms of, of. What this generation expects out of games and, as an industry, we're going to need to make sure that we're like keeping a good pulse and like what that audience wants and needs and, is excited about so that we're building towards that, as part of, of the future.

So this is like more of a start of a wave. , again, it's not going to be like, Oh, the big thing in 2024, but it's like the start of that wave of. , this next generation that has grown up with, , devices and, , much more accessible gaming and social gaming from since they can remember, , it all, it's also going to challenge our , paradigms and like preconceived notions of what games can work and cannot work and what should we be building as, as game makers.

For me, like that's also very, very exciting, just like that challenge and that is going to make us, reevaluate not from like a technology standpoint or like what are, what is fun, but from like an audience standpoint.

Aaron: Yeah, maybe just a couple of like very last things. I think this year is going to be good for handheld gaming.

I mean, the, the new switch device will probably come out, but also like we've talked about like steam deck a lot, but even like other devices are hitting the market and scaling up like the, the rogue ally, the Lenovo Legion go like we're at a point where, , you know, similar to like the old school laptop days.

Like there's just so many, like the technology is there for people to make like these types of experiences that expand the market for what traditionally you had to be planted in front of your computer, you can take that on the go. And I think that's exciting. And we'll grow the market in terms of people spending more time playing games.

 I think we probably hit the bottom. And web three at this point doesn't mean it's going to come raging back to life in 2024, but, I mean, Devin, he's even working on a piece right now that maybe we'll be published when this goes out or soon about just the most anticipated, web three games in 2024.

And I think that's pretty interesting. and then I guess lastly, I still think, I mean, 2023 was a golden year for kind of transmedia with Mario Brothers movie, the last of us, et cetera. I think that's just going to continue and gaming is just going to become more and more integral with culture and being more integral with culture, is going to just make gaming more relevant in so many different ways, which is exciting and provides opportunities for developers to build on.

So there really are so many things to be excited about, even though efficient, like an age of efficiency. and a reset can be challenging. So yeah, I think we're all still excited about a bunch to come. It's funny when you're

Devin: It's funny when you're talking about the, this sort of like age of gaming and gaming becoming normified, because it's just, there's, there's periods of, of history where board gaming was so like, just.

Norm, everyone was doing it all the time, but there was never like a, Oh, I'm a board gamer. And like that, that sort of identity. So it is funny that like we've established an identity around video games, but, if it becomes so normal, then everyone's doing it. As we've talked about with mobile games and other things, maybe it's just not a thing we talk about as its own thing as much anymore.

Just like you're not a movie watcher, right? You can be a movie aficionado movie buff, but that's more of a, like a cultured. Take on it rather than just what you do on your free time, because, well, that's what everyone does on their free time. But, , my kind of pseudo prediction is just, , or at least I'm excited about is generally a lot of times when there's these periods of like high stress on everything that's been built so far, meaning like discoverability is a problem because everything's inundated money money is like a problem because these financial models aren't working as well anymore and all these things sort of hit that that point where they're not working like they used to towards diminishing returns.

That's just. The time when something new gets developed, something new and exciting. And that's why I was like, bullshit on web three was that opera, one opportunity, for example, to, to be a new business model. And I think maybe it doesn't hit this year. Maybe it, maybe it's. Drags out till next year, even potentially, but I think that period of high stress, you know, it's the necessity is the mother of invention sort of thing, right?

Like in order for this industry to survive, people got to come up with something new. And I think, that will be a good way to put pressure on that. And also building on what you guys are talking about. I think, Social stuff, I think is, you talk about all these people that grew up on social platforms that just didn't exist as much back then.

We, we had Facebook games that transitioned into mobile, but that wasn't really social in the same way things are now. And I think the stuff like what Sebastian's working on, just things like that, where you're building off these social networks, where you're talking about cozy community things, or just looking at the way what Web3 did for Discord.

Around gaming in terms of all these pocket communities, dedicated fan bases to each game. I think there's a lot of potential in that stuff to, to blow up this year. And, maybe some of these latent technologies like VR and web three that have took a dip for a minute, may hit, before the end of the year, but maybe not, it might still be a little ways out.

These hype cycles are a little slow. Like kind of a bit more broader, I guess, maybe going into 2025, but, I think exciting stuff to come. I don't think it's going to be a dour. Like I think once we get past the layoff phase, I think there will be actually a lot of really cool things to be excited about, that we just didn't see coming, which is part of the fun, right?

Something, something, hopefully, by second half of this year would be nice. , so we can get that ball rolling, but, yeah, speaking of the ball rolling and then you joining in this year, thanks to everyone who is tuned in so far, of course, we've only had a couple episodes this year, so hopefully you've got off to a good habit.

For the new year, right? Everyone making New Year's resolutions and hopefully yours is to catch every episode of the round table. And of course, all the interviews, everything else that Naavik does, as well as our digests and the new services, as Aaron mentioned as well. So, lots of cool stuff going on, at least from us, right?

We're trying to keep it interesting. thanks to everyone tuning into that. And of course, thanks to the panelists. It's well for coming in and bringing a lot of cool topics, a lot of cool thoughts, and as well as cool projects, like Sebastian's working on. So make sure to check that out, but in the meantime, enjoy the rest of your weekend and yeah, hopefully that, web three article pops out around the same time as this.

Make sure to check that out, in the digest and, catch you guys next week.