Episode Transcript
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>0:00</time>
<p>all right guys. how are you? Happy 2023.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>0:02</time>
<p>Doing good. Can't complain.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>0:03</time>
<p>What? What?</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>0:04</time>
<p>Crypto crypto's on the up and up. It's starting from a low base this year.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>0:07</time>
<p>It's gonna be hard not to at least go sideways,</p>
<time>0:10</time>
<p>Let's start with utility. I don't understand what it even means. Anybody has some kind usuals in their head that they're calibrated. There's hardly anything that hasn't been used for money. In fact, there may be a fundamental problem in modeling.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>0:28</time>
<p>do you feel like there's a, like a web three meta on Twitter what is the current problem? There's like these phases of what they think the current problem is in web three games. it's always changing</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>0:37</time>
<p>It was like, it was l v t for I don't know, last month, two months ago. It was like everybody was talking about taxes. I think everybody, and we'll talk about it today, but, right now I think it's UX U U ui.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>0:49</time>
<p>I would like to see some product to, to be honest with you,</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>0:51</time>
<p>whoa, whoa, whoa.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>0:52</time>
<p>Where is the proof, where is the proof In this, when Valve launched Steam, they launched it with Half-Life, two They made a serious commitment to making something platform exclusive. what is the thing that's gonna make me endure the pain of crypto And it's a very painful, where's that benefit? And I'm not seeing it. That's my problem</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>1:07</time>
<p>And, that's why I think it's gonna be slow and boring for this year. I think a lot of companies that still exist are like, fuck, we gotta get to work. And the ones that didn't a lot of them are probably gonna go under. in my opinion, VC's investing in companies right now, like that's a good sign. companies that have actual game infrastructure and at least some sort of demo. That's a good sign. And those people are just gonna have to build for the next 12 months, 12 to 18 months before they can really expect any sort of revenue or growth</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>1:33</time>
<p>all right, man. Here we go. Game Economist, cast episode three. It's Phil. Welcome to 2023. I'm joined today by Chris and Eric, who are hanging out from their respective homes in California. And are you still in Wisconsin?</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>1:48</time>
<p>No, nobody has ever lived in Wisconsin, Indiana. Get your Midwestern states, right? Geez.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>1:53</time>
<p>When you look at them on a map, they just all blend together. It's just like this land maps.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>1:57</time>
<p>But, yeah, no, still in Indiana.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>1:59</time>
<p>we, announced a little while ago that we're gonna take mail, and you guys have been sending in all of your messages. We've appreciated receiving them. We're gonna do a mail episode. Let's pin it at episode? Seven. Keep sending it along. Your questions have been read. Other than that, we got three amazing topics today. We'll all be naming our game of the year, and I'll be talking about loot boxes being removed from Brawl Stars. Chris starting us off you've been thinking about land and taxes in games.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>2:24</time>
<p>L V T, not to be confused with L T V, which is a land value tax. This has become super popular, in the last couple of months, especially in the crypto space and metaverse, because, everybody's got, digital land nowadays. this is also a concept that's been popularized in radical markets, which is, PO and wheels, pretty new book. I don't know when it came out, maybe a year or two ago. but, it's very fashionable to talk about. Lars Duces article, On game developer.com. from early last year,, based on his book and, one of his main, philosophies, which is, how important land is and how important, geography, is and in terms of, economic pro. His article is a how-to, guide. It literally says a how-to guide, land value tax and online games and virtual worlds. I want to talk about, some of the things that he says in that article. But then also,, we're gonna discuss a critique of this land value tax in the context of digital worlds. An LV t is this old, concept from Henry George who's an economist in the mid 18 hundreds. it was an answer to the, land monopoly problem that occurred out of feudalism. You've got all these landowners who own all the land and they're not willing to give it up because, it's theirs and they were given it, and they don't want to, they'll, they won't part with it for any price at all. so you have this, essentially this squatting. The L V T is a solution or an answer to this problem, or at least a suggestion, to a solution to this problem. If you live on a plot of land or you're producing on a plot of land, you have some sort of economic process on a, on a plot of land. It's up to you to value that asset such that you pay a tax every single period, and the value of that asset is high enough. So that nobody else comes in and swipes it from underneath your feet, but it's low enough so your taxes are minimized. So there's duality here where you wanna make sure your taxes are low, but you don't wanna, you wanna make sure that the value of your land, that you are self-assessing your land at is not too low, such that somebody comes in and swipes it from you. You pay a tax each period, and that tax is, there are a whole bunch of ways that you can determine that tax. And that's what this whole entire literature is about, is trying to figure out what is that tax, what's the best way to deliver this tax? But the idea is that you actually are taxing yourself, almost. You're determining your tax rate. If you're tax rate is too low, then somebody else who can use that land, who's willing to spend more, it's gonna come and buy it from you. Or not really buy it from you, but take over that land and start paying that tax. So the idea is you. Price your property, price your land at exactly your willingness to pay or your marginal benefit. So the marginal benefit is exactly equal to the marginal cost. That's basically what a land value tax is. Duette goes through in this article, talks about how and when you would need to implement an, land value tax. and he also defines land. One of the main pieces of information in his article is identifying land like assets. and this is where really I think the whole entire discussion, especially our discussion today is going to lie. he says that land is three things. It's strictly scarce, meaning, unique. There's no way to replicate. so there you can't just create more, more or less valuable because of its location. So that's the second, point. So location matters. Obviously we know that this is true in real estate, in the real world. You want to be downtown LA and not in the middle of Utah. And then the third piece is that it's necessary for production or gameplay. So in games it has to have some sort of,, absolutely essential, utility in order to produce, in order to become, good at a game or productive in a game in the real world, the land has to have some use, right? Whether it's farmland or it is, it has precious materials, metals, if it has oil, if it's beautiful. These are all different reasons why a land might have, necessary qualities or characteristics that make it, a land and valuable. Some things. One or two of those three, but not many things have all three of those. Only physical land has all three of those. And I would argue that digital land, as we know it, does not have all three of those, especially in a video game setting. The article is quite, quite robust. Very interesting read. there's also been a couple of other articles that have come out very recently. and my main critique of this whole entire argument is that at least in a video game setting, There's no uniqueness to land. There's no reason that you couldn't just, copy and paste a piece of land somewhere else. You can instance land in a video game setting so that even if you do say, it location matters, it's okay, fine. let's create multiple instances. You can just stack people on top of one another. so I argue that at least right now, digital land does not really actually hold up to the definition of land, and therefore an L V T wouldn't work, as a player. I'm supposed to be incentivized to pay for that land, but why wouldn't I just go somewhere else where it's cheaper? Oh, it's bad location again, what if a project comes in? It just allows me to stack land on top of itself. So location is no longer. Okay, I'm gonna go to that project instead. Game developers should just ask the question, why am I implementing this policy that makes this thing land? someone used the example. What if there's a unique character that can only be used? you have to have the unique character in order to play the game. If you don't have one, you can't play the game. What, if somebody starts hoarding the characters, then you've already made a huge mistake because you've gated the characters that are required to play your game. Behind this u uniqueness thing, where you really shouldn't, there should be anybody who wants to play should be able to play. there are places for uniqueness. There's a place for, gating ownership. But if you're talking about a video game where I need a character to play and there's a thousand characters, then you're telling your player population that there's only ever gonna be a thousand players in this game. The prices might be high because there's only a thousand people that can play. 99% of the time land is not land in digital in a digital setting. it doesn't follow those three, distinct, the definition, by doucette of what constitutes land. and then,, the other 1% of the time probably isn't even necessary to turn it into this unique thing.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>8:24</time>
<p>do you think this is a Steelman case? does this pass what Brian Kaplan calls the ideological turning test?</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>8:29</time>
<p>Ideological turning test.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>8:31</time>
<p>The idea that Brian Kaplan proposes is that for any idea that you explain if you can explain it in such a way that someone doesn't know if you're a supporter against or for a particular policy.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>8:42</time>
<p>I see Duette article as more of a guidebook, more of a here's a bunch of definitions. he even suggests I think, an optimal tax, which I think is really cool. There are some newer articles that talk about the tax, but they don't actually talk about how to set the tax, which I think is really interesting cuz the tax is super important here. if the tax is too high., then obviously there are some interesting implications for the equilibrium strategy.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>9:04</time>
<p>I'm approaching this As someone who hasn't spent a lot of time with economic arguments for jism. Eric, you said you were in a very similar position. I have questions about this that I'm curious for us to discuss. The fundamental thesis seems to be that we should treat land in a very particular way. I don't understand where that comes from. Is the argument that land is inherently heterogeneous in these weird and unique ways? Cuz that I don't buy that</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>9:27</time>
<p>Why not? Because location is far more heterogeneous than like, you know, bales of hay, right?</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>9:32</time>
<p>I mean, that's fine. But I guess what I would say is when I look at it from a cost benefit perspective, land arrives rent and that is ultimately the metric we care about in doing this analysis. You can be in California or it can be in Bali, those are unique places, but there's still a marginal cost, marginal benefits associated with them. We think about that for every good, what is the value of, if Ken Griffy touched a. what is the value of that? you can transform objects by history. I get that. I recognize that, but at the end of the day, it still has a price.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>9:59</time>
<p>I think a lot of these, thoughts came out of feudalism where, the argument Wants to, treat, land as like this public asset that's available to everybody. And the person who's gonna use it the best is the one who, gets to keep it. It's, that person is the one who's willing to pay the most, and the person who's willing to pay the most can make the most off of it. it's to get around the land monopoly</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>10:19</time>
<p>So then if that's the case, you could say it for any limited supply. Good. So why can't you say the same for an N F T?</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>10:24</time>
<p>that's where I am, critical, of this framework. In terms of,, George Jism. In the real economy. I think it's interesting. I don't think I'm for or against, it would be extremely difficult to actually implement and obviously, the pause in your book, goes over like, how would we practically, approach this. my main critique is why are we trying to all of a sudden put this into video games? Because NFTs, like you said, they don't,, it doesn't have to just be uniqueness. It doesn't have to just be heterogeneity. It has to be also, location. It has to be like the, immobility of the object. the reason that land is, was valuable early on was because of the resources that you could extract from that land. And you can't move that. That's the key. So it's not the fact that it's producing coal, it's that you can't move it to somewhere more, more convenient.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>11:07</time>
<p>I don't understand holding it out of productive use argument. I think about sneakers, sneakers are really popular right now. There are a lot of sneaker resale sites. It's completely plausible to me and even likely that people hold out sneakers and search of speculation because they know when they drive the sneakers off the lot, so to speak, and put them on the value proposition changes. But it's not clear to me why it would be better for the world if We tax them in such a way that they had to use their sneakers.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>11:33</time>
<p>I think it's the scarcity.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>11:34</time>
<p>Could you tell me more about that?</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>11:36</time>
<p>If people are hoarding sneakers, you can produce more sneakers, right? If speculators are driving up the price of sneakers, suppliers can produce more and earn more,,, a lot harder to do that with land.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>11:44</time>
<p>That's also where I don't understand this argument I look at the course of human history and we've made and reformed land into things that are valuable. We've recast it in really incredible and significant ways. Again, that just seems like a cost to me. I guess you could argue we're operating on this incredibly expensive, marginal cost curve to make something that's not land to transform into something else that is more valuable. But I just don't buy that we've done that pretty successfully. If you look at where we live now for, versus where we used to live as human beings. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot more to go I feel like this is Malian</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>12:18</time>
<p>Yeah, I feel like the examples that are used to in favor of these types of policies are usually edge cases. It's not like it's the average. It's not, this policy isn't meeting us at the mean, it's meeting us at like the edges of the distribution. I tend to agree with you there.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>12:33</time>
<p>So I guess when we were thinking about in the context of games and it's something else that you mentioned, Eric is why not increase supply? I guess that'd be my same question here is,, are we trying to meet what is a supply problem with an improper prognosis and perhaps the wrong treatment? When the treatment here be expanded supply for problems like this rather than a land value tax? Shouldn't that be our first intuition?</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>12:54</time>
<p>so here's My, hot take as to why this got so big in crypto discourse. first is that a lot of these NFTs were sold on the premise of scarce supply. It was the fixed mint volume. It's never going up to attract speculators. But then those speculators created the intended problem, which is. crazy price growth and minimal usage. and now people are saying, oh, how do we solve this problem that we've artificially created ourselves? It's this weird circular thing. the other thing is just that a lot of it is to your point, it's called land, but it doesn't behave like land in the way, Lars Doucette talks about. And a lot of these games, the land, N F T, is just a resource stream. And there's no like, location element or No, building on top of it element. But people see land and they make the connection to land value tax. and they're off to the races.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>13:40</time>
<p>I broke my thesis into two points, and it's, I don't believe that digital land actually qualifies as land. so that's what you were just talking about, Eric, but your first point that you made, if there's a monopoly problem with your digital assets, Duette says, You're the God of your world. You're the game designer. You have all the power. The reason that it's a problem in the real world is because we're not God. We can't just create another planet, but you literally can in a video game. So my thing is if you apply the principle to other digital assets that are like not land, like at all, don't just un make them unlimited supply and you don't have this</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>14:12</time>
<p>I don't think that's always true either. But consider this. Chris, what do you think about shards as unique worlds? technically there is shard limitations in many four X games. So in Star Trek, flee command, spawned into a shard in which there might be only 10,000 players. And I might want to be in another shard. There are vast differences in what I can achieve between shards as an example, there might be different median populations. So if you join an elder shard, the power level might be higher, which makes the probability of victory lower. In that sense, you can imagine each shard or the immigration rights to each shard being a scarce good and being heterogeneous in a way that land might be conceived of.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>14:49</time>
<p>but how's the membership of that determined? Are you gated from</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>14:52</time>
<p>there's what we do and then there's what we should do.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>14:57</time>
<p>As a player,, I'm assuming that they create these shards almost as servers because there's like limitations to, computational limitations. I guess if you have that issue, then</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>15:06</time>
<p>it's, so, I'd say it's very expensive to transfer shards in most games. Like in a world of Warcraft, you have to contact customer service. I believe sometimes you can choose your shard. At login, and so it might just be server capacity. That's a very interesting model as well, is do you have preferences in what shard you responded to if you choose it every session? I would say to me, what I think we should do is something out of the econ playbook, which is we should sell the rights to the shard That to me would be very interesting as like an N F T or even just in game.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>15:37</time>
<p>and then I think that's where probably the L v T becomes useful, right? If you, if it, if you buy it, if I snipe it for$20 and all of a sudden there's, a bunch of people that want to come into this market, and I'm like, I'm gonna just squat on it. I'm not playing in the shard, I'm just squatting on that, drive the price up and then finally maybe I sell it for 120 bucks or something like that. So I guess that is where this type of a policy would become relevant. The thing that I struggle with is, We can't really talk about like economic productivity, especially in a traditional video game setting. we're talking about utility, like how much is the utility of playing this game, especially in the shard setting. and how much am I willing to spend on that? That is unique. there's a distribution of enjoyment that players are gonna get out of playing a game. And every single person, it's all heterogeneous. Every single person is getting a different utility. Whereas if you try to take this productive, like production like point of view, where it's like, how much can you get from that? How much money are you making? this is the crypto argument. I find that less compelling because everybody can MinMax their character until they're like all homogenous at the very top. Everybody's built,, built their character to the meta. They've got every single charm and bracelet and whatever to get their character to the maximum. So all of a sudden willingness to spend should be equal. And if anybody spends over that, then they've, com they're, they're in the winner's curse where they've overpaid because they're the highest payer, but they're not able to make that money back cuz everybody has the same productivity.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>17:02</time>
<p>Why can't I view land as a consumption good too? Why is it always, why always what I can produce it for I guess the ultimate buyer in almost many land cases is just someone who's looking for a nice view, and that's how they're gonna choose to consume it.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>17:14</time>
<p>I don't know if I agree with that,, so land is consumption good for me, but it's not a consumption good for, my father-in-law who owns, like an apartment complex. Like somebody who invests in land. And that's the key, right? That's the difference. I think we could talk a long time about whether land is a consumption good, and whether it's an investment.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>17:33</time>
<p>Then do you think a wheat field in Wisconsin, has more value than let's say a apartment land plot, let's say it's just a zone for apartments in the middle of New York City.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>17:45</time>
<p>I think it has less. I think though the plot in Wisconsin has less for sure.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>17:49</time>
<p>So wouldn't that counteract your theory that, that you tend to have lower prices if it's an investment or a consumption good. it's all consumption good at the end of the day, right? that is the end of the chain of production. Is that ultimately what we're trying to do is we're trying to, we're consume utility.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>18:02</time>
<p>so the investment good. Those people aren't the ones who are consuming that. It's more like an intermediate good in another, in a longer process, um, See, my, my problem is I have not heard of a setting where an L V T makes sense. I have not heard of a setting where I can't think of another solution that's easier. It doesn't require this like crazy, like workaround,</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>18:26</time>
<p>in games specifically or In, general?</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>18:28</time>
<p>In, in games, especially games, video games. I personally, I would say I'm 90% confident there's no such thing, unless it is a gameplay mechanic that you're introducing for fun. I don't think it's necess, I don't think it's ever necessary. There are games and I posted in our game economist big, discord channel. I was like, Please give me examples of. of. like land ownership and like public goods and stuff like that in games. And there's actually like a handful, which is really cool, but they're all gameplay mechanics. They're not like, oh, we had to, we had this problem So Altima online, I think when Altima first came out, and I don't know if they ever ended up fixing this, cuz that's be before my time, but they had a, a capped amount of resources that could be gathered at particular locations. And really good veteran players were squatting those spots. And as a new player, you couldn't get access to that. And you guys correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean I'm pretty sure that kind of was a very early, realization in M M O RPGs that hey, we can't physically limit resources. we have to give everybody like this equal opportunity. And that's one of the things that people like about video games. It's one of the things that, you know, early on in the nineties, uh when game economics was first becoming a thing, that was one of the things that was talked about is this equal playing field. Everybody has the same opportunity. I think it was learned early on that limiting, digital resources, digital land is unfun. The reason I personally, I believe this, when I go into a video game, I go into it to get away from the real world, to get away from the unfunding, the land monopolies. There's a way to make that fun. There's a way to make land monopoly fun in a video game. There are board games that do this., the gameplay mechanic is to have this like, uh, literally monopoly, literally monopoly, is the perfect example of this where like the point of the game is to get a monopoly. now if you've designed your game for that's fine. If you've accidentally designed a mechanism that requires an L V T, I'm of the personal belief that you can just revamp that mechanism.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>20:26</time>
<p>On that note, what games is this actually a suitable mechanic for? In the vast majority of them, it's not like when I think say, Monster Hunter. That's a game about hunting monsters. I'm not trying to compete with people for apartment space. So make an infinite number of houses, that's fine. But for Eve online or for decentral land, right? It does seem like a core mechanic that there is scarcity of land and that people do compete for it. When is it appropriate? It seems pretty niche to be honest,</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>20:49</time>
<p>It could be a super niche gameplay mechanic that would be really interesting for certain players. I think it's most relevant for hardcore MMO RPGs, things like Yvon Online, where you don't have casual players trying to come in. I would say that's one of the biggest critiques of Yon online is like how difficult it is to get into, if you start getting land behind really expensive. I've gotta, first of all, I've gotta get good enough to even be able to produce on this land, and then I've gotta put a bid in, I've gotta get enough money to put a bid in. I'm just like, I'm not sure where it is practical.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>21:19</time>
<p>And Chris, to your point, like one of the ways I would get outta that problem is just by sending an account level limit on the land. That's a one way to limit the potential bidders against it too.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>21:29</time>
<p>You create a location that's player friendly and then maybe you have another location that is hardcore economics, like you've gotta compete for land. And this L V T, I could see that being fun. I could see that being a fun, gameplay mechanic people wanna participate in, but it's not necessary. And I think that's the thing that kind of bugs me about this literature right now, or at least the discourse, is that oh, there's this huge problem and we're gonna solve it using this. And it's like, no, no, no. Just go back to basics. Just go back to your fundamentals and. Meant some more NFTs, like you chose to have limited NFTs. If that's a problem, then you need to mince some more, be, because otherwise, like why was the uniqueness important? If all of a sudden it ruins everything?</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>22:09</time>
<p>All right, let's open up, a loop box. I don't know,</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>22:11</time>
<p>loop boxes are no longer</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>22:13</time>
<p>the article for today is a piece out in Mobile Gamer Biz talking about brawl stars. Brawl Stars has turned four years old. They are. Already at 1.25 billion and about 355 million installs. Huge success for the game. They have come out with a new update that will remove loop boxes in Brawl Stars. Altogether, this has generated a ton of conversation. I offered a comment on Mobile Gamer Biz, in which I try to examine a little bit about what we might expect from an update like this. Overall, brawl Stars has been in the decline, which is unfortunate for Supercell, which has also had a portfolio that has declined. Now, whenever we talk about Supercell, I always like to remind myself that, any declines for them are from Everest. They're falling down to Mount Kilimanjaro, they continue to operate on a level that is unbelievable compared to everyone else, especially when you consider like their revenue per. But if you look at it as a time series, it looks like even by that metric, Supercell has been on the decline. Clash of Klans is on the decline. Clash Royal is on the Decline Bros on the decline. Heyday is on the decline. It's not a portfolio that's growing right now. Even as they continue to add more games and Brawl Stars has been no different. With that context in mind, I think it makes a bit more sense why Supercell would be willing to try some different strategies. And even in their portfolio at large, they've been trying some more, I would call it hd, similar monetization strategies. They've been building small parts of a cosmetic business across all their games. I've been paying quite a bit of Clash Mini, which is their auto chest like attempt cosmetics are probably the strongest part of the games monetization relative to the other games they have in their portfolio. Clash Rail has added skins in a really big way and emotes. So we continue to see Supercell take stabs at what a cosmetic economy would look like. Don't believe it's executed very well, but that's outside the scope of this podcast. But with that being said, why not try another swing at an HD friendly monetization strategy? I think the other thing that's important to note is that the number one complaint you get when you're working on gotcha games or games with loop boxes and characters is that they didn't get the tune they wanted, or they didn't get the character they wanted is the most common complaint you also get on the app store. It's the most common complaint you get on Reddit. And so a lot of these probabilities can be punishing for a very small group of users. In fact, it's guaranteed that they're gonna be people at the ends of distributions. There's going to be a section of your players if you have truly random loop. That may spend,$5,000 and not get a particular character. And that's a very shitty feeling to have. And so by entering some bumpers into your loop box design, you can hedge against details of your distribution. You can almost shore up the probabilities that people would have certain experiences by the use of pity timers, which you see in Hertz Stone. So you open so many packs without a legendary, you get a legendary. But I would say overall, why don't we just remove that entire system and satisfy the player base at large? Seems to be the theory here from Supercell. The only thing I'll also mention about this update that is not getting a lot of attention as we start to see for all stars revenue also accelerating as this changes come into play is this was a huge content update. You can completely expect that anytime you drop a huge amount of content, it is going to increase revenue. And players have never had four Brawlers, I believe released at once. That's a huge new CONT content update. They're new skins you can earn. There's a new live ops event. You'd expect revenue to increase. The question is, is revenue increasing despite the loo box removal or because of it? And so the only thing I would offer here as we start to examine stuff like this is not necessarily an any ethical conversations. The only thing I would offer here is really in terms of what the modernization outcome would be and how we could think about that. And to me, this is just a question of price elasticity. When we think about the Loop Box mechanic before and after in Brawl Stars, the question I would ask is, what has happened to the relative or average price to acquire a brawler? Has that increased on net or has that decreased? Because mon Loop boxees are really just a, a, they're a toll. They're toll to buy certain brawlers. And so at the end of the day, is it gonna be cheaper and more expensive with or without loop boxes on average? And what I can say from playing the game a little bit, and the prices I've been seeing, and I've seen around$16, sometimes a lot less for brawlers, is that seems to be far below what the revenue maximizing or profit maxing price would be on an open marketplace. And so that suggests to me that I don't think this will be successful in terms of increasing revenue. Again, it's hard to know without any experimentation, but to even get a theory, I think we have to start with what we believe the price elasticity of brawlers. and where we're operating around along that elasticity curve. And I just think that if you're going to decrease price like this in such a dramatic fashion, that you're gonna see some inelastic returns and you're not gonna see as much revenue as you might expect from a price decrease. Actually, I think what they should be doing is increasing price. I think they were perhaps pricing too low, especially when it comes to brawlers and definitely when it comes to cosmetics. I don't think they have been willing to increase the price in a lot of their products. We've seen Clash Royale also cheap in a lot of their goods with the Battle Pass that had come out and gives quite a bit of content away at a very low cost. And the long, harmful, long run effects we've seen in that game economy. They've just given away a lot of progression. That ultimately is what you're buying when you buy those things. So you're buying progression. They give a lot of that away for very little. So at the end of the day,, putting aside the ethical concerns, for all the conversation we have about the tools, at the end of the day, we're still charging a price. That to me is, it's a lot of gymnastics to get to a price, but in the day it is a price. There is an experience to get to that price. I think that's worth recognizing as game economists, not just something that I think, economists recognize as strongly as we would is what's the experience of that price? And a loop box is an experience of having a price reveal to you. And I actually think it's a very joyful experience. Maybe that's a hot take. Yeah. There's some moments of frustration, but,, opening loo box can also be a very satisfying, enjoying experience. I don't think that's crazy to say. We like solving puzzles and loot boxes give us puzzles we haven't experienced before. That's fun. I like suspense. I don't think that's a bizarre thing to enjoy. I don't think there's anything sinister about that.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>28:11</time>
<p>I disagree about this being a question of price elasticity. I think it's a dynamic problem. I think that this is literally, like this is a problem from dynamic programming, right? I have every period, I have some consumption of this game that I need to achieve, and I need to spend some amount of money and I need to discount. Deep into the future, how much I wanna spend on that. If I am risk averse or if I discount the future more heavily. which, the male gender actually does, there's research on, differences. He heterogene risk preferences, between, gender, age. So if I'm somebody who's very, risk loving, I might discount more heavily into the future, and not account for the fact that in the future I'm gonna spend more money. So I actually think it's a discounting problem. it's this dynamic programming problem where when you spread out the value over a very long period of time through l like having to re-roll the loot box a million times, I think you're able to extract a little bit more out of people because of their risk preferences. Now, I don't know if there's a good literature on this. I know that there's literature. The paper that I would refer people to is called Welfare and Fairness and Free to Play Video Games by Manuel Sanchez Cardis, From 20, I've got it over here, 2022. It's super recent. and he basically talks about when and why someone would want to move from a premium model to a free to play model. and it's, it all has to do with kind of this, like this discounting, your ability to see into the future. And I obviously that paper's about free to play versus premium, but I think that there's a similar lesson to be learned here between loot box or like micro transaction.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>29:53</time>
<p>We have this idea in a lot of loop box based games that I think you're alluding to, which is this idea of charting. So when I open a loop box, I may get a number of copies of something and then when I exceed a certain toll for the number of copies, I can activate that good and it becomes the good I actually want. I might need a hundred copies of a given character for the character to become usable. Very common in squad RPGs. Very common when you're using a star system and Gotcha. The games, could we think of that as a way in which prices also declining precipitously at each T plus one period. And so like you're having this reevaluation period where some goods are actually becoming cheaper to activate, I guess in some sense. If you have any autonomy over those probabilities.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>30:33</time>
<p>This period, if I buy something, everything next period is cheaper because I have this currency from purchasing. so I get like a little</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>30:41</time>
<p>Almost like these weird path dependencies that you can imagine these path dependency trees</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>30:45</time>
<p>I mean, personally, I love shard systems. it makes me more willing to spend, especially in so I think of, Hert stone, as a good example of this where like you can literally like turn cards into dust and use that as a currency. to me that's much more compelling. I would prefer that system, but at the same, you're, you are changing the expected value of the pack. Now the question is could you keep the expected value of the pack the same? is there, what's the difference in, in willingness to spend if you have these two, these two options, one has, the sharding one doesn't, but the expected value is the same. So you have maybe a lower probab in the charting model, you have a lower probability of getting a good card. I'd be curious to do that AB test. See what does this willingness spend look like in both of those.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>31:28</time>
<p>And that accumulated currency point is pretty similar to how battle passes behave, right? It's just you're making progress towards a milestone,</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>31:35</time>
<p>And I, I think that's what people like, people like, they like some semblance of certainty</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>31:41</time>
<p>I think the other way you might be able to argue this, and I think it's a little bit tougher in the sharp piece, but it has more explanatory power in the battle pass, is that you consume an item and consuming it now is more valuable than consuming in the future. Like it's just a time inner temporal time problem. Time discounting again. that's why I might buy something at the end of a battle pass that's tier 100. Like I buy all the tiers to get to tier 100 in the battle pass. And it might be because, even though, I don't wanna say it's rational, I don't wanna use that word, but like one thing you could do if you wanna maximize nominal money is that you would wait till the end of the season to see what level you got to in the battle pass and to see whether or not it's worth it to pay for the$10. Because then you would prevent overspending on tiers. So if you, for instance, buy a tier 100 on day one of the battle pass, and that's the maximum level, all that additional effort that you make during the season is revenue that you could have been retained had you not bought the tiers that you ended up spending. So the question is like, well why would you get to tier 100? And I guess the argument I would make is these battle passes can last for three months and so that's three months where I wouldn't necessarily have that good or however long it would take me to get to tier 100 like this. This is free to play in general though, isn't it? Isn't it a time discounting problem? like the whole point of free to play is I could hit this timer, or I could insert a speeder to make this go faster And I want it to go faster. Like that to me is the whole. It's the whole shebang. That's what holds it up.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>33:05</time>
<p>To me it's an inter intertemporal problem. should you, should you like keep up free to play micro transaction model or should you open up your economy and have these transaction fees, which is like the crypto model. but I think that's a little bit too far. so one question I have for you guys is why are they not just called lotteries? Why do we give these a fancy name? I hate that.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>33:23</time>
<p>Lottery's got a stigma.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>33:25</time>
<p>Surprise mechanics, man. But here's the thing that every proponent of loop box regulations struggles to answer. And this is one of the top questions I have for Eric Crass. What is the difference between car packs and loop box?</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>33:38</time>
<p>I think he would tell you that card packs are loot boxes,</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>33:40</time>
<p>So if that's the case, and I think that is what I want to push them towards, because I don't believe that there are differences when I open up something in Magic, the gathering arena versus a real world magic gathering pack. The thing I would ask if that is the case, then we already have the evidence that loop boxes don't lead to all this crazy problematic gambling because there have been literally billions of kids who have played Pokemon cards and Magic the Gathering, and we don't have an epidemic of gamblers in the same way that video games don't cause violence. We literally just went through this because we don't have an epidemic of crazy people in the world. We only have epidemic of crazy people in America, and we've seen video game usage everywhere.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>34:18</time>
<p>So this is a whole rabbit hole, but I think a lot of parents would argue. kids, did overspend on Pokemon cards. and on top of that, if those kids had access to an adult's income, they probably would've spent a lot more. and you might see some of that problematic behavior. I don't know. I don't have a huge horse in this race, but I don't think it's So clear</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>34:35</time>
<p>lower cost of entry for these kids, right? Like the only reason they weren't spending all their parents' money was because it, it wasn't as easy to buy a shit ton of Pokemon packs, at the Walmart than it was to,, go into your app and somehow get your parents' credit card information or something</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>34:49</time>
<p>yeah. And I think if you asked them afterwards Hey, would you rather have had opened all these Pokemon cards or had six new video games? Most of them would probably tell you they'd rather have had six more video games,</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>34:59</time>
<p>I think that's a testable hypothesis. I think that's fine. If we were to test that, I still don't think that's evidence that they've led to problematic gambling later in life. You could argue that it's just problematic gambling. At their own age,,which I think to me is a different conversation about whether Billy loses his$5. Is that something that we really want to spend C time on? Is Billy making optimal consumer behavior?</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>35:19</time>
<p>There, there are experiments showing that kids have like almost zero, like they discount 100% into the future. Would you rather$100 in 30 seconds or$1 right now? And they're like$1 right now. Obviously that's extreme, but like I know there are experiments that have looked at</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>35:35</time>
<p>sure. And, kids complain when they can't get the present they want or the toy they want out of nowhere when they go to, a toy store. Okay. Like it happens. I don't think that's something that is worthy of government regulatory boards, I think that the, the bar's gotta be a little bit higher. Cuz if you can establish that video games cause problematic gamblers later on in life, and this is a significant problem, or this is pretty prevalent relative to the number of people that play video games. I'm all ears, man. but I don't think that case or that link has been established in any sa sort of convincing way.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>36:06</time>
<p>How do you get away from not introducing any uncertainty whatsoever into the child's decision to play? What if they don't like the game? What if you say, okay, premium model,$60 to play the game? And they're like, mom, I hate this game. You don't sue the company because the kid didn't like the game. There's uncertainty in</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>36:20</time>
<p>zooming back a second, right? Like, why are loo boxes so valuable in video games? Well, it's because it's a giant fractionalized bundle, Video games are full of assets that have zero marginal cost to produce. So we want to upsell constantly, but there's loads of garbage that you don't want. It might be good, but you might not play that character or that style or whatever. Don't, might not like that cosmetic. And so by having a bundling things, that's how they upsell all the content you don't care about. Loot boxes are a great way to sell a fractionalized bundle. You can't sell everyone everything at once. That costs hundreds, thousands of dollars, so you put it into little piecemeal boxes, right? that's why they're so effective as a monetization tactic in games. Battle passes are essentially trying to replicate that effect without the uncertainty, It's a certain fractionalized bundle. You pay$5, you get some amount, you buy a level, it's another chunk of this bundle. But the important part is bundle. It's a bunch of crap that you don't care about, you're excited to get, Yeah. And so I think that's why we're seeing battle passes, displace loot boxes so directly is because they fulfill that same need of a fractionalized bundle. I know I'm looking at Valant compared to Csco, right? Valant has no loot boxes. Csco is full of loot boxes. and to your price point, Phil, the functional price of loot boxes is actually quite high. And to your point, like they bra stars probably underpriced when they converted. and if you look at ca, valant is a carte, and the skins are like 60, a hundred dollars for a lot of this stuff. Which, you know, sounds a little crazy, but when you consider the fact that is the functional price that the loot boxes we're offering people, makes a lot more sense. But that high price point I think scares a awful lot of people. And that's why you, the fractionalized nature of loot boxes is so important.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>37:57</time>
<p>What's the economic, like what's the economic theory or mechanism that gets someone from buying a$60 game to spending like$600 on a game? I've always been curious about this, I only spent$60 on Elton Ring.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>38:11</time>
<p>I think you've already said it. The answer is time horizons. I think people are willing to spend$300 in a game. This is a fantastic article that just came out on Kotaku and I loved it because the article didn't even realize that he was arguing against himself, the author of this on Kotaku. And so he interviews people who have been playing GenOn Impact and have been spending thousands of dollars. This is the type of research we wanna see in Player Insights. It's actual interviews with people who spend a lot of money, and we've seen a few instances of this. They're very expensive to run, but I thought this was one that was done beautifully. And what was the answer from these people over and over again? That there was no regrets. So again, I wanna fight the point that this is some sort of,, hyperbolic discounting argument. In fact, it's just the opposite of that. When you choose to spend this amount of money in a game, what these players have done is that they've spent thousands of hours in this game and they were happy to spend money in the game. And it's because I believe that they get those assets and those assets in terms of their value is, amortized. Over the life of the game because they're using that content for thousands of hours. I play Dota two for 2000 hours. I checked my steam tracker. If I spent$2,000 in that game, that's a dollar an hour. That is a pretty good cost benefit ratio for entertainment, but I'm having a continuous relationship with one product over a long period of time. You could say the same thing about movies. I probably spent a lot of money in movies. They monetized by me making multiple purchases of movies. Instead of buying five movies, I just play one game. From a cost benefit perspective, games have always been cheap and what really you end up seeing to justify the value of these digital assets, especially when they have floating prices and marketplaces and players can bid against one another. Like in See Us Go, even though there's a price cap on the Steam marketplace, they go to these High amounts because they end up being played by the people who play the game for thousands upon thousands of hours. It is cheap in that perspective. I think people just have sticker shock and that makes them uncomfortable and it doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. like, go for it. If you'd like to spend a lot of money in a game, Sure. I think that's completely fine. I think a lot of people spend a lot of money in strange ways. People buy houses that are large. People buy big sandwiches. they allocate their I don't know. That's the best I had is they buy big sandwiches.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>40:09</time>
<p>The 12 inch over the eight inch,</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>40:11</time>
<p>topic three, do you guys wanna talk about our most interesting game of 2022?</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>40:14</time>
<p>I'll say two games because one was released this year, neon White. it's like a speed running like shooter game made by the guy who made Donut County, but very totally different genre. the draw of this game for me is it got me to speed run. I think speed running is something I really enjoy doing because I love optimizing, I love exploring new strategies and trying to execute on them, but I would never actually speed run the way, like at g a G D Q, they speed run. Cause that just seemed super tedious. I got all the joy of speed running without actually having to speed run.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>40:42</time>
<p>do you mind just talking a little bit about what it is,</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>40:44</time>
<p>Neon white is, it's, how do I describe it? the gameplay is, you run through these levels with the goal of killing all the monsters and getting to the end pretty straightforward. but you have movement mechanics, like double jumps, air dashes, rocket launchers, grappling hooks, that are attached to guns but you have to throw away the gun to use the movement mechanic. And so there's a lot of trade-offs between okay, I want, I need to shoot this monster, but I also need to throw away this pistol so I can do a double jump and skip this gap and get to the end faster. it's a 3D shooter, platformer. And a lot of it is looking for shortcuts, faster ways to move from A to B while also hitting all your targets. there's a whole like Japanese like anime visual novel story, a very cowboy bbo style story, attached to it, which has been hit or miss depending on the critic. But, the core gameplay is pretty innovative. and I love seeing it coming from a indie dev who made previously made Donut County, which is basically Kamari dci, you know, the game where you roll a ball and it gets bigger, which has very little of that twitch action skill component. So very interesting genre shift for the developer.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>41:52</time>
<p>This looks very cool. What else you got on your list?</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>41:54</time>
<p>That was released this year, but my most played game this year is probably super auto pets. It's, a minimalist auto battler, Doda under Lords, that style. but the key innovation is the drafting is asynchronous, so the entire game is asynchronous. It's a competitive game where I match make against other people, but when I match make, I don't play against someone else who is currently live and playing. I'm playing against some, anybody who has ever played the game in the past. The game saves all the teams players make as they play. And,, when I play, I can play against anyone in the database, the historical database, which is great for a small competitive game cuz you know, competitive games tend to have matchmaking Q time issues. Also just an amazing one man dev stop shop. all the art assets are emoji art, it's like, emoji turtles and steaks and stuff like, really creative way to cut down on, dev costs. I just love minimalist competitive games.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>42:49</time>
<p>is there vertical progression in this game? downloading it right now, by the way.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>42:53</time>
<p>not really, no. you, you get like cosmetics but no power progression. And so a lot of competitive players really like it cuz they, there's zero power progression.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>43:02</time>
<p>A chill auto battler. I mean, that is</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>43:04</time>
<p>Wow.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>43:07</time>
<p>This</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>43:07</time>
<p>Oh God. The sound is, is loud. I, I started it in my browser.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>43:11</time>
<p>Yeah, it's on, it's on browser, it's on steam, it's on mobile. Um,</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>43:15</time>
<p>wanna be in this, this octopus medal right now.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>43:17</time>
<p>how many dimensions are there like to a team? Because I assume it's not a single number, if you have a bigger number than the other person you win. I'm assuming it's a multi-dimensional kind of decision that's made, based on the inputs. Cuz it's, it's auto battler. So like the outcome is determined before, do you have any information on that?</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>43:35</time>
<p>It's a lot simpler than say, auto chess or team fight tactics, but still a lot of depth. So you have a team of five pets, animals and they fight front to back, if you had just had Hearthstone cards attack each other automatically. but, every pet has a unique ability which triggers, so there's, you can find synergies and combos and counter your opponents. and there's, ways to make them stronger. And the main resource constraint is every round you get to spend 10 gold either buying pets, upgrading them, re-rolling the shop. Every round you get 10 more gold worth of investment in your team. And, your opponents will also have 10 more gold on their team. And then you'll fight an opponent of equal, gold investment</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>44:15</time>
<p>every auto chest game is kind of dead, but it looks like this one has some life.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>44:19</time>
<p>they cut out a lot of the unnecessary stuff, I think made it much more accessible. they did not do a good job monetizing. I mean, it's, it's great, it's very player friendly, like I'm happy. But I think, if someone,, if one of you guys could figure out how to properly monetize this thing, it could get a lot bigger.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>44:33</time>
<p>Oh, interesting. It's like you direct purchase characters for i E</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>44:37</time>
<p>yeah,</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>44:38</time>
<p>even v virtual currency.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>44:40</time>
<p>I pretty much just play the weekly pack. The weekly pack is a random, it's like every week it, they cycle what's in the pool. Yeah.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>44:47</time>
<p>Interesting backgrounds. I can buy backgrounds and they got like wishbones or my currency. That's it, man., that's what I need in my life. Wishbone currency,</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>44:58</time>
<p>They started adding pets that were not a preexisting emojis and they did them in a different art style and the player base got all mad and they were like, no, we like the emoji art style. make'em look like, you know, doofy little cartoon.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>45:09</time>
<p>Chris, what do you got for us? What's your most interesting game of 2022?</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>45:13</time>
<p>So I, I feel like my taste in games is basic. I like.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>45:17</time>
<p>man.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>45:18</time>
<p>I no. no. That's the thing. Like I just play, I am playing an indie game right now, but I don't necessarily like indie, indie, games. But, no,, so I'm definitely a big fan of, linear games. I almost hate games where there's two pathways. if it's open world, whatever. but so this game I was super conflicted about because it was really tough. that I would choose is Tunic, which is, I think it's one of the first, yeah, it's one of the first games to come out on u e five. I remember I was at G D C this year and they were like all,, going crazy over u E five, and it was like the look this was made in u E five. And I was like, that's really like for a cute little polygon game. that's really good. but the gameplay, it's like this open world. And it's very dark Soul's esque, where it doesn't give you any guidance at all of where you're supposed to go. and it's so funny cuz after about two and a half hours, three hours of playing, I was like, screw this. I keep dying and I keep going back to this stupid like shrine. I don't know where I'm going and I know I'm losing points every time I die. So that's pissing me off. so I stopped playing it. and then somebody on Twitter was basically wait a minute. You stop playing this game, but you kept playing Dark Souls. So I got back to it and I started to realize that they embed how to play the game, like in the game play. So you unlock pieces of paper that are a part of the game manual. It's just really, a unique, mechanic that I found really interesting. it's probably not for everyone. It's very story driven. Like you're supposed to piece together this very, very ambiguous story, but you'll literally find a page that says here's how you jump. And I'm like, oh. Okay, that's good to know. Here's how to swing your sword and you literally piece together this book. and then there's a whole giant puzzle side of it where there's this big puzzle. and I won't do too many spoilers here, but like within the book, there's like a whole bunch of fun surprises as you collect this whole book. the game itself is great. It's a really fun game. But that unique kind of player manual was really cool because games today don't have player manuals. So it was really fun to see a player manual again in such a unique way. so I think that's my choice. My favorite game of 2020, two was, Elden Ring, but that's not fun, so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna talk</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>47:25</time>
<p>Hence the Dark Souls.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>47:27</time>
<p>Yeah, exactly.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>47:27</time>
<p>in you.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>47:29</time>
<p>Only a little bit.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>47:31</time>
<p>I'm going to go ahead and say Vampire Survivors is my 2022 game of the year. In terms of most interesting, I mentioned a different game, Marvel Snap on one of the mobile gamer biz websites. And that is personally, I think for innovation, but I, I want to talk about vampire survivors because it actually is the game I've spent the most amount of time in. What it reminds me of is how embarrassed we should all be in terms of what we can achieve. When I look at vampire survivors, it is something that has been out for just a couple months. It is made by a one person dev. From what I can tell, it has a very approachable, a bit art style, which again,, who knows how much that would scale as a MA audience, but the reason it seems to win is despite all of that, and it's because it's just an absolutely compelling mechanic and to me, starts to signal. What I've seen as a clash between in round and out of round progression for both mobile games and HD games and especially in the Roguelike genre, which has focused on this in round progression. You see it in battle royals as well where you're getting more and more powerful contact, items in the context of round and then resetting. That is the core of a roguelike, is you have that in round progression that resets. And so this to me is a crystallization of that mechanic and a stripping away of all the noise to just how compelling that mechanic is in and of itself. And I'd love to see us play more and more with combining that with other elements. And I think we saw that immediately with Survivor io. So this was a fast follow to vampire survivor that was made by the. Firm behind Archero and what they added was out of round gear progression. So you did have vertical progression that you would get for completing emissions or playing,, a certain amount of time. And then when you entered into the game, you still have the ability to get a pool of items that successfully built that, that you would build into over the course of a given session that then reset. But it's combining these really two, two things that players seem to find compelling. I'd love to see more of that. I'd also love to see more of small teams taking big swings with simple mechanics. And I'd love to see that at even a AAA quality level. apex Legends was one team taking a stab at Battle Royal, and of course now it's branched into other modes. It has a CS go like arena mode. It has a little bit more live ops that are going on. We see call duty FormIt strategy really around the cod multiplayer experie. Then it has the DMZ zone, which is a looter shooter built into Call of Duty. It also sometimes has some co-op elements. I'd love to see even more AAA games take stabs at doing something truly unique within the context of a broader title using mechanics that they already have. the fact that one person can go out and make a game that, sends shockwaves throughout the industry is super impressive and reminds us that if we can get this shit right we can make some great games. Prompts to the developers behind Vampire survivors.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>50:19</time>
<p>what's the monetization like in that? Is it just the$5 fee to play?</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>50:22</time>
<p>$3 for the entry fee. And I believe they have DLC coming out, which seems like the right move for them.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>50:28</time>
<p>$3 seems ludicrously cheap.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>50:30</time>
<p>I see 4 99 on Steam right now.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>50:33</time>
<p>maybe, maybe it's gone out. Maybe I got the early a</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>50:35</time>
<p>went up. Price went</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>50:36</time>
<p>dude, infl inflation, man. It's the Biden</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>50:39</time>
<p>That's like 75%. Geez.</p>
<cite>Eric:</cite>
<time>50:41</time>
<p>getting gouged. These greedy game developers doubling their prices.</p>
<cite>Chris:</cite>
<time>50:46</time>
<p>This dude's probably made like$50,000 off of this thing. Spent three years of his life.</p>
<cite>Phil:</cite>
<time>50:51</time>
<p>That's that guys, that's all I got for this week.</p>
<time>50:54</time>
<p>We should teach this to our children. Economics. Economic is major, major, major, major. Everyone has to major in economics,</p>
