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Keeping Up with the Gaming World: Insights from James Batchelor
205 Plays2 years ago
Join Greg as he sits down with James Batchelor from gamesindustry.biz to discuss the profound impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gaming world. Amidst the initial boom in sales and investments during lockdowns, the industry now grapples with a market correction leading to significant layoffs. As companies big and small navigate these challenges, there's a talent reshuffle that might be a silver lining for indie studios. Transitioning to mobile gaming, despite the tech leaps allowing AAA titles on devices like iPhone 15 Pro, there's an uphill battle in monetization. With the ubiquity of free-to-play games and the unique nature of mobile gaming, creating immersive experiences becomes a complex task. Tune in for an insightful conversation as Greg and James unpack the nuances of the gaming industry's evolution in this post-pandemic era.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engage podcast, where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keyword Studios and HelpShift. Here is your host, Greg Posner.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Player Engaged podcast. Today's going to be a really exciting episode. I am joined by James Bachelor, the Editor-in-Chief for gamesindustry.biz. I'm planning to talk about all the current news that's happening in the industry. James has got a front row seat for that, and he's got a great, informative website that keeps people up to date. Before we jump into it, I'll hand it over to James and say, James, you're welcome to the show. Anything you want to say about yourself?
James Bachelor's Career in Gaming Journalism
00:00:39
Speaker
Ah, just thank you very much for having me. Yeah, my name's James. I'm a journalist in the games industry. I've been entirely focused on the B2B side, the business side of journalism, the trade journalism. For about 17 years now, it doesn't feel that long, but apparently that's how long I've been doing it.
00:00:56
Speaker
It's awesome. And looking at the companies that you worked for, you were a Eurogamer and a number of other different publications and magazines. And I think there's a lot of cool things out there. And gamesindustry.biz is one of the first websites I'll usually open up in the morning when I'm trying to figure out what's going on in the industry because there's a lot of
00:01:14
Speaker
good nuggets in different places and where do you find a place that actually collaborates and puts them all in one place. I think it's really informative. How do you stay up to date in the current news cycle? Obviously, there's a lot of news that comes out all the time recently in gaming. It seems to always be some sweaty week on what's going to happen here. How do you always keeping a front row seat here? Honestly, it's a mix of trying to keep on top of my inbox.
00:01:37
Speaker
because the amount of stuff that comes into that like just on a frequent basis i had a holiday about a month ago and i got i think it was 3000 emails in two weeks so some of the news comes directly to my inbox but also i kind of i constantly have like a window open with
00:01:53
Speaker
I use Feedly to just show all the news that's going up on all the other sites to kind of just check that I don't miss anything. And I used to, before Elon ruined it, TweetDeck. TweetDeck was the perfect way to see what people in the industry were talking about. So rather than just copying other people's homework from other sites, like, oh, hang on, a bunch of developers are talking about something that Unity's done, right? What has Unity done? Let's look into this. So yeah, just constantly being on the internet is how I keep up with it.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point, right? Feedly is something I just recently started using, so I'm trying to wrap my head around which RSS feeds I want to apply to, and it's cool stuff.
The Nonviolent Games Project
00:02:31
Speaker
Before we get too far, I also want to mention James is also now going to be able to add author to his list of, I think this is his first time author, to a list of achievements with his new book coming out, Best Nonviolent Video Games, which is fantastic because violent video games scare me, but I see you still play them. But how did you get into that idea of a book?
00:02:50
Speaker
So that actually stems from something I've been doing as a side project for about 10 years now. I run a Twitter account called Nonviolent Game of the Day. I'll try and give you the brief version. It sounds a little morbid and I always worried about coming across sounding too casual, but it stems from the Sandy Hook shooting.
00:03:07
Speaker
After the Sandy Hook shooting, there was the usual blame going on. Video games and violent video games, rather than the killer's access to guns, it was, well, he's playing lots of violent video games, therefore this must be what has propelled him to do this. Despite the fact that years and years of academic studies have failed to prove a link between violence in video games and violent actions of their players,
00:03:33
Speaker
The debate about video game violence read its head again and one group from a now defunct website called Game of Fit Nation decided they would do a ceasefire, an online ceasefire, right, we're not going to play video games, violent video games for one day. We're going to stop playing violent video games to kind of show that gamers respect what's going on here.
00:03:53
Speaker
we don't all share this kind of like we're not all dependent on video game killing. So yeah, they did that as a kind of I apologize, my phone has just been going off. Like you said, you're a busy man. They did this as a market respect to show that they
00:04:09
Speaker
understand the severity of the tragedy and to show that not everyone is reliant on video game killing as their leisure time. And it got me thinking because just because they're not playing violent video games doesn't mean they're not playing video games. So I thought I wonder what sort of games they would be playing, what other titles you could play on a day if you want to take part of the ceasefire but you do want to
00:04:30
Speaker
play games. And I started thinking about potentially putting the list together. And the more I looked into it, it's like, you know what, you could probably play a different nonviolent game every single day, there's definitely going to be enough out there. And so I started compiling them on this Twitter account. And originally, it was a Tumblr blog as well. But everyone seemed to miss the Tumblr blog. So I just stuck to Twitter. And then I've got I've actually got a database like so again, like this goes back to staying on top of things like any time a video and nonviolent game is announced or
00:04:57
Speaker
shown off or it's demonstrated at an event or something, I add it to my database, my, I say database, that's a really fancy word for a Google spreadsheet. And I've got, I think it's something like, I've covered about 1200 plus games so far. I've got 3600 left to go. And that's without going through the entire history of video games, because I've not scoured the last 50 years for every single nonviolent video game. That's without
00:05:24
Speaker
the mobile, I've barely kind of touched. I've done some mobile games, but you think like how many match three games and idle clicks and so forth, like it'd be impossible to like list all of those. And more are being announced every week, which is fantastic. So yeah, so that's something I do in my spare time. And I, I got to the point where I was like, I actually scrolling through a Twitter feed looking for recommendations and normal and video games is not a conducive way to find something you want to play. I would love to do it as a book.
00:05:53
Speaker
Fortunately, a journalist I know, Chris Scullion, works with a publisher called Penn and Zord Books. He does things like the Nez and Cyclopedia, the SNES and Cyclopedia. Books are like, here's every game ever released for this format. He was saying, my publisher's interested in other gaming books, does anyone have any ideas? I messaged him saying,
00:06:12
Speaker
really interested in the idea of doing a non-violent game book. Do you think they'd be up for it? And he goes, yeah, absolutely. I think I think they would. So he put me in touch. They loved the idea of it. And the best non-violent video games is now available in both the UK and Europe and in North America, released a couple of weeks ago in North America. So go buy it.
00:06:32
Speaker
awesome congratulations and that's a great story as a father to a five year old and three year old who I'm excited to who are playing video games now it's it's always touch and go about which games we open up it's just kind of like do I really care if he sees that we play the Lego marvels and you know like
00:06:48
Speaker
blocks are exploding and it's like, all right, whatever. And then I'm thinking about if I want to start up Call of Duty, I'm like, that's not a good idea for them to even watch it. So I love the idea of just creating a database that has all this information that you can just basically, is this game safe? Is this game? I'm trying to think of publishing and go there with my mind, but like a good place you can go and just check your facts before starting your game so you know what you're walking into.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, that was the aim. And it was also like, kind of, hopefully helping people, like, kind of break out and try different games they wouldn't have done before. Like, I say in the intro of the book, like, I really hope people find it, you know, if you find a new favorite game, let me know, because I'd love it if, like, people have a reading thing. Yeah, actually.
00:07:28
Speaker
I wasn't going to play this, but this is brilliant. Why have I never played
Innovative Game Mechanics and Nonviolence
00:07:31
Speaker
this before? So I want to kind of keep this topic top of mind as I asked my question I have here was that this weekend, I think it was this weekend, right? You were at EGX conference. And one of the one of the
00:07:44
Speaker
One of the shows or panels, that's what I'm looking for panels that you went to, I believe was a pitch your game panel, which is always fun. I know it's something that we talk about here is like, Hey, it's like, uh, let's hear what indie developers are coming up with and see if we can help enable them to kind of step up and get the help that they need. And.
00:08:03
Speaker
When the podcast we talk about focuses about the player experience and violence in the game is part of the player experience. And so is moderation and community and support. And we're seeing a lot more of that based on even what Microsoft announced a few weeks ago about kind of the moderation in games. When you listen to someone pitching a game, do you listen to how, I guess, how they're handling violence in games or bullying or moderation games? Is that anything that's top of mind or is it purely story and gameplay that you're excited about?
00:08:32
Speaker
I am personally interested in seeing what people do other than combat as a core gameplay loop. I think there are so so many more things that video games can do and already do. Hence the 3600 games on my spreadsheet and the 300 plus in the book. I can never remember who said it to me but one developer once said to me that the industry changed with space invaders because as soon as we knew that
00:08:57
Speaker
getting one pixel to fire another pixel at a third pixel and making that third pixel disappear the instant injection you get of endorphins the satisfaction of that that puts on the the road to well let's make games that are about killing all of the things and obviously as you know video games have become more sophisticated and more complex like you know they're much more
00:09:17
Speaker
graphically realistic version to this. You've seen games that really kind of revel in that. The one I always think of is Bulletstorm, which gave you the points we're giving based on how stylishly you killed things. The vast majority of games now are very loot driven because it's all based on the numbers. And the numbers dictate how well you can kill things. And so any time a studio is coming up with a game that is not centered around that, is centered around a very different kind of core loop.
00:09:47
Speaker
plucking examples out my head, like Heaven's Vault, the core loop there is translating ancient hieroglyphics and trying to understand the meaning. That's absolutely fascinating. Journey, always absolutely classic. That game is just about traversal, about trying to get from one space, you know, get the explorer space and trying to understand what happened around it. You know, moving out, overcooked, all those sort of things, like, you know, people like
00:10:07
Speaker
frantically cooperating on some silly and perhaps impossible task. The rise of simulators, the stuff that's out there, like, you know, obviously journalists went nuts for Euro Truck Simulator two, you know, a good few years back, but like, you know, farming simulator is huge. And what I love is like, sometimes I get press releases where like, there's stuff like
00:10:26
Speaker
mining and tunnel digging simulator, chemical spillage simulator, air traffic control simulator. These are all real games. And people, you know, they're out there. I played one at EGX space trucker, and it's basically Euro truck simulator in space. And I played it for five minutes. I'm like, this is brilliant. Like I'm really enjoying this. Like I don't I don't need to be swooping around and having dogfights and blasting space pirates out of the sky. I'm quite happy really struggling to park this floating cargo block within the designated area.
00:10:54
Speaker
I love that you say that this weekend. I'm embarrassed about the amount of time I put into Starfield just building outposts and getting one outpost to put the right.
00:11:04
Speaker
minerals into another outpost into another galaxy. It's just like, literally, I could do anything in the same, I spent hours just building outposts. And it's this interesting concept of you creating a new mechanic, simulation being a type of mechanic that kind of triggers you and gets you excited to do something, right? Get those endorphins going without having to make that one pixel disappear. And I think, you know, as you're sitting listening to pitches from people, is there any kind of concepts? Probably this, but like,
00:11:31
Speaker
that excite you? Like, I'm sure you've, you heard concerts about first person shooters and third person shooters and stuff. It's like, all right, what's the exciting mechanic here? Are there any mechanics that I guess maybe that's the question, any mechanics that you've seen coming out that excite you in the industry? I mean, I'm not on the receiving end of pitches that often. Like the pitch against the dev panel was just, it was just a fun thing. I thought it'd be funny. Like let's get completely random people off the show floor.
00:11:53
Speaker
to pitch ideas to game developers and see if they're judging them. Some of the ideas were there really cool. There was someone pitched like a pod racing game but you are robots and if you crash into each other all the components of your pod fall apart and you have to fight, not fight, but you have to race to grab as many components as possible and put your cart back together and you could even steal the components. That's not something someone's working on, that's just a really fun idea. I think anything that's kind of a twist on
00:12:21
Speaker
a an established genre is is great fun. And just really clever things that people do like, particularly in the first person space, I think first person games, you assume it's all going to be shooting. And then as soon as you change the actual verb of what you're doing, so powerwash simulator, everyone loves this. And you are shooting it's a first person shooter, but it just happens to be you're shooting
00:12:41
Speaker
you know, water instead of bullets, which is brilliant. That light year frontier that's coming out is, you know, it's a mech game, but rather than the mech going around and killing things, it's a mech that farms and you're spraying water and using it to dig up stuff. The other examples, there was some great stuff.
00:12:59
Speaker
Even if you just change the context, the one I liked was, I always feel quite a little bit self-indulgent, like giving this example, but please bear with me. Rainbow Billy and the Curse of Leviathan was a game developed by a Canadian indie called Manavoid.
00:13:14
Speaker
They read an article I wrote, listing me trying to plug my non-violent games and other stuff. I did an analysis of how many games at E3 2019 were non-violent. If you look at all the games that were shown off during the show cases and on the show floor, et cetera, how many were non-violent. It was something daft like 30% at the absolute most.
00:13:37
Speaker
Manavoid read this article. They were working on Rainbow Billy as a kind of a proper traditional JRPG. And they read this and they realized, well, actually, there is a lot of violence out there. Let's try and reframe what we've done. And they changed their game from, it still turned base battles like a JRPG, but rather than trying to whittle down the person's health bar and kill them.
00:13:58
Speaker
you're trying to whittle down their depression or their anxiety or their anger, etc. And you're I think they believe rightly the monsters you face are start monotone and you're trying to fill them with the color, the colors of the monsters in your party. Once you've done that, you've kind of helped resolve their issue and you befriend them and then they join your party so you can use them in later battles. Mechanically, it's still a JRPG. It's still essentially turn based battles. But the context is completely different and not violent. I think that's really interesting.
00:14:28
Speaker
I love that concept. This is something at keywords. What we do recently is we have a lot of moderation teams built in. We work with a lot of moderation tools. And we always kind of previously talked about penalizing the people that are doing bad in video games, like bullying or anything like that. But rather than doing that, I said we should we should try and do a focus on rewarding the positive. Right. I think there's more that comes out of rewarding the positive than always blaming the bad person. Right.
00:14:56
Speaker
I mean I'm sure you remember and I remember back when GTA 3 came out years ago right I feel like that was the first big step of guns and games violence in games that that's at least the first thing that resonates with me because I remember what that was like and it's still going on but I think if we start rewarding
00:15:11
Speaker
good actions in games people taking the time and highlighting that it's like watching the news the news is just a negative place to watch but if you see positive stuff news it gets you excited like oh there are good people out there and I think rewarding the good in games and I love the idea of hey instead of killing someone you film with different hope where you film with you take away like that's an awesome approach to keep doing what you're doing but kind of spin it in a way that is a more positive light.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the stigma about violence in video games, it's not going away, as you say. I feel like it's got better. I think mainstream acceptance of video games is getting better. The larger concern is things like in-game spending and addiction and all this sort of stuff. But I mean, it's been going for years. I remember the upset around GTA 3, but then obviously there was upset around the earlier GTAs. And even before that, I don't remember the exact story, but my understanding is that
00:16:07
Speaker
The whole reason the ESRB, the J-Joints came about is because of backlash against things like Mortal Kombat. So the industry is fairly good at reacting and trying to address concerns of violence. As if you look at the industry as a whole, and I mean as a whole, including mobile, everything, it may even be that the vast majority of people playing are playing nonviolent games. Candy Crush, nonviolent game. Coin Master, nonviolent game.
00:16:36
Speaker
you know, even things like Clash of Clans and stuff, you know, they're particularly popular. And they're not graphically violent. You know, so violent, non-violent games are out there. They've been there. They've been there since the beginning. Like I was kind of saying in the book, like the very first commercial video game was Pong, was a game of table tennis.
00:16:52
Speaker
There was no violence in that. Non-violent games have been throughout the core of the industry from the beginning and have done things to really change the way the industry goes. I wrote a piece a few years back on the impact of Farmville. Farmville, obviously the original Farmville closed a couple of years back. The original Farmville, because it became such a huge hit,
00:17:15
Speaker
It didn't invent the mechanics it used, but it really popularized the use of like timers and you know, those kind of the user, the UI things where like, you know, get like stars every time you, you, uh, harvest your crops and stuff. Like all the sort of stuff that we, you know, gifting social things, where you gifting your friends or visiting your friends from the sort of stuff that we see a lot in a lot of casual games and free to play games, et cetera. All that came from or was popularized by FarmVille, which was a nonviolent game. And that's had such an impact on the industry.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah, and that means Farmville is such a unique case too, right? Because they also utilized Facebook as their platform of choice, right? That means anyone can get Farmville, right? They just have to log in with their Facebook, they can start using Facebook. And I think, you know, violence in games, maybe it's not going down, maybe it's less
Current Gaming Concerns and Parenting
00:18:03
Speaker
of a focus, right? We still have violent games, but I think the bigger concern now is bullying, right? And like you said,
00:18:08
Speaker
the microtransactions. Like, I give my kid my phone to play some silly game that he runs and turns into more people, right? And then all of a sudden, literally like every 15 seconds, an ad pops up. I'm like, how are you even playing this game? There's more ads than there is games that he loves the game and like,
00:18:26
Speaker
This is what worries me. Maybe it's just me now as a father, right? The look at the industry, it's like violence is still a concern. But if he turns on video games, he's going to turn on Marvel on the TV, right? And he's going to see violence there anyway. It's this predatory things that are more of like, this is where, in my mind, we have to be worried about in the future. And the next thing was going to be the next thing, right? I mean, our age was violence. Next stage was gambling and addiction. The next stage will be who knows what. But it's an interesting place to be in. Yeah, no, agreed. Agreed.
00:18:55
Speaker
The risk of going on tangent. I'm also a father. I've got two, I've got five and seven. And my son has been into video games since he was kind of like three and a half, four. And yeah, that balance of like, okay.
00:19:07
Speaker
What do I, don't I think he's, he's safe to play. Like I let him play, um, it's on the X Spider-Man because it's a 16 rated game. He just wants to swing around. He just swings around the city. And if he comes across bad guys, we just run away. We don't show him like, cause the fighting there, like he's visually quite violent. Not like there's no like blood and gore and broken bones and stuff, but we just run away just to be sure. Cause he wants to, he wants to swing around like Spider-Man. My son is going to beat Davis. He loves Spider-Man. He doesn't realize that we don't have a PlayStation.
00:19:36
Speaker
We were an Xbox family. So he is going to be devastated when he realizes he can't play that game, but we can watch all that. We've been watching clips on YouTube, which is fun, because it is a visually beautiful game and we are very excited about the release of it. It does look exactly like excellent. We're a friend of mine. We're basically still hoping that Insomniac basically make a Spider-Man game based on Spidey and his amazing friends from Disney+. Let's get that going. That's going to have to be...
00:20:04
Speaker
Who makes all the other games? Who makes the, uh, the Peppa Pig game and the, uh, outright, outright games. They'll have to make it. I started ahead of DC game. Uh, I like outright games. I love watching my kids play that. That's how they got started with games. I think it's just so good for kids. Yeah. Oh yeah. My son, my son's intro to video games was, um, Ice Age Scrat's nutty adventure by our games. And he's still playing that now. He's like, yeah. So.
00:20:29
Speaker
My attention, sorry. We've gone way off topic, but my kid loves goat simulator 3. Oh, don't. Yeah. It is a hilarious game.
00:20:39
Speaker
He loves it, absolutely loves it. I can tolerate Goat Simulator 3, Goat Simulator 1, I hated. Yes, I agree with you. All he wanted to play for a year. He was like, why did this game? It's awful. I know they have like Rocket League in there. He's like, can you play? I'm like, no, I'm not going to. I'm kind of pivoting here,
Microsoft's Acquisition of Activision
00:20:58
Speaker
right? It's been a big news quarter, half a year, whatever you want to call it at this point between
00:21:03
Speaker
Unity making their announcements, LiOS which continue. This weekend I read somewhere that EA said the gaming's pulling in $350 billion a year. A lot of it which is mobile related, which I think maybe people outside the industry don't realize how much money mobile gaming is truly generating. Now we also had Activision, Microsoft getting approved.
00:21:24
Speaker
I think it was this weekend or late last week. It was Friday. It was Friday. I was in the middle of EGX when the email came through. I was at EGX, but it was in my hotel room. I'd literally just woken up and got a text. The CMA has approved MSABK. It's like, oh, God, here we go. Fire up the laptop. Here we go.
00:21:45
Speaker
I genuinely felt like a weight had lifted. It was in the afternoon when Microsoft officially announced that they had completed the deal and Activision is officially part of Xbox. The weight that had lifted because it's like almost two years of worrying that I'm going to miss the next step, particularly the last month or so because you're waiting for that last final approval to come through. It's like, when's it going to happen? And now it's done.
00:22:13
Speaker
Do you think it's, I'm not going to use the word bad. Do you think it's, is it going to be as big of a deal as people think it is knowing that the next what 10 to 15 years of Activision games are going to be on multi-platform anyway?
00:22:30
Speaker
That deal, that concession is not as significant as it seems. It hasn't changed the deal that much. That concession is like, okay, so Activision Games are going to be available on other cloud gaming services. Any games that are currently available and any release in the next 15 years will be distributed by Ubisoft on other cloud gaming services.
00:22:53
Speaker
they can still go on Game Pass. They can still make stuff exclusive to Game Pass. That's not something they can stop doing. They promised 10 years of Call of Duty on Switch and Nintendo. But 10 years later, who knows what they're going to do? Call of Duty was a big kind of sideshow. It makes absolutely no sense at all for Microsoft to make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox. That just makes
00:23:22
Speaker
no financial sense in any way, particularly given the dominance of PlayStation. There are a million people who only play Call of Duty on their PlayStation. There's a million PlayStation owners who only play Call of Duty. There is no way Microsoft was ever going to do what it did with Starfield, and I think back and forth on confirming that Elder Scrolls VI is going to be exclusive.
00:23:43
Speaker
But what if a guitar hero revival is? What if the next Tony Hawk's is? None of those are as big as Call of Duty. In terms of the impact this deal is going to have, I honestly don't think we can know. I don't think we can know.
00:23:55
Speaker
I doubt it is going to be entirely beneficial for the industry for a company the size of Microsoft to acquire a company the size of Activision Blizzard and then not be an impact on the rest of the industry. That's just very unlikely. It's going to impact competition in some way. It might inspire competition, perhaps.
00:24:15
Speaker
Now that Activision's out of the way, people might want to try and make their own corner Call of Duty competitors. I mean, no one's managed it in 20 years, but why not? Give it a go. Yeah, funnily enough, I've paused mid-feature. I'm writing a feature just before speaking to you about reactions to this and talk to analysts, talk to developers.
00:24:38
Speaker
It's mixed. Some are optimistic. All this is doing is leveling the playing field for Xbox because PlayStation and Nintendo are so far ahead. Others are like, this is going to be really devastating for, say, indies on Game Pass. If the new Call of Duty is available on Game Pass every year, why on earth would you play an indie game on it? But then I've had another indie developer say, well, actually, more people signing up for Game Pass to play Call of Duty on it means more people that are going to be playing my indie game in between
00:25:06
Speaker
each college you can release. It's a copper, but I honestly don't think we can possibly know the implications of the full impact of this deal. There's never been anything like this in games history, so it's impossible to know how this will end up.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's well said. I think, you know, playing Starfield now, whether it's multi-platform or not, I don't think Microsoft cares because there's no in-game transactions, right? Not yet, at least. I think Microsoft realizes they see the success how mobile gaming has worked by subscription and by continuous passes like
00:25:39
Speaker
I don't see why they would make Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive. It's going to kill the revenue of Call of Duty. It's going to kill what Call of Duty was. Will they still do it to sell Xboxes? Maybe, but I don't think they're going to sell a significant amount of Xboxes by having Call of Duty only when half the people that play it anyway are playing on PlayStation, especially with cross-platform playing now. It's pretty much seamless on who you're playing anyway.
00:25:58
Speaker
It is fascinating to see.
Industry Layoffs and Market Trends
00:26:01
Speaker
Call of Duty is without fail one of the biggest selling games of every single year and has been for 15 if not 20 years. That is because it is available on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. If it were suddenly to drop PlayStation in particular given that that is the market leading console, it would not be the best biggest selling game of every year and therefore would be a massive chunk of Microsoft's revenues.
00:26:23
Speaker
now Microsoft serving you. So like, it never made sense for Call of Duty to go exclusive. You know, but it's going to be fascinating to see what happens because Microsoft owns a lot of interesting IPs now to see what they can if they can actually build that that first party killer app to start attacking back at PlayStation will be an exciting time to see.
00:26:44
Speaker
Other news, right? I mean, Unity has been happening. Layoffs are happening everywhere. I know you mentioned some companies already through our conversation here that have been affected by layoffs like Team17, who make Overcooked and stuff like that. I mean, what's your take on why EA is reporting a massive $350 billion year and companies are having layoffs? Is it all COVID related? Yes and no.
00:27:12
Speaker
Basically, when COVID happened and pandemic happened, it's no secret. The industry benefited from this. There's no polite way of saying it. The industry was boosted by the fact that suddenly everyone has to spend their time at home. The amount of people that bought consoles in the opening weeks of the lockdown measures, the amount of people who spent more money on their mobile games, etc. People who needed entertainment and video games are
00:27:36
Speaker
really good forms of entertainment when you're stuck at home. Investors got really excited about this, like all the money people, the money men, started pouring more and more capital into the games industry. That allowed companies to expand drastically. I can't remember which company I was talking to, but one of them has expanded from 120 people to 300 people within the space of two, three years.
00:28:01
Speaker
Now that the market is coming down and investors aren't as quick to pour money into it and debt is more expensive and all these macroeconomic factors, the market is realigning. It's a correction. It's a very uncomfortable correction. Even uncomfortable is it is underselling it. You've seen
00:28:18
Speaker
I think there's 6,100 jobs in the game sector alone have been affected so far this year. Tens of thousands more, if you look into the broader tech sector like Microsoft and Amazon and Google, it's beyond, unfortunately, it's just a horrible reality of the industry is that every time there's a massive, sudden period of growth.
00:28:40
Speaker
companies have to slim down a streamline and the human cost of that is just devastating. All these are publicly traded companies. They have to assure their shareholders that they're keeping things lean as money becomes an issue and the global economic scene becomes a lot more uncertain. It's awful to see. I hate reporting on layoffs. The only silver lining I ever get is I hope that
00:29:10
Speaker
You always see loads of studios like on Twitter, on social media, on LinkedIn, etc. Like anyone affected, please drop us a line. We've got a bunch of vacancies. We'd really be keen to help people out. And then occasionally you obviously get like people who've been laid off, bound together and form a new studio and that studio goes on to do awesome things. It's awful that it takes layoffs to get to that stage. But yeah, we're in a period of market realignment at this point, market correction. I'm just really hoping it slows down soon and just normalizes
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good point on the alignment of people who might start new studios or go to some indie studios. That means there is a lot of talent out there right now that's available. And hopefully, they can find homes at studios where they can make an impact, make a difference, take their learnings of bigger AAA studios and bring them down to smaller studios. I think that's a great point and maybe a silver lining in all this. If you were going to start your own video game company right now,
00:30:07
Speaker
Where would you put your focus on building a game? Is it, I guess, this is a bad question that I probably don't want to ask you, but is the focus going to be more on kind of, again, a community? Is it going to be on the game itself? Is it going to be on sound and visuals? Are you going to go mobile or are you going to go? Yeah, this question probably has too big of an answer to that. I'm not really sure how you answer that. But like with all that money in gaming, why do you think AAA studios are still making games on console rather than focusing on mobile?
00:30:38
Speaker
It might be too low to have a question. No, it's initial. I'm trying to work out which part of it to answer first. Why are AAA games still making games for console and mobile? Because mobile is incredibly competitive.
00:30:50
Speaker
because you could pour hundreds of millions of dollars into making this incredible AAA game, especially now that mobiles are starting to catch up with the hardware of consoles. We saw this with the iPhone 15 Pro, the fact that's going to be a run
00:31:09
Speaker
Assassin's Creed Mirage and Resident Evil Village, things like that, natively, like not streamed, that will be downloaded onto your phone and run natively. Like, you could do that, but the audience is just not there, like the monetization is not there. The mobile market has been so pushed towards free to play and very, very, very, very cheap games.
00:31:27
Speaker
you cannot justify spending blockbuster budgets on a mobile game because you'll never recoup that cost. Even if you do microtransactions and so forth, there'd still need to be a price of entry. We're starting to see some exceptions. Things like Genshin Impact. Genshin Impact could be classed as a AAA game. That's done really, really well. That's free to download. That's a brilliant game. I've played a fair amount of it.
00:31:54
Speaker
I think AAA developers still want to. There's enough of the traditional games industry that want to continue producing traditional games experiences. And for that, you need a console, you need a PC. Because...
00:32:06
Speaker
People are invested in that device. People have bought that device and then you buy that title and you have, before you've even opened the game, you have invested enough money and time into it that you're like, I'm going to give this a fair shake. Mobile games, it takes seconds to download, maybe obviously, maybe Resident Evil Village won't, but mobile games take only barely a minute to download. You open it up and if it's not hooked you within that first minute of play, you delete it. You don't even think about it. It doesn't bother you.
00:32:34
Speaker
the premium game market sadly on mobile has really dried up there are some still out there doing it well enough but convincing people to buy a mobile game in the face of so many free to play alternatives and mobile gaming like the just the form fact that the nature of mobile gaming mobile gaming is something we do
00:32:53
Speaker
around everything else. You play a quick game of Russell or Candy Crush while you're watching the telly or while you're on the bus or while you're waiting for your train to arrive or like you dip in and out of mobile games whereas AAA games you sit and you dedicate time to. People don't dedicate their time to mobile games in the same way which is why developers can't make those sort of experiences and that's even without getting into like the whole
00:33:17
Speaker
controls. I know you can Bluetooth a controller to your phone or you can get one those like cradle things that snap onto it. But the vast majority of people play one handed with your thumb. And most games don't lend themselves to that. Yeah, it's great, great insight. And I think also with the mobile games, right, also that taps on different
00:33:37
Speaker
different age groups as well, right? I mean, my mom will pick up a game and play Sudoku on her phone or something like that, but she's not gonna pick up an Xbox controller and start playing. Even if Sudoku's on the Xbox, she's not gonna do that, I think. The four in fact, it's fascinating that you mentioned the competition, right? Which is obvious, because I don't like one match three, I just download another match three. But it's funny to think about the cost of a AAA game.
00:34:00
Speaker
on an Xbox and PlayStation PC versus the cost of a mobile game and how much money each of them bring in. And I think that's what also makes this Microsoft deal is going back to that kind of fasting because when all of a sudden I don't have to pay for the remake of Tony Hawk, hopefully three or four, some game pass, right? Like why? How are they going to fund the next ones and how they can do the next ones, right?
00:34:20
Speaker
It's an interesting time for gaming. The value proposition of video games is changing so much at the moment with Yo. Obviously, we've had the rise of free-to-play, and you've even got free-to-play on consoles now. But yeah, the rise of subscriptions, the way that Microsoft is pushing for subscriptions, and it's not just games. It's wider entertainment. The subscription model has trained all of us to kind of expect access to a vast library of content for a relatively cheap fee per month. Not no one.
00:34:50
Speaker
I imagine DVD sales and Blu-ray sales have taken a hit because people just sign up to Netflix or Disney Plus. I know plenty of people who don't buy books because they've got Kindle Unlimited. How many people buy albums nowadays because they can just look up the music on Spotify? Subscriptions and streaming have disrupted every other form of entertainment to the point where people just expect access and convenience rather than ownership.
00:35:18
Speaker
And I'm still of a generation that I would prefer ownership. I prefer to own the things that I've got because you never know when that thing is going to be pulled from the service you're subscribed to. You don't own anything that you have access to there.
Gaming Subscription Models Debate
00:35:33
Speaker
But enough people are shifting towards that model. And the assumption is that that's going to be where video games go. But I think there are enough differences with video games in terms of budget and the expense of them and the way that people engage with them.
00:35:48
Speaker
People you know you people binge TV series and stuff on Netflix so that justify you know You can binge like so many different series on Netflix and some different films within a year that you more and more than make up your monthly fee Some people only play one or two games a year. So actually $70 times two or three is all they need to spend like they don't need to spend you know, I I'm on game pass and
00:36:11
Speaker
genuinely considering whether or not I'll re-subscribe because I don't play enough games on it. I've got enough in my backlog going on. And you look like, yeah, there's something like 300, 400 games on Game Pass. I've probably played 15, 20. Am I getting the most out of that service? It's different. It comes down to everyone's different perspectives.
00:36:30
Speaker
It's also, I mean, I could speak from the TV perspective, just fatigue kicks in, right? Like, which streaming service do I need to open up to get this? Like, in the States, right, I was watching Thursday Night Football last week, and it's on Amazon Prime. Like, who thinks to launch Amazon Prime to start watching live TV when I have YouTube TV and I have everything? It's just like, all right, I don't know where to go.
00:36:51
Speaker
And again, it goes to the whole macroeconomic climate. People are tightening the belt, people are looking at what subscriptions they are going to cut down on. I'll be honest, we're looking at dropping, we've got Sky TV, our cable TV. We're going to drop that because we spend most time watching Disney Plus and Netflix. We can justify those because we use them enough.
00:37:11
Speaker
but we don't justify how many people can justify playing and paying a game subscription when there's so many free free alternatives or you buy a call of duty and it lasts you a year if you're that sort of player you know but the amount of people playing fortnite you know kids play fortnite they only play fortnite you know they don't need a subscription they don't need other games like you know game subscriptions on uh
00:37:32
Speaker
a guaranteed success. I think there's a lot going on here that raises to questions of whether or not subscription can take off and disrupt the games industry the way that they did all other forms of entertainment. I know. It seems like Microsoft's giving it their best try. Yeah.
00:37:49
Speaker
For as an Xbox player, I hope it works out, but we'll see where that goes. I don't want to keep you for much longer. And I know you got a busy day here. One of my last questions I have for you is anywhere from one to three, you can pick your number here from an experience
James's Top Games of the Year and Closing Remarks
00:38:03
Speaker
perspective. Like you launched the game and they're just like, wow, what are the top three games this year that have really like
00:38:30
Speaker
You all pick a character, there are clones of that character who are NPCs in the level, and you've got to work out which of the clones are the enemy players and assassinate them. And if you assassinate an NPC that's not an enemy player, it just disappears. Deceiving corporate is like that, but better, because it's very kind of spy themed, it's a heist, and you're all disguised as NPCs.
00:38:33
Speaker
blowing you out
00:38:56
Speaker
Half of you are on a team who are trying to pull off some sort of heist, half of you the guards who are trying to work out which NPCs are the human characters. The guards and heist thieves can all kind of scan any NPC you walk past and change your disguise at any moment. It's a brilliant kind of stealth and social deduction game. I absolutely adore it. It's brilliant. Number two, I would say Baldur's Gate 3.
00:39:19
Speaker
I am barely three hours into it, but I love it. I had no interest before people went absolutely nuts about it at launch. I was like, okay, I'll give this a go. And honestly, after years and years of my colleagues trying to get me into D&D, I think Be at Baldur's Gate 3 might be the one that does it, because those little dice roll, like mini, not minigames, but like, you know, the little dice rolls, like actually showing you the dice and letting you kind of influence it with your
00:39:44
Speaker
your bonuses and so forth, rather than just a small box, a text box, someone saying, oh, you rolled this, really opens up the idea of, oh, okay, I get it now, I understand what's making my choices. So I'm really keen to get more into that. Number one, hands down, tears of the kingdom.
00:40:01
Speaker
I am absolutely loving the new Zelda game. I'm a Nintendo fan. I'm always going to love the new Nintendo game. Breath of the Wild was amazing. I'm a bit more of a traditionalist 3D Zelda fan, so I wasn't sure about Breath of the Wild to begin with, but I recognise it's incredible. Tears of the King is like that and so much more. I don't want it to end. I've been playing it since launch. I've put about 70 hours into it. I've only done three of the main areas on the surface.
00:40:25
Speaker
And I don't want to finish it, because I want to say, OK, now I'll go and do this bit. Now I'll do this bit. Now I haven't done enough shrines yet. And I haven't done enough of the depths. And I love it. Absolutely love it. Amazing game. Awesome. Yeah. I've heard great things about boulders. I've heard great things about Zelda, clearly. So I'm going to look up to see if Incorporated sounds like a fun game. So I appreciate that. That's a great list. I think that's all I have for you, James. I appreciate you coming on and learning about the industry. Is there anything you want to just talk about or plug?
00:40:54
Speaker
No, if I may, just briefly plug my book again. The Best Nonviolent Video Games is available from retailers in hardback and in ebook form. You can find links to buy. I've actually got a website for, I've published a couple of fiction books as well. So it's JamesBachelor.me.
00:41:13
Speaker
There are links to buy the book there and a couple of other books I've got. I've published two books. One is Wandless. It's an urban fantasy novella about a witch on the run. She's escaped from a prison camp. It's kind of Harry Potter if the Muggles found out that witches and wizards live among them and put them in nice prisons. And then Blow the House Down is an action-packed take on fairy tales. And it's what happens when you sit in a room with your wife and your sister who are watching Once Upon a Time and think, I wish this had more gunfights.
00:41:42
Speaker
Perfect. Awesome. Well, we'll have all of James's information as well as information to his book and gamesindustry.biz on our player engaged website we'll talk about. I really do appreciate hearing your insight in the industry. James, thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. Really, really appreciate you having me on. Thanks for listening today. And be sure to join us next week when we have Renz Chong from Breeder Dao join us. Thanks again. Have a great rest of your day.