Deconstructor of Fun

Most of the team (and the audience) is off at the Istanbul Gaming Summit, leaving Ethan and Phil to hold down the fort. Today is LiveOps, LiveOps, LiveOps. We talk about the Apex Legends Mobile shutdown and the incredibly difficult challenge of feeding a live service content treadmill. We talk Knockout City's shutdown and the incredibly difficult challenge of profitably running a cosmetics forward monetization strategy. We talk Angry Birds Classic and the incredibly hard problem of getting organic traffic to your profitable games they are not #1 in the search results. And we talk Niantic's next game and the incredibly difficult challenge of finding a second, globe spanning phenomenon. 

Headed to GDC later this month? Don't forget to show up for Ethan's Sunday night casual meetup at Standard Deviant Brewing company to meet your fellow Fundies. Or the Xsolla Game Night we are co-hosting with Mattel and Xsolla on Tuesday. And if you see a member of the DoF team, don't forget to tell them "Mice Nuts!"

The crew discusses Neil Long's App Store exposé in The Guardian, Rovio pulling the classic Angry Birds from distribution, Playtika suspending new game development, Street Fighter: Duel's launch and the explosive success of Hogwarts Legacy. Join Laura, Eric, Eric and Ethan and help us settle which Eric is the grumpy one. 

Mr. Kress sits down with an executive coach and an investor Niklas Herriger to chat about what it takes for Founders, CEOs, and CTOs to grow their companies from 5 to 100 people. 
Niklas Herriger is a former founder, whose company Gondola.io, was acquired by Tilting Point in 2019. 

LINKS: 

http://niklasherriger.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklasherriger/

The crew assembles to cover all the latest and greatest games industry news, including the latest annual letter from Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, Blizzard's return-to-office policy, the PSVR2 launch and more. Also, we've got a couple of exciting events coming up:

Istanbul Gaming Summit on Thursday, March 9th: https://www.deconstructoroffun.com/istanbul

Xsolla Game Night at GDC on Tuesday, March 21st: https://events.xsolla.com/gdcgamenight

We got a spicy episode for you. Someone is either getting fired or assassinated as a result of this week's episode.

This week, Eric Kress updates us on the latest on Microsoft’s acquisition and Playtika’s bear hug of Rovio as well as a summary of earnings. Eric Seufert talks (rants?) about Alex Shea’s PCG talk on Hypercasual’s demise. Phillip discusses Knockout City’s sunsetting and joins Laura in covering Supercell’s beta game, Squad Busters.

Türkiye was hit with magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been affected. Join us in helping by following this LINK.

It's a newspacked and unfortunately negative news cycle this week for the games industry. This week opens (as always) with a non apology apology from Kress. Laura talks about the let down of the promising looking Forspoken. Phil reads Supercell's offloading of Everdale to Metacore as a bad portent and Ethan defends the strategy. We lament the death of E3, the death of Apex Mobile, the death of Battlefield Mobile and rumored lackluster PSVR2 pre-orders. We discuss Embracer and the Amazon acquisition of Tomb Raider, and round it out discussing the recent piece of investigative journalism into Valve's work culture.

Before he took the entrepreneurial leap to found Phoenix Labs, CEO Jesse Houston had an enviable collection of gamedev experiences across Ubisoft (Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six), BioWare (Mass Effect) and Riot (League of Legends). With such a depth of experience, the success of breakout hit Dauntless feels almost inevitable. In this week's spotlight interview, Jesse sits down with Ethan to talk about building Phoenix and how a well designed culture has been its secret superpower. With Phoenix, Jesse and co set out to build a forever company. And you can see that ethos in action with their amazing growth following an exit to Garena. It was the power of cultural values, for example, that led to the birth of upcoming Switch release (and guaranteed cozy game hit) Fae Farm. This interview is a masterclass in the power of a game company's culture and values to creating success.

In a week chock full of games industry news, we've got a full house as Ethan returns from paternity leave and new face Phillip Black makes his second appearance on the pod. We discuss Playtika's unsolicited offer to acquire Rovio and how we expect they'll respond. We discuss the many gaming SPACs of 2021 and 2022 and learn that Ethan bought into many of them and why they've been so disastrous for his retirement savings (wamp wamp). We cover the frayed NetEase/Blizzard relationship, the new spin off studio from the founders of Jam City and more. So put on your headphone and join Kress, Seufert, Laura, Ethan and Phil as we go deep on all the latest news.

TWIG has a special guest: Phillip Black! Phillip joins the usual mötley crew of Eric Kress, Eric Seufert, and Laura Taranto, to cover: Marvel Snap’s performance, roughly 3 months post-launch; Ubisoft CEO’s email to employees; Voodoo’s $3m privacy slip-up; Apex Legend’s Matchmaking as well as a few other smaller updates.

REMINDER: The Deconstructor of Fun x Google Istanbul conference is coming up on March 8-10th, 2023, mark your calendars! Signups liver January 25th!