Game Development Livestream

Unknown: music All right, welcome back everybody to the game development live stream.

Jon Radoff: You are here at episode number two. You are right here at the beginning. I'd almost call that the penultimate of the beginning episodes. I am Jon Radoff. I'm the CEO of a company called Bemable. We make game development infrastructure before that. I was building games, Game of Thrones Star Trek. Let's do some super quick intros for the rest of my team. First my co-host, Paul.

Guest: Howdy, I'm Paul.

Unknown: I've been building games since the dawn of time and currently working on products at

Guest: the King. He might have played some candy crush, although in this capacity, my opinions are my own and not my employees.

Jon Radoff: Thanks, Paul. Today we've got our special guest, Matt. Matt, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Guest: Hey guys, I am Matthew Negi. I am the COO of Triumph Games. We are the makers of Battle Rise, which is basically Dungeons and Dragons on your mobile phone. I've been in computer games for quite a long time. I was originally, I was the designer of diehard trilogy and alien trilogy for PlayStation 1. There's nothing as fun as seeing somebody get the face hugger up on screen, full screen on their face and freaking out.

Unknown: It was so much fun. All right.

Jon Radoff: Thanks, Matt. Here we've got Oscar as well. Oscar joined us as producer this week after our call for help because I can't do videos and post interesting links to the stream while I'm talking. My brain just doesn't multitask that way. Oscar, thanks for joining us as our producer this week. It's going to be transformative.

Guest: Pleasure as always. Thank you for having me.

Jon Radoff: Yeah.

Unknown: Okay.

Jon Radoff: So, a little bit about the game development livestream for people who are listening for the first time. I'm going to mention this a couple of times during the course of this thing. First of all, this is an open platform. So you're going to hear me and Paul and Matt and Oscar talking, but this isn't a show that's so much about us talking at you as it's talking with you, which means if you're interested in joining this conversation and you've got a camera, you can join us on stage. We'll send you a link. You can pop in. You don't have to be here for the full hour. You can come in, share your words of wisdom, talk about what you want to cover. The topic is always about the craft and art and science of game development. We like to talk about design, technology, things like that. It's frankly more the craft than the industry. So we want to really focus on what goes into a great game. What do you need to know as a game developer? What's an idea for a new game? That kind of stuff. But if you want to be part of that conversation, by all means, post a comment, say you're interested in joining us. We will also be watching your comments. We'll post them live on the stream. We'll use them to talk about. But we'll try to get started with a few topics that have come up just in the course of the week. The one that I just, we can't avoid this. I know I promised. I promised on the first episode we weren't going to talk about AI in every single episode. And I maintained that promise. We're only on the second episode. But how can we not bring it up after deep seeks? Sorry, came out just last week and rocked everyone's world. There's some pretty interesting game applications of this. I'm just going to stop there because I have my own thoughts and I don't want to own the whole stage here. But Paul, do you want to just share your thoughts like AI? We think it's a thing. How do you see change any of this?

Guest: Well, I mean, it radically changes the compute cost, right? So what that actually means until somebody builds a game, it goes to, it marines to be seen. But up until very recently, these LLMs and stuff are very expensive to run. And even more expensive to create. And so nobody's built a lot of, to purpose build your own game LLM for your special thing cost millions and millions of dollars, right? Yeah, and Billy, it's exactly. And so yeah, no, it's a shift. But like when most leading technology is man, like, you know, with something new drops, we all get excited about the potential.

Unknown: But in some of the day, tell somebody actually build something, you know, but it certainly

Guest: certainly seems like a big step change, right? It's it's it was a really interesting thing. And obviously, I mean, you probably saw the stock market was rocked and in Vitya dropped,

Unknown: you know, 20% and sorry, dad.

Guest: And you know, you know, it's a very interesting thing. We're building AI for our own games and like it's like, oh, they just put all this stuff out for free. That's interesting, you know, what does that do for?

Unknown: Yeah.

Jon Radoff: And I'm wondering, just what, what were people thinking with the sell off of in Vitya? I mean, who knows why stocks move in any direction, but obviously some people thought it was negative. They trained deep seek on in Vitya chips and having an Nvidia chip means you can run the LLM better. So you think that's like super bullish for like Nvidia is the one company that no matter what, like they just win all over the place. So what was with that? What's the rationale?

Guest: I know a lot of people are thinking that people are sheep when it comes to losing money. Everybody was like, oh, God, somebody else is going to sell before me. So, you know, everybody sells it is like, oh, but then smart. People buy it again because they're like, in Vitya is going to win. So, anyway, this is not financial advice. Yeah, yeah. So you're telling me that the company, that the supposedly the leader in building predictive AI systems that can see the future got caught unaware of something. Like if this Vitya can't get it right, what hope are the rest of us at?

Jon Radoff: No. I know what I'm sure of. So one thing that Vitya was sure of was they knew exactly who was working on LLM's at scale. And they knew that China was working on a bunch of them because DC was the only one that like it's not even the cool kid on the block anymore. What's that? Yeah, Quinn.

Guest: Yeah, Quinn from Alibaba dropped like yesterday. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, that was really funny. But could you imagine Nvidia's AI, you know, going, you know, how, how, no, how was the, what's the, what was the AI? So, but you know what I mean? I'm going, boss, alerts coming in, boss, you better do something. And they're like, why is the AI talking to us, you know, trying to, what's it trying to warn us of? Oh, there it is. Okay.

Jon Radoff: Shenan again. Let's maybe steer it back to like the application for game developers here because I think that deep seek is interesting. If we think of what it means to have things that operate on your own device. So if you think about LMS in general, obviously, there's a lot of approaches to training LMS and they have each one has its own advantages and they're getting more and more advanced. But there's cloud-based LMS. And if you used deep seek on your phone, then you're connecting in the cloud to their cloud-based service.

Unknown: But there's also the open source versions of these people have installed it on basically

Jon Radoff: their everyday computer, their PC and they're running it there. That's really interesting. If you think about a language model of that power being put on your own device because now you can run a game that utilizes that locally. And that just opens up the market a whole lot more because one of the big impediments to

Unknown: any game is if you start attaching cost, meaning cost to you as the game studio, to everything

Jon Radoff: that the game player is doing, then that's going to limit your ability to scale unless you have a really clever business model that makes you more revenue every time someone does that. So in free-to-play, we have that because you're selling people items all the time to essentially fund your ongoing operations. And surely, of course, there are interesting things you can do with language models there

Unknown: too.

Jon Radoff: But if I wanted to say a PC adventure game or something, something that doesn't really have an in-game economy or whatever, you probably just want to run this stuff on your own device.

Guest: It's really, and it really makes your game fragile when you do this. If you have your himmerging massive runtime costs, you're a bad month away from going out of business. If you're especially if you're a smaller studio and don't have the deep pockets of the big guys, the more you layer on those feature added costs, like now you have bad enough having to pay for servers. Now you've got to pay for deep GPU and rich servers that cost 10X with the old servers cost. Yeah, it's a scary proposition. Interesting. The whole cloud thing I find fascinating. One of the things we've been partnering with various technology companies, and I know I want to talk to John. I want to talk about it being available in some way. Talk more and deeper. But one of the companies we partner with is Aether. They've got their own AI suite. They've got their own cloud suite. They did a huge node sale, something like a 180 million node sale to help fund them and things like that. But BattleRice was never intended for the cloud. It was always built as a free to play game, a firm mobile specifically. But we were finding that some players in the A-PAC regions were saying, oh, it doesn't run on my phone or it doesn't run on my phone. Because we had a minimum spec and some of the phones just aren't there yet in some of

Unknown: the A-PAC regions, not all of them.

Guest: Well Aether took a version. I mean, literally all I did was give them an Android version of the game. I didn't give them deep code or anything. I gave them it. And within four days, they gave me back a version that you could run on it was that all the rendering was in the cloud. Right. Basically, they containerized the app and then you ship a portal to the game basically or something like that. And it loaded like that. And it was so exciting. It was like, oh, my God. It doesn't matter what phone you are on. Now you're going to be able to play it. That is really, really exciting of the game. We still have to do it properly. We've got to do a proper tech dive into their system. Because we need to separate out certain rendering on the cloud and certain rendering local. But for what they did, just in a matter of days, it was so exciting. Because for us, for battle rise, for getting the game out as much as we possibly can, through a bigger audience who we don't want to be offending, that's a really big deal to us. And it really helps growth. And if we can get growth everywhere, as opposed to just in North America or just in Europe, like if we can get growth in Philippines, Indonesia, Latin America, across Africa, despite the phone, that's really, really exciting. Then you throw an AI. Now we've got a huge grant from Smart Grant Europe. It's like $1.2 million grant for AI innovation over the course of three years. And we're almost a year in now.

Unknown: And we've got to sit somewhere.

Guest: The server's got to be somewhere. So it's like, again, shout out to our partners at Aether.

Unknown: It got some really cool cloud services as well that we're able to tap into.

Guest: But again, it's just exciting times to me. My vision is that one day you'll be able to play it on your smart refrigerator.

Unknown: You know?

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Aether is a really interesting company. So we're kind of in the third era of the way you access compute on the internet. So in the earliest days, everyone had their own computers. You might have had the, if you were on long enough, maybe you had a web server in your basement, just running, or you had a data center inside your own company. And then people started realizing how expensive that was to scale for a lot of users.

Unknown: And then you got Azure and Amazon and Google entered the business of cloud services.

Jon Radoff: You could access a company that could essentially give you as many of those computers as you wanted when you needed them to see it enough to run it anymore. Then people started finding that that can get kind of expensive. So now you're starting to see different approaches to distributing that, which runs everything from people having these networks of bare metal computers that you can access around the world. But Aether is a decentralized network where people can basically add GPUs to their network. And then you can access it to do it. That sounds like in your application, it's pixel streaming because you're, and maybe more of an AI application in the future, but you're doing pixel streaming in the cloud because they're running your software in the cloud and then serving it up via pixels, which is cool. I still scratch my head wondering how we can afford to run two GPUs for every game that runs because now I'm running a GPU in the cloud and a GPU on my device, which somehow the math doesn't work in my head, but maybe they're so underutilized part of the time in the cloud that the math does work out. The nice thing about it is the immediacy of that experience, nothing to install or download and whatnot. That's been the theory for streaming now for, I don't know, 10, 20 years that people have been talking about trying to pull this off. But yeah, there was actually Oscar. You might be able to find an article from Wall Street Journal on this because it wasn't any theory was about this overall trend towards essentially creating a market for compute, right? Instead of having silos of compute, big piles of millions of servers at Microsoft, for example, like, is there a way to aggregate it together? I mean, this is actually what B-Mobile is doing. Like, we're taking all the game servers out there, aggregating them into a network, not on the GPU piece, but on the CPU piece of running your online game. There's a bunch of companies working on different parts of this. And Wall Street Journal just had an article the last day or two about this new trend that

Unknown: was emerging.

Jon Radoff: Really interesting. Because that can change. Yeah, there it is.

Unknown: Yeah, so a market for compute.

Jon Radoff: If you think about, like, I think the analogy is to energy. So we have a liquid market for energy today. You can basically buy and sell energy. It isn't there yet, because it's still kind of proprietary. But what is it? Make a liquid market for compute.

Guest: I mean, let me poke that for a minute, John. I mean, I feel like I'm usually the last person to bring up crypto. But like, hasn't the crypto experience, yeah, hashtag not invested in crypto. But hasn't the crypto experience for the last few years showed us, isn't that ultimately a distributed compute experiment? Isn't that like the first stage of us sort of doing distributed compute? And couldn't we do a similar, I mean, it seems to me that like with the amount of pressure we're putting on data centers that like, I feel like we're like one open source project away for like a federated, you know, open source compute structure, where, you know, when I'm not using my computer, you know, which is in their farm and it's, farm and it's GPU or it's compute, right?

Jon Radoff: It's definitely an application of, of building a blockchain technology, even more so than crypto specifically. But, yeah, and there are companies doing this in a non crypto way as well for, I think,

Unknown: Wall Street Journal's article talks about other approaches to it.

Jon Radoff: But yes, sure, if we go back to Bitcoin, what is Bitcoin? It's a, it's a crypto token, essentially, if it's generated because you do a lot of compute. And today, it's a fuckload of compute that you need to do that. And it's just running cryptographic puzzles, basically. And then the sort of the next wave of blockchain stuff like Ethereum came along, which eventually got away from what they called those proof of work algorithms and found different financial incentives to make it so that it was less work. We won't get into all of that right now. But that's sort of how that evolved. But your right, Paul, which is, if you think about these things like Aether or Beamable or all these different markets for compute, well, you could serve up different kinds of compute. And the token that's generated, essentially, the payment that's generated back out of it is doing something more useful than running a bazillion crypto puzzles. It could run someone's game. It could do pixel stream.

Guest: Or you could earn, or earn an LM. Yeah. And then you could even stay closed ecosystem. If I leave my Xbox on all the time, my game pass is free, basically. You could build closed loop systems. Yeah. It makes total sense, because in England, they've got an initiative for people to buy solar panels, right? Put solar panels in your house. It'll take less stress off the national grid. And any energy you don't use will buy back off you for X amount. So people who did invest in that, I mean, early days that were paying well. They're not paying as well now. So that really does make sense. One thing we have been considering, I think we are going to do a traditional TGE, but prior to that, towards the end of the year, we were talking about nodes. So because the game would battle rise and our other game that's coming up, Gold Armor X, both games would benefit from their being thousands of little mini CPU GPU little things out there, you know, in other people's homes. They're effectively the people who are running the node. They're generating a bit of token for themselves, but they're also generating token that goes into the ecosystem for the players to find within the game. But we were like, but look, we shouldn't just do this as nodes. The shouldn't just be about token. What if we coded all of the little CPUs that we're sending out to people, what are all the hardware we send out to people? What if we coded them as server relays? And one thing that we have coming in battle rise, which I absolutely adore later in the year in 2025, we're going to do an NFT sale called the Dungeon Builder NFT set. And people will buy a little set of NFTs that basically they can make their own dungeon with their set of NFTs and the treasure, the artifacts that you find within that they put into their dungeon for you to find. You beat the enemies and you find that you get a random draw of any NFT from the game, but you've also got a chance to get the legendary NFT that is unique to that person's collection.

Unknown: Well, what if we added in addition that that person actually hosted it on their own little CPUs so they were their own mini server in their home.

Guest: And because the concept is that we've got various dungeons in the game with a little storyline that we have. But what if people again, now we'll go back to AI apologies if we're trying to stay away from it.

Jon Radoff: But we're doing AI and we're like, just go on with all of these. We're going to harness the R&S, I promise.

Guest: We're going to harness the AI that we're building to allow the person not just to build a dungeon, but to allow the person to create a story with prompts, you know, and the RLLM will kind of put, you know, how about this? What about this? And what language do you want it? Do you want it dark? Do you want it scary? You want it emotional? Right. And then a narrator to be the dungeon master. They convey the story to the person. So people will pay a little bit of our token to the creator of the dungeon because they want to try a chance to get that legendary artifact. But if that person is also hosting it on their own little server at home. And so they're farming token for themselves. They're hosting the dungeon on their server node. And they're putting our token into the ecosystem for people to find. So like, you know, this is where it gets me.

Jon Radoff: It's kind of a game of a fight way to mine a token, which is interesting. Okay.

Unknown: So we did AI. We talked about crypto.

Jon Radoff: I blame this guy Paul here for. Oh, I know. I know. It's down that path.

Guest: You're good. You're good.

Jon Radoff: It's okay. It's okay. We can talk at this. It's part of gaming. It's kind of at the very bleeding edge. And we can talk about any of those topics. All right. So where I'm bleeding edge, like maybe, maybe talk about VR again. Oscar, you were pointing out an article. I always laugh at these updates on Meta's financials where they're always like, here's how meta. Here's basically the article is Meta's just taking over the world, look how profitable it is, except ha ha Zuckerberg doesn't seem to know anything about VR because he just keeps throwing money down the down the toilet on this thing. So this is always the headline, right? It's like, oh, reality allows. Just keeps losing money. I don't know if you would dare you invest in this future. There are also the biggest platform out there that you can actually use for VR. And it's not like the tens of millions of users on Quest are insignificant number anymore. Like that's a lot of that's a that compares with a decent game console.

Guest: Yeah. And it's just it's just waiting for software releases. I mean, I almost bought it. I've almost bought a meta the other day because I saw the release of I think it's revolution games. Demio was a big popular game early on. They're releasing a essentially a pure up Dungeons and Dragons game based on their stuff. So they've partnered with Woods and the coast. And I'm like, that's the kind of app that causes me to buy hardware, right? It's like, okay, I guess that I guess I need a meta three or whatever the version is or on because I you know, it's been a few years since I got me any chimney. So because I'm damn sure by whatever hardware it takes causing me to run Dungeons and Dragons virtual reality. That's the killer app, right? Maybe battle. Maybe you do that direction, man. It's like, you know, I mean, you know, I would love battle rice to go on console. I'd love it to go on the R. I think it'd be really fun. You know, we don't have co-op in the game yet. When co-ops in, you know, it's Dungeons and Dragons. You need a team of friends to go through the dungeon, you know, because you like at the moment, it's like you build a team of five and you go into the dungeon.

Unknown: So it'd be so much fun if each, each, each character, each champion was one of your friends.

Guest: Now adding the VR and have them experience like being in the dungeon.

Unknown: I mean, this is like, larping on, you know, on another.

Jon Radoff: What, what, what demio did really well though. If so, first of all, if you've got a quest and you haven't tried demio, you should just go down, you can download it for free and try the first stuff. You don't even have to pay anything, I believe. At least it was that way when I tried it. But yeah, immersively experiencing the dungeon, cool idea. That's kind of been what we've been talking about in VR for years. But here's what demio did well. So pretty much every week from the age of, I'm going to say 10 years old till I was 18 years old.

Unknown: I played D&D typically once a week if not.

Jon Radoff: I reckon we're the same age. Well, we won't get into that. And then typically in a basement location, either my basement or a friend's basement, just seems like where it always was because it's the only place your family would put up with you doing that for like six or eight hours. And you played D&D there. And demio, when you first interact with it, it recreates that gaming room, much nicer gaming room than I had as a kid, but still reminiscent of it. And you're in a place and it captures that idea of being with friends around the gaming table. And that's really what really well, like you have this nostalgic feeling the second you do it.

Unknown: And you feel like you're back in the gaming room as a kid again.

Jon Radoff: And I love that.

Guest: That's so fun. That's really fun. Yeah, yeah. I think we're going to have to look into this for ourselves.

Unknown: For sure.

Guest: I think the reason that many of the losing money here is that it's just really hard to get people to, it's one thing to get people to play games where they're at. And it's a completely another to get them to buy a special piece of hardware and to go into a room. We've had specialty consoles and specialty devices as far back as time. As far back as our happy video games. And they've always with a few rare exceptions, always been very niche prospects. And we've been struggling with this VR thing since the 1980s. And the reality is that it's just, I mean, we have had how many countless conversations about the use case of slapping a thing on your face. Like I'm a big sucker for it. Like I love it. But I just, I mean, you know, even when you have the gear, I mean, obviously there's some people that are completely committed to it. And I respect that. But I don't know, man, like games have to meet me where I'm at. Unless there's a killer app that's so amazing. It draws me to that. So I don't know that Meta is ever going to see their reality. I kind of respect what Apple has done, frankly. They built a specialty device for the specialty people. And you know, they're sort of walking it slowly in. Like, you know, I think the Apple strategy might be better than the Meta strategy. I don't know who's buying these meds.

Jon Radoff: Like, no one has the right perspective on any of these devices. You know, that's the right perspective.

Unknown: There you are.

Jon Radoff: Well, so I don't know something about the gaming media generally and VR. I'm just going to sit even though VR isn't just games. It sort of covers a lot of the same space of like journalists who cover this stuff. Yeah. It's rare to see a media that just, they just savor the ability to craft the biting critique here. Yeah. And like, look at this headline. Meta's speculative reality labs division continues to sell losing billions. Wow. Mr. Zuckerberg, if you look at this, by the way, we'd like to thank you for this investment. Let me re let me re title that. It's more like, you know, Meta's long range pioneering vision for VR requires an investment

Guest: of billions because it's also not just a cost of investment in the next stage of human experience is costing a bit money. It's a good thing they've got enough to burn. It's good. It's good.

Jon Radoff: They've got more than enough.

Guest: All the consoles, all the consoles cost a lot of money to build. Yeah. Exactly. Sony spent millions building the various play stations. Nintendo spent millions and Microsoft, you know, the funny thing about the VR, we have two in fact. We got one and then my daughter won in one. She used her Christmas money. She got her own. You know, the games that they liked, they really liked that the ones that were only really

Unknown: playable in the VR, you know, like the beat Saber and things like that.

Guest: You know, the ones where you got the lightsaber and you kind of, you know, moving them around,

Unknown: your arms around, things like that, you know.

Guest: But the one thing and this was the same for the Wii to some extent for like the Wii exercise, you know, the Wii mat, you know, the Wii. I was literally on the floor. Yeah. The fun, the thing is that part of gaming is engaging your imagination and being absorbed in a world or story that is only partly conveyed by the game. Your brain is filling in the rest. Your brain is not distinguishing reality from the visuals and the audio.

Jon Radoff: The extension of disbelief.

Guest: Okay, you're in there, you know, your brain is filling the rest in. You know, this is why, you know, one of our competitors, not really our competitive, a Ray Shadow Legends came out a year and a half before, batterized came out and they absolutely captured the audience and, you know, they had a much larger budget than us. And, you know, their video adverts are beautiful, right? We're like, we don't have that kind of budget, we can't compete with that. We're going to do comic book style adverts instead of trying to do this full rendered motion video.

Unknown: But the point is that the rendered motion video sets this paradigm within your imagination

Guest: so that when you go into their game and play their game, you're living it as realistic as the advert was. When in fact, the models on screen are not those million poly models that are used and rendered.

Unknown: Okay.

Guest: So, you know, so the, the F and B sets that, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah.

Unknown: Go ahead, Paul.

Guest: I mean, the age old, the age old conversation about fidelity versus the quality of the gameplay and, you know, where does the immersion come from? Does it come from the fidelity? Yeah, I totally agree with you. You know, I yell, you know, like, you know, they had to start putting not actual gameplay footage on the adverts on TV as a result of that exact thing, right? But, but, but where I'm going with it is that part of being a gamer is losing yourself. It's escaping, it's escaping you a fantasy world. Whether you're in, you know, World War I soldier or you're in the future of sci-fi or in the past fantasy or, you know, even a casual, you know, my, my Facebook joke is, oh, Facebook, all this was once farmland, you know? This is a part of that. It was a part of that. Because, like, this is the imagination. So, the issue that I have with VR.

Unknown: That was very funny.

Guest: The issue that I have with VR. Is that you have to stand up in the room and you have to do the stuff and it's tiring. You know, I like, I don't want to move my arms for three and a half minutes straight for beat saber. Like, I'm terrible at it. You know, like, I'm not out of weight. I'm not overweight. I'm not out of shape. Maybe I'm a little overweight. Maybe I'm a little out of shape. But like, I'm tired of the three minutes song. Right?

Jon Radoff: I don't want to play consoles figured out that this is the form of this or for playing your

Unknown: game.

Guest: I don't know. I think that's a very funny thing. Although there are some games. You know, like, you know, like the old, the old missed games, you know, that was so perfect

Unknown: for me.

Jon Radoff: You know, yeah, definitely the mental bandwidth consumed by VR plus the number of calories consumed is a little bit high on VR still. I think it's getting better though.

Unknown: But that really it's back to sort of this whole meta headline again though.

Jon Radoff: Like, and by the way, like the suckiest headline would be something like meta, meta terminates its long term vision to preserve more of its advertising profits. That would be like what there, that's almost what they're asking to happen by saying that by this criticism. But it does, so we should look at how multi-dimensional the problem of making good VR is. So first of all, the hardware itself, like getting long battery life in a lightweight device that sits on your head, that works with your body and your eyes, like that is a really, really hard problem. We're still actually not that close to the ideal weight of these things because the ideal weight is like sunglasses. They have actually done studies on this and they found that like until you get to sunglasses, people are just going to complain about the fatigue forever until it's, you know, at that weight. And that's why the long term vision in fact is to have something that's like smart glasses as opposed to the bulkier VR device. Incredibly hard engineering and even basic science. Like you're in the realm of like really basic fundamental physics exploration, material science, things like that, battery technology to be able to get anywhere close to that. And then, but it doesn't end at the hardware. It's the software. The operating system has to be rethought. It's artificial intelligence. It's training for gesture rescue mission. Like all of these things have to come together to build these devices. Totally.

Guest: Hey John. Yes, where the cloud comes in, you know, and I'm cloud compute services, you know, like let's hide all together.

Unknown: Yeah.

Guest: That's how you hit it in the sunglasses. I mean, in England, Sky TV has been for years. It's been a satellite signal to a literal box that looks kind of like an Xbox or a DVD player that sits under that takes it and it translates it. But now it's, you know, it got bigger because now it's got hard drives. And now you can download movies and you can save this on your local, right? They're moving away from that completely to this lovely, thin, smart TV. And now instead of buying the thing, now you buy their TV that has a technology built into it. And it's like thin. You could like, you can hang it on, you know, hang it on the wall, hang it on the mannel piece, you know, and you can display art on it. You can pretend you've got a Picasso in your living room. I want to talk about smart, I wanted to add smart TV to that, this whole thought process we've been talking about the edge. But before I do that, I'll remind you, John, it's the bottom of the hour and you need to do your spiel.

Jon Radoff: Let's do the station identification. Yeah. So here's the thing with this chat. We've talked about VR. We talked about crypto, even though I didn't think we were going to. We talked about distributed compute. We've talked about AI. We want to talk about any topic that could affect game development. But this is for game developers, people who design build games want to make really creative games. It's not so much about the industry and commercial metrics and things like that. It's about the craft and creativity. This is your opportunity to participate as well. There's basically two ways you can participate in this because it's not just us talking with or each other or at you. It's inviting you into this conversation. So number one, our intrepid producer Oscar is monitoring all of the comment channels here. If you post on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, any of the places where we're broadcasting this, we're looking at those comments. If you comment, we may, in fact, flash that on the screen and start talking about your

Unknown: comment.

Jon Radoff: You can go to the next level though. You could actually join this talk. So message us, post in the comments that you want to jump in. There you go. There you go, Oscar. Thank you. This is what having a producer means this week. This is just transformative. And you could join the chat.

Unknown: You could join the chat.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Oscar rolls DMU a Streamyard link. You can jump on the stage. You can be part of the conversation. If you didn't like any of the things, we were just talking about bring your own topic. We'll talk about that instead. Or if you want to call back something earlier, you think we missed something. And especially if you think we were wrong, like I would love that.

Unknown: Come tell us how we're absolutely insane.

Jon Radoff: Like VR should just be shut down at Metta to save the world. Look, hey, we want to hear your reason for that. I think that could be an interesting conversation. So do take part. I think we're about at the max viewers we had from last time. So we're working to get to an even bigger number than last time. So the audience is bigger.

Unknown: You're out there. Post a comment.

Jon Radoff: Join the conversation.

Unknown: And let us know what you want us to fight about.

Guest: So what I was going to say, like I got a new TV. I moved to Alice earlier this year. And I guess I said this year earlier in 2024. And yeah, the new smart TV, which I've always sort of avoided, because I didn't want to TV that was going to monitor my life. But at the same time, I was really impressed. I tried. Let's try to see if all these craicular laps that are in my smart TV are actually worth anything. And the thing that unlocked it was, it came with the NVIDIA Cloud Gaming solution built right in the TV. Shockingly good. Shockingly good. I don't know. This cloud streaming, I mean, we talk about a lot of almost their technologies, whether it's here or everywhere else. And we talk a lot about, theory, we'll get to do this someday. But the cloud thing has been there, like for forever. And it's mostly, it feels like we're always told it just, it isn't on the top of everyone's mind because of the bandwidth.

Jon Radoff: It is interesting, Paul, because for years and years it was sort of almost the running joke in the industry, like here's another streaming platform is going to go out of business. And you know, in Stadia imploded, it was like, okay, if Google, if Google couldn't pull it off, nobody can. There's no, this is just not it. It just does, the numbers don't work or something. But the tech, it's actually works.

Guest: The tech, the mom, but it's really worked.

Unknown: The question is, does it work? I guess one question is, does it work outside of the most networked kind of dense urban

Jon Radoff: areas? Who knows what's going on with the numbers behind the scenes? But yes, you can sign up with what you were just saying or PlayStation. I've used their stream games. They were perfectly fine. So it's a thing. It's almost like as we've been critiquing these new efforts to build cloud streaming tech and they failed, slowly, like, I don't know, Sony and other companies like that were just kind of like quietly figuring it out.

Unknown: I don't know why in every article that was about Stadia, for example, they weren't just

Jon Radoff: saying, well, I don't know. Sony's works fine. You can just do that too.

Unknown: Very, very funny.

Guest: I feel like the battle is always over over the content side of things. I feel like Stadia's struggle was more on the content side than does the tech work. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I always heard people bringing up bandwidth. It seems like today, when everyone's able to stream Netflix at 4K, it's like bandwidth is still an issue for worldwide adoption.

Unknown: But I really felt it would be, it should be more, I was a big Stadia advocate. I really hated seeing that take a notice that the way it did.

Jon Radoff: Chris Malina is posting about his project he worked on, which is ads guards wrath too. Hell yeah, that's great. Like the ads guards wrath is a fantastic game.

Unknown: I'd played it.

Guest: Well, I mean, that's part of the problem with these, what we were just saying, all of the less. That's one of the marquee platforms, i.e. console slash PC. Then what's the hardest part about, I mean, we got much of game makers here. What's the hardest part about game? They ain't making the games. It's about user acquisition, right? User acquisition is the friggin that's more, that's everything that these days, right?

Jon Radoff: 18,000 games on Steam last year. That's kind of the problem. Yeah.

Guest: So how does the kick ass game experience that doesn't have the, you know, literally tens of millions of dollars in marketing behind it, get in front of people? Like it's a, you got to work, you got to hustle. It's like a, you know, it's hard work. You know, you like the land, the, my God, the landscape for advertising for games, you know, KOLs and, and you know, you're hoping game goes viral. You know, you're doing your best to convince Apple to make a game of the month, or, you know, otherwise you have to rely on actual sales in order to chart in order to get, you know, oh my God, it really is all over the place. But, you know, for us, user acquisition is everything at the moment because we think we have a fun game and we think we think everybody who plays it will enjoy it. You know, if Dungeons and Dragons, if it's in your blood, we know you're going to like it, you know. So anyway, yeah, user acquisition is big. But maybe that's where Smart TV could really excel because like, if battle rise, if we, when we, when we finish getting battle rise properly into the cloud, you know, we could approach the Sony Samsung's all the TV manufacturers, everybody who's got, you know, embedded apps. And we could say, look, a game's in the cloud. It's not even going to be on the TV. And all your TVs are connected to the internet now.

Unknown: So please, you know, get us, get us on there, you know, and take, take 15% of the revenue,

Guest: you know, for, of that comes from that particular which would be a savings of half from Apple and Google of course, you know. So, you know, but, but like that might, you know, that'd be real because everybody's got a TV. I wonder if you know what really real, I mean, I know people, we hear about the news a lot, I don't think most people think about the fact that when they buy something, you know, literally a third all goes to the, the overlords. Yeah, yeah, you know, a third of it, you know, somebody's commented, Marty Kaplan's commented, you got to have the UI built into the core game loop. Yeah. That's really interesting. So like, you know, one thing the battle rises is doing is that we're rewarding players who refer and the, and the referees come in, you know. So, you know, we're giving you a assets to, for referrals, you know, so we're trying to get our own people to, to, to, to do it. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Gen Z, Gen A kids pull their friends into games on every platform. Yeah, exactly. I said, this is so funny. My kids, I said, you know, you guys are online all the time. That was, you know, years ago when, when they were teenagers. Um, you're online all the time. You know, why are you arranged to meet your friends? Go out, go out to town, meet your friends. You don't have to do that anymore. We could just meet online.

Unknown: Yeah.

Jon Radoff: You know, I have cognitive dissonance on this idea of the UI and the core game loop. I, first of all, I totally get it. Most of the game units I've shifted my entire life or mobile games and we tried to do that with every opportunity. And for good business reasons, for the exact rationale we just discussed, which is direct to UA via paying for ads is so damn expensive. It really, it really puts a dent in your profitability, may make you not profitable at all. So, anything you can do that makes that happen organically or through word of mouth or through some kind of clever, bring me a nail to build the farm would be the classic example

Unknown: from, from when Paul was doing that, that, that, Zinga, um, that would be a way to do it.

Jon Radoff: But like, how do you, there was other ways to build UA into the core game loop, namely, make it such a great game that everyone wants to talk about. Oh, totally, totally. Totally. Oh, Baldur's Gate 3, my favorite game of all time at this point is just such a great game. I wanted to tell everybody about the stories I was living in that game and I'm very, I haven't looked at any previews yet, but I know the new Siv is coming out, um, imminently. And I'm hoping that it'll be the kind of game where I'm just going to annoy everyone with how much I'm going to talk about it. And that's your use track, was it right there, right?

Guest: I want to do exactly that. Um, first of all, eight minute, what Todd Harris's code is up here. Um, who has played a dragon sweeper yet? Has everybody here played dragon sweeper? This is the kind of content our, our, our haven't, okay. So this is the, this is the hotness like a, uh, Oscar, bring out some dragons. Bring up, bring up dragon sweeper. Like, like, this is, this is the kind of organic because, because this is the, you know, one person UI in the, damn, that needs to be, so this is about the cool kids are playing

Unknown: this week.

Guest: It's not it. So who likes mine sweeper? Who likes Dungeons and Dragons? So, you know, this is a two hour game. You'll finish it and, you know, it's not a, it's not a big game, but oh my God.

Unknown: I, this will change your life.

Guest: Looking for.

Jon Radoff: And let's celebrate the game that has two or three or four hours of gameplay, too. Like, don't get me wrong. I played Baldur's Gate. I'm going to guess. I got about 300 hours of gameplay out of that game before I put it down. If they ever came up with an expansion, I'm trying to understand they're not.

Unknown: I, they get me another 300, but it's fine to make a name that only has a few hours

Jon Radoff: of game plan that you just love and, and it sticks with you. Like, I play games like that.

Guest: I just want, I want the actual game. Here it is.

Unknown: Like, I bet you, I said Jill, link, go ask me.

Guest: Yeah. My, my, my kids, my kids got into the binding of Isaac. Oh, yeah, that's great. Yeah, yeah. And but my, my, he's now 21. He's been playing it since he was 15. And he's almost 100% of it. He's got one more task to do. And then he says he can put it down. I'm like, you're six years. But I can't, you know, he, he got it for me, a tiny bit. This looks fun. You got it for me, a tiny bit. I, I managed 100% to use the kingdom. I had to put a lot of time in it. And my goodness, the songs I didn't write, the books I haven't written. I'm here to the kingdom. You found the dragon. That's fun. So you got, you got to be high enough level to kill the thing. Look at the bottom. So click on, well, scroll down or do that. It's mine to be for, but you level up. See at the bottom, you got to level up and you got health, right? And so click, click on one of those blue dots. Was this game made with chat GPT? I don't know. It could have been.

Unknown: But it's not too much skill and it's, this game is awesome.

Guest: So anyway, that's not a criticism, by the way. I'm like, now I'm a big help. I'll put on your guy. You'll click on the guy. See his pulse and at the bottom, at the bottom. And now see he levels up and see you get a few points. And now he has more health and he can click on bigger and bigger. It's, it's multi-tiered mine sweeper. All right, we don't have to spend all day talking about this game. I'm just like, I played a super fun game. Everybody who plays it loves it. And now I'm doing my part for user acquisition. Play this game, everybody. They will appreciate you.

Unknown: Yeah.

Guest: I'm looking forward to seeing.

Jon Radoff: I'm looking forward to seeing, I mean, we can be game fans as well as game makers. I'm looking forward to seeing what other games is the panel here. Oh, what's the minute?

Guest: What's that Louisiana sort of steampunky game that we saw at the Microsoft game days last quarter? I mean, last year, it's come out this year. Is everybody know what I'm talking about?

Jon Radoff: No, tell us, Paul.

Unknown: Oh, my God.

Guest: I mean, I got caught on the spot. It was a, we'll come back to you, Paul. Yeah, come back later. We'll come back. Just figure it out. That's funny. Did somebody say that?

Jon Radoff: What are you looking forward to?

Guest: No, I'm looking forward to it. You know, it's really funny. I play games that are Dungeons, Dragons, Esk, but I'm such a huge Zelda fan. You know, I'm like, I always go back to Zelda. I'm always waiting for the next one. And so I'm actually, I'm about three hours into the new cute one where you actually get to play Zelda for the first time. And I'm really enjoying it. You know, so like, I'm really enjoying it. So like, so I'm not looking for anything else at the moment. I'm committed to Zelda for a while, you know, not looking for anything casual, you know. I am also looking forward to it. And this is, you know, oddly, very self-serving, but I'm looking forward to some of the new game modes that the guys are doing for our own game. Like, we've got Dungeon Crawler at the moment. We've got live PVP. And we've got the story mode is coming back. We pulled it out because we thought the story was a little trite. We wanted to beef it up.

Unknown: And we got an actual, yeah, I, I, I, I, he found it, right?

Guest: Okay. You know, we got a famous author in Poland, who, because the team in Poland took, to write a new narrative. But I'm looking forward to this new mode. It's been, is dragging, but we're almost there, which we call gauntlet. And gauntlet basically takes our dungeon crawler

Unknown: and it takes our PVP code and it adds a bit of co-op.

Guest: So for the, you know, you're, we all, if you're a dungeon dragon player ever, you know it's about the party and the dungeon master, right? So, so a really looking forward to gauntlet mode. Because I'm looking forward to people and be able to jump in and play together against another team who get to play the bad guys, right? And it's in speed battle mode, right? So it's a really fast experience. I am, I am really looking forward to that, to that. Um, but yeah, and I, I, I can't say what else I'm looking forward to because between our own game and me getting the new Zelda where you get to play Zelda, and I have, I've stopped looking at the moment.

Jon Radoff: Uh, well, Matt, that's, that's a good lesson for game developers. It's surprising how many teams actually, they're working out a game, but they don't really play their game. So, um, that's a very negative sign in my experience. What's going on? Yeah, and it happens more than, more than you'd think.

Guest: Yeah, you have to love it. Although having said that sometimes you've seen your own game for so long that it doesn't look real anymore. When we were doing Batman and Robin for the PlayStation one, and we did crazy thing. You know, we, we're like, we streamed miles of Gotham City data off the hard drive in order to be able, you know, at the highest speed of the vehicle moving. We did it years before, before grant that daughter we're doing, you know? And, um, but we were, we developed it for two and a half years. And year one, we're like, yay, and then, yeah, we finally got to play. We're like, oh, this is awesome, but honestly, by the end, I went to GDC or, or no, was E3 at the time. I went to E3. I saw my game on a screen alongside four of the games that acclaimed studio we're bringing. My game didn't look real to me. So you do get burnout when you're making a game and it takes too long. Oh, yeah. So, so fair enough. That could be a future, we can get a future topic. I've got all sorts of great burnout stories. I've burned out many times, my career.

Unknown: Yeah.

Guest: You know, you know, so, you know, you got to be burning out in the game industry.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. I'm going to work out. Yeah. How to complete it?

Guest: But that's part of people who would be sympathetic. No. No. Isn't that what everyone's going to participate in now? So, because you get bored of what you're building, like a plan to build this, and I'm almost done building it. And, but I'm so bored of looking at it. You know what'd be cool? If Robin was able to do X, Y, and Z, and the back row could, you know, all of a sudden, we need that. And if the six months of development, it's like, no, god, no, put it in a box, you know.

Jon Radoff: It's a box, you know, future creep. All right. I'm going to, I'm going to tee up one more topic on our last few minutes here. And, and maybe it's one that'll even continue into next time. I'm going to try to bring together a few different things we talked about.

Unknown: So much earlier on, we were talking about AI and decentralizing it,

Jon Radoff: moving it to individual devices. Why? Because it could save the cost of cloud computing, run it on the game locally. We talked about this whole new market of distributed computation, to lower the cost of cloud computing. But we also brought up topics like user acquisition, and how expensive that can be to drive games. So there's all these cost centers in games. We haven't talked about game engines. Like, game engines have kind of been, you know, we're in the new era of the game engine war. And I guess what, you know, first of all, like, I, I, I love, my most of my experiences with Unity on Unreal. And I love both of them for different reasons, frankly. But Gado has been getting a lot of action the last couple of years, because that's the open source engine. And I guess the question is, that can be like the next blender. Is that going to, is that going to start displacing the more commercial engines as people just get the open source alternative? What does everyone think? That's a narrative that exists. I'm not sure. I have an opinion. I have seen a lot of people moving to Gado though. So there is a, there is something happening there.

Guest: You know, I was around when Renderware arrived. You know, you know, we were when Renderware first came, people like middleware were never catch on. They don't never catch on. You know, and Renderware were like, oh, it's not quite catchy on as fast as our finances needed to be. So let's make our own game. And then they made a fantastic game with their own technology. And everybody stepped up and went, oh, this actually is interesting. Because everybody was building their own engine. Everybody, you know, and, you know, so I'm a, I'm a big believer in middleware adoption. We are using Unity for Battle Rise. We're using Unreal for our other title, which is called Armor X. And, you know, so we were using Unity. And then we were using it when that new guy came in and shook everything up and said, everyone's going to have to pay a lot more for it now. And everybody went, if you will go over to Unreal, you know, so. And then the guy got fired.

Unknown: But, you know, I'm a huge.

Guest: But I haven't seen, I haven't used the, the Gato one. I've been waiting for Gato, but, you know, I haven't used it yet.

Unknown: Maybe the interesting.

Guest: I love that. I mean, Gato's pretty great. I've looked at it pretty closely for my own projects. And I think it's pretty robust. Like, I don't think I could make a convincing argument to build a, I guess, you know, I guess I want to say, there are a lot of different scales of games, right? And I tend to work on what I would call skyscraper games, you know, very large teams, very large outlets. And I don't think Gato is necessarily ready for prime time. I don't know anybody that's building a skyscraper game that's using Gato, which does, which is for those of you that out there that are big Gato fans, that's not a slide on Gato like it might just be, it hasn't had it's chance yet, right? But like, you know, it looks super acceptable. And I bet a lot of people are going to, in the very near future, and some people already have, you know, make their, you know, first indie game, you know, even their breakthrough game in that engine. Like, I think it's a, I think it's a credible, credible game engine to be building your, your, your indie title, right? And it may have more potential behind it, right?

Jon Radoff: I mean, commercial games, I mean, games that have made decent amount of money have shipped off like RPG maker or game. Yeah. So of course, Gato is perfectly fine for many, many types of games that we want to build. And it's only going to have more and more capabilities over time. And if you are a C sharp programmer, which you are, if you've been doing Unity, then you have a really short path into Gato. So kind of easy onboarding process for you there. So definitely worth checking out. It's, it's, I'll just, we haven't announced anything or made decisions on this yet, because we've got a million priorities at, at beamable. But like Gato would probably be the next SDK that we would support after the midi.

Guest: I'm a little, but having, having beamable behind Gato would just be, you know, that much more what I was saying. Like the things that keep me back from Gato are just the, the plumbing, right? You know, I have to, you know, I have to, you know, writing the gameplay logic is not the hard part. The hard part is all the stuff that beamable hours. I'm talking about why you operate. Right. It's a really nice look. I almost, what?

Jon Radoff: I almost want to say if we get a thousand shares on this video, then beamable. They will set it up. Yeah. SDK.

Guest: It just did a quick search and there's a really nice looking game. I love skyscraper, it is called Halls of Torment, a belt-on-go-dow. It looks, it looks nice. Oh, I'm in some, one of my mini YouTube channels. I get a YouTube channel of video every few weeks. Maybe it's once a month, it's like five great games that ship this month on Gato. Right. You know, and there's some, some real baller games that are coming out on it. You know, but there's, you know, between looking good and actually operationalizing a game is, you know, there's miles between those things, right? So just because the game looks good or is fun is important to have me those things. But, you know, is it a successful business? Unfortunately, is also a thing. Or maybe fortunately, because that's how I, you know, pay for my rent.

Unknown: But,

Jon Radoff: Marty makes a great point here about, Marty makes a great point here about WebGPU. Like, I'm a big fan of WebGPU. It's not quite all the way there yet, particularly in terms of game engines just being able to just a great way. But it is a really great technology that could completely reshape distribution models. This is something I've written about on my blog. We'll have to talk about that next week. We should actually return to the game engine conversation because what could be more quarter game developers than the actual engine you build your game on in WebGPU. And we could even talk about UEFN and Roblox and all the other ways you could be building games. Great topic for next week. But we've used up an hour and this is an hour show. And here's an exciting metric that I can share. We hit peak viewers of 105. So that's a little bit higher than last time. Yeah, we probably had a few hundred come on through. So really grateful to everybody who decided it was worth anywhere from a few seconds to an hour of your day to join us and be part of this conversation. Next time I'd love to invite you to join the stage too. Like, let us know, let us know. Let me know, let Paul know that you'd love to join in. That's what Matt did this week and Matt, you're welcome back here any time to talk with us about this stuff. And we'd love to welcome you from the audience as well. But this is this is what it's all about talking about game development, foregame developers, the craft, the science, the art of it. Just super happy that we were able to pull this off again. We'll return every week. One PM Eastern time on Thursdays is when we're going to talk about all this stuff. And it sounds like we'll be covering a little bit more game engine conversation. Maybe some WebGPU next week. And whatever the latest AI. We'll mention that too for sure. But thanks everybody. Thanks Paul, thanks Matt, thanks Oscar for joining in on this.

Guest: Thanks. Thank you everybody. Appreciate it. Great to join you guys. Dead piece.