Wolverine lifts PS5, but Xbox struggles despite Gears of War launch

0:00Jenna ‘Jennisary’: This week we talk to video game legend Bing Gordon about his new book, US data leader Matt Piscatella chats GTA, consoles and the state of the games industry, and we find out about making games better for blind people.

0:14Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Hello and welcome to The Game Business Show. So, I came across this saying a few months ago, which is if you're not paying for it, then you're not the customer, you're the product. And it's sort of in reference to social media and media, right? Ultimately, a lot of modern media is about traffic. It's about attracting as many people as possible to reading this article, watching this video, listening to this podcast, all so they can deliver for their advertisers. The advertiser is the customer, not the reader. So I kind of really love this movement we're seeing towards media charging the reader or the viewer, whether it's via Substack or Patreon or whatever.

0:48Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I think that's good because then suddenly the onus is on these writers and creators to produce stuff for the audience primarily and not worry too much about having to have a click baity headline or write something that's a bit sensational or misleading just to get a click and that's kind of what we're about the game business we do have advertisers but we limit it and we really want it to be about you that's that's what we're all about and that's why a year ago we introduced a paid tier to the game business show which includes an extra podcast a newsletter every week plus access to our sort of live events for no additional cost now we're sort of doing okay when it comes to paying subscribers but it has stalled in recent weeks so if you're a fan of us if you like the show, please do think about becoming a paid subscriber.

1:28Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I know that that's a lot to ask of people right now. And a lot of people, it's just not realistic. And that's actually why we do our main shows for free, because we're trying to help the business and not a lot of people can afford things right now. So that's why our shows are free. Now, if you're a part of a company, this is expensable in a lot of places. And actually, if you're a leader in one of these companies, you can buy group subscriptions and share it with some of the team at discount. And you can find out more about all our subscription options at thegamebusiness.com. Of course, we do have sponsorship options as well.

1:56Jenna ‘Jennisary’: That's not really my side of things. George Corner on my team handles that. We only allow one an episode. There isn't one in this episode. There isn't one in the next episode. So hit up George on georgeatthegamebusiness.com if you're interested. Now, before I dive into this week's episode, just a reminder that the Game Business Marketing Awards is a thing we're doing. You can submit your entry to the awards via our website right now, and there's links to doing so in the email. and also there's some more details on what it's all about we just want to celebrate cool marketing campaigns i used to do a lot on mcv when i used to work at mcv magazine but we don't really talk about it these days since the end of retail and i thought it'd be cool there's been some interesting campaigns this year right now this episode and we've got a bunch of stuff going in it we've got interviews with bin gordon matt piscatella and jenna and we're going to begin by talking about bin gordon the vc and former chief creative officer at electronic arts has written a new book with his daughter, Chloe.

2:49Jenna ‘Jennisary’: The book is called Everybody Wins. It is out this week. And I had a chance to chat with Bing about it. The interview was long. It was well over an hour. And we will release the full thing. Don't worry. However, as the book is out this week, I thought I'd best share some of the interview with you today. I asked Bing, what is this book about? What can we learn from it? What can we expect from it? And this is what he said.

3:10Bing Gordon: I figure I've done probably maybe 40 ,000 notes-giving sessions in my business career, and a lot of the same themes come up. So the book is organized around themes. So Everybody Wins is the title of the book, and that's one of the themes that it turns out most people are not motivated by competition. They're motivated by cooperation. Didier Sports, for example, with Madden, we thought it was all about, you know, I'm better than you are and I can prove it, which is a tagline once upon a time. And then we found out when we started getting older people and more emotionally sensitive people into the games business, that for most people, losing has a lot more emotional weight than winning.

4:00Bing Gordon: My first example of an everybody wins game was in football. So we'd build a football game to basically prove who could win. and that's a teenage boy thing but your teenage boys when they lose they go yeah now i'm gonna get even i'm gonna man up but a bunch of people when they lose awards with friends player when they lose just like real life and they stop playing so one of the lessons in a big arcade football game was yeah i just scored a touchdown but you can come up and punch me out and get away with it because there were, you know, there were no penalties. So we could both win on the same play.

4:44Bing Gordon: I get the points and you get the emotional satisfaction of wiping me out. And so there's this whole notion of, I think career scores are that kind of thing. So in Fortnite, you can finish 99th and still win some points. So I mean, that's, I find an awful lot of times when I'm giving notes, I start out trying to take it back to consumer behavior you know so often people uh when they're designing or they're strategizing they do it in a vacuum and i try to get them to tie it back into what they would actually do with their mom or their brother or their kid in real life so everybody everybody wins is another idea called uh win fast win first we learned that in the mobile business where you You got to get somebody to level up a few times in the first session or they won't come back.

5:37Bing Gordon: We also learned that in Madden football, there was a year where we were competing with a Sony game. And at one point, I think Chip Lang, who was a young prodigy in EA Sports Marketing, said, have you actually counted the number of seconds it takes to run a first play in Madden? And I go, what do you mean? He goes, well, just try, put a stopwatch on it. We realized that people get the game, they would unrack the shrink wrap, they'd install the game, and then they'd look at nothing but menus for a couple of minutes. And we realized again and again and again that in life, as in games, most people want to front load a sense of victory.

6:25Bing Gordon: They want to get a sense of confidence to build resilience before failure. So that's a book I found myself taking a collection of in-person notes and speeches that I've done and tried to figure out how to make it into a single artifact that people could consume that I could hand out. As I said before, I'm kind of a fanboy of authors. And there was a time in life where I thought that's what I wanted to do is be a writer. and then as a broke kid I finally made enough money to afford some time off and a typewriter and I kept dithering and dithering and dithering and after about a week of that I thought you know I forgot writing is really painful and writing is right writing is really painful and so much easier to create content in an interview format and then get a transcript and then edit it so that that first draft creation is so painful, which is another interesting thing about AI.

7:28Bing Gordon: AI is in the business of much easier creation of shitty first drafts. And creating a shitty first draft as a writer is really hard, especially if you're self-critical.

7:42Jenna ‘Jennisary’: What do you think is one of the key takeaways from it? Do you think there's like an overreaching sort of...

7:47Bing Gordon: Yes, for different customers. I think it's for people who have gamers in their lives they don't understand. This gamification is a high life skill applied everywhere. And, hey, moms, if your child is off gaming when they should be doing homework, think about that as a parental life-enhancing moment and understand how what they're doing connects to real life one way or another. I think it's for game designers. I hope people who are worried about employment in the game industry realize that gamification broadly is an enormous growth business. and you know the companies that I work with in education and medicine and health and fitness in commerce in agentic design all wish that they had game makers on the team and I used to tell companies back in the other 2000s.

9:00Bing Gordon: If you don't have somebody in the executive suite who grew up playing Nintendo, you're probably not as good with consumers as you think you are. And I think that's still the case. I think that people who channeled game-making lessons are more valuable than they think. And so that's kind of an unlock. It's the glorification of game-making skills and how it can be applied everywhere. And so many people think about games as this narrow lane, as movies is a narrow lane. So gamification is to video games as storytelling is to books or storytelling is to movies. and storytelling turns out to be a wildly valuable skill.

9:55Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Thank you to Bing there. Everybody Wings by Bing Gordon and Chloe Gordon is out this week. Now, on to my favourite topic, which is video game sales. The US September games data has come in from Sakana and it was a big month for video games. There were lots and lots and lots of new releases and there were some really positive numbers in there and some negative ones too. the ps5 sales spiked a little bit on the release of marvel's wolverine and xbox sales were down switch sales were down um there were lots of new games in the charts including the likes of onimusha and fire emblem and blood of the dawn walker and surprisingly halloween and to talk me through the numbers but also what we're expecting around the launch of gta now they're a little bit closer to release i've invited to khan as games chief matt piscatella back on the show matt is of of course, a regular, and I know that you all love him.

10:44Jenna ‘Jennisary’: And so here he is. Hello, Matt. Welcome to the show.

10:48Bing Gordon: Hello. It's good to talk to you again. I don't know if you've noticed, but the business is a little crazy at the moment.

10:56Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Oh, it's quite calm. I don't notice anything. Yeah. Yeah. Oddly, just before this call, I had a chat with Sean Layden and we were talking about how this period of utter, we've just gone through Bioware and just gone through all these sort of quite shocking stories. And then I think everyone's looking at GTA playing, please save us. No pressure, but please save us. Well, I mean, I've just had this Sakana press release coming. Apparently one in three US console and PC gamers plan to buy GTA 6, which confused me because I'm not quite sure what the other two are planning to buy. But that sounds like a lot.

11:32Bing Gordon: It is a lot. First off, though, congratulations. You've been on a hell of a run with guests and with, you know, your appearances in person, in places. I don't know what happened this week, but it's been really great watching everything you've been doing these last few months here. So just congratulations on everything with the show. And my other question for you, that wasn't a question. This is my question. In all of your experiences and all of the time you've been doing this, has anyone ever worn a suit better than Sean Layden? That man can wear a suit. That is like, he is clean every time I've ever seen him in person.

12:10Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Well, oddly, the interview I just did with him was wearing an orange t-shirt and a baseball cap. And I was like, I like this version of Sean as well. But he still pulled it off.

12:18Bing Gordon: The guy's got swag, man. I love that. But yeah, we had to get in on the action of all the Grand Theft Auto fun when it comes to public press releases. I don't know if you saw the other one floating around yesterday about that work tracking company saying they've seen this huge increase in the number of plans. work absences for the day we're gonna see just a whole bucket of press releases come out but yeah ours was around purchase intent in the u.s uh it is at a record high for grand theft auto 6 because of course it is uh you know it's rare to see purchase intent for any game you know exceed the mid teens uh this thing is you know on a whole nother level of course it is and and of course purchase intent is just a vibe check at a certain point in time uh based on what players are feeling and that can always change based on marketing or reviews or influence or whatever.

13:13Bing Gordon: But, you know, coming into this launch, absolutely off the charts in terms of historical intent among those people who play on PC and console.

13:22Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Now, I've read some of your comments, so I kind of know what I expect you're going to say here, but what are you advising companies to do? Are you saying, like, don't bother? Don't put your game out anywhere near this thing? Or are you saying, hang on, there's, you know, there's 60, 70 % of players actually who aren't necessarily looking to get GTA?

13:42Bing Gordon: Well, no one asked me before they had moved all of their games. Everyone just got out of the way of this game, out of, you know, I'm sure it's well thought out and planned and considered very carefully. But really, at its core, I think it's more fear than anything. um and in that respect like everyone's moved their games into the same windows that have become more competitive on their own so by trying to get out of the way of grand theft auto they've just gotten into the way of several other titles that are coming out um like when you look at the september uh sales charts or even release charts like that was just such a crammed month of releases october was also pretty tight it's loosened up now of course because now everyone's moved out of this window so what what they've left is this huge open space in november for grand theft auto 6 legend of zelda ocarina of time remake and world of warcraft forever and those three things which are you know on different platforms entirely like now they just have this window which yeah cool i guess i mean but really like if you have a cozy sim or you know you have a first person shooter is grand theft auto 6 really your direct competition or is Fortnite still your competition?

15:01Bing Gordon: I don't know. I get it, but I think it's been more irrational than rational, but people disagree.

15:08Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Interesting. I had Call of Duty on the show recently, and they talked about, you know, with Call of Duty, a lot of the things, it's about people hanging out and playing together online, and GTA 6 isn't about that. GTA 9's about that, but GTA 6 isn't about that. And so they sort of see themselves playing a different role. But, and by the way, Zelda and GTA are now called the Ocarina of Crime. That's the...

15:26Bing Gordon: Okay, is that it? Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's actually pretty good. All right. That's fine.

15:30Jenna ‘Jennisary’: But I think a lot of it's down to coverage. And I don't know how important it is these days, but I do know that, like, what's left of the press, it's just going to be, you know, you're putting out press releases about GTAs, because everyone's talking about GTA and everything. The BBC interviewed me recently, and they were doing some preparation for a load of coverage they're doing around GTA, and it's the entertainment team, and they said it's all GTA for the next few weeks. So I think there's probably an element of, you know, you're going to struggle for coverage, but I think certain games won't.

15:57Jenna ‘Jennisary’: And I think that's, you know, I think that's what you're basically saying. You know, if you're different, you're gonna, you're gonna still find those groups of people. You know, the RPG specialist websites aren't writing about GTA. The Nintendo websites aren't writing about GTA. Do you remember the Red Dead Redemption launch? Were you at Warner at the time? I can't remember where you were, but the impact it had on like Alan Wake and all that kind of stuff. I think ever since then, people have been quite terrified of Rockstar and what happens if you go too close

16:20Bing Gordon: to it um fly too close to that sun correlation causation i don't know um certain games just don't have the mass market appeal of others anyways we could go into whole rabbit holes about that i mean i'm just i've always been after 20 years of over 20 years now looking at this stuff uh there's a lot of audience that has a lot of different tastes and and wants and needs and you know we're not a monoculture in gaming haven't been in a long time there's opportunity for games to find audiences it's very difficult it's getting harder all the time um you know but i think for the the vast majority of games grand theft auto is not your competition it's still fortnite minecraft roblox and that's never going to alleviate anytime soon so i i don't know but you know people have their own takes on all this stuff and i get it

17:11Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Well, this is obviously the question nobody has answers to is, will GTA 6 bolster console sales beyond launch? Will it lift the market for everyone and boost sales of other games? Or will it just suck all the oxygen out of the room? Will lapsed players or even new players come in for GTA 6 and stick around and play more games or just drop out at that point? These are all questions we don't have answers to, but do you have a best guess?

17:35Bing Gordon: Yeah, so, I mean, you can look historically, right? if you look at 2013 which was forever ago uh but when grand theft auto 5 launched there was a moderate bump to hardware sales it wasn't earth shattering or massive it was it was moderate you know teens bump over baseline they had some people showing up that haven't hadn't invested in playstation 3 or 360 at the time um so you know you look at that go okay well maybe we get a moderate bump this time. The challenge now is, of course, you know, back then you could walk into a store and pick up a bundle for cheap, and now you've got to pay six, seven hundred dollars for a new box, and then you got to pay, you know, eighty or a hundred dollars for the game.

18:21Bing Gordon: So, the costs are far different than they used to be, and back in the day, in 2013, you didn't have the big live service games you didn't have the competition from mobile like you do now for attention and all of these other areas where people are focusing so maybe it's less so you know we had that reveal right the netflix reveal and you know we saw a moderate bump on playstation in the u.s hardware unit sales according to sercona data around that time it was the same time nba 2k was doing some stuff so it's kind of hard to parse out exactly what percentage of any lift is from one game or another if there's competing games out there but at the same time that happened on playstation xbox sales fell so do people not know the games coming out on xbox is x are xbox's bigger problems kind of dwarfing uh potential incremental demand because of gta like that's we don't know like those are questions we also don't know the answer to you but you know generally i think you know we're going to see a moderate increase but because of the price points because the availability, because of how different the market is now than it was back in the day, there certainly is more uncertainty.

19:32Bing Gordon: I think that's something you could say.

19:34Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Well, yes, certainly more. Or a thing with GTA 5, because I went, obviously, this is about a year ago when GTA was coming out last year, and I was looking at, oh, what could it do? I think it was GTA 5. GTA 5 was the second GTA on that platform, right? So GTA 4 was the first on PS3 and 360. So if there's going to be a GTA which drove users to a console, the second one might have some impact, but it would be the first one. But even that was hard for me to work out, looking back at that. Because now we're going back nearly 20 years, and you're sort of getting to a point where you're going, it's a completely different ecosystem.

20:07Jenna ‘Jennisary’: And GTA is obviously a bigger beast today than it was in that time. And obviously, there's been this build-up and hype. That's what I mean. We don't know. I think there's a lot of anticipation, a lot of waiting for it. We haven't had a new GTA on a console, since, well, two generations ago. So it's mad to think, really.

20:26Bing Gordon: And Ajit, in Grand Theft Auto V, it's been a best-selling game for 13, now 14 straight years in the U.S. Online had the third most players in the U.S. on both PlayStation and Xbox last year. So, like, the property hasn't gone anywhere. So the question to me is, like, okay, Grand Theft Auto VI launches. Does it have the biggest two weeks in gaming history and then completely fall off because, you know, there's no online component or recurring component? Or does that pull in more people over time?

20:57Jenna ‘Jennisary’: And if it does fall off, do those people, like, I'm done now, put their console back under the TV? Or do they, you know, play James Bond or Call of Duty?

21:05Bing Gordon: Or do they start up online, right? Like, do they start playing Grand Theft Auto online and they start building shark dollars or whatever?

21:11Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I think the work for the data analysts such as yourself will really begin after November 19th. Well, I mean, talk about Xbox. It really, so same thing happened in the UK, by the way. So I know the difference in the UK and the US numbers for September was that the data window is different, by the way. That's the other thing. But PlayStation 5 did pretty well. Nintendo Switch 2 did pretty well in the UK, but not so well in the US. I know the price rises around that point. But with Xbox, I was surprised at how much it was down, both the US and the UK, because that's the Xbox's strongest markets, those two.

21:45Jenna ‘Jennisary’: and so I don't know but I did wonder if there was another reason why those numbers might be the way they are outside of the fact that it's just been a bit of a brutal time for consoles in

21:54Bing Gordon: general I mean it's just it seems to be just on another level with Xbox and everything they're doing all of the new programs they're putting into place at least in the sales and engagement data that I look at I'm not seeing that have any positive impact like the disk to digital program hasn't changed their sales of new physical software trend at all. No matter what they do in terms of the console side, saying like Gears is going to be exclusive, that hasn't made any difference in terms of the hardware trend. In fact, like the hardware trend keeps getting worse. You know, they've lost some distribution in the US.

22:32Bing Gordon: So like, it just seems like everything they're doing is not having a positive impact. And now, you know, they took Call of Duty out of Game Pass on day one. And, you know, in the engagement data I'm looking at through our player engagement tracker, I mean, basically you just, you know, you lost a ton of engagement on Xbox because it's no longer on Game Pass Day 1 and you got no benefit. Like, it's just, I don't know what they do. It's just, it's really hard to find any signs of positivity or hope on that platform right now.

23:06Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Gears of War, obviously half a billion dollars it cost to make that game. So I'm sitting there going, Did it do anything? In the UK, because they got their hardware data in, Xbox was down 2 % over September and 22 % down over October last year. That's the Xbox hardware sales. In the month, they finally released an exclusive Xbox game. I don't know where the engagement numbers, I don't know how many more people turned on their Xboxes or something. In terms of hardware sales, not only did it not move the needle, the needle went down. So you just feel like the momentum's so against that it's almost like they're trying to push a bolt uphill and they just can't do it.

23:41Jenna ‘Jennisary’: maybe for the next generation. I don't know.

23:43Bing Gordon: Yeah, the$12 to$1 ,800 Xbox console.

23:49Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Yes, yes.

23:50Bing Gordon: I don't know. I don't know what you do. They're still the biggest publisher around. Oh, of course. But for how long? Like, I don't know. Everything they're doing seems to be, you know, I mean, it's getting Twitter likes from the most passionate part of their fan base. But other than that, in terms of the actual results,

24:10Jenna ‘Jennisary’: i'm not seeing anything right now yeah and i'm looking really hard and you know gears is

24:15Bing Gordon: beautiful what a it is a gorgeous game i know that is a gears ass gears of war game and it looks great uh but yeah you kill the you know you make it exclusive you kind of chop the legs out from under its potential as an individual title in order to try to boost your platform and that i don't know at least in the short term it hasn't made a difference i'll be honest one of the key

24:37Jenna ‘Jennisary’: things about Xbox have always said and I don't mean this like they put out lots of good games they've not put out a lot of great games you know and this year I think Gears this is what I'm reading is being as a great game I think Modern Warfare 4 by the sounds of it is a significant improvement on on where we were last year World of Warcraft forever from people in the beta telling me that this is a pretty special thing so it certainly feels like Microsoft anyway Xbox as a sort of a whole as a publisher are getting there with the quality of the games they are obviously the same old franchises which um i wonder if that's part of the problem but that's always been the key thing for me you can we can talk about business models we can talk about um all that kind of stuff but the key element in video games as we know is the game's got to be you've got to do something you've got to create a strafselnick whenever i asked him like what's your secret he goes you make hit games like it's the board it's a really really dull answer but xbox hasn't made many hit games and i don't know i was quite pleased to see that these they're getting some good review scores and some good ratings from fans as well but i'm not seeing anything in the numbers as of yet.

25:35Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I guess it's a long-term play what they're going through. So go on, you say what you're going to say.

25:41Bing Gordon: No, it just reminded me of the mission statement when I first joined Activision in 2005. It was, we make great games that sell. And then later on, they turned it into this really long, convoluted engagements and delights and all this stuff. But really, like, ultimately, yeah, like, those very basic statements still tend to work out. But anyways, go ahead.

26:01Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Well, I was going to ask if there's any early indicators around Call of Duty, because the only indicator I've got is I've got the physical weekly sales for the UK, and it was basically the same as last year. Last year, as we know, was a disaster. Switch 2 version didn't do much at all in the UK. In fact, Final Fantasy Resonance, is that the new Final Fantasy game? Sold more copies on Switch 2 than Call of Duty did. So that didn't seem to do anything. But I don't know if you saw any early indicators.

26:27Bing Gordon: I was just looking at this this morning. We have our player engagement tracker, which, We have a large panel of players, and we snapshot what they're doing every few minutes and then aggregate all that information to see what they're playing for how long and where. Anyways, I was comparing the launch window, the public launch window, the full launch window, not the early access or whatever. But like, hey, here's the games available to everybody year on year. And so last year, we had, with the Game Pass Day 1 launch, according to our worldwide engagement tracker data for Xbox, we had about 28 % of players last year on Xbox who turned on their Xbox on that day and played Call of Duty.

27:10Bing Gordon: So good chunk, right? This year, on the same day the game was fully released, that was 14%. So that engagement rate was cut in half because the game wasn't available on Game Pass on day one. now on sony it was it was very similar a point different um just slightly lower than last year which makes sense you know it wasn't on again it wasn't on ps plus day one last year it's not this year relatively similar engagement uh and pc was actually boosted a little bit in terms of our steam tracking i think it was somewhere you know um on a much lower scale because pc is a whole different thing when it comes to engagement rates but we did see the increase in engagement on steam so So ultimately, you know, the PlayStation platform in terms of the percentage of PlayStation players playing Call of Duty on launch day was higher than it was on Xbox in terms of the percentage of Xbox active players that day playing Call of Duty.

28:09Bing Gordon: So like PlayStation's returned to become like this lead platform for Call of Duty because they've pulled it off at Game Pass. and you know last year there was all that conversation you remember it like oh you know we lost 300 million or some crazy number uh because the game was on game pass on day one and you do the backwards math on that and you go okay what they probably did was take the total number of people who played on game pass and multiplied it by the cost of the game like piracy math which whatever but in any case like we've seen this dramatic downtick in terms of the daily engagement rate on Call of Duty or on your own Xbox because it isn't on the subscription service.

28:49Bing Gordon: So we didn't see a whole bunch of Xbox players buy the game this year because it wasn't available. Maybe there's a gap there because, you know, still 14 % of people played, so you had some gap there. But it wasn't like they maintained the player count. All the people who played on Game Pass last year went out and bought it this year. That just doesn't look like that was the case at all so what did it buy you like all this really does is in in my opinion looking at this is like you've hurt the the value proposition of the one key differentiator of your platform which was game pass so you've you've removed some of that value proposition there you haven't improved the value proposition anywhere else and you've raised the price significantly a couple of times like that's a bad combination, especially leading into a holiday.

29:44Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Is it an indication that more people might have bought it this year, or is it a bit too early for that kind of...

29:48Bing Gordon: We'll have to see. I don't have that data in yet.

29:51Jenna ‘Jennisary’: So we had Call of Duty on the show, and actually when I asked them what went wrong last year, they said the game wasn't good enough. That was their... Well, not only good enough, it just didn't connect. That's probably the more accurate sentiment. That was their analysis of it. It just wasn't what fans wanted. And when I asked them, and it was quite a good answer, actually, when I asked them what would success look like this year, and they said, look, it might not be, you know, they didn't say it exactly like this, but the numbers might be whatever the numbers are. But really what we've got to do is put out a good call of duty so that the fans aren't disappointed in us anymore.

30:19Jenna ‘Jennisary’: And then we can rebuild that trust and regain that enthusiasm and build over time. And obviously they're talking about Modern Warfare 4 being an end of an era and they're doing new things for the future ones. And I thought it was quite good answers to that sort of a question. I hope that that does the case. But I think I agreed with you when you said it earlier in the year. to us, I think there's bigger problems at Call of Duty. There isn't Game Pass. And, you know, you can see that in the drop in engagement figures, the amount of players they're getting in a month to month basis. You can see that it's losing momentum.

30:50Jenna ‘Jennisary’: It's still obviously a juggernaut.

30:52Bing Gordon: Oh, absolutely. But like the bouncing around between the studios, kind of the, the, oh that, you know, the other studio didn't do it right. We're doing it right this time and boots on the ground and oh, we're getting boots off the ground, like in this back and forth over the years and kind of sniping at itself as a franchise like and and look man i got like a personal interest in this like i was at activision the day we launched call of duty 2 on xbox and like saw the numbers coming in and went oh my god this is like you know the the 76 or whatever attach rate we had on that so yeah like i've got this game in my heart and when i hear like that kind of thing's happening or like oh there's a call of duty tax from journalists on the reviews or whatever.

31:34Bing Gordon: It's like...

31:35Jenna ‘Jennisary’: That was in my interview, yeah.

31:37Bing Gordon: Come on, man. Like, what are we doing here?

31:40Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I did feel a little bit... I did surprised about that because I basically... I spoke to a journalist who... I said they don't cover Call of Duty as much as they used to. And I asked this, you know, it was Andy Robinson of EGC. And he said, well, we do cover it, he said, but you know, we don't cover it as much as you used to because sort of influencers have been the domain of Call of Duty. You know, they've become such a dominant force in terms of sharing that news that Activision, I guess, have leaned into that and i brought that up in my interview and i wasn't having a go i was like is it that the plus space where you go now for that kind of thing and then they brought up this call of duty tax and i was like and then i looked back on it and actually call of duty review is generally pretty well like pretty well last year's didn't well last year's didn't as well as high as usual and the modern warfare no black ops what was the one is it seven seven yeah that that that didn't and then modern warfare three didn't so those sort of those sort of quick sequels that they did didn't do quite as well.

32:31Jenna ‘Jennisary’: But the ones I've beforehand didn't. I wasn't quite sure.

32:33Bing Gordon: This one's great. Like it's reviewing extremely well. People are really into it. It's just very strange.

32:40Jenna ‘Jennisary’: They seem to be like swinging from we're so back, we're so up. But anyway, hopefully, hopefully, you know, they've got a new plan. They've got a movie coming out and they say, we hope they do really well. But it's a bit early, I guess, to tell how this one does. So let's talk about Switch too quickly because we talked about how you didn't think necessarily that the Netflix reveal had a big impact on PlayStation 5. sales. Did you see anything on the Switch 2 sales around Ocarina? I'm guessing you didn't based on the Ocarina Direct they did based on the fact that Switch 2 sales were down in September.

33:09Bing Gordon: Yeah, nothing that jumped out at me. And of course, like when you're looking at like a weekly sales number or whatever, like it's very hard to kind of pick out the components of what would influence that, right? But nothing jumped out.

33:22Jenna ‘Jennisary’: As I asked the question, I realized it was kind of a stupid question because obviously they showed a new Switch 2 special edition that isn't out until November. Yeah. When that shows up, I'll see something. Yeah.

33:32Bing Gordon: Like when Marvel, Marvel Wolverine's PS5 showed up, like you see that in the sales, it pops like when a special edition shows up and people actually buy it. So and there people are going to buy the hell out of the Zelda one. And I'm sure on eBay, you'll be able to find one for four grand if you want.

33:49Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I bought a third Switch 2 off of that Zelda thing. I'm very much that target audience. I was disappointed to see the Switch 2 drop, mainly because it did quite well in the UK. So in the UK, it was up 17 % year on year in September over here. But at the same time, that should be a surprise to me, because I think the price rose from September 1st. So...

34:07Bing Gordon: And like, early on, early on in the Switch 2's life in the US, like, stock was never a problem. It was widely distributed. So like, we still have that elevated early... Yeah. Like, early run for Switch 2 we're comping against. Like, it's no longer the fastest selling console ever. I think it's, I don't know, number. I don't know. I don't even want to say it because then I'll see something on a message board. But it's no longer the fastest selling in the US. But it's still doing very well. But yeah, the comps are weird on Switch 2 because it's rare that such a successful device in its first year in market is widely available and doesn't have supply constraints or whatever.

34:45Bing Gordon: I'm not seeing anything to be concerned about in the Switch 2 numbers at all. And I'm sure it's going to pop with Zelda. uh but yeah the price increase took a pack it took effect what they did was pretty smart they dropped the world bundle and they went to a standalone skew maintained the price point so effectively on shelf there wasn't a significant price change but yeah it's less value in the box uh and so yeah that's going to have an impact especially in like a short-term window following

35:11Jenna ‘Jennisary’: that that implementation yeah i was i did wonder if um was there a new mario kart world bundle that showed up as well at the end. I wasn't sure if somebody was telling me about that.

35:21Bing Gordon: So I didn't see anything.

35:23Jenna ‘Jennisary’: No, maybe not. Well, September was an odd mix, I thought. There was a new IP. Like, War Dogs obviously took a lot of people by surprise. Blood of the Dawn Walk I did think was going to do well, and it did do well. But Halloween. What was that about? It's just, it was worldwide, by the way. It wasn't just in the US.

35:41Bing Gordon: Yeah. And across platform, like it wasn't even just a Steam thing. Like that was a,

35:45Jenna ‘Jennisary’: console thing too it just had a nice pop it was right in there in some on some platforms globally in the top five if there's one thing that took caught me off i didn't you know control resident and silent hill wasn't wasn't up there but then it was towards the end of the month that game but those games but yeah seeing halloween do so well uh i did wonder if i thought is there some sort of secret from it you know was it particularly incredible price but it was at a slightly budget

36:07Bing Gordon: price um but if you look at the whole list right you look at the top 10 list from the us where you have things like ace combat yeah don what you have yeah i mean the variety of like a bunch of new games moved into into september right because they wanted to get out of the window for gta like we're talking about earlier um but all of those games they were different like it wasn't all of the same game different genres different it was it was beautiful to see the variety of different types of experiences and all of them found audiences like that's what we should be focusing on like every big publisher's like no we're just going to do fewer bigger and to hell with like ea to hell with racing we're just going to make sports and and battlefield like man like there's so much opportunity there for these smaller ones if if you can control your costs which of course

36:57Jenna ‘Jennisary’: is the problem which is the big question which is ever which is honestly all we've been talking about now for 18 months is how can you make a game sell a million copies and that'd be fine you know but people are finding ways you know you go back to star wars zero company end of august you know okay it took a little longer to get to a million than some on a musha but it got there on a musha did very well blood the dawn walker did very well and again you say variety and actually fact going into the month where i did a little bit on the show i said the thing is people talk about september being highly competitive and congested but a lot of these games are targeting different groups i don't think fire emblem fortunes we fanatics are um are choosing that over war dogs yeah it's the secondary audience right so if you've got an audience of people who really want fortunes week they'll get it but if they if they're maybe also like western rpgs like the dawn walker maybe they're choosing one now and getting one later maybe but so secondary audiences i think primary audiences will go with the games they love maybe there's halloween and silent hill maybe control and wolverine this there's some sort of crossover in that sort of area but broadly speaking there's a lot of different stuff and i thought and i agree with you basically it's it And it was great to see so many of them do well.

38:03Jenna ‘Jennisary’: It wasn't like, you know, we thought maybe one might emerge as, well, one did emerge as the successor, but like one would particularly come out of it on top. Actually, lots of companies, I think, would have come out of September with a bit of a smile on their face.

38:13Bing Gordon: Yeah, it's encouraging in a market that's lacking encouraging things to see. But, you know, it also kind of showcases this shift that we're seeing away from the traditional big publishers towards, you know, the mid-tiers are, Well, now the big ones like a Capcom, I don't think it's a mid-tier anymore, but you know what I mean? Like these publishers that aren't the Ubisoft's EAs of the world because, you know, we're kind of seeing those types of companies going through all kinds of things, whether it's, yeah, EA, Ubisoft, now Warner Brothers is apparently going to be going through the ringer because of its acquisition.

38:54Bing Gordon: and there's opportunity there for, like you said, some of these smaller teams and smaller games to really thrive. And that is encouraging, although also depressing at the same time. Video games.

39:05Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Yeah, yeah. Well, so what you're talking about there is the big AAA companies like Microsoft. Microsoft and EA are the best two examples. They've done it recently where they're going, right, we're going to focus in on the big bets, right, the big plays. I'm not entirely sure focusing in on franchises that might be past their best is the ideal scenario, But I completely, much as I hated what happened to Bioware and Mass Effect, you go, look at EA, you look at, you know, EA Sports FC doesn't get out of bed for the sort of money that Mass Effect sort of would probably make them. And that is where they go, right, that's our bets.

39:34Jenna ‘Jennisary’: But that leaves all these other companies to go, OK, then we would get out of bed for that money, actually, quite happily. And then I think what I'm, I've talked about it on the show a couple of times, I'd be really fascinated to see if companies like EA and like Microsoft go, well, maybe we should open our brands up for licensing opportunities. Maybe we should, you know, because a lot of these smaller AA studios, AA budgets, I don't think they're AA quality necessarily. These sort of smaller teams that go, you know what, we're struggling for attention. We're struggling for cut through. And our game is quite similar to Dead Space, right?

40:05Jenna ‘Jennisary’: And maybe what if we could, AEA, could we do a, we'll fund it. And could we have a, I always want, we had people like Velen Studios come on and talk about that. And I just think that'd be an interesting opportunity for those franchises that are dormant. Fans love them. And there's probably a lot of passionate game studios out there. They're independent. that would take that and probably do it working out ways to get those games out faster and on a cheaper budget but still delivering on the quality and um sorry i've gone off on one well no it's

40:31Bing Gordon: it's it's similar to like the disney model and how they shifted when they you know when they stopped doing things like disney infinity and started partnering with uh teams that wanted to make games and you know things like galactic racer um are the result of that reaching out they did to smaller teams and saying, hey, we have the IP, bring us your ideas. And we've seen some of the benefits of that. And so it would be beneficial. But with the big publishers, it's what? Every 10, 15 years we get this like, oh, we're going to do smaller, bigger bets. And then a few years later, it's like, oh, no, we're indie friendly now.

41:06Bing Gordon: We want to fund teams. And then a few years later, oh, we're going in bigger bets. It's like, golly, like this back and forth we've been doing for 20 years.

41:15Jenna ‘Jennisary’: It's very true. Let's talk about the number one game, Marvel's Wolverine. I know it's difficult to get a read without knowing what Sony was expecting, but it's bigger than Yotai, right? Smaller than Helldivers 2 for launch. Obviously, you've got the numbers. Were you sitting there thinking, hmm, when you saw that? Or were you... Do you think it did well?

41:33Bing Gordon: I think that's good. It sounded like, whoa, and it sounded like, hmm.

41:41Jenna ‘Jennisary’: That's going to make a really tough headline, Matt.

41:43Bing Gordon: yeah i mean if you look at you know if you look at the weekly sales cadence of things like accessories and hardware like the the wolverine uh dual sense was the best-selling accessory of the month um you know we tracked those by individual skew so that that wolverine controller best-selling accessory the bundle sold out uh there wasn't huge quantities but they sold it out and that really helped boost playstation 5 sales that particular week so in terms of like an old school here's an exclusive game and we're going to sell some consoles we're going to sell some accessories with it i think yeah i think it's about as good as you could hope for for an iep that you know isn't the level of a spider-man no i don't know i thought it was it was fine it

42:28Jenna ‘Jennisary’: was like yeah well good for them it didn't review as highly as it normally as you would expect from a sony first party so i guess yeah so um but i mean a lot of that's also like especially from

42:40Bing Gordon: like the influencer community was very mis-targeted and overblown on it. But of course it is, because that's just kind of what they do to drive that engagement, which is fine. But from a general player perspective, like it seemed to do the trick. Like if someone just wanted to run around and slash things and have a good time, you know, a popcorn movie video game. So yeah, sure. It's fine.

43:04Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I'm with you. When I'm so said to me, it just tells you where to go all the time. I'm like, oh, good. Okay. Good. It's like, yeah, great. Great. I could do with that, actually. Thank you. Thank you for holding my hand. I could just do with a... I could just tell... I did that with Spider-Man 2, to be honest. I just went, where do I need to go? Show me the direction. Because I'm a 40-year-old and I don't have time to wander around aimlessly and look under every barrel.

43:26Bing Gordon: Yeah. Sometimes you want an Elden Ring and sometimes you're just like, I just want to go hit this button a lot and drink this half bottle of wine and try to forget. In that respect, hey, it worked out pretty well. What happened to subscriptions?

43:41Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Yeah. Every month I'm getting used to these subscriptions are up, subscriptions are up, but they weren't. In September, they're just down 5 % first drop in 18 months plus. What happened there?

43:53Bing Gordon: Yeah, the first year on your drop in a while. Tough to say. It was pretty broad in terms of the downtick in spend. okay so is this a you know um people adjusting their spend is it a you know waiting for certain things to happen is it some subscriptions that people started up a year ago they decided not to renew or something like is there's there some call of duty is not going to be on game pass day one impact like uh not super clear yet um we're going to need some more time to see the trends and see if it was a blip or something more. You know, consumer dollars are in a real pickle, especially in the U.S.

44:34Bing Gordon: at the moment, between all of those cost of living factors that are impacting everyone globally. And so we're starting to see consumers in the U.S. really focus more on essentials, shifting their dollars around things like, you know, if you look at the mobile numbers from Sensor Tower, they've been hit pretty hard, both from a combination of people changing spend but also because of those storefronts opening up and some dollars entering the ecosystems from outside the in-app purchase environment not my wheelhouse but that's what my friends over there tell me so like yeah and of course you know grant that auto and zelda are gonna you know make that problem disappear for a couple of months but what happens in january and february and i think that's when we're really gonna see things, where things are netted out, including subscription.

45:27Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I think it might take a little bit longer because actually February is the other month everyone's run away to from GTA. Fair enough. There's the people that move forwards and then there's the fable God of War, Tomb Raider, whatever, February, which also seems like a mess. And actually those do seem a little bit less variety there. There's a lot more crossover.

45:46Bing Gordon: Yeah, because what big AAA studio brings games up, right? The people bringing games up are the ones that are a little bit more agile and budget conscious, I guess.

45:56Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Yeah. I think we've gone through most of it. Is there any data point that you think that I'm not talking about or nobody's talking about and we definitely should be?

46:06Bing Gordon: Oh, my. Let me look at my notes here. I wrote some notes down. uh well okay the only other thing i thought we might get into is the whole decompiling recompiling jailbreaking i'm gonna talk about next week okay go on oh you're doing that next week okay well i'll let you get to it next week no no no no no no i'm interested in your take on it go on uh it is terrifying it is um very concerning uh i don't know how you stop it if you do um and what you know the average player like right now it's very much isolated to like the core group of sickos who are really into it but if that does break out in a mainstream way if people go well wait a minute why am i buying this game i can just play it in a browser through this vibe decompiled recompiled version of this game uh that could have pretty big implications that i don't think

47:01Jenna ‘Jennisary’: anyone's got their heads around yet it's an interesting question and so i have i have not to spoil next week's episode too much. I have been speaking to the anti-piracy groups in the industry a little bit. And they are being, some of them are being quite corporate with their answers, some of them being a little more candid. But it's weird. They're looking at that and going, that's a concern. But because the lid is on piracy in a way, right? It's happening. It happens. But since the R4 days, they've managed to keep a little lid on it. There seems to be an element of like, you know, people just aren't pirating, right?

47:31Jenna ‘Jennisary’: On a mass market scale. And what you're saying there is, what if they start doing that? But at the moment, they're not. And so I think that they're more their biggest issues of people like bot farming and all that kind of stuff is their sort of where their things are. They are concerned. What I'm trying to get a sense of if there's any panic coming from the platform holders, obviously, because the PS5 has been jailbroken now and I'm not surprised it's happened in an AI era. But what was interesting was one of the answers I got, oh God, I'm ruining next week's episode. Sorry, if you don't skip next week's episode, please.

48:00Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Don't do it. Do it next week. There's one of the answers around what AI might be doing to help combat it. But yes, it's an interesting topic. Because then Xbox announced Xbox Labs, which seem to be sort of them leaning into that rather than anything else.

48:15Bing Gordon: So, yeah, led by Scott. Yeah. Like Scott in the email. Oh, who's Scott? Okay. And I later found out who Scott was.

48:22Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I emailed them when they sent me it to me. They sent it to me like an early embargo version. And I said, great. Who's Scott? Yeah, Scott. Well, Scott's got it. Great.

48:31Bing Gordon: Thanks. Scott. Scott's on the case. Like, I'm like from Star Wars? at Star Trek? Is that... Oh, come on, Xbox. Just, like, come on.

48:40Jenna ‘Jennisary’: But what I liked about that is, look, I'm being mean. I think it's a cool thing they're trying to do, but I did think to myself, surely Xbox Labs, which is experimenting with AI tech, surely you already had a division that experimented with AI tech, and it's just another press release excuse. But I guess for them, any disruption in the market might be seen as an opportunity for them to find a place for them and platform-wise, which might be interesting for them. I'm intrigued. Last time you came on, you announced you were moving to this model where you had, the charts you were putting out had like, what's the word I'm trying to find?

49:14Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Projected volumes? Projected volumes in it. How's that gone? Have you had a few companies that are being a little bit more secretive of their data at the moment? That's the vibe I'm getting from any charts I'm receiving these days.

49:26Bing Gordon: Yeah, and it's global and it's the big publishers, the big traditional publishers that are moving to a fewer bigger model and are limiting their slate so they no longer really need the deep detailed benchmark looks because they're not, you know, they're playing in some very defined spaces, usually the ones they own. So, you know, it's happening here. It's happening in Europe. People are getting a little bit cagier about that stuff. Now, in terms of like what we're doing, I feel pretty good about it. I mean, anytime you project anything, you're going to have a range of error. your outputs could be dependent on the quality of your input.

50:03Bing Gordon: In video game projections in particular, there's a lot of art that goes with the science. No one's told me that the projections we're doing are shockingly wrong. So I take that as a positive. And I think relatively speaking in terms of the rankings, I think we're pretty close or as close as one can get. I know there's a lot of folks doing this kind of thing out there. Ampere is the most vocal, I think, with specific projection numbers out there. We're not going to do that. But in terms of the rank...

50:33Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I think this might be a linear.

50:34Bing Gordon: Oh, linear.

50:35Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

50:36Bing Gordon: But in terms of like that kind of thing, we're not going to do that. But in terms of like a projection, a relative rankings, it's going okay. It's going to get dicier over time as physical becomes less and less important as trying to find engagement to sales correlations becomes tougher to do. You know, it's just the nature of the beef with numbers. You know that.

50:59Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Yeah, it always drives me nuts, this industry, because we can never really... And I guess it's because we're such a disparate industry that does so many different things. We can't seem to align on certain... It's the same with the piracy thing. Again, I don't want to spoil next week's episode too much, but some of the anti-piracy people said to me, everyone's got slightly different... It's difficult to do certain things to combat piracy, because some publishers care more than others. I've got this thing with data in that, you know, in the movie industry, not only do we know how well films do with the box office, we also know how much it costs to make the film.

51:31Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I get it. It's weaponised by fanboys and idiots online that want to go, hey, your game didn't sell very well, like kind people like to do. But it also shows us all, oh, this is where we need to be looking. These are the budgets we need to be aiming for, for a title of this type. And it's so useful information, I think, for particularly this rising number of small and mid-tier game developers out there. well, maybe not rising, but increasingly important. And I don't know, I hate the fact that we're this secreted with our data.

52:02Bing Gordon: There's a lot of like, you know, we have a secret sauce. We don't want people to know about. There's also like, well, we want to protect the stock price, but also a lot of these companies are going private now. And, you know, they're just pulling back because they just don't have to, or they're not interested in the other data in the marketplace. And then you have, you know, the ESA, which hasn't really filled that particular role of trying to provide that level of guidance as they focus on their lobbying efforts. So, like, you know, the IDGA was doing some stuff around this a while, a long time ago.

52:34Bing Gordon: I don't know if they're still, you know, doing that kind of thing for helping folks around. But, yeah, it's way too secretive. There are lockdowns on every piece of information. like, you know, the reason, you know, we've never shared digital sales from our panels because, you know, we're not allowed to. It's just one of those things, right? So it would be great.

52:57Jenna ‘Jennisary’: It gets out there anyway. That's the thing is like, oh, we don't want to share it because blah, blah, blah, this will happen. I'm like, but then you get the projectionists out there, like the Alenias of the world, that are happy to share all of it. And all the Amperes that do it as well, but via me a lot of the time. And you can just get the information that way. And I'm sure it might not be completely accurate, might not be completely correct, but it's still the headlines are still happening i don't know i don't think it i don't think it's it's great i guess for the data companies gives you a reason to exist but um in a in a positive i mean you're sickan always did but like some of the some of the more um estimated ones but i i i

53:29Bing Gordon: don't know it frustrates me that's the funny thing though is like all the data that's public is usually estimated and so therefore by some measure in some increment incorrect just because range of error on projections and the data that's real is in public so like it's one of the chats like like i always feel like i have to be so cagey online i'm like well that's not quite how it is but i can't actually say it's 16 because you know then then i'm not saying anything to anyone soon after that um yeah yeah anyways it's it's a really kooky dumb business world that we're in here

54:07Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Years and years ago, Chitore Awata talked about doing the digital stuff. Because he was trying to reassure retail. He said, look, I'm going to share all the data with you so you can see and you can work out what to do with your business and how we can work together by showing you how many of our sales of box games are digital. And then Nintendo are the least open with that. And it was like, oh, that wasn't that intro anyway. Anyway, sorry, Matt. is my usual rant. I just find it hard. Oddly, since launching the game business, data is a lot more data out there, but I find it harder to actually work out.

54:41Jenna ‘Jennisary’: You know, I want to know how well certain types of third-party games are performing on Switch 2. Not because I want to stitch up Nintendo, but because I know that Nintendo are trying to push that. It'd be interesting to measure that and see what games are working, which ones aren't working, and where audiences are. I think that would be really useful for readers. But, um, uh, then... Who knows?

55:01Bing Gordon: Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, part of the reason I'm out there on social doing stuff is like, I want to try to bring some level of like, okay, you're on the wrong path here. This is the better track. But because I can't be specific with a lot of this stuff, you know.

55:20Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I get, I get, I did the same thing. I used to do it occasionally on X and I would sit there and go, well, you know, it's. That's worked out well for you sometimes I've seen. No, yeah. I mute conversations. Sometimes I post something and immediately mute it. It's just like, I don't want to know. But I don't... There's been a few times I've got the information wrong. But often it's when I get sent a report and they've put the data wrong in the report. And then I've gone, oh, that was okay. And then I get an email from them and then I have to go sheepishly. But now I just make sure anything that I say will be published on the game business now.

55:53Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I'm not putting it out on social media.

55:55Bing Gordon: Smart. I should think about that.

55:56Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Yeah, but a famous one was everyone was saying all of Horizon sales in Europe were basically the bundle and everyone's just getting a cheap PlayStation bundle and then nobody's actually buying Horizon. And I was like, well, I've got the bundle split here in front of me. And I know that, okay, the bundle has done well, but I can tell that that's not true. And so I'm trying to sit there, but I can't share that. It's not my data. So I'm sitting there and I'm trying to sort of, and they go, why won't you just tell us the numbers. But trust me, you're on the wrong path on that analysis. Well, he's partially on the wrong path.

56:30Jenna ‘Jennisary’: But anyway, sorry, I've gone off on one.

56:33Bing Gordon: It's nice to hear the similar kind of pain points from my own life because there are very few of us out here talking about this stuff, right? And so it's nice to know you're not alone in some of these things.

56:49Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Well, it's a pleasure having you on. I always love having you on. And I'm sure we're going to get a lot of angry fanboys about everything we just said. But to make it be known that we love all games consoles. And this all comes from a place of trying to help the market succeed.

57:05Bing Gordon: Yes. We want everyone to be successful and everyone to be employed and everyone to have the games they want to play and be happy. And any C-suite executive that wants to hit me up on LinkedIn about how purchase intent doesn't equate to sales, I know already you don't have to send me that DM. Thank you. I understand. And so I keep saying purchase 10 is a vibe check. So don't yell at me about where we rank your game on purchase 10 charts. Thank you very much. Okay. That saying that's, yeah.

57:33Jenna ‘Jennisary’: There's your caveat. There's your little, there's our terms and conditions at the end. And Matt, thank you so much for joining us. We're going to be, the data is going to be really followed, I think, over the next couple of months. So I'm sure we'll be talking against him. Right on, thank you. Right, thank you to Matt there. Now for one more thing. At Gamescom I met up with Jenna, who is a prominent video game accessibility expert and also a producer for live and interactive audio description at Descriptive Video Works, which is a subsidiary studio at Keywords. Now I spoke to Jenna about video game accessibility, in particular around blind and people with low visibility.

58:09Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Now I think it's a surprising conversation. I think it's an area where I imagine a lot of people think about, particularly when it comes to building their games. And so I'm going to share this with you now. Here is Jenna. Hello, Jenna. Welcome to the show. Thank you. You have quite a unique job, right? Tell us about it.

58:26Mat Piscatella: It's a little unconventional, yeah. So, I mean, in short, we help make video games more accessible for blind people. But in long, Descriptive Video Works, which is a keyword studio, helps add audio description, which is a narrator that talks between any of the existing dialogue to describe the visuals that are on screen. Most of what we do is for TV and film, but I am our resident expert on video games. Is there much demand for it? Are you getting an increase in it? Yes, actually, yes. I mean, technically the demand has always been there, because blind people have played video games for as long as video games have been a thing.

59:00Mat Piscatella: It's just, it's never been easier to be a blind gamer when the game itself isn't itself a barrier to playing it. And the more that that demand, and if you'll excuse the pun, the visibility towards blind gamers increases, the more those accessibility features get added to new titles.

59:18Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Is there a common misconception about it? I assume there is.

59:22Mat Piscatella: I mean, I often run into the misconception that blind people or that, by extension, players with disabilities just won't play games or won't even try to play games. It's, in reality, the opposite is true. People with disabilities are going to buy games, they're going to try games, they're going to play them. It's not a matter of, will a disabled person play my game? It's more a matter of, when they do, how much is that title going to disappoint them? And our job is to make sure that it disappoints them, not at all, ideally. But there are many common misconceptions that people with certain disabilities won't play games or won't be interested in certain titles or won't even want to try a game when that couldn't be further from the truth.

1:00:08Mat Piscatella: In reality, we want to bring as many games to as wide of an audience as possible, and that includes the world's largest minority, people with disabilities.

1:00:18Jenna ‘Jennisary’: What I was just gonna say, like, um... Obviously, it's a very good thing to do. Of course. But is there actually a good business reason for it? Is there like a big address in the market?

1:00:27Mat Piscatella: Definitely. Yeah, um, consistently, when there have been surveys conducted between people of the general public who self-identify as having a disability versus gamers who self-identify as having a disability. Gamers comprise a larger percentage of the population of people identifying as having a disability as compared to the general public. So there are more disabled people playing games than those who aren't. It is a very large market share. And even though I'm sure video game studios have the data on which people are using which accessibility features, how often they're turning them on, how many of them they're using.

1:01:09Mat Piscatella: Unfortunately, as I'm sure you know, studios are rather opaque with data like that, so that doesn't normally get publicly released. But we can infer what that data says by looking at the development habits of studios who have intentionally built in robust accessibility features and then looking at what they do with subsequent titles. And in every single AAA studio that I've worked with and that I've seen, every time they have chosen to continue and increase the breadth of accessibility features that are in their games. We can read into that a little bit and infer that what that means is that the features that they built in with their last game made them more than enough money to justify expanding those accessibility features.

1:01:54Mat Piscatella: We have yet to see, or I personally have yet to see, a studio regress in the offerings of their accessibility features.

1:02:02Jenna ‘Jennisary’: What are the biggest roadblocks? What's potentially putting people off doing these things? Is it the money?

1:02:08Mat Piscatella: For some it is. I mean, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that. It does oftentimes cost a little bit of money to get over the initial hump of getting these accessibility features in the game. But the advantage of it is that if you are working with the same engine between titles, oftentimes you only have to build in a lot of features like mine once. You only have to build in the infrastructure for it once, and then you can just keep doing that. And that looks great to players, and it builds so much loyalty, because players with disabilities are unfortunately very accustomed to disappointment when it comes to trying new titles, because even though we've seen an increase in accessibility features over the years, the fact remains the vast majority of new titles are still closed off to a lot of players with certain disabilities.

1:02:58Mat Piscatella: but that means that when they find a studio who is willing to ensure that their needs are met, that they can actually play the game, you are going to have an unending loyalty from that fan base and they are going to buy every single one of your games and every single one of your expansions from there on out.

1:03:17Jenna ‘Jennisary’: What stages should developers, studios, publishers be thinking about doing this? Is it from the start or is it something they can do at the end?

1:03:24Mat Piscatella: Yeah, it's a good question because the accessibility feature that I help build in is a little unique in the sense that audio description normally comes very late in the development process, but that's not the norm. The vast majority of accessibility features should be considered extremely early in development. There are specific features that we know from experience are an absolute nightmare to effectively retrofit. Things like a screen reader, control remapping. There are some things that are much easier to do it if you do it early. I'd recommend engaging with an accessibility QA service or an accessibility consultant, preferably a wide variety of consultants, to tell you what your game might need, even if you're at the early concept building stages.

1:04:13Mat Piscatella: They will be able to give you more pointed recommendations for things like, ideally, audio description, which is written very, very late in the game because by the nature of our work, it has to be done when visuals are at or almost completed. But I don't want anyone to think that, oh yeah, I can wait until three months till release and then I can start on accessibility. No, the vast majority of that has to happen really early.

1:04:40Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Obviously, so many games are live service these days, constantly being updated all the time and changing. Is that an added complication for you or does it not change as much as I imagine it does?

1:04:49Mat Piscatella: No, it's a boon, actually. It is nice because it is a great opportunity for oftentimes older games to build in new accessibility features that maybe they didn't necessarily have time for prior to release. So we've seen this with the Elder Scrolls Online. We've seen this with Sea of Thieves. Both have put a very noble and concerted effort into building more accessibility features into their live service, which also just makes good business sense because it is effectively expanding the game to audiences that previously just couldn't play it. Because every single accessibility feature added is a barrier removed for someone out there.

1:05:31Mat Piscatella: It's a new customer out there who is subscribing to that live service model. Every time they make updates, that's a new chance to remove more barriers.

1:05:40Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Can AI help? Is AI the tools that sort of help enable some of this?

1:05:45Mat Piscatella: It's a bit of a, it's a complicated question. I think, yes, potentially it could, but it's not there yet. In my field, in audio description specifically, there have been quite a few attempts at generating or at writing an AI model that can generate and or voice audio description. And we've reviewed a number of these attempts. There have been some studies. There have been some large tech giants that have tried it. But none of them have really come close thus far to the quality and the knowledge base of human narrators. In audio description specifically, there's a lot of rules. And AI models, for some reason, are terrible at adhering to those rules.

1:06:26Mat Piscatella: That's not to say it can never happen. We are very open to the idea of an AI-assisted workflow in the future, but it's just not there yet. And until we get to that point, it is extremely vital to maintain quality for our audiences.

1:06:43Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Well, obviously, smaller studios have less resource, they're saying, capabilities to do these sort of things. What would you recommend for them in doing this sort of thing?

1:06:51Mat Piscatella: Yeah, I mean, I am going to quote an accessibility giant in the industry in that we only have so many blueberries that we can put into our blueberry muffins. So sometimes you do have to decide where those blueberries go and how many resources you have effectively. There is an entire game accessibility conference talk on that that's available for free that I would highly recommend. But smaller developers, just do what you can with the resources that you have available. and you'd be surprised what you can achieve for something that is low to no cost or low to no effort using tools or resources that you already have in the game or that you already have available.

1:07:33Mat Piscatella: You just have to ask the right people and the right people are disabled consultants who will be able to point you in the right direction.

1:07:41Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Where would you like to see, I guess this is quite a broad, I imagine I know what the answer is, but where would you like to see sort of, not just the stuff that you do, accessibility features in general, where would you like to see that in five years? Maybe where do you think it will be in five years?

1:07:56Mat Piscatella: Ooh, good question. I mean, the future is bright. In my line of work, we've seen a steadily increasing interest in audio description and by extension, a steadily increasing interest in making games more accessible for gamers who are blind or low vision. But ideally, I want to see some games come out where it's not even a question whether it's going to be accessible. It's just a matter of myself and all of my friends who are blind get the privilege of getting excited about the same game at the same time because we know we're all going to get to play it. And that's a privilege that we normally don't have access to.

1:08:38Mat Piscatella: Normally, when new games get announced, players with disabilities have to tamper their excitement because you can watch a trailer and you can get super hyped about it, you can watch it with any amount of interpretive services to ensure that you can digest that trailer and know what's in it, but you can't let yourself get excited about it because you know, deep down in your heart, you might not be able to get to play that game. I want there to be a game or a series of games or a franchise or something five years in the future where during the first announcement, we all know we're going to get to play that game and we can be excited about it.

1:09:17Jenna ‘Jennisary’: I think that's not an unreasonable ask. Jenna, thank you so much for your time.

1:09:21Mat Piscatella: Thank you so much. You've been a lovely interviewer and I adored being able to chat with you. Thank you.

1:09:28Jenna ‘Jennisary’: Thank you. Lovely. Thank you. Thank you to Jenna there. Certainly lots of food for thought from her. and indeed from everybody in today's episode of the Game Business Show. It's such a packed show, I don't really have time to our news roundup, but the news roundup will be in the newsletter attached to the show. So do read that if you want to remind yourself all the goings on from the last week. But thank you for tuning in. We will be back, of course, with more news analysis, insight and interviews in the days and weeks ahead. If you're not a subscriber to the Game Business, paid or otherwise, you can become one by going to thegamebusiness.com.

1:09:57Jenna ‘Jennisary’: And every time we put out a new episode, you'll get an alert about it. But that's it from me today. Until next time, thank you for tuning in.