Unleashing Passion and Purpose in Game Development with Joseph Kim of Lila Games and GameMakers.com

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse...

Joseph Kim:

Having worked in publishing with so many game studios, the vast majority of the time is just spent talking about problems rather than focusing on solutions. I strongly believe that so many teams would have dramatically higher rates of success if they can just fix that about their culture.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi and Marc Petit.

Marc Petit:

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Building the Open Metaverse, Season 6, the podcast that showcases the community of artists, developers, researchers, executives, and entrepreneurs who are building the internet of tomorrow.

Today, we have a very, very special guest: Joseph Kim, also known as JK, the gaming industry veteran and seasoned entrepreneur. JK has had an impressive career spanning over two decades, working at major companies like Sega, FunPlus, and NBC. However, his true passion lies in the startup world, where he has co-founded multiple game studios, including LILA Games, his latest venture focused on developing shooter games.

JK is known for his relentless work ethic, brutal honesty, and iconoclastic views on workplace culture. He's no stranger to controversy, and his outspoken nature has sparked debates around topics like remote work, personal sacrifice for career ambitions, and what it really takes to build a successful startup.

We're super happy to have you with us, Joseph. Welcome to the show.

Joseph Kim:

Thank you. Sounds like you've done a little bit of homework in terms of some of the topics I've spoken about.

Marc Petit:

You made my work easy. You have so much content you've been creating; we'll come to that: your newsletters, your blog, and your podcast. It's really fantastic. But first, our tradition on this podcast is for you to describe to us your journey to the metaverse and where you are today in your own words.

Joseph Kim:

I went to UC Berkeley and studied electrical engineering and computer science. A fairly technical background. I started off working at companies like Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and their distributed computing group, and then at Cisco working on networking software. From there I kind of shifted to try and start a company in Korea very early on, early internet days. I guess my career has been kind of like a winding path.

What did I do after that? So after Cisco, I tried to start a company, and then I went into management consulting and worked at a firm called the McKenna Group. Most well-known for a couple of partners, Regis McKenna, who did some early work at Apple, as well as Geoffrey Moore, who wrote a book called Crossing the Chasm.

Basically, I learned a kind of strategy and strategic context from the McKenna group. From there, I went to business school, then left and joined up with a few McKenna partners to do boutique consulting as well as some early stage investment. Based upon some of the stuff I was seeing, I broke out and started a gaming studio working on social games back around 2010, 2011, or so during the early days of social. That started off as a hobby but then I tried to do a company.

From there, after credits, that kind of killed social gaming. Then I tried to go into mobile. Right place, right time in 2011 or so in terms of trying to build a mobile game company. At that time, I didn't have a lot of operational experience. As a guy who had a technology and strategy background and management consulting experience, I didn't really know how to motivate people about company culture or anything, but I tried to start a company at that time and failed. Even though it was like the perfect time, the perfect place, I was not the right dude.

It was not very successful then. After that, I basically did consulting for a number of Asian mobile game publishers like Smilegate and RenRen Games. I jumped and worked at FunPlus in Beijing; that's when I kind of put all the pieces together in terms of having a technology background, a strategy background from my management consulting experience, really putting some of the operational lessons that I learned trying to start my own company at FunPlus. We were able to have a fairly big hit in King of Avalon. That was a big success on the studio development side.

After that, I left and joined Sega, eventually becoming chief product officer for their mobile gaming division for the West. Then I joined NBCUniversal leading game publishing there.

About three and a half, four years ago, I started LILA games, which is my attempt after all this time in the career I've had, getting older, thinking, "Man, wouldn't it be cool to try to do something meaningful with my life instead of farting around and working at companies where there's a lot of politics and nonsense? Wouldn't it be cool to try and build a company that actually had a kind of purpose and meaning and would be able to do something cool and very ambitious?"

I wanted to take a shot at doing that, which is the kind of backstory behind founding LILA games. The context behind this company is that I felt that going back to my studio days at FunPlus, they had a model there which they kind of took, although now they're much more experienced, but at that time, a fairly inexperienced team building mobile games, but brought in leads from around the world to Beijing and were then able to develop and successfully launch pretty good products out of Beijing.

I'm trying to do the same thing in India. India has a game development ecosystem that is fairly early and, I would say, unaccustomed to new game development for the global market. And so we're trying to do that here.

Marc Petit:

You left some really comfortable jobs to go live the startup life. I know you talked about the politics of bigger organizations. Is there anything you miss about bigger organizations?

Joseph Kim:

I miss not having to sell my Tesla stock every month to be able to cover my expenses. I miss being able to invest and buy stuff. I miss being able to take vacations. I miss spending time with my family and my kids. And my kids used to be really far ahead academically. I have not spent time with them in a long time. I mean, there's a cost, right?

It's been well said that for anything really valuable, it requires sacrifice, and that's what I'm trying to do with my life. You can't have it all. And so there is a cost to this. I am very appreciative, especially to my family, for accepting the sacrifice. I think if I were married to somebody else... I mean, we've actually had a number of issues and conflicts because of this job, but certainly, it could have been a lot worse. If she cared about money more, which she doesn't, then... Yeah, it makes no sense. What I'm doing right now makes absolutely no financial sense. There's certainly a lot of things on this.

Marc Petit:

Look, this is amazing. You commute between Bangalore and the West Coast, right?

Joseph Kim:

Currently doing 2-2: two months here, two months back, going back and forth. I would say that going to some of the controversial topics that you had mentioned, that's one of the things where we're a little bit different in that I don't believe that for a new team, certainly if you're a very experienced team, having worked together for many years, you're probably in a different situation. But for a new team working on new game development, I generally suggest onsite in-office.

Even when I'm doing this 2-2, when I'm back in the US, I still work like crazy; I work all the freaking time. But the effectiveness in terms of the team, because I am not the team, the team is here. It's very difficult to get alignment, get progress and things like that.

And so we're certainly getting better at it where there's a number of folks here that are developing, where we're building a stronger leadership and management layer here, but we're not there yet. So I would say that going back for two months is not ideal for me. And the longer that I could spend here, it's actually better and more effective and more efficient.

Marc Petit:

Another question before we talk about the present. You were behind a huge hit; you mentioned King of Avalon. In hindsight, what would you think made this game such a success? What was the recipe that worked for King of Avalon? It's so hard now to get a new game off the ground.

Joseph Kim:

When we were working on that game, I would say the vast majority of the team did not believe we would be successful. At the start, I felt the same way. But I think you really do have to credit the success of the game to FunPlus's CEO, Andy Zhong. Now, he may not have spent that much time on the game itself, but I would say he gave it enough resources, and he brought in the right people to kind of deliver against the mission of making that game successful.

I would say we did so many things wrong. And I think that when you think about a lot of game studios, I would say that if you look under the hood, most people would be shocked at how many screw-ups, problems, mistakes, and things of that nature occur. I would say, having been on the publisher side and having visited many studios, virtually all studios, looking under the hood is a little bit scary.

But in my experience, successful studios often do a few things really right. Maybe the two biggest lessons I learned from Andy and Andy's co-founder, Yitao, were two things. 

First is optimism; Andy always believed. And I didn't believe initially, but he kind of convinced me to believe in the product. I think that that level of optimism, especially when so many things are going wrong for a team, is very important.

From Yitao, what I learned was that I used to be the guy who would point out a lot of problems. I call it the warner, "This thing's messed up, this thing's messed up, this thing's messed up, this thing's messed up." But I wasn't super solutions-oriented. And so the thing I learned from Yitao was like, "Don't just point out the problem, but go and fix it. Be more solutions-oriented. Be on the offense, not on the defense." It doesn't help if you talk about a problem; you have to shift to an orientation towards spending 80% of your time fixing problems and 20% of your time or less talking about them.

There are a lot of people at many companies that spend 99% of their time gossiping and talking about problems, "Oh, Bill's like this, Sally's like this, this and that. That's all messed up. That's screwed up too." But I would say the difference between the kind of people who move the needle and make a difference in a game studio are the ones who are oriented towards action and who are proactive instead of sitting there waiting for things to happen or reactive, and really spend their time gossiping and talking about all the problems. That's not helpful. That was the biggest lesson I learned from Yitao.

Marc Petit:

I can relate to that. At Epic, the culture was that if you see something, say something and do something. If something is broken, you're not just expected to point it out; you're expected to contribute to the solution and do something about it.

Joseph Kim:

Having worked in publishing with so many game studios, you would be shocked at the number of studios where that's the default, where the vast majority of the time is spent talking about problems rather than focusing on solutions.

I strongly believe that so many teams would have dramatically higher rates of success if they could fix that about their culture.

Marc Petit:

So, let's talk about LILA. You raised a total of $13 million for the studio in two rounds. In hindsight, fundraising is always a very, very bizarre moment in somebody's life where you have to pitch your work. 

What stands out from this process in hindsight?

Joseph Kim:

What stands out to me is that sometimes, a few good decisions make up for hundreds of very bad decisions. I would say the one good decision I made… so we initially raised a seed round of 2.8 million. The thesis for us has always been long-term. I've always told all of our investors, "Look, guys. If you're investing in us, we're going to India. Nobody knows anything here." Well, I don't want to upset anybody, but the maturity of the ecosystem here is not very mature.

We have literally what's called a fresher, or literally fresh. We have five fresh grads in very critical roles, and we have a lot of folks here who have never done it before. We're literally training many people in the studio from zero. For us, the focus has always been that we would be a long-term play.

Now, after our seed round, we decided we needed to raise more money because I felt that developing in India was actually dramatically harder than I had thought. Because I did it in China, I was like, "Oh, yeah, we just do these. We kind of set this stuff up. We hire these people." But, the people we were able to find were not as skilled as the folks we had available in China. We actually had a huge recruiting department. I would say that's one of the things that FunPlus did really well: the recruiting was on fire. That was solid, always bringing in candidates and able to get people.

Now, I'm having to spend over half my time on recruiting, reaching out to people directly, training, as well as being on top of a lot of stuff here, and everything's on fire.

I would say the path towards getting to where we needed to be was a lot longer. The availability of talent wasn't as abundant as in China. We decided we needed to raise more money, but at that time, everybody told us, "Don't raise too much. Raise as little as possible." And I was told quite distinctly that if you're a great entrepreneur, you can raise in any environment. What I told one of our investors at that time was, "Well, I'm not a great entrepreneur, so I'm going to try and raise as much as I can now."

It was a good thing we did because if I didn't do that, we'd be out of business right now because we are a long-term play, and we have had so many problems. I think we are starting to turn the corner.

I'm sure we're going to have more challenges and different kinds of challenges moving forward, but different challenges, and I think a lot of the really massive major problems are hopefully behind us, where we've got other problems that we're going to be dealing with moving forward. We've got about half our cash left, and we still do have a pretty decent runway, but now we're kind of in a new phase in our company. Back to the fundraising question, if I didn't raise that much, we would've been screwed. It would've literally been game over for us.

Marc Petit:

Because raising today is much more difficult.

Joseph Kim:

There have been rules that we've had to turn over many, many times, and finding the right people here has been extremely difficult.

Marc Petit:

As a CEO, one of your roles is to create culture, and you started in India, a place where there is no pre-established gaming culture.

I came across a deck that you published that exposes your corporate culture and your company values with a clear call out, "If it doesn't work for you, do not apply or do not work for us." I found it very, very, very good. Do you remember some of those elements that are in their deck to share with our audience here?

Joseph Kim:

I basically looked at a lot of the lessons that I learned from other successful entrepreneurs and read or studied what they did, but then also through my experience in development from my previous background as well as on the publisher side and seeing what other game studios have done and what has made them successful, that has formed the kind of values that I believe that we needed to succeed.

But there are a number of values there, and I actually am working on an updated version of that, Marc, just so you know, which I'll hopefully publish in the next few weeks. Things like having a wartime orientation and addressing problems, as I mentioned, which touched upon before. I won't go through all of them because I think it'll eat up a lot of air time.

For anyone interested, feel free to go to lilagames.com, it's right there. In that deck, I believe there were eight values. And again, one of the things that I'm working on now is an update to those values, which I'll publish shortly.

Marc Petit:

There was a lot of my experience when I first was at Epic Games. I mean, I think you'll find this kind of open and direct communication, this notion of radical truth and debate, it was always important. Clear areas of responsibility are also something. It sounds obvious, but I was reflecting upon that; it's true that in an environment where there is less pressure, those tend to be second-rank values, and the managing of the day-to-day and the politics and the relationships in the organization seem to take over.

Joseph Kim:

Yeah, I would say that for me, I think that stating those values clearly for people will basically help you. Because it doesn't serve your company if you have somebody who's not aligned, who then joins, and then based upon the misalignment, you have to let them go or things like that. I believe in putting that out there and being as clear as possible on how you plan to operate. Because those values, in my view, really kind of serve as the operating system for the company. It dictates how you're going to interact with other people and how you're going to act at the company.

Every company is going to have a little bit of a different view and perspective. One of the values that I think, I'm not sure, is in that version, but in the newer version is called character and cruelty. Meaning we do, I believe, need to be kind of cruel. Character and cruelty. 

In my opinion, it's just like we'll help people understand and make a determination of whether this is the organization for them. The good news is that there are a lot of different kinds of companies out there, and I think it's better if people have more information so they can make the right choice for themselves. In this life that we live, time is so precious. If you spend time at a company where you're fundamentally misaligned with how they want to operate, it's so inefficient and it's going to waste your time, it's going to waste the company's time.

I would strongly advocate for anybody, if you're a founder or if you're responsible for this kind of thing at your company, to really make it clear to people who are applying so that you save a lot of time and it's more efficient.

Marc Petit:

Now, tell us a little bit about the games you're building. I think it's called Project Black. Get us excited about it.

Joseph Kim:

We're working on two games. We actually just started working on a second game. To step back, when you think about India, the way that we think about gaming opportunities in India is in two parts. The first part is the Indian gaming development ecosystem, which comprises all of the makers here in India and the kind of people that we want to recruit and work with to build games. That would be building games for the global market.

The second part is India's gaming market. It's all the players and people in India. We started this company trying to leverage the Indian game development ecosystem to find people who would make games for the global market. The first game that we are developing is an extraction shooter, which I can go into more detail about. The second game, which we just started, is a dating simulation game for the Indian market. So we're actually trying to go after both now.

As far as an extraction shooter, I would say that we decided to build that game on two basic premises. The first is that for mobile games, compulsion and progression are as important as gameplay. The second premise or thesis that we believed in is that in mobile, distribution is all about ARPU, so your LTV. Monetization is critically important.

Based on those two theses, and based upon what we believed could help us get better distribution for mobile in terms of understanding the shooter market and the nuances of that market because it is so competitive, that kind of formed the kind of game that we wanted to create. When you think about the competitive dynamics and shooter, because it is so saturated, we felt like we needed what we call a strange attractor, meaning you take something novel and something familiar and you kind of mix those together. That kind of formed the basis of our art style and some of our visual pillars for the game.

I think that when I talk about compulsion and progression, that kind of informed the kind of game that we wanted, a stateful game that would help you with progression.

It also informed the fact that we not only have a gameplay and combat component to our game, but we also have this social MMO side to the game. We wanted to embed a number of progression vectors in this social MMO space because we really wanted a very visual and visceral kind of experience for players that gives them a reason to go into the combat and the gameplay.

We knew that building out of India, we're not going to be able to compete in terms of the gameplay itself. We don't think we're going to be able to make a game that plays better than Call of Duty Mobile. We feel like we need to be good enough there but then really orient the game around not just the gameplay but also the systems and having great or interesting compulsion and progression mechanics.

On the monetization side, because we believe that, for us, distribution equals ARPU, we've built a number of systems in terms of collection and upgrading and things like that, crafting and other things, so that we can potentially try to increase monetization so that we can compete against other shooter games in the market. It also led to our decision for extraction. If you think about the main forms of monetization in a lot of shooters today, it's largely cosmetics-driven, like a cosmetics-driven battle pass of some kind. But what extraction gives you-

Marc Petit:

Can you explain what extraction is for everybody just to make sure that people follow you there?

Joseph Kim:

To set the context for people who don't know anything about shooters, there are basically two primary game modes that are successful in the market today. One is team deathmatch, meaning you have 4v4, or 5v5, or 6v6. You've got two different teams that battle each other for a number of kills or whoever kills the other side. And you have battle royale, which is popularized by Fortnite. You have a hundred players, there's a shrinking map based upon a storm, and then there's eventually one survivor who wins. And that winner feels great. But it's not stateful, meaning the things that you get in the game, you don't keep.

Now, in an extraction shooter, basically what happens is you extract into a map, and you can go and scavenge and collect stuff, but you'll be able to keep it. There's generally one big prize like an airdrop or something at the end that you can get, but the things that you get and when you extract from the map back to your base or whatever, you keep that stuff. So it's stateful.

Now, one of the interesting things that we thought about with extraction is that you can have different starting points in the sense that, Marc, you might come into the game with a mega gun, and I might come in with a pistol, but because these things are at risk, meaning there's stakes involved, that we felt that we could kind of use free-to-play mechanics to try to make that a little bit more interesting.

One of the things you see with Western players is that they really care about fairness. One of the big bets is that you can have asymmetric gameplay in terms of the loadout that you start with because it's at risk. That's one of the things that we will find out if it works or not once we launch.

Marc Petit:

I have a question about the dating game because it looks like those games pertain to culture, and it looks to me like India is not one culture; it's a mosaic of cultures. How do you go about addressing such a vast... Great news is it's a big market, but it seems to be a mosaic of cultures.

Joseph Kim:

It's a little bit of a challenge to really understand how to best optimize a game based upon the number of different languages. To your point, India is almost like a bunch of different countries brought together, but I think some of our choices are to go with, from a language perspective, Hinglish, which is Hindi plus English.

We're certainly targeting certain demographics, or actually, we're about to enter our concept testing phase. One of the things that we're trying to do with this game is to be very market-driven, where we're trying to, very similar to companies like Century Games, where they do a lot of early market testing and where you're actually doing a lot of your UA testing, things of that nature before you develop the game. We're doing that for this game now.

We've developed a number of concepts, we've written a bunch of treatments, and now we're about to enter a phase shortly where we test those concepts in market. And based upon that, that'll determine the kind of game that we make.

Marc Petit:

I brought you in because I wanted to talk a little bit about the state of the game industry. Our audience is not familiar, but before that, I want to talk about you a little bit more.

I mean, you are a startup CEO, you're very dedicated to your organization, but you also take a lot of time to give back to the community, and you have a number of activities as a content creator. You're a very prolific content creator. The GameMakers podcast is actually a fabulous resource if you want to know about what's going on in the game industry.

You always bring on some really interesting people. I did listen to the GDC wrapup, which I felt was on the nose in terms of my experience at GDC and the current state of the industry. I think you're part of the Deconstructor of Fun family as well.

Joseph Kim:

I started the podcast, the Deconstructor of Fun, This Week in Games podcast. But I left that podcast, I don't know, a couple of years ago, a year or two ago. I forgot when. I'm not doing much with the Deconstructor guys anymore, but I hear it's doing well, so good.

Marc Petit:

Tell me about GameMakers.

Joseph Kim:

In terms of the content, I develop content for a couple of reasons. One is that I think for any startup, CEO, one of the primary objectives is recruiting. What we wanted to do is we wanted to send out a bat signal for people who were interested in game development topics and in which we could potentially market to them.

In fact, here at our company today, I asked our top five employees, "How did you find out about LILA? Why did you join the company?" All five of them came in through a LinkedIn post about some content that I had posted, or they were already subscribed to GameMakers in some way.

It's been very helpful from a recruitment perspective, but I also think the other reason why I developed content is because I want to be very thoughtful. The gaming industry is so dynamic, it changes so much, and it is so complicated that I want to make sure that I'm on top of any major changes or difficult issues or topics. By having this platform where I'm able to discuss, in effect, all the issues that I care about.

For example, when I was not sure about UA, I would do podcasts on UA. When I was fundraising, I would do podcasts on fundraising. When I have issues around specific development or production issues, then I would do a podcast on those issues.

It's been very helpful because I think that by having that kind of a platform and having an excuse to be able to talk to very smart people about some of the problems that I'm thinking about, it's been helpful for me to understand those topics in a better way and being able to speak with people who are truly experts in those specific areas.

Marc Petit:

Through the newsletter and through the podcast, you cover so many topics; how do you stay on top of all of those things? This is incredible.

Joseph Kim:

I'm very curious about all that stuff. There are a lot of things that I need to know about competing in a competitive market, and for me, it's interesting; I love talking about that stuff. I don't have a lot of hobbies, and I don't have a lot of free time, but those are things where... That's kind of like my hobby is learning about those things.

Marc Petit:

Let me put you on the spot here. You recently did an episode on two important companies in the gaming industry called Ubisoft and Embracer.

What was your takeaway in a nutshell to give people?

Joseph Kim:

There were a couple of things I did on Ubisoft. There was one where I got a lot of hate, but it went kind of viral where I talked about bookings per revenue and kind of efficiency. It was kind of timely because when we talked about Embracer, we did talk about, one of the things that came up is like, "Where's the synergy here with all these companies together?" That was a key point that Matthew Kanterman was keying in on. We kind of came to the conclusion that maybe there isn't enough synergy, and literally the week after they announced a split. I think that's probably something worth revisiting.

When I think about Embracer, it represents a fundamental question about where the games industry is headed.

Zynga, for example, if you look at the history of Zynga, for the most part, for about, I don't know, the past 10 years, virtually all of their growth has come through M&A. There is a strategy and a synergy that made sense for them to roll all those companies together. In Embracer's case, it didn't make sense. One of the things that I think about from an Embracer perspective is when do you bundle, when do you unbundle, what are synergies that make sense, and what are synergies that... are just not there, so it doesn't make sense.

That's one of these strategic questions. Certainly, I think that going all the way back to the nature of the firm, which was the paper that talked about, "Why do you have a company? Why does a company exist?" The thinking is that when you have all these external transaction costs that don't make sense, you bring that internally.

Not to go too deep on that, but I do think there is going to be a fundamental reevaluation now about what kinds of combinations and acquisitions make sense in today's market for gaming. What is the ideal size of a company? Do small companies become more competitive, or do bigger companies become more competitive?

On the Embracer side, that's the key question that I'm thinking about. And on the Ubisoft side, that is really a question about efficiency. When we look at, again, bookings per employee, and they're dead last of any major public company, it speaks to, for me, whether that model is sustainable. Especially in the context of a lot of capabilities that are being developed in China where you have companies like HoYoverse, miHoYo, Lilith, Game Science, and these companies that are not only more efficient, but they're working 9-9-6. And so that, to me, raises the question, "What does the competitive landscape look like, and how do companies like that—are they going to survive? How do they survive if they maintain that structure?"

The reason why I like speaking to guys like Matthew and Brian about these topics is, one, I learn a lot about the financial side. If we were ever to go public, I think that would be good for me to learn. But also, it helps me really think a little bit more deeply about some of these strategic issues, and I've got a couple of smart guys to talk through these issues with.

Marc Petit:

I do believe there are good proxies of what we're seeing going in the PC gaming industry right now. I think Ubisoft, for me, is the epitome of the traditional ways of building AAA games. And as you said, I think it's getting more difficult for them given all the market changes.

So, let's switch to mobile, I think. Do you want to tell us what happened at IDFA and in this market? I think it's good to look back at Apple's decisions regarding tracking.

Joseph Kim:

Sure. I mean, I think this topic can go pretty long or deep, so maybe I could do a very cursory explanation about IDFA, which is ID for advertisers, basically got deprecated on Apple's side, and basically that IDFA helps game studios track users and track all the activities of a specific user, and more importantly, spend by that user. What that allows you to do by having IDFA is when you're advertising, you can try and target very high value spenders. Based upon some of the capabilities, based upon machine learning that Facebook made, the kind of UA campaigns that you had through Facebook and then Google in terms of targeting those high value players, it became very lucrative for those guys.

But then you can really do a lot of targeting, which you are not supposed to be able to do today, but you can still do it because of something called fingerprinting.

I would say the big thing to take away is that if you have a high LTV game, you're able to target those high spenders and basically acquire those spenders. In the absence of targeting, the advertising becomes more broad-based. The net effect of this, without going into too much, I don't want to lose the audience here, but the net effect of this is that without something like IDFA or fingerprinting, then I think the net effect of this, my theory has been, that games that monetize really strongly like Forex and social casino will decline; in games like Supercell games that have higher conversion, but lower ARPPU will likely win.

The net effect should be positive because, when you think about it, what happens when you take away IDFA and many of these very sophisticated machine learning and AI-based targeting capabilities? You're taking margin away from those advertisers and giving it back to players and developers. Overall, I think it's probably a good thing, but winners and losers will shift.

The current state of the industry is that fingerprinting may get deprecated. I mean, I think based upon Apple's policy, they don't want you to do fingerprinting, but they haven't started banning apps that have SDKs, whether it's Unity or AppLovin or others that still do fingerprinting.

Marc Petit:

There were a number of decisions there that really, as you said, changed the landscape for mobile games. Probably shifting more attention to the ends of, I would say, legit developers and people who are actually trying to compete on gameplay and good attributes to game developers such as yourself.

Joseph Kim:

Well, we'll see what happens too, because the whole fingerprinting thing, I don't think the hammers come down. I'm not sure if it will come down. I mean, I don't know. Then there are potential workarounds even if Apple fully bans fingerprinting. I'm kind of guessing. A lot of people think that a lot of the ad companies are going to be fine. I am one of the few who think that it's going to be a problem, but we'll see.

Marc Petit:

Actually, it has been a problem for Unity, I think a very public problem. And since a few days ago, Unity has a new CEO that joined from Zynga. Do you have any recommendations for him? I heard your podcast; you had some good insight on that company.

Joseph Kim:

Look, I don't know who that guy is, but a few people who have said that they have worked with him say that he's actually great at operations, which is the kind of person that they need. In theory, I would say that that's probably good news for Unity. But I do think there probably needs to be a little bit of a cultural shift at Unity.

I do think they've got to become a lot more focused on execution and around being developer friendly. We'll see what happens.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, we wish him good luck. I think we have so many industry friends at Unity, so we want them to be happy and successful.

Let's switch back. I mean, you have Matthew Kanterman in your podcast, and we had Yon from Supersocial here a few times ago. One of the big things is the new platforms like UEFN, Unreal Engine for Fortnite, and Roblox. Would you ever see those platforms become viable for a studio like yours?

Joseph Kim:

I would say the economics of a hit mobile game versus a hit Roblox game, the economics, the potential outcomes are much higher for a standalone mobile game. But when you look at a company like Century Games, they also have a top Roblox game in addition to having hit mobile games. I would say probably the vast majority of that revenue comes from their mobile side versus Roblox.

I think it might be good for some game companies to experiment with Roblox and UEFN to get into the habit of speed and understanding what is successful on those platforms. When you see some of the success there, that could potentially be leveraged into a standalone mobile game.

I had done a podcast with Pete Hawley, who was at 100 Thieves, and that was part of the thesis. I'm not sure if it panned out or not. At 100 Thieves, at least before, they had this view that they would be doing stuff on UEFN but also having a mobile game dev studio that would take lessons, learn from their experience on UEFN, and potentially turn that into a standalone mobile game.

Marc Petit:

The last two things of interest to us here is Web3 gaming. They are still some part of the market interest. Do you have a point of view on that aspect of it?

Joseph Kim:

Actually, that's an area I've done very little. I tried to learn all the crypto and web gaming stuff way back, and I tried to learn more about it, but I don't know much about it. I do know that the one advantage that they have is dramatically high ARPPU. If there's something that you can do with that, great. I think the thing that I worry about is that there's a limited number of wallets out there. How many of the wallets are actual players versus speculators? I don't know that market well enough.

When I was at GDC, I heard that Web3 games are sort of back to some degree and that there have been some recent—I don't know, I think they call them mints—that have done really well. So good for them. I personally hope they do well. I hope that they're able to figure some stuff out, but I personally don't have a lot of experience or expertise there.

Marc Petit:

No, it's the same. I mean, we observe that Web3 gaming has some interesting characteristics, but we need good games, and we haven't yet. Maybe Shrapnel from Mark Long is going to be one of those. We'll see. It should be out relatively soon now.

And finally, one thing that's more important to me or to us here in this podcast, we talk a lot about the web becoming a viable 3D platform through standardization. That's one thing. We're seeing a lot of web going on in e-commerce, we're seeing through glTF and open USD, and we're starting to see a full 3D ecosystem developing itself around the web.

What about web and instant gaming? I mean, it looks like improvements like WebGPU and WebAssembly. We're starting to bring a level of performance to browsers with the recent upgrade. When you were at GDC, did you come across interesting things in terms of instant gaming and Web-based?

Joseph Kim:

I remember this way back in 2011 or 2012 when I was introduced to Trip Hawkins. I remember getting on a call with him, and he spent an hour and a half just talking to me about how, in the end, the web browser is the console; everything's going to go to the web browser.

I mean, we quite haven't gotten there yet. Maybe we can do it in the future. I mean, I do think that there's a web browser everywhere: every PC, every mobile device, and so maybe.

Marc Petit:

It's also monetization right now. You got the virality of being able to invite somebody to the game session with a URL, which is very positive. However, discovery and business models are still to be figured out.

Joseph Kim:

I think, in general, trying to fight Apple is a losing battle. I think trying to get games through Web that then bypasses the App Store; I think they're going to figure out some way to not let that happen. When you think about how many people cannot give up their iPhones. I remember hearing a statistic that over 80% of people here in the U.S. anyway want their next phone to be an iPhone.

I would say maybe the technology finally gets there, which I don't think it's there today, but if it finally does, then I think you have to deal with how to get that past Apple.

Marc Petit:

All right. Well, I did not warn you about this, but the usual last question in this podcast is to give a shout-out to a person, an organization, or an institution that matters to you.

Joseph Kim:

I want to give a shout-out to basically... I recently did a podcast on a show called WTF Is, and, basically, the podcast was hosted by this guy. I think he's India's youngest billionaire, but his name is Nikhil Kamath. He's just a really good dude, like humble, super interesting podcast. It is a little bit with an India focus, but I would highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel or podcast. It's called WTF Is.

He's a really great guy doing good things in the world, and I think he already has one of the most popular podcasts in the world and a very popular YouTube channel. But I think more people should be aware of him because he's awesome.

Marc Petit:

Well, thank you very much for that. Also, talking about good guys doing good things for the world, I want to thank you for being with us today. I also want to thank you for all of the content you create for the GameMakers podcast; it's really helpful to me to keep a pulse on what's going on in the game industry.

I encourage everybody to find you on various platforms. You seem to be on many of them. Any pointer you want to give us today?

Joseph Kim:

Go to gamemakers.com. That's the newsletter, and then it should have links to YouTube and the podcast. So yeah, I would say go there.

Marc Petit:

Joseph, your unwavering pursuit of excellence and conviction in your beliefs continue to shape the gaming industry in profound ways. Thank you so much for being with us today. 

Thank you to our ever-growing audience, we will be back soon for another episode of Building the Open Metaverse. Thank you, JK. It was an honor to have you with us.

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