The number one mistaken belief is that you can just launch and spend all your marketing dollars post launch and your

game is going to go well. Particularly if you’re a desktop game, this is the number one way to like guarantee that your game fails. I’ve seen games with

half a million to a million Steam wish lists convert into almost nothing. That’s ridiculous, right? Why would

someone wishlist a game? They’re not planning to buy it. So, something’s going wrong. Today, I’m joined by one of the most influential minds in game publishing.

He’s helped over 690 games go from development to global launch, including multiple number one app store hits. As

co-founder and president of Immutable, a multi-billion dollar gaming platform backed by global investors, we got into

why 90% of games fail before they launch, and how studios can flip that stat with the right data, audience

strategy, and AI powered tools. Steam doesn’t reveal any analytics. You have no idea the quality of the cohort

of these players that you’re bringing in through the door. And if you’ve tasked your marketing person with get the most

Steam wish lists, they are going to go to the cheapest tax source possible, which is probably the players who are

the least likely to spend. In today’s podcast, Robbie shared what Amuseable learned from partnering with top AAA studios and has turned those

lessons into a platform any team can use. The biggest problem we see devs make is they go and have a great activation,

they get a bunch of PR, some sort of, you know, successful campaign in the year before they launch, and they never

talk to those players again. And these people are like, “What the hell is this game? I can’t even remember signing up to this. I don’t trust this.

From beating 90% failure rates to building a billion dollar company, please enjoy today’s guest, the

co-founder and president of Immutable, Robbie Ferguson. Robbie, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Harry. Great to be here. Great to have you. I’m very excited to have this chat because this is kind of

unprecedented. Like, I’ve always thought immutable equals web 3. And then there’s

just been a massive splash at least on my LinkedIn feed the past couple weeks and there’s a lot going on. So I love

for you for people who don’t know or may have heard something like what are you guys up to right now because it seems

like there’s a lot of moving parts and for a lot of people at least I’ve been speaking to they’re like okay what is happening?

Totally. So for anyone listening bit of context, Immutable is a gaming

infrastructure provider that helps games uh improve their growth uh and helps

customers own and get better value from the games that they play. We are uh the

leader in web 3 infrastructure uh and we’ve recently expanded our software to sort of be invisible software that any

game in the world can use and fundamentally improve their acquisition, retention, engagement, activation and

monetization. And uh for a bit of context, you know, we’ve we’ve raised uh

well over I think $300 million US um from TESC, from Tencent, from some of the top gaming names in the world. Uh,

and we’ve been really laser focused on how do we help games succeed in I think

one of the toughest building environments for for games ever. And how do we help players get a fairer deal out

of the the games that they’re playing? Beautiful. And for a bit of scale cuz the numbers here are a bit crazy. So

you’ve already supported over 690 game launches. So this is a lot of data and I

have a bit of a personal Those are all funded games. So this is not, you know, long long tail. Those are all, you know, um, significantly funded,

uh, games building, you know, sort of indie plus in terms of their development scale.

Yeah. So, there’s a lot of data and you’re already working with Ubisoft as of at least August this year, right? Yeah. So, can’t wait to get into it. So,

the main topic we’re going to cover today, guys, is why a lot of the games fail and what is the science behind the

ones that win from the data that you guys have. Before I get into it, I want to really ask like why do you care so

much? cuz surely you’ve kind of done enough to kind of chill right now like

just from a personal level like why are you doing this? Why are you doing games audience? Like what’s driving you right

now? Yeah, I think there’s two answers to that. Um the first answer is I am super

passionate about what we are building. Um, every day we meet game developers who they themselves and their teams put

their heart and their livelihoods uh every single day into building a game that is going to bring people joy and

bring people delight. And uh a ton of those games fail not because their game

sucks but because marketing is more difficult for than ever. There were n there were 19,000 games that shipped on

Steam last year. 14,000 shipped the year before. So, the amount of games,

especially because of AI, driving costs down is is higher. There’s the same number of players, and for them to

actually get to good distribution, is is harder than ever. Um, and the other part of that is, of course, I’m very passionate about how do we make in-game

asset ownership, which is 70% of gaming spend, $150 billion a year, fairer, and

a model where players can actually own and and uh have essentially real value

attached to those economies where games want to do that. Yeah. But the second reason, and just so I’m

I’m not doing any double speak, is I love the game of business. I love who I work with. I love our team. Uh we have a

phenomenal and very bright and very enthusiastic team. Um and I find personally you know the pursuit of

mastery and um business really exciting and I I want to grow immutable to be the biggest enterprise possible and um help

deliver on our mission at at bigger and bigger scales. Beautiful. All righty. Let’s get into it. So in terms of the reason why games

fail, you mentioned that number 19,000 games launching on Steam and that’s actually come up a few times on the

show. There’s a few different takes. Also, there’s a few comments that we’ve had. It’s like, “Yeah, but a lot of those games are just because it’s easier

to publish a game on Steam right now, but there’s actually not that many quotequote good games being launched.

I’m wondering like what’s your take on like the actual industry right now? Like, are some of these games not going to market because you think they’re not

good enough or you think it was actually down to the marketing?” You’re seeing a couple of trends at the moment. One, you’re seeing massive

industry consolidation of bigger gaming studios, especially at the mobile layer. We’ve just seen the largest LBO in

history with EA. We saw Scopely acquired uh 24 months ago, a number of mobile

publisher acquisitions. And the reason this is happening is most games now succeed or fail based on how efficient

they can get their advertising, not how good the game can be, particularly in mobile. Uh in desktop, it’s still a

little more brand driven. And the problem with that is it’s pulling up the ladder on anyone except a game studio

which is part of these giant conglomerates in terms of their ability to succeed. You know, I think it’s something like 90 plus% of games will

never earn back their investment. And obviously gaming is a very hit- driven industry. And we think that’s a shame

because so many of these games don’t achieve that. Not because the game isn’t good, but just because they don’t have a

team of a thousand performance marketing experts, CAC specialists who are driving

down um sort of attention costs across every platform and monetization experts

who are uh the best in the world at figuring out how they can extract marginal dollars from their users, often in a way that you know is not super

aligned with players interests. And so I our our thought is pretty simple, which is how do we create software that makes

it incredibly easy for any game developer in the world to succeed. And uh the cool thing is we spent the last

seven years working with hundreds of games. We’ve shipped multiple games by

ourselves. Uh fundamentally what we focused on is how do we improve economic models, acquisition costs, and loyalty

with crypto. And now this latest product that we’ve built, I immutable audience makes all of that invisible and it is

basically created software that is a the most efficient landing page software. It’s the most efficient homepage for

games on the internet. And you know, I’ll share the generic principles because there’s nothing special about what we do. We just made it incredibly

easy to use. And anyone listening can basically implement these whether they want to use our software or not. Uh and but B, we’ve actually made it incredibly

easy to instead of going out and hiring a 10-person marketing team, performance marketing uh specialist, an attribution

specialist, a channel manager, um a copywriting specialist, a life cycle marketing uh expert, uh someone who’s

going to think about brand, someone who’s going to be your website designer, your um CRM engager, your monetization

designer for launch, like there are so many different specialist roles and the meta for what works most efficiently

updates every 12 months. And really what we’ve just tried to say is how do we build a single piece of software that

games can come to and is super opinionated on here’s what you need to do to have best-in-class acquisition

best-in-class engagement leading up to your launch. You mean the software I guess it has an

LM or an AI it can talk back to you and tell you what it needs to do or it it can but it’s also designed to not be

you know I’ll give you one example. We’ve basically built out full email marketing um and life cycle marketing uh

in in this software and instead of saying hey you can kind of program this any way you want. Uh instead we’ve said

we actually are very opinionated about this is the best way to do life cycle and email marketing. Most game studios

aren’t experts at this and we will literally generate this for you tell you when you should email your users at what

time of the day based the information we have. It’s not just the tool. Exactly. So, we’re hyperpinated around

how do you create the best results for video games rather than just being a generic horizontal software. And we we think that’s really important because um

it is so expensive and so difficult to do lots of these things if you’re an independent studio or even a large

studio um to to do all these things. Well, all righty. Sweet. So, you guys have a

lot of data and you probably have had many conversations, you and your team. So I feel like there’s the immutable

back office opinion and then there’s a games industry opinion. I’m sure there’s some difference. So in your conversation like what is the

common misunderstanding about maybe why game launch will do well or what is this mistaken belief that people have when

they go to do a launch a game? Like what’s the biggest one that makes you go like ah you like please understand this. Yeah, I I I would say like the number

one mistaken belief is that you can just launch and spend all your marketing dollars post launching your game is

going to go well. Particularly if you’re a desktop game, this is the number one way to like guarantee that your game fails. And then the the people who

realize that are often like, “Yeah, of course I need to grow my Steam wish lists.” And the reality is I’ve seen games with half a million to a million

Steam wish lists convert into almost nothing uh in terms of spend on the day. That’s ridiculous, right? Why would

someone wishlist a game if they’re not planning to buy it? So something’s going wrong. Because what what it comes down to is

Steam doesn’t reveal any analytics. You have no idea the quality of the cohort of these players that you’re bringing in

through the door. And if you’ve tasked your marketing person, which is often the founder themselves or or someone

internally with get the most Steam wish lists, they are going to go to the cheapest courses possible, which is

probably the players who are the least likely to spend. Uh you know, they’re probably from tier three economic.

Could ask some stupid questions quickly. Yes. So, Steam wish list, you’re saying there’s like not even country based

analytics. It’s literally just a number. I’m I’m I should know this, but you you you get very little analytics on

your Steam wish list. Uh to the point where I think there was literally an article that came out two weeks ago

where they asked to send an email on the launch day and literally the email

failed to send. Now, we we we like Steam wish lists and and and you know, we we

actively involve this in our software. For example, we’ve created a landing page that is driving more Steam Wish

lists per dollar that you send to our hyperoptimized landing page for games than if you send it directly to the

Steam Wish itself. And we give you and we give you the ability to contact and own the relationship with those players

to notify them on any surface to connect their discord to connect their Epic Games platform. The whole goal is give a

hyper optimized default page for your game where you can manage your customers, engage them automatically

with AI, pre-written coms, life cycle marketing, etc. This is pretty cuz I’m in the B2B world,

right? So, we’re ghost riding for founders and we’re currently in the funnel stage. We’re trying to improve like when we get the traffic, where do

we take them? So, before it’s like book a call with the team. Now, we’re thinking, well, we might as well give them something. And I’ve seen you guys

do this very well on LinkedIn. like you’re posting playbooks, you’re giving before you ask him to book a call. And

when I look at the game world, I don’t know why in my head I’m like, “Yeah, you send them to Steam.” I’m like, “Why would you send them to a company which

doesn’t give you the data? At least send them here and then they can also become a Steam Wish.” It’s like making YouTube

my company’s website like like you would just make you you want the data. So you

get You’re totally right. Howular do we get? Well, it’s like making YouTube your homepage.

if they could change and they regularly do change the the algorithm the software

and you don’t even have the ability to contact your audience. Um and you were

asking earlier they reveal geographic data about wish list. They don’t even reveal that. I think they reveal geographic data on page visitors and

then eventual purchases. But the problem is people have no idea the value of the cohorts they’re acquiring prior to their

launch. And there is an entire literally multiundred billion dollar industry

built for how do you optimize your spend post launch because that is easy. That

is we’ll acquire a customer, let’s see their rorowaz, let’s see how could they turn into a profit uh for for the gaming

company. There is almost no one thinking about how can we effectively help launch games and help uh games companies figure

out the value of these users before they actually have something to sell them. Um, and so we’ve developed basically what we call the the immutable unified

uh attribute profile where we basically take in all of their uh data from the wallet, all of their data from every

connected surface uh from Steam, from Discord, from YouTube, from Epic Games,

from Reddit, uh all of their behavioral data uh on on the platform. And of

course, if they allow if they click ask uh allow app to track all of the app based monetization and behavior from

from Apple or the Play Store and we can build basically a predictive model that says these are how likely these players

are to spend, play or engage with your game on launch day. These are the players you should focus on and these

are and we can lally create an advertising pixel for you to retarget your best cohort price. So our whole

you said Apple. Sorry, I’m getting too excited. So you got the Apple and the Android. Does this work on desktop as well? that granular data or is it?

Absolutely. It is it is actually primarily designed uh for for desktop. But because we can create this unified

attribute profile across all surfaces, we can basically collect data from everywhere and expose that to the game

developer. Um and and the best thing is the player has consented to all of this. The moment you sign up, you we we have a

hyperoptimized landing page that’s getting GDPR consent, that’s getting email consent. We’re rewarding them for

connecting these different services. So, our value proposition is we’re just really good at getting players to say, “Hey, I’m going to create this sort of

central profile where I’m going to connect everything. I’m going to get the best offers, best rewards from these games. Uh, and then those games are

going to know how to tail the offer me in the most efficient way possible.” Whoa. So, like my experience with this

is like Super ID. So, I get a few cash backs or I get some rewards, they do some Black Friday deals I couldn’t find

in the normal store. Happy days. What I’m hearing here is it can basically be the storefront and then be the hub. So

you’ve kind of like democratized that, but also it’s got behavior tracker across everything. Like I want

So I mean this is a landing page built for the games. The game is the hero. This is literally like it’s fully branded. Like these look beautiful,

right? These are they’re fully designed by the games and and we actually um

Yeah, sure. Um check out for example uh Men Magic Fates, which is Ubisoft’s

game. I t that in and Mic Fates immutable play. Menagicfakes.com. Would that work? Was

this yours? Uh, and then you want a mutable play so I can actually link you. Yeah, let’s do it because I want to

visualize this. Um, maybe even a better example today just to keep it simple.

All righty. We got eightball as well. Cool. So, this is eight ball.

So, so I can understand how many people actually opting into

those extra tracking like do you have the stats on that? Like the percentage is it like a considerable amount? Is it 10% 80%? I don’t know.

Yeah. We are currently significantly beating Steam’s uh if you send a player

directly to a Steam wish list, we are typically beating the cost per wish list

while also signing them up to play and therefore getting GDPR, email consent,

the ability to connect other services and we’re getting 40% more on Steam wish lists uh on an average case study basis

uh because we literally run AB tests where we send because remember this is a new product very much generating

validation case studies But we’re running AB tests to both of these surfaces and comparing the results.

Cool. Okay. With with identical ads, etc. And the coolest thing is like the the

net to summarize, Harry, that the net thing we’ve been able to do, we are getting close to now 50 to 100% more

wishlists per dollar spent and then 50 to 100% higher likelihood that they play

or purchase your game upon launch. where if you combine them, that’s anywhere between a 2.25 to 4x multiplier on your

overall dollars spent in terms of ROI pre-launch if you’re looking at I want to spend a dollar and I eventually want

to get someone to turn up and play my game or spend in my game. So that the multiplicative effect is profound.

Okay, let’s say we know that this exists now. Like are there any changes I should make to the way I’m launching or

designing my game? Like based on the ones that you’ve seen, is there any trends I should be aware of? I’m listening to this and I’m working on

games. Totally. Yeah. I I think one of the most important things is you must keep your

audience warm leading up to launch. Uh too many people basically think basically a a warm uh customer is is

someone you can contact and they’re likely to open uh an email or open an engagement from you over a period of a

month and then eventually will convert at a much higher likelihood into playing or purchasing in your game. Uh, and so

the biggest problem we see devs make is they go and have a great activation, they get a bunch of PR, some sort of,

you know, successful campaign in the year before they launch, and they never talk to those players again until like 2

days out from launch, and these people are like, “What the hell is this game? I I can’t even remember signing up to this. I don’t trust newsletters.” Like,

in my world, I was like, “Of course you don’t build a newsletter and then activate it in a year’s time. It doesn’t mean much.” Precisely. Like even it tells you the

quality of your list goes down down down every month that they haven’t opened an email. But Exactly. But it’s hard it’s hard to do

really good ongoing content. It’s hard to figure out what to send when, what time of the world should you send things based on the geographies they’re in,

what CTAs are effective. Like these are totally different problems to then building a great game. And they’re

problems that really we we think game developers shouldn’t have to struggle with and there shouldn’t have to be this

big discrepancy based on it. So that that’s the number one advice I’d give to someone listening today is like you must

effectively figure out a what’s your most effective channel in terms of the metrics you actually care about. B what

are the value of those cohorts and c how do you engage them leading up to your launch and of course you know our software can help but these are all

things people can do by themselves if they’re willing to put in the the grit to do them. I want to understand what

you see as an optimal team now because you mentioned at the start that you

don’t necessarily need a 10 person marketing team. So if we can talk to the marketers now they are doing it the way

they think they need to be doing it. Not everyone knows what they don’t know and all that stuff. But like if you’re a games marketer now

listening to this like is it too late to do this like halfway through warming up a game? Do

you have to do this from the very start? Like I’m just thinking how do I act on

this information? Do I need to go all in? Is it a gradual thing? Yeah. So look, first of all, I’d say if

you’re already really good at demand genen and actually bringing in players, the the goal of this software is just to act as a multiplier on all of those

efforts. It’s to say, hey, if you’re already bringing in 10,000 users per week, this is going to mean that the

10,000 instead of converting into 500 wish lists converts into a thousand. And then instead of those 500 converting

into you know a 100 players the the thousand converts into 400 players. So like the goal is just to multiply the

efforts through much more efficient software retention and activation methods. Um I would say the most

important thing for marketers to be aware of right now is there’s so much leverage you can get. You know I I I would tell someone there are now hires

you no longer have to make but also your existing team can get so much more done. They can hyperpersonalize messaging. You

can figure out what cohorts matter the most. You can create content with less

input than ever that is perfectly written to your game’s brand, your game’s tone in a super exciting way. All

obviously with Gen AI. So I I I mean I really think one of the biggest benefits

is personalized uh hyper opinionated content that is really engaging for your

audience. uh and obviously you need the inputs for that content. But that that’s I think why why it’s such an exciting time in in marketing land right now and

also from a performance marketing perspective. I mean so many creatives are now being driven by by Gen AI.

Yeah, I’m curious about this cuz I have a ghostrine agency, right? And the way

we use AI is if I interview the founder, I get a transcript. I have ideas already

in my mind, but then I’m like, “Hey AI, what are some good angles here that we may have not seen?” and then I can then

pick the ones and I have taste. But I feel like that works because I’m working

with let’s say five 10 clients at a time max. When you’re talking about thousands of gift lists, you said personalized.

How can something be personalized? Like the thing that you’re putting in, you say the input and then it becomes personalized.

Like basically I’ve seen some dodgy AI writing like um very curious like when you say is personalized like how does

that look in this world? Today we’re not writing one-off emails for every uh customer. I think that’s

probably like the the the biggest extent of personalization. I would just view it as a spectrum. Uh and you know the the

the first thing we’ve done is we basically tried to create archetypes of different players based on their spend profile, their player profile and then

you can kind of pitch them exactly and and then you can pitch those cohorts what activities are they most likely to

engage in prior to launch. If you know they’re a low propensity to spend, they’re say like from a you know a low

economically valuable region, you might pitch them more like social engagement, verality, things that are helpful to your game but are non-economic uh things

and you may not spend as many time as much time with those players. If you know this cohort is Wales and you know

uh gaming monetization follows the 8020 rule, right? 20% of your customers will drive 80% of your revenue. 20% of those

customers will drive 80% of that revenue. And so you very much want to be able to identify these are your whales

and these are who you should be tailoring custom communications to. Literally even VIP like one-on-one support uh is worth it in in in some

cases depending on your game’s monetization. And the cool thing we have in our data is we can only predict that.

We know exactly how much they’ve spent on every other game or surface on immutable play and we provide that data

to our customers. I’m very curious like because a lot of people say like design

for the whales, make sure there’s enough spend depth, but you track whales across multiple games. I don’t know if many

other people are doing that apart from like like very huge mobile gaming publishers who have like multiple titles.

Precisely. And the app store has shut down a lot of this information with AT and IDFA which

came in 2021 which really made the advertising landscape much more difficult for video games.

So yeah, like what does a whale look like? Because a lot of the reason I asked this is I had a podcast where

someone this was with Senya um she was on the podcast previously just for anyone

listening and it she was talking about how they went to a VIP area where it was

a VIP event and they were like billionaire farmers something crazy and then they were like 27y old Saudi people

and then it’s like retired couple all in the VIP event for this like play race

game. So they all look very different, different genders, different demographics, but that’s that core. You see this

across games. I wonder like what does a whale look like? Is it the stereotype or is there anything interesting that you’ve seen?

Yeah, I look I think it depends on the genre of the game. I think it depends on the type of monetization of the game

you’re going to see demographics wildly vary. Obviously uh Japan is the single highest APU uh sort of average cohort in

the world and so a lot of your ordinary players there are whales by western standards in terms of like their average

spend on ARPGs etc. There’s a lot of whales uh obviously out

of you know um the UAE uh there’s a lot certainly still from the US. Um, I think

the most important thing is to be able to identify for your game. What is the

cohort that you’re trying to maximize? Is it Wales, which is if you have very high spend depth, it’s it’s likely to be them. Is it just people actually

purchasing copy of your game for $80? And so, you just want a very high percentage of real audiences from

countries that are likely to pay with a with a, you know, high propensity to to actually flow through to purchase.

Very cool. All righty. That’s a lot. We we went into a lot there. I feel like this is does it feel as

I don’t know this feels like a I don’t know new era I guess like this isn’t what was the case last year like are you

getting this from people when you’re talking to them like wow like we can now do this like any examples that you’ve seen

so the biggest things that have opened up and we haven’t even really touched on this is like there is the culmination of

two interesting trends at the moment in gaming more games coming out than ever distribution is harder than ever and AI

is going to keep that trend going right now you can create 2D assets sets that look excellent. And you know, I I’m I’m

not even going to kind of buy into the Epic versus Steam debate. I think disclosure is fine if you want to, but

clearly the trend is AI is going to drive so much of content creation in games. It it is just like the law of

physics of of digital production at this point. Um, and soon it’s going to be 3D

assets and mods and maps and NPC dialogue and NPC behavior. Like the

overall cost of creating content is going to massively commoditize. Um, and so the supply is going to get even

higher. And at the same time, you have uh the most difficult advertising

territory, the most competitive advertising territory because all the marginal spend uh and all frankly like

the the CPMs for valuable cohorts are being soaked up by hyperefficient massive studios who know exactly how to

optimize this stuff. Some lost leaders as well. I’m hearing like some people will spend for a year maybe just get their money back. Like

some people can’t afford to do that. like at least on mobile like the stuff I’ve seen on how much they would spend to get a user like not really caring

about the profit in the short term. It’s crazy. Yeah, exactly. Um and the bigger these

platforms become, the more they can afford to sort of invest into the future because they can share them between games and between audiences.

Um so that that’s interesting. And then the other thing is it’s really interesting is for the first time ever

the app store monopoly on IP fees has been broken and they’ve had this huge regulatory mode essentially or or it’s a

technical mode but enforced by uh regulators for the last decade. Um and

just how significant that is is almost difficult to overstate because a game success or failure is basically the

difference between can it achieve an LTV DECAC of like 1.01 versus 0.99. the first game can scale profitably until

that, you know, uh, basically marginally is no longer profitable. And the second game can never acquire a single user

profitably. And so now, if you’re earning 70 cents on the dollar and

suddenly you don’t pay that 30% Apple tax, your net profit margin is expanded by 42%.

with things like stable coins uh and wallet technology over the last year, we think these games can get another 5% on

top of that as well as creating loyalty systems that make it incredibly uh sticky for for their players to to

purchase. So the net uplift is that all these games which were uh literally at 7

now jumped that profitability threshold. So we think it’s one of the most significant essentially openings in um

the infrastructure of gaming in the last couple of decades. Yeah. And I’ve felt this very real. Like

increasing 30 to 50% in your revenue doesn’t increase the profit by 30 to 50%

if everything else stays equal. It might 5x the profit if you have like ex Exactly. Because suddenly you can spend

to the marginal threshold and you’re totally right. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz like if people are able to

make a profit in the current situation and they can get an extra 15 30%. If your net profit was 10% 30% extra

revenue, it’s like it’s like it might double the bottom line which is ridiculous. Very cool.

Yeah. Great. So, is this just I’m just curious now because we’ve been speaking about this for a bit now. Like is this what

you guys are working on like all in now? Just curious like immutable. Is there anything else that you’re cooking or Yeah, I mean look the the core

infrastructure the the chain and checkout infrastructure um the the wallet technology we’ve been building is

very much a core focus of uh of the company. Um the exciting thing is this audience software line makes a lot of

that invisible and then uses whatever is helpful to the end game. So you know you don’t have to build a sort of real money

economy if you want to use it. uh you can obviously and we have the solution infrastructure there but we think this is the way to basically like if you look

at the biggest crypto company this year it is strike and uh they don’t call

themselves a web 3 payments company they call themselves a financial infrastructure company increasing the GDP of the internet but also you have

Pat Coulson on record saying stable coins are going to 100x the TAM of

financial payments and they’re essentially room temperature superconductors. So we we think the same thing is is

going to happen to gaming. The most important shift is how do we actually improve the fundamental economics of these games, not why is this technology

exciting. So I would actually love people to completely lose the term web 3 or web 2 games a year from now. I I

think it is just here is technology that makes games more efficient that makes players have a better experience and and

offers them more value. I like that you said that because I was in my previous company on my company

podcast. I started doing a few web three uh panels and because it was a panel

there was like three four people and if people went back and listened to those it’s usually one or two I’m like what’s happening like what are you actually

doing there like I don’t know what the fundamentals are of what you’re building and then when I speak to people like you

like we’re focusing on the game right like it’s just the game it’s nothing else around it like when I keep hearing

about the web 3 from people in industry all of them, and I do mean all of them,

look at it like, eh, unless someone’s coming in as a challenger, they’re thinking, “Oh, okay. This is what we’re

doing as new technology.” But all the traditional games in industry just have, at least the ones I’ve spoken to, this perception of what web 3 is. I think

it’s because we’re over complicated. They think web 3 equals this type of game. So, this type

I I totally agree. Exactly. And and and our whole goal is we should be able to increase uh the efficiency of every game

on the planet. That’s what this software does. Um, and you know, I it’s been our fastest growing product line ever. You

know, this product has grown in the space of under a year on a SAS basis alone um to to zero to eight figures in

ARR. Um, so the and and that’s with last cycle we had zero churn apart from

structural churn games that ran out of money. Um, so we we are solving such an important need for these games right now. Uh, and I think that’s coming

through the market and and so really, you know, our goal is to scale this to to um as many games as possible over the

next few years. Yeah, fair play, man. Like, it’s really cool. It’s really cool to see. Are you doing any Europe trips next year or you

staying in Australia kind of? Look, I’m always through at some point. So, uh I’m I’m sure I’ll be there for the big craft conference or something.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s awesome. Lovely. So in terms of the maybe AAA’s now, so I

think we focused a lot on just like the average person. Is there anything the AAA’s were doing a couple years ago that

you looking there like what on earth are you guys doing? Um when it comes to scaling? Yeah. So the the biggest thing with

AAA’s is a lot of their spend is changing from monolithic big brand campaigns to like how do we activate a

thousand Koss, a thousand influencers, etc. and track all of that efficiently. Um, and again, you know, this is where I

think interestingly our software has been super efficient at at being able to like be a central point where you can

look at every marketing dollar you spend and working out where should your marginal dollar go in terms of

efficiency as well as uh tracking and using all of that data. So like the the most interesting thing about we’re

building is every customer that signs up to your play page, every uh influencer

which sends you a customer or or channel source uh every time they open an email, all this data feeds back in to make that

machine more efficient. Whether it’s we know how to tailor an email campaign based on the UTM which says actually

this person for this trading card game is brought in by Proparian. So, we’re going to put his face on the first email

we send them and sell the life cycle marketing around that. That’s the personalization that AI unlocks and and and basically personalizing based on

experiences players have already had is is one of the most efficient things you can do in sort of life cycle marketing.

And so, it’s this data flywheel with every player signing up. The ability to

market and figure out who you want to spend the next dollar to acquire becomes much more efficient.

You mentioned that you can point influencer campaigns into immutable. Why

is that different than pointing them to the Steam page? Like obviously wish list number goes up. Wish list number goes up

when it goes to immutable. Is there anything else happening? Like we getting like granular tracking of like where

everyone came from people submitting a forms like I was recommended by I it’s everything. One, you get to know exactly

where they came from. Two, you get all the data on what does that player then go on to do and what is the modeled out

predictive value of whether that player will spend. Then we can match that to what do they do they actually spend in the end. Three, you get the ability to

own the relationship with that customer and connect every gaming surface that they have. Not just send them to a

random wish list where they just do one action. You get them to do that anyway. But then you can also connect their Steam, their Reddit, their YouTube,

their Discord, every social service that they’re spending time on. And then all that data goes into automated

engagement and retention marketing that we will literally like AI will write for you. All you have to do is click send or set up the their email sequence and they

will retain and engage 50 to 100% better than if you just sent them to a to a

wish list. So our whole goal is we call it the double double. How do we double your wish list or initial signup metric

uh and conversion through a hyper optimized landing page and how do we double the amount of those people who go

to play or spend in your game which is a 4x overall. Wow. So just so understand each person

I’m guessing has like an immutable creator code and then it’s very clear where they came from and

or just a UTM. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So you can actually track if a influencer

has a smaller audience but their audience is so well placed for your game that their kind of market rate for

whatever they charge you get a massive arbitrage because you know how much they’re spending. don’t know. Ah, they

came in and broke 10 players, but like those 10 players might have been gods or like a whales or something. Totally. Yep. Yep. And and that’s a

really important point which is you can spend as much money as possible to get users and unless those users spend money, you you’ve gain nothing. And you

could get 10 users and it could be Wales and it can be the best spend ever. So knowing the value of a cohort is the most important thing. That’s why

Apploven’s a $200 billion company because they understand marginal propensity to consume of players better than anyone at the time they’re selling

the ad. Uh, and we we’re basically building this out pre-launch for any spend that you’re doing anywhere,

whether it’s an influencer, whether it’s organic, whether it’s paid ads, whether it’s PR, they all go through this

machine. You get to win the relationship. You get the best life cycle marketing possible and they’ll activate with a much higher propensity.

Very cool. Um, you mentioned Japan being the most valuable cohort. I I’m curious

like, so obviously games that they like to play, but that is the highest average cohort in the world for video games. Is

there anything that you see people in the east doing game development wise and maybe people in the west should be

doing? I want to ask you all these perspective questions because you have a very unique position where you can see all these game launches and you actually

have the data. So yeah, it’s a good question. I mean structurally uh I I assume um you you

mean Asia here? Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of commentary when I see someone goes to a

conference in Asia, they come back saying, “Oh my god, they’re doing things differently here like this.” Every time

I see it and at least maybe this will open a few conversation threads like I

see people saying they are building the teams. I think I saw an example where someone in Vietnam where the head of

like marketing is like the head honcho or it’s like they’re they’re pretty much the head honcho and then everyone making

the games they come underneath the person who’s in the marketing where in some other place in the west is a bit different. So that’s one example. Uh,

another example is maybe I think the speed and the iteration and how much

they make games based on the conversion rate of an mobile ad. And yeah,

these things make sense from a B2B sense, but I think there is just like turned up to 11. Um, but I’m just wondering if there’s anything that

you’ve seen that maybe kind of people can take away. You know, the biggest difference is between mobile versus desktop games in

terms of the development approach. And that makes sense. You know, um I remember speaking to a good friend of

mine, Justin Walrren, who was one of the founders of Zingga. And when I met him eight years ago, he’s an adviser to the company. And the first thing he said to

me is that for mobile games, half the budget was spent on the first three minute slice of the game to see, can you

get someone to stick around for the benchmark times? And if you couldn’t get it for three development budget,

half of the development budget. Oh, wow. Yeah. To basically see whether it should be green lit or not. Because if you can’t get someone to stick around for

the first three minutes, the rest of the game doesn’t matter. Three minute retention.

Exactly. And so it’s obsession with what’s a vertical slice and based on the

data, is this going to work? And there are mobile, you know, mobile companies are famous. They will they will plow $10

million into a game, $10 million in launch, and then pull the game if it doesn’t hit their prescribed metrics at

day seven and day 14. It was just not worth their time to allocate more capital to that game. It’s very

different to a desktop games uh which is which is much more of a brand driven approach. Um and I think marketing is

quite frankly a lot harder, a lot more opaque there uh because it is much more around build up your brand for a big

bang launch, generate virality, generate word of mouth and and that’s really where we’re actually trying to bring a

lot of clarity to um the efficiency of of that spent. Yeah. Cuz um there’s so many parallels

to the business world, but I don’t know why I haven’t made them before cuz they’re not like crazy. own your list, you know, like that’s pretty it’s very

common business sense. Like you don’t ideally want to have your whole business on something like Amazon because they own your customers. Ideally, you want to

have a plan to get rid of it. But like in the games industry, I don’t see people talking about which is so crazy to hear. Like it’s

I think it’s just there’s really a lack of alternatives. Um people are not thinking about these problems. Um, you

know, we we’re we’re so surprised continuously we talk to these game developers and

their number one problem is they don’t know how to efficiently market their game. They feel comfortable on the development side. Um, and so it’s very

gratifying to see the impact we can have overnight for for a lot of these people. Beautiful. Are there any

because you said you grew the business crazy amount. So I’m guessing that’s small devs, that’s big devs. anyone, you

know. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, uh, Treeverse, we helped hit number one

most streamed game uh for for its category at launch. Um, with for for Ubisoft, we’re basically delivering 40%

increase in in cost per wish list uh on a like forlike basis versus running ads directly to Steam. Obviously, we’re

we’re excited to activate for their launch, which will be end of January for Might Magic Fates. Um there’s there’s a

number of uh games that have I think really delighted with what they’ve been able to achieve. Uh and the most

important thing again is it’s a multiplier on all of your other efforts. It’s if you’re already doing X Y and Z,

you can now do that with 50% more efficiency um through this through this software. And if you don’t have any idea

what to do, it’ll be pretty opinionated around doing all the basics from having the best place to send your users,

having the best place to engage them, and having the best place to activate them. Uh, and even things like we’re looking at earned known media, etc., and

how you can actually build all these free artifacts that will passively bring you in users.

Yeah. Beautiful. Is there an MVP studio you think now? Like if you

get this sort of data, if you build a game and it gets X amount of metrics,

you could then go take that to a publisher or investor versus before you

build the vertical slice. got to convince publishers like do you think this will do big numbers like at least in the mobile gaming world investment

wise now it’s tail end right like I’m wondering now you don’t need to wait too long in the

real world because you got such better granular data yeah this is actually really exciting I

I don’t think anyone’s yet saying um raising $20 million off the back of uh

just the the cohort information but I’d like to be in a place in 6 months where an investor could look at this and say,

“Hey, look, we actually understand the value of this cohort that you’ve built because investors do use wish lists and they increasingly distrust the value of

a wish list alone without the analytics accompanying it.” Um, so I think that’s where we can actually provide a pretty

useful layer of transparency. But that changes every I’m being very dramatic

but I think it’s a I think I have a reason to because if now investors are looking to invest in games which have

metrics that they can be like we know what’s going to happen. The previous losing my voice the previous examples of

this is Steam wish list numbers and we had our most popular episode is called

the game scout. Why publishers kind of what are they getting into? And they basically said, “If you get 10,000 wish

lists or more, they will take you a bit seriously. And if you have a community, even better.” And that’s kind of what

they were looking at like not that long ago, a few months ago. And now I’m like, well, if you can track where these users

have come from, the value of each user, like imagine I have a wish list with X

amount of people from this country and they came from this influencer, which has typically resulted in these type of

players. That’s a very nice that’s a nice slide deck. That’s a much nicer one. like if I’m being an investor now.

Um but like that may bridge the gap a little bit because investors wouldn’t

make that bet before but when you have all this data it’s a much more compelling um thesis. You’re exactly right Harry and this is

we’ve talked extensively about this internally is like how do we help solve this problem of giving investors

certainty and giving games clarity of proof points they can show to investors to say hey like we’ve actually built something really valuable people really

want it. That’s so cool. That’s so cool. It’s exciting. Yeah, I it’s it’s really

exciting. It’s surprising how blue ocean a lot of this stuff is. There’s really not that many people thinking about it. Um so we’re I think we’re in a

privileged position to be able to build a lot of this stuff out, especially in a consolidated single point um software

solution. You know, we’re really I I think vertical AI SAS, right, is the hottest meta right now. Um, and it is

for a reason which is it’s never been easy to build out point solutions in a pinidated way for a single customer to

solve all of these needs. Uh, and and and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with with audience. Yeah. Beautiful. Lovely. Um, if you

don’t mind, take a bit of a pivot here. Um, the company that you’ve built from

the outside, right, it looks incredible. Like big numbers, amazing, but you’ve been doing this a long time. And I’m

just curious if there’s maybe any lessons for anyone like building teams here or what have you. Any lessons you

learned the hard way cuz you’ve been through a few pivots as far as I understand. Um kind of and you’ve raised the superman money and I think a lot of

people might learn from that journey. Is any big thing? This is the most generic question but I found that it gives me

very many lessons. I’m very happy to share. Yeah. My my question is like what do you

tell Robbie day one in Mutual versus now in terms of would you what do you wish

that that person knew? Yeah, very happy to share. So I think number one is hire slow and hire the

smartest people you know and be extraordinarily selective and whatever you think is extraordinarily selective isn’t uh you can raise the bar further

but there is especially in today’s world with the leverage you get from AI no downside in hiring better people and I

would always pay more to get the talent quality you need and have fewer people internally and the best people we hired

internally at the start were people we had networks and relationships with you know I literally went out and hired the

smartest few people that I knew and they all I think literally all all three of those

people are still at the company today. Um so I really cannot recommend um highly enough uh talent density and to

get more tactical and very practical one. Interviewing is only half the process. We trust back channels and

references more than interviewing. References only count. Absolutely. Because an interview is enough to tell

you someone can fail, can’t do the job. It’s not enough to tell you that someone can do the job. Say test over references. I didn’t

expect you to say references. They’re both necessary. Um that they’re both must haves. Uh the important thing

about references is most people do them in a way that gives absolutely zero signal. If you just call up uh or have

your talent team call up their previous uh employer and ask was this person any good? 99% of people say yeah. They’re

like pretty good. And like that tells you absolutely nothing.

reference Robin. Exactly. So really you need like two things. One, back channels are more

valuable than references. Having someone you have a strong relationship with proactively say these are the best people I’ve worked with. Like I every

new hire we sit down and say who who are the top people you’ve worked with ever in your career. It doesn’t matter if they don’t fit for the company. It

doesn’t matter if they’re overseas. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing. We’ll put them in a list and we’ll see if we

can somehow fit them into the company. Um, and the the second thing is you must be closer to the reference than they are

to the uh person they’re referring. Uh, otherwise you’re just not going to get any signal. Um, so that those are my

lessons on hiring like slow to hire very much um quick to to fire like you have

to figure out is someone from match for the company within the first two three months. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to your

team if you wait longer or if you have low standards. There is nothing that will kill high performers motivation

more than having to work with low performers or people they think are not pulling their weight in terms of the team and effort. Um I would also say uh

most people work on far too many priorities. This is tricky if you’re a game developer. So uh you’re speaking to

one right I the post coming out in 10 minutes is like I’ve started a B2B event

brand. I’ve also ghost writing for founders and we do outbound for those founders and I have a podcast and I

think I’m yes I will be doing an accelerator for the B2B games industry

in February but my kind of defense is it all serves the same goal which is help

people have more conversations. It’s just in my head more leverage but it doesn’t help with the sleep and whatnot. So I definitely I feel the

pain. I’m like how do I not do it? I’m in that situation now. Like I I get it, but like I I still feel compelled to do

these five different things. Yeah. And and look, all I would say is

at any point in time, there is only ever one constraint on a business or an enterprise.

Yeah. That again is the physics of a business. And the hardest thing and the most

important thing is for you to figure out what that constraint is and only work on that or work on that with the most intensity

until it’s solved. Um, and sequencing problems is much better than approaching them simultaneously. Um, is is the other

thing I would say because it’s it’s very very easy. If I gave you five problems and they’re like the five top problems

for your business, you’ll be able to smash three or four of them and like the one most important one typically the biggest constraint you will not solve

because it’s hard. It requires six months of continuous ef but if you solve it will be the next sort of exponential growth to your

business. So that was the other big learning I had. Um, any example of a constraint that you

didn’t realize was so big until you actually sold it? Um, yeah, sure. Uh,

being able to scale to web two games was the biggest company constraint because we had basically built complete market

dominance of all web three games. We had we had all the market share and and yet we we didn’t have software that could be

easily used by any game in the world, which is the biggest constraint because the scale and difference of those markets is 100fold. Um, and so we solved

we we focused and we solved that constraint at the start of the year and and now it’s been our most successful product ever and is fundamentally

changing how we think about taking this technology to the world. So I I really say and there’s a great book on

constraint theory called the goal by Eli Goldrat. Highly recommend. Um, so yeah.

Yeah. Very cool. I recently started becoming a kind of big boy business owner I guess and you

know started looking at constraint only and when I actually looked at it was like hire a writer and I was like oh

okay I wasn’t trying to hire a writer for the last four months that was not even though that was the only constraint

hire the writer I’m like cool now I need to know how to build the systems around and it’s just like one after the other

and I feel like when you solve the constraint then the next one becomes a lot more clear but I’m very

Yeah, a bit bit scatter in terms of I love working on multiple things, but the

one constraint thing is very useful. I’m just curious at your level now, do you

live by calendar blocking? Do you have an assistant? Any top tips for someone who’s maybe a founder of a studio,

they’re going to be pulled in every direction, right? Yeah, I do. I I have a weird one that we

only started doing this year that every morning I will sit down with my two co-founders

and we will all commit to what our top goal for the day is and we’ll all interrogate each other’s top goals and

say is this actually the highest leverage use of your time? Is this going to move the business forward and is this goal smart? aka is it objective, you

know, specific, measurable, um, actionoriented, whatever, time bound, time bound, all that jazz.

And then at the end of the day, we will present to the other two founders what we got done against that goal

every day. Every single day. And it is it is very manual, but this level of intensity and

commitment to every day we must get the most important thing we could possibly do for the business done. and we know

it’s the most important thing because we’ve all literally spent 10 minutes interrogating each other’s goals and two

we know we’re gonna get it done because we have to present at the end of the day. Yeah. Right. It’s pretty remarkable

but you only do it because I kind of have that with like the focus teams. I have my older brother and we’re building

these events. So you it’s a stand up with rigorous standards on what like one goal

it must be the most valuable thing. Everyone will debate that and it’s a very high psychological safety meeting. Like I find this is almost it’s

difficult just to even do with teams because like you have to be like hey this is a BS goal. This is not the most

valuable thing. And at the end of the day you have to basically be like hey I got this done or I didn’t and here’s why I didn’t. Here’s why I did.

Um but that single change I believe it means like you go from

getting two of these done a week to like four and a half and that means you progress the business at literally 80%

faster like four five 4.5 2.5. So I’m going to try that, Robbie. I like it.

I’m going to try it. I’ll let you know if you It’s very manual, but it it really worked for us. Ah, it’s really cool cuz I do that

anyway, but I my issue I have multiple tasks like what all the things you want to do today and then when something

doesn’t get done, I’m like, “Oh, okay. You did all the rest. If we just have one thing, just report on one thing.”

Nice. I like that. Very cool. In terms of the marketing side, this is just

something that came to mind because I’ve get this question. I had a indie founder who’s actually on the podcast and he

listened to one of the marketing podcasts we did and he said you know any advice on how to do marketing with

performance marketing and I know this person specifically so I want to tell you a bit about his circumstances and

maybe you can just tell him what he could do. I can just send him this clip. Haha. So he goes to a lot of conferences

and he pitches the game to publishers to investors and also wants to get metrics and whatnot. He’s very much a conference

basher. Like he does load his lives and grieves it and he’s very good at booking meetings with the publishers. That’s

kind of what he spends most of his time doing as the founder. I’m wondering what you feel about that just from where you are when it comes to

maybe Yeah, I think this is basically how to publish your own game, right? Like do you feel like maybe he still needs to do that? Is there anything

wrong with kind of spending all your time going to publishers? Um there’s nothing wrong trying to network

publishers. I would say it’s much easier to do when you have social proof on your game. You before referenced the fact

that if you get above 10,000 distinguish lists, if you have a community, people are much more interested. And so our

advice is like just like the advice of, you know, put the oxygen mask on yourself first. Like actually have

enough of an interesting asset before you go and have these conversations because you’re going to have far fewer and they’re going to convert much

better. So, put all your effort into unblocking the key progress in your game, getting traction with your

community, and getting these early social proof metrics before you go and do those and the conversation will be

much much easier. It’s like dating. I guess if you go if you’re going to pick a time when to go

to the gym, you probably do it before you start your dating stream. Appreciate as an asset before you’re

going to present yourself. Exactly. Yeah. Awesome. Uh, nice. Lovely. Um, I’m

curious just before we close here, the next steps for you, Robbie. I asked you this before, but like

you want to build this uh big enterprise. I’m just very curious like what why are we doing this? Why are we

doing this? Like what’s the what’s the reason? I’m very curious because I mean I wake up every day and yeah, I I

love what I do. I I love the team that I work with. I think we’re solving a really important problem. Um, and I

think we’re we’re helping uh basically a 3 billion people get better value out of

games. There’s 3.3 billion gamers every month. Uh, and also hundreds of thousands of people working on games

have a chance to see their game succeed because the quality of the game rather than fail because they don’t know how to market. Um, so you know, I I I’m both

love what we do, love the team, and also just love business and and getting better at business. So, um, that’s

probably the pretty boring answer. Yeah. Um, Robbie, do you mind telling people exactly what they could do to

maybe get in touch, maybe get in touch with the team, try the product? Yeah, absolutely. So, I’d say do one of

two things. Number one, if you want to feel free to message me on LinkedIn, always have it have a chat about your game. Um, two, go to immutable.com,

apply. There’s a form takes 20 seconds and our team of growth experts will

literally do a 20-minute breakdown of your game and tell us and tell you where we see all the problems and and where we

see opportunities to improve. Like we’re not going to hard sell you or hard pitch you anything. You can have the call and and you know never call us back. Um but

that that’s something we can we can absolutely do as well. So I’d say either one of those things and and we’d love to help um even if it’s just a friendly

conversation. Lovely. Thank you so much. This has been great. Thanks, Harry. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Awesome. All righty.