What’s the truth about Nintendo Switch 2?

0:00This week, Epic lays off a thousand employees. We dive into numbers around Nintendo Switch 2. The VR industry reacts to the end of Horizon Worlds and we celebrate our one-year anniversary. Hello and welcome to the game business show. We are officially one year old. It's been a fantastic ride so far. We've done a hundred shows now. We've had over three million of you read or watch. We'll listen to us. It's been an absolute delight. I have to say, it's been stressful at times and ups and downs. Who knows this is going to work, but I've enjoyed the learning process so much. But I want to say, as much as I am the face of this, I'm not the only one that makes this episode, this show happen. I have had fantastic support and advice from fellow journalists and podcasters, but specifically, I want to make sure I give a shout out to my producer, Richard Wilcox. I could not have gone through this year without him. An absolutely wonderful person, fantastic video editor and producer,

1:01and just been a completely essential part of the game business. I didn't call him out on my recent LinkedIn posts around our anniversary, but he's behind the scenes reason this has worked and it's want to make sure that I give him absolute credit on this. I've also obviously had support from Jeff Keely. He's always been quick to reply to a text. He's always on the other end of a phone. He's been fantastic. Backer of the game business and last year, we had other support as well. We had Alex Boucher and he helped us with some sponsorships last year and secure some vital financial support. But also, I've got to say all the PRs and people in the industry have given me this incredible access. I really don't take it for granted. Thank you for those interviews and hopefully they're worthwhile for you. And of course, thank you to our paying subscribers and speaking of paying subscribers, we have a promotion going on right now that people interested in supporting the game business. Until April 1st, you can get 20% offer subscription to the game business. Now, that subscription gets you access 12 weekly show that we put out on a

2:03Monday called the game business micro. It's a short version of the show we discuss the news, share my views on those news, and that means you're well armed for the week ahead. That's the idea behind it. It comes out every Monday morning. It's coming increasingly popular, which is great. And paid subscribers also get our monthly market report. We talk about how the video game industry performed over the month prior. And also, you get access to our live events too. If you're interested in going to the game business live in LA and you're paying subscriber, you can register for no additional cost. It's part of your subscription. So all of those reasons is why you should consider subscribing to the game business. And for best of all, right now, we're offering 20% discount. So you can find out how to get that discount by reading the newslet or just by visiting the gamebusiness.com. It's all over that. We will be promoting it. It ends on April 1st, right? Enough about us as much as we have to celebrate our news. And we're bound to talk about it a little bit more when our guest comes on the moment. But we have a lot of big things to talk about. Including these, it hurt quite shocking epic job cuts. I have to say it's quite a surprisingly brutal cut.

3:04I'm going on there. We also going to talk about the truth behind the performance and intent to switch to. I've got some data around how that's performing. And we're also going to talk about how the VR industry is reacted to the end of matters, her eyes and worlds on the quest store. And to discuss those topics, we're going to welcome back. Stephen Tortillo, the writer, reporter at GameFile. He was our very first guest host on the show way back in March 2025. And it's going to be exciting to have him back on one year later. But before we welcome Stephen, let's do the news. And the story that broke yesterday is that PlayStation has closed down dark, outlaw games. If you're not familiar with that studio, it's because it's a new one. It was founded last year by former Call of Duty Zombies boss, Jason Blundel. It's actually the second time Sony has partnered with Blundel. He had been working on the project with them as part of Deviation Games, which was an independent studio. But that game was cancelled in 2024 and then Jason got hired by Sony. Sony is sort of cutting some studios at the moment. They closed BluPoint early in the year as well. Sony's first party outposts generally slowed down a little bit.

4:05There's a few reasons for that game to just take longer to make. And of course, they've been pushing live service a little bit more. They're still putting out projects, though. It just released the marathon, obviously, from Bungie. That was a big, big play. It had Ghost of Yota out in October. It does seem to be focusing on these bigger projects these days. I have to wander with changes in the competitive landscape. Perhaps there's less pressure for Sony to ramp up its development output. And by that, I mean, if Xbox is putting all their games on PlayStation, what's the incentive to try and sort of match Xbox's output, for instance? I'm sure that's not the case. I'm sure it's just a very competitive video game landscape where ultimately games find it harder to succeed and decisions need to be made if a game isn't quite working out in development. But obviously, it cuts always disappointing. Speaking of disappointing news and cuts, I've got a couple of stories here. Tiger. Now, if you don't know who Tiger Wilder, the UK trade association, the specialising in development side of the industry, they're calling on the UK government to respond to what it says is the sharpest record decline in the country's game development sector. And they did this report called Making Games in the UK. Employment is falling at the fastest rate ever measured.

5:07And starter activity has dropped to a 15-year low. UK game development sector lost 1,537 jobs, a 4.5% drop, which is the fastest way of decline ever recording. The first time since 2011, the number has declined instead of grown. And then the trade body said the number of new studios formed also fell 30%, and that's for a third year in a row. There are now 2,110 game-to-studios in the UK. That's down from a peak of 2,175 in 2023. And what Tiger says will solve this as if the UK government could enhance the video game's expenditure credit, which is the tax relief that the UK had seen offers on video games. It's not just the US having a hard time. It's affecting things everywhere. Speaking of hard times, we talked about this actually on the micro this week. Ubisoft's Red Storm Entertainment will cease making video games, and that's going to result in 105 jobs lost. The studio will remain open working on the snow drop engine and handling some other services such as customer relations. Now Red Storm is an iconic studio. It was made to work on Tom Clancy games in 1996. Ubisoft picked up in 2000. It launched way by 6 and go 3-con.

6:08It's part of Ubisoft's roster of studios. It was working on a spin-to-sell game, a VR game, two or a few years ago. It was working on a expansion to the division. Both of those are Tom Clancy games, non-expansions or a spin-off to the division. That was cancelled as well. A few years ago, it's part of Ubisoft's goal to save 500 million euros between March 2023 and March 2028. I have to say, it's a slow cut all of this going on. In January, Ubisoft closed its Stockholm and Halifax Studios. A few weeks later, it announced planned to cut 200 jobs from its Paris division. There was also cuts at Ubisoft's Abu Dhabi, Red Link, some massive entertainment. In February, it cut 40 jobs at Far Cry 6, and some other sell developer Ubisoft Toronto. This month, it's been Red Storm. I'm not sure this gradual death by 1000 cuts is the best way to boost the business. Morale, they must be extremely low. I think there's just an element of how easy is it to make really successful games when they start for theory in the acts all the time. I need to talk about this a little bit more on the micro this week. But yeah, it's death by 1000 cuts over at Ubisoft. This is slightly better news. Crimson Desert, which is that highly anticipated open-world RPG.

7:10It launched last week. It received mixed critical views, shareholders panicked, and the share price of developer Pearl Abyss dropped nearly 30%. Nevertheless, the game has sold very well. It's now on 3 million copies sold, and that's caused its share price to go up again. 23%. Shareholders are nervous bunch, but the game is doing very well, at least, financially. Let's talk about numbers a little bit. So can't release their latest market figures last week. The US video game market generated $4.6 billion in spending during February, according to Sokana. That's up 1% from last year. This was because of a few things. Resident Evil Requiem did incredibly well. And there was a 27% boost in subscription services, which all of that led to video game content being flat compared to February 2025. Hardware was up. That was because an Nintendo Switch 2, which obviously wasn't on the market this time last year. However, PlayStation 5 once again led the hardware market in both units and revenue. I have to say, a 1% increase isn't a lot. And when you think about how much of that increase is down to just a few things, Switch 2, Resident Evil, and subscription services,

8:11that suggests that everyone else had a slightly harder time. We all have our market report out soon that you can spend the sky as well, and we'll dive into that a bit more. Taking a better financial. New CD Projekt posted strong financial results. Revenue reached $235.2 million, which is a 9% year on your increase. Or profit rose $33.7% to $161.4 million. Cyberpunk 2027 was the big revenue generator for this. A revenue was up 12% on that game, which has helped along with an Nintendo Switch 2 edition of the title. And the base game entering the PlayStation Plus subscription service. So the idea is the game is in the institutional service, and then people may have bought the add-ons on top of that. The developer also said that invested over $140 million in game development last year that included an unannounced IP, but also the Witcher 4, which everyone's very excited about and subpunk too. So good news there, third. New CD Projekt, very, very good news there. And I'll end with this drama, which is Krafton versus the Unknown World's former leadership team. Krafton now must reinstate Unknown World's CEO Edward Gill

9:13and extend the terms on which his team can secure $250 million bonus. This is the latest development, this ongoing dispute between Krafton and the leaders of Unknown World, which includes Edward Gill, Charles Cleveland and Adam McGuire. This is big deal because Subnautica is a big game. Subnautica 2 is currently the most wishlisty game on Steam. It has over 4 million wish lists. Now Krafton acquired Unknown World's in 2021, and Unknown World was supposed to release Subnautica 2 into early access in 2025, and there was a big bonus attached to that, that $250 million bonus. The leaders of Unknown World's are accused Krafton trying to avoid paying out on that bonus by forcing other lace to the game. This led to a really big back and forth of legal letters and courts Krafton accusing them of downloading company files and all sorts of things. Now the Delaware Chance Recall has judged in favour of the Unknown World's leadership and stated that Krafton breached the agreement by terminating their employment without valid cause and by improperly seizing operation control of the developer. That means that Krafton has to reinstate the CEO,

10:14who isn't really talking to them. It doesn't seem like a sustainable situation. Krafton said while we respectfully disagree with today's ruling, we are evaluating our options as we determine our path forward. Today's ruling does not resolve the former executive claim for damages or an urn out related to Subnautica 2, with further litigation still pending in the meantime, Krafton's immediate focus remains unchanged, living the best possible games of Naughtica's fans. That's the new you may have seen I missed a few things there, including about Nintendo and the parent cut in production for Twitch 2. We also didn't talk about Epic's layoffs, but we will, because I'm about to welcome our guest. Today he is the reporter, the founder, the creator, the face behind the excellent game file newsletter, long-term partner, friend of the game business. It is Stephen Tortillo. Hello Stephen, welcome back to the show. Delightful to have you back. It's one year, well you've actually been on since then as well, but one year ago almost exactly to the day, since you were our first ever guest. How have you been? Thank you for bringing me back Chris.

11:16It's congratulations to you on the year of the game business. It's been fantastic to see how you've built it in relatively short time. I don't know if you had this. I know that you did similar things, I guess, axes and stuff before then, but I've felt I've learned and it's such a full-out of learning things and working out how to do video. I think somebody said to me the day what was the thing I was most proud of in the last year, and it's a weird thing, but it was the fact. I went to see Shiji Tsumi, president of Sega, and the interview was good, I think. It was. But all it's something about that is I turn up to that. I didn't have my producer with me, Richard. He had to turn up with tripods and cameras and set it up in the room and never done anything like it before. And interview, there's really senior person in video games and it came out really well. I mean, if you watch it, my head's a little bit too close to the top of the camera and there's loads of little bits, and an expert would pick at. But that, for me, was just learning this stuff. It's just been a thrill, really. I don't know if you had that when you did GameFile, but that's what's been really motivating from my side. Yeah, I mean, everything is a crash course.

12:17I think, for me, the most startling thing to have to learn and deal with with GameFile, which is now gone on for almost two and a half years, is the fact that I distributed over email, as obviously a lot of people read the game business over email, and realizing, I mean, I had a little bit at Axios, but realizing how, basically, once it's out, you can't take it back. You can't bring it back to fix it. I had a copy editor at Axios. So if I made a mistake, they would catch most of the mistakes, but being solo and trying to go from writer brain to self-editor brain, self-copy editor brain, and then self-publisher brain, putting that out there, I would run into all these moments where I'm like, I forgot this step, I forgot to change the URL, or the headline isn't the right headline that I really wanted to put, or the social copy was wrong, or I got a factor wrong, and I have to, do I now send an update to readers? I'm sure you've never had that problem, right? Every edition you've sent out of the game business

13:18has been pristine, perfect, and flawless, correct? Of course, I mean, I get called a Fallout 76, Fortnite 76. You know, I mean, like, you can like the strap. Oh, well, you man. So yeah, no, I've done a few of those. I used to work in print. I used to work, you know, I did weekly magazine, so you had to, you turned them out really. There's only four of us. In some of those issues, like 100 pages long, and we'd turn those out super fast, and once we called Koch Media, Koch Media, and you know, is that horrible thing where you just want to press Undo, and you can't. Maybe you can see it sort of disappear off. Have you messed up enough that you ever emailed the correction? I don't feel like I have ever gotten one from you. I've wondered if you ever like gotten that close to considering, oh, I got to say something now. I haven't, if I got like a major factor wrong, I think, and there's been times when I've had interestingly the topic that I'm going to bring about today on today's show, I've done things which haven't gone down well. Right. So, and it's like, well, was I too much with it? The angle I took on this, was it a little bit too fierce?

14:20It had they not fully considered the variables. It's just the thing with this industry. So you think this looks bad. You know, we saw this Bloomberg report recently about Nintendo, and the reduction from six million to four million, which we're going to talk about in a moment. But actually, those production tweaks, ups and downs, is quite common. And if I was a journalist writing that story, I don't know how significant this really is, like how much of a thing these, and sometimes I put something out and maybe I've regged it, or at least I hadn't done it deliberately, but maybe the lines I had done. But then, are you just talking about it later on in a different show? I sort of course, correct it. Can I, so, you know, you said you sent out, you did 99 editions of the show when you wrote your, your sort of address to readers about the state of the game business, over 100 articles sent out. I'm curious, what were some of the biggest surprises, the things that people were more interested in than you thought they would be? Where you're like, okay, this, I thought this was going to be like a small thing, or this is a thing I worked on

15:21for half an hour, and it was one of my biggest things. The biggest, the number one feature slash video, edition of the show, this with Jack X. Right. And I have to say, when I put it out, I thought it was a filler episode. Yeah, that surprised me when I saw that in your rankings. It surprised me. And, you know, it doesn't surprise me that the Patrick Sodeling embark one was so popular. That didn't surprise me at all, but it did surprise me that the Jack X one was. And that's actually the lightest service ones have done. And I think perhaps because it goes to the, because obviously I'm mainly my pieces of business people. But every now and again, you do something on ruined skate, but get into the ruined skate community, do something on World of Warcraft. It gets to the World of Warcraft community. And watching that sort of spiral into deep conversation would be the most surprising. And what surprises me is one of the questions I always ask because the strategy behind the game business is however you want to, if you're somebody listens to stuff, you can listen to it. If you like to watch it, you can watch it. So whenever I come across someone, particularly if they say they listen or watch, I'm like, okay, you've got to tell me how,

16:23when, what's the scenario yours are? And a lot of it, like six out of 10, I think, we did a little gamescom thing me and Richard did. And it was, it's when they're walking the dog. The dog walker is, yeah. But I've had, I don't know if I should name them because I, you know, it wasn't, wasn't like, it was on the Reconnaissance thing, but I had a very, very, very big name in the industry, US games industry come up to be at the Game Awards, introduce themselves to me. I haven't met them before. It's a very nice time. And they told me that they watched the show a lot. Oh, question, where do you, where do you, how do you watch? And they said on TikTok. And that was when I was, I was like, I'm gonna put a little bit more effort into TikTok going forward now. All of that stuff surprised me. We're on somebody's TV right now, right? Didn't you say that you are the game business? Hello to whoever has put us on the television. There's a very, very senior person at Xbox. Who, every day I'm gonna say, I'm watching the latest show, and it would just take a picture of himself. And the background there's this giant, like I have no big, big TV and it's huge.

17:23And it's just my huge face on his screen. And it's, that stuff always, I, that's because that's the, when I launched, I have to be honest. I hoped this would be the case, but I was ready to pivot fully to newslets. Yeah, that was my, I was in that mindset that that's probably what we'll do, but we'll try this. And I'm pleased that people do engage in it in ways and that's been pretty good. I have one more question just about this, is that I don't have a dog. So I don't know how long a dog walk takes and how close you are optimized or dog walking length, but it sounds like that's successful. Do you have a dog? Like how long do I, I don't, I take it. How long do you take it? Okay, so what, that's a good question. Oh, and that's probably a piece of, maybe that maybe, because I do two episodes a week, maybe they do it over like multiple. Yeah, I don't know. The news shows about an hour, but the, the feature shows about 30 minutes. So it's, and then if you watch the micro, that's 15 to 20 minutes, which is only for paying subscribers the micro, but I love the micro. So I don't know. That's a good question. Maybe that's my next one, rather than just asking them,

18:23they know where and how, like, how long is your dog walk? Well, according to our dogs, 10 years, 10 years ago, so this is all information. There may be new science and dog walk lengths, but according to our dogs, how long do you walk exercise your dog? People are saying 45 to 60 minutes. Oh, this is running off the leash. Okay, that's not what we wanted. Adult dogs, this is from Woofee's website. This is the first things from Google. Adult dogs typically need at least 30 to 60 minutes of walking per day. So, you know, you're on the upper end of the dog walk length, right, free with your episodes, but that's good. Yeah, perfect, on the perfect dog walk. This is like, sorry Xbox executive watching this on your television. You want, you want video game business talk? We're getting there. We just had to talk about dogs first. Phil Spencer told me once that he listened, he listened to at least one episode on the treadmill. So I'm like, good. And he told me the name of the episode, and I thought, well, that's a good old run there Phil. Well done. It was a, it was a, if you watch this into the whole thing. And how are things going at game far? It's, I'm always, I'd loved, I know that there's always, you do these big breaking stories, which are fantastic, but I do love it when you do things about fonts.

19:25And these are the fonts of PlayStation. Yeah, I mean, that was news in the sense that it was a talk from GDC. And I had a good time at GDC, ran it to you, which was a pleasure, as always. And I like to go to some of the panels and just find interesting stuff that people are talking about. So the installment of Game File that you're talking about was about some folks from the centralized creative services team at PlayStation, about fonts and branding for Destiny 2 and the Horizon series. And that was just interesting to learn some of their process. And then I just did a story this week that I thought was the AI well. Intriguing and maybe harrowing for some folks. You're reading this. Definitely something that I imagine many subscribers for the game business will be interested in, which is a company called EchoMark that is using AI, machine learning and other advanced technology to try to basically stop leaks. They're the guy who did it, who runs the company, Troy Batterbury was previously a Microsoft Recorder Century, but he'd been looking in missile defense

20:25and so he's got a lot of thoughts about classified information and military secrets and stuff. And so they've come up with a bunch of different techniques so that if there's a company email, if there is a summary presentation about a game, or even if there's a game itself with footage that there's ways to create unique identifiers that are imperceptible to any individual person, but would make each copy of something identifiable to their systems. And so I wrote a bit about that. And I just, you know, you see so many different ways people are saying AI is going to change gaming and when I saw this on the GDC schedule, that AI could maybe stop video game leaks. I'm like, that's very provocative. I need to go check that out. And so fun stuff like that. It's always fun to find these stories. You dive, I sort of look at the headlines of those talks like, yeah, not for me, but then you just dive in a little bit deeper and you find these little gems. It's really good. Yeah. Yeah, I really, I enjoyed the AI one. In fact, it made me think that that's something that I might look to cover at some point that I was to game far was my number one crossover audience. So I know that there'll be a lot of people here that, you know, know exactly what we're talking about. But there's one of the stories I didn't talk about

21:27before you came on, which was Epic. Yeah, because I know that you did a thing talked about it yesterday. Yeah, for me, it was quite shocking that the scale of this layoffs and cuts that they're making. Right. Epic have laid off a thousand employees from their business and that they're together they're making over $500 million by dental, dental fire will cost savings in contracting, enclosing some open roles. The reasons that they gave for this is, you know, the industry wide challenges of slower growth, the console market being down and Fortnite having a bit of a tough time. It's certainly compared to you. It had a fantastic 2094 Fortnite in 2025 was sort of a lot more hit and miss, Simpson did well and where others did not. And that led to some cost, but didn't you discover that thousands from what is it? 5,000 they have? They had before this news. Yeah, so the thing that gets a little bit lost in some of these layoff stories is that we lose sight of what the hiring numbers were and it doesn't mean that the layoffs themselves are not significant to the people involved or even to the company involved. But you're right, on Tuesday, Epic said,

22:31we're laying off a thousand, over a thousand people and they didn't say out of what head count. I checked with the company and they said, basically they were at 5,000 people and the layoff of a thousand and bring them to just over 4,000 or over 4,000. I don't know if they said just, so over 4,000 people, right? So it's a 20% cut, 5,000 to 4,000. But if you were to go back and look at the most recent prior to that cut, that was in 2023 and I think it was September, when they announced a cut of 830 people and at the time they described that as 16% of the workforce. And if you did the math at the time, it implied that their head count was around just over 5,000, maybe 5,200 or so in 2023 and that they had it to just over 4,000. So to put that just in order in 2023, they go from over 5,000, they cut to over 4,000 and then just earlier here in 2026, they were cutting from over 5,000 to over 4,000. What you can infer from that is that between those cuts in 2023 and the cuts in 2026,

23:33they hired possibly as many people as they had let go in 2023. So the head count of epic had grown, had regrown. After in 2023, they were like, well, we were too big. Well, they made themselves that big again and they found themselves in a spot where based on how they decide things, they were like, no, we have to cut. Yeah, it's difficult to know with epic. They always seem to be doing so well but I always think with them, they're fighting the biggest companies. And whether that's in the courtrooms with Apple and Google or whether it's sort of competitively against Steam or competitively against Roblox, I mean, they don't do anything really small in any way. And these things are almost impossible to be a monster, try and take down and try and impact. And they have to spend so much money in order just to make a dent in these markets. And they're not winning against Steam. Epic still has grown and it's doing very well but it's not, it's grown. But Steam has grown more. And then you've got unreliable to fortnight hasn't quite caught on in the way that I think that they had imagined or had hoped for it.

24:36And then you've got the Google deal which every time I talk to a mobile developer about that deal epic stunt, I just get like a shrug. We did add in to a scopely this week and I asked them about how big a deal is this, you know, better, you know, cheese you're getting from Google. And he's a lychewa sponsor. It was like, and it's so epic of doing all of this effort spending all of this money, putting all this energy into these things. And I imagine it can, it's just costly. And yeah, they have to sort of redeploy. Yeah, when I interviewed Tim Sweeney, when I interviewed Tim Sweeney a few years ago and asked him about how much money they'd spend on the legal battles, I think the quote he said was that they cost them about a billion dollars in his estimate. And that was I assume a matter of a combination of legal fees and lost revenue from just having, because basically they took themselves off of iOS by putting, you know, putting in their own payment systems and basically breaking apples terms of service and then, you know, fought a legal battle against them. They are fighting, as you said, a lot of the biggest companies. They also though are partnering with many of the biggest companies. So it was only 2024 that they announced that Disney

25:37was making an equity investment of over a billion dollars into Epic. Yes, of course. They have a big deal with the Lego company that we've seen manifest at some projects and I believe others. I think it's still supposed to be forthcoming. They have major investment obviously from Sony, from Tencent, which has a big stake in them. We don't know, when you talk about kind of the opacity of their finances, we don't know what these stakeholders are expecting. And if there is any pressure from those stakeholders in terms of Epic's books, there's constant speculation about Epic potentially considering going public. And then what do you want your finances to look like if you were to do that? I don't have any insight information as to whether that's something they have planned. But another thing that I think about Chris is the Simpsons. The last fall, Epic introduced a, basically a redo of Fortnite, a whole new Fortnite island completely themed from the Simpsons. This was years in the making. It was arguably one of the best Simpsons video game

26:39experiences ever created. Obviously they had to pay licensing to Fox and however else you have to pay to get the access to the Simpsons. And it lasted a month, and they removed it. And there is a philosophy around live service games where you move things from one thing to the next. But you do sometimes lock in certain modes, notably by the way they were canceling or winding back a couple of modes as part of the cups this week. Ballistic is going away, one of the rhythm experiences and other experience. But I wonder, did they leave money on the table by not continuing this Simpsons experience? Are they in some cases not just not building some things that they should be building, but at least in this one case, did they take something apart, dismantle something that they should have kept going and is there something flawed about the way that they're managing some of the content or some of the creation?

27:40I think we forget sometimes how difficult it is even for these live service games. Because we talk about how they suck all the time out of the market and they're causing a challenge for the rest of the industry, but it's a challenge for them as well as the rest of the industry tries to come up with innovative and new ideas and big games that can take people away from Fortnite. Fortnite then has to do the same thing to keep them. And then you get, and it raises the bar, which obviously is good for consumers, but you talk about the Simpsons thing that was excellent and they followed that up from trying to get my timeline right with that kill-bill crossover partnership that they did with Quentin Tarantino, which I don't know if that did much for them. And then they did a Harry Potter promotion or thing around some items and stuff or near a Christmas around there, Christmas and promotions around Fortnite. And the numbers, I looked at the numbers before and December was always their strongest month and it was as well, but you do, I had to have to wonder if it was just two months of Simpsons, would that have been a bigger thing? Did those other things, was the investment they put into that worthwhile? And I think that's, when that's a question, I think we all have as individuals in this industry, we have to ask ourselves, is it worth the energy, is it?

28:42Are we better off making it? The Simpsons thing is you're right, was so huge and it was so strong, you compare it even the South Park thing they did. Why, why and I keep around people like it? Like the sort of thing. Well, they do tend to, they do bring it back though, don't they, sometimes they do go right, we're taking it away and then it comes back like, you know, a year down the line or six months down the line and stuff. So I guess there's that option. Sure. But yeah, with the do wonder of my slightly old-fashioned way of looking at video games that I just wanted, I'm a great example, because I only touch the Simpsons Fortnite thing once, very briefly. My plan was to go back to it and by the time I got round to it, gone. And that is the, particularly for an interesting cultural thing like that, because that appeals older, right? Because you know, we talk about Fortnite being for the sort of teen audience. And the Simpsons is an iconic series. But I do wonder if that's something that dads were doing with their children or moms are doing their children and things. But I don't know that, right, that's the most cutting edge thing for them to be working on.

29:43But there have, if you compare like, what does the Simpsons based on, right? Well, you know, maybe it was initially a comic strip, but it's a TV show that's had over 30 seasons. They didn't learn one season and say, that's enough for moving on. They kept it around. Whereas we see this manifestation in the video game of, well, it's here for a month. And then it's gone. Now, another thing that's notable, I think, about how Fortnite is being managed. And part of what was interesting about Tim Sweeney's note on Tuesday was him saying we haven't done well enough to create Fortnite experiences that excite people, you know, whatever that's code language for in terms of having some seasons that flopped or whatnot. But there's been a lot of talk about the fact that the video game peak just got a skin in Fortnite. And peak is very much the kind of where gaming is actually at right now, right? And that it's so-called friend-slop gaming, it is a game that only costs six to eight dollars

30:44when you buy it, you know, I interviewed one of the co-creators of it, and it came in earlier in the year. And he had the $8, this $5 quote with it. That a lot of quote. And of course, this skin costs more than that. But what I think, one of the things that I think I saw people taking note of was just the kind of game that they were making as Fortnite's skin about. So much of what we have seen in terms of Tim Sweeney and Epic's view of the metaverse has been about brands for people of our agenda recognizable people of our generation. So whether it's Star Wars, Transformers, Simpsons, or what we just discussed. Yes, there are some younger skewing ones. K-pop Demon Hunters was in there recently, right? But the, I think it was, right? Was there K-pop Demon Hunters? Or am I making that up? Or am I willing them to existence? I think it's pretty much. I'm pretty sure. But peak is like a game for like the youth, right? And they have, yes, there was a K-pop Demon Hunters test. Peak is like a game that like younger people are playing. It is what a lot of, you know, these big companies

31:46wish they had the agility to create. And to see Fortnite tap into that, to me is a sign of them saying, okay, this is some of the zeitgeist that we need to be pulling in, not just the things that blockbuster movies are based on or that, you know, the sort of old guard entertainment giants are producing, but we need to bring in things that are from that more kind of popping up out of nowhere, indie spirit kind of creations, certainly at least in video games. And I think that's an intriguing acknowledgement by them of sort of where the excitement is and what excitement they want to be associated with. One of the things that came out of their recent epic store update back in January was that epic store games can now, if you buy a game on an epic store, you can get like a skin or an item or something in Fortnite, right? I mean, they have done it in the past with games like Borderlands and Alan Wake, but they did it with Resident Evil Requiem. The plan was to get to a point where they're doing a hundred of those a year.

32:46Yes. It does worry that's a lot. It's a lot of promotional items being flooded into that game. I don't play Fortnite enough to know if it's a problem. But you know what was shocking me? It's not shocking to me about that $500 million cuts number in there in their blog. That's, I think, about the same as what Ubisoft are looking to cut over five years between 2023 and 2028. Put that into context. And that's in addition to the $1,000,000 people being laid off. They said that the 500 million epic did that would include contract work that they would be ending roles they wouldn't be hiring. So maybe they had a job listing out there that pays $100 million. So that's just one one job. But for the most part, no, it's a, that's a big question as to what that entails and what sort of curtailed ambitions that indicates. So much of epic business in theory should be a money machine. Whether it's the Unreal Engine, which in theory is some architecture that so many developers would need to use to create new games or Fortnite

33:49just having such a massive player base that in theory, you could figure out how to make good money out of it. And there's obviously skepticism and pushback, right? My LinkedIn feed is full of people who are, you know, who are laid off by Epic, who are in shock. I feel horrible for those folks. I see articles, you know, in various gaming outlets talking about the credentials of some of the people who were laid off and a fair number of them sound, you know, quite integral to the development of Fortnite past and present. And so there's, I think, a lot of questions about, was this necessary? What does this mean for, you know, how the company is being managed and questions being raised about that? And I can't make those judgments myself, but I think it's worth acknowledging the employees, your frustration and bewilderment as to some of what's happened. It's very easy in the US, if you need to make cuts to make the cuts and if you need to hire back, you can hire back. Yeah. You know, because of the way the employment laws work,

34:50it's a lot harder to do that in Europe and it's even harder to do that in a less such a pan. And so, you know, the early data you pointed out of them, basically having hired back all the people they laid off in 2023 or at least close to that. Maybe that, I don't know, with all speculations. Yeah, that's the head count. And we don't know the locations, right? And so when we see head counts being replenished, electronic arts had been laying out five percent of his workforce year after year, time 23, 2024, and then your head count kept going up. But was less clear when I reported that story last year was where are they hiring when they replenished? And that I think could potentially really tell the story of what actually happens when you see these chefs in head count. That's all that in tender. This is a topic that I keep getting a lot of. I don't know if you get dragged into console war conversations. I'm trying to, I've started to avoid ever engaging in them anymore, but I get dragged into it sometimes and I'm trying not to. But what the console wars were ended? Well, that's what I thought. That was one of the Trump wars that was ended. And it immediately. Yes. You'd think so, wouldn't you? But apparently everyone still needs to compare meta-critic schools between first party playstation

35:52Xbox Studios, apparently it matters. Yeah. Here are mixed messages around just how well the Nintendo Switch 2 is performing. We know it had this record breaking launch. It's still trending above pretty much every game's console ever in terms of sales. It's actually in the US. It's the number two faster selling games device all time behind the Game Boy Advance. Nintendo raised expectations. It's projections, it's initial projections are quite low but they raised them and they still look set to hit those numbers they rose to. They're still having to hit games. The Switch 2 exclusive, Pocopia. That's 2.2 million copies in just under a week, which is a fantastic result for a spin off Pokemon game. But then we started this in a way. We sort of did a report that said that Switch 2 in the West had a relatively soft Christmas. And what I did also compare in the first Christmas of Switch 2 to the first Christmas of Switch 1 is that over November and December, it was 30% down in the US. Yes. Then came Nintendo's comments during its own financials

36:52where it revealed that its international sales were somewhat weaker than expected. So that sales outside of Japan. And then came Blingbo's report that said Nintendo has reduced production of Switch 2 units temporarily down from 6 million to 4 million. Naturally, the internet is black and white on this. So either the Switch 2 is the new Wii U and is on the cusp of collapse or what you're talking about, it's going to be the best selling games console ever. There's no middle ground in this conversation. But I thought there's so many numbers out there. I thought I'd actually dive into it. And I've spoken to so many people about it over the last month or so. OK. Nintendo Switch 2 is doing well. I think it's worth making that absolutely clear. For the first nine months on sale in the US, Switch 2 is 45% up over Switch 1. And it's even 29% up over PS5. That's in the US. That's a car. In Japan, Switch 2 has shifted just over 4.8 million units in nine months, just over nine months by comparison. It took 17 months to switch one to hit the same number. So it is doing very well.

37:53But the concerns don't come from nowhere. I gave those statistics about how Nintendo's sales have softened at the beginning of this. If you take January and February this year, Switch 2 sales are about 20% lower than Switch 1 managed during January and February 2018. Those stats from Sokana about 45% up for the first nine months. It's worth remembering the first nine months of Switch 1 takes you to the beginning of December. Whereas the first nine months of Switch 2 take you to the beginning of March. And that, because therefore, Switch 2 sales include its first four Christmas, whereas Switch 1 sales doesn't include its December. So the like for likes aren't entirely fair. There is some signs of some softening. But obviously, a lot of the concerns I think are what's going on around the Switch 2. So you've got the cost of living crisis and the impact that's having on disposable income. We had a Piskatella on, he did a presentation at the Game Business Live in June last year. And he showed loads of survey data that Sokana had.

38:5344% of consumers were cutting back on non-essential items, such as games due to concerns around rising prices of essential items like food. And 46% also, they were putting off big purchase due to concerns about the economy. So you've got that wider economic impact. Some people might have wanted a Switch 2. Can't get one. Obviously, then you've got that other issue between from the other way when Nintendo happened to deal with these rising component prices in these component costs, which means it gives them almost very little room to be able to add value or do anything with price or anything like that to try and alleviate those concerns. That's the big macroeconomic issues. And I've got, I've had it on the show before, I'm not entirely convinced Switch 2's had a particularly strong lineup of games. I don't know, how do you big Switch 2 player, Stephen? A little less than I expected to be, but I don't know how much does it do with the software lineup has just has to do with some ways it has or hasn't fit into my kids gaming appetite. Since my kids got into playing games that a few years ago, that really radically changed

39:55sort of what the TV is used for and while the Switch can be played off TV. So I thought all of us were gonna be super excited about it because we'd certainly played a lot of Switch games over the last few years. And they have played Mario Kart World a lot. My son loves Dragon Drive. But like Pokemon Pocopia, we've only been playing very slowly as they've been distracted by other things, for example. And Dr. Kong Benanza made my son nauseous. So I did it. Yeah. Oh wow. Apparently some players are kind of sort of digging underground, kind of get disoriented. Yeah. You know, the same way that FPSs can can nauseate kids. Chris, my theory all along is that the Switch 2 is gonna be the 3DS, which fits into your like, it's not gonna be the Wii U, you know, that's the bleakest view and it's not gonna be the Switch again, which is or the DS, which would be another they sort of phenomenon level system or they guess the Wii. The 3DS was technologically superior in all ways to the DS. If you were to make a checklist of all the ways that you would want the Nintendo DS to be improved,

40:57the 3DS did those. And then some, some people didn't care for the glasses 3D, but you could turn it off. And the system came out, it had ultimately a very good lineup throughout its history. Early on, the system was prohibitively expensive to the point where then CEO of Nintendo, Satorrawada apologized, took a pay cut, if I remember correctly, they cut the price significantly within the first several months of the system's launch. They created an ambassador program, which was kind of a make good for people who'd paid early where they got exclusive access to some retro games that were never otherwise offered to 3DS players to regular 3DS shoppers. That system got a lot of different physical iterations and got a lot of great games. The Sigma 3D land was particularly good. Linked between worlds was a fantastic 2D Zelda and had a great animal crossing. So really, really strong games yet, just could not reach the phenomenal level of sales

41:57of the Nintendo DS. Why? I would say because the DS caught lightning and a bottle and managed to catch it in multiple times. It caught it with Nintendo's virtual pet game that was quite a sensation. They caught it with brain training, such brain age, which really helped cross the DS over to a mainstream audience who began to use it. I think people might have trouble kind of remembering this moment in history. They use it as a lifestyle device because it was prior to the ubiquity of lifestyle apps on smartphone. So you could create at the time crossword puzzle program for the Nintendo DS or cooking recipe program for the DS and people who otherwise never buy a game system were buying the DS holding a book style and checking recipes. You had the phenomenon with the DS, again brain training, Nintendo, but also like a really strong Mario Kart game in Mario Kart 7. And if that sounds familiar in terms of catching lightning in a bottle multiple times, that's the story of the Switch 1, right? It's the story of Breath of the Wild,

42:58an all-time game in its first year of Super Mario Odyssey and all-time game in its first year, and eventually Animal Crossing New Horizons, one of the ultimate crossover games of all time to the mainstream released in 2020. Those kinds of... What is COVID here as well? Right. Those kinds of lightning in a bottle, lightning strikes three times. Whatever cliche you want to use, that doesn't happen for most companies, even for one system, it's happened for Nintendo for a couple of systems with the Wii and the DS and the Switch. I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that it's not going to happen for the Switch 2 and that the best the system might be able to do is like a respectable, healthy, enjoyable run, but not the phenomenon that it's being measured against. There's a few reasons, I think you're right. I think it's worth noting Nintendo handhelds typically do between 80 and 100 million. There is the Game Boy that did 110 million, but that was on the market for a long time. And then you've got the DS, which did 150 million, but actually,

44:00the 3DS wasn't too far off what the Game Boy Advance did. And if people forget Switch is a handheld, people compare it to the Wii U, but you should really be comparing it to the 3DS and the DS, I think you're completely right to do that. Where things are little different is Nintendo's IP are a lot stronger today than they even were in the 3DS era. Mario is a much bigger brand today than it was. Pokemon's even a bigger brand than it was. There were definitely opportunities to do slightly better than 3DS, but I agree with you in sort of generally. I think, even at the beginning of the generation, I thought the likelihood of Switch 2 doing what Switch 1 did, it was kind of unlikely, but I don't think it matters. And certainly not even to Nintendo in its bottom line, because I think Nintendo's bigger to put you in from a business point of view is digital. And you look at the growth of a place to Xbox, like Phil Spencer said a few years ago, Xbox One was a more profitable generation, a more successful generation in terms of money, than the Xbox 360 era, despite the much more in install base. And that's because of subscription and that's because of digital downloads, you think. Right, right, no. If more people are digital downloading on Xbox

45:00and they're doing it via the Xbox Store, Xbox get a cut of that and it's super beneficial. Whereas when you get to Nintendo, most people buy Nintendo games, Switch 2 games, not just Nintendo games. In a box, that's still the case in Europe, as much as 80% of video game sales are on Switch 2, our sold fire, physical retailers. It's the opposite way around on Xbox platforms and play stations, what more digital than physical would be a little bit lower than Xbox. And you only need to have to do is start and keep working out ways to increase that. And you look at Pocopia, which why there wasn't enough stock at retail, I'm not entirely sure was it retailers didn't book, or directed Nintendo whole back on it, I'm not sure. But whatever the reason was, we saw that consumers, if they couldn't access the game physically, they were happy to download it. And I think that's actually a positive sign from the Nintendo's point of view. Their subscription service is quite popular, but it's really low that low priced. There's opportunities for them there

46:02to sort of increase their margins and generate more revenue, which if they need to, that isn't nest, so they can end up leading, finishing this generation with, let's say, 18, 100 million Switch 2 sales. And still have had a more successful generation, the Switch 1, for that generation, not all about that install based figure. There were a few sort of other statistics. I tried to dive into how well the Switch 2 is doing as a game in terms of games. It's impossible. It's impossible to work this out. Nintendo sold in basically 38 million Switch 2 games during its first seven months. By comparison, it sold 27.5 million Switch 1 games during that first seven months. But Switch 1 is a much smaller install base for Switch 1. And actually, if you do a sort of, you know, you do a look and attach rate, that works out 3.7 games for every Switch 1 unit sold and 2.2 games for every Switch 2 sold. But that doesn't count Switch 1 games, which of course are fully compatible with Switch 2. And when you start working, you start thinking, well, hang on, Switch 1, they sold 100 million Switch 1 games

47:03in that period of time. You realize you don't have the data in which to back it up, it's worth noting as well, because of Switch 2, Switch 1 not being back as compatible with anything. If you wanted games for you had to buy a game for Switch 2, you probably had some games that were just being, you know, Pokemon, Skull, and Violet, around a lot better on Switch 2 apparently. I've not tried it. So there is that, it's again, it was just impossible to work out if Switch 2 actually has had, what install base situation is like. I do have some data on the third party games, but not a huge amount, because there's this myth that third party games don't sell on the Nintendo platforms. It's not quite true. Minecraft, Lego, Hogwarts, Legacy, Stardew, Valley, Just Dance, Crash, Bandicoot. They all do really well. Even sports games do well on Switch, Switch games. And sometimes an adult game, like the Witcher 3 or Grand Theft Auto, the Trillage. Cyberpunk, the Valor. Well, it's not entirely clear. It definitely boosted sales of Cyberpunk in the year. Okay. And I saw the numbers came in. They were quite, they weren't huge. I see. And it's all down to expectations. My feeling, I have no data about this up annoyingly.

48:05My feeling of people who bought Switch 2 at launch are probably people that already had access to other platforms, because you're the sort of person that's buying their day one. So you've probably got a gaming PC or a PlayStation Xbox, which means you've already already got access to Cyberpunk. You've probably already got access to Star Wars Outlaws, as I said, to Switch shadows and Firefox 7. And I think that's going to impact the performance of these games. Resident Evil Requiem was an interesting experiment, because obviously it was an interesting case point, because it launched simultaneously on Switch 2 alongside other platforms. I've got, I don't have too much data on this, but I have some from Europe. And we can see that around, it varies by country, but around 5% of Requiem sales came on Nintendo Switch 2, which is really low. But I don't think anyone is expecting Switch to be the primary platform for that. And when you talk about 5% of a very high number of sales, that's still a decent number. People buying Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games. I've always said that. So if you have to make a game that kind of suits those sort of people and those sort of games.

49:05But it's, again, I have data about third-party sales. I have data about software sales for Switch 2, but it's really to be inconclusive. I can't really talk conclusions. I think when people are kind of wondering about how Nintendo is doing, you're right that there's a few different ways that people might talk about. So there's the silly console war way where people just want to understand or be able to tell themselves how well Nintendo doing versus Sony and Microsoft to prove that Nintendo was smarter or were foolish than those companies. People, other people will compare it to its past. And you're doing a very good job of showing that it's very challenging to actually compare how the Switch 2's performance rates against the Switch 1's performance. You didn't even mention the movie that's about to come out. And so about to you. You have, you weren't. You were going to skip it. You forgot. The fact that they've diversified their business so much more in the last few years, which I know you've also been tracking that story

50:05quite closely. So you have movies and theme parks and other merchandise that they have definitely expanded upon. Changes probably what they're what kind of need they have in terms of revenue from the games themselves. They're competing with themselves as you acknowledge with the fact that they have backwards compatibility on the Switch 2. So how much do they care about a number of copies of Switch 2 games that they're selling versus if they're continuing to sell legacy Switch 1 games where I imagine there's probably some pretty good profit margins on games whose development has been fully paid for a long time ago. You have questions about some of their financial experiments that they're doing. Look at the Switch 2 editions. So here this week we have Mario Wonder getting a Switch 2 edition. So we've had at least we had about half a dozen now Switch 1 games that have gotten $10 to $20 add-ons of questionable quality. People have not exactly been raving about the quality

51:06of these Switch 1 expansions, but maybe financially it's been lucrative for Nintendo to do those. So there's quite a few variables to potentially look at. And I really think you can walk out of that with any conclusion you want about how they're doing. Tough, it's tough. The Galaxy movies are conservative estimates. There's 160 million over a five-go opening weekend. That's what they expected. That's what the conservative estimates from deadline. What the box office would be or what Nintendo's take would be? Box office. OK. The company obviously mentioned the Wonder game. That's just quite interesting because that seems to be targeted. That seems almost cynically targeted at the Galaxy movie. He's got Rosalie, I've added Roselina into the game who's from the film. The film has the wonder version of Bowser Jr. in it that ties into the wonder they've got. Interesting. They brought interest to load of family-friendly modes and multiplayer modes and assist modes aimed at a younger audience, I guess, which the movie might be speaking to. I think that's quite an interesting. I don't think it's going to, you know, I'm not expecting huge things from it,

52:07but I think it's an interesting, hey, because they didn't really have a time product for the first Mario movie. They don't really have one for the second one either, but they've sort of adapted things they've got. They've had already to try and suit that. And I think that's quite interesting. Ultimately, I went by Cote and Kostral Soundic who was on the show two weeks ago and I talked about you're a Roblox being a challenge for Nintendo. He just replied with, I don't think anybody's throwing a benefit dinner for Nintendo any time soon. And I went, there we go. There we go. Yeah. They're fine. They'll be fine. And hopefully their employees are fine. We talked about Epic and the cuts. I think a lot, there's a lot of respect that people have for the fact in Nintendo. Even things aren't always going quite as well as they want. It seemed to keep their teams together to give them another shot at something in a way that we don't necessarily see that happening for other game companies. Hopefully they continue that approach because that does seem to benefit everybody long-term. Yeah. And actually, you know, it's what it was reasoning around that. He famously said that he doesn't think they'll get to create. You can only create yourself out of trouble

53:09in this industry. You can build really cool things. And it's a lot easier and can you, an ask a thing I worry about Ubisoft and these sort of endless cuts they're going on? How easy is it and how motivated are people to make really cool things when they're thieving the axe all the time? I don't know. Nintendo's quite small, not small organisation, but yes. So only all the people that are predicting and this is the Wii U too, it's not. Steve, enough, taking up too much your time. I was planning to keep these knives and show up. But I did have one last story and I'll keep it really short, which is the, the meta to Horizon Worlds has come off the VR store, which the Metacl the Quest store. And we talked about this on the show a couple of months ago. This is probably the one good news that the R Industries had this year. Meta sort of scaling back on the I's been a real concern because so much of the R Industries around the Quest and the Quest store. But actually, over the last few years, it's been tough at the Quest store because it's flooded with Horizon, Meta Horizon sort of experiences and content. You Google, you Google, so you search for a game on Meta Store,

54:10you end up getting a bunch of pippings from the Horizon store. And I got a few quotes from people in the VR industry, Cassia Karen, who runs the VR Agency, told me that it's really good news for discovery. The Meta store would highlight specific worlds from Horizon Worlds taking up valuable storefront space and shunting out games and apps that were independent of the platform. Also quite annoying for most users, default library layout would have random worlds listed in with their purchase games and apps without their wish and consent. And this was basically what she's saying is that this idea meta was based on a brute force to Horizon Worlds into people's, by doing this sort of thing. Alchemy Labs, who made job simulator, actually, their queries, I encourage you to see Meta's focus on the commercial health of the store, having the same goal between the platform, the studios is good for the long-term health with the ecosystem. It's no longer being used as a way just to brute force her right. Horizon's now moving to the mobile experience rather than the VR experience. That was a quick story there, it's just that this news story about them is,

55:12this has had that little potential benefit to the discoverability and the store experience for the AR developers. I think that's a hopeful take by people in a sector of gaming that has certainly been quite rocked by events, it's not that long ago that if you were an indie studio, the thing to do was to make a VR game because there was so much funding available to you. We saw that wave come and go. We've seen some of the true believers in VR stick around all while other trends, web three gaming, or now maybe AI gaming have come up and web three gaming seems to have gone. Hopefully, there's a lot of talent out there making VR games and there's a lot of really interesting ideas. To me, the main barrier that that format will always face is just the physical limitations of that, not putting on a headset is not for everybody in playing games for a sustained period of time

56:14can be physically challenging for some, but if there's a lot of really creative stuff, the rare times and admittedly they were rare that have put on a VR headset and I try some of the new stuff that's coming out. I'm quite impressed and if this can somehow help because Zuckerberg is found something else to focus on and Horizon, I think was always kind of a dubious quality and prospect for its future in terms of whether that was really something that everybody wanted, maybe getting it out of the way is the best. There's still long-term issues for VR and meta sort of general scaling back is not good news for the industry, but this might be a bit of a short-term bubble. Stephen, I've taken up too much your time. You've got so many newslets to write. You're telling me you've got a billion to put out. My kids are off next week. So it's a great business. It's a great business. Yeah, yeah, my kids are... What are you doing? You're doing something? Well, I'll probably take them to the Mario movie. They're very excited. We were just discussing this morning that they want to go on opening day. So we're trying to think of a movie theater that won't be clogged full of people on opening day.

57:15I can't book my opening day tickets. All right, okay. And we had bought ski tickets in the months ago. It was not really ski weather anymore here, but there might still be a little bit of snow on a slope and we bought three day tickets and we'll use one of them. So maybe we can use the second lift ticket. But there's a magic show at the resort that we're going to and taking the kids to a magic show. Well, hopefully... Not Randy Pitch for doing it, is it? No, no, but I got a video on my phone of him doing a car track from a long time ago. It's weird. Does he have a magic castle in LA? Yeah, I have not kept track of Randy's magic. I went to that for a couple of years ago. It's incredible. Sorry, we've deviated off. Yeah, that's fine. But yeah, I know I am digging out of some fun coverage interviews that I've done through... Honestly, all the way back to December, but I think there's some stuff that'll stand the test of time, including a fun one later this week, involving the developers of Claire Obscure Expedition 33,

58:17where I did something rather ridiculous ahead of interviewing them and then we talked about it. I think people will enjoy that one. So yeah, keep up with game file if you can, but everybody support the game business. And if you are not subscribing to the paid version, I think Chris, you were running a sale. Yeah, I love the micro. I love the micro. So you only get the micro if you're paid customers. So sign up, I'm going to click that out. We do. We have a 20% promotion going on for the paid subscriber to celebrate our anniversary. In fact, Stephen, thank you. I'll let you back to the newsletter. I'm looking forward to the... And Claire Obscure, I've not heard of it. It's kind of a big game. Kind of an interesting game. I look forward to reading those. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Chris. I look forward to having you back. All right, like us. Well, that's it for this edition of the game business show. Thank you to Stephen for joining us in our anniversary edition. We will be back next week, but a slightly reduced schedule due to the spring break in the US and the Easter holidays here in the UK. If you want to make sure you don't miss our next edition,

59:18head to thegainbusiness.com and sign up to our newsletter. You can also take us up on that 20%. anniversary discount offer for the premium access to the game business. But until next time, thank you for tuning in.