Jacob Navok

@wolfejosh didn't feel anything in midtown

Earthquake in NYC just now? Whole apartment shook. thought it was a big truck but felt like quake

ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party ready up to play with your party

Ready up to play with your party.

There is not a single mention of Gaza in the 192 page DNC autopsy report. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you- one of the main reasons we lost was our blank check to Israel while they committed a genocide. Our party must put human rights first.

@DanFriedman81 They encouraged it, and the more they bring the DSA in, the more the antisemites will run things. This was the party of the KKK in the past, it can be again.

@JNavok They have clearly decided to allow antisemites into their coalition.

If a candidate with Graham Platner’s online history was the Republican nominee for a Senate election, Jimmy Kimmel would be making “masturbating Nazi” jokes every single night. The current season of SNL would have featured him in five cold-opens. We notice the double standard.

@politico Or, what journalists and social media are important turn out to be not important.

‘A huge omission’: Everyone is baffled by the exclusion of Gaza in DNC autopsy dlvr.it/TSfsFr

@makemefamous201 @GameOverThirty MS doesn't have a good track record for profitability by its acquired companies.

@GameOverThirty @JNavok Pimp then out to MS. Let them make a new Halo game on the understanding that it releases on the PS. Everybody wins.

Perhaps it will be what I argued a few weeks ago, which is what Square Enix did with IO Interactive years back. Sell Bungie to its management. x.com/JNavok/status/…

@makemefamous201 Sony needs it off their books and is going to take a major write down anyway. They might as well sell it to the management for $0 than shut it down and have to pay more severance.

@JNavok It’s not the same thing. Sony paid billions for Bungie, whilst Square bought IO for £23m. There’s very chance management have the money to buy Bungie back, I doubt they will be using any of the money they got from Sony considering the state of the industry right now.

@shaunmmaguire Look at all the racists in your reply and have anyone not racist say you’re wrong. We can know Massie by the lying company he kept. I wish him only the worst.

Thomas Massie campaigned with Ryan Matta two days before his primary Ryan Matta called Hitler a hero and wore an "American Reich" sweatshirt to the meeting But when *AMERICAN JEWS* donate money to fight Massie it's framed as "foreign money" This rhetoric is un-American

The write down last week was most likely just Destiny 2 ahead of this announcement

@AltayCapital There is nothing that the Chinese can build that the western or Japanese cannot. This is just true. Everything is a market decision. Their costs and technical capabilities are even, the Japanese market just doesn’t sustain it.

Still hard disagree. Cheaper shots at goal with low effort mobile slop is the definitive strategy in Japan. The most profitable games in Japan are old arcade style mobile games like puzzle and dragon, monster strike, etc. Japanese gacha rpgs haven't progressed since Fate/Grand order. These were products of their time and will continue to mint money, but new low effort gacha slop has little chance to succeed when competition is higher fidelity Chinese games. Dailyshincho article says Tribe Nine by Akatsuki was rumored to cost over 5bn jpy ($31m). Not as much as genshin but much more than many more technically impressive Chinese games. Tribe Nine was technically impressive only relative to other low effort Japanese games, but not remotely on par with Chinese or KR games with even 1/2 budgets or less. I'm not sure why you find this hard to believe. I remember quotes from gaming execs in WSJ and NYT years ago basically parroting my position that Japanese game companies simply can't make games like genshin. The best thing corporate Japan can do is never make another mobile game again and license their IPs to whoever wants to try. Focus on console and pc and push boundaries of ambition there.

Two years ago I said that one of Square Enix's biggest mistakes was to let MiHoYo make Genshin Impact instead of Square Enix. In my thread from last week, I pointed out that Square Enix has failed to bring its IP to a new generation, and that this will eat away at its future. The question I ask is what is it going to take to get my kid to care about the brand? If we solve that problem we can open up the rest of the opportunity. This is how I landed on Disney, Roblox and other partnerships. You have to be where the young people are. Imagine a Kpop Demon Hunters x Final Fantasy Collab, and how that would draw headlines and interest into the brand. MTG's success shows how Final Fantasy can play in other worlds; Kingdom Hearts shows how the lore can be malleable to other IP. The company can do it, with the right leadership and creatives. Square Enix has a deep bench of experience with live service, having run FF14 now for 16 years, and FF11 for decades. It would have been interesting to leverage FF14 as the technical basis to build a new, F2P "Elseworlds" server that brought in regular new experiences and collabs. I imagine blending the business model and platforms that Genshin Impact and Honkai are on with the RPG gameplay of FF14 and regular collabs with Elseworld lore. I really enjoyed the Demon Rush mode in Fortnite's Kpop Demon Hunters partnership last fall, it showed how simple tweaks to gameplay, art and sound could make the game feel utterly fresh and different. And it was impressive how quickly Epic put it together. Yoshida would have been great at pulling this off as well. It would take the CEO to go and pull off the negotiations with the IP holders, but Wada-san once said the CEO is supposed to be the ultimate BD person of the company. I think Square Enix is so used to being slow that it can't imagine what life would be like if it acted fast. There's a lot of internal red tape; the CEO's job is to make a decision and cut that red tape so that innovation flourishes. I know that Ichimura-san walked back his comments last year (gamesindustry.biz/dragon-quest-p… if you didn't read them) but look at Square Enix's focus on remakes from last week's strategy slide and tell me he was wrong. Also this YouTube overview of the Square Enix financial results is astounding: youtube.com/watch?v=gD8dpw…

@batv4leska I don't have any grudges against Square Enix, I love the company. The decision to invest a dollar in external developers rather than internal developers is a telling choice.

@JNavok you base this on what? a grudge you very clearly hold? indie publishing has worked out quite well for companies like shueisha/gsc. you may be opposed to everything that doesn’t involve frivolous usage of AI & online co-op, but those markets are saturated.

"Our internal development costs are so high that we would rather people give us new ideas for the possibility of payment than invest in our own"

@BigBox1598193 I think it's hard to compare games that aren't priced the same and have different genres. We have to look at this issue from the lens of Sony: what can they do to bring in customers that haven't bought the game yet?

@JNavok I understand but I look at Hunt Showdown, or even REPO (below), and I get the feeling the limiting factor for Bungie and PlayStation is not a marketing issue, but a quality issue. I assume Marathon has a sizable marketing advantage over Crytek and Semiwork?

Destiny 2 died so Marathon could limp and Bungie staff could continue to be paid by Sony to work for years toward searching for the princess at yet another castle.

@BigBox1598193 Marathon's business model is to sell new package. They need to market the hell out of new package, which means a blitz of another $55m worth of new players coming in.

@JNavok I love reading your tweets and think you're insightful on a lot of this stuff but this topic (marketing for Live Service), I just can't see it. Here's the trend line for Hunt Showdown through its entire life cycle...

@batv4leska The industry is no longer the industry of the 1980s. Great indies just put stuff on Steam. If you want to find them, they are there, and they don't need Square Enix.

@JNavok yes because clearly bringing the initiative back that discovered talents like horii, nakamura & morita is just dreadful…

@BigBox1598193 The issue is a faith in content versus marketing. Sony needs to market the hell out of S2; can't assume that good content alone solves.

@JNavok Season 2 please save us.

@noi_samuel23850 Depends on the write downs in the next 1-2 quarters.

@JNavok Question is how long Marathon will limp before the leg ultimately breaks.

@STGshmups Anyone who has a job should hold onto it for dear life considering how poor the job market is for games in those areas.

@JNavok Bungie staff (or whoever remains over there) lost the plot long ago and they seem to be treated as prime talent for love service games (when ultimately, they aren’t). I wonder what the employee turnover has been in the past decade over there.

Our first investments into mobile at Square Enix were ports and then some ambitious titles like Chaos Rings. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Rin… We made a few Chaos Rings. It sold okay and then poorly. Do you know what made money for us? Final Fantasy Brigade, with no real gameplay and super simple graphics. When you can make way more money doing simple and cheap, the audience is telling you what it wants. Executive management listens to that. The audience kept saying they liked simple graphics and gameplay on mobile. Then mobile got harder and harder as a revenue model. We had many pitches for ambitious games; our devs would love to make them. But every time we did fancy things (like FFXV Pocket Edition) on moble it would not sell. The ROI was better on simple stuff, the audience told us what they wanted. There was no technical failure. There was a failure of ambition during the mid-2010s and MiHoYo stepped right in.

Why do you think not a single, even janky lower budget, mobile open world action rpg has ever been made in Japan? Countless games have launched and shut down in the over 5 years since Genshin launched. Doesn't this give you pause? If I had seen some launches and fails, we can argue about design / marketing / ambition, but we haven't seen any of this! Doesn't have to be triple A. Plenty of low effort games launch and fail. If there had been a single genshin like game from a Japanese developer (even if it's low budget and jank) I wouldn't hold my position.