🔈 Speakers

Host:

• Maria Gillies, Product Manager @ Hutch

Guests:

• Manyu Kumar, Co-Founder @ Naavik
• David Amor, CEO @ Playmint
• Matt Dion, Product Manager @ EA Mobile

🚀 Recent Game Highlights

• 6th Anniversary event for Supercell’s Clash Royale
• Elden Ring with its unexpectedly powerful NPCs, unlike Max Payne or Hitman: Codename 47

🤖 AI in Games

• Reference: Inworld.AI raising $10M in funding to build AI-powered virtual characters, and a creator platform with integration with game engines
  • Potential for creative and intelligent NPCs for richer game experience
  • Potential for brands to use always-on agents in environments like The Sandbox
  • Remains to be seen if it could successfully provide open tools to empower smaller developers, a la Unreal Engine; depends on actual use cases prioritized
• Range of applications in games
  • Characters in Web 3 experiences e.g. Rave in Decentraland
  • Replacing the need for voice actors → cost savings
  • Adding depth and content to MMORPGS and other open worlds
  • Enhancing QA and testing
  • Extension of Web 3 investment analytics/advisors e.g. Whale Analytica
  • Companionship in the Metaverse, e.g. Replika
• But still a bridge too far, tech still maturing
  • Few examples of AI making a game experience significantly more compelling
    • Often, AI-powered opponent isn’t engaging, e.g. in Starcraft II
  • Involves complex Machine Learning problems across speech, visuals, etc.
  • Need to navigate the Uncanny Valley by being consistently unrealistic, or truly realistic
  • Work ongoing e.g. at Altered State Machine, a platform to build AI NFT agents
• Aspiration: NPCs that grow with you as a player, learning from your playing style and knowing how to engage you deeply thru emotional triggers

🎮 UGC in Genshin Impact (see Naavik’s Dec 2020 breakdown)

• miHoYo’s Genshin Impact launched time-limited Divine Ingenuity event
  • Running from 2 - 21 Mar 2022
  • Players complete quests to unlock the ability to create their own domains and traversal challenges
• miHoYo context
  • Part of experimentation process, findings likely to reappear in new games down the road
  • Aligned with their vision of creating ACG (Anime, Comics, and Games) experiences
  • Recent Metaverse-like rebranding into HoYoverse
• Why User Generated Content (UGC)?
  • Supports content treadmill, especially for games like Genshin which are heavily content-dependent. We also see UGC options in Fortnite and FreeFire.
  • More ways to engage players - more things to do, draw in new users through influencers
  • Could be a strategic move to position as first mover on groundbreaking types of gameplay, e.g. how Dota grew out of Warcraft III, Dota 2’s Auto Chess, PUBG was a mod from DayZ
  • But difficult to build, the complexity is almost as much as a game itself
    • Editor tools must be user-friendly and easy to be onboarded to
    • Adds a lot of value but not every game is suitable

🧑‍💻 4-day Work Week

• Blackbird Interactive announced a shift to 4-day work week
  • Following other developers including Armor Games and Mighty Kingdom. Hutch is also running a trial.
  • Blackbird’s trial indicated no loss in productivity, but a significant increase in quality of life for employees
  • Part of a larger shift around work norms accelerated by COVID lock-down measures and remote work e.g. focusing more on output than input
• That said, challenges persist
  • Operational: refining processes with external partners who aren’t on 4-day work week, much more ruthless on meeting times
  • Equality across functions and types of employees e.g. QA, customer success, other contractors
  • Convincing stakeholders including investors using data
  • Culture change and managing employees’ expectations → hard to shift back if it doesn’t work e.g. Epic