Epic Games just fired everyone..

Live service is failing, Fortnite is dying, everything is over. That's bad. The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we're raising prices to help pay the bills. It's done.

About two weeks ago, that is all that Epic Games told players about a price hike for their premium currency, the humble V-Buck. But it turns out they had far more brutal plans for their staff and partners. And now 1000 staff have just been laid off. That's right. Games. That's about 20% of the company. That's a huge amount. There's $520 in operating costs on top of that. And since the story broke, we've been speaking to insiders and we can see that the impact of this decision is going to hit far more than just Fortnite. Because we know a thousand staff are gone from Epic, but what about the ripple effects everywhere else and the other cuts?

Turns out everything is quite rough. Epic Games just showed the world that one of the few pillars holding up the games industry, Fortnite, is in fact shaky. Right now we're approaching the end of the financial year for most companies, and that means it's usually when the big publicly listed giants start cutting staff

to make their end of year reports look good.

That's right.

Of course, Epic Games are a private company, and in theory, they are one of the most successful companies on the planet. I mean, Fortnite prints money, right? So according to this announcement, for once, this is actually not about AI-driven efficiency.

Instead, Epic freely admits they are, quote, spending significantly more than they're making, and they say that the thousand layoffs and $500 million in cuts to contracting, marketing, and hiring will balance out their books. And they give many reasons why. There's the same general economic situation that we've seen everyone...

Honestly, you gotta respect Tim for just laying it out. He just said, yeah, we don't have as many people playing right now and we gotta save money. Like, I really do respect that. Somebody that just tells it to me straight.

Publisher or maybe just a... They hired too many people? They did. Specifically for them, it means that growth and spending are both down because players have got less money, costs have went up, and the total industry player growth just has not increased as people expected. Turns out that as engaging as video games are, well, a vertical feed of videos may in fact be more engaging for many people. Now there are other reasons as well, Epic specific reasons, and here's what they've said about that. In being the industry's vanguard, we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in

the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers. Now, what they're referring to there is all the legal stuff. And as an example, Fortnite only just came back to Android last week, and it hit iOS again last year. And at least one of those returns is reportedly tied to an $800 million deal with Epic paying Google over six years. That came after five years of, of course, legal crusading from Epic to crowbar open the phone ecosystem. They basically wanted liberalization and storefronts and payment providers. Of course, specifically-

The storefronts and Epic is totally right, by the way. They're completely justified and totally in the right with this. The amount of... basically there's a duopoly that exists between the Google Play Store and the Apple Play Store and it's completely unfair to everybody because they've effectively monopolized the entire market between the two of them and I think it needs to be regulated.

That's what I think.

They can launch their own store and do the payment providing themselves. That of course means a better revenue share. They absolutely succeeded on that and as much as they stand to benefit from that, many of the rest of us do as well. Some of that legal crowbarring is probably good but for them, it's been

absolutely perfect.

It's expensive. Because all that money they weren't collecting during all that time, you know, could have paid for developers. Back in January of 2025, Tim Sweeney told IGN that they could afford to fight Apple and Google for- And that was, yeah, this is from 2025 in January. So it was like literally over a year ago they said this.

Decades. Yeah. So obviously something changed. He was not anticipating these layoffs. The company clearly projected that they would be making more money by this point,

but they're obviously not. The money's not coming in, meaning that Epic are cutting their spending. So let's talk about those cuts. First, you need to know that all this follows the 2023 layoffs, which were 830 employees, about 16% of the company.

Damn. So like they've dropped like 2000 people then.

Holy shit.

The divestment of Bandcamp. Yeah, I don't think Bandcamp was ever going to save their finances. Now back then the reasons given were that creator content profit margins weren't high enough and the company was spending too much and that two thirds of costs sat outside of their core development teams. And now... Yeah there's probably HR and other types of management roles that don't add any value to a company. I really do think, and this is in 2023, I do really think that Elon buying Twitter, firing 80% of people, and then the product not changing was like a light bulb moment for the entire tech industry.

And after he did that, he broke the ice and then everybody started doing it afterwards. Well, cuts are happening again. So that's what I think happened. The peripheral game modes like rocket racing, ballistic and festival battle stage are all being sunset. Nobody gives a shit about it. Systems will be released into UEFN for player creation, which honestly is a fairly good thing. It's a good idea. Normally in video games that would just all go into the bin. That would be that. Yeah. Going to the community is actually a little bit of a silver lining. As much as it's not going to be great for those staff, maybe it is nice that at least

some of their work does get to live on and get into the hands of players. Outside of Fortnite, games like Horizon Chase and its enhanced version, Horizon Chase Turbo, have suddenly been announced for delisting. Basically their developer is owned by Epic. So what we see is that experimentation and some degrees of ongoing support are basically And even the incoming free-to-play version of Save the World, originally a paid mode,

is an attempt to get more money from a game that frequently rivals the top hundred of Steam. So you can basically see that Epic is looking at their worst performing official modes, they're cutting them loose, or...

Well yeah, they're getting rid of the stuff that loses money. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense, honestly. Like, why wouldn't a company make this decision? It's a good call. I'll be right back. Give me a second.

All right. All right. We're good.

Excuse me. We're good.

Community, and they are laying off the devs who worked on them. Oh, but they're not stopping there. Experienced staff are being cut, like, say, principal engineers who have been there since 2017. And even a director of character art who created Fortnite's most famous characters. And you got to think, for a game monetized like Fortnite,

I mean, character art really does seem like it's something that helps the bottom line. And when you think about that, and then see Tim Sweeney posting about how the fired staff are in the, quote, top few percent of the discipline, you really see how bad this would appear to be.

I mean, Sweeney is absolutely projecting these are brilliant people. You should absolutely hire them. This is an unprecedented wave of talent that I have graciously injected into the labor

market.

But obviously implicit in that is that if these are the top percent, then they're really not the sort of people you want to lose in your company. So that does suggest that-

It could also mean that they just changed the way that they develop games and like what their process is. I think that's another big component. And I think that's what probably happened is that they changed the way they have a process because it wastes money the way they're doing it now.

I think that makes sense, and I think it's going to continue, especially as you have, like, technology, not just AI, but like, everything, that's able to effectively do these people's jobs for them. I think that's what's gonna happen. And also, like, a lot of people have a very weird relationship that they think companies should have as employers where they think that this company should employ

you even when the company doesn't get value out of it. So they think that the company has like a moral responsibility to fund you indefinitely, even though they don't need you or need to make money off of you anymore. Right? I think this is a very, very toxic mindset. And nobody would actually... and the issue why I don't like this is because people don't have this standard for themselves. If you moved into an apartment, you wouldn't continue paying the guy that mows your lawn.

Nobody would do this. Nobody would make this decision. So in people's personal lives, they would never make this decision, but they expect every company to make this decision. Why is that? Because they want the company's money. It's that simple. So again, it's not a principle. It's just greed. Basic economics are kind of fucked, but we've talked about so far,

the cuts to modes and stuff only tell you a part of the story. Because underneath all of this, there is a question about Fortnite itself.

Oh, is Fortnite dead?

And how Epic just did not plan for the money printer to finally slow down. If Fortnite is succeeding, then Epic can afford huge legal crusades. They can afford to expand, afford to experiment. But in 2025, Fortnite was not succeeding. Player numbers were wildly variable all of that year. The zero hour crossover event in November pulled in more than 10 million people, but that was the exception. People kind of swung between being thrilled at new modes like Blitz Royale and the Simpsons crossover,

which was by all accounts loved, but then bored to tears by the drawn-out Star Wars season fronted by, of course, Gen AI Vader. This stuff doesn't mean that Fortnite is-

I'm gonna be honest, I think Gen AI Vader was probably one of the best things they did. It had more viral marketing and viral advertising for Fortnite than almost anything else. I think that it was a great idea.

It's hilarious. Actively collapsing. Cercana analyst Matt Piscatella points out that in the US last month, 35% of players in PlayStation played Fortnite for 16 hours on average, while 31% of Xbox players played it for 15 hours.

That's a lot of people fortnighting. I mean, a third of the install base is playing this game. That's a lot. Really is a worrying thing. I mean, if success this hard is not really financially sustainable.

Oh, dear. Is this entire thing built in sand? In a way, I think that what it's built on is it's built on the projection of growth. And so once a company because company, what they do is they overhire because they plan for 20% growth years. But whenever they don't have a 20% growth year, it doesn't mean that the company is failing.

It doesn't mean the product is failing. It just means that it's no longer growing and it's reached market maturity. Every product reaches market maturity, whether it's Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, World of Warcraft, or anything else, there is a point in time where the number stops going up. And when it hits that point, it doesn't mean that the product has failed.

It means that it's just simply stopped growing its user base because it's hit market saturation. This is the most normal, reasonable, common sense thing to happen. So whenever you have companies that are building for being 20% larger year after year and that stops happening, then you have to recalibrate the size of your company because you're not building your company.

It's like basically people that buy houses that have like eight bedrooms or five bedrooms and it's just a man and a woman. Well they're not buying that house for themselves, they're buying that house because they're going to have kids and the kids are going to move into those apartments, right? Or into, sorry, not apartments, into those rooms. And usually after parents, after their kids move out, many parents decide to

move into a smaller house after that. So, but it's again, it's about planning for the future. You see what my point is?

Maybe. You see the problem is that last February those averages were 21 and 19 hours. So the time is actually going down. And when your entire business model runs on engagement, driving, spending, losing four to five hours per player per month is a serious hit to your revenue. And in Epic's year in review, they said the total gameplay declined

to only 6.65 billion hours.

That's a lot of hours.

Is that low? But it's in the wrong direction

and leadership's response was to squeeze harder. Well, it's also like they want to stop, like for example, like whenever you're turning a big ship, you can't turn the ship immediately. Whenever you see something on the horizon, you have to make a decision today that will allow you to avoid a problem or a collision in two years.

That's what they're doing. I think it makes a lot of sense, honestly. It does.

The crossovers alone were not enough, and some of the crossovers were actually loved, like the Simpsons one. In November 2025, Fortnite started to look a little bit more like Roblox. That's because on top of existing engagement payouts, individual island servers could start selling microtransactions paid for in premium currency. Now it was a 100% revenue split for the first months, and then 50% to Epic after February. Seems like a good way

to make money, but it just didn't move the needle. So a month later the price of V-Bucks went up, with all bonus currency from the battle passes being eliminated. That's quite brutal. Now players understandably didn't see how that was their problem and responded with outrage, especially given a perceived drop in core seasonal content quality over the last few months. Now obviously this isn't a case of people saying, you know, we hiked the prices, you guys should have really paid attention to that and actually jumped on top of it and just

bought loads of shit so that you could protect our staff. Obviously no one really thinks that.

I don't think Tim Sweeney thinks that. His layoffs are not the fault of players, but I think they're also not really- Another big problem that I think Fortnite has is that the game has a massive skill gap. And the big difference between Fortnite and Roblox is that Fortnite is defined as a competitive game that is challenging, that people can be good at.

Roblox, you can't really be good at Roblox. And because of that, there are a lot more people that it is accessible to. Like if you're a brain-dead five-year-old, it's going to be hard for you to do anything in Fortnite because you're just going to get killed instantly every single time. So you might play the game because it's really popular, but are you really getting a fulfilling

experience whenever you're just getting farmed constantly. Not really, because the game is complex. There's so many mechanics that are complex. Whereas in Roblox, you just join a server and the server is throwing snowballs at each other. And I think that the simplicity of Roblox is what's allowed it to kind of eat into Fortnite's younger generation of players, right?

Whenever you're thinking about, especially the tens and unders. Like Fortnite is a complex game. There's a lot to it. The fault of developers either. You see, Fortnite was always going to stop making

as much money as it has been. Well, yeah, of course. Eventually, it's a decade old. It's an old game. Soon, they will be calling Fortnite a boomer game.

Yeah, don't we all feel old?

No, the real question here-

That's crazy, wow.

Is what the people running Fortnite did to prepare for this eventuality. And the answer starts with what was happening behind the scenes months before this announcement. So we spoke to a source who worked as an external QA contractor on Fortnite in North America. And we've learned that Epic

has actually been cutting for months. We just haven't been able to see it. Stretching as far back as October, contract staff levels have been cut at very short notice, or Epica's tried to negotiate for the same level of support, but of course at a much cheaper deal to themselves.

And from our sources' perspective, the workload has not dropped, even as staff numbers have absolutely dropped. Well-supplied external teams like these are the sorts of ones that you never really hear about, but they are vital to shipping live service games. Now, Fortnite's most recent major update shipped buggy and late, and that was before the $500 million in cuts to contracting and support that they just announced.

And this is perhaps the most dangerous part of these layoffs. Okay, systemic impacts. So, 1,000 more developers across the globe will join the thousands already laid off this year and the tens of thousands laid off over the last five years. Each of those former employees will have a wealth of experience, but obviously finding new roles in 2026 is incredibly difficult, especially because they're now all competing

with each other.

And those are- It's also that, like, I think that a lot of the people that are hired to make these games are just garbage at making games. That's a big fucking problem. Like, I think there's a huge component to that too, where a lot of these people are not very talented,

they don't really know what they're doing, and they make bad games. Like, and I think that companies have like, if you guys ever watched one of those like videos where it's like somebody that goes through their day at working at some tech company, and all they do is sit in meetings all day and then, you know, drink coffee and then go to the place and have lunch, then they go to coffee again, and then they have lunch again, then they have one adult daycare. It is. It's adult daycare. It's a woman thing. Well, yeah But like here's the thing is that whenever you create a bunch of incentives to you know You know proactively hire a bunch of women and then you have them in all these jobs that are effectively fake jobs Then well, yeah, I mean you're losing money at a certain point. And like this obviously isn't sustainable. It never was sustainable.

But I think that because they thought they had to or because the company was continuing to grow, they thought that these people would eventually be utilized. And so they're kind of used as a buffer to where like, oh, if the company does grow, then we can utilize this person more. But I think that now as these companies have reached

maturity, they're realizing that not only do we not need these people, but they're actually a waste of money. And so now, or they're costing us money and now they're being fired. I think that's what's happening.

Just the staff directly impacted.

DEI is dying. Yeah, definitely.

External developers, support teams, or QA impacted by the 500 million in cuts. That's a lot of money. Yeah. or QA impacted by the 500 million in cuts. That's a lot of money. And of course there are cuts leading up to that. Well, those can also lead to layoffs at those companies, ones that you probably won't hear about, as all of these companies scramble to find replacement revenue for what previously would have been seen as a fairly safe deal on a big industry titan of a game.

Yeah.

And beyond that, this is Epic Games. One of the biggest game companies on the planet is making layoffs like this, and they're openly admitting that they're not making enough money. Here, it doesn't matter that Epic themselves are a private company.

The point is that if Epic, sitting on Fortnite, sitting on the Unreal Engine, can't make their numbers work, well, what does that tell every investor evaluating new deals in the gaming industry right now?

I personally don't agree with this analysis. I think that Epic, just like every other video game company, will reach its maturity level eventually, and that growth will eventually stop. Now, just because their growth has a number of zeros behind it that other companies don't have doesn't mean that it's not still subservient to the same baseline market forces that every other company is accountable to. So whenever Epic experiences this, I don't think this is really an indicator that like

video games are failing or like live service is dying i think that it's just a reality that eventually all good things maybe don't come to an end but they stop continuing to make more and more and more money that's what i think maybe lower than anyone thought and maybe the sorts of projects many of those groups were into funding? The big, exciting live services that would just promise continual, stable revenue month after month after month, year after year, not the traditional game revenue of, oh, you

know, in three years we'll have a game done and maybe it'll make a lot of money, maybe

it won't.

Ah, who knows?

It's art. No, there's a reason why they all wanted to fund live services. When they work, live services generate revenue in a way that is absolutely fantastic for a corporation. So when we see a story like this one happen, there is a real risk of making a difficult funding situation far worse and at the exact moment.

Well, maybe it should be worse. Maybe if your job, if your focus is create a forever game that just endlessly pushes out slop content to get people to play it regularly because of FOMO, maybe that's not a good business model. Maybe that business model is bad, and maybe the market is saying that we don't want that as much as you think you do. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing.

We do need investment the most, but the thing is, it almost certainly didn't have to be this way. So far, while many directors in Fortnite are getting yote out the door, we haven't seen anyone from the executive team take a hit. Of course, those people are the key decision makers here, and here what we see is that the people making Fortnite have been making Fortnite, but the people leading Epic, well, they've been using Fortnite to fund endless dream projects, making the game a platform for creators, deals with Unity to make all games run in Fortnite, deals with Disney to make it the future of marketing. Three years ago, they overextended and they had to cut back. And

now at least a thousand people are losing their jobs because the same leadership basically made the same bet again and lost again. That's what happens. It doesn't seem like they've learned much, and there don't seem to be many consequences for them. And look, this isn't just an Epic Games problem. This is absolutely everywhere.

We've seen it across just about all of the big top companies with huge teams placing these huge bets and then really finding an awful win rate for those bets. So I think this might mean it's time for us to re-evaluate where this industry is going and what sort of games it's actually focusing on because it does not seem to be sustainable.

The AA scale game.

I think that definitely you have a lot of these live service games that are not sustainable. And I think that especially the ones that are made by big companies like recently we had the marathon release we had before that high guard. You obviously had Concord. You've had other games that have released since then like New World is an example of this is that these big companies try to push out a live service game and they invest so much into it that they can't afford to fail.

And even more than that, it's not that they can't afford to fail even, it's that they can't afford to not succeed on a massive level. Like Marathon would be fine if it made the same money that Arc Raiders did, if it was bringing in the same player base that Arc Raiders brought in but it's not and I think that's the Issue is that whenever you set your sights for you know this massive, you know Astronomical top 10 on the Steam most played list and then your game is just simply a mild success

For a period of time like marathon seems to be a mild success. It's not great It's a six out of 10, but whenever you're betting and you're planning for an 8 out of 10 or a 9 out of 10 and you only get a six you fail. It's kind of like, you know in Dungeons and Dragons if you're trying to like land a hit on some mob that's like

really hard to hit like rolling of 17 might not be enough. You might need an 18 to hit the mob. So even if it's something or a monster, right? I mean, that's how it works. So I think the same thing happened with Ubisoft with Assassin's Creed Shadows. Assassin's Creed Shadows was a just really milquetoast six out of 10 game. It was not awful. It wasn't a total failure. It played, I guess, kind of well, right? I mean, it was basically a video game and it was not, it was a mid, it was a mid game, but like it was a little bit above mid.

It had nice graphics and there was, you know, a progression system to it. And, you know, people thought it was okay. And it sold, I think maybe a couple million are invested, can you afford a six? Because that had to be their silver bullet that had to be their, you know, their home run that had to be the one game that averages out all of the previous commercial failures. So

when you have a video game like that, that you plan on being a nine, and it only is a six, well, then you've got to recalibrate. And I think that's what's plan on being a 9 and it only is a 6, well then you've got to recalibrate. And I think that's what's happened, is that a lot of these studios are now recalibrating. And another big issue is that there are also overseas pressures as well. So for example, it becomes a lot harder to make a video game, a fantasy video game, and

compete whenever you have Chinese developers making games like Where Winds Meet, or you have Korean developers making games like Where Winds Meet, or you have Korean developers making games like Crimson Desert. So why is it that, for example, they can make these games that are these expansive, massive, open world, with When Winds Meet, an example, is better?

It's a live service, even. Why are they able to do it, but Western devs are not able to do it? Well, they can go to market at a cheaper rate because obviously the cost of doing business over there is less. They're getting support from the government in China, at least on top of that also.

And you're going to see this happen also with Middle Eastern games, too. I think the Middle East is going to start developing games. Well, they're not really even developing, they're usually just buying games, they're buying companies, but I think you're going to continue to see that happen, is that they can develop at a lower cost, and they also are not focused on, and I talk about this a lot, right, but I do think it's a big component, is that, you know, the video that we were watching earlier, of like, all of those weird, stupid Karens talking about the process of

points of privilege and everything, the game developers, a lot of them think like that. They do, and they have the same bureaucratic waste of time, narcissistic, pathological, useless mindset that I think just wastes money infinitely. So they just infinitely hire more HR people, they infinitely create infinitely more meetings, and they just waste everybody's time and money and at a certain point that has to stop you know like

The the buck stops eventually and when it does that's the end of it. They don't get anything done Yes, they basically get nothing done like that's fundamentally what it is And I think that you see this with World of Warcraft you see this with a lot of other games So I would Dragon Age the Ve veil guard, so the Concord, etc. And so when you invite a bunch of people into a into an organization that have a mindset that is absolutely antithetical to a

creative process and to delivering a product to market, big surprise, you're going to have a failed product. And that's why they're being outperformed by such a ridiculous degree by Polish developers, other European developers like sandfall that made exhibition 33, and especially by developers that are in China and Korea, like those guys are just blowing them out of the fucking water.

And it's because they're able to bring a product to market for a cheaper cost with a more acute vision for what the player actually wants. And then being able to do that has caused them to completely control the market basically and look at for example gacha games they're totally dominant they're massive like that's it they own the market and it's only going to continue to become more the case like this isn't a problem that's going to improve it will continue to get

worse there's barely a thing anymore live services have basically eaten the top and in trying to outspend and out make Fortnite, the industry's done untold damage to itself, probably incalculable damage to itself. It's a total disaster, but in my view, it's not a surprising one. For a long time, we have never been paying money for video games. For a long time, we've been paying money for upcharges within video games. And I have a little feeling that the further the economics get away from being driven by developers making content, the worse things will be.

Because why have a healthy stable of appropriately scoped games all targeting diverse audiences who are going gonna get a game made for them. Why have that when you can just make huge mono games to target every human on the planet? It doesn't really make sense, does it?

Because they don't work. And also there's a problem where you can't build an ecosystem. Like for example, like in a dinosaur ecosystem, there can only be so many T-Rexes. There can only be so many Brontosaurus. There can only be so many blue whales in the ocean right now. And do you know why? It's because an ecosystem like that cannot support a large number of these apex predator or massive drains on that ecosystem.

Right? That's it. And so you have to have those smaller games. And you can't have... every company can't make their forever monogame and get the same feedback and the same type of returns that the first people that did it did because obviously, you know, they don't have the first mover advantage and on top of that, they don't have the ability to Like, I have a mindset. This is my mindset.

I only do dailies in one game. I only play, I might play multiple live service games at a time, but I only do one set of dailies. And that's a way for me to prevent myself from being on the infinity treadmill. I'm okay with dailies in a game, but the reality is that each single video game has an ecosystem that expects you to devote a large portion of time to it, and as somebody who likes to play different games, that's not feasible.

And I think that that causes people to break away and not play them, or it causes people to make a choice. And ultimately, there are only so many people out there that can make that choice. All through the research, writing, recording, stages, etc. of this video, there were more layoffs at more companies. I haven't played since Crimson Desert came out. We'll talk about that soon, but suffice to say, stuff is not looking good. But do you know who has got their

job back in a really funny way? The Subnautica guys. Oh yeah! And the Crafton CEO who basically

said, get over there, chat jippity, I would like to get out of a $250 million contract. Please help. Turns out that was a bad idea. And you can learn all about it in the next video.

Yeah, I dropped Enfield. I stopped playing it because the game just kind of, it just drug on. And I felt like I, there was no real reason, like there's no reason for me to keep playing. Like, I mean, I beat the game, I, I, dailies are chores, I unlocked everything, I have all the money, I, infield got boring.

The reason why it got boring is because the combat's bad. That's the reason why it's boring. If it had Wuthering Waves combat, or Dragon's Dogma combat, it would be amazing. But it's literally, you can play Ar Knight's infield with a garage door opener. There's, like, ve- there is so little depth to the game, that it's just fucking boring. And, yeah, and also it's a lack of content, to be honest.

I- I didn't even do the combat scenarios, because it was the same thing. Like, every- and also the bosses are so easy, they're a joke, they only do like two mechanics, like, what the fuck? Compare that to Tempest Mephis in like Wuthering Waves, that is a release boss, or Crownless that was a release boss, or I think Dreamless or something like that, that was also a release boss. It is not even in the same fucking universe.

The other games are just so much better. And, uh, Crimson Desert, Margit, well, I mean, we're talking about, like, gacha games, right? But I think that's the issue, and I think gacha games are reaching that entropy point.

And I think that right now, like, Genshin Impact came out, it was a massive success. And I'll link to watch that maybe tomorrow, but I'm not a big boss Enjoyer the lack of content was the killer. Well, yes, but the bosses are content But I see what you're saying to like you're not wrong about that

But the main concern that I think that a lot of these games have now is that you're having like Silver Palace come out, Neverness to Everness come out, Anatta come out, that apparently isn't going to be a gacha game now. I don't really know. I think there's one other game that's coming out that's also another gacha game that's like a character selector type game. There is only so much space in this ecosystem until they reach market saturation where everybody that wants to play an anime waifu collector game is already doing it.

They're already as our premier. Yeah, that's the other one. Yes. Uh, like they're already playing one of these. So how are you going to get somebody to move away and to play your game? And I think the reality is that every single time a new one of these comes out,

people will go and try it out, but only I think a very very small subset of people are actually playing multiple gacha games at the same time. Like I think that if you play more than two games you're basically in like the ninth circle of hell. Like you're doing dailies, it's just oh my god you're like trying to keep up with multiple banners, like holy fuck, like what a piece of shit, terrible experience. So it's exhausting, it is. Like I could never even imagine that, right? And, haha, I'm playing 3? I don't know about haha, that's not what I would say.

But yeah, sure. Infield is actually my first and only ever played Gacha? Yeah, I think that really, I mean, Infield is a great game, but it doesn't have the complexity and the combat's not fulfilling enough for me to want to keep playing it. It's just not. It's just kind of a mediocre game, really. And, you know, it could be worse or, you know, it could be better. But overall, that's kind of the way that I feel about it.

Honkai Star Rail and Wuthering Waves are the best. Honkai Star Rail is very good, but I just I feel like it's kind of like that game also and another big issue is that gotcha games run into an entropy point and What I mean by that is that you can only release your first goth Dami Mami waifu one time So after you already release that that style of character and you can only release your first hot big titty redhead character once and Then after that happens you you're over. Like,

that's it. It's done. And so, Star Savior replaced Honkai Star Rail for me? Yeah, well, what my point is is that, like, you add in, you have so many characters that the novelty of bringing in a new style of character is diminished by how many other characters in that same world that share a commonality with that character are. You see kind of what I'm saying here, right? So like, you're kind of meeting people's desires or meeting what people's demand is already,

so they already have a character like that. Like, I already have my character that's like this in general, not in Genshin. Well, I don't know about Genshin right? I mean I think that they definitely... Genshin is the best at avoiding that but they're not perfect at it. If they released a Giga Chat Swordsman 10 times I'd get all 10 but I'm not the target audience for waifu collectors? Well yeah you'd probably get all 10 but I what my point is is that you'd get more of the first one probably than the seventh one right? And I think on average that's a reality. Now it might not be a reality for everybody, but when you look at something at scale and at a large numbers amount, I think that you will see

on average that's a reality. Now it might not be a reality for everybody, but when you look at something at scale and at a large numbers amount, I think that you will see a diminishing returns. You see what my point is? That's where I'm at.