Data & Dimensions | Ep. 18 (Video) - The Data Behind Gaming's Eight-Quarter Rally

View Full Transcript

Neil Barbour (cold open)   00:00:00

Tomodachi Life from Nintendo, shipping 7 million copies in the quarter, just an absolute rocket.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:00:06

Interesting. I remember reading about this game when I was scrolling through X. So what is it about?

 

Neil Barbour   00:00:12

I have no idea. … Welcome to Data and Dimensions, a podcast at the intersection of Entertainment, industry and interactivity. I'm Neil Barbour, an analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan. And with me today is fellow gamer and account manager for the nonfinancial corporates team, Eiman Hussain. Eiman, thanks for coming on the show again.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:00:33

Thank you so much, Neil. It's a pleasure to be here.

 

Neil Barbour   00:00:37

Okay. So we have the second quarter data from the major public gaming companies, and we're ready to make the call. The gaming sector has grown for 8 consecutive quarters. That's year-over-year growth. Not huge growth, nothing compared to the pre-pandemic era, nothing compared to last decade, but a 2-year rally is certainly something we want to take note of, particularly as much of the news and analysis around games recently kind of suggests the sector is stagnating.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:01:02

That's impressive. And this has always been the case, I think, because data always tells a different story compared to general market perception in the news and especially in the video games industry. So my question is what's really happening here right now?

 

Neil Barbour   00:01:16

Yes, good point. So I want to start with console here first. Console is not necessarily the biggest subsegment in gaming, and it's not really the fastest growing right now either. But often, when I talk about games, we talk about Tencent and NetEase leading the charge, and they still are kind of the big growth stories here. But we're going to surface some of these smaller stories that come in and out of the market, particularly as we're thinking about console games in general with Grand Theft Auto coming out and all the stuff at Gamescom. Just generally, the market or the industry sort of leans this way this time of year. So I want to talk about that a little bit. So I think the story that everybody missed here, at least I come at that from a perspective of my media bubble or my peer group bubble is Tomodachi Life from Nintendo shipping 7 million copies in the quarter, just an absolute rocket.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:02:08

Interesting. I remember reading about this game when I was scrolling through X. So what is it about?

 

Neil Barbour   00:02:14

I have no idea. No. So I kind of had an idea. I remember they rolled out a beta for this game some time ago, and I sort of said, well, that kind of looks like Animal Crossing or something like that, certainly something to keep an eye on from a market perspective, not something I was personally interested in playing. But yes, what it is, is it takes the Miis from the Nintendo universe that have kind of been around since the Wii. So those are your personal avatars that you can craft and custom to look like you or people you know and then you put them inside a different game. So if you remember, Wii Sports, those were the Miis you would bowl with your Mii. So this was a game that incorporated those avatars into sort of a social sandbox experience. So you could have them walk around a village and just sort of socialize with one another. Maybe they fall in love, maybe they become friends, maybe they want to do this activity together, and you sort of guide this maybe dollhouse experience around. And I think what really happened here is that it did tap into the cozy game phenomenon that has been really strong on -- or on the Switch, particularly since Animal Crossing launched in 2021, something like that. So yes, just a crazy game and a crazy sales statistic. I would say it launched across Switch 1 and Switch 2. So it had just a huge installed base to sell into. A lot of things that Nintendo is producing right now are Switch 2 exclusives. This wasn't the case. Maybe that 130 million unit installed base for the Switch 1 played a big role here.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:03:44

Interesting. It sounds like a great game. And well, it is surprising because I thought you were going to mention Forza Horizon 6 or some other blockbuster AAA game.

 

Neil Barbour   00:03:55

Right. Yes, coming into the quarter, I would have fixated on Forza 6. I guess the problem with Horizon 6 is that it was an Xbox exclusive. Maybe that held it back. We saw the really strong sales off of Forza Horizon 5 when it moved to PlayStation last year. That was sort of an underserved market for the Forza Crowd. Obviously, Forza had long been an Xbox exclusive and for it to finally leak over to PlayStation, it found an audience that it didn't have before. All the sales statistics we saw coming out of Microsoft around Forza were very positive. I think they said something like they had 6 million people playing in the first week. Some of that might have been Game Pass, but it suggested strong sales. The problem is it was tough to see it inside of what Microsoft reported about its games division, which has been kind of soft. A few ways to think about that, right? Game Pass has been kind of lumpy. They did that pricing reset earlier in the year. They made it more expensive. They appear to have chased away some gamers by making the price less attractive. I think there was a doubling for some of those segments for some of the tiers of Game Pass. They reset those prices and maybe they brought some people back. The other thing to think about is that it does kind of look like Call of Duty is in a down year. So some of that stuff potentially hit the better sales story, the better success story for Forza Horizon 6. I got to say that doesn't bode well for E-Day later in the year, which is another Xbox exclusive. That could have a different market around it. Forza Horizon 6 has had a pretty consistent cadence over the past few years. You get one either Forza Motorsports or Forza Horizon maybe every 2 to 3 years. So maybe there's a little bit of fatigue in the market and E-Day won't suffer from that. Also, there's a new Call of Duty and maybe that does well and that a rising tide boosts all ships. But yes, Forza Horizon 6 did not show up in a big way in our Q2 review of gaming content revenue.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:06:01

That was, I think it was just yesterday that I was browsing through the PlayStation store, and I saw that Forza Horizon 5, the previous game, is still selling at $70 on the PlayStation store, which is still surprising where they're charging for an older game. Yes. About Xbox, it's not been a great year for Xbox 2026 and the timing for Xbox games has not been great. I think they're banking a lot on just Gears of War: E-Day to give them that push they need in October of this year. Yes, that remains to be seen. We'll see what happens after GTA VI comes out and how Xbox numbers are by the end of the year. So what about Sony? Is there where Sony's lack of first-party support starts to become more and more evident?

 

Neil Barbour   00:06:48

Yes. So we did kind of see a down year year-over-year for Sony for its software division. The hardware sales are down, too. That has a different sort of story around it. You can listen to our previous podcast from a few weeks ago where we talk about that. But yes, so -- last year was when Microsoft started shipping more games on Sony platform. So that Forza Horizon story we were talking about. I think that is also when the Indiana Jones game around that timing was when the Indiana Jones came to PlayStation. But also, we got to talk about the Miyazaki impact. That's right. Elden Ring: Nightreign is now a year old, and there was nothing really big to replace it this year. So Sony is definitely looking forward to Wolverine in the next quarter.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:07:39

Yes. I think Black Myth: Wukong was considered to be a replacement for Elden Ring, and it didn't exactly hit that mark. Well, as far as Sony is concerned, of course, it's going to be a big year for Insomniac Games when they release Wolverine. I'm really excited for that game. I think it's coming out in the next couple of weeks. So really excited for how it pans out. So speaking of Fromsoft, we got a good look at their new game, The Duskbloods at Gamescom. Did you see that one?

 

Neil Barbour   00:08:09

I want to push back gently on the idea of Black Myth: Wukong not being a big success because I mean, compared to kind of coming in nowhere, it really defined a pretty big market. I don't know if it moves the needle as much as an Elden Ring would. But yes, I don't want to sell Black Myth: Wukong short there. Yes, I saw The Duskbloods. I tend to underestimate the gravitational pull of these Souls games. And this is from a guy who enjoyed the King's Field games back on PlayStation 1 was a big fan of Demon's Souls when it first came to PlayStation 3. I thought that was an awesome left field hit. as they keep coming out and people keep responding to them more and more enthusiastically, it's kind of confusing to me as a gamer because I -- there's -- half of it I've been there done that. And the other half is these games are really hard. Why do people love to play hard games all of a sudden. All of a sudden is weird because this has now been a phenomenon for what, 10, 15 years. Duskbloods looks cool. I am a little concerned that it's a Switch exclusive. It's just that it might not hit as big of a market as it could, obviously. I think there are probably special considerations in place that we should think about this driving a lot of revenue for -- or a lot of sales for the Switch, bringing an audience to the Switch that may not have been there. Like if you're a big Souls game fan, those games aren't really switch games. And maybe 1 or 2 of them have been ported there. So this could be a big hardware sales driver. At the same time, it's coming out as the Switch 2 hardware price is going up. So interesting story to follow there.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:09:53

Absolutely. I agree. And I think Souls has been such a huge part of the gaming industry. I think it created a genre of itself. People call it Soulslike. There's always a subcategory of games called Soulslike, but yes. I know that you mentioned that you were watching the GamesCom stream that happened, I think, last night or a couple of days ago. So for context, for our viewers, GamesCom is one of the world's largest video game events. It brings together game developers, publishers, media and hundreds of thousands of fans from around the world. So for this year's Gamescom event, I made a small little list of notable games. So first game was Witcher 3. And CD Projekt Red is releasing a new free patch for Witcher 3 with a long list of enhanced gameplay features and graphical improvements. I imagine CD Projekt Red is importing features from their next installment, Witcher 4 into Witcher 3 and -- quite likely. And also, CD Projekt Red is moving to Unreal Engine by Epic Games for their development, which was a huge massive decision because they let go of their REDengine. Anyhow, I think it's great that CD Projekt Red is not keeping this update for Witcher 3 behind the paywall. It's a breath of fresh air considering how things are in the industry. It's a free upgrade, and it's releasing by the end of September. I'm curious to know, will you play the Witcher 3 again once this update.

 

Neil Barbour   00:11:17

That is such a good question. You've really put me on the spot there. I played the Witcher 3 twice, not to completion, the first time to completion, although I didn't do the entire bevy of side quests available in that game. And then they did a massive overhaul of it somewhere about a year, 1.5 years after it came out, and I played it again then to sort of get a taste of what they have done differently. And they did a similar thing for Cyberpunk, right? The game -- if you buy and play Cyberpunk now, it is not the game that people bought and played in the first few months or first year. And I'm not just talking about the bugs. I'm talking about they rebalance all the fighting. They change the way that Armor works in the game. And this has been kind of the secret sauce to CD Projekt's success for a while is that they -- even when it's a single-player game and there aren't the live service hooks, they keep going back and fixing things or improving things, refining things. So they kind of bring people back into the ecosystem to play it again. Maybe they buy the new DLC that came along with these improvements or they find a new audience because the the people who thought this game doesn't look like it's for me. They see all the changes. They go like, well, now maybe it is for me. So I probably won't play the Witcher 3 a third time, but this is definitely something that a company that is big a CD Projekt gets to do. And you see Rockstar kind of do a different version of that as well that not every developer publisher can do, but probably would like to if they could.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:12:51

I agree. And also, in my case, I will be playing Witcher 3 because I first played Red Dead Redemption 2 first, and then I play Witcher 3, which felt a little clunky. I started to see the game age when I tried that game, but I might try it after the update because the gameplay has become more and more smooth. Yes. So I'm really looking forward to the update. There are other...

 

Neil Barbour   00:13:15

The Witcher 3.. When did that originally release?

 

Eiman Hussain   00:13:18

I think it was somewhere about … Yes, we should definitely look -- I think my guess is somewhere around 2015, 2016.

 

 

Neil Barbour   00:13:27

Wow. A decade of the Witcher 3.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:13:30

And it seems like it has a fan base of its own when it comes to Witcher 3.

 

Neil Barbour   00:13:36

Yes. I mean there was the show, too, and there's the books and the comics. It's a complete media empire.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:13:43

And then I think they created a TV series as well on Netflix with Henry Cavill, which had a fan base of its own as well.

 

Neil Barbour   00:13:49

Yes, I watched a bit of that. It was okay.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:13:52

So other notable mentions are Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, Gears of War again, and Metro 2039, Nodusfall and Ananta.

 

Neil Barbour   00:14:04

Yes. So I didn't realize the third -- the revelation, is that the third part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake Trilogy? Is that how I should interpret that? I haven't.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:14:19

At this point, I've lost count of how many final are there.

 

Neil Barbour   00:14:23

We look like noobs here for sure. But I know there have been some offshoots as well. They have not just been going 1, 2, 3. They split the original Final Fantasy 7, which was a huge game on the PlayStation into 3 parts as they remade it over the past couple of years. And I think this is the conclusion of the Trilogy. So we -- it's not necessarily been a secret that they were doing it that we hadn't maybe seen a lot of it. We may have to edit this out if that's what it is. So -- that's cool. Also, E-Day, obviously, really gaining steam. I think what we saw was the single player trailer. So they're definitely going for a lot of big set pieces, cinematics, the voice acting, all playing in there. If you are familiar with Marcus Fenix and his friend, Dom, there will be a lot of payoffs for that relationship. So a lot to grow on there. Again, the -- being tied to one piece of hardware that didn't sell as well as maybe some other consoles in the market could be an issue, but also maybe it drives sales. Metro 2039, I think the metro is always a good sleeper hit. Yes, Exodus was an incredible game and a really good show piece -- tech showpiece for that era of hardware. So these last 2, Notice and Ananta, these, as I understand it, are part of a growing trend of free-to-play games that are focused on consoles that sort of lead with narrative single-player experiences and then sort of build on that with maybe gacha elements or buying energy or different currencies in game to round out the experience. So if you were to go on to the PlayStation store right now, they would center these experiences. And I'm trying to think of some of the other -- Genshin Impact is in this world. There are a few others. I think there's one called NTE right now. Again, maybe I should have done better.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:16:21

Not sure about NTE, but Genshin Impact has a huge fan base.

 

Neil Barbour   00:16:26

Yes. Neverness to Everness is this new game that's kind of on the PlayStation and it follows a similar pattern. These games generally are done by Chinese publishers and developers who -- in that market, free-to-play is the primary viable way to get a game to market. And so as they sort of grow out from the traditional free-to-play experiences, which are things like League of Legends or the Mobas or VALORANT, Hero shooters or battle royales, they're trying to grow a broader library of games in this business model, but give people things to do like single-player games and stories and narratives. And each one that comes out feels like it's a little better than the -- a little more fully realized than the last. It looks a little better. this could be a pretty big subsegment of the market to keep your eye on. And I think we'll look back on this Gamescom as kind of a flash point of this subsegment.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:17:28

Right. And we'll also have Grand Theft Auto later in the year, which had its own preview event on Netflix.

 

Neil Barbour   00:17:36

Yes. Outside of GamesCom because Rockstar doesn't necessarily need Gamescom, like sometimes mega publishers and platform holders don't gravitate to the traditional show structure. We've talked about that in different parts of our coverage. It's kind of why E3 isn't a big deal anymore. So yes, they had their own event on Netflix, which is kind of a first in the games industry where it seemed like Netflix incorporated this as maybe a documentary style highlighting of a new piece of cultural currency outside of Netflix's own ecosystem. So yes, and you got to -- I haven't seen it yet, but you watched it. Is that right?

 

Eiman Hussain   00:18:17

Yes, I did. And I was waiting for that Netflix trailer to go out. So I did get a chance -- did you get a chance to view the extended look on Netflix yet?

 

Neil Barbour   00:18:26

I'm sorry, I've read the coverage. They've been busy this morning. I didn't get to watch it. I don't have Netflix right now. So I didn't get to watch it last night. I know it's coming to YouTube soon. I read some reviews of it, but I'm looking for you to really break it down for us here.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:18:38

You were in for a surprise. I'm sure you'll love of the extended look. I saw the extended look a couple of times. I had to watch it at least 5 times and I saw it frame by frame. So the most surprising thing for me in this gameplay trailer is the fact that they're running this game at 4K and a steady frame rate on a base PlayStation 5 console. The console is almost 7 years old at this point. I sat very close to the TV, and I can clearly see some rough textures in there. So I the developers have had to scale things back for these older machines. But the draw distance, water, hair physics are really, really impressive. Even the ragdoll physics have improved a lot. So there was one specific thing I saw that made me truly very happy, especially since it has been on my GTA 6 wish list long since before the game was even announced. They have imported features from Red Dead Redemption 2 and Max Payne 3. The slow pace, the slow motion kill cams, dead-eye meter and the ability to replenish those meters by consuming food and beverages. I noticed that even some of Jason's walking and blending animations are exactly like Arthur Morgan's from Red Dead Redemption 2. and the driving also seems to be much better. NPCs have evolved significantly as well. NPCs in the world are going to have daily routines, tempers and interactive options. So I'm guessing that we will see the return of the choices to either antagonize or greet them. And also, when it comes to story and the characters, it is very obvious that the developers have taken heavy inspiration from Bonnie and Clyde, the movie from -- I think it was from the 1950s or '60s. The interesting part here is that the characters relationship and romance are going to be a huge part of the overarching story, so which makes me guess that the game will lead players towards multiple endings. And to be honest, I'm more excited for November more than ever from what I saw on Netflix yesterday.

 

Unknown Speaker   00:20:47

Great.

 

Neil Barbour   00:20:47

Yes, I'm glad I had a good showing. I was reading in the New York Times write-up of the preview that they were saying that if something about there were 300,000 animations inside of Red Dead Redemption 2, which was like a doubling or tripling of what they did in Grand Theft Auto V. And then this doubles it again. There are like 600,000 bespoke animations, which is speaking to what you're talking about of the NPCs kind of feeling like they're more dynamic, more alive, that they're moving and breathing in this real-world setting in a way that is believable. And it's interesting that it kind of does come down to that brute force handwork of we need this many animations. And some of that is going to be made easier by what has happened over the past generation of solid-state storage becoming the norm, which wasn't true when Grand Theft Auto V came out and kind of wasn't even true when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out because they -- certainly, SSDs were more common in PC workstations and gaming computers, but they weren't in the PlayStation 4. So they had to really think about spinning data off the drive. I'm kind of speculating a little bit whether this actually shores up this kind of technological advancement, but those are the kind of things going on under the hood that you can do on PlayStation 5 that you really couldn't do on a PlayStation 4.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:22:06

It's great that you mentioned the animation side because Take-Two filed a few patents when it comes to animation because the blending animation that makes it really realistic, all those patents are publicly available. Although I don't understand all of them, it's very technical, very computer science, a lot of technical jargon goes in those patents. But from what I saw in the patents, there's a lot of stuff and a lot of work that has been done to make those animations really smooth.

 

Neil Barbour   00:22:35

Cool. So I feel like that's a pretty good wrap of where we are in the console space and where we're going in the next few months. I think this is probably going to be -- I haven't put my official forecast into an Excel yet, but I think you can kind of see where Grand Theft Auto is taking as it's going to be a pretty good year for console. And there are some other stories sort of emerging that should support that. But let's spend a little time talking about PC and mobile, which right now are bigger and growing faster than the console ecosystem. And again, if you really want to know what's sort of plaguing the console ecosystem in a nutshell, it's that the RAM crisis born of data center build-outs is monopolizing the components that would otherwise go into the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox -- so that is making the consumer pricing on those devices skyrocketed. So what used to be a $500 machine is now a $600 machine, a $700 machine, an $800 machine, and that's cutting down on user acquisition opportunities. So if this would have been a big sales moment for hardware for Grand Theft Auto VI, some of that is going to be shaved off just because it's the sticker shock of getting into the ecosystem is rising so rapidly. So they'll have to rely on just monetizing whatever is there. I think they're going to do a good job of that, but that is a challenge that they have. So anyway, that out of the way, let's talk about PC and mobile. So we have a new split in the quarterly tracker for video game content revenue that we put out every quarter. And this time, we want to talk about direct-to-consumer channels in the mobile space. That's something we've seen underlying by publishers like Playtika, Modern Times Group, SciPlay. The basic idea here is that if you buy in-game currency through these web portals supported by the publisher or developer, you get a better deal than you would have if you had bought through Apple Pay or Apple App Store or Google Play. And the reason you get a better deal is because the publisher gets to keep more of that money instead of having to pay the toll to Apple or Google. So why is this happening now? Well, it really picked up speed or really started to become a thing in 2022. There were different regulatory decisions that were made that opened these channels up. It used to be that if you operated in these app stores, you were kind of locked into it. Again, there were regulatory agencies that -- and court rulings that sort of lean this market back into the favor of the publishers. And now the publishers and developers are really starting to get good at finding out how to move people out of the App Store and into their web portals. It's not the entirety of the market. We sort of estimate it's somewhere in the range of like 8% of mobile spending rate right now, but it's getting bigger.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:25:33

What about PC gaming? What's going on there?

 

Neil Barbour   00:25:35

So this is where we'll talk about Tencent and NetEase -- you can't really get away from. They're in the middle of any gaming revenue conversation. They've made their catalog more PC-friendly over the past few years. I'm thinking about Valorant, I'm thinking about Marvel Rivals. I'm thinking about Where Winds Meet. And it appears they're creating a lot of excitement, both domestically in China itself. There's more PC gamers there that they're catering to and that they sort of foster the development of. It's kind of like originally, China was thought of as a mobile-only market or certainly a mobile-first market. But as these developers and publishers in China got more ambitious, they started making games that would really benefit from the improved graphics that you get from a PC. And with those -- not only improved graphics, but more gameplay modes, different ways of expressing yourself creatively inside the game. So they have harbored that ecosystem there and it seems they're capitalizing on it. But at the same time, they get to export those games internationally as well. And Marvel Rivals has been -- Marvel Rivals, sometimes difficult for me to say, has been big not only in China, but internationally. Obviously, the Marvel license is huge. Everyone loves it. So they've been able to have a lot of success with that.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:26:52

Right. It's great you brought up free-to-play games because there's something that I've been thinking about for a while. In the last episode, we discussed that consoles and video games are getting more and more expensive. Consumers are opting for free-to-play games on mobile and consoles. Now advertisers are finding ways to place ads within video games and interactive experiences. Now on the console side, I find it strange that consumers are already paying $70 for a video game, which is essentially a premium experience. So what's your read on in-game advertising?

 

Neil Barbour   00:27:30

Yes. So we did do a forecast or a TAM or a SAM for the in-game advertising market about a year ago, sort of trying to size up that opportunity. We did not find as much evidence for that being as large a market as some other market observers have. I mean you sometimes see estimates that it can be like 1/4 or half of all mobile gaming revenue is running through advertising. And it's largely a mobile phenomenon right now. I think we were closer to like the $5 billion to $15 billion range, which is still it's not negligible. It's -- you wouldn't -- if you were in that market, you wouldn't want that money to disappear all of a sudden. A couple of things to think about in mobile and game advertising. Some of it is kind of cyclical or it's kind of a closed loop, I think, is a better way of saying it, is that you turn on a game and a lot of the advertising is for other games. So if you were to click on that ad, you're taking your -- you're sensibly taking your money from that game and moving it to a different game. So it doesn't grow the overall opportunity. But there is -- if you think you can double the play time of a person by showing them an interesting game, particularly if you're a publisher of both games, then that could be advantageous. The problem with moving it to console is exactly what you said. Historically, console gamers have chafed at the idea that they should spend $70, $60, $50 for a premium game. I'm thinking $50 2 decades ago. When this was still an argument.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:29:02

Yes, $80 to $100 now because of GTA.

 

Neil Barbour   00:29:05

Sure. Yes, exactly. So if you're spending that amount of money, you don't really want to watch a bunch of advertising, too. It's like if you were to -- it's a difference between TV and a movie, obviously, there are now advertisements before movies, but they don't stop the movie in the middle of the movie to show you some ads as they did on classic TV. Obviously, a lot of TV now isn't ad-supported. I suppose there are ad-supported tiers on Netflix and Disney+ and whatnot. But you can pay your way out of it if you want to. We don't see a lot of opportunities right now to just start putting advertising into gaming. The way that could change is if you were to say -- let's say, you want Xbox Game Pass, but you don't want to pay $10 or $15 a month for it. So if you were to get Xbox Game Pass for free, which has premium games on it, and they put advertising in that, is that something people would be interested in all of a sudden? I think those are the sort of opportunities that people are looking at. I don't think that Grand Theft Auto VI at launch has much of a lane to get into to put advertising in front of people. So that's kind of -- that's where I'm thinking about it right now.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:30:23

Also, I think if not advertising, I think it would start off with product placements. And I think product placement is not new when it comes to gaming. If you look at EA FC -- and if you choose the big leagues, you have all the sponsorship rights on their shirts, whether it's Emirates or Spotify, different companies. So product placement might just be a starting point for in-game advertising.

 

Neil Barbour   00:30:47

That's 100% right. Yes. And it really pops on things like that where in the real world, that advertising would be there anyway. So it doesn't break the sense of immersion when you put it into a soccer game or a football game or even a baseball game. And it used to be that in racing games, they would put real-world advertising on the billboards because you would expect to see advertising on billboards. Rockstar can't really do that because they've set a tone where they put jokes on the billboards. They put fake products into the real world. Yes, exactly. They use that for places to advance their stylistic narrative. -- nothing to say they couldn't do that. I would say the one thing that pops out in my mind is when Death Stranding did it, they had a deal with Monster Energy. And so you would -- yes, you would have that drink when you wanted to have more stamina or something like that. But then that deal lapsed and they had to go in and redo the asset. If you play that game now, it's not Monster Energy, it's like Death Stranding Energy Drink or something like that. So yes, there are little additive things that you can do like that, but you would have to tread lightly on it.

 

Eiman Hussain   00:31:54

Perfect. Those were amazing points. Neil, thank you so much. It was an absolute pleasure. This was really insightful, and I'm looking forward to the rest of 2026.

 

Neil Barbour   00:32:04

Definitely. Thanks for coming on the show, Eiman. This has been Data and dimensions.