Yuri Sokolov: So we've just finished our conversation with Ritis Yatzevichus. he's founder of an Indie studio called Flaxo Games. he's been managing the studio for quite some time. Yeah, we
Amit Netanel: Yeah, he he has his hands in many plates in the Lithuanian game developer community. And we actually talked about quite a lot about things we find similar in our own like communities and about we found ourselves talking about books, about marketing, lots of different things. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, indie games marketing. We talked about government support for games. We talked about a lot of interesting stuff surrounding the life of an indie studio and the life of any game developer out there. So I think you'll have fun listening to this episode. I know we did. So
Amit Netanel: Yeah, we we had fun producing it, so I hope it works for you too.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. So take a listen. And today we're here with Retis Yatzevichus from Lithuania, founder of Flaxa Games, chairman at Lithuanian Game Developers Association, right? Business develop not anymore.
Rytis: not anymore. Sorry, not anymore.
Amit Netanel: Any more.
Yuri Sokolov: so we'll discover everything about it, but before we start, we usually start our podcasts with with the most interesting question in my mind. what are you playing these days?
Rytis: that's a good question. I sometimes I hook up with strategy games and I can can let them go, you know. It hits me more than probably people hits with gacha games or casinos. Like if I go for half an hour and I could spend like four hours easily. So right now it's Mountain Blade 2.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: Very cool.
Rytis: so yeah, my fiancee said if you play it more I will delete that game because I was playing a wit a bit way too much. So I pivoted it yesterday to space marine Warhammer forty K Mastercraft version.
Yuri Sokolov: Sa and she approves this game a lot more than the Mountain Blade.
Rytis: She liked that I switched, you know, and I'm I'm more more here than in in the game.
Amit Netanel: Maybe she's in favor of the emperor. Like she's yeah.
Rytis: Maybe. Mm well, she do still don't know, but yeah. She she
Amit Netanel: Soon.
Rytis: will, because I'm getting hooked on Warhammer.
Yuri Sokolov: No, I wasn't able to to get into this franchise. I know there's a lot of fans out there. I wasn't able to to get into it. I I don't know, something something about hundreds of books scares me off usually. Not because I'm afraid to read all of those b books, but and and I probably will anger right now a lot of people, but I remember my my young days when I was introduced to Conan the Barbarian and then I
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: noticed that there are like 30 or 40 books and all of them, pardon my French, horrible. They're just cheap literature. And since then I kind of well every time I see that some some franchise has this huge amount of books in its lore, it's something in my head says, no, it's not gonna be good. It's not gonna be good.
Amit Netanel: You need you need to rethink it. It's the the lore is there to sell you more figures. Right?
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: Every figure needs a l backstory and an enemy to fight and more vehicles and spaceships and whatever. So yeah.
Rytis: Yeah, it's also the universe which inspired a lot of popular games like have you heard of StarCraft? I'm joking, yeah. But yeah, yeah. Really?
Yuri Sokolov: Course, of course. by the way I didn't know that. Didn't know that the inspiration to StarCraft came from Warhammer.
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The even the races have some similarities like while I'm still quite new.
Amit Netanel: But the the Marines desi the Marines armor designs are very Warhammer. Very. Just without the skulls, because they're not the baddies.
Rytis: Yeah. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Hmm. That that I remember, yes, that I remember that it's similar. But once again, I'm not that versed into Warhammer at all. I just saw the pictures. what I do think is kind of great about this franchise, I see I never play them, so I don't know the quality behind them, but I see at least once a year there's a Warhammer game released. It's tack a tactics game, a sports game, whatever. Something related to Warhammer is released constantly. So I kind of think if I was a fan, it it would probably would be great for me to to get f content from my favorite franchise so often.
Rytis: Yeah, it's one of a steam tags. I did some analysis I think this year. one of that Steam Tag with Warhammer forty K is safe one. I would say it's more profitable compared to the other ones.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. Yeah. Amit anything new you played recently?
Amit Netanel: Yeah, so we recorded just last week and you heard about my losing streak in all the trading card games. Okay, I'm a losing streak in Marvel Snap and I lost in pre-release for Magic the Gathering. So I decided to to take a break and actually the game designer in my studio just went up to me and said, Man, I have I have the game for you. Okay, you you have you written all over it. It's called Sir, we have an orc problem.
Rytis: my.
Amit Netanel: It looks good. It just released like I think two a month ago, something like that, earlier this month. It already sold two hundred K copies. It's it's amazing because it's the simplest tower defense game. Okay, you you're
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: you just place turrets and flamethrowers and stuff, and there are orcs coming your way. just regular fantasy orcs, you can buy the supporter pack and make them space orcs. If we're talking about Warhammer, it's a clear inspiration. And and the way it's it's hundreds of thousands of orcs on each level. So my shocking realization was after I beat the game one hundred percent, I actually watched the trailer because I immediately installed it and finished it in like two days. And it's a short game. And I saw the Godot logo. At the start, I was sure I was one hundred percent convinced it's Unity dots under the hood. And now since it's Godot, I want to reverse engineer it and see what they did there because it runs smooth. Okay, you have hundreds
Yuri Sokolov: Interesting.
Amit Netanel: of thousands of orcs on the screen and it runs sixty frames per second, no problem. So
Yuri Sokolov: But you know, Unity did not invent U E C S, so
Amit Netanel: No. No, no. But someone did their research. Like it's very, very well implemented.
Yuri Sokolov: Awesome. I I love well-engineered games. I actually didn't have didn't play anything new this week. I didn't have a lot of time but I needed to relax somehow. So I've dived into one of the probably stupidest series I watched in the in the past couple of years, I think. So it's it's Pure masculinity stuff. It's Richard. Somebody watched Richer. it's one huge muscular guy who goes and he's super smart and in and he's muscle in his way through army, through bandits, through mafias, and he kicks everyone's asses. So basically, straight from the 80s or 90s, but but recent years it's on Amazon. well.
Rytis: It sounds like MacGyver, you know?
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, it it sounds like any nineties action movie. Like it's it's more like it's more like how how was this series called with Chuck Norris the Ranger? Texas Ranger.
Rytis: yeah, Texas Ranger.
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm. Takes a stranger.
Yuri Sokolov: So it's it's more like this. So this cop super intelligent and super strong and It's it's really stupid, but I kind of like it. I remember in myself as a kid. so Ritis. Flaxo game. What is it? What what is Flaxo game? How did the studio start? What did you do before? The mic is yours.
Rytis: well in my I don't know. Yesterday I became thirty-five. That's why I have, you know, this one.
Amit Netanel: Happy birthday. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Congrats.
Rytis: Thank you. I I done a lot of stuff in in my days, you know, working in government, doing some I know it's it's alright.
Yuri Sokolov: Don't arrest me.
Rytis: It's good connections. yeah working with commercials In digital marketing, with YouTube, like different different kind of stuff. And in 2019 I decided to try go into a gaming field because I always had the special place in my heart for games. You
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: know, they they helped during hard times in life and also have good memories with some of the games, so yeah, I ventured into this black hole. I first first impression was really good because the community was super friendly here in Lithuania. Also when I started traveling to other countries, I noticed it's like everywhere. Everywhere I go, it's like subcultural by its own, which doesn't have
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: any borders and people if they are not corporate too or too corporate mindset, they tend to share some even sometimes private information from their
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: companies like sales numbers or how did they get to their what was their success formula and stuff like that. And I was fascinated by that. it's it's completely different with other industries where people you know go at each other's throats. So yeah, that's pushed me to try it here. I'm no programmer. I know a little bit about programming, but not too much. but I was always surrounded by programmers so it was a bit easier to take command of some unit of my own picked and hired programmers. So we started with our first game. It was Plastic Ellipse,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: isometric action adventure with with submarine ship which does looks more like tank. It helped us to show what we can deliver. And in twenty one we got our first client from mobile to do like a mobile port because it was done
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: I think in not Java but like very flash. It was done in in flash.
Amit Netanel: yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Rytis: Yeah, it do that was discontinued, so they needed like a updated new version. And yeah, we managed to do the that in I think less than a half year, like a full game for kids on mobile and yeah it was it was great. After that they
Yuri Sokolov: The the you ported the plastic plastic ellipse or another game? Another game.
Rytis: No, another game. It it was called Peppy Ride.
Yuri Sokolov: Okay. So you you ventured into mobile and why didn't didn't
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: you continue there?
Rytis: Well, we did our own game called Monkey Flip, which was not success. But we we experimented a bit in mobile market as well.
Amit Netanel: So you always
Yuri Sokolov: So if
Amit Netanel: you like always have an in house project and an outsource project going on?
Rytis: Yeah, that's how we survived for until now, I would say. Until now.
Amit Netanel: That's that's smart. What what can I say? Like publishing a game especially for the mobile market is such a gamble. Like you work
Rytis: yeah.
Amit Netanel: on something and you don't know if it will take. It's a massive risk.
Rytis: I will probably not do that anymore myself. Maybe if I would be working with like successful studio and there are some successful studios here in Lithuania, which I'm good friends with some CEOs. so if I would do that, like look, I have a few prototypes, what do you think? And he's say, Let's try with this one. I say, Okay, let's do it together. But I would not go myself anymore because like it's completely different market. going with marketing
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, it's it's it's really different market. Me and Amit here are mostly familiar with the mobile market and good game design is not necessarily the the the thing that will bring you money. Yes, because
Amit Netanel: Yeah. It does not translate necessarily.
Yuri Sokolov: good gameplay loop can get you so far in the mobile market. The most most of the money there comes from what we call a metagame. So basically live operations, things that surrounding the gameplay itself, things that keeping the players engaged. So they they're collecting their tickets and their coins and they're doing this side quests that they can do only once a day. And all of those things, those are the the main drivers in the mobile gaming industry. And also user acquisition is super, super costly. It's
Rytis: Yeah. And it's ever changing.
Yuri Sokolov: It's growing in the recent years, it's only growing, and many companies are are falling. publicly traded companies losing shares because the user acquisition is so high and the competition is so high. Because today, in in in today's realities, games not only compete among themselves, so basically,
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: let's say you have a match three game and another company released match three, you're not only competing with this match trade game, you're competing with all other games. You're also competing with with TikTok, with YouTube, with Instagram reels, because the the you're competing for time the player the the user spends.
Rytis: Also other advertisers, you know, even if it's like a automobile company or or I don't know, selling ice cream, whatever, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, you're competing for time.
Amit Netanel: Ha ha ha.
Yuri Sokolov: You're competing for players' time. So yeah, it's super it
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Time and attention and everything in between. But it's also it's fascinating because it's ever-growing science. So when we started working on mobile games, playable ads weren't a thing, and now you you just have to be there to actually make it. Okay, you need
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: playable ads, probably. And the playable ads becomes another type of market, I would say. So Yeah, it's it's as as as someone who owns a
Yuri Sokolov: In mobile games it's a science.
Amit Netanel: company, I think it's the most terrifying endeavor someone can do. But as someone in the industry it's super interesting and dynamic.
Rytis: But it it it is a little bit s doesn't take like a lot of creativity out of it and it goes straight into like Excel sheets, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: No, it's not it's not like that at all because the ones that that are working on Excel sheets and stuff like that, they are completely different breeds. They're a completely different area of those of this operation. So yeah, the the flow of developing a feature for a game like because in those in LiveOps games, those games are live living for years, right? So the core loop. Let's say you're making let's take I don't know a monopoly go, right? It's the core loop is simple. You have a board, you you drop your cubes, dice, sorry, and and the character is walking on the monopoly board. It's it's super easy. Everything around it is also co constantly updated. The the metagame, as I said it. So let's say we're starting developing a game, a meta a feature, a mini game into into Monopoly Go or any other game, other mobile game. In a PC market, you would start, okay. I need a game designer to create me an outline of what what we're doing. Game designers should should design some some idea. In a mobile market, sometimes a company would not have a game designer. Sometimes it would be a purely
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: product decision. Sometimes game designer would start, but then a product would and and the goal of game designer is to make the game as fun as possible, right? Then the PM comes and he says, Okay, it's fun. Now I'm starting to cut these things so it would be also profitable. Because we're and then you're working with You're working with analysts, with business intelligence, and and you're deciding what where the market goes. Only the big companies are having the ability to experiment. Most of the small companies are actually trying to recreate sometimes blind blindly to recreate features by the big companies. But the big
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: companies get to experiment and try things out. And as a developer, for example, it doesn't really matter what where the idea came from. Because when I get to the table, a simplest feature I need to to develop a simplest feature as a developer, I still need to figure out how this is done. Because how this done technically speaking, the artist that is drawing those images, the animators that working. They still need to figure out those things, they still have the creative process. So, yeah, in terms of game design, it's probably more engineered and less soulful. But the creative process behind actually creating those things is is the same. So yeah, we we we're having fun at fun at our job even working on mobile market. so
Amit Netanel: Yeah. And but by the way, speaking of of having the same process, like how do you manage to do your how do you divide the studio's attention? Do you have tribes in the studio? Do you have people working on two games at the same time? infrastructure, how does it work when you have more than one game?
Rytis: Yeah, mo most of the time what I do is people working on different projects. You know, sometimes for some projects it's like one two people is enough. Sometimes you need all of a team. If you get like a big government project, so you take out from from your internal teams go directly into that one big project.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. So okay, interesting. How how big is the team?
Rytis: ten people.
Yuri Sokolov: Ten P well it's not a small studio.
Rytis: Yeah, well we are right now it's not the best time, so we're a bit cutting corners. Yeah, and shifting.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, it's not it
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Everyone. Everyone are. Unfortunately.
Yuri Sokolov: unfortunately, unfortunately, yes, it it's affecting everyone inside and outside of game the gaming industry. It's those are hard hard times. Me and Amid here were affected by it even before even before the main issue started. In twenty one, I think, yeah. Twenty twenty two, in twenty twenty it's it was January.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Twenty tw the no, twenty twenty two. Yeah. It was after we went from the the high of COVID, like everyone was spending money and playing all day. So two years after our c CEO said well, enough fun in games. you need to deliver.
Yuri Sokolov: So a hundred people were fired, a whole studio. So we we were a studio inside a bigger, larger company.
Rytis: Do you feel like that's that's interesting take because I was trying to compare, like do you feel this time at the moment we're having like a crisis, we can probably agree on that. And is it like as big as after COVID or still not as big?
Yuri Sokolov: No, in after COVID it was small. I think right now it's the biggest it's the biggest cr crisis w
Amit Netanel: Yeah. I think I think right now it's it's just it's amplified because you have also companies that have you know survived or slowly declined after the heights of COVID, combined with everything that's going on in the fields of AI, basically.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: I I can give you an example from my own studio, like cutting speaking of cutting corners, we are we're not having a rough time, but our CTO has told us listen, two people People have left the company in recent months on their own volition. Like one of them moved, like relocated to another country,
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: not in our time zone. And one of them wants to completely change his career trajectory. But he said, We're not opening a job because someone left. There is
Yuri Sokolov: Not back feeling.
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: yeah, there's there's no help coming. If you need assistance, feel free to spend it on tokens. but but there's no help coming so. power through. And that's the really hard like part because we're less people with like moving faster because of AI.
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: And it's a lot of just it it feels like a grind because we do more every week with less people and more people are wearing more hats.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, w along along with faster work, you're also have faster burnout.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: well I think we're still in in the zone where COVID the post COVID syndrome is still affecting the the layoffs
Rytis: Industry.
Yuri Sokolov: because a lot of companies overhired during COVID and even when The revenues from COVID started to decline. Those companies continued to hire and to grow because they expected, you know, something. I don't know. And today it's easy, in my opinion, it's easy to blame AI for your fuck-ups. Pardon my French once again. some people believe that they need to overhire. They hired, they made a mistake, and instead of Accepting the mistake that they did, they just say, okay, we were iterating the AI changed the game, so because of AI we're firing, no, you're firing because you made a mistake and overhired during COVID days. And today you cannot run in the same thing. So probably, probably somewhere in some black site, there are people are planning another COVID.
Amit Netanel: You know, breeding all sorts
Rytis: You never know.
Amit Netanel: of animals together in hopes something will come up.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And hoping somebody would eat them.
Rytis: Yeah, but you know, some people, you know, which the don't dig dig too deep, think it's not only AI, as you said. And that's interesting take that you're saying it's also post-COVID thing, but I think it's also a few other things like consolidation of power of like big companies, big tech, like Microsoft trying to take the market and also You know, even taking the successful studios which are very profitable, it's not enough for them, so they let them down, like high rush, for example.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, that was a weird decision.
Rytis: Also
Amit Netanel: Super weird decision, in my opinion.
Rytis: Yeah. China. China is probably the most growing market and it's very
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: closed off.
Yuri Sokolov: I think they're starting to get out, get outside of China, because a lot of games starting to a lot of Chinese game developers are starting to pour out. And
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: also a lot of I hear in the recent years, I hear more and more from indie developers that are actually trying to get into Chinese market because sometimes it's it's a gamble like this for an indie game. If you're If you're adding Chinese localization, it's a coin toss. Either they love it or they hate it. If they hate it, your game is doomed because there are a lot of Chinese players. And if if you offended them somehow, because it's a different culture, you might have done something that it's okay in most of the world, but not okay in China. And they don't like it, and suddenly you get you know, you get a lot of negative reviews. You got review bombed and your game is dead. But if they like it, if Chinese market likes your game and you made a Chinese localization, wow, you're you're you're set. I I don't wanna say set for life, but you're you're you're
Amit Netanel: It'll do good.
Yuri Sokolov: okay with
Rytis: In a good spot.
Yuri Sokolov: with the next game, at least one game or two games you can develop quietly. So a lot of people trying to get into Chinese markets, a lot of suc people succeed, and a lot of Chinese developers go and put interesting ta things out there. Let's
Rytis: Even publishers approach, you know, indie developers. It happened for me a few times. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah,
Amit Netanel: Milly.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah. It's it's interesting. I think the I think those guys gonna gonna rule. I think most of the popular indie games, and and I think indie is the future currently, small lean teams that that doing something for the fun of it, not as the I don't think there's a lot of companies like Rockstar that are triple A but still pour their heart and soul into their games.
Amit Netanel: They they they put an art piece out there, not a product. That's basically
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, so
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: what you mean.
Rytis: But with
Yuri Sokolov: Indie game
Rytis: GTA six I think it's can be dividing. We'll see. I just heard
Yuri Sokolov: We'll see.
Rytis: a lot of you know different kind of news.
Yuri Sokolov: I don't think we should rely on those news because nobody's seen the game. Nobody's
Rytis: Yeah, exactly.
Yuri Sokolov: seen the game just yet. Let's see, because Rockstar have a track amazing track record with their games. So you can you can tell a lot of stories about I don't know, crunch, no crunch, whatever, poor decisions, maybe. But if we're talking about the quality of the released product, then it's it's amazing. Every single game is just I don't know. I still think that Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the most beautiful games released ever. It's game, the game was not remastered. I don't know, maybe it was remastered in the recent years I haven't followed, but even the not remarmastered version, the one that was released for the PS4, looked a lot better than a lot of games that was released for the next gen consoles. just I don't know, w without ray tracing it looked a lot better than games with ray tracing.
Rytis: That's an interesting thing. I recently I saw like somebody taking out the crisis with Crytek
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: engine and saying like what the fuck happened? Where are those like high end graphics, you know, these days?
Yuri Sokolov: But Crisis 3 was was a nightmare to run many years after it was released. You you could run it only on top end machines. It just was it was amazing, but it was super unoptimized. The the engine, I don't know, the game struggled to run on a lot of high-end machines a couple of years after the release.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. By the
Rytis: But isn't
Amit Netanel: way, I
Rytis: it the same problem with some unreal games these days, you know?
Amit Netanel: It it is
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: a problem and I think it's it actually should be on the list of priorities of game developers nowadays because not everyone can buy a decent GPU nowadays. Okay. I've looked at prices.
Rytis: yeah.
Amit Netanel: I'm looking into I'm in the market for buying a machine to run local LLMs on, okay? Because I spend way too much on tokens. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: It's a different kind of machine. It's a different kind of machine.
Amit Netanel: It's a different kind of machine, but we we could dive into that subject, but one of the co most common rigs, okay, is using GPUs. I've looked at GPU prices today and man, I don't think any a kid can go and just buy a gaming PC nowadays. Just can't.
Yuri Sokolov: Talk to me later. I'll
Rytis: Yeah, and
Yuri Sokolov: I will I will
Rytis: l look,
Yuri Sokolov: help you out.
Rytis: I will now connect
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: shit. I don't know how to do this.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: For those of for those of you who are
Amit Netanel: We're now focused. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: who are listening to us without watching, Ritis
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: just made a gesture with his hand and his camera just decided to zoom
Rytis: So
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: in, full zoom.
Rytis: I'll I'll find in meantime. I just yeah, I don't know. It's a bit funny. I wanted to connect where we started
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: with AI, you know. like GPU prices. GPU is not only it's also consist of of RAMs. look. Fixed. yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, we've calmed down. Okay.
Rytis: It has RAM and RAMs used to be the cheap
Amit Netanel: That's expensive as well.
Rytis: part back in the day.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: And now it's sometimes can be even more costly than the GPU itself. So the AI
Yuri Sokolov: Yes, we have we have
Rytis: cr AI like boom boosted the prices of GPUs like all tech, all tech PCs, mobiles, everything that has RAM RAM in it, and it is because like I heard I'm not sure about the numbers, but I heard like seventy percent of all RAMs w which are created goes to the data centers because the big tech or and growing AI companies just invent tons of money into into running the AIs, even it's if it's not, you know, profitable but they just don't wanna lose the race.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, listen, if in if
Yuri Sokolov: Maybe
Amit Netanel: if it's if it's it it doesn't matter if that's the the actual number, like seventy percent, it's less important. we all feel it. Like the tech is getting more expensive.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. We recently spoke, we recently spoke with CTO of Microsoft for startups, Imea,
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: and he said one thing that like think about this way. So you we need silicon to to develop chips for GPUs. Forget about the RAM for a second, which is also a big thing. But we need silicon for chips. There is only one company in the world. That can can create is it called lithographs, I believe. that they're creating those disks that they're later sell to companies like Intel or TSMC or whatever. So there's only one company, I forgot the name, they're from Holland. the company from Holland, I think from Edenhoven. So one company in the world that can do this. So basically the whole world of chips is of processors of GPUs, CPUs, have this bottleneck of how many products this company can produce in a year. So you you can have and everybody Samsung, iPhone, sorry, Apple, Samsung's
Rytis: Which part was it? I'm I'm now I'm curious, you know, just to Google it.
Yuri Sokolov: it's the only company we will add this to the show notes, the the name of the company and the link, and we'll we'll search for it as well later on. Forgot the name of the company, but there's only one company in the world that produces this. So
Rytis: company for ships. Okay.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: A S L
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah. SML. Right.
Amit Netanel: Probably. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: SML, that's the company. So they they are the only ones that that are doing it. So regardless of other price searches, we have this issue, right? So you have a bottleneck of how many disks, how many silicon they can process.
Rytis: But I know that also like Taiwan has a monop kind of monopoly on the chips as well. Properly a good
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, they are producing
Rytis: part. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: they are producing it from this technology. So that's that's the issue again. We have I remember the days when when hard drives went nuts in pricing because Taiwan had those issues with flooding. There are floods in Taiwan
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: that flooded a lot of warehouses. And suddenly every hard disks or solid state drives went I don't know three times four times the price. It's always some kind of crisis in the the in the computer sector, so it's never gonna and some people say to me, I'm not gonna buy a new computer right now because I don't know the RAM is too too pricey. And I say, Okay, before the RAM we have had GPU prices up. Before GPU prices we had SSD prices up. We always gonna have something and and notice that the prices never go down. After they they restore the the the issue that they had. Yeah it's never going down.
Amit Netanel: It doesn't feel it doesn't feel that way, yeah. it's not in
Rytis: For a long time,
Amit Netanel: the c
Rytis: you know, before the COVID, for a long time it was like always going down and increasing tech and yada yada yada. It it was quite well at least for me, it looked like a quite safe time. But I don't know, something happened.
Yuri Sokolov: Something happened and today's more difficult, yeah.
Amit Netanel: So what you're saying is that that I should buy that GeForce fifty ninety. That's what you're actually saying.
Yuri Sokolov: No, no. no no. I talk talk to me later. GeForce 5090 is not a graphics card that will get you somewhere with AI. It can probably play a great hero's tree with a great graphics. But but yeah, probably 16k
Amit Netanel: Yeah, yeah. Eight K Heroes free. That's all I ever wanted.
Rytis: Right.
Yuri Sokolov: if you want it. But yeah, I I think I think you need to look at other Graphics card and systems. Talk to me. six six thousand dollars and you're set with a good machine for AI, just six thousand dollars, right? Just for the price of 150 70. It's ten. I take four
Amit Netanel: Just six thousand dollars, you say. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm going to write you write you a check after the show.
Yuri Sokolov: for 40% my cut. Yeah, but let's let's get back to our business.
Amit Netanel: Just just assemble and deliver. That's all I want. Yeah, we digressed. We digressed a bit.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rytis: There are so many topics these days. I I fully get it. My my head is also all over the place.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, we have this as well. you've mentioned Plasticalyps game, right? that you've developed. I looked at it, it's still in early access. Was the game abandoned at some point? what happened to the game?
Rytis: Yeah, kind of. Like I always wanted to come back to it, but you know, f looking into the future and financially, it didn't make sense to go back to it. And we just approached new projects, new ventures, new games. So yeah, it's kind of a bandit. Maybe I'll come back to it with a team. someday but looking at this moment you know in industry probably not in like three years. you can fully finish the game, it just we wanted to have like more features. That's that's about it. It's a full
Yuri Sokolov: Got it.
Rytis: game but it's not like fully
Yuri Sokolov: You don't feel confident enough to say it's not an early access anymore. It's a full game. Got it.
Rytis: yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Yuri Sokolov: Got it. F I I I remember the days when when the name was beta, when you would
Rytis: yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: it's wasn't early access, it was beta, and you weren't supposed to have a beta access. You downloaded you pirated betas. but yeah, how how do you decide when to kill a game? This is an interesting thing.
Rytis: That's a hard one. That's a hard one which I think I struggled with it, you know. some games that we done some of the games probably shouldn't have seen the daylight, but we still did it anyway.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: And there are some games that we which we managed to kill in a good time. So I Think we should have killed more games before releasing something substantial. And it's advice probably for everyone.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: more on mobile side, but for these days also for PC. right now we are doing some prototyping on co-op games, and I'm trying to think a bit more out of the box. Like okay, we have this direction, but Let's try that approach or that approach and let's see how it looks better, feels better, or maybe even test it somewhere a little bit. So I I feel like these days more experimentation is needed if you want to stand out somehow and
Yuri Sokolov: So you basically want to jump on the on the Friendslob hype wagon.
Rytis: Yeah, but also
Amit Netanel: Ha ha ha.
Rytis: I can't jump on Friend Slob because we've been prototyping a bit longer than the Friend Slob games. I think it's been Maybe four or five months and some of the games you know it's done in a few months, like two free.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. But the the but the quality are quality ones are taking a bit t longer. But yeah, yeah.
Rytis: Yeah, I noticed like sometimes ten months, maybe?
Yuri Sokolov: Today I think today the the commercial success games, if you want to have a commercial success with a game, you either need to be super lean, I don't know, solo developer, living in a country with a l that doesn't require you to ha to earn a lot of money. I I don't know how to say it properly in English, but it because saying cheap country doesn't sound right. but Country that for example, if you're living somewhere in LA and you need ten grand a month
Rytis: Mouse.
Yuri Sokolov: to survive, versus living in Portugal where one or two thousand euros a month is more than enough to to live a happy life, I think I think it's you need to be lean, you need to live in one of those country countries and Or you have to do it fast.
Amit Netanel: that that that centerly lowers that that certainly lowers the risk, right? also you could get
Yuri Sokolov: Or you to n to be fast.
Amit Netanel: you can get funding somewhere, but yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Funding usually comes with strings attached. It's I think I think
Amit Netanel: Yeah. It's it's downside.
Yuri Sokolov: I think what Ritis company doing is is interesting. I I've met a couple of guys here that doing something similar similar where part of the time and part of the time they're working on games on on client games like outsourcing and Part of the time they're working on their own game. We have Cloverbyte Studio that does that. Cloverbyte studio, so basically when when they started working on on the Grime, the Grime game, it was their first attempt at indie. Before that, the Cloverbyte was working a lot of mobile games for clients, not not their own. They're developed things for clients, for other clients. and then they're decided this was the the ability to fund the indie game, which was financial success and huge success. Not a huge as huge as they wanted, but it was a big success for them, and they managed to create another game, Grind 2, and probably is another game on VR. So basically to expand a bit. yes, it's it can work. But they also worked with a publisher. They also worked with a publisher. publisher helped, but the financing was internal.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. But by the way, not it's not a new concept to divert like divide your attention between projects, like some of them are like in in house projects, some of them are outsourced. It used
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: to be much more common like twenty, thirty years ago. I can recommend
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: if anyone of you wants to to read a diary.
Yuri Sokolov: Don't say his name. Don't say his name. Schreier? No.
Amit Netanel: No, no, no, no, no, no. no. That's that's the the the the less standard recommendation from me. the diaries of the Jordan Mechner who created Prince of Persia. yeah, he released his diary from ba way back when he was developing that game at the end of the eighties. for Bruderbond, which was a company, well known company at least in my eyes. And the way he describes it is that he was like a sort of a freelance developer that got just the royalties for releasing the game. And Bruderbund as a company would develop some in-house stuff, some freelancer stuff, and some governmental or edutainment or
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: similar, like safer projects. so it's not new. It's has always been done. We're just like I think in in recent years we've been used to thinking about studios as either doing their own thing or as software like software houses, right? With a no name software company. And there's a lot of you know a range between these two. And
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: I think it it's
Rytis: But I noticed like these difficult times where competition increased in terms of like work for hire, and it is not easy to get something since like a lot of studios scales down or closes even down.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: So it's not that easy path for a future, even in like two thousand and four or five. four twenty-four or twenty-free after you know COVID, I noticed that I will not get soon, you know, contracts. So I started working with governmental projects like
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: educational, also projects like simulations, so that was going well s since I had some projects from the government and where they were well paid. But right now at the moment there is no government projects and there is no projects from industry, so it's like a dry desert. Feels like everyone is fighting for the scraps. So we are thinking what could be the next thing and what could help, you know, the industry, ourselves as well. a few things I tried I started this year with QA Which is more like a on on the side thing, but if you have like a good partnership with some publishers, we want something quality from one hand, not to hire like seven different companies from different
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: things, but like you have one company, if you can do this and that, like porting QA, and
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: if they satisfied with the results, we are happy as well, you know. And VR, so we started doing some QA plus influential marketing, and I started that because we released Book Smugglers this year on February. quite yeah, I I did a lot of marketing myself since we self-published, did a lot of research, what works, what doesn't work,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: had some help from other industry friends, and I noticed influencer marketing is still a thing which can be profitable for the right games. For us, it had some impact and still does, but since the game is quite niche The impact is not scalable as for the games, which is for mass audiences. So we worked with one company already, the bigger one with we were testing some prototype demo of also co-op horror game. So it's it's quite popular. game game genre at the moment and
Amit Netanel: Genre. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: yeah that was quite success. We managed even to get a lot of influential like videos outreach for free, even just you know sending them the copies, communicating with them. So that was
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: quite success. And it wasn't expensive and I thought like even when it came to Israel like you have a lot of talented indies which might need some marketing so why not you know for a small price help them a little bit you know pushing the influencers but
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: yeah I always would look at the game and most of the times I could say like right away if it's going for more popular audiences mass audiences it can have an impact and if it's going for more niche it's way lower chance. So yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah,
Amit Netanel: I actually wanted to
Yuri Sokolov: yeah.
Amit Netanel: to ask a qu s a question about that. I mean you you've mentioned book smugglers in you know in a sentence. But it's it's what I would qualify classify when talking with people as a passion project, right? Because it's about yeah, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, sure.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. But before that, I mean, sorry, I'd love before that, because probably our listeners never heard about book smugglers. So if you can give us I don't know, one minute pitch for your game. What is this game about?
Amit Netanel: He he's been marketing the game, so he could do it.
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: the game is about resistance. It's about what makes country a country, you know. when everything is banned, what the people can do to save the country, to save the language. So it's the i we were inspired with sprung word by inspired because like the war in Ukraine happened. And we wanted to tell different stories about different kind of resistance from history perspective. And our history, our culture have that kind of story. We wanted to tell that. It was as you said, it's a passion project. It was more for the culture, for people who are interested I expected a bit more people, but I kind of get when I read what's happening in an industry why it's not as much as I expected.
Amit Netanel: What do you mean as much as much as a success? Do you mean? Like sales,
Rytis: No, as much that we didn't expect, yeah, in sales like expected
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm. And
Yuri Sokolov: What what is what is success looks like for you for for a game like this?
Rytis: For a game like this, the success would be to break even, I think.
Yuri Sokolov: Break even. Yeah, i it would it would be great.
Rytis: Yeah, I didn't expect it bad.
Amit Netanel: To at least break even.
Rytis: I didn't expect it bad.
Yuri Sokolov: Passion Project, it's you know, it was a always a risk. You you're doing something that you're passionate about, and you're just hoping other people will see it the way you do. We will see it with your eyes and will love what you you what you did. It's always a risk. and you said yourself published, but I heard in I read, I think, or heard somewhere about no gravity games, the publisher no gravity games.
Rytis: Yeah, we had a contract. We had a contract, but we note well they are small publisher from Poland and we weren't happy with their work and it was mutual decision to, you know, part ways. So we decided to go f for ourselves and I noticed that they wouldn't and probably a lot of other publishers of that scale wouldn't do as much as we did because we approached also a lot of media, a lot of influencers, like I'm talking about mass email campaign of more than ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand of influencers.
Amit Netanel: Well,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: that's a lot.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. That's the it's the main
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: That's quite a lot.
Yuri Sokolov: driver today for indie games to get recognition is the social media. It's either influencers play your game on streams or you manage to get a really cool gameplay video on shorts, reels, and people get hooked up and then yeah, yeah, it's it's really out there in social media. It's interesting like this because mobile market, you need to pay a lot of money to acquire users. So you pay, I don't know, two bucks, three bucks for a user, depending on your niche. yeah, yeah. And and
Amit Netanel: Depends on the genre. It could be more. Let me tell you that.
Yuri Sokolov: you I I'm not familiar with recent prices and I know they're they're up. So you pay, let's say a dollar for for the example. You pay a dollar for a For a user, and you hope that this user brings you more than a dollar back as an LTV value, lifetime value. And in in indie gaming, in PC gaming, mobile gaming, when we're not talking about AAA, where where the marketing is also is a huge budget, most of the budget people sometimes don't realize it, but when you hear that this game, GTA had a budget of more than a billion. It's not most of those money weren't given to artists or programmers or game designers. I I would I would love to think that 20% went there. Like probably most of the budget went to marketing. But when you're talking about indie games, the best marketing is the free marketing. It's like you need to contact, you need to do a lot of footwork to get there. But it's not like you can well you can run Reddit Reddit ads, it's working for indie teams right now, but it it might also not work. And this is the only place you can like spend money in hopes of actually getting getting potential players. Other than that, the marketing is free, but you need to work hard for it. And this this is the interesting direction.
Rytis: You know, even influencer marketing can be good for mobile games. It's w one of niche marketing w which they don't approach that much and I talked with some of studios in Israel as well, mobile studios about that, that they could approach it and you know, try it or you know, hire somebody who has like a big list of contacts on on on that field.
Yuri Sokolov: Actually, they do that. I worked in a couple of companies that that done it. I worked, for example, I worked for a company called Just Play. it's non-existent
Rytis: Okay.
Yuri Sokolov: right now. They were developing, we were developing at the time, it was Fortnite Lite. Let's call it like
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: this. So basically, it's a dumped-down version of Fortnite where each match would take you roughly around a minute or two. and
Amit Netanel: The the the
Yuri Sokolov: The c
Amit Netanel: the main selling point in my opinion was that it was running in browser, right?
Yuri Sokolov: Not only that, not only that, the the main selling point that the of the company, what company did is there were a lot of kids wanting to play Fortnite during breaks at school. And the time it takes you to load up a game to to load the lobby
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: and then to start a game and the the the break would end. And in our game it was like You just enter, play 1v1. It's it's not battle royale full scale. You play one one player against one player or two versus two, and a match ends in one or two minutes. So in one break between lessons, you could play three, four, five matches. That was and and you would see graphs of players, you would see that during during school hours the the amount
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: of players is would be huge and those the same players that coming home they would drop the game and go play fortnite or or whatever so yeah we did great great things there but one of the things we had our influencer on on a payroll so basically one of the influencers For this specific audience that would play our games, would pay him, he would play the games. And there were other companies I worked at that usually pay influencers to to play it. It's I don't know.
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: You probably heard of this little small game called Raid Shadow Legends.
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: It's it was everywhere. They paid basically,
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: I don't think there is an influencer out there with more with more than hundredk subscribers that they haven't paid him to advertise or haven't
Rytis: Or contact it.
Yuri Sokolov: reached out to advertise their game. So
Amit Netanel: Yeah. No, it's it's a meme for a reason, right? to promote Raid Shadow Legends.
Yuri Sokolov: Yes, they they actually so mobile companies are using influencer market, but usually it's a paid paid promotions. It's
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: not like sometimes, sometimes there are, believe it or not, there are players that are super passionate about social casinos. There are players that s love to press this red button and see reels spin. And coins fly, and they host social casino companies often employ, and I put quotations here, employ people to manage their communities. And why why I'm putting quotations on employee? Because they're paying them with in-game currency. Like the people are super passionate about the games.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, it's like the like the script shop in in mining colonies, right? you get paid with the the product itself.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's working.
Amit Netanel: I I can say I can redeem the the genre in which I'm working, that there are like legit content creators in the gacha space because they love the game and because people like like to talk about
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: the games and strategize
Yuri Sokolov: And people like to see other people more successful with pulling rare stuff and then saying it's influencer luck or whatever.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, yeah, rage rage baiting is totally in the industry, right? I can I can go on all day. I can you you spoke earlier about adoption of games in the Chinese market. Like all the gacha developers want to reach like Mihoyo
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: levels of success.
Rytis: it's a holy grail for them.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. So they actually cater the content towards Chinese players, and that includes covering up the girls because you can't market games with jigophysics over there properly like you like you can
Rytis: Mm, it's not Japan.
Amit Netanel: in the in the west. Yeah it's not Japan. We're not in Japan anymore. I wanted to ask something else regarding the marketing of and maybe it w maybe it will segue into the into other like topics we wanted to ask you. so Book Smugglers, which I read about and I plan to play because I I mean I went into the rabbit hole of reading about the whole like time period it revolves around. so it's it's deep it's deep in Lithuanian like lore and culture. So I would I would try and imagine like maybe maybe the Lithuanian government could, you know, thro i can you approach I mean Lithuania is I read it's a small country, at least like Israel, right? and I w I I think I have maybe five lips from me to someone in the government that can handle like budgets, move budgets around.
Yuri Sokolov: So your your bacon number is five, yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, my big my my ministry of of economy number is I think maybe five. Maybe five.
Yuri Sokolov: Everybody familiar with the term of bacon number, right? Okay.
Amit Netanel: I I'm at least, but maybe you could elaborate.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, so i if if one of the listeners are not familiar with the term bacon numbers, it's regarding the the actor Kevin Bacon. So you can pull up you can pull up Google and write in the search bar, give me give me any what it is, give me any celebrity. Give me a name of it.
Rytis: And
Amit Netanel: Any celebrity.
Rytis: Okay, let let's try something
Yuri Sokolov: Even Lithuanian celebrity.
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm now curious.
Yuri Sokolov: While you're thinking, I'll explain. So the Bacon number says every celebrity is connected to Kevin Bacon in maximum seven handshakes, meaning seven people. This person you you chose, shook a hand with someone that shook a hand with someone and maximum seven iterations, it will come to Kevin Bacon.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: Okay,
Amit Netanel: And
Rytis: let's go with president of Lithuania. it's Gitan
Yuri Sokolov: What's his name?
Rytis: Gitanas Noseda. I'll write in the chat.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: It's gonna be easy, but yeah. I I
Yuri Sokolov: No, I
Rytis: know that term, I I know the different term, but I forgot the name. I know that with social media we are connected to with
Yuri Sokolov: Okay, he does not Google Google stops doing it probably. Google had Google had this thing that you're it's it's an Easter egg. Would you enter some some celebrity name and bake and add bacon number, it would give you a number. So let's I probably they're stop doing it. Sometimes they're kill their Easter eggs.
Amit Netanel: Maybe it's more more relegated towards actors. Like he he has a credit with someone
Rytis: Okay.
Amit Netanel: on IMDB and that's the way it's connected.
Yuri Sokolov: No, listen, I I I tried it with politicians as well, when it worked a couple of years ago. So no, but yeah, yeah, but you can find
Amit Netanel: Really. No. No, Kevin Bacon is a popular guy, but
Rytis: that's it.
Yuri Sokolov: b you probably can find it other in other places because not Google invented it. There's there were a couple of guys that just started joking around about it. So, okay, Amit, I interrupted you.
Amit Netanel: So so what I'm saying is that small country means you have access, more access towards you know, people in general. did you try to like go through like like to play on the patriotic emotions or cultural emotions and try to promote the game that way? Because I think I think every time I I know every time someone makes even a game jam game. About Israel. Like Facebook blows up, it's being shared. I get it. Lots of shares about it. And it drives like traffic to the to the person that made the game. for example, we had a game released here 25 years ago, called the Piposh. Never mind, it's about nonsense, basically. Okay, it's a funny
Rytis: Okay.
Amit Netanel: game, funny adventure game, and 20 years later. the like the original team said, maybe someone remembers that game, maybe someone has nostalgic feelings about it. And they opened the Kickstarter and they funded the the development of the game in like a day. Okay, because people
Rytis: wow.
Amit Netanel: had strong feelings towards it. It's deeply ingrained in Israeli culture,
Rytis: Nostalgic.
Amit Netanel: only Israeli references. And I I think like it i you can play to your advantage. Like if that's A game deeply rooted in Lithuanian lore and feels. you should. You should use it.
Rytis: I I think it will would be easier with Great Duchy of Lithuania. That's the other historic part,
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: which everyone is more proud of. this one is interesting one and it could get some success, but I'm not sure if would that would get enough success for get the game funding funded in one day or even in 30 days. With government I'm like directly connected with Kevin Bacon because you
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: know I'm part of association of Lithuanian game developers and also with creative industries I'm a part of the board. So yeah, I I talk with them not like all the time but quite quite often. So yeah, they They still need to learn. It's changing little by little, but it's you know, the bureaucrats it's take a lo takes a lot of time.
Amit Netanel: Would you say would
Yuri Sokolov: Does you do you
Amit Netanel: you say the the gaming industry in Lithuania is recognized that's something that's like financially they should get on it, or people like still say look at you weirdly when you say you make games, you know, for a living?
Rytis: Well people are more curious about it, you know. Or just neutral, you know. Depend depends on people if they play the games or not. Like if you try pick a girl in a bar, probably that wouldn't work.
Amit Netanel: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: You need to go to to the
Rytis: But if you
Yuri Sokolov: the the good bars. There are I I believe I strongly believe that Lithuania as well has gaming bars, right? It it it must have.
Rytis: We used to have a gaming bar, we don't have it anymore. We used to have you know a couple of places, yeah. But you know. COVID
Yuri Sokolov: Well.
Rytis: and even before COVID not all the places profitable and bars and restaurants
Yuri Sokolov: Got it. Yeah, it killed a lot of businesses.
Rytis: have their own life's lifetime. And
Amit Netanel: Life cycle.
Rytis: yeah, but if you tell the guy who plays the game that you're creating games you can t find some friends.
Amit Netanel: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, you know it's it's how how bodybuilders say people that go to the gym and build a strong muscle body, it's not it's not to attract girls. They do it for to attract girls, but actually attract other men that could come and say,
Amit Netanel: Right.
Yuri Sokolov: how how can you how did you do that? yeah,
Amit Netanel: Major, so buff. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah. So yeah, actually
Rytis: Yeah. Hey, can you squat me? Now you have a new friend.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. By the way, if I'm not mistaken, you worked on this game for three years, right?
Rytis: Yeah, I think it's a bit more, but we had some pauses, you know, because we had some governmental projects. So yeah,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: all in all, probably three years, but it also varies with how many people worked. Sometimes it's like one person, sometimes it's
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: more for a few months, and but you know, most most of the time what it took probably is programming, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: Programming and free the art and I think Yeah, there were like a lot of mistakes done on the production line as well, and probably most of the studios would have killed the game three times. But with the final project I'm quite happy. It was good learning experience, you know, and in the future I'm thinking about the games who which are more marketable, which are more profitable and Maybe less so serious and more just about fun.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. I i it's definitely shows that was passion project as Amit pointed earlier. Was it a passion project for the whole studio? because I don't know, to work even on and off three years and sometimes this person works on it, sometimes the other, was it a shared passion?
Rytis: At the beginning, yeah. later on, you know, some people change, the the emotions change as well. Sometimes even me myself, you know, get sick of you know doing the same QA for your game or trying to balance some things
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: or whatever. sometimes you need a break from your game as well because it's it gets repetitive. It's not like playing
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: the game, you know, creating the game is different experience. And it's also different than writing the game. Like writing could be more creative and more fun, but if you are like trying to match the mechanics and something doesn't work, needs some Experimentation it it can be a bit frustrating.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, the last twenty percent of the development takes eighty percent of time.
Rytis: Yeah, because we noticed the game was too short and we also extended it, so yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: have you released it on Switch?
Rytis: Not yet.
Yuri Sokolov: I I saw that you had plans on releasing it on Switch and are you planning to do it alone or are you planning to employ some publisher because it's really hard to publish? You're porting yourself.
Rytis: No, we do reporting how itself. Yeah, I know about switch marketing, the publishers probably besides the porting or if they are like big publisher and have some big portfolio, they don't do much on the marketing part. There isn't.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, usually the issue with Steam with switch publishing is the the development kit to to get licensed by is by Nintendo and it this is the nightmare today. You have
Rytis: Yeah. So we have a license for
Yuri Sokolov: a license and you have a d development
Amit Netanel: you have it already?
Yuri Sokolov: kit. So this is
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a first one. Not the second, the first one.
Yuri Sokolov: For the first for the swi first switch.
Rytis: Yeah, which still have, I think, kind of the same audience as the second, or maybe even a big bit more.
Amit Netanel: You know, if it works if it works on Switch,
Yuri Sokolov: this this might be your answer.
Amit Netanel: it probably works on Switch too, right?
Yuri Sokolov: This is probably
Rytis: Yeah yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: may can be your answer to you know, earning money without government programs, because if you have you have one kit, you can probably get the second. And a lot, a lot, a lot of developers looking for people to port their game to switch because they can't get their their hands on the development kit. And this is huge, by the way. We have an Israel.
Rytis: Even if you don't know the first development kit, you can't get it anymore.
Yuri Sokolov: The second as well.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: Second is like limited to some companies, but yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yes.
Rytis: So yeah. If you wanna do the sport to s first switch, you can contact me. A bit self
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: promo.
Yuri Sokolov: By the way, how does Lithuanian government treat game development industry? Do they support in any way game developers?
Rytis: Yes, I know. We used to have like a small program before, but right now we don't have anything consistent. It's more on the project basis. Like we had last year first accelerator with three batches,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: which was great, but still you know, government man managed to stick some random companies which we were raising the eyebrows like what a fuck like cooking app is doing on game dev you know field. So yeah, there were some weird things but all in all it's shifting in the right direction.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. Got it.
Amit Netanel: We we the the guys here in Israel trying for years to find the right avenue to raise games to the level of support that for example cinema gets here. Because
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: it's very similar and it's just as you said, some projects get backed up by government basically government money. it's municipal and like from the the state, you know, it's different funds. But usually when you go to see an Israeli movie, there are like twenty slides at the beginning of the different people that gave money to make the movie happen. And I hope that we'll reach that day in games as well. Like I want to see
Yuri Sokolov: I think
Amit Netanel: our logo there.
Yuri Sokolov: I think
Rytis: No, we're loving.
Yuri Sokolov: most of most of countries have support for cinema, like government support for cinema. There in in a lot of countries I've seen movies that produced in the on the government money, but not a lot of companies invest into gaming industry. Poland does amazing work there. really amazing work.
Rytis: It's one of the biggest industries and they have quite good history because before like Witcher One even we didn't had much.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, po in Poland, but the Polish guys the produced couple of big things at the right moment. For example, not only CD Project Red, even we
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: can talk about smaller companies like Super Hot. they've they've created they created a game that a lot of people both vr headset to play this game.
Rytis: It's a great game.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah, it's it's an amazing game. Then There is there is the 11-bit studios that developing
Rytis: yes.
Yuri Sokolov: awesome games. Like like this war of mine is one of my top games ever. I I really love this game and I can't play it anymore.
Rytis: Have you played Frostpunk?
Yuri Sokolov: Frostpunk One, yes, amazing game. Frostpunk two, I
Amit Netanel: Amazing game.
Yuri Sokolov: haven't played yet. I didn't have the time to to get to it.
Rytis: Well it's different kind of game. For me,
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: the first one maybe was more more my type because the second is four K like strategy, grand strategy.
Amit Netanel: Mm. Like forex, yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: What I heard about the game, and I don't know how how accurate it is, I'll still give this game a try because I so love so much love the other games this company produced, the studio produced. What I heard about the for Frost Bank too, that in the first one, you would okay, you're managing a city and you're managing a lot of people, but somehow you're still each life matter. So when when you need to decide on somebody is going to die, it's it's you feel the consequences. And then
Rytis: Uh-huh.
Yuri Sokolov: I heard that in the frostpunk too, it you're managing too many people, and sometimes people die in a bunch and you just don't care. You just city management game and not not experience driven game. This is what I heard about this game, but once again, I haven't played.
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, that's quite true. I felt the same. I tried it, I haven't finished it, but it also gave me a bit you know, time to think, you know, like when you care about each individual and when you stop caring about like thousands and thousands of people. It's like a bit similar to the war
Amit Netanel: Mm. It's larger in scale though.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: itself. Or how some governments are run, you know, in the world. So yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: they they actually released another game that I haven't played with the clones. How the game Outers,
Rytis: yeah, I loved altars. Yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Alter it.
Yuri Sokolov: right. I haven't played this game yet as well.
Rytis: Great game, actually. completely different from what we
Amit Netanel: Me neither. Yeah.
Rytis: do. It's more like sci fi fantasy, which I I liked, yeah. I I enjoyed it.
Yuri Sokolov: I need to get to this as well because I heard a lot of good things about it, and once again I love 11 bits, they're great. so yeah, there there are countries like Poland that invest. I I heard Brazil is investing in game developers as well. in Dubai, you get grants for game development. so there there are countries, but still there are a lot of countries that that fund cinema but not games. And that's too bad. And I ask you because you were the chairman for a National Game Dev Association, right?
Rytis: Yeah. But
Yuri Sokolov: What what does it mean? What what did you do as a chairman?
Rytis: I was leading like the strategy of what we should do, you know, talk with other board members and what we should do like this year because our like duration of of each board member is only one year, which is a bit stupid because it should be at least two years, but whatever. So what we try to do most of the time the main topics would be, you know Talking with the government about different things, talking about some events, talking about the things what matter the most for the industry itself in Lithuania. So we managed to do some of things like to get like st special statistics code in Lithuania for game development itself, because we used to be in the programming branch. So
Amit Netanel: Mm.
Rytis: that helps with differentiating for future projects if you wanna target like game development or creative industries and you don't want to have like a huge part of the programming industry which could come and take money so that helped a lot we managed to push push a few other agendas like the accelerator itself, the companies who delivered it was also invited by us because there was a competition between two two accelerators and GameBCN one from Barcelona. Like we were happy that we did it. Would we hire them in the future? Probably not because it felt like they were counting every penny How much we can earn, so yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Got it. So I I'll ask another question that I probably know the answer to, but I still want to ask it maybe maybe the listeners don't know. Lithuania is a small country, right? what's what's the population size there?
Rytis: It's up f up to three million.
Yuri Sokolov: Three million people. So it's a small country, yet. And yet, you had your own game awards there and right. So I know the answer to this question, for me at least, but why does a s a tiny industry like this need its own events?
Rytis: it's more for the industry itself. It's more for giving a bit more time for each in game developer who worked in this industry a bit more time to celebrate, to relax, to talk with friends, to have something. to share and be proud of and you know it's I don't know it just gives hope for people, you know, for somebody who creates and can be on that short list, you know, for like
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: top four games, you know, and one of them is gonna be a winner. And yeah, that's the game awards itself wasn't my idea, but it was my idea in twenty twenty three. to elevate to next level because I love the LA Game Awards with Jeff Keely, you know. There are a lot of memes with him. Yeah, V game awards.
Amit Netanel: Mm. Mm, yeah. the game awards, yeah. They call it the game awards.
Rytis: So yeah, it's not as huge, you know, as as that one, but we still We'll see, maybe.
Amit Netanel: One day it will be. One one can hope.
Rytis: But we managed to do like quite an event for a small country like with all the gala and hostess and also having partnership with national television so yeah it
Yuri Sokolov: It was streamed on national television.
Amit Netanel: Amazing.
Rytis: at first first year when i started was only online and then it was online and national television not the main of their channel
Yuri Sokolov: Channel.
Rytis: but also one of the channels so I think it was quite quite an achievement and people were happy but about it. Last year was the first time that I didn't organize it. Because I
Yuri Sokolov: Mm.
Rytis: was doing that for three years in the association and I loved it. Yeah,
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: it's it's it's a good feeling.
Yuri Sokolov: The community work is awesome. By the way, if you're having why is why I said that I know the answer for it's basically we we're also a small country that have some
Rytis: Ten million?
Yuri Sokolov: some measure yeah, nine I think, nine nine nine million. Yeah, some somewhere.
Amit Netanel: Not not quite, but yeah. Give it a year or two,
Rytis: No.
Amit Netanel: birth rates here are way higher than they should be.
Yuri Sokolov: Threw that up. Yeah, yeah. I I agree on the second part. So yeah, it's it's the recognition, the small recognition for a small community. Like 10 million is a whole country, right? It's for you, it's three million as a whole country. The part of people that that are interesting in games is smaller, significant smaller. And the part of people that are actually developing games, it's even
Amit Netanel: Even smaller.
Yuri Sokolov: smaller.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: It's it's a a tiny, tiny percentage. And yet we all have our heroes to celebrate, local heroes that do actually valuable stuff that that pave the road to other people. And those those are people in small communities, those people are paved the road and make give give the ability to make meaningful contributions to other people. That's why I think we need events like this. And the only question left for me here is if you're doing it annually, how many games Lithuania produces a year?
Rytis: Around forty.
Yuri Sokolov: Around forty games a
Amit Netanel: Forty.
Yuri Sokolov: year. like I I mean not mobile game, right? you're talking mobile included, around forty a year.
Rytis: Mobile included. Yeah, yeah. Because we have mobile and we well yeah, maybe board games are not included, but we have one of a nomination for best board game as well.
Amit Netanel: That's cool. That's cool to see that like the the merging of the industries. it's really
Rytis: Yeah, well
Amit Netanel: important.
Rytis: Actually, yeah, the COVID was quite renaissance for board games Lithuania.
Yuri Sokolov: I think in the whole whole world, suddenly
Rytis: Problem.
Yuri Sokolov: when after
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: COVID, I returned to office and suddenly people started to talk about board games once again. Like before t
Rytis: Too cool.
Yuri Sokolov: before twenty one, I didn't hear people talking about this. Probably there were gigs like a mid here that were playing board games. but yeah, yeah. It was yeah, before it was cool, it's it's the actual definition.
Amit Netanel: Before it was cool. Actually, actually, I have a theory. It it's really, really, really, really related to the weather. Because when I visited Amsterdam, there was a board game or trading card game shop like every other street. Because like sixty to seventy percent of the year it's it rains. Okay, you can't go outside. And I hear that in Norway and Sweden and places that it snows like fifty percent of the time, you have even more because people are stuck at home and they need something to do. And they develop the the community around that.
Yuri Sokolov: I think I think it's fifty percent of people stuck at home. The other fifty percent is stuck not stuck, they're out in the woods playing black metal. That's
Amit Netanel: Sure. I it's it's probably related as well. I can cook up a theory about that if you want, but
Yuri Sokolov: No, no, no. There there's actually a a great movie. It's called Headbanger's Journey. It's one guy that
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: did a decom documentary on metal music and he traveled around the world and took interviews from many metal bands. And so one of the consensus regarding why in you know in northern countries like Finland and there is so much dark black music. Like this, it's it's because they said I I don't remember who said it on the interview. did you see our weather? It's so depressing. You look,
Amit Netanel: Ha ha ha.
Yuri Sokolov: every way is gr every everywhere is gray. So that's how our music sounds. It our music sounds the way we see the world here. yeah. So we usually wrap up okay, from recently, usually, we wrap up the the conversations with two questions. The first one, you have the stage now to give any advice or message to to the remaining listeners. What would it be?
Amit Netanel: The hardcore audience, like the people that deserve something.
Rytis: There are so many so many advices, but If you wanna start game dev, think about it twice these days.
Yuri Sokolov: I think it's related to everything.
Rytis: But if you're already hooked up on it, you know, you you're in, you know, like in Mafia, you're in. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: Start thinking outside of the box, you know. It's very not something new that I said, but the thing is like industry is changing and changing really fast and you need to find stable ground again because the platonic plates are already shifted and
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: you can stand and go down with the whole ground or find a new ground where you will be stable, strong and maybe even stronger than you were before. That's why what I think about mm small indie studios or my own even studio situation right now.
Yuri Sokolov: Great, great advice. And the last question for today is it's not really a question. recommend us one book, one game and one movie.
Rytis: All right. Mm one book I would go with trilogy
Amit Netanel: huh.
Yuri Sokolov: That's okay.
Rytis: First King trilogy by Joe Abercombi.
Yuri Sokolov: the First Law. The First Law by Joe Abacrombie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's awesome. I just finished the
Amit Netanel: I d I didn't get to that one yet.
Yuri Sokolov: ninth book, the last book in the series. I just finished them. There are nine books.
Rytis: I'm behind. I'm in red country right now.
Amit Netanel: Really.
Yuri Sokolov: I just finished all of them. It's it's a bit on the slow side. It's the books are kind of slow-paced, right? a lot of dirt. What I loved about those books is The same thing I love about Sapkovsky's books, the The Witcher, it's
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: it's it's accurate. It's like if there's a dirt, he will say there's a dirt. If if a person needs to curse, he will curse it. It's not like exaggerated fantasy when everything is sunshine and rainbows. It it's it's a dirty world world with politics and a lot of stuff. Everything you could imagine would go badly will go badly in this book. So I I can recommend.
Rytis: Yeah, but some funny, you know, accidents happened and I don't know, like
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rytis: they are so different. Like I love Sapkovsky books. I read well old ones, I h have the new ones but did just didn't have the time. the thing is I still would probably classify Sapkovsky more on grey fantasy and be more on the darker tones.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. totally, totally. Because yeah, Abcrobin is darker. I I really liked him as a person as well. I looked I watched a couple of his interviews. He's he's really cool guy. so yeah, I I can get behind your recommendation. Great book. It's great series of books.
Rytis: Yeah, it is just yeah, something to try. I don't know. For games. let's go with classics. Warcraft free but custom maps, you know, because we are like if you need to pick only one game, what game would you pick? Warcraft free with inf infinite
Yuri Sokolov: Heroes three.
Rytis: infinite heroes free. Yeah, it's a good one as well. But yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, I'm sure many game developers that listen to this type of podcast have begun their career by just saying, okay, I'll put one hundred Death Knights here and one hundred orcs here. Who will win? Play
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: and and do these kind of maps. I I did it in StarCraft with every unit combination, I think. I was really
Rytis: sorry.
Amit Netanel: bored. But yeah, it's it raises memories
Rytis: And
Amit Netanel: to think about.
Yuri Sokolov: I actually I actually Warcra Warcraft III I played all of them but all of the expansions I mean but I I'm more of a Warcraft II guy. So I loved when it was you know the fantasy StarCraft and not not with with a hero that you can you know hero alone can defeat a whole army.
Rytis: I I need to try it, yeah. I I read about the lore, you know, watched some YouTube videos, but yeah, wanted to try it. But yeah, with the Heroes Free not very popular opinion, but I quite enjoy the two one as well because it was probably
Yuri Sokolov: Heroes 2 was great. I started with Heroes 2. I never played Heroes 1 actually. I just saw it. I started with Heroes 2 some sometimes in 97, I think. In 1997, I played Heroes 2 in in
Rytis: I think ninety six for me.
Yuri Sokolov: I played it in there were those intranet cafes.
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: so I would skip school take my lunch money to to go to internet cafe and play heroes 2 and karmaged on
Rytis: yeah, I remember that one.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah and then then i move to heroes 3 and it's obviously for me it's it's the best one in the series but but the guys at unfrozen are doing amazing work with the new heroes the olden era
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: so i i i can recommend them as well but Let's wait till the early access ends. okay, so we have a book and a game. What what about a movie?
Rytis: It's a bit harder because I'm more in a serious guy serious, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, l let's let's do series.
Amit Netanel: You can go with a series, that's okay.
Rytis: Mm. I'll be a little bit cheeky and I'll go with edge runners.
Yuri Sokolov: With what?
Amit Netanel: season two is coming up. Season two is coming up
Rytis: Edge runners. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Edge Runners.
Amit Netanel: s real soon.
Yuri Sokolov: I haven't seen that one.
Rytis: You should if you played the cyberpunk you should. If you're not go play cyberpunk as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's real good.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, it's a cyberpunk anime.
Yuri Sokolov: it's it's the animated series, right? I I love animated series. some of the animated I really like I liked anime a lot back in the day. So
Rytis: Same here, guilty as charged.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah, yeah, yeah. okay. Awesome. Great recommendations. some of them I already experienced, some not. I I saw a meet when you when you s started talking about Joab Crombie, I meet starting writing notes to him. I'll tell you all
Amit Netanel: Yeah, sure, sure.
Yuri Sokolov: about it later on when you finish all of the book all of the Sanderson books.
Amit Netanel: I I need to man, I'm I'm in the I'm right in the middle of I finished the first trilogy of
Yuri Sokolov: Miss Bourne.
Amit Netanel: no, I I finished okay. I finished the first trilogy of Mistborn and three books of Stormlight. I did I did
Yuri Sokolov: Okay.
Amit Netanel: a break and listened to the first trilogy of Red Rising. I did a break there and started Dungeon Crawler Carl after our interview last week with the guy from Unity. So
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: for my gauge and I'm finished the first book already. That's like my fastest listen ever. Okay. I it's
Rytis: wow.
Amit Netanel: it's a super page turner, it's an easy listen. So I'm actually quite near the end of the second one. I had lots of drives the the last few weeks, so audiobooks are essential for keeping my sanity. So
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: yeah, but I I'll get to Ambercrombie someday. Someday.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, it's good to have you know have books waiting for you. It's it's awesome. You don't have
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: when you don't have to look look far when you say, okay, I have a reading list. So it was awesome having you here. really interesting conversation. I had fun. Thanks again for coming,
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: and maybe we'll meet again.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Hope
Rytis: Yeah,
Amit Netanel: so.
Rytis: yeah. Yuri when I'll read all the books, write me on WhatsApp or whatever. We'll talk. I don't have
Yuri Sokolov: Sure.
Rytis: many, many people who did that, so yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Great.
Rytis: Thank you, thank you very for having me. Thank you, Israel. Thank you, everyone.
Yuri Sokolov: Thanks. Bye.
Amit Netanel: Thank you too. Bye, man.
Rytis: Bye.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, he he has his hands in many plates in the Lithuanian game developer community. And we actually talked about quite a lot about things we find similar in our own like communities and about we found ourselves talking about books, about marketing, lots of different things. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, indie games marketing. We talked about government support for games. We talked about a lot of interesting stuff surrounding the life of an indie studio and the life of any game developer out there. So I think you'll have fun listening to this episode. I know we did. So
Amit Netanel: Yeah, we we had fun producing it, so I hope it works for you too.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. So take a listen. And today we're here with Retis Yatzevichus from Lithuania, founder of Flaxa Games, chairman at Lithuanian Game Developers Association, right? Business develop not anymore.
Rytis: not anymore. Sorry, not anymore.
Amit Netanel: Any more.
Yuri Sokolov: so we'll discover everything about it, but before we start, we usually start our podcasts with with the most interesting question in my mind. what are you playing these days?
Rytis: that's a good question. I sometimes I hook up with strategy games and I can can let them go, you know. It hits me more than probably people hits with gacha games or casinos. Like if I go for half an hour and I could spend like four hours easily. So right now it's Mountain Blade 2.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: Very cool.
Rytis: so yeah, my fiancee said if you play it more I will delete that game because I was playing a wit a bit way too much. So I pivoted it yesterday to space marine Warhammer forty K Mastercraft version.
Yuri Sokolov: Sa and she approves this game a lot more than the Mountain Blade.
Rytis: She liked that I switched, you know, and I'm I'm more more here than in in the game.
Amit Netanel: Maybe she's in favor of the emperor. Like she's yeah.
Rytis: Maybe. Mm well, she do still don't know, but yeah. She she
Amit Netanel: Soon.
Rytis: will, because I'm getting hooked on Warhammer.
Yuri Sokolov: No, I wasn't able to to get into this franchise. I know there's a lot of fans out there. I wasn't able to to get into it. I I don't know, something something about hundreds of books scares me off usually. Not because I'm afraid to read all of those b books, but and and I probably will anger right now a lot of people, but I remember my my young days when I was introduced to Conan the Barbarian and then I
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: noticed that there are like 30 or 40 books and all of them, pardon my French, horrible. They're just cheap literature. And since then I kind of well every time I see that some some franchise has this huge amount of books in its lore, it's something in my head says, no, it's not gonna be good. It's not gonna be good.
Amit Netanel: You need you need to rethink it. It's the the lore is there to sell you more figures. Right?
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: Every figure needs a l backstory and an enemy to fight and more vehicles and spaceships and whatever. So yeah.
Rytis: Yeah, it's also the universe which inspired a lot of popular games like have you heard of StarCraft? I'm joking, yeah. But yeah, yeah. Really?
Yuri Sokolov: Course, of course. by the way I didn't know that. Didn't know that the inspiration to StarCraft came from Warhammer.
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The even the races have some similarities like while I'm still quite new.
Amit Netanel: But the the Marines desi the Marines armor designs are very Warhammer. Very. Just without the skulls, because they're not the baddies.
Rytis: Yeah. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Hmm. That that I remember, yes, that I remember that it's similar. But once again, I'm not that versed into Warhammer at all. I just saw the pictures. what I do think is kind of great about this franchise, I see I never play them, so I don't know the quality behind them, but I see at least once a year there's a Warhammer game released. It's tack a tactics game, a sports game, whatever. Something related to Warhammer is released constantly. So I kind of think if I was a fan, it it would probably would be great for me to to get f content from my favorite franchise so often.
Rytis: Yeah, it's one of a steam tags. I did some analysis I think this year. one of that Steam Tag with Warhammer forty K is safe one. I would say it's more profitable compared to the other ones.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. Yeah. Amit anything new you played recently?
Amit Netanel: Yeah, so we recorded just last week and you heard about my losing streak in all the trading card games. Okay, I'm a losing streak in Marvel Snap and I lost in pre-release for Magic the Gathering. So I decided to to take a break and actually the game designer in my studio just went up to me and said, Man, I have I have the game for you. Okay, you you have you written all over it. It's called Sir, we have an orc problem.
Rytis: my.
Amit Netanel: It looks good. It just released like I think two a month ago, something like that, earlier this month. It already sold two hundred K copies. It's it's amazing because it's the simplest tower defense game. Okay, you you're
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: you just place turrets and flamethrowers and stuff, and there are orcs coming your way. just regular fantasy orcs, you can buy the supporter pack and make them space orcs. If we're talking about Warhammer, it's a clear inspiration. And and the way it's it's hundreds of thousands of orcs on each level. So my shocking realization was after I beat the game one hundred percent, I actually watched the trailer because I immediately installed it and finished it in like two days. And it's a short game. And I saw the Godot logo. At the start, I was sure I was one hundred percent convinced it's Unity dots under the hood. And now since it's Godot, I want to reverse engineer it and see what they did there because it runs smooth. Okay, you have hundreds
Yuri Sokolov: Interesting.
Amit Netanel: of thousands of orcs on the screen and it runs sixty frames per second, no problem. So
Yuri Sokolov: But you know, Unity did not invent U E C S, so
Amit Netanel: No. No, no. But someone did their research. Like it's very, very well implemented.
Yuri Sokolov: Awesome. I I love well-engineered games. I actually didn't have didn't play anything new this week. I didn't have a lot of time but I needed to relax somehow. So I've dived into one of the probably stupidest series I watched in the in the past couple of years, I think. So it's it's Pure masculinity stuff. It's Richard. Somebody watched Richer. it's one huge muscular guy who goes and he's super smart and in and he's muscle in his way through army, through bandits, through mafias, and he kicks everyone's asses. So basically, straight from the 80s or 90s, but but recent years it's on Amazon. well.
Rytis: It sounds like MacGyver, you know?
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, it it sounds like any nineties action movie. Like it's it's more like it's more like how how was this series called with Chuck Norris the Ranger? Texas Ranger.
Rytis: yeah, Texas Ranger.
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm. Takes a stranger.
Yuri Sokolov: So it's it's more like this. So this cop super intelligent and super strong and It's it's really stupid, but I kind of like it. I remember in myself as a kid. so Ritis. Flaxo game. What is it? What what is Flaxo game? How did the studio start? What did you do before? The mic is yours.
Rytis: well in my I don't know. Yesterday I became thirty-five. That's why I have, you know, this one.
Amit Netanel: Happy birthday. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Congrats.
Rytis: Thank you. I I done a lot of stuff in in my days, you know, working in government, doing some I know it's it's alright.
Yuri Sokolov: Don't arrest me.
Rytis: It's good connections. yeah working with commercials In digital marketing, with YouTube, like different different kind of stuff. And in 2019 I decided to try go into a gaming field because I always had the special place in my heart for games. You
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: know, they they helped during hard times in life and also have good memories with some of the games, so yeah, I ventured into this black hole. I first first impression was really good because the community was super friendly here in Lithuania. Also when I started traveling to other countries, I noticed it's like everywhere. Everywhere I go, it's like subcultural by its own, which doesn't have
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: any borders and people if they are not corporate too or too corporate mindset, they tend to share some even sometimes private information from their
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: companies like sales numbers or how did they get to their what was their success formula and stuff like that. And I was fascinated by that. it's it's completely different with other industries where people you know go at each other's throats. So yeah, that's pushed me to try it here. I'm no programmer. I know a little bit about programming, but not too much. but I was always surrounded by programmers so it was a bit easier to take command of some unit of my own picked and hired programmers. So we started with our first game. It was Plastic Ellipse,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: isometric action adventure with with submarine ship which does looks more like tank. It helped us to show what we can deliver. And in twenty one we got our first client from mobile to do like a mobile port because it was done
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: I think in not Java but like very flash. It was done in in flash.
Amit Netanel: yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Rytis: Yeah, it do that was discontinued, so they needed like a updated new version. And yeah, we managed to do the that in I think less than a half year, like a full game for kids on mobile and yeah it was it was great. After that they
Yuri Sokolov: The the you ported the plastic plastic ellipse or another game? Another game.
Rytis: No, another game. It it was called Peppy Ride.
Yuri Sokolov: Okay. So you you ventured into mobile and why didn't didn't
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: you continue there?
Rytis: Well, we did our own game called Monkey Flip, which was not success. But we we experimented a bit in mobile market as well.
Amit Netanel: So you always
Yuri Sokolov: So if
Amit Netanel: you like always have an in house project and an outsource project going on?
Rytis: Yeah, that's how we survived for until now, I would say. Until now.
Amit Netanel: That's that's smart. What what can I say? Like publishing a game especially for the mobile market is such a gamble. Like you work
Rytis: yeah.
Amit Netanel: on something and you don't know if it will take. It's a massive risk.
Rytis: I will probably not do that anymore myself. Maybe if I would be working with like successful studio and there are some successful studios here in Lithuania, which I'm good friends with some CEOs. so if I would do that, like look, I have a few prototypes, what do you think? And he's say, Let's try with this one. I say, Okay, let's do it together. But I would not go myself anymore because like it's completely different market. going with marketing
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, it's it's it's really different market. Me and Amit here are mostly familiar with the mobile market and good game design is not necessarily the the the thing that will bring you money. Yes, because
Amit Netanel: Yeah. It does not translate necessarily.
Yuri Sokolov: good gameplay loop can get you so far in the mobile market. The most most of the money there comes from what we call a metagame. So basically live operations, things that surrounding the gameplay itself, things that keeping the players engaged. So they they're collecting their tickets and their coins and they're doing this side quests that they can do only once a day. And all of those things, those are the the main drivers in the mobile gaming industry. And also user acquisition is super, super costly. It's
Rytis: Yeah. And it's ever changing.
Yuri Sokolov: It's growing in the recent years, it's only growing, and many companies are are falling. publicly traded companies losing shares because the user acquisition is so high and the competition is so high. Because today, in in in today's realities, games not only compete among themselves, so basically,
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: let's say you have a match three game and another company released match three, you're not only competing with this match trade game, you're competing with all other games. You're also competing with with TikTok, with YouTube, with Instagram reels, because the the you're competing for time the player the the user spends.
Rytis: Also other advertisers, you know, even if it's like a automobile company or or I don't know, selling ice cream, whatever, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, you're competing for time.
Amit Netanel: Ha ha ha.
Yuri Sokolov: You're competing for players' time. So yeah, it's super it
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Time and attention and everything in between. But it's also it's fascinating because it's ever-growing science. So when we started working on mobile games, playable ads weren't a thing, and now you you just have to be there to actually make it. Okay, you need
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: playable ads, probably. And the playable ads becomes another type of market, I would say. So Yeah, it's it's as as as someone who owns a
Yuri Sokolov: In mobile games it's a science.
Amit Netanel: company, I think it's the most terrifying endeavor someone can do. But as someone in the industry it's super interesting and dynamic.
Rytis: But it it it is a little bit s doesn't take like a lot of creativity out of it and it goes straight into like Excel sheets, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: No, it's not it's not like that at all because the ones that that are working on Excel sheets and stuff like that, they are completely different breeds. They're a completely different area of those of this operation. So yeah, the the flow of developing a feature for a game like because in those in LiveOps games, those games are live living for years, right? So the core loop. Let's say you're making let's take I don't know a monopoly go, right? It's the core loop is simple. You have a board, you you drop your cubes, dice, sorry, and and the character is walking on the monopoly board. It's it's super easy. Everything around it is also co constantly updated. The the metagame, as I said it. So let's say we're starting developing a game, a meta a feature, a mini game into into Monopoly Go or any other game, other mobile game. In a PC market, you would start, okay. I need a game designer to create me an outline of what what we're doing. Game designers should should design some some idea. In a mobile market, sometimes a company would not have a game designer. Sometimes it would be a purely
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: product decision. Sometimes game designer would start, but then a product would and and the goal of game designer is to make the game as fun as possible, right? Then the PM comes and he says, Okay, it's fun. Now I'm starting to cut these things so it would be also profitable. Because we're and then you're working with You're working with analysts, with business intelligence, and and you're deciding what where the market goes. Only the big companies are having the ability to experiment. Most of the small companies are actually trying to recreate sometimes blind blindly to recreate features by the big companies. But the big
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: companies get to experiment and try things out. And as a developer, for example, it doesn't really matter what where the idea came from. Because when I get to the table, a simplest feature I need to to develop a simplest feature as a developer, I still need to figure out how this is done. Because how this done technically speaking, the artist that is drawing those images, the animators that working. They still need to figure out those things, they still have the creative process. So, yeah, in terms of game design, it's probably more engineered and less soulful. But the creative process behind actually creating those things is is the same. So yeah, we we we're having fun at fun at our job even working on mobile market. so
Amit Netanel: Yeah. And but by the way, speaking of of having the same process, like how do you manage to do your how do you divide the studio's attention? Do you have tribes in the studio? Do you have people working on two games at the same time? infrastructure, how does it work when you have more than one game?
Rytis: Yeah, mo most of the time what I do is people working on different projects. You know, sometimes for some projects it's like one two people is enough. Sometimes you need all of a team. If you get like a big government project, so you take out from from your internal teams go directly into that one big project.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. So okay, interesting. How how big is the team?
Rytis: ten people.
Yuri Sokolov: Ten P well it's not a small studio.
Rytis: Yeah, well we are right now it's not the best time, so we're a bit cutting corners. Yeah, and shifting.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, it's not it
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Everyone. Everyone are. Unfortunately.
Yuri Sokolov: unfortunately, unfortunately, yes, it it's affecting everyone inside and outside of game the gaming industry. It's those are hard hard times. Me and Amid here were affected by it even before even before the main issue started. In twenty one, I think, yeah. Twenty twenty two, in twenty twenty it's it was January.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Twenty tw the no, twenty twenty two. Yeah. It was after we went from the the high of COVID, like everyone was spending money and playing all day. So two years after our c CEO said well, enough fun in games. you need to deliver.
Yuri Sokolov: So a hundred people were fired, a whole studio. So we we were a studio inside a bigger, larger company.
Rytis: Do you feel like that's that's interesting take because I was trying to compare, like do you feel this time at the moment we're having like a crisis, we can probably agree on that. And is it like as big as after COVID or still not as big?
Yuri Sokolov: No, in after COVID it was small. I think right now it's the biggest it's the biggest cr crisis w
Amit Netanel: Yeah. I think I think right now it's it's just it's amplified because you have also companies that have you know survived or slowly declined after the heights of COVID, combined with everything that's going on in the fields of AI, basically.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: I I can give you an example from my own studio, like cutting speaking of cutting corners, we are we're not having a rough time, but our CTO has told us listen, two people People have left the company in recent months on their own volition. Like one of them moved, like relocated to another country,
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: not in our time zone. And one of them wants to completely change his career trajectory. But he said, We're not opening a job because someone left. There is
Yuri Sokolov: Not back feeling.
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: yeah, there's there's no help coming. If you need assistance, feel free to spend it on tokens. but but there's no help coming so. power through. And that's the really hard like part because we're less people with like moving faster because of AI.
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: And it's a lot of just it it feels like a grind because we do more every week with less people and more people are wearing more hats.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, w along along with faster work, you're also have faster burnout.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: well I think we're still in in the zone where COVID the post COVID syndrome is still affecting the the layoffs
Rytis: Industry.
Yuri Sokolov: because a lot of companies overhired during COVID and even when The revenues from COVID started to decline. Those companies continued to hire and to grow because they expected, you know, something. I don't know. And today it's easy, in my opinion, it's easy to blame AI for your fuck-ups. Pardon my French once again. some people believe that they need to overhire. They hired, they made a mistake, and instead of Accepting the mistake that they did, they just say, okay, we were iterating the AI changed the game, so because of AI we're firing, no, you're firing because you made a mistake and overhired during COVID days. And today you cannot run in the same thing. So probably, probably somewhere in some black site, there are people are planning another COVID.
Amit Netanel: You know, breeding all sorts
Rytis: You never know.
Amit Netanel: of animals together in hopes something will come up.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And hoping somebody would eat them.
Rytis: Yeah, but you know, some people, you know, which the don't dig dig too deep, think it's not only AI, as you said. And that's interesting take that you're saying it's also post-COVID thing, but I think it's also a few other things like consolidation of power of like big companies, big tech, like Microsoft trying to take the market and also You know, even taking the successful studios which are very profitable, it's not enough for them, so they let them down, like high rush, for example.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, that was a weird decision.
Rytis: Also
Amit Netanel: Super weird decision, in my opinion.
Rytis: Yeah. China. China is probably the most growing market and it's very
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: closed off.
Yuri Sokolov: I think they're starting to get out, get outside of China, because a lot of games starting to a lot of Chinese game developers are starting to pour out. And
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: also a lot of I hear in the recent years, I hear more and more from indie developers that are actually trying to get into Chinese market because sometimes it's it's a gamble like this for an indie game. If you're If you're adding Chinese localization, it's a coin toss. Either they love it or they hate it. If they hate it, your game is doomed because there are a lot of Chinese players. And if if you offended them somehow, because it's a different culture, you might have done something that it's okay in most of the world, but not okay in China. And they don't like it, and suddenly you get you know, you get a lot of negative reviews. You got review bombed and your game is dead. But if they like it, if Chinese market likes your game and you made a Chinese localization, wow, you're you're you're set. I I don't wanna say set for life, but you're you're you're
Amit Netanel: It'll do good.
Yuri Sokolov: okay with
Rytis: In a good spot.
Yuri Sokolov: with the next game, at least one game or two games you can develop quietly. So a lot of people trying to get into Chinese markets, a lot of suc people succeed, and a lot of Chinese developers go and put interesting ta things out there. Let's
Rytis: Even publishers approach, you know, indie developers. It happened for me a few times. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah,
Amit Netanel: Milly.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah. It's it's interesting. I think the I think those guys gonna gonna rule. I think most of the popular indie games, and and I think indie is the future currently, small lean teams that that doing something for the fun of it, not as the I don't think there's a lot of companies like Rockstar that are triple A but still pour their heart and soul into their games.
Amit Netanel: They they they put an art piece out there, not a product. That's basically
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, so
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: what you mean.
Rytis: But with
Yuri Sokolov: Indie game
Rytis: GTA six I think it's can be dividing. We'll see. I just heard
Yuri Sokolov: We'll see.
Rytis: a lot of you know different kind of news.
Yuri Sokolov: I don't think we should rely on those news because nobody's seen the game. Nobody's
Rytis: Yeah, exactly.
Yuri Sokolov: seen the game just yet. Let's see, because Rockstar have a track amazing track record with their games. So you can you can tell a lot of stories about I don't know, crunch, no crunch, whatever, poor decisions, maybe. But if we're talking about the quality of the released product, then it's it's amazing. Every single game is just I don't know. I still think that Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the most beautiful games released ever. It's game, the game was not remastered. I don't know, maybe it was remastered in the recent years I haven't followed, but even the not remarmastered version, the one that was released for the PS4, looked a lot better than a lot of games that was released for the next gen consoles. just I don't know, w without ray tracing it looked a lot better than games with ray tracing.
Rytis: That's an interesting thing. I recently I saw like somebody taking out the crisis with Crytek
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: engine and saying like what the fuck happened? Where are those like high end graphics, you know, these days?
Yuri Sokolov: But Crisis 3 was was a nightmare to run many years after it was released. You you could run it only on top end machines. It just was it was amazing, but it was super unoptimized. The the engine, I don't know, the game struggled to run on a lot of high-end machines a couple of years after the release.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. By the
Rytis: But isn't
Amit Netanel: way, I
Rytis: it the same problem with some unreal games these days, you know?
Amit Netanel: It it is
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: a problem and I think it's it actually should be on the list of priorities of game developers nowadays because not everyone can buy a decent GPU nowadays. Okay. I've looked at prices.
Rytis: yeah.
Amit Netanel: I'm looking into I'm in the market for buying a machine to run local LLMs on, okay? Because I spend way too much on tokens. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: It's a different kind of machine. It's a different kind of machine.
Amit Netanel: It's a different kind of machine, but we we could dive into that subject, but one of the co most common rigs, okay, is using GPUs. I've looked at GPU prices today and man, I don't think any a kid can go and just buy a gaming PC nowadays. Just can't.
Yuri Sokolov: Talk to me later. I'll
Rytis: Yeah, and
Yuri Sokolov: I will I will
Rytis: l look,
Yuri Sokolov: help you out.
Rytis: I will now connect
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: shit. I don't know how to do this.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: For those of for those of you who are
Amit Netanel: We're now focused. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: who are listening to us without watching, Ritis
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: just made a gesture with his hand and his camera just decided to zoom
Rytis: So
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: in, full zoom.
Rytis: I'll I'll find in meantime. I just yeah, I don't know. It's a bit funny. I wanted to connect where we started
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: with AI, you know. like GPU prices. GPU is not only it's also consist of of RAMs. look. Fixed. yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, we've calmed down. Okay.
Rytis: It has RAM and RAMs used to be the cheap
Amit Netanel: That's expensive as well.
Rytis: part back in the day.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: And now it's sometimes can be even more costly than the GPU itself. So the AI
Yuri Sokolov: Yes, we have we have
Rytis: cr AI like boom boosted the prices of GPUs like all tech, all tech PCs, mobiles, everything that has RAM RAM in it, and it is because like I heard I'm not sure about the numbers, but I heard like seventy percent of all RAMs w which are created goes to the data centers because the big tech or and growing AI companies just invent tons of money into into running the AIs, even it's if it's not, you know, profitable but they just don't wanna lose the race.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, listen, if in if
Yuri Sokolov: Maybe
Amit Netanel: if it's if it's it it doesn't matter if that's the the actual number, like seventy percent, it's less important. we all feel it. Like the tech is getting more expensive.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. We recently spoke, we recently spoke with CTO of Microsoft for startups, Imea,
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: and he said one thing that like think about this way. So you we need silicon to to develop chips for GPUs. Forget about the RAM for a second, which is also a big thing. But we need silicon for chips. There is only one company in the world. That can can create is it called lithographs, I believe. that they're creating those disks that they're later sell to companies like Intel or TSMC or whatever. So there's only one company, I forgot the name, they're from Holland. the company from Holland, I think from Edenhoven. So one company in the world that can do this. So basically the whole world of chips is of processors of GPUs, CPUs, have this bottleneck of how many products this company can produce in a year. So you you can have and everybody Samsung, iPhone, sorry, Apple, Samsung's
Rytis: Which part was it? I'm I'm now I'm curious, you know, just to Google it.
Yuri Sokolov: it's the only company we will add this to the show notes, the the name of the company and the link, and we'll we'll search for it as well later on. Forgot the name of the company, but there's only one company in the world that produces this. So
Rytis: company for ships. Okay.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: A S L
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah. SML. Right.
Amit Netanel: Probably. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: SML, that's the company. So they they are the only ones that that are doing it. So regardless of other price searches, we have this issue, right? So you have a bottleneck of how many disks, how many silicon they can process.
Rytis: But I know that also like Taiwan has a monop kind of monopoly on the chips as well. Properly a good
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, they are producing
Rytis: part. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: they are producing it from this technology. So that's that's the issue again. We have I remember the days when when hard drives went nuts in pricing because Taiwan had those issues with flooding. There are floods in Taiwan
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: that flooded a lot of warehouses. And suddenly every hard disks or solid state drives went I don't know three times four times the price. It's always some kind of crisis in the the in the computer sector, so it's never gonna and some people say to me, I'm not gonna buy a new computer right now because I don't know the RAM is too too pricey. And I say, Okay, before the RAM we have had GPU prices up. Before GPU prices we had SSD prices up. We always gonna have something and and notice that the prices never go down. After they they restore the the the issue that they had. Yeah it's never going down.
Amit Netanel: It doesn't feel it doesn't feel that way, yeah. it's not in
Rytis: For a long time,
Amit Netanel: the c
Rytis: you know, before the COVID, for a long time it was like always going down and increasing tech and yada yada yada. It it was quite well at least for me, it looked like a quite safe time. But I don't know, something happened.
Yuri Sokolov: Something happened and today's more difficult, yeah.
Amit Netanel: So what you're saying is that that I should buy that GeForce fifty ninety. That's what you're actually saying.
Yuri Sokolov: No, no. no no. I talk talk to me later. GeForce 5090 is not a graphics card that will get you somewhere with AI. It can probably play a great hero's tree with a great graphics. But but yeah, probably 16k
Amit Netanel: Yeah, yeah. Eight K Heroes free. That's all I ever wanted.
Rytis: Right.
Yuri Sokolov: if you want it. But yeah, I I think I think you need to look at other Graphics card and systems. Talk to me. six six thousand dollars and you're set with a good machine for AI, just six thousand dollars, right? Just for the price of 150 70. It's ten. I take four
Amit Netanel: Just six thousand dollars, you say. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm going to write you write you a check after the show.
Yuri Sokolov: for 40% my cut. Yeah, but let's let's get back to our business.
Amit Netanel: Just just assemble and deliver. That's all I want. Yeah, we digressed. We digressed a bit.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rytis: There are so many topics these days. I I fully get it. My my head is also all over the place.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, we have this as well. you've mentioned Plasticalyps game, right? that you've developed. I looked at it, it's still in early access. Was the game abandoned at some point? what happened to the game?
Rytis: Yeah, kind of. Like I always wanted to come back to it, but you know, f looking into the future and financially, it didn't make sense to go back to it. And we just approached new projects, new ventures, new games. So yeah, it's kind of a bandit. Maybe I'll come back to it with a team. someday but looking at this moment you know in industry probably not in like three years. you can fully finish the game, it just we wanted to have like more features. That's that's about it. It's a full
Yuri Sokolov: Got it.
Rytis: game but it's not like fully
Yuri Sokolov: You don't feel confident enough to say it's not an early access anymore. It's a full game. Got it.
Rytis: yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Yuri Sokolov: Got it. F I I I remember the days when when the name was beta, when you would
Rytis: yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: it's wasn't early access, it was beta, and you weren't supposed to have a beta access. You downloaded you pirated betas. but yeah, how how do you decide when to kill a game? This is an interesting thing.
Rytis: That's a hard one. That's a hard one which I think I struggled with it, you know. some games that we done some of the games probably shouldn't have seen the daylight, but we still did it anyway.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: And there are some games that we which we managed to kill in a good time. So I Think we should have killed more games before releasing something substantial. And it's advice probably for everyone.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: more on mobile side, but for these days also for PC. right now we are doing some prototyping on co-op games, and I'm trying to think a bit more out of the box. Like okay, we have this direction, but Let's try that approach or that approach and let's see how it looks better, feels better, or maybe even test it somewhere a little bit. So I I feel like these days more experimentation is needed if you want to stand out somehow and
Yuri Sokolov: So you basically want to jump on the on the Friendslob hype wagon.
Rytis: Yeah, but also
Amit Netanel: Ha ha ha.
Rytis: I can't jump on Friend Slob because we've been prototyping a bit longer than the Friend Slob games. I think it's been Maybe four or five months and some of the games you know it's done in a few months, like two free.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. But the the but the quality are quality ones are taking a bit t longer. But yeah, yeah.
Rytis: Yeah, I noticed like sometimes ten months, maybe?
Yuri Sokolov: Today I think today the the commercial success games, if you want to have a commercial success with a game, you either need to be super lean, I don't know, solo developer, living in a country with a l that doesn't require you to ha to earn a lot of money. I I don't know how to say it properly in English, but it because saying cheap country doesn't sound right. but Country that for example, if you're living somewhere in LA and you need ten grand a month
Rytis: Mouse.
Yuri Sokolov: to survive, versus living in Portugal where one or two thousand euros a month is more than enough to to live a happy life, I think I think it's you need to be lean, you need to live in one of those country countries and Or you have to do it fast.
Amit Netanel: that that that centerly lowers that that certainly lowers the risk, right? also you could get
Yuri Sokolov: Or you to n to be fast.
Amit Netanel: you can get funding somewhere, but yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Funding usually comes with strings attached. It's I think I think
Amit Netanel: Yeah. It's it's downside.
Yuri Sokolov: I think what Ritis company doing is is interesting. I I've met a couple of guys here that doing something similar similar where part of the time and part of the time they're working on games on on client games like outsourcing and Part of the time they're working on their own game. We have Cloverbyte Studio that does that. Cloverbyte studio, so basically when when they started working on on the Grime, the Grime game, it was their first attempt at indie. Before that, the Cloverbyte was working a lot of mobile games for clients, not not their own. They're developed things for clients, for other clients. and then they're decided this was the the ability to fund the indie game, which was financial success and huge success. Not a huge as huge as they wanted, but it was a big success for them, and they managed to create another game, Grind 2, and probably is another game on VR. So basically to expand a bit. yes, it's it can work. But they also worked with a publisher. They also worked with a publisher. publisher helped, but the financing was internal.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. But by the way, not it's not a new concept to divert like divide your attention between projects, like some of them are like in in house projects, some of them are outsourced. It used
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: to be much more common like twenty, thirty years ago. I can recommend
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: if anyone of you wants to to read a diary.
Yuri Sokolov: Don't say his name. Don't say his name. Schreier? No.
Amit Netanel: No, no, no, no, no, no. no. That's that's the the the the less standard recommendation from me. the diaries of the Jordan Mechner who created Prince of Persia. yeah, he released his diary from ba way back when he was developing that game at the end of the eighties. for Bruderbond, which was a company, well known company at least in my eyes. And the way he describes it is that he was like a sort of a freelance developer that got just the royalties for releasing the game. And Bruderbund as a company would develop some in-house stuff, some freelancer stuff, and some governmental or edutainment or
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: similar, like safer projects. so it's not new. It's has always been done. We're just like I think in in recent years we've been used to thinking about studios as either doing their own thing or as software like software houses, right? With a no name software company. And there's a lot of you know a range between these two. And
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: I think it it's
Rytis: But I noticed like these difficult times where competition increased in terms of like work for hire, and it is not easy to get something since like a lot of studios scales down or closes even down.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: So it's not that easy path for a future, even in like two thousand and four or five. four twenty-four or twenty-free after you know COVID, I noticed that I will not get soon, you know, contracts. So I started working with governmental projects like
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: educational, also projects like simulations, so that was going well s since I had some projects from the government and where they were well paid. But right now at the moment there is no government projects and there is no projects from industry, so it's like a dry desert. Feels like everyone is fighting for the scraps. So we are thinking what could be the next thing and what could help, you know, the industry, ourselves as well. a few things I tried I started this year with QA Which is more like a on on the side thing, but if you have like a good partnership with some publishers, we want something quality from one hand, not to hire like seven different companies from different
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: things, but like you have one company, if you can do this and that, like porting QA, and
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: if they satisfied with the results, we are happy as well, you know. And VR, so we started doing some QA plus influential marketing, and I started that because we released Book Smugglers this year on February. quite yeah, I I did a lot of marketing myself since we self-published, did a lot of research, what works, what doesn't work,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: had some help from other industry friends, and I noticed influencer marketing is still a thing which can be profitable for the right games. For us, it had some impact and still does, but since the game is quite niche The impact is not scalable as for the games, which is for mass audiences. So we worked with one company already, the bigger one with we were testing some prototype demo of also co-op horror game. So it's it's quite popular. game game genre at the moment and
Amit Netanel: Genre. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: yeah that was quite success. We managed even to get a lot of influential like videos outreach for free, even just you know sending them the copies, communicating with them. So that was
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: quite success. And it wasn't expensive and I thought like even when it came to Israel like you have a lot of talented indies which might need some marketing so why not you know for a small price help them a little bit you know pushing the influencers but
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: yeah I always would look at the game and most of the times I could say like right away if it's going for more popular audiences mass audiences it can have an impact and if it's going for more niche it's way lower chance. So yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah,
Amit Netanel: I actually wanted to
Yuri Sokolov: yeah.
Amit Netanel: to ask a qu s a question about that. I mean you you've mentioned book smugglers in you know in a sentence. But it's it's what I would qualify classify when talking with people as a passion project, right? Because it's about yeah, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, sure.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. But before that, I mean, sorry, I'd love before that, because probably our listeners never heard about book smugglers. So if you can give us I don't know, one minute pitch for your game. What is this game about?
Amit Netanel: He he's been marketing the game, so he could do it.
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: the game is about resistance. It's about what makes country a country, you know. when everything is banned, what the people can do to save the country, to save the language. So it's the i we were inspired with sprung word by inspired because like the war in Ukraine happened. And we wanted to tell different stories about different kind of resistance from history perspective. And our history, our culture have that kind of story. We wanted to tell that. It was as you said, it's a passion project. It was more for the culture, for people who are interested I expected a bit more people, but I kind of get when I read what's happening in an industry why it's not as much as I expected.
Amit Netanel: What do you mean as much as much as a success? Do you mean? Like sales,
Rytis: No, as much that we didn't expect, yeah, in sales like expected
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm. And
Yuri Sokolov: What what is what is success looks like for you for for a game like this?
Rytis: For a game like this, the success would be to break even, I think.
Yuri Sokolov: Break even. Yeah, i it would it would be great.
Rytis: Yeah, I didn't expect it bad.
Amit Netanel: To at least break even.
Rytis: I didn't expect it bad.
Yuri Sokolov: Passion Project, it's you know, it was a always a risk. You you're doing something that you're passionate about, and you're just hoping other people will see it the way you do. We will see it with your eyes and will love what you you what you did. It's always a risk. and you said yourself published, but I heard in I read, I think, or heard somewhere about no gravity games, the publisher no gravity games.
Rytis: Yeah, we had a contract. We had a contract, but we note well they are small publisher from Poland and we weren't happy with their work and it was mutual decision to, you know, part ways. So we decided to go f for ourselves and I noticed that they wouldn't and probably a lot of other publishers of that scale wouldn't do as much as we did because we approached also a lot of media, a lot of influencers, like I'm talking about mass email campaign of more than ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand of influencers.
Amit Netanel: Well,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: that's a lot.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. That's the it's the main
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: That's quite a lot.
Yuri Sokolov: driver today for indie games to get recognition is the social media. It's either influencers play your game on streams or you manage to get a really cool gameplay video on shorts, reels, and people get hooked up and then yeah, yeah, it's it's really out there in social media. It's interesting like this because mobile market, you need to pay a lot of money to acquire users. So you pay, I don't know, two bucks, three bucks for a user, depending on your niche. yeah, yeah. And and
Amit Netanel: Depends on the genre. It could be more. Let me tell you that.
Yuri Sokolov: you I I'm not familiar with recent prices and I know they're they're up. So you pay, let's say a dollar for for the example. You pay a dollar for a For a user, and you hope that this user brings you more than a dollar back as an LTV value, lifetime value. And in in indie gaming, in PC gaming, mobile gaming, when we're not talking about AAA, where where the marketing is also is a huge budget, most of the budget people sometimes don't realize it, but when you hear that this game, GTA had a budget of more than a billion. It's not most of those money weren't given to artists or programmers or game designers. I I would I would love to think that 20% went there. Like probably most of the budget went to marketing. But when you're talking about indie games, the best marketing is the free marketing. It's like you need to contact, you need to do a lot of footwork to get there. But it's not like you can well you can run Reddit Reddit ads, it's working for indie teams right now, but it it might also not work. And this is the only place you can like spend money in hopes of actually getting getting potential players. Other than that, the marketing is free, but you need to work hard for it. And this this is the interesting direction.
Rytis: You know, even influencer marketing can be good for mobile games. It's w one of niche marketing w which they don't approach that much and I talked with some of studios in Israel as well, mobile studios about that, that they could approach it and you know, try it or you know, hire somebody who has like a big list of contacts on on on that field.
Yuri Sokolov: Actually, they do that. I worked in a couple of companies that that done it. I worked, for example, I worked for a company called Just Play. it's non-existent
Rytis: Okay.
Yuri Sokolov: right now. They were developing, we were developing at the time, it was Fortnite Lite. Let's call it like
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: this. So basically, it's a dumped-down version of Fortnite where each match would take you roughly around a minute or two. and
Amit Netanel: The the the
Yuri Sokolov: The c
Amit Netanel: the main selling point in my opinion was that it was running in browser, right?
Yuri Sokolov: Not only that, not only that, the the main selling point that the of the company, what company did is there were a lot of kids wanting to play Fortnite during breaks at school. And the time it takes you to load up a game to to load the lobby
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: and then to start a game and the the the break would end. And in our game it was like You just enter, play 1v1. It's it's not battle royale full scale. You play one one player against one player or two versus two, and a match ends in one or two minutes. So in one break between lessons, you could play three, four, five matches. That was and and you would see graphs of players, you would see that during during school hours the the amount
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: of players is would be huge and those the same players that coming home they would drop the game and go play fortnite or or whatever so yeah we did great great things there but one of the things we had our influencer on on a payroll so basically one of the influencers For this specific audience that would play our games, would pay him, he would play the games. And there were other companies I worked at that usually pay influencers to to play it. It's I don't know.
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: You probably heard of this little small game called Raid Shadow Legends.
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: It's it was everywhere. They paid basically,
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: I don't think there is an influencer out there with more with more than hundredk subscribers that they haven't paid him to advertise or haven't
Rytis: Or contact it.
Yuri Sokolov: reached out to advertise their game. So
Amit Netanel: Yeah. No, it's it's a meme for a reason, right? to promote Raid Shadow Legends.
Yuri Sokolov: Yes, they they actually so mobile companies are using influencer market, but usually it's a paid paid promotions. It's
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: not like sometimes, sometimes there are, believe it or not, there are players that are super passionate about social casinos. There are players that s love to press this red button and see reels spin. And coins fly, and they host social casino companies often employ, and I put quotations here, employ people to manage their communities. And why why I'm putting quotations on employee? Because they're paying them with in-game currency. Like the people are super passionate about the games.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, it's like the like the script shop in in mining colonies, right? you get paid with the the product itself.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's working.
Amit Netanel: I I can say I can redeem the the genre in which I'm working, that there are like legit content creators in the gacha space because they love the game and because people like like to talk about
Rytis: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: the games and strategize
Yuri Sokolov: And people like to see other people more successful with pulling rare stuff and then saying it's influencer luck or whatever.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, yeah, rage rage baiting is totally in the industry, right? I can I can go on all day. I can you you spoke earlier about adoption of games in the Chinese market. Like all the gacha developers want to reach like Mihoyo
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: levels of success.
Rytis: it's a holy grail for them.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. So they actually cater the content towards Chinese players, and that includes covering up the girls because you can't market games with jigophysics over there properly like you like you can
Rytis: Mm, it's not Japan.
Amit Netanel: in the in the west. Yeah it's not Japan. We're not in Japan anymore. I wanted to ask something else regarding the marketing of and maybe it w maybe it will segue into the into other like topics we wanted to ask you. so Book Smugglers, which I read about and I plan to play because I I mean I went into the rabbit hole of reading about the whole like time period it revolves around. so it's it's deep it's deep in Lithuanian like lore and culture. So I would I would try and imagine like maybe maybe the Lithuanian government could, you know, thro i can you approach I mean Lithuania is I read it's a small country, at least like Israel, right? and I w I I think I have maybe five lips from me to someone in the government that can handle like budgets, move budgets around.
Yuri Sokolov: So your your bacon number is five, yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, my big my my ministry of of economy number is I think maybe five. Maybe five.
Yuri Sokolov: Everybody familiar with the term of bacon number, right? Okay.
Amit Netanel: I I'm at least, but maybe you could elaborate.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, so i if if one of the listeners are not familiar with the term bacon numbers, it's regarding the the actor Kevin Bacon. So you can pull up you can pull up Google and write in the search bar, give me give me any what it is, give me any celebrity. Give me a name of it.
Rytis: And
Amit Netanel: Any celebrity.
Rytis: Okay, let let's try something
Yuri Sokolov: Even Lithuanian celebrity.
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm now curious.
Yuri Sokolov: While you're thinking, I'll explain. So the Bacon number says every celebrity is connected to Kevin Bacon in maximum seven handshakes, meaning seven people. This person you you chose, shook a hand with someone that shook a hand with someone and maximum seven iterations, it will come to Kevin Bacon.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: Okay,
Amit Netanel: And
Rytis: let's go with president of Lithuania. it's Gitan
Yuri Sokolov: What's his name?
Rytis: Gitanas Noseda. I'll write in the chat.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: It's gonna be easy, but yeah. I I
Yuri Sokolov: No, I
Rytis: know that term, I I know the different term, but I forgot the name. I know that with social media we are connected to with
Yuri Sokolov: Okay, he does not Google Google stops doing it probably. Google had Google had this thing that you're it's it's an Easter egg. Would you enter some some celebrity name and bake and add bacon number, it would give you a number. So let's I probably they're stop doing it. Sometimes they're kill their Easter eggs.
Amit Netanel: Maybe it's more more relegated towards actors. Like he he has a credit with someone
Rytis: Okay.
Amit Netanel: on IMDB and that's the way it's connected.
Yuri Sokolov: No, listen, I I I tried it with politicians as well, when it worked a couple of years ago. So no, but yeah, yeah, but you can find
Amit Netanel: Really. No. No, Kevin Bacon is a popular guy, but
Rytis: that's it.
Yuri Sokolov: b you probably can find it other in other places because not Google invented it. There's there were a couple of guys that just started joking around about it. So, okay, Amit, I interrupted you.
Amit Netanel: So so what I'm saying is that small country means you have access, more access towards you know, people in general. did you try to like go through like like to play on the patriotic emotions or cultural emotions and try to promote the game that way? Because I think I think every time I I know every time someone makes even a game jam game. About Israel. Like Facebook blows up, it's being shared. I get it. Lots of shares about it. And it drives like traffic to the to the person that made the game. for example, we had a game released here 25 years ago, called the Piposh. Never mind, it's about nonsense, basically. Okay, it's a funny
Rytis: Okay.
Amit Netanel: game, funny adventure game, and 20 years later. the like the original team said, maybe someone remembers that game, maybe someone has nostalgic feelings about it. And they opened the Kickstarter and they funded the the development of the game in like a day. Okay, because people
Rytis: wow.
Amit Netanel: had strong feelings towards it. It's deeply ingrained in Israeli culture,
Rytis: Nostalgic.
Amit Netanel: only Israeli references. And I I think like it i you can play to your advantage. Like if that's A game deeply rooted in Lithuanian lore and feels. you should. You should use it.
Rytis: I I think it will would be easier with Great Duchy of Lithuania. That's the other historic part,
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: which everyone is more proud of. this one is interesting one and it could get some success, but I'm not sure if would that would get enough success for get the game funding funded in one day or even in 30 days. With government I'm like directly connected with Kevin Bacon because you
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: know I'm part of association of Lithuanian game developers and also with creative industries I'm a part of the board. So yeah, I I talk with them not like all the time but quite quite often. So yeah, they They still need to learn. It's changing little by little, but it's you know, the bureaucrats it's take a lo takes a lot of time.
Amit Netanel: Would you say would
Yuri Sokolov: Does you do you
Amit Netanel: you say the the gaming industry in Lithuania is recognized that's something that's like financially they should get on it, or people like still say look at you weirdly when you say you make games, you know, for a living?
Rytis: Well people are more curious about it, you know. Or just neutral, you know. Depend depends on people if they play the games or not. Like if you try pick a girl in a bar, probably that wouldn't work.
Amit Netanel: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: You need to go to to the
Rytis: But if you
Yuri Sokolov: the the good bars. There are I I believe I strongly believe that Lithuania as well has gaming bars, right? It it it must have.
Rytis: We used to have a gaming bar, we don't have it anymore. We used to have you know a couple of places, yeah. But you know. COVID
Yuri Sokolov: Well.
Rytis: and even before COVID not all the places profitable and bars and restaurants
Yuri Sokolov: Got it. Yeah, it killed a lot of businesses.
Rytis: have their own life's lifetime. And
Amit Netanel: Life cycle.
Rytis: yeah, but if you tell the guy who plays the game that you're creating games you can t find some friends.
Amit Netanel: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, you know it's it's how how bodybuilders say people that go to the gym and build a strong muscle body, it's not it's not to attract girls. They do it for to attract girls, but actually attract other men that could come and say,
Amit Netanel: Right.
Yuri Sokolov: how how can you how did you do that? yeah,
Amit Netanel: Major, so buff. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah. So yeah, actually
Rytis: Yeah. Hey, can you squat me? Now you have a new friend.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah. By the way, if I'm not mistaken, you worked on this game for three years, right?
Rytis: Yeah, I think it's a bit more, but we had some pauses, you know, because we had some governmental projects. So yeah,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: all in all, probably three years, but it also varies with how many people worked. Sometimes it's like one person, sometimes it's
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: more for a few months, and but you know, most most of the time what it took probably is programming, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: Programming and free the art and I think Yeah, there were like a lot of mistakes done on the production line as well, and probably most of the studios would have killed the game three times. But with the final project I'm quite happy. It was good learning experience, you know, and in the future I'm thinking about the games who which are more marketable, which are more profitable and Maybe less so serious and more just about fun.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. I i it's definitely shows that was passion project as Amit pointed earlier. Was it a passion project for the whole studio? because I don't know, to work even on and off three years and sometimes this person works on it, sometimes the other, was it a shared passion?
Rytis: At the beginning, yeah. later on, you know, some people change, the the emotions change as well. Sometimes even me myself, you know, get sick of you know doing the same QA for your game or trying to balance some things
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: or whatever. sometimes you need a break from your game as well because it's it gets repetitive. It's not like playing
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: the game, you know, creating the game is different experience. And it's also different than writing the game. Like writing could be more creative and more fun, but if you are like trying to match the mechanics and something doesn't work, needs some Experimentation it it can be a bit frustrating.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, the last twenty percent of the development takes eighty percent of time.
Rytis: Yeah, because we noticed the game was too short and we also extended it, so yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: have you released it on Switch?
Rytis: Not yet.
Yuri Sokolov: I I saw that you had plans on releasing it on Switch and are you planning to do it alone or are you planning to employ some publisher because it's really hard to publish? You're porting yourself.
Rytis: No, we do reporting how itself. Yeah, I know about switch marketing, the publishers probably besides the porting or if they are like big publisher and have some big portfolio, they don't do much on the marketing part. There isn't.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, usually the issue with Steam with switch publishing is the the development kit to to get licensed by is by Nintendo and it this is the nightmare today. You have
Rytis: Yeah. So we have a license for
Yuri Sokolov: a license and you have a d development
Amit Netanel: you have it already?
Yuri Sokolov: kit. So this is
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a first one. Not the second, the first one.
Yuri Sokolov: For the first for the swi first switch.
Rytis: Yeah, which still have, I think, kind of the same audience as the second, or maybe even a big bit more.
Amit Netanel: You know, if it works if it works on Switch,
Yuri Sokolov: this this might be your answer.
Amit Netanel: it probably works on Switch too, right?
Yuri Sokolov: This is probably
Rytis: Yeah yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: may can be your answer to you know, earning money without government programs, because if you have you have one kit, you can probably get the second. And a lot, a lot, a lot of developers looking for people to port their game to switch because they can't get their their hands on the development kit. And this is huge, by the way. We have an Israel.
Rytis: Even if you don't know the first development kit, you can't get it anymore.
Yuri Sokolov: The second as well.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Rytis: Second is like limited to some companies, but yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yes.
Rytis: So yeah. If you wanna do the sport to s first switch, you can contact me. A bit self
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: promo.
Yuri Sokolov: By the way, how does Lithuanian government treat game development industry? Do they support in any way game developers?
Rytis: Yes, I know. We used to have like a small program before, but right now we don't have anything consistent. It's more on the project basis. Like we had last year first accelerator with three batches,
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: which was great, but still you know, government man managed to stick some random companies which we were raising the eyebrows like what a fuck like cooking app is doing on game dev you know field. So yeah, there were some weird things but all in all it's shifting in the right direction.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm. Got it.
Amit Netanel: We we the the guys here in Israel trying for years to find the right avenue to raise games to the level of support that for example cinema gets here. Because
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: it's very similar and it's just as you said, some projects get backed up by government basically government money. it's municipal and like from the the state, you know, it's different funds. But usually when you go to see an Israeli movie, there are like twenty slides at the beginning of the different people that gave money to make the movie happen. And I hope that we'll reach that day in games as well. Like I want to see
Yuri Sokolov: I think
Amit Netanel: our logo there.
Yuri Sokolov: I think
Rytis: No, we're loving.
Yuri Sokolov: most of most of countries have support for cinema, like government support for cinema. There in in a lot of countries I've seen movies that produced in the on the government money, but not a lot of companies invest into gaming industry. Poland does amazing work there. really amazing work.
Rytis: It's one of the biggest industries and they have quite good history because before like Witcher One even we didn't had much.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, po in Poland, but the Polish guys the produced couple of big things at the right moment. For example, not only CD Project Red, even we
Rytis: Mm.
Yuri Sokolov: can talk about smaller companies like Super Hot. they've they've created they created a game that a lot of people both vr headset to play this game.
Rytis: It's a great game.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah, it's it's an amazing game. Then There is there is the 11-bit studios that developing
Rytis: yes.
Yuri Sokolov: awesome games. Like like this war of mine is one of my top games ever. I I really love this game and I can't play it anymore.
Rytis: Have you played Frostpunk?
Yuri Sokolov: Frostpunk One, yes, amazing game. Frostpunk two, I
Amit Netanel: Amazing game.
Yuri Sokolov: haven't played yet. I didn't have the time to to get to it.
Rytis: Well it's different kind of game. For me,
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: the first one maybe was more more my type because the second is four K like strategy, grand strategy.
Amit Netanel: Mm. Like forex, yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: What I heard about the game, and I don't know how how accurate it is, I'll still give this game a try because I so love so much love the other games this company produced, the studio produced. What I heard about the for Frost Bank too, that in the first one, you would okay, you're managing a city and you're managing a lot of people, but somehow you're still each life matter. So when when you need to decide on somebody is going to die, it's it's you feel the consequences. And then
Rytis: Uh-huh.
Yuri Sokolov: I heard that in the frostpunk too, it you're managing too many people, and sometimes people die in a bunch and you just don't care. You just city management game and not not experience driven game. This is what I heard about this game, but once again, I haven't played.
Rytis: Yeah, yeah, that's quite true. I felt the same. I tried it, I haven't finished it, but it also gave me a bit you know, time to think, you know, like when you care about each individual and when you stop caring about like thousands and thousands of people. It's like a bit similar to the war
Amit Netanel: Mm. It's larger in scale though.
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: itself. Or how some governments are run, you know, in the world. So yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: they they actually released another game that I haven't played with the clones. How the game Outers,
Rytis: yeah, I loved altars. Yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Alter it.
Yuri Sokolov: right. I haven't played this game yet as well.
Rytis: Great game, actually. completely different from what we
Amit Netanel: Me neither. Yeah.
Rytis: do. It's more like sci fi fantasy, which I I liked, yeah. I I enjoyed it.
Yuri Sokolov: I need to get to this as well because I heard a lot of good things about it, and once again I love 11 bits, they're great. so yeah, there there are countries like Poland that invest. I I heard Brazil is investing in game developers as well. in Dubai, you get grants for game development. so there there are countries, but still there are a lot of countries that that fund cinema but not games. And that's too bad. And I ask you because you were the chairman for a National Game Dev Association, right?
Rytis: Yeah. But
Yuri Sokolov: What what does it mean? What what did you do as a chairman?
Rytis: I was leading like the strategy of what we should do, you know, talk with other board members and what we should do like this year because our like duration of of each board member is only one year, which is a bit stupid because it should be at least two years, but whatever. So what we try to do most of the time the main topics would be, you know Talking with the government about different things, talking about some events, talking about the things what matter the most for the industry itself in Lithuania. So we managed to do some of things like to get like st special statistics code in Lithuania for game development itself, because we used to be in the programming branch. So
Amit Netanel: Mm.
Rytis: that helps with differentiating for future projects if you wanna target like game development or creative industries and you don't want to have like a huge part of the programming industry which could come and take money so that helped a lot we managed to push push a few other agendas like the accelerator itself, the companies who delivered it was also invited by us because there was a competition between two two accelerators and GameBCN one from Barcelona. Like we were happy that we did it. Would we hire them in the future? Probably not because it felt like they were counting every penny How much we can earn, so yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Got it. So I I'll ask another question that I probably know the answer to, but I still want to ask it maybe maybe the listeners don't know. Lithuania is a small country, right? what's what's the population size there?
Rytis: It's up f up to three million.
Yuri Sokolov: Three million people. So it's a small country, yet. And yet, you had your own game awards there and right. So I know the answer to this question, for me at least, but why does a s a tiny industry like this need its own events?
Rytis: it's more for the industry itself. It's more for giving a bit more time for each in game developer who worked in this industry a bit more time to celebrate, to relax, to talk with friends, to have something. to share and be proud of and you know it's I don't know it just gives hope for people, you know, for somebody who creates and can be on that short list, you know, for like
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: top four games, you know, and one of them is gonna be a winner. And yeah, that's the game awards itself wasn't my idea, but it was my idea in twenty twenty three. to elevate to next level because I love the LA Game Awards with Jeff Keely, you know. There are a lot of memes with him. Yeah, V game awards.
Amit Netanel: Mm. Mm, yeah. the game awards, yeah. They call it the game awards.
Rytis: So yeah, it's not as huge, you know, as as that one, but we still We'll see, maybe.
Amit Netanel: One day it will be. One one can hope.
Rytis: But we managed to do like quite an event for a small country like with all the gala and hostess and also having partnership with national television so yeah it
Yuri Sokolov: It was streamed on national television.
Amit Netanel: Amazing.
Rytis: at first first year when i started was only online and then it was online and national television not the main of their channel
Yuri Sokolov: Channel.
Rytis: but also one of the channels so I think it was quite quite an achievement and people were happy but about it. Last year was the first time that I didn't organize it. Because I
Yuri Sokolov: Mm.
Rytis: was doing that for three years in the association and I loved it. Yeah,
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: it's it's it's a good feeling.
Yuri Sokolov: The community work is awesome. By the way, if you're having why is why I said that I know the answer for it's basically we we're also a small country that have some
Rytis: Ten million?
Yuri Sokolov: some measure yeah, nine I think, nine nine nine million. Yeah, some somewhere.
Amit Netanel: Not not quite, but yeah. Give it a year or two,
Rytis: No.
Amit Netanel: birth rates here are way higher than they should be.
Yuri Sokolov: Threw that up. Yeah, yeah. I I agree on the second part. So yeah, it's it's the recognition, the small recognition for a small community. Like 10 million is a whole country, right? It's for you, it's three million as a whole country. The part of people that that are interesting in games is smaller, significant smaller. And the part of people that are actually developing games, it's even
Amit Netanel: Even smaller.
Yuri Sokolov: smaller.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: It's it's a a tiny, tiny percentage. And yet we all have our heroes to celebrate, local heroes that do actually valuable stuff that that pave the road to other people. And those those are people in small communities, those people are paved the road and make give give the ability to make meaningful contributions to other people. That's why I think we need events like this. And the only question left for me here is if you're doing it annually, how many games Lithuania produces a year?
Rytis: Around forty.
Yuri Sokolov: Around forty games a
Amit Netanel: Forty.
Yuri Sokolov: year. like I I mean not mobile game, right? you're talking mobile included, around forty a year.
Rytis: Mobile included. Yeah, yeah. Because we have mobile and we well yeah, maybe board games are not included, but we have one of a nomination for best board game as well.
Amit Netanel: That's cool. That's cool to see that like the the merging of the industries. it's really
Rytis: Yeah, well
Amit Netanel: important.
Rytis: Actually, yeah, the COVID was quite renaissance for board games Lithuania.
Yuri Sokolov: I think in the whole whole world, suddenly
Rytis: Problem.
Yuri Sokolov: when after
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: COVID, I returned to office and suddenly people started to talk about board games once again. Like before t
Rytis: Too cool.
Yuri Sokolov: before twenty one, I didn't hear people talking about this. Probably there were gigs like a mid here that were playing board games. but yeah, yeah. It was yeah, before it was cool, it's it's the actual definition.
Amit Netanel: Before it was cool. Actually, actually, I have a theory. It it's really, really, really, really related to the weather. Because when I visited Amsterdam, there was a board game or trading card game shop like every other street. Because like sixty to seventy percent of the year it's it rains. Okay, you can't go outside. And I hear that in Norway and Sweden and places that it snows like fifty percent of the time, you have even more because people are stuck at home and they need something to do. And they develop the the community around that.
Yuri Sokolov: I think I think it's fifty percent of people stuck at home. The other fifty percent is stuck not stuck, they're out in the woods playing black metal. That's
Amit Netanel: Sure. I it's it's probably related as well. I can cook up a theory about that if you want, but
Yuri Sokolov: No, no, no. There there's actually a a great movie. It's called Headbanger's Journey. It's one guy that
Amit Netanel: Mm-hmm.
Yuri Sokolov: did a decom documentary on metal music and he traveled around the world and took interviews from many metal bands. And so one of the consensus regarding why in you know in northern countries like Finland and there is so much dark black music. Like this, it's it's because they said I I don't remember who said it on the interview. did you see our weather? It's so depressing. You look,
Amit Netanel: Ha ha ha.
Yuri Sokolov: every way is gr every everywhere is gray. So that's how our music sounds. It our music sounds the way we see the world here. yeah. So we usually wrap up okay, from recently, usually, we wrap up the the conversations with two questions. The first one, you have the stage now to give any advice or message to to the remaining listeners. What would it be?
Amit Netanel: The hardcore audience, like the people that deserve something.
Rytis: There are so many so many advices, but If you wanna start game dev, think about it twice these days.
Yuri Sokolov: I think it's related to everything.
Rytis: But if you're already hooked up on it, you know, you you're in, you know, like in Mafia, you're in. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Rytis: Start thinking outside of the box, you know. It's very not something new that I said, but the thing is like industry is changing and changing really fast and you need to find stable ground again because the platonic plates are already shifted and
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Rytis: you can stand and go down with the whole ground or find a new ground where you will be stable, strong and maybe even stronger than you were before. That's why what I think about mm small indie studios or my own even studio situation right now.
Yuri Sokolov: Great, great advice. And the last question for today is it's not really a question. recommend us one book, one game and one movie.
Rytis: All right. Mm one book I would go with trilogy
Amit Netanel: huh.
Yuri Sokolov: That's okay.
Rytis: First King trilogy by Joe Abercombi.
Yuri Sokolov: the First Law. The First Law by Joe Abacrombie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's awesome. I just finished the
Amit Netanel: I d I didn't get to that one yet.
Yuri Sokolov: ninth book, the last book in the series. I just finished them. There are nine books.
Rytis: I'm behind. I'm in red country right now.
Amit Netanel: Really.
Yuri Sokolov: I just finished all of them. It's it's a bit on the slow side. It's the books are kind of slow-paced, right? a lot of dirt. What I loved about those books is The same thing I love about Sapkovsky's books, the The Witcher, it's
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: it's it's accurate. It's like if there's a dirt, he will say there's a dirt. If if a person needs to curse, he will curse it. It's not like exaggerated fantasy when everything is sunshine and rainbows. It it's it's a dirty world world with politics and a lot of stuff. Everything you could imagine would go badly will go badly in this book. So I I can recommend.
Rytis: Yeah, but some funny, you know, accidents happened and I don't know, like
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rytis: they are so different. Like I love Sapkovsky books. I read well old ones, I h have the new ones but did just didn't have the time. the thing is I still would probably classify Sapkovsky more on grey fantasy and be more on the darker tones.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. totally, totally. Because yeah, Abcrobin is darker. I I really liked him as a person as well. I looked I watched a couple of his interviews. He's he's really cool guy. so yeah, I I can get behind your recommendation. Great book. It's great series of books.
Rytis: Yeah, it is just yeah, something to try. I don't know. For games. let's go with classics. Warcraft free but custom maps, you know, because we are like if you need to pick only one game, what game would you pick? Warcraft free with inf infinite
Yuri Sokolov: Heroes three.
Rytis: infinite heroes free. Yeah, it's a good one as well. But yeah.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, I'm sure many game developers that listen to this type of podcast have begun their career by just saying, okay, I'll put one hundred Death Knights here and one hundred orcs here. Who will win? Play
Rytis: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: and and do these kind of maps. I I did it in StarCraft with every unit combination, I think. I was really
Rytis: sorry.
Amit Netanel: bored. But yeah, it's it raises memories
Rytis: And
Amit Netanel: to think about.
Yuri Sokolov: I actually I actually Warcra Warcraft III I played all of them but all of the expansions I mean but I I'm more of a Warcraft II guy. So I loved when it was you know the fantasy StarCraft and not not with with a hero that you can you know hero alone can defeat a whole army.
Rytis: I I need to try it, yeah. I I read about the lore, you know, watched some YouTube videos, but yeah, wanted to try it. But yeah, with the Heroes Free not very popular opinion, but I quite enjoy the two one as well because it was probably
Yuri Sokolov: Heroes 2 was great. I started with Heroes 2. I never played Heroes 1 actually. I just saw it. I started with Heroes 2 some sometimes in 97, I think. In 1997, I played Heroes 2 in in
Rytis: I think ninety six for me.
Yuri Sokolov: I played it in there were those intranet cafes.
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: so I would skip school take my lunch money to to go to internet cafe and play heroes 2 and karmaged on
Rytis: yeah, I remember that one.
Amit Netanel: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah and then then i move to heroes 3 and it's obviously for me it's it's the best one in the series but but the guys at unfrozen are doing amazing work with the new heroes the olden era
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: so i i i can recommend them as well but Let's wait till the early access ends. okay, so we have a book and a game. What what about a movie?
Rytis: It's a bit harder because I'm more in a serious guy serious, you know.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, l let's let's do series.
Amit Netanel: You can go with a series, that's okay.
Rytis: Mm. I'll be a little bit cheeky and I'll go with edge runners.
Yuri Sokolov: With what?
Amit Netanel: season two is coming up. Season two is coming up
Rytis: Edge runners. Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Edge Runners.
Amit Netanel: s real soon.
Yuri Sokolov: I haven't seen that one.
Rytis: You should if you played the cyberpunk you should. If you're not go play cyberpunk as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's real good.
Amit Netanel: Yeah, it's a cyberpunk anime.
Yuri Sokolov: it's it's the animated series, right? I I love animated series. some of the animated I really like I liked anime a lot back in the day. So
Rytis: Same here, guilty as charged.
Yuri Sokolov: yeah, yeah, yeah. okay. Awesome. Great recommendations. some of them I already experienced, some not. I I saw a meet when you when you s started talking about Joab Crombie, I meet starting writing notes to him. I'll tell you all
Amit Netanel: Yeah, sure, sure.
Yuri Sokolov: about it later on when you finish all of the book all of the Sanderson books.
Amit Netanel: I I need to man, I'm I'm in the I'm right in the middle of I finished the first trilogy of
Yuri Sokolov: Miss Bourne.
Amit Netanel: no, I I finished okay. I finished the first trilogy of Mistborn and three books of Stormlight. I did I did
Yuri Sokolov: Okay.
Amit Netanel: a break and listened to the first trilogy of Red Rising. I did a break there and started Dungeon Crawler Carl after our interview last week with the guy from Unity. So
Yuri Sokolov: Mm-hmm.
Amit Netanel: for my gauge and I'm finished the first book already. That's like my fastest listen ever. Okay. I it's
Rytis: wow.
Amit Netanel: it's a super page turner, it's an easy listen. So I'm actually quite near the end of the second one. I had lots of drives the the last few weeks, so audiobooks are essential for keeping my sanity. So
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah.
Amit Netanel: yeah, but I I'll get to Ambercrombie someday. Someday.
Yuri Sokolov: Yeah, yeah, it's good to have you know have books waiting for you. It's it's awesome. You don't have
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: when you don't have to look look far when you say, okay, I have a reading list. So it was awesome having you here. really interesting conversation. I had fun. Thanks again for coming,
Rytis: Yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: and maybe we'll meet again.
Amit Netanel: Yeah. Hope
Rytis: Yeah,
Amit Netanel: so.
Rytis: yeah. Yuri when I'll read all the books, write me on WhatsApp or whatever. We'll talk. I don't have
Yuri Sokolov: Sure.
Rytis: many, many people who did that, so yeah.
Yuri Sokolov: Great.
Rytis: Thank you, thank you very for having me. Thank you, Israel. Thank you, everyone.
Yuri Sokolov: Thanks. Bye.
Amit Netanel: Thank you too. Bye, man.
Rytis: Bye.
