Unity & Epic Join Forces. What It Really Means & Apple MiniApps Explained. NO 💩 TL;DR News Navigator

Speaker 1 The other big news story of the week is of course Unity and Epic becoming the best friends instead of die rivals as they were last decades.

Speaker 1 Hello, hello these listeners. This is News Navigator by two and a half gamers.
We will

Speaker 1 round up the news of the week.

Speaker 1 Specifically this one will will be from the week of 17th of November, where we'll really try to go very brief, no fluff.

Speaker 1 Uh, this will be as podcast as it is, so don't expect anything on video on YouTube unless you want to see my face.

Speaker 1 We'll be switching positions with Felix and Matte, so each week, uh, one of us will be doing their own setup, maybe a little bit of a flavor.

Speaker 1 Should be again very brief, give you the latest without needing to kind of go through all the stuff and noise that's been out there a few big news with context and then just just the headlines and descriptions so yep let's get to it

Speaker 1 so biggest news this week uh apple launches the mini apps party program

Speaker 1 which is basically their take on wechat minigames the important part of this is that there's different commission fee which is 15 instead of the usual 30 percent

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 yeah of course you need to in order to qualify we need to follow the Apple's guidelines and have some kind of a technical

Speaker 1 stuff there such as HTML 5 and JSON

Speaker 1 this is just another one of those pushes that we've seen there nothing really new Facebook already tried it I was there it died horribly let's see how this goes in China this works of course in WeChat where WeChat minigames are growing like crazy they're doing billions of revenue a year because WeChat is the super app, which means all the other apps are there in it.

Speaker 1 Therefore, the whole Chinese mobile ecosystem is built around it. Whereas here in the West, we have the Silicon Valley Apps ecosystem, meaning that there's a separate app for lots of things.

Speaker 1 Therefore, it's not that easy to kind of get all the users immediately. But yeah, let's see.
Because I'm guessing that at some point, because it's so successful in China, somebody will crack it.

Speaker 1 Maybe this time, I don't know. I'm a little bit more skeptical.
The other big news story of the week is of course Unity and Epic becoming best friends instead of dire rivals as they were last decades.

Speaker 1 So there were multitudes of announcements by Unity CEO and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney where they announced a pretty deep collaboration and partnership regarding all of the things

Speaker 1 ranging from AI, web stores, compatibility and interoperability between Unity and Epic, and basically Unity games going to Unreal Engine and being cross-compatible, even UFN, if I understand correctly.

Speaker 1 So yeah, I'm guessing that this still needs a little bit of a dust to settle for this to understand like how this will actually work.

Speaker 1 But of course it's again, it seems that it's broader push, that is just a consequence of people going outside of the usual stores, which is again coming from China, the influence there, where there are multitudes of stores, multitudes of different models and payment stuff

Speaker 1 setups.

Speaker 1 Where again, this could give Epic and Unity the edge over pretty much breaking the usual Apple and Google duopoly that we have lived in for the last pretty much from the onset of the app stores.

Speaker 1 So, let's see how this goes. Pretty important stuff about the app.
Let's move on. Then, we have some

Speaker 1 small headlines. I'll just kind of skim through it.

Speaker 1 Stash acquires Galleon to explain global to stash acquires Galleon to kind of again try to be competitive in the D2C race because that's heating very much up.

Speaker 1 All the guys are again going because of the new rules on the market to try to have as much web store revenue as possible and capture as much companies to kind of go there.

Speaker 1 Epps Flyer has presented their new suite of products.

Speaker 1 Google ruling, the one that opens up the third-party payments, is finally enforced and this is US market only. So yeah, from this point on,

Speaker 1 this is much more like this. This is now kind of changes fundamentally, but as I said, like everybody is expecting this, so nothing new.
Roblox introduces some new verifications

Speaker 1 to kind of, I guess, try to mitigate their one of their biggest problem, which is just child moderation content because of their whole user base being very, very young.

Speaker 1 The interesting part about this that users will be placed into brackets which will be 9 under 9 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20 and 21 plus

Speaker 1 and should be only able to chat with the others in their own bracket unless they are designated as trusted connections. So yeah,

Speaker 1 this is in my opinion expected because

Speaker 1 Roblox, I think, is just one scandal away being hit by, I don't know, 30% loss in stock because it's very hard to kind of moderate that of a giant platform if i understand they even shut down them forums because they just just couldn't moderate them just too much

Speaker 1 so let's see how this goes but definitely i think a step towards the right direction

Speaker 1 um there was a google play competition the usual annual one where it was announced the winners already announced and the best game of the year is pokemon tcg pocket currently the biggest pokemon game on the market which already grossed more more than 1 billion from its launch in last year, October.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm still playing it, it's great, and yeah, let's see how this goes forward.

Speaker 1 Then we have some new announcements,

Speaker 1 Vampire Survivors, the PC game is having a deck builder spin-off slated for somewhere next year.

Speaker 1 yeah this just like out of all the news is seems to me quite interesting because we just covered a deck builder uh which is cows zero nightmare the big korean game and i still think like the mobile world is waiting for a very very good deck builder because that game is very very complex so let's see what happens next uh nvidia uh the biggest company the biggest uh company by market capitalization in the world just announced their results which is 57 billion for the quarter which means the ai bubble continues to be the bubble and just going to monstrous proportions so nothing there the dark horse news of the week is of course ubisoft uh by the time you're hearing this maybe we would already know because as you know ubisoft stopped halted trading basically and didn't release their usual earnings and yeah everybody's thinking that somebody probably bought it in the meantime as it's still halted but the news is that Friday, as you're hearing this, they should release the earnings and trading should resume.

Speaker 1 So yeah, this is coming from Bloomberg. So let's see if we see either the mysterious buyer or a giant drop in the stock price and basically the acceleration of Ubisoft's fall from Grace.
Let's see.

Speaker 1 Anyway, that was the news.

Speaker 1 See you next week and stay two steps ahead of the game industry. Ciao!