 I got I got to say I'm getting each day. I'm getting closer to my lifelong dream of becoming a talk show host and I get to practice it with you, which is awesome Fantastic. You are the David Letterman of Finland. I'm trying to be I'm trying to be How's your how's your morning going for it's amazing to be back here with all the people It's just wonderful. Hi. This is my fourth slush and just so happy to be back here and actually in real life It's amazing Yeah, I completely agree and it's wonderful to see all the people here. I said, right? I think we're gonna have a wonderful chat about something. That's obviously very close to our hearts Come talking with gaming talking about MMOs But even more so and kind of what the next frontier for some of these more deeper more engaging games are are going forward and Naturally hearing hearing from the best best in the industry But obviously we don't have a lot of time on our hands So I think we should cut to the chase here and start start getting into the discussion So I want to start the discussion asking you You want to tell us a bit about why you started mainframe and just how did the team come together? Yeah, sure So mainframe industries the company that I'm one of the co-founders of Came together around an idea that a few of us had over the years of creating a virtual world a social virtual world that Would breach potentially millions of people that would choose to call that world Their online home for hopefully decades to come some of us had worked on projects like have a hotel here in Finland or Eve online in Iceland and we came together as a group of co-founders across Iceland and Finland to create an air bridge of experienced developers looking to kind of create the game that we've been practicing for our whole life Hmm, and I think I think what's real special about mainframe is this very rare combination of triple-a talent from companies such as Remedy and obviously CCP the guys who built even line But also combining it with this free-to-play expertise that's been built in Finland for many years Obviously the the original guys from Sulake building up a hotel later at next games And how have you seen these two kind of worlds converging? Yeah, it's a great question So our concept around the team formation and the founding team and then subsequently the team that we've built out now Was really to bring together three different corners of the games industry So mobile gaming MMO and triple-a PC and console because the the massively multiplayer online game that we are creating needs to be adapted and Excel on every screen that it's playable from and that means mobile that means your laptop that means your Large-screen TV console, etc. And that's a fairly challenging design Spike so we had to bring together a really unusually diverse group of developers to really have a shot at climbing this mountain Exactly and everyone's aligned on the same mission here and that there's no no prior to anyway, but that's not that sounds really good Then if we if we jump into the topic of cloud gaming Obviously, it's a topic now That's during the latest years generated a lot of hype a lot of awareness especially in the gaming industry But also in the wider wider kind of tech space with a lot of the incumbents having They're already building platforms in this space with Microsoft xCloud Amazon Luna Nvidia GeForce now Google Stadia So so it's clear that these these platforms want to be the de facto infrastructure for the content companies of tomorrow and the ones that are building the next big games, but Needless to say there has been Their own hiccups in the space as well mainly with Google Stadia having had their ups and downs So what are some of the challenges that still remain ahead when you guys are building in this space? Yeah, I think what's really fascinating about what has been Emerging over the last couple of years really are the you know the largest tech Forums and Giants in the industry are all moving to bring to gaming what happened to music and video With companies like Spotify and Netflix You know each of these companies that you noted are setting up, you know, very expansive technology Infrastructures that allow gaming to be made accessible to you know anyone that has a screen You know whether it's your phone your TV or your PC the challenge I think really with the space is like any new creative Disruption that is happening is that the old ways of creating games for PC or console, etc There are certain type of you know creative Execution but to create something new for the medium takes experimentation. There's a lot of risk-taking There's sort of a leap of faith and so this is a very classic sort of technology shift that is giving rise to new companies new concepts and It takes time. So what we've seen so far in cloud gaming is really Catalog games or games that were created for PC and console simply made available in the cloud So it's like having a game console in the cloud It's Experientially not any different from playing it on your Xbox or on your PC and that's just a function of time The studios the startups need time to create Content that's made for the medium. So that's taken a little bit of time I think we're just around the corner from starting to see some of the breakthrough Experiences that really you leverage what cloud gaming brings to the space No, exactly because I was trying out always PS now some time ago And I think I think the first effect is obviously the kind of fit getting the sense of a Netflix for games that it's Just pick it up from there start playing, but yeah It's a it's a lackluster experience when compared to playing playing the actual game on-site currently and I Like your point about what you said about about kind of obviously the new is the new titles that are going to shape What's actually possible with the tech? I think people usually They give a lot of credit to the the platform and the infrastructure being able to to give the features and the tools and etc That the developers then can use a build a platform and then the content will come But but I think especially in gaming is clear that it's the studios It's the games that actually push the tech to their limits and that's then what spurs more innovation on the infrastructure side And I think I think the same thing is probably happening here as well We had I think good examples would be Gran Turismo on on on PlayStation at the time and And obviously Halo 2 and and their multiplayer on Xbox and how we're there pushing pushing a lot of that infrastructure And I think this is actually a great segue Into the discussion of what we could expect from this new breed of cloud native games and Could you describe to us and to the audience here? What cloud gaming what cloud gaming really means in your view and what are some of the key things you're most excited about yeah, sure So sort of to just establish the basic sort of possibility space Technologically You're essentially running an instance of your game in the cloud in a data center and then streaming that as a series of video frames that are then being you know controlled by the screen that the player is on so That that's sort of the baseline and we're now at a stage where we're starting to see really high quality experiences technically But really the breakthrough In my opinion is going to come from both the new types of user experiences the kind of Ways in which we can access and play Game is made for this medium But also it's it's critical to also remember that Cloud gaming brings a complete shift in terms of how we do user acquisition How onboarding happens this notion of friction-free seamless Accessibility to a game experience that possibly was recommended to you by a friend who just sent you a link on whatsapp or messenger Or snap and you're jumping in and you're getting into the action immediately So the virality that the cloud enables is just a game changer from a game developer perspective Exactly and I Think I think sort of what's what's cool about that part is that obviously now if I start playing a high-end PC game It's it's quite the setup process It's much better than it used to be because now you usually have a launcher in place It's a download process, etc. You can start playing while downloading, but it's I don't think it's anything compared to let's say In this space, I would be watching some of my favorite twitch streamers, you know a lot world of Warcraft We've had this this discussion many times and Obviously I watch a lot of content creators from that space as well, but What if obviously they're doing really cool live events in the game? But I'm only participating as a spectator watching the stream I might spam the chat, but there's not much else I can do But but now imagining that okay my content creator Organizes this raid for 200 people and I'm like I want to get into the action So could I basically in this in in this space? Could I just click the stream jump straight into the action of playing with it? Yeah, that's the transformative Innovation that's around the corner I mean basically if you imagine that you and I were playing a game session here on stage and all of you in the audience are spectators you're watching and Antoine needs a buff he needs help in the combat that he's engaged in and he sends out a call to action to all of you You look at your phone. You're maybe watching what's happening in the session But you can actually either choose to do an airdrop So similar to the film The Hunger Games where people spectating are actually becoming participants in the game And not only that but you can choose if you have time and you're in the right location To actually jump into the action So if you're a member of a guild for example from World of Warcraft that of course you played competitively for many years You know if your guild leader is calling for support that call to action happens on whatever screen is available to you at that time And that's just insanely cool to be able to kind of multiply the level of engagement the number of people Beyond what we traditionally do we have a session-based game like fork might etc Yeah, I think it has the potential to just have a multiplayer effect on The engagement and participation in video games, and that's just a hugely exciting innovation Exactly and one thing I want to double click there on is is basically is this notion of I think When you can access the game through many different platforms and I could play it on mobile. I could play it on browser And and it changed the session quite a lot because now if I look at the MMO games that I've been playing Obviously it requires it's a big time investment. I gotta sit down for a couple of hours and I'm just do the grind But there's not much I can do outside of those hours despite there's The MMO gamers in the audience know this but there's a lot of chores we need to do in these games as well It's almost like a second job at times obviously a very fun job I actually remember this my favorite advert back in the day was from Logitech. It said Work horse by day warlord by night and that was this guy image of this guy playing playing MMOs and but What do you think about or how do you see basically how this changes how players can interact with the game outside of that Core session itself could there be stuff that let's say when I'm waiting for the bus Jump in and do do certain things in the game. I might not play the full game at the time But how do you how do you see kind of the? Disimpacting kind of sessions and the way that players can interact with the game or on a more frequent basis or or let's say I'm How how how will it look different in terms of the let's say the old yeah, I think what we're seeing with both our project and some of our peers in the industry is a Expectation that the engagement pattern with the game will change fundamentally because you're you have access to that game session Throughout the day. So yeah to your point. It's hard work, but it's also entertainment throughout the day But more over what I think is really compelling is because our phone is our major social tool This is how we communicate with our friends, etc The ability to dip in and out of that virtual world, which is also your social network That's where all your friends are Throughout the day whether that's just for a couple of minutes You know checking in maybe doing a little bit of prep for your longer game session that evening This this kind of pattern and frequency of engagement with the game is Just radically different from what we've seen before because to your point if you're a PC gamer or console gamer You have to sort of intentionally plan get ready block out some time, you know a couple of hours usually But in a cloud game Scenario you're doing that throughout the day at your option and that is just a Tremendous shift again in terms of how social and the network effects of video games will change with this This shift the clock game exactly Another thing I want to double click a bit on is Matthew Ball had an interesting essay I Think a few years ago on basically what the next gaming audience looks like obviously the last big shift We saw was mobile coming into the market bringing billions of new players Across the globe of his mobile is the biggest market by revenue and by by user numbers And he had this compelling idea of of actually the next Audience of gamers being the spectators actually and how to actually build experiences for them And also for them to to get vested into the stuff they're following because I'm I also find myself Spending more time watching the content creators that play in the game Game itself. It's it's quite the social experience also just be part in the chat and follow follow what's happening but With that in mind Yeah, I mean I think just to tack on to that like when I think about how Spectating is evolving and streaming obviously if you spend time on Twitch You can kind of just passively watch what's happening. And that's how most people discover games today They don't read game reviews. They're watching on Twitch or YouTube or Facebook gaming And we're starting to see of course this shift toward an interactive format Which is the chat on the side and you can kind of interact with the streamer with the influencer that you're following And that's been happening for a number of years, but it's this next step of Breaking through the fourth wall Crossing over into the action That is is just it's a complete game changer. It literally is like when I think about mass media, you know when when You know TV came along the first idea was let's do radio plays, but on the screen You know, we we all look at what we did previously on previous versions of that medium And that's what happens initially and of course we see a glimmer now of this with what Twitch are doing with the Bit the ability to drop bits, you know, basically give tips to the influencer But I imagine how cool it is if you can actually show your fandom the fact that you're a super fan of this influencer by Supporting them directly in the game And then if you're ready for it drop straight into the session with that influencer and you're there you're playing and It's just from a creative perspective. That's what gets us out of bed It gets us excited about this this shift exactly and to put things into context. Could you do you have some ideas? You could share on what this could look like in practice. So for the audience. What could audience participation? You mentioned something like buffs What what could audience participation look like in the game that you're building? Yeah, absolutely I think so we're experimenting with a number of different interaction patterns and and sort of The the way in which we think about the core loops of our project are all with this shift from passive spectating viewing to Active participation in mind So we're always thinking about what is the user behavior or the player behavior when they cross that fourth wall and jump into the game And so we believe at least that the concept of social onboarding is incredibly powerful This idea that instead of going through a traditional first-time user experience Where the game developer needs to kind of catch you catch you really in the first few minutes of gameplay Wouldn't it be cool if the first time you hear about this game is from your best friend who invites you to join And when you get there seconds later They're waiting for you. They're there And they begin that social connection happens immediately in the game now I think that doesn't remove the need for a classic onboarding and first-time user experience because people will also come to these games Using playable ads for example So Facebook has been doing some innovation in this area Google as well this notion of you know accessing a demo of the game by watching a live session of the game and jumping in and Trying it But we want to go a little bit further with this and I think most of our peers that are thinking about this Want to go beyond just a demo which is the playable ad Conventional demo to actually deep linking and joining into kind of random arbitrary moments of the game world but again always in that social context, so This is hugely experimental You know as as a game developer We know how hard it is to balance that first minute that first five minute experience the moment moment action So this is non trivial to pull off But again, it's just such an exciting opportunity space for us creatively And I think that's really what I'm looking forward to the most is seeing how people use that shift in the medium creatively That's a really interesting challenge actually because we've seen obviously studios in in free-to-play They have honed the onboarding process now for years It's it's it's very strict on what we need to teach these players in the beginning So they learned the game very intuitively But what happens when for the first time I click I click I click a deep link Get into the game with someone else for the first time in that game. We're fighting some end-game content there I'm like, okay. What's happening? But yeah, it's an interesting challenge. It's hard. I mean I could take like a simple analogy So let's imagine you're playing a MMO and you're a World of Warcraft gamer So you've had this experience many times and and traditionally when you join World of Warcraft you come in at level one and You go through the grinds you go leveling up you get to level 80 and your your your mission in life Is to be a level 80 player and slay the dragon But in a future cloud gaming cloud native MMO Maybe your first experience is the end game moment You drop into a raid party of you know, 20 30 people who are playing and you're the noob You're gonna die really quickly But you've just had a foreshadowing of the coolest experience in the game in the first five minutes of that experience Of course, you're going to come back. You're gonna say wow. I mean I just got literally You know the most visceral dramatic element of the game and that was my first experience So I think that is just hugely exciting and of course You know you you practiced a lot to get to the moment where you were literally ranking You know at the top of the league in europe as a competitive pvp a wild player But you know to get that sense of emotional connection so quickly with your friends is is just Tremendous, so I'm looking forward to what What you're going to actually be doing when you come back to A competitive MMO and and how you would sort of assemble your party differently You know, how would you put together? The best possible experience for all the people that you're trying to recruit to your clan and bring into the game Right, so you become a co-creator of that experience in in this world Yeah, so currently i'm thinking two options that i'm going to do in the game First i'm going to give it a try on On the bosses i'm going to try and get the best team go out there If we get if we get our asses whooped i'm just going to go and build a house on one of the ridges In the game and just be uh, just I'll just be a farmer But um, but we'll see we'll see what ends up happening Uh, one thing I'd like to touch upon a bit and also kind of catering to the founders Also in the space that are working with experimental tech across industries or or or even in gaming How are you thinking in terms of Of know what platform to optimize obviously because this is accessible through a multitude of platforms, but I would assume there's There's one platform that you're optimizing for and and the other ones are kind of secondary to that So how are you approaching that? Yeah, that's a great question. So for our particular Project, we are very much trying to treat each screen or each device as an equal citizen in the experience Now in practical terms that of course means that the user interface the user experience is going to be different when you're playing on a touch screen Uh, you may be doing shorter core loops shorter experiences You may choose to be engaging in voice communications rather than texting Simply because of screen space that's available to you Um, and so as game developers if we're thinking about this Shift we need to think about each of these screens as being an equal entry point So we actually don't view mobile as like an accessory to the experience You know some of our players of course core mmo fans will come to the game on the traditional pc setup They've got their rig. They're you know, they've been playing games for years But I think the exciting part is if we if we don't view mobile as like an afterthought If we think about it from the get go then The experience the feeling of being an equal participant in the game for people that come to it from mobile is just going to be Completely different from what we've seen previously because as you know The conventional way to reach multi-platform is to port the game Adapt it to that particular platform But usually the game starts as a console game or a pc game or as a mobile game And its roots are always obvious, you know, it's never a native experience It's just a port of something that was mastered in a different format So I think that is one of the big challenges. This is a hugely challenging design problem It's one of the reasons why we founded our company here in Helsinki because the innovation around mobile gaming You know the shift touchscreen gaming happened here with companies like supercell rovio and so on And and and so you know maximizing for that Thinking of treat each of the screens that you aim to be on as a window into your world and make it as optimal as you can from the beginning That's sort of the initial design principle and it's really important to think about this because what's happened in gaming Over the decades is roughly every decade. We see a technology innovation that leads to creative disruption It happened in the 90s with the advent of 3d hardware acceleration that led to games like tomb raider I mean playing as lower craft in the 90s was just amazing and that was enabled by that shift In the early part of this century. It was the shift to digital distribution The movement from downloaded or box product to downloaded products And then of course the internet and the connectivity led to the rise of mmo's In the last decade it was about the shift to touch screens And and every time these shifts happen roughly again once a decade You know the new furry animals show up to kind of run underneath the dinosaurs But they always do it because they're leveraging a underlying shift And that's where the the opportunity for a startup or a startup studio comes because let's face it if you're just going to compete with the big guys Like trying to go head to head you're you're playing a losing game So you need to bring something fresh something different as a new team. And so that would be My main takeaway you you wait for that moment and if you pattern match to that shift and you form your thesis as a founder Then you move as quick as you can and and jump into the deep end because that's where you're going to actually You know dominate if you're if you assemble the right team. Yep perfect Looks like we're out of time Thank you Thor for the amazing session always pleasure It's a pleasure. Absolutely. And and so you're going to be the talk show host in a future cloud native mmo Being the mc for a raid party that you assembled with your team. Yes, I will be I will be the caster for that raid Fantastic. Thanks. I'm signed up Cheers. Thank you everyone