 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE. Covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the LA Convention Center at E3. It's our first time coming to this convention. It's 68,000 people in every single hall and outside, inside hotels. It's pretty crazy, pretty crazy seeing. We're happy to be here. But we've got our next guest. She's been coming for a while. It's Katie Stone-Perez. She's the director of Mixer Interactive for Mixer. Katie, great to see you. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. So before we jump into it, I'd love to get your perspective. You've been in this industry for... 17 years. 17 years. I wasn't going to say that. I was going to stay close to two decades, but good. So have you been in and watched this thing develop? What are your impressions today, 2018 and how it's transformed? You know, it's so, the whole game industry has so fundamentally transformed over the last 17 years, right? I mean, at that point in time, we didn't even have services like Xbox Live where people were connecting and playing on live together. Everything was really sold as a disc-based media. So you walked into a store to purchase your disc. Now we have so many digital purchases happening online. We had no player data. We had absolutely no way to actually know how far in the game our players were getting and all of this kind of stuff. That's why you shipped the disc out, right? You didn't know. And now we have all this telemetry, right? We have all these experiences. You have the, you know, free-to-play has made a huge rise. We have mobile, right? Mobile gaming within the space. So the show is so transformed both from, you know, the people who are playing within the space, the technologies that people are using, and the growth. I mean, we can also just really see, you know, years ago it was really much more about a trade show so that, you know, the big people who are going to buy the disc could actually come to E3, check out our games and place their disorders. And now it's really much more of a consumer phenomenon as well. So I'm curious. So we cover a ton of tech shows. Just haven't been here before. And data and the use of data is a huge part of the digital transformation story. So I'm curious from your point of view from a game developer point of view, how did that change? Because you guys are a little bit ahead of the curve in getting the usage data, getting the tracking data. How did that impact the industry and the way you developed and chip games? It's been phenomenal. You know, all of a sudden you can really start to understand who your players are. And so if you're going to do an upsell offer, you know, you can understand like, oh, this person has actually already purchased this type of material. So I'm going to give them this type of upsell versus this type of upsell. Or, you know, I see all my players who are really struggling on level three and no one's making it through. What's wrong with level three? Let's look at changing that up a bit, right? So data has actually really informed us in so many ways to re-look at our basic gameplay loops, our retention mechanics and all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, most game companies now have teams of data analysts who are just specifically focusing on those KPIs and just analyzing the data and learning. But with that too, we've also then had to get more agile in our development and publishing processes. Because, you know, when you ship a disk and you just let it go, you could get data, but then what are you going to do about it, right? Your next sequel's a couple years out. And so now too, with the ability to like push updates over the air and all this kind of stuff, it changes it so we can actually take that information, have an immediate impact. And sometimes you can get that data within one or two days, actually have an impact. You know, so I actually work on Mixer, which is a game broadcasting platform. So we have a live service. So we can just constantly update and make these changes. I gotta ask you a philosophical question that I'm always thinking about in terms of difficulty and the right amount of difficulty. And it's kind of generically, but in game specifically, right? You want to be difficult enough so people feel challenged and want to continue the journey. But obviously you can make it so difficult that they just couldn't get through. So I just wonder if you have some, if there's some best practice or philosophy about what is the right level of the degree of difficulty? Yeah, you know, funny enough, I gave a talk at GDC in like 2005 and it was called Let Me Win. And it was, so my background's actually in psychology. And so it was really as someone who has a psychology background who loves to play games, my like issues of playing through so many games in our media because we are a very defeatist mentality. If you think about it, we started as an industry as this coin-off industry where we had to kill you off because we needed you to put another quarter in the machine. But now we carry that trope with us even though we have people put $60 worth of quarters in the machine in advance, right? But we're still killing you off in the same way. And so it's kind of crazy to me. And so we really, as an industry, I do think need to think about that more. Now there's certain games like, like Cuphead is one of my favorite games but it's really brutally hard. But that was very much the intention, you know, these Dark Souls and the Cupheads and those games, their genre is that they are super hard. And so people kind of know that going into them. But I do think across our broader audience, we need to think about how we're being more inclusive in our design. And that's everything from, you know, still giving people that harder experience, but also an educational principle called scaffolding. So, you know, just like when you're teaching a kid to do something, you're not going to say, okay, do this and this and this and this and this and this, because that's not fun, right? Instead of you can be like, here's what the goal is, here's your tools, and then within the game we want to help do that. Now with data, actually, we can help scaffold better because we can actually see, oh, these players didn't do this, or this age group of players didn't do this, or this type of thing didn't do this. So we can actually use that to inform our decisions and actually do better scaffolding within the game. Okay, so before we get the mixer and streaming, which is like the latest thing, I want to get to this middle step, which was the cloud, and really opening up the ability to do multiplayer games, opening up the ability to go from just that console out into the universe and play lots of other people. And again, how did that really transform the way you guys thought about designing and delivering games? Oh, I mean, fundamentally, you know, Xbox Live was a part of our program very early on. Live came into the Xbox business, and I think it was actually great because we had that as a Microsoft asset and strength that we could bring over that type of infrastructure. And we've seen it really just connect and bring people together and form community, right? And it's so much fun. Like there's some element that you get when you're sitting next to someone and playing, but not everyone in the world has someone sitting next to them. And so we're doing that over live by bringing people together into different platforms and services, like Mixer as well, where we can bring these communities together. And so it's really, I think, about creating that essence of community. It just makes everything more fun. Right, well, so now we're in 2018, and actually it's been going on for a little while, which is a whole different level of community in that streaming where someone's playing the game for those that aren't familiar and other people are invited in to participate with them. Again, another huge shift in the way that people interacting with the game and more importantly, kind of the social aspects around they're playing with the game. And that's what's so cool. So in traditional game streaming platforms too, there's quite a bit of latency. So what the streamer is actually doing at the time, you know, by the time the viewers end up seeing it on a platform and then, you know, they can comment on it and then the streamer kind of sees it, there's a lot of latency there. So Mixer was actually created by two young kids who actually were huge in the Minecraft community. They had already created a million dollar business actually hosting Minecraft servers. And they had all these streamer friends that were Minecraft streamers. And they were talking about how frustrating it was because they were streaming and people were like, put the block over here, put the block over there. But by the time they saw that feedback from their fans, they had already moved on. They had already done something different. So Mixer created low latency streaming. So what we call our faster than light technology where we have sub second latency. So exactly what's happening in the game, that's what people on Mixer are seeing. And then they can comment and the streamer immediately sees those comments and that then paved the way for this richer conversation. And from there, we had interactivity come about. So we have all of our new mix play experiences where people can actually come on to Mixer and not just watch, now they are playing themselves. So you can actually be playing one of our games like next up hero. And I can actually choose to help heal you or I can choose to help throw in enemies. And you'll see my gamer tag sweets, right? Go right across the screen, right? You can actually see as a gamer who's then broadcasting, you can see what I'm doing on Mixer and how that's having an impact within your game. But didn't the streamer kind of like the latency so that they had time to kind of split their attention between playing the game and then interacting with the community? Because it's all streamers for them. It's all about community. You know, there are certain competitive sports events and things like that, what that we do within the eSports space. And so there might be certain instances in which you don't want to have low latency engage. But for the most part, streamers want to be having that conversation. And our faster than light technology on Mixer really enables that for them. And it just seems like it's almost gonna come full circle. So if I'm engaging with the streamer and I'm participating in the game to some degree, at some point do I just step in and we're playing the game together? Yeah, I mean really, really now you can play on Mixer. That's really what we're talking about with our new Mix Play experiences. So we even have games that are playable only on Mixer. So these games aren't even, we were talking about distribution, right? These games aren't even shipping. There's no disc. They're not even shipping on any of these other platforms. They are playable only on Mixer. And so you can actually go to mixer.com today and check out several of these game experiences. And you can actually look for Mix Play experiences. We have filters and so you can actually find all of that content. All right, so get your perspective for it before we let you hear you've been at this for a little while. As storage and compute and networking, right? It's infinite in scale and asymptotically approaches zero in cost. As you look forward, where do you see leveraging some of this new horsepower? Well, I think again, Microsoft actually just had this amazing acquisition of PlayFab technology and I love seeing what they're doing within the space and bringing that into our portfolio of content as well. Cause again, it's about having this data and being able to really respond and change your game instantly to really make sure that you're doing the best things for your business. And so it really just makes developers be informed and be able to be much more agile in their approach. And it's also democratizing that opportunity. Previously years ago, to get some of these insights, you would have had to be one of the largest game companies on the planet. And now with the democratization of these different game engines and then the democratization of this type of tooling and online services that are available with things like Azure and things like PlayFab, it really creates an amazing opportunity for all developers everywhere. It's amazing, the democratization is a theme we hear over and over and over again, more the data, more the tools and more the ability to do something about it is distributed to a broader audience. All right, Katie, we'll thank you. Let me get more voices with that, right? We get a much broader set of content that ends up like the content that you see here today is much more diverse and much broader. You know, we still have a long way to go as an industry but it's very different than my first E3 17 years ago. 17 years ago. All right, Katie, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and congrats on all these success. Thanks. All right, she's Katie, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from E3 at Lake Convention Center, thanks for watching.