Jeff Rick here at the cube we're at the LA Convention Center at e3 is our first time coming to this convention is sixty eight thousand people and every single hall and outside inside hotels it's pretty crazy great to see you thank you so much for having me [Music] years ago it was really much more about a a trade show so that you know the big people who are gonna buy the disc could actually come to eat right right check out our games and place their disorders and now it's really much more of a consumer phenomenon right let's have a competition let a brand's find outdo each other but more of let's make this more about the games than the booth babes and those things it's funny everything changed in dubbings chains right people are always super excited there's always gamers that want to see the newest stuff that hasn't changed at all but just the sheer technology differences so we're doing this series as part of the Western Digital data makes possible and data is such a big part of what you guys do you can really start to understand who your players are and so if you're gonna do an upsell offer you know you can understand like oh this person has actually already purchased this type of material so I'm gonna give them this type of upsell versus this type of upsell or you know I see all my players are really struggling on level three and no one's making it through what's wrong with level three they're spending too much time in an area not knowing what they're doing will go OK right we need to change that we need to signpost back to serenity we need to turn around say how can we make it clearer to the players they know what they do but also keep the reward so that they feel like they've achieved it they feel like they've figured it out right we've placed people in front of the game in very early stages to receive him alcohol ideas of working and then based on that we then look at video footage interviews and all that stuff some kind of that feedback see into the design loop process previously years ago to get some of these insights you would have had to be one of the largest game company from them and now with you know the democratization of these different game engines and then the democratization of this type of like to lean and online services that are available it really creates an amazing opportunity for all developers everywhere we see these tremendous boots that are here fabulous graphics VR coming down the pike CPU and graphical chips are all over the place so basically power an internet and 5 G's coming mobility is gonna be way way faster the horsepower that you need to run this kind of game is actually pretty staggering we can compute a lot of stuff on the GPU the CPUs tons and tons of the objects get physics constraints and things that are costly for computation cycles and then there's like memory issues you know we have streaming that we have to kind of get better at these worlds are very large and so to store the things that you're gonna see and do takes a lot of actual you know harddrive space and the speed at which we can load and unload things is that critical factor in terms of you know unlocking the freedom of your experience right we really have a PC development technology that is easy to port the Xbox and PlayStation so we have a private cloud in Europe and a private cloud and we run this on your own inference we're on our totally on our own infrastructure and it has its advantages because we're completely in control but I think now just don't need to make the big investment in hardware upfront you can solve all the problems in a cloud solution right now and then deploy either privately or publicly it's much more flexible now than it was we know from our creator standpoint the biggest thing that they complain about is hey I want to grow right like I've been streaming for X amount of years I'm creating content how do I grow at twitch we have like the broadest means of ways to monetize but also the lowest barrier of entry to take advantage of them and our subscribers by the way they know that they're supporting you and proud to do so Joy's supporting the kind of courage do they know if they didn't support you you might not be streaming they love being playing a role in keeping their favorite creators around the content that you see here today 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 17 years ago used to be gamers played games because of the technology and now they play games because of the games right because no one cares about the technology right because you could do almost anything on any device now and now so it's really important to us as game developers to hide the technology from players and just give them a great expression and every year you know new stuff rolls out slightly newer Xbox slightly newer PlayStation better pcs so we just stay up-to-date with the drivers and make sure that we support whatever crazy hardware is coming out right and it all works great you're watching the cube from e3 I like convention center thanks for watching [Music]

my leg issues a plane 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 motor in the machine and but now we carry that trope with us even though we have people put 60 quarter $60 worth of quarters in the machine in advance right right 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 face because you know when you consume content it's usually through news feed right worth one of your friends shares that content so we've seen a lot of creators come on board and have really heard our early 66 success with that in terms of like sharing content we're asking they're you know they're fans when they're on the stream like hey you know I'm live right now share this content with your friends right then they get instant exposure right which helps them grow what extensions are its developers they're created by outside developers and what they are is they add interactive functionality to broadcasters channel pages whether it's a widget underneath the screen or it's an overlay that goes on top of it and with these overlays you can just creating a more interactive experience for the viewers and that's where we see the future of gaming going which is that it's not a it's not a sit back experience it's the lean forward [Music]

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at E3 at the LA Convention Center, 68,000 people roamin' all over the place. It's really something to see if you've never been here before. The dogs were gettin' a little tired. We look over. We see some really comfy lookin' chairs, so we wanted to come over and check it out. So we are really excited to have Ulyana Poteshkina, and she is from AKRacing, the marketing manager. Great to see you. >> Hi, great to see you. Thanks for stopping by. >> Absolutely, so tell us about these chairs that we're sitting in. >> These are, well, we are sitting in the gaming chairs. We have our office chairs, as well, but the ones we are in are the gaming chairs. I am actually sitting in our limited edition Fortnite chair. Yeah, that was the one. So Fortnite had a huge event yesterday, Fortnite Pro-am. That's the chair that was onstage. We only had 121 of them manufactured, and this is one of those. >> [Jeff] One of those ones. >> Yeah. >> So very interesting. So you guys started out a little, before we turned on cameras, in the automotive space for chairs for cars, and then you said you have office chairs, and then here we have gaming chairs. What is the difference between those types of chairs? What are some of the things you have to think about as you design these things? >> Sure, so the racing car seats, originally that's our heritage. That's how we started back in 2001, and those seats are used in the race cars. We still manufacture them. We don't carry them in the United States, but we do sell them in other regions. >> [Jeff] Okay. >> And then we expanded into gaming chairs 'cause that was a hot category, and that's where the race car design comes in, the bucket seat that you see on a lot of gaming chairs. But we not only know the aesthetics of it, but also the ergonomic principles that need to be in a seat that you are gonna be sitting in for a long time. >> [Jeff] For hours and hours and hours, right. >> Right, and that's exactly what makes a gaming chair different from just a regular office chair that you can get from any place. >> Right, so what are some of the key things that you do that enable somebody to sit in this thing for five, six hours? >> All of the chairs come with headrest supports and backrest support, it is included with the chair. It's adjustable. The chair itself adjusts in any direction you can think of. The backrest on all AKRacing chairs actually reclines all the way flat 180 degrees. Like everybody knows the meme by PewDiePie, But Can You Do This?. >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> So yeah, so our chairs go all the way flat. You can adjust the armrests. Even our entry level gaming chairs have 3D armrests, which means they are adjustable in three directions. They would go up and down, they'd rotate to the sides and slide back and forth. The higher you get on the product line, you also get shifting in and out. That we call 4D armrests. You can, of course, adjust the height of the chair. Then we're using top quality cold cured foam inside the chairs that is guaranteed not to go bad for at least five years. We have a five year warranty on the chairs, so that also. >> [Jeff] A five year warranty? >> A five year warranty. >> And I can sit in it for 10 hours at a time. >> Yeah. (chuckling) That's a lotta chair time. >> Right, so all these things combined, the support, the premium materials, the adjustments on the chair allow you to make it good for yourself so you can sit in it for a very long time. >> Right, so I'm just curious in terms of the, you said it was the hot market. You guys got in this 'cause the hot market. >> Yes. >> And you know, the games are obviously the stars of the show here, but there's all kinds of ancillary products like you guys have. There's really fancy keyboards. There's all this kind of thing. So when did you see the market for this type of stuff really start to go? >> I would say, so we entered the gaming market back in 2004, but I would say it really started booming once the e-sports arrived, and that would be about the 2010-ish, 2010, 13. That's when it went crazy. >> Right, 'cause then you're really showcasing the professionals sitting in their chair, playing at the highest levels, and that was probably the catalyst. >> Exactly, right. So back in the days when no one was streaming, no one was playing professionally, that would be all the home environment, nobody saw it. Like it was used, but nobody saw it. Now it's all over. >> Alright. Well, Ulyana, thanks for taking a few minutes and letting us rest for a minute on your comfy chairs. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Alright. >> Feel free to stop by anytime if you need a rest. >> Very good. Or if I need to game for 12 hours at a time. >> That is correct. >> Alright, she's Ulyana. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from E3. We're at the LA Convention Center, 68,000 of our closest friends. Thanks for watching. >> Thank you. (uptempo music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube, we're at E3 at the LA Convention Center, 68,000 people milling around, but we've got kind of the backdoor access here to the Warner Brothers Games booth, so we're really excited to be back in here, the inner sanctum, talking about some of the new games coming out and we got Phill Ring, he's the Executive Producer of TT Games, Phil, great to see you. >> No, thank you very much for having me. >> Absolutely, so you're in charge of this wonderful game, that we've got on the wall behind us, the Lego DC Super-Villains? >> Sure, yeah, I'm lucky enough to be one of the incredibly talented team, 'cause we're really excited about this game, Lego DC Super-Villains is something we've actually been playing around with as an idea for a while, you get to be the villains, you get to be the bad guys, so we're really excited we actually finally get to show and talk about it. >> Right, after doing what, three games of Batman, so now you get a flip over, you get to be the Riddler or the Joker? >> Yeah, this is it, so with the kind of DC universe, we did the Lego Batman titles, but DC has amazing villains, you've got Joker, you've got Harley, you've got Lex and we were like you know what? Let's play as those, let's do something really cool, let's do a story where we're focusing on the villains, because we've never done it before, we think it'll be quite fun and hopefully people are gonna really enjoy it. >> Great, so it's coming out, so give the particulars for everybody at home, who's waiting to get their order in. >> Sure, so it's available October 16th, it's actually available for pre-order now and depending where you're pre-ordering it from, there's actually a really cool Lex Luthor power-suit mini figure you can get, so it features in the game and then you can actually have that model sat on your desk, so I'm really excited, I'm gonna run off and pre-order it as soon as I can, 'cause I want that figure. >> Well, that's cool, but the other feature you talked about before we turned on the cameras, you can actually make yourself into a Lego figure, right? >> This is really cool, yeah. So when we were looking at this game, we were sat there thinking, okay, villains are really, really cool, but I wonder what it would be like if I could put myself into this world, what happens if I'm playing with Joker and with Lex, so we decided to put the Character Customizer in, so right at the very beginning of the game, Commissioner Gordon's heading to find out some information about this new character and then you customize that character and that's your character, so you make whoever you want, as crazy as you want, there's loads of kind of depth to the Customizer, you can change decors, colors, torsos, facial features, hair pieces and then that character appears throughout the story, so they walk out in a cut scene and that's really cool and then that character unlocks new powers and abilities and becomes stronger as you play through the game. >> Right, so I'm just curious on kind of the evolution of the game, again you did some earlier versions, that weren't the same game, but you know, this one is kind of built onto that, what did you discover, in terms of how people play the game? One of my favorite topics is degree of difficulty, >> Sure. >> How do you figure out the degree of difficulty, to make it difficult enough from excited to attack a challenge and conquer it, but not so difficult, where I'm just banging my head against a wall and throw my controller out the window and say, I just can't get through this thing. >> So that's something that the team do really, really well. We always look at it and go, okay, we know that these games are for a younger audience or at least to start with, so we want something that an eight-year old kid, who may have never played a Lego game before can come along, have loads of fun with this world, so we're making sure that we're kind of educating the player, we have a new tutorial system in this game, where we can show little videos to go, so you've just unlocked this cool power, this is how it works. So we can kind of educate people, but then we know that we're gonna have like either fans of Lego games, but also like DC Comic fans, like we have people kind of telling us, "Oh, I play this with my wife and things," so they want a bit more of a challenge and that's when we get to go into like the Free Play world, so once you're playing the story, you can then go explore all these locations and you find the slightly trickier puzzles, where it's like, oh, I need to figure out what I need to do here, what character do I need, what ability do I need to use? So having that kind of accessibility, so it's really accessible to get into the game, but then there's loads of depth to it, >> Right. >> so that's really cool for us and it's one of these things that we're really kind of happy with, 'cause we also find that the eight-year old kids run around doing all the hard puzzles and we struggle with them, so sometimes it swings, so. >> I was gonna say, so what are some of the things you measure to see if you're hitting that objective? Is it time in a level? Is it time being in there? I mean, what are some of the factors, that you guys are actually looking and measuring to see if you maybe have to make an adjustment, based on the actual behavior? >> So we love getting people to play the game, so we bring kids in and we'll sit there, then we see them playing it and if they're getting stuck, if there's something that's not really kind of standing out to them, if they're spending too much time in an area, not knowing what they're doing, we'll go okay, right, we need to change that, we need to signpost that differently, we need to turn round and say, how can we make it clearer to the player, so they know what they do, but also keep the rewards, so that they feel like they've achieved, that they feel like they've figured it out. >> Right. >> So that's one of the things, like if someone's getting stuck on a level and they're there for like three, four, five minutes and they don't know what to do, we don't want that experience for people, so we'll sit there and go, okay, how can we make that clearer? Is there something we can do? Is there something we can maybe flash a piece of Lego or something and sit there and go, these Lego bricks, maybe you wanna smash those up and that's also really cool, 'cause villains get to smash things up. >> Right, right. >> and go, okay, if I break that, I can make that clearer, then the player will then know what to do and they'll be able to progress. >> So it's really signaling is really the big kind of, way to help them get over that, versus completely changing that piece of the play? >> Yeah, we really do think that we can hopefully change the puzzles to be able to do that, we have had instances though, where we sit there and go, actually, no one gets this, this is too complicated, back to the drawing board and so we'll rip a puzzle out and sit there and go, actually, how do we change this, this is overly complicated, it's too confusing, let's do something different, let's do something that's really cool and it also means that we get to go, let's have a second stab at it and sometimes we get really cool results from it and some of the puzzles are even better than what we had previously, so. >> And the other piece I think is really interesting is clearly these are very well-known brands, Lego's a very well-known brand, DC is a very well-known brand, so you've got a narrative, you've got a story, you have kind of the look and feel, at the same time you want players to be able to do all kinds of things and you don't necessarily know where they're gonna go, how they're gonna interact, so how do you kind of balance the play with the narrative? >> So one of the great things about this game is from a story point of view and a narrative, we actually, it's an original creation and we worked really closely with DC and that allows us to kind of really help with the kind of pacing of the adventure, so as you're playing through and you start off on the first level, when you're breaking out of a prison, you then get dropped into the Open World Hub and we get to signpost people and say, hey, you can go over here to continue the story, but if you wanna go off and explore, you do that, go for it, go see what you can find and then we kind of have something that allows players to keep coming back, because these worlds, we know that there are massive fans of them, so if you turn round to someone and say, you can go to Gotham City, they'll know where they wanna go, like if I'm a Batman fan, I'm like, I'm going to the Iceberg Lounge, I wanna see what it is. So we give players that freedom to really explore it, but then always kind of let them be able to kind of return to the story path and that's another thing that we think is really important, because when people are playing these games, we want them to be able to make the choices of how they play the game. >> Right, great, that's interesting, so if there is a place, that they want to go to, 'cause they love Gotham City, they're big fans of Batman and it's not there, you guys hear a lot of feedback? I mean, do people come back, so that you've got to pump that into the next iteration of the game and the next update? >> Yeah, we do, we listen to what fans do and we've been doing that for years, so ever since we've been doing these DC titles, we sit there and go, what do people wanna do, what do people wanna see? One of the things that I love is that we have massive DC fans in the office, so a lot of the stuff, we'll sit there and we'll see like requests coming in on social media going, I really hope this character's there and we get to look at our character list and go, yep, he's there, who put it in? And then we go chat with them and they go, of course I'm gonna include that character, I love them and some of them are really obscure. >> Right. >> But yeah, we love listening to feedback and seeing what people expect and what they want to see from this world. >> It's really interesting balance, 'cause you get all the leverage from those known brands, those known characters, those known stories, >> Sure. >> but at the same time, as you said, you've got a lot of people, that are really into it and they're gonna hold you to a standard, >> Yeah. >> to make sure, that you're representing everything as they think it really should be. >> Yeah, very much so and this is the other thing about having fans in the office is we keep ourselves to that high standard as well, we sit there and go, it needs to be right, like I am a fan of Gorilla Grodd, he needs to do everything I want him to do, because I know this character inside and out and so when we have people, who are that passionate about the game on staff, we just wanna be able to share that with the world and so when we hear feedback, that people go, "Oh, we love it, it's exactly what I wanted," it's like we love that, it's incredible to know that we kind of feel like we've got it right, we've got these characters right. >> It's so cool though, just the integration of the Legos with all these other brands and just the, and it's not even the Lego blocks, the Lego people and how well it's been able to be integrated with all these other brands and the integration just seems to work so, so, so well. >> Yeah, no, I've been lucky enough to be with TT for over 11 years now, so being able to work on these games and see how we can do a Lego version of these stories and these worlds and these universes, I'm so privileged to be able to do that and the Lego version is different, so Lego DC Super-Villains is a world of DC, that you won't see anywhere else, because it's our take on it, >> Right. >> it's the developer and working with DC, being able to go, let's make something cool and working really closely with Lego and going, what sets are you making? Let's put those in, that's really cool, so. >> It's awesome, alright, well Phill, thanks for taking a few minutes, congratulations on the game and good luck on October 16th. >> Great, thank you very much, thank you. >> Alright, he's Phill, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from E3 and LA Convention center. Thanks for watching. (dynamic music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back , everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground at the LA Convention Center at E3, 68,000 people filling every hall, hotel, LA Live. The place is crawling. We're excited to be here, and there's a lotta things going on, and we're here with Matt Firor, and he is the game director for ZeniMax Online Studio. >> That is correct. >> And we're launching Summerset. >> Yeah, it launched last week. It's been crazily well received. We're super happy with how it's doing. It's probably some of the best content we've ever done in Elder Scrolls Online. >> So why is it some of the best content? Is it new game play? Is it using new technology? What makes this something different than you've launched before? >> It's basically we do rolling content updates every quarter, and every year, we do one big one, and this is the second big one that we've done. So really this one is set in the home High Elves, so it's kinda really high fantasy, and so it's green, lush environments and big, tall, white castles in towns. So it just feels epic just going into it. And the story is really good, which I'm not gonna spoil. >> [Jeff] Yeah, don't spoil the story. >> But the story is really good. >> So this online game, very different kind of challenges and opportunities than you get in kind of a classic console game. So how do you address some of those things? What are some of the things that you can do that you're excited about that you couldn't do on kind of a traditional console game? What are some of the real challenges that you gotta overcome to deliver on that promise? >> Yeah, well, we started developing this game nearly nine years ago or eight years ago. It's been launched for about four years now. >> [Jeff] Right. >> But it was funny, when we were in development, we were right at the edge of when cloud technology was becoming available, but it wasn't quite there yet when we were making all the important launch decisions, so we built our own private clouds for this. So we have a private cloud in Europe and a private cloud in North America. >> [Jeff] So you run this on your own infrastructure. >> Oh yeah, we run it totally on our own infrastructure. And we've gotten up to 500,000 concurring users on our tech, so it's really robust. And the cool thing is that it hides the server structure from the players, so they just make a decision, do they wanna play in North America or Europe, and then after that, they just log in and play, and they don't worry about servers. >> Wow. So, you know, a lot of the advance in technology has come a lot way, like you said, since you guys have started. So as kinda compute, store and networking continue to increase to infinite capacity and asymptotic leap approach a cost of zero. Not quite there yet. >> We'd make different decisions if we were doing it today. >> Yeah, exactly. But I mean, how do you look at the increase in horsepower, the increase that you have available from an infrastructure point of view working that back into the game design? >> Yeah, I mean, now you can start developing in the cloud, and then when you launch, you just get more of it from whatever cloud provider you're using. We didn't do it. We actually have iron. We actually have hardware in data centers, so. It has its advantages 'cause we're completely in control of everything, you know, but I think now with the technology going the way it is, you just don't need to make the big investment in hardware upfront. You can solve all the problems in a cloud solution and then deploy either privately or publicly. It's much more flexible now than it was, so. Yeah, I've been in the online gaming industry for decades, and obviously, the change has just been amazing, especially in the last three or four years. >> Wait 'til 5G comes out in a couple years. That's gonna take it up a whole nother level of madness. >> My last big game, we had to work on 28-8 modems, so that was a long time ago. >> So I'm curious just in terms of how you prioritize the additional horsepower that you have to work with between better graphics, faster play, latency, story? I mean, obviously, you can't optimize, you can't maximize all those variables. You're always in kind of an optimization play. >> Absolutely. >> So how do you think about those things? >> Well, you know, fortunately, the latest console generation is really PC based. They're DirectX based, so we really have a PC development technology that it is easy to port to Xbox and PlayStation. So they solve a lot of those client frame rate API problems for us, and we do the backend ourselves. Yeah, and every year, new stuff rolls out. There's a new, slightly newer Xbox, slightly newer PlayStation, better PCs, so we just stay up to date with the drivers and make sure that we support whatever crazy hardware is coming out, and it all works. >> Right, but then as you said, at the end of the day, it's about the story, and people will probably put up with a little bit less on the graphics if the story is there. >> Yeah, it used to be gamers played games because of the technology, and now they play games because of the games because no one cares about the technology anymore because you can do almost anything on any device now and now. So it's really important to us as game developers to hide the technology from players and just give 'em a great experience. >> So you've been at this for a while. Just love to get kinda your perspective on E3 specifically, where the show is today, where it's come from, and looking down the road, what do you see? >> Yeah, it's funny, us old-timers, when we go to E3, we all try to figure out how many E3s we've been to, and I actually don't know, but it's gotta be 20. Like I went to the Atlanta ones in the late '90s. So the change, it's funny. Everything's changed, and nothing's changed. Like people are always super excited. There's always gamers that wanna see the newest stuff. That hasn't changed at all, but just the sheer technology difference is, you know, monitors are thin now. They were giant CRTs back then, you know. Just the funny, it's much easier to load in and out 'cause all the technology is much smaller. The booth, you know, there's a lotta open space in this booth. It used to be you needed whole rooms of technology driving everything, and you don't need that anymore. >> And that's before you brought the chillers in, right, to keep the stuff from blowing up. >> Yeah, we still have those. They just don't need to be quite as big now. >> Alright, so Matt, gimme the last word on Summerset. What should people know? Where should they go? What should they jump in on? >> So The Elder Scrolls Online is a phenomenon, right? So Summerset's the latest chapter for it. You can get it on Xbox, PlayStation, or PC. We roll out content every quarter, so we have a dungeon DLC coming up next called Wolfhunter and then a story DLC coming out fourth quarter, and we're working on huge plans for next year. >> Alright, and hang out with 11 million of your closest friends. >> And hang out with a huge community. >> 500,000 of 'em concurrently. >> A huge community which is awesome. We love 'em. >> It's all about community, right? >> Exactly. >> Alright, Matt, well, thanks for taking a couple minutes of your day. >> Thank you. >> Alright, he's Matt, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from E3 at LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE! Covering E3, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff right here at theCUBE. We're at the L.A. Convention Center in E3. It's our first time coming to this convention. It's 68,000 people and every single hall and outside, inside hotels. It's pretty crazy--pretty crazy scene. We're happy to be here. Well, 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. From 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 say close to two decades. >> (Laughing) >> So as you've been in and watched this thing develop, what are your impressions today in 2018 and how it's transformed?-- >> Of the show? You know, 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 online together. Everything was really sold as a disc-based media. So you walked into a store to purchase your disk. Now we have so many digital purchases happening online. We had no player data. We had no way to actually know how far in the game our players were getting and all of this kind of stuff-- >> [Jeff] That's right. You just shipped the disc out, right? You didn't know. >> And now we have all of this telemetry, right? We have all of 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 has so transformed both from the people who are playing within the space, the technologies that people are using, and the growth. I mean, we can also just see-- years ago, it was really much more about a trade show so that the big people who are going to buy the disc can actually come to E3-- >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> Check out our games and place their disc orders. And now it's really much more of a consumer phenomenon as well. >> [Jeff] So I'm curious, we covered a ton of tech shows. Just I've been here before and data and the use of data is a huge part of the digital transformation story. >> Yeah. >> 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 in the way you developed and shipped games? >> It's phenomenal. You know, all of a sudden, you can start to understand who your players are and so if you're gonna do an upsell offer, you know, you can understand, like, "Oh, this person has actually already purchased this type of material." So I'm gonna give him this type of upsell vs this type of upsell. Or, You know, "I see all of my players are really struggling on level three and no one is making it through. What's wrong with level three?" Let's look at changing that up a bit. >> [Jeff] 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. >> [Jeff] Right. >> 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 disc and you just let it go, you can get data but then what are you gonna do about it, right? >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> Your next sequel is a couple of years out and so now, too, with the ability to push updates over the air and all of 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? >> [Jeff] Right. >> 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. >> [Jeff] I'm gonna ask you a philosophical question that I'm always thinking about. In terms of difficulty and the right amount of difficulty, and just kind of generically but engage specifically-- >> Right. >> You want to be difficult enough so people feel challenged and want to continue the journey. >> Yeah. >> But obviously you can't make it so difficult that they just couldn't get through. So I just wondered if you had some-- >> Yeah! >> If there's some best practice or philosophy about what's the right level to 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 so my background is actually in psychology and it was really as someone who has a psychology background who loves to play games. My issues of playing through so many games in our media because we're a very defeatist mentality. If you think about it, we started as an industry as this coin-op 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 quarters-- $60 worth of quarters in the machine in advance >> [Jeff] Right, 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 Cuphead is one of my favorite games but it's really brutally hard but that was very much the intention, you know? >> [Jeff] Right. >> These dark souls and the cupheads in those games. Their genre is that they are super hard-- >> [Jeff] Right. >> 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 principal called scaffolding. So, you know, just like when you're teaching a kid to do something, you're not gonna say "Okay, do this and this and this and this and this." Because that's not fun. >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> So instead, if 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. Cause 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. >> [Jeff] Okay, so before we get to 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 multi-player games, opening up the ability to go from just that consul out into the universe and play lots of other people. Again, how did that really transform the way you guys thought about designing and delivering games? >> I mean, fundamentally, you know, Xbox Live was a apart 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 can bring over that type of infrastructure. And we've seen it really just connect and bring people together in form community, right? And it's so much fun. 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. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So we're doing that over Live by bringing people together and through different platforms and services like Mixer as well where we can bring these communities together. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So it's really, I really think about creating that essence of community. It just makes everything more fun. >> [Jeff] Right. 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 and that's streaming where someone's playing a game for those that aren't familiar and other people are invited to participate with them. >> Yeah. >> Again, another huge shift in the way that people interacting with the game. And more importantly, kind of the social aspects around their playing with the game. >> Yeah and that's what's so cool. So in traditional game streaming platforms too, there's quite a bit of latency so what the gamer-- the streamer's 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 called 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 Mixplay 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. Then you'll see my gamer text "Sweets" 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. >> 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 interacting with the community? >> No because it's all->> streamers for them, It's all about community. Now there are certain competitive sports events and things like that that we do within the e-sports space, and so there might be certain instances in which you don't want to have low latency engaged. But for the most part, streamers want to be having that conversation and are faster- >> than-light technology on Mixer really enables that for them. >> [Jeff] Right. 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 now, you can play on Mixer. That's really what we're talking about with our new Mixplay experiences. So we even have games that are playable only on Mixers 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're 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 Mixplay experiences. We have filters and so you can actually find all of that content. >> [Jeff] Alright. So to get your perspective before we let you->> you've been at this for a while. So as storage and compute and networking, it gets 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, you know, Microsoft actually just had this amazing acquisition of PlayFab technology and I love seeing what they're doing within this space and bringing that into our portfolio of content as well. Because 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 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. >> [Jeff] And to me, the democratization, the thing where you're over and over-- >> Yeah. >> More of data, more of the tools, and more of the ability to do something about it is distributed to a broader audience. Alright Katie, well thank you for-- >> We get more voices with that, right? >> Right, right. >> You 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. >> [Jeff] 17 years ago. Alright Katie, well thanks for taking-- >> Thank you! >> a few minutes out of your day and congrats on all the success. >> Thanks! >> Alright, this is Katie and I'm Jeff. You're watch theCUBE from E3, L.A. Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat, techno music)

why from Los Angeles it's the cube covering III 2018 what do you buy silicon angled media hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the keyword III and LA Convention Center 68,000 people this is ooh it's our first time here we're really excited to be here but the guy to my left has been here for a number of years and we're excited to have monies John EEMA he is the global head of gaming creator for Facebook Tom great to see you great great to be here thanks so first off just kind of impressions of the show 68,000 people that's been awesome and also I don't know if you checked out all the different like booths and stuff around here but it's just been nuts and stuff and I'm really proud about booth that we have behind us was the gaming booth that we've created so inside this booth we got Instagram which is behind me as well as oculus for VR then we've got a stage where it has a crater you can go on there and livestream to Facebook which is cool right so I know Facebook's been pushing a lot of live streaming just coming for general events and different different things but I haven't heard so much about it within the focus of gaming and that's really your yeah yeah yeah so in January we announced the gaming creator pilot program okay just basically our way of sending a signal to the industry that we're gonna invest in games right so we've done two things is one from the product side we built this new thing we call the gaming destination to where you as a viewer or a fan can go there and consume content right to go to FB Gigi calm you can see like you're famous streamer as well as like whether it's like vodka and that type of thing on the second side of the is making it easier for creators to make a living on Facebook so we've been building monetization products as well it's really just working hand-in-hand on them to figure out what are the best products that they need to succeed on our platform right so we've got some of the top streamers like Stone Mountain in darkness and list goes on and on and on and this is globally - so right now Facebook sits in a pretty unique position because obviously you have to base the basic platform which is giant I don't know what the current publisher amount of people 2.2 billion users how many 2.2 billion Wow like a third of the way of the entire world a little bit more basically then also you have a lot of other brands I know everybody thinks of oculus and Facebook is obviously really play into the VR space yeah you've got Instagram you've got a bunch of other prints not just oculus so you're able to leverage it yeah so at Facebook we give just like you're saying we've got oculus for VR we've got Instagram we also have whatsapp which is a communication app that's right we have messenger as well so we've got like a family of sweet apps which is cool and we know just from like a creative perspective that they probably use maybe one or all right so how do we leverage that to make it easier for them to do the things that they love to do right right and how does how do those map back into gaming is it different type of distribution is a different type of way to contact people when you're writing people how do you integrate all these different platforms into kind of a single experience from the streaming person yeah so if you talk about like with oculus right you can play games on there you can also stream for that which is cool we know gamers on Instagram like to post you know gaming content whether it's like pictures of that type of thing so yeah that concert there and then like you know if you're looking like messenger on whatsapp you know if you're a gamer you probably use that to communicate with your friends hey let's play overwatch let's play fortnight or that type of thing same right so you guys obviously Facebook is big into date everybody knows that you guys use day the big data's taken over the whole world but it's a pretty interesting tool that you can use to change it the experience yeah help the experience so how are you using you know kind of data and big bandwidth and big store big compute to deliver a better gaming experience to the fans yeah so we're very strategic with our approach we want to make sure that it's right for the creators you know as we know you know how we position that is just basically working hand and hand and hand with devs as well as traders really figure out one of the best ways that we can make them bigger on our platform we know from our creator standpoint the biggest thing that they complain about is hey I want to grow right like I've been streaming for X amount of years I'm creating content how do I grow the cool thing with Facebook as you know when you consume content is usually through news feed right or if one of your friends shares that content so we've seen a lot of creators come on board and have really early sick sick sick success with that in terms of like sharing content or asking their you know they're fans when they're on the stream like hey you know I'm live right now share this content with your friends right then they get an exposure right which helps them grow so there's all these different ways that we can help them we're still learning right well you know we just launched in January but we got a long way to go but we're seeing a lot of trajectories it's just going up which is great so that's a big platform so yeah so that's it kind of what are some of your priorities if we come back a year from now and talk what are some of your priorities for the next 12 months to help Jesus thing yeah so right now you know we've rolled out stars which is like one form of monetization which is essentially like Tippi oK we've also got subscriptions so you can subscribe to a creator so we're rolling that out soon like in the Alpha stages right now you know you'll see the program containing to roll out more globally as well and then with FB GGG our gaming destinations only gonna get you to start seeing more content in and there as well right you also see us working with Antrim and Pape and I'm sorry an arc oculus more as well so you know we just got a lot of things that were up to but it's exciting keep you busy very much all right all right we'll we'll keep an eye on it and look forward to catching up a year from today awesome okay thank you all right he's drawing on Jeff you're watching the queue from e3 in Los Angeles thanks for watching thanks [Music]

>> [Narrator] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're actually in the Warner Brothers games booth. This humongous booth, we're kind of in the inner sanctum here at E3 in the LA Convention Center. Lot of stuff going on with Warner Brother Games. A lot of really cool combinations of brands and games and movies. But this is a very special one, Hitman 2. We're all excited to be here and learn more about it with Jacob Mikkelsen. He's actually the game director for IO Interactive. Jacob, great to see you. >> Oh, thank you. >> So let's just get to the basics. First off, when is Hitman 2 coming out? What do people need to know, we'll get that out of the way, and then we'll get into it. >> Hitman 2 is out November 13. And if you pre-order now, you have a special pre-order bonus where you get access to a new game mode called Sniper Assassin, which is a sniper-only mission. And then for the first time in Hitman history, we also have a co-op mode where you can snipe alongside a friend, into the mission and create all sorts of havoc. It's still deeply founded in the roots of the game's DNA, where it's all about getting away with the sniping without anyone noticing that you're there. So it has a very, very strong puzzle element to it. So it's about peeling off the layers of an onion, without anyone noticing you're there. >> So you talked a little bit before we turned on the cameras about the freedom that a player gets, not like in a traditional game, where they can can choose a lot of different options of how they're gonna do the mission. So how do you guys come up with that? How is that all determined? And how do you actually still keep the game true to the mission? >> Well, the thing is that as you say, it's very much, we call that hyper-detailed sandbox. So when you play a Hitman mission, we don't give you a linear path through the level that you follow. We give you an open sandbox where you have to figure out how do you want to approach this mission. And in the case of the mission we're showing here at E3, it's a race event in Miami. And your target is one of the race drivers, actually. That's our half of the mission. And she's roaming around the track. So the whole thing in the demo today is like, "Okay, so how do you get close to Sierra's car?" And then in order to do that, then you need to obtain disguises, which is a key element in the Hitman franchise, that you can disguise as the characters you meet in the scene. So you can knock them out and become, take their uniforms on, and then infiltrate the areas. Some guards are more suspicious of you than others, so you have to mingle your way through the level. So it's very much up to you if you want to sneak in and try not to do the disguise stuff, or you can go for the disguise stuff and then make your way. And then the game adapts, in a way, because we have to foresee all these different permutations of play. So there's a lot of things you can do in the game, in terms of which way you take and how you get there. >> So I'm just curious from a game development point of view, in terms of building in difficulty, 'cause you want to have enough difficulties that it's a challenge and people feel satisfaction in rising to the challenge, but clearly you could make it so they just got wiped out every time. You could make it an impossible game. So how do you find that balance? How do you tune that balance? What are some of the things you think about when you're trying to get in degree of difficulty? >> Well, that's a really, how difficult should it be, that's a really hard question to answer in a Hitman game, because of the many ways that the players can do it. So we have an initial idea about where we want to challenge the players and where we want to give them a bit more leash where they can just roam around. But once you get a new disguise, then it's a different scenario. And we have to account for that in our design. So we do a lot of iterations on this. Okay, so if I went to the right and went this way in through the level but there was no resistance, I didn't have to do anything, I could just walk straight in the main door, then we have to go back to the drawing board and then jiggle around the characters, maybe add some new ones, remove some, and change the amount of guards, so the player will have challenges no matter how they approach it. But in the end, the crazy thing is, no matter how hard we make it or how challenging we make it, they will always find crazy ways of bypassing the systems and bending the rules of the game so much. And that's what makes Hitman great, is that you can do all of these things. Just, okay, can I do this? Yes, and you go and try it, and maybe it worked out, maybe it was not a good idea in the end. But it's very much up to you, as the player, to figure out how you want to be creative in this. >> So we're doing this series as part of the Western Digital data makes possible. And data is such a bit part of what you guys do. And really, as gaming has moved off of the pure console into the connected world, gives you an opportunity as a developer to see really, how are people interacting with the game? How are they making decisions? So how did you guys look at the analytics? You must be doing more and more and more analytics on all these various movements and potential options that they have. >> We have systems in place to figure out where people get spotted, so we can actually see that. The tricky part about metrics is that during development, there's actually not that many people playing the game besides ourselves. So we rely heavily on user testing, where we subdue people to the, we place people in front of the game in very early stages, to see if our core ideas are working. And then based on that, we then look at video footage, interviews, and all that stuff. That feeds back into the design loop of the process. >> And have you mapped every potential option, or are you using AI? You just used the example, some guy's too smart, we really need to have more guards for this guy. Is there AI and intelligence in the game that you can make little fine-tuned adjustments along the path as people actually play the game? 'Cause you're gonna have a whole lot more data by December first than you have today. >> Precisely, the amount of data we get is pretty wild in the end. But the core of the game, the characters are AI-driven. They have their own plans that they want to do. And the way it works is that we then build stories on top of this core AI. So the designers, they have freedom to create custom moments. But at some point when things go in the fence for the player, you get spotted or someone sees through your disguise, then the AI takes over. And I dare to say that we have some of the most complex AI systems in the industry. We go to great lengths to have them be very living and communicating a lot. So if one guy finds a body, then it's one situation. If he has a friend, then they begin to talk about what they've just experienced. And they work together to figure out what is actually going on. So there's a very high level of AI running behind the scenes in the Hitman game. >> Now, do you do that at the level of the characters? So it's really how a character responds to different stimuli-- >> Yes. >> Versus just a generic overlay for the whole game? >> Well, it's a mix. Some of them are different kinds of characters, guards or civilians, and they have different behaviors, based on what happens. But each character is more or less himself. And then he is not hive-mind controlled. It is a lot of agents that are running around in the world, trying to figure out what this player's up to, creating havoc behind the scenes. So it's a lot of fun to work with it, because it's also so unpredictable. And then all of a sudden, something happens that you didn't expect. >> Right, 'cause you can't possibly scenario every potential outcome, right? >> Exactly, we have some control, but it's systemically based. So we kind of, the way we normally say it is, we encourage the characters to do things. And then they might do it. For instance, you and I having an interview right now, that requires that you're standing in your spot and I'm standing in my spot. If I were to create that scene in the game, then there is a certain chance that one of us is lying in a dumpster somewhere and never shows up for the interview. And then the next question is, okay, so what do you do? So we have to construct the game in a way so that you won't break down and stop here. I don't know if you remember in season one of Westworld, if you've seen that? >> I have seen season one. I haven't caught up on season two yet, but yeah, season one. >> I haven't seen season two yet. But in season one, there's this scene where there's a bonfire scene that breaks down, where all the characters just stop. And then it turns out that the guy who went for firewood has been killed. So he never returned with the firewood, and thereby, the entire bonfire scene just grinds to a halt. >> [Jeff] Just freezes. >> That is Hitman gave development in a nutshell. Then we have a bug when that thing happens. And that can happen during development, we do that stuff. >> It's gotta be so cool, to discover how people actually work their way through the game. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause the other thing I think it's interesting that you guys always have to balance is you have narrative, you want to have a narrative. You have a story, you have characters, and a look and feel. At the same time, you have individual operators, the players, that bring in their own point of view to the game. So how do you balance? When does one take priority to the other? How do you keep it on that narrative flow? >> It's been one of these returning challenges of making a Hitman game. And with the previous game, we narrowed in on, okay, so how do we do this? So we have a main story that is told outside the levels, which the levels don't directly affect. So the overall main arc and storyline is set. But what happens in the levels stays in the levels, so to speak. So in season one, we actually managed to go through the main story with some characters left alive, which is good. Because now in the second, in Hitman 2, we're going to get closer to them. And the story evolves around Agent 47, and we get a glimpse into his past, which is a bit of some things we haven't told yet. So that's going to be very exciting to see that, as well. >> Right, well Jacob, thanks for spending a few minutes. And good luck with the launch, congrats on the new product. >> Thank you very much, nice talking to you. >> He's Jacob, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. We're in the Warner Brothers games booth at E3, LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hey, welcome back here, we're ready, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3, it's amazing. It's like 68,000 people. They're in every single hall, they're out in the streets, they're in the hotels, they're at LA Live, they're all over the place, for really the biggest gaming conference I think in the world, and we're excited to have our next guest, he's Dana Jan, he's a design director for Ready at Dawn, and you just introduced a new game, right? Great to see ya. >> Thank you very much for having me. Yes, that's true. We just announced Echo Combat last year in October, and today we're showing off on the floor. >> Private beta still or are you going to public beta you said soon? >> Yeah, we just had a closed beta actually. We're moving into open beta, and that's gonna be June 21st. >> Right, pretty amazing though, you guys have not been around that long, and this is already your third game. >> Well, the studio's been around for a while, so we've been making games for a long time. This is actually kind of a new foray for us though going into VR. We released a game called Lone Echo last year, and Echo Arena was a multi-player mode that we also launched simultaneously with Lone Echo, so yeah, this game is new and fresh, but it's, we've been developing VR now for a little over two years. >> Right, so from a design perspective in the VR space, what is some of the special considerations you have to be thinking about, either challenges and opportunities? >> Yeah, I mean some of the challenges are obviously, performance is a big deal for us. The game has to run at 90 frames per second on Oculus per eye, so that's rendering essentially like two different-- >> [Jeff] 90 frames per eye? >> Yeah, it's really fast. You have to render 90 frames per second, otherwise it gets really uncomfortable for the user, so we optimize a lot of our experiences. And it's even like, some of the ideas that we have, we have to figure out how to make them viable at that frame rate. And we have a lot of high-fidelity body movement going on in Lone Echo, Echo Arena, and now Echo Combat. We do a lot of IK work to kind of represent a full body avatar that honors essentially head, hands, and because our game takes place in zero G, we have this floating body that has to convincingly flow behind you wherever you go. >> [Jeff] Right >> Yeah, it's actually, it's a pretty big challenge for us as both designers, developers, and just on a technical standpoint to get all that to kind of harmoniously work together. >> Right, so other thing, just in terms of the game play inside VR, 'cause the other thing is right, you don't necessarily control which direction they're looking. I mean, how do you kind of direct the player to where you want them to look, and where you want them to participate? >> That's a great question. Actually, so part of the beauty of VR, is we try to do some of that like you would for a conventional game, trying to use lighting, trying to basically design environments with things, cues, details that would maybe help people along, but ultimately you're as free as you are, just like right now you and I, we can look all over the place. >> [Jeff] Right. >> We don't really want to restrict that. Part of the beauty of VR is that ultimate freedom. If you wanna of kind of go, look in that little corner underneath you for the whole game, you really can, and we try to as much as possible make that something that's beneficial too. We try to code every little bit of our world with something that's interesting to find, discover, so. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, it's freedom of movement, freedom of wherever you wanna be, whatever you wanna do. >> Right, so we're doing this as part of the Western Digital data makes possible program, and really as we get closer and closer to infinite store, infinite compute, infinite networking, you just said you've got designs, and you've got ideas that even today you can't necessarily put into place. So as you look forward for the opportunities when all these things are basically gonna be close to infinite, at close to zero cost, what are some of the things that excite you? Where do you see kind of using that power to do a better job, or different job in your storytelling? >> Yeah, I mean the horsepower that you need to run these kind of games is actually pretty staggering. We compute a lot of stuff on the GPUs, the CPUs, we have a lot of physics-oriented things in the game because VR is really big into like letting you kind of touch everything, and manipulate stuff, and it doesn't feel like you're really somewhere, you don't feel present unless you can actually interact with the environments. And for that we have to basically create tons, and tons, and tons of objects, we have physics constraints and things that are costly for the computation cycles. And then there's like memory issues. We have streaming that we have to kind of get better at. These worlds are very large, and so to store the things that you're gonna see and do, takes a lot of actual hard drive space, and the speed at which we can load and unload things, is a critical factor in terms of unlocking the freedom of your experience. >> Right, so when you get more horsepower, a new processor comes out, and you get more memory, whatever, I mean do you already have stuff keyed up where you want to use that? Is it more a realistic nature of the graphics, is it speed, I mean what are some of the priorities that you would immediately apply if you had some more horsepower tomorrow? >> Yeah, certainly I mean there are things that we absolutely know about like there's texture resolution, there's like I said, there's physics objects, there are just things that we end up going, that's too costly to do, we're gonna have to maybe stop doing that or cut back on it, or scope back. We do look at creating settings and things where our users who actually have more high-end machines, to actually turn that stuff back on, but I think every time we kind of go into another design kind of exercise and sort of looking at what do we want to do in VR, I think we're surprised at what does it take to actually accomplish it. And so I'm not sure I know right now fully what we're gonna start getting into and what kind of hardware that might require, but every day's just a different challenge, and that's part of the excitement of working in VR. >> Right, right and I was gonna say and also obviously the trade-offs. I mean you could go bananas on the texture, but at some point is it the law of diminishing returns in terms of the storytelling, in terms of the experience 'cause you can't optimize across all the potential variables. >> Yeah, no, you have to pick and choose, and you're right, like basically we look at what are our goals, what are we trying to get out of this experience, what do we want the user to really get out of it? And then we have to compromise. We have to make some of those smart choices. But I do think at some point, we'll have to make less compromises as the technology gets better, and certainly things like resolution, if the headsets have higher resolution then it makes sense to put more resolution into the textures because now you can actually see it, and so we kind of hit that synergy where both of those are unlocked, it'll never be infinite obviously, but to where they're more in sync with each other, maybe we can make that compromise now, but maybe in the future we won't. >> Yeah, the headset's a whole 'nother bucket of technology. >> It is yeah. >> That you guys have to account. >> But they're awesome I mean, yeah we're doing, I think it's really impressive to me how far we've come with the headset technology. And I think in the next few years, we're just gonna see even crazier advances. So I'm really excited about that. >> Not just slap on the phone in the cardboard box, like a couple years ago. Here's your VR box. >> I know, right? That's not that long ago if you think about it really. >> All right, Dana, well give a shout out, what's the date for the public beta so people know where to go and how to get involved. >> Yeah, our open beta's gonna be starting June 21st. They can sign up on oculus.com. And yeah, we're looking forward to people getting in there and seeing what their impressions are, and taking the feedback. >> All right, well, Dana, thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by. >> Great, thank you very much. >> All right, he's Dana, and I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube from E3 at the LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE! Covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back here everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Los Angeles Convention Center with 68,000 of our closest friends. It's E3, it's the biggest industry event in gaming and we're pretty psyched to be here. It's our first time, but our next guest has been comin', I think he said for like 19 years. So we're really excited to invite Chase to the set. PR Director from Twitch. Chase, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you, too, and you've oversold my time here. It's actually only been 18 years. >> 18 years, that's 'cause you missed one, I think, right? >> Yeah, I took a break. It was during one of the slower years and then I came back into the fold. >> So I'd just love to get your perspective with kinda looking back at how the industry has changed, how the event has changed, and how gaming ecosystem has changed, and the way people interact with these things. >> Yeah, it's interesting. E3 has definitely gone through almost a roller coaster in terms of what it's like on the show floor. My first year in '99, I was working with the PR Team for the Sega Dreamcast launch and we had a full stage show that every other hour we'd have Ulala from Space Channel 5. She would come out on stage and with a full dance troupe and it would be like a vacuum. All of the attendees in E3 would all be sucked into our booth and then it would dissipate after that. But every two hours it was like the tidal wave comes crashing back in. Every other hour we had in-line skaters and graffiti artists for for Jet Grind Radio. We had a second floor where local broadcast crews could come and film the whole E3 'cause there's so much happening. And everywhere you went, it was a bombast of noise. And then, in the years that followed, booths started getting more smaller, not because of the scope of the show, but because they were trying to make it more industry-friendly, less of a carnival ride and less of a competition of brands trying to outdo each other. But more of let's make this more about the games than the booth babes and those things. But then slowly, it started building back up and it's gone through peaks and valleys. So it's definitely been interesting to watch. >> [Jeff] Right. >> And we were talking earlier about, you know, what are some of the biggest changes I've seen. And, from the Twitch perspective, it's seeing the validation of content creators grow. You know, live streaming is a fairly new aspect to the convention space, to the convention era. I mean, obviously we've been doing it for about a half decade or so, but in terms of the validity of the creators themselves, like in the past, they weren't treated as media, you wouldn't see 'em on preregistration lists. Now we have hundreds here at E3, you know, where every year it doubles, the amount of content creators. And it's not just because of E3 saying, oh they're as relevant as traditional media if not more so, but all the brands are leveraging them. So what you'll find is, a lot of live stream setups from booths. >> People are streaming their contents. When they're doing their press conferences, they bring a lot of content creators in, you know, put 'em in the front row. You know, one thing I love about the content creator era is that there's people like me who, I'm a hard-core gamer, but I've been doing this for so long that, even if I see a game I love, I don't jump out of my seat goin', oh my gosh, they've done it. But when you have all these new gamers who might've been gaming for a while, getting that treatment that I did traditionally, they're so vibrant about it, there's so much more excitement. And that's why E3 is so important, but it's definitely so for the content creators who traditional media might feel threatened by. But I love seeing the energy they bring to the space. >> It's such an interesting twist on the content creators. 'Cause the developers have always been, you know, in high demand, they've always been rock stars. You want to get people developing on your platform, but the content creators is a very different kind of flavor of that, where now people are sharing their experience and they're becoming like little mini rock stars in their own voice and the way that they interact with these games, which is really an adjunct to the actual gameplay itself. So it has been a pretty interesting growth and you guys pioneered it early on. But one of the other things I think is pretty interesting in the content creator space, is the monetization. Can these people make living, and we know that you can't really do it on advertising, there's really not that much advertising. But you guys have pioneered a ton of kind of direct monetization options and opportunities to help these people actually make money while they're creating this great content. >> Yeah, so content creators on Twitch, you know, people stream for a number of reason. Some do it for the attention, some do it for the money, and some do it for fame, well they do it for the love, like the attention, to get famous, or they do it for the money. And so, you know, it terms of monetization, we want to help support those who are trying to do it for a career. And so, at Twitch we have the broadest means of ways to monetize, but also the lowest barrier of entry to take advantage of them. And so what I mean by that is that we have what's called our partner program. And that's where all the best streamers want to be. 'Cause that has the most monetization options. But we also recently introduced what we call our affiliate program, which is a stepping stone to partnership. And while it doesn't have all the whistles and bells of being a partner, it does have ways to monetize so they can start making a living as well. And when I talk about having the most means to monetize, we have a whole laundry list of ways. We have revenue share from advertising, we have the ability to offer subscriptions to your viewers, and while every channel is free to watch, with subscriptions you can offer special perks to your viewers. You give them special emotes, you make it so that chat is only for subscribers, there's a lot of perks you can give your subscribers. And our subscribers, by the way, they know that they're supporting you and they're all frequently proud to do so. They enjoy supporting their kind of careers 'cause they know if they didn't support you, you might not be streaming and they love playing a role in keeping their favorite creators around. We have a program called Cheering with Bits. And it's a little complicated to always explain, but it's where we have Bits, which is a virtual good, and with these goods, you put them the into chat, you purchase these Bits, you put them in the chat, and they become these animated emotes. And the more you put in, the bigger the emotes get and the more animated they get. So the creator can see who their biggest fans are. And that's another way they can monetize. We have a really successful program in partnership with Amazon called Twitch Prime. Twitch Prime is a benefit of Amazon Prime. So if you have Amazon Prime, all you have to do is connect it to your Twitch account and you can start taking advantage of all these great perks. >> [Jeff] I haven't done that yet. >> Yeah, and the one that benefits our Twitch Prime members, Amazon Prime members, both of 'em, the most is that you get a free 30 day subscription to any content creator of your choice. And so, the way that helps is it's the same as if somebody were to go hit the Sub button on that channel directly. And so we've seen huge amount of revenue being generated by our creators just from people using their free 30 day subscription. >> Well, that's great. It's just interesting to me, that before to pay content creators in the old media model, they create their content, they sell advertising, you buy some Tide, Tide gives some money to ABC, they give it to the content creator. But this has really opened this whole democratization of this kind of this direct support, if you will, of the type of content that you're interested in without really going through the middle man. With all these micro-payments and as you said, all these kind of fun and different options to compensate for 'em, to enable just this massive explosion of these creator types. >> Right, but you also have the advertisers... >> [Jeff] You still have the advertisers. >> But what's they're doing is that, our creators are getting a lot of sponsorship opportunities, they're being part of influencer programs. We actually have a full advertising sales team who works with brands to do what we call custom solutions, which is where they will, instead of just run an ad on a channel, they will do like an activation. For example, we work with Totino's for their pizza rolls, where we create a bucking couch. So we had a couch like a buffalo, there was a content creator playing a video game on it, and the people in chat could control it by saying up, down, up, down, or right, left, and they would move the couch. >> [Jeff] Tryin' to throw 'em off the couch. >> Because it was very in-line with what our community enjoys, they like the personality involved in it, they like being able to play a part in it, so those types of custom activations are something that really resonate with our community and by default, they resonate with brands. And there are things you can actually only do on Twitch. We sort of pioneered this new field of advertising. >> Interesting. So, as we look down the road, and I'll let you go back, I know you're super busy and I really appreciate you takin' a few minutes. You look at the future right, we see these tremendous booths that are here. Fabulous graphics, VR comin' down the pike, we're getting ton more CPU, and graphical chips are all over the place. So basically, power and internet and 5G's coming, mobility's gonna be way, way faster. Where do you see it going? What are some of the things that, in your vision, as you sat around, you would love to be able to do, but just haven't been able to? Where do you see some of these kinda new visions being enabled by some of this new leading-edge technology? >> Well, I can speak in terms of where we see Twitch going, which is, we recently introduced a product called extensions. And what extensions are, they're created by outside developers and what they are is, they add interactive functionality to broadcasters' channel pages. Whether it's a widget underneath the screen or it's an overlay that goes on top of it. And with these overlays, it's creating a more interactive experience for the viewers, and that's where we see the future of gaming going, which is that, it's not a sit-back experience, it's a lean forward. For example, if you're playing Hearthstone, there's a Hearthstone extension where you could literally click on the screen and see what cards the person's holding. And you know, we worked with G League, which is that live MBA minor league system >> [Jeff] Right, right, no longer the D League, now the G League (laughs). >> Yeah, and so you could actually click on the player or find stats on the players who are on the court, you could find stats on the league. Where also with extensions you could do leaderboards, you can do polls, you can do mini-games. It's actually unlimited, the amount of creative ideas. You could have viewers vote during an award show on what games they think are gonna win. We did this with the game awards last year, where viewers would vote on what games they thought were going to win and then the game awards put a leaderboard to show which communities got it closest. >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> So there's so much with it and that's where we're putting a lot of attention on. So extensions is definitely gonna be one of the futures for spectators. >> Right, and just overlaying all these different things over that baseline content, over that baseline creator. >> Yeah. >> All right Chase, well thanks for takin' a few minutes. I was gonna bring you a 20th anniversary tee shirt next year, but you got two more to go (laughs). >> There ya go, I'll have to wait. >> All right. He's Chase, I'm Jeff. We are at the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3. Thanks for watchin'.