(ethereal music) >> Good morning, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We are live in Las Vegas at Caesar's Forum, looking forward to an action-packed day here on theCUBE. Our first guest joins us, Bill Stratton, the global industry lead, media, entertainment and advertising at Snowflake. Bill, great to have you on the program talking about industry specifics. >> Glad to be here, excited to have a conversation. >> Yeah, the media and entertainment industry has been keeping a lot of us alive the last couple of years, probably more of a dependence on it than we've seen stuck at home. Talk to us about the data culture in the media, entertainment and advertising landscape, how is data being used today? >> Sure. Well, let's start with what you just mentioned, these last couple of years, I think, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of trends and impact to the media industry. I think there were some things happening prior to COVID, right? Streaming services were starting to accelerate. And obviously, Netflix was an early mover. Disney launched their streaming service right before the pandemic, Disney+, with ESPN+ as well. I think then, as the pandemic occurred these last two years, the acceleration of consumers' habits, obviously, of not just unbundling their cable subscription, but then choosing, you know, what services they want to subscribe to, right? I mean, I think we all sort of grew up in this era of, okay, the bundle was the bundle, you had sports, you had news, you had entertainment, whether you watched the channel or not, you had the bundle. And what the pandemic has accelerated is what I call, and I think a lot of folks call, the golden age of content. And really, the golden age of content is about the consumer. They're in control now, they pick and choose what services they want, what they watch, when they watch it. And I think that has extremely, sort of accelerated this adoption on the consumer side, and then it's creating this data ecosystem, as a result of companies like Disney having a direct-to-consumer relationship for the first time. It used to be a Disney or an NBC was a wholesaler, and the cable or satellite company had the consumer data and relationship. Now, the companies that are producing the content have the data and the consumer relationships. It's a fascinating time. >> And they're still coming over the top on the Telco networks, right? >> Absolutely right. >> Telco's playing in this game? >> Yeah, Telco is, I think what the interesting dynamic with Telco is, how do you bundle access, high speed, everybody still needs high speed at their home, with content? And so I think it's a similar bundle, but it takes on a different characteristic, because the cable and Telcos are not taking the content risk. AT&T sold Warner Media recently, and I think they looked at it and said, we're going to stay with the infrastructure, let somebody else do the content. >> And I think I heard, did I hear this right the other day, that Roku is now getting into the content business? >> Roku is getting into it. And they were early mover, right? They said the TVs aren't, the operating system in the television is not changing fast enough for content. So their dongle that you would slide into a TV was a great way to get content on connected televisions, which is the fastest growing platform. >> I was going to say, what are the economics like in this business? Because the bundles were sort of a limiting factor, in terms of the TAM. >> Yeah. >> And now, we get great content, all right, to watch "Better Call Saul", I have to get AMC+ or whatever. >> You know, your comment, your question about the economics and the TAM is an interesting one, because I think we're still working through it. One of the things, I think, that's coming to the forefront is that you have to have a subscription revenue stream. Okay? Netflix had a subscription revenue stream for the last six, eight, 10 years, significantly, but I think you even see with Netflix that they have to go to a second revenue model, which is going to be an ad-supported model, right? We see it in the press these last couple days with Reid Hastings. So I think you're going to see, obviously subscription, obviously ad-supported, but the biggest thing, back to the consumer, is that the consumer's not going to sit through two minutes of advertising to watch a 22 minute show. >> Dave: No way. >> Right? So what's then going to happen is that the content companies want to know what's relevant to you, in terms of advertising. So if I have relevancy in my ad experience, then it doesn't quite feel, it's not intrusive, and it's relevant to my experience. >> And the other vector in the TAM, just one last follow-up, is you see Amazon, with Prime, going consumption. >> Bill: That's right. >> You get it with Prime, it's sort of there, and the movies aren't the best in the world, but you can buy pretty much any movie you want on a consumption basis. >> Yeah. Just to your last quick point, there is, we saw last week, the Boston Red Sox are bundling tickets, season tickets, with a subscription to their streaming service. >> NESN+, I think it is, yeah. So just like Prime, NESN+- >> And it's like 30 bucks a month. >> -just like Prime bundling with your delivery service, you're going to start to see all kinds of bundles happen. >> Dave: Interesting. >> Man, the sky is the limit, it's like it just keeps going and proliferating. >> Bill: It does. >> You talk about, on the ad side for a second, you mentioned the relevance, and we expect that as consumers, we're so demanding, (clears throat) excuse me, we don't have the patience, one of the things I think that was in short supply during COVID, and probably still is, is patience. >> That's right. >> I think with all of us, but we expect that brands know us enough to surf up the content that they think we watched, we watched "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", don't show me other things that aren't relevant to the patterns I've been showing you, the content creators have to adapt quickly to the rising and changing demands of the consumer. >> That's right. Some people even think, as you go forward and consumers have this expectation, like you just mentioned, that brands not only need to understand their own view of the consumer, and this is going to come into the Snowflake points that we talk about in a minute, but the larger view that a brand has about a consumer, not just their own view, but how they consume content, where they consume it, what other brands they even like, that all builds that picture of making it relevant for the consumer and viewer. >> Where does privacy come into the mix? So we want it to be relevant and personalized in a non-creepy way. Talk to us about the data clean rooms that Snowflake launched, >> Bill: That's right. >> and how is that facilitating from a PII perspective, or is it? >> Yeah. Great question. So I think the other major development, in addition to the pandemic, driving people watching all these shows is the fact that privacy legislation is increasing. So we started with California with the CCPA, we had GDPR in Europe, and what we're starting to see is state by state roll out different privacy legislations. At some point, it may be true that we have a federal privacy legislation, and there are some bills that are working through the legislature right now. Hard to tell what's going to happen. But to your question, the importance of privacy, and respecting privacy, is exactly happening at the same time that media companies and publishers need to piece together all the viewing habits that you have. You've probably watched, already this morning, on your PC, on your phone, and in order to bring that experience together a media company has to be able to tie that together, right? Collaborate. So you have collaboration on one side, and then you have privacy on the other, and they're not necessarily, normally, go together, Right? They're opposing forces. So now though, with Snowflake, and our data clean room, we like to call it a data collaboration platform, okay? It's not really what a data warehouse function traditionally has been, right? So if I can take data collaboration, and our clean room, what it does is it brings privacy controls to the participants. So if I'm an advertiser, and I'm a publisher, and I want to collaborate to create an advertising campaign, they both can design how they want to do that privacy-based collaboration, Because it's interesting, one company might have a different perspective of privacy, on a risk profile, than another company. So it's very hard to say one size is going to fit all. So what we at Snowflake do, with our infrastructure, is let you design how you create your own clean room. >> Is that a differentiator for Snowflake, the clean rooms? >> It's absolutely a very big differentiator. Two reasons, or probably two, three reasons, really. One is, it's cross cloud. So all the advertisers aren't going to be in the same cloud, all the publishers aren't going to be in the same cloud. One big differentiator there. Second big differentiator is, we want to be able to bring applications to the data, so our clean room can enable you to create measurement against an ad campaign without moving your data. So bringing measurement to the data, versus sending data to applications then improves the privacy. And then the third one is, frankly, our pricing model. You only pay for Snowflake what you use. So in the advertising world, there's what's called an ad tech tax, there is no ad tech tax for Snowflake, because we're simply a pay-as-you-go service. So it's a very interesting dynamic. >> So what's that stack look like, in your world? So I've pulled up Frank's chart, I took a picture of his, he's called it the new, modern data stack, I think he called it, but it had infrastructure in the bottom, okay, that's AWS, Google, Azure, and then a lot of you, live data, that would be the media data cloud, the workload execution, the specific workload here is media and entertainment, and then application development, that's a new layer of value that you're bringing in, marketplace, which is the whole ecosystem, and then monetization comes from building on top. >> Bill: Yes. >> So I got AWS in there, and other clouds, you got a big chunk of that, where do your customers add value on top of that? >> Yeah. So the way you described it, I think, with Frank's point, is right on. You have the infrastructure. We know that a lot of advertisers, for example, aren't going to use Amazon, because the retailer competes with Amazon, So they want to might be in Google or Azure. And then sort of as you go up the stack, for the data layer that is Snowflake, especially what we call first-party data, is sitting in that Snowflake environment, right? But that Snowflake environment is a distributed environment, so a Disney, who was on stage with me yesterday, she talked about, Jaya talked about their first-party datas in Snowflake, their advertisers' datas in their own Snowflake account, in their own infrastructure. And then what's interesting is is that application layer is coming to the data, and so what we're really seeing is an acceleration of companies building that application natively on Snowflake to do measurement, to do targeting, to do activation. And so, that growth of that final application layer is what we're seeing as the acceleration in the stack. >> So the more data that's in that massive distributed data cloud, the more value your customers can get out of it. And I would imagine you're just looking to tick things off that where customers are going outside of the Snowflake data cloud, let's attack that so they don't have to. >> Yeah, I think these partners, (clears throat) excuse me, and customers, it's an interesting dynamic, because they're customers of ours. But now, because anybody who is already in Snowflake can be their customer, then they're becoming our partner. So it's an interesting dynamic, because we're bringing advertisers to a Disney or an NBCU, because they already have their data in Snowflake. So the network effect that's getting created because of this layer that's being built is accelerated. >> In 2013, right after the second reinvent, I wrote a piece called "How to Compete with the Amazon Gorilla." And it seemed to us pretty obvious at the time, you're not going to win an infrastructure again, you got to build on top of it, you got to build ecosystems within industries, and the data, the connection points, that network effect that you just talked about, it's actually quite thrilling to see you guys building that. >> Well, and I think you know this too, I mean, Amazon's a great partner of ours as well, right? So they're part of our media data cloud, as Amazon, right? So we're making it easier and easier for companies to be able to spin up a clean room in places like AWS, so that they get the privacy controls and the governance that's required as well. >> What do you advise to, say, the next generation of media and advertising companies who may be really early in the data journey? Obviously, there's competition right here in the rear view mirror, but we've seen services that launch and fail, what do you advise to those folks that maybe are early in the journey and how can Snowflake help them accelerate that to be able to launch services they can monetize, and get those consumers watching? >> I think the first thing for a lot of these brands is that they need to really own their data. And what I mean by that is, they need to understand the consumer relationship that they have, they need to take the privacy and the governance very seriously, and they need to start building that muscle. It's almost, it's a routine and a muscle that they just need to continue to kind of build up, because if you think about it, a media company spends two, three hours a day with their customer. You might watch two hours of a streaming show, but how much time do you spend with a single brand a day? Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 10 seconds, right? And so, their need to build the muscle, to be able to collect the data in a privacy-compliant way, build the intelligence off of that, and then leverage the intelligence. We talked about it a few days ago, and you look at a retailer, as a really good example, a retailer is using Snowflake and the retail data cloud to optimize their supply chain. Okay? But their supply chain extends beyond their own infrastructure to the advertising and marketing community, because if I can't predict demand, how do I then connect it to my supply chain? So our media data cloud is helping retailers and consumer product goods companies actually drive demand into their reconstructed supply chain. So they both work together. >> So you have a big focus, obviously, on the monetization piece, of course, that's a great place to start. Where do you see the media data cloud going? >> Yeah. I think we'll start to expand beyond advertising and beyond marketing. There's really important sub-segments of media. Gaming is one. You talk about the pandemic and teenagers playing games on their phones. So we'll have an emphasis around gaming. We'll have an emphasis in sports. Sports is going through a big change in an ecosystem. And there's a big opportunity to connect the dots in those ecosystems as well. And then I think, to what we were just talking about, I think connecting commerce and media is a very important area. And I think the two are still very loosely connected today. It used to be, could I buy the Jennifer Aniston sweater from "Friends", right? That was always the analogy. Now, media and social media, and TikTok and everything else, are combining media and commerce very closely. So I think we'll start to see more focus around that as well. So that adds to your monetization. >> Right, right. And you can NFT that. (Lisa laughs) >> Bill: That's right, there you go, you can mint an NFT on that. >> It's the tip of the iceberg. >> Absolutely. >> There's so much more potential to go. Bill, thank you so much for joining us bright and early this morning, talking about what snowflake is doing in media, entertainment and advertising. Exciting stuff, relevant to all of us, we appreciate your insights and your forward-looking statements. >> Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Good >> Bill: Bye now. >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're up early with us watching theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back in a moment with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are wrapping up a three, the first day of a three-day show. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Scott Lowe. He is the CEO of ActualTech Media. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> And also David Davis, director of events at ActualTech Media. Thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So, you are a former CIO that started ActualTech Media in 2012, tell our viewers, a little bit about Actual, what was the vision and what did you set out to create? What kind of content were you setting out to create? >> You know what we started and what we have today are actually very, very different things. We started off to create sort of an empire of websites that provide content to people. What we do now is we're helping connect enterprise IT vendors with buyers, that's really what we've settled on over the years. We've found our path about six years ago, five years ago, and we've been executing on that ever since. And that's our mission, is to help buyers find the right enterprise IT solutions. >> So how do you do that? I mean, what's the lead generation that it takes? >> Sure. I mean we basically for our clients who are companies including Cohesity and companies like it, we do event series we call MegaCast, EcoCast, virtual summits, webinars, things like that. We have a significant audience that we draw from to drive those events. And we also created our own content series, we call Gorilla Guide, which is a series of books to help educate IT buyers about solutions on the market about different technologies and try to help them understand the lay of an ever-evolving landscape that seems to be changing faster than it ever has before. >> Yeah, and actually one of the reasons I invited the two of you is, you both have deep background in this environment. Scott, before the Gorilla Guides, you wrote big books about Microsoft, and David, you've been training people on this ever environment but the pace is faster. You're talking about it's changing all the time. So I'd love for both of you, just here 2019 Microsoft Ignite, first impressions, how you think of Microsoft in the ecosystem. David, let's start with you. >> I mean, it's my third Microsoft Ignite and every time I come here I'm really blown away by kind of the scope of the show compared to the typical infrastructure shows that I go to. Those shows are more you know, the plumbing of the data center. This show is the keynote, is like using AI and ML to cure cancer and provide food for the world and it's just, like, really empowering and exciting and I find it very personally exciting. And Microsoft Azure just seems to be on a breakneck pace to catch up with AWS and Office 365 and all these innovations they keep coming out with, have been really impressive so I've been excited about the show, what about you Scott? >> Same, I mean, I think that when we talk about other shows, we are really looking at plumbing. That's a good word. When we're here we're looking at real solutions that are helping solve big problems. And because Microsoft has such a wide ecosystem from which to, in which it participates, from productivity and enterprise to driving quantum computing, to artificial intelligence to help tractors talk to the internet. I mean just, it does everything and it does it increasingly well. Microsoft hasn't always been thought of as the most innovative company in the world but I think in the last few years we've seen a different Microsoft and I think that has a lot to do with Satya, and the leadership change but it also has to do with just a renewed vision for what the future looks like in the terms of IT. >> And what does that future look like? I mean it is interesting because Microsoft is a middle-aged company compared to all these young upstarts that really, that much more DNA of innovation, of course Microsoft has innovation in its DNA but how would you describe what is driving the change at Microsoft? This is not your father's Microsoft. >> Honestly, the Microsoft we see today and the Microsoft we saw 10 years ago are not the same company. This is, I feel like Microsoft is almost a startup again. And I think if you look at Microsoft as a company, it has its hands in so much that each individual silo is almost a startup feel in the way it's brought to market. Let's just look at Azure. I mean, Azure has been playing catch up in a lot of ways to AWS for a lot of years just like a lot of smaller companies are playing catch up to some of their bigger cousins in the market. But Azure has proven itself, it's still not quite as capable as its bigger, you know, its bigger sibling AWS but it's more capable than GCP for example. But as Microsoft continues to iterate that service, it gets ever more capable, it gets ever deeper into the organization and I think it's something that I see that across Microsoft and everything that it's doing. It's not just Azure that's like this. It's like this with, you know, we've been looking at Windows virtual desktops. That's not all that sexy and exciting on the surface, no pun intended on surface, sorry. But it's something that the world needs at this point. And how we're trying to handle computing in the enterprise as we move into 2020. >> There's so much, you know, there's a few shows I go to every year where you just drink from the fire hose when you go to the keynote. This absolutely is one. Amazon absolutely is one where you come through in the breath and depth of what they offer. So we've spent a lot time saying something like Azure Arc, it is early. And still trying to understand exactly where that fits, by the end of the day, I'm like, wait, it's management but actually it's highly tied to the application, which really is the strength of Microsoft if you talk about what Microsoft knows. Microsoft knows your apps, you're running so many of those apps, not just Office but SQL and some of the various pieces. I'd love to hear what, give me one or two things that jumped out at you either that you want to dig into or that you've been saying "Oh I've been waiting for that." >> I mean I was really impressed with the technical keynote where they talked about Azure Stack Edge and they have this mini server that can be ruggedized or even put in a backpack, and he had the demo going with the server, a person sitting next to him using the server and he said "It has battery power," so he pulled the power plug on it and it kept working and then he said "And it's rugged," and he just dropped it on the ground and it bounced on the ground and he said "See, the demo just keeps on running." So I was like okay, that's cool, that's pretty impressive. >> Yeah we actually had the HPE, an HPE representative on the program. They're super excited to have their gear in the keynote and those of us with a hardware background do like to wrap our arms around some sheet metal every once in a while and touch this thing, software might be eating the world. >> We call you server huggers too. >> Exactly, am I an Edge hugger now? >> I guess you probably are. >> Yeah it's free shruggs. >> When it comes to, in my opinion, Arc and Edge, I'm sorry, Azure Stack, I think it shows some incredible opportunity for Microsoft moving forward. I mean Microsoft has a formidable presence in the enterprise and not just the enterprise, from the SMB to the mid-market to the enterprise. Everybody, almost, has something Microsoft. So there's an opportunity for Microsoft to further that incursion into the enterprise that can help them be a driver for Azure. Because when you think about a lot of the challenges people have with cloud it's around adoption and integration. That's not quite a soft problem but close enough when you start thinking about the myriad of technologies that Microsoft is bringing out. >> Yeah, so Scott I think your background, you worked in some of the commercial markets, you talk about the education space, areas where Microsoft had a strong history. Are they still as prominent today as they might've been back in the days when you were a CIO? >> Yes and no, it depends on the organization. If I look K12, I think Google's had a lot of inroads there because of Google Apps for Education, whether that's good or bad is really a different opinion but I think Google's taken a lot of Microsoft's market share there. And higher education, we still see a lot of Google colleges and universities of course, but we see a lot with O365. And a lot of that is because of the pricing which you can't beat free. But it also has to do with the capability that the Stack brings to bare. So I think that Microsoft is playing differently than they used to, not necessarily, probably a little bit more strongly in some ways and weaker in others. >> Another, I'd love to hear you say, think about is, the Microsoft of old I think of as rather proprietary and you will do all Microsoft. We had one of the Microsoft partner executives on the program today and he was talking about embracing VMware, embracing Red Hat, not something that you would've thought of Microsoft in the past. How do you think of Microsoft just as a trusted partner in the ecosystem today? >> Yeah, you bring up that word trust and in fact we were talking about that at lunch, Microsoft, we feel like has so much more trust when it comes to our data, when it comes to our applications. I mean there's another cloud provider that starts with a G that's well-known for selling data, selling data that they own, you know. And he talked about in the keynote today, we protect your data and the security around your data and I feel like trust is going to be a big factor in the future when people think about which cloud should I trust? Microsoft seems like they have a leg up on some other competitors. >> I may be naive but I actually trust Microsoft and I have for a long time. There's other companies I don't trust. And Microsoft I actually do trust because for Microsoft, our data is not their resource to mine. They're using it to give me things but they're not using it to sell things to other people. Does that make sense? I mean, that is we're not the product of Microsoft. And it might be a little more expensive because of that in some ways but I think it provides that layer of trust that you're not necessarily going to get from other providers in the near term. >> So we're nearing the end of 2019, what is on deck for IT pros in 2020? I'll start with you, I want to hear both your impressions but I'll start with you. >> That's a great question, we're actually doing a big event this week. In fact and that's the topic is the pillars of IT for 2020. >> I might've done some research. >> Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in fact, I was at a local user group recently and I was asking IT professionals that very question. You know, where are you going to spend your budget in 2020? What are you going to re-architect? And there was a lot of answers around security. That was I think probably the most popular one that I heard. Automation, some people were interested in that and improving the efficiency of their infrastructure I think overall. No matter how they do it, hyperconvergence or something like that, just overall improving things to make their life easier. >> For me, I look at the role of the CIO and to look into 2020, I think we see a lot legacy challenges that are still not solved. Some new opportunities is probably a good word. Some of the legacy challenges are what's the role of IT? That's the age old question. I think we saw the next phase of IT business align with digital transformation and now we're going to look for what's next, right? 'Cause that phrase is now going out of style. But we're still looking for ways that we can do more with technology than we ever have. And as I look at some of the things that happened at the show this morning that were announced, I see a lot opportunity for CIOs and for organizations as a whole to do more than they ever have before without having to bring a whole lot more complexity to the organization. But I also think to see some of the things that have to be addressed. Security is a board level issue and it's a top issue for the CIO, it's a make or break your career type issue at this point. And I think going into 2020 as we look at some of these technologies, it becomes even more important because it's going to all require new focus on security. We have an opportunity around to actually solve the data analytics problem at some point here in the near future. That hasn't always been possible and now we have the tools to do it. And we have tools that can do it without having to hire a whole bunch of IT experts through some of things like companies like Microsoft can bring into market. >> Would love to get your viewpoint on the future of work. We've been saying what is the role of IT? And we say in its best light, IT helps drive innovation and actually can be a leader inside the business. But we know that the roles have been changing inside a company. Microsoft talks rather aspirationally about citizen developers, and we're going to empower everyone to be their best out there. But what does that mean to the person that has been a Cis Admin or going through certifications or trying to learn the latest on hyperconvergence infrastructure and Kubernetes and the latest buzzword that they heard of? >> I mean, I think that's exciting, especially for people who are new in IT or people who have the time to invest in learning development, they were talking about power apps in the keynote. I was excited, I wanted to try it for myself, it looks fun and easy. But in reality, in the real world of IT organizations, things take time. I mean I talked to a CIO at a large bank and he said "Hey, I have 10 stand administrators "and we're going to move to hyperconvergence "when they die or retire." So things take time, that's my take, Scott. >> For me, I think it's the enabling new ways to work. If you look at ActualTech Media, we're 100% virtual. We don't have, people ask where we're headquartered, we have a PO box in North Charleston, South Carolina and the rest of us work in Microsoft Teams. For me one of the most exciting things I've looked at in the last year is Teams. I absolutely adore the tool. >> I've heard a couple of people talking about you know people thought Teams was dying and Slack was killing it but Teams is really good. What is it about it that drives your business? >> So we used to use Slack, we used Skype, and then we used Slack. And Slack was good for what it was, it's an instant messaging tool that makes sure that you can get in touch with people right away and you can share a file. What it lacks is context. Once something is scrolled off the screen, that's it, you don't ever look at it again. And what we get with Teams is an ability to provide context for the work we do. So we were working on one of our Gorilla Guide books this week collaboratively inside Teams. We had the document open in one window and we were chatting about it in a chat in Teams in the other window. But the document lived in the same channel that we were having the conversation. So enabled a great degree of collaboration that we just couldn't get with Slack. That's not to say Slack's not a great tool, for what it is, it's a great tool and I still use it for other teams, which sounds weird. But I love the ability that we've had to bring additional tools into Teams that we didn't have before. When we bought, when we bought, when we deployed Teams, we got rid of Slack, we got rid of Smartsheet and we're in the process of getting rid of Dropbox. And it wasn't 'cause we wanted to save money, I mean it's nice, but at the end of the day it's about improving workflows especially when you don't live in the same office. You don't get to talk to each other over the water cooler. >> So particularly for distributed virtual teams, Microsoft Teams. >> It's a beautiful thing >> It's a beautiful thing. >> And also even with clients, now that Teams has guest capability, we have guest teams that we work on, work with clients in the same way we work internally. So it's become a central hub for just about everything we do. Literally Teams is open on my laptop and on my phone 24/7. It's an app that never closes. >> That's a powerful endorsement. >> It is. >> Scott, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, David thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will see you tomorrow for more of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.

>> [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)