>> [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)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Oh, good afternoon and welcome back as we continue our coverage live here on the cue from Mosconi North in beautiful San Francisco. Clouds of melted away In a way, of course, we're still talking about hybrid Multi. They're not going anywhere. In fact, there are very much entrenched into this show. John Wall's Justin Warren. Glad to have You with us. Joined now by Kevin Chats. Camera. Who's the vice president of Product management Enterprise and SP Solutions of Dental Technologies. Kevin. Good to see you again, sir. Nice to see you, too. Two shots in one week on the Q. We love that and Wait Holmes, who's the director of technical product management at Veum? Where? Wade, Good to see you this afternoon. >> But if you also >> so this this is kind of your party here, VM where? I mean, just give me your impression so far. First off, just kind of what you're sensing that the vibe here of the show and, ah, the kind of work that you're getting done. >> So the vibe here is excitement. I mean, I think everyone's excited about a lot of the announcements around either probably Pacific and how we're redefining the V's Fair platform and Tan Xue and now these capabilities on how these capabilities are going to be able to enhance our capabilities of our cloud provider partners. So I'm part of our club fighter salt for business unit, who specifically makes products and solutions for our cloud provider V, C P P program. And I think couldn't beam or excitement. And they've been a crescendo the past few years and be anywhere and b m world. And I think this has been one of the best ever. >> If the waves hitting the shore big time now. So you you talk about cloud providers about service providers. I mean, one of the same. Or Or how do you guys define that now? Or how do you separate that? >> Yeah, I think these terms are largely used interchangeably. To a large degree, I think if we look att at the cloud industry in the provider industry over the last several years, maybe about 5 to 7 years ago, there was a belief from every single cloud provider that they needed to build a scaled platform like a W s like Microsoft Azure like Google Compute. And that they were all in the business of a race to building the most robust, most scalable, most feature rich, most differentiated cloud that was largely erased the bottom from an economics perspective. And I think just about all of all of the service providers and now these cloud providers that we work with have really moved to a different model. What they've recognized is first off. The race to the hyper scale is not a profitable business that you want to race against. Number two. Ah, the transition for large enterprise I t small enterprise medium business to the cloud is so complex that it's not a game of building clouds and not a game of building platforms. It's a game of building practices at this point and cloud providers or building practices that allow them to find their own niche and differentiation off differentiated offerings. Whether that be on Prem Private Cloud hosted Private Cloud and then partnering with the hyper scale er's for the massively scaled multi tenant cloud world. And when we start to realize that this managed offering these cloud practices are there to help the enterprise and small medium business in their transition to the public cloud in transition to cloud and moving towards more managed I t offerings. What we're finding is the reemergence of these cloud providers in a meaningful way, starting to bridge the gap of skill, set, mismatches and expertise. Mismatches at Enterprise I t just doesn't have to embrace cloud technology. >> Yeah, for a long time there, there was the cloud Geraghty, who were saying that the public cloud is the only way this is gonna happen. Everything's going to be there. And some some of us I would count myself among them was a little bit skeptical about that. That approach to things and a lot of it with a lot of the pressure on on service providers was you don't even bother getting into the cloud business. Just shut up shop and go home. This is never going to be a good idea for you to compete in this at all. And it sounds like that that some of these providers have actually gone. You know what we've We've got a viable business here. There are customers here who need things done that we do really well that are not available out in public Cloud. So what are some of the things that some of the things that you're hearing from these cloud cloud providers, that that they are finding from customers that they value, that they not finding anywhere else? >> So I grew 100% that the club wider there, find their business is still growing, and it's due to their expertise. Is Kevin said, that the building practices they understand enterprise customers? Veum, Where business? They understand the platform that they're running the enterprise and are able to provide additional differentiated service's while leverage in the technology that the enterprise they're utilizing in their own data centers. So it's able to pride value out of service is with the same platform that air using in their own premises and providing those capability of same platform in a cloud model. So, given a pragmatic way for enterprises to be able to migrate to a cloud in a hybrid cloud, >> are there specific practices you noticing that is that kind of stand out as being particularly common? >> Yeah, s so I think that through the answer is yes, right? And the answer is that vertical expertise is king here, right? Understanding the industries in which the cloud platforms get deployed and how those industries consume. Resource is the use cases. How they monetize their business is key for success. But I think that what we where we've lived over the last several years is that the building blocks for all of these vertical industries, the only uniform way you had to do it was with the massively scaled public cloud providers. The hyper scale er's what we're doing now, Adele Technologies Cloud is we're enabling a consistent set of building blocks for all of these vertical industries that all of these vertical X three experts in the vertical industries across the cloud providers can then bring a common building block and go address the complex problems of building the use cases, building the monetization models, building the differentiated feature set. >> So I mean, can you give me an example? I mean, what you talking about? It's like if you're going about health care versus transportation versus manufacturing, some things that were going to a different way, we're going to slice this That's right. It's a different >> set of ecosystem partners. It's a different set of vertical applications, a different set of problems. It's different set of monetization models across the board, right? You know, retail has very specific requirements around Leighton See sensitivity and the need to be able to address micro transactions. Security capabilities of those transactions or what not, Health care is governed by hip on various other legislative. When you build in Europe, you have, ah, various data protection and privacy implications to keep in mind. It's right, so all of this is not typically available in public Cloud Public Cloud is built for a lowest common denominator. One size fits all, and then you come bring differentiation. On top of that now is enterprise. I T organizations start to migrate their workloads to Public Cloud. They're looking for consistency in terms of how they've lived before and how they work before how they've operated before. How do they migrate those applications, right? It's not I'm building everything natively for public cloud is that I have an entire set of applications that were designed in my enterprise i d environment that I just want to find a new way to operate in VM wears a consistent abstraction. Layers is really the path forward, So DT Cloud on Deli emcee and TT Cloud leveraging the public cloud providers in the V M wear abstraction with both feet spheres. Well, it's vey cloud foundations, eyes really a commonality that they can now the uses a foundational building block for all their service is >> yes. So where one of the things that a lot of customers have invested over a decade or Maur envy em where? And they have a lot of processes and tools and skills that they have invested in. And it sounds like for some of these cloud providers specializing in a particular industry, that there's a risk there that you will end up with building blocks that, yes, they're customized for one particular thing. But now I have to operate them a little bit differently. And now I've got a lot of different ways of doing things, and particularly as a provider, then that that adds cost. And I want to try to get some of those costs out there because they think that influences my margin. So is the choice. Of'em were one way of dealing with that because I can maintain that same consistent way of managing things. >> Absolutely. And that's key to some of the work that VM wear and Dell has been working together on two. Allow for Kevin Mention, Adele Technology Cloud Platform, which the baseline of that is being more cloud foundation. So been ableto have that homogeneous operational model, and Mona's data plane set is the same V sphere and XXV sand based originality perspective. So the operational model, whether it's in the providers infrastructure or whether it's on premises within enterprise is similar. >> And I think there's even 1/3 vector to this, which is, um, yeah, one public cloud provider is not gonna win. All of the public cloud providers are going to exist, and the scale of a Microsoft azure and the scale of an AWS on a scale of a Google compute put them in position to continue to lead this industry forward. And it's it's difficult to bet on one horse, right? So the GMC model on the DT Cloud model allows us to be able to scale across all of these different cloud providers and as an enterprise organization that's making specific decisions based on region or based on other financials that some of these workloads are going to say in AWS, and some of them are going to sit in Microsoft Azure, etcetera, etcetera is a common abstraction across all of them. >> But at that point, I mean the fact that you're talking about, um, vertical practices, right? Verticals having practices that might be unique to their particular industry. And now you're talking about them deciding that they might all flowed work Thio, maybe an azure. Maybe in Google. Maybe I'd be it. Whatever, Um, I mean multiple complexities for you in dealing with that because you're gonna be the translator, right? You've got to be. You've got to be multi lingual, not only within in the cloud world, but also in a vertical world too. Right? So tough road for you guys to provide that kind of flexibility and that kind of knowledge. >> Oh, I mean, that's the key to the software and solutions that GM was providing and allowing for solutions and sat space capabilities to provide a modernise, softer, defined capabilities across clouds or a and be able to manage things across, such as cost in via cloud health and other manage service's capabilities by our software platform and then be ableto have this. These capabilities in the Bean Imlay consumed by providers and turnkey fashion by utilizing del technologies, bx rail are and VCF one VX rail and having us all package together, and so that providers no longer have to focus on building a core infrastructure. But they're now able to focus on that integration layer. Focus on the additional higher level service is that are able to stitch together the use this multi cloud environment >> decision logic that our customers have. It's just so complex, and I think that the message that we've heard loud and clear from them is that they feel like once they're in particular ecosystem, they're locked into that ecosystem. And the more that we can do that give them flexibility to bring these ecosystems together and leverage the benefits and the capabilities and the regional and geo location of just about all the different ecosystems that exists and build their own ecosystems. On top of that, especially if you're a cloud provider, is really what they're looking to do. And when the foundational building blocks all look different, the integration look different the automation look different. The orchestration look different in the storage. Later look different. It's just It was impossible, right? It's really on us to provide an abstraction to make that easy for them to accomplish their business. >> Consistent foundation is critical, and that's what we're bringing through the cloud provider today. >> One thing that has changed from from technology of 12 12 15 20 years ago is the consumption model that cloud has provided. S. So what are you seeing around service providers, providing that pretty much you have to provide if your cloud provided you have to provide some kind of consumption model because that's what people have in their minds when they think about about Cloud it is. It's not just about the technology side of things. Actually, we're out the business operations about, you know, the financing and the funding models of things. What are you seeing with the cloud providers and service providers? How are they changing the way that they allow people to finance the buy of this infrastructure? >> So that's one of the pieces that, in being where Rendell is working together to allow for not just software, which through the visa program all of our software solutions are consumed through a subscription like model. So it's pay as you go, but also be able to consume hardware and consume the turnkey patches package so that VCF on Vieques rail and the Cloud Provider platform can be consumed in a pay as you go subscription model, which is a way that providers want to be able to then provides software and capabilities to their enterprise customers. >> Have they completely changed across to being purely consumption? Or do we still have a lot of industries that preferred by things that with Catholics >> it would be fantastic if the world converged on one answer? Everything is always easier when there's one answer. But I think, ah, one of the things we recognize is that, ah, and it's true and technology. It's true in business models. It's true. In operational models, there's never in. It's never just a or answer right. It's always an end, and there's a need for us to embrace multiple different models in order to meet the needs of our customers. And even a single service provider will find particular areas that they wanted, consumption based model and others that they realize that it's a well entrenched business for them, and the risk is a little bit lower, and they're willing to take on that risk and look at a Cap IX base model right there. Certainly financial implications to both an Op X and the Catholics model. There's tax implications, and you know where. We're still a little bit all over the map in terms of their preferences. >> Hopefully, we'll see that shake out a little bit and we'll have some standard patents to match the practices that will just make it a little bit easier to design the solution. >> I think the Saturn standard pattern that I expect to emerge is that we have to do everything >> for everyone >> in every way that they want to see. >> Oh, you left there, Kevin. I can't imagine that being too difficult. Everything. Everyone it all at every time. That's right. All right. Hey, thanks for the time of and the discussion and good luck with handling that. I know. That's a that's a big lift on. I know we're joking, but, uh, it's a great world for you. Certainly exciting time. And we thank you for your time here. >> Thank you. Thank you guys appreciate the time. >> I appreciate being World 2019. Coverage continues right here on the Cube. We're live and we're in San Francisco.