Chip Thurston (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss digital product companies and how we can increase the value of a business with FastSpring. I’m your host today, Chip Thurston. I’m the head of gaming at FastSpring and I look forward to bringing you deeper insights on marketing and monetization in the gaming industry. And in that vein, today I am joined by the CEO of Game Data Pros, Bill Grosso.

Bill, how are doing today?

Bill Grosso (00:33)
Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Chip Thurston (00:35)
Yeah, yeah, course. Thrilled you were able to join me. ⁓ A peek behind the curtain for our listeners here. We’ve been a little star-crossed getting this on the calendar. We planned it for January, had to push it back, planned it for February, had to push it back. And here we are at the end of March, but we are talking. It is happening today.

Bill Grosso (00:53)
yeah, and you know in a very real sense, I mean it’s much better this way right? One of things we wanted to talk about was predictions for 2026 and we get to view the predictions not only through what was predicted but also through what has happened and sort of do a little bit of an update there. So you know I think this is actually fortuitous.

Chip Thurston (01:13)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. In fact, it would probably be even better if we did your predictions for 2026 in like December and then your predictions will be true. The year will be done. ⁓ No, no, I’m being glib but I do think, yeah, it’s great that we can record a few months into the year because you posted these predictions back in December of 2025 for what would happen in 2026. And now that we’re a few months in, we can really reflect on those and meditate on

and think, okay, what has already come true? Or maybe what would you repackage a little bit now knowing what you know with the beginning of 2026? So I’m excited to have this discussion for you today. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through your predictions for 2026 one by one. You made seven bold predictions, I would say, what will happen this year. Before we do, I would love for you to tell me a little bit and tell our listeners a little bit about Game Data Pros and what you do there.

Bill Grosso (02:07)
I’m happy to talk about Game Data Pros. What we are is we’re a small consulting company focused on optimization in digital entertainment. grew out of my work at Scientific Revenue, one of the very first dynamic pricing and machine learning startups in digital entertainment. And what we do is we essentially analyze data, propose solutions, help companies understand their performance with respect to industry best practices.

Sometimes we build prototypes, sometimes we don’t. But a lot of it is focused on if you capture the right data and then you look at it, what can you tell about your game performance? And what can you tell about your application performance? So a lot of it is actually focused around user acquisition or your user acquisition campaigns working correctly. A lot of it is focused around pricing and a lot of it is focused around retention.

The practice goes deep into experimentation, deep into multi-armed bandits, and deep into predictive analytics. as part of that, we look hard at industry trends because one of the things we try to do is understand if the industry is moving in this direction, how does that impact the data you should collect? How does that impact how you should structure your predictive analytics and your analysis?

Chip Thurston (03:24)
I love it. And that’s such a valuable service you provide, especially in the predictive side, being able to tell where these trends are going. And I’m especially excited to talk to you today because this will be such a broad topic. So much of what we talk about at FastSpring is the direct to consumer space and we will touch on that. And that’s one of your predictions. And that’s certainly what my expertise lies. But the other six that we talked about of your predictions will touch on all sorts of topics from PlayStation 6 launch to Grand Theft Auto 6 to

and many other topics that we’ll get into. So it’ll be a great far ranging conversation. And the other reason that I’m excited to talk to you today is because you make these bold predictions each year. I was looking through your 2025 ones and was pretty impressed. Can you tell us about the success rate you had on predictions last year?

Bill Grosso (04:10)
Well, I mean, there’s two different notes to thank you, first and foremost, both for reading it and for, you know, saying nice things. The interesting thing about predictions is you get to see which ones were correct, and that’s interesting. And it helps you correct your thinking as well, the ones that were wrong. But then the other part is you get to see the trends you totally missed. And that’s something that I think is perhaps the most interesting thing about predictions in gaming.

Every year, starting roughly November 15th, going through January 15th, about 100 people do this. some people are predicting just for their segment, some people are doing more general predictions. But then you can look at this and say, this is the consensus opinion among the people who are willing to make predictions of where we’re going. And then you can go, OK, ⁓ how did we do?

And I always think that the trends we miss are perhaps the most interesting thing. fast forwarding to this year a little bit, it totally wasn’t on my radar that Phil Spencer was going to retire and that Microsoft was going to be completely rethinking their Xbox strategy. And that’s like, ⁓ you know. And so I think, you know, the metric is like, if you look at the 2025 predictions, I think six of the seven came out correct.

And I did this thing where I, you know, everyone always believes their own predictions. ⁓ So I actually, I went out to Chat GPT and I think it was GPT four at the time. And I said, you know, assume the persona of an industry pundit and assume the persona of an industry CEO and, now grade this. ⁓ And that’s sort of an interesting change in the world as well. You can actually take somebody’s predictions and you can feed them into an LLM.

know, Chat GPT is now at five four and you can say, what is the evidence that they were right? What is the evidence that they were wrong? What is the systematic gaps in their thinking? or what are the systematic gaps in their thinking? And you can use that to not only know whether they have a track record of being correct, but to know where they have a track record of not paying enough attention. And that’s a fascinating thing. You know, candidly, I’ve been doing that.

Like, I made these predictions, this is what I think is gonna happen. But I do monitor my own predictions. Are they coming true? What have I missed? What are the changes? And that’s sort of the really interesting thing as you watch the evolution gaming industry.

Chip Thurston (06:41)
Yeah, yeah. And I especially appreciate the notion of the predictions that you don’t make are where we can really learn because there’s things that maybe we didn’t see coming going into the or we as an industry didn’t see coming. But then when we look back at the year, that can really inform where the next year will go. And I think that’s a really good place to start with where we go with your predictions of and I’ll quote here seven things that are absolutely going to happen in twenty twenty six. Love the title.

and the confidence there. ⁓ So we’re just gonna run through these in the order that you posted them on your site. Of course, gamedatapros.com. You wanna go through the full article. But number seven, we’ll go seven to one. Number seven is the new normal will continue and revenue will be up and headcount will be down. Can you take us through this one?

Bill Grosso (07:28)
Yeah, I mean, so basically this is sort of the safest prediction, right? If you look at the past five years, the peak years of COVID through today, you know, the gaming industry over expanded during COVID. A lot of people were, you know, under house arrest, essentially, record highs in video game playing record highs in a lot of different, you know, entertainment software categories.

And so there was always going to be a contraction from that. ⁓ The rise of AI as well. There’s a lot of efficiencies, horrible term, but there’s a lot of things you can do with fewer people now. And so that contraction exists and has existed for a while. And it’s still showing up. I think GBC this year announced that they had an attendance of about 20,000 people. So that’s Game Developer Conference.

It’s one of the top five conferences in the world and it’s the North American top gaming conference. And 20,000 people sounds like a lot, unless you realize that last year it was 30,000 and pre-COVID it was 70,000. And you look at that and you’re like, okay. And there’s a little bit of an industry blinder around that. The number of people posting on LinkedIn that the conversations were absolutely great and absolutely energizing. it’s like, yeah. ⁓

When you lose the 50,000 people who weren’t true believers, yes, the conversations are gonna be exciting and energized, but still, the fact is if you’re down by one third over a year, that’s not a good signal. And at the same time, know, Epic just recently announced a thousand-person layoff. It’s a 20-person layoff in a company that is one of the poster children of success. Fortnite was a monolith, right? Apparently it’s not doing as well, but…

It’s interesting that GDC is much smaller. There are alternative conferences springing up. like PocketGamer Connects are adding cities where they bring the conference to you as opposed to having you go to the conference. And that’s a great service to the community, but it’s also a sign that maybe budgets aren’t where they used to be and we can’t really afford to send people on a week long trip to San Francisco anymore.

And then just the ongoing layoffs. In North America over the past three years, it’s been a 40 % layoff. And it’s continuing. And it’s continuing on a weekly basis.

Chip Thurston (09:51)
There are a few interesting points you brought up there. One is we are seeing the unfortunate continuation of the layoff trend you mentioned Epic. I also saw the Eidos Montreal was just announced this week in terms of, it seems like each week or every other week we’re seeing these big headline studios announce other contractions, as you said, ⁓ which is unfortunate. I think that

the flip side of the coin there that you mentioned is the events and how we’re seeing those events shape up. And it is really interesting to me that we’re seeing these more targeted events come up. You have the giant events of a GDC and a Gamescom, which still have a place in the market and this really special way of extracting global decision makers and strategic conversations and having those take place at those events. ⁓ But I almost see it as an evolution of the events now that we have more targeted, maybe regional

events, where you have some maybe in Toronto, or you have some in London or the Nordics or in Spain, and we’re seeing them pop up and be a bit more targeted, and it will be a smaller audience, but still extremely relevant to that audience. And maybe that’s a function of ⁓ where we’re heading with the investments that these studios are making, as you said. But I think that will be really healthy evolution from the event standpoint and making those meaningful connections on a regional

of those events too.

Bill Grosso (11:12)
absolutely. ⁓ And then the other part of it is, ⁓ you know, with the rise of generative AI, and there’s all sorts of controversies about, you know, it’s proper role in gaming that I’ll just sort of skip over. ⁓ It’s possible to build a game company that is much smaller and yet successful. I know a number of people

who have said, I don’t need to be within the corporate studio umbrella, and I don’t need to have 200 people in order to produce a good game. The marketing apparatus, like last week or two weeks ago or something like that, Applovin sort of started pushing hard on, we can generate your creative for you and target it. Something that Meta started pushing on last year, right? They can evolve the creative and target it for you.

and you can target more and more smaller and more niche audiences. And so that’s interesting because the advertising portion, the user discovery portion used to be one of the primary functions of publishers. To some extent, the networks are taking that over. And you don’t need as many people building the game, you don’t need as many people doing the artistic part of the game.

creating the creative and the imagery and so on. And what that means is you can have a smaller, lean game company, but now if you’re a 20 person game company leveraging all of these things, do you really send people to San Francisco? No, you’re best served by a conference in your country that brings the things that you’re interested in to you. And so I think it sort of naturally dovetails.

As we go more towards single-A or double-A and indie style game companies, and as the fabric of the game studios changes, the monolithic conferences still have a role, but it’s a much smaller

Chip Thurston (13:04)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. think we’ll see that role continue to play out. And I do want to make sure to advocate for the human value in those disciplines as well. Anything from art to engineering to production, like we do see the capability quickly evolving on the generative AI side. ⁓ But I think the incumbent experience and knowledge and just systems that we developed over time.

still have immense value. And so I think we’re in this interesting inflection point where I think it’ll take a little time for that to balance and settle. And we see what really the optimal path forward is. And really, there’s not a single optimal path forward for a given studio. think in some cases, it will be the hyper AI side of it, where it’s a truly AI-powered studio. But in others, it will be much more human-driven and human-powered. And I think both can be completely viable for good game production.

Bill Grosso (13:58)
Absolutely. AI actually makes people who have a vision much more effective. And then the other thing that it does that is underappreciated, at least in the public discourse, is it enables cheap experimentation. Right? If I want to just try an idea, that used to have a lot more barriers. Doing the creative for a wacky idea used to be hard. Right? And so, you know,

Not only are we enabling people who have specific visions of what they want their game to be, but we’re also enabling larger scale experimentation. The barrier to, well, let’s try it and see what it looks like, is much lower. And so I think we’re actually about to enter a year of massive innovation across gameplay. And that’s going to be powered by expertise.

Chip Thurston (14:46)
Agreed. Agreed. I’m excited for the innovation that will come. like Bill, I knew this would happen. We’re on track for I think like a two hour podcast here. So we got to pick up the pace a little bit. We’ll try to go a little faster through these next predictions so we can not keep people on the hook for too long. Number six, adjacent verticals will continue to staff marketing teams from mobile gaming. So I think this is a really interesting

contrast with your previous point of if there is this continued reduction in gaming, you’re saying that there’s this ⁓ other outlet that those gaming people can go to. Is that right?

Bill Grosso (15:24)
Yeah, absolutely. we saw a lot of fairly high profile moments in 2025 around this. ⁓ know, I personally, ⁓ know, Kimberly Corbett became the CMO at Underdog, which is a fantasy sport. So she moved from Fortis to Underdog. And Jeff Gurian became the VP of growth at PrizePicks. And those are both very clear examples of an adjacent vertical.

fantasy sports, valuing expertise that was primarily generated in the gaming sphere, around marketing, around user discovery, etc. etc. And I think we’re seeing that play out. And you know, the clearest evidence we have of that is we crossed a threshold in Q1 of this year, which is non-game revenue exceeded game revenue in mobile app stores. ⁓ And you might say, but it’s true, mobile gaming

was more than 50 % of the revenue in the app stores for a long time. Games are a very popular thing. And what we’re seeing is the world has moved to a point where phones are the way you interact with everything. I was first surprised and then utterly delighted by the fact that Claude Code now has this thing called Dispatch, where I have agents doing things for me and I can be out on a job.

and check in with my agents via the phone, right? Everybody got a phone and that’s a really interesting thing. And the revenue on the app stores is now more than half non-gaming. And that means all this expertise we developed in gaming around how to manage mobile apps, how to manage mobile experiences, how to queue things up, all valuable. And so we’re seeing this continued, okay, gaming is contracting a little bit. Non-gaming is increasing its revenue share.

and the skills we developed in gaining are bleeding over

Chip Thurston (17:19)
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. think it’s extremely transferable. And I think even in more disciplines than people might realize, because I think the first place people might go with this is something like marketing, right? If I’m trying to get installs for my game versus get installs for my non-gaming app, it’s very similar in terms of the strategies, the vehicles you may be using.

and all that, but even for something like product management, ⁓ like live operating, retaining users on a mobile app versus retaining users on a game. Sure, they’re not gamified maybe as much as a game literally is and you have that day-to-day gameplay, but things like live operations are still very critical for mobile apps and finding ways to engage the users of a mobile app. And so I think what is really interesting to watch for me is the ways that

those skills and that perception continues to evolve of how all those various disciplines can translate to ⁓ non-gaming apps.

Bill Grosso (18:19)
Absolutely. One of the consulting engagements we did last year was essentially explaining to a non-gaming company what a core loop is. it’s like, central to the idea of a mobile game is there’s a 10 to 20 minute core loop where you achieve a thing, and then a lot of times you’re dropped off in the metagame to collect some rewards. And then the core loop, you go through it again. And it’s very carefully designed for how long people are willing to…

How long do you wait in the Starbucks line? You know, I mean, because that is the unit of time in a mobile app. ⁓ And so you have to structure your activity that way. Gaming took 10 years to figure this out. The 2010s were all about figuring out how to architect core loops. And it’s a very valuable lesson in almost every other field of mobile application. And so that’s an interesting product management exercise.

Do we have a core loop that fits into the amount of time people are going to interact on their phone before they get distracted? And have we made it obvious what the next steps are? do we have, et cetera?

Chip Thurston (19:24)
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great example. And you reminded me one I will stack on top of yours, which is direct to consumer revenue. We’re seeing more mobile app stores make sure they have their own web stores. And they’re thinking about the user journey of how the user gets from the mobile app into the store. And especially because there’s often mobile apps are subscription based. And so thinking of having a good subscription manager on the web store, which is something we don’t see be as common on the gaming side.

and FastSpring is really well suited for both of those cases, but I think more broadly in the industry, it’s going to be interesting to see how those evolve.

Bill Grosso (20:00)
ties into some of the other things we’re talking about as well, because as we look at the evolution of the industry, mobile gaming talks a lot about discovery and how discovery has gotten much But a big part of that is the new players that are entering have businesses in other verticals. Mattel just bought Mattel 163.

So they had this joint venture that did mobile gaming and Mattel is a toy company. And they decided, no, we’re not really a toy company and we need to own our mobile gaming company. So they bought it or they need to own that. And so they bought it and they’re doing these other games, which are not all entirely mobile and they sell things that are not digital, right? And there’s an entire, we want to have a relationship with the consumer.

that goes past the mobile app store. And we want a unified ⁓ customer experience. We want a unified wallet. We want a unified idea of who this person is as they interact with us as a larger entity. And that plays into the whole web store idea, the whole D2C idea. That’s a place where think companies like FastSpring have an enormous advantage.

Chip Thurston (21:15)
Absolutely. Absolutely well said. So I’m going to keep us moving here. Let’s get to… Well, we’ll try to do some of these pretty quickly. I think we’ve already covered this one for the most part with some of your ideas about innovation and how AI will facilitate that. But number five is that mobile apps will continue to get weirder. Can you quickly explain this one?

Bill Grosso (21:36)
Yeah, mean, so a large part is ⁓ AI lowers the barrier to experimentation. You can try new things. A large part is that the capabilities that are being built out in the SRNs, the large scale ad networks that do analytics, meta, you know, et cetera, enable micro targeting. And a large part is that there’s just enormously increased competition for attention.

If you look at the Q4 statistics for 2025, the ⁓ rate of submissions to the app stores continues to just go up. Barriers to building it can go down, rate of submissions goes up. How do you rise above the noise? And so you put those back to back and you say, the ad networks have enormous micro-targeting capabilities and the ability to evolve your creative. And the marketplace is frothier and noisier than ever.

If you do your creative yourself, you have the ability to try new things at very low cost. And you put all of this together and you just see an explosion of, you know, and it’s not like, that’s completely unprecedented, but you sort of see that we’re sort of gradually drifting towards more and more interesting ads, which is fun. you also see a lot more scammy ads. The number of, you know, you need to update your game and it’s actually an ad for a different game sort of thing show up as well.

But the market is essentially trying whatever will work. And the tools enable the experimentation.

Chip Thurston (23:01)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The anecdote this one reminded me of is in my time in game development when I was overseeing user acquisition for a mobile game I was working on, the bottleneck for us was ad creation. And we were working on using playable ads. And the lead time to create a playable ad was several weeks. It took a long time just to get the creative direction aligned, then we get it created with an agency, and then we get the feedback.

or we provide feedback from that, have to iterate. Anyway, it became this long drawn out process to go from concept to launch was over a month. Well, now we have a partner that we co-host an event with called Playables.ai and they just can crank out playable concepts very quickly. And I think about that from a game development standpoint, wow, if I had had that tool when I was doing this, I could have easily found what would have been the most successful playable. Throwing several concepts out there.

learned from it, iterated from it. And I would say had much more successful UA, but at the same time, I have to recognize that my competitors are doing the same thing. And so it’s, yeah, yeah. And so it becomes, I think, more challenging in the user acquisition space and an already challenged space. But also the opportunities there, and it requires you to really invest in those tools to quickly iterate and to quickly think of different concepts. Otherwise you’ll

quickly fall behind.

Bill Grosso (24:25)
Well, and so this is also sort of, there’s another step to it, which is, I’m an advisor at an incubator ⁓ called Berkeley SKYDECK. It’s sort of a program that’s run in conjunction with UC Berkeley. And one of the companies I’m advising is a company called Vectorial, which basically builds synthetic users out of marketing data. So for example, if you have a game or you’re going to compete against the game,

you can create a synthetic population using the Reddit groups associated to your competitors and then try out your ads there. And that’s a really interesting idea because you can create ads faster. You can also, you don’t have to put it out on Meta pay tab at display to 10,000 people. You can sort of get quick feedback from synthetic focus groups. And that’s early days. It’s fascinating stuff and it works really well, but it’s

not widely adopted yet, but that’s also going to be a driver. So like if you go back to your UA days, it’s much cheaper to do the final creative. Absolutely. And that’s a revolution. But now you can also at the concept stage, even before you generate the creative and without having to go and buy the ads and wait a week, you can actually get a first pass evaluation from synthetic users.

Chip Thurston (25:44)
Yeah. Wow. That’s awesome to have feedback even before you’re launching the app ⁓ from a focus group of how they can perform a synthetic focus group. ⁓ Okay. So let’s keep it moving here. We got number four, GTA 6 will ship and the live ops backlash will end. Can you tell us about this?

Bill Grosso (26:01)
We

don’t have the evidence on this one yet. you know, ⁓ at GDC, I was talking to whole bunch of people and opinion is divided as to whether it’s October or November, or whether it is ⁓ next February. And the argument for next February was essentially because AI is consuming all the memory.

you know, the PS5 and the PS6 and the next generation Xbox are going to be delayed and more expensive. And therefore Rockstar is going to have to go back and make GTA 6 perform on current generation hardware. And that’s going to cause the schedule slip. But that was entirely, you know, late night drinks and hotel bars, you know? I mean, there’s no, there’s no public evidence yet of that. ⁓

Chip Thurston (26:50)
Yeah, so from what we know, still penciled in for ⁓ Q4 this year, but there is a chance that that doesn’t happen. you mentioned the LiveOps backlash will end, and I assume your meaning here is that Grand Theft Auto is such a well-monetized and well-respected game that players will be okay with the LiveOps monetization structure within Grand Theft Auto 6. Is that right?

Bill Grosso (27:14)
Yeah,

I mean, they’re okay with it in five, right? Five is sort of the poster child of effective line ops. so if you go back 20 years, there was this extraordinary backlash against the idea of in-app purchases and in-app transactions, right? And, you know, gradually people, got normalized, people got used to it, people understood that like, okay, you get the game for free. And then if you really like the game, you can enhance the experience.

And we developed a whole set of rules, you know, we can’t do gotcha except in limited cases, we shouldn’t put loot boxes in front of children, there’s now a societal framework for what constitutes acceptable IAP. And you know, there’s still a certain amount of, I really don’t like in-game events or I feel like they’re exploitative. And the point is,

that we’re now going to evolve the societal rules. And what we really need is a couple more large scale success stories to sort of outline the acceptable best practices.

Chip Thurston (28:13)
Okay, I love the prediction there. I feel like the backlash will always exist. That’s my prediction. Players will find any excuse to get out the pitchforks, but we’ll see. I take your point and I agree. I Grand Theft Auto will certainly help drive the case forward and really demonstrate effective live operation of the game.

So number three here is that Apple will drop the standard rate to 15 % and Google will be a fast follower. What is your reflection on this one?

Bill Grosso (28:52)
Yeah, I got that wrong. Google came first. ⁓ I’m a little surprised by that. But that’s part of the Google Epic settlement within the past month. Essentially, the point is, for a long time, there’s been this 30 % rate in the mobile stores, right? And actually also on the Xbox store and so on and so forth. And the question is, what does that really get you?

And it doesn’t get you enough. And that was Epic’s point writ large, right? I’m giving up 30 % of my revenue for the privilege of being listed in an app store that doesn’t really do much for me other than I get listed in that app store and it’s sort of the choke point onto the device. And so, know, Epic did ⁓ the high profile lawsuits. You know, you could argue that Epic lost billions in revenue as a result of that. But the walls are crumbling.

and they have been for a while. They’re alternative app stores. When you sort of look back to what I said earlier about Mattel 163 and wanting to own the relationship. mean, all of these things, you can do them and you can do them well and FastSpring does them well. And you can help people take payments. You can help people handle taxes. You can help people.

understand the overall fabric of how to do monetization and sales and purchases and processing payments well. And that’s not a thing that’s worth 30%. ⁓ And so it’s an interesting question. Why is Apple kept at 30 %? And the answer is because they can. ⁓ Would you give it up? No, I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. ⁓ But it’s crumbling And then the Google cave, well, that’s probably too soon.

But that Google has negotiated with Epic and they’ve settled and Google fees are dropping is really interesting. ⁓

Chip Thurston (30:42)
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. And also the fee amount. So the fee dropping to basically an all in of 25%. If you’re an install and you’re not involved in the level up program, which is the general

take from publishers. And so if we’re still 25 % there for like 20 % service fee plus 5 % billing, that makes me still very confident in the future case for direct to consumer. Why I feel this settlement is actually, as we’ve learned more about it, very ⁓ impactful for the future growth of direct to consumer. One part is that it legitimizes direct to consumer revenue.

But up until now, it’s been kind of this gray hat territory of like, how can I get my players out of my game into my web store, but without the platforms knowing too much about what I’ve got going on here. And this is saying, this is the policy that in this case, Google has defined and we expect Apple will be a fast follower to define similar policy. And so now we’re operating within that policy and driving revenue in an effective way. And there’s no constriction on messaging.

within this policy, which is another big change. Up until now, they’ve been very prescriptive, they being the platforms, have been very prescriptive about what I as a publisher could or could not say about my web store, talking about the percentage bonus or just that the store exists and having these draconian policies and this doesn’t have any restriction on the messaging. And beyond the messaging component, it’s global in scope. At least Google intends for it to be global in scope. Up until now, the main

case for steering has been inside the United States. And with this settlement, Google has said, no, this will be our new global policy. Now, I’ll caveat this saying that that doesn’t mean every country globally will accept this policy. Different countries will have different appetite for it. And we’ve seen this pop up in different regulations otherwise. So that’s something we’ll have to continue to watch. But the fact that Google is saying that they’re intending to roll this out globally is extremely significant. ⁓

And the last part is that, it’s cutting Google into these revenue streams, which I think is great in terms of that partnership, but also the fees that Google takes are limited in scope. They’re very specifically applied to when you link a player directly from your mobile game into your web store. If a player gets to your web store through other means, like an email campaign, a content creator, social media, even direct load, where they’re just coming back to make another purchase, you’re not paying that fee to…

the platform, you’re just paying it to your merchant record like FastSpring. And so it still becomes this extremely valuable revenue stream for you. And so those are, as I’ve thought more about this settlement, I’m like, wow, this is really going to accelerate not just adoption as people get more confidence in the state of D2C, but also just the growth and the potential for what we can achieve here.

Bill Grosso (33:32)
Yeah, I mean, and the nice thing there is exactly the last part you said. It’s like, okay, so now if the person comes to my, if they’re a fan of the game and they’re used to buying things or they’re thinking about making a purchase and they know about the web store and they go through there through an alternate means.

the platform doesn’t get anything, right? ⁓ And that’s interesting. And so now your incentive as a game company, when you’re small and you don’t have very many players, focus on the game, focus on growing the game. But as you start having a significant revenue stream, your focus shifts at least a little bit towards building a permanent direct relationship with the consumer. that’s actually a little bit of a change. didn’t, know, if you go back.

you know, five to 10 years when the only payment option you had was in the game, you know, why would you maintain that outside the game relationship? And we see lots of really interesting things, you know, so like the Supercell store is the Supercell store and it sells stuff for all the Supercell games. And that’s an interesting little change, right? I mean, it’s not a big deal, but it’s an interesting idea because it means, you know, we have a suite of games and you can see them as you interact.

one game you see the other games and you’re just sort of subtly made aware of the variety of different things, right? ⁓ And so you know now you start to say my goal as a game company is to establish a direct relationship with the consumer outside of the envelope of the platforms, outside of the Apple envelope, outside of the Google envelope and that’s a place where I think FastSpring plays well as well.

Chip Thurston (35:12)
Yeah, absolutely. The relationship will be critical and the data that comes along with that, that you get from facilitating those direct purchases, things like email addresses, will enable so much more just optimization and really understanding your player base in a way that just purchasing through the apps does not.

We’ll go ahead and go through the last two here. And I think this is a good time to insert the asterisk that the views and opinions here and the predictions are those of Bill Grosso and they are not reflective of myself or FastSpring I am going to abstain from commenting on this one, but I will tee it up for you. Your prediction was that Elon Musk will begin to talk extensively about the Neuralink as the ultimate gaming platform. Go ahead.

Bill Grosso (35:56)
Well, every set of predictions has to have something that’s a little bit forward thinking, right? And it’s an interesting thing, right? So, know, Elon does Tesla, does Starlink, etc., etc., etc. But one of the things he has is this company called Neuralink, which has early stage clinical trials where you’re essentially inserting electrodes into people’s brains. And that’s a really, really valuable technology.

If somebody is partially paralyzed, they get the ability to manipulate things by thinking about them as opposed to moving their hand over there and things like that. It’s an enormously powerful assistive technology. ⁓ But it almost immediately started having people thinking really, you

what if I didn’t have to move the mouse, right? What if I could just think and I could get more precise control, right? That impulse happened almost immediately. And we have a lot of really interesting precedents for things like this. So a friend of mine ⁓ ran a headphone company for a while. And the point of his headphone company was that it had sort of these very special speakers that went behind your ear.

and used subsonics and sending sound waves through the bones because they go faster than they go through air. And so these were incredibly expensive headphones that were positioned to send sound waves through bone because that way you got a tiny, tiny little advantage. You could react a little bit faster. And people would buy these and I’d be sitting there going, seriously? Seriously. That costs more than your console, you know that.

Chip Thurston (37:37)
You

Bill Grosso (37:40)
But nonetheless, people do that, right? ⁓ And we know that cheating is incredibly widespread throughout gaming, right? Anti-cheat systems are, you know, we don’t talk about them in public very much, but they’re endemic and they’re hard to build and players innovate constantly in performance enhancements. And so then you start to say, okay, so Elon Musk is an ardent gamer. He’s made various

public pronouncement of how important games are. He’s arguably lied about how proficient he is as a world-class player in several games. ⁓ I’m not gonna wade into that, but there’s evidence. And then you say, and he owns a Neuralink company. Okay, how long before those beams cross? And what we’re really waiting for is Tesla to have a bad quarter. ⁓ More than anything else, right? ⁓

because it’s a certain element of public distraction. And so Q1 of this year, there’s been a lot of really interesting clinical trials and clinical research. There hasn’t been a lot of focus on gaming, but as we move forward, I expect there will be. And that’s an interesting thing. I don’t know how mainstream that playing platform will ever be. We’ve seen that people don’t really want to have VR goggles. And so I think that bodes ill for the injecting, you

electrodes into your brain to play Grand Theft Auto better. But I don’t know. You know, that might actually be normal behavior in 10 years.

Chip Thurston (39:12)
Yeah, okay. Well, that is certainly a trend to watch and something we’ll be watching for in 2026. Like I said, I not be commenting on that. But we can go to your last prediction here, which is that the PlayStation 6 will be delayed until 2028. I think you touched on this earlier with some of the predictions that we had touched on at the top. But also, we’ve recently seen the PlayStation 5 price increase announced. And so I’m curious how you see that impacting a prediction here.

Bill Grosso (39:41)
Yeah, no, mean, the fundamental thing is I think this has been confirmed at this point, or at least it’s strongly on track. There have been announcements about DevKits not making it out for a while longer yet. And we also know that memory prices are through the roof right now. The AI boom has basically caused a spike in the price of all hardware. so you look at that and you say,

on any projection of what the PlayStation 6 is supposed to have in it as capabilities, it’s going to be a thousand dollar console, right? And you stare at that and you kind of go, okay, so it’s behind, we don’t have ship dates, we don’t have dev kits. And the recent spikes in equipment and component prices have indicated that when it ships, it’s going to be out of the reach of anybody. A thousand dollar game console is not

mass market device. And so that means that that cycle is going to elongate. And we talked about that a little bit because that goes back to the Grand Theft Auto VI question. If you’ve been building Grand Theft Auto VI on the theory that it’s really going to take advantage of the capabilities of the next generation of consoles and PCs and those elongate, do you now have to go back to the drawing board?

Do you have to rework fundamental systems to make them work on current hardware? And so it sort of has echoing going on.

Chip Thurston (41:10)
Yeah, that’s great point on how it can impact some of the bigger game launches that are coming up, certainly at Grand Theft Auto, but I’m sure other games could get caught up in that as well.

Bill Grosso (41:21)
And

then on the Xbox side, because this had sort of like, the Xbox will also be postponed, you know, we had Phil Spencer retiring. We had a whole set of leadership change on the Xbox side. you know, I don’t know what Microsoft is thinking. I have no connections there, but that certainly feels from the outside like a whole strategy rethink, which also feels like maybe it’s not full steam ahead on the Xbox.

Maybe we pause and think about what we want to be in there. And given that it’s 2026, that means 2028 for the Xbox as well.

Chip Thurston (41:55)
Got it. Okay. Well, in the interest of time, I think we’ll go ahead and wrap things up here. So we’ve covered your predictions, but one thing I do like to ask at the end is what is the number one thing people should remember about what you shared here today?

Bill Grosso (42:12)
that’s a great question. I think the number one thing I shared that I, it’s partially in this conversation, partially outside the conversation, I’m extraordinarily bullish on the future of video games. Owen Mahoney, who used to be the CEO of Nexon, wrote a blog called Size Matters. And what he basically said did some math. said, hey, you know what? If we assume that

people go from spending 45 minutes a day playing video games to 60 minutes, which seems like a reasonable assumption. And we assume that the world gamer population increases from 3 billion to 5 billion. Seems like reasonable assumption. Then you’ve essentially doubled the amount of video game playing that’s happening. That’s a really interesting thing to say out loud. You know, on the one hand, we have GDC shrinking, we have the layoffs, have, you know, the headcount reductions, et cetera.

On the other hand, the available markets increase, or is increasing dramatically. ⁓ And so those are interesting parallel trends. And then the third trend is what we were talking about earlier, where Applovin and Meta, et cetera, can do micro-targeting, and you can build a game with a much smaller team. You can build a high quality game with a much smaller team. And all of a sudden, it’s like the golden age of entrepreneurship in video games.

And that’s a really interesting, it’s not any of these predictions because like how do you measure it? But it’s a really interesting moment. We can build better games faster with smaller teams. We can target them more effectively. And we know that the addressable markets increasing in size dramatically. ⁓ That’s an opportunity that is mind-boggling. And so that’s sort of like the biggest takeaway of these predictions. That’s not actually in the predictions, but nonetheless, I think I believe.

Chip Thurston (43:59)
Yeah, no, but it ties together if you ⁓ put some wonderful bow on it. And I think it’s a great note for us to end on is the optimistic future of the gaming industry about the impact of all these. So I think we’ll wrap it up there. But thank you so much for sharing today, Bill. If you would love to learn more about what Bill is up to, please visit gamedatapros.com.

But thank you to you, dear listener, for your time and for joining us on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, Chip Thurston. I love getting to dig deep on gaming topics like this with experts like Bill and share them with people like you. So thank you for listening and I will see you next time.