Ethan Wilde: Why is wrong.
Ethan Wilde: Welcome, everybody. Thanks for being here this evening.
Ethan Wilde: very excited to have a special guest with us tonight.
Ethan Wilde: Chris Davis, who has had a tremendous
Ethan Wilde: arc of a career in mobile games.
Ethan Wilde: Just very recently he was appointed
Ethan Wilde: chief business officer at Azra games, and you can see the quote from Azra's CEO. Here his track record in mobile gaming and business operations is unmatched. If you want more on Chris's bio, be sure to check out our game views. 2025 page. There's a little bit more there about him, and we're certainly gonna have a chance to hear from him and and chat together tonight and learn about his journey, and I hope to get a chance to
Ethan Wilde: to learn how some of you might be able to enter the space of mobile gaming. Welcome, Chris.
Kris Davis: Well, thank you so much, Ethan.
Ethan Wilde: Really glad to have you here.
Ethan Wilde: Our department's game Development program focuses on
Ethan Wilde: introduction to some of the the major commercial engines like unity and unreal. But we also have a focus, too, on
Ethan Wilde: mobile games through in browser webgl games.
Ethan Wilde: So having you here with us is really a special treat for me, because
Ethan Wilde: I think you've gone from pretty early in in mobile games rise to now, and and I think we're going to have, I hope, a chance to talk about
Ethan Wilde: That journey that you that you took, I see is that is that a live backdrop behind you?
Kris Davis: Oh, yeah, these are I. I don't normally have these on, because it's so distracting. When we
Kris Davis: meetings, when I was working at playstation. Oh, my gosh, it was the it was I loved it because I could talk about. You know, all these games like.
Kris Davis: Wow, I'm here. I've got 7 arcade cabinets.
Ethan Wilde: Beautiful.
Kris Davis: But when you work with other people in games like it sparks a lot of nostalgia, and people really want to tell their stories about how they played some of these games, and
Kris Davis: and they're playing with their cousins when they were growing up. And just all these stories which I love and is amazing. But playstation is like a
Kris Davis: it's like a well oiled machine. And there was no time for all of this like game talk.
Kris Davis: So I actually turned it off after I've been there for a couple of months, just because, like every you know, 25 min meeting would be 10 min of people telling me how they could play.
Ethan Wilde: Pac-man.
Kris Davis: Bragging.
Ethan Wilde: Dragon, player, dragons are, wow!
Kris Davis: Ace, ace on a quarter, or whatever.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, that was a hard one for me.
Ethan Wilde: Dragon Slayer was tough.
Ethan Wilde: Wow! That's fabulous. I love your your home setup there with all of that history behind you and playable history.
Ethan Wilde: history is a buzzword. We have a game history class. We we try and
Ethan Wilde: look at and and get an understanding of of how mobile games came to be what they are today.
Ethan Wilde: Surely, you know, game boy
Ethan Wilde: is a big milestone in in mobile game history. But but tell us, what was mobile gaming like when you 1st came on the scene of this particular space and games.
Kris Davis: For the most part it just was non existent, and the timeframe to just sort of like set the stage of what it was like at that point.
Kris Davis: people had flip phones that were, typically.
Kris Davis: you know, definitely not touch screen. And the screens were very small.
Kris Davis: The screen sizes varied wildly from device to device and processor speed RAM.
Kris Davis: There was a lot of inconsistencies, handset to handset, so it's very difficult. And very very expensive at that time to make gains for for mobile devices, because it's not like it is today, as you guys may know.
Kris Davis: there's companies out there that make billions of literally billions of dollars. So you know, this concept of paying a lot of money for device porting is
Kris Davis: is like a not that it's not a big factor at this stage, because there's so much consistency
Kris Davis: in the way game makers can make
Kris Davis: games, and then they'll just scale to the device. But back then, when companies weren't making billions, they were making maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Kris Davis: But then every device was a couple of $1,000 of Qa. And testing. And
Kris Davis: at that time also, the distribution was different. Because today, like any of your students, could
Kris Davis: could write a game and
Kris Davis: literally, just like, create an account on the Apple app store, Google play store, upload it, and maybe start making money. Who knows? But back then it was it was gated. There were gatekeepers. Which is a very, you know, negative term. And it definitely.
Kris Davis: we earned that reputation in some ways, but also
Kris Davis: the carriers. When I say carriers I'm talking about like
Kris Davis: in the Us. It would be. Verizon was the big, the big cheese, and.
Ethan Wilde: Guys, we pay our cell phone bills to basically right.
Kris Davis: At. And T. That's right.
Kris Davis: And there was dozens. It was insane. But they it was very expensive for them to have teams that could
Kris Davis: test these games across all of their devices. That's why. At that time there were essentially people making choices about which games could could be on those devices. So it was expensive. It wasn't just the
Kris Davis: the cost of
Kris Davis: porting it to all of these different types of handsets. But also having teams, many, many people that would have to fly all over the world and go talk to sprint talk to Metro Pcs. Talk to Altel, talk to Verizon, and
Kris Davis: and basically try to convince them to take your game. At that time there was typically like maybe 10 games a month that would launch, whereas, like today. You could.
Kris Davis: I don't know.
Kris Davis: No, it's probably 10 who knows? It's probably 10,000 games a month that launch, maybe more.
Kris Davis: But it was different that time.
Ethan Wilde: Wow! That is an astonishing chronicle of barriers to entry there, the technology, hurdle the coding, hurdle the device compatibility. And then you have to have dealmakers flying around the world trying to shake hands with cell phone carriers and cut deals. And then at the end of the day the cash out of that was a drop in the bucket compared to now that's what I heard you just tell us.
Kris Davis: That's right. And I just wanna
Kris Davis: double click on this part about having people you would either have if you were a big company, and you made a decent amount of money. This would be like.
Kris Davis: the game lofts of the world or
Kris Davis: I'm trying to think of like the really big part Bandai Namco, you would actually have
Kris Davis: people stationed in every city that had a big carrier in it, so
Kris Davis: you'd have to have some dude and or some do that in Kansas City, Kansas.
Kris Davis: to come sell into us, and then you'd need somebody up in Toronto to sell the Bell Canada, and and
Kris Davis: I don't remember the Virgin Virgin Canada, and then you need somebody in London to sell into. I I don't even remember the all the carriers, but you would have to have people everywhere.
Ethan Wilde: Regional carriers all over the place.
Kris Davis: It was insane, and then I would. I became one of those people. So I was flying
Kris Davis: down to Texas and Little Rock. It was crazy, but it wasn't just little you know, low level. So sort of Bd, people like me.
Kris Davis: you would have the. I don't know if you guys are aware of who like Trip Hawkins is. But he was one of the original founders of Ea, and he's gone on to become very well known in the industry. Or recently, there was a movie on Netflix, I think. About Tetris, and they're the guy who went to Russia and was able to
Kris Davis: get the rights for Tetris and then essentially distribute it Hank. He would fly all over the world, and he would come out to freaking Kansas City.
Ethan Wilde: Hundreds, which is.
Kris Davis: Where I was based in basically ask us to preload Tetris onto our devices and.
Ethan Wilde: Of course.
Kris Davis: Take us out to some barbecue dinner. Then he'd go with to go fly out to to Seattle, to go sell into to at, and T and
Kris Davis: T-mobile at that time. It's crazy.
Ethan Wilde: That's that's a great
Ethan Wilde: slice actuality from from the massive history arc of Tetris. The story of Tetris. Like you, said Major Motion. Picture
Ethan Wilde: some great documentaries about that, too. So you had people coming around the world pitching, and and you were working
Kris Davis: At that time I was.
Ethan Wilde: decide@firstst Is that right?
Kris Davis: Yeah. So at that time.
Kris Davis: you know, you would call it carrier side back then. But people today like it. It would be like asking a kid like what a rotary dial telephone is. It doesn't make sense to them because it doesn't exist like that hasn't for a long time it, although that's not entirely true, and parts of the world like in China, the carriers are still very powerful there. But for the most part it's just sort of apple. And Google.
Ethan Wilde: It's the device in the operating system. Publishers now that have in the storefront
Ethan Wilde: Google play app store. Basically, is that what you're telling us.
Kris Davis: Yeah, that's right. For now, but and not to sidebar too much. But like, when you mentioned the web based games.
Kris Davis: there's there's something that I think is emerging called progressive web apps. And that is basically like where you can run a game in the browser and right now, essentially, all games on mobile devices are are a game that you have to download from Google Play or the apple app store. And there's a few exceptions, but that's that's basically how it goes.
Kris Davis: But it is possible to create an app
Kris Davis: and even a game to some extent that runs in the browser.
Kris Davis: And the reason that's relevant is because you cut out who we just talked about which is Apple and Google, which take 30% of your gross profits.
Kris Davis: Yeah.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, that's that's a great sidebar, really? Because it's it's the now of of the industry. Certainly
Ethan Wilde: in in the contrast, like you said that that carrier role and the power of the carriers, at least in most of the world, has has dissipated and shifted to the
Ethan Wilde: the storefront device operating system providers, which are those the big 2? I I like how you spotlight this other possible solution. It's interesting, because in our classes, when we we build in basically in browser games. And then we wrap them in mobile app shells. So we can upload them on Google play and apple app store, but at the heart there's just a web browser running in there so.
Kris Davis: Yeah, that's that's a really fascinating
Ethan Wilde: Opportunity to knock down the wall of it. It's interesting, too, because those 2 storefronts and those 2
Ethan Wilde: global behemoths, they kind of represent distribution. Freedom, too. They they replaced the the deal makers and the and the carrier roles that.
Kris Davis: Old gardens. Yeah.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah. So it's it's a fascinating evolution.
Kris Davis: Yeah, I feel like, I've been doing this now in games. I've been in games for 25 years part of the reason I figured out that I had actually had a few more years was I hadn't thought of the fact that I used to work at a small video game store at the Mall. So when you add those like additional 2 or 3 years on it got got me to 25
Kris Davis: but I feel very fortunate to have seen this like crazy
Kris Davis: sort of timeline, and how things have changed so much over time.
Kris Davis: there's a lot of people that really want to get into games. And when I was a lot younger I really I couldn't even have imagined how I could have found my path into games I was living in in Kansas. There's essentially, you know, no presence in Kansas, and it's not even like it is today where you could go
Kris Davis: like you guys like any one of your students could move to
Kris Davis: Omaha and start up a game studio and write, make games, and then distribute it from from Omaha, but at that time you couldn't distribute in that way. So the concept of
Kris Davis: working at some game place was was practically inconceivable to me, but I had always been very interested in
Kris Davis: I don't know. I guess the business of games is what you'd call it, but back then, which is so so long ago the Internet didn't exist. So all of the information that I got about the game industry came from video game magazines, which is like almost unheard of today. I mean, I don't even know if you could go. I don't even know where you would go buy a magazine.
Kris Davis: But that was my Internet back then, my access.
Ethan Wilde: Who are.
Kris Davis: At that time. It was, you know, to begin with, you.
Kris Davis: you would buy Nintendo, and you'd send in your registration card, and then they would actually send you a magazine once, once a quarter at that time, or whatever, and that's how you would figure out what was coming. And at that time it was just interesting to see what games were coming, because
Kris Davis: there was really no other way to to find out about that unless they did a an on air television ad.
Kris Davis: but there was not a lot of that back then and then there was another one that became not so. It's not Nintendo centric, but electronic Gaming Monthly.
Kris Davis: And there was a section in there that was all rumors and gossip about things going on in the industry in the video game industry, and it was all so foreign to me. And it was just really fascinating, though they would talk about systems that I had never even heard of before. That were in other countries, you know, ways you could run games on other consoles, or whatever that didn't. They weren't being distributed in the Us. And I just found that very interesting, and
Kris Davis: I always just studied that. And when my
Kris Davis: When my opportunity came, I had actually been at
Kris Davis: at Sprint for not long in my career. But I graduated from college with a business degree in in information systems.
Kris Davis: And I I was. I was basically in it, and
Kris Davis: I found out that there was a a games division of sprint which was crazy. And I think it was around 2,002. So a very long time ago. But it really surprised me that I didn't even know our phones had games on them, because I didn't have a phone like, I work for sprint Pcs.
Kris Davis: But they were expensive. You know the plans and everything. I didn't have one, so I didn't realize you could at that time play snake and a couple of other, you know, sort of blackjack type of games.
Kris Davis: But I found out about this team, and I
Kris Davis: went to go talk to them to see if I could, you know, be part of it. And
Kris Davis: I went through the interview process, and
Kris Davis: I don't know the the people on the team actually wanted to hire somebody that was a friend of theirs. It actually wasn't, wasn't me. I didn't know these guys.
Kris Davis: but I think
Kris Davis: one of the things I learned at that time, and even recently, when I was laid off from playstation for a few months, which is not a bad word. A lot of people get laid off, and that just happens. But you really find out how powerful a network of people can be to help you get a job.
Kris Davis: So going back to when I got into the games business, I actually had
Kris Davis: unknown, unseen forces working against me, getting that job because other people had the network. But I didn't. But this just goes to show it doesn't always. It's not always network.
Kris Davis: It can be X factors that like what you bring to the table. So
Kris Davis: when I finally quit that public sprint.
Kris Davis: when I finally quit that job at Sprint, I went to go tell the the head of the department, who was many rungs above me, that I really appreciated the opportunity, and that I appreciated that they had hired me.
Ethan Wilde: My boss had hired me, and when I told him this he was like, Oh, they didn't want to hire you. They wanted to hire the person that was friends of Maria's.
Kris Davis: And I said, Well, why? Why did you guys hire me?
Kris Davis: And he said, because you were coming from it, and we in our department at Sprint were having so much trouble with the It department. Not it in terms of like, you know, get my computer running. But like buying servers like that was actually the the part of it that I was in. But they were having so much trouble getting
Kris Davis: resources to build what eventually became what you guys would build in your games just in at purchase. Things like that didn't exist. And they needed the engineering department to build it.
Ethan Wilde: Infrastructure. Wow.
Kris Davis: So they had no inroads there. So they hired. The director was like, I wanna hire that guy which was me because he knew I was coming from it, and could help him in that way.
Kris Davis: so the the moral of the story here is that your network is very powerful, but sometimes your X factor, or with the unique things that you can bring to the table, can actually get you the job.
Ethan Wilde: That's wonderful.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah. That's a good antidote to despair or writing it off to connections all the time. Right? Yeah, absolutely.
Ethan Wilde: The the story you started to tell.
Ethan Wilde: I'm a gadget person. I'm a lot of game. People are, I think, especially mobile games. There's so many dedicated devices you talked about how it started on these screens probably had, you know, maybe a couple 100 pixels at the most. Across. And no, no consistent operating system. Everything different. All that device testing what was the next evolution in mobile games that
Ethan Wilde: came after that challenging period.
Kris Davis: There. There was a big push. Because there was all these little services that were being offered on these flip phones, and they weren't all flip phones. It eventually sort of be started to turn into other things that were not iphone or android devices.
Kris Davis: And there was a big push for consistency
Kris Davis: to go back to the manufacturers. So this would be like the Motorola's, and you know the Motorola razor, and I don't even remember all of them.
Kris Davis: but they were disincentivized from creating consistency, because
Kris Davis: the more fragmentation there was in the market the better opportunity they had to sell more devices. And what I mean by that is.
Kris Davis: let's say I work for
Kris Davis: it's so funny like I can barely remember the names of the, because now it's just it's just iphone and Android.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah.
Kris Davis: Like Apple and Google. But back then, like, I said, it would be Motorola. So imagine you're the motorola rep. And you're selling into all these carriers around the world. And I can say to you, Ethan, hey, I know you're selling like 1212 different devices of ours. But guess what I have a new device that has a diff like a different screen size.
Kris Davis: And then I have another device that has a slightly faster processor. And then I have another device, and so I am incentivized to get you to carry or carry as many devices as I can, because it's all about shelf space, just like at Walmart. When you see these end caps. So the more of my devices I can get you to buy, the less space there is for my competitors. So there was just a lot of
Kris Davis: incentive for there to be this fragmentation. But
Kris Davis: The carriers started to push back because they they wanted to offer more of these services. They were making them a lot of money.
Kris Davis: you know. They made their base amount from selling devices, and then they made from the the plans, you know, like everybody has to have a plan today.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, the recurring revenue. Yeah.
Kris Davis: And then on top of that, you'll find in business that like anytime, you can.
Kris Davis: you know, add anything on top of that. It's like wildly
Kris Davis: valuable to that that business. And so for all the carriers back. Then this was ringtones, and.
Ethan Wilde: Right.
Kris Davis: Games, and like.
Kris Davis: I don't know. SMS. Somehow they were. It was something like SMS. I don't even know like how the hell like it was all just like sold and
Kris Davis: trying to upsell customers on all these different plans and things that you could, you could add so then the carrier started to push for more consistency in the devices so that these things would work seamlessly, and then you wouldn't have the problem that I described, which is just trying to get a game to run across all these different devices. It actually was exponentially worse, because it was also ringtones and apps and a bit like all these other domains of of business. So
Kris Davis: they started to push back, and then you started to see some more consistency come out, and with Motorola. They were one of the the ones that were doing that. And
Kris Davis: so when they would create these
Kris Davis: razors, Motorola razor all the variations of it sort of had the same ability to run games, and so it was becoming more consistent. But then,
Kris Davis: I I started to see the writing on the wall at
Kris Davis: At Sprint, the the Google play and those stores did not exist yet. But games was just not.
Kris Davis: It was not a an important part of the business from a macro perspective for sprint, or really any carrier. And it just became clear that eventually, like it was not gonna be a business that they own
Kris Davis: or cared about like they would just sort of. It was a. It was a commodity. It was like something that wasn't unique. Every carrier offered the same. So I ended up leaving to go work for capcom, and when I left it was still sort of these very primitive devices. There was some touch screen stuff like the palm trio, and the blackberry even had a a touch screen device. But
Kris Davis: when I was at when I was at Capcom.
Kris Davis: It was very interesting, because
Kris Davis: there was a started to be discussion, that there was an apple was gonna make a phone.
Kris Davis: And
Kris Davis: I thought that sounded really cool. But back then it's not like today, where every person has like, you know.
Kris Davis: the apple TV and iphone. And like
Kris Davis: it was like a very niche brand. It was not something that, like everybody owned. It was just people that had a lot of money that would buy a Mac, and it wasn't even like a superior sort of device. Like a lot of stuff didn't run on it. Things weren't really run out the web and the way they are today. But people would have that. But I thought that it's called. But ipods were very popular back then, and I thought that
Kris Davis: I thought that there would be an interesting
Kris Davis: possibility that the apple could become a powerful player in the phone space specifically in the game stuff. But what a lot of people don't know is when the iphone 1st launched there was no app store. It was like a web store, so
Kris Davis: I don't even really know how it worked. But people could go play games somehow, but only on the web. But there was no app store, and and then we decided to try to get ahead of that. So I'll pause there. To see if you have any questions.
Kris Davis: Obviously, I can sort of just like, talk about this, for
Kris Davis: where people like they give like an 8 h review of some video game
Kris Davis: definitely do that about the games industry.
Ethan Wilde: Well, he here's a chance, I guess, to to take it a sidebar for a moment.
Ethan Wilde: We're in basically a conversation so far about the history of games on, on mobile communication devices.
Ethan Wilde: What do you know of? And and what was going on in parallel at before the iphone arrived with mobile gaming. Was it pretty much the game boy? Were there? Were there other devices around the world, or things that you know about that.
Kris Davis: Yeah, that was also something that sort of
Kris Davis: we would see a little bit on the
Kris Davis: periphery. We were when I was still at Sprint, and we were having, you know.
Kris Davis: Namco, come and get Pacman on their devices.
Kris Davis: There were always like little things that were happening that were sort of like a cross between a phone and a play and a game boy, that it wasn't quite the same as what we were doing.
Ethan Wilde: And hybrid devices.
Kris Davis: Yeah, we didn't. We didn't actually carry.
Kris Davis: We didn't carry any of those, but there were carriers around the world that were getting into like.
Kris Davis: I'm sure some, you know, some of your students might have heard like the the engage.
Kris Davis: There were devices that were phones that were also play like they would have more like 3D processing capabilities. So they were like a little bit more capable of running like
Kris Davis: something a little bit less than playstation. One games.
Ethan Wilde: Interesting.
Kris Davis: But there were. There was always like some things that were happening like this when I before I moved to capcom
Kris Davis: that were like weird, not game, boys, and not playstation portables.
Kris Davis: People were trying to break into that that space. But now it's so freaking red ocean that like, can you imagine? Like if somebody said to you, Hey, let's let's make a portable gaming device like
Kris Davis: you're competing against steam game, boy. And well, I don't even know what else there is. There's no place, I guess, playstation portal, but I don't really think of that the same way. But basically back. Then there wasn't as much competition. So people were still trying to break into that space.
Ethan Wilde: In the hardware space. So yeah, that's interesting. Well, well, another thread, too, I think.
Ethan Wilde: with with your evolving history, what was it like to go to an organization like capcom.
Ethan Wilde: They must have hundreds of game titles.
Ethan Wilde: And they, they have a global presence, really right?
Kris Davis: Yeah.
Kris Davis: So that was really when I got my 1st
Kris Davis: introduction to the politics of games.
Ethan Wilde: Oh, I like that phrase. Can you unpack that one? That's fascinating.
Kris Davis: I mean there was like obviously a little bit of that at sprint, but just not not to the same extent. But you know, at sprint at whenever you're at the the platform whenever you're like, in such a position to power
Kris Davis: like all this stuff about how much it costs to make games, or like your students like how much work they put into it. Like, it's like, it's so far removed from your day to day. It doesn't even matter. You're just like.
Kris Davis: Is this good, or is this not good enough like that's it doesn't like the rest of it doesn't really matter
Kris Davis: how much they put into it what the marketing campaign is like.
Ethan Wilde: You guys had the power, like traditional television networks, to green, light a game and put it on air, so to speak.
Kris Davis: Yeah, that's right.
Kris Davis: So the the politics there were, you know, it's
Kris Davis: it's expensive to make a game like your students. It's expensive in terms of their time if they're working by themselves. But for larger companies, it's not just the time that you put into it like you. You have to hire a lot of people to be competitive.
Kris Davis: And
Kris Davis: there, there's always an expectation that like when you're in a startup mode and you're not
Kris Davis: owned by somebody that that you
Kris Davis: that you have a return on people's investments. So for capcom, we were a like a
Kris Davis: like a little splinter cell, or we were a spin off, or we were a startup within a larger organization, which is, which is very common in games.
Kris Davis: They wanted to get a piece of the pie at capcom of of Mobile, because they saw that it was getting it was getting bigger than when I 1st described it, which is just sort of like in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. At that point it was in the millions or tens of millions of dollars.
Kris Davis: So
Kris Davis: They capcom allowed my
Kris Davis: my boss to to start this division up, and then she brought some people on board
Kris Davis: but in order to really make money in the games business. You really need to own your your means of production.
Kris Davis: And that basically means like, you can't just outsource other people to do the
Kris Davis: to to build the games, because.
Kris Davis: you know, larger companies they have like margins that they shoot for, and what that means is
Kris Davis: they can't take any less than some profit margin on, you know, a per game basis. So
Kris Davis: for capcom that was that tended to be like maybe 12 to 15% any money they put in the game. They needed to see 12 or 15% profit on top of that, returned eventually. But when you, when you're paying other people externally to make a game.
Kris Davis: what tends to happen is
Kris Davis: they will charge a margin. And a margin is basically
Kris Davis: their profit on top of whatever it costs them to make it so.
Ethan Wilde: Retail.
Kris Davis: Yeah, if you if you're paying somebody
Kris Davis: to build something for you, and you're paying them 15%. And then you're paying, you know sales and marketing, and all these other things on top of it. It's like, almost becomes impossible to ever get to that profit margin that companies need. So when I was at capcom, they basically
Kris Davis: bought a studio to make all of our games internally, because then your costs are a lot cheaper.
Kris Davis: But then you have more risk, because you, you have people that work for you, and if you, you know, need to lay them off, or whatever it's like, that's something that's really undesirable. People really don't want to do that. It's very difficult to downsize when you when you own studios.
Kris Davis: So we
Kris Davis: we bought that studio, and we started making some games and that the politics piece is just like
Kris Davis: it's just like it's so many things.
Kris Davis: are you making your profit margins? Are you building value for your company by using their IP? So capcom is known for games like street fighter and resident evil.
Kris Davis: So for for capcom. What they really wanted was for us to make successful games based on street fighter and resident evil.
Kris Davis: But at that time
Kris Davis: you couldn't like really make money by putting street fighter on a flip phone just like there's there's just not enough people to buy that. But what people were playing because
Kris Davis: people that play games on phones tend to be a much wider audience, and they don't generally care about street fighter, resident evil
Kris Davis: back then, and even today they care about puzzle games. So Tetris. That's why that's why he was flying out to to get his games on our devices, because people would play a game like Tetris.
Kris Davis: So for us, that meant that we were doing a lot of trivia games like, who wants to be millionaire? And are you smarter than a 5th grader.
Kris Davis: because they were easy to get to run on all these different devices. And it was like very widely
Kris Davis: interesting to people, and they would they would pay for those types of games. So that's just a little bit about the politics of games.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, that's fascinating that that
Ethan Wilde: it makes a lot of sense.
Ethan Wilde: and and we hear about in the news today some of the biggest multinational organizations, buying studios that are themselves amalgamations of smaller studios. Kind of the bigger fish eating the smaller fish.
Ethan Wilde: What?
Ethan Wilde: What happens next? At cap at Cap, at Capcom. Excuse me.
Kris Davis: So we had a moment of infamy. With a game called Smurfs village.
Ethan Wilde: Fabulous.
Kris Davis: And that is definitely one of the 1st times I I learned that in a way, there's really no such thing as bad press. So we had a game called.
Kris Davis: We were making this game called Smurfs Village. And basically like, I thought it would be a really good. I thought the Smurfs IP would be very popular among people that played mobile games, because it's sort of.
Kris Davis: you know, kids and adults can play it.
Kris Davis: So we went and got this IP. And my CEO was like.
Kris Davis: I want to make a game.
Kris Davis: or we take the Smurfs and have them. Basically.
Kris Davis: it's like Farmville. It's like smurfs in. So I made this game, and.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, surf, SIM.
Kris Davis: It. It was a really cool game, but
Kris Davis: a lot of kids or a lot of moms and dads were getting this game, and then basically handing it
Kris Davis: back to their kid and like, there's a whole thing like a back. I don't know that I can't remember the term for it. But you would basically download a game and give it to your kid in the back seat, and they would play it. But Apple had this
Kris Davis: so like lack of security measure, where basically, once you put your password in to buy in at purchase, you just sort of buy unlimited.
Ethan Wilde: Oh!
Kris Davis: My purchase. So then there was all these kids that were playing our game, and they were like buying smurf berries like
Kris Davis: thousands and tens of thousands of dollars because they didn't know what they were doing.
Kris Davis: And it got a lot of press like
Kris Davis: there's like so many articles about.
Kris Davis: It'd be like some mom with.
Kris Davis: you know, some whatever. 6 year old kid sitting on her lap, and he's holding an ipad with our game Smurfs village, and he's got this huge shit eating grin on his face, and his mom is sitting there. She's got a big, frowny face because this kid had bought $4,000 with the smurf berries.
Kris Davis: So we just got a ton of bad press, but that also got a lot of people that didn't even know the game existed thinking they they should check it out. So that actually helped us. Make a lot more money. And Apple did end up fixing that loophole, and again that was like no intention on our side.
Ethan Wilde: Brilliant.
Kris Davis: And so that was basically capcom.
Kris Davis: capcom was basically smurf village. And
Kris Davis: yeah, that's that. That was capcom.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, that's that's an interesting quote. I like it.
Ethan Wilde: wow! Where? Where did you go next? At this point the the Ios devices were out
Ethan Wilde: in your in your time. At capcom. They they popped in the mid 2 thousands, and
Kris Davis: It was funny because I I was saying that I thought that was gonna be something big. And they they said, You know, my my boss, who
Kris Davis: was? He's very broy, was like, I don't think it's gonna be big, and I was like, no like I think it will be. And then it started to take off. Once they launched the app store and within like
Kris Davis: actually, it was before they launched a couple months before they actually launched the app store.
Kris Davis: He wanted to fly down to Cupertino and try to sell them on our games, and I was like, this is great. Let's sell them who wants to be millionaire, and they're gonna love it. And we're going to get a lot of love from them.
Kris Davis: And and he was like, I want them to distribute our game dope world.
Ethan Wilde: Hmm.
Kris Davis: And I was like, there's this is not gonna work like they don't want that kind of stuff. And the store hadn't even launched yet, and Steve still alive, and he wanted it to be this like
Kris Davis: Utopian place, for, like, you know, the best apps and games in the world.
Ethan Wilde: Worse, right.
Kris Davis: We try to show them this dope world game, which was basically like.
Kris Davis: you know, it's like making it's like growing drugs and mixing them up and giving supplies from all. It was an interesting Sims game. It was actually a pretty good Sims game.
Ethan Wilde: It was fun for the right audience.
Kris Davis: Distributing around the world. And and they were just like, No, we won't even accept that game.
Kris Davis: Yeah. So I left Capcom once it appeared that they also were
Kris Davis: kind of on a death spiral with the mobile business. Because capcom ultimately is a it's a it's a console game business. That's where they make all their money and.
Ethan Wilde: Hmm.
Kris Davis: Found in my career like places that dabble in in Mobile like they always end up pulling out after some number of years.
Kris Davis: So I left there and went to go work for Kabam. I moved out to California and
Kris Davis: Kabam was it was still privately held, which means it wasn't publicly, you know, wasn't had an Ipo.
Ethan Wilde: The stock market. Yeah.
Kris Davis: And it wasn't owned by anybody, and
Kris Davis: a buddy of mine that knew me from Kansas that I had helped
Kris Davis: get my job. Once I left Sprint had moved out here, and he was some very senior Svp. Exec, and he wanted me to come out here and help him with the launch of a game called Marvel Contest of Champions. So I moved my family out here. And we made this game, and it was really successful. In fact, it's
Kris Davis: it's closing in on 3 billion dollars in sales. So.
Ethan Wilde: Wow!
Kris Davis: A really big, really big game.
Ethan Wilde: That is amazing.
Kris Davis: 3 billion.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah.
Kris Davis: So you can't even play this game up literally. It's only for mobile.
Ethan Wilde: Fascinating.
Kris Davis: Yeah.
Kris Davis: so it was a really good time. Very exciting, and I I had a really good time.
Kris Davis: I worked there for 7 years, and became Vice President there, and and Rancorp dev and bought a company and
Kris Davis: did a lot of licensing deals. We did fast and furious Star Wars Marvel Disney.
Kris Davis: I don't know. Just like a ton that was a.
Ethan Wilde: Amazing upper echelon of the popular culture milu. That's like
Ethan Wilde: those are the big players and
Ethan Wilde: building global pop culture that you're talking about. That's astonishing.
Kris Davis: At that time part of the reason it was so much fun at Kabam was, it was still marvel phase one so like everything that we were doing. It was so much fun we would.
Kris Davis: We would put the black panther in the game, and then we'd go to the premiere, and it was just like fun. Time.
Ethan Wilde: So you rode the wave of this amazing Pop culture marvel phenomenon that is still kind of cresting that is wild.
Kris Davis: Yeah.
Kris Davis: yeah. So that was a that was a really fun time. And then a friend of mine that I had met at Apple
Kris Davis: had just joined playstation as a Vp. There, which is extremely senior. To be a Vp at playstation is like you're pretty much reporting to the CEO
Kris Davis: and he needed somebody to help him with business stuff that they were. They were trying to start up Mobile within playstation. So I left Kabam and went over to playstation and some
Kris Davis: really good deals worked up for almost 3 years. And and then they basically decided that
Kris Davis: they weren't doing very well with console games. And that's really where their bread and butter was. So they needed to get focused. So they basically shut down the the Mobile division, except for a handful of people to to finish the work that we had started. So it went from like maybe 60 people down to I don't know how many there are now, maybe 10 or something.
Kris Davis: but that was a very fun place to work, because it was so prestigious when I would walk into the the Playstation Headquarters. It was like walking into hollow grounds like every day. I just felt like.
Ethan Wilde: Oh, my God!
Kris Davis: I cannot believe I work here.
Ethan Wilde: That is fabulous. That's on the Peninsula in the Bay area somewhere. Sony has
Ethan Wilde: down in San Mateo. Yeah.
Ethan Wilde: Oh, astonishing!
Ethan Wilde: What happened to Kabam? Are they still in Indy with that huge.
Kris Davis: So Kabam was acquired for 750 million dollars by a Korean company. And and now there is a handful of people that still work in San Francisco, but
Kris Davis: for the most part the the remainder of the companies in Vancouver, which is where they made
Kris Davis: made and make marvel contest of champions.
Ethan Wilde: So in the compam environment that organization there, there were teams in studio environment building the games
Ethan Wilde: as part of as part of that organization, right and.
Kris Davis: Yeah, we didn't. I don't think we did really any outsource development because and your students will probably see this in their careers, like cause. They probably won't start out at really big companies
Kris Davis: when a company is smaller and they've taken some investment dollars.
Kris Davis: Those investors want to see a big return on their investment. So they're looking for ways that you can build
Kris Davis: institutional value in your company. So in general, that means like you don't really use external development. You do everything yourself, you you make it all because then you develop expertise.
Ethan Wilde: Cool.
Kris Davis: You create your own IP that way. You're not renting other people's IP, although that's not what Kabam did, and end up working in their favor, but in general they don't.
Kris Davis: They don't want to use other people's stuff. They want to maximize the amount of things that that company is making, so that when it does sale it will sell for more money, and then, whatever percentage of the company that that person owns, they'll get that profit.
Ethan Wilde: Right? So again, like you were describing earlier. They want to cut all the other people's margins out.
Ethan Wilde: so they do it all in house.
Ethan Wilde: That's right. Yeah, yeah.
Ethan Wilde: amazing. But at playstation you you said, in the mobile team there were like, like, I think you said about 60 people or so were there. Was there a studio environment there, too? Were they making games.
Kris Davis: So that was such a startup like when I had done
Kris Davis: when I joined Capcom. There were some people there already, but when I joined playstation. There was effectively nobody in in Mobile. So
Kris Davis: they they didn't, even though it was a big game. You know. It's playstation. They have.
Ethan Wilde: Right.
Ethan Wilde: like 19 studios that make games like, think about that. They have 19 studios that are all probably worth.
Kris Davis: I don't even know at least 500,
Kris Davis: at least 500 million to a billion dollar at least.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah. 19, triple a studios under one.
Kris Davis: Lot of value they have.
Ethan Wilde: Wow!
Kris Davis: But they didn't have the expertise to make mobile games and really what that means. And I saw teams that were console teams that make console games, try to make mobile games. And there's really 2 reasons that doesn't work well. The 1st is.
Kris Davis: they make all of their money from console games. So
Kris Davis: imagine that you were really good at something, and you make a ton of money doing it. And then I tell you, hey, will you try to do something else that's adjacent to what you're doing already, and and it's very difficult to do. But if you are really, if you happen to be successful. It'll be massive.
Kris Davis: What ends up happening is those teams just like they start out with the best intentions. But then, in business everybody just wants to
Kris Davis: optimize and squeeze as much margin as possible, and things are always delayed. So what that means is, everybody's attention always turns back to the thing that they're good at and at playstation that's console. So they they were just. They just did not have the skills and expertise or stomach to stick with the mobile stuff, and I think it makes sense like, if you're naughty dog and naughty dog is the studio that makes the last of us
Kris Davis: think about like this is like high art that these guys are making. It is an amazing exceptional product that they make. And if they have to go start making mobile. They got to like start hiring people and focusing turning attention to that.
Kris Davis: And one thing about game making that I've found is like there's basically true game makers.
Kris Davis: They're actually like artists. And I've seen this at multiple companies. I'm not a game maker. So I'm definitely not describing myself.
Kris Davis: True game makers, though they're like artists, they're true visionaries. They, they think, eat, sleep. Everything is just game making. And I don't mean in a like, you know, there are people that work really hard at game making, but they're not really artists at it. But people that are they have. They can't like.
Kris Davis: Imagine that you have a Picasso or Michelangelo. You, this guy can. This person cannot be making art and then having a side job. So
Kris Davis: they have to focus on the thing that they're really good at. And this stuff, like with Mobile always just ends up becoming a distraction, and then it falls to the wayside.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, that's fascinating.
Kris Davis: So you asked about, that's internal development. That that's why they weren't doing internal development of playstation.
Kris Davis: We were doing some external development and at 1st they were very excited about that, because they have very playstation, is very powerful. IP. God of war, last of us, horizon like it's just endless, this, this like list of like really powerful IP, so there are companies out there will pay a lot of money for the license. And when I 1st started doing those deals. Playstation was very excited about that
Kris Davis: But after we did a few deals, I think they started to
Kris Davis: really think about the future. And a place like playstation was a Japanese owned company that has been around forever. And these guys do not think in the short term they they plan everything out like decades in advance. So when I 1st started there, they were totally fine with incubating. And what that means is like, we're like a little side project.
Kris Davis: So you know, if I dabble around and kind of break a few things, it doesn't really matter, because we're just a little tiny startup. But then, when I started doing a lot of licensing deals.
Kris Davis: it became a problem. Because when you think out 10 years from now, they don't
Kris Davis: want their IP to be really
Kris Davis: just showing up on a lot of other platforms. So you might argue with that and say, Well, why is it, then, that you can go by God of war on PC. You can buy horizon on PC. That that breaks the argument that you're making.
Kris Davis: But that's because and this is like really important. I know we're kind of coming to an end. But I think this is like one of the more important things to understand about games. Now
Kris Davis: the games business is not like when I was young, and I was telling you I'd like read about it in a video game magazine where it was very young, and there weren't these gigantic macro level owners.
Kris Davis: But now it is such a big business that people think very strategically about their long term plans, because companies plan to be around for a very long time. Just look at Nintendo. Think they have enough money on the balance sheet to operate for like a hundred years, even if they don't make another dollar
Kris Davis: So with playstation, what that means is.
Kris Davis: if I start licensing out the let's say as an example, the last of us.
Kris Davis: 1st of all, the studio that's making it is not naughty dog. So the product that you get is not going to be the same kind of product as what naughty dog would make. So there becomes an integrity question about the product.
Kris Davis: The second is more strategic, and that's if I take
Kris Davis: the last of us, and I put it on. PC,
Kris Davis: what happened the way the way this actually happened was they put Helldivers part one on PC, and it was just a little testing, and they actually made really good money from it. So that helped fill out the financial hole. And I talked about that earlier, like when your margin, like you have to keep it a certain margin.
Kris Davis: and the easiest way to do that is to find new money. It's always easier to find new money than it is to like, take existing products and make more money from them. So
Kris Davis: they continued to launch more games on PC, and that's why you can play God of war. Now you can play horizon. You can play all these games on PC.
Kris Davis: Because it helped fill a financial hole. But now they're in a tough spot. Because in the minds of people that actually play games, they might start asking themselves, Why do I need to buy a playstation 5
Kris Davis: or eventually, why do I need to buy a playstation? 6, if I can just play all these games on? PC,
Kris Davis: so then.
Kris Davis: 90% of the revenue that comes from for playstation that they make comes from hardware comes from hardware and selling games on their store.
Kris Davis: So going back to what I was saying when I was there. And I'm out licensing these games, and we're going to be launching them on Mobile and launching them on Netflix and launching them on Apple arcade and launching, launching, launching. And I'm basically just like further continuing this concept that like this.
Kris Davis: these games can be bought anywhere, you know. I don't need a $500 playstation I can play last of us on.
Kris Davis: If I had done a deal with Netflix. I could play it on my, you know, on my whatever on my computer, or where, you know, Netflix will be available everywhere. So that started to become a really big problem for them
Kris Davis: strategically.
Ethan Wilde: Fascinating to think about the the licensing of their intellectual property, diluting the value of their hardware market dramatically and and taking away the differentiator. You can't get the title
Ethan Wilde: unless you buy the hardware.
Kris Davis: I think it's just also interesting, because
Kris Davis: game game places they tend to be very
Kris Davis: they're like they have very startup mentality. So they always want to try new things in general. This is like in the genes of people that are in the games business. It's really fun place to work.
Kris Davis: So when we came along and we started doing this stuff at first, st they're just like this is amazing. Keep doing it. But at a big company like playstation or at Sony. More importantly, they think about this stuff in the long term. So once we started to get too big.
Kris Davis: then they started to try to cut it off because they didn't want to potentially hurt things in the long term for a short term gain, and I would be the 1st one to say, I think that's brilliant. So ultimately, when I got laid off at playstation I had no bad blood with them. I actually, I love those guys. I think the
Kris Davis: I think so highly of them.
Kris Davis: But part of the reason that they let me and the most of the rest of the mobile team go is because it it just didn't make a ton of sense for them to distribute through other people's channels.
Ethan Wilde: Wow, right? Well, let's let's wrap up our discussion on a future looking arc. What do you have planned in your new role, which you've just started in. And where do you see mobile games going? And then I hope we can take a minute or 2 to see if any of our audience have any questions for you. But
Ethan Wilde: yeah.
Kris Davis: Brief, I work for a an.
Kris Davis: a startup at series A, which means they have raised money. I think they've raised 57 million dollars or something like that. So they have a lot of money. And they're building a really cool, a really cool triple, a game
Kris Davis: that I think we'll announce in the next couple of months, and then
Kris Davis: they plan to launch a bunch of other stuff. And I'm chief business officer. So basically do all the deals I go find licensing deals. I go find M. And A. Deals. I go find money for them like I just anything business business numbers numbers. That's me.
Kris Davis: What was the next question, Ethan.
Ethan Wilde: Well, so it.
Ethan Wilde: I guess, where you think mobile games are headed as a business and and as a form of pop culture.
Kris Davis: I think
Kris Davis: the players now are so big, and I'm sure your students know this. It's very difficult to compete in Mobile now, because it's red ocean. There's players out there making billions of dollars, and it's very difficult to come in.
Kris Davis: so it will continue. But new player entrance is just going to be extremely difficult. But I do think that we're at us like we're coming to the close of the app store cycle and which way it's going to go is a little bit unknown. It will take a few years, but
Kris Davis: I I kind of like my gut tells me I I see like with the increase in cellular speed, and just like more wi-fi capability. I think that, like progressive web apps, I think that could be a pretty big future cause. It takes out one of the
Kris Davis: barriers of entry. And it puts it into like self distribution in the hands of of people to make their own games and distribute them, and like collect their own revenues and cut out the middle middle man.
Ethan Wilde: That is a great close, I think, on what a fabulous story you've shared with us, mapping the history of mobile gaming. We've got some folks who've joined us. Anybody with us like to offer a question to Chris before we wrap up tonight. I hope you all have been inspired with some questions of your own. Yes, Victor.
Ethan Wilde: I see you unmuted, Victor, but I'm not hearing. You might have to jiggle the handle on your mic. There, check the audio connection.
Ethan Wilde: You can also share a question in the text, Chat Victor, if you want on on zoom, if you open up the text chat, you can tap something in there.
Ethan Wilde: It's been really interesting, I think. A theme that I see you. You've really illustrated for us is the the change in control between the game makers and the people who play games. And really an interesting diversity of things have happened in the time you've been working in this space from the carrier gatekeepers to now the app store gatekeepers, and, as you described, possibly a future
Ethan Wilde: of direct self distribution.
Ethan Wilde: It's certainly striking to me. I know some of the big fish, like epic games, have been battling the gatekeepers themselves, probably for their own interests, legally fighting with Google and Apple about
Ethan Wilde: the
Ethan Wilde: closed nature of of their stores, and I know the EU legally has taken action against Apple, and apparently, if you're a European iphone or ipad owner, you can install stuff from other stores
Ethan Wilde: so that that monolith is is breaking down definitely. It's interesting.
Kris Davis: Victor.
Ethan Wilde: You want to tap your question in, or here we go.
Ethan Wilde: I see. Just just a just a thank you. Yeah.
Kris Davis: That I'll leave you with for your.
Ethan Wilde: Yes, you do.
Kris Davis: And these folks, and whoever you talk to in the future. I talked to another
Kris Davis: kid that was going up to you to Uc. Berkeley, and he was asking me how to get into the games businesses in economics, and I told him
Kris Davis: there's several conferences in San Francisco. One of them's Gdc, and then another one is in Vegas called dice but if you if you just go hang out in the city, if you just go to hotels like around the convention center. And
Kris Davis: you know you're kind of ready to talk about something a game you've made, even if it's not amazing, just like your thoughts on AI like you can go there and make connections. And the great thing about the game space is it's full of people.
Kris Davis: They have passion, conviction, and in general, people want to help people figure out how to get into the industry. So if you don't know how to get in that would be one of the places. Besides, you know, trying to find a job. That's 1 of the places I would encourage you to go is just to hang out at Gc. For the week.
Ethan Wilde: I like that. That's full circle. Because you started your your
Ethan Wilde: personal story with us tonight about the the power of your network. And and that's a great observation connecting with people in the industry already who have passion just by being physically present at some of the conferences, I think, is a great idea like you said. You don't have to go on the show floor. You can mingle in San Francisco, I know. Going to Gdc. Every year. Just is overrun
Ethan Wilde: for blocks with people everywhere in the.
Kris Davis: You're gonna run into you literally. I literally ran into Tim Sweeney at Gdp, and.
Ethan Wilde: Of epic right.
Kris Davis: To sell. I was ready to sell, so we pulled out the device and we showed them our game.
Ethan Wilde: Right on.
Kris Davis: And he goes. Oh, it has great graphics.
Ethan Wilde: Fabulous.
Kris Davis: So I'll leave you with that. Thank you. So.
Ethan Wilde: So much.
Kris Davis: And.
Ethan Wilde: Thank you.
Kris Davis: Such a pleasure.
Ethan Wilde: Deeply grateful to you for taking the time for us, and I know many students will watch this recording so best wishes in your new position, and
Ethan Wilde: be in touch with you. Thanks so much.
Kris Davis: Thank you, Ethan. Take care. Goodbye. Nice to meet you.
Ethan Wilde: Bye-bye.