You guys have presumably used the new friends service. How are you feeling about it?

I am excited. So I'll tell you a little story about a playtest we tried to do a couple of years ago. This has been something that has, I think, been a bit of a sore spot, at least for me, because I want to quickly jump in and just go test something out and get a crew together and go try one of the ships. And we spent about two hours with 10 people in a room who could literally talk to each other and had a hard time getting on the same server at the same time. And that was really frustrating. So we did a 50-man playtest, just to kind of put it in comparison. We went through the process of friending everybody, getting into a 50-man party, and we're in the server together. And that was about 35 minutes. And that was the entire process from start to end. That, to me, was amazing. I think this is going to start really encouraging the group play in our game. I think it just makes it so easy, the fact that I can right-click on somebody and guarantee going to their server, assuming it's not full, right? These are the kind of ease of use things that I think are going to be game changing. I really hope to see concurrency kind of start to spike up a bit. So yeah, I'm super excited and I think this is a massive difference.

The difficulties involved in getting together with your friends in game previous to this, I have to assume they turned some of my friends off. I mean, get them in the game, and then we want to get into a group together in the same session, and the amount of time and effort that that took, it was very difficult to maintain their interest. So this social system, especially the front-end one, right when you log into the game, I think it's critical for onboarding new players, keeping existing players happy, allowing them the confidence to suggest the game to their friends and be able to have a play session that evening with no problems. So that was really the main kind of anecdote we were taking forward when we developed this. And that's the one that most of our further development on the feature will include: how do we make this easier and fun?