What about multiplayer lobby support in Arena Commander, the ability for players to all load into the same Hammerhead or the same 890 Jump, if that's what you want to fight in? What can you tell us about any plans or intentions?

Yeah, we've actually worked on a design for this already with the internal game team that we've got there. Again, it's not a ton of people by any stretch, so we can only work on stuff slowly. And it's the same even for myself. I've got this combat pillar here, but I've also got three other departments that I run at the same time. So again, there's some amount of work that goes into it. So we do a lot of the design work anyway. So design's already been done for that, let's call it a lobby anyways, but it's really a change to the lobby, matchmaking, and friend group kind of support, but outside of the PU, at the launcher kind of level or at the main menu kind of level. So yeah, we've already done that, and that is so important to be able to do, because right now, for example, if me and Rich wanted to go play in a Super Hornet, and we want to do Vanduul Swarm, Pirate Swarm, whatever, to make that happen is kind of a pain, because we both have to join, we've got to get to the same thing, he's going to go bail out of whatever ship he got, he's going to go get into my ship, and then we can progress, and then if we die or something, we've got to do it all over again. So I think that's pretty silly. We need to be able to group up long before we're in the map, and then choose that map as a group, and whether there's a group leader or something like that. So we've got that design actually in place, and you could call it a fleet manager, you could call it however you want, but it's really important that we're able to not only say what friends are in your group, what they're doing, what you're about to go do, but also be able to place those guys within seats within the ship, because just getting them spawning standing in the cargo bay is not that useful. It's better than what we've got. Sometimes you don't even have that. So again, like on a Super Hornet, if I want Rich to be gunning and I want to be piloting, I want to be able to set that up and then join the game, right? So yeah, we've got the design for it. So the technical things that are in front of that have everything to do with the matchmaking services. So you'll be happy to know, though, that we just completed the whole changeover and the refactor of this. So we are not thinking about a refactor, we've just completed it. So that's all done. And that needed to happen in the last three to six months or so, and it had to happen for the PU for other reasons anyways, VoIP and all these things. So now that that's done, we can actually pull that out and we can change the matchmaking that was set up with that first map, Broken Moon, five years ago. So we can upend that, we can get our group system at the front end a lot more robust and a little bit easier to use. And this way we can shunt them into a ship together or whatever. The other nice little benefit that's going to come, and I don't know if it'll hit 3.8 or 3.9, but it'll be right between the two of them, is it'll allow us to do our round cycling. So one of the things that really annoys me with Star Marine significantly, and Arena Commander a little bit, is that once you complete a round, you've lost, you've won or whatever, you're kicked all the way back out to the main menu. That is such a game development, game design 101 faux pas. It's like, once you get them in the game, don't kick them out. You've just got them in there. You've just paid whatever, hundreds of millions of marketing or whatever, to get these guys in your game. And you play one round and boop. That's weird. So we need them to stay in the round. We want the round to keep going. Basically, it should complete, just like a lot of other games that you've played. Once the round's complete, you get a nice scoreboard, but then a new round starts without any other tomfoolery going on, right? So we want the same thing within Arena Commander and Star Marine as well. So all that matchmaking refactor stuff and the work towards a lobby, where it's just a lot easier for them to set up the settings they would want in Arena Commander or even a Star Marine match, all kind of go together.

Yeah, because actually, touching on that lobby refactor, just being able to change your loadout, select your loadout from a Star Marine point of view. So I think what happened is we had obviously Star Marine and Arena Commander, and we obviously wanted to get those game modes on there to actually test that core gameplay. But the extraneous things, the things that Sean is talking about, the smoothness of not having to kick you out of the game, or how you actually get into the game, is something that we're also going to be focused on going forward, so that we can actually make the whole experience, from you double-clicking the executable to actually getting into the game, to actually continuing to play the game, a lot smoother, so that you can actually stop railing against the machine and actually get into the game and enjoy that aspect. So it's definitely something that's on our mind and something that we're absolutely thinking of going forward.