Category: Game Business

No One Has It All

No one has it all. Everything costs something.

A lot of hustle-culture lifestyle business nonsense shows people driving fancy cars, being influential, spending time in beautiful places, blah blah blah. And a big part of what draws people to entrepreneurship is this idea that they too can be rich, powerful, and control their own destiny.

Most of that is bullshit.

It’s easy to forget that everything *costs* something. Building a startup consumed everything about my life for years other than it, and the time I carved out for family. And at the end of it, it cost me another five years in therapy and waking nightmares and cPTSD, and a handful of relationships I once valued. It gave me a certain level of financial independence, which is a massive visible positive (and which I never, ever take for granted), but on balance, I’d trade the latter to get rid of the former, which I know may seem weird to folks who didn’t go through it. And that’s all invisible to people. What is visible is the “success”. No one sees the cost. This is true for almost any level of any type of success.

You look at folks like Elon Musk – he’s got the adoring throngs of sycophants, and more money than … well, almost anyone else in the world. But what did it cost him? He doesn’t have great relationships (if any at all) with his children or spouses, he doesn’t have any relationships to anyone who isn’t so far up his butt that he can maintain any connection to reality. Is that a trade you’d make? I wouldn’t.

You know the kinds of folks at work who will stab their co-workers in the back and get promoted. You know the folks who work 20-hour days at the cost of their health and their marriage.

Maybe you look around and think, “How is it that this is all I’ve managed to achieve when others have done so much more?” And sometimes, yeah – you hit a rough patch and don’t make a ton of progress. But I think more often than not, what you’ll find is that the people who achieved that thing you call success were willing to pay a price that you *weren’t willing to pay*. And while hustle-culture bros will tell you you’ve gotta learn to pay that price, I have a different message for you:

Knowing what your boundaries are is more valuable than almost anything else in the world. Understanding what you will not do and why, and having the integrity to live up to those values? Yeah, it will often cost you. But in the long run, knowing who you are, and what you believe in is a really difficult, often very expensive thing to learn. That’s *character*. That’s *integrity*. That’s your *soul*.

Don’t trade it for anything.

Game Design Is An Actual Hard Job With Skills

There are very few people within the game industry that would argue that a good game designer isn’t worth their weight in gold. Why is it that so many folks outside the industry think it’s a trivial job they can do with no experience?

I think if you ask folks, they wouldn’t say that they think game design is a trivial job you can do with no experience. But it doesn’t matter what someone *says*, it matters what they *do*. So when you see someone *say* that game design is a job that requires deep understanding and experience, but then what they *do* is they start up a company and then design the game, despite having no experience doing it, what they’re *showing* is that they think eating pizza is the same as making pizza.

I see this *all over the place*. Educational companies trying to gamify their products. Game-centric startups. Healthcare “games”.

Game design can seem trivial when you think of it as just the high concept. “Let’s make a sci-fi game about rocketships and cat astronauts who land on a planet made of yarn!” But the high concept has to *do* something. It has to be the foundation of a whole wealth of interactions and decisions. Why cat astronauts? Why space? Why yarn?

Building games is about *focus*. Good ideas are all around you, and if your only metric is “this idea is good!” you’ll end up heading in 20 different directions. Most games? They’re about ONE core idea. Sure, that idea mutates everything it touches, so the whole game seems new. But every single feature – every single system you introduce into the game blows its complexity exponentially.

So a great game designer’s job is keeping the possibility space as interesting and as *simple* as possible. That complexity has to be *focused*. Every game I’ve designed that has failed has failed not because it was too simple, but because it was too complicated. Every game I’ve designed that has succeeded did so *because* it was simple, and could grow into something more complex.

Simplicity is *extremely difficult*. It’s very easy to grow, and very hard to pare down. My record of it is probably 50-50 at *best*, and that’s with *decades* of experience and insight and iteration. It’s an incredibly challenging, multidisciplinary problem that requires insight into a lot of different fields – art, psychology, technology at minimum – to really understand.

And yet, so many teams, and so many companies think it’s something they can do with zero experience, because they’ve played games.

I get it. And frankly, every experienced designer started that way. But most started on smaller projects, or by working for more experienced folks they could learn from. Starting up a company is a *terrible* place to learn game design, and if you think you’re the exception… you’re probably wrong.

Why I Can’t Be a Fractional Product Person

Over the years, the idea of a part time product-person role has come up. A fractional CPO, or something of that ilk. I have friends (and family) doing fractional CTO work, and that’s always seemed sensible to me. I *want* a fractional CPO position to work, because that’s the kind of work I’d love to be looking for.

But I’d never, ever hire a fractional CPO, and I’d recommend that you don’t, either.

I get why you’d want someone in that role. There’s some sort of limited-domain or limited-size product knowledge that you don’t have, and an injection of experience could make a huge difference. Your company is otherwise good, and the person leading the product charge currently can do *most* of the job, they just can’t quite do all of it.

But here’s the problem: The product is the business.

Yeah, you can make similar arguments that the tech stack/process is the business, or marketing is the business, or whatever. But I’m a product guy, so for me, the product is the thing. And it’s not just my bias. I think that your product is so central that the decisions you make around product will bleed out into everything else, and everything else about your company will similarly bleed into your product.

The problem with a fractional CPO is simple: They will never endure the full pain of their decisions.

Product pain comes in many forms. A consultant can be very good at solving short-term pain. But the problem is that many solutions to short-term pain cause long-term pain. And if your consultant isn’t around for the long term, they don’t consider that pain to the degree that they should.

That’s it. That’s the whole problem. But it’s unsolvable. Because no amount of intellectualizing or rationalizing how you’re anticipating that long term pain is the same as knowing that it will one day punch you in the face at the worst possible moment. Even full-time folks often make this mistake. But fractional product people are heavily incentivized *to make this exact mistake*, and because of that, they will – consciously or otherwise.

This is the central bit of your business, and an absolutely critical thing to get right. If you are having product problems, you need *full time*, heavily invested people who can fix those problems. If you can’t afford to hire a full-spectrum product person with the expertise you need, you are failing to hire one of the single most critical roles for your business, and your chances of failure will skyrocket.

I know it seems like a fractional CPO can be that boost of product knowledge you need. It means you don’t have to expand at a time when expansion is scary and expensive. But it is a bad investment. It will always be a bad investment, and the problem is that it will seem good until it catastrophically fails. Please don’t do it. You need a full-time product-focused person with the necessary expertise as a central role in your company.

Loyalty

Stopped by GDC for a few minutes this year, and one thing that was a stark contrast to when I regularly attended a few years ago was that the amount of company swag that people were wearing was 10% or less of what it was in the past.

Teams used to wear their company stuff loud & proud. I’m curious if the change is because everyone’s now unemployed, or they realize that companies aren’t their friends no matter how positively they feel about them in the moment, or both.

Probably a mix of all three. It’s a hard lesson to learn. Be loyal to people who treat you with respect. Never spend your loyalty on a company – it’ll never, ever be returned in kind.

VC & Games

I have friends who are VCs. VCs in games, even. So writing this, please understand that I’m not like “F all VCs under all circumstances.” There are some incredibly smart people who are motivated by the right things that are in the field doing the work, trying to give people opportunities.

But one thing that I really don’t think people think about enough is what the whole game really is. VCs are funding things with the expectation of *astonishing* returns or failure, because that’s essentially how the market works. You make a lot of money on massive successes. You lose money on everything else (even moderate successes).

So taking money from VCs sets you on a specific trajectory to either be a massive success or die. This then informs *literally everything you do*. It may not start out that way, but it will evolve into that over time. This has huge follow-on effects. It dictates what kinds of games are made. How games are marketed. Who they’re targeted at. How mechanics work. What monetization is like.

It’s not “Here’s money make your dream game.” And I worry that a lot of folks who are thinking about building companies are turning to VCs believing they can raise cash to build their dream. The moment you take VC money, you’re not building your dream. You’re building a product to maximize potential to make as much money as possible to return to their fund.

Some VCs will have a process for this that realizes that in games, the biggest successes are unlikely and weird and very personal that then explode in unexpected ways, and they will help you build something very close to your dream. 

So there’s a huge difference in aligning yourself with VCs that have deep, deep, deeeeeeep personal experience building games – leaders – the folks that build the business models, the core mechanics, the plans. They can be value-adds.

But I’d suggest this is not *most* VCs in games. It’s certainly not *most* VCs. And the best way to distinguish the two is to ask folks you know who have been funded by these orgs. And second best, ask folks who have experience building the plans and business models and who have achieved some sort of success, and have them look at the VC to see if the folks behind them know their shit.

This is your dream. This is probably one of the most important decisions you can make, because if you go with a team that doesn’t align with your values and experiences, it won’t be your dream anymore. 

It’ll be an unending nightmare.

Two Steps to Building Better Products

Had a fun conversation with a friend this morning, and it was sort of weirdly illuminating for me. My #productdevelopment process basically breaks down into two pretty simple concepts that are *incredibly* difficult to actually execute:

1.) Know what you’re trying to do. That is, you have to be super specific and use very precise language to articulate the one big idea that you’re building your product around. Every entrepreneur can describe their product *generally*, but I find very, very few who can do it with exacting precision. Who is your market? What problem is this solving? What is the benefit to the user? If you can do this in one crisp sentence, you’re way, way ahead of the game. But the funny thing? It’s actually less about knowing what you’re doing – most people can understand that. It’s almost entirely so you can understand what you are *not* doing, which is a boundary that a lot of entrepreneurs actually never quite figure out. Which leads to scope creep, bloat, and eventual death.

2.) In traditional product development, you might do some testing, but basically, you’re going to bundle up a bunch of stuff, release it at some point, and then either succeed or fail. For me, the goal of everything I do is “How do I disassemble that one giant ball of risk, and try to mitigate every individual piece of it as early and cheaply as possible?”

That’s it. If you want to reverse engineer almost anything I’d say about product development, it’s “Do you understand what you are trying to do, and how to make good decisions about whether or not to do something?” and “How do I make this less risky and learn earlier?”

Now, while they’re simple concepts, doing them in effective, meaningful ways is an incredibly complicated, nuanced, and product/context-specific challenge that’s new and difficult and surprising every single time.

Gamification is Bullshit

A lot of people have been trying to sell the idea of gamification as a way of using the power of games to get people to do things.

This is not a good approach.

People will sell you on their consulting services that promise higher engagement/effectiveness by adding points and badges and other “game-like” things to your product. They will work for a very small percentage of your users for a short amount of time. And that’s it.

If you want to harness what make games powerful, it’s not points and badges and achievements.

Games are about playing. Trying things out in a high-feedback, low-risk, no-stakes environment. By “high-feedback”, I mean that in games, you can wildly amplify the reward you give someone for any kind of success, or make it very, very clear when someone does something you don’t want. That’s the sort of 1st level of properly using the mechanics of games.

The higher level is that you can “re-skin” experiences in transformative ways that create new meaning. I worked on a therapy game where players had to move objects from one place to another. In traditional therapy, they’d move boxes on tables. This activity, and its difficulty, was a constant reminder to the player that they were now disabled, and simple things they’d done forever were now impossible or difficult.

We built the *same* interactions, but instead of moving boxes, you picked up little birds and put them in their nests. They’d animate, and sing, and it was a magical, Disney princess kind of moment that everyone (even gruff German doctors) found incredibly enjoyable.

It didn’t remind patients of their disability. They had fun, and they worked *much* harder, because they wanted to make the birds happy.

Games are tremendously powerful, and utilizing that power can make otherwise intensely boring or difficult experiences enjoyable and engaging. But it has almost nothing to do with points and badges. It’s not simple, it’s not fast, and it’s not cheap.

It is, however, totally worth it when you do it right. But doing it right means bringing folks on with deep, deep experience from DAY ONE in the process. This is not something you can “slap on” later, and it’s not something that some snake-oil “gamification” expert can do at all.

If you want to engage the power of games, you have to build a game development *team* from the ground up, right from the start, and it has to be a foundational part of your product.

And if you ever hear some “expert” telling you how they can give you that power fast and cheap, walk away. Don’t even wait for them to finish talking. They are *lying to you*.

Oh, and an additional thought:

Game design is a field where expertise and experience matter. A lot.

Being able to understand how to incentivize behavior, how to balance risk and reward, how to properly communicate ideas to a player, when & how to provide feedback, how to manage possibility space without exploding into unmanageable complexity… all that, on top of how to get a team of people with wildly diverse creative disciplines to all understand the core idea and work together to build it…

Yes, it’s a fun job. But it’s a complex one that has a LOT of moving parts.

A lot of entrepreneurs (and I’m speaking here from direct experience, having worked with quite a few game-related startups) think that their understanding of games, because they’ve played games, is equivalent to an experienced designer/game director.

It is not.

And most of the game-based (product) companies I’ve seen only reach out for expert help when it’s FAR too late.

If you don’t bring in game-centric expertise for a game-based product from day 1, you are dooming your product to fail. I’m serious. This is a fatal mistake, and I’ve seen company after company make it, then ask for help when they realize they’ve done it wrong, but have no money or time to make any changes. By that point, it’s *incredibly* difficult to turn things around, if it’s possible at all.

Game development is an expertise, with value. It is distinct from “playing a lot of games” and your expertise in whatever other field you’re bringing to the table. It’s often strange and counterintuitive, and while yeah, some people can figure it out, I keep seeing teams on death’s doorstep because they believed they could do it based on no experience and found out it was harder than they expected.

Hiring Fields You Don’t Understand

How do you go about hiring a game development team, if you have no experience with #gamedev?

I’ve seen MANY companies over the years, be scammed – sometimes out of *millions* of dollars, because they hired a development team that promised things that they weren’t equipped to deliver. And it’s not just game developers – on one project years ago, before I’d joined the team, they hired a team of “experienced Hollywood writers” to write the script for the game.

The work they turned in nine months later was a failure in so many different ways, it’s almost hard to know where to begin. The writing was awful, juvenile crap. It wasn’t suitable for the targeted rating of the game. It was full of racism, homophobia, and otherwise wildly inappropriate content. But it was also completely unsuitable for a game where the player-character *is the player* and doesn’t have a prescribed personality.

We had to scramble to rewrite as much as we could in the six months we had left. I ended up redoing three characters *from scratch* in that time, writing *all* their dialogue while ALSO implementing the script into game logic. It was bananas, and if we didn’t have a team of dedicated, excellent developers fixing the problems, that game would never have shipped.

But other projects? I’ve seen “devs for hire” claim experience they simply don’t have. They’d say one thing that was technically true-ish, but where the text implied something that was explicitly untrue.

And it sucks to see companies invest their valuable time and resources into a team that’s essentially scamming them.

But how do you keep that from happening, when you’re trying to hire for a discipline you *don’t understand*?

I think the best way to think of it is “How do you buy a house?” Sure, there are some folks who will buy a place with no inspection and no contingencies, and hope for the best. Some get lucky, some get very, very screwed.

But most people who have a finite amount of money and care about risk get inspections. And they have contingencies. So if you’re looking to hire a dev studio, you have to find someone with knowledge to vet that team.

I don’t know of anyone who provides that service.

But on a project a while back, I had questions about the dev team – the project wasn’t working, and the claims they were making were raising the rest of the team’s suspicions. So I did a deep dive just into their website and their LinkedIn profiles. At first blush, things looked okayish. A sort of B-grade team with experience.

As I looked closer, though, cracks started to appear. Yes, they worked on that game & have a credit on it, but as part of the IT staff. And yet that person is the “Creative Director” here. Is that fatal? No – not by any means. But as I went further, it turned out everyone’s titles and experience were … illusions. And once I realized this, it became clear what the right questions to ask were, and the whole house of cards came falling down…

Why didn’t the project work? Why were the dev team’s answers to the rest of the company’s questions so evasive? Why did things they said with certainty and confidence make no sense?

That ability to say things definitively had snowed the inexperienced entrepreneurs who’d hired them. They used a bunch of fripperous bullshit jargon to make arguments from authority to justify their awful decision-making, but those arguments fell apart the moment they encountered someone (me) with actual experience.

So, I guess my point is this, and when I started writing this post, I had no idea where it was going:

If you want a “house inspection” when you’re hiring a dev team, hire me to do it. It’ll cost you a thousand bucks, and I’ll spend a day looking into the team’s experience and bona fides. I’ve had 20 years in games, led and built multiple successful teams, and while my background is primarily in game design, I’ve worked with every stripe of game developer at every scale out there.

I’ll tell you whether the team is what they say they are, what experience they *actually* have to back it up, whether what they’re proposing makes sense, and whether you should actually work with them, or find other teams to interview.

The worst thing about this: I was thinking of two specific situations, and only later realized that two OTHER specific situations could be described exactly this way, but were even worse, I’d just blocked them from my mind at the time.

This happens a LOT. Seriously, if you need someone to validate a dev, I have even more experience than I think at finding bullshit artists, apparently.

Layoffs & Frustration

Sorry to hear about layoffs at Riot Games. I’ve known a few folks who’ve worked there over the years, and it’s always been a bit of a mystifying place, to me. Super frustrating to hear that the cuts are super deep, and that the folks in charge are basically taking no personal responsibility, but I guess that’s one of those things that I’ve always found mystifying about Riot. Some parts of it produce incredible things (I loved Arcane), and some things seem toxic AF. The consistent bit is that the leadership never actually takes what I’d consider “actual responsibility”.

But hey, game industry, am I right? Kotick made that his whole career and won a glorious and lasting victory for himself at the expense of everyone else, so others taking that playbook and running with it shouldn’t be surprising. Disappointing, sure, but hey, what the fuck do I know?

(Here comes the turn!)

What I *do* know is that if you’ve been impacted by this, and you’re looking for another job, you might need help with your resume. You’ve worked on huge, impactful products that helped define the industry, and everyone undersells their experience and impact. I wrote this doc, and it will be helpful if it’s been a while since you’ve polished up your resume.

While this seems like it’s a turn into cynical self-promotion, here’s the other turn – https://lnkd.in/gddfND3x It’s totally free. If you read through this and want personal help, reach out – send me a draft resume & provided you’ve ALREADY read the entire doc, I’ll help you for $0. (If you haven’t read the doc, it’s $1k/hr.)

So yeah – sorry that the never ending onslaught of layoffs keeps never ending. Maybe it’s about time we take a deeper look at how collective organization might give workers some actual leverage in this industry that relies *entirely* on the creative hard work and value that the workers provide.

Boy! This is a post that isn’t likely to go over well. 😛 I’m just disappointed that the rich keep getting richer by fucking the folks doing the work and saying that they’re somehow taking “responsibility” because gosh, laying people off sure “feels bad” like that’s equivalent to stripping 500+ people of their livelihood.

So yeah. If you need help with your resume, I’m here for you. If you need help talking through deciding to start up your own company to do things differently and BETTER, hit me up, I can help with that, too.

The ONLY good thing about the last two years is that this is the environment of desperation and chaos that creates the next big thing, and I hope whoever figures it out takes the opportunity to create something better than this garbage structure we have now.

I wanna put my previous post in a bit of context. When I started in the game industry, I worked 60-80 hour weeks, slept in the office, got paid for shit. I was called into the office on weekends when I’d busted my ass all week getting my stuff done, just so that managers could have “butts in seats” to show off to the execs who were wandering around the office on a Saturday for some reason.

This was all bullshit.

It was a stupid, awful way to run a team & a business, and when I had the opportunity to run things, I swore I would do things differently. At Self Aware, we made a *billion-dollar game* and crunched ABSOLUTELY NEVER. And that’s not an accident. That’s a series of choices. We had to have some artists stay late *one night*. It’s literally the only blemish on that record while I ran the studio. It was a couple of hours, they knocked it out of the park, and the Art Manager and I talked about it afterwards, relieved and proud of the team, but I made it clear that this was a failure on our parts, and we needed to do better in the future.

These kinds of layoffs are the consequence of choices. They’re a failure on the part of leadership. And yet, leadership *keeps getting off scot-free*. Worse, Wall Street *incentivizes* this mercenary bloodletting and *rewards* it with money for the people holding the axe. Leaders make a choice. They’re making record profits, they choose to cut to keep the stock price up, they cut to keep their exorbitant compensation. They say, “Oh, I feel so bad,” but they *chose* to do these things.

Wall Street won’t hold them responsible. And workers, for the most part, can’t, either. If they’re hiring, in an environment like this, they’ll find people willing to fill those roles.

So the cycle continues.

But people are going to come out of this and create new teams with an animating purpose. What was “crunch” for me will be “layoffs” for them. They’ll do whatever is necessary to run their teams in a way that values the team, and puts their needs *ahead* of the share price, and *ahead* of their personal comp. And those changes will create better studio cultures, and people will be excited and happy to be invested in that company, and the results will be *better*. Just like our results were better. We crushed the competition – Zynga – at a time when they had gobs of money and hundreds of people crunching nonstop to try to hang on to their lead.

They failed. We won.

In the future, look for the teams that are built to make positive change. Someone’s going to get it right and eat the dinosaurs’ lunch.

QA Is Important

Over many years in game development, I’ve seen QA get treated like trash and expected to be grateful just to be a part of game development. Parties hosted for “devs” where QA was excluded. Catered lunch for everyone *except* QA. Companies where QA was *literally not allowed through the front door*.

I’ve also seen QA departments that are hot garbage, staffed by folks who were barely “professional”, who generated unintelligible bugs, or who wanted to be game designers and didn’t understand what the job entailed.

BOTH are symptoms of leadership that doesn’t value QA, and both are faults caused by that *leadership*, not by the QA department.

Way back in the day on the Sims, there was a phenomenal QA dept that worked tightly with engineers & designers, that knew the product and the players inside and out. When Maxis was acquired by EA, that whole team was fired, and replaced by people they hired at a *literal sausage party*. Like, “here, have free sausages & apply for QA positions”.

The bugs we got went from being helpful feedback that closed the loop on development to useless trash, and the supposed “cost savings” was totally burned on the extra time everyone in the development pipeline needed to spend to get the QA team back up to some minimum level of competence.

QA is a critical part of the development team. Hire high-quality QA people and treat them well, and you will:

1.) Save money EVERYWHERE in the development pipe
2.) Create a much, much better product
3.) Make your engineers’ & designers’ lives a lot easier.

Bring QA into your development process early, reviewing designers’ output, because they will break design *documents* just as thoroughly as they’ll break code. It’ll be 100x cheaper AND your designers will start to think like QA folks, which will make them *better designers*.

This is a no-brainer, folks. There’s no downside. All you need to do is not be elitist ding-dongs.