Inside the Hidden World of Game Loops | Tadhg Kelly

Will Wright famously, like having already made Sim City, I think, had to like go around and around and around inside EA for like years trying to convince them that The Sims was a good idea because they're just like, "Why would anybody want to play a game of being in their own house and stuff?" And he's like, "You know, >> it's awesome. >>" [laughter] Because it's awesome.

Exactly. But again, it's just we don't. We are, I think, as an industry, we're quite, we're quite bad at having a lot of faith in, um, our own medium. Like, we're quite worried all the time that things won't work. And we have this, I think, maybe overly, um, negative attitude to the value of trying a given game mechanic or trying to like change up, um, the gameplay itself in the game, or, um, trying to maybe find some way for the gameplay and the narrative to work together in a new way, rather than the same way that we see over and over, stuff like that. And we're, um, we're just very, very, I think, I don't think any other medium, um, because I, I don't think film people have the same problem, and I don't think TV people have the same problem. I don't think any other medium has the same sort of identity crisis the same way that games does, that it's like that they just don't, people, even who work in games, don't really actually know what they are, and they're usually mortal, mortally terrified that, um, that even stepping out a little bit will actually be a disaster.

I've been a game designer, uh, one form or another, pretty much my whole adult life. Even before I ever sort of joined the, the video game industry, I used to do a lot of kind of things like board games, or, uh, live action role playing games, or run D and D sessions, or like that kind of thing. So I've always, even since I was a kid, pretty much had a, um, kind of a game designer's head. Um, and then in terms of like my kind of career path, I've worn a couple of different hats in the video game industry over the years as a kind of a designer, producer, uh, sometimes consultant. In fact, that's what I do a lot at the moment. Um, sometimes a manager of, uh, teams or people or, um, or things like that. But my kind of root, if you like, thing I always kind of keep coming back to again and again is the psychology of play. Whether a game works or not, whether it's interesting or not, like, what's its, um, how is it designed? And so that's kind of very much my, um, my kind of through line, I suppose, through everything that I've done for the last 20 billion years.

So, >> So what do you mean by like the psychology in games? Because I think that's that's really interesting. >> So yeah, that it is, it is. And it's actually something that I kind of feel is a little underattended in a lot of discussions about, uh, video game design at the moment. The, um, there's design itself is, is such a, it's actually a multi-headed kind of set of disciplines. Like, there are people who, for example, design levels. There are people who, um, design user interfaces. There are people who write stories, narrative content, quests, missions, um, uh, fighting game tuning, like, just like on and on and on, right? There's lots of different sort of types of design and lots of different skill sets, if you like, that kind of come in that are within that economy, design, system design, stuff like that. Um, and we, as an industry, actually tend to group them all under one kind of label and assume they're all sort of the same job, right? We all, like, in the same way we might think of a producer, or an engineer, or a, uh, an artist, or, um, or that sort of thing. But producers, engineers, and artists will quite happily tell you that actually their fields are quite specialized and there's lots of different sort of parts to to what they kind of do and not everybody does the same thing equally. And design is, is very much the same. There's an awful lot of different aspects to it and I think most people who are really good designers tend to be very good in certain areas, but maybe they work with other people kind of in in different areas.

So the psychology of play, why players play, motivations of play, what's interesting about a game, what captures the imagination, what makes people inspired to play a game, maybe why is a game compulsive or addictive, maybe why is a game meaningful, like all of those kind of things. That's the stuff that I very typically have, um, thought about over the years, written about quite a lot over the years. When I advise clients, a lot of the times I'm kind of bringing that sort of perspective to the game that they're working on. Um, that sort of thing. And that it can involve a lot of different, because every different game is different, every project is different, every project's goals are different. So, it's not like one size fits all, but that sort of set of thinking is, um, it's kind of my, my baby, for want of a better word. Like, I like, I think an off, not in terms of like whether players understand a game, whether it seems like a game is what I would call extended. Does it grow? Is it interesting? Is there more to do inside it? Like, does it, you know, develop for the player as an experience? Um, those kinds of things. Um, is it, uh, appropriately presenting the right kind of fun given what the game is trying to be? Which again is a huge question because a lot of people tend to think fun again is kind of a one-size-fits-all quantity. Like, you know, you'll see a lot on on LinkedIn, for example, people making posts about like, "10 steps to design a video game," whatever. And they'll always say, "Oh, the first thing is, you know, make sure is it fun?" And [snorts] I'm always like, "What do you mean?" [laughter] >> "What do you mean? Is it twitchy? Is it quick? Like, is it reactive? Is it like splashy? Is it like is there a lot of juice? Or if it's a simulation game, do you mean like it takes me an hour to figure out how to craft an axe?" Like, and that that because that's fun for some people too, and it's not the same kind of fun as an. So there's, there's an awful lot of, um, there's a lot of nuance involved for sure, and it's actually quite hard to get to any kind of definitive description as a result, but that's a whole bag of wax, pretty much, is what I tend to work on.

>> Well, like the, a game is ultimately an experience, right? You're experiencing it from the decision to wanting to play. [laughter] >> We'll get into that, but I'll tell you what, how kind of in my head it's, it's like this. [laughter] >> You hear about a game, you decide to to try it out. There's obviously a whole, there's like the marketing process before that sets up your expectations, maybe what the community is saying. You download the game, you get into it, there's a kind of you're getting accustomed with whatever the interface is, the type of game, the genre. And throughout it, I kind of see it. I mean, when I, when I was studying product, when I was trying to get into product management, kind of one of the interface maps I really liked seeing like the, those maps where you can see like it's called service design, but you could see at every level how things run through. So like if you're going to a movie theater, like this is like the, the user experience for buying popcorn, and this is how you sit down at your seat, and everything's mapped out. And I'm wondering if you see games at like that kind of bird's eye view, or like you're looking at >> really in totality, how does someone experience it? >> That's a very fair question. Um, I think that that is applicable to a, a large but nevertheless subset of games. That I think that it's not, um, one of the things that's very difficult with games in general is that pretty much any, any kind of assertion of what they are in that sort of sense tends to ultimately reflect, if you like, a kind of a lens of the person that's asserting it. So, for example, if you're a very gameplay-focused kind of designer, somebody who makes like say, uh, very, very high skill multiplayer shooters in the, you know, um, Counter-Strike, Quake, or some other game that isn't 20-year-old kind of vein, right? Something kind of quite sporty, quite esporty. They don't really have the same assumptions of like product layer, or of user experience, or first-time user experience, or onboarding, or anything like that. They actually think of those things as sort of detracting from the kind of "get good," if you like, kind of, um, thing that sort of imbued the game. And if you talk to people who come from that world, they will often regard everything that you just said as kind of a weird imposition on top of what games should be.

By the same token, people who are very into making very heavily simulation kind of sort of style games, a lot of engineers, for example, who love to make kind of crafting games, or open-world games, or MMOs, or stuff like that, they have a very different sense of what experience means as well. They tend to think of it as much more of a kind of player-driven, agency-driven, um, "here's a toy set," like a giant toy set of interlocking, interrelated pieces. Um, and it's kind of up to you to find your fun in those for you, right? If you play any one of a hundred survival games on Steam, many of them are actually not that accessible at all, and they certainly don't really present anything approaching like a coherent through line. But, um, for the people who really, I like, love just sort of getting into a world and just kind of like kicking the tires on it and kind of figuring out what it does and stuff like that, that's what games are for them, and they don't really care that much about say, very behavioral-driven games. The exact opposite end would be very casual, often in mobile, but not exclusively, very casual kind of mobile games that are very reward-driven, very like linear, usually quite light in terms of interoperability between elements. In mobile, for example, there's a lot of games that look like sim games. They look like sort of Sim City, or build your zombie fortress, or like whatever, but there's no actual behavior underneath any of the elements that you'll see in those simulations. What they actually are is essentially like a series of farming, collection kind of activities. Not unlike Farmville or that kind of stuff, but there's no kind of like, "I actually need to route the power from one to the other in order to make the water collector do it," like types like you would see in an actual sort of proper kind of sim game. But in the context of the players who play those games, that level of complexity is not really what they want. They actually just kind of like playing around. And certainly for the people who develop those games, we're often very data-driven, who are often very like, um, game loop-focused in a sort of a narrow sort of way. Um, they actually regard a lot of the more kind of open-ended, open-world sort of stuff as just kind of a black box of mystery that they don't really know what to do with and they can't really figure out whether it would be fun or not.

And lastly, the, um, the kind of people who make very kind of action-adventure kind of games, which is closest I think to what you just described, the, your kind of, um, your, uh, God of War style game, for example, maybe, or your, um, Last of Us kind of game, or your single-player Halo, or like all that kind of thing. This idea of a kind of a curated experience, almost like an amusement park ride that you're sort of working your way through, where you're growing and it's becoming more difficult, but you're getting better weapons and all of this kind of stuff, and you're following a journey. That's a lot of fun, obviously, for a lot of people, particularly, um, uh, console and kind of AAA kind of PC, especially people who are into, um, sort of game awards style kind of games. But that doesn't really make a lot of sense to a lot of other people in other, uh, kinds of categories. And you can go on and on like this, like there's, there's a whole different sort of set of, um, philosophies that come with sports. There's a very different set of philosophies that come with educational or pedagogical gaming games, that were often games that are designed for young kids. Um, and there's a very different, in fact, very radically different, uh, sense of, uh, values that come from people who make casino games, or gambling games, or, um, or those kinds of things. So, they're definitely not one thing. Like, there's, and I think an awful lot of people have sort of, um, tried over the years to kind of come up with one universal, um, verbiage to describe all this. I myself, at one point, had a site that tried to do this about 10 years, 12 years ago. Um, a lot of people have have created like dictionaries of game development and or that kind of stuff, but I think it's such a, um, difficult thing to describe a game directly in language because it's a, a dynamic system that you're always kind of, it ends up in, you always end up in some situation where you're essentially speaking about games from a point of view rather than, um, being able to kind of objectively in totality, like, you know, arrive at one final sort of, like, descriptive kind of text that everybody will agree, or, um, those kinds of things.

>> It's like there's a whole spectrum of like, you say, what is a game designer, right? But the game designer depends on like how specific they are in that type of genre and that type of game. The platform, like you could be comparing a board game to an MMORPG. >> Both can have like similar tenants of of what a game is, but they can also be so fundamentally different. >> Um. >> Fundamentally different. Exactly. Exactly. The context of them is very different. The language is very different. Um, to be honest, the reasons why players played them can be quite different. I do think though, at the same time, there are a lot of kind of through lines, um, that that otherwise it's just me going, "I don't know," because it seems all right. Um, but there are actually a lot of through lines and kind of feel like somewhat consistent, um, consistent lessons, I think, that kind of derive, um, when you've worked on a lot of different games. It's just that you're, it's not, there is a temptation, and there has always been a temptation in the industry, I think, to sort of act as though like we figured out how to solve games, right? And I think every time that the industry sort of does that, and almost invariably, some along comes something within a year or two, and we're all going, "What is this? And why does it work?" You know, like that, it's, and has that, that has kind of always been the case. Um, so I try to, I try to avoid being overly, uh, prescriptive, right? I try to sort of be a bit more like, "Take in everything," kind of thing, and sort of try and see how it sort of fits into the matrix of >> of what I think I thought I knew, right? [snorts] >> And, um, and go from there.

>> So, what is it about the game loop? Because I think that's like a big thing about what you enjoy talking about, but in general for like someone listening in, like you, you imagine the game loop to be, >> I don't know, for a mobile game, I come in, I do some kind of activity, I get some kind of resource that then goes towards a longer-term reward, and then there's a cooldown period, or maybe, you know what I mean? Like that's the loop in my head of like >> how do I come in, spend my time, get some fun out of it, uh, and then kind of come back to it later, and I see that as a full loop. >> Yeah. So there's, game loop itself is actually a good example of different people come into games from different angles. They hear this term, when you actually talk about it in depth, what they think it means, you end up with these like radically different kind of interpretations. At a very simple level, the idea of a game loop comes from like psychological compulsion, right? It's the idea that it's the spinning plate metaphor, or the the the waiter in the restaurant kind of metaphor, that by having tasks that I'm working on but are not completed yet, like a psychological loop, that this is kind of inherently interesting, and that this provides me a reason to come back, maybe keep playing, keep paying attention, treat my, if you like, uh, journey through the game as a, as work to an extent, but like chosen work, if you like, rather than imposed work. And that, that, that is in and of itself quite, um, educational, which is therefore quite fun, which is therefore quite, um, kind of inspiring and interesting and all that sort of thing. [snorts] Now, and it's very sort of like, you know, there you go, simple description, sort of thing, that's fairly easy to understand. The complexity tends to come when, uh, people try and sort of use it as a, as a design tool. And the frustration, I think, for a lot of studios tends to come when people try and use it as a design tool because on the one hand, they might mean something quite soft, like just a general pattern of play of behavior through the game. A lot of people in the AAA and indie world, for example, when they're trying to, um, characterize what they think the loops of their game will be, or that sort of stuff. What they usually mean is something quite fuzzy. They mean like, "It's kind of like the player will sort of do this, and the player will kind of do that, and this will kind of repeat, and this and so on and so forth." But that the, if you like, the, the individual sets of actions and pieces of rules or behaviors or that sort of stuff within within states within that will actually be quite, um, quite mushy, right? That there might be a lot of like individual elements that are that are quite tradable in that, that they're sort of operating a little more on loop as a description of like the general feel of what they want. The, um, famous example of Jamie Griezmmer's, um, Griezmire, sorry, "30 seconds of fun" is a good example of that kind of thinking, right? Just something quite soft, something kind of like vaguely like this. We don't want the game to be too slow. We don't want the game to be too fast. We kind of want like a reasonable spread of things happening. Um, we kind of want it to feel like the player's kind of solving something, right? But if you're in the, um, if you're in the mobile world, they have a much more rigid idea of that. They're much more like, I mean, there's an actual hard structure that the player just keeps going around again and again and again and again and again, right? Um, if you're, uh, in the sort of more simulation-y kind of world, you really tend to not think a lot in terms of game loops at all, other than when people make you. And so it's, you tend to think of things much more like as a series of actions of things I'm kind of working on that may not take, uh, they may take hours to to actually kind of complete, like, or they might be like long-term things that you're kind of noodling on quite a bit, or, um, like huge progression goals that are going to take you like weeks or months to try and kind of complete, right? Um, or that sort of thing. And so the, the net effect of that of all that is actually again, nobody really agrees on what they actually mean when they're saying these words. They think they do, but they don't. Um, as somebody who who consulting is, I look a lot for, uh, what I would call hard loops rather than soft loops. I look a lot for, well, okay, like, is the specific action that you're talking about, does it have some kind of like important resolution state, something that's actually important that will generate a piece of feedback that a player will be able to understand and may or may not lead to like a fairly repeated kind, um, kind of structure. Like, if the Tetris piece comes out, and I twist it around, and I put it in the thing, and I make a row, and the new piece comes out, that's a, like, that's a hard loop. It's a very, very definable, like unit of of kind of game action that's going on. It's a mechanic, essentially, that you're kind of seeing sort of repeat over and over, right? And so I tend to advise when when developers are sort of working on their games, and they will usually come at me with much more kind of soft, loopy kind of stuff. I usually try and work with them a lot to sort of break down at a lower level whether the individual pieces of their game, like, loopy loop correctly, right? Whether they produce enough of a kind of a game system that there's something interesting going on, whether the player starts to realize, "Well, if I do this more optimally than that, or if I work on this more than that, then I will progress more than that." Like, if I get a good interplay of like these kind of little, um, these little kind of hard loops kind of working off one another as a player, I might start to see like an edge to the game. I might start to deform a strategy. I might think in terms of like my tactics. I might, that's where that's that's the goal. Like, that's where you really sort of start to get like interested in the game and, um, and that sort of thing. And so the, the, that that's a bit of a waffling answer, but like, what I'm trying to sort of say is that the, there's, there's, there's a, um, there's a degree of kind of low-level thinking that comes with a lot of this kind of stuff that actually tends to, I think, be a lot more productive. Um, and I tend to sort of try and steer devs away from, I think, sorry, that was my PC binging. I try and steer devs maybe away from kind of more higher-level, like, wishy-washy kind of sort of soft loop thinking because it doesn't actually tend to produce very much.

>> That, that totally makes sense. Uh, it's this idea that you try to maybe, uh, break down the loop into like one large loop and think, "All right, we run them through this whole thing." But a great game is lots of hard loops that then contribute. Like, I try to think it through like a, like an MMORPG. Like an MMO, I kill, I'm a human. I kill, I kill a wolf. I get some XP. If I kill enough wolves, I go up a level. >> But then what does that level bring me? Well, I can go get spells. >> Um, I can go get a new quest. What happens when I complete a quest? Well, quest gives me XP and then loot that then maybe I get some gear I can wear. And there are all these, like, I love MMOs because it's like loops on top of loops on top of loops. >> That then, and it doesn't, it's, it's incredibly alluring from that point of view. Exactly. >> But I, I can totally see how a lot of people maybe try to overdesign the loop to say like, "No, you have to follow this like three-step process to make sure that like your your players get as engaged as possible." It's like, "No, no, like a game is much more fragmented and >> I'd say significantly more complicated." But I love that distinction between a soft loop and a hard loop. A hard loop is like you're actually getting something out of it, right? So >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I think there's also like a couple of other things that sort of then kind of come in from that are like, again, at a kind of a softer level, then what are you trying to sort of pull the player through? Like, are you trying to pull them through say, a quite pulse-like experience, again, going back to Jamie and there "30 seconds of fun," or are you, are you looking for something maybe where it's like an hour-long kind of mission you're kind of working through, and there's supposed to be maybe phases, like periods of pinch or difficulty or prosperity or stuff like that that kind of apply, right? Like back and forth in order to kind of make it feel, again, give it some sort of sense of pattern. Um, are you, um, are you looking to be quite narrow with your loop design because you're trying to force a bunch of monetization outcomes, like a lot of mobile developers want to do? And so like, do you actually maybe feel like having too much complexity or too many things going on in parallel actually is bad for your game because it makes it kind of indistinct? Right? There's, there's a ton of different, um, uh, filters, if you like, that kind of then sort of you need to kind of apply can depending on what your product is trying to actually do and what your goals kind of are. And, um, and, you know, if you're a hard-nosed business person type of thing, like you really want to see where money comes out the other end of it, right? If you're an indie developer who's trying to create an artistic experience, totally different mentality, and your your sense of how these things should kind of interplay off with one another is radically different. And so, so yeah, so there's, there's, it's kind of like the building blocks, but then what you do with them. Essentially, that is, um, that's where that thinking tends to invariably go.

>> Yeah. I think idealistically we, we, we think, "Oh, a game is a game, right? It's going to be like, as long as it's fun, right?" Like, but it, but the reality is you need to like really be clear about the lane you're going into, like what lane of genre is. And then >> Because of that genre, there are expectations from those types of players or those people that find that type of fun fun, >> right? >> And and there it defines really what type of loops. And and that's why it goes back to what we were saying at the start, which is like, in general, what is a game designer? It entirely depends to like the level of spec specificity that you want to take. >> Specificity. That's right. I think, um, there's Have you ever run across a guy named Greg Castikian? >> No. Who? Who's Greg? >> So Greg is like, he's, he's an old school, I mean, he's still around, but he's an old school game designer, uh, who, um, like has worked an awful lot on a lot of foundational games in the '80s and '90s and into the 2000s. And he also is kind of famous as being quite a, like, an ordinary, um, orary character to an extent, but like actually quite a kind of a harsh critic, essentially, of the industry and and all that kind of stuff. He wrote an essay many, many years ago called "I Have No Words and I Must Design," which very much kind of touches this is from like the mid-'90s, which very much kind of touches on the sort of themes that we're we're describing, right? This idea that actually it's, it's almost impossible to describe a game, that it's really hard to kind of like find the right, like language of design, if you like, or, um, or that sort of thing. But his, his kind of central idea, and maybe he might disagree with me on this if he ever sees this, but his, um, central idea would be that like, as a designer, his kind of through line tends to be intent. It's like, there's all this bucket of stuff that I'm working on. There's all these things that I can potentially do. What am I like? What is the intent? What am I intending to sort of generate as an outcome? Like, what am I trying to kind of push the player towards? What am I trying to inspire in the player's minds? What kind of business am I trying to build off the back of this thing? Like, that all of these kind of decisions ultimately, I think, kind of are filtered through and fundamentally, uh, guided by this idea that like, "I intend to make the thing do something fairly specific, go in a certain way, give it a certain direction, paint in a certain way, make a great fun experience, maybe make quite a frustrating experience, whatever it happens to be, something that's extremely skill-based, something that's just kind of a cozy hangout sort of thing, again, whatever it happens to be." But that a designer, I think, a game designer, very specifically, is characterized, I think, by a sense of intent, a sense of like, where, what the overall kind of outcome I'm trying to generate sort of looks like. And that is different to, um, just general game development. There, there is a common confusion in the industry where people call game developers game designers back and forth. But there, and there's definitely a lot of crossover. They're not actually the same thing. That it's not the same exact kind of, it's like one is actually a subset of the other. Game designers are part of game development. They're not, um, just anybody who makes a game kind of stuff. But it's also its own somewhat, um, obscure skill set that, um, that kind of drives direction and drives to drives a project in certain directions that, um, that it wouldn't, they wouldn't otherwise kind of go, or maybe they would spend a lot of time faffing around on other things or stuff like that. And so for me, at least, the, um, the overall, if you like, if you want a sort of a really broken down description of what a game designer is, um, the overall kind of thing I keep coming back to is that I think a designer's job is ultimately to get a team where it wants to be without costing so much money that it's, it's actually essentially like kind of getting ahead of, we could, we could prototype in every sort of direction, we could kind of do whatever, like, yeah, you can. But as a designer, I think my ultimate, my ultimate kind of responsibility is to try and get the, the, the, the project to where it intends is to be without having to try all the things, but actually to kind of help it sort of get there a little bit faster, a little bit maybe a bit more efficiently, a bit more, um, uh, directionally, a bit more intentionally. Um, and so, yeah, so that's about the closest I've ever been able to come up with.

H >> How do you distinguish between the difference of someone who needs to prototype and experiment and then someone who has a clear vision of a game they want to build? Like that's something that like working in tech, it's like, "Okay, I want to release this app. Let's build an MVP. Let's test that people are finding value from it." >> And you can say the same thing for certain games, like you want to create a prototype, like, "Is this like core loop or whatever, or is this at least fun?" This this very basic prototype. >> Um. >> I think for someone listening or even just for myself, absolutely having this conversation, it's like >> How clear does your vision need to be, and then how open to, uh, experimentation and and change do you have to be based on technical constraints, based on like what the market is telling you, and what like players are telling you, and testers? Like, there's kind of this push and pull between the two, and it's not clear which >> you should follow. >> Yeah. Yeah. That actually, I think more than anything else, that's actually a reflection usually of a team's financial circumstances, whether they have the ability to do one or the other. Um, that I think a lot of, a lot of, um, a lot of teaching in games kind of tries to advocate for this, that quite sort of prototype and find the fun sort of mentality. And I think, you know, when you're, if you're being honest, that is the most noble way of trying to make a game. That is kind of where I think the best, um, and most inventive kind of games tend to come from, right? That like it is genuinely people messing around with a code set, an engine, um, whatever, realizing, "Wait a second, I can kind of do this," and then sort of figuring out if they can kind of spin a game out of something that kind of thing. Whereas the more imposed, "We've identified a market or an opportunity or categories or whatever," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like that will, that's a, that tends to produce a lot of games that are quite conservative mechanically, but they maybe are quite interesting thematically, right? Or, um, or that sort of thing. So they might be Greek mythology, or they might be dragons meets puzzles meets freaking vampires, or whatever, but like, it's a slots game, you know? Or like, it's like they, they collapse on on what the, um, what the system of the game does, like as fast as possible because they want to spend all of their creative energies on the, um, on the outward sort of stuff that will probably help to make the game seem cool and sell it and stuff like that. So, so it, it really reflects a lot, I think, where your team is coming from, whether they have the capacity to do one or the other. And actually, honestly, whether it's a little bit appropriate to what what they should be doing, right? There's an expression that I use a lot, again, it's kind of borrowed from, uh, many, many, many earlier sources, sources that, for a lot of teams, like a game is very much like a possibility space. It's like, "We could potentially do anything." And as a game designer, again, thinking back to what I just said about intent, a lot of the, I'm, what I'm trying to do is collapse the possibility space. I'm trying to actually make it much smaller, um, and more defined and more specific, and kind of define the range of what's the game is doing versus what it's not doing, um, to be a, a much less infinite-shaped, um, kind of space, something that you can actually kind of meaningfully experiment in. But that does mean you end up making decisions. You end up making decisions around whether to be, "We really want to prototype on this," or "We have a framework that we're going to borrow from that because thematically we want to do this," or like those kinds of things that you, you end up having to be kind of the bad guy to the team, actually, a lot of the time, where because everybody else wants to be creative, and you kind of are like, "No, no, no, no, no, no." And, um, and that kind of stuff. But you're saying no, no, no, no, a lot because you have a very clear, um, uh, direction, very clear intent in your mind about again, the kind of thing you're trying to engineer on the back and the outcome, what it's actually going to do and stuff like that. And it has been my experience over the years that a lot of game teams are very well-intended, but they tend to be very bad at sort of, um, estimating, for example, what the scope of their, what they're actually undertaking is. They actually tend to have a very, they tend to be quite bad at sort of being, if you like, disciplined with themselves around prototyping, or around the intent of their design, or around like a lot of that sort of stuff. And so, um, it kind of, it's very helpful for a lot of them to be able to kind of give them a solid framework that they can kind of work off of. So,

>> It's, it's an interesting thing because you'd think, um, the indie developer or maybe like the small team, um, is less capable of prototyping because they have less time, less resource. They should try to be get making sure what the market tells them to before they kind of commit a lot of financial resource. And it's the large kind of maybe AAA game or like the company with a lot of resource that has more open field to like just experiment and have fun. But it's the complete opposite, right? What you see in in the AAA, it's like, "All right, we need to like, let's say extraction shooters are the big thing now. Perfect. Let's get some Disney IP. Let's get the extraction shooter. Create this checklist. Follow it. Perfect. That's our path because we know that the metrics are there and there's this audience." And >> Like I imagine kind of like, uh, Yeah. It just to me it's such a funny thing because it's like, you guys can, you guys have all this resource to build like to try really cool stuff and not to say that some companies don't, and, uh, like you said, it's the less than you think. >> Exactly. >> It's the exact opposite. >> I mean, that is a lot to do with like how projects get financed and therefore like how, um, how stakeholders receive or understand what it is that you're trying to do. And so pretty much, like the further you go up the corporate ladder, essentially, the harder it is for, "Look, we just want to try something," like as a message, kind of gets through, right? The more things have to be justified, the more that you have to make a case, you got to build a business case, you got to come up with like a realistic roadmap, you got to come up with a timeline, you got to come up with like, "How does this adhere to like the kinds of things that the company likes to kind of make?" You like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that the, the natural tendency really from like all sorts with larger organizations tends to be, "What did we do that worked already? And why are we not just doing that again?" Type of stuff like that, because they think they understand what the shape of that is, and they understand how to maximize it, how to make it good, how to, you know, how to do a great job with it, and, uh, and that kind of stuff. And so it's only very rarely that you see environments where that's, um, that is at least allowed to be kind of loose. The classic examples are, sure, you're indie, yes, although if you really are very honest, an awful lot of indie game. Uh, an awful lot of indie game developers do actually just copy the hell out of other games that they sort of see. That the number of like very like truly innovative games that come out every year, even on Steam and such like that, kind of it numbers in the kind of dozens to hundreds. It doesn't number in the 15,000s, which is actually how many games get released. But there's at least enough space, right? There's enough kids with access to an engine and no idea what they're doing. And I mean that in a good way, like that they have kind of like, you know, open field kind of thinking, and that they're able to just kind of like muck about, stumble across something, and suddenly they actually, they're suddenly accidental millionaires, right? That sort of thing. But the, there's loads of, um, there's loads of room in, uh, a platform like Steam to do that. Although again, in fact, the majority don't do that. They tend to go, "I really like this," and then they just try and make a version of it, right? Or they try and do the the incremental thing. "I really like this game, but there's one thing that's wrong with it. So, I'm going to make it, but like fix the thing that's wrong, and then I'm going to be the king of the genre and take it over," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which almost never works. Um, but you see it year after year. Whereas like on the on the higher end, it's only generally ever been like projects, um, that have maybe accidentally been innovative, that like the, it's almost like stakeholders didn't quite realize what they were what they were buying into, or they come from outside funding sources. So like somebody who got investment from some guy who's not in games at all, kind of thing, but that created a lot of room to try something because they didn't have a lot of quote unquote industry thinking that was kind of making everything sort of, um, too, uh, conservative, or, um, and very typically so, um, uh, teams that exist within first-party platforms. So, um, Sony has a very good track record of of creating enough room for some of its studios to just make crazy stuff. Nintendo has a really good track record of again, creating some room for some of its teams to make just kind of crazy games, right? Because the incentives inside those companies reward having, um, very innovative titles because it helps push hardware. Whereas most third-party publishers don't do that. Virtually all mobile, mobile game publishers don't do that. What they actually do a lot of the time is look and see what has been bubbling up in other areas. Like, there's a pretty common practice in mobile these days to keep a really close eye on what's a popular indie game on Steam and then make a mobile version as fast as possible, like that sort of stuff. Um, and, uh, so yeah, so like the vast majority of teams really actually in all markets essentially use other games as their game design documents, and they, um, they very typically essentially try and increment from what is what they think is known rather than like just blue-skying stuff. And, um, and yeah, so.

>> I think that's so fascinating because you, I think risk is, risk aversion is something that you see so much in the industry, and it's not to knock them, like I understand it. I think what you said that I want to poke you on is is really interesting. The fact that like companies like Nintendo or PlayStation, Xbox, >> they have maybe more desire to be risky, although you can argue the specifics of like those companies, but because they have hardware that they want to push. >> But a company that has no hardware is like, "Well, look, we only have like the actual game and the software and like the service we're providing." >> Right? >> And it's just, there's that whole climate there. And then on top of the fact that games are getting more and more expensive to make, um, it's, it's, it's harder to kind of compete, discoverability. There are all these like emerging forces that are coming out that make companies even less, um, um, less less, uh, prone to risk or like taking on risk, creative risk, which is at the heart of what is to build a game, >> right? >> And it's just, it's just a, it's a tough spot for the industry because it's like, as soon as someone does go out and try to create something that's different, and it pops off, and everyone's playing it, then everyone moves to that, and it's like, "How did we not realize it before?" So, well, no one, like everyone's just sticking to their lane, and it's, I think a lot of players. Yeah.

>> At a, at a very root level, man, we are cannibals. [laughter] >> You know what I mean? Like, we just are. Like, it's, it's the, the nature of the industry is that like, we're, there's always like 10,000 reasons to say no and one to say yes, essentially. And like, and that the, the, um, the natural instinct at all levels in the industry, and this is not new. This is not just because of the discoverability crisis of the recent cost, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This has always been true. The natural instinct of of the industry is always to assume something doesn't work, or to be maybe cynical about why they think something works, or that sort of thing. And it's only generally the occasionally lucky, and sometimes talented, um, who, uh, maybe happen to like be working in a particular, uh, segment or corner of the industry where that sort of thinking is not quite as negative. And that that alone creates a lot of room for, um, for genius to thrive. You know, even like the, the number of games that we now consider as like unbelievably obvious successes that actually had a very torturous route to market, right? Or like where like the, if you like, the story of their genesis, like was kind of ridiculous, is actually massive. You know.

I was at um uh Games Beat um not too long ago for example, and I heard Genova Chen talking about what it was like to actually try and get Journey made. And it's just like, how did that game ever come out? Like, you know, literally, like everybody, including their publisher, was kind of against them, and yet it sort of kind of worked. And they all ended up like living on soup money for ages. And then, but then it's like, oh no, and now we're all like, but of course, Journey, right? And he, he's a little like, uh-huh, yeah, tell me about it. [laughter]

You know, um, Will Wright famously, like having already made Sim City, I think had to like go around and around and around inside EA for like years trying to convince them that The Sims was a good idea. Cuz they're just like, why would anybody want to play a game of being in their own house and stuff? And he's like, >> you know, >> it's awesome. >> And Right. [laughter] Because it's awesome. Exactly.

But again, it's just we don't, we are, I think, as an industry, we're quite, we're quite bad at having a lot of faith in um, our own medium. Like, we're quite worried all the time that things won't work. And we have this, I think, maybe overly um, negative attitude to the value of trying a given game mechanic, or trying to like change up um, the gameplay itself in the game, or um, trying to maybe find some way for the gameplay and the narrative to work together in a new way, rather than the same way that we see over and over and stuff like that. And we're um, we're just very, very, I think, I don't think any other medium um, because I, I don't think film people have the same problem, and I don't think TV people have the same problem. I don't think any other medium has the same sort of identity crisis the same way that games does. That it's like that they just don't, people, even who work in games, don't really actually know what they are, and they're usually mortal, mortally terrified that um, that even stepping out a little bit will actually be a disaster, right? Or um, or that sort of thing.

>> I'm glad you brought up like the the film and TV comparisons. I do think about it a lot when I compare it to games. Like the the two, like there are two major movies that have come out recently. Um, I think one is uh, one is Obsession, and then the other one is uh, I can't remember. There's just two YouTuber movies that have come out.

>> Right. Right. Right. The the rooms one um, >> a broken house, broken room. Yeah. Something room. >> Something. Yeah. Yeah. It looks amazing. I just can't remember the name.

>> And it's incredible cuz it's like they had like what, like 750K budget or like half a million budget, and they've grossed like, like 100 times that.

>> 100. Absolutely. And and the crazy thing is that like, I think they just had lots of cool ideas and they're like, let's just try doing something different, or let's just try approaching something from the mind of a YouTuber. Like, you don't need all this >> pedigree and uh, right. I love that that happened because I think for so much of games, you have a lot of people who come in maybe at the top, maybe investors, maybe executives from from adjacent industries. I'm not knocking them. There are a lot of great talented people that deserve to be running these companies, but >> right, >> at the same time, they kind of come in and think, "All right, this is the formula. >> I don't have so much of an idea of how things are evolving, how the market's changing, how player expectations are changing. So, I'm just going to stick to the formula because my job is to keep the ship moving." Like, if there's a hole, I plug it. >> And I think gradually as games has grown and grown and grown and grown, it you lose that hunger to innovate. You lose that hunger to take on risk. You lose that hunger to listen to that person, right? Maybe I don't know.

>> Kind of, kind of. I mean, there are like, for every, for every, I mean, Hollywood is actually a great example of of how people actually are mostly very terrified of risk. Same odds. There's a very famous quote from, I think it's William Goldman, many years ago, he said, nobody knows anything. He's talking about like how, how, you know, the film industry works. And he's like, the thing you have to understand underneath all of it all is nobody knows any, nobody knows how any of this works or why. All we're doing all the time, basically, is making it up. But the um, the, the, I mean, the number, the amount of TV and film output out there that's actually extremely formulaic or extremely like whatever is colossal, right? That the vast majority of TV shows that launch are like, very obviously off a production line kind of thing. And the same is true with a lot of movies, right? The the um, the MCU is a really good example of like, you can just see the story beats coming from a mile away on every single film. You're just like, "Okay, so in about five minutes time, he's going to have a crisis of faith, right?" Kind [laughter] of thing. [snorts]

Right. And the um, the the degree to which Hollywood has actually had a surge recently of um, of innovative um, movies and has been more willing to kind of take risks, I think has come about by virtue of kind of two things simultaneously. One is, there's a huge crisis in the film industry, just the same as there is in games, around uh, budgets, employment, cost, market fit, stuff like that. There's lots of like big pro, high-profile films that are failing and have failed uh, over the last few years. There's lots of like, why doesn't the firm work anymore? I was reading just this morning, for example, the the Supergirl movie that just came out, which is driving kind of mixed reviews, right? Um, some people really like it, some people think no, but like, independent of all that, it's probably going to lose the studio about $100 million because it's just not landing. Like, people are not going to see it and um, and that kind of stuff. And so Hollywood actually is no stranger to trying to find a formula and just run it into the ground, and then try and find what the next formula is, and then do the same thing. And you know, we're in good company in games. We're very in good company for with that.

But I think the second factor that's kind of prompted Hollywood into into um, trying new things is uh, a kind of a realization that actually there is a category of of movie that doesn't necessarily cost the earth, but seems to be quite popular, and that's indie horror movies. [snorts] The other is that the um, in many cases, like they are working with people who have actually managed to establish audiences on their own already. And so there's a kind of a sense that there's a pre, a pre-primed audience kind of ready to go. And if you have that, then the chances that your film, TV show, whatever, will at least kind of find some sort of viewership is much, much, much higher, right, than if you're just kind of coming out of like, wherever. Um, and the theme is kind of appearing in games quite a bit. So, there's not a lot of great funding available to make new games anymore. The um, the VCs, for example, have deserted the industry. There's something like 90% less VC funding in games this year than there was like, three, four years ago, right? Um, and publishers also, like their sense of like, what is a viable budget has collapsed. So, particularly third-party publishing, Steam, indie publishing, used to be the case, like a couple of years ago, that asking for like, say, a $2 million budget was not considered crazy. I mean, you would, you might not get it, but like, that's certainly the kind of the amount that you might pitch out a lot in order to try and develop a game. These days, it's actually more like, kind of 400, 500k. That the degree to which uh, uh, publishers don't want to spend kind of heavy money is kind of out of, maybe out of control, but like, nevertheless, that's the reality. And in many cases, they're not looking to come in at the early stage, let's develop, prototype, and build a game. What they're actually looking for is projects where like, somehow somebody managed to basically get 90% of the way there, and they can kind of sweep in and essentially do the marketing stuff like that.

So like the, the, the degree to which the industry is um, is replicating Hollywood is pretty strong. The degree to which we're sort of seeing a huge change in like, how financing and this idea of a pre, a pre-sentimented audience or a pre-existing audience, that's very, very strong. The um, hope I think that a lot of us have is that the developers themselves will kind of figure that out and be able to kind of work on and bring their games to market in a very, very efficient way, probably with external financing and um, and then that that sort of gives the industry something to kind of latch on to, right? And then we'll see a thousand games of that type. But but it's just the shape, the shape of the industry is like that. We're cannibals. We're always, we're always kind of eating our young to an extent. We're always like, you know what, I, we're always trying to um, to like jump on whatever the hell we think is cool now. Whether it's like a uh, a poker game that suddenly blows up on Steam in the form of Pelatro, whatever. Like that. We're just like, "Oh, that's what that's what it is now. That's what games are now." You know, >> like fresh, fresh bloods in the water. [snorts] Go for it.

>> Right. Right. Right. >> Exactly. Exactly. You know, again, it's it's hard not to be too cynical because when you, when you've been in the industry quite a long time, you see this pattern repeatedly, right? And so you do just sort of like get the sense after a while that inherently, it's probably always going to be like this to an extent. But like that, there's there's room for lots of cool stuff kind of within that. It's just the shape of how things tend to kind of mutate tends to sort of follow that sort of pattern.

>> So what do you think is the problem? I mean, I, I understand that there are loads. I mean, I've, I've had conversations on the podcast about the issue of discoverability. I've had conversations about how expensive it is now to have like a games team and like how a lot of studios in America can afford all these workers, but obviously outsourcing has become like a more >> uh, prolific way to become more productive at a cheaper cost, and that like everything's just becoming more expensive. It's harder for people to find your game. There's a lot more competition. Uh, those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, but for you, like, what, what is the problem? Cuz we are the games industry. I say this all the time, it's bigger than music and movies combined. Like, it's, it's a massive industry. You have two billion players ready to go. Can be playing on your phone. Like, you just tap into an audience. Uh, >> you have streamers playing. You go on YouTube. There's, there's everything tells you that games should be like the biggest thing ever. And yet >> Mhm. >> all we can talk about is just how in a lot of ways it is struggling or it is not what it used to be.

>> Okay. Yeah. Exactly. So I think there's the, all of that, all of that is true. Um, I think adding into that, it's a couple of things. One is um, the, the industry is quite franchise-based and always has been. And franchise-based thinking in the last few years has evolved into forever games, and like, you know, persistent world, or um, games that are essentially attempting to like, capture the customer for years rather than months and stuff like that. And that's actually worked very successfully. The fifth games that have managed to do it. The amount of of likes, I think it was, was it Matthew Ball, maybe, someone sort of uncovered a stat a while back that said that the majority of players were actually playing um, games that are like six and seven and eight years old now, rather than trying new stuff. Like, so the, while the overall kind of topline numbers, the industry revenue-wise and that kind of thing are um, going ever, ever upwards, we're like, 205, 200 billion a year now, something like that. That the, the appetite, if you like, for trying new things, or for um, for like novelty kind of in your experiences, or that sort of stuff, actually is either flat, or or in some cases, lower. Um, and now, a really good example is, mobile continues to to grow and grow and grow. It is by far the biggest sector of the industry in terms of software revenue, but it's also the absolute worst place to um, to try and get a new game kind of launched. Because on the one hand, you have all this heavy competition from existing games who just keep adding levels, content, modes, whatever, permanently in order to keep their their players kind of in their in their game. And on the other hand, you have um, so much like, so much competition from other smaller developers who are thinking the same way as you. But on the third hand, the actual like download rate from players in mobile of games in general is lower and lower and lower and lower and lower because players in that space in general don't seem to um, either a, be exposed to content that's appealing to them, or b, um, aren't actually genuinely all that interested in finding new content in that way. You see a similar, there's a lot of, I don't know if you see the similar thing exactly, but there's a lot of worries in console and PC that a similar kind of pattern has taken hold. That the, while we're seeing certain kind of very, very successful um, uh, games that are kind of in that sort of live service model, forever game kind of model, that kind of stuff. I think there's worry, quite a lot of worry that um, the, if you like, the appeal of new game content to players is lower, or that there's kind of a mismatch, right?

And interestingly, I think like, for example, we had the whole uh, showcase season about a month ago, and right, we had like, I don't know, like 20 different game showcases. It was ridiculous. I counted them all at one point. >> Yeah, there's so many. >> Something like that. And I had Chat GPG help me count like exactly how many games were announced, and it said, I think there were about 800 titles, and I was like, what? >> In fairness, like a lot of that is kind of small scale indie stuff on like showcases for certain themes or certain regions or like that kind of thing. Um, but even like, you know, there's several very large showcases. Obviously, there's like Summer Game Fest, there's um, like Xbox did a thing, Sony did a thing, like yada yada, Nintendo Direct, whatever. Other than, I don't know, because of the controversy around the God of War title and all that sort of thing. Do you remember what any of them were, [laughter] you know, like, no, who does, right? Does it seem like a lot of the content was very, like, sy, but that it was very like, well, this is, I know what this is. Like, I, there's, there's no, I'm not, like my imagination is not triggered by any of this, right? That it's kind of like, yep, okay, this is a game in this genre, extraction shooter, whatever. This is this, this is that, this is the other, right? The like the breakthrough ability of a lot of games these days, the impact ability, if you like, of a lot of games, the genuine excitement ability of a lot of games is quite muted, I think, even though they're very expensive looking and gorgeous and like beautifully produced and very well tuned and like, like they're so much better as games compared to say, 20 years ago, right? And yet they're just not, I think, landing with the audience in an excitement kind of way because it's very obvious what their origins are, or like that they're actually not that um, uh, they're not that exciting, if you like, at a play level, that there's nothing that they're doing fundamentally that seems quite different to um, to what's come before, right? Or with those kinds of things. And so [snorts] it's, I think a lot of those kinds of forces. So it's on the one hand, yes, discoverability. On the other hand, yes, financing. On the other, and absolutely, uh, difficult conditions, something, something, the economy, people don't have as much money, sure, like, whatever, the rising price of of RAM, sure, whatever. But the um, the conservatism around content itself, I think, is something we don't talk about enough, and is something that is actually a pretty significant um, uh, influence on that as well. Like, that the, our, if you like, willingness to um, to try different themes, different ideas, different settings, different mixes of mechanics, like that. We're just not really doing that a lot at the moment. We're doing really good job on like, continuing to refine down on the things that we think we know. We're doing a pretty poor job, I think, on um, breaking our heads out of like, certain rigid sets of thinking and um, and just getting, you know, letting ourselves be crazy kind of thing. [snorts]

>> No, I, what came to mind for me is, and and this, I'm not knocking the game. I think it's, I think it's going to be really fun, but like the Wolverine game, >> I was watching like the trailer the other day. It looks really cool. It looks like I'm just mashing buttons. I'm, I'm killing loads of dudes with my cool claws. >> Right. Right. >> But I'm also looking at it and thinking, I've played so many of these games before. Like, I kind of know what to expect. It's all like very linear. It's like story-based. It's very cinematic. I can kind of sit down, have the whole experience as Wolverine. But like you're saying, like it, it's lacking that innovation or something that says like, "Wow, I really want to try this." Like, >> right. >> And another, the another game that came to mind that I thought like is the opposite of that, and it flopped at the beginning, but now it's kind of coming back and they've done a really good job is No Man's Sky. So when No Man's Sky was announced, everyone was like, "This is so cool." Like, I could take a spaceship, I can go to different planets, I could build, right? >> Like it, it made the mind like explore and think like what this could be. Um, and I think maybe that is in a way, maybe what you're trying to say, which is >> maybe we're all just kind of like, o underwhelmed. Not even, not underwhelmed. We're not overwhelmed either. We, we've just come to expect what these games are.

>> We're just welmed. We're just like, I've seen this stuff before. It's going to be really cool. It's going to have really cool IP. >> Like you say, it's going to look beautiful, but it doesn't make me think like, >> crap, I really want to play this. Like, like >> Yeah. Yeah. There's so many.

>> Exactly. Exactly. There's one exception that I can think of to that, which is the um, the excitement around Grand Theft Auto 6 is >> palpable and going to be ridiculous.

>> Supposedly. I, this is all like rumor, rumor, rumor, rumor. There's a rumor going around LinkedIn this week that like people think that they've sold like 30 million pre-orders already or like, whatever, right? That it's going to be. So >> there you go. And it's going to be an absolute monster. And like, I think that that's because a, the time gap between those games has been so long that we all like GTA V is now very firmly in this sort of fondly remembered nostalgia phase. And that's great. Um, but also I think it's long enough that we can all imagine in our minds how how much this game will have grown, what it's going to be, where it's going to go, right? That sort of stuff. That does potentially set it up for enormous disappointment. We don't know because it could very well be that everybody's like, "Oh, okay. 10 years and it's this like, like that kind of thing." You >> I'm not saying it is. I haven't played a thing. I don't know anything about it. I'm just saying like, I'm, I'm thinking in terms of like, are is it just a gigantic expectations kind of thing, right?

>> Yeah. >> Um, but uh, but nevertheless, like it's, it's becoming the game that we're all holding our hopes on at this point, right? Um, you know, with GTA, um, the story is something that is going to be incredible, but I think if the game just came out with the story and maybe the same version of online, it would probably do what you're saying. Like, people would be like, "Ah, >> cool game, really impressive, but like, doesn't really move the needle." I think what I'm really fascinated to see, and I've always talked a lot about the importance of UGC, is the idea that like Rockstar is like opening up for like private servers and like game modes and like piggybacking off roleplay.

>> I think what they're going to do is not so much all the work they put in the game, but the foundation that they're going to provide to >> um, developers, to people who want to create their own experiences. I think that's like, that's going to I think completely flip the whole industry on its head because they're providing just like, here's a playground. Like, obviously you have the story and everything we've done, which is amazing, and it's like our Rockstar bread and butter, but what we've recognized is that all these incredible assets, this engine, the cars, the way people are used to playing our game, >> that is all for you guys. You guys just take it and just people are going to break it apart anyway as soon as it comes out on PC.

>> Sure. Sure. >> And just have fun and and make this whole business model based on it. And I, I'd love to get your take on what, how you think that is, cuz I, I just see so much of the industry heading towards this UGCification of everything. >> Like you see it with Roblox, of course, but >> I think if Rockstar hits this like on the head perfectly, everyone's going to follow suit, and then we're going to look at games completely differently. Um, I think maybe the, the one big problem that I sort of foresee with that um, for every other developer, not really for Rockstar themselves, is um, like building something that's intended for widescale UGC is incredibly difficult. Like, and in fact, it's a very much a a graveyard of um, of many a game to sort of get into something gigantically scoped like that in the hope that they think that they know what the back end of it will look like. I, I can think a lot around say, for example, the um, the post-WoW MMO boom and bust. So where like WoW came along after, I mean, obviously there had been MMOs before, but WoW came along and really kind of like defined it. They were like, "This is it." Like, "We've solved, you know, this is, you know, it's never going to get any better than this kind of stuff, right?" But this didn't stop like half a dozen, maybe more large studios trying to do the same sort of thing over the next few years. And I remember like, there was a Conan MMO, for example, stuff like that. And like the vast majority of them just freaking died on their arse because the um, the central thesis that they would have around, we just need to provide all this kind of stuff, it's going to be cool to players, and then, you know, they will come kind of thing didn't pan out because all of the players who were already invested in that experience were in WoW. They didn't, they would tour us. They would come over, take a look, go, "It's not WoW," and leave, right? And stuff like that. And so I, I really do think that you will see a few pretty major high-profile games like that that fail because they'll have this that thinking of, if I can just pull the GTA player across, or if I can, you know, whatever. Then um, then something, something, something that's going to be amazing, and something, something, something, question mark, question mark, question mark, profit kind of stuff. But like, what will actually happen is the same thing. They'll see a ton of tourists. They'll see a lot of people go, "Well," and go, "We've seen a lot of that with extraction shooters the last few years, right? It's like, it's been several like huge shooters that have like launched on with massive budgets and all this kind of stuff, and it's like this kind of pop-die kind of um, kind of structure. You know, they um, we've just had, very unfortunately, we've just had all the news with Bungie laying off 300, 400 people.

>> Yeah. >> Right. Off the back of their entrance into that market just not doing nearly as well as uh, they maybe thought it would. um uh, but for the same reason that it's like, even though they're Bungee, yada yada yada, that they've actually had an awful lot of people who've come into uh, Marathon from Arc Raiders and gone, "Eh," and, you know, and just back they go, kind of stuff. And so the um, the same, there's no reason again, the industry is very cyclical. It's very cannibalistic. There's no reason to suspect that we won't see uh, a lot of that, like we'll see a lot of kind of um, people trying to get UGC religion, but the fundamental product they're trying to base it off of actually doesn't hold up to that, or doesn't have the right design intent behind it, or those kinds of things, and it will feel like very solid taped on for lots of players, and they won't stay, and uh, that kind of stuff. So, it's tough, you know, but it's, yeah, you inevitably, if it does very, very well, you'll see that for sure.

>> And what, what are your thoughts on opening up kind of development to a certain extent to players? uh, this idea that I'm not so sure developers can often keep up, partially due to the restraints they have from a financial side, like you can't really experiment as much, you don't have the appetite to take on a certain type of risk. So it's like, all right, let's just open it up to the players, let's give them like, just like the source code of the game, maybe some kind of API. >> And just let them build, and then let them market their own game, and maybe a streamer starts playing it, and then all of a sudden, boom, like, you, you, I, I saw this growing up with Warcraft 3, and how Dota just came out of nowhere, right? Like, I was just on the, the, I was just playing online on on the matchmaking, and then Dota, and then all of a sudden, League of Legends, and then boom, MOBAs are massive. And >> And I just, I just wonder >> um, why don't we do more of that? Like, especially with, and I don't want to get into it right away, but I'm introducing it is the fact that AI is coming into fold, and like, all of a sudden >> AI, we got to >> AI, AI [laughter] beer or something, and go, AI beer. >> But, but, but [snorts] genuinely, like, like people who aren't that technical, I think, are now going to be able to write their own plugins. And I've spoken to streamers who play World of Warcraft who are like, "I needed to make a plugin to find this type of resource and track it somewhere." And >> right, >> I asked Claude, and it wrote it to me in Lua, and I just popped it in, and it created it. And I'm just wondering like, >> players can just kind of manage their own experiences, and shouldn't we allow for that? Won't that make the forever game that we're looking for?

>> For some people, it will. I think for a lot of people, so certainly at least what we've seen in the past with um, with widescale kind of platforms where um, where you can kind of get into a lot of kind of heavy creation. Um, I mean, obviously Roblox is a very current example, Fortnite is a very current example. U, but actually it would go back to games like Little Big Planet, or um, things like that, right? Where there's just a ton of like player tooling kind of available, and you can kind of do what you want, and that kind of stuff. What you will tend to see is there will usually be like a huge surge of like early stage um, creativity, which will mint some creators as like the next generation, right? That there a few people will become famous off the back of stuff they made, right? Or that you'll get some um, some developers who really make their bones kind of within that environment and go on to great success. But what you'll also see is a ton of the don't, and you'll also see a lot of um, a lot of uh, disinterest then kind of rise up after a while because you get a lot of kind of very um, copycat kind of, again, cannibalism. You had a lot of very copycat kind of behavior will start to kind of take hold, and then at a certain point, uh, the people who were very interested, maybe a little bit later, feel that they can't really make a mark in it anymore, and that there's like, there's not really opportunity to do that anymore because the channel is flooded with like, chillware, or um, or stuff like that. Right? So like, that is generally the pattern. And so it tends to be the case that like the mods that succeed, so to speak, Um, usually a very small subset of the the overall kind of stuff, and everybody else either is just too late, or their idea just isn't interesting, or they're too um, too inclined to just kind of copy and increment, or like, whatever. Like, all of those kind of same things we've been talking about for an hour. Um, and uh, and so on and so on and so on. But um, then the, then the follow-on question I think that emerges for the more professional developers later is, are the conditions in the platform itself sufficient that it's actually possible to monetize a studio out of them, right? Or to actually make a um, uh, like a real kind of mark, rather than just kind of hoping you'll be lucky kind of thing. And so like, you'll get um, a lot of skepticism probably after a while if they can't, if that, if those numbers just don't really make sense. Which is true for um, developers in other UGC platforms already. Lots of um, Roblox devs, and lots of like, quote unquote, professional game developers haven't gotten into Roblox in any kind of great degree because they look at like, how the revenue percentages kind of stack up, and they're like, "That is hard to build a business out of." Um, similarly, a lot of uh, folks who have tried to make a go of it in the Fortnite space have found it quite hard because of the the mechanics of how payouts work within that sort of space tend to be like, just very, very fragile, and also very buzzy, like something's very popular, and then it crashes into nothing, like sometimes in a couple of months. And um, and it's just very difficult for uh, for professional devs to kind of build a business case on that, or to to even project like a, you know, their quarterly financials kind of based on that, or um, or stuff like that. So they will tend to gravitate back toward more reliable spaces where they know they can make retail sales and um, and kind of take it from there, you know. So it, it is very interesting. There's, there's I think probably going to be a ton of like, just really cool, but very buzzy stuff, right, that sort of comes up um, because there always is. I don't know that I believe that there'll be a Dota that emerges out of it, or that sort of stuff. Really depends a lot on like, what the um, what the conditions of the of the setup kind of actually are, and um, and whether there's honestly, whether there's enough kind of like sense of opportunity kind of within it, you know. But you, like, never say never. Like, there are definitely a bunch of games that have come out of like, unlikely, uh, unlikely circumstances like that, or come out of unlikely sort of avenues like that, and you know, we've seen several successes over the years where it's like, "Oh, right, that actually started as a mod kind of thing, right?" [laughter] So, never say never, but it's just, it's not a keen, it's not a keen path, you know. And um, yeah, so, you know, I'll preface this with like, uh, I, I was using Fable 5, Anthropic's model, uh, I was using it like, uh, at work and stuff, and it was crazy good. But I started checking out like, what people have been able to do with Fable 5, and there have been players that have been able to like, oneshot Minecraft, or have been able to create like a rough prototype of World of Warcraft, and like its tab target attack system, right?

>> And I just looked at it and I thought, okay, um, we're now in 2026. I highly question that in 2030, what these models, if they can even, what they they'll be capable of doing. And I don't want to put the doomsday hat. I don't want to say gaming is finished and AI, because I think everyone just overreacts and thinks, "Oh, AI is going to take away, and it's all flop, and it's going to destroy creativity." It's like, no. But it's like, >> right, >> there's no denying >> because I looked at these like oneshots, which were like the equivalent of 30 pounds in tokens. One guy just recreated Minecraft, which is like a pretty good benchmark to understand how well these models can perform. But I just, I just wonder like, how is this going to, when when people can just create games and just vibe code them and just go back and forth with the model and say, "I have this idea of this game with this type of stuff, and then I want this type of feature?" >> And on top of the fact that with AI, I've spoken to some people who have reached out to me, and they've taken the source files of World of Warcraft, use GDAU, hooked it up to Claude, and they're just tearing apart that game, and they're just creating new stuff on top of it. They're taking assets. They're changing the textures a bit, so it's no longer as >> I mean, you, you probably, there will be arguments in in court for like, what the legality of it is.

>> It'll be huge. But >> yeah, >> like, I just remember when I was a kid, and I remember I used to see all these kids who would uh, play Flash games and just like make Flash games at home, and I always thought that'd be so cool. I would love to make a Flash game, like a stick figure matrix stuff, doing all this stuff. I can just totally see a world in like, the next five, maybe 10 years, where like, kids are just using AI, leveraging it, breaking apart games. Like, there's a really handy-dandy platform to build this stuff, and it's going to give everyone a run for their money. It's a scary world, but like, it's impossible to deny that this alien tech that just builds game like that, [laughter] right?

>> How are we not like, freaking, like, I guess we are freaking out about it in a way, but what are your thoughts? Sorry.

>> I'm actually not freaked out at all. I think, I think it's going to be like, is it going to like, is it changing how things will work? Absolutely. Like, is it like offering um, uh, the opportunity for essentially kind of a remix culture of of games to kind of like fully take hold? Absolutely. And I don't think that's a bad idea. Like, I like the idea that that, you know, I [snorts] mean, lawyers may have different ideas about this, but the idea of like, people being able to kind of riff essentially off of like, what um, the games they like and like, and what they, sorry, let me say that again. The ability of of like, people to be able to kind of rip off the games they really, really like and be able to kind of roll their own sort of thing with them and kind of create and kind of come up with new things or whatever. Like, that's kind of like the nice side of the sort of cannibalistic sort of stuff that I was talking about earlier. Like, that's like so much of the like, innovation of the industry has come from people going like, "How does that work?" and then building their own in order to understand how it works from first principles a little bit, and then be able to kind of like, sort of use that as a basis for how they then sort of like go off and have their own adventures, right? That sort of stuff. There's nothing kind of wrong with that. This also [snorts] obviously opens massively opens the door for like, a ton of intellectual property theft, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Although that kind of happens all over the place kind of already. But um, and for sure, there's kind of a running target to. But I think beyond that, the, the two things that I actually find very, very interesting are um, one, that I think it might open the door to a lot of the AAA industry working in a more kind of freelance sort of basis, rather than uh, kind of a studio employment sort of basis. So for decades, like the way that that pretty much every game company above above a certain size has worked has been pretty much the same as a software company. So it's a lot of people on staff. Sure, there's co-development now. That kind of helps with that a bit. But co-development essentially tends to be like, there's three studios making this game, rather than one studio making this game, and two of those studios are based in, you know, Argentina, and something like that, because they're cheaper, but they still organize and work largely like kind of studio model. Everybody's got a job. Everybody's just kind of doing whatever. Whereas in every other medium, the vast majority of production happens on a much more fluid basis. It's much more kind of contractor-based. It's much more um, uh, what do you might call, uh, like project-to-project kind of based, right? Which obviously has some risks as well. But it does mean that there's more room sometimes for um, like a lot more kind of ideas and whatever to be kind of considered and brought forward and that kind of thing before production dollars get like poured into a game to sort of see, you know, what's going to result. Um, and I think AI's got a big role to play, particularly in making that happen, because what it allows for, which is something actually that we don't have a lot of these days, is it allows for a designer like me, um, to sit down and really kind of noodle on an idea for quite a long period of time and iterate on it a bunch and a at a pace that's actually much faster even than a small tiny team working away can do, and kind of passively a little bit, almost like a part-time job while I'm doing other things. Um, and sort of see like, if they can discover new kinds of gameplay, new kinds of game, new kinds of ways of, you know, recasting what's fun, like that sort of stuff. And um, and potentially kind of discover a lot of new game concepts that working through the traditional channels tends to dampen down and um, and that sort of stuff. So, does it change things? Yes. Do we end up with an industry that's probably a lot more fragmented, maybe less traditionally structured? Probably. Um, do we see a lot of kind of hijinks? I would for sure. Um, but actually at the, the bottom end of all that, do we see a lot of like opportunity for creativity? Yeah. And like, and that's, I think, maybe the biggest advantage that like, we don't really have a good handle on yet, you know. That we're, here's a good example. If you were to ask me what that sort of looks like, right? Maybe what that looks like in five years' time is we see an increasing surge of games that launch on the open web directly, rather than going through any existing channel platform that kind of stuff. That they're built on a technology stack like WebGPU or something like that. So they look pretty good. That they're very innovative in terms of how their gameplay works or what they do or that sort of stuff. That they're built by like one guy, two guys, whatever. That they find an audience that sort of idea again of a pre-sold audience. They find an audience organically themselves long before they ever kind of quote unquote hit the industry type of stuff, which puts them in a great position to then quote unquote make a proper version of it for existing platforms, find budget, all that sort of stuff. Maybe that, that's kind of the pipeline that we we sort of get to, right? That we get to a situation where it's like, like ebooks, maybe, where we have like a um, a very kind of direct creator to small audience relationship, facilitated by everything being very accessible, monetization being very accessible. You just integrate like a cheap Exola store into your game, rather than go through freaking Apple or whatever, right? And then from there, you build a nut of something that actually has a lot of legs to it, and from there you get to go on and make a big boy version of it and become a betrillionaire, like that. It's like, maybe that's the path, like that. It's, it's very um, very kind of sort of self-developed for quite a long period of time. Excuse [cough] me. But not like trying to front-end work through say, the Steam economy, or trying to like find somebody to give you a million dollars just to make something or like that kind of thing. That it's all, we get to this point where like, the low state is so accessible that like games are just kind of blowing up all over the place. It's like their release strategy is somebody gets freaking posts a link on Reddit or something, and people just come into the game directly, play it a bunch. They're not even installing anything. They're just kind of like playing it like immediately, something like that, right? Like [snorts] we've got all of these um, these pillars in place, and it's uh, it's probably just a question of like, how they kind of grow together um, to form a new kind of pipeline essentially. So it's like, how the, I always link back to product management, but instead of having product managers, uh, with AI, you now have product builders, people that can prototype quickly, can get kind of >> right, can get feedback from the market, and that's going to completely like change like the way you would operate, or how a game designer would operate, how like a small company gets funding is like, hey, >> um, I can quickly prototype this type of game I'd like to build, I can show it in a way, I can probably even reason with it uh, with the AI to like, figure out like a certain type of model. Like, there's, I don't want to say it's only, I'm not, I don't want to say that game design only has to come from the person, but I think there's so much power that you can work with like, uh, like an LM to be like, "What are other games? How do they work? Okay, what works there? Like, what, what's the data?" Even though also creative pursuit, and like the designer also has to, not has to, but it should come from a place within. But again, going back to the idea that you can prototype stuff, and you can get feedback very quickly, and you can create an MVP, and then rather than spending a bunch of time like trying to spend money to build a prototype that may or may not work, let's say like EA's Anthem, which is like a really cool game, but like >> it, it completely, it didn't do what it should have. Um, a, this idea that you can prototype, which I'm very kind of fascinated with, and I think it opens up the doors in general for anyone who wants to be

A game developer or a game designer. And then the second thing you said, or this was more at the start, is that we're kind of going back to the Hollywood model. Like we're there, just a bunch of studios. Like people come in, "Oh, I'm the director of photography. I'm the lighting guy. I do this." And people come together for a project and then they break out. And, in a funny way, we've come full circle. Cuz like, when I joined games, I, I remember I was so confused with like, why is there an executive producer and I'm a product manager and there's a producer, but we kind of do the same thing. And then someone sat me down. It's like, "You understand that games is like, it's it's structured kind of like the way a set is. Like that's why you have those roles." And I was like, "Oh, that makes total sense." And now we're kind of going back to that. So, I think that's a funny thing to think about. It's fascinating.

The one thing that's very different, I think, in in that future compared to today, is people don't have jobs anymore in the traditional sense. So like, the, the one thing I think that's been true of the industry for a long time, but it's probably not going to be as true anymore, is there's a lot of people who are very used to say, you know, working at a studio for six years, seven years on a number of titles and then, you know, getting promoted and then moving on to maybe another studio for six or seven years. Like a career, you know, like a, like as though they were a tech worker, kind of stuff. That's been for the majority of people who work in games, that's been like how the model has worked for a long time.

The idea that, um, actually it's more like you're a producer who comes in on a project, but like you're independently a producer yourself, kind of thing. That, or that you're, say, an engine developer who comes in on a project maybe for nine months and then is off to something else. Like much more like freelance. Maybe it's a little bit self-directed because this is basically how I work as as a freelance designer, essentially. But that this idea that you kind of chop and change into things and that you're, you're much more responsible for finding your work and kind of developing your own business, essentially, and stuff like that. That's very, very different. And that's actually very different for a lot of people who are, um, full-timers in the industry today. They're not actually used to doing that. And I think that that is probably going to cause an awful lot of volatility, um, in the shortened media term because it's a kind of a skill set that not a lot of people actually want to learn. You know, it's like, who actually wants to learn how to network? It's awful.

It's so scary. We met at GDC conference going, "Hey, hi. What do you do?" You know, like, or here's my, here's my rates, like stuff like that.

The, um, so the, but I do think that there will actually be a pretty heavy restructuring of how games are made. And, um, it may not exactly be Hollywood. Like it may be sort of maybe a hybrid of what I'm saying. But that it's, it's, I fully expect that we won't, we won't really think of studios, for example, in the same way as we think of them today as these like huge entities where there's a thousand people working on some gigantic game. Or I, I find it very hard to think or to reconcile that idea with the future. I don't think that's going to be true. But, um, that the idea of that a studio is more like kind of ten people at a core who like, you know, build out like a, not even a prototype, something that I would jokingly call like a nano-type, like a micro-type, um, to be able to pitch with. But it actually is working because they built some of it in AI and it didn't take them six months, it took them like a month, kind of stuff. And then from there, like scale up fluidly around what they need specifically. That is a model. That's a model that actually quite a lot of indie developers have used for years. Um, but it's not one that exists in double A or AAA to any great degree. In double AAA, it's actually all codev. It's like get a block of people, kind of stuff. But I think in the future, actually attaching a lot more individuals, people who are like sort of, um, uh, independent workers, kind of stuff. I think that's much more likely because AI will allow things to standardize a lot more. Will allow things to be a lot more, um, uh, risk-tested way before they would ever get anywhere near like budget and stuff like that. And to be honest, that's a super complicated topic all by itself. There's a hundred different nuances to why that may or may not work. But, but at root level, if I was to put my sort of finger on how it, what I think the shape of the industry looks like in a few years' time, I think it kind of has some degree of that, or it's quite likely to be something like that.

And it's, it's scary. We're clearly going through a period of transition. And, uh, I, my heart goes out for for for people who are are losing their work and stability. And it's, it's, it's tough because like, you know, so many people work from a place of passion. And, uh, we are all look, like we're all right now. I think what, what date, it's the last day of change. This is the last day, I think, of Microsoft's financial year. We're all waiting to hear what's about to happen at Xbox. That the, the degree to which like layoffs seem like they're going to be come down the pipe and be devastating is, uh, is strong. That's what the rumor mill certainly is like very, very active on at the moment and on a number of fronts, right? But it's, it's like potentially like structurally changing, particularly for how the North American industry works. And, um, and that kind of thing, sort of seeing that kind of thing. And so like, it's just, I feel like it's unlikely that we get in a couple years from now, just some other entities that just hoover up all those people back into the same way of working that they used to. I think there's a ton of skills out there. Great. Um, there's lots of, there's tons of talent out there, right? Um, but that the model by which we work itself is actually antiquated. And that the, there's a big need for it to, um, to change quite a bit. So, I think that's going to happen.

You, you've put that really well. It's that this model is antiquated and we're kind of, uh, we're living a little bit in the past in how games should be structured. And like, just watching that the industry just go down and down and and and restructures and layoffs. And then everyone's just trying to blame something. But in reality, it's like, yeah, this, the ship no longer sails the way it used to. There are too many holes.

And I think we're particularly, we're feeling it in the US first because we're all bloody expensive over here. But like, to be honest, the same pressure, um, is is exists kind of everywhere to an extent. But like, particularly in the US, like in the US, particularly on the West Coast, man, like game workers out here get paid like twice as much as anywhere else in the world, like, you know, and more kind of thing. That the, the cost of living out here is so high and the expectation around salary is consequently also very high that it's quite a, uh, rigidly kind of locked in that sort of sense. Like if you were, if you're to go to, um, Europe and you're trying to hire for the same kind of talent level, like it'll cost you half as much. You know, if you're going to go to Asia, certainly certain parts of Asia, same thing. Um, you might find it a little more difficult to find talent of the same quality because some of those territories are still kind of emerging and stuff. You're going to pay like 30% on the dollar. Like, and so it's, it's the case, particularly in North America, for the industry to continue in the same format, if you like, that it has for decades, is just disappearing, you know. And I think everybody, anybody who's working here in the West Coast, especially Seattle, especially where I am, Jesus, like, it's layoffs, layoffs, layoffs here at the moment. Like, the, um, anybody who expects that the industry is going to work that way going forward, I think is just kidding themselves, to be honest. Like, it's, um, it's just change is, no matter what you can do, change is on the way, you know.

Are you optimistic, um, about at least the direction we're heading? Uh, like, let me, let me preface this question by saying that so much of what I see in games is nostalgia-based. Like, well, World of Warcraft Classic was such a great game, and so we just keep feeding into that loop. Uh, right.

I mean, I, I worked at Old School Runescape, and that game is grounded in what it kind of used to be and like continuing that tradition. And, uh, there's a big fear of like, what's coming up that's new. Can new studios handle it? Are there the right people? Like, I think I made this point, um, when I was speaking to, uh, Richard and Coen Nie, which is like, Bungie is is a great company and it's awful what happened, but these companies aren't the same as, it's not the same company that made Halo. Like, people keep attributing like, "Oh, it's Blizzard. They're going to smash it. They're going to make classic great again." And it's just, there's so much pressure. And I think all of us, we want to be optimistic, but we just feel like we don't have the same people anymore. It's not that same vibe. It's not the guys all in Southern California making this game. Like,

Right. Right. Right. Exactly. No, like every studio, every game studio on Earth is like a ship of Theseus. Do you know what I mean? It's like theoretically it's the same place or whatever, but like nobody's, none of the original people are there. Like they're long gone. You know that, like, you know, at a certain point, you know, it's not really, it's just an entity that has a brand attached to it. Like, God knows if it's like got the same values, ideas, people, talent, creative, intuition, like, whatever, like all of those kinds of things are, um, they're all people-based and they all move with wherever people kind of move to, right? And, um, and they become very, very stuck in their ways. Like they get very, very fixated on like what they used to make and what was very successful for them back in the day. And like, at a certain point, like that's just basically all they do. Sorry, I have a cough.

It's okay. Sorry, listeners. Um, but, um, but no, like they're, they're just, you know, they're, they're, they become temples, like in a sense, they become kind of churches to the, to the thing that they became like really well known for years ago. I remember, um, I won't name names, cuz it's rude, but I interviewed at a really well-known studio about ten years ago for a role, um, I think it was to be the head of their, um, god, what was it? Be the head of like their online version. This was a company that makes both traditional like tabletop and digital games. It was to be the head of their one of their, um, online skews. And so like, I went and I did the whole kind of interview round. I met a bunch of people, lovely guys, and, you know, we talked about, um, like what, uh, my approach to games is, like, what I think they should focus on. Um, I had done a bit of a pre-play of some of their stuff and, you know, commitment notes and ideas and things like that. And I remember over and over hearing from the the guys on the team that like their attitude to what they make these days was not like, just to get it out of my head a little bit. Their attitude was not like what I might think of when they were like surging and very popular in the mid-'90s, you know, and they were kind of growing and taking over the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But instead, it was like, as a church. Like the guy literally said like this, you know, "You got to think of this place as like a church. Like our our role here is to tend what we're making and to continue to iterate and make it successful year after year." You know what? That is absolutely the right attitude, like, you know, when you've got the thing, when you're up and you have the success and running, like that's what you do. But like the idea that that particular company would therefore be the place where, you know, they would just break out and kind of do new things and stuff like that, that just wasn't on the cards. That's not what they do, right? And that's like, they're just in a mode where, um, they're, uh, their way of working is not really like that anymore, or like that sort of stuff. That is true of like every, every single freaking big studio, particularly when the original leadership has moved on, that you know that it's just, they don't tend to maintain a kind of a "woohoo, what are we doing?" kind of like attitude. They tend to be much more like, "Right, we make Halo, we make Call of Duty, we make, this is what we do, you know. We are the, we are the studio that makes this." And, um, and then from there, do we make it well or not, you know? You know, is this year's financials better than last year's financials? Was this product better than last year's product, you know, type of thing? Do we have a competitor that we're like fighting against all the time now, or like, do we own our space? Um, you know, that sort of thing. You mentioned Runescape, for example. Like, like Jagex has kind of been famous for being a little bit like that for decades at this point. Like, I'm fairly sure when I lived and worked in London, like even back in the day, back then in the day, people were like, "Well, you know, we really like, we we're all about like servicing like what Runescape like used to be and stuff." You're like, "Isn't that, that was ten years ago, still the same thing?" It's like, "Yeah, pretty much." You know, but like, it works for them. They have a really loyal set of players, you know, that they're very, um, they're very in tune with what their own audience is doing. CCP with Eve Online, same thing. Very in tune with what their own audience is, their own kind of corner of the universe, you know, like it's not really maybe in their interest like to, um, to break out and like, "Never going to make a beat 'em up." [laughter] Or like, whatever, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It just, again, some, some companies have that goal that they just, it's like for them, it's a very stable, very, um, uh, mature, maybe sure, but like, very kind of close relationship, sort of thing that they've got going. And like their, their sense of success is is basically that, you know, like, "It's like, we made it, we're, we did really well, you know, happy days, um, we have millions of players. What's wrong with that?" Nothing, right? Other companies maybe have a more kind of ambitious thing. They want to, you know, be, or whatever. Uh, in which case, they sort of try and do it. But what they basically try and do then is sort of do that, several times over. Like they want to have a bunch of properties that like all essentially ultimately have that shape. And, um, and that they're, um, they're, you know, building multiple temples rather than one, kind of stuff, right? Um, but they still all kind of have that same attitude. It's like, they, they, they really want to get to that forever state. They want to get just get to that point where, um, they're doing well eternally, kind of thing. Yeah.

Is, is the large corporation like EA, is that going to be a successful model moving on where you have all these different studios? I mean, you mentioned Microsoft that's going to have to cut, like we'll find out, but it seems that the rumor is that a lot of studios are going to get cut. Is that model of just buying out as many games as possible and then just having all these studios sit underneath a large corporate entity? Is that still something to move on with or like, is that, is that something that will work in the next, continue to work or, yes, are moving away from it?

Yeah. No, I think so. I think so. I think what we, we'll see is, cuz there's always, there's always efficiencies that come with like being like ever larger kind of capital group. Um, and even if say, for example, we have a, um, if we have like a, like a surge of like middle-tier size kind of publishers over the next few years, like we've seen a bit of this on Steam already, right? We have a surge of these kind of companies that come through with a track record and all of this kind of stuff that they, their value as, um, acquisition targets, like ultimately becomes kind of overwhelming for much larger kind of entities and their appeal to be acquired, um, internally and like inevitably grows. You know, when the founder or whatever of a, a micro-publisher of today, kind of thing, you know, ten years from now is staring at like a freaking $200 million check that he's personally going to get paid for having done that, he's going to sell the company. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's going to, it's going to happen. And so like, we are, it's capitalism. Like, we will inevitably see, even though like the, the names may change, we will inevitably see, um, large-scale, um, kind of publishing groups, um, eventually acquire, purchase, whatever their way into into whatever those kind of new, um, trends happen to be. Again, we've seen that before. Like, there was a whole period of time in, um, the late 2000s, early 2010s when a bunch of Facebook game companies, um, came up out of nowhere, the Zingas of this world, stuff like that, right? And like, you know, proved very rapidly that they had a player model that was clearly new and, uh, maybe a little bit fluid, but like, whatever, but it existed. It was a thing. And, you know, they're posting huge numbers and like they all within a couple years, like traditional industry just went, "Yeah, bye bye bye bye. Yep. Great stuff, guys. Bye bye. You get a yacht. You get a yacht. You get a house." You like that kind of stuff, right? The, um, and this, the same is, is very likely to be eternally true. So.

My last big question is, uh, I'm obsessed with this idea of, I mean, depends on what you want to call it, but the metaverse, the Ready Player One. What is gaming going to look like in, uh, ten, fifteen, twenty years? Like, is it still going to be, uh, all these isolated kind of islands of games that you just like plug in the game and you loop in and like you play that experience and then you move on to another one? Or, uh, I want to dream and think that maybe we're going towards a more interconnected kind of way of playing games. And that's why, uh, holistic, something, something. Yeah. Holistic. That's why I'm so interested in like the idea of like AI and like multiple servers and players defining games, giving them the playground. I think all that in my head somehow connects in a very weird way. Um, and I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on like, have you ever thought like what it can be?

Well, so I, I obviously have a little bit of background in this because I did work at Magic League for a while and there was a lot of the thinking around what the, um, the software platform of that would be was very, very influenced by metaverse-style kind of thinking. You know, we thought a lot about things like not that it was just sort of an app platform, but that there might be an environment where you have like, kind of game as object type thing, or you might have some sort of fluidity between, uh, between kind of experiences. I've similarly worked off and on with a couple of crypto companies that were in the early days, the before it all sort of fell apart days, that the, um, where a lot of that kind of thinking was trying to take hold. The idea of like, you know, transitive game objects, transitive game properties, uh, certain fluidity of persona, Ready Player One, blah, blah, blah, um, kind of stuff. And of course, I do, I work, one of my many hats is I'm a co-founder in a startup that's trying to do use kind of AI to build, um, story experiences and story world kind of experiences. And, uh, one of the co-founders that is Neil Stephenson. So like the, the, um, space of kind of, I've, I've ended up in a lot of rooms talking with a lot of fun people about their kind of metaverse ideas because of the that association. And, um, and I've heard a lot of kind of pretty interesting kind of takes on what that, um, what that future might look like. Right. Um, I think there is, I increasingly in my mind, I think there is a, a pretty interesting, um, case to be made for the idea that we'll see some amount of kind of transitive properties evolve in game platforms over time, and maybe even eventually across all kind of platforms. But I do think that the, um, the user experience, the, if you like, the, um, the individual experience will still think of games, I think, as kind of somewhat independent kind of entities. That I think particularly, there's an element of game design, particularly that again, go back to what I said earlier about collapsing the possibility space, there's an element of game design where, um, allowing a game to kind of go to the infinite, as it were, where it just can be anything, anywhere, kind of actually often undermines what's fun about it. That the, this, the like too much fluidity, too much agency, too much, uh, uncontrollable kind of factors, too many kind of like unknowns, kind of turn it into maybe a virtual world, but not really a thing that's actually very like entertaining or focused or not interesting, really. You know, that where, remember I said earlier about, you know, building loops in your mind so that you can form strategies and tactics so that you actually, right, all of that actually only really makes sense if the universe of the game itself is somewhat closed, if it's got like rules that prevent you from doing what would be otherwise the most obvious thing to sort of, you know, to kind of win or stuff like that. The fact that a game actually imposes limitations on you, the fact that it kind of interposes upon you is kind of usually why a game is interesting and it's kind of usually what makes a game, um, successful and, um, and that sort of stuff. It's a few years back, I gave a talk about this where I kind of laid out several kind of rules of games. There's a bunch of stuff like around, you know, the spread of resources that you should have, the, uh, the idea that the player should always have a clearly definable job within the game, like this kind of stuff. But one of the, the ones that I kind of come back to again and again is that, um, really successful games always have a defining rule. So it's not that the game gives you all of this like agency, things you can do, powers, whatever, like upgrades, upgrades, upgrades, like, you know, progression, progression, progression, all of those things, sure, should exist. But in order for a game to really sort of then like win, um, it needs a rule that actually kind of limits that in certain ways. Something that actually introduces a really hard constraint on everything in the game that then kind of like drives it, pinches it, causes it to, um, to become hard, causes it to become a challenge, causes it to become something that you actually have to be creative with, like stuff like that, right? If you undermine that too much, you don't really have a coherent, uh, idea of a game anymore. You have something that's quite mushy and you have something that's probably very easily exploited, cheated on, that sort of stuff. Um, crypto, for example, like the idea that people had about like, you'd be able to buy a sword in this game and take it into that game and all this kind of stuff, independent of the fact that like, there's an unbelievable amount of engineering involved in doing something like that. Actually, it's not necessarily a good idea for a game. You don't necessarily want somebody to take a freaking blaster from Warhammer 40k and take it into Diablo, [laughter] right? Or like that sort of stuff. Like it just kind of makes Diablo sort of nonsensical, like kind of thing. And the, the, and so, so like heavy, and a, and a kind of a strong attitude to collapse in the space, to constraint, to, um, to inefficiency, to, um, to intentional friction, like all of these things, to intent, like these are the things that that actually kind of tend to give games a shape and kind of make them kind of work, right? So as a portal into how I access game experiences, I can see that sure, I can vaguely, holy, I suppose, as a, like, we're in some kind of collective world where it's all fluid interoperability, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, a certain kind of low level. I can't see that because I think it just makes a lot of games not make any sense anymore. And so, yeah, so, yeah, so that's my kind of attitude to it, like as maybe as an access point.

Great. Um, if that is the case, I think the, the two things that you really sort of need to see is, um, one, that the access point itself is somehow more fluid than what we have already. So, being able to go to a website, get a thing, download a thing, whatever, that is an extremely fluid experience these days. So, is your metaverse, like if you're putting on a headset or whatever, is it like you're just kind of straight to things, like at the speed of thought or something? Maybe, right? But is it like, well, I have to walk over to a thing and open the doors? Like that's not, that's not a thing. People aren't going to do that, right? We have seen a bunch of virtual worlds fail because it's like awkward, like it's like, you know, um, we don't, I think, as well have nearly enough, um, agency for at the controller level and most VR error kind of stuff to be able to kind of make that actually work. You can't do simple things repeatedly and easily. You don't have a lot of robustness in the input methods. They tend to be very fragile. And, uh, and so again, that really gets in the way of this is the future, kind of thing. Like the fact that I can with a mouse just click and drag and edit a photo and do, and it's like I don't even think about it anymore. It's great. I have worked with a lot of AR apps. I've worked with a lot of VR apps. I've never seen anything nearly as fluid as what I can do with with the interface that I have right now. Right. And so, um, so those are the two big things. There's a lot to solve there as a result, like, and nobody's like, yeah, on the kind of side of things. I think a lot of the, the key platforms have not focused on that problem. Well, particularly the input problem. They haven't really figured out how to solve it. There's been a lot of stuff with like software fingers and, all of it's fine, but it's fine. Um, but it's, you know, but it's not like, yes, you know, it's, it's just cludgy. And,

And they're not, until they figure that out, they're not, we're not going to see that future happen. It's all still to R&D. And if the UX isn't as good as it can be, then there's no, there's, it's, it's just a fun gimmick or maybe a fun way of doing things, but it's not.

Yeah. Yeah. Even just, I mean, I wouldn't even think of it as a UX because UX, again, going back to what we said at the start, like there's a lot of thinking comes with that, just basic utility, just like honestly, like making, even if it's awkward to learn how to use, like an interface, like as long as it's able to do stuff, like people figure it out, you know. Keyboards are not exactly like, they're not intuitive, right? At all. Figure it out because like they can do literally a trillion things with them. And so, um, so for me, at least, it's, it's, I think a lot of the thinking in from the VR world has been too focused on quite mobile, like, you know, single swipe, like type of thing, or like this beautiful kind of touch or like feedback or whatever. Um, because of where we've all come from. But actually, I, it's just in a corner. It's like, it's hit a local maximum. I personally think the way out of it is is just go right back to and just come up with something super awkward, but like really complicated to use, but also very capable and just go down the rabbit hole of making an interface that makes that work and then rely on users and just figure it out, essentially. So.

It's crazy how quickly these things come and go. Like AR, like I just remember the world was all about AR at some point. It's like, point your phone at this and then you'll get like this, this thing on your screen. It's like, wow. And it's like Pokémon Go. And then it just like, it just seems like the few, cuz I remember I was trying to break into tech at that point. So I was like, how do I get in? And how do I, how do I get into games? And it was just such a big deal. And then it just kind of goes away. And then like, uh, then then like the land grab stuff and like, uh, where you can buy your own plot of land and then the metaverse and then Meta rebrands and everyone's like, "Oh, this is the future." And then like,

Right. Right. Right.

You know, like, it's, it's so fascinating how, how we ebb and flow through these things and then.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, we're very, we're very like in the industry, we're very trend-hoppy like that. So like, there's, you know, there's always kind of hope that like the next thing that comes along is the thing. And funnily enough, I think, cuz obviously we are living in a time where there is also like a lot of AI skepticism and worry about environmental impacts and all that kind of thing. And particularly, I think, worry about job impacts, right? And stuff like that. But,

More on Celsius, essentially parking crash.

Sorry, that's my Alexa going, "Stop." Um, that the, um, sorry, yeah, backtrack, backtrack. There is a lot of worry in AI around things like jobs and, um, and, you know, etc. Right? But the, um, the fact of the matter is, the AI trend, unlike metaverse, crypto, VR, actually has a ton of legs to it. Like it actually is very, very useful. It's much, it's almost the opposite in that it's actually fairly user-friendly, but it has a ton of utility. And so like, the, that's one of the reasons why I think it will actually kind of do well in the long term is that it just, it has that capability as a, as an input method, as an interface to actually do essentially whatever you can think of, and then it's got the back-end processing to try and render that and, and sort of see what it kind of comes up with. Right. Which is not something we had with any of the AR/VR stuff before.

Yeah.

Who knows? Maybe voice will finally have its moment.

Oh, I mean, I'm using Handy on my computer every time when I have to talk to an LM, and it's pretty good. I mean, uses the Whisper model and everything. It's perfect. Like I can just.

Yeah, I've been using Whisper Flow and it's kind of blown my mind how, how it actually makes me sound not like an idiot this time.

Exactly. [laughter] Like, um, no, actually not that. I meant this. Uh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Um, uh, exactly.

And it just comes out so coherently. It's like, "I do sound, wow, I sound that smart."

Wow. Wow. Wow. Like, welcome to my, welcome to my TED talk. [laughter]

Exactly. Exactly. Um,

Yeah.

For, for a game design student that's coming out of, maybe is in high school or secondary school, and then they're thinking of going to university and they want to study game design. What advice do you have for, for, for someone who's maybe watching or listening and thinking like, this industry looks scary as hell. Um, AI makes everything seem pretty unpredictable in terms of like, what I should be doing. Um, we talked a lot about prototyping. Like, what's your advice for, for someone listening in that wants to get into the gaming industry?

I think the thing, I think actually the thing, and this may sound a little controversial, hopefully it doesn't annoy my friends too much. I think the thing that, um, I feel is most, uh, important for sort of newcomers into the industry to kind of really take on board is to have that more kind of open idea around what, um, gameplay can actually be. Um, because I think a lot of this is my perception. I think a lot of teaching in, uh, at the university level and at the, um, the kind of skills level at the moment is training, training a lot of students, I think, to develop games in a way that is already three years out of date, type of thing, and will invariably become more and more and more so over time. Um, and I think philosophically, a lot of what's being taught to students around, um, like what it is to make a good game or what a game looks like or stuff like that tends to be come from that place of being very, like, again, the medium that doesn't have a great sense of its own identity. And so like, there's, there's a lot of kind of focus on things like narrative and stuff like that that maybe feel like part of an argument that the industry was having a few years ago, but really don't sort of reflect where the medium itself is going or that kind of thing. Which is not to take away from the value of story in games, not at all. But what I'm saying is more like that, that it's a little like, I kind of feel like we're, we're entering into a phase of sort of modern bands, whereas universities are sort of still teaching ballet, type of thing. Uh, the, there's a, there's a fluidity. There's a real focus, I think, on playability and on interesting system design, um, and on like mechanics that sort of have a different tack on things and stuff like that, that I think is what I would like to see students kind of learn more. One thing I really noticed, for example, compared to say, even fifteen years ago, there used to be a really good series of blogs having a very active conversation about like where game design was going, what was happening in game design, like all of this kind of stuff. A lot of the psychology of game design stuff that we started off talking about was very actively debated years ago. But I feel like design teaching in the last few years has become much more of a sort of a skills-based thing, like how to make a level, how to use Unity, like that kind of thing. But also that it's become quite, I think, rigid around, um, around certain kind of ideas or certain assumptions or certain maybe philosophical, um, standpoints or like that kind of thing. And, um, for me, it's like, I just, I feel like that, that's all sort of out of step with where, uh, where the medium and the audience is actually going. And, um, and so, yeah, so like, it's a bit of a multi-headed answer, to be honest, but I just, I kind of feel like to equip the next generation for, um, for like what's to come, I kind of feel like we need a bit of a, bit of a shift in terms of what we focus on teaching-wise, maybe be a bit more confident in games as games, rather than, um, games as whatever they else they might pretend to be, kind of thing.

Ty, I want to, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been, it's been a blast.

This is really fun. Yeah.

Yeah. Really cool. Really cool. Where are you based, by the way? Are you out in France or something? It's freezing.

I'm in London. London.

You're in London. That's it. [laughter]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the days have been super long, but.

Yeah. I hear it's like super hot over there.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it is. I mean, now it's like 25 degrees. It's perfect, but like before, like last week was a nightmare. I swear. Like, I couldn't sit in my room. I had.

Heard.

I know. I'll tell you, I'll tell you off stream, but it's, it's, it's great. It's great to chat. Um, thanks for.

Yeah, you too. You too. You too. Um, definitely like if anybody wants to sort of follow up with me on, I'm on LinkedIn if you want to kind of yell at me. Um, I'm very messageable, stuff like that. If people want to go, I take issue with what this thing you said was, like, please reach out and say hi.

Yeah. Description, everything will be in the description. Yeah. For the, for LinkedIn, everything. I'll put everything in there.

I'm very, very happy to chat. So. [laughter] All right. Go ahead.