2x Founder Chris Scholz of Free Range Games and Upcoming Blockbuster: Return to Moria

Activision came to us and you know I think the budget I don't know is maybe 25 million dollars to make Spider-Man web of Shadows and um they said listen we're you know we're looking at p l if you want to do another Spider-Man it's only gonna be 15 million and at that point like I can't make anything perfect yeah yeah right and the irony of course is like three years later I probably would have said I can make it 15 Spider-Man games so it's just you know your perception changes when it's like your dollars that you're spending welcome to the gaming Founders podcast a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry I'm Eden Chen the CEO of pragma a back-end game engine founded by engineering leaders that built the platforms for some of the largest live service games like League Legends fortnite Destiny 2 and plants for zombies 2. pragma power services like accounts matchmaking and player data for the world's most

ambitious live service games and I'm Kevin Zane partner at upfront Ventures we're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco I lead game Investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work including pragma we interview Founders on their origin Stories the tactics that help them survive and thrive and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies learn more And subscribe today at pragma.gg gaming founders [Music] Chris scholes has an amazing story as a long time designer and founder in the games industry he's founded multiple Studios and Shabu games and free range games and went through an Activision acquisition we cover how to think about licensed content versus owning your own IP how to manage a company that has competing priorities like work for hire and first party titles working with a large publisher like Activision and their upcoming title return to Moria a

Lord of the Rings Dwarven survival crafting game now on to the conversation with Chris [Music] hey Chris thanks for joining us on the gaming Founders podcast so just to start off what what's your early Story how did you uh get into games so uh back in the the you know I started in the kind of mid to late 90s and uh there wasn't a such a clear-cut path you know there's no college courses there's no nothing like that right so I got in through my friend and eventual co-founder um Zach crafting who had gotten a job first as a tester and then a designer and um at the time I was doing a whole lot of nothing I was uh in kind of like a shoegazer band and wanted to be a rock star and then just kind of like a kind of terrible temp jobs and uh um It's actually kind of a funny story so at the time then Zach came home once we were

living together at the time and Zach said there's a design job open and this was to work with um kind of one of my gaming Heroes this guy named Paul Ritchie who you know his claim of Fame uh most recently is he he uh he developed Skylanders which was a billion million dollar hit for uh Activision but long before that he had made a game called Start Control and start control 2 and even before that archon which were quite legendary early PC games that I loved and um they had a game called a game company called Toys for Bob where Zach was working of course oh yeah yeah so he said hey there's a design job open you should just quit this is Zach speaking you should quit everything you're doing and learn 3D Studio become video game designer and um at the time it's like I just didn't know much about making games or I love games but it's like just no real conception you know and kind of self-doubt I guess right so I was kind of like on the fence but um at the same time I was a terrible temp

so like I have a Charles Schwab Temp and like I had it was an important job and I was the wrong guy for us like it was like office space I had to move print for accounts from this file to this and just terrible right and just it was a kind of a miserable job so I actually ended up getting fired by that and the guy said I like you Chris but you're actively trying to make the people here hate their jobs so it wasn't for me so anyway Zach I have this offer and I'm just kind of going well I don't know and then and the temp agency called and said you know Chris you're a real people person and we got a great job for it's kind of theatrical what we need you to do is dress up as a pilgrim and guard this mechanical turkey at the moment you know shoot kids away and so that was finally The Tipping Point Pilgrim video game designer I choose video and game designer and the rest is

kind of History that's how you know yeah and so so you were playing games as a kid yeah totally that was me and playing role-playing games and you know gaming was a huge part of my life it just again it just was a big black box of like this nascent industry and uncertain how you even break in but I will say once I got in this you know like when you find the thing in your life and it just brought total Clarity and focus to what I should be doing and then it was just at the time different culture right but I was like 100 hour weeks uh not because someone was forcing me to but it's just because I found the thing I loved and uh I just wanted to get great at it how big was the company at the time so toy survive was actually a subsidiary of Crystal Dynamics at the time and uh I mean I I shoot six people seven oh tiny okay yeah so um it was Paul and Fred were the anchors and again it's just crazy it's like Paul Fred uh Fred and his brother

Ken I'm sorry yeah and so Fred and Ken were the only programmers and then Paul was the designer and bleed and then uh there's a group of young designers that we all became best friends and we kind of all in Mass left only really like two years later to uh start our own company called Shabba games so but I mean the thing that was so unique and crazy to me about toy surviving the thing that I really like just I feel so lucky that um Paul and Fred were my mentors Paul just totally believed in designers and so and Fred too and so they only had two programmers and so um they really were very early on to what you would call like a graphical user interface for programming now so it's like a scripting very simple scripting language using this kind of Byzantine code that was possible at the time but that just was just opening the door of like the responsibility of real what a designer was in charge of uh it was just kind of

crazy to me how much power they gave us and uh very exciting how did you sort of Master the design craft is it just all learning on the job kind of thing because yeah I mean a lot of hours and just trial trial and error you know being a designer it's a it's a different role than a lot of I mean especially back then it was kind of you're really like the ultimate jack of all trades you were kind of supposed to be good enough at a little bit of everything to start with a black blank page and at the end of it like have something that's looks good enough sounds good enough and plays good enough so that you know all the other disciplines could kind of like oh I see you know like they are you're here to the artist and the artist would make it look prettier you'd talk to the audio guys and make it sound better but ultimately the vision was yours and you had to get enough down to really show that to the to everybody else what was the Catalyst for leaving to start shallow games how did that come about youthful exuberance it's like honestly

it's one of those things where I guess technically it was only about 20 months from of being in the game industry yeah before we started Shabba and I don't know man I like looking back and I'm like I have I have no idea how it worked right because we were pretty much clueless on how to run a company I guess really if it is as I have to go to my parents but I did they did put in a little bit of seed money for us that got us off the ground nice um again I think Paul and Fred because we contracted with uh doing like we'll work for hire uh work with him after the fact to uh kind of keep the the lights on as we're building because you know at that time we had to build our own engine right so you go from a long time ago you're looking at a single triangle on the screen and then I remember the a when that triangle started rotating and it was like a huge deal you know uh and it's like oh now it's got different colors and now it's multiple triangles it's it's crazy you know to build

something from from the ground up like that yeah and I guess seed capital for that was it friends and family and just kind of work for hire in the beginning yeah yeah and again um there wasn't a whole lot of investment in games I thought yeah so um really the whole goal was get a demo get a publisher right that was all we knew uh what to do and um and it took us a good long time about 18 months to finally get something that uh that that uh you know snagged a publisher did you have an idea already when you started what to build or it was just hey look we're all good friends let's go do this on our own and figure out whatever it is so just a little backup the game that we're making with toys for Bob was a game called uh pandemonium which was an early platform game kind of delightful it really did quite well too but I think when we're leaving um Crystal it was crystal dynamics that time too uh we kind of didn't want to do another platformer it was just kind of burnt out on that and um one of our lead

artists uh a woman named Laura was the lead artist on uh Wipeout remember Wipeout oh yeah of course classic and so the thinking was a racing game like that would probably be the easiest for us to to do and so really what we started out doing was kind of like it was a Wipeout like racing game but you were on hoverboards and nobody wanted that so I was out trying to get a contract for that and um it just was like never was like yeah it's just too Niche and you know and so kind of in desperation one of our kind of cooler designers and partners this guy Tom toysher thought um we should just put him on a skateboard and uh this is pretty Tony Hawk right so we did it we spent a month we kind of turned it into a skateboarding game and then everybody wanted that right and so it's just like like kind of like later 90s and skating had really started taking

off again you know the X Games and um and so um we ended up getting a deal with uh Sony first party which put us kind of in rare fight air right I mean at the time it was only Naughty Dog Insomniac and us were the only wow Western Developers for Sony and so that was awesome right it's just like a kind of incredible producer there who's still at Sony doing producing all of those uh companies games and more uh was this guy Grady hunt and great guy he was our champion inside of Sony and um kind of got us the deal and that was great but um you know what happened with that is uh right away we said you gotta go get Tony Hawk right because we all knew like he was it right and uh he comes back a week later it's like oh you can't believe this like he signed up with Activision right you know when they're doing a skate game right we were like God damn it that sucks but

you know at the time this is you know Activision was nothing like they were a tiny company right so the thought was like well they got Tony Hawk but they got this kind of shitty developer called neversoft they're not going to be any good and we're Sony and we'll just crush him right you know even though they were like eight months ahead of us right but then you know it just was I remember that the first time that um like at the time the way you got demos was they they'd show up in discs inside of magazines do you remember that yeah yeah and so there's a Tony Hawk they just had a warehouse level and we were playing it and we go uh-oh this is really really good right and they're way ahead of us and then E3 happened and they won game of the show and then kind of like in August or September right before they were going to launch Tony Hawk landed this legendary impossible trick called the 900 at the X Games and we were there and there's a hundred thousand kids going Tony Tone I just looked at my

partner I'm like we are screwed man there's like there's no way so our game came out it was a good game but um every time Sony ran a commercial 20 Hawk sales went up and it just kind of sucked but um kind of karmically Tony Hawk was so big that Activision it just was too much for one company to handle and so they actually came to us they said we got this game called Matt Hoffman that's in trouble we want you guys to take it over and then we want you guys to do Tony Hawk 3 for the PS1 turn it into a three-game deal with them and then the rest is history you know they bought us about a year later and how many people just going back a little bit how many people did you start Shabba with that was um eight oh wow okay so it's just a a bunch of people yeah yeah and then uh I think at the peak for the our skating game was called a grind session the peak there we were about 18 18 people okay and I guess so as you mentioned you guys

got acquired by Activision started working on a bunch of games for them and you were there for for quite a bit of time right yeah it's a um I stayed on a studio head for man about at least another eight years okay well I guess as a Founder that was working sort of in an entrepreneurial environment and then going to sort of I guess this big company what what were sort of The Vibes for you well again um it's free there's like almost different eras there with that period of Activision because at the time Activision was not that big Australia was we were the third Studio bought it was Raven was first then never soft and then us okay yeah and really that Tony Hawk was like their thing right it was pre-call of Duty and so then it was just like it was actually fun and Scrappy and you just felt like you were with these cool guys that you know uh it was it was pretty great and and and then you know and then the infinity War guys came and that was awesome and life Care's visions

and um host of other uh companies I actually managed in that time to repay Paul and Fred because plexingly at some point Crystal Dynamics fired Toys for Bob and this is right when Shabba was getting bought and they go well can we just join Shabba and so but we're already in negotiations with Activision and so they said listen we don't want to complicate this deal we'll contract with them get them you know throw them a Lifeline you know and so they ended up getting bought by Activision later so yeah another part of them now yeah like many yeah yeah years later but that was cool you know again just go Payback right you know it's uh did you consider any other options whether to try to did you talk to other Publishers potentially or you wanted to raise money yeah but yeah there was actually um some competition there right so um Idols was interested in in buying us at the time is like we had this success

we could see Tony Hawk knew that we could do a really good job and the deal you know it was a pretty good sure thing to do to you know it started as a game deal dude but we had a you know decent back end and so I think the real question was do we stay independent or do we get bought right and um you know at the time uh we took a vote it was only you know the the kind of like the core six partners and actually you know I remembering it is like I was actually the only one to to vote no right okay which was weird but you know the argument was you know again at that time it was like I had like 50 bucks in my bank account right so even though you know it was a decent amount of money it was split up amongst all the partners and so no one was like going to like Fu money right it was like but it was still like buy a house in Marin money right you know and so I think kind of the argument that kind of carried this way is like who's likely going to be that much different even if it was twice as

much money you know so I think the difference from nothing to something is pretty Monumental in someone's life did you have any concerns around giving you said you were you were going to work on Tony Hawk three for PS1 and there was obviously never saw if we did the original one like was there was there a lot of collaboration or conflict that Activision now like how did they sort of you know the big brother right those guys are great Joel and Scott who uh Scott is an investor in my current company uh but Joel Jewett is like the biggest character you'll ever meet in the gaming space he's imagine kind of like a Yosemite Sam root and tootin guy you know he's been he's his retirement is he bought most of Montana lives out there on a ranch he's just like he's a crazy dude but he taught me a lot honestly and there's some Joel quotes that are just hilarious uh so you know we were we were in it for the art of the game you know and and I remember I was hiding him

because they want us to do like 2006 or something there was something and I'm calling Joel and he's like so what are you gonna do it and I said well you know my guys are they're kind of concerned about their Artistic integrity and like over the phone Joel basically spit at me it's like Artistic integrity no one cares about their routines Artistic integrity when they're driving their new convertible you got a point there but uh anyway Joel uh so yeah there was tension they but you know it was such a big game and it was it was great for you know it was Rising Tides right so the bigger Tony Hawk got the more work there was there was more for everybody so it worked out for us I had no complaints interesting to view Tony Hawk as like the Call of Duty predecessors like multiple Studios working on it multiple sequels yeah why did I vote no you know

it's almost like a cult for us I just thought we were great and so I thought might as well shoot for the moon but you know once the decision was made I'm like all right fine let's just do it I guess that maybe goes into your your latest company free range and so obviously you stayed at Activision for a while what made you decide to give it another shot and did you did you go with the same Partners how did that all come out so free range came uh you know the the first 20 or so folks from pre-range all came from shama and it came when I mean I'd love to say it was all 100 our choice but um at that time it was 2009 and Activision was doing this like crazy consolidation right they basically if you're not working on Call of Duty it was I it was like remember like a the Guitar Hero was the thing but then that fell out so really all they had at the time was Call of Duty and so now there

was like all this jockeying of who's gonna work on Call of Duty right yeah so they shut down nine Studios and Charlotte was gonna be one of them and they said listen you guys could go up and you join up with toys for Bob or we could we'll find homes but I just was like no it's time for me to go and um and so you know grabbed um a bunch of the folks that just wanted to try something new and um you know the first while there we were kind of uh Sweat Equity uh bootstrapping it just from basically from the severance said the actor had given the folks you know you know at that point now I'm much more confident about what has to happen but even then I'm like it it is funny when you um when you're working for a big company you stop worrying about certain things like oh budget you know and and so now just getting back in that world of like because you know like one of the last big games that we did was a a Activision was a game called Spider-Man Web of Shadows and uh really there's a flawed game but it definitely

thinks about it that were just the best about any Spider-Man game frankly ever I think our combat system beats what insomniacs does right but it you know it was a classic tale we had 17 months to do it they'd given us a trailer engine for Spider-Man 3 which was just a mess and Spider-Man 3 was a 50 ranked game and so there's like tremendous you know just not enough time not Tech wasn't good enough we were fighting an uphill battle the whole way so I'm super proud I mean the game ended up getting like a 70 or something right but honestly the you know there are definitely a lot enough reviews there people say like this is a gem give them the time and resources this is going to be like incredible right but then at that time Activision came to us and you know I think the budget I don't know it was maybe 25 million dollars to make Spider-Man web of Shadows and um they said listen we're you know we're looking at p l if you want to do another Spider-Man it's only gonna be 15 right

million and at that point I'm like I can't make anything perfect yeah yeah right and the irony of course is like three years later I probably would have said I can make it 15 Spider-Man games so it's just you know your perception changes when it's like your dollars that you're spending for yeah it sounds like a lot of money for a a new company like 15 million dollars that's like a massive yeah or whatever yeah but at the time it's like you're looking at Call of Duty and yeah like how are you gonna hit this yeah yeah yeah that makes sense what did you learn from your I guess time at Java that maybe you did differently at free range as as you got going I think that's a good question we're just so much better at our the process of making games so really knowing how to schedule I mean I don't think we had a schedule when we made a grind session we didn't have like Milestones or you know an Excel sheet we didn't have anything that said when did things have to get done I think we had like a scribbled

piece of paper on but um it was just basically show up every day and just try to make the game better you know but a lot of like what we cared about at Shabba is still kind of the mantras of of what we do at free range um like yeah our things are kind of you know it's uh you know be a pro and that means like if you're a tech artist you're up on the latest of everything and you're just pushing the boundaries but it's also doing the little things like you show up to meetings you you pay attention live the dream you know which is a funny saying but um you know we at the end of the day we're making games and it's like every the 12 year old us is just the idea that our career is we get to make games and you know we always have this vision of like the little Timmy out there that they only get to buy one game a year so you just want to make sure that whatever you make is something that guy is going to think is amazing right and then finally don't be a dick and so for that it's like it's not enough just to be a pro you also have to make the other the person

sitting next to you feel like they're at the best company in the world and so those those that's why we had a Shabba and that's why if you're a free range and um you know maxims kind of work what's the state of the company today like how big is it what um who's what do you like I guess working on in terms of first party versus work for hire and whatnot well okay so when we started free range that was the height of like Facebook games and then mobile and um and free to play and you know we dabbled but we never really had a big hit there and it just wasn't really what we wanted to do you know we just like making the craft and we're not as interested in the business model side of it you know like I mean frankly if like you're playing in the mobile space now it's it's Financial Arbitrage right you go if you just do math of like can I get users can I get make more per user than it's costing me to get them right and it's just not what we were into we were into making games that delighted people right so yeah I'm about three or four years ago we made the kind of conscious decision to get

back into just making console games and at that time too it was finally when I totally took a step out of development right uh up until I was still designing right and the problem we'd have there is like I'd get too into a game and then kind of look up and go oh we need another deal and then the time it took the Delta there all the money we'd saved would be gone and since start over right so my job now is like mostly just keep the money spigot on full blast uh to make sure that we've got great projects that are creative and and really grow the company so really that was and I was like let's say that's really not 2019 either I was not a great designer and dragging the company down or I'm actually pretty good at the other one because since that time we went from 25 people to we're over 150 now we you know our Revenue has gone up magnitudes we've got three games in production two I can't really talk too much about

um but one is announced and that's a a survival crafting game uh you that's Lord of the Rings is called a return to Moria it's gonna be coming out this year super excited just you know again something like you go back to the 12 year old you and the idea that's like we're making Lord of the Rings uh it's just incredible and um and games that it's just it's the easiest game in the world I've ever pitched just because the the high little pitch is like your your dwarves task with going back and reclaiming Moria for the dwarves and uh just meet like oh I know what I'm gonna be mining and crafting and forging and drinking beer and singing songs and being a dwarf yeah dwarves and Survivalcraft didn't go go pretty naturally together yeah so very exciting the team is amazed you know that it's um you know now I get you know Fridays is my show and tell day where I get to to see the progress that each of the teams have made and it's just amazing to me but what we're doing and uh the but

actually right before this I was listening into uh this is a cool little feature in a little Tech thing there's a a website called listen to which lets you kind of just broadcast live streaming stuff and um our sound guys are in you know we're we've got all these original songs because dwarves love to sing right yeah yeah so we had written these great songs and now we're in the recording studio and we're I'm listening to these Hopper singers perform on there it's just like it just the hair stands up in your your arms it's just incredible so the World's Gonna Be Blown Away was this a game you've been wanting to make for a while or or how did you end up on a loader game for sure I mean um so we had made a crafting game before um with Linden Labs called patterns this was like 2012. and I went in there to Linden and you know Lyndon Labs is like the second life folks right we pitched this game that my co-founder Burke and I had kind of brainstormed which was like

imagine if this world was made out of triangles our our kids have been playing with this this uh toy called Magna tiles right which are like Legos that snap together in these kind of platonic solid shapes right so we said what if there was a game like magnatals but recurrency is the triangles right but then you can make these patterns which are you connect them you save them off and then you're building like these building blocks that you can make a whole world but then you can mine them away to get all sorts of different ones right and so we pitched this game to Linda and they go this sounds great and then one of the creative directors there says hey by the way have you heard of this game called Minecraft it sounds kind of like I've been hearing about this game right yeah and so we go no and then we played Minecraft we go like so many of ideas for that and so anyway but that started our Minecraft addiction right and I mean thousands of hours later uh so you know as you go

granddaddy of Mall the survival crafting is is Minecraft right so I think for us we're all huge fans it's just that it's just two loves right it's like that both survival crafting and Lord of the Rings it's it's kind of um kind of a Perfect combo how did the license come about like uh how did it all the gaming industry uh relationships that first game we talked about was called slip Groove uh it was the uh the hoverboard racer yeah so um one of the guys I pitched was this guy named John Miller who at the time was at idos or Sony or one I can't remember where it was at the time and um you know we did the you know the dance of like trying to get the deal done and didn't happen but we became friends and stayed in touch over the years and then John was always on the publishing side and um he uh ended up being head of third party publishing at Telltale and then the whole Telltale thing exploded right and uh but he was Savvy enough to

um grab the developers he was working with which were um oh who makes seven days to die you know the the pimp something fun pimps anyways seven days to die yeah fun tips yeah and then um the second one was uh stranded deep which were both uh successful uh yeah that's right yep and then all this time that I think he is a Telltale he had been wooing the Lord of the Rings folks right yeah and sold them all accountable like we should do a survival crafting game but at the time you didn't know what the game was that he didn't have a developer right so I was getting with him and then he's like hey what do you think about Lord of the Rings like I think it'd be amazing right I mean immediately we came up with the idea of doors right and I kind of sold him on it and then we went to Mill Earth Enterprise and sold them on it and then the whole deal kind of came together and there's all sorts of moving pieces I guess in The Lord of the Rings world one which is the Amazon series the other which is all the embracer stuff going on did you guys know about any of that I mean I'm guessing this stuff happened so before

so uh we knew there was a series getting made but we didn't know what if it was gonna be good or or when it was come out even the kind of scary thing was we knew Amazon was making like a huge MMO right sure yeah yeah and some were like you know yeah yeah how are we going to compete right uh but we thought hey it kind of in our head it was never going to be this like 300 million dollar epic right and kind of like in our back of the heads it's like we want to be Mandalorian we want to tell a smaller cool tale inside of this universe and just flesh that out for the for people right and so there was always this question of like what happened to Moria after the third age right and so it's like oh we could add to the lore and you know I will say uh our creative director on this this guy named Jean-Paul uh he was um the loremaster for a lot of ea uh Lord of the Rings game so you're not gonna find a guy in the world that knows more about Lord of the Rings maybe Steve uh Colbert apparently yeah I don't know

if Steve Colbert is like a huge thing for you yeah yeah so again the fortuitous thing was after we signed up we started made our first demo and everybody's stoked it just is looking great Miller Earth Enterprise folks think we're great we hear that the developer that Amazon was using to build the MMO got bought by tencent and that whole deal got canceled right so now all of a sudden there isn't this giant competition we're home free and we're really there's one other kind of more Niche game and so it's like oh my God like it was in you know it's funny when you look at success in the Video Game World you need the right team you need the right game and you need the right time and you know like I think our skate game right team right game wrong time we came out just too late you know right after Tony Hawk right yeah and so this is really the first time in my professional career well we have everything right it's like the show was good there's a whole generation of kids

that want to know more about Lord of the Rings we've got an amazing game an amazing team and I just I just it's been an incredible year yeah and I mean I just watched the show and there's a pretty large dwarf dwarf yeah element in the in the show too as well it seems like it's all synced together you know what's funny too it's like you see some of that and uh um even some of their artistic choices you go oh you guys are on the same page as us so but uh we're definitely doing our own thing and it's not tied at all to the Amazon show yeah it's all based off of the original text the people that really love Lord of the Rings are going to be the ones that love the game the most I guarantee it yeah it seems like at least from what I've read the the reception from a kind of respect for the lore and kind of respect for the story has been really positive and it really for us the way the way we look at it is like we will be a chapter in this growing story of what is the world of Mill earth right so take that like super

seriously yeah I'm curious how you guys think about third party licenses versus building your own original IPS you know working with the publisher versus self-publishing and you guys have done so many different iterations so far like how do you think about the balance at free range that is a tough call right uh there's no denying the the power of of working with a license and and the challenge of breaking original Ip our first foray back into making console games was we were helping out a Friend studio Glenn Schofield um build Calista protocol and it's challenging man you know because when you original Ip it's hard enough to make a fun game right but you go we have to make a fun game we have to come up with compelling characters a whole world of lore you know it's you're you're it's four times the work right yeah and then just when you go into the marketing brand side just the brand awareness and there's just a lot of choices right but um you know obviously the the original Ip the rewards are greater because you

don't you're not paying a licensing fee right and I would you know you could argue I guess it depends on license um but you know the creative freedom that comes with building your own your own stories is pretty awesome and owning the IP obviously is like a huge thing for a company so yeah I would say um like most things it depends so on what the license is and what the deal is so I think uh many of the IP deals fail because the business model set up in a way where it's like there's just no way you could ever make money so it's just making sure everybody's kind of being reasonable and the the you know the deal is something that everybody can win by let's have a question around you know I talked to so many game studios that are sort of tiptoeing the line between sort of the work for hire and trying to chase the dream of first party do you have any thoughts on like how you organize the team in such a way that allowed you to do it successfully

because obviously you guys are doing both like how do you I guess tackle that well I I start with um I never hire for projects culture is like a huge thing for me so I just want people to not really even care what they're working on knowing that it's something that's going to be cool and just be more about the you know they want to be at the company and I've been really fortunate that um like uh my partner Zach crafting from the copy of the game I'm still working with Zach all right and now his wife Mary and uh you know that's been 25 plus years I've got Scott Werner our art director was from the same era and you know there's at least 20 or more folks here I've worked with for over 15 years so we don't have a lot of turnover right um people generally and a lot of times people that leave they end up coming back so I'm about that it's like you know I take it super seriously that it's like I want this to be everybody's last job so then the responsibility to me is

making a great place make it so the work satisfying and challenging and make it so that everybody's financially successful so that you don't have to go to another job you you know like they never can raise a family and buy a house and retire that's what I'm about you know so if you get people that don't care about that's what they're looking for yeah I don't care if it's worked for higher or original as much right um so you know let's start there but now of course everybody does care right and I'd say the hardest part would work for Ohio is is the relationship part of it right you know how do you you know make everybody get along nicely and that's a challenge so it's really just trying to be a good partner and and finding good partners to work with now a company like ours the sink or swim Nation notion of uh um you know I mean actually and just for all transparency we did do a really small raise about six years ago so I've got kind of a foot in both worlds where we were VCA you know we do have some

institutional money but then the bulk of our Revenue has been coming from Partnerships right and um the great thing about work for hire is that safety net the continuity right just knowing that you're going to be around for several years is it you know like it's it's kind of terrifying when you go you got a chunk of money and now every month you're seeing it gets smaller and smaller it's not fun right you want to go the other way so um so you know I like that about balanced portfolio right where you go here's the thing that um it brings stability and continuity and new tech and people and then you take your you know home run risks with some some smaller bets that are you know uh that you own completely what motivated you to take on some outside capital I mean six years ago still wasn't like today or you know the last couple years in terms of all the craze of funding game studios I'm curious how you went about picking yeah

yeah we we had a game idea that we really believed in um it was kind of um early days of hearthstone and um one of my career directors Brad Fulton uh had developed this pen and paper card game and we were playing in the offense going like this is great and kind of thought about what it was like a ccg mixed with a tactical RPG and um you know we just thought well you know this is good enough it's like I don't want I want this to be ours I want to own the IP I believe in it and so let's raise some money to make it right at the end of the day it's like that's a good challenge I'm like it you know it ended up finding a home on Apple arcade and the game changed his name from Labyrinth to spell Drifter but it's just hard it's hard to get um enough users you know the game the people that played it loved it but just not enough people were playing it so yeah tons of mobile competition yeah it's a tough space Yeah you mentioned culture earlier I mean you also mentioned you've dramatically expanded

the team you know from dozens to now like over 150 how is that the biggest sort of scale team you've managed so far like how has that changed culture I saw the God not that big um Miss Peak but um yeah it's big um we have um a couple of other company Partners where um they would be employees of free range except they live in other countries and we just weren't set up to work with them so we have groups in you know basically around the world that only work with us so we we think of them as employees but we call them contractor the name only so that brings us up to 150 I think it's like technically it's like I think like 100 FTE so yeah and you know I don't want to get a lot bigger right uh you know there's all the studies of 150 is the Tipping Point the having multiple teams helps a lot because now the culture while is kind of the same on each team there's different flavors and um and it has worked out where you know

we have one game which is like a big AAA game it's you know it's a it's a five-year project or or a multi-year project and big budget right and there's definitely people here that they want that they want to work on AAA they they just want to try their craft at the highest level with the highest expectations right totally that's great that we have a home for them right those other people are refugees from that world there's anything on another super team I want to work on a small smaller team of 30 and really have a big difference and and be able to take more design risks right and so just being able to have kind of a home in any of the teams the way the teams are managed are different and so it's just been it probably does help our retention also because there really is something for everybody you know so it's easy to find you know a home for everybody do you guys have an office are you guys fully remote how does yeah we've got uh we actually have two offices that

neither are like fully staffed right we just got a uh um a big mocap facility in uh Marina Del Rey down in La which is amazing it's total state-of-the-art and that comes with a you know a dozen office spaces there and then we uh office up here in Sausalito California but really it's a handful of people come in um Fridays are starting to get a little bit more populated but again because we have this we have workers all around the world it just feels like a genie that can't put back in the bottle because you can't have half the team having one-on-one conversations in an office and half the team unaware right so it just doesn't I don't see how we could ever make that work I missed it I feel I honestly I feel bad for kind of like some of the young guys that are this is their first job yeah because it's like how do you this was how I got all my friends you know and yeah just to go it's just it's just a different world they're missing out on like the most fun years of your life I think yeah yeah we

go through a lot of the same things and trying to understand how to build strong culture when you know with the remote work it is very much just like you get your stuff done to some extent and then you're done sorts of stuff like in in lieu of getting a bigger office where you were to spend that money flying people in sort of twice a year we'll have a week of meetings and parties and social time you know and yeah and that's great well I guess we always ask kind of one final question and um let's if you could go back to sort of the founding of shavu and the founding of a free range do you have any sort of advice you would give other other Founders that are looking at maybe starting their first Studio on what you might do differently or just um I guess like good pieces of advice for them stay really small until you know what you're doing you know that definitely with free range there was a sense of like let's keep the band together you know so immediately we went into we need

to get a deal and so the more you could just be with like just a handful of people until you got something you think is really special that's probably the way to go that's great well built a really impressive company really impressive culture thanks thanks and uh yeah well thanks thanks for thanks so much for joining us yeah this is a lot of fun super fun thanks so much Chris [Music] foreign [Music]