Best of 2020 | Game Dev Unchained Episode 248

[Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of game dev unchained the number one game development podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof i am your host brandon fam and this episode is dedicated to the best of 2020 this is a surprise episode hopefully not too much of a surprise by the end of the year what i like to do is kind of do like a best moments of this year uh what a crazy year this has been obviously i don't need to tell you that but the there's been a lot of changes right this year was my first official year uh transitioning from a partnership podcast to a loan podcaster and i have to say it was kind of tough because uh it was a in a conversation i would share the mic and be able to rest

kind of think about things but i'm constantly on my toes uh listening to guests that i have on so it is uh it's been an uh interesting challenge but i think i've navigated 2020 in a way to find some comfort into being that lone interviewer and met a lot of great people along the way uh also 2020 was when i really stepped it up with the uh gdex.me conference the third one uh for the podcast that is dedicated to three days talking to people across the industry from all corners about major issues of this year and already thinking about what to do for the next year so last year when we did it we were trying to break through and transition from physical events to digital events and conferences

because we felt like that was the way i felt that it was important that our industry moved towards a free educational and making it available to everybody which was of course on my conferences and if anything 2020 kind of pushed everybody into that direction so there was virtual conferences everywhere that you can assume every company had to adjust and make marketing changes and i would like to say that i had some help into that but if anything i saw the trends going that way it just fast forwarded this year in addition finally cozying it up made the apartment looking nice uh as you can see i had a lot of interviews done in this apartment while i was trying to avoid the pandemic outside

but i want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for for sticking it through listening to the podcast we are uh reaching new heights and a lot of new cool partnerships that i can't wait to announce for next year in terms of uh 2020 guests already cool people are lined up i already have it booked all the way to march uh for for interviews and uh it's very exciting times and i can't wait to share that with you you can see this might be a new trend we might be a new uh two podcasts a week type of show going forward at least for the next six months because as i was kind going through all the episodes uh for for making this episode best of 2020 i realized i had a lot of shelved interviews that i never really released which was odd i did i did a lot of interviews

i think i did over at least 50 interviews and that's excluding the gdex.me conference talks that haven't been released yet so i'm sitting on approximately 20 to 30 interviews that haven't seen the light of day uh officially on the gdu podcast and i'm looking to kind of put that out there and since i'm i'm still booking people and talking new people every week to stay on the latest trends uh that means we're gonna have to move to two podcasts a week just to kind of make sure that you guys had the consumption out there so for at least for six months uh i'll be making probably fridays tuesday and fridays a new episode hopefully you guys are are enjoying the content to vary it up uh it's going to be different segments on fridays a little different and tuesday are still dedicated to to the interviews that you guys are used to in roundtables right and and friday's episodes are going to

be dedicated to g duck's dead enemy episodes as well as what i'm doing over at uh games online with art boosts so look forward to that starting next week uh i i unfortunately couldn't include every interview that i've done i tried to clip the best moments of every episode but it was getting pretty long i mean this episode alone as is it's going to be three hours long so hopefully you guys are buckling up and preparing yourself and might have to do and finish this on multiple sittings but um it was cool to kind of go through now go down memory lane uh compositing all these episodes together and it really made me feel very thankful that you know i'm able to kind of do this uh and and be unaffected by what's happening this this year i i i i had a lot of fun i learned a lot and uh hopefully this guy

this will encourage you guys to kind of go through those backlogs this past year and and catch up to those episodes because next year's episode's gonna it's gonna step it up a notch it's pretty exciting what's coming up right first one up for january will be an episode with uh joe walsh the lead designer on fall guys it was very inspirational and motivational it's one of the biggest games of 2020 so it was cool to kind of be able to kick 2021 with with that episode so look forward to that next week one last thing if you guys have not been able to peruse through the new relaunch site of gamedev unchain you should we are moving on and becoming a media conglomerate a full blogging site in addition to the podcast and there's like other youtube shows aside from game dev unchained so if you

haven't had the chance go over and check that out on gamedevunchain.com to see all the best episodes and when i'm talking about one of my new year's resolution is to go through over 200 episodes and start blogging those up to become a resource for you guys in case you can't listen through an episode you can at least peruse through the best points of that episode in written form and this is one of my biggest goals for next year and it's a huge undertaking because 200 episodes that's 200 hours at least uh of content that i still need to put up and uh it's going to take a lot of time but i'm fully committed the website's doing great i launched it uh mid-december and uh traffic has grown uh exponentially over 300 percent

uh just by by giving it a makeover so when you have the chance go over and check that out all right that's it enjoy the best of 2020. episode 214. crunch culture in 2020 the whole um cyberpunk cyberpunk delay has i think sprung forth more and more discussion about this again because uh somebody that was on that team said oh yeah we're gonna still be crunching to get the game done by i think it's like what is it september october yeah uh and so everybody i think that kind of spurred everybody talk about it again do you feel like overall i i think like the overall um survey uh there was like a state of the industry that everyone's kind of doing uh gamma sutra has been doing one i know edgar kind of been sharing their news and overall at least the last couple years what i saw was there's been uh actually a decrease

in overall crunchiness so there's been an effect in the last two years where developers have been at least conscious of their rights as game developers and maybe because of the a lot of the expose articles that's been kind of turning a light onto the game industry as a whole has been making an impact is this an assessment that you agree richard how do you feel about it um well actually since you gave us a hint and said that you read the karma sutra state of the industry i just sped read it um i think that uh so for the people who haven't read it yet like what are the reasons you believe caused you to work those maximum number of hours a week basically more than 40 hours self-pressure i personally wasn't working hard and i felt i needed slash wanted to i think like a lot of the video game

industry still runs uh and it will probably always run on the idea that uh this is an art form you wanna express yourself you wanna get your best uh stuff out there in front of players um when you think about a game like cyberpunk with a ton of hype around it and um it's a large uh you know box priced game like you have people who really want to make sure that they get their stuff out there and it's the best that it can be uh whenever i read about articles of crunch like being bad like uh the last one i remember was uh with um grand theft auto rockstar uh and yeah that's another like big ass game that takes a lot of effort and energy and you really only get like one big shot to make that uh super awesome first impression and to um like uh meet everyone's expectations around your game uh so i definitely uh can relate to that uh i think like that's a main reason why like 40 hours plus

uh is still always going to be around so yeah i mean uh yeah wait wait wait saying ray i'm saying part of it like yeah so some people would like to believe that it's just i want to get my best stuff out and i need to work harder to get my best stuff out right but like when you're on a team like that even when even when i saw the same um the state of the industry survey where it's like oh it's self-pressured i want to do it right a lot of times it it may feel like that or you may tell yourself that but but you know at the same time it's you want to make sure that you're pulling your weight on the team and everybody else is there late there's nobody to tell you to go home there's also somebody telling you that oh or somebody's setting the schedule up in such a way where in order for you to get your best stuff out you have to crunch right rather than setting it up in such a way where you can have a time to polish and have a regular work-life balance and

still produce high-quality stuff right um like i i people always use like yeah we always want to cram more stuff in and make it great right but that's where the management the people running the teams need to be like nah nah this is good enough all right or put time in to get that polish in right so that people don't have to kill themselves yeah yeah i mean to add to that like i totally agree like um so i think it's on both sides like the people are willing to put in the hours like i i don't know how many um i don't have any stats off the top my head but like how many of the people who are crunching like what age are they like is this their first game i mean you can look at the people themselves but ultimately it does come down to how the team is managed how the schedule is set up like is there time to polish is there time uh to accurately estimate how long any major task is going to take uh since i shifted to like indie stuff and i'm working with my family i need to make sure that it's like really tightly scoped to keep that work

life balance going and it's given me a lot of empathy towards understanding precisely how much time is needed for a feature to get done uh and i don't think that in larger uh corporations like that much attention can be given across the entire project so i'm not saying it's anyone's fault but it's definitely like how like people want to give their best effort but also just like you know do they have enough time to do it and are they overcast yeah i i think at least my measure by default with the crunching is that uh anything more than five people it becomes a choice uh because essentially when you're working with the large team there's a lot of gates in place to kind of prevent problems uh with delay of game or quality stuff not getting in right to me uh it becomes more about peer pressure and bad planning than actually trying to push this game

that is so close to being the best right it's not it's not about a ledge and so uh my my understanding with that in my you know there was a certain point in my career where i just said no right just like straight up neo just looking at him and said no and a lot of that is because of experience but just not wanting to be taken advantage of and fall into the peer pressure of things and so um i i i just see the long game of crunching so with crunching i think essentially i agree with i think we all all agree right um with smaller teams because there's so many so many factors that so many variables at hand that you're juggling with many disciplines at once and you're essentially maybe working on this game for the first time as a group that it's hard to account for all things

and with larger teams until we fix that problem where a five-year game is actually being made the last two years or last year i'm not crunching the first three years of this five-year development no i mean it's it's most of these games that get delayed like we were talking about uh cyberpunk right that game is essentially just being locked down the last two years of development there was a lot of high um uh high ranking officers kind of leaving at right pretty much right after the first trailer announcement was made right a lot of high departures being made shortly after that because the game was nothing but like an idea right it wasn't fully fleshed out and there were problems already happening so you guys can speak on this right you guys have been leads of major games most people kind of stick to the end just to get that credit

but for you to leave before the game is out and allegedly it's getting a bunch of hype right it usually means because of production problems that you just don't believe in or agree with the creative control of what's happening with the projects not because it's super tight at least in most of the cases correct yeah like uh game like cyber uh oh sorry no i don't know if you were oh yeah yeah all right so i was gonna say it was like uh yeah i think like um uh games like that uh which have a lot of hype to it i mean so much of like what uh you have to do when you like manage a product like that is like hype it up and you need to get people excited about it you need to get people to get invest into it like way way way back then like pre-sales matter but now it's a much different like sort of market that doesn't matter as much but you still want to stand out you know the industry is only getting larger and

larger and there's still more money that goes into these games people are spending more like the um just the the spending patterns of like consumers is like always just like increased over time um for a game like uh i i haven't like done like a full analysis on this but i think like if you were to like make a check box of like things on a product that would contribute to crunch i think stuff like you know like uh how long has it been in development uh you know how is it a new ip like how much like um content is being promised and stuff i mean i think there's a correlation that you can draw i mean it's not like you know these uh uh companies are actually thinking about like how their product is similar to other big products and how should they scope their stuff differently um so i think like a lot of these like jam ups that you see uh with big delays like for cyberpunk and even like final fantasy 7 remake um these things like just uh are just part of the game industry and like you never know like sometimes it's like

maybe sometimes it's not the development team's fault maybe they've got to work wait for things like like gold masters or regulations or other geopolitical stuff like who knows like um there's definitely reasons for these delays and sometimes it's due to poor planning and i would like to say that most of the time it's not because of that but you never really know episode 212 with ryan kingston figured out you know so i'm still failing still succeeding and um i think the um you're right it is something that is it's hitting a lot of people in our industry now as they're heading off into education and in many ways it seems like that's the recession-proof approach but once you get into business you realize you know business is business it's it's been around forever there's a whole physics to the way in which businesses operate and that becomes its own thing and it is not the same thing as being an artist

uh so you can quickly find yourself at odds with why you're doing it and that's something that has to be kind of addressed you know i got into business um unintentionally it was an i'm an accidental entrepreneur by all means um and it was just i the company i worked for the last company i worked for where i worked for somebody who made me decide i would never work for anybody else again um was just a horrible experience you know it was just a bad boss and you know he was going through his own crap so you know i'm sure what he was struggling with was real stuff in the middle of the depression and you know so all good there but it was still a bad experience for me and i as a creative realized how little control i had over my life and decided i was going to get control you know i went off i started freelancing and i realized i was just you know work i was basically working the same hours plus more hours drumming up work and then my wife told me that she was

pregnant and uh and that we were having a kid and i was like i gotta level my game up you know how do i do that and this was in the beginning of internet marketing and all this stuff and you know jeff walker had this class called um product launch formula and that class kind of opened me up to being um you know they didn't have this word back then but an influencer who's launching classes and builds a business around that i had no idea what any of that meant i just knew that um i had some standing in the community and i had the capacity to teach i loved it and um maybe somebody might actually take a class or two and um we we started with my own classes we just were like we're just going to offer this out and nobody else was doing it so it just grew gangbusters we trained thousands of people we brought people into it um we had partners all this kind of

stuff and and then more people started to flood into it and then people were able to do this on their own through gum road and so you know right around that time uh that's when it became more real it became more of a business because competition was there and there was more options for people to do stuff so we had to convince people um to go with us or do things on their own and you know we had to figure this stuff out and and you know those were very difficult years and they were mixed right with uh just a couple of years before i was really unhappy with my own artwork and so you know i had a team releasing classes and doing stuff but i personally wasn't satisfied and i was trying to struggling to figure out like what's my art what's important to me and what makes you know a difference and um and that struggle man i mean like there was the business struggle uh and in the beginning it was no not a real struggle because we were in what they would call a blue ocean so it was just you know as a free-for-all and as long as you were adding value it was great

when it got to a red ocean we started to struggle and that's where we're at today a little bit is we're in a bit of a red ocean in terms of training and people are undercutting pricing and everybody's trying to go cheap and getting and they're doing normal business tactics right and so um what i had to decide myself and this is like if we if we bring this back to how you how did you figure it out i i'd say i haven't figured it out but what i have figured out is um you just got to find what you want to do right like what's what's the mission what can you lead people in and that's where i took two years and i took game art institute i uh i was working with a partner and we severed the relationship i had a bunch of other teachers i severed those relationships and i focused on just what i wanted to do which was basically get somebody a job um i wanted to find a path where it's

like you can take that guy and grab some water i had a class right before this so i was talking non-stop um i wanted to find that guy that was like working at starbucks or the job i had which was you know a night restocker at costco you know and i mean i've worked as in this i've worked on an assembly line i've worked in construction i've worked in bookstores i've uh worked as a pizza delivery guy you know i've done all those jobs and i wanted to find that guy and give him a path to a job so that you know he goes from 20 30 000 whatever this current job is to 60 000 but not just that but he's doing something that he loves that would have not been possible before and that in all honesty i don't i mean traditional education is ill-equipped to prepare somebody for you know i wanted to make that difference in the world um and we did we built the boot camp the

bootcamp is the the primary vehicle for that and um and that's the thing that i feel i can lead people and that's the mission of my life that's where i could stand up i can be in here with this um in this meeting with you because i'm very um introverted uh even though i'm on camera and you know i i kind of i work on a persona and i project uh if i'm if i don't have to do that kind of stuff i don't you know i i like to just kind of be behind the scenes um but that mission of getting that person that job that was the siren's call that led me to kind of get through all the other crap you know i have to get through um which includes cash flow you know that's something you got to think about in a business how much money do you have come in how much you i love to spend money i'm an artist you know it's like i want this guy's tutorial i want this thing let me buy it let me get it let me work with this person right but

i got to think you know do we have the students is the cash flow coming in and and so there's these real business concerns and the only way that i will invest myself because i have to make tiny sacrifices the only way i would invest myself is if it's a big enough um if it's a big enough call to what to my mission in life you know which that is you know because i now know what that is i know i have one focus getting somebody a job that would not have gotten a job before it's hard to it's hard to uh grab a beer with a friend that like screwed you over recently you know like the trust right there is not the same um when something like that can happen because it really tests a a relationship uh i always kind of compared it to like a second marriage it's like everything it's just fast forward 50 years with the worst possible conditions and

you're just stress testing what you guys are made of basically and i would love to hear your thoughts about that i you know i may my wife and i went into partnership in this in the beginning and that is one of the more painful things to experience in fact just yesterday we we reincorporated as a c-corp in delaware um just because some investors that's what they're um requesting from us and uh we exited my wife from the business so she all the shares just went to me because it's too hard you know like we had to make a decision what's the better relationship and obviously the better relationship with husband and wife than business partner i mean that that was just an ancillary thing um but that's hard uh to deal with and you know i think the primary thing that i look at now that i like to um help people understand is that as a creative you're a business person whatever doesn't matter you know you might be an employee you

might have your own company who cares either way in today's industry when the skill the half-life of skills probably two years now maybe three if you're lucky like and you're having to re-skill if you are focused entirely on you as an artist and what you are a specialist in today you will be out of a job in five years hands down guaranteed i saw it i experienced it you know the the whole world of digital sculpting that i helped you know educate and and i helped like that world is still a very powerful very thriving world but it's much more competitive today and so much of that has been moved to different geo locations that pay different salaries and so that affects where i am here in california in laguna beach california and you're orange county so you know this place is insane you know and um

so there's all these uh these pressures and these things that kind of uh affect it and i i've spent a little bit of time today trying to educate my digital sculptors to the fact that uh they have to they have to wake up to realize that that there's a half-life to this skill like digital sculpting will change it will you know and you've got to be ready for what's next um it's still very viable still lovely it's it's you know if i have time to myself i'm not spending that time oh let's go in substance painter and and do some stuff i love substance painter but if i have time to myself i sculpt a face yeah you know and because it's so offer did such an amazing job of like making that a program that goes straight to your heart you know and you love it and he you know god bless him he he spent um i mean when i worked at pixlogic he uh he would call me at 12 30 at night you know and um and he'd he'd he'd be working for

another three hours after that call i'd be asleep after that call because i was like this is crazy um and then he'd be in the office before i was in the office at seven o'clock right so he gave his life to making this program that that connects with people and and changes their life and you know you get a sense of it in there but all of these skills have a half-life and uh we have to always be thinking about ourselves not just as this specialist that somebody's gonna trade time for dollars but you gotta think yourself as a brand and a business and how do you expand outside of that and um education is one part of that so i like to tell i tell all my boot campers anybody who's in here you know i don't the worst case scenario for me is they get a job and that's they just grind on that job forever because now they're under the thumb of somebody else you got to build a brand learn this skill then go and teach other people this skill and that's when you start teaching the community you

start engaging with the community that builds your brand that builds insulation it builds connections when this job doesn't work out somebody's like oh yeah i learned this from you right like one of my students corey mulligan he did this tutorial on gambeson's creating uh padded armor basically and that helped him get a job because he's in the job interview and they're like oh yeah you're that guy that did that that padded armor that gameton tutorial and marvelous designer i used that on this project and next thing you know he's hired yeah you know so we have to be thinking about ourselves as more than the skills that we have and i think that's the problem that we as creatives have it's it's actually fundamental to our existence because we must dive in deep into our skill develop that skill and then we bring all that capacity back up to the surface to say hey i can do this but but what we brought back up is not the core of who we are that's just the

end product the core of who we are as creatives is we are somebody who will dive deep who will put the time in who will digest who will go into that dark wood and discover new stuff that's that's the core of who we are as creatives and that's our core capacity that's the capacity that's going to create a brand and create revenue for us and create future jobs for us when ai and machine learning i mean machine learning now is doing stuff with 3d faces that blows my mind and so are we in a world where vimal and hussein and these guys are going to going to be the best facial digital sculptors what we are now but what's going to happen in five years you know can i just feed a bunch of frames to the computer and it outputs jean-claude van damme episode 215 with victoria tran other

mediums like the movie entertainment business and looking at the game business and how differently we use data i mean the movie business is a lot more open with how much a movie movies being made how much movie how much money it makes because there's no way around it the theaters kind of release the numbers like day of and stuff yeah and so you're able to kind of track that and kind of guess which movies which time frame would be best for this particular uh project that you have right games don't really have that type of thing um yeah the steam thing used to be what was called steam data or something that was done steam spy yeah was done through a third party but they shut that down but that was our best kind of measure before um so i'm wondering with all the kickstarter data and all the kickstarter projects that have been greenlit has there been a pretty good formula so far to kind of guess like before we even start our kickstarter campaign this

the likelihood of this being success is based on the interest that we buzzed before we even start the count off i would i mean sort of again like i hate answers they're like oh it depends but it does depend um because some people will announce their game and launch it with a kickstarter so they wouldn't have any like community beforehand or they wouldn't have any marketing or like revealed marketing beforehand until the kickstarter launches which was different from boyfriend dungeon because we had we've released other games before i was hyping up boyfriend dungeon for a few months before the kickstarter so it's really hard to say whether or not it'll be a success like we we figured it would be but we weren't sure and i think being able to account for okay if this game fails on kickstarter what are we gonna do and if it does really well on kickstarter

what are we gonna do i think it's one of those things where you just it's hard to say and it again depends on the game and how much marketing you have if you have a dedicated marketing person um and also the budget you're asking for and to get kind of the buzz going uh before during and after uh is it through the use of what what kind of facilities are you guys using is it through social media is it a lot of interviews is like there's so many outlets now it can be overbearing but i feel like uh a marketer such as yourself or you're like your industry definitely has the the the the the things stacked to kind of go to the right places and and know how to utilize it yeah so there's a lot of different avenues in which we try to get news and kind of just hope and sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't but one again it's really helpful that kitfox itself has made games before and we have a

community from that and we have press contacts from that but kind of the ways we built them is yeah so one we use social media mainly twitter and discord uh newsletter doesn't count on social media so yeah we do email marketing we also go to a lot of conventions we do press interviews and we do interviews like whenever we can no matter what usually uh we do panels we do talks we share our knowledge we uh do trailers and yeah we and we specifically like time exclusives for press just so it becomes a more attractive thing for them to cover because when you give press something that's really exclusive then you know they're more excited about and they're more willing to talk about it versus if you've already talked about it and spilled everything before it's a little bit less exciting and then we also work with streamers and influencers and all that kind of stuff and obviously uh so much of the work is also word of mouth through our community

which are the best and i love them so much uh and i think that's kind of the best marketing you can get when it's just people in your community and fans be telling their friends that oh this project's really cool or oh i really like the studio you should support them uh that's kind of where we built it and it's something that takes a lot of time it's nothing that can be rushed like a lot of people like oh how do i immediately get discord people on my discord participating and being my fans for life and i'm like uh it's gonna take that's gonna take a while i'm gonna take a hot second episode 216 with zach rich five it codifies into law a common law test that has been used for years and what this is is for the longest time there was always a constant struggle between independent contractors and employers and what their classification is an employer obviously will always favor an independent contractor status because they don't have to pay things like certain wages taxes insurance etc

and in some states like california where there's uh other requirements of an employee or employer provides an employee it's significantly beneficial for the company to treat you as a independent contractor the flip side of that it's not all bad for the contractor because you get access to write-offs you get access to having your own business you can theoretically pick your own hours etc well enter the gig economy which decided to turn everything up on its head and when i mean my gig economy i'm talking about postmates ubereats uber lyft um etc and california said look at all you big companies out there and specifically targeted ride sharing and said you know you're exploiting your workers you're not paying a fair wage there was lawsuits filed all across the country trying to reclassify uh gig economy workers as employees so

california said enough we're not going to put this in the court's hands anymore we're going to make this law thus enter ab5 yeah it's a scary law because i mean i'm not i think i'm more uh attuned to what's going on because i own my own business and i'm running it and i'm constantly i live in california so but like most people kind of like how health insurance is kind of required now this year or else you're going to pay a taxpayer in a year most people don't know about this and uh and it's a funny way to find out about it like most laws that get passed uh you kind of find it out about it when it's too late in most cases right so the thing that bothers me the most is that this is something that was kind of built to help all these ride share type of economies but it was so generalized and i think we've kind of talked about

this before that it's kind of affecting all industries without without the the input and the opinions of these other industries to kind of formulate this law so that it actually makes sense and so now correct me if i'm wrong it's affecting these industries in ways that is causing more trouble than good oh significantly i mean if you're a small shop and you don't really have necessarily the funds to hire individuals as employees i mean it's very expensive just to give you an idea you there's an increase in wage you have to pay there's a minimum amount of annual paid sick leave you have to do you have to pay time and a half overtime for anyone who works over 40 hours a week you have to reimburse employees now for out-of-pocket expenses you have to provide meals or rest breaks i mean these are all things you never had to do with contractors before and how small businesses in small studios never really had to worry about and now this is something very real this is this is what happens when you have an

issue and let regulators solve the problem and the first thought when you hear those type of provisions or things that affects contractors is that you a company would most likely not want to hire californians they would immediately try to look elsewhere because why not there's other 49 states that is available outside of the united states there are many countries available for freelance work and contract work that they don't have to go through this headache or any uh go into any accidental errors that can really affect their companies um is this something that is happening right now do you feel that most people are just looking elsewhere instead of trying to abide by these laws um i think it really depends on your level of risk that you're willing to absorb as a

company your size for example there's been public statements by uber saying that they've just are going to ignore ab5 and then there's necessarily i don't want to call them loopholes because that's not really the right term to use but i was reading the other day that california has seen a significant we're talking 45 plus increase in newly formed llcs so there are ways around these things um you know one of these exemptions are b2b contracts so if you're an independent contractor who is doing the right things and creating a business that your you know company is run under and in theory if say uh you brandon are going to contract with me zach you're not contracting with me personally you're contracting with my business so your business to my business those types of contracts will still exist but that doesn't really affect say the gig economy workers it doesn't really affect the small studio who is hiring that

single designer developer coder engineer etc so does that still work because i i've read somewhere too that the loophole would be creating an llc and doing a business to business but there were some companies that have reservations about going that route because it still is affecting their ab5 provisions um will it work it's it's a risk and this goes back to what i was saying you know how how risk-averse are you and yes you can as a single individual create an llc and focus your work that way there is going to be other problems to that that you the individual creating your llc will have to resolve for example you are now an employee of your own company and you're going to want to get a fantastic accountant to who can set up certain tax structures for you to

make sure that you're following everything to the t but yes in theory the the business to business uh contract is a loophole to ab5 so has this been you were kind of mentioning before like uber just simply ignoring ab5 like what are the ramifications like are they able to do that are are there actual penalties in place to kind of execute on people who violate this ab5 absolutely um and that kind of goes to that list we were talking about earlier if you're treating somebody as an independent contractor and they file suit under their uh excuse me they file suit under ab5 seeking reclassification as an employee they're you're going to be paying back wages you're going to be paying the sick leave you're going to be paying for time and a half for all hours worked over 40. i mean there's just a number of things that you didn't have to worry about before that now are going to become a problem

but if you are a company of that size you try to do certain things that maybe bend the rules per se not to say that uber is bending the rules but they find other ways ways that would not necessarily be available to a small indie developer so i've been in the industry for a while i mean i've been in the fortunate position of been able to kind of pick full-time over contract work i think i've only done contract uh as my main job maybe once but most of the time it's been a side thing for extra income which i'm seeing a lot of it being affected now because a lot of full-timers who are looking for that side income to do freelancing on the side is affected by this especially living of course in california uh they're not uh they're not getting as much work as it used to right because people are not knowing how this is gonna play out right i mean initially

there was problems and now i think there are even more issues with it because now as they kind of um there's a lot of exemptions on it right it's like pages of pages of exemptions trying to address how this is a failure of a bill and but like of course the exemptions are very specific to certain industries because they had lobbyists helping them with that so of course game developers aren't really on that list right they really have to um kind of squint at it to kind of make it fit no okay yeah i mean there's um graphic designers were on that list right so you know artist within game artists roles within the game industry arguably can all fall under graphic design but i don't recall and i'm trying to find the list to get it off the top my head i don't believe engineers coders developers were in there

i did see website services um yeah so again take that for what it is what what what is a website service so in theory if you're doing some sort of development in that respect i think arguably you could be exempt but yeah a big big portion of this industry uh is not exempt and that's why you're starting to see a lot of these llc's being created another piece of the detail that kind of was like a red flag was this is towards journalism and uh it said anything over 35 pieces of articles uh within a year qualifies you for like uh not a contractor but a full-time or or uh that will follow along with this bill where you can start pretty much um kind of following suit and uh yeah so that's i mean like that's a really odd number i think

we talked about this before to kind of put down on paper and say no more than 35 it's not even one per week uh if we're we're talking about contributing to a website or or uh to a piece of work right and the big question there is who's watching you know if you're doing it through your buddy's website do you really think you know that's a risk i i'm willing to say no um you know if you're say writing for new york times and you're one of the more say featured freelance writers of a particular article or opinion piece you do yeah i think you have a higher risk of of causing problems with new york times or being classified as an employee uh if you're say writing a new article every week or every couple of days you know then it's clear okay well they're not just a contractor here they're providing a very important means to this particular business um but that's not the only sort of uh way to fall under an employee status they they did codify this test

uh if you want we can kind of break down the three prongs of the test here um so to determine a worker qualifies as a independent contractor only if you satisfy what's called the abc test you actually have to satisfy all three prongs to give a little bit of history these tests used to be balancing acts where it was let's take all the things that make you or at least what the company would argue an independent contractor and put them in bucket a and then we'll take all the things that you the imp contractor trying to become classified as an employee would would argue and put that in bucket b and we're going to put it on a scale and a court will sit there and view these different factors some obviously have greater weight than others and determine okay well based on the evidence provided you're either x or your y now it's no longer a balancing test per se it's you have to satisfy these three things and if you don't you're an employee so the first you have to be free from the control and

direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work both under contract of the performance of the work and in fact the second you perform work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entities business that is a big one and we'll get back to that in a second but most of these gig economy um companies this is the this is the part of the test that they fail is section two the third the individual is customarily engaged in independently established trade occupation or business of the same nature that is involved in the work performed this also is kind of a catch-all i would say a good portion if not a 75 plus percentage will fail b those that somehow pass b and we're talking about gig economy companies will not get past c episode 213

with richard ku it's weird because i would never consider myself an industry expert but then like i realized that i turned 39 like more than four months ago so i guess i'm by default an industry i don't know it feels weird um i think like that's one quality about trying to make games that's really important is always to like to sort of stay humble and sort of like always look to like learn how to do stuff um i like really enjoy learning how to make things and how to create stuff that's fun and innovative and like interesting so that's sort of like you know in trying to bring my wife and my brother to build this game like it's it was pretty easy to say hey guys like what are some games that we want to make that are uh that we've always wanted to like make or stuff that we grew up playing that really inspired us that you know when you're working for like a large uh company that's trying to like make a mass appeal game like you have to think of um

uh you have a huge uh xx million dollar budget you've got to think of this target audience you've got to plan out your development for x years and you know a lot of things are done very top-down for lack of a better word uh whereas when you're trying to come up with something with a small group of people it doesn't matter if it's your friends or family or if your wife or partner or husband it's like you got to think a little bit like you got to percolate the ideas from the bottom up too because you have that freedom to sort of think about it that way and that sort of turns into top down because it's like all right so what do we want to actually accomplish in the core gameplay and then we can actually plan out like the bigger picture which actually is um one of the ways that we did stuff for several of the projects i worked on but those were like within well-established like um like uh frameworks and stuff so like oh it's a sequel to starcraft 2 or trying to make like a a competitive rts uh

moba uh or or whatever like the stuff that you and i worked on brand new which i'm not sure we're allowed to say yet but um the uh the main thing that is uh important to because because like you know for for my wife's brother and i like um have the most experience so i i am like the de facto leader so there's a lot of things that go into making a business that you just sort of want to protect from the team because it's really important that like when you're working on the day-to-day especially the creatives that you sort of like protect them from like thinking about stuff that doesn't really matter for the stuff that they want to do because you have to still treat it like a normal game development uh team where it's like hey guys so let's like come together and talk about what we're going to do for the week as opposed to every day um and there's advantages to that but also disadvantages to it um but then

it's like you know in the background i have to think about well my lawyers contacted me about uh having to register trademarks for this and um you know we need to get the website up or um i'm gonna be talking to some guy on the podcast about like the like game development with family so uh what should i say not say about like the trials and tribulations of making games and stuff with family um but uh yeah that doesn't really cover it brandon can you throw me a question so i can latch on to something no i mean you're starting to get into like the meet-up topic here um you're talking about working with family and and kind of playing well i mean it's always going to be a blurry line of like uh of a team and then uh how you talk which i feel is part of the conversation that's interesting where you know how do you separate that um well let's talk about physical space or or remotely right do you guys work remotely mostly when you do these stand-up

meetings or do you guys hang out in the living room and talk like how do so i'll repeat that how does it work oh yeah yeah so like a kind of like a like a day-to-day sort of thing uh yeah so as uh i guess like to kind of tie it back to your original question as the uh most experienced uh person like there are there's importance to like the daily rituals like um in our case it's more weekly rituals because we can get a lot of stuff done when we are together uh and so we figure out what we're trying to do for the week and uh every month like we plan for like you know the next couple months or uh figure out what the high level goals are and stuff um it's already a bit a bit rambly because i think like one of the things about working as a family is that you don't have to do a lot of retros and stuff like it kind of just happens organically um so like to answer your question about like the the day-to-day like it's um we already

know what we're going to do uh my wife like my wife and i split duties with like taking care of the kids in the morning um so it's not like we'll go down into the living room and sit down and work uh my in-laws uh my brother sorry my my brother-in-law actually lives in anaheim and we live in long beach so we can actually go and visit him like pretty often uh like after uh after this podcast i'm gonna go grab some food and just go drop by and sort of see how he's doing with like some of the stuff that we've already planned um so i think like part of i guess like a lot of experience that i have is just like in making sure that you stay connected like i uh so it's not really remote at all like if i if i need to ask them questions i'll ping them on discord or [Music] facebook or text or whatever um there's like different response times i found out like if i use like discord versus facebook you know um so you gotta like sort of measure that as well um and like i'm with my wife

pretty much like all the time so you have to like always uh you have to again treat it like work-life balance like that's really important to not like um talk about work after like um some time like uh past like 10 p.m or 11 p.m but even then that like that's still sometimes like we have something important that we need to talk about that we couldn't talk about because during the day we're like taking care of the kids or like running around doing errands and stuff um i think the big secret about this is that uh our our parent my um my in-laws actually uh actually can take care of the kids uh on fridays friday evenings and all of saturdays so that actually gives annie and i time to like uh you know go out on a little date for just the two of us so we can catch up with each other but then also like work all day on saturday and someday some of the time on sundays so that we can actually get a lot of heads down work um my brother since he doesn't have any kids uh yet i

don't know um he can actually work on the project like pretty much full head of steam like uh almost every day but he even balances it out so that he only works from like around 9 or 10 a.m in the morning to about 4 p.m in the afternoon and then he just sort of like chills for the rest of the day and like um plays music plays games hangs out and stuff like that and that's where we usually can catch up with him like after the kids are done school in the afternoon we'll go like we're over um anne's parents house and we're like talking to him and talking to like uh like sort of just catching up on the project but um if you think about it in a normal work setting like you have all of these like um and sorry like i'm usually better at structuring all this i just haven't thought about in a long time so i guess it's interesting um you'll have like daily you'll have like a you know set lunch time you'll have like you know weekly scrum meetings and stuff you'll have like monthly

um company meetings and and whatever right um in this case as a family like you're just sort of like figuring out ways to balance doing work with your normal life as it is and you're sort of like you know the way our family works like we're always like with each other like very often so it's not really a question of um how to do it in a way that works for day to day for me i realize that it's better to plan week to week and sort of just let you know annie and vic figure out like how they want to do stuff because i don't want to micromanage them like that's actually generally what you don't want to do anyway which is something you learned like in nowadays people are very empowered to just do their work by x date and um it works really well with family because like um we don't have to spend time like you know talking to each other trying to resolve issues or anything like that we're a family and you know we're all like we're all in

this together so you know we're not worried about whether someone's like committed or not or whether someone's passionate about a thing and we know each other's like you know strengths and weaknesses like inside and out because like we live with each other and we can talk about things and you know like my brother and i used to work together at wargaming andy and i have worked together on a lot of creative projects before so um it works out pretty well like that episode 232 first month epic versus level 100 so of course it had climbed tens folds and they're kind of hiding behind i feel uh uh a barricade of uh the the the people right where they're saying like we're doing this for you guys and so there's a lot of things happening right now but let's kind of before i ask you and throw you what your thoughts are let me kind of break it down for a lot of people out there and fill in fill in the the gaps here right so epic recently uh had like kind of like this

uh agenda with apple for weeks before they finally released their app with in-app purchases bypassing apple's payment system and uh we all knew they were kind of prepared because as soon as they got banned from apple they kind of threw a lawsuit at apple and google at the same time saying that there's a monopoly in the app store and the google play store and how 30 is too much and that they're not asking for any uh crazy damages or anything they just want reinstate fortnite and allow uh developers like themselves to have a cheaper deal right so a lot of that kind of harks back to how amazon the only deal of its kind that got like a break 15 and we kind of know why because apple and amazon are neck and neck in terms of muscle power right so respect so fortnite even though it's one of the biggest games ever

uh is nowhere near where apple and amazon is and the last time i checked that's a two trillion dollar you know flex from an apple so like apple can literally buy epic tomorrow if they wanted to uh which would probably be cheaper than just going through this lawsuit and paying everybody to do that that's their trump move right so i get i think this is a little vague overview of what's going on but i want to throw it over to you man what what where your thoughts as these things are happening one after another yeah like normally i'm on the side of the people on this right like i i do believe i do believe that apple can charge less of whatever cut yeah right on on ios right so for for the in-app purchases and for their their payment system they

could take less than a 30 cut they really can right they can afford to do that uh but when it's a big rich company complaining that apple's doing this with apple has already done this to other big bigger and richer companies yes i'm like man i like man you you need to calm down right that's basically where that's basically where i'm at right like i i'd rather be the little guy like and this is not the first time this has happened like like epic is flexing a bit more because they have a bit more money than say uh the hay app was a big point of contention um there's this email app that came out called hey for for at least a couple of weeks they're going back and forth to the apple over their terms because they allowed people to sign up for their subscription uh inside the app but weren't were kind of bypassing apple's payment system right and apple was like nope can't do that sorry and so they worked the apple and they figured

out a way of that was seamless and not horrible for their users in order to get their users to sign up for this for the subscription um but they're way smaller than epic right epics like no we're not going to take this anymore but then at the same time they have so much money where it's like yo just pay the 30 because you know there's a benefit to being on apple right there's a benefit to be having access to to to the largest mobile customer base in the u.s right and in asia it's a completely different story but in the us you know that it's apple all day and you know that's where you're gonna get all your customers and so there's there's a premium you have to pay for that um should that premium be 30 on every transaction uh probably not but it's not like epic is struggling to afford that right so right that's kind of like so the grounds of what they're fighting

on is the monopolistic uh app store where apple owns everything like you said therefore uh the government it sounds like they want the government to step in since the lawsuit but the government kind of did this with all the tech companies like a few couple weeks ago right with nothing to say like they all they proved was they got a little smarter in asking questions but they weren't really pushing these tech companies to do anything that they were used to be able to do with microsoft was the last big split that i've remembered uh where it was forced to but it's been what two decades this is not really but it's not really monolithic it's not really monolithic practices and then people are we're also mentioning consoles right because if you ship your game on an xbox or on a playstation you have to pay you have to pay a fee the ship there's a percentage that they take right yeah um because you're getting

access to a customer base that they have cultivated right and so there's there's cost there right and uh and so like it's not even and and then you have your platform that you're building you have the right to say how people will use your platform all right so if you're just like if you're like hey if you want to do payments do it through us because you will make sure it's secure right so there's the security of the safety aspect which i think like it's like apple will use that as a way of justifying 30 i still think it's a bit overblown right like you want the safety security you don't have to charge 30 for it right but apple has every right to do whatever they want on their own platform right and you can't come on to somebody else's platform and tell them you can't do that and and i want to punish you for your success because you have a large customer base right

yeah so i kind of did like a a warm-up for this right and i i know i'm more on your side but kind of checking the other side right here in the discord channel we there was quite a conversation and i think the people uh generally sides with epic obviously this sounds right and really correct but the business side of me is like yo get off my list it's like it's like to me the the the comparison i keep going back to is like if i'm walmart and you're cloroxed and you come into my store and then suddenly tell me how i should conduct business and what my percentage takes should be i'm going to tell you to get out of my store like there's no incentive for me on the business side besides moral obligations quote unquote right because that that's still iffy ground because epic is it's another rich billionaire company right just not as rich as trillionaire but it's another rich kid yelling at another rich kid

about what to do so for me it's always been like that even on a more personal level you come into my house right just because i use one of your things and you tell me how to arrange my whole house it doesn't make any sense right so history shows that it never works that way yeah yeah no it gets worse when you think of it like uh it's it's such as it's what is it it's let's say it's walmart and target and target is coming up into walmart and saying you know what like i don't want to sell my stuff in your store i want to build my own store inside your store right and i want to sell my stuff in my store in your store and exactly walmart's like yo walmart's like yo i pay rent over here and i have all these customers coming to my store and then target's like nah yeah i just want to build my own store in here screw what you're doing i just want to i just want to make my money and i want to take it with me and i'm not going to share it with you at all but i'm going to use your your floor space

you know what i mean and then the walmart's like walmart's like nah i'm not going to allow that and then target is like well well your first face i don't care i'm gonna i'm gonna screw you down right that's what's happening right and like i totally agree with you man like i don't know why i'm thinking maybe i can throw some asian history right while like uh world war ii china and japan was in war japan was buying up land in china claiming that because they bought these land that they can make up the rules and laws within those proximity that doesn't make any sense it's still you know the country of origins law and order right so i i don't see any example where on epic like the thing that i keep bringing up too yeah go ahead let me finish this really quick yeah go ahead do your thing yeah so if the thing the funny thing is epic kind of had a similar fight with steam right but they did the right thing they opened up their own epic store right

which was commendable and they're creating their own ecosystem that they feel is the correct way of doing it right i think that's the best way to respond to a system that you don't agree with as a business right um and and for i guess for more obvious reasons even though steam is not as i still still feel steam is pretty pretty pretty strong in the pc market right it's the spot for pc but not quite as much maybe as apple and google kind of owning the app store right but even then i feel like it's so crazy that they're going down this route when they just proved about six months ago how to go about it correctly right yeah and it seems like because they're they they're already folding up their throwing their hands up because they know they can't win this fight even if they can't go out there and make epic phones right they can't do something um i think there were some

instances where they tried this with the android devices right they were trying to make some uh fortnite deals with uh manufacturers like oneplus or certain phones but google kind of put a stop to it saying that you can't have these phones be pre-installed basically yeah that i think is a better argument to have right because it feels like i mean is that a workaround too how do you feel about that because i feel like that's a little bit more fair because android is is open system it doesn't really falls off as much i i think in the case of android though like they google play still has rules right so you if you put your game through google play they have rules you could sideload your game on android super easy right but they but epic and google both know that it's a much better and easier user experience so you can reach more people

if you could just install it through the store yeah right and because that is true google's like give us our money yeah run run me my paper is basically what google's saying right yeah and epic pixels like nah i don't think so right yeah um and re and like if this was like a small company that didn't have their own store that was just trying to sell an app and trying to keep most most of the profits for like for those to keep up your amount of people they're going to reach so that they can make their app successful that's the difference right then that is a different story yeah but if it's like the company that's making mad money and super successful and really what they want to do is just cut out more from google like now that they have that the foothold they're like hey epic game store on iphone and on google that'd be amazing and we keep all of the bread right like like it's just a way for them to try to

exert their dominance and get get customers and to get market share uh it's not like but it's and then it's being painted as a move for the for the little guy for the customers and like i understand how the customers benefit but but epic benefits way more right oh yeah i think that's um that's what's looking sounds very disingenuous basically yeah that's that's exactly it i think that's why i'm so apprehensive to kind of give epic it's um it's it's a time to shine with this whole ordeal like there is a lot of gamers and even i think new developers that are kind of like yeah i mean epic is on the right so let's do this right but for me like the more jaded senior side of me is like come on guys like in my eyes and in my mind i'm seeing my my boss of every aaa job and i'm seeing the greediness in their eyes hiding behind the people right i think it's just

the most the the oldest way to kind of get your way uh but like even though the execution was so stupid man like they came out with the it was a cinematic perfect it was perfectly stupid for my reason for this reason right it's a cinematic right made in like freaking sequencer by a few artists and this is just their off time when they're not making billions off of fortnite and then they just made it thinking you know geeking out over themselves saying this is going to change the world hahaha and and that's their campaign free fortnight it's like if there was any war would you round up the geekiest 10 year olds maybe 20 year olds as as in your court stacked them up in your corner to fight this fight for you is like how are they changing anything dude no i know honestly honestly it was a troll let's just be real right it was basically

tim sweeney is like okay we're gonna do this because like you know like under the covers like you you saw him you saw the emails under the covers he said the email yeah guys allow me to do this because i don't want to pay the 30 and tim cook was just like was like hey lawyers handle this guy right right for the listeners who don't know about this there were like weeks and weeks of emails before the the the final yeah cutthroat move that apple did yeah episode 220 would sing a small team together before going solo um um

uh i did that i thought did cross my mind but when i first already started making the game in pre-production and in the early development i was already doing it by myself and i figured i'd see that through um for bigger projects or for the larger parts of the future of the games i make i may will probably branch out and look for a team or individuals to come help but for right memory especially i really want to see it through on my own so as you were uh beginning this project what was your focal skill set and what did you have to branch out and learn to complete this project [Music]

uh that's been a constant uh it's been very difficult in terms of picking up new skills i do have about nine years of development since

then since 2011 uh 2011 i have about nine years of game development uh background so i did have some preset skills already but it's still been a pretty difficult path learning uh new things

a big part of it was uh kind of learning the ins and out of unreal and that particular game engine and kind of troubleshooting and learning how to do the ins and outs of that engine and essentially figuring out a problem a lot of problem-solving issues with it uh in terms of scripting and the like but um that's kind of been the learning process of kind of learning what works and what doesn't work with unreal [Music] was there was unreal from the get-go the engine that you had in mind or you think of unity and if you were thinking about other engines why unreal at the end unrealized uh

i initially looked at unity 3d but a lot of unity requires a lot of really complicated coding um unreal i ended up settling on because it has a lot of the built-in blueprints and a lot of like kind of the ease of use that allows a um energy developer such as myself to really um go through much easier and with a much easier barrier for entry [Music] as you were looking at that can you kind of paint a global um picture of the development of bright

memory just in terms of how long was pre-production development and to a point where you're you're you're you're finally able to share and promote like what was that uh timeline uh the

so it initially started with a lot of the environmental stuff making sure we can get the environments right before we moved into the uh game uh the actual game side of it and then making sure that all that worked together as well as the coding for it uh before i just really kind of narrowed down the idea of um the characters and everything else a lot of my focus was on the environmental aspect as that has taken up the largest portion of my um of the production schedule um before we

were i was comfortable with kind of showing off the game um making sure everything looked the way i wanted it to and interacted the way i wanted it to and play the way i wanted it to our boots episode with scott now there's definitely gonna be a hybrid uh step with um the need of like uh traditional compositors and now virtual production compositors do you feel like the traditional compositors just to future proof should start to get into our tech as it seems like this as unreal gets better and better there's gonna be i mean rendering will always be king but at some point it's gonna get to a high quality bar where with the waiting time and the render farms just don't make as much sense as before i wonder what your uh general opinion about that is there is there going to be a world where this

is going to replace traditional compositing i think um there's always gonna be place for uh traditional compositing for sure uh this these sets are massive and um the work that goes into to making these you know i i i don't know what the cost difference would be instead of just you know doing it all after the fact um i think there's pros and cons like you're limited to like this space and the set a little bit right there's definitely limitations uh with this workflow um where i think that you'll always need some form of digital compositing uh that's you know completely done in post but i do think this is cool and exciting that um it's another way of doing things you know it's cool to see stuff getting pushed forward um hopefully things will look a little bit more grounded and stuff as well um with like in the terms of reflections and lens flares and stuff you know yeah i think there's a weird phase and like

so you can kind of see it happening here it is an interesting time like it feels like for a long time game developers have been like the ugly stepbrother for visual effects companies for a while and now we're kind of we're not shoulder to shoulder just yet but i do feel like there's a a certain level of respect that's happening that uh that it's becoming more mutual which is really healthy because now we're we're learning from each other we're more open to to learning from each other and more accepting for people to kind of move back and forth um whereas like i wouldn't even say five years ago that was ridiculous it's like get out of here with your ps3 graphics it's like i don't know yeah i mean i i think it's it's a little bit of both like i've heard that on the game side too like um you know might throw a resume someone somewhere to someone and they're like oh it's just he's only worked at disney and ilm like he's never worked in

video games it's like yeah but like look at his art you know it's super good i'm sure you can figure it out yeah but there's like that kind of stigma as well that oh they're going to come in and have million poly characters and stuff they're not gonna know what to do um but i think uh people can learn and people can adapt um same with a game artist going into to film like if they want to transition into film um i think a lot of the same theories are similar um it's just technical specifications are a little bit different but that stuff can be learned you know i think people get a little bit intimidated by that and some in some cases people have been burned by putting trust in someone from a different industry and it not working out uh but i don't think there should be like a straight up stigma where you're like i'm not gonna you know even take a chance on someone because of this i think that's stupid but i do agree i think now that games are looking better i think there's like a fascination with people in film like oh how do they do that like this looks so good you know

and that's right like because we're used to rendering like i had some shots that would take you know 24 hours per frame on the render farm yeah that's per frame 24 frames per second so um stuff took forever so being able to see things run at 30 frames 60 frames per second and it looks like not as good but close is like super exciting what do you think is um in years of difference maybe in a couple years what needs to be done so that that bar of um it doesn't look as good it's good enough but like to a place where you feel like you know this is better than sitting 24 hours for one frame where the average consumer won't be able to tell i feel like right now the average consumer can't tell it's mostly mostly visual effects people just like masturbating to art basically right but like frustrated for you personally

where do you think what needs to be done within the pipeline i mean ray tracing is already on board it's it's not there where it's widely adopted it's not in games everywhere yet but it's getting there what else what other tech needs to happen for us to be like okay it's here we don't need to wait 24 hours anymore and and wait for for to reach the graphics that we need there always will be a difference to the train not but we're we're here we're we're okay with doing this real time [Music] um i think when we get to uh the level of destruction you can do in like houdini and stuff i think that'll be a big one if you can have that many paulies and be able to bring in like caches um of like such density of having like a skyscraper collapse or something like that for example um and bring that into the engine uh like you would in a feature film where it's like millions and millions and millions of tries um and not having the game engine poop

its pants um i think that will definitely you know we'll be able to start doing more effects in in real time and then for lighting um ray tracing is pretty good in unreal right now um for shadows so you can have raytrace shadows from a light um and that's pretty solid but we're still not there with the global illumination so the bounce light um that stuff is still pretty janky and it's very expensive like it you're not going to run out frame rate for a game with uh their gi right now unless you have a super beefy computer um and then same thing with reflections uh translucency all that stuff can't be retraced um like he would in a feature film yet um they do have like some forms of it but for example with the ray trace reflections i think there's like a limit on how many times it can bounce a reflection so if you had like you know six chrome balls next to each other they would only reflect each other's reflections so many times then it would terminate to black

um we're in like uh you know a pre-rendered thing you can set that number super high and just wait for the render um so i think we're getting there um but there's just technical limitations still um doing it you know you have all these pros who work in houdini and maya and stuff and doing pre-rendered things in arnold and redshift and stuff and uh you know these are some of the smartest people in the world making these renderers and it still takes hours you know so i think for the real time side of it being good enough i think we're already kind of seeing that with things like the mandalorian uh where it's good enough like it's fine like having practical characters in a digital set i think it's pretty solid now having fully digital characters i think maybe we're ways off from that um but maybe maybe that will be you know a thing in the future like even the guy i was talking about the digi doug thing at digital domain

it's still really really good but there's still the uncanny valley um you can tell it's a digital dude you know um even with pre-rendered stuff that's like one of the hardest things to do is a digital human to make look convincing um but i think it's getting there dude maybe ps5 dude we'll see yeah well speaking about the next gen systems i don't know if you specked it out is there anything there that you feel like we haven't really seen like a premier title from any of those two and um with the next systems you can pretty much you know people have rigs that are more powerful than these systems already but what helps with these consoles it kind of brings more development teams to kind of push to the limit which high-end pc users aren't used to right you need these consoles to kind of bring in that type of firepower and talent behind it uh do you feel the next system is gonna

gonna really push the bar i mean what type of tech upgrade do you feel besides maybe ray tracing getting better and more optimal for for gi especially on the unreal side they're still still wrapping their heads around that i feel unity is actually probably doing a better job at figuring out that type of tech they have a really talented team but a lot of these games we're still using light maps and it's like sure it's like 2008 man uh light maps is like most most like uh aaa companies don't even use light maps outside of unreal anymore so um what were your thoughts about that um well there usually is some kind of baking process that happens uh for most games um whether that's baking spherical harmonic probes that are you know they might have like a diffuse uh term and like a specular term where they're like providing that lighting information at a given space and those just interpolate

between things or you'll have like the traditional traditional light maps like you do in unreal engine um or a combo of the two um like an unreal engine you have volumetric light maps and those are kind of like spherical harmonic probes um what those do is like give movable objects like the indirect lighting information so that they look like they're receiving some kind of bounce light or shadowing and stuff um so i think maybe with the new uh systems if we do go more raytraced we don't have to do as many cheats and bake as much um which would make things a lot more dynamic like i could see games becoming a lot more dynamic um you know there's a lot of when you when you have to deal with baked things you run into issues where it's like what are what's a physics object and what's not like why can i blow up that barrel but i can't knock over that coke can that's on the table you know it's like oh because that's baked like we don't want we want that to stay static because it's cheaper and the lighting

looks better you know so you run into those kind of issues where i think physics is really bound right now and i think uh physics stuff is gonna get way better with the new the new platforms uh lighting for sure is gonna get a lot better and i think level streaming and uh the way that the engine's able to handle like huge open spaces and stuff is probably going to get a lot better too episode 230 with nadav it's quite interesting because first of all just like you said i think that the advantage of mobile coming last to the party of games is that it it kind of shaped with the most advanced uh quality processes or or technology or or ecosystem around it and and even if i go further and and we will focus even on on let's say the trend that the latest trend of mobile gains which is hyper casual in the past two three years

yeah i think this even took it even to the more advanced extreme end that you can have for a using data to take any decision and and maybe just to share for instance what we are doing in supersonic to to to to show how how true what you said is so we are working on on several games simultaneously and and and we are trying to release a new game every couple of weeks and and this is the the more hyper casual ecosystem and and the first thing that we start with when there is even just a concept for the game is to build a very very very very minimal mvp and and to and to upload it for marketability tests over facebook with untargeted audience to understand the cpi and the marketability uh potential of this title before building the game we probably have like three four or five levels top uh in the game it's not even a game

just a couple of levels into unity project but what we care the most about is to see how marketable the concept the game is to users and what will be the cpi and 96 97 of the concepts are being killed after this very very initial test this is why we also recommend not to build a an advanced product in this stage under the assumption that 97 of the games won't survive this initial test and and the goal here is exactly what they said we don't want to walk on a title for a weeks month or years and then to find out that users don't like it either from the marketing perspective or from the product perspective and we always look at these two different hats because because in our eyes and in hyper casual specifically in order to to generate a big profitable scaled hit it needs to be marketable and it needs to be a good product it's two different

areas many many times we see great games with with super high retention and play time and and and our poo and and many and many good kpi that we measure but if the marketing side is not working well if if if the odd the potential audience is very very limited or the cpi is very very high it probably won't be able to be scaled to the side that we are looking for and therefore we always always always start with with a marketability test on a very very very early stage and and if it's not there we just kill it we just kill it after it was a concept and with few levels and we move into the next concept and and we are testing several concepts a month in under this methodology only measuring cpi ctr understanding the user behavior to the ad itself not even to the game we don't really care how the user will behave behave within the game what would be the retention we don't care because there is no real game it's just a couple of levels that are

being grouped because the whole idea is to generate something that can have an ad to understand the marketability potential first only if it survives and shows potential from the marketability perspective then we say okay now let's build the game now let's build much more content several levels progression meta now start working on the day one day day two day seven day fourteen day thirty retention and play time after we do this now let's work on monetization on on and adding the meta and progression and to make sure that we are able to monetize and only then we are moving into soft launching the game which is another a a beginning for a very very data focus a process just like you said marketing today and user acquisition there is no today in in the mobile industry or exists in the leading players in the mobile industry there is no brand awareness marketing almost at all almost at all only few right you can see

moon active doing some influencers and and others but but the very very very very majority of the mobile game industry is not doing any brand awareness marketing everything is performance everything is being measured every user that you are paying for you are tracking its behavior afterwards within your app you understand how much revenue you are making per user or per group of users and then you adjust the price or the cpi or how much you are willing to bid or to or to pay for this type of users to the margin goal that your game is aiming to get so so i can't agree more that today at least whoever is doing it right taking all of all of their decisions based on a a on the data and and the mobile ecosystem allows you to do it and this is what's great about this this ecosystem because it was built on the right way with tracking companies with mnp with everything needed with analytics with the ability

to understand and to a analyze the a loss return on expand roi behavior ltv output versus cost and cpi of each user in your game and and and we are going in the most granular level after we are publishing a game or launching a game we are doing our user acquisition in the most granular level possible meaning that we are monitoring the the output and the ltv of the most granular level of users from a app source to device to country to city to whatever whatever possible in order to try to predict what will be the ltv of similar users we will acquire tomorrow and and and the whole mission here is to understand what should be the cpi that we are bidding currently to pay as much as possible to get the right skill but on the other hand to be profitable with a very very stable and good prediction for the income that will come from this uh type of users

and and if finally while you are hitting the margin goal that you aim for it means that you did very very very good job on analyzing the historical data predicting the future and bidding accordingly if you are not hitting your margin goal for good or for bed either your margin is too high and and you missed potential scale or the margin is too low because you predicted you're too optimistic about your prediction then it means that you are not doing good enough job on on analyzing all this data and taking the right decisions accordingly episode 217 stadia and cloud gaming indie games that are coming to stadia um they announced uh what are they events ea um um the last star wars game fallen order jedi fallen or whatever um that is available this will be available in savia now um and what else pubg pubg is going to be outstanding um those are those are kind of the big the big takeaways fifa fifa madden under me on stadium um and they and then they showed off a

bunch of indie indie stuff you know more variety kids co-op multiplayer games um so yeah like you know they're they're they're swinging for the fences right um oh i can't i think that's a i think i'd be a little bit too strong uh it's not exactly strange for defenses because like a lot of those games so i'm kind of like i don't know um but but uh like about two i'm not too excited i'm not too excited about a lot of these games but but i think they're they're trying to beef up the the catalog right trying to be forget about this is where i feel it was a mistake i mean this guy's face right here i think i've made fun of this guy enough i've seen this guy's face at every single console right we're talking about initially sony he had a weird student microsoft which was and now he's over here i'm not gonna hate on this guy like like that's og og

shipping consoles over many many years right so you know but bro there is about being the front man of a a competing product that just devalues the product right you can't be at tesla and say tesla is the best car in the world and then next week i see you over at bmw saying no this is the best car in the world it just it just leaves a bad taste of consumers how can i trust somebody sometimes things happen man then you gotta keep it moving right so yeah well that's why nintendo didn't have them because they understand good pr [Laughter] but like definitely like give it give it away give it away two months two months to stay be a pro you know so you could get a bunch of free games with stadium pro and and then they made a bunch of announcements you know yeah do maternal yeah yeah sure i got a taste of the two months stadium right it popped up in everyone's email i think it was a smart marketing

decision for sure to at least have people try it i logged on for about two minutes i looked at their catalog and then i immediately unsubscribed yeah yeah dude no i said it already with magic leap i'll say it again like you know um content salesman and and they have some stale content on there there's stuff that like is old and people have already played and like you're not gonna get a whole lot of people attracted um they are working on first party brand new stuff and when that stuff hits like maybe it'll be successful right but right now it's like it's a waste it's a wasteland of old games that you've played already you know and that's like that's what that's the number one thing but that's why they're doing this though to say hey we may have the old games that you've played already but if you haven't played these games um you know and you don't want to install them and you don't want to download them um you're all good you know octopath traveler is a pretty good game you know what i mean so why not play it and i think too like um their whole

founder's edition thing was kind of holding it back but now it's just you could play it in a web browser um it's free to to try it out right so like there's no harm in trying it out right hey yeah except you know there's games that you should be playing right now and not waste your time on this crap like i i always know but i'm also also saying it's probably not for us right it's not really for us right like but who is it that's a good question that's a good question you know like i can't really say who maybe people that can't afford or don't want to buy a super expensive console uh well here you go you could play equal stadia you don't need to buy the console right um i just wonder what like for me like

the proper rollout would have been kind of like a closed beta right just to get people testing until the first party content was ready to go right i don't understand why they had such a lackluster launch knowingly so and then have basically vacant months of not producing content for their uh you know they're they're number one fans right it's just underserving everybody yeah well they're two big they're two big games right were um were uh odyssey and uh destiny right but if you're a hardcore player you've already played these games right but for folks that like i said they haven't and you didn't buy a console right like you could play on stadia why not right um it's it's yeah it's i don't understand it i don't understand i don't understand how it's gonna be successful but i think

i think it has to be successful with um this looks so much like fortnite anyway um but it can be successful um you know with a really standout first party title that really leverages the cloud based machines leverages youtube leverages all of the cool features and says this is why you have stadia right right now none of this is saying this is why the united states you could play this on a bunch of other systems right and they're announcing some exclusive very announces of exclusive games right that are going to be first first on stadium so they're going to release first on stadium and then probably be everywhere else later um so that's cool they're trying to lock down some exclusives right but you know it's their indie titles are like you know very fun games to play you can play with your friends play it on the couch or whatever but you know um it isn't destiny right or is

it it isn't a game of the destiny caliber right yeah it's definitely what they can afford right now for sure yeah they're trying dude they're trying to they're going for it so like hey yeah i would say this right um in this time where you got sony microsoft and nintendo like this is if anything the best fourth console uh that you should be competing the only thing with this is kind of relevant to what we were talking about with how magically pat this hype at the beginning right and that eventually died down [Music] we're talking about three to five years before that first party game from the assassin's creed team uh is producing is going to be out maybe right does this have enough legs until then uh can they afford basically operating at a loss until then is google cool with that i think

well is google history it's the real question um i know google google can spend the money yeah sure um but like yeah they have to be really devoted to this right and yeah only time will tell with that right i have no idea what i'm seeing right now is without sound in context i am so bored yeah what is he doing well this is uh yeah i think this was like testimonial testimonials from streamers and players saying how awesome it is all right um that's that's what that is it clearly isn't you gotta get some random ass gamers that isn't ready for camera time right interlaced with boring gameplay video as if that was your cutaway shot and your cutaway option

is what i'm seeing here is i'm seeing a lot of priority right and a platform that you want to reach a bunch of different people you have to bring the priority right you have to bring many different experiences all right same thing with the like you know xbox game password has a lot of different experiences and different types of caliber and quality of games you got to do that you got to do that on these platforms like for real for real you know um i think it's at the end of this video where they show the pubg stuff um all right let's go let's go pubg so what's the big announcement with webg it's free completely yeah yeah it's available now it's available now you can start playing right because that's so that's a big deal a lot of pub g players out there they're definitely getting a lot of mileage out of that game already so you get and the thing is it's it says free with stadium pro and they're giving you two months of stadio pro right so you can play it for free for two months right so hey

yeah man don't play all these other battle royales that are free play this one google stadium she's the it's the granddaddy right i guess whenever i look at this stuff i'm just so i get it i mean it's good to have a fourth player in the foray of things google is a major player i just don't understand why they launched this way they could have done closed beta and we wouldn't be critiquing it as much it would have been just fine they would have had the same amount of paying customers you know the hardcores and it would have been forgivable if they weren't updating every month on their stuff like it's very weird that they launched without a key first party game i don't know if they thought they needed the launch like i wonder if they thought they just needed to launch

before xbox one series x and ps5 right um like this need to get out there before the new console cycle sucked all the air out of the room right i i mean i don't know man if they're stadia they're all about the cloud like who cares if it's a console yeah yeah no go ahead but uh i was just saying that's one of the biggest advantages is that it's in the cloud right because then you can upgrade the hardware whenever you want and they can just get faster so why why try to be a ps5 when you're going to be a ps 5.5 at any second right or any minute i don't understand that but the biggest the biggest draw for me when they showed that trailer was the youtube future the ability to kind of jump in like that's huge that's a huge future not only are they attacking twitch but like all the consoles at once

they should have just worked on that and have a division-like game ready and just launch with it they would have had a better success than what they were doing now but you becoming a joke but you also but you also know that like it's hard to make those happy games like completely unique experience on some new experimental hardware um i'm sure like when with the the kits were working a lot of those features weren't even working yet right those are promise features but that weren't quite working yet weren't quite ready for prime time we're quite ready to scale out to all the players and so they're kind of doing a gradual release um i do think the barren wasteland that is the content offering is is pretty it's like bad it's really bad um but uh but yeah like i don't know how you watch it unless you were working on it working on the games three years before the launch rate

you know what i mean and we're brand new like when it comes to making video games like google's brand new who doesn't know how to do this right so um so that's why it's taking longer yeah i mean the only lingering hope that i have is because they have a lot of your old co-workers over there some key players um from they've got somebody yeah they've got some folks they've got some folks working on that stuff i mean they [Laughter] yeah i'm anxious to see what games come out like the the flagship first party games like what what actually comes out i'm super hyped to see what happens right and now you know it's and small plus small plug too like you know you know there's the google what is it stadium makers program with with unity of course so so folks can make stadia games with unity right so yeah

you know you know how it is [Music] [Music] yeah no and i'm also curious to see what happens with like you know project x cloud for microsoft and sure and whatever sony's whatever sony is going to do so do you see that you know we won't spend too much on this topic but do you see the xcloud what sony is doing threatening what stadia is doing like stealing their steam or do you think they can still coexist because state is so different i think it it depends on the business model and it depends on the games right you you know um from day one when project xcloud is like out of beta or whatever and you have your xbox series x or whatever um those first party microsoft titles

are going to be on that thing you know your game pass you probably have game pass and pay extra five dollars and then all of a sudden now you ever all your game pass on next cloud like you know it's gonna be something like that and and if it's exactly what if it's yeah and if it's that it's gonna be a problem right that's true it's already a problem dude right i've seen the games that they are beta testing right now it's way better than what because you're talking about the xbox library right and sony has the same ammunition they have the sony library day one that's hundreds of awesome games so i don't see my own opinion is i don't see how stadia can can do anything i mean but fall back on youtube

flagship first party games right but they're not gonna have hundreds or species but microsoft doesn't have hundreds either microsoft has a solid five right but uh all right but sony bro sony every every 35 years stadia can have maybe 0.5 awesome game right like how are they going to beat any of these systems in the long run it's impossible how is it going to work but also like i said right um does it need to win right does it need like define define what is the success right like is it you know what i mean right like all it has i'll just find i'll just find google's google maps google the search engine all right these are wins

and that's it nothing else exists for everything successful for stadium to be successful everybody in the world has to use it okay uh yeah that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying that's why i'm so worried for your friends in their mansion right now shaking in their boots over at the studio camp they know the outcome has to be better than just good it has to be the best console ever episode 227 with celia something we need to see that we're progressing that we're getting better at it let's say that you're starting to play the guitar and you're rehearsing a specific tune or whatever and you know the more you rehearse you see that you're getting better at it that's encouraging that makes you that's motivating that makes you engage more in that activity and so it's often skill based but doesn't have to be necessarily like in games if you

think of rpgs it's the more you level up the more you have skills are unlocked that artificially make you more powerful within the system but still you progress and you see that you're progressing and this is the main reason why progression bars are so powerful it's not just because you know that oh i'm gonna soon be a level 10 i'm going to have a super cool uh reward but it's also because you see yourself progressing and that's very satisfying and a lot of games categorize a lot on on competence because you get better at the game you level up uh if if it's a skill based game the more you you practice the the the better you're you're uh playing it so a lot of games do that very well whereas sometimes at work or you don't necessarily feel that competent you don't necessarily have a lot of feedback or you don't necessarily know how to do things better and so that that's a thing that we can

gain from games not just the level and up thing but ensure that people feel competent into doing what they um that activity the second one is autonomy so autonomy is being able to express yourself um and to also solve problems the way you want if you look at very big games that are some of them are very offer a lot of autonomy you think about minecraft or think about gta it's these are sandbox games it means that you can solve problems the way you want and you can just like tinker around with with the system and that's very powerful and we love that um so now you have a lot of games that are more linear but oftentimes you know you can choose your character you can choose your skins you can choose your dance moves so that gives you a way to express yourself so uh games that are allowing to express

yourself are more engaging same thing at work if if you are able to solve the pro some problems the way you want it's more engaging than if your boss is telling you all right now do this and this and that and in that way then i'm telling you you need to do it that's way more empowering to say okay this is our objective uh figure a way to you know get to that objective uh in the most efficient way possible then you feel more empowered because you decide how you're gonna get there you have an objective to reach um but you are empowered because you are you have autonomy into how to solve for that problem and the last one is relatedness so we are very social species we need each other to survive in this world and a lot of people forget about that but we need each other and because of that we love to have activities when we can play with others now a lot of games uh capitalize on that all any multiplayer game capitalizes on that uh there's a lot of

focus on competition um so competitive games are of course quite engaging but actually uh cooperation is even more powerful than competition um and any even like look at sports most sports are team-based sports so yes there's you compete but it's a team so you collaborate with your team and you compete with another team um so anytime you have games that allow for that uh and and making sure that that how you play with others is meaningful so rpgs are very good at that because it's not only you play with some people but everybody has a specific role that they need to play uh and when they do that properly they feel competent say you know you're you're the tank and you get all the aggro and and flyers thank you or you're the healer and and you kill someone before that person died uh that person says thank you and you feel competent because of that and everybody has

a role to play that's very specific so this is really that the essence of of of game center there's many other stuff but i know otherwise i'm going to talk like for forever but this is something that companies need to understand and this is what games good games do very well uh and that we need in more products it's not just badges badges are important because they give you you know rewards give you feedback if if you're accomplishing something or you found a treasure it's giving you feedback that you're competent that you did something good in the game so um it's you know that dichotomy extrinsic intrinsic sometimes you know the learn the lines are bit blurred because what's really intrinsic what's really uh extrinsic you don't necessarily know um but if you only focus on extrinsic oh yeah you're gonna do that just to level up and progress uh it's most of the time it's really not as compelling

as having like the bigger picture and make sure that people um are intrinsically motivated into uh during this activity well speaking of the trying to get motivated it's great to kind of great to talk about the psychology and more than ever during this covert world a lot of people are facing a lot of these issues or mode of meditation or simply from a job perspective just to interacting with people but doing remote working and more and more people are stuck at home facing issues i i think at a celebrate than we normally would i would love to hear your thoughts i know this is kind of taking a step back from applications with games i feel like this discussion of this will actually lead back into any creative outputs lately yeah so yeah so there's a lot of stuff going on

with the virus crisis uh it's not yes there's the fact that we a lot of people all of a sudden could not interact with other people physically um so it's that's also uh put an emphasis on how technology can bring us together uh including video games and it's and thank god we had that during the coronavirus crisis like a way to see each other not just have them on the phone to see each other and and be able to still have that relatedness going because we need it as as humans um but it's more i mean there's a lot of stress going on and then people losing their jobs and people being sick so there's a lot of stuff on top of just like the the relatedness part because it's also proving that remote work works um and and we there's a lot of benefit from that it's more inclusive to make sure that we can uh work remotely rather than having people

all the time in the same room so there's there are some benefit of some benefit you know at least it was it was emphasizing that there are many things that we're doing in our society it's not inclusive and it's not useful and it's not good for the environment so we can there's it's it's helping us seeing these things and hopefully we're not going to revert completely back to normal once the crisis is over and we can keep doing that and keep being inclusive and and make sure that people can can collaborate remotely because that works um but yeah the stress and the distraction is not just that is the politics and all the stuff that's going on and you know having people dying around us and then people being sick is serious it's uh there's a lot of layers um there that are contributing to the fact that we're distracted and it's hard to stay concentrated right now yeah it's it's definitely a lot of issues happening at once even with friends who's been

remote working for or excited about remote working finding a sudden change of of their whole lifestyle on top of being full-time teachers it's it's a lot to ask even for me i've been fortunate enough to be remote working or working from home for about a year before covet happened so i'm used to a certain lifestyle even with me being stuck at home longer or or not being able to go outside to for recreational needs it's uh 300 way way intense than what i was used to so i can't imagine about people who were in office all the time and then suddenly being in the spa yeah we were not just working from home like we were sheltering in place and and and you know how we're dealing with a crisis that's uh there's a big difference someone's not just working from though

and yes we could not take a break and and go outside and go have a beer or someone or just like you know in many places that parks were closed uh so it's hard to regenerate like we need to to be able to unplug and go for a walk it's actually pretty good for uh for our brains to uh to uh uh you know stay sharp and stay in good uh mental health and also be creative it's really important to just go wandering outside and look at nature and when you can't do that and and for all the people like we're living in uh like in a small apartment with a lot you know a lot of close relatives with them it's it's it's really hard um for for many many people so it's it's yeah episode 221 has been working with renee a lot of resources to support the community while we have our discord with over 1300 active members that can help

provide community and a place to talk for those who are trapped within their homes we also have been putting together resources such as information from uh the world health organization from local governments uh different types of funding and other financial relief opportunities both within the us and other places in the world and we've put together our own recommendations for how to work from home in a way that best supports your career and your mental health that's awesome um besides that too in addition to that uh there were some talks at least before gdc got cancelled how game developers were still kind of thinking of gathering i think as the situation gotten worse as it was leading up to the week of gdc that people were slowly realizing yeah this is business as usual we can't just still show up do you know a little bit

more detail about what did people even bother going at all uh as the week was coming close or did they just all write let's just cancel the whole thing and let's not even meet up because you know the whole city was quarantined by the time uh there were um various plans to gather at within san francisco despite gdc's cancellation however as the situation escalated those started canceling themselves uh i heard at least one person say that five developers gathered together uh at one hotel in san francisco but certainly there weren't any large gatherings not that i was aware of that occurred during the week of gdc as you were mentioning like steam charts are shooting up there's a lot of people that turn into video games and entertainment such as netflix usually in recession times where they're especially at home a lot

what kind of advantages are you seeing with any developers looking at innovative ways to kind of get their games in front of people now that everyone's at home but they're mostly relying on internet resources um the age-old marketing plan yeah yeah i mean certainly marketing these days is very different than it used to be a lot of it is very influencer based versus um printed and digital ads however i've seen a lot of indie developers coming together not only to try to market their game more but to try to provide relief for people who are quarantined so i've actually seen a lot of developers doing the maximum discounts they can on their steam games and on other platforms just trying to make sure that all the people who need games to help buy their time have access to them additionally i think we really see the

value of a lot of indie games in a situation like this for example kind words which came out this last year was remarkably popular because it shows how to provide empathy and kindness to other people and i think in these times that's something we really need yeah most certainly um you're talking about a couple events that you guys are helping out with uh gamedev.world a lot of relif efforts a lot of community coming together which is um the bright side of this uh side of the story where where everything seems to be coming oh well a time of uncertainty right uh where do you foresee for the rest of the year i mean people who are kind of more up-to-date to the news and kind of seeing how other countries are kind of dealing with it or at least at the tail end of things uh it feels like the rest of the year is done like we're just gonna be hunkered down

and and this is this is 2020 uh for for everybody um do you see the impact of it really extending beyond 2020 because it's doesn't feel like business is going to be as usual after everyone recovers um i think that there will certainly be impacts of this lasting beyond 2020 um regardless of how long the quarantines and outbreak occur and i think that's mostly because right now we're seeing a huge shift in technology and a lot more people working remotely um as someone who has worked remotely for four and a half years of the last eight it's something that i'm very familiar with and i'm very familiar with the social effects of that i think that we'll see more people and more companies supporting remote work and remote workers and because of that

we'll see those remote workers desiring more online communication so i think we'll actually be seeing a growth a continued growth of online games especially ones that support communities that really can collaborate and work together it would not surprise me in fact if we saw mmos becoming much more popular in the next few years it definitely seems that white people are kind of snatching up assassin's creed and games that extends a lot of playing time in the last few uh couple weeks and um what what's interesting is that a a few about a month ago we were kind of discussing on the podcast about the um the california ab5 which is a bill that was passed recently in this state uh how is affecting contractors everywhere and um and then shortly after this this virus kind of spread and it's

really forcing uh companies kind of look outside of physical um work environments right and uh how do you feel that um that this is gonna be the pros and cons of this effect of forcing remote work and removing the stigma with remote work but also looking outside of the physical area of uh of a company for for talent and uh extending that talent beyond the the the project's deadlines and stuff yeah i mean i think even outside of game dev uh the advancement of remote work is going to be really good for technology overall um because more people will be working remotely we'll see even a bigger push for having strong uh high data internet connections

and that is clearly beneficial to games as games tend to be the things that make the highest demand of those internet connections at least on a regular basis for studios um i think a lot of studios have generally been comfortable with outsourcing but we're potentially going to see a rise in that especially as remote work rises that can be both positive and negative it certainly gives a lot of opportunities to people all over the world but it does mean that local laws can be um i guess skirted is probably a word that could be used so for example with ab5 it would be potential it would potentially encourage people to hire remote workers outside of california instead of within it

however i think it's important to note in cases like ab5 while there were a lot of questionable parts and vagueness within that law a lot of the biggest concerns were actually already covered by laws that were active within california it's just that not all employers were already respecting them yeah definitely um one of the biggest discussion we because we had a you know our our local um lawyer consultant kind of come on to talk about ab5 and uh the impacts of that and naturally um he gave a short-term and long-term um idea of what it could look like affecting game developers where you know in a good way it could really help contractors not be taken advantage of right and in the short term there are a lot of issues that can be skirted around like

he said uh and then this with this rise of remote work uh everyone's at home anyways it makes no difference if you're californian or or not as long as you have the talent which opens a lot of opportunities for people outside the country um kind of work with these big game developers where they used to be very nda protective of their property as they should um but that also leads to another thing that i i've been reading more about um when we naturally think about game developers we think about uh the art resource technical resource that makes up a team but then there's a huge department that helps really ship a game like the qa department shipping and products and these guys are not really getting the type of fair remote transition and some companies within the united states are still forcing them to kind of come in because they simply do not trust uh

these guys to kind of bring home the the intellectual property and and continue play testing uh is there any news on developing yeah yeah i definitely saw a report that some qa houses were requiring that their workers still come in physically to their office and i think that is definitely a health risk and unfortunately um you know it's something that the igda definitely discourages we encourage listening to your local government and their regulations and i think that we will see local governments responding um to to companies forcing their workers to come in for unsafe conditions for um non-critical tasks um non-society critical tasks i think that there are definitely some technical challenges that i can understand

um you know when you are doing qa testing uh you are sometimes really limited on the devices you can use you know especially if we're looking at the next generation of consoles uh those dev consoles can be very expensive and there might not be you know one per qa person um but i think that it is the responsibility of those companies to work around and to find solutions because there are many other qa firms who have found ways to support their staff while still supporting their customers and making sure that everyone stays safe episode 233 with naughty head game studios 20 years ago um it was um dad said to me you know what do you do um and you know you've got no idea and i i think the best way that i could describe it to him i said listen i'm a virtual painter and decorator

as soon as i said that it went oh okay i'll get you i understand yeah um my mum um i had to go back and get my visa sorted out a couple years ago and um and because i was doing characters um i sat down and you know obviously took my work out with me and um and then she just literally just looked over my shoulder and just looked at what i was doing and and then then i i broke it down for her and showed her how everything works and and so on in very very laymen terms and um and then it clicked the light i could see the light bulb just click on them yeah with her um and then she said you know the hours that you dedicate to your craft is is amazing you know you know you you've all got very good work ethics and and you know your commenders on that but it's in in many regards it's like it's only to like our generations now that um you know something my sister you know

she's got a young boy and he's at what 12 13 years old so he loves fortnite and stuff like that and he's got our game recently and he's playing and he's loving it you know he said you know i didn't pay him to say that but he said he's loving it um and um you know it is just one of these things it is generational it is generational and it's also people in india also shows like families it's um you know they i think they the expectation is similar to england um the expectation is that you're following the footsteps of so-and-so so you're going to be a lawyer engineer doctor etc but when you say something of the arts that's when people are a little bit um worrisome i suppose because you know they don't know too much [Music] yeah the role of a starving artist i think is very true and the game development scene of anything is very competitive right so i come from the game development as well

and i i did see like an evolution i've only been in industry for for 12 13 years but even in those 12 13 years at the beginning it was very much like how you guys describe your job to people who were curious you know i start very basic he's like i'm a 3d artist i say and if they ask more he's like oh i work in the game industry if they ask more he's like i make the world so they ask more the environment so there was like you got a piecemeal to people i i made the first mistake of just like explaining everything and you just see their eyes kind of roll back in their head yeah yeah yeah it just goes over and again the same thing is what i have a chill was talking about uh they just assume everyone's in animation because they can most people see the tv and things are on the tv it's like you you're on tv you do tv stuff it's like no i do games so i think um iphones the age of fortnite has helped greatly the last few years for people to kind of respect game

development as a thing because now they see it everywhere and they now kind of know like at least gamers make money right and then and then fall down to the game developers so it was nice to kind of see that evolution uh kind of going through but what i'm also very interested in what you guys are doing is that you're ushering in a whole new voice into the game development scene i think there's the western then the eastern like far eastern game development scene and some european cropping up um but i think asian games are still underrepresented and a lot of it is just like what we're saying it's just we're seeing colleges starting to offer uh game development as a course or as a degree now and uh accessibility has gotten a lot easier with tools um an army of 10 developers have the same tools as an army of 300 plus developers that's only happened recently to kind of

lower the bar with everybody um you guys were kind of mentioning you guys were instructors and teachers over there too uh i mean what what changes have you guys seen in that evolution in the last five ten years in terms of quality of students in terms of students of interest i mean where where are these students finding it are they just scouring the internet for you guys how are these accessibility happening over there in india there's very few the you know decent schools that offer such courses um and you know we were involved with the interview process all the way through to you know when they're passing out um you know and we've got particular standards that we employed um you know we rewrote the curriculum um because it wasn't up to present standards or you know today's uh skill uh skill sets at that

particular time um and you know it was funny because i recall remember some of the students when they turned around and said to our standards are too high and we just turn around so this is industry standard yeah you know this is if you can't hack this then you know you're gonna have to really sit down and practice or all you know really question why are you here you know what do you want to do um you know and so you know we had that so with this with some of the students um you know he had you know some good ones that really wanted to just knuckle down and get on with it and what i would like to add is like when i was uh so after i did my degree i did a small course in animation and 3d art so basically the softness so that's when people around like artists who especially coming out the thought process the way

things were approached were very different like it was more like stuff that's given to me i'm just gonna do that like and move on like it's more of what's this is my reference image this is how i'm gonna approach it and that's what my end result is gonna be like very uh yeah exactly like approach was like this this is my way and i'm not going to think otherwise or try i'm not going to deviate but when we were teaching in that college like more it was more of a broad thinking like how this will help in the game and thinking about the broader bigger picture and not just like how your job is related with design team and how it affects the game and all the other stuff the technical stuff that needs to be thought about is also like a lot of artists like now you have branches you have tech artists you have

artists that specialize in certain then there are generalists so these things were not prevalent before but now people are like artists especially when we were teaching the students were a lot more like aware yeah they were doing their research online they were part of communities they were talking to people artists around the world they were following artists on art station they were a lot more aware of what the standard is and they wanted to like reach a certain standard and had a aspiration to be in certain companies or do start their own game or like anything like so that's what was different i think from what when like just the industry started or how artists were made and like yeah because it's like you know remember the students as well you know we were literally saying get these off and open them up a little bit like this and but yeah but a lot of them were like

that firm style from the staff because right now like internet it's got so much source there are so many online courses all artists uh even share their uh approach to how they us do their projects so like there's so much material out there like anyone who has the passion for it can definitely learn and grasp episode 219 magically the round tape on news and again uh i just want to reiterate that these are opinions that only reflects upon ourselves and not of our companies i'm a lot safer than ray over there but i just want to reiterate that so let's go into it why magic leap is scamming everybody all right so i'm gonna go up here and then switch my camera uh to to this news article that we've been checking out here uh so like the last time we talked actually it's funny how these roundtable news are tying into each other

uh because it just takes about a month for things to kind of show its ugly colors right so magically the last time uh kind of as a warning signal a fire where there is uh a fire there's smoke right or is it when there's smoke there's a fire there's fire they were asking 10 million uh 10 billion dollars um that's kind of like a prayer hail mary that nobody bit on and then shortly after they found out that no one's really liking them as much they basically laid off i think a good portion of their staff um it's like a thousand looks like a thousand people or something like that they laid off yeah i didn't realize they were that big of a company to even start with um dude they're enormous enormous man australia florida offices in san francisco enormous company yeah well i'm always impressed with these companies um being able to build these hype trains uh

it's funny how these companies all in your area man the bay they seem to be able to kind of hoard all this investor money and have nothing to show well that's where the investors are that's where all those like climate perkins and all those all those dudes are in um or in the bay area but um like at the end of the day right i think i messed with magic leap right i tried it i thought it was cool right um i didn't think it was like three thousand dollars cool right and that's really what it all boils down to is that unlike vr um they they were able to get it they weren't able to get the price down to something reasonable for that so people on the streets would just be like yeah give me that right and uh and and with all of these things the other thing i say about all these things is content cells right content actually will sell the box right and i didn't see any content that would really sell sell that right to the mass market especially at

to a 2 000 3 000 price point right and then they realized that too and they realized they couldn't or these they currently were struggling with getting the price down to the consumer level and so they're like okay let's just go with enterprise right and if you're gonna go with only enterprise all the things that are related to consumers well that's that's done right um gaming gaming the gaming applications and all that stuff just well you don't need to do that anymore right um it's and it's it's sad for the people that are working there um you know it's just overnight jobs jobs are gone especially during this time getting laid off during uh the covid stuff is like probably a horrible situation um but like yeah like i don't know about no i wouldn't i wouldn't use such strong language as scamming and all that kind of stuff because you know investors are going to invest in the promise you know what i mean and actually had a promise and when you

when you mess around with it you're like oh yeah this is promising right but uh it just you know like money money dries up nobody's investing everybody's like okay well how's this going how are you going to scale this i need to sell this and i think they can still be a viable business just do an enterprise it could be applicable in that space for like architecture or for you know training or surgeries or whatever right um it's just not a consumer device right now so that's that's basically that's basically the story right well as you were saying that like you know they had great promise i i wish i went back to college and redid it and majored in promises because it feels like the wrong business it takes a lot of effort it takes a lot of effort to make something that could convince people to give you billions of dollars you know what i mean and uh it's the size of a couple years it was obvious right don't get eaten all

those people yeah it reminds me a lot of what sarah was just about yeah it's not even as bad as their nose right it's not as bad because they had a product actually yeah they should still think that worked right but so i want to ask you this right from from the time you demoed and it feels like even the article i was pulling up and reading through um there was a lot of smoke and mirror like even the press and everybody even the consumer market was kind of like at arm's length it's like all right all right i see where it can go right but like let's just see where you guys actually how close you actually get to it but like how far away if you were to guess how many more years would have taken them without any all these financial troubles in the pandemic to get to where they were saying that this technology will be for consumer and be basically a profitable business without investor money yeah i yeah i think they're so far far far away from that too far away

um like the video you know the initial video they showed of like the first person shooter in the office kind of thing um given given the size of the screen like you know the screen size is actually really really tiny uh when you when you're looking through the magically the screen size is super tiny it's like a little box right um so delivering the promise of what that video was um like they're years away from that right and then on top of it i had no idea what it would take to make that tech cheap enough and small enough where it would be so bulky and cumbersome right um so yeah like i think they're way way way way far off and that's kind of that's also kind of why you do the pivot now right you're like hey um we're really far from this um money's going to run out so let's uh kind of make a pivot and see if we can make a sustainable profit business just focusing on the people

that will pay thousands of dollars for the hardware yeah i mean this pivot definitely is admirable for any company that can see the dangers and actually have a chance or give themselves a chance but this type of pivot kind of reminds me of like the game stop type of pivot where it's the last roll of the dice yeah well for sure for sure it's a it's a hail mary roll of the dice right um the one thing we're not talking about is how it's how they did this during kovid right and kind of mentioned it as a reason why they're doing this um and like and that's that's yeah to me that seems kind of disingenuous i'll say it a nicer way it seems disingenuous right it seems uh it seems like yeah to blame it to blame it on kovid why their product is uh five years old maybe being into fruition

yeah maybe maybe it uh it played a role in it maybe um but like i think it was like when they announced it and they said hey we're shifting to um enterprise like like i was not shocked by such an announcement right that that's just that just made sense yeah even with the pivot to the enterprise space and this is something that um i feel uh a very similar headset that was promised by microsoft a few years ago hololens did but they saw kind of the path clearer and earlier and they actually pivot towards enterprise and have secured like a major [Music] american military contract uh since and they're not as in the news as much for a consumer market but they're definitely making money and profiting and are probably leagues ahead magically uh i don't know how much do you know about that uh

headset as much no yeah yeah no i've actually tried both and i do think the magic leaf magic loop was better in my limited interactions um you know i had bigger bigger aspect ratio right i don't even know what the current state of the hololens tech is these days i've been just having to look at any new hardware anything like that if there is anything to do um but like everything about measurement seemed seen better um better quality image and everything seemed better than hololens like they'll be at least the last version of halloween sidetrack yeah but i'm pretty sure since um you know magic doesn't make money anymore and hololens is getting military money if that's profitable but like i have no idea right so i can't comment but uh but yeah yeah well you know magically you'll be there too getting that

military money eventually from somebody i'm pretty sure they're getting the kovitz uh sba loan money if anything [Laughter] but in terms of uh actual money i think they're far from it man a thousand people lay off and even investors now are i feeling are a bit too naive to think that they're gonna be turning this around anytime soon they've lost i think people's faith uh in its product and uh i'm pretty sure the ceo is looking for a way out if anything and count yeah if they're smart about it i don't know maybe they're just going to talk to gamestop and work together somehow i just think so it's just as ridiculous but uh good rinse hopefully this is the last time we talk about them i always track them because they've always been super hyped uh but i

never really i've never tried the product right it sounds like you were impressed with it but from what i've seen through the demo it just seemed too far away for it to make an impact immediately yeah it is not right and i think it's the same with all this stuff right like with the early vr stuff the newer vr stuff is built on the learnings of that technology has improved there's hololens there's magic leap there's other spatial computing stuff like people like ar kit just on your iphone um there's there's there's things that apple might be working on that that people keep kind of hinting at right um there's all sorts of stuff right that um that you're gonna see down the line that's gonna kind of try to improve on this tech and you know sometimes you're the first part person there and you fail and then other times you're the first person there you succeed right so it just depends on the time right um i think the same thing

with like you know google stadia right stadia um is on the line of working on tech that was developed before that really failed dramatically like on live and guy kai failed dramatically and now everybody's back at it again trying to uh be successful with with game streaming right and maybe everybody who's trying now will fail too but then there might be somebody that comes after that improves all the technology and learns the lessons right i think that's the main thing it's about learning you know there's a lot of failures along the way to actually being successful yeah yeah yeah i i think um through the rotting corpse of um magic leap and stadia and we're gonna get something really good out of all this 222 with shora farah naughty dog talk i think i joined them when they were like

starting to ramp up for the full production like one of the great thing about that studio was like the moment you entered you're presented with like you know hey this is the game that we are making like there's there's because because people come in to the office so they there's not much concept work on display but at the same time there is like presentations there's a lot of documentation that you can go through and like you know familiarize myself your selfie uh what is like the game that you're working on what section of the game your and the way it works is for us the environment artist is they essentially give you a full level do whatever you want to do and you it's like between you a modeler and a texture guy um and it was just ramping up at the time so at the time uh like when i started nothing crazy and in general i personally like didn't get too crazy like crunch even like after six months because i would take like you know lunch breaks go like you know have a like you

know play basketball but there is a certain point in the studio that you know you start seeing these emails like you know like hey if you want to work 60 hours it's fine we are approving it um you and like you know we are providing you know food and all of that although that thing is its own like you know i remember when we were at pocket gyms there was like and off like free lunch everything and they were so chill about it like when you were going to some of these game studios they think they're giving you like so much benefits with providing you food and stuff dude these are tax deductibles um and yeah uh so there is not necessarily any force but you're looking at your peers and you're looking hey this looks really good i want to keep up you know you're an artist you want to create the best work you're doing and you have the tools to create the best work you're doing

like there are certain times like you know when you were on call of duty the tools there were certain things that did not fit like you know if you're working like on sci-fi thing the tools are not suited for that but in naughty dog the tools are there everything is there uh so you are trying to push the best that you can do and you see your peers you're walking past like a vfx person he's doing a fantastic job creating just waves you know um like everything you see is so high quality you want to prove yourself that you are capable of doing that high quality um and but there is not necessarily any force that says hey you have to stay this long but overall um i i over time but it wasn't in in a way that because again i took the lunch breaks hey maybe this worked in a way that they cancelled my contract after six months because i wasn't staying till 11 at night

who knows but um uh i personally but i was seeing a lot of people who are there like for very long hours and like the person next to me you know the kid like he was coming off of it like you know this was his his first main gig and he was like staying till late coming to work like super drawn out and tired again and again some of the scenes that were given to him because the quality they want from him um is so high he's just like there are parts that he was like how do i do this how can i get over this hug you know and it was a lot of that it's definitely crunch culture is a young man's game for sure i think i think even if you take your younger self right let's say you're probably a few years in the industry and you are starting at naughty dog you have everything to want to prove yourself and

i think and that's the dangerous part of this whole crunching idea is that people have this misconception that there's a manager producer uh like a toga that comes at your desk and then points fingers and and forces you to stay or else right but the reality is like they can't legally do that right because it will cause an uproar but it's more like subtle peer pressure you see everyone or in your cubicle pushing really hard and even if you clock out at 7 00 p.m a normal like that's even later than normal right 6 to 7 p.m there's a sense of guilt uh or you don't want to be the first one out right and and and and there's um it's mostly driven by peer pressure so we have like a a good experience at least that we can draw from right so i don't know about you but um we worked since we work at pocket gyms together right

that was my first mobile outside the traditional game industry company right and i was very shocked at how open and because it's not quite like facebook where they have like chefs in the kitchen but we had catered dinner and uh lunch every single day and like every month there was like a team outing of some sort and then every two months there's like a bigger team outing and so there's always seems to be every week an activity outside of just sitting at your desk to keep you busy and for the first time there was like a huge sense of security where it didn't feel like every deadline was our last um and then after that i i kind of want to hear your thoughts about having that type of experience and then going to back to traditional uh a highly praised studios such as not the best of the best of aaa by this point they have eight like uh top selling games every time

they they ship right can you kind of compare those experience and dive a little deeper about the differences where you felt like oh wow we're we're really still behind on on the accommodations here for game developers so yeah like we meet with pocket gems i think again the work that i was working on might not have been the most fulfilling thing artistically because the project i came to pocket gemsport never got off the ground but in general yeah like other even than that like you know catered food and all like you know the fantastic kitchen and all of that it was just like the chill vibe and also it was at the time that remember like you remember like i told my my knee like you know my knee got shattered at the time and like i was on crutches and i was going to physical therapy and the physical therapy is what was in our building so sometimes in the middle of the day i would go out for one hour one and a half

hours every everyone and then i would stay later of course but in general everyone was so relaxed about it like you know that like even though it was at three o'clock that i would go um and then the art director that i worked on like like again there was a lot of you were very in good touch with everyone who you were working with and that's what really disappointed me when i got to naughty dog like naughty dog again i just wanted to get back to triple a games because i was away for so long so i was willing to accept a lot of this so i invented certain expectations that hey just work hard in this like six months that you are there i just want to get back to triple a but like like it was shocking for me even if you remember we were like at um sledgehammer and uh you could go talk to glenn anytime he was so chill you can you know bring ideas to him you know but not only that even though it's a first party like you know it's their own title it's a

lead studio but when you go there like there's so deep so much divide that to be frank in the time that i was there um i even i only met the creative director of the game once just like in an elevator and i introduced myself to him i was just i knew like you know i'm i started working here um and like they don't like the the upper management of the studio i don't think they they just look at you as a number per se like just to finish this game um but you are not someone who's like essentially oh we are ingraining you as the core of the studio like other people would have communication with you um it was very i i personally did not like the culture at all but um like it was also shocking coming from such a family vibe of like you know uh pocket gyms and again even like sledgehammer we were very united like you know during

advanced warfare even though we were like uh like 150 200 we knew everyone we collaborated with everyone um the ideas were flowing but i think uh yeah it was very difficult for me to adjust to some of that at naughty dog commenting a bit more on the culture shock um do they try to at least have some activities during your six months there i mean i i totally agree you got to be there at least two years before before one of the leads actually look at you when they're giving you tests because they're you know it really is every year they have a whole truckload of contractors come in to help finish development and a lot of those don't make the cut and we can talk about that a bit more uh in a bit but um what kind of stuff do you feel like i mean they're they are a pretty big studio the problems are pretty pretty widely known i mean were there

conversations about this while you were there with your colleagues about hey man it seems like we just come in there and work and leave uh really late i mean is there any um any other picture that you feel like while you were there that you felt like hey they're making some kind of effort a little picnic here and there we i used to laugh at that but but like what kind of efforts have they been making just to paint them in a fair picture i i honestly think they did a little effort because actually the location of the studio of naughty dog is is isn't this like nice building that has a lot of like water part like like there's like a park area essentially around it it's a nice area so if you want to go for walk lunch times it's pretty nice uh and they use a little events here and there i'm not like saying they don't and actually like every friday like you know they have a belly day all day or something like that they typically do these sort of events but like they're

when i'm saying like there's no unity like let's say somebody is cooking something for it's just for their own group there's no like oh hey the rest of the team we have like you know i made this like great like you know cookie basket and come and share and share in the kitchen with us like you know it it wasn't there is a divide there is no um like company wild email like that it's just like if you go to kitchen and you see something you pick it up but there is no like hey how who should i thank for this like you know there's no none of that um but uh i think that part is fine um and yes sometimes for me it was just a divide between the the contracts and again even like some of the sony stuff because naughty dog is a sony team so there's certain like sony benefits that go um we you know with one side that uh hey all the full times you have these

you know sony activities that you can do but the contracts cannot you know enjoy any of that episode 241 game licensing for streamers that's why i don't think it's so bizarre the way he said it where he's coming from yeah it makes it very click-worthy right but the the way that's polarizing the community a bit it was like there's something there to explore where like we're not just talking about streamers and game developers right we're talking about twitch we're talking about youtube we're talking about facebook right these mega multi-billionaire multi-billion companies who completely skips the developers and go straight to the streamers like athletes as they are i'm not downplaying that but again def is our out of that circle of conversation it's like what they're building a whole thing based on our content here to get rich off of so what i'm hearing is if streamers

weren't successful weren't making money then we wouldn't care like you're just salty that people are making money that's that's what it's so like it sounds like a whole bunch of pocket pocket watching right you're watching you're watching a next man's pocket right you're like yo you're using my content and you're making a whole bunch of money well just like anything else if you make noise where's my piece of the money that's in your pocket and like there's something there man like the end of the day at the end of the day though is like if i just stream your game and i don't know what i'm doing i'm distributing your game i'm not gonna make no money nobody's gonna watch my stream and nobody's gonna care right and there's also nothing stopping the developers themselves from streaming the game and saying because there's developer streams right of course people before the game comes out they're like we're going to do a developer stream every week for like the next month so you can see our game and see see how we're building in house come together before we launch

and then they do like all day streams of day of launch they try to get hype and people watch right yeah but there's a ways there's ways for developers sure but when i'm just saying as a developer to be unchanged for a developer to be having control again like i think we are letting go of something uh without putting up a fight and or at least having a conversation about why why why why shouldn't this be a devs first type of rights to stream your own content and not have everyone and their mom uh just be able to kind of stream your home game interpret their own way and and and market it in a way without your input like it feels kind of silly that we don't have that message that's what makes it art that's what makes it art too and that's what makes it different than say movies and music right where music movies music i play your music i'm not adding anything to it i'm just playing your music if i play your movie i ain't adding

anything to it your movies yeah but right but guess what even if you go pewdiepie on a piece of music and you play and stream three hours of kanye's you know album you know you're going to get sued because yeah because it's also a non-interactive form of media like because games are interactive every streamer is going to be different every playthrough is going to be different unless now the argument you get to is like oh i'll make it a two-hour story game it ain't different it's just a story exactly you're playing through it i i do think in those cases you could like and i think i've seen people have done this they go hey streamers you can stream our game cool just stream the first 20 minutes yeah but how how how many of those cases are like hey no they're like hey you want a key here's the key here's the game stream here sign this contract sun stream only the first 20 minutes sure i mean that's kind of like a gentleman's

agreement but like the same way we don't let's be honest here twitch and youtube is not going to do a dmca sweep uh when a single player game nintendo though they've done that for nintendo right yeah and so so they're it's possible for devs like like if you're in yes so like a light switch publishers big publishers if ubisoft suddenly say hey you can't do this then yes it will stop it in the call and also what's crazy is publishers also have streaming embargoes right so like they're being youtubers and stuff that get the game early and can't stream it because they'll come back to their console and find their consoles lock off right because because there's an embargo and they're like now you can you can only start streaming it once the game's released or or once uh other people could start buying it right that that's also happened that happened with spider-man which other games right so so there has been some cases of publishers being like nah nah nah stream it when we say you you are going

to stream it but they all recognize that they want those streamers streaming their games right because they want to make money and that's how they're going to sell more copies right yeah i i i guess the the pushback is that yeah the publishers if they want to they can right yes and the small developers don't really have that ability to do that right you're small you're small man you know but so i'm trying to go from a standpoint and it's not like me telling hey let's turn off the switch stop the horses stop the engine all right you're just hanging you're just like me yeah yeah i'm not saying that i know that's not gonna happen right unless all the publishers in coalition can can realistically say no streaming of our content unless you get approved they can't do that tomorrow but they're not ready to do that for because of the backlash

um it i think i think game cells will drop too i think the backlash should be just like it could it would take a chance and i i would probably agree with you if across the board all games are benefiting but in in in most cases it's multiplayer it's it's it's uh mostly multiplayer games right it's mostly uh physic based games right uh there's a very uh catered audience that streaming does really well and actually benefit the game right there's a very specific type of game that can do that right but across the board when they're not doing that other games don't benefit and in most cases hurt the sales uh because people already experienced that um and like movies right there's more leading towards linear game play people don't go out and usually follow through and purchase because of those reasons right if if all games were benefiting like we are

thinking when people are streaming games and the games are going crazy right the argument for streaming to keep it open and free then of course yeah i was like why why stop this gravy train right but i feel i feel it's changing the way we make games so much because we have relinquished control game developers in the financing of games have kind of have to bend to the will of this cult the subculture right that has went bonafide success that it's affecting the way we make gains it's affecting the games that we want to make that and we're not a part of that conversation i think that's a real problem it's like hey if you're affecting not just the game that i made then you're streaming the content but you're affecting the future games that i want to make and i'm still not a part of this conversation then there's something wrong with this system here because now we're just catering to your audience right yeah yours you're streaming because that's the industry right like the interest is

going to react to where the money's at right that sucks right because not everybody watches streaming you know war zone all the time it's like i do miss like a single player experience where where where it's completely non-existent anymore play that joy play a single there's tons of single-player games in play spider-man it's just game of my game of the year last year but we know as a fact that these type of games when you go into these investor meetings and you have this idea that 10 years ago would have been financed on the spot because of the you know clear resume of successes out there they're not getting funded anymore because of these streamers kind of changing our culture where like uh they know it's a risk it's like hey you put this out but like what what's the point was once on one stream or just streaming for two hours straight you're not gonna steal anything that was the same argument people had for like oh you're making a game without multiplayer yeah those those exist right like every game had to have multiplayer for a while

because that's the only way you really get fighting because every game is both very now and then and then last year it was like six uh single-player non-multiplayer games there were major successes right like so and i think we're always worried about these things but i don't think it's actually a problem per se um and like uh you said you're saying something else about like we don't have control you know we never ever go over the games we're gonna make right and of course there's also there's also the diversity aspect of this you know you know you know a lot of people talk about the game industry and how do you get your foot in the door in the game industry right um so there's the development side but then other people are like hey you could be a commentator you could be a streamer you could be esports player right um and make good money do these things right so it's just another part of the industry that has opened the door to a lot more people uh sure but with even esports right there's uh

and grown the impact of gaming right you know esports the cup the commentators that go wrong with esports the amount of money yeah i don't want to like completely put people out of jobs that are because streamers are part of game development right now is especially and um but i would have to argue that esports and and these competition events are doing it correctly they're involving developers like you can't just throw one in your garage well you you can but the big ones were the ones that were started by the actual publishers right exactly and so and so and i'm and there's nothing stopping you as a publisher from doing that but somebody else could say hey and you kind of mentioned before like the way yeah yeah the the way that have uh you know made uh battle royale games really popular have been

the sponsoring of streaming content sure on a big level sure but across the board again i think the story is still the same right the big guys are always going to succeed with uh with this but the small guys are kind of left in the dust right and it's it's i feel like there's something there where we can work together and and make this work better than it is right now where it's kind of the wild west it's like as soon as my game is out tomorrow on steam i know it's going to be either good or for bad it's gonna be streamed the whole time and i i just gotta hope and pray that people find it like impactful enough to follow through and you better make a good game you're gonna be good gamer people you leave the marketability of your game uh out of your control but then you're you're asked to go and fix it because it's your problem again it's

it to me it's like hey the streamers and everybody's wrecked my place in my plan and now i'm asked to kind of fix it and work around it like we've always done and i and i'm not saying anything and not this guy even though i don't like the way he said it he's not saying anything that other industries haven't been doing it's like very normal um let's just go back to homeboy real quick like i'm just saying if you're working at google stadium of all things yeah you don't say that you don't do that you and i don't even know you don't do that right like if you're if you're working at some other video game company if you're working at like a cd project right or something interesting you've already seen you've already said that that's still you're still going to be at a whole lot of job of our state this year right because cd projekt red is like every streamer on earth has a cyberpunk secret lab chair right like i mean right like like every streamer on earth right now has a cyberpunk secret lab chair right so like they know

where the bread is getting buttered right and they have their own streaming that they do to pimp their game every week they show off you know their game uh so yeah like it's just it's just you don't say that stuff like i hear you yeah you wanna you wanna go to streamers and be like hey guys give us three percent of of all your every time for every hour that you stream our game no it's not even that complicated it's not even that complicated i don't want to be as i don't want to spotify the out of it all right it's more like hey uh it's like conversation it's like hey i want you to stream or it's as simple as like you gotta gain my permission to stream my game i mean that's all it i'm asking like it just it sounds like a very respectable way to in some cases these streamers are getting sent the game for free because they because the publishers are like yo stream that episode 225 with brad somewhat prophetic the last time you were on talking about how having

people source up to to perforce ten thousand companies is less impressive than having ten thousand people onto on force at the same time from the same company and that was almost a year ago yeah it was almost like crazy that you kind of foresee this type of near future issue for prayer for us that you've been warning everybody about and it is so much happening i mean the game industry themselves who are the hugest proponent for using perforce for over two decades now are are still having a lot of issues just thinking at a different angle with everybody being remote uh i can't imagine other industries at this point who are 10 steps behind learning learning where they i mean how how's that handling all that type of questions coming in at this time yeah i mean it's interesting like you said it's kind of been you know scale across the globe and

thinking about remote teams and all that has kind of always been in our wheelhouse so we we designed for it um part of the vision that i've had with the product is that that's only going to increase and it's going to get more difficult as you know 4k 8k all that you know comes to fruition it's not getting easier to work in these environments right with the size of the data so we're we're always trying to stay ahead of that curve and build that culture in our company to support those kinds of environments and we have stuff in our road map that's going to just take this all to a new level from a scalability perspective for people working remotely working locally it really doesn't matter to us i want it to be ubiquitous where wherever somebody seed is in the globe they should experience the same performance and the same ability to do work uh regardless of where they're located so that's really driving the strategy on um you know a lot of our products so we're well suited for it fortunately

so uh aside from that though like um as this was happening around the globe and finally hitting north america i think about a month delay uh you guys are already set up for this type of situation where you even with the preparedness were you ready for the whole world to kind of plug in and kind of use the number one files file management system out there i mean i can't think of any other type of um product out there that is allowing teams to kind of coordinate cooperate and work with each other at this scale uh literally every company in the world right now is is needing this type of file management system to talk to each other essentially aside from you know video chatting all the time yeah no i mean it's it's been it's been uh from an infrastructure perspective on our part we were ready because we saw sort of the

it's kind of the mold that people were working in anyways so where you know you can use perf like the perforce products anywhere but where we really shy right where we really stand out is when there's some dimension of scale right whether it's you know lots of files huge files lots of products lots of product variants um or you know lots of people working on it or certainly teams distributed across the globe so we it's been always it's just been part of our messaging right and part of our uh enablement is to allow this sort of global spread of data um and collaboration regardless so a team in the uk can just as easily contribute uh to the same set of code or assets that a team in california or boston is right and there's literally no difference there's no um restrictions uh that are slowing them down and so it's just it just really

fit in line with how we work anyways and you know we've been seeing the trends as well where people are moving their uh infrastructure using our platform where traditionally um you know certainly across all across the board 10 years ago and earlier it was all local right so massive files large servers um you know all the people are working locally and if per chance somebody uh was to do something remote it would have to be through some sort of vpn kind of situation or you know remote access etc whereas we've seen some of our biggest customers are now looking to move and have already started moving a lot of their infrastructure of uh perforce into the cloud they've already started that and they're looking at and being very attentive to the different regions where they set up servers and with our products they're setting up the uh the different replication technologies we have

again so that somebody on this side of the globe we don't want to have a positive experience in somebody on the other side of the globe to have a negative experience so with our products and our replication capabilities which we've been working with customers for years with they replicate that data all across the globe so it really doesn't matter where you are um we're going to give that same sort of local-like experience whether it's local hardware or it's in the cloud it doesn't matter which sort of ubiquitous with us so that's kind of this situation is just sort of right in our wheelhouse for what we're what we're doing anyways so we've been fortunate and it's and it's shown too the certainly with the gaming market with people at home and uh you know some people aren't working unfortunately um or even people that are working but can't go out to dinner or go bowling or go to the movies gaming their demand is up right i'd love to get your your take on that we're certainly seeing it i don't want personally you know me and my wife play like you know

golf on the ps4 every night right after we put the kids to bed i didn't wasn't doing that before um and uh it's it's kind of a an interesting you know trend so our customers are they're they're under the wire they've got to deliver software and you know games because they're seeing a lot of pressure to to produce content for people uh what have you seen there no i i definitely agree i think at first when people were anticipating how many we're going to be at home and turning usually to entertainment to kind of ease the time suffering basically a lot of people were kind of guessing that they won't be spending as much money but more like going towards freeware or mobile games you know on a cheaper side but data are in saying that people are spending more money towards game industry stuff um which is great for us um for everybody essentially because

there's only so many times i can lap in my backyard very limited space before i have to go back in the house and do something and so uh and not knowing how long this will be people are saying summer or even this is 2020 basically um right a lot of people are adjusting to the new normal and everything uh something that you touched on a bit that has been somewhat controversial and i just want to know your opinion on it uh since it kind of correlates you know to your company but also to the industry overall has been data cap right that is a very new concept in the last year and a half and more than ever thankfully recently a lot of the internet companies have relaxed their measures on data cap letting people actually spend more time uh how do you see that conversation returning after this kind of subset because that's a pretty insane thing to think that um we should limit any of that

in charging people yeah i think you know my from a personal consumer perspective i mean i'm completely against that right uh and the data throttling and all that um and i think it would be uh you know to your point it would be a horrible look in today's climate you know for them to be enforcing that and uh trying to garner more dollars out of the consumers um i think uh it's interesting to see how that will play out uh moving forward once we're kind of out of the out of the fray here even if it's late this year or next year whatever when things are back to whatever normal we're gonna have um it's gonna be interesting i think uh you know i i heard something like you know people people were kind of talking at the beginning of all this like you know you can learn a lot about your company or the people that you do business with the people the the restaurants the stores the you know your

own employment you're gonna learn a lot about um companies and people based on how they treat people during the situation right um so i think the companies that are being you know empathetic towards uh you know the situation where people are home uh a lot of people aren't working um you know and then how they deal with it now and how they you know how quickly do they kind of go back to business as normal and try to try to try to squeeze right i mean everybody's in business to make money but um you know it's going to be i think there's going to be a chance for some companies to sort of separate themselves based on their approach right um you're seeing it with the airline industries right like so uh you know i fly delta a lot and they kind of came out and basically just said your status whatever you had is good till 2021 right like don't worry about it uh marriott did the same thing so it's like some of these companies are they're thinking about what the daily

person's thinking about um and what life's gonna be like when they go back to normal and um it's just it's just one example right so um you know i know uh my cell phone carrier they're increasing the amount of free hot spot usage you can you can use right now i think those are good things to do i mean a little bit of good grace and goodwill i think goes a long way um it like to your point though i i don't have a forecast on what they're going to do once once they can kind of start to leverage things again it's going to be interesting but i think it's an opportunity to sort of separate out a company's mindset and their persona you know once once things kind of loosen up a little bit episode 244 with adnan chad musing alone you got to be a little tech savvy to be really good at your job and be valuable at these companies because uh you need that uh because making games is all about cheating and performance and you can't just go on there and zbrush everything and then just make

sure you just walk away from the thing and make and hope that it works right so uh this actually kind of ties back to to to your beginnings of polygon flow right um you you mentioned you spent a good amount of years uh at quixo at the ground floor what kind of lessons did you see going through that before the acquisition of course at epic just seeing like a startup like growing and gaining traction and and then like coming into form of what the original vision is like can you kind of share a little bit of that aspect from your perspective that you're carrying forward for for your company yeah so um at quicksell i was very fortunate because and this is probably one of the things that i miss about uh offices is that sometimes you get to sit near someone that you would never uh be working closely with otherwise and

at kwiksel uh the office in sweden uppsala i was sitting with daniel and jason jason was the cfo and then business development no chief of business development and then head of sales and daniel was cfo and other and investors as well and um you know instead of being around artists i was really with the people that are kind of making big decisions that drive the company forwards and i was really involved with the tech tech slash art part of quixote bridge their software that sends you know geometry between uh different tools and that also meant that i had to talk a lot with teddy and with the pakistani team like it it was just a really fortunate setting and uh it was incredibly insightful because you get to hear the the best and the worst of everything like when everybody is celebrating you hear it hand when everybody is not celebrating you

also here at firsthand but most importantly i think what's really special about quixo is just that the company has an incredibly good culture uh when it comes to just hiring good people and uh it you know it seems trivial when people here like just hire good people but it's just you have to have a filter that starts from the top and at quicksole that was teddy and vaqar like if you talked with these guys you could just feel it that they really mean what they say when they say we want to simplify the artist's work we want to have a good uh company culture and uh progressively you know i just started taking notes okay how do they hire um usually they're just scooping over the internet if there's an artist that has been working with their tools for a long time and they're doing amazing work and quicksilver happens to be in need of an artist they just hire that artist if you're a programmer

or tech artist like i was and you happen to be making tools that they think might be good for their ecosystem they just get in touch with you and uh yeah you know just making sure that just like i had to talk to teddy in order to uh be hired every time i was hiring someone in the company at belgium flow as well i always contacted the person first and really started the deep conversation into hey you know what are you passionate about and uh always making sure as well that the person that you're gonna hire and the the job that they're doing if they're doing it also as a hobby on their free time that's even better like all of these different lessons i had to just learn them and see them sometimes work sometimes sometimes failing taking notes and uh this is just from the hiring aspect and other aspects uh jason is in the chat and uh i think he would have some crazy uh

anecdotes and stories about basically the growth of a company like quicksole but the gist of it to me is just that it's a constant struggle and the fact that everybody in the company was passionate about what they're doing made it struggle that was enjoyable and yeah it's uh fantastic people again all over the place over there yeah it's it's a lesson i think i've learned later in my career um when i was working with smaller teams and seeing the advantages of that i've always started my career a little like big aaa companies but it was the smaller teams where i learned that for longevity of a career for interest and internal growth being around like-minded people passionate people where everyone's opinions matter you can really move mountains at a quicker pace than other bigger companies and i i definitely saw that with teddy with

quicksilver with you guys and i definitely see the the gem of what you're building over at polygon flow it's like um it it has all the remnants of of making a big change and speaking of big change so let's go into polygon flow and what it is and where the thinking process and how why why did you feel it was a solution needed for a problem um this is the type of thing when i saw is like oh wow okay this is something that artists are going to be fully embracing been waiting for and and can't get you know can't wait to get their hands on and this is also something that tech artists are either gonna like or really get scared of like job security is like this guy's revealing all our secrets right so i would love to kind of hear you know your your your beginning process of um you know the problem that you're seeing and what you're using uh polygon flow to kind of create solutions for yeah so the story of polygon flow began in 2016. back then i used to make small maya

plugins i was really starting to learn how to do tech art and i didn't want to quit art just yet i just wanted to solve some problems you know get some cash to be able to survive literally and then continue on with my art career but progressively i started noticing that okay i had to make this really generic tool where you basically have a curve and you want to generate geometry around it like to create a pipe and the code to make that whole thing where it's like a good system ended up being over a thousand lines of code because you had a lot of different features and i was like okay there is no way that if i want to keep making tools i'm going to be writing thousands of lines of code because at heart i like solving problems i don't like coding whenever i say this even to my colleagues they go like come on but it's it's just i feel like what makes tools like unreal

engines material editor and substance designer and so on so good is that they really speak to your soul as an artist like they have a really high barrier of entry but it starts uh like it starts easy if you follow the right tutorial and most of the time you know there's tutorials everywhere and at that point in late 2016 the idea then was okay i know how to create uh scripts uh simple ones but you know it is what it is so i thought what if i had like a layer stack where i could do something like hey give me the selected object bevel the object move it into the scene export it whatever like you just have layers similar to photoshop and each layer would have an operation and you basically run a bunch of different tools like that and you'd have a button called bake to tool so you would bake the layer stack into a complete script just like what i would write manually and uh the idea was charming but i had

no skills to build a tool like that again i didn't like coding much to begin with so back then i put the the idea on hold and uh one year later i joined quicksole now while at quicksaw i started noticing that problem more and more that okay we have some fantastic artists and they're telling me all these amazing ideas hey would be great if i had a tool that would do this and that like these are ideas that would genuinely change the way artists work and they don't even exist yet but there was no one to do them you know i was too busy doing something else or whatever and uh in uh i'll never forget it was an evening in early 2018 and i was talking to teddy about this idea hey what if there was this node-based tool that allowed you to create your tools would you use it and uh teddy also had kind of a similar background in that he started as an artist wanting to solve uh

you know just sci-fi panels creation because you can if you can create them with like normal maps you don't have to model in maya and so on and he said oh absolutely you know back when i started writing andu which was quicksilver's first tool it was just so much code and i really wish i had a system like that and from that point i was like okay now i think i have a rough idea of where this needs to go and so i started doing a lot of research learning what options are there um there was like houdini which was the first software that i considered um i tried it out learning curve was really really steep and i mean like crazy and i i had to give up immediately because there was no way that i could come to you and say hey this tool is made for you as an artist that doesn't know how to code or any programming language like you have to know a little bit of that to use houdini really well unlike

substance designer for example and uh then i started exploring other options like some that are dead like softimage had this system called ice that was like houdini but a bit simpler and progressively it was just really clear that there's no solution out there and if i wanted to see the idea that i had in mind happen i had to do it myself and uh that's when you know i just started writing a really simple prototype like i had to learn okay how do you even make a note based tool how how deep does your programming knowledge need to be to do that and uh fast forward summer 2018 i was like 50 sure of how everything needed to be and that's where i started talking with daniel because you know we're in the same office about this he was like no base yeah whatever yeah yeah cool and but that that basically meant that

he was there and seeing the idea from its inception and progressively grow until it became like a proper something with a proper structure and uh yeah after that you know early 2019 i was like 100 sure okay i'm gonna quit by uh summer 2019 and start my thing but then you know the whole kind of acquisition thing and uh the company quicksilver was growing and i i felt like okay i'd rather make sure that i live uh with everything kind of in good state and with a good uh relationship with quicksole rather than just living to pursue my dream because uh friendship is really important and i value teddy and jason and daniel everybody there i just love them too much to you know quit suddenly so what i ended up doing was just uh trying to develop it a bit in my free

time because at the time quiksolino a lot of things had to happen in 2019 for us to get to a point where people are where we're on the map where people know what we do where if you're using their software quicksilver bridge which completely removes the need of importing textures and applying them and creating materials like that we need we needed to ensure that there was no going back from that kind of workflows and uh yeah you know late 2019 in november 12th of november announcement that quicksilver was acquired and uh four weeks uh four days before that i had announced to teddy that i was leaving i spent the whole evening before that just uh tearing up in front of the computer thinking okay what am i gonna say to this guy tomorrow um but then you know uh the the whole process was super smooth and uh he just kept giving me advice on

okay you're trying to solve these problems i would have been the ideal customer uh of polygon flow a few years episode 226 unreal engine 5 demo right like the tech the tech um is is a feat it's really it's a lot of work that went into it and it looks great like there's just no there's no doubt here that it that it's really really good looking and um and it definitely sparked a lot of conversation on internet the marketing you know everybody's talking about it everybody was going crazy and definitely all the artists that i know all the modelers and environmental artists and all of them were just immediately oh my god this is amazing what you know what will happen with my workflow how will i work oh my god i can't wait right so everybody's like super excited about it and it was it's great you know and it's a it's a really good tech demo to show off show off that tech um ps5

i think it really shows the power um or what we could theoretically expect you know that we could pump out onto the onto a ps5 and it really gets me excited about that the amount of detail and amount of it's really the detail that i think is missing a lot of games um that it kind of shows off so i think that's amazing um at the same time though you know this is not planned to be out until like the end of 20 to 2021 right and there's still probably a lot of open questions and performance and like how do you really make this this content um what went into actually making that demo how much work did it take what the tools look like what were the workflows so there's a lot of unanswered questions around around that part of it

some more time uh uh so yeah i mean the first question is of course i mean i i kind of know the answer but i want to make it clear out there for people who haven't seen the demo or if you're watching this i'm gonna get the video going so of course uh how how practical is that real how much of it is real uh how how much of it is faked i mean i know we're near launch and usually in that case uh whenever a tech demo is near launch it's pretty close right it's not like a fairy tale but i want to hear kind of your opinion of because there were new tech in there the the i believe the lumen uh the first time global elimination is really introduced in a practical unreal right yeah yeah yeah yeah like i wouldn't go that far but um but yeah definitely like i think is is interesting um and and how you

know and and definitely the approach that they're taking with it is super interesting and there's a lot of other real-time gi techniques but and this it looks like lumen is kind of combining a bunch and really delivering something and kind of also leaning on uh the fact that um nanite is a thing to also help to help do some of the some of the heavy lifting at a high detail level um but yeah so yeah definitely real-time gi is a is a huge uh productivity saver for for people that are making these levels and uh and i think that's that's really a big deal um i on the other hand though i think there's so much implications in like having the budget and the artistic team to even be able to create the create assets of that quality um some people are like oh no i don't need to create assets of that quality i could just use qixel or whatever right um but then you know you don't want all the games to look the same

right you want to be able to add your stamp and your artistic touch right so um it's really a high bar for for a lot of gamete game dev teams out there to even be able to try to reach right um and i have no idea what the asset sizes are on disc like there's so many unanswered questions there but it's but it's there's no doubt that that tech demo is amazing i mean let's try to break it down i mean there's two main system as we kind of discuss uh there's the geo one and they were talking about how i mean i think i read into it a bit where it's kind of like how virtual texturing was kind of introduced in unreal recently and the idea is kind of similar to how they apply it to geometry do you mind kind of talking more about what the theory is behind that and how they're applying it per pixel a certain amount of triangles and so it's just what you see is not exactly

yeah like i don't yeah i don't know all of the details about like of course they haven't really released all the details either right right how the gi system is working uh they kind of detail the rails let me see if i can even find that look again um but there was there's something you know about at a at a long at a long distance you're using a much more coarse representation of the scene like voxel voxel-based geometry uh or junction that's converted into that course of course voxel graded and you use that to kind of do your uh your traces against for the for the gi uh and then when it's closer to camera it's using more detailed detailed information right so that's how you can kind of get um like a larger distance on a large scene with real-life gi without like killing your performance right because the further away you are you use a more closer approximation right um so so that that part is is really interesting and every artist every artist wants to

do it with baking and bake steps they just want to pop in their lights and and it just works right the one thing to take away you know it's one light source right um so so like usually with these kind of techniques the more light sources you have the slower it's going to go right so but but just doing one main one main light and having that be give you real mgi is a big improvement over having nothing right um yeah so you know when it comes to real time yeah i think that's that's really cool there's a lot of techniques up there for like you know there's lighten that does real-time gi but that has a big step there's ddgi um it that that also has some some type of uh baking involved in where you have to kind of like make some sort of uh some sort of uh occlusion or visibility um calculation for for the probes that you're that you're doing the gi on um so like to have a system that's truly

like no baking and you just drop some lights in uh that's actually really cool yeah i mean i guess i don't know if it's even no no baking right so because like i said all of the details yeah the prep work behind it the one thing that scares me is how people look at this demo and just especially they haven't done game development right they see it as kind of like a like a skip a skipping step uh for basically 20 to 30 years of game dev knowledge it's like oh no lld is done i guess i shouldn't learn that or either optimize or any of that technique it seems like i can just create something in zbrush drop it in light it call it done which is foolish yeah yeah i think i think that promise is a little bit of overselling right i think it's still uh it's still to be known how much

of how much of this job she can you have in a game where you're like hey my target is 4k 60 frames a second how much of this how much of your game could be this geometry the that's unknown right and so yeah i think people ready to abandon all of the things you've learned about how to optimize assets and lods and all that uh hold hold your horses on that right right um and the other thing i was pointing out about this technique too that i don't think anybody really noticed is the environment's very static yes right so um so when you want actual dynam dynamic movement stuff like that it's it's unclear how that how this tech translates to that [Music] yeah i i think everyone's so character so character artists are still like character artists are still like damn i guess i guess i don't have a silver bullet just yet right character

artists are already thinking this way and current gen dude the way they build their props this is exactly how they are this is how sloppy they are bro the the the the spoiled the spoiledness of a character artist at some point i'm gonna write a book on it it's just ridiculous dude i remember this one time where uh we were so constricted with our levels where we're like all right this is the amount of textures and then basically the character artist would have six times that with a character it's like i'll just use one for a finger another one for an eyeball 2048 max but that's just how they think that's how they are i mean in a way the characters are pretty close to camera but it's just one of those things i feel yeah i think environment artists just by the nature of what we do have a

little bit more care with how we optimize and make things work because the impression of the environment especially something like what we're seeing right now you know uh making it run making it look good at the same time that stands up to a well-made character it's very important to make it feel like one item right but um well i mean this demo achieved what it wanted needed to achieve which was impress the out of everybody and it set a high bar i mean you got to have these type of things to kind of stretch out you know the possibilities and even if you don't hit that that that mark uh every time uh you'll still end up pretty close to it which is in the end a better product for everybody right so yeah i'll i'll say that like for um for like film and tv production like this is weird this stuff is like really really promising right um

for games there's some promise there it's still very unknown like like in practice like how will you actually use this how did you do it yeah and like how will our team you know be able to get their vision across with this tech and and not go crazy with huge ass assets and take forever to make them and all of that yeah this part they're just showing off right here i mean this is that's incredible oh my god yeah it's two yeah well it's crazy it's great this one have a demo yeah that's great i would say like so here's here's where i'll i'll talk about some some of my philosophical beliefs um you know we're coming into another generation right yeah of of console hardware and we're showing again we're showing absolutely amazing graphics right absolutely amazing graphics look

at these graphics look look at the level detail you could get there's there's a big difference between these graphics and like say the games of last gen right um but you know character animation character movement all of that is still the same right um they talked about in the video talk about some advancements they did with like ik and the cloth their scarf and all that um and yeah that's cool but like it it's not as big of a leap as these graphics are you saying those disciplines are lazy is that what you're saying no no they don't they don't do as much i would never i would never say that but what i would say is that you talk to gameplay guys or animation folks uh they'll tell you the same the same thing it's like uh we focus on

every gen we focus on graphics graphics graphics is easy it's the easy thing to sell it's the thing that people could obviously see is better um and we don't really give a lot of love to uh to some of the other disciplines right uh although like there was a lot of talk in this as well about audio right because audio seems to be something that people want to focus on this game um and and you know you've worked on games every game you know audio team gets like hey you get two percent yeah you could get you could get whatever scraps you have left over in the memory for your little audio right and so like now they're you know now we're talking about actual like real proper 3d spatial sound and those all sorts of modeling of your how you hear in the same sound waves and all this kind of nonsense right yeah can you expand on that nonsense because when i heard that i didn't wear it like what do you mean 3d sound we have that don't we have that already can i just hear where it's coming from [Laughter] come on let's get back to the graphics i guess

exactly exactly right exactly right and i think even i think even most people unless you're like a serious audiophile you won't even really notice yeah um but um but yeah yeah we have 3d positional sound right sounds over there it could be bind you to lefty whatever usually right uh but then actually to be able to do proper reverb and and it changes based on the room that you're in and a different smaller room as so we're talking about so all the effects that used to be done in post-production you know same idea like any real-time applications just to here or if you yeah or if you were to do it like in a different gen it would like take up a whole core or something in the main trend without those effects and then you're like no audio guys you got like two you got a two uh you got like a half a millisecond or quarter millisecond budget for this stuff right so you can't do that there's a lot of talk about audio processing and audio hardware specific

audio hardware to do this in hardware right um and so it's an audio person's dream you think and so hopefully you know more games like focus on that and lead me to that as well and not just the graphics right i see it yeah i agree i mean i hear a lot of talk with um well with characters especially they're trying to like finally do something with hair i mean it's been the same technique for for a few gen now uh we're talking about hair simulation actual physics with the hair and really fancy stuff that the film industry has have been pioneering for a while now um yeah same with the cloth same idea cloth simulation yeah homegirl's hair is not doing anything special here though right but also this this isn't really the focus of this demo either yeah the characters in this one especially i mean i i felt like it's probably an art direction choice where it felt more like style stylized right

so it wasn't very um yeah i've seen better characters uh yeah this demo this demo is definitely not about the character yeah it's all about the environment for sure i mean it's the most important department of the game [Laughter] we make everything work show your bias [Laughter] we create worlds bro matrix wasn't about i guess it was about the characters well we were talking about the matrix though yeah anyways uh kids kids kids at home video game making is a team sport do not listen to brandon well i mean like the lighting system i mean you made a valid point to you know they uh they really bragged about the gi solution but it's from a single light source um they didn't really play too much with well this one they have one light source with one effects source so two at most and

it seems like the rule still applies in next-gen where too many dynamic lights will kill your your processors um yeah so that has especially if you have to trace your chase you're tracing rays around right so yeah um the more you have to do that and you have to do more of that if you have more light sources right so so this actually leads into my next piece of conversation so ray tracing the last year and a half especially starting with that star wars demo at gdc was like the onslaught of the next wave and we thought we were going to focus on that for the next few years which we are but then this whole lumen system um what's your take on that is there gonna be a combination of two is ray tracing gonna be better because it's still struggling with um with just hardware limitations right there's not much we can do about that or what's your opinion about that yeah i'm not really yeah i think it's a big topic right but

um but generally i think like part part of what lumen is doing is ray tracing right yeah uh but just kind of like in in software and compute right um and kind of doing it in a way that's sufficient for this use case right um and there's other there's other yeah there is like straight up like um you know dxr nvidia demos that show like uh global illumination right but but those that technique like doing straight up dxr rendering for the whole of your global illumination is just not like the cost is still very high even if you have a 2080 ti and you want to and if you want to run it at like really high resolutions it's a problem at high resolutions right so some technique like this like lumen here where it's like kind of doing like a like a three stage approach to uh to generating uh the gi is a way of kind of like reducing

the cost and getting a believable look right um so like i'll be i'm interested to see what more what more games are gonna do like i know like you know gears of war showed uh they were talking about uh what was that rachel's reflections uh for for xbox series x um so i'm curious what more and more games are to what extent they do uh ray tracing on the consoles so i mean um kind of going back to the original point right when people first saw this especially newbies i call them noobs where they saw this demo where they're like abandon every type of valuable knowledge that we built the last 20 years forget it uh let's just throw all to the wall right they're talking like film people now i wouldn't say the news only in the news should talk like that some uh some veterans were super excited about that prospect as well and some veterans or super some veterans

are super excited about it and then kind of joked about it right and they're like what do you mean i can just take my zbrush and drop it straight in amazing i can't wait right so um this is where renault's brain explodes gritting his teeth he's like what the are you talking about i was super excited about this too yes right yeah i think if you're into graphics and you're making video games this is awesome yeah it's exciting this is why we're in games yeah you can't yeah you can't not be excited by this like this is this is uh this is really good yeah so let me let me ask you this like with the last tech demo right um from all engines right usually near launch for ps4 i feel like a lot of the games actually surpass those tech demos um we're just kind of uh talking about unreal right we're talking about unreal right now like i feel like a lot of the later generation like last

of us two all these other games that have been coming out oh yeah have been totally killing it um so do you feel by the end of ps5 maybe not that long where we're gonna see something like this in a playable way where it doesn't seem so impossible yeah i think i think i think that definitely is a possibility right um people also bring up like the playstation so the playstation 3 the playstation 4 demo uh the voxel the box of cone tracing one right uh that never actually came out right right never came out in right in anything that was performing and actually useful um and it was that was also another cool demo from like way back right um so like it's very possible too that you never see this in any game or any game reaching this quality either right or you see parts of it right you know you see games where a couple of a couple of hero pieces are using this this technology um

the man i am talking about and and i i'm more bullish on uh on lumen being something that you can use across many games right because i know there's a lot of a lot of people working on similar techniques for real-time gi right um so yeah like like i think you'll see something like this and it's possible that this could this is the uh the benchmark for games to strive to uh many years down the line on playstation 5 and xbox series x right yeah i would want to bring up this point like when people there there are general reactions to this is like oh my god this is exciting right and then um and then there's another type of reaction and let me just kind of call them um burnouts people who are kind of washed up from the industry where they look at this is like and there's a legitimate concern where they feel like the the fidelity of what's expected

uh from this type of demo from the consumer from the publishers uh where the team size is not exactly growing right and not everybody is sourcing mega scans that has readily available assets to kind of populate the world um they are very concerned with this type of demo and expectation uh what's your feeling this is this is how old tech demos are right tech devils are aspirational right but um but yeah like you need a crazy talented and skilled art team to make this like you need that and a lot of and that is not that is not the majority of the industry right um this level of quality and this level of detail is not what all game creators want to make right so even though ps5 and xbal siriusx have have way more gpu horsepower and way more cores and all this kind of stuff right some people still just want to make uh i'm just trying to figure like a game

that's pretty simple like animal crossing right people still just want to make animal crossing animal crosses making a killing right and it's not anywhere near this level of fidelity uh because it doesn't need to be right because it's it's a different type of game right and there's still space for those different types of games but those different types of games and this has been this is historically i think true right when you want to sell hardware and you want to sell a console box right nobody nobody wants to see the new version of animal crossing to make that decision right they want to see what kit what is the absolute maximum that this thing can do what is the aspirational target of what this box can do and that's why these technologies yeah so it's best to kind of just treat this as aspirational and don't be the um the warrior ward warning about the apocalypse of game

development yeah and i think like if you looked at the xbox event that happened a while back all the you know the third party games that could be coming out xbox series x that's the majority right yeah none of them are at this quality level right and and and so like don't ex don't expect every game coming out on that console to look like this here right this is right i would say i would expect more what you saw on that xbox devils to be the norm definitely yeah um i mean that's a very interesting point like even with the first party publishers like their xbox team and their sony team or whatever that seem to have like more stability and infinite resources to kind of deliver these well yeah yeah this is just going to be a special case type of studio to kind of deliver this right yeah like don't get me wrong right i think uh xbox we have not seen the xbox first party stuff right really that's true he saw gears

but we but we haven't seen halo other stuff right um we haven't seen we haven't seen the heat that somebody's gonna come with with on ps5 first party right like we have no idea right yeah june what was it june 3rd or something that's they announced their event so that's actually that's last week if you're watching this did they actually announce did they actually announce i heard that was like they just announced it today where they're going to have an actual playstation 5 event they're going to keep the uh what's the lead engineer uh mark mark cena as far away from the premises as possible too his name is sir his name is ernie by the way cerny cerny mark cerny let's keep away from the premises of this presentational event they're trying to get people interested not low people to quarantine sleep right so um yeah it's going to be a i think that's when they're going to show stuff

yeah i start to see like heat expect to see stuff that looks really nice that's what i'm expecting um but we'll see we'll see what happens yeah all right man i mean that's pretty much it i i think uh everybody was super i'm kind of actually well we kind of turned this into like a a slightly better than uh developers reacting to on real engine five i've been seeing that pop up like every time you see it it's like oh my god have we gone that low this is more discussion this is i'm a fancier saying i think when this video came out i was in a meeting yeah and then my phone was just vibrating i was getting messages all over the place people were freaking out like like let's just be real this definitely this broke the internet topic this was a topic of discussion in every single game dev uh studio around the world it's exciting yeah yeah yeah i don't i don't even think between

ps3 the ps4 i i saw a demo that was just this exciting it's been a while for us i believe it just feels so out of grasp um and even with discussing this we have no idea how they put it together they haven't really shared too much details about it except for maybe combining a lot of the techniques that you're saying that we have now to leverage the fakery right um what do you say how much of this is really fake like i think like it just it's just good like there might be some clever placement of things and like you know so of course it's a controlled camera right right um but it's just you know i i can't say it's fake i gotta say it's really good it's a really good this is why everybody who who makes a demo for a game needs to have that that marketing guy in there because i feel like they really nailed the beats it's like all right here's a statue from zbrush right i was like oh this is pretty cool i guess yeah here's this here's a room full of them