Biz Dev for Beginners with Bekah Saltsman | GduX.me

[Music] okay so my name is Becca Saltzman and I'm gonna be looking in different places than I expected today so I know it's a way the heck up here on my second monitor so I'm gonna talk a little bit today about kind of the last ten years of phys dev for sort of thin jian myself personally i've been in the industry now for ten years so a little bit to start out like Who I am what I do what are my games and why am I here Who am I I'm Beck Saltzman what do I do I run fin G which is both an independent game development studio and a sort of a small micro publisher and so we've put out we put out night in the woods with the with Scott and Alec in Bethany I missed the team two years ago was sort of West for ever we still have one more

launch even on it I am launching overland this fall which y'all already mentioned I was in the Apple arcade video in March that was a wild experience and then I'm also launching Wilmots warehouse this year and then in the future we have tuna coming which is an Xbox console launch exclusive and that's another one of my publishing projects um and then why am I here today I don't know I do a lot of business that's her darn sure and a lot of the things that I do are things that a lot of people like we just can't talk about publicly I'm behind a lot of NBA's so when people talk about vistas um like what are we talking about and who is that person and are they really part of the development team we sort of get that a lot so I'm gonna talk about some of the skills that I brought from sort of my past life before I got into games and how those have sort of move forward into

kind of interacting with the sort of things that I do today this really okay so a decade of x-lite before games what did i do before games I worked in media I did Media Relations so people would send me press releases and I would run press conferences and then I moved in from there into software I worked as a product manager for a photography software company like a workflow company and I was pretty good at those things in my past life I really liked working for kind of corporations and I'm up for PR I work mostly like the nonprofit world and I found all this things really really interesting and and when the opportunity

arose for me to sort of quit my real job I kind of took it to work with Adam and to help him run kind of the video game companies which I did it's sort of silently I put up a picture of me at my very first GDC which was in 2009 I attended that GDC on a press badge because I took photos for a website so that is like the first day with my flip phone sitting I think probably in the W hotel lobby but yeah my first GTC was in 2009 and I was there as a wife I hadn't I guess a hundred percent entered the industry yet I was just sort of doing the money for our iPhone and turnkey companies so some of the things that I am good at based on like sort of my past life is really good at managing

bureaucracy so sort of like the weird decisions or decisions that large companies make that you think are weird make a lot of sense to me I'm also really good at sort of organizing systems in my head especially systems of larger Titanic size companies pretty good at management and also strategic planning which are the things that came out through sort of my work in PR and marketing and then also my work at the software company so that's sort of my life before games and this is me up through like age 28 so I'm 38 now so yeah that was sort of like my first decade out of high school now I'm gonna talk today about sort of three skills I start developed in my 20s that I've now carried forward um I honestly thought nothing would because in games you always feel like you're doing something so weird you got from

instructor families of the holidays of any clue what you're doing like in real life but that's actually not the case at all especially when you're working kind of on the business or production side of things so here these are sort of three things that I rely on more than I thought was I would so the first thing is and they kind of all are connected to things from my past life so the first thing is sustainability and sort of the terrifying result of being poor I my parents got divorced when I was in high school so I sort of put myself through college and I didn't have enough money to buy groceries I was dating at him at the time so he would sort of fill in the edges of where I couldn't like afford anything from month month but in that I learned a lot of things like budgeting and in particular

with Finn G the ability to be sustainable the second thing I want to talk about today is the relationship equation which when I joke around talking to friends I call it managing the spiderweb and the third thing is the crystal ball and that's the science of culture and that's sort of the idea of how creating media and culture and how studying media and culture have influenced my current use of the science of culture which sounds kind of stupid right now but I promise it'll make sense in a second so yeah first thing sustainability um and this is the question I asked a lot of a lot of friends which is why did you put all your eggs in one basket so one of my lessons especially from not having a lot of money when I was sort of in high school in college and starting I started working at about 15 working more hours and I was legally allowed to work

because I knew I was gonna have to put myself through college I was I learned to sort of be terrified of putting too much control in the hands of a single source that had more power than me the idea that somebody else would have complete control over my financial future was very very scary for me and this is sort of turned into the idea that like when I design sort of Finn Gees financial future I get very uncomfortable when I put too much trust into a single company or a single investor or even a single team member um we work with really interesting people because that helps me be more sustainable I'm bringing and we're bringing more people into our company to make us more sustainable and a big reason for this is I worry

constantly about how I can write out sort of the tumultuous times in the industry so every few years the industry will it contract down and then you'll see like sort of a rise of more exclusive content for consoles whatever and then though it'll open up for Indies again look at it'll feel like every indie can publish on anything and then they'll feel like it contracts again in my whole goal is to make sure that those contractions don't really affect us in a way that would require us to change the type of games that we want to make so there are two things that sort of go along with this is how do you control for studio sustainability and the main things are we have to diversify our revenue streams there's this horrible very busy turn which is like cross-pollination but we talked about it a lot which is across pollination of audience base so we release a bunch of

games like almost one a year and each one of those games are kind of in a different genre so how do I get somebody from my hardcore strategy game to also play my tunic which is you know like a fox with a sword game and then how do I get the Fox of the sword action-adventure game kids to play night in the woods which is like you know an 11-hour narrative explore this city derp around town simulator which is sorry Scott so how do you control for sustainability and for us it's we need to make sure that we are hitting the same audience but at the same time taking an outside audience to games that are outside of their genre we have something that we call sort of outward facing development and market marketing instead of inward and isolated so that's why you'll find us at shows the marketing sense or the money I spend going to things like packs or Gamescom

or e3 when PlayStation experience used to exist that was really important to us guess that's our outward facing marketing and that is sort of allowing sort of the cult of personality to like use us to help push our games because we're very very small and that's sort of on an individual buying basis depending on the dev team member so that's one of the ways that we are controlling for studio sustainability but then we also control for project sustainability and this is where as a please dev person I'm looking for strategic partnerships and that's as a plural ask strategic partnerships I have a lot of games and even within each game I have multiple partnerships for every single one of my titles and I use these these partnerships to promote my games in a

lot of ways because they're much bigger than me I call them our mavens which is not a term that I coined it's a sort of a culture term so you're a cultural maven it means that you're like an early adopter of something I find it really useful to think of my strategic partnerships as maidens so you know our partnership with Xbox with tunic Xbox is sort of my partnership maven they're the ones who are currently the most excited about sort of driving this title forward so the cool thing about sort of maven these people with power is they can be platform holders these people can be investors fan forums content creators and across every title I develop relationships that make the most sense for all aspects of a title so when we go to launch Overland in which we're doing right now is we're looking for Maven's in the strategy genre who can

who are the you know eyeballs deep in the strategy genre but also our excellent streamers who can sort of push the title out in front of people who want to play that genre and these are things that I'm constantly doing on a studio at a project level to sort of even the playing field on our sustainability so in doing all these things I've created a ton of baskets and we have so many eggs weird-looking colourful ones puffy eggs kitty eggs all the eggs so many baskets so many eggs an example of this so several years ago sort of before we made the Finn G change we were kind of several different studios we sort of ran our iOS branch then we ran our turnkey branch and write r3 launched our last name hundreds which like won awards we

realized that there was no way that could take that game that took us almost two years to make and port it over to anything else because it required the touch screen in such like an inner way to the game account so um it terrified us we realized that at that point because the iOS device market we had sort of put all of our eggs all of our financial security kind of in one basket based on our design and the only storefronts that we could put it out on which at that point we had just had our second kiddo so we were like a family of four we had a house in Austin and that was a little bit too scary for us so we had to think really long and hard about how are we going to create more baskets for us to make sure that if a game did well we were able to take it to more places and that's what we started sort of in 2014 and that's what y'all are familiar with with Finn G itself um so yeah so there's

a couple of things here a lot of things here actually so for studio project sustainability the first thing we do and have done in the past is we diversify our revenue this is really important especially for new indie Studios starting out or an indie collaboration they're just like my gosh how am I going to pay for this it's like well you have a lot of options available to you give a day job contract work by how much money do you actually need are you gonna find investment and for us in the past we basically bootstrapped everything so our diversify our revenue was to have our games out on as many platforms as possible using our strategic to strategic partnerships to elevate them as high as you can but then also when we needed to fill in the gaps we took on a lot of turnkey contract works we've worked with sort of the entertainment

industry on advertising contracts and we've also worked with like our last big contract was with like a steam grant with the University of Utah so this makes like our the general sort of financial uncertainty of games which is like I wash and then I don't make any money for the next like I don't know three years until I launch another game it means that we have launches but then we keep bumping up our bottom line enough that we're able to carry more employees and we've done that yeah with the publishing projects our strategic partnerships our contract work and that is a safer way for me I am much more comfortable doing it that way because I know that I have a lot of baskets right now and if one of them fails I'll be okay because my background in not having a lot of money I need to have that sort of

security dug out for me there's another thing and I run into this a lot loans actually freaked me out because I have to pay those back and I have to pay those back at a premium so I see and I get asked a lot and I mentor a lot of friends on should I take out this investment should I seek investment should I do this and it always kind of comes down to like are you comfortable with the fact that that investment is someone else's money and it's not free it will pay for you but you have to pay it back so we've taken out very few loans over the years as a matter of fact we've taken out one and that was just a bridge loan between the end of some funding and the beginning of some other funding on a project I'm centering Kisa so I'm very careful with how much money I have to go other people and to do that to make sure

that I can actually bootstrap the projects is I cut scope we cut budgets and we do the math and the math is all capitalized because when you create your budgets you need to make sure that you are thinking through how many copies of the game that you're going to sell and at the revenue rate you're going to receive so if you sell a $100 on i don't seem you're only gonna see $70 of that and maybe you know maybe that's ten copies it's important to think about how many copies you're going to sell at old price which is very important and how many of those need to sell to cover the budget that you're expecting to mean and when you start getting up into like you know I have a half a million dollar budget you're looking at a lot of copies that you have to push it at full price so it's very very important that if you're looking at studio and project

sustainability and this is something that I've learned over you know the last 20 years is you got to do the math always always always open up a shitty Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet or whatever and run some numbers and run them at full price and then run them at you know what I'm gonna sell all these during a sale at 70% off how many copies do I need to push and then ask around and see if those numbers are even reasonable I guarantee you probably based on most the budgets that I see they're not reasonable at all you should probably cut them by a tenth all of our budgets and over land is higher than this now but the majority of our budgets run like thirty to forty thousand units that I'm because I I know I can sell that many copies across all of my platforms or lines a little bit higher now because I'm supporting more platforms that I intended from the beginning but I have accounted for that

in my budget numbers and the last thing especially when you're talking about business relationships and studio and project sustainability you have to rein in your personal fandom this comes up a lot and which is you need to be careful that you don't let your nostalgia and your fandom of games get in the way with a very good opportunity but so a lot of times are sort of pointless prejudice against various consoles it's possible that your bestest partner champion might be a console that you don't play it might be on a device that you don't own or a business model that you don't like and it's important to keep an open mind when you are approaching people to sort of have studio and project sustainability I joke with Adam all the time that I publicly I'm not a fan of anything my biz dev

relationships are based in fact not fiction and finally it's okay to be cautious and to feel scared this is normal I am paranoid and terrified every day I've got a studio of eight now eight people that we are paying health care for and paying their monthly salaries and that's a lot of people on top of my own personal family so if you feel like you're out in the weeds or you're treading water you are in good company there's a lot of us out there treading water okay that was my first thing second the relationship equation um a thing I rely on from a past life is all relationships start with identifying where our interests overlap and I also call this building your spiderweb okay so uh this sort of comes from how I made

friends when I was a painfully shy kid and then it painfully shy teen and then a faking fake it till I make it painfully shy adult um I used to and still do limit the scope of friendships and I often define friends initially by we are friends because of fill in the blank so I had I people I was friends with because we went to church together and that was our overlap I was friends with girls because we went to dance I was friends with my basketball team I was friends with I was friends with these people because that's not to say that's what my best friendships were like but it was easy for me to quickly classify people because it made sense in my brain this sort of I don't necessarily do that anymore but when I was learning sort of my professional communication style like

in my 20s I used to practice identifying common ground why we're speaking to each other as quickly as possible so this is really useful for example when you work in media I am pitching a story to you the journalists and I have to figure out why that journalist needs the story as fast as possible and every single journalist has a different reasoning behind that and it was my my job to figure out that overlap as fast as possible so the interesting thing about the relationship equation and sort of your overlap is oftentimes especially in a fist up relationship you focus on the overlap even though your end goals might be different a biz dev relationships and goal might be to have a project that had son of win awards

like so we have a best award winning game on our library or whatever but your relation or your end goal might be you are raising the profile of my game so I saw more copies it's possible that your game doesn't sell enough copies for the business partner for it to really matter but those copies matter to you so when I talk to people I focus on what I overlap and kind of not much else so things that you should really like they're nice but they can't matter when you approach a biz dev relationship it doesn't matter who you hang out with it doesn't matter like that you there you're known as being really nice your past experience might be okay but and your personal strong loyalty doesn't really matter some of these help you get a meeting but they won't solve your biz development problems because none of these things

address your goal your overlap why you're talking to that person in the first place when I took tunic and I was negotiating tunic with Xbox our overlap was really obvious and it was easy to identify the same thing when I think about Overland and it's participation in Apple arcade we overlap on multiple points but that doesn't mean that we are completely in line with each other that we're running on the same course is that's insane this is Apple and little loaf in gee we don't have the exact same end goals however we have so many that overlap it's a really smart business decision so you're the idea that you are looking for a partner where your interests overlap and that's what you're focusing on in the communication is like super super important so yeah

just to reiterate this again because it is by far the most helpful things what is the intersection point for you at the developer and them the company this is also the main subject of all pitches it's also what you're going to talk about it most business and dinner meetings these are also often your talking points um when I am being if I'm at like a council event the talking points are the intersection points for my game and that console and that's framed in that point I don't I pretty much don't bring up anything else because what's important there is our shared goals um so I'm gonna go through a couple other things that this actually works across several things from sort of like the last twenty years my life when I worked in media relations my story mattered but what mattered Marv was the subject of the subject of the story so if I were pitching a story about a kid

with months of muscular dystrophy what matter was that kid lived in that region and that's why that newspaper would cover it the muscular dystrophy didn't matter it was that here is a human story for that region when I did medical radio news Fox the University Michigan Health System what mattered was that the subject matter would reach the widest possible impaired demographic at a national level but only on a 5th grade reading level they wouldn't cover wild corner case medical things they would cover the widest possible sort of generic health issues for the United States population skewed upwards that like 30 enough when I pitched stories for games media we find the hook is it new content are they breaking a story or you offered an exclusive do you have talent to offer for interviews what's the overlap what's they want when I represented the software company and I was speaking to a photographer or a lab owner I would tailor my conversation to the exact

workflow that they needed I didn't talk to wedding photographers the same way that I talk to sports photographers the same way that I talked to school photo of photographers and when I'm working done relations and games I speak to our intersection point all of my goals and that relationship are not the same and I only focus on the ones that are when I talk to a mobile mobile console or a mobile dev partner I don't talk about console problems unless they matter okay next and my third thing culture is silent science so I'm curious now what are you watching um I I went to school for media or for communications which means a lot of different things depending on where you're at um my particular degree is in I was a student

of media and culture and my interest was in watching mass media trends and sounds kind of weird but reactionary capitalism so the way mass media trends make people buy things or adopt certain sort of like cultural phenomena so a better question then what are you watching is what am i watching my biz dev life is watching all of this stuff and what else am i watching I'm watching other game developers I'm watching what kind of games are my fellow dubs in the indian triple-a space making I'm watching how are these capturing the imagination the players how do they perform what language is being used when they talk about them I am watching big and small publishers what kinds of business decisions are my fellow publishers making were these good or bad moves or

the outcomes and how can we we meaning thin G control for them are there any mistakes that we're watching that we can learn from so we don't have to make them I'm watching investments consolidations and closings where are the people with money putting their money if you do nothing else follow the money I watched press trends what kinds of articles are leaving a footprint which press articles are reactionary which are expose is which reviewers provide thoughtful critiques and we keep lists of them movie and TV webseries trends across the major markets which seems odd except working games but it's important to look at culture as a whole I am fascinated by the types of mass media the actual masses are consuming what is their obsession and more importantly why are they obsessed can you pick out the pieces and are any of them usable for us in games the answer is yes um

generational identity trends this is all of that like oh these damn Millennials what's important though is understanding how those older and younger than yourself use and interact with the technology that you are creating things for also who has the most disposable income and are they buying games what kind of games are they buying and how are the buying trends changing for the most recent batch of independent adults what kind of social media are they using what are players buying and what are they saying what's selling why who's buying it how does this overlap with your game in your genre how are streamers producing content and how does this overlap with my projects does streaming and streamer personality fit with the development in place I love my game at all is it worth developing relationships

content creators for my title how do people use their computers phones tablets consoles what controllers are what are they using controllers are they mouse and keyboard still who owns the consoles and what games are selling well on those consoles and then attitudes about the world in all major markets and I wish I was kidding but I'm not I pay attention to whether it's recession or not are people freaking out about money do certain generations have less are some more likely to participate in escapism at this time are more likely to be parents and young children or caring for their elderly parents who may need shorter more flexible play sessions in the genre that I'm making and this probably seems insane but this is part of Vista this is the stuff I'm thinking about all the time so when you watch and study where things have been you will better understand where things are going

if you have a good understanding of the world around you you will be able to sort of internalize that and the people with money the biz dev relationships you are cultivating you will understand sort of the pressures the outside pressures that they have you guys are working with multi media companies the idea that you would ignore mass-market culture and media seems insane so you should probably just start paying attention to it not just the culture you like cool we love sci-fi fantasy B movies but you should also pay attention to I don't know anything a woman in her 30s would like because women in our 30s are buying media for their kids and you should just have a grasp on like what the hell is going on with them um you will have a lot more context on decisions that are made by watching the whole industry which includes all of these tangential industries so three

things be scrappy diversify your business plan to be sustainable it's okay to be overly cautious about money and power my experience with poverty kind of meant that from the beginning we distributed our risk to make ourselves more sustainable but that's like a lesson I learned but it's a lesson that I've taken on from like my like childhood basically it's okay to be crafty identify were you and a business partner overlap interests because of my background in the media and product management I was required to always think of conversations as pitches because of my painful shyness as a kid my interactions with other people were as sort of quick and dirty as possible so I would could stop talking it's okay

to work on these sort of things and it will help you represent yourself better and get your head out of the sand and educate yourself on the whole industry there is so much else out there that influences games all the time and as both in both in academics and as a hobbyist now and having this interest in sort of media culture I am constantly approaching everything that I do from a place of research I like to poke at trends and I like I watch what people say versus what they do oftentimes it's really fun actually to watch larger companies they'll do for example a press conference and you can hear all the words they say and then watch everything they do and how it rolls out and oftentimes they are similar stories that they're not the whole stories and that's that that's the whole idea of talking points so it's really important to not take things at

face value and to watch kind of all the pieces as they come together and I do this before I make any future decision so yeah this is all my stuff if you want to follow me my personal Twitter's a hot mess but my dev team both me and Adam we hang out with indie discord kind of every day and then all my other sort of Twitter accounts for all oh my game are there across the bottom so yeah that's me and I think we will be doing questions possibly through discord so I just have to wait for things to pop up there this is just one last gen mega can you hear us or no yeah you can't hear anybody's seems like we've gotten to the end of her presentation I've already got Brandon off-camera he's gonna try to be reached out to her directly through uh I guess you'd call it non-conventional

methods ie telephone and we'll see if we can get her on there so that we can complete the loop and make sure that she can hear us so that we can get the questions out if that does not work we're gonna take it I guess it's actually newer than the telephone but still considered old school we will just type the questions to her and see if she'll respond to that because we do have type communication so hopefully you guys have actually had a good chance to get a great understanding of how someone like Becca Saltzman will be running the company Finn G both creatively but then also on the business and she said some very key points that I just like to touch on for a moment again identify those cross sections where your interests and the interests of the person you're potentially working with will overlap and align those end up being great talking points when you're presenting to them or even in just discussion in where your brand and their brand can take each other don't waste your time on anything too far outside of those intersection points that's a great tip that i'm gonna use moving forward in my own life as i do business things and i hope that you guys on twitch everyone

else in the world will do that too also she said she's looking for mavens in industries or in sectors of industries that are really standing out and looking to have opportunities that they can take advantage of as well so much like our podcasts on game development was probably about how we get in touch with them in the first place and then we've continued to do things supporting them they've continued to do things supporting us so that is a clear and prime example of exactly that type of talk actually happening in real life and that's her putting it into action I don't know if we're ready for questions yet let me just how are we doing keep going okay cool I'm gonna look at twitch and see if twitch has said anything cool really quick thanks to everybody who is obviously shouted at our pocket since which that's great thanks everybody there again thank you for watching thanks for being a part of this come hell or high water we're getting through day two no matter what comes our way we make sure that the show must go on because that's what we do here both on the podcast both on the show so again if I can't take a moment Becca you may not even hear this until you watch this back but thank you very

much for being a part of this being here with us and taking time out of your very busy day to construct the talk to prepare and then come on live and then you know present all this wonderful information to everybody you look worried before I could show you in the other big screen yet but I'm still over here do ya ha no I I don't see anything happening so let's give me a sec ah it's a one-man show so I'd like to tell everybody about my new rap album that's coming out soon oh good I wish I had something to say that I could promote for myself but no seriously I'm really happy that we've gotten this far through Jesus I can personally reflect on that it's you know it's been a tough couple of months getting this all planned getting everybody you know pitching to all the speakers say hey do you want to do this thing for free it's gonna take time out of your day pitching to the sponsors getting them involved so again thank you to all the sponsors who follow through who wanted to be part of this thanks to Brandon for handling all the off-camera stuff and thanks to myself

for handling all the screen transitions that you guys see for example when I do that that's me when I do that even though that's Brandon that's still me yeah I'm not talking yeah I'm getting her on the phone we're using old tech I had no idea my phone does this but I can actually call her so that she can hear us who uses a phone to be a phone anymore I guess that's that's so old-school societally she's calling me all right so let's just hang tight guys this is Hannah I believe if I unmute you Becca we can hear you on this side so let's just test Becca can you hear us can you hear us she has for a second she had us at hello you hear us a little Oh I can hear you but you're cutting out okay just hold it to your face I will hold it up to my face hello up do you hear me yeah I can hear

you okay there we go alright so we're gonna do what can use this the phone as a Wi-Fi thank you for joining us over 30 minutes ago fantastic presentation my first question is of course you're talking about putting your ace in many baskets to make sure that when you're balancing things if one thing fails you have others to fall back on how you keep and manage all the things that you're doing aside from looking at the market and not just games all different mediums out there on making sure that you are on the cusp whatever your next product is going to be relevant by the time it comes out like how are you using some kind of super software we're not aware of are you just keeping this on your head how are you doing this she's stolen also paralyzed okay that's a loaded question

okay um how am i doing this I don't know I the cool thing is like and you guys have sort of mentioned at the beginning like I am NOT I'm not alone over here like I'm not some crazy superwoman whatever I I'm meticulous that's true but I'm sitting in a studio with Adam and like my husband and he's brilliant and then we work with other people who are also brilliant but in so many ways like I I talked to a lot of people and it's not like the decisions I'm making are always right it's that I am making decisions based on the best information I have at the time so in some of those sometimes they're bad like we've excuse my language up pretty bad

multiple times so I yeah like juggling it sucks I I'm like old school so I'm like I keep my like slow blow Nietzsche is just like packed full of a to-do lists like endless to-do lists but then there's a reason why there's eight of us now um three or two of those eight people are technically on my team so I have a community manager that's managing all of our discord and their forum stuff and he also sort of does double duty over on helping out with our media which is a contract position so I'm not including including Felix in that eight but then I also have this dev assistant now here in Grand Rapids because my job was too big so I am better at managing kind of like the

higher level stuff because I'm watching trends all the time but I brought on other people to sort of take care of the rest in a lot of ways because my job used to be finances and legal and this higher stuff in biz dev relationships and I would get us through all the back ends with the consoles and they managed to have the testing but we're bringing on more people so I only have like four jobs instead of 15 but that's kind of a cross all within G yeah so yeah that answer your question it does and forgive us for be you know going right through the next question unfortunately not letting stuff breathe all the time because we do have a bunch and we are in limited on time so without further ado the next question I have for you is Oh can one have too many baskets in regards to time or attention or the ways that you're splitting things up as far as your focus goes yes and we actually ran

into that when we were launching night in the woods so we were working on night in the woods like full-time both of us we were also doing development on Overland which had to take sort of a back burner in 2017 but then we were also doing our University of Utah sort of our last turnkey project was still going on at that point so and we were in the process of trying to hand that off and on top of that like I've got to goblin children in my house and the little one in 2017 yeah right was not in school yet and I had only put him in preschool three days a week so like yeah you can have too many damn baskets and it's important at that point to start consolidating to identify that hey you have overstretched in a way that's unhealthy and it sucks so yeah at that point like sometimes especially

with contract stuff it's almost easier to cut your losses it's okay to quit a job took me down 15 years to be okay with that but yeah you can 100% like the scale back and find a healthier way to live as it stands right now we're working extra hours because the code block on Overland is literally on Monday um but even our extra hours is nothing like an actual crunch it's just like an extra couple weeks of overtime well thank you for giving us some of your time yes I do have one question as well this is from calyx Jimmy oh yes so for sustainability research for games that are different but the same people similar people would play like how exactly do you find that

you should know that he's on my discord I can't like okay so um this has been a kind of a passion project problem whatever you want to call it partly because I am not in any demographic for games nobody makes games for me the closest thing is night in the woods so the idea that we would have a dedicated fanbase who trust us enough in our taste that they would play something outside of other genre it's kind of like my whole mission it's why I put like if you go to like a pax I have eight seats and I have you know Wilmots warehouse sitting next to tunic sitting next to Overland sitting next to night in the woods and every single one of those games is in a different genre and the only thing that

I actually want are people who show up to play their favorite genre stick around and play the other games because there's no I mean there are people who are like I only play this game genre but oftentimes it's not even for very good reasons like I have a preference I have both types that I like to read i movies that i prefer but there's no reason that I wouldn't want to experience other types of media and it's kind of like my goal and our company's goal to encourage people to explore other types of media so even if you only play you know triple a first-person shooter you're gonna love tunic and to be perfectly honest you'll probably love Wilmots as well because it's outside of it's outside of the genre it scratches a different okay so as a fan of what you guys do who's looking forward to the

next piece of software coming out for your company and I've seen a little bit I saw the Apple commercial as well so congrats there but is there one thing that you think is really cool about this product that you'd like to tell our audience that you're like hey you know this next piece of software we got coming you guys want to check it out it's different but we're telling some stories through this perspective going on this long adventure that you're gonna be fly on the wall like how would you wrap up your pitch and then say this is cool because blank about Orlan are we are we like on my next games that I'm launching oh if you'd like this exactly if you if you want if you can I'd love to hear but anything that you can say you know feel coming out this year oh I'm sorry please have you forgive me I haven't followed up to the tee like I should have no it's fine a bias towards one of them yeah I got I got two super cool games coming out this year um one very very big game and one sort of smaller game and the a lot of

people know a lot more about the bigger game so they know a lot more about Overland because it's coming out on all the consul's so finding information about that is a little bit easier but I guess my pitch my next launch is probably going to be Wilmots I don't have a date on it yet but Wilmots warehouse is this amazing experience where you play as this it's litterally plays when I'm square and you get truckloads of warehouse items and you have to organize them however you want it's like playing Animal Crossing but only the house and then you have to like deliver things from your house to somebody else it is like the most relaxing like like you know when you have to you're like I have to organize this in my house but it sucks I never want to do it yeah now imagine scratching that itch

yeah so imagine feeling like you organized your house but not having done a damn thing and that's Wilmots all right we put it next to through Nick real quick we put an extra tunic at taxes on purpose because the tunic line is usually the longest and I usually end up having people bounce out or the tunic line we sort of just hold their space to play Wilmots cuz they're like what is this and they'll lose like a half-hour and it's just one of those like really satisfying experiences and it's made by two like veteran award-winning developers so actually you guys know Hohokam okay sure the guys who made a cocoa come are the weed Doug's on it alright so you have to forgive me so I two games on my radar that I'm looking forward to coming from you guys know not just the one so thank you for educating me but also our entire twitch audience everybody on YouTube everybody watching

from LinkedIn Facebook or even the Twitter link all of them are active right now so we got all the eyes so most importantly Becca thank you very much for being a part of this is the first time we tried to do something like this and you taking time out to believe in this to offer your brand and your experiences to help push us for another hours worth of content I mean it's immeasurable to us and we really appreciate what have you done so thank you on behalf of our audience and behalf of Brandon and myself we appreciate you being here yeah of course thanks guys [Music] you [Music]