Catching up with the Industry with Matthew Burns | Game Dev Unchained Episode 209

[Music] number one podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof I am your host Brandon Pham please welcome our special guest today Matthew burns I doing that hello good I'm doing alright this is also the part of the podcast Matt where you introduce yourself to our audience out there about who you are we're sure where you hidden yeah so right now I work at Zack tronics which is a small indie

studio of about five people I write the stories for the games and I do the music and sound for the games I have a pretty long history in the industry I think last time I spoke to you guys I can't remember how long ago it was I might have just started at SEC tronics or I might have been working at the University of Washington before that I worked in triple-a at places like Bungie and Treyarch and stuff like that so been doing this for about 15 years maybe maybe longer actually yeah it's great to have you back for all the time listeners who are familiar with his voice we've had him for I think like you're two of our podcasts and it was great pleasure talking to you then back then it was mostly about your time in Japan right and how Japanese games differ from well that's right yeah definitely we talked about like how Japanese like game

development practices differ from from Western practices and things like that I think that at that time there was a lot more worry about the Japanese game industry like if they were going to be able to survive because there was some consolidation going on so I think we talked about that I don't know I don't completely remember you know if you don't mind I kidding giving like a little update ha ha it's uh from my observation that Japanese industry has really bounced back and I always define it by the PlayStation era at the ps4 era mm-hmm with Dark Souls trilogy and like they've been really picking up a lot of picking a lot of their weight Kojima with mgs 5 and all these other games and efforts from mom Square Enix and everything uh what's your general feeling of what's going on over there and why the resurgence I think you know just took a little bit longer for the Japanese industry to kind of like absorb

some of the changes that were going on in the in the market right now you see a lot of really interesting things like you said Kojima's death stranding is looks really wild and creative Final Fantasy 14 is doing amazing it's one of the best MMO around I think it's just a matter of like sort of learning how to operate in the new in the new like paradigm and the new business of games and sort of adjusting their product design and adjusting the sort of their development practices to match and then once they were able to do that all the strengths that we're still there you know great creativity and an art and design and engineering could be brought to bear on that so I think that's what happened I think it just took a little bit longer than then maybe people wanted it to sometimes it takes a while right to like adjust your business model or like learn how to do things in a new way so let's talk about that stranding for a sec I'm a huge kijima fan he's the

reason why I got in the industry with the middle gear series and he never fails to impress especially with that game as soon as I realized or heard that it took them basically three years to announce from pre-production to release like it it's completely unheard of in this day and age like not only that he represents Japanese game industry in a huge way but somehow just completely I feel like upstage triple-a development nowadays mm-hmm I think what are you thought you can you can go fast actually if you want to a lot of triple-a development I don't I don't know about your experience but but mine when it when a triple-a game takes longer than three years so much of those first few years are just kind of like working with prototypes and like kind of

feeling things out and trying things that don't work out and most of the actual game is made in like basically the last year mm-hmm right or even like the last nine months if you are not doing it very well so I think like in the case of I don't know a game like death stranding like if you just pick something and just go with it and you don't spend those first couple years like messing around with like oh what if we what if we made it an open-world game what if we made it an online persistent world and you kind of just say look this is gonna be this and just do this you can kind of make get things done faster I think you know you just decide something and just go with it because so much of triple-a on those big teams is just like kind of like circling around and having meetings and saying do we like this and can we make it better or should we change it to something else let's test it let's do a you know let's do a focus group or whatever all of that kind of stuff I don't know if Kojima is

doing focus groups it doesn't seem like he would write like he's just kind of like doing what he thinks is best and so that actually probably speeds development up right just be like yeah it's crazy but I'm doing it you know I'm having a character named bad man or when I forgot but but it's like you know just just go and just do it um yeah it probably helps that he probably has a wicked journal of game ideas that he wasn't able to execute when I was working in the middle gear franchise that uh over a long time yeah for a long time he was a he obviously loves making it but probably Phenom II didn't really let him explore too much as he can now les he has that right force mentality to do something else and I don't know if you read that expose not explicit but like this kind of like um article about him trying to set up his new studio and

the trouble as he went through even being a cop in Japan right no I didn't read that but I've I've heard about it like secondhand kind of the the I know it takes a certain like I don't I don't know it's a like self regard in order to just like push your ideas through and say I really want to do this I think a lot of people have ideas and then they would go and they work on their team and it's good to like work with other team members and maybe like decide on something together there's a certain quality that some people have where it's like I really want to do this exact specific thing and so it's I mean it's great that he's gotten the opportunity to do that I think we're in for something extremely unique I mean I'm looking forward to checking it out well let's turn the table back to you so it's been a while since we've talked and I kinda want to play catch-up with you

Howie how you been doing II say you mentioned you with the team of five is this the same team of five okay so yeah I'm also assuming that you guys went with a lot of contractors to kind of get your game going and would you mind cut out no all right let's talking about that it's pretty much just us yeah so so Zak tronics is Zak bar for the founder and creative director of the studio there's two artists one programmer and me and we pretty much do everything in-house we're helped by the fact that our games are like 2d games they're like puzzle programming games so they're not super asset heavy and they don't require like 3d assets or anything like that and the games are mostly sold on Steam their PC games and we're able to pay our way by by making these games mm-hmm some of the latest topics that I've been trying to kind of

a start guess I feel like there is a lot of teams now that are exploring ways to kind of produce and not not only try to sell but try to yeah I don't know it's like a mixture of crowdfunding but during development like have you guys looked into that type of model business model or anything different than just waiting to the game ships and then selling it at the end we've thought about it but up until now everything's been just we make the game and we we put it on out for sale I think there's a there's a lot of work involved in like if you do a Kickstarter or some kind of like fundraising thing you have to that's its own campaign that you have to run and for us I think we've we've crowdfunded a couple like special projects Zack had a game design book that he made that was like we wanted to print physical editions of it and so at

that point it makes sense to like kickstart something because you have to order you know minimum orders like a thousand copies of the book and we don't know if they're like a thousand people even want the book so you could kickstart that and then when you raise the money then you can get them printed so it works for that kind of thing I think really really nicely as for like making a game with the funds it's you you have to get people really excited by the idea of the game and like the promise of what the game is going to deliver when it when it's when it ships and that's something that maybe we're not as good at as some other developers I think it's more like we have this game and want people to check it out but it's kind of hard to get people excited about like a puzzle program in game like like you're really gonna like its highly anticipated or something like that so I not sure that it's the best model for us specifically but we are thinking about it you know we keep it in the back of our minds so a lot has changed since the

last time I talked to you and I kind of want your thoughts on that with you guys being indie developers and in this climate of ours art is is constantly changing right mm-hmm I don't I don't think streaming games was as big as I talked to you about it two years ago yeah I don't think so wonder what your perspective on that as you are building your games in this like celebrities are basically glory glorifying let's play videos to to the extent that I don't think anybody imagined it would blossom yeah that's a hard one I think our games are not necessarily really built super well for streaming either and so that's something that we've struggled with kind of thinking about like how what does it make you know how does it make sense to make a game in this world where so many

people are just watching people play the games instead of like playing the games themselves in the case of like some some of the some of our games to work okay with streaming like opus Magnum I think the solutions that people come up with in that game are very beautiful and they're fun to share with other people and there's actually an animated gif export feature in opus Magnum that allows you to share your unique solution on social media like on Twitter and things like that but in the case of some of our other games like like my game like Eliza that's it's just a straight-up visual novel and there's no there's not a lot of point to streaming it unless you know unless you're adding a lot of commentary or unless the people who are playing it are very funny or insightful or something like that and I you know it doesn't add a ton I would really rather that people played Eliza like on their own and experienced it for themselves so it's like not even that

good for streaming and I don't know I guess my my answer is you know we know that that streaming is a big thing but we haven't really like shifted our like how we make games necessarily to accommodate for that very much well that leads me to my next question like how do you avoid temptation for future creep when you seeing these trends that seems to be happening every year so in the game registry where you're like well everyone's into that should we design around streaming per se or something else I mean how do how do you keep away from that type of feature creeping we usually try to make games really fast we just try to like pick something like a like a point on the wall and just throw a dart at it and just try to like hit that thing and so we don't have a lot of time to like second-guess ourselves and say oh but what if we change this game around all the way and like added this completely new feature set to it's really more like

we have to ship something whereas a very small outfit we need to finish it so just pick something and go and make make kind of the the smallest version of that thing and get it out there and don't worry about like oh each you know be better if we like worked on it for another year instead save those ideas and put that in the next game that you make in the next year so we try to make like a game a year and so over five years you know we've made five games trying out different ideas as opposed to like trying to put everything into like this one game that we've been working on that has to be the best and and you know incorporates everything together that's sort of how we approach it can you walk me through and kind of expand on your development schedule so with a game of year like what does that look like for the pre-production prototype stage shipping getting things ready I'm guessing your distributions digital mostly right so yeah would love to hear

more about that process sure it's pretty fluid actually with five people we don't have to do an enormous amount of like pre-planning so usually what happens is Zach has some ideas that he's playing with some mechanics that he's investigating and he'll usually make like a digital kind of prototype version of those mechanics with programmer art well we'll play it we'll discuss like sort of the the story of the game because that's actually very important and something we do right at the beginning so that the mechanics on the world of the story coincide with each other and at some point we decide that it's good enough and we start to make assets for it and you refine the refinement design while that's going and then it pretty much just goes from there we use the steam early access feature when

we're mostly done I think when we're like maybe 85 to 90 percent done just to iron out bugs and things like that but there isn't really like a like a check pointed process so much as we just sort of like decide that things are about ready for the next stage and then like you know during the asset design process like if if Zach doesn't have a lot to do I'm a design side he might like go off and work on some ideas for a new game as well at the same time so again it's pretty organic actually and it works I think because they're team size is really small that absolutely wouldn't work on a very large team right like on a triple-a team you really need to have like a process like button down so everyone understands where they are in the process at any given time but here I think we just kind of like we're all experienced game developers we all sort of know how things should go and then we just sort of like work organically toward those goals over the course of

our you know shipping cycle which is usually about a year hmm when we first talked we were talking about the Japanese industry on the reasons why they are failing and you know it wasn't too recently as we talked to beginning this podcast that they found a resurgence I want to talk about team size right team size been both in the triple-a industry we've seen the disadvantages and advantages of that being able to work in a huge team you're able to deliver all aspects of the disciplines to the pinnacle of excellence right but also the downfall of that is if it doesn't do well well everyone gets laid off because there's not a lot of room for developers to King hang out and being in the indie develop space now seeing the flexibility of how a small team can operate and move nests what what are the things that you feel

that any developers now are can't really do right aside from the big explosion sure the the gimmies right like the things that we're still struggling on the smaller scale that you feel like we're not exactly there in terms of being able to match up even as a small square footage right yeah yeah I think the biggest thing for me actually is like marketing and stuff you and I both have some familiarity with Activision and like I think it like at least half of their budget of any given game as like marketing right and a huge part of their organization is marketing and and probably the most like powerful division in that company is marketing I would say as indie developers you know we're just a studio we we make the products the five of us are really fully focused on like making the game because it's just the five of us and then like marketing is like oh I guess we'll tweet about it or whatever

whereas triple-a companies and big companies have all kinds of interesting things that they're doing with marketing they're able to think about it year-round they have lots of you know teams dedicated to it full-time and they're doing all kinds of marketing activities and there's been a lot of talking in the indie community lately about like how do you get the word out about your game there's so many indie games now out there just a ton of them and so how do people find them on Steam how do people know that they exist I wish that more people knew that Aliza existed for example but I don't know how to reach those people necessarily because we just don't have that like marketing know-how and that marketing like organization that's the biggest one and then yeah I think the other one that you mentioned which was just like bigger explosions I mean I would love to to work with a like a 3d big team and make lots of art assets and tell a story with amazing graphics and things like that

like I do still wish that that were but it's it's not with the kinds of budgets that we have so we stick with like our 2d art and and try to make that as good as possible which I think does look good and is a great like value for customers because there's a lot of game play in our games and I think they look amazing but it's just not you know it's just not the big WOW factor of like a huge 3d scene in your face that kind of thing it's not like the big system seller mm-hmm like standing tonnato to these behemoths there's a lot of things that I've been noticing you mentioned marketing right with being number one issue and we actually just recently talked to a lot of PR firms that focus on indie marketing which is a relatively new concept which at first sounds like

an oil slick ceman trying to sell me and because I think like with you know we were counting our cents here on the team is like what are you gonna do is it gonna update my facebook yeah yeah exactly I gotta pay you for you but now I think it's I think smaller teams are slowly embracing that because finally they're realizing like this is a lot more work than I gave credit to uh what's the perspective on that being a part of a big team with the huge marketing budget and now slowly seeing like these firms kind of out there to help you but again you know you it's still not like a firm sell yet to everybody's like that's enough course yeah I think the jury is still out because there's so many of these like indie PR places that will happily though I mean they're happy to take your money right and then like what they actually do with it is it differs between the different firms but like if they have

relationships with news outlets that like to cover any games for example maybe they can get some coverage for your game but is that really valuable or not like just because a website writes about a game like oh here's this weird indie game that does that that doesn't necessarily translate like into sales of the game very much certainly not as much as it as it used to I think these days sales are driven much more by like word of mouth or what people are playing or these kind of like tastemaker streamers that you mentioned earlier or like like other channels like that and so there's like a component of thinking about like how to get people excited about what you're doing and how they're gonna find out about it and there's more to just like oh we'll take will spam your press release out so a bunch of like media people and I think you see some of some indie Studios like the larger ones have like a full time marketing person on their staff like on

their own staff and that that makes a little more sense to me because it's like someone who's like continuously trying to like refine the message and get the message out there and like figure out like what message is working and resonating with people versus like you just hire someone to like try to spam your information out there one time like when the game is released and so integrating it into the into the company as like kind of like a small version of what big Triple A games do sort of makes more sense to me although in our case again SEC Tronics is such a niche developer it's hard to imagine like a sixth person who's looking solely dedicated to marketing like being worthwhile because our games are so like specialized in there for a specific audience that's not just like it's not just like anyone who plays games would play these games you know yeah and it definitely makes it easier who to fire first if it doesn't it's like clearly

that's true you did not do that work it's the marketing whoo it's the marketing but it's um that's an actually pretty interesting proposal because the last elyse year you know the guests that we've had on it's been the conversation have been more shifting towards how the traditional media outlets haven't been a real driver for sales is a at least public information that is slower I mean indie developers you guys are on the ground floor so you know that this is the case but it's it wasn't until like the last year or so where I and people like myself are kind of more like this is true you know we've grown up with Kotaku or polygons or any of these Rock Paper Shotgun as our way of finding out what games to play next but even with me still regularly kind of visiting those sites for news stories I never

really go to a Buy Now button on Amazon right after I read an article it's I'm far from it right it's and I never really based my decision of buying anything from reading about a game reviewer or any of that sort yeah which makes it hard like indie developers would love to have that as a as the answer because it's a format it does yeah I wonder what what is it really now because right now it's still a mixed bag of proper exposure with the right streamer because streaming isn't really the answer either and it's just a lot of luck still right I mean what did you try to think so yeah I know there's really no like specific formula at least that anyone that I know has as like able to articulate it's really kind of like a mixture of luck a mixture of like being in the right place at the right time being seen by the right person it's kind

of like I kind of think of it like like tweets right like sometimes a tweet that you make or random only takes off and you have no idea why you you made like a joke or something it wasn't even that funny you've made funnier jokes and other tweets or whatever but like sometimes some of them just randomly take off and it's just the matter of like the right person saw and like retweeted it or something like that and that you can't really like make that happen right you can't that you'd like you can't just force that to happen and so in terms of games it's just like I mean you can try to do everything as best you can you can make a good game you can try to tell as many people about it as you can and then it kind of just like has a life of its own that like maybe it catches on and maybe it doesn't like maybe it's sort of like is able to punch through like whatever layer of just people's like people are

inundated with information like every every second of their lives now right because of being online and so it's like what will like actually like punch through and get their attention I don't know I don't have a good answer for that so I guess I'm just gonna try to like keep making good games and hope that they reach on the audience and and we'll do the you know we'll try to get the word out there but we don't have any like secret tips or special sauce or anything as far as that's concerned it's a mystery mm-hmm I mean it was until recently either that I felt really old how no one uses Facebook anymore like it wasn't until I started really hanging out with more indie developers or at least interviewing him that I realized Facebook is completely dead on that side of the fence like very few developers even have a Facebook profile yeah which

is a conversation that I didn't get the memo like what was up that fro via Facebook is for like a Gen Xers and boomers maybe I don't think kids really is Facebook at all yeah and what Twitter being like the ideal format because it's um I'm guessing less algorithm you know when you tweet its most recent yeah does that help with sales I mean is there a formula there that like the most followers like is there something is it just another platform or another mountain to shout from and not necessarily a way to get people to pay attention to your ear I think that's what it is it's another place where you can yell about yourself and people will maybe pay attention or maybe they were I don't know how effective Twitter actually is at starting trends so much is it just kind of reflects trends that

are already happening so it's like if your game is already viral then sure like a lot of people are tweeting about it I'm not sure how like you know if you just made the perfect viral tweet about your game that it would necessarily make your game as successful it doesn't seem like it would to me again you can just shout into the wind on on any of these social media platforms and sort of not necessarily get anywhere well what were your thoughts about it's a changing landscape every year so I mean we're just talking about the last time you were on this show to now like mm-hmm there's a whole different element to the streaming wars not just popular streamers streaming let's play but like consoles right now or looking at streaming as a viable distribution Auto than paying attention to indie developers as to resource since there's

no really loyalty which oblate developers just right yeah one year exclusivity but it's the any developers to have real well what we're used to like real exclusivity alright how do you see that playing a factor in the industry I think it's like you know these these new streaming services like Google stadi and some of these some of the others they're in this the they're in this place right now or they where they're trying to get content for their platforms and so they're being nice to indie developers unlike trying to say hey you should come on our platform you know like we'll give you money actually the epic game store is kind of a similar example to this which is like we want people to be using our store regularly so we'll give you money to be on our store and be exclusive to our store because we were in that kind of startup phase once the once the platform is successful though there's no real reason

for them to do that because you kind of have to be their platform if you want to like be able to sell your game right like so steam doesn't like offer Indies Monday money to be on Steam because like everyone has steam it's sort of the de facto platform right I think like early in the lifecycle of the PlayStation 4 and early in the lifecycle of the Nintendo switch they were also very nice to in these because they wanted that content because there wasn't very much content in their platform but both of those consoles now have tons of games on them just tons and tons and there's no way like you could go to Sony now and say hey I'm doing a new ps4 indie game give me money for it because they're like well they did you know we have a established platform with like 30 million ps4s or I don't remember the actual number so some of these are very good at like sort of taking advantage of this when it's early in a platform the platform holder is like nice to you and

once once your content and so some of these developers can like really take advantage of that and say oh we're gonna give you this thing for your new platform we'll make you this new thing and then other developers like us we just kind of make stuff for PC and we don't pay very close attention to that because I think if we were always like chasing down a new platform and saying oh we should make this we should make that we would kind of lose the the speed that we have in making games just for PC in the in that kind of the niche that we have so that kind of strategy isn't necessarily for us but it can be good like if you're able to take advantage of a new platform as an indie mm-hmm it kind of like a lead way to the future of the industry I think when we last talked to kind of playing a lot of recaps because it would discontinue a like a lot of things has happened since last time we talked of Aeon was starting to

blossom it was becoming thing I think at that time right it was really buying it and now it's like I feel like it's kind of bouncing back with with the oculus quests and like there's a interest again with there hand motion controls without the can motion radials I mean that is a huge advantage for them to to really go in that direction know what's your general feeling industry being bigger than it can't be coming out yeah it's it's still like cool technology it hasn't it definitely hasn't like caught on you know in a mainstream way that I think that maybe some of the people working on a help to thought it would but the technology continues to get better and better if someone gave me a lot of money to make a vr game I I would give it a try you know it seems interesting enough but I don't know well I guess we'll just

have to see it definitely didn't happen as fast as like the people in the VR space like wanted it to or maybe thought that it would but I you know I'm not like anti VR like some people are real real skeptics about it I guess I'm just kind of like keep keeping an open mind about it and I tried the demos with the latest technology and it is you know it's it's not it's never like completely blown me away but it's always been like oh this is interesting and maybe at some point there will be like a point where it really clicks with a lot of people or maybe not I don't know I couldn't say but it's definitely been like it's like the the VR market and like the studio's making gamers for VR are depending on money from Facebook and and other players in the industry to make the content to make the games like they're not necessarily all just paying their

own way by sales of these games and so you're projecting that's not really self-sustaining we're just playing the long tail I'm hoping that one day there's enough of a consumer market out there for it to support itself I think as long as Facebook continues to believe it's the future and invests in it you know they will continue to be like games in VR like Facebook is just so huge and can invest so much money into it that like it could be like this market that doesn't it's not necessarily like a 100% real market because like when people aren't buying all of those products but like in terms of like Facebook's investment I think that they can probably like keep paying for that for as long as they want right into until they decide like until it either takes off or until they decide never mind and then there will be less VR stuff going on my last question that ties into

that you're mentioning the last ten minutes a lot of these companies that weren't players in the game industry are players now having the affordability to do what they want to I guess in a way innovate our industry that we haven't seen for a while I think we removed all these guys to face with the Google we would have continued this like downward spiral that we were in where the Japanese market was collapsing and the shift late of owners were closing doors every month you know without Apple as well with their iPhones and and and you know I were give them credit for the indie surge that they started do you feel like we I don't want to it sounds like I'm saying like we lost control of our own industry but we have really given the responsibilities of innovation to those other players that are really well what are your thoughts

about that mm-hmm I think that's a fair point I think that like yeah Google and Facebook getting into like gaming in the in a way that is pretty serious I know I think the jury's still out right like apples been taught like apples always had like a kind of an on-and-off relationship with games especially with Mac but also on the on the iPhone there they sometimes like take appear to take games really really seriously and really want to work with game developers and then other times they see him extremely uninterested in game developers or doing things that would be good for the industry so I think like the big technology Giants they'll probably just continue to like do things that seem to make sense to them that that may or may not necessarily be good for games and right now like there are ways in which it benefits the industry there's more money

coming in there's like new technologies being developed at the same time games is not necessarily like the biggest bit of the businesses that these that these companies do and so and this was always the danger with Microsoft - which was like if Xbox doesn't do well they might just like give up on it like they really could Microsoft has so many other business units that are that make so much more money and do so much more stuff so if Microsoft or Google or Facebook decided that gaming wasn't strategically important to them anymore they could just pull the plug and and leave so it's a matter of just like being aware like when you're working with these big companies like sure they seem like a huge presence now and and maybe that maybe they're here to stay maybe they'll be a big force or maybe they won't so I think yeah I agree with you that like in some ways maybe it feels like we're we

lost control but I'm not sure we were ever like fully in control to begin with just because you know it's all about shareholders at the end of the day you know no matter what no matter what company you you work with whether that's EA or Activision or Microsoft like it's out there they're all publicly traded companies and they have to answer to their shareholders so that's really the where the buck stops with all of those companies I think well we are at the end of the hour I know you have a heart stop coming up soon and this is my fault for starting us a little later I know listeners out there's and viewers out there would love to keep going and we're definitely gonna have you back sooner than later but this is quite time to kind of hand my mic over to you it's for you to shout out give attention to or promote anything that you would like sure yeah I'll talk about my visual novel it's called Eliza it's available on Steam and it's a story about virtual

giving giving therapy to people using an AI interface it's a really interesting story I think it's about that technology companies are kind of like mediating more and more of our lives it takes place here in Seattle locally it's a pretty linear story narrative game and I wanted to do that and so if you play it it's fully voiced it's got beautiful art in it and it's only 15 dollars and it's and it's on Steam so please check that out if you get a chance we'll definitely we'll be checking that out and it sounds like nonfiction which we are yeah I'm gonna say it's about it's close but yeah everyone check that out thank you everybody for joining us today and this week but that is it that's the end of the podcast and Matt thank you for joining us and always

loving your presence and your thoughts you're so introspective about the industry it actually keeps me on my toes about like alright what's really going on so cool thanks thanks for having me all right have a good one you too [Music] you [Music]