Defiant in Life and Death: What Happens After You Fail?

[Music] thank you thank you all for coming my name is Morgan jefford I'm here to talk today about about the rise and fall of Define development and uh and some of the things that kind of go along the way um this is a talk about running Indie Studios and Studio management but it's not really about that I'm going to lie to you a lot about what this talk is about um one thing that is true when we talk about business conversations and and this is a studio management kind of perspective on things is we often don't talk about the the human factors and the human costs and the feelings and emotions that go alongside running Studios and there's really good reasons for that

particularly if you have staff nobody wants to hear that their boss is sad um and worry whether or not they'll have a job the next week so given that Divine development is now uh a little over three years deceased um that gives me the opportunity to speak really frankly and honestly about about some of the ins and outs in a way that I wouldn't have spoken publicly uh while it was running and this talk is about Studio management it's also about failure and it's about closure it's about how to hopefully avoid ending up in the situation we did um but it's also about some of the reasons that we ended up making those decisions and you know I'm not fundamentally a believer that companies need to be Eternal entities that run until the end of time uh it is it is a model to

understand what you're for and what you're about and uh and to run for that period of time so but this is also a talk about uh about sadness to talk about identity um and what it means to to be a visible game developer especially in the Indie space um to talk about you know loss and what you do after things go wrong and but one of the things I want to talk about to kind of kick things off some of you know about defined development some of you may not um it was a studio that was founded post GFC in Australia and during the GFC Australia lost a lot of games jobs we lost about 75 of the game's jobs in Australia lots of people lost their jobs some some people lost their jobs multiple times going from one Studio closure to the next Studio closer to the next and it left the Australian landscape which had been previously dominated by American-owned

International studios in a really Grim position Dan the co-founder of defined development and I uh started the company in that environment we started with a really clear Mission you know we wanted to build a company then gave people great jobs working on exciting games so that those great people that we knew were out there had had opportunities and we started small but but across 10 years we built a studio that honored those goals at every stage along the way um I I believe in any case and I am biased at um and when you're setting up the goals for a studio I think it's really important particularly in that sort of environment it's very easy to talk about the things you're not going to do like we're going to avoid all of these mistakes that the big studios made negative goals I don't think help you

get to a destination positive goals can help you get and get to where you're going so we had a studio and we knew what it was for and one thing I want to stress here there are two elements that I really want to kind of knuckle down on one many of the things I talk about will sound simple none of them are simple they were all very complex situations but this is a one hour talk and I'm gonna go through things fast so if if you happen to listen and go gosh that sounds simple he's an idiot you could be right but you might not be and the other is that this is this is my story across the the lifespan of defiant and there are some people in this room um over 50 people were involved either a staff or working on the periphery um at our Peak we had we had 30 full-timers they all have their own stories and they are absolutely as important as mine

I got to see quite a lot from my seat but I sure didn't see everything so if you're interested please ask and and they'll tell you and the last thing I want to stress just before we move on is that you know I talk to a lot of people who run Studios um both smaller and larger than defiant and I talked to a lot of people who find that experience incredibly stressful and who are who are very um unhappy in in the role that they're in and there were stressful moments at the end don't get me wrong but if there's one thing I want you to take away from this is that 10 years of that Journey for me was just a great time I was walking to a room full of creative people doing doing work that that I loved and that they loved and uh and it made me happy so I I think it's important to hold that context as we go

so before we close down to fine we were working on a new project we'd we'd delivered hand of eight one which was a success and enabled us to grow we delivered head of 82 which was a success and had quite a lot of post-launch support and we were looking at new projects and there is a lens that we apply that we applied sorry my tenses will wobble um there's a lens that we applied to Define to find a meaningful project it had to sit somewhere in the Venn diagram of games we wanted to make games we felt there was an audience for and games that our team could make as well as anybody else and also we always wanted to make sure every new project was something new and something old but it combined something we knew how to do and could rely on along with some things we've never done before and you know we knew we'd learn along the way that's that's how hand of

Fate came to be so the game we were working on was called A World in my attic you can go and look at the trailer it still exists although the project is no more and it was taking hand of Fate which is a card game that comes to life and it was taking it to kind of a new level in that it was a open world zeldery game with a Settlers of a guitar and set of hexes you'd build your world and then you'd go out and adventure in it and that project was intentionally bigger than we built before we wanted to grow the team we wanted to make a bigger game we that that was the ambition we'd set for the studio to bring in more great people make great gains and give them a great environment to do it in um the thing I will say is a lot of our team were pretty outside their comfort zone at this point in time we've been doing hand to fade at that point for five years we really knew how to make that game a lot of the team had joined along the road they've never been involved with

like the messy confusing start of a project which is a whole different board game and it is difficult to express to people who've had a very solid and robust framework to work from from the last three or four years that it's okay it's okay that it's messy in the start it is all a mess but we're going to put all the parts together and it's going to come together so there was a lot of work that needed to be done on that front and as the studio head and also creative director and a bit producer the question of how I was doing is not great my personal life was a disaster is the truth at this point in time um my wife has a very high power job I had a very high power job we had two children who were six and nine and it was a disaster because they needed us more than we could provide and we both needed each

other more than we could provide I I was not doing great um the combination of all the personal and professional stress at that point in time meant that where I needed to be patient I just didn't have the time didn't have that there is a lot of deep thinking that's involved with initiating projects and I I was not able to provide the support and structure that was going on I this is not the only issue we had the team it was very independent and capable of playing along uh very well I I I'm not trying to take all of this on my own shoulders but I do think it's important because we reached a position where we had a game was bigger than any game we'd made before was bigger than we could fund to conclusion on our own and we needed external support now we knew that and we had great relationships with a range of Publishers we'd had good conversations all the way along and uh and we had

interest from a good half dozen publishers uh the thing about interest from Publishers is that it uh it's all very well and good until it comes time to sign a check and everybody will say show us a little bit more and show us a little bit more um we'd been on the show it's a little bit more Road for a while and truth be told we've been on that road for too long so there came a point where we sat down and went what are our options and opportunities and there were some options that we'd intentionally written off because they didn't fit with the the reasons that we built the company we weren't particularly interested in taking external investment we weren't particularly interested in you know selling the company off wholesale um and that was all fine until we realized that all of the publishing deals had now officially fallen through and we didn't have the runway to make it to the end so that leads to a plan uh with no

alternative positions and our burn rate was pretty inflated and the studio was at the point where we had to do something about that which leads into a bunch of options and opportunities and when I was speaking earlier about like not having negative goals like not having the I will run a studio and I will not do this thing I'll tell you the one that I've always held because pandemic Australia is the studio I worked at before to find development that studio was bought by AI and then it was shut down through the most brutal series of iterative cuts over the course for a year that I've ever experienced in my life I was the last person there I turned the lights off I laid off a hundred odd staff on behalf of EA one piece at a time in a desperate attempt to save anybody on that Lifeboat and I will tell you one thing that is on my negative list I was not going to do that again

so then there were sell-offs and and they didn't look very attractive either every option and opportunity in front of us effectively compromise the reasons that we set the studio up in the first place so there was there was a point where Dan sat down and ran the numbers and we looked at what we could do and how long we could go and we realized that there was no no plan that we had that could be executed in that time frame to a positive outcome what we could do is give people uh good packages clarity and an end to their time so we ran those numbers we ran those scenarios and we basically came down to the point where there was there was a decision that had to be made between a very high risk you know fly close to the Sun lay off three quarters of the team try and pull something together uh or to call it a day and

after sleeping on it we we made the decision to call it a day we met with the leadership team and we explained it and uh and then we met with the rest of the team then we explained it we gave everybody as generous packages gave them their Hardware so they could work on projects if they wanted to uh and it was dumb it was one week from the initial decision to the studio being closed one week from that room that I love to walk into being full of life and vigor to empty and just me and Dan and for a moment there was silence so one of the things I think is the question of like how do you avoid ending up in this situation which is

hopefully meaningful and useful to uh to some of you and the truth of the matter is that all the decisions that led to Us closing down happened two years before we closed down the the correct time to make change was well before we reached the point where where closure was inevitable uh these so so this then is going to be a talk uh about how to avoid some of the pitfalls that we hit but it's also not really about that either when we started to find a friend of ours who ran big studios for for uh for EA and C uh it gave us some advice and he said that your job is not to work in the business that you found but to work on the business that you've had you don't you shouldn't be giving yourself a job you should be working on building a business that supports people

and that seemed great except for the fact that it seemed really stupid from the Indie deaf perspective like why do we build Studios we build Studios because we want to make games it's the only way to get games made that's why that's why I asked it out of the studio like all I ever wanted was to build the business I could work in why else do it and I've had this conversation uh with a lot of Indie Studio heads right where they're like well where often the question comes up why are you creative directing that project rather than getting somebody else in to do it and it's like because that's the fun of it that's why I built the whole thing right like um and that is true but it is limiting and one thing that I think is important is strategy meetings and we had strategy meetings we had a five-year plan we had a one-year plan we had a two-year plan but we've done them all and we hadn't updated them and those values I showed you right at the start

about what defiant was about that defined us those those were post GFC values when we closed jobs for skilled developers were easy to find there was no there was no shortage and that's one of the essential reasons that we started the studio and it just wasn't valid anymore and by putting a big strike through one of the core pillars that had made built the studio we didn't have that reason to continue and press on it is critical that you know what your company is for but it's equally critical that you revise it and understand you know what your company will be for you need to work backwards from your big goals to what you're actually going to hit and sit out and Achieve right it's it's all about

um you know everybody knows about smart goals specific measurable attainable whatever um but specific and measurable is important the reason our strategy meetings were nonsense is because they weren't specifically measurable they were big and they were fluffy and we could always feel like we were doing the big and fluffy thing no if you want to be bigger in five years you say you want to be bigger in five years we want this many people if you don't want to be bigger in five years and I would recommend that [Laughter] um then then say that talk about how specifically you're going to do these things because you can only identify the vulnerabilities of your studio when you miss your goals that that's the start of the process of understanding and you always I mean the thing is we're all smart people right and smart people are really really good at justifying why the step that they've taken is the right step

just in front of them because of course it is it's the only natural step by the time you get there planning is all about structure and it's all about setting up those goal posts seeing I'm making you can go actually you know what we missed actually you know what we're not doing the thing we set out to do actually you know what maybe this isn't the right game for us at this point in time actually you know what we need to sign up for a publisher here or we're going to go off in a different direction and that for us uh you know vulnerability um particularly uh structural vulnerability for a studio shouldn't come as a shock um and I'm not saying that uh that we completely botched the planning but we hadn't set our goals clearly enough to know that we were missing them along the way we hadn't set the road clearly enough to understand that the path had gone awry I mean one thing I want to touch on too is uh is money is like

money's a big part of running a business you've got to keep the engine turning uh you can't simply follow money but you also can't operate without it so you do need to make sure that you have your cash flow sorted out and you know how you're getting from one place to the next so this when I think about you know what would we have done differently how would we have updated the company goals from Simply being a great place for people to work making great gains there are things that we understood and one of the big ones for me is that if you put a team of people together and you have them chew on the same sorts of problems for long enough you get to Great and meaningful and revolutionary games every great game not universally true but certainly

there are a lot of great games that are examples of people who've been sitting in the background chewing away on the same sorts of problems for game after game after game after game before hitting a moment where it's great um there's the uh there was a terrible Hulk game back in the day that was followed by the fun hog game that was followed by prototype and as you look at prototype you can see all those steps along the way it's true of the Infinity Ward team who moved from Medal of Honor to Call of Duty to Call of Duty to Call of Duty Call of Duty to call him anyway um keeping developers together and chewing on the same sorts of problems is one of the fundamental beliefs I had it's why at defiant we had a philosophy about the games we built where we always took something old and combined it with something new yeah if if we had taken that value into one of the founding principles of the studio we would have found a new reason to exist that could have carried us forward the other thing you know you've got to have big dreams and the

truth of the matter is we we started the studio with Big Dreams we wanted a we wanted a game that was you know out of consoles we wanted to uh wanted to self-publish and and you know get out to the the masses and we achieved all that and if there's one thing that you take away from from this talk all the planning on the strategy of all the race is is largely irrelevant take this away when you succeed celebrate really important to Mark the wins along the way she don't necessarily get to keep winning all the way so so when you when you pull it off make sure you stop give each other a high five and then you need a new plan then you need some new goals you need some new Ambitions the truth is we

didn't have a big enough dream and this is the theme for this talk is advice I give others but I'm too stupid to take myself and uh and I've spoken to Indie devs often to say it is important that you forge a big enough dream to act as a lighthouse for your team in your studio and the other thing is that the transitional phases of game development studios are now well known and understood a two-person Studio does not run like a 10 person Studio a 10 person studio and a successful 10 person Studio that's doing really well and making great stuff does not run like a 20 person Studio to go from 20 to 40 or 50 is a whole nother ball game and involves a whole new layer of management and every step along this phase transition is a chance for things to go terribly wrong and they always do by the way we

had planned for them every every time we change size we had a plan that said you know we're writing off six months working out how to make this happen there is always a uh a discomfort as you go through those transitional periods but you do have to plan for them if growing bigger is part of your your set of goals and each one of them is about letting go so when you grow uh you find that the many different hats you've worn need to be taken off and put on individual people so the process of growth in the process of transition is always a uh a place to um to you know what I've said here is you know put the team in charge of the dream the the fundamental thing that went awry here was for me looking at defiant as a place I could work um as opposed to a place where my job

was to to help others Thrive and succeed uh we needed a vision that carried forward that it was a place that we were building content continuity we were building Studio we were building that ongoing value and forward motion so you know the the truth of the matter is that again in talking with other Studio heads this is really common everybody's like well I wear a lot of hats and I think it's important that we understand I wear a lot of hats to be a direct synonym for I'm doing a lot of things badly and if you would like them to be done well it's important that you entrust people with the responsibility that goes along with those hats things likewise one of the one of the things that I think is is very true um universally with games is that games only happen through belief

and willpower everything in games is taking something that doesn't exist and just forcing it to to be birthed into the world in reality through sheer force of will belief is important and I I'm a big believer in the people I work with a big believer in the the people I work with now uh I I have I have an enormous amount of belief belief needs to turn into trust and faith and people will surprise you so what happened next what I've said here is energy gets released and this is true and this is one of the reasons that you know while the closure of defined makes me sad it doesn't you know well I'm talking about the sadness in a minute um

but companies tie up people and effort and energy and sometimes they tie up people in effort and energy as they did it pandemic for us for several years with no outcome whatsoever it's not the worst thing in the world but it's not great people have a right to say that the creative output of their work when a studio closes all of that energy is released and as I said when we started to find there were not great jobs around when defiant closed there were great jobs around and working for defined meant something for the people who'd worked for us um they they had options and opportunities to go work on great projects or great Studios I could not be more happy about the uh the successes of the the defiant alumni there are so many people along the way who've gone on to do such great things and uh and that that can the fact that we were able to be a small part of that Journey with them makes me happy

we did still have an office and a lease at this point in time um which again was mainly a place that I could go and sit and be alone and feel sad um but it wasn't long after uh that you know Dan and I Dan's my business partner by the way um and Dan and I were effectively the last people standing there so we still had ongoing support for the old products we weren't doing development anymore but our games that we self-published were in the market there was there were still things to do there was still support and that kept us busy um and it wasn't long after that that uh James Scott who was one of the programs to find said look I don't want a job but I did Pitch you know I pitched a superhero game back in the day uh as a thing that defiant could work on and wasn't the right thing for the studio at the time he's like dude can I have that of course you can of course you can have

that we're not in the business of keeping people's ideas so James started work on uh on what became capes which uh which is now signed to day delic and will be out later this year um and then Dan started working on that and Sean had been our art director started working on that and the nice thing about having an office is that there was a space in which that could happen and then you know covered began and it was a big enough office that five people could in fact sit in opposite corners and still be socially distanced so that that was that was a positive um and I got roped into that project as well I started doing some writing and doing some design and for Dan I think the process of keeping busy was quite healing and for me it was not it was really bad I did not need to be

busy I I was I was very dumb so you know this is this is a talk in some ways about the very many ways that games can break your heart but it's not really about that there's a thing that comes along with being a developer in public uh and missing that is very shameful failure makes it really hard to want to put yourself out there and the other thing for me too is one of the things that really gave me joy was acting as a mentor to other Studios and to uh to other developers offering advice where that device advice was useful and practical and uh nobody wants advice from a great big failure

is certainly how I felt at the time um and the phone stopped ringing and I think you know in retrospect having spoken to people I think people were being compassionate so I think people didn't call because they felt like you know I'd take myself away from the public eye and that was that was a fair and reasonable thing to do but it had stolen from me one of the pieces of joy in my life which was talking to other developers about the questions of game development so here I am Studios closed and people are working on a game I'm sort of working on the game but not really and it's impossible to not kind of come to terms with the fact that you may have just done the best thing professionally that you'll do and from here it is all downhill and I've got to say that running Indie Studios

is a thing that gave me great joy but uh but it's really hard to work out what the role of a failed Indie Studio head is in the broader context of the industry 10 years running it successfully one not so good we it's hard to work out where you fit and to be fair early in the piece I had some very generous offers from people to come on board and do various roles for them but I really wasn't ready um you know I talk here about the fun parts of a nervous breakdown and I don't mean to use the language of mental health lately because I was not in a place where my mental health was light um I was certainly depressed or certainly burned out I'm certainly in the midst of a nervous breakdown uh I was certainly doing very very badly but pretty privately it is interesting

the contrast between being a very very public game developer which I was something like 50 000 Twitter followers I'm turned my Twitter off because I was very keen not to be in public at this point in time that turned out to be a mistake I probably should have paused it 50 000 Twitter followers is useful when you're up to stuff um but I I definitely drew a line through that moment and said oh I am very much never gonna make games again both both by choice and by circumstance I could not see myself as a person ever doing that work again I was happy to help people who were doing stuff but not not for real so you know I uh I took time to uh to work with my family and as I said my wife and I had been very busy and I'll tell you the young children um uh really benefited from some full-on

parenting um particularly as we went through covert uh I I would not take those two years back under any circumstances I would like to have been happier during them um but uh but the value of turning my focus which had been on external matters to the internal you know health and well-being of my family helped a lot and as I say there's also you know the fun parts of a nervous breakdown you get to you know tattoos and you know focus on your hobbies do a bunch of gardening and at that point I decided it was time to you know I'm gonna get out of games I'll go and become a therapist or something I'll go and do some study see how that goes there's a reasonably big gap here at the end to taking responsibility and the thing about the way that I've always approached game development and the way that I've always approached the teams

I've worked with and Studios I work with ever since ever since I've been a junior is to be responsible I do feel responsible for the team I feel responsible for the game I feel responsible for the people I work with I carry an enormous amount of responsibility but at this point I also just couldn't help but think that there was a lot that was unfair you know it's possible to have a poker hand play it perfectly and lose the hand I'm not saying we played it perfectly but I didn't think I mean I think that game would have been great I think Publishers were wrong and stupid not to sign it often wrong and stupid um but but there comes a point where you go well I I did make all those decisions like the road that led me here I I

walked down on my own and then 10 years of being Morgan jaffet of defiant development um and you know I'm certainly not the biggest named Indie Dev but I was pretty well known particularly in Australia um I was very visible I was very vocal when you are a public person you become one thing in public it is hard to have a multi-dimensional and complex identity in the public sphere and when you're an indie game developer it's hard to keep your public personality out of your private personality because there is an enormous amount of bleed backwards and forwards a lot of my friends are people in the games industry a lot of my social environment is the games industry a lot of the ways that I interact and share and I'm a member of a community is is

through the games industry being Morgan jaffard of defined development was exhausting and don't get me wrong either like I'm not a woman I'm not a visible minority but it was equally impossible not to worry that with 50 000 Twitter followers and visible public presence that one day that could just all turn into a rabid mob and it would all be over like the the the ongoing pressure of the the social media machine is uh is a tough thing when you are just one thing it's very hard to uh to live a complex and fulfilling life there's a bunch of things that uh that play in to the way that you may uh

approach other people the stories you tell the the ways you pull things together um that that being crushed down into that singular thing is also part of the kind of myth that keeps companies going right people think people in charge are in charge for some reason they they know more are they they're wiser they're cleverer you know we we make uh we make sort of you know figureheads of people so that you know we can respect them we assume that the person at the top of the pile has a good reason for being there it's all just people it's all just people they're all strange and weird and you know have their own things going on but a lot of those people have forced themselves into very boring shapes in order to do the job that they do and you know it is important to have a

public face that represents the company that is important for a myriad of different reasons it's important in business it's important in hiring it's important for for the overall relationships but it's all people in the end and you have real limitations because as I noted at the start your public Behavior has a really concrete impact on the people you work with and for the things you say are going to be read If by nobody else on the internet they will be read by your team who will um it's it's interesting um at one point I realized that whether or not I had a beard was one of the ways in which the team was trying to work out whether we were doing well or in trouble because when you lack the big picture information when you don't actually see the bank statement you have to you know cut open the

animals and and Scribe the orgas right you pick whatever the weather is and you go gosh is it does this indicate a bigger picture is God angry is that why we're being punished you have to be careful with your public persona so this was two years of like not a great phase for me uh where I was sad and people had gone on to do good things and I could be happy and proud of the the work that had been done but I was largely said in private and then you know we'd been working on capes in the meantime and that had reached a place where it was in good shape so we decided to uh to take it to Gamescom and we were taking the Gamescom to speak to Publishers that is the thing that I've done for divine many many times in my life previously I was happy to do it for the the new group uh Spitfire

interactive is what that group of ex-defined people were called and you know they had Dan and I support and Dan was working very hard on it and I was working gently on it and we went to Gamescom and in the lead up I realized I was terrified absolutely terrified to go and Pitch this game which is the thing I'd done many many times before with with complete confidence and I was terrified of the question of like well what happened why didn't defiant work out why is this a new studio what's a relationship how's that going on and I did the thing that I hadn't done across the previous two years which is I reached out to my friends in the industry and I said I'm terrified what am I gonna do and it was a great moment because they were able to talk me down off that ledge

which was not a very high leads they said nobody cares show the game is the game good nobody cares you care nobody cares um and I went to Gamescom we successfully signed a publisher for that title and as I returned home and sat for the first time I had an idea for a game that I passionately wanted to make and I realized I something had changed and I could see myself making games again and I could see a way in which there could be a future for me in this industry and that there were ways that I could represent things it is it is hard to say what burnout is and isn't and where it starts and ends but for me it ended

when inspiration came back and there was nothing I could do to force that to happen but to clear the space to allow it to happen and God knows the first step on that road was being honest about the fact that I was in a terrible place but while you're waiting for that kind of inspiration to to come back and for new things to flow in I do think there's a big question of like what do you do I mean outside getting tattoos and gardening and I think the answer that I found was to help other people and there's a truism in my life that is universal which is that often I'm helping other people in the way that I'd like to be helped myself and and you hope that people will pick

up on those cues but I tell you what's even better than cues which is just telling people that you'd like a hand um this flies very much in the face of the things I was talking about in terms of public face for company and that is the challenge in the mind that I was stuck in but they're big and wide mentor and peer groups to ask for for help so at this point things started opening up again options and opportunities were certainly in front of me that felt interesting and compelling I had my own projects I was working on I was able to help in a fundamental way on capes I was able to work with with local developers on uh on a game that not sure is announced yet uh but but doing some narrative support um and uh

and I've recently started working with a team in New Zealand helping other people doing the thing that I'm good at has been very rewarding and fulfilling it's it's nice because the message that I'd taken away from from the closure of Define is that I was no longer good for anything but the reason to find Ren well for 10 years is because I'm actually quite good at a bunch of things and it was nice to be able to start to apply them again so at the same time that was an opportunity for me to engage with those projects as a much more complex and three-dimensional human I am no longer Morgan jefford to find development which is good which is good and help different projects in different ways I helped a mobile project that's based on narrative therapy and mobile health and rewrote all of their narratives so

that it was a narrative therapy game with actual viable narrative design um and that was good the thing about all of this fundamentally this is a talk about How to Mend a Broken Heart and that's that's really what it's about games games will break your heart if you let it but it'll heal it too if you let it companies I think are not the be-all and end-all they tie up an enormous amount of energy and often we have to build Studios to make games which is stupid by the way we need other models and that's part of what I'm working on now but what a company does is is form human potential into a collective shape that it can achieve bigger things that we can do alone and that is worth doing it is worth working with other people to try and make bigger games and

and Achieve bigger things than we can do on our own but if it's not going to do that Let It Go let people free let them go into the world and do other things but before you do that maybe make a better plan because that that can really make a difference you've got to have a plan that's worth your efforts that's worth the people you bring together another thing that's really important to me and this is something I did pretty well but imperfectly while the journey is good tell your business partners tell the people who work for you tell them you love them and you're having a good time or at least tell them you love working with them if you don't want to be too confrontational

it's him if you don't life is and this is the thing that I've realized in talking to so many Studio heads life is what you do every day and if the things you're doing every day are exhausting you and draining you and running you down use the power you have to change that to build structures that renew you and invigorate you every day and when it is good tell people share it let them know what that means to you you know defiant development was a commercial proposition that we built for a singular moment in time and I'm really proud now I find myself able to be proud of what we achieved over the nearly a decade that we ran that studio but we did grow it out of a particular

moment in a particular thing and in that same process we're able to be part of something bigger there was an indie game uh explosion happening around the world there was an indie game explosion happening more specifically in Australia we're able to be a part of that incredibly exciting moment in history the studio closed and you know that left me with literally no idea what to do and no idea who I was and if you find your public self becoming visible and one-dimensional and creeping in at night and sliding in under the sheets keeping you company it might be time to think about how to how to expand yourself how to be three-dimensional how to be vulnerable I it's it's one thing to be popular but it's another thing to be loved you can be popular with a

lot of people but you can only be loved by a few but relationships are everything but if you're not vulnerable and honest if you spend your entire time holding other people up but not letting them hold you up you're doing them a great disservice and this applies not just in the broader scheme of things but it applies in a studio fashion as well if you're a studio founder and you're looking at yourself and you're going but I'm indispensable this company cannot run without me you do that team a disservice you're denying them the opportunity to grow into the roles that you occupy you're denying them the opportunity to become the things that have led you along the path yeah ultimately when it comes to making Indie Games running into Studios uh you can walk that road on your own and that's that's a viable way to do it but I will tell you it is better with

company it's better with peers and it's better with friends and all I can tell you at the end of this is the answer I found not easily what heals a broken heart only only people to love dreams to Chase and doing it together that's that's my answer thank you so much I appreciate you very much bearing with me for this story this is a different talk to many of the talks I've given um I'm delighted to answer questions if anybody has questions

and I wrote some things down because people like slides but I'm really bad at slides and and it's hard because I'm asking you to ask me questions but I've just given you a bunch of stuff to read which is why it's lines all right uh thanks Morgan for such a um honest and vulnerable talk um I'm sure everyone here uh will agree with me that it was a beautiful beautiful moment that you've shared with us um I'm curious now like after the collapse of defiance and working now with all these smaller Studios do you have a bit more hesitancy with Studios to tell them to expand oh yeah man getting to that same size even when I was running defiant I told people uh people would often come with questions about expansion and expansion is a natural and easy thing to do when

things are going well I mean uh there's a problem when you are sitting on a great big pile of money and you're a company and effectively you should be putting that into some use right so games being successful or a publisher deal signed but even before this I I would always tell people that the fundamental is to know what your company is for and growth can be a part of that or not a part of that I think the thing that I spend more time than anything else talking to people about is people who have grown and are finding it uncomfortable and it's really hard to put the genie back in the bottle at that point in time so yeah I I would I would advise everybody I mean I know people in this room who have teams of three making games that are commercially successful that they can keep making forever and look don't get me wrong there was a time when I said if you've made a lot of money making a game you probably should give some people some jobs because Australia was

desperately in need of people to provide jobs but yeah I'm a long way from that now I think that I think thinking about a game and what it can sustain and how it can support people is is the key step and if if people have companies they want to build they should know what they're for and where they sit and I think you should hire with great caution um because yeah burn rates will kill you yeah every single time every single time so yeah I would my short answer to that is yes grow only with caution yeah okay thanks pleasure yeah hello one question I had was in regards to resisting the urge to grow one thing is that investors always want you know continual growth yeah how do you push back against that without cutting off your source of funding yeah I I mean this is tricky this is this is definitely one of the places that we hit

at the end right it's like we just didn't have a good story to tell investors because we weren't interested in doing the things that would tell a good story to investors um I I think it's it's really important to go into investment with eyes open as to what that means um and I say eyes open to what that means in terms of what is the mechanism of control how does how does the board seed work in the example of an investor how does the decision making work how can how can leaders be replaced under certain circumstances who's actually in charge and I think investment where you lose control for me defeats a lot of the purpose of being an indie developer but it's certainly appropriate for people who really want who want to be on that exponential growth Road for success or failure I mean the interesting thing is I've spent a lot of time beating myself up about running a studio for 10 years and then not

and in the in the investor Tech startup space that's the norm right take the money write it to the moon or fall off one's finding nobody if you miss you miss you know everybody took a good shot and you try and fail fast and succeed fast and and if you want to be in that world then absolutely be in that world but going with eyes open uh I think we are more and more able to find investors who understand what games are I don't know how this is going to shift you know when interest rates were zero investment models changed a lot and people are now suddenly just interested in getting a better than zero return on their money so you could find investors for games who had a really different approach and mentality than the ones that have previously been around but uh but yeah I'm not 100 sure where we sit now that the interest rates are bouncing back up and people are starting to you know want to bet on tell me how this is going to explode and be worth 10 times as much

um yeah I as I say know what you're for know if that's the ride you want to be on if that's not the ride you want to be on fine compassionate investors who understand that they're investing in a long-term proposition that can be a really great Revenue raiser for for a long time thank you pleasure anybody else hey Morgan thank you for an amazing heartfelt talk that was actually just what I needed to hear right now in this moment um my question for you is was there a sweet spots size wise where you're happiest with the smaller number of people people I mean I can I can tell you my personal sweet spot and I think in a lot of ways um this is the story of why my personal Sweet Spot isn't necessarily the best way to run a business because my my personal sweet spot is around that 30 person team that's that's where I can have the most impact and influence

that's where I can get the most done um but it really pushes you into making a certain sort of gain and to find you know I spend a lot of time talking to very wise people who run very successful Studios and uh you know Jamie Chang and Clay always said to me you are crazy putting all your eggs in one basket if you have a 30 person Studio you need three games you need to make much simpler games you need to make more of them you need to have the security and the backup of multiple partners um that's probably right like Jamie's very smart so um some yeah I think I think that's one of the takeaways for me is that the The Sweet Spot and what I like to do and what I'm finding I'm most useful doing now with with other Studios is helping them around that um that transitional Point as they go from like 15 up to that 30 point because that's the place I'm comfortable but I worked at Ubisoft back

in the day on you know 300 person teams and got myself fired because I'm really bad at you know big company politics uh in that in that context so um so yeah I think I think it's important that is one thing I will say is through all of this I've learned where I like to be making games and it's not the same place that everybody I work with has right like some people who worked for defiant were on a journey where they really wanted to go work for a blizzard for example and they really wanted to be a part of that big team doing big things that get plastered on the side of buses and it's great because those people got to work with us fabulous contributors and then move on to do great things um I think everybody has their comfort space and their comfort zone so I know where mine is and that's kind of where I try and lean in and be impactful now um but I also you know I wouldn't I wouldn't try and build a 30

person studio just because I like making games with 30 people at the moment so awesome sorry this one no excellent um yeah so you talked about uh that transition from 15 to 30 um which sounds I mean from from my own experience quite a an interesting one yeah um and I yeah I wondered if you had any kind of like um specific bits of advice from your experiences about how to make that transition as smooth as possible yeah yeah I mean that that's probably another full talk um so that's there's probably another full talk and I will say hit me up anytime I'm very happy to talk um but it's all about uh structures and Frameworks with individual leadership in there versus people who know everybody and can get things done so when you're a 15 person Studio you know everybody in the room you know

everybody's specialty you know who's working on on what and you don't need a lot of structure to to get results you just somebody goes ah I'm gonna add this you know I know you're working on that what what's your take on that and and those things all happen very organically as you get above that and hit the 30 40 kind of person team you actually need to make sure that you've put formal structures in place that work horizontally and vertically so when I say horizontally and vertically I mean you might have a department that works together at defiant where you used to have a writer's room of designers to to break uh new content talk about what we were doing we would we would solve that problem collectively but then one person would own it and that meant that not only did one person own it but like the whole design team could answer a question if somebody was like hey what what the hell are you thinking with that one and you're like oh that that's important because it ties into this thing so we had that kind of horizontal knowledge across the design team but then you make sure you have vertical

knowledge as well by putting you know a designer an artist a programmer together on on implementing this part implementing this part so by building that that Network you build a really robust Studio that can deal with the fact that no longer is it easy to just stand up and say I know this bit is John's bit John what's the deal with that um so yeah that's that's that's one of the one of the elements more structure more structure and people whose job it is just to make sure that people have meaningful work to do like that's the other thing again this is where that talk of hats comes in lots of people are really good individual contributors and therefore they become leads and then you have a lead who's like oh yes I'm also the best level designer so I'm going to do this level because really important so I'm going to get that done that is a guaranteed way to make sure they do terrible job so um Dan and I were always famous for saying you know if you want something done badly and Light

you can put it on our slave uh otherwise somebody who knows what they're doing should know like we we can do things we used to be great individual contributors but yeah bad and light is how we do it now so brilliant thank you very much hello hello thank you so much for your talk it was great um my question is um when the size of the studio grow yeah um they overhead administrative administrative overhead grows and usually the founders are create creative directors they are game designers and it's like you feel that you need to stop doing what you like the most that is do game design then stop doing creative Direction and then you run a business and you don't develop games anymore it's people under you that will will develop video games but not

you I I think that is extremely true and my answer to this now is different to my answer then my answer to this now is that that is what you should do you should stop being a creative director or a designer and you should be a person who grows creative directors and designers and that that actually is a terribly rewarding thing to do um to help other people become great and trust me a lot of them will become greater than you ever were but to do that you need to let go so it is so hard for us particularly when we've built something from scratch to let go but I am free now than I have ever been and that freedom came at the cost of the studio but it didn't need to I could have just let go and if I had just let go

I could have been free a lot earlier um it's amazing when you stop viewing yourself as indispensable and and start viewing yourself as responsible for for helping everybody else become indispensable it's a really valuable shift so so that's the best I can offer from the experience I've had but a garden outside so it's all I ever wanted to do was be creative director on games yeah and sorry yep and uh and you know I've had the chance to do it and I had a great time but I actually have other things I want to do that's that's you know when I talk about becoming one-dimensional don't let yourself become one-dimensional we're big complex strange things you you have other projects in you that you will be free to do when you Empower people to do those roles and take those jobs and then your company runs like a real one

um but uh but like I say it was a hard pill for me to swallow so thank you I I was thinking the same because in our case we cannot afford not to grow because it's the only way to survive because we had to offer work for care services a lot of things just to keep the company running and don't crash down and we went from three people to 62 people in two years so it is very fast very fast and I felt that there there were no people with the capabilities to take responsibilities but the answer I have to that is that I will only ever be able to when you let them so you have to let go and and you have to let go and they will drop some things and they won't do them as well as you and and that's where you apply your creative Direction skills to helping them and being a great mentor to them um I I certainly you know I'm really sympathetic to that tale of growth we started as a work for higher Studios so

I uh I understand where you're coming from um and yeah I as I say I think it is uh I think it is important it's also important for corporate resilience right it's important to have multiple people who can sit in those roles and do those things in order to build a company that is strong and robust as I didn't so you know um I I definitely as I say a theme for the talk is advice giving advice that I'm very poor at taking myself but uh but there is a great road on the other side thank you pleasure I think we are done we have to end there thank you so much for coming along I really appreciate it [Music]