Designing Live Service Games | Design Club

[music] [music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that offers you two and a half times the number of guests for the same low monthly rate. I am your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff and some illustrious guests. Jeff, say hi to the people.
Hi to the people. Hello everybody. I am Jeffrey Zakin, the studio director of Extra Credits and more importantly for this longtime game designer who has indeed worked on live service games which we will be talking about today. But rather than having to just listen to only Will and myself talk about this for a while, we have decided to bring on a couple of people who know as much if not more than we do about this to bring in extra perspectives. So I would love to introduce Well, actually, hold on. We're supposed to let me set this up. I'm Jeffrey Zacken. I'm the studio director of Extra Credits. I've been a game designer since the late 90s. Um,

favorite game? Well, you know, I hate favorites. I I will list games I I have lots of games I like a lot. I tend to like strategy and rogue likes. Uh, favorite fun fact, I've been a game designer more than half my life now. Um, and I'm in my young 50s.
I like young 50s. That's very good. That's Yeah, that's very good.
Well, I'm not in my I'm not in my mid or older 50s. So,
right, but people nor All right, keep going. Keep going.
Anyway, and um join we are joined here by Kenny. Let's see. Let me point the right I'm mirrored. Kenny, why don't you introduce yourself and say a couple games or why you would be a good person to talk about live service.
Sure. Hi, Jeff. Well, thanks for inviting me. I'm Kenny Sha Dinkan and uh recently left an eight-year run at uh King where I was the senior creative director for uh the metagame for Candy Crush. So the metagame is sort of

everything around the core game which is a lot of live service upkeep. It's a lot of the events and features and seasonal content that you know changes and evolves and keeps people coming back. Um before that I kind of also long career Jeff you and I have known each other for a long time. Uh long career started in kids games on there was this ancient technology called CDROMs like they were circular and you put them in this disc drive and um anyway I started uh on game kids games like Carmen San Diego Oregon Trail Cluefinders stuff like that. Uh I went to a company called PlayF first where I was the head of the games group and the CCO and we did a game called Diner Dash. Um, and I managed the portfolio there for about seven years and then I was at Disney for a few years running the San Francisco studio and a few hop skips and jumps later went to King and um, lot of live service uh, Battle Scars from the last eight years.

Uh, favorite game probably still that first Bioshock game still lives inside my soul as my favorite game. Maybe a couple of board games have over the years. And then fun fact about me, you may recognize me from my three years on As the World Turns when I was a child. This is a true story, but yes, from ages two to four, I was uh a child actor on As the World Turns. And I was fired because I couldn't grow up fast enough and they wanted me to get into a romantic relationship and I was only four. So um as as they do in soap operas. So that's my fun fact,
Jenny. I never knew that one. That is an excellent excellent fun fact.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My dad is an actor and he was on it and they needed a kid for some, you know, I wasn't on every day cuz that that stuff was like daily, you know, and kind of
Yeah. Anyway,
for those unfamiliar, for our younger audience, that was one of the biggest soap operas um going on in the world for a very long time. It probably still is.

Um
I think they canled it maybe in like the as or something. It went down for I think I could check. Don't know.
But in the 70s and 80s it was still going strong. Yeah.
A whole different kind of live service when you think about it.
Yeah.
But um
that's right. That's right. Fire and forget I think is like what you call it.
So uh David and Justin, why don't Hold on. Let me put the right way. There we go. Why don't you two uh introduce yourselves?
Uh sure. So uh I'm Justin Sts. I'm one of the co-founders uh and lead designer uh here at Codename Entertainment. Uh we've been at it for uh it'll be 18 years in a couple of months. Um making started out making flash games on uh Facebook and uh now we don't have any flash games anywhere uh or nothing on Facebook. So we've evolved past [laughter] that. Um but yeah, we've had some some live service games. We've got one live service game that I think has been going on for I want to say 14

years, but it's probably more like 12. Bushwhacker 2. Bushwhacker 1 is 16 years, but that's not live serviced anymore. But yes, we've we've been live servicing uh casual online games for for
our very first game was live service, so since 2008.
Yeah, since 2008. Um and uh my acting credentials, I was a I was a present uh in the Nutcracker in grade two. Oh no.
Um, [laughter] that's about all I've got there. So,
favorite games, just you got to list a favorite game. They're making you choose, too.
Favorite game is tough. So, I've decided instead of doing favorite game, I'm just going to do game I'm currently playing.
Okay.
And no one would guess this. Uh, it is a live service game.
I know. I know what it is.
You know what it is cuz I've been talking about it internally, but uh I am currently playing Asheron's Call.
Uh, which was a one of the first MMOs. Came out right around the time EverQuest did back in like 1999, I think. came out about eight months after EverQuest launched. That was ours. And the lead designer was Toby Regaini, who I ended up working with on an MMO

two MMOs later for me.
Yeah,
he was at a sister team.
It's surprising the number of people from Turbine who are still kicking around doing stuff. You run into them all the time. Um, but yeah, I that that game ran for I think 13 years. I think they closed shop in 2012, but they have a very active uh you know, private server community going and uh and no one shut them down yet. So, I've been playing a bit of that for the [laughter] last uh
You just you just outed them live on the internet. Way to go. [laughter]
Ah, it's good. It's a fun game. Uh and I'm glad that it still lives uh in some form out there.
Cool. Uh and I'm David Whitaker. I'm the other co-founder of Codename Entertainment here. We've been, as stated, doing it since uh 2008. Um, and over that time, I think we've made something like 12 13 game releases. Um, which all started as as Justin said as Flash and on Facebook and then there were games that went on to Congregant and Congregate, Big Fish. Um, then Steam

and of course across Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, all the fun places. Um, let's see. Favorite games. Geez, this was a put on the spot. Make Sophie's Choice. I don't think I was like whether whether it was Yeah, my brain just goes I can't have one favorite. It goes back like you know Mario 3, Doom 2, HalfLife, um you know, A Link to the Past. Um and of course the original Quest for Glory was up there on the list at the top.
Quest for Glory. Yeah.
Um things I'm playing currently, I play more Fortnite than I'd like to admit. It's sort of an easy [laughter] goto.
And yet you just did.
Yeah. Well, more than I Yeah. I would like to do. Yeah. Um, fun fact about me, um, in in addition to doing the game, uh, development design, I like to do a little woodworking and wheels. Everything has to have wheels. So, here at the office, a lot of the furniture is stuff that I've put together, uh, and everything has wheels on it because it's just it's so much nicer if you can wheel things around. T, it's a Yeah, fun fact. Everything's got to have wheels,

you know. It's pretty It's a pretty fun fact. So today I we've gathered all of you here today to talk about designing games for live service. And I I think as we start out we should probably establish a baseline. What the heck is a live service game? Because we exist in a world of early access and games with many updates, right? I'm playing a lot of Slay the Spire 2. Most people probably wouldn't refer to Slay the Spire or Slay the Spire 2 as a live service game, but it does get bi-weekly updates. And so, what in your opinions defines what it means to be a live service game? Like, what kinds of games are we going to be talking about?
That is a Let's see. Let me throw my hat in the ring first. I think almost every live service game is in some ways online. I think all of them have somewhat frequent updates. And I think

the point of a live service game is that it is not a playthrough and done. Um that it is a game that you continue to play over and over and over again. So, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, Idle Champions, games meant to have exceedingly long um playthroughs, not necessarily single, but where you do it again and again and again, be it levels or challenges or other things. As opposed to like a Bioshock, which Kenny mentioned, you play through the story and it's kind of done. it maybe you play again or like a Mass Effect you might play to get both alignments done but it isn't meant to be played continuously over and over um as its base design even if some people choose to do that
we're just counting
things that's at least a starting point
um gentlemen
yeah I think sort of it's sort of key to what you're saying certainly online is one of the first things I think of but I think that's sort of required for the

next bit which is that the game continually evolves with the player is you're constantly getting more uh like regular updates and those regular updates are changing both with what you know the designers and developers are looking to put in but also on often feedback from the player. So there's a loop there in the service that it's you know what are players playing what do they like the developers look at that and then include that or integrate that into the next next sort of updates that go and those updates do have to be at a regular cadence I think otherwise you don't doesn't really feel like it's being like the game has like a service so to speak. Yeah, I I agree. I think the the regularness of the updates is something that really separates sort of good live service from from more poor live service. I think having having stuff come out on a regular cadence, even an expected cadence, like for Idol Champions, we have a new event that starts always on the first Wednesday of every month. And so players have come to expect that they get to the first Wednesday and they get a new event. And it's it's wonderful and great except for when that falls on a holiday [laughter]

uh which it just did in July here for Canada Day and at the beginning of the year for New Year's Day. But you know that sticking to that expected cadence I think is something that uh
you can come back to that cadence and always get something new.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean I would I would define it a little differently I guess. I would define it around the monetization schema. Like I think you know there's lots of uh you know history in the video game industry of fire and forget of a premium game where you pay once and you have it and you're done. And maybe it gets patched if it's needs to or breaks but I wouldn't exactly call that live service gaming. I would call that oops we made a mistake and need to patch something. Um and I think you know the premium model is differentiated from an ongoing relationship you have with the the customer to continually engage and uh pay. And I think that that has forced game designers to think in odd ways about how to deliver fun. Sometimes in wonderful ways, sometimes in really constrained and awkward, you know, free

I'm thinking now freeto play in app purchase kinds of, you know, ongoing relationships. And the typically, right, you're working with business minds who are trying to figure out how to make this live service experience fun for the player and an ongoing revenue stream for the game maker. And so those have to kind of counterbalance in the world of game design. You've got product managers looking around going, "How do I maximize the the money I'm going to make on this?" And then as a as a game design leader, you've got to figure out how to answer that call with the player first in mind. like how do I make sure I don't mess this up for the player while delivering a reason for them to continue subscribing or buying inapp purchases or buying soft currency or hard currency to get more fun out of the experience and that that is the service right that might mean you know live events that might mean seasonal stuff that might mean new features sometimes it might even mean patches but it's really in an effort to keep your customers keep your

players coming back and engaging uh as as uh not just players but as fans and customers. I think
all right.
I I think that's really interesting because I think that's uh I think that's very very true for freetoplay titles, but I do wonder about how you define live service with a game like No Man's Sky, which obviously came out as a premium game. Hasn't had any, you know, uh major DLC that I'm aware of, but is still doing regular what I would call live service to that game. Um, you know, over the last however many years it's been out. or even games like you mentioned earlier like Slay the Spire, you know, that that is, you know, it's early access, so there's a little bit of a different kind of animal there. But, uh, there are certainly premium games that put out free content on a regular basis to try and keep people involved. Obviously, it's still built around monetization. Their goal is to get new people to engage. Uh, but a lot of that content is for existing players and keeping those people engaged as well. In

fairness to our discussion, uh, and not to to squash this point, I I do think it is difficult to include No Man's Sky in this conversation simply because No Man's Sky is like the exception writ large to like 12 different rules about designing and releasing video games. There is an ongoing meme uh of um the you know uh of Shawn kicking of like Shawn kicking in the door and being like, "It's free update time." And you're like, "No, please Sean, I [laughter] have money. I can pay you. Let me pay you. AND HE'S LIKE, "NO, IT'S A FREE UPDATE." RIGHT? Like it's it is very I think by everyone's admission weird, right? In in some ways. I don't know. I just I have I have a special soft spot for No Man's Sky and how bizarre it is. Something Kenny brought up though that I think a lot of people probably don't realize is that um internally for the teams doing it, there is almost always a push back back and forth and it's usually the design team

that are the advocates for the players. Um I mean I mean the whole group company is theoretically the advocate for the player in some ways but in the same way that like on a schedule you know the producer and the art director talk about what can get in and kind of that push back of back and forth is what makes it into the game. There is often a product or a monetization team or somebody whose job it is is to think, you know, maximization that has that relationship with kind of the designer to figure out where that happy spot is to keep it from swinging one way or the other. Like remember a while ago we were talking about when Riot launched um what was their freeto play um not League not um
Valerant or
No, it was their um
2X KO 2X KO is the fighting game and
casual Legends Run Terra.
Yeah,
they gave so much away in Legends of Rune Terra. Nobody felt everybody wanted well people wanted to give them money but there was nothing to give them money

for and they because they designed the monetization side so poorly because Riot was used to designing monetization in a different way. So on the like fund to monetization the fund was cranked over without the monetization push back and so they had a really hard time monetizing that game because they' basically been way too permissive. Um they just gave you everything.
Yeah. And so like and will it was such an exception that will and I actually had a whole design club talking about that
years ago.
So there is that back and forth kind of internal team for what actually happens. And almost none of that is ever visible to the players because our job is to put together a cohesive thing and get it out, not let them watch hours and hours of backroom back and forth. Well, and so to to Kenny's point where it's really deeply rooted in monetization, um would would something like the Sims series or Paradox games, games that have um that routine update release cadence, right?

Uh that we were talking about, but also that it is always a premium fire and forget style purchase, but there's a consistency with which they're released that almost approaches that live service. Are are are we where do we fall on that? Do those count? Do those not? Are those a side branch? Are those like
closely related but a different family?
I I feel like they're probably closely related but different. The I think the live part of it is the thing that kind of differentiates. I think live service happens more frequently and the sort of DLC drops are
lessent. Cadence I think cadence is an important part. If you're getting an update every 3 months with like a DLC patch, that's way different than, you know, the weekly or bi-weekly or you know that the that you see on actual live service games where if you're gone for a month and come back in, you're going to expect to see multiple new things have happened.

Yeah. It's part almost feels like and I'm just trying to reconcile it in my mind that the live part feels like that you know you've signed it and and I know there's probably caveat or like exceptions here but it feels like you're playing a game you've logged in you have an account it's got a server the devs are making changes and those the frequency of those changes might be like a big release at a regular basis but hey maybe something special is happening tomorrow and you live you log in and it's there and it's live because the platform that you're on is is living which I maybe isn't quite the meaning of this of the term because it feels like live service might just mean like hey you've got regular updates there's still the game is still alive but I do feel like there's this this like uh I don't know the best word for it is but when you log in and something could be different and it's sort of it's and it could just be the things you expect or it could be something that isn't expected but it's just something they did that day like things are small things are changing more frequently large things are changing less frequently but everything is still changing and moving and living I guess
I want to hear from Kenny and then I want to throw in a definition for all three of you which is going to sound really silly But I think it we might

nail it. Kenny, what were you gonna say? Because I could see
I was sort of gonna build on the sort of um No Man's Sky being an outlier thing and just draw a connection between something you can do. Look, No Man's Sky comes out and they're like, "This could be better. This could be different. This could get more people loving it if we could keep working on it, but it's already out there." And so they figured out a way to do that, as you said, will to get more people buying the game and and more people loving it. And and I think that's a passion play to a certain extent. It's like they just love their game and they know that it can be better and so they keep working on it, right? What's cool about live service games as I'm defining it is you can do a feature and you can AB test it and you can release it into some cohort and go, "Oh, this isn't working." And some exec might come and go, "Oh, it's not working. It's not good. Kill it." And you might go, "No, no, no, no. Let me know Man's Sky this like give me a little bit of time to rework this because and and I've seen this where teams rework something because they're off by a couple variables. They're off on how long this the event runs. they're off on, you

know, whether it runs the day or the night or the weekend or they're run they're off on something really uh that they need to test and when they get it right suddenly it raises KPI and gets people more engaged or monetizing more or playing more game rounds or whatever it is. And um I think when you look at like No Man's Sky or even Slay the Spire, I don't quite understand how they or why they do it, but they're outliers to a certain extent. But in live service games, that's your daily bread and butter. You're not doing it because that's who I'm passionate about. You're doing it because you need to find ways to keep growing uh the the game and you feel close. So, you're not ready to kill it. And I think that's probably writ large what folks like I mean No Man's Sky said, "Look, let's keep investing. We think there's a win here." Um and that's brave and cool and creatively driven.
Anyway,
yeah. The the the thing with No Man's Sky that is also quite interesting is that they've been quite upfront that they are using the No Man's Sky audience and the game as a test bed for the

technology that's going to run their next game, Light No Fires.
Well, that might be a part of what defines Live Silver Games, right? Is telemetry, data collection, and sort of building out of what your player you being able to understand what your players are doing, not by just asking them, but by kind of gathering telem, you know, data and then being able to modify based on that. Okay, I think I have a back of the napkin definition that will let us move on to the next question.
It is a live service game if you see a holiday event, a Halloween event, a New Year's event, and something in the sprint. [laughter]
That's all only four? I don't know.
At least. But like Slay the Spire, No Man's Sky, other games like that don't have those. every live service game I can think of starts pulling in holiday or other things that happen. It's not a perfect definition, but I think if you had to like take 20 games and say, are these live service or not? If you ran that test, you would be pretty accurate

with your results based on what came out.
You might have one wrong in either direction. fight
out of those 20.
Yeah,
it that doesn't make it a live service game, but it's an easy flag of this game is a live service game versus this game isn't.
Yeah. I mean, I I guess is one of the questions about a live service game like how frequently player we want players to play them because that that was kind of a thing that came across my like the DLC versus live updates is like for us here like live service games that we do are games that we we you know allow the space for people to log in and play that game every single day. Whereas like a Sims update, you're going to log in, you're going to play with it for for a week or two, and then you're going to put it away until the next one comes out. And similar with No Man's Sky, you know, I'm gonna the new exciting thing comes out, I'm going to log in, I'm going to play that for a bit, and then I'm going to put the game down until the next one comes out. Whereas like with a with a, you know, a mobile freetoplay game that's uh that's live service or one of our games, you know, there's

opportunities to log in every single day, you know, collect your daily updates, see what's new this week, uh, and just, you know, continuously play for months and months on end. And now we're seeing, you know, phenomenon of daily puzzle, daily plays, you know, from sort of born out of, I think, the New York Times, frankly, but like this idea that
that, you know, I I have sort of ritual game ritual games on my phone or habit games, games I play maybe when I wake up and go to the bathroom or I'm on the subway every day [clears throat] and
solve your puzzle, catch your Pokemon, do your daily
talking about like connections.
Yeah. connections. Yeah, I mean I don't know the New York Times one.
I think that's right. I think in one of the key measurements that that at least games of service and mobile use is is day two retention, day three retention. How how much do people come back every day? And how are you designing for for that kind of um daily fun, you know,

daily gratification or or or daily checkin, right? That's another place where like it starts to bleed over out of freeto play where you get a game like like a good example of a daily puzzle is like Mini Motorways. I play I played that for a while and that's got a daily puzzle and they're also putting out new maps uh in you know somewhat frequently.
Does that bleed over into but I can see how they would motivate each other, right? Like if your objective is to get people to come back and play every day, then how do you do that? Well, you do that by continually giving fresh content and fresh content is part of the live update service sort of cycle. And so by having this this desire to keep people interested every day, give them something new every day means you're creating new content, which means you're live servicing it.
Yeah.
Is there something to the to the difference between procedurally generated daily content and bespoke designed daily content? Right. That is to say that there are plenty of rogue likes um or puzzle games like mini motorways that have um I don't I don't know about mini motorways, but I do know

that for many rogue likes the daily is procedurally generated that there is an algorithm which generates a daily every day and everyone gets the same one on the same seed and that is the daily play mechanic but it's not bespoke. It's not um custom generated new content that's based on telemetry or data. It's just something that's baked into the way that the game works. Is is is that a difference that we could work with?
I mean, I I definitely would say
I think that's a fair
procedural is not live. It's
Yeah. Someone's not actively working on making your experience different or better.
Yeah.
Okay. So,
that actually tailor nicely into kind of like how designing live service games is different than designing others. Because for example, one of the big things about every live service game I can think of is in some way they're all number go up games that they are games that over time you know players need feedback for as they keep playing that they're making progression. Progression is a thing that we've seen is very engaging and for a

lot of games running out of progression tells you game is over. Like when you hit max level on game, right as you hit final boss or other things like it is one of the key indicators that says oh you have finished the game you know you have finished your progression and so we've learned from live service games to find ways that lets progression keep going number keep going up because otherwise people kind of think it's done and it's a continual thing to chase and feel good that you're continuing to make progression.
Can I say something about this? I am going to have to go kind of soon. Yeah,
apologies to everybody, but my daughter's college orientation is happening pretty soon. I'm going to have to jump.
Um I I think this is right, but I think you know what we see is a lot of ways to kind of leverage the psychology of progression to make it stronger in in live service games. The obvious ones are like streaks. Don't break your streak, you know. um collection. You as you

progress you get a collection, but I wish there were more uh I'm going to get on my soap box for a minute. I wish there were more innovation and more kind of uh imaginative thinking around how to solve this problem, Jeff, that you're bringing up because um I think what tends to happen at least in mobile and I bet this is true in in most of the the game industry is there's a kind of everybody to the right side of the boat thinking like you look out at the at the market and see what's working in the competitor space for a live service event or a feature that drives progression, right? or makes it more than just number go up and you see it works in game X. So you have people who are measuring that looking at that and going d-risking it do what they do and the problem with that is that each game has its kind of own soul. I you don't want to the danger is you're like importing someone else's soul into your game. You have to sort of ask what's authentic to your game first. Like I've been in conversations about like social fabric and Candy Crush. Like I think it's it's a really interesting

question. Social fabric is really important. Um, but it's not authentically a multiplayer game the way say Clash of Clans is or or Clash Royale is, right? And so you have to kind of keep in mind what's true, what's at the heart of your game because it's a little bit horses for courses. And what you don't want to do is just bolt on or staple on things that you're seeing across the industry and assume that if it worked there, boom, it's going to work there. And as design leaders, I feel like we have to encourage designers to think how do I create how do I integrate [clears throat] this holistically from a design perspective? Thinking about what does the player enjoy about my game? What does the player thinking when they're in my game world? What's true to this game? What metaphors can I build on? What kind of uh um you know mental models can I use to make that feature that worked in Clash of Clans or worked in I don't know any other game work here without feeling like it's stapled on? Because if it's stapled on the player starts to play it, they put it in their mouth and they taste it and they taste staples. And

what do is it should be invisible to them. It should be like this is exactly in line with where I think I am and what I love about this game. And that takes a little extra finesse from game designers beyond just the look over there, see what they're doing, you know, to build around authenticity. And I think the correlary to this is if you do it right, and I'm sorry, I'm going to get off my soap box in a minute.
Do it. No, do it.
If you do it right, it leads to innovation, right? And and I think, you know, some of the areas that we explored in Candy Crush for this were like discovery. Like what if you people think they're on a map in Candyland, but they don't. It really just number go up, number go up. What if you put an event on the map? And for that we, you know, bubblegum volcano is on the map. What does that mean? Is it going to blow up? I got to get there. And I think that kind of uh discovery, the kind of urgency, the kind of use of narrative or or how do you make a collection because collection is a very powerful way to build off of number go up. Jeff, how do you make it not just another card collection that you see in all of the

every casual game of mobile games. How do you differentiate it? How do you innovate? And I think when you build out of the authenticity of the framework of what people love about your game, it leads to innovation. It leads to features that sustain, that get people logging in all the time, feeling that emotional engagement, not just with the fun in the moment, but the sort of regularity and the sort of allegiance to that experience that, you know, is is uh just builds more. Anyway, that's I'll get off my soap box now, but that's kind of what I was thinking when you said never go up.
I I 100% agree with everything you just said and you reminds me once again of why I enjoy getting to hang out with you on the few times a year we get to hang out.
Yeah. Uh I think to to sort of piggyback on that, it does feel like
real quick, Kenny, are you here for a bit more or do you have to bounce?
Keep going. I'll let you know when I got to go. I'm going to text my daughter right now. he's on with them, but so far it's preliminaries.

Um, I think that one of the important things to note is that everything Kenny is saying is like broadly true of the idea of designing a game, but is more persistently and consistently true of live service, right? That like when you're building a fire and forget, right? You you lock it in, you have the gold master version or whatever 1.0 know is and then you hit it to Steam and you say go live and you might end up with like a 1.1 or like maybe a 1.2 but that's it's locked versus something um that demands constant innovation, right? That demands a constant conversation and relationship that maintains that like the the design um the design content schedule like Justin was saying, right? there there's that ongoing um need to innovate constantly in your space. Would that would that seem to be like one of the the biggest I guess signpost structural differences between designing a live service game and

designing for fire and forget? I mean, I don't really know in fireforget how much user acquisition and rorowass like is calculated into you know when you're leading design or creative direction or CPI but like it's such a like death match out there for user acquisition costs and you know you have to stand out in the market and otherwise you're you know all of these obstacles end up in front of what you've built and and of course what you want is to get your game out there. And so to me, I think that yes, that is that is like key that you need to kind of be designing in a in an I mean, and we're seeing it now, right? We're seeing like like that game scrutum like is that what called scrutum these screw games suddenly have like in mobile casual become like a thing and it's because they kind of innovated or pixel what's that one? Pixel Flow like there these games that have sort of come in a little bit out of nowhere and stolen market

share from what was a few years ago everything was match three match three maybe merge um and I think you know you got to keep your eye on what's different and new and capturing the new market you can't just keep doing the same thing and so yeah I think innovation is is key to standing out in the market I don't know what it's like in in you know you guys at code names how you experience this but I definitely experience it when I see people copying I get skeptical.
Yeah. I mean I definitely think innovation is is a big part of of keeping something keeping something alive. But I also think like just going back to the progression like I think that's kind of the biggest challenge of live service is just having something to do having having a new thing to to to um to finish. And I think those two things kind of go hand inand where you know the same old same old like our youngest live service game is nine years old. Uh we've been working on it for 9 years. So like

it doesn't have all the new fancy bells and whistles that new games have coming out. And so we're constantly looking for ways to uh to innovate on
what started as a 9-year-old base game, which I think is its own set of challenges as well. But looking at the new stuff that comes out and trying to put that into the game, you can't just to your point, you can't just slot it in that in. It doesn't. Yeah.
And I think a really good example of that, and this is something that a lot of games have done, is when we kind of went through this battle pass era where everyone wanted to put a battle pass into their game and everyone put seasons into their game. And we're guilty. We put seasons into our game for for a brief period of time um and uh totally hosed our monetization for a little bit because we didn't do it well and we didn't innovate enough on it and we didn't match it to the structure of our game well enough for it to uh to work really well.
Yeah. I mean it really changed the sort of the gameplay incentives and then it changed the way the players were playing because of that and then it changed like Yeah. So
definitely didn't fit right into the

game but
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can't just copy paste from other games. No matter how well those things, you know, no matter how much money Fortnite is making [laughter] in their battle pass, you can't just drop one into any game and have it make a million dollars.
Well,
and it's tricky, too, because especially if you have a game that just came out, people are learning how to play it. If you have a game that's been out a year, they're like, but that's different than a game that's say 5 or 10 years old. Because if you have players in a in a 10-year-old game, you're going to have players who started last week. You're also gonna have players that started two years ago, five years ago, and 10 years ago,
but you're gonna have a huge amount of the audience that kind of knows what they expect out of the game as they play it. And changing that is tricky. It's one of the reasons that you see like so few MMOs like there's been case studies on a couple of MMOs that did massive redesigns and only one of them I believe has ever succeeded because the people who were playing it kind of like the way it is
and trying to design it to capture a bigger audience often does very poorly

because the people who already tried it and didn't like it left and the people who liked it stayed and you don't always get a second chance to kind of redo. So even adding new things into an older game, it's doing it in such a way that engages and meshes with the people who like the game that you've already designed
because you're not trying to radically change it up at that point. You're trying to continue to service that audience and give them things that they really like and enjoy.
Yeah. I think one thing that's actually quite interesting on the battle pass uh design and it kind of goes back to something that you mentioned earlier which is that sort of uh contention well maybe contention is not quite the right word but the push and pull between design and monetization and fun like the designers being sort of the advocate for sort of player fun. Um, and I think what ended up so certainly for us with the battle pass setup was that season pass um, ended up being something that the players actually really quite enjoyed playing and it got a lot of like extra

content from it. Um, but it was probably far more on the like the push and pull from design got pulled too far under the design side and meant that it didn't it wasn't um, functioning as an actual like hey this is going to make a sustainable um, like game going forward if we continue it like this. So I think that the players actually really liked it. The change was good from a hey we're liking this but not good from a hey this is creating a sustainable game that can carry on sort of in that live service sense. So sort of it has that push and pull in design. It's sort of super really important that that gets balanced otherwise you can make a game that's really fun for a short period of time um but then doesn't support itself and then obviously that ends up being well bad for everybody because then you don't have your game anymore. But
yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if we're talking about tenants of live service games, the the the main tenant is it needs to bring in enough money to be able to support that long that long-term uh live service, which yeah, that's you know, we were talking earlier about Run Terra and similar issues with our kind of season stuff is, you know, we it starts to not

be able to support itself.
Yeah. And one of the interesting things that um actually a lot of people may not know is that um especially for larger studios, the team that builds the game is often not the team that ends up running the live game.
And that um there is often, though not always, a different set of skills in let's build a fun game versus let's continue to think about how we could expand this game along its original skeleton for the next decade. And some people are good at both, but I've met any number of dev parts of dev teams who are good at one, but not good at the other.
And so, especially for large studios, like I guarantee you the live team for Grand Theft Auto 6 has already been spun up and is getting ready, but is completely has a very small ven diagram overlap from the people building kind of the core parts of the game. And that's often because also there are different teams needed for continuing and maintaining a

game versus building the initial set of it.
Yeah, I always worry about that. I It's really complicated also when you're like you have a different a team with different talent skills, but you do have to design for the live operation of the game. Like
you have to at least put in those hooks and
the handoffs. I mean there are expertise I suppose that you know you get these people who are really good at discovery and prototyping and getting something finding the fun and then you want to move them on to the next thing but you got to make sure that if it's going live they've designed it with that in in mind but yeah one other aspect of live service that I think is sort of controversial and interesting is is the notion of more than one player is there in the in the game. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean it's combat or it's a sport or an esport, but but the notion of community is there. whether there's an opportunity to compete or collaborate or compare. It feels like live service

gaming has opened that world up whether it's through early MMOs and you know social the social fabric and um you know that that is I think really obvious to you guys because you all work in that space but it's less obvious in the world of of mobile casual puzzle games where I think the integration has sometimes been awkward of of those elements or lean too hard into competition when maybe collaboration would have been more appealing to that market. And I, you know, I don't know that this is an area that's been fully like excavated or or figured out. But um but I do think it's part of at least the opportunity index when you're talking about live service games. You how do you make it feel like the place to be where everyone's playing and where it's it's like fun to kind of join in a community or hang with my people or my my tribe?
It's funny. I've actually been replaying Pokémon Go again recently because my child is the right age that he and I are

exploring it and they just had their 10th anniversary. And that to me is a game that actually has handled their live service community really well. Like players get together to do raids. It is only beneficial to have other players around. You can trade with them. You can catch with them. You're not competing for resources. It's always a kind of a value ad. And for the 10th anniversary, we went down to our local mall recently and in like the central fountain area, you could see large numbers of people playing Pokémon Go, jumping in for these huge raids they were doing. And everybody was just having a good time and feeling good about other people being there. And it was a fun sense of community. It actually reminded me of some of the early Pokémon Go days where you'd see groups walking around the malls like in packs like hitting the different spins on the refresh rates. And um it was just fun to see like I'd kind of forgotten about that live as because that's a game you actually have to show up live live. So, their live service is actually incorporates part of the live part of

live service, meaning live event, in-person ones, and it kind of stretches through like all the different aspects of how we design some of the games um and get the community in so that it is a plus as opposed to, you know, you're always having to go after the other player. Yeah, I feel like Pokémon Go is a great example of like that duality of like there's a PvP aspect and there's a there's an active PvP, there's a passive PvP in the gym holding and then there's um group PVE in the raids, right? And it sort of encompasses both that collaborative and that competitive thing versus something like
all I can think of is Dolingo, right? where like you've got a leaderboard and like you have to learn language better than your friend Timmy does or you won't be as cool as Timmy is and like wait why why are we doing this? Why are why am I competing with Timmy to learn more French? I don't I don't fully understand

like that mismatch feels like it it is a major potential stumbling block. That's actually well remember we were talking about the um procedural content of some games like say slay the spy or monster train where they have their daily challenges.
I think that is an interesting thing because everybody's going for the same one. Nobody in the community has incentive to like team up and say this is how we solve today's seed because everybody's trying to get the highest score on that seed and then it refreshes and it's the next thing. So they keep some of the ongoing content. I think a lot of the live service games at this point have incorporated in ways for players to team up together, talk to each other about like in Idol Champions, I remember reading message boards about what was the best setup to like hit this quest line, you know, push past this point, you know, what because Idle Champions is also a puzzle game on formation and other things. So like I remember reading forums back when I was a very active player on that and it's

just same kind of thing. Kenny, are there I assume there are forums on Candy Crush that give advice for particular styles or segments of the game as you get to them.
Yeah, I mean there tens of millions of fans and players. There's all kinds of both, you know, forums and both, you know, company monitored ones, face, you know, social media and then also all kinds of, you know, non-monitored n conversations and there's wikis. It's like a, you know, very big fan base for it. um wasn't my why like I didn't really you know monitor that stuff on the daily base. I think there were people from uh I don't know I don't know how that was monitored or or um um you know for me the more important piece was always consumer insights with player insights you know what are what are people saying about what they want
in your experience actually for all three of you how accurate is that insight because one of the problems that

I encounter on Twitch is that and and and this is also true of YouTube Brad Janet Please listen to the whole thing. The audience is kind of stupid. Each individual person very smart. The whole audience together has no idea what they want, right? Like if you take a poll for like what the audience as a whole wants, you will generally get an answer that is not useful in the slightest, at least in my field. Is that is that true? Does that do you do you aggregate that that um player feedback to get something useful? Are individual pieces more useful? How how do you feel about that? How how useful is direct player feedback on what players want like to to you and your work? I mean,
I I think the most important thing that that we as designers can remember when we're when we're taking in player feedback and and trying to use that to

determine what to prioritize is that uh every single player is an individual player and your players are not just one glob of people uh who are all thinking the same thing. Uh it's very easy to get sucked down that rabbit hole if you go and like you're reading like Steam reviews or something and you you're only reading the negative ones and you're like, "Oh my god, these people don't understand what they're talking about or they're like you don't like the game, but don't leave a review. Like what are you doing?" Um and [clears throat] so I think that uh it's taking a step back and being like, "Okay, there's there's different types of people playing this game. There's people who have been playing this game for nine years. They're like super endgame players. all they care about is this one very specific thing that they've been optimizing for 5 years. And then there's players who just started playing it yesterday. And those players are going to want very different things. And I think one of the big challenges is how do you service all of those people at the same time or how do you prioritize who you service if you don't have the

resources to service everyone at the same time.
Yeah. And I think also like determining like sort of in that same vein of like what's sort of a very you can end up with a very vocal minority on certain parts of the game% you know everyone in the game is really happy about it but one you know small set is very unhappy about it and the people who are happy they're well they're happy they're not it's that uh sort of what's the name for the bias where people you look at the box of uh suggestions at the doctor's office and it's all negative and you'd think it was is that that whatever that I remember what the name of that bias is but basically you you don't hear from the people who were happy and then if you change it and it'd be like you know maybe you have 90% of the players who actually really didn't like that uh that that was changed like they liked it the way it was. So it be very thoughtful in how we discern feedback to make sure that we're listening to something that is
um going to be a positive for the player base at large if we make that change.
Yeah, I think it's very dangerous to ever take player feedback at face value. I think you got it depends on the feedback.
You got you got to have it backed up by

something else. I have a slightly different like alchemy that I like to use here which is um if you're trying to set course maybe you call it vision maybe you call it design target maybe you call it even more detailed specification whatever uh consumer insights or player insights are one really important seat at the table. They're really they're one very important voice that you want to include because ultimately you're looking for some sort of magical alchemy of what the vision pillars are for where you're headed. And that alchemy isn't just I'm the creative director. I know how I know exactly what you should build. Just listen to me and I'll tell you. Um because you might actually have a really good idea, but it's going to get better when it's sharpened and and mixed up in the soup with the people who are the day-to-day stakeholders or the people who are like hammering and nailing it every day or the people who are talking to the customers every day or the customers themselves. And so like my

view of this is listen to each other. Like I always tell the teams, be the Beatles. Like you're not Everything I learned about making games I learned from playing in a rock band. Jeff knows I'm a musician, but like you gota listen to the bass player, you got to listen to the drummer. Like you can't just be I'm the lead singer and I'm going to tell you how it goes. Like it gets shaped in that magical kind of team listening to each other and building on each other's ideas to get the right answer. And so player insights, consumer insights, what are the players saying is one really important piece of that. Sometimes it's the driving force. If it's like unanimously people are saying X, I want to listen to that and then but you don't just want to listen to it and then go give them what they say they want. You want to think about the things I was talking about before like how do you authentically integrate that into what keeps the game soul protected and alive? Or or another way to put it, like if you just add everything that every player wants, you're going to create the most cacophinous experience and you're going

to push players out, right? So even though they say they want X and Y and Z and you put them all in and they're going to be like, "This sucks. I can't make heads or tails of this. There's too much going on." So you gota you got to kind of both include it and also make sure that you're also including your own hypotheses, your own intuition, your own craft, right? Because most of the time, well, to your point, it's not that the internet is stupid or people are stupid or people are wrong. It's that they're not experts in the craft. They're they're fans. They love and they know really very much in their heart why they love it. And so, you want to listen to that in my opinion. Well, would it also be fair to say that there is, and these two things tend to get lumped together conceptually when we talk about it, even though they're two very different concepts, the sentiment of something that is versus desire for a thing that could be are two very different kinds of feedback that like players, if you run an event and you ask the players what

they thought about the event, they'll give you an answer. But if you ask the players about the event and how they would make the event better, you will get a very different answer that may be more or less useful. In my experience, generally less, right? But there's a difference between active sentiment analysis of a concrete experience versus asking players to theorize. Asking players to theorize feels like the dangerous one to me because then they get their hopes up for something that you never promised them and then they get disappointed when you don't magically give them the thing. Yes, I'm talking about specific things. Yes, this is a Final Fantasy 14 playerbased call out. I see you. I'm part of you. I know this is a problem.
Yeah, I mean I definitely agree. I think when players are looking at an experience that exists, then they can often times very much like readily identify pain points in those that are things of like, hey, this would be better if you made this like this or this like that. But asking sort of more like theoretical this feature doesn't exist. I think it gets tough because

often times because they're not an expert in the craft there's a bunch of constraints on that that they don't recognize are there and then it's like well actually we can't do that for XYZ like it's just so um yeah but I definitely think and something that we do constantly which is listen to feedback on things that are like concrete things and then list them out and and something that we do on on our live stream uh and then mark those things and then put them in and get them adjusted based on um what makes sense. sense to us. So, obviously not everything that comes through, but when we get a a feedback and it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's that's a good suggestion, you know, and then, you know, obviously time being a big limiting factor for how much we can get done, but um I I think players I like are very good at identifying pain points in system setups, ways that make it easier to do things like, hey, I'd really like it if this was one click instead of seven or whatever." [laughter] Okay, we don't do not quite that bad, but lots of stuff like that. Um,
don't you guys also feel like it's not just player insights where you this sort of phenomenon happens or consumer

insights, it's also data.
So like you get data that comes you know I don't know my experience is you might partner with a really smart really great product manager or product director and they're looking at the player insights and they're looking at the data and then they're coming at you and saying hey we have to address this but they don't always have a hypothesis. So it becomes like this really open blank canvas and you know I think where we sometimes want to derisk something is go well the data says so let's do what the data is telling us and but we don't come in with a creative hypothesis that's based on yeah craft intuition [clears throat] I don't know artistry or something or elegance I don't know what the word but hypothesis is probably the best it's the most helpful thing I think for the PMs right or the product directors if you say well let's let's talk about what our hypothesis is and then do the design work rather than just react
to, you know, data and pivot everything. I mean, sometimes it's obvious and you

go, okay, this didn't work. It broke. Let's But I think that hypothesis is sometimes skipped.
That's actually a thing I'd really love to talk about, too. Like I have seen this in not just game design but almost every creative endeavor I've ever worked is that there are groups of people and it's very easy to do that come in with designing a solution before they've realized what the problem is. Like they'll you'll kind of hear a thing you're like oh well we could obviously fix it with this and they they start thinking from design whether they're designers or not rather than pulling back to say what is it we're actually trying to do let's design towards that. you know, they might come in and say, "We've seen battle passes are great. Let's put them in without thinking about what is the purpose of a battle pass? Why do we do them?" You know, and like pulling back, having that big philosophical discussion of what does it solve, what does it do, what teams does it impact, how does it affect monetization, all of these other things, and then like recompiling that in how does it work on our game, whether it be

battle passes or progression or any number of things. like it's easy to start from a design first, not a problem first uh perspective.
Yeah, I I really agree with that and I I think like the bringing a solution to uh without fully understanding the problem I think that kind of backs up a little bit to like you know player suggestions on things often players um when you get feedback will try to suggest a solution um to a problem that hasn't really they haven't thought about what the problem is. is and when I think you bring the I think bringing a problem to like a a team of designers who know what they're doing, they can then solve that problem in a better way than trying to just feed them a solution. Um yeah, I kind of drives me nuts when people come with a solution without talking about the problem first. It's
especially tricky in in the world of technology, right, where we have there's always new technologies that are cool and neat and like you end up having solutions that for things that aren't a problem because

you look, oh wow, this is so cool. We can do this. But you people never ask, yeah, but why are we doing it? You know, like what's the problem we're trying to solve? I find myself in a weird way some days missing good old-fashioned product positioning. Um, like back in the day when I worked at Mattel, they had this elaborate marketing organization that was focused around, you know, what's the consumer positioning for this game, this feature. And by positioning, they were talking about really the language that they use in the market to describe it to the player, to the cons, to the buyer.
Can you give an example?
Well, for Mattel, yeah, you know, I worked in kids games and there was this whole line of products called Reader Rabbit. We rabbit kindergarten. And we were at first grade, we were out at second grade. And once you got to third grade, like kids were like, "Read a rabbit is stupid." You know, cuz you're third now. You're cool. You're in a third grader. You don't want to play Rita Rabbit. And so we needed something that graduated up, you know, from from the third graders to the from the second graders to the third graders that wasn't

going to be reader rabbit. And so I had to work really closely. I was the head creative on this. It was a new brand, a new initiative. And meantime, Jumpstart was doing like jump start first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. And they because they didn't have a story brand that they needed to worry about, they could just pivot when you got to third grade. It could be cooler and different and edgier. And so I had to kind of get a lot of help from my marketing partner on what the positioning, how we were going to broadcast this or explain that to the parents and the kids became an exercise in defining the positioning of the product in the marketplace that then I could step back, understand, digest and design from out back from. And at some point around the advent of data and zinga and sort of we lost that kind of traditional product marketing in games, we became much more about, you know, PMs driving data driven work. And and that's don't get me wrong, I think data is super important, but I think we've lost some of that uh good old-fashioned prioritization of like how

do you position a product in the marketplace? And we don't have as many tools as we used to or exercises that we can do to make sure we're really clear on that and aligned on that before we spend a lot of time designing or let um or building it.
Yeah. Good old marketing. We can figure out what people want designing that instead of making a thing first then figuring out how to market it.
Yeah. Or back to one of you said it maybe I said, you know, a solution without a problem. Like what do the people want? At least have a hypothesis there and then define it before you spend a lot of time building it. I I I now am having vivid flashbacks to jump start third and fourth grade, which were both significantly edgier than jump start second grade. Third was robots. Fourth was your classmates have been turned into frogs by a witch. Uh
okay. So I'm I'm like so old that I'm I'm You're my target market from back then. Is that what is that possible? So we
maybe [laughter] maybe
we ended up doing this thing called the Cluteinders which was like third, fourth, and fifth grade. Like that was

the that was it came out of like research, you know, the kids really like Indiana Jones. They really like Babysitters Club. They like these things where kids are off on their own solving adventures, you know, spies. And so that's where
that helped us position the the creative.
Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Uh I had another I had a follow-up question to what was it? See, I got flashbanged with nostalgia for my childhood. Uh, so [laughter] you know, um,
we didn't play any of those.
Well, Rita Rabbit. I played Raider Rabbit when I was a kid. [laughter]
Mountain, the super uh, the the sleuth.
Reminds me, I taught you how to read. [laughter]
So, okay.
I learned to read before I got computers. So,
I learned I learned to read because it was very inconvenient to have to have someone else help me play Loom. It was very inconvenient because I wanted to play Loom all by myself. Thank

you very much. And I also learned to read from Magic the Gathering, but I'm weird. Um,
I I won't say letting my child play Pokémon Go as an encouragement to learn more words so that he he can read the quests and other things is not part of my game designer mind. Like,
yeah. Uh, okay. So, so here's here's my question, right? So we've got this um this problem that is uh pretty prevalent in technology today where we have solutions in search of a problem. That's one whole thing. We also have this need to continuously innovate sort of this and and maintain the heart of a thing. How how much of a of a um how much of a stumbling block is it when you're doing minor innovations to not like how much of your time spent designing new feature X is spent on designing the feature versus scoping it to make sure it's not a

solution in search of a problem and making sure that It maintains the heart because it feels like th the the combination of those three things is really what differentiates like the ongoing work of the day-to-day designing for new content, right? Like what what do you think the breakdown of that is or or is it a breakdown or all of those things constantly in mind as a synthetic hole and that is what it is to design for live service? Does that make sense?
[clears throat]
I think it's going to be a team by team, game by game, even patchby pass basis. Like I'm coming in from having designed MMOs for a long time. And like our content drops were very consistent, but you know, we would have long-term goals cuz we'd be having the game out. We'd have a team working on the live service and a team working on the expansions. And we'd all be talking back and forth together because the expansions didn't want to do things that interrupted the live service and vice versa. And you needed certain things coming out for each one. And you know, maybe one week

you had two or one patch you had two weeks to work on these three things and another might be one big thing over the like it goes back and forth. At least in from the games I worked on, it was never standardized. It was based on what was coming up and what had surfaced to the front, you know, or what I as a lead designer or, you know, maybe had come in from product or even, you know, from management. Hey guys, if we're going to keep everybody employed, we need to raise, you know, revenue by 10% over the next three months. Like, that's a very good goal. Let's keep everybody on the team here. Okay, how do we do that and still feel good? Like, there's always different things coming in,
you know?
I I think it's a process question. I think you can fix this at the process level. Your studio can have processes to um make sure you're asking those kind of questions at the right time. so that you don't go down the rabbit hole of building something that's cool for us as

the builders but doesn't have an audience because that can be really expensive and you know and if it's innovative and new and built on a new technology it could actually not work. I've had that experience too where like this is cool new technology wow let's build it and not only does the audience not care but then you hit technical obstacles that you didn't see because it's a new technology. So yeah, I think that it's a and I you know I think the studios I've worked with tend to be good about having those processes in place so you don't fall down those rabbit holes and you ask the right questions in the right order to avoid that. But, you know, I think now we're seeing it somewhat, especially with some of the new technologies we're seeing in the landscape, right? How do you use AI, for example, in the right way? So, it's not just a it's cool, so let's put it in, you know, like what do [clears throat] you what is what's the right answer there? And and I think um I think those kinds of processes can weed out those kinds of um

you know,
yeah, we we saw we saw this quite a lot with uh blockchain and NFTTS in games. Uh I I'll be the one that brings it up. Um and and those were like key examples of like this is a blockchain card game and you're like great, why is it being a blockchain game matter? And they're like cuz it's a blockchain card game. And you're like, "But is the card game any good?" Blockchain, blockchain, blockchain, blockchain. And you're like, "I am going to look for the next thing instead as a player." Thank you. Thank you so much for your pitch. Blockchain. Blockchain.
Um, yeah, that was definitely stellar. Yeah. Time. Yes, Jeff.
Code name guy or do you guys have anything you want to add to that? Um, or shall I throw in with one more thing?
Um, yeah. Yeah, I mean I sort of like been sort of mulling over what I've been hearing. I feels it feels like from our side for some of the stuff that we work on particularly I think like the design um of new content and new features in in

Idle Champions that it's not we we don't run a lot uh into the problem of like having a solution that we're looking
one sec Kenny looks like Kenny has to go so we're going to wave bye to Kenny. Good luck with everything Kenny. We'll get you back on another time. This is great to have you. Thanks for coming in.
It was a total pleasure. Lovely to meet you guys. Sorry, I have to jump. My daughter is calling. [laughter]
Bye.
Um,
sorry. Carry on. I just Kenny had to go and I wanted to let him say goodbye.
Of course, that's college.
Um, what was I saying? Oh, yes. The uh I think where we're at like currently with champions, it doesn't we don't often run into the case of a solution looking for a problem to solve. um because I think most of it's sort of very iterative in terms of like what new content like what new pieces are getting are getting um designed and then built. I think we definitely run into a push back of like can we technically do this or is this too ambitious or is this

going to cause problems that we haven't thought of.
Um
yeah, I think our team size makes it very interesting or we we have to be fairly efficient with our team size. We we don't have time to go and design a whole thing and then decide, oh, this isn't going to work. Uh we have to be like every every line of code we work we write kind of has to get into the game at some point.
Uh unless it's egregiously bad. Um [laughter] [clears throat] [snorts]
so yeah, it does it does kind of lessen that and force us to kind of have those processes where we're like, is this necessary? What does this solve? If it doesn't solve anything, then let's not let's not do it.
Yeah. And it also makes me think about like from both because I think this occurs on both kind of an engineering side of things like developers have decided they're going to build this tool and it does this adds all these additional things the game might be able to do which of course is like you built this solution and now it's looking for hey what can we use it for? Uh versus sort of a design idea of like you know I really like familiars for example and I really want the familiars to be in this

system. It's like but the game part didn't really have familiars before. How can we make this work as part of a design for that? So you've got these design solutions that uh don't necessarily have a problem that then needs a bigger design to be built around. And then also same from an engineering standpoint of like hey I made this new technology that automatically like recolors things. We better do like a bunch more recolor things. You know it's a um yeah but it doesn't come up too frequently I don't think in in sort of our process um especially in late game a game like Idle Champions where things are usually fairly incremental.
Yeah. Once like like we've been saying before, once you get late into a game, if you change it too much,
you're going to have a revolt.
Yeah. Plus, we're on such a tight like release schedule. It's like what can you get done in, you know, four weeks for the next character, the next update, the next set of content.
That actually brings up um a really interesting point that I I was wanting to circle back to. I was hoping Kenny was going to still be here, but um I think part of this is also team size. Like I'm guessing that the number of

people working on Candy Crush is larger than the number of people working on Idol Champions.
Yeah, probably just a little. Yeah. So [laughter] let's call it a a strong working hypothesis
like they're going to have more variability of what they can experiment with and try because they have more manpower to get it done
where a smaller team and also the content uh release cadence like I'm working right now on a different live service which is extra credits and extra history. Extra History puts out a video three weeks out of every four weeks, rain or shine, hand animated, and four shorts a week, one for every week. Extra Credits usually puts out two shorts a month and at least one video a month.
So when you add that together, that is at least um four, sometimes five fulllength videos and around six plus shorts every single month. Like our pipeline for production is robust and we know exactly how much and like we know

how long an episode could how many words it can be because we know how fast our animators can animate. Like our scripts are cut down to match how fast our animators animate because that's our gating factor. And so we have all of these different things. So if we want to try something new, which we do, you know, from time to time we'll try it. we know how much leeway there is in the schedule for being able to try a thing before it's like, oh, we missed ship date equivalently on this. And so team size and cadence of release are also huge factors in live service games or things where you have to keep going
because you're you're going for a long time. You can't it's a marathon. You can't burn everybody out by being every week this is the extra special thing. Everybody work extra hours to get this part done because that's nonsustainable. Yeah. Yeah. We we basically we we have actually I would say like I'm I'm kind of like the the father of of the of the team here, but like I'm very proud of how much content our team puts out. We

have a small team, but we we put out a content update every single Wednesday in Idol Champions. We've got two people who still put out uh weekly content updates in Bushwhacker 2. Yeah.
Uh they've been doing that for 14 years almost, I think. Well, well, they've been doing it for about seven or eight years, but yeah, the whole team's been doing those for. So, we put out a lot of content, but what generally happens with respect to this sort of thing is we we've got our general pipeline that is our our new events and our new adventures and our variants and whatnot. And then anything we want to do above and beyond that uh is is sort of like the new features, the the the new the special new things that go off of that sort of base content pipeline. those things get deprioritized for us. So, you know, the the community, if you go talk to our community and you ask them about the trials amount TMAT update that we've been promising since I think two 2023, 2024, I don't know.
Hey, it is it is underway. It is getting

close.
It's underway. It's it's we're we're making progress towards it, but it's a thing that kind of has to happen off the side of the desk because it's uh it's it's not something that fits into just that regular cadence. And so I think that's something especially when you get to be a team that is as small as ours that it it is really challenging to innovate because you just you just end up not having a lot of time because so much of the revenue that comes in is driven by those regular updates that you're doing. Um, and I guess I have a question which is, um, how do you build in cushion, right? Because we have a certain amount of of pipeline, not a lot, but a certain amount of pipeline cushion before Jeff is like, well, um, so, uh, to to be like ahead, right? Like I've got scripts in the can for a bit, um, for our shorts. Uh, how do you build in that?
Like when you're constantly building the next thing and making it as good as you could possibly be, how do you balance that with the need to get ahead to have some amount of uh failure proof, some

sort of some sort of scheduling um flexibility, right, to do things like the trials of Mount Diamont or whatever. Yeah, I think that's that's similar to kind of what Kenny was talking about, which just processes and we've built those processes over years and years such that you know like I'll I'll go off with the other designer and we'll be designing stuff for four to five months out and then that'll go into art three to four months before it goes out and then it goes into tech. And we've just got so much room on that that if something comes up, like we had a champion, we had a champion a few months ago where design us wanted to do something really uh fancy with stacking and uh it went into dev. Uh it went into dev I think two months out from Yeah. two months out from when it was going to launch. And I think that ate up a decent amount of buffer because it kind of bounced around like, "Oh, we can't do it this way. What if we do it this way? We can't do it that way. What if we do it that way? we can't do it this way. And

that that happened about four or five times before we just cycled back around to design and being like, "Yeah, we can't do this." And then we had to come up with a different thing that then got shoved in in a couple of weeks.
I just love David's middle distance like going to long distance stare. The more Justin talks about this just like the horror flashbacks of like, "Oh god, not again."
Yeah. I mean, I think
I mean, I think that's another sort of it's a bit of a side note, but that's another thing that happens with design this deep into a project is we are we do a new champion in our game, a new collectible champion that you can level up and and equip and stuff every month. And design on our side, we always want every champion to have something new that other champions didn't do. And we're 60 something champions into the game at this point. And it is hard to find new things that we haven't explored in the in the game space. And uh so whenever we try and step just a little toe outside

of what is uh what is existing uh there's always a risk that we're going to get uh
I think it's a because in cor in corresponding to that is that that because it's been we've had nine years worth of champions and at every time we've done a champion we've wanted to have that champion do something a little bit new a little bit unique a little different from the other champions that that often times results in sort of a request to tech that's something like hey can it do this? And tech looks and says, "Well,
yes, we can do that." Um, but it's a little out of sort of the structure and scope of how things work. And so you end up with these things that get attach like sort of um what's the best word for it? Like just sort of additioned on, you know, stapled, duct taped, clued in, failing wired, tied on um in ways that Yeah, it's a good way to put it. But uh the results is that um as this gets bigger and bigger and bigger and all of these exceptions go in places that they become larger larger and larger problems to manage and then when you know you

come along at the ninth year and you're like I want this champion to uh have this ability that it copies from this other champion and then when that champion is in the formation and they're using this ability it should apply to the slots behind them like all these sort of and then it becomes like oh well this champion which had a stacking ability which was added in in a special way to accommodate the thing you asked for two years ago doesn't work the same way as this other stacking ability that we added recently. And then there's actually this whole system that another developer who's not working on this game anymore wrote and it was used for like 30 of the champions. Now, how do we make it so that that works with this new ability that you've added for this one champion that you want to to copy the abilities in from?
Yeah, spoiler alert, we don't. We just change the ability. Well, sometimes people take a stab at it, but
yeah,
this reminds me there there is a fighting game where I do not remember which one, but all characters are uh looking at the same base character who is hidden under the map to check what moves they should do because only that character directly links to controls.

[laughter]
So that character is under the map doing whatever the player inputs and every other character is checking that character for control inputs.
That's funny. I'm not shocked.
No, no. Tech techad is a is a hell of a thing particularly on a game that's nine, right? I think and and you all were talking about like flash and congregate. I remember congregate fondly. Um I wasted so much time at work in it on congregate. [laughter] But um with with a game that's nine, I feel like there's how you were talking about like someone who's left or someone like we did it this way before. How how hard is it to really be innovative and to give space to all of the like historical knowledge? Like do you find that that's a big challenge or is it are you consistently like coming up with new things and new things based on things you see or read

or you know from outside the game or is it very difficult at this point to really cut new territory in a game that's nine?
Uh I I think it's definitely a challenge. Um, you know, every once in a while we'll stumble over something where it's it's just something we haven't done that fits within the existing systems, but very often it is it is something where we need to just step a little bit outside of our comfort zone and and do something that we haven't done before. And that just it definitely makes things excuse me more [clears throat] challenging. I'm glad I grabbed this water.
I have a question for you guys. Um, and this is something that like I'm going to pull in something we've been doing off of YouTube recently. So, one of the things about the YouTube audience is that, and there's some fairly good stats to back this up, people migrate around what they watch. And so like despite the fact that we have say 9 or 10 years worth of extra history episodes, most people haven't been

watching that 9 or 10 years. They might have joined a year ago or two years ago or they watched six years ago, stopped and started watching three years ago, stopped and started watching one year ago. And so we have these vast this huge back catalog. And about a year and a half ago, I put an initiative together where we started taking old series that we launched. They're each like 10 minutes long, five episodes, and re-editing them into a single series. So, we'll call it Extra History Complete. So, instead of the five episodes on Jon of Arc, it's Jon of Arc Complete, and we'd take any comments that we found like, "Oh, you got this flag wrong." Or anything that we talked about in our post episode talk about making the series, we'd make those minor corrections. And so, it' basically be a master or an updated master. We re-released it as a single episode that was like 50 minutes long instead of specifically because a lot of the people who enjoy our stuff weren't around back then when we did this initial thing. And so it's a way for us, it still takes us time to do

all that, but it takes us maybe one episode's worth of time to make a 50-minute video as opposed to one extra 10. And it's let our studio get ahead on some things and get people who've never experienced this cool stuff. It brings it back up to the forefront.
Have you guys ever considered for some of your live service stuff because you have so many champions being like, "Hey, this is the re-release and update of Hitch or
and this is just more of a a personal interest question because on games that last this long, it gives the opportunity to basically reintroduce older things back into a current place play style or play session. Yeah, I I think I have two or three points on that. Um, one is it's definitely something that we've been that we've been looking into. In fact, recently we've been looking to that for some of our monetization where we've been diving back into items that came out six or seven years ago and being like, "Hey, most of our players probably haven't even seen this item because we retired this pack years ago." And so, let's

package that back up into like it sort of initial thing and do we call them like from the vault packs. And those have been those have been doing fairly well. But I think another good example of that is our every year we'll do a new campaign, a new D&D campaign. Usually it lines up with uh whatever Wizards is releasing. Uh but last year we we went a little off script and we did a um a campaign that's kind of like a intended for sort of newer players where it was it's called Tales from the Champions and it's basically uh a series of adventures about a specific champion that we released at some point and you can unlock the champion and gear them up through that campaign which is not normally the way that you do it. And so it's a way to kind of introduce newer players to a subset of the champions that were like these are good champions, these are fun to use. these interact in interesting ways and uh and you should use these. Um, but I think the the the most interesting thing that that that that I'm I'm thinking about in this discussion is sort of the challenge with

live service of being 9 years deep in content and releasing stuff that players from across the whole spectrum of of, you know, brand new player, player who played six years ago and stopped for five years, player who's been playing for the full nine years, and having content for each of those players that is interesting and um also consistent because I think one of the things that we didn't realize um early on or didn't design for very well early on was sort of the power creep that naturally occurs in live service games.
I was going to ask about that.
Yeah. So, like we we were looking at the tutorial of the game and sort of playing through the first 25 areas and even though we haven't changed the functionality of the champions that you use in that time or their abilities or anything like that, you still play through that for some reason significantly faster than you did when we released the game uh 9 years ago. And

then the first couple adventures after that, there actually is stuff that's our fault that makes it uh so you progress through those and at at a different sort of power curve than you did when we first released the game. And so, you know, one of the things I often talk on on our stream about the with the community is that if we could go back in time, I think like gating progression in such a way that you could almost put a bunch of content into like an like a refrigerator or like a freezer or something and freeze it in place so that stuff you do later on in the live servicing doesn't affect the, you know, the progression curve through that. um is probably something I would have done if I if I sort of knew then what I know now. Um cuz we're kind of struggling to solve that from the other side, which is like, okay, people are getting through this initial content a lot faster and they're getting up through the sort of early game a heck of a lot faster than we were expecting them to. And so, how do we, you know, do we is is that okay? Do we want to try to adjust that? Do we

want to try and, you know, keep them down? because all of the monetization and all of the systems that were built into the game were built in expecting people to progress at a certain rate and now, you know, they don't need as many booster packs. They don't need as many chests to sort of get to uh the mid or end game uh compared to how they did back when we first released the game.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's seems to typically seems to happen in games like this. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if there's a catch-up mechanic on sort of where you're at with the content, but certainly one of the things that we've always looked at from the like the structure of the campaigns or the events is always to make it so that whether you are a 9-year-old player or you know a nine that's a weird thing to say, but if you're depending on your tenure, if you've been playing from the beginning or if you're a relatively recent player that there's something for you to do and when we release new content that it's accessible to both groups of people
um and has stuff for everybody in it.

Um which is why like the event content sort of starts you fresh when you start the event. It's not like you what you're bringing into it. Yeah, you bring in, you know, your your more powerful champions and gear and stuff that helps you, but you're both starting from a situation or from a from a level that you can both complete the content at least to um a moderate degree. And where we've got like certain caps if you're not like if you haven't been playing for a while, you can't get the highest rewards, but
Well,
or you can I that's a That's that's one of the great like we have uh we have like a person who does power testing on all the new stuff and uh I know the last time we dropped them into a brand new account they were able to get basically to the end game of our event content within two weeks. [laughter] We're like okay if you know what you're doing in this game and you do it super efficiently you can get there. But then on the other side of that we have new players who play and they're like ah this game is pay to win. Like you have to give money in order to progress. like I'm getting stuck at a wall. And you know, it's it's one of those things

where there's different types of uh of players that you need to be catering to. And a starter pack for somebody who's brand new to the game is very different from a starter pack from someone who
is an expert, which is also very different from someone who was brand new to the game 9 years ago.
So like everything needs to be constantly evolving. It's not just the latest content you put out in a live service game. It's all the content that came before and how that is now interacted with given all the updates in the game.
One of the one of the and especially with early content, right? So, uh I play Final Fantasy 14 a lot. It is probably my main game. Um I've played every piece of content almost in the game. There's like one difficulty level I haven't sunk my teeth into yet, and it's up next. Um, but one of the problems is that the very old early game content is suffering immensely from power creep as as new classes get released with each expansion. Not because the content's getting easier or because that class is

particularly mechanically like powerful, but just it's numerically powerful at that level because they didn't think about downscaling it to the very early game. So now people are like, and it becomes a real problem in an MMO or in a game that's very knowledge heavy like Idol Champions, right? Because if you're skipping things that you were relying on teaching players a mechanic or a concept or an ability or something and now players are skipping it, the the knockon effect of having the early game be power shifted in some degree, it just ends up being massive. Uh because there are definitely like
there are definitely early like dungeons, raids where we're like, "All right, so this is where you learn this concept." And someone's like, "No, we don't see that anymore. We just we just blow right through it. We just we never see this mechanic that's important to teaching you that the debuff that you get during a mechanic matters and you actually need to read those. You can't

just be like, "Oh, it's a debuff. I'm sure it's fine." No, no. What what that is actually really matters. Rip Flame Blow. Um,
yeah, I haven't played Final Fantasy 14, but I 100% can can equate that experience in like World of Warcraft, which I did play for a number of years, where it's like, you know, going into going into the whatever the dungeon was in Westfall, uh, and and running that six or seven times was like part of the early game experience.
Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah. But now you go in, it's like you're level you look at a monster and blink and you're level 30 and you don't have to do it anymore. And so, you know, you only go back there for nostalgia or I guess
you played on the classic servers quite a bit.
Oh, you play on the classic server.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, I I think that um packaging up content for like Yeah. content for newer players and and helping them kind of come into a game that is 9 years old is a is a big challenge. which is actually one of the things we're working on right

now in Idle Champions is sort of redoing our introduction to the game cuz like you lo you log into the game and this is an idol game that has nine years of content and nine years of added features. It's got buttons for everything going on everywhere.
The features give a bit of an overload, right? You see Jeff really wants to say something.
Yeah. No, it's just you you literally hit my next thing. I'd written a small outline that will and I were trying to follow. Like it's that exact thing that if you've added 9 years worth of content, everybody who went through the 9 years knows why new UI interface button went up knows it all. But I once went into back actually I think it was like 10 years ago or even 15, but it was one of the early live service games. It was one that had come over from China and it was one that literally had copied every mechanic from every other game it had seen and put them all in like every 3 weeks. I came in two years in and there were literally layers on top of layers on top of layers of interface with 14 different currency systems cuz and it just it was incomprehensible. And one of

my friends was like, "Oh yeah, you do that that that that that like he knew it cuz he'd been playing
but for me it was literally even as somebody very fluent in this incomprehensible the amount of stuff." And so trying to maintain like League of Legends has this problem, not as much, but because they change seasonally and do resets, but every live service game I've ever bumped into wants to has kept adding things and constantly has to re-evaluate the new player experience and the onboarding process and how to teach things when you have equivalently for the new player unlimited amounts of things to do.
Yeah.
That have been all added in.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so sort of slowing that down and gating that introduction to everything that exists in like you know you go back in time and be like okay everyone who starts playing this game is going to have exactly the same experience no matter when they start playing the game is is you know probably not a bad thing to aim for. Uh you know

I [laughter] mean I can see it in making if we if things are improvements then I could [clears throat] see that being it. I think if you're introducing features,
you know, I don't I don't want to have a game where it's like, hey, we released this new feature after 2 years and so now everyone who starts playing the game today has to wait for years to get it. That's not what I'm saying.
But, uh, you know, having it not be there right away, I think is, uh, is definitely something to aim for.
Yeah. Well, it can be overwhelming. You don't know what features you should be paying attention to. You don't know if you're like Yeah, it's Yeah.
Yeah. There there is there there are two extremes to this. One of them is the end that Jeff just talked about and the other one is uh 14 which has chosen as its methodology. No, no, we're not speeding up new players. No, you get everything when you get to the point in the story where you get the thing. And so on boarding for a new player in Final Fantasy 14 is I'm not kidding. Someone clocked it roughly 500 hours of main story and to unlock all of the

side content. that's really like any degree of importance. Uh it's like 500 hours of onboarding. So yeah, you got you got to cut the middle ground somewhere on that. Like you can't both ends kind of don't work so hot.
Really hoping they do something about that.
How much game is left after 500 hours of onboarding? The game starts.
Oh, right now we can finally play the game.
Comes up [laughter] the cold.
Yeah, that's to get you to the end of the main story. The end of the main story gets you to the current level cap and gets you access to the current um savage raid tier difficulty like the current the current gear cap stuff the current
what all the current players are doing.
Yeah. Correct.
Yeah.
So if I wanted to come play with you will I would basically have five hours to get to the point where you and I could play and I would be significant. I would make a significant contribution.
No sort of. No
never mind. Right. more complicated. [laughter] We're just going to go with it's 500

hours of onboarding.
Okay.
Yeah. At some point I'll explain this whole thing in great detail and watch your eyes bug out of your head, but it'll be not today.
And whatever you do, don't roll another character. I guess
Oh, no. They at least have the the job classing system where at any time you can basically switch to any other character class.
My my one character is every combat and every crafting class all
and I can change. It's actually part of their on their keep the layers busy is that you can replay and level up every single class on your main character and then switch at roughly any time.
So every time they add a new class, they're actually adding content for every single player because every player could theoretically also then
learn that class and experience it as well as every other one that's been done.
Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Um,
which actually goes back to Final Fantasy 10 or which was 11?
Uh, 11 is the other MMO. Four is the job first job switching one and tactics is

the one that has the most fluid job switching.
I was thinking their first MMO also had the the job SL classes. Anyway,
anyway, tangent. Um, Jent, as as we as we look towards uh the end of our time together, um, is there anything that you two ponder about designing for live service that we haven't touched on? Is there anything that like you like you find yourself in vacant or intensive mood just thinking about this particular branch of of game design that you that that you really like talking about that we haven't touched on today? Um,
should have had these questions in advance. [laughter]
Let me narrow that a bit. Like since this is a general audience watching, like what are a couple of nuggets or fun things that you might like here's a couple things about live game design. Most people don't think that like I like or I dislike. You know, a couple of things that if somebody's standing at the water cooler, not that we have water coolers anymore, but your little water

cooler moment where you feel smarter like, "Oh, did you know this about live games or live service or live design?" I mean, I think the thing that that I think is is the most interesting about designing these games, we kind of talked earlier about this push and pull between sort of the design team and the sort of business team, the people who want the game to make money and the people who want the game to be fun. Um, [clears throat]
maybe [laughter]
sometimes they're the same.
We're sitting here looking at each other and I want the game to be fun and make money. Um, but I do think that I mean that that is one of the big challenges of of live service uh of of game design, live service game design, really any game design, but especially in live service where you're trying to keep it going for years on end is that, you know, the there's oftent times where we'll see this kind of like, oh, greedy devs, like they're doing this thing uh to try and make money and it's like, yeah, we're trying to to do this thing. Yes, there is some money aspect. Um, but we're

trying to do it as nicely as possible so that you can still have fun doing it. Um, but I mean I think the thing that really [sighs and gasps] I don't know how I don't it bugs me but uh it's just the really really the people who come down too far the designers who come down too far on the uh make money thing and not on the fun thing to the exclusion of uh people who just want to play the game and have a chill time. Um because there are definitely games out there where you run into a wall where uh you must now insert your credit card to continue playing this this free-to-play game. Um and I have endeavored for myself over these years to not be one of those designers and not have one of those games. Um, and so it's it's always funny when those games still come back, like players who have played those games still look at ours, which is like a very generous, I would say, free-to-play game, and uh, and find ways to complain about the monetization, even though we try so hard to make it in

to make sure that all of the content can be completed by all of the players, whether they're paying to get additional items or whether they're just playing completely for free. I think it's sort of been a design philosophy for us from like day one um was not to
to to create a situation where you have invested a bunch of time and effort into something and then find that actually now to continue it we're you know you're getting forcibly paygated. I think that's a really awful feeling. So certainly we've endeavored to to never have that be part of part of any of our design.
Yeah.
Yeah. Which reminds me actually of the um of the cat food. a [laughter] cat food.
One of the things early on um
when we were still working on uh one of our first games, Eggbreaker, we had quite a community around that and this particular discussion around like monetization and and in the game and um had come up among the players and and it had turned into an ongoing joke, I think that that you have to at least

contribute some to the to the developers because otherwise they won't have any money and they'll have to eat cat food. Uh [snorts] to which at one point one of our players actually sent us uh sent us some cat food [laughter] was I don't remember why they why she sent that. It was I think it was a thank you so much for the game and uh here just in case uh players aren't aren't aren't purchasing items. So
we still have the can of cat food. I think that that uh symbiotic relationship between players in ongoing games, particularly like freeto play games, is a very uh is one that is often not well understood by players. I feel like that is often like a big problem from a from a knowledge gap, right? Because while it's understandable that players want to receive fair value for both their time and their currency, it's not always clear to them how much it really costs

to maintain an ongoing live service game. It's sort of the same problem. Jeff and I talked about this what, a couple years ago now, how it's impossible to actually kickstart a video game. Like mathematically, the amount of money that you would need to raise on Kickstarter to actually start the development of a video game is so much. And people are not willing to put up that amount of money on Kickstarter. So it becomes Kick Finisher. In just the same way, a lot of people don't understand how much money it actually costs to like pay a team of developers a living wage. And that includes health insurance if you're based in the US. and also right to like pay for server upkeep costs and advertising to bring new players in and fight churn and god we that's the first time in an hour and 40 minutes about live service that anyone has said the word churn right we skipped that whole thing
it's been a relief I've
probably for the best let's [laughter] be honest like um it's just very difficult right to like convey to

players in a accurate and honest weigh exactly how much it is without it coming across like we're asking for a handout. But like also at the same time play there are players who will riot if you can't
do absolutely everything for free all the time forever.
It's I don't know it's it that feels like it's always one of the big battles at least from someone who talks a lot about live service games and who sees a lot of discussion about live service games that don't necessarily involve developers. That that
I I agree. I I think that the number of people I've seen talking about idle champions and talking about the monetization and talking about how I must be on my seventh Bugatti uh is uh [laughter] it's like me and my Honda Civic do just fine.
I was going to say, hey, is it a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla? Cuz it's one of those. [laughter] Those are the only two options.
But yeah. Yeah. I I think that there's definitely a perception uh on

free-to-play games that just, you know, because of how aggressive some are
uh that sort of plays through to to pretty much all of them.
Um but what are you going to do?
[laughter]
And that actually brings me up to the closing thing I'd like to say on this which is a trend I've noticed personal observation is that and this is for designers and product people out there games which overemphasize freely giving to their communities in my opinion tend to do the best like one of the reasons I've played Idol Champions for so long and enjoyed it for so much was you guys always like you know here's the weekly email with your gold chest you know here's this drop here's this so and so like giving giving players stuff. Pokemon Go does that. League of Legends does that. There's a lot of groups that have been very good and do very well because they give enough away that players are like, "Cool." Like there, if they can be this generous, I you know, it gives you kind of the freedom to feel like you can try stuff out stuff out, see what it is without feeling like

you're getting nickeled and dime for every single thing and getting kind of disappointed when you then like buy your first thing. You've tried it out. you know what you're getting. And like philosophically, I think that's a really good place to be is designing your games in such a way that you can give out lots of free stuff while still maintaining a healthy game on paying everybody who works there. [clears throat]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think morally that that helps me that, you know, being that being that generous helps me sleep at night. I also sometimes wake up in a cold sweat being like if we had been just a little bit more aggressive with our monetization. [laughter] Could I be driving a you know a slightly like a a Civic with the with the with the little win things at the back?
I think one one of thing to say on that is that like certainly while when you look at comments and feedback and especially that says that comes in and says oh it's paid away and blah blah blah. um that uh because we do you know we have a lot of the giveaway items that we are very generous in terms of making sure that you know you don't need that stuff to to to complete the game that

when people do bring it up on like our communities on Reddit on the Discord that you know players who've been there for uh you know for a long time are are very quick to say no no no that's that's not how these guys operate that
so I think that's nice to see I think it's sort of it can be sort of dis not dis what's the word I'm looking for not disappointing but
discouraging
discouraging when you see that in in in reviews and feedback back. Um, but on the flip side of that, I think when you go to the community, they're very positive about it. And so I think that's
all right. Well,
I just realized Line Break did something different in Twitch chat than I thought it did, so I posted early and I'll I'll I'll bring that up. Actually, I just posted a link for anybody looking. Speaking of ongoing monetization, um, Extra History, our YouTube channel, puts out one Kickstarter a year, and every year we do a new history calendar where we'll redraw famous art in our bean style. Um, and this this is one of our biggest fundraisers per year. Well, fundraiser thing like we give everybody a really cool calendar, history facts

every day, but this is part of what helps us keep the studio lights on is we put out something beautiful that hopefully people will really enjoy. in chat. I just threw in the link. Our Kickstarter is going to go live next Tuesday. That's a pre-link and we do early bird specials like for the first X amount in. So, if you want access to that, there's the link. If you go to Kickstarter and just put remind me, it will tell you when the campaign goes live. But it's going to be this coming Tuesday. And we have some really good art this year. I'm very excited about it. So,
yeah. threw that in um for anybody interested because a it supports our studio and all the people who make the art and b it's a cool thing and we have some brand new stuff in there this year on the deluxe package that is um extra sweet. So, sorry, minor product plug. I don't do those often.
It's true. We're all We're all very excited. Well, Jens, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for lending us your expertise on uh

designing live service games. Uh, I will look forward to our next discussion. Uh, friends, if you haven't checked out uh any of the fantastic games that Code Name Entertainment makes, you can find them on Steam or wherever or Epic or wherever fine games are downloaded. Uh, and you should try Idol Champions of the Forgotten Realms for yourself if you're interested to see a little bit more about what we've talked about here today. Uh, I think that's going to do it for us. Uh, Jents, any any final parting words?
No, thank you very much for having us. This was a It was a fun time.
Cool.
Yeah, absolutely.
I appreciate you joining us as always and I will preempt Will or Will say the thing so I can say the thing.
Yeah, I was going to say all there remains to say bye to the people, Jeff.
Bye to the people, Jeff. Thanks everybody. [music]