Discord Community Building: Seth Sivak on How Spellbreak Built a Fortnite Sized Community

Well, what everyone cared about at the time was the size of our Discord server. We had had about 30 to 40,000 going into October and then we put out this YouTube video. We went to like 120,000 over a weekend and we were like the second largest or the largest compared to Fortnite. And I was constantly having to ping people at Discord to like up the cap. Like we were going back and forth with Fortnite as to who had the most. It was like we would hit, you know, 250,000 then like they would hit 250,000 then they would get to go up sooner and they'd go up to 300 and then we'd go up to 300. And so during that era of 2018 to 2019, we were just fighting about who could have the biggest and most active Discord server.
Welcome to the Gaming Founders Podcast, a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry. I'm Eden, the CEO of Pragma. We build tools for studios to connect with their players and essential services, including First Look, our player relationship platform, Connect, and Engine, our cloud and source-based backends that power many of the world's best studios today. If you have an interest in getting exclusive access to the game industry's best early access games, sign up at playtest.fverlook.gg.

And I'm Kevin Zayn, partner at Upfront Ventures. We're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco. I lead game investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work, including Pragma. We interview founders on their origin stories, the tactics that helped them survive and thrive, and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies. Learn more and subscribe today at pragma.gg/gaming founders. In this episode of the Gaming Founders podcast, we have Seth Civac, the founder of Proletariat. He shares his journey from Zingga to the founding of Proletariat. The conversation highlights the importance of timing, building a world-class team, and survival as Seth and his team went through multiple pivots and kept finding ways to keep the studio going. We spent a lot of time talking about the journey of Proletariat and the challenges faced during the development of Spellbreak, particularly

the way that they built one of the largest Discord communities up until that point and the eventual acquisition by Blizzard. I hope you enjoy this episode of the Gaming Founders Podcast. Hey Seth, thanks for joining us on the Gaming Founders Podcast today.
Yeah, thanks for having me. All right. Well, why don't we start with uh what your early story is. How did you um get into games?
Yeah. I mean, so I I uh I'm one of those people that actually never intended to end up in games. My undergraduate degree is actually in mechanical engineering, and I spent during I went to school at Nor Eastern University, which has a co-op program. So, I did my first two co-ops um in defense work. Um so, I was working on missile defense and satellite stuff. Um, then I had this moment where I just really didn't want to work on these giant contracts and I wanted to do something more creative. And so I went to graduate school at Carnegie Melon um at the Entertainment Technology Center. And my focus there was I told myself I wanted to go be an imaginary. I wanted to go work at Disney.
Um, and I had I had done some programming at the time. I had I had almost gotten a minor in computer

science at Nor Eastern, but instead of taking the final class I would have needed for the minor, I took science fiction instead, which was like the right choice, but um I didn't tell my mom that I was that close to getting a CS minor. Um uh so
at uh at Carnegie Melon in between the first and the second year of grad school, you can actually um take an internship. And so I did one and I and I moved out to um Burbank and I worked at Imagineering, Walt Disney Imagineering. Um and I worked in the creative technology group there, mostly doing graphics programming. Um uh and I I loved it. It was super cool. We got to work on some really awesome projects. I was working on my very first project was uh one of the first rides, the first Pixar ride, Radier Springs Racers.
But during my time at Carnegie Melon, we had pitched a game and we were working on that as a project in grad school. Um, and so I was starting to get I'd always loved video games, but I never really thought I'd make them professionally. I just didn't think, you know, it was going to be a job that I'd want to do. And so coming up to the end of my time at Carnegie Melon, I started to look for jobs. And I knew I didn't really, this

was during the Great Recession, and all my friends at Disney were like, "Don't come here right now." This was 2009. They're like, "All the budgets are cut. It's not a great place to be. Go somewhere else for a couple years and then come back." And so I didn't take the offer from Disney and instead took a role at a very small startup called Conduit Labs. Um, and that I was a gameplay programmer there. And this was before the Facebook platform was really a thing. So we were writing games on the open web. And so we were making music games specifically. A year goes by, we move to pivot to Facebook games. We make a game called Music Pets where it was like literally like Pandora but a pet. So you'd feed your pet music and it bring you back more music you liked. that got enough traction on Facebook that Zinga acquired the company. Um, and so I joined Zinga in August of 2010. And I was really excited because at the time, you know, it was it was Zinga was blowing up and they were like doing something totally new and different for the game industry,
right?
And they didn't really know what to do with me because I was an engineer but also a designer. And so they actually had me interview for both roles because

it was like an aqua hire. And so I I interviewed as an engineer, I interviewed as a designer and they're like, "Well, you can pick one or the other." And that broke my brain. And I was like, "What do you mean I can only do one or the other?" Um, and then the CEO, my CEO at the time, um, who I think, you know, certainly Kevin knows, but I don't know if Eden knows is Nibil Nibil Hyatt was the CEO of that company, now investor at Spark Capital, but he didn't know he was like, "Hey, Seth,
you should you should do product management." And that was like the secret alchemy that Zinga had. And I was like, "All right, cool. I'll do product management."
And so I got I got my product management education for six weeks of like deep immersion. like they moved us to San Francisco and I was working with the team. I mostly was working with Cafe World and then I would occasionally moonlight with the Mafia Wars team and it was incredible like the ability like the the the product management lessons you learned the education you got there was incredibly valuable. Um the product management team on Cafe World loved loved having me around because I was also an engineer and so that was like most of them were non-technical. A lot of them were like you know MBAs and things like that. Uh then I you then we

moved back to start Zinga Boston. So we moved we moved back to kind of start the studio. So we were a team of 13. Over the next nine months we grew to 65 and I became the lead designer of the game we shipped out of Zinga Boston which was Indiana Jones Adventure World. Um that wasn't an Indiana Jones game initially. That's like a whole different story. Um but but then uh but then yeah about a year after that they laid us all off. Um and myself and four other founders from the Zinga Boston studio we started proletarian about two weeks later. And this was the conduit team or this was the cafe world team that moved to Boston.
It was it was the conduit team. So the conduit team was all brought in and kind of trained and done like an immersion on the integration side with mostly Cafe World, but we were also kind of pitching what would eventually become Indiana Jones Adventure World. Um and then that we went through the whole green light process for that and kind of moved that forward.
You were not the first uh Zinga person on this uh show. Marine fan was on uh last season.
I listen to Marines. Yes. I uh you know and and I think she mentioned this in her but a bunch of the Boston team

actually after we shipped to Indian Adventure World was working on Farm 2 when she was the GM I believe at the time. Yeah, I feel like Zingo was I was just talking to someone about this. Like Zingo was like the first game company that made like mom's proud about somebody working in games or like it's like before that it was like all like you guys are you know degenerate like game people and Zingo was like you could make a real career out of this and be a PM. So that was definitely true, but also Zingga had this insane culture around t-shirts like like every game would have lots of t-shirts and there was a whole like scarcity of like who got what t-shirt and things like that. But so I had I have like dozens of Zinga t-shirts in a box upstairs. But I would wear them out and I was amazed the number of people that would come up to me and talk to me about like whatever the Zinga game was that whatever shirt I had on. It was like it reminds me of during peak Fortnite I had like a Fortnite shirt from some friends at Epic and I would get stopped constantly. I basically stopped wearing it because people would like want to come talk to

me about my Fortnite shirt.
So, so in terms of your co-founders, like like walk me through what were the kind what's the what was the breakdown of sort of uh who was doing what and then like what did the early days look like in terms of I mean back then it'd also be interesting to hear the context of fundraising for games because I I feel like you guys were like before your time. It's a little bit less common to have five founders, but we had so all of us had worked together. Um, four out of the five of us were actually at Conduit together and we were going to the original like conduit team. We were going to actually hire the fifth person. Um, but we were basically in the middle of the acquisition to Zinga. So, he was our first hireer post acquisition. So, we had all been working together for a while. Mhm.
Um and so the breakdown was we had um uh four of us were technical and then we had our art director. Um we basically had the our sort of like lead systems designer which was his title at the time

was design director and then we had a VP of engineering and CTO. Um and so all four of us uh myself included for the first game we wrote a lot of code. Um, and we actually ended up building two different games before we raised funding. And it was because we just, you know, we were we were very lucky in in some respects because we had we had 3 months of severance that we felt like we could stretch to be 6 months. And so we basically all decided, hey, let's give this a shot. If we don't have health insurance in 6 months, we'll all go get jobs, like no harm, no foul. And I think one of the things we did very early that was really good is we were we were very transparent with each other from the beginning. like we you know and there were even during this time right when we left Zinga I actually didn't want to I didn't want to stay I didn't want to go to a startup I wanted to go into AAA and so I I actually went down to Foraxis and I interviewed for a role on XCOM 2 at the time I was actually set to potentially go interview for a role at Bungie um and and so we were all very

transparent with each other of like hey where are we leaning like two of the people right out of the gate were like we want to do this we're ready to go we're not even interviewing elsewhere and it was very helpful cuz we were just meeting constantly. We would meet like, you know, several times a week in person, just like at a local coffee shop. Um, and and that was set, I think, a really great relationship very early that we were all going to be incredibly transparent with each other on how we were thinking about this and what we wanted to do. And so, um, so yeah, so we we had four people that were pretty technical. We had product and design covered within that group as well. Oh, and then we had our art director who was like a really great illustrator as well as as well. So could do concept all the way. Basically the only stuff he wasn't comfortable doing was um was rigging and animating and so that gave us a lot of coverage on just general IC work that we could we could do just between the founders.
What were those first two prototypes like? Uh, and how did you end up raising with the I guess I'm assuming it was like 3 to 6 months or something and you

had
Yeah, so it was so we uh so we started in November of 2012 and we we wanted to make a game and ship it before the end of the year because we just wanted to the whole premise was mobile was blowing up like about 3 months before that Clash of Clans had released and heyday had released and it was like taking you know there was both like mobile was getting really big but also specifically iPad like tablet games were like huge
and so We we knew we we were working on some mobile stuff that got cancelled when we were still at Zingga, but we wanted to get our ability to actually ship mobile games in place. And so we decided to make a game called Hug the Sloth. And it's exactly what you would think it is, but the whole goal of it was we wanted it to have one of everything in the in the um uh in the app. So, it had like a push notification. It had a Facebook post. It had some microtransactions. It had, you know, all of the things that we felt like a game, a modern game would need to have, but it was basically just this super like this this sloth would hang out there. You could like tickle it

and interact with it. And then every on a random timer, it would need you'd need to come in and press a button to give it a hug. And there were leaderboards on who got who gave it the most hugs and like all this sort of stuff. And it sounds really simple, but it was super valuable because then we had to figure out like all the integrations to do this. And actually the biggest thing was getting our Apple um uh getting our Apple like business account set up
because you had to get like a third party thing like a done in Brad Street number which was like a third party thing that you know
and they they they spelled our name wrong. They spelled it prolipariat and it took me like six weeks to fix it. Um but I think it was really valuable to actually build that out and so we're able to test it. The second game was a game called Letter Rush, which was an initial we used as a way to really test a bunch of tech, specifically an open source programming language called Hacks, which allows cross-co compiling. And so we built that game as as a word game, as you can imagine, but it was both like real time co-op word game and things like that. That was really fun to build that shipped

in early March. Um and and so the way we approached fundraising is we at the time like raising venture it was it was very it was very different. So we were like okay originally we wanted to just go out and maybe raise like 750k or a million. Um in that era I would constantly get asked two things. One was like why don't you just use Kickstarter? Because like there were a few pretty big Kickstarter games at the time. The other thing was a lot of people being like you need 750 grand to make a mobile game. That seems like way too much. Don't they cost like 50 grand? Um, so I started by just talking to angels, lots of angel investors and and pitching uh them while also talking to a bunch of mobile publishers. So we were kind of having and this was the wild west of mobile publishing. It was all over the place. And so we were having kind of both of those conversations at the same time. And really what ended up happening is we we got enough traction that by early March we got our first term sheet. So all the publishers had kind of dropped away. There was definitely like a couple

of dark moments where we gone really far with one of these publishers and they they dropped us and I like spent the evening sitting in our co-working space like looking for jobs cuz I'm you know figured we were done. But we got the first term sheet in early March. Um that was for only raising a million. Then we ended up getting enough interest over the next couple of weeks and some of it was we got a bit of press about like an Ex-Zinga team like making stuff and there was some excitement about that and we were right at the time that that Supercell did a large secondary
and so like timing is everything here like luck and timing is so critical
and so that really helped us.
Were you trying to get press or it just came about organically? we were we so we were trying to get some press and we were kind of like announcing that we were a studio and that kind of thing um right around that timing and so we we ended up raising 2.5 million instead of one cuz we were like over subscribed I mean um
in modern day it seems insane we raised 2.5 million on 5 million pre because like that's what you did in 2013 right so
um but it set us up really well because

we had a number of institutional investors in there was basically we had consumer VCs So, so Nibil ended up leading our round at Spark um but he actually wasn't the first term sheet and then we had um uh first round or first Mark Capital um so Rick Heman who was also like first money into Riot and familiar with games um and then we had a local VC uh in Boston and so the three of them kind of split it and then we had a couple of small angel checks including like a really small check from Google Ventures in that first round. I mean, that's definitely a very stacked group of uh people and I guess I could see the tailwinds being mobile and Supercell and Zingga and some of that coming through. Um, and
yeah, we funded seriously at that almost exact time point for almost exactly the same terms and round, right? Same like, oh, that was a season team out of ROIO and like, you know, this is the moment like
you can build your own mobile IPs and make it big and Yeah. It was a good time.

Yeah, timing is really important.
Yeah, I guess the lesson there is really more timing oriented to some extent. I'm sure the perseverance is always an interesting one because it sounded like you guys were near the near the end.
I think the other piece is just like re really trying to capture what is the what is the narrative for the company. And for us, it was like this Exzinga team that had clearly already shown they could build stuff cuz we had shipped two I mean they were admittedly very small games, but we had shown that we could ship two things. So there was no question on our ability to actually like build stuff and get it out the door. And I think there was just a lot of excitement specifically on the opportunity not only in mobile but in tablet games. And we were really pitching, hey, we're going to take a lot of the Zinga and Zingga had been doing the like this is the year of mobile for like 2 or 3 years and they were still fumbling to make mobile work, right? And the the floor hadn't fully dropped out of Facebook games. And so I think there was just a lot of opportunity at the time for that. And there was a bunch of exinga, you know, cohorted studios that all all at the same time were getting kind of the same funding like us.
Yeah. So you raised the two and a half and what sort of

what was the game that was next and kind of how did you build a team all that?
Yeah. So the first game we made was a game called Worlds Domination. Um so we we started as soon as we the round
I play that. That was a tower defensy one, right?
Yep. Yeah, exactly.
I remember that. Wow.
Yeah. So we that started as um you know we we were kind of experimenting with a couple of different options. The original pitch was Clash of Clans but with better momentto moment gameplay um was kind of the early pitch and we ended up as soon as we closed the round which I think ended up closing in like midappril um uh we we hired an animator we hired a UI person and two additional engineers pretty quickly um all from kind of within network. it was either people that we had worked with before or basically like friends of friends. Uh and then uh we started we started working very quickly. We we like like I said a huge amount of the game was built by the founders because we were just writing

code for the next you know four or five months um kind of heads down and and by the time we got to May of 2014 we released the game into early access. So about a year, like 11 monthsish, um something like that, 13 months. Um and we had grown the team to 10 or something, 11 maybe. Uh but one of the early things we started to do was we hired a community person. We actually hired two community people and we just wanted to before I think we really even knew what what you'd call it, we were kind of building in the open. like we were live streaming our Twitch, you know, on Twitch. We were live streaming our like weekly updates about the game, which was crazy because like no one cared about mobile games on Twitch at the time. Um, but we wanted to be really experimental with it and and we just figured, hey, no one's going to care about our game. And and so we we should just try to keep, you know, there's no point in us being quiet about it. We might as well just see like how could we do this? And and at the time there was a lot of interest by Twitch and experimenting with this stuff. So we'd

sometimes get like front paged on Twitch and so we it was able to help us kind of grow some excitement and and you know we we'd show some behind the scenes stuff. We'd show in development stuff. You know, we'd have an artist making a making a um uh a model on screen. We'd have our level designer kind of just working for an hour or two. We do this a couple times a week on our Twitch stream. Um and so then we went in to fully release it uh in like March of 2015, I want to say. And I think it was February, it was early 2015 before GDC. And um we got we were an Apple choice game which was great. We got many more installs from that than we were initially expecting which was awesome. Um and we ended up being Apple gave us like best iPad game of the month for um for that window. And the game itself is uh a bit bigger than I think we initially had set out to build because it was sort of tower defense but it was also tower offense. you could play as either the humans or the zombies. So, it

was faction based and it had a bunch of MMO elements that we built. Um, which I think about the amount of content we built for that game and it's sort of crazy that we thought that that was a good idea at the time with a team of, you know, I think when we fully launched the game, we were 16 or something. Uh, but yeah, so so uh that came out and um and then uh and then from there we ran it live for about 9 months and we really focused on trying to grow. This is at the time you were seeing cost per install like rapidly increase. Like every quarter we were watching the watching cost per install double or triple.
Jeez.
And we were really worried about the amount of capital we had to kind of do the next thing and and you know was it it had it had roughly broken even the game. Um but it wasn't it didn't feel like we could we could advertise profitably at really small scale like 50 grand a month, 60 grand a month. Um, but we we we got really worried about being able to really grow it massively and that we would slowly like get we we

would constantly be running behind because some of these mobile teams had just way more sophisticated user acquisition, you know, things than we did and we worried about building all that and what it would take. Uh, so so that's when we decided to to basically move on to the to the next project. Um, but we we learned a ton of valuable lessons going through that obviously. And um, and it was great for the team because not only were we an Apple Ender Choice game, but we because we were one of the first teams that were was using Apple's like metal graphics stuff, we were actually like in the Apple keynote, like our little logo was up on the screen, which was super exciting for the team and stuff like that. So, we were starting to get more wellknown in the industry, which was really helpful to kind of be talking about partnerships and things in the future.
And this was all still off of the original two and a half. Are we do you guys were you guys did you guys raise more money?
We raised six
in November of 2014.
Okay.
All inside round. It was awesome. Closed in like 10 days. It was the best round I've ever raised. It was amazing.

Highly recommend it. Um uh
it it came about because our existing investors were like, "Hey, do you guys have enough money to really put the weight behind a launch?" And we we could have gotten a launch, but we would have been pretty tight on cash. And because we ended up splitting the first round between so many investors, they were just not at their ownership per stake that I think they wanted. So they just all wanted more. And so it was very easy to to just go do that.
So you guys still had a decent amount of money. I'm well I guess you only ran it for n I guess it was only about a year after that you shut it down then.
When we shut it down, we still had you know four four or five million in the bank because we were we weren't like you know we we didn't really spend that much. Um and we had mostly made a bunch of it back. So,
what was the next G? Is that Spellbreak and then?
No, no, this was before Spellbreak. So, one of the things that we felt like had really worked for us with World's Domination is we were doing these smallcale um individual deals with influencers like in early 2015 um with like

YouTubers and we were giving them affiliate links and we're paying them like a quarter an install and they give us like you know $18 LTV users. It was amazing but it just didn't scale. I remember explaining to our lawyer what an influencer was, which was like really funny because we were trying to craft these very specific, you know, individual deals. Uh, but we we saw, I think very early the the ability for influencers to to drive um uh eyeballs and we we had felt that if you're going to bring a new IP to life, you really have to build a game that can distribute itself. And so we leaned pretty heavily. This was right around the time that Twitch plays Pokemon had come out and there were all these really interesting moments happening with live streaming. And so we thought, what if you made a game that was specific for live streaming that was really built for kind of like the the the streamer, the players, and the audience to all participate in a shared entertainment experience together. And we had heard from a lot of folks on the on the Twitch side that they were really excited about this

idea. Like streamers really wanted this. They wanted more ways to interact. They wanted to do all these things. So we started to build a game called Streamline. And along with that, we built a platform called Streamote, like a remote for streaming that you could go and actually interact with the game. So the game was a 16 player uh sort of like action sports game. It it was sort of like a big game of tag where the streamer was usually the one that was it and they would go around and eliminate the other people that were effectively, you know, doing this action parkour to gather points and avoid the streamer. And so we really hustled to get this game out. We started working on it. We pivoted to away from Unity to Unreal. And we ended up getting a bunch of interest from Amazon. And so Amazon came to us and they were like, "We think this is really awesome. Do you want to be the first game to release through Twitch Prime?" And so the idea would be it would be for free on Twitch Prime for a month and then we'd also be the first game to release for sale on Twitch because in that

moment Twitch Amazon was really trying to take on Valve and they thought they could sell games directly on Twitch. And so um on top of that we ended up also being the first game that was outside of Lumberyard to use Gamelift. So we had this like three-way deal with Amazon which was definitely an interesting lesson and experience for me. was some of the most complicated and difficult moments of my time at at Proletariat was doing this because the different groups inside of Amazon all thought this was a different deal. But for me, this was all the same deal and they were like all tied together. Um, but what ended up happening is I think there was a lot of challenges. You know, one we rushed the game out cuz we had 11 months to do it which was just not a lot of time on top of building this like this like stream remote thing. Like so we were building both like a massive website in React and then this game in Unreal as well. It required a Twitch login to use. We had these really smart things where you could like put an invite link in the Twitch channel and click a button and it

would automatically matchmake you into the right match. Like we we did a bunch of work to do some I think pretty innovative stuff at the time. Uh, and then you know Twitch Prime launches and uh, and the launcher I think was much buggier than they were expecting. They acquired like Curse I think right before that and they kind of turned that into their launcher. And so Amazon had originally said that their low bar estimate for us for installs in that month was going to be 500,000. And so we took that and we were like, "Okay, let's say we get half that. That'll be our low estimate." We ended up getting like 16,000 in the first month. So like less than 5% of their target. And then the best part is that I flew out to to the Amazon team and they're like, "Oh, by the way, we're pivoting away from all of this in the next 60 days. Like we're actually going to close down the store. We think this is a bad idea." All of that. So
don't trust big tech companies.
So now we're So now we're in November of of 2016 and this is like the darkest time of proletariat for sure because we

were lucky in that we we foolishly did not raise leading into the launch. We launched in in like early October, I think, of 2016. Everybody was super excited about this. We could have easily raised a great round of funding, but we were just super overly confident that this was going to work. We were like, "Oh, we have the next Rocket League. Like, you know, Amazon is going to put all this weight behind it. Like, this is a whole new platform. We're going to be the first game on it. It's going to be great." And we had this opportunity to raise and we didn't. And we we only had about even given the minimum guarantee that we got from Amazon, we only had about 6 months. we can only get through kind of like mid-March of 2017. And I don't know if you if you remember this, Kevin, cuz I'm pretty sure like like uh we we probably met around this era. I'm trying to think when we actually met, but it was a frozen tundra of financing in that moment. It was like the tail end of the you know, we're in the back half of the console cycle. VCs that had made any of the like mobile bets, it was incredibly difficult. They were fading out. there were some some

VCs that had made VR and esports bets, they were taking a lot longer to get to fruition and so there just was no money. Like there was no money anywhere. Um and so we were kind of staring down the barrel of like in November of that year. I remember we sat down for a board meeting and I was like, you know, what do we do? And they were like, I try to get Aqua hired like I don't really like there was no, you know, they didn't really like there was no good options. Um so so yeah.
Okay. Well, yeah. What's next? What happened? I actually don't know the story. So,
yeah. I mean, so what happened next is we we I pitched everyone on the planet um that would listen uh and we just hustled as much as possible. We started to work on what we think what we thought would be potentially the next game. And one of the things we saw is we thought there was a ton of lessons we learned from doing the live stream stuff and that we think there was still something there on the influencer side. And there was this game at the time that we felt was getting so much content created for it on both Twitch and YouTube, but we felt like it wasn't you could do a much

more high quality version and there was an opportunity to go after it and that game was H1Z1 and we really thought that the battle royale genre was a huge opportunity. Um, I remember I like had this conversation with the team where I said it felt like a um multiplayer rogue like for people who don't play rogue likes is like what you know and and so we got very interested in this especially doing a fantasy version of it that really leaned into some of the RPG aspects of rogue likes with battle royale. So we started to work on it. We started a prototype. We built two different prototypes. And then, you know, um uh you gota you gota fast forward a little bit to to um early 2018. So, we started to work on that a bit in like 2017. We were able to get a round of funding basically 10-centent le because they thought what we did with Spellbreak was super interesting. Um, and and they really thought like the the ability for us to figure out go to market and stuff like that was worth backing, but also extremely lucky cuz we were the first investment that Tencent

did when they started to really do earlier stage.
Um, so luck and timing. We ended up getting that money about like a week before we were ready to shut down the studio and to our investor's credit, they gave us a bridge to get the deal fully done. Um, which was great. Did you have to make any cuts through this or were you were able to hold on and and not have to make cuts?
Didn't do any layoffs through this. So then yeah, so then we started to work on Spellbreak and um in early was it 2018 is when PUBG launched if I'm thinking right. I think that's right. Um
and we were like, "Yeah, we should definitely make this game." And so we we really started to move forward on where Spellbreak was going to go. We um went into early kind of pre-alpha on Spellbreak, but we didn't have enough money like we didn't we only raised like another six million from Tencent um and our existing investors and we didn't we knew we didn't have enough money to finish Spellbreak even to get to just early access on PC and so we knew we had

to raise again and I tried to get capital like I had you know I tried to have all the conversations and we just like knew we would need some form of traction and so that's when we went into the pre-alpha in August of 2018 July 2018 with um with Spellb Breakak because we just needed to get people excited and that ended up going really viral. We were at a moment where we were about to run out of money again in kind of November of 2018 and we ended up going super viral in October. We effectively like released a YouTube video that just went really viral. We went from having zero term sheets to 12 in like a two week period. again, our existing investors gave us a 500k bridge and we were able to use that to get enough time to get a distribution deal with Epic, which gave us an advance. Um, and we got that deal done before the end of 2018.
What does really viral mean? Like, uh, like views on YouTube or like

Yeah. So, I mean, what everyone cared about at the time was the size of our Discord server.
Okay. Yeah.
So, we we had had about 30 to 40,000 going into October and then we put out this YouTube video. We went to like 120,000 over a weekend and we were like the second largest or the largest compared to Fortnite and I was constantly having to ping people at Discord to like up the cap. Like we were going back and forth with Fortnite as to who had the most. It was like we would hit you know 250,000 then like they would hit 250,000 then they would get to go up sooner and they'd go up to 300 and then we'd go up to 300. And so
during that era of 2018 to 2019 we were just fighting about who could have the biggest and most active Discord server. many of the pitches I see in games like are extremely light on go to market and marketing. Um, and you guys didn't have uh like someone that was a marketer per se, but clearly like in each of these eras, you guys thought a lot about community building,

marketing, you know, from the Twitch streaming to the influencers to, you know, even, you know, the mo even each fundraising has that element of that like how are there any lessons you learned from um sort of go to market lessons? per se in terms of like I mean even the morality of like the you know the trailer like there there must have been some I'm sure it wasn't just luck there was some tactics that you had going into it.
There's lots of things to think about in go to market that I think are really important. One of the one of the big things that we really benefited from is we we latched on to I think a compelling core concept, but then we created this sense of exclusivity because it was initially from July of 2018 through February of 2019, we had the game under what we called like quote unquote NDA, but it was really like a checkbox in a form that said I wouldn't share this game. And we basically threatened you that if you shared the game, we would ban you. And to be honest, the community policed themselves. like there would be the occasional person who would like

post something or go, you know, go live on Twitch and the community would go over and be like, "Hey, like, you know, turn your turn your stream off." Um, uh, and so it meant that there was this exclusivity of people wanted to know what this game is. Like like they wanted to get in there and play. Like we were the hottest, you know, kind of pre-alpha code you could find. Like people were selling them secondary for like, you know, not tons of money, but like tens of dollars. Um uh and so
so I think one of it was was doing you know finding exclusive things. The other thing is just really experimenting with your content until you find ways to go viral. Like I see people posting on you know ch like things like Twitch or Twitter or any like you're never going to go viral there. What we did is we ended up moving all of our um our dev blogs to Imager and we put them with like these really cool animated gifts
and they would go mega viral because there was like a trending page on Imager,
right?
And they would get hundreds of thousands of views and that would drive tens of

thousands of signups into the pre-alpha.
And it's because at the time it was still relatively easy to go viral there. And so, you know, I I we were we were pre-Tik Tok era, but I would be definitely looking at like, hey, like how do you play that algorithm to really go viral? And I think you just have to experiment. Like, we were experimenting with the types of content and the places we were going. I think it's a mistake to I think it's too easy for devs to get into a sense that they should be maintaining the community, not like focus solely on growth. Like, I don't think posting spending the time, your community person's time to post to your Twitter matters at all. Like, don't even bother. Like until you feel like you have a sustainable game that is killing it, like then maybe worry about it. I would just be spending all of my time trying to be as experimental as possible with the content, the channels you're trying to go on, any of that and really focus on what could what could work cuz also that stuff changes so fast. The difference between, you know, I don't even know if Imager is a good channel today, right? And like I said, Tik Tok didn't exist when we did this and those

things shift all the time. So being as experimental as possible, I think is really critical. Was that you that was doing that? Were you specifically going out and trying new channels? And
I I was I was involved like we had so we had a community person at the time. Most mostly it was myself and like two other people really pushing on this.
Did you guys use outside agencies and stuff or it was all it was mostly in house?
Way more scrappy than that. Right. And then so that YouTube the YouTube video that ended up going really viral. It was interesting like we so we didn't have any money to make a trailer cuz like I said we were about to run out of money. Um uh which is kind of the story of Spellbreak. We had to raise capital four times during during Spellb Breakak's development. Um, and so basically every year and and we there was all these trailers were coming out and at the time they were all none of them had gameplay. And so the original pre-alpha teaser for Spellbreak was like 90 seconds and it was just gameplay clips. And we we joked about whether or not the the actual title screen should say, you know,

spellbreak, you know, pre-alpha teaser just gameplay. And we actually like made that cut of the video, but we ended up changing it and we we we got a little nervous at the end and we made it like real gameplay from real players. And because of that, I think we were just listening to the sort of narrative of what was happening around kind of games media. And and I think also just the visuals and the gameplay of Spellbreak was just so unique and different at the time that that was compelling in itself and it was just a bunch of gameplay and so it ended up like getting onto the algorithm and YouTube and really driving a lot of growth.
In the Spellbreak case, there clearly was product market fit in the sense that like obviously like it connected and people connected with it. That's why you join a Discord. That's why you get um you know into those play tests and whatnot. I guess what are the what are the what were some of the pros of that and then I guess in the end spell break had some issues um and I guess what like what were the false and negative signals I guess from that huge amount of hype

that you guys generated
well so I think there's something that's that's really important to understand which is there's a big difference when you know I think it's great that we were able to build that exclusivity
um and people really wanted to like get into the early access and be involved. But when you have built that level of hype and exclusivity, the in the motivations for people to be in there,
yeah,
is different than the they just want to play a cool game.
And so you just have to kind of keep that in mind when you're when you're thinking about it. I think um
the you know, if I could go back, you know, obviously if I knew what would have made Spellbreak sustainable, like we would have done it,
of course. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But I can speculate if there were some things that I could do again. Um, there's a couple of things. One, I think the business model was just wrong. I think we shouldn't have gone free to play and we toyed with whether or not we should have and we were selling founder packs early, but I think if we had charged $40 instead of making it free, I think we would end up probably closer to what like a Naka Blade Point is right

now. Um, and I think that was a major mistake. If I could go back and do it again, I would have done that. The other big thing was we we were really pushing for this idea of full crossplatform crossplay on day one which I think it was great that we did it but because of the nature of co we were working with an external studio in Japan to do both mobile and because we were planning to launch on mobile as well which was insane.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they were working on the mobile and the switch versions for us but when the lockdowns happened in March they couldn't work.
Mhm. And so we basically had to end that contract and then we decided to shove the mobile version and then we brought the Switch version in house. But that meant from basically March till September, we reoriented our entire gameplay team to do the Switch port,
right?
So we lost 6 months of iteration and content. So we actually didn't even launch with like a battle pass like that came later
because we put the focus on the Switch version. So if I could do it again,
I would do those two things. And the

other big thing similar to the like I did not learn the lesson that I should have learned with Streamline, we also could have raised a huge round of funding in the summer leading into Spellbreak's launch, but we didn't. And so we launched with like a $3 million $4 million marketing budget. And I think we probably would have wanted $24 million because we got 8 or 10 million players in the first month, but I think we really needed like eight or 10 million players just on the PlayStation to get the especially with a freetoplay model to get the sustainability that's required.
Yeah, that makes sense. And and I guess with Steam nowadays, it's so difficult. It's like you launch, people are constantly critiquing the retention and if it falls below sort of threshold,
right, there's all sorts of narratives there of like dead game, right?
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Especially on free freeto play online games like you're you're just getting
I think free free to play scares scares me deeply now. And I think honestly I think that my my sort of take on it is that I think you you almost always want to launch premium because you can always make it free over time. I mean we saw

like Destiny did this, PUBG did this, like a bunch of them have done it.
There's just so much risk to being free at the start because you need so much scale and it's very very hard to cut through all the noise when we talk about the go to market. So you know if I could if I could go back and change anything it'd be that.
Yeah. I mean, you don't have the content usually to to to retain anybody and then you don't have any content to sell to anybody. So, you're you're just free and then
and then the marketing is tremendously hard, right? It's hard to make the math work um because of how expensive it is to acquire a user, especially on console, you know.
Yeah. So, next step was at some point you guys decided to exit um and and sell the company. um what what did what what where did the company go and what what what was that point you all decided to kind of go over to Blizzard?
We knew Spellbreak wasn't going to work without significantly more capital and at the time there just wasn't the capital there to go get we were just too late for games funds. This is in so in 2021 we sort of knew this was going to happen
but there was so much demand for people

that wanted to work with the team that we ended up actually doing some code development which kept us going while we were kind of churning on the next things and we you know and we had had a couple of this was peak M&A time so we had a couple of companies come take a look um some spending significant amounts of our time to then not give us an offer a lot of due diligence for a lot of time I made a lot of debt that didn't matter at all. Um the so we we were we were trying to figure out basically if we were going to stay independent, I felt like we couldn't be a single game studio and so we were attempting to pitch multiple games. We had a new IP game that we got pretty far to we actually had term sheets for before we ended up doing the sale to to Blizzard. Um, we we knew and that was a big game was like 80 or $85 million development budget. And then we had we thought based on that we would go raise additional capital and probably try to get a a

second like a Spellbreak because we really thought that we we nailed the the theme, the idea of Spellb Breakak, like the IP was worth doing, but a freetoplay battle royale was not the right venue for it. Um and and so we would we thought by the end of 2022 if we stay independent we'll raise additional capital we'll go try to get a second deal in place and we'll try to be a multi-p project studio and we had enough demand coming in that we were actually going to have kind of like the third leg of the stool for us was going to be either co-development or basically working on other people's IP um because we had a lot of asks coming in for that because there were at the time so much demand for people that had done live service games um because everyone wanted to go make a live service game with their IP
and and so we were we were kicking around that as if we stayed independent and then we had a couple of options. There had been some conversations on what would the opportunity look like and how would this go? Um and you know the original Blizzard conversation started

as do you want to come and make a uh you know a World of Warcraft expansion for us as a code studio. Um and then it became clear that that really wasn't going to work that way. Um and uh and we'd had a couple of conversations similar to this. Um and then basically we were watching the market turn a little bit under us. So I don't think any of us would have predicted that it would have shifted as much as it did by like the end of 2022.
Yeah. Uh but really it was a combination of if we did stay independent it was going to be another probably 5 years till we could try to exit again and it was going to be really difficult and and um and we had already been at it for 10 years and we thought that the opportunity with some of these exits made sense. Our investors were supportive um and the opportunity was really good. like we thought that the Blizzard opportunity was a really interesting one to come in and and deeply help the World of Warcraft team and the Warcraft franchise. We were really excited about it and I think it made sense at the time. I still think it

was the right choice given everything we know. I mean, especially given everything we know now. I think there's a very good chance that that $85 million game I mentioned got cancelled and we laid off a large percentage of the team and and all that stuff. And so, um I have no regrets on the the decisions we made going into it, but that was that was really the choice. um was you know and and you got to remember that since we'd been around for 10 years and we it wasn't you know things were by no means straight up and to the right you I mean we we we had less than two months of runway in the bank every year from 2017 through 2022
at some point
that's very stressful while
yeah we were like 120 130 people right so there's you know I wasn't getting a lot of sleep I was like waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat all the time uh but the also our cap table because we had raised at that time close to 50 million bucks. It just was was going to be really hard for us to then go get additional capital to go do this. Like we just we didn't own a lot of the company
anymore.
And there are five of you too, so it gets split up.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it is an incredible feat.
I see the look in your face. Like you are terrified.
It's incredible. Like the the the amount of times you you guys like, you know, just made it work, you know? It it's an amazing
A lot of it is a lot of it is definitely like the luck and the timing, right? because we tried to be in the same position today with today's market. There's no way we sell, right? There's just
I mean, I would say it's luck, but then you've done it so many times. I was like, it's definitely not luck.
Um,
you roll the die enough. It's just like, you know, just, you know, take take all the shots on goal you can, I guess.
No, I mean, you guys were amazing marketers. I mean that that's that there's no like and and that is like the the skill of experimentation and I think a lot of people need to hear that message cuz yeah I mean that clearly there there's a level of de-risking that happens in that process. I mean it obviously doesn't fully de-risk it uh but it certainly gives some signal. Um,
anything you would have done differently about the exit process? Like did you I sounds like you guys didn't use a banker or any you know thing to watch out for for for the our listeners when they

think about these types of scenarios.
So actually like in 21 we had gotten enough interest that we had hired a banker to run a process. We just didn't get an outcome we wanted there. That was super valuable to me because I basically got to watch a banker do it. And it was really funny. We we had pulled around again and we were like, well, where given where we're at right now, how do we want to handle this? You know, we have some interest on the publishing side. We have, you know, we want we want we need to like very quickly see how cuz we also, you know, we didn't have a lot of cash. So, it was like we need to very quickly see how real any of these potential acquisitions were. We didn't have a lot of time cuz all of this was basically happening like following GDC of 22. And we ended up closing and closing the deal with Blizzard in late June. Um and and the board was like, "No, Seth, you got this." And so it was just myself and our lawyer, um uh who was awesome and super like, you know, I I I uh I I think I I can't stress enough how how like, you know, it can be really

painful to pay expensive lawyers, but if they're really good, like, oh my god. Um uh having someone who
who was the lawyer, by the way,
who um our lawyer was a guy named Ed Peas, who's like local here in Boston. He basically is not he's not an entertainment lawyer but he's a startup lawyer. He predominantly works in like life sciences and other startups but he was our lawyer throughout the entire time at proletarian. He's amazing. But the but the value was one he like had seen tons of deals and had done things including IPOs and M&As and so had done a lot of it. But the other thing is that he did a really good job not like being very, you know, dealing with my dumb questions and really being able to explain things to me plainly where I'm like, what does this there are 70 pages of reps and warranties in this in this document. Like I really, you know, explain to me like I'm five what all of this stuff means. And he did not that did not annoy him. He did not get tired doing that. And it was that was incredibly helpful.
Well, maybe we'll move to a lightning round. Uh, so just just some uh some quick questions for you.

What's a piece of media that you've consumed recently that you like?
So I just finished this year's Call of Duty campaign and it's the first time in a while that I've played it and it is excellent. Um uh I think it's really really good. I think if we want to go outside of games um the uh show I think I think it's an Apple show um shrinking with like
Harrison Ford psychologist. Yeah.
Hilarious. I love it's so good. I think it's great with Jason Seagull. It's It's very good.
Maybe the dream IP that you would work with.
The ability to work with Warcraft is really cool for me. Um I think I would go back to like I I'm an Indiana Jones fanboy. Like I'm so excited to actually go play the indie game. I haven't had a chance to do it yet. It's installed on my machine.
Um but it sounds like Machine Games nailed it. So I feel like it can't be my my dream anymore. Um uh but I think you know it'd be fun to work on the expanse. That would be a cool one.
Yeah, absolutely. That'd be amazing. Not not like just a telltale type game.
Yeah. Yeah. No, like uh you know doing something more more full. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. What what about a

productivity hack?
It's probably like a normal one for people, but um uh like sleep, a lot of sleep is good. Um I'm big into that. The other thing is that um I write everything down. So I have a remarkable tablet, which I guess like you know, not sponsored by them, but I find it really really helpful to take notes in meetings and I find that I retain it a lot more. I I don't use one of, you know, an AI transcript. I actually like typing out the notes in notion and that's how I remember it. 100% agree. But what about the opposite? How do you relax?
Get outside, I guess. Um get away get away from a screen as much as possible. Um uh I' I've struggled to really be able to meditate, but I um do I found like distance running really helps me. Not that that's that relaxing. Um but you know, I I I try to do that. And then the other big thing is just, you know, just turn things off. Like trying to get much better about not having push notifications and staying away from that stuff, which is which has been interesting detox since I left, you know, um, Blizzard and Proletaria to kind of have the opportunity to do that.

Biggest lesson from a mentor
since we've been talking a lot about kind of like the the deal making side and things like that. Um, one of a really good mentor of mine gave me this advice which I thought was incredibly valuable, which is, uh, if you have one option, you have no options. Um, which I think is like really interesting when you're when you're, you know, and and he would always push me to be like, hey, if you it's great that you got this one term sheet, but that means you only have this one term sheet or you need to be ready to walk away. Um, so
question that we ask everybody on the show, uh, if you could go back to the founding of your company and give yourself one piece of advice, what would that be?
It's going to be really painful, but nothing's more important than making sure you have the right team. The investing in the hiring, investing in the firing when necessary, doing those things is incredibly critical. And I guess the last thing, although we deeply internalize this, so I don't know if I would need to remind myself of this, but like no one gives a about your game, so go make them basically.

That's good. Love that. Well,
on that note, thank you so much for joining us and uh we'll have to
Thank you.
We'll have to deep dive with you sometime on some of these, but I feel like we It's like there's so many so many seasons to cover.
Cool. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. [Music]