Embrace’s Eric Futoran On Understanding Every Player Experience For Record-Breaking Issue Resolution

[Music] hello world welcome to pg. Biz we are here yet again and yes Brian Bago my co-host he is at large he is Somewhere Out There finding incredible guests and that's what we do here because we talk to the companies and we talk to the people behind the companies and head of the trend today we have a little bit of all of that in one person because of course you know about the insane success of scopy Monopoly go and stumble guys I don't need to tell you that and my guest today well he built scopely as a co-founder before focusing his energy and passion on a project he's going to tell us about today so Eric Furon it is great to have you maybe you don't even need an introduction beyond that that I

think I I appreciate the kind words thanks for having me thanks for having me and it's it was more than a pleasure building two successful companies obviously scopely is off the charts especially right now with Monopoly go but having built uh before even I moved on to embrace six number one games which is insane to say so lot know a lot about the the dos and don'ts and excited to chat about them yeah it's your track record basically Eric when uh when your team reached out to me I was like this is great someone who took the helm at scopely at such a time and shaping it when the market was it was a gold rush it was legendary it's something that you're going to see movies about you know parties uh big times is there I'm just curious is there a book in this for you as well uh I've been known to write but I can't say I'm going to write a book but there are definitely some good stories I think the uh the funny thing is every every founder loves to talk about

their their wins along the way there definitely some hard times no company and it's good for the audience to know every company has good and bad especially in a downturn like right now so I think there probably is a book somewhere along the way and uh I'd be happy to be part of it maybe not write it makes me think of uh I'll forget his name now I'm so sorry but this fantastic person at fingersoft not necessarily the founder but he said you know you have to fail to win and he thinks that that is the secret of it it is the failure even within a game I think the hard one of the hard things about building games is even when you have a success something could change along the way Apple could change their terms of service Google could change how they rank uh you're somebody important on your team could leave uh you could have a an app issue like a crash or a freeze and then you lose a significant portion of your audience like it there's a bit of paranoia all the way through uh but there's failures along the way and then

you persevere um which part of part of the stress but honestly part of the fun you get higher highs when you have lower lows oh I like that that's such a good way of looking at it and it's true and you're going to tell us about your company Embrace but first let's go back just a little bit in your backstory because scopely well scopely emerged a winner it wasn't an easy path obviously um particularly during your time it was a different approach to games how would you describe your leadership style at that time and what would you say was the toughest call you had to make sort of the the most brutal advice you had to give or take my leadership style is one where I mean it's easy to say but harder to do but I tend to try to find really good people and I call it throwing them in the deep end of the pool you can't be afraid to fail it feels like it might be a theme today um but you can't be afraid to let your people fail as well as well

and the the key is when they do fail to be to almost celebrate it but more importantly to support them they can't feel like they can't fail again so when I say deep into the pool you throw good people in you let them tread and you just make sure they don't sink and the good people will stay at the top and they'll keep going and it doesn't mean you have to tell them every little thing or help them on everything they they've got to make mistakes and then you just support them so I'm helping hand at the side of the pool when they have an issue uh so I'll take an the second question I'll take an example I think the hardest thing for any game executive is to know when you are going to release a game or potentially kill it or reinvest in it I think we were lucky enough at scopely that we were we had the ability and the track record to raise money so we were never forced to put a out a game but nine times out of a 10 any game company especially on their first game at some

point you feel forced to release and it's not just putting it in a beta pool or trying in a different country but like putting it in the store and going and when you're forced to release your metrics are often not there uh and first impressions matter and so when you have a people installing the game and trying it and they not liking it you're generally never going to get those users back so those first couple weeks are the Make It or Break It so if you're forced to release you're tough um and you see it over and over and so I think the biggest thing is I've killed a lot of games especially early on uh titles I can't even talk about but some of the biggest movies in the world we had our we had Games built I had them on my phone and I was forced to kill those games because the metrics weren't there like if you have a you're just looking at the cohorts like if your LTV is not higher than your ability to acquire those users and you don't see a path out

of it you kind of have to trust your gut and you don't have a ton of data behind it but at some point you just got to say is this worth the investment or am I going to build another game or hopefully not be in the position where you're forced to release it knowing it's potentially not going to succeed there's so many stories out there where people release and they're still successful you can't and I just want to empathize with the audience you can't listen to them uh those are the the ones out of a 100 the majority of people go through that gut um and I I want to give better advice the advice is look at the metrics don't look at the vanity ones make sure you understand your core game Loop what is the metric that drives it if you truly believe in that metric and you trust your G you can release the game people would love to see your phone I think Eric there might be people that have a second time around chance because now the world's different right I'm just reading today we're going to have this blockbusters Zelda movie who would have

thought right it's funny I have all the old tablets over the years I've kept almost all of them including Android tablets which I gave to my entire team at one point because everybody had an iPhone and most the users in the world are on Android um and I have all the test flight and hockey app Builds on those even if we don't support those games anymore they're just sitting there with the icons there's some pretty crazy ones probably some gems in there as well those are clearly the moment that um continue to teach what from that skill set have you taken over uh in the case of embrace the core concept for any game continues to be that LTV has to be greater than your ability to acquire it and how do you break that into smaller pieces is hard and it depends on the game and the game Loop and things like that but the core is the the key and I mean most of the topics of conversation in today's world are around that like it's the margins around the games the ad

cpms are dropping the cost of user acquisition is getting harder and maybe not going down that the quality is going down because attribution is harder that Loop is the pain it's making sure you're improving your ltvs while making sure your effective user acquisition is working um and anything you can do to help either side gives you a better chance of success not just for releasing the game but also iterating and doing live operations and continuing to build the game um and making sure you're building a sustainable business where you can build more games uh and so when I was at scopely I started seeing all the pieces that I felt like degraded my ability to do that and there were so many products out there uh and tools and very few that directly understood both the game GM and CEO but also the PM and the engineers and they all want to talk the same language and they all think about the metrics which we're all Lucky

that we have Engineers that actually care about the metrics generally in games because at the end of the day they care about the end users experience and it's not always true outside of games especially not but in games there's nothing more prideful than like walking on airplane and seeing someone play your game and that's kind of what we all aspire to and the engineers do too so how do you get them to talk the same language it's hard and they don't and often different groups get blamed like if a crash comes across which obviously is very visceral and affects both those metrics then your often it goes to your engineer and they don't have the tool sets to make it work or uh even in Performance Marketing right like there are constantly Innovations in that space to help understand the core metrics and make them work um and so when I was at scopely long story short I got to sit on the front lines of seeing where all these tools are and we you mentioned it was a gold rush it was uh every user

that bought a phone uh there were tons of them and today that Gold Rush is still growing but it's not a gold rush you could call like a copper rush like people are still adopting mobile it's still faster growing than the web in the grand scheme of things and so in that scheme it's harder and harder to make good things and the picks and shovels start coming out and so I identified a bunch of problems uh one of which became Max ads which was required by L to become their ad server of record uh and this one Embrace to help the engineer specifically but the teams talk the same language so they can all be more proactive and improve every user's experience at the end of the day we get the better metrics and we can build better games let's just talk for a moment about why it's important to make certain that engineering is in on it that it is part of what can make a better more profitable game because first it was marketing we were all

excited about marketing then we moved in like oh product is marketing so now they sit at a table together and that's a great connection but we're now saying you know engineering really is at that table I'd heard it before you're a company putting them there putting them in that picture and breaking down some of that Silo why what is the result of that yeah I think there's a couple reasons and instead of talking high level I'll try to give an example from my own experience um but if when I was building a game so I was the first product manager on dice with buddies that became yatsi and is still a top grossing game um that was our first true mobile game at scopely and we were figuring out how to build a publishing business even if we didn't know what that was at the time um when I was building that game like there were tons of issues we all have tons of issues and as a product minded founder so I was basically a product manager I would take my phone show it to the engineer and the engineer would either try to plug it in

maybe try to reproduce it on my phone there was no way to do it and at the end and it became like a blame game which is the worst thing possible the worst thing you can do to anybody is to go to them with an issue and not have a potential solution or ability to prioritize it or even know you could solve it and so I knew it was affecting my ability to build a great game my teams knew that my performance marketers knew that and yet I had this disconnect with the people that were actually building my games and who could actually affect those metrics and it sucked and it created a inability to have the right conversations because the engineers didn't have the right tooling um and so like a frozen startup it's a really hard problem like is it your code is it a third party at SDK is it a backend API issue there are a lot lot of reasons generally it is a bad

Network call often it's your own but there's no way to diagnose it there's no way to proactively decide it and the tools that were available going back to your question like product managers and marketers they're naturally reactive like product analytics is looking back at the data by definition in if you're really trying to hit your metrics you don't have the time to wait a week or two weeks when you know there's an optimization to be had you have to jump on it and you have to rele release it and the Cadence is hard uh but that's how you iterate to success and so the tools need to be proactive they need to be built around those hunches and they need to allow you to prioritize and give the engineers the tools to do it without having that back and forth conversation so they can Empower themselves and be part of the be at the table and be part of the the solution and not necessarily the action item on a product manager's plate and not look back because that is not where they're going they have to be future focused and there's another

driver so it's actually perhaps a happy coincidence I don't know Eric but you know you come out with this approach and guess what whether you like it or not you're going to have to pay more attention to this because of course how your performance metrics stack up that's going to start to impact your ranking as well yeah Google uh recently or the last couple months and people many game companies especially the biggest ones like the wildlife which is a customer or um mini clip which is also a customer and many others they're really realizing it so for many reasons Google has released a Google cons console like they have that always but they now are taking performance measurements like app not responsive or crash crashes or frame rates and things like that and starting to put a Line in the Sand and making sure that you have to be on the the right side of that line for all the

primary metrics which and Android it's primarily crashes and app nonresponsive or an anrs um and if you don't cross the line you're good but if you're on the wrong side of the line you will not be ranked you could be potentially pulled from the store you'll definitely not be featured and you got to know that Apple's doing the same thing they're just more opaque you have me thinking that yeah apple Google they're not doing this necessarily for the good of humanity they're also think that if their Stores stay high quality at a time when we're going to open everything up and we're going to have multiple distribution channels and alternative app stores and all that good stuff they have to offer quality oh 100% And there's a balance and I love being pragmatic on this they're not looking for maximum quality they know where it hits where a user is going to shift uh and it's not as hard as it used to be and as much as most of us probably listening to this love iPhones in the US at least doesn't mean our users do and it's

really easy to switch now the carriers have made it really easy Apple and Google both fight over it there's lots of rumors about Apple now releasing apps for Android because of being able to access that user base like it's happening uh and so you're right it's going to get more and more competitive uh and we're going to be in the crossfire and we're already seeing it on ads and acquisition like it's not purely privacy as much as I believe in that as well it's exactly I see your face it's it's it's a battle around how do I accumulate the ad Revenue how do I own the data how do I uh own the end results for the apps in my ecosystem so that they can better acquire users and if they can create more stickiness in those apps the users keep coming back to their devices and or or they sell more in at purchasing or ads and they make more money you have to say though it is masterfully executed the Privacy

discussion ongoing I'd like to oh yeah I hate to be the in the room on that one that's between us Eric that's that's that's meeting someday at a at a Mau or GDC and having a drink on that one let's talk about how you do it because how you do it I love the way you described it because it was so simple you said you collect the exhaust coming out of apps now I can visualize that anyone listening in can grasp that what does it mean when I was building games like a walking dead it was really frustrating when you had a problem especially your own like I call it the CEO use case which is every I'm sure everybody can relate we find the weirdest use cases and then we go to our teams and are like how do we solve this and the data wasn't there like the data is available that's why I call it exhaust like the app and Os has lots of data around it but no one was collecting it and while everybody says they do whether they're logs

APM replay product analytics they don't this is why end of the day every user matters in Mobile every user experience is unique because they represent a mobile device and because of that all data matters and when you're on the web or PC and console that's not true the device isn't moving the OS is very standardized there's not a lot of variability the it's not really a about the user anymore um while you need to understand and monetize them in Mobile it is every user experience is unique and you have to build companies with that in mind and I think the engineers and the product managers ux they all get that but in reality the tools don't um and so when I I think about like the common pains and the pressure like there's so many tools but I'll say it over and again like but there's no way to connect the dots and so logging by

Nature samples APM is not a it's not a mobile concept it's a server side concept about putting an agent on something and collecting data it's not exhaust it's collecting very specific pieces of data replay everybody has problems with it it's just the visual maybe they collect some of the backend and then you look at like Firebase and crash lytics it's a it's a great product they're tail product everybody knows they sample and why I think sampling is bad because you're not collecting every user and so at the end of the day if you really want to be proactive and you really want to affect your metrics you have to be able to look up a user whether it's the CEO somebody you complains and then back it out how much impact what is that problem how much impact is it really having as opposed to doing reverse which is reactive like a crash comes and then you look at the crash and then maybe you don't don't have the data you generally

don't you have to implement more logs you have to go resubmit to the store and by the time you're going through that whole cycle and trying to collect the data that's already there that people should be collecting in the first place you're screwed like two weeks four weeks it's a long time to solve things they're not instant like a browser where you can just release and it's there you're at the whims of Google and Apple's approval process it sucks it's frustrating and then you end up living with these pains and I felt like it was like a death by a Thousand Cuts and so then I know my LTV is degrading and then I know that that's the paranoia that once the LTV goes low enough I might hit a death spiral where there's no coming back and then you see games dying that are great games because they they hit this moment of where they couldn't there's no return enough users are leaving they lose the social fabric of the game they lose their ability to rank and there's no coming back it just slowly creeps into your performance so the exhaust the exhaust is definitely

the goal like why don't just collect everything so it's there so that you have the ability to analyze it as opposed to reimplementing creating events doing logs like just have it in the first place so this is data that can stand on its own right it can solve performance problems but I think it gets really exciting when you start to layer it because you know the technical data you know the behavioral data um this layer is on top of that tell me a little bit about the interplay here because it sounds like we're almost getting to a point we can create holistic picture of something that's more than performance yeah I love the question uh I'll go back I'll keep saying it every user matters uh and so when you think of it that way uh yes I want aggri metrics and I want understand impact but at the end of the day I got to get to the user and if I really want to solve that unsolvable crash or an A n r or performance issue

or slow startup at SDK the end of the day I might be able to solve it off of a whim but it for the really hard ones like that unsolvable crash you got to go all the way and just look up that user and see what happened I need to see the technical replay like every step the user took what did they press what were their activities where did they pause but I need to see it layered with the technical and so it's not just a visual replay it's the ability to cross them over and so like if a a slow startup happens maybe a third party SDK loaded and then I had a series of network calls and then a thread started running like it's the blend of the two that allows you to be more proactive and solve things faster um but it's because every user matters and I think that's subtle I think of it this way do your tool sets index by user like it should be like it shouldn't be an afterthought it's not a property uh it should be the way that

your vendors think about your problems it's because that's how you think about your problems it's that do not try from Star Wars you know it's not it's not have a hunch it's know the problem and give your best to solve it and you can with the data so what does embrace for lack of a better word Empower Engineers to do better quicker faster than before because every tool has to do something amazing we talked about the intersection let's talk about the multiplier Factor what am I doing better how much am I doing better if I think about like a customer use case so like uh color by number which everybody knows that game uh we all see the ads for it it's by Wildlife it's an amazing game when they used us like they I'll use a crash example um because it's visceral uh but I don't think those are the primary issues that everybody has I think they're other things things today but from a crash they had they had crash

reporting most people have more than one it misattributed the crash the engineers knew it and misattribution meaning the crash code that was shown that was grouped wasn't was their own code but they knew that that line wasn't the cause of the crash so they had no ability to do anything about it so how does it how do we impact the engineer we give them what led up to that crash we allow them to to see other users that had the same one and again allow them to be proactive when right now they're kind of getting blamed or pushed or given a series of tasks without knowing if there's an answer and so in in some ways it's like switching them from a brute force and the enti and then switching them to the ability to actually be confident and be a member of the team at the table and solve and so in that case because they could see everything that led up to it they knew exactly what the problem was it was an third party SDK

that was firing incorrectly I think it was 500 in they relying on the output and then it crashed and so that's hard it's a hunch that often it's a third party SDK or you're back in but now you have the evidence to actually do something about it and so what's empowering is it I think of it as raising the game like if the entire team is on the same page they're all confident in each other and they all have the best tools they can all work as a unit and build better and then over time build more features and not necessarily think about all these problems like my goal at Embrace in some ways is to not have you constantly thinking about crashes and anrs and performance and startup kpis and it's allowing you to get back to just building games and making your users happy and features as well I like the scenarios and I'd like to explore a couple more because as you said it's not always the visceral horrible crap there are others there are others that you can look at where you're saying you know if

I just prioritize this or if I make a call on whether or not I should even put my resources toward it you know it will have a bigger impact across the whole studio it becomes everyone's business yeah so let's let's walk through two examples uh and so for the first one the Google Play console the the hardest ones are these anrs and why they're hard is because the what they show you is where the user left the app often the most troubling and difficult to solve is the application not responding or anrs so let's dig in and click into the anr page within the Embrace flow and I'll show you how to actually tie it to the Google console and solve them so clicking into the anr page you get traditional views that help you understand the impact and the amount of anrs but in this case we're trying to tie it to the actual ranking effect of Google play so let's click into the data that

is provided to us from the Google Play console we call that the AEI data tab shows you the methods that were captured by the console but often not helpful look at these three native pole ones load URL web view super not helpful and that's the common complaint while they rank you on these they don't actually help you solve them so let's help you solve them so while we have Google we can actually show you what happen so clicking into the Embrace view of one of these methods you can see that it was based on a cotlin x co-routine dispatch test. run this is when the thread and the method that started the anr as opposed to the one that Google shows that ended it also not that helpful so let's dig in further and you can get to a flame grath of every method that contributed to this often this is where Engineers stop they can see everything that contributed to the anr and finally solve it not always and it can be tough so let's

dig in further and use an ad SDK as an example so picking one from the Embrace list com. google. Android you can see ads in the method let's dig in and if we click in we can see that same flame graph View and all the things that contribute whether it's a traditional at SDK and the ones we know and love like iron source and applo and an inmobi and all the other ones or maybe it's not that simple to solve so the best thing about Embrace is you can keep digging in and you can always get to resolution so digging in we can see the logs and activities that led up to this in a traditional view but more importantly we can see what the user saw we call this the user timeline it is a horizontal view of the behavior the user took and all the technical details that led up to any issue crash anr Frozen slow low startup or otherwise in this

case there were a ton of low memory warnings and if you scroll down you can see the anr that's actually a culprit as well as the network calls that happened before maybe this one was caused by chart boost maybe it wasn't but we can see every single ad method that led up to it and we can see where theyr started where it ended and how we actually want to solve it and so an engineer looking at this has much better than a hunch they can now be proactive solve RS and improve your rankings and featurings very quickly and finally and this is applicable to any game especially on Android so you can improve the end experience of your users and let your Builders those client side Engineers that love their games build great games and get back to Features so segue into performance metrics when I was building like yatsi and Walking Dead and WWE and Wheel of Fortune Performance Marketing was obviously super important and so you have these third parties reporting on

their metrics and how many installs they gave you and and then you look at the cohort and the cohort of users that come in off that install could they often get stuck somewhere in the game like maybe it's on a purchase maybe it's somewhere in the tutorial flow you want to think it's the data and the users characteristics but often it's something more nefar in the performance of the game itself or a feature that's blocked and then you end up with bad data you're making bad decisions and then your effective CPI actually gets worse uh and you don't know you can't trust any of the data sources and then again you have to talk a Common Language and that's my common theme it's frustrating to go have an engineer talk to Performance Marketing and they are both pointing at each other or a third part or you're back in team talking to engineer and they're all pointing at each other because they're not they don't have a single vendor they're using all these different

vendors that are all sampling and no one has a single view of the user and it's just so frustrating you can see me like reliving my scar tissue I was thinking that you know the blame games the arguments the the fights you know what happened was it your fault what did you do and it comes down to something like you know what they aren't getting past this point in the game exactly which is the best it's like euphoric when you actually have proof or like uh another example uh we had another game which I won't mention because I'm going to throw the backend team under the bus but they were relying on a new feature with API calls to display something uh which everybody's thinking about that's the core how it works uh core of Technology especially in Mobile and there are a lot of assumptions that we don't think about so I'll get a little technical um the API calls timeout over time like they can't stay open forever but if the timeout window isn't doesn't match the expectation of the client side the builder of the game it

can mismatch and so what was happening was they were calling the backend and before they got all the data the API would time out and it would be over and then you'd have a user sitting with the the spinner of death and that's the death of your game they'll take it to all the channels to social to Tik Tok they will you will burn for these experiences yes yeah I mean the better I mean it was so fair first but the better the game the more people complained uh so like I'm religious on my own game I play Star Trek there's it it has some performance issues I'll admit it but uh users stick around uh they would they spend more if these things weren't there but they flame that game like crazy all channels it's hard to be person on that mobile game team that studio probably watching The Flaming and being told that you can't solve these things things or you don't have the tools and there's nothing you can do or

it becomes like an endless list of jur tasks like that's no fun and eventually you're going to just switch to another Studio I love talking with you Eric is because your personal life and your experiences have really impacted your career path and the outcome that we're seeing in this company you know they are aligned it's almost like want to stay with Star Trek you know it's like you and the planet you are one right in a sense you you and the company they feel like one and it feels as if it's your vision somewhere to have brought all these layers together was that your vision I'll be honest there you start a company you have a vision but it's really a problem set and I think uh that's the honest answer I think a lot of Founders won't say that you look for a a a space that you want to play in which obviously I'm passionate about games data and honestly adtech as well and the three kind of fit I mean for our conversation they fit really well and there's very few people that have kind

of all three expertises like myself so I'll give myself a Pat in the back but that happened fortuitously uh through just experience and having built two adte companies and then a games company and now assass heavy data company um but that's fun like it's exciting how do they was all marry uh I think the vision was and I keep like to let the team all work together and while we're focused on engineering because I feel like that's the ultimate way to really impact these metrics and make that wheel of iteration faster um at the end of the day the data we collect and the way we make sense of it is usable by all the different groups and so if you want to call that marrying it to demographic data or psychographic or product analytics or APM or uh I think of it as true observability which is a word that is really thrown around on the devop side and often in the AI world but uh not as

much in games which is surprising and it's because true observability is collecting everything so that you have a chance to make sense of it and then the vision was sending the data to each of the the people in the game team and not necessarily having them to use Embrace but we'll send the data to Gana or to uh a Content like an experience product like a condent square or full story or Quantum metric which isn't really heavy in games but the ideas are there or to an APM like we partner with a bunch of the APM vendors because we collect better data that's made better sense and we bet I'd rather equip the teams with where they have their workflows than to try to be disrupted the teams work the teamwork is working I have to wonder now if like some segments of user acquisition are looking at this and saying you know oh you know we don't

have the data we used to now I'm jealous of engineering um are you getting any thoughts any interest any ideas around how that can be made available to them as well they're all struggling with not just the Privacy stuff on the attribution side uh but the ad networks are struggling with targeting um I think on the monitoring I talked about experience the product intellects they're all trying to figure out how they all fit together and I'm sure the teams are seeing that so you're right like the we're in a kind of a unique advantageous place where we don't necessarily need to figure that out like there's going to be convergence and in the next year especially in a downturn a lot of these companies are going to probably come together like do we really need that many attribution vendors out there obviously there's a ton of stuff happening with appen and unity requiring iron source and Maloo and a bunch of other AD vendors like they're trying to

figure out where they fit and then the backend tools are figuring that out too many of them are releasing kind of traditional product analytics we think of ourselves as the feeder like better data higher quality makes more sense easier to make decisions on we'll work with all those parties and we already do to some extent you have the mindset you have the conditions that nurture these ideas um and you also know how to give tough love you know it's like you let people go their way you're not a micromanager so that works out in your world let's zoom out to the other mobile game companies and developers how can they find inspiration ideas innovate iterate where do you see there are those those Wells of of good ideas and good opportunity so I'll answer in two ways if you're a game company that's trying to come out and there's a lot of them now which is awesome like there's a ton of new VCS that are active in the game

Space and generally in a downturn games are counter cyclical so if you're thinking about starting one and you can make it happen start it um and to answer your question for that segment don't overthink it like in the grand scheme of things mobile hasn't been around that long um and so there's a lot of things and game types that haven't been built yet that you should just go for or iterations on existing games that you can definitely be successful don't try to reinvent the entire wheel at scopely we would we really wanted to do a realtime shooter the tech wasn't there at the time it is now uh and we see that with fortnite but is fortnite it's a great game don't get me wrong is it a great shooter not really I want I want somebody to do better on PC and console like is their ability to innovate there oh yeah like they're still not doing live Ops even though they pretend like like there are ways to make more money to make users

happier to to leverage those ecosystems uh to the te and I don't see the bigger companies doing that quite yet um and PC is 100% converging with mobile like look at where where Apple's taking iPad and Microsoft has the surface those are tablets uh that are computers that and Microsoft's going to start releasing Android games on them um it's crazy they're all converging so there's a lot of opportunity trust your gut pick a genre you know and go after it and you'll do better um for the bigger companies I think there's obviously a bunch of consolidation I think where they struggle is kind of where I was kind of heading uh with a lot of embrace it's we're used by both but in the bigger companies it's not just creating the best metrics for your users and building those best experiences it's really knowing how to capture the team and your

own team and the best Engineers think of themselves as Builders and if you're going to make them happy you've got to let them build games and if you're they're stuck in the weeds not and you're not actually building quality experiences or letting them do it because you have a series of bugs or you're pre-release your games or you're letting the incentives kind of come as skew they're going to leave I that was honestly one of the biggest fears and our our biggest accomplishment at scopely was to build an environment where people didn't want to leave because in games you can and especially in Los Angeles you can walk across the street and join another company uh and it's scopely are we invested so much in not just the environment which is easy and everybody talks about but it's the culture of building and having users experiences and making sure Engineers knew that they were valued and product managers and ux and QA and that they

were part of this team and that they were there to build cool stuff you were touching upon some of the cool games some of the cool ideas so let's wrap it up with your favorite game you're currently playing and your favorite game of all time favorites all time is much easier I have two young kids 11 and seven they're awesome I uh I haven't fully opened the gaming can of worms because I want them to to resist as long as they possibly can um and so I don't get to try a lot of new games anymore it's sad uh I'll put a pretend tier the best games really understand the psychology of the users they're trying to attach my psychology is I love narratives and I love stories almost like movies so my favorite games are like Bioshock back in the day uh not the highest quality game but the narrative was amazing the mood it created the the pace was different it wasn't like Fast PA like the tempo wasn't crazy it was it

was moments of time what I'm playing right now I'm mentioned one I'm heavily addicted to my own game Star Trek uh which is another one that was took a really long time to build with a lot of iterations for people out there and a lot of patience uh but it's been around for five years now because they were patient before they released it and then they kept iterating and they're I'm very proud of that that team that's mostly the same um that was there building it while I was there which is crazy it's been around for a long time um I love that game well speaking of loving something I have to say I love this I love this conversation Eric and I'm taking you up on that you come back again if we just want to geek out about psychographics or go in user psychology and player psychology you're welcome here anytime thanks so much happy to talk user marketing too thanks for having me it's uh fun that's a that's a date thanks [Music]

again this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market and all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter @pg Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube If if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you

as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the poppet gamer. Biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm Peggy and saltz and that's the wrap until next [Music] week