From Imagine Dragons Fame To Night Street’s Shooter: Last Flag

[Music] Welcome to the Navit Gaming Podcast, where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games. We bring together the industry's brightest builders, investors, and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events, dissect emerging trends and games, share lessons learned, and have a great time. This podcast is also part of Navik's growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to consulting and advisory services. For more information, visit www.navic.co. [Music] This episode is brought to you by Neon. For the first time in our industry, developers can finally have their own DTOC channels to save on app store fees and build closer relationships with players. But there's a catch. Selling direct means either building complex infrastructure yourself or choosing among legacy providers whose inexperience in games or questionable

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unlock immense value from Discord, simply visit leveler.com or check out the link in the show notes. And with that, let's jump into the episode. What's up everyone and welcome to the Navic Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the interview and insight segment. Earlier this month at Summer Games Fest, uh the studio I have on air today dropped their launch trailer for their shooter Last Flag, a zany 5v5 true capture the flag hero shooter that takes place in a stylized arena. If you have not seen it, the trailer is linked in the show notes and the studio is Night Street, founded by Dan and M Reynolds of Nightstream Records fame, a ventureback gaming studio with investors like Bitcraft and Mantis, as many of you will recognize, the chain smokers VC firm. I am particularly excited about today's conversation as we're going to go deep on the intersection of two industries, music and games, and a novel approach to building a game studio. I'll keep this intro short as I want my guest today to tell us about the game. But overall, in addition to talking about Last Flag and building Night Street, we're going to discuss cross media learnings, making

music matter in a competitive shooter, you know, music in the DNA right from the start, and the general crisis of building and marketing new games on Steam and other PC storefronts, particularly ones with new IP and generally double A distribution to today's videos video game market. With that, I'll get to introducing my guest. My first guest is Mac Reynolds, CEO and founder of Night Street Games. Prior to founding the studio, hello. Um, he has a long-standing career in the music industry at Reynolds Management as a co-owner of Night Street Records, the label under which The Imagine Dragons publishes. And everyone has probably heard of The Imagine Dragons, so I don't need to explain who they are. Um, welcome to the pod, Mac. Thank you. Thank you. Small small correction if I can. So, Imagine Dragons are actually Intercope Records, but Dan and I uh started our own kind of side record label, Night Street Records, and uh our artists include uh Benson Boon and Kay Fle. a small a smaller little subset. No, that's a large correction. Thank you for telling me that. The music industry is so convoluted to me. I'm like, who

owns what? Who owns this song? Taylor buys back all of her tracks and now she owns them. Didn't know she didn't own them before. Um, so thank you for that. Um, no worries. My second guest and I uh share background at Blizzard. Um, and I'm pleased to welcome Matthew Burgerer, game director at Night Street Games. Matthew spent the majority of his time at Blizzard on Diablo. Um, D3, D4, Diablo ROS, Diablo Immortal. Um, can I name more Diablo titles? Um, but it's always good to have another Blizz alum on air. Uh, welcome to the show, Matthew. Thank you very much. I actually think I may be the only person who's worked on Diablo on all platforms, console, PC, and phone. So, you go. That's pretty impressive. Very nice. It's on a lot of platforms. Um, oh, what about Switch? Uh, so that one's cheating a little bit because I was there, but the Switch port was done by a different studio. Um, so I can't I can't, you know, say that I actively worked on Switch, but I did

work on PS4 and and through Osmosis. You you um all right. So, it's really good to both have you here and um what a journey it's been since um at least Mac, our initial meeting for the series A investment at BitCraft. Um, I will call out um on air today that Night Street was one of the deals that I covered at BitCraft. So, it's been extra special seeing this project evolve from the first Unity playable to where it is today. And we'll talk a little bit about that migration, Mac. Um, but before we kick off our show and our standard order of operations, um, I want my audience to get to know you both. Um, and so Mac, maybe you can start us off. Uh, tell me a little bit about your background, but specifically I want to know why you started a game studio. Um, I know Dragon's DNA runs deep. Sure. you know, um, so my, uh, you know, my background was originally in law actually. Uh, I went to UCLA for law school, stayed out there for a little bit, did like a little stint of corporate law at Soul and Cromwell, moved over to Proscower and did mostly entertainment litigation. Um, but, um, and ended up kind of sideways finding my way into music. Um, you know, I started managing a a couple

artists, including Imagine Dragons, while I was in law school and, uh, decided to jump ship and go into management full-time and, uh, and so started managing them about 15 years ago. Uh, and have been doing that ever since. But, um, you know, gaming was very much in the DNA for Dan and I. Uh, so Dan, the lead singer, is my brother. Um, we uh we grew up, you know, on studios like Lucas Arts and Sierra Online and Deline and like these studios that just played a huge uh huge role in our childhood. You know, I remember sneaking out to like call the hotline for Sierra online, you know, like while uh you know, when my parents weren't looking, you know, I'm dating myself here, but uh you know, I did 3D modeling and animating when I was a kid as well. And Dan is a pretty decent coder. He's actually pretty great. He does a lot of work in C. Uh mostly does stuff in Unity. Builds little games and uh often shares them uh shares them online anonymously actually. And uh we talked for years about getting into games. And

about three years ago, you know, after doing every kind of collaboration we could get our hands on with gaming and music for a decade, decided, you know what, we got to stop talking about it and uh and and step up and make games. And so we started a prototype and uh the rest is uh history. All right. Well, that that's an amazing story. Um and it's so cool to see um so much uh artistry overlap between kind of two mediums, you know, on the music side as a singer and a songwriter as well as on the game side. Okay. So, Matthew, I'm going to turn to you. Um these guys start a video game studio. Um what makes you uh join them? what what do you see as the opportunity and pack up your bags from Blizzard and and join this brand new video game studio with the with Dan and Mac? Um, actually it it it really boils down to Mac more more than anything else. Um, first of all, he and I really hit it off very quickly and um had a really good rapport when we were

chatting and they had already built a prototype for what would become Last Flag. And so Max showed me his prototype. We played it. I got to play uh you know a play test with it. He and I chatted about it and between Mac himself and the fun I was having chatting with him and his vision um that just really really convinced me. One thing is people sometimes hear Mac you know manager of Imagine Dragons and they think he's the studio head he created the studio. Those things are true on the creative and on the game design side. And you could see the promise of of the stu of the game initially right out in the little prototype. And he and I really, you know, started kind of vibing about what potential updates we could make, what changes, what adjustments. And usually when that happens to me when I dive right in, it means that I like the core idea. I'm I'm excited. And it so really it's that like I really love talking with Mac. I like what they had put down and uh we had a good rapport

and games are a creative endeavor and so who you work with is not only critical to the success but also to your day-to-day because you're going to run into tricky spots and whatnot and you're going to put in some long hours often. And so if you can work with people that you connect with and that seem to have your back and that you know you have a good relationship with, it makes all the difference. Wow, that's incredible. And as someone who's played that early demo, um I agree it was loads of fun and had was was spiced um with a ton of really great creativity. Um so I want to start with, you know, Last Flag's journey and kind of building Nice Street. Um and the journey that you've undergone so far. Um I'm familiar with where you started, but Mac, you know, tell me a little bit about growing and scaling the studio. You know, where you began when you and Dan were like, "We're going to start a game studio and and where you are today." Yeah. So it's, you know, it started out with us kind of just dinking around with our own game design documents and kind of talking about the game. We drawing

diagrams. Dan actually made a whole series of animations and and handdrawn sketches and music and and voice over and all kinds of stuff to start building out the world and the thought. But really the core for us was we knew we wanted to make capture the flag. We knew we wanted to kind of recreate that childhood experience of actual hiding and finding that we didn't didn't really get in the CTF game modes that we loved uh you know especially the 90s 2000s you know Unreal Tournament Wars Gulch whatever great great great great uh great games um but never scratched that itch. So, we started from this place of, okay, how do we recreate that? And logistically, you know, we knew we couldn't do this on our own. And, you know, credit to Dan, he kind of started the ball rolling. He I I think he literally was like googling how to meet other game developers and like ended up going to like various outsource kind of websites and started you know looking at things that other companies had made around the world and had narrowed it down to about four uh four outsource

companies he liked and uh and and that's when I kind of dove in with him a little heavier at that point in time. we started doing these like uh web conference, you know, interviews and it was really funny because of course he didn't say anything about Imagine Dragons. That was not part of the pitch. And we got pretty far with uh the company that felt right to us, which is this company, Argentics, out of Ukraine. We just really like the guys. They seem the most uh realistic, I think, you know, which is nice. You a lot of people tell you what you want to hear when you're bidding out stuff like this. And we just really vibe with them on a creative level. And so at some point in time in those conversations, I think, you know, they were like, "You kind of look like that guy from Imagine Dragons." And that was like a whole kind of funny conversation, but we started with them. We started building our prototype and it was uh, you know, that was a a long labor of love and it took a lot of twists and turns. The game like at one point was like isometric fog of war, right? And now it's like a third-p person shooter. It's like really taken some turns. Um, but we got the prototype

to a place where we felt like, okay, like the fun is here. It's not super consistent, like there was a lot of work to be done there, but the fun is there and and we took that and went out and started just like many other studios, you know, talking to different firms and trying to raise money. And that's where we met you, of course, Alex, when we're we were doing our seed round and uh raised some money and from that began kind of the next leg of our journey, which was okay, we've got a prototype. How do we elevate this to a game? And and we need a team of people who have shipped great games and and understand the the lay of the land. You know, we've been really lucky to have awesome adviserss in our corner. You know, people who we' worked with in the game industry in other ways, uh who were kind of helping us and guiding us in some ways. But, uh, building a team was the most important thing that we have done, I think, as a company. And and fast forward, you know, to today, we're now, you know, we've got about 50 folks on the team, a little more than that. But to be able to work alongside people like

Matthew who worked on like one of our favorite game franchises of all time, uh, is just one of the most remarkable things. And we built that team kind of just person by person, um, you know, over the years. And with a very, very high index on culture fit. That was really important for us. Um, but also, you know, we were fortunate enough to be able to get a lot of people who worked on not just the right games for what we were doing, but did the exact things that we wanted in those games, which you can't always do when you're hiring up. And um yeah, we we ended up building up the team and then taking the game, porting it from Unity where we started into Unreal, which is a whole another journey. Uh raising some more money and like a seed extension and now we're kind of finally post uh as of was it last weekend, the weekend before? I don't know. Time's flying. And um off to the races, looking at a launch next year. So, it's a it's been a crazy journey.

Um, I'm curious, uh, given that you guys started actually as an outsourcing studio before bringing on maybe like I guess who you'd consider to be in-house, um, what challenges have presented them along the way with maybe beginning as an outsourcing team and then hiring a staff of in-house and it sounds like you're about 50/50 now. Yeah, so there a lot of challenges but also some real opportunity there and we've taken a little bit of a different approach. Um, for us that original team, they might have been an outsource team, but for us, they were our team. And there wasn't really a difference, right? These are the people making our game that we were in the trenches with every day. And so, even though we saw a need to kind of supplement with kind of these full-time employees in-house, um, we soon found kind of like halfway along the time of development that there was uh those challenges of having two teams, right? like some people sometimes you feel like you're throwing things over the fence back and forth between people and and we were like how do we eliminate those visibility and accountability gaps that can happen between team A and team

B and uh and so we made a determination actually to fully integrate the outsource team into our company. Um we didn't want to lose the magic of these are the people who started with us. Uh they have shared this vision with us and helped shape that vision. um instead of kind of pushing them further as we built the team, we were like, "No, how do we pull them closer?" And so today, even though some folks are kind of contract through this outsource company, it's an exclusive relationship. Um and and they're team members just like anybody else. So we report up through the same lines. Um all of our team meetings are together and we're already remote studio around the world, so we can kind of get away with that um kind of one team, one dream mentality. And it's worked really well for us even though there were difficulties I would say in figuring out like how do you take a a separate company with its own structure and hiring practices and culture and we have this little like shell of a company we started here with like these core

people. How do we mesh those together? It took us some growing pains but it was well worth it's a little bit like M&A to be honest. um you just kind of bought brought in a team and it's actually become really popular because you know before the feeling of working with an external development partner felt external given that you were in person and these people were not in person with you except that now I think actually a lot of people have been more open to outsourcing and co-development relationships given that it's kind of now the default that everyone is external um physically um which I think is is really really interesting um Matthew any thoughts to add to that yeah actually that last point that you made that that was my experience. It's it would almost be harder to think of them as an external partner because all our all our meetings, all our conveyations, everything being remote since we're all fully remote, we're all split all over the world. My interactions with people whose contract nominally says Argentics isn't any different than my interactions with, you know, someone whose contract might say Night Street. And also Mac was

it was very important for Mac to just bring them into the fold as one studio for us to feel like we were one team making one game. And so it's almost there was at no point I felt them like an outsourcing partner personally. I just felt like they were always part of the team. I see. Yeah. And so my next question is actually maybe going to be in that vein. You know this is to me maybe from this outside looking in this is a maybe a way of starting a studio. But um Matthew, there's been a lot of challenges um in game making space today, especially across double A and AAA. Um you know, this idea that traditional development is broken. And I'm sure that you either both have heard or read the summaries of Owen Mahoney's latest pieces, specifically his talk on um or his blog on sympathy for the devil. Um and many issues centering around an inability to make decisions fast and iterate and get the product into the customer's hands and sort of building in the dark. um from your perspective on the game director side, you know, how have you tackled that at Night Street, um given the team dynamic of where this where the studio started

and and where you are today? Well, I think um you know, you do have some there's essentially some drawbacks and benefits to being large and some drawbacks and benefits to being small and they kind of dovetail one another. At a smaller studio, um you have less resources. Um you know, that's that's a drawback, right? you have less money literally. But with that, you also have more freedom in terms of your decision making, right? You don't have somebody over your shoulder going, "Hey, how are we going to make this a billion dollar game because I've just invested$200 million into this?" And so the drawback becomes a strength, right? Yes, you have less money, but you get to make decisions that you feel are the right decisions for the game, not necessarily the decisions that match the financial outlay. This also means that the team being smaller is more responsive. You get their feedback faster. Everybody has a stronger voice in terms of the the quality of the product. If somebody has something that they see, it's very easy

for them to send me directly a message, you know, and for us to have a quick conversation. There's really no layer of hierarchy that is preventing people who see a problem from giving it to the people who may be the ultimate decision makers. So you can move very quickly because of that. You can also pivot really hard, really fast. And we've had that experience a few times where we've had an upcoming deliverable, an internal milestone that we had decided for ourselves. And when looking at where we were standing, we had decided that there were some key things that we really needed to hit before getting to that. And we made some very hard adjustments really quickly in a few conversations. And while that can still be painful in terms of the overall project, it's the right decision and everybody understands why you're making those decisions. And I think that again like that can be more difficult in a big organization where you have $200 million plus writing on your project. It takes longer to make a pivot like that. And that that costs

more money. It costs more time and it compounds the problem. Interesting. Yeah. I mean there's definitely I think one of the interesting things was about um also just like an asymmetry of the ability to know the information that you would need to know to greenlight or not greenlight a project and those basically those knowledge bases being housed in two different people um and two different sorry almost two different functions um so like the executive team doesn't know whether or not the project can be delivered and the project people obviously want their project to be delivered and so there's no one's really telling each other always the truth um and so I think that that level of cander on a small team is is probably part of the ability to pivot and the ability to shift gears. Yeah. And and in this particular case, Mac is the executive layer, but Mac is also the vision holder at the highest level, right? Mac was very clear about this is a capture the game first, it's a shooter second. And so having that clear vision be uh inhabited by the executive layer is really important. And also there being nothing between me fundamentally and Mac

means that if there's any moment where I need to question that decision, we can have those conversations. We can have those conversations quickly and we can make a decision, reinforce or pivot. Got it. Interesting. Um, two more quick questions before we move on to, you know, the the relationship between music and game making for you guys. But, um, do you think that there's any kind of interesting AI use cases for your studio today? And I mentioned the shift from Unity to Unreal. Um, give me like the the two highest pain points that you guys experience and and how you got over them. Uh, I'll take a second question, let Matthew answer the first question. Is that so nice of you, Matthew? Go ahead. Um, so Unity Unreal, the biggest pain point uh was team. We had a we had a team of folks that were, you know, making an a game in Unity. And so we had to be strategic and and pivot a little bit in our hiring. We had to work to level up folks on our team who didn't

have experience in Unreal. Uh this I think was mitigated by the fact that we knew exactly what we were making at that point which made a huge difference in terms of tech debt. It really helped us when we went into Unreal to to kind of know exactly, you know, we weren't building the airplane while we were flying it, which is sometimes how you're doing when you're coding, right? Um so that's I think was was one hurdle. Um the second hurdle was just kind of the inherent you know hurdles you face in terms of Unreal is constantly updating and knowing where where are you jumping in you know like what resources are you going to use like are you using lumen are you using nanite what are the imp implications like we had to make those decisions pretty quickly um and and that required kind of a lot of testing baking lighting versus lumen versus you know whatever else uh and you know we're still, you know, we're still trying to make some of those decisions, right? We're in 55 right now, but but that was something we had to kind of jump into

pretty quickly. I feel 55. It's fun over here. Um, in 55. Oh, we could have a whole 55 conversation. I'm sure we could fill up an hour. We're also in 55. It's so stay the line. Okay, Matthew. Uh, so I get the AI question. So the first thing the first thing I think I will say is when you get something a new technology like AI that can be potentially very disruptive, you also always have to be a little bit careful how how you approach it and what you you do with it. Um internally um there's sort of essentially two cases where AI has been used. Um, very early on we we have a a voice announcer, you know, comments during a match. And very early on, being able to record some of the voice lines using an AI voice, which is essentially the more modern version of the old text to chat allowed us to get a feel for whether this was landing, whether the voice lines were connecting and all that prior to us then having it actually recorded with, you know, a voice actor who did an incredible job

and and and is amazing. So that that was a good way for us and this is especially good for a small studio to kind of proof prove out this this this system and prove out the the writing on the lines without having to record them, listen to them, re-record them, which is expensive. Um I also sometimes personally will use chat GPT as like a super search engine. You have to be very careful because it can throw false positives out the wazoo. But it is when I'm trying to like look up large reams of information. I'm trying to kind of get some information that I'm I'm using to kind of brainstorm things or information about different places. It's a good start in the same way that going to Wikipedia is a good start. You can't rely on that to be the truth, but it's again like it's sort of a supercharged version of Google and Wikipedia together. So that's that's mostly how I've viewed it and that's really the extent of how we've used it on on our you know on our project. Yeah. Interest. Yeah, it's it's a really interesting

frontier, Alex, and you know, we're seeing a lot of studios use it in some exciting ways, whether it's building out, you know, worlds in real time or having characters that take on their own life. It's just for our project, you know, having generative uses hasn't really hasn't really been a thing. Yeah. But it's interesting to see um the different ways that each team uses it to brainstorm. Um you know, sometimes I've heard actually designers using it to help do like level bands. Um, and so it's even though that's something that is known, it's just a lot of work to write them all and do the math. Um, and so it's interesting to hear what you guys have to what you guys have thought about. Um, I want to start talking about our second topic, which is music, right? U music as it's impacting Last Flag, but also the music industry and what can be learned and applied to games. Um, and we're actually going to do something in this episode that we've never done before at Novvic, which is, um, at some point in time during this podcast, we'll actually play some riffs from the actual game itself, which I think will be really cool. Um, before we talk about it from the business side though, um, from the artistic side, uh, Mac, uh, you know, what are the three ways that you

guys are innovating with music and how does that actually connect to the game's design? Three ways that we're using music in the game. And like, why is it important to the game's design? It it's funny because you know Dan and I I think we almost deliberately were like but we're not making a music game like you know like this is we're making a game. Everything's got to serve the game first. Um but that said it's kind of inescapable when it's a part of your DNA and you think about music so passionately when you're thinking about player experience. Um so for us it was like how do you how do you have the music make the game more fun? That's really kind of our our focal point. And so at at at a base level, it means an unusual experience for a shooter. Shooters typically you're not really thinking about music. It's like if you I don't know. I don't remember the music in any of the shooters that I play. Let me just put it that way, right? And I'm sure there's exceptions with some games, but in in the ones I play, um we have some unique opportunities because we're

capture the flag first. So you for example, you start the game and the first minute of a game is you're literally hiding the flag anywhere on the map as a team. And if you're not hiding the flag, you're like hunting down these like golden cash bots and like trying to find them and kill them to get some pregame money. But you don't have to have great spatial awareness of every bullet flying by you in that part of the game. So we have this spy thriller7s song that plays that makes you feel kind of a certain way while you're playing. It's a little bit different than you usually have in a shooter. Like you like it like puts you in that like mind frame in a way that you can't usually have that experience I think in a shooter with music. So So we use it for you know uh immersion purposes I guess you could say. Uh it's also important for us in terms of you know we really uh care a lot about IP like we want to have like a a world and a story that that feels kind of meaningful and even though your options

are limited somewhat again by the genre uh there are some opportunities there and being able to have that music underline that you know people talk a lot about uh the identifiable nature of your art that you should you should be able to see screenshot and know, oh yeah, that's Last Flag or oh man, like I recognize that that's Firewatch or whatever the game is, right? Like it should be unique. You don't often get that opportunity with music. And for us, we wanted to take that as a challenge where you hear something, you're like, "Oh, like that not only does that feel 70s, like that's like real instruments and that's like this has got to be that's got to be a song from Last Flag." So it's another kind of opportunity I think to center the player inside the IP in the universe and for us it's a tonal thing as well because you know we take a lot of inspiration from I I mentioned Lucas Arts for example as a studio but maybe like a more modern example is Portal right like we love the Portal series uh

that tongue and cheek humor where you feel like you're in on the joke and it doesn't take itself too seriously where a little bit of like an anti- shooter or anti- you know hero hero story in a way and uh and the music does that. So, for example, there's a song that plays when you lose. That's maybe the best song in the game currently, right? And uh it's like the consolation prize when you lose. Unfortunately, I get to hear it a lot, but the um the the lyrics, if you listen as you move along, are pretty hilarious. They like they and so it gives a chance to kind of show that like side of our game. So, in the future, there might be some other interesting case studies in terms of music as expression in the game. And uh, you know, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself here, though, because right now we're just working on making that core experience pretty awesome. But those are some of the ways that we integrate it right now. And we're going to play that track right now. [Music]

over. [Music] Get lost. Get lo. What do you want from me when I give you it all? What do you want from me when I giving you it all? [Music] Okay. Yeah. And so, um, hopefully everybody heard heard the track. Um, and I think it's super cool because, uh, you know, I think a lot of defeat songs normally try to make you feel bad about losing. Um, I've definitely played enough Final Fantasy to know that the defeat sound is not pleasant and the victory song is very pleasant. Um, so I think it's really cool that you've done that kind of innovation around, you know, making it kind of cool or viby

that you've died. Um, and I think that's that's pretty exciting. And I think you're you're calling out to a good point that music has never really mattered too much in competitive shooters. Um, it stands out. It's less front and center, but your game has this kind of spacing for you to allow to create this immersion. um which is obviously, you know, by design and by the nature of being um a capture the flag game versus, you know, immediately drop in three people and then you could be in a firefight almost instantly. Um but I've got to ask you this question because um you know, everybody will have me asked it on air, but you know, you guys are composing a ton of music inhouse um but how involved are the Imagine Dragons group themselves in this project beyond Dan's participation? Sure. Yeah. No, it's a fair question. So, you know, Dan and I, this was kind of like a brother labor of love together, right? This is like something that that, you know, started with a project with just us two. Now, it's really a team. It's a Ninth Street studio. It's not really about us. It's about this like group of 50 incredible developers. And pretty soon, hopefully, it won't even be about us, right? It's

going to be about the community who's going to adopt the game and make it their own. And and we're going to be trying to serve the game together. Um, in terms of the rest of the band members, you know, they're incredibly supportive and awesome. They're gamers, too. Um, and so, you know, they're even though this isn't their project, you know, they uh they'll they'll they'll they'll support play and and be a part of the journey. It's in their own way, I think. All right. Um, and from the business side, you know, you you mentioned actually on some of our kickoff calls that you've done, you know, many collaborations during your career so far in music and games. Um, you know, for, you know, with the Imagine Dragons doing stuff for like, uh, Riot or, you know, a bunch of other things. But, you know, I think I'd be curious to know what about working in gaming um and what about working in music are super different and what should gaming take from music and what in music just like makes absolutely no sense. You're like, "Thank God games does it this way?" Um, you know, like what kind of has what what have you kind of had to rewire in terms of like the business of the actual industries? Um,

and have you thought about that while you're at Night Street? Well, let me start with maybe maybe I'll start with the similarities and then tell you about the differences and what they taught me. I try not to make any kind of like lazy comparisons. It's so easy because I'm like, well, this is where I come from. So, I look through this lens, but I do think there's a lot of interesting overlap and and a lot of lost opportunity in terms of the way the two mediums work together. Uh, in terms of saying everything is a pro process of creation, right? And it's a magical thing like anytime you're starting with nothing, creating something and trying to connect people together. Um, that's magical. And I think it's also, you know, on a similar note, gaming and music are very similar that at the end of the day, it's about community. It's about people. You're you're making something and trying to pull people together through that that medium and connect them through that medium. And it's kind of starts there and it ends there. Everything you're doing is kind of serving that, right? Um, one thing I think that's been a learning for me over the last little bit

where and it was a positive learning where we kind of started this and you know we were lucky enough to start it as kind of a passion labor of love. We never Yeah. Even if that had been in our attention we we wouldn't have had the uh the skill set or the experience to be able to kind of work backwards from some kind of case study of here's how you make a hit game, you know, like like oh we got to this is where the biggest audience is, let's go chase it. We never started from that place. We really started from a place of like what was inspiring to us and and and and you know how did we feel about you know the creative and and and where this would take us following our muse. I guess and I think there is something to that though that's also kind of like music. If you're trying to write a uh you try to write a radio hit this happens people get into we're going to write a hit or whatever. You're almost never going to succeed. You know what I mean? Like it's like it's just that's not how you make something great and special. It's not how creativity works. you kind of have to, you know, if you're trying to fit a niche or like, you know, sell to an audience, uh, it's an uphill battle. And I think it's the same way in games. It's

like if if you're like, well, there's this huge demand or this is very, you know, I I think that you struggle in that process. And this is something I'm still learning, but it's been reinforcing for me as we've as we've moved along. It's uh scary sometimes when you're creating something without with almost having those blinders on of like, hey, like this might not make sense because of A, B, and C for a business reason, but I think this sounds fun. Um, I think we've seen some early reinforcement of that of people playing the game saying, "Oh, yeah, this is fun." And and uh so that's I think I'm only talking about similarities here. You didn't even ask that. I'm so sorry. Difference. Um, so yeah, I uh one of the differences for me that was awesome is a lot of times in music it feels like uh it's a lot about the artist and so it can be a little egocentric sometimes insecure between artists and I just think artists in general like I was like I was like yeah

it's like it's like everybody's looking Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Everybody's looking at each other and it's it's feels very like a zero sum game sometimes and it's tough. And I think for Dan and I both like it was so cool to get into games and see how selfless the the game dev community is. And I think it's because it's really about the art and everybody kind of acknowledges it typically takes a village and you know there's small dev teams don't get me wrong built things on their own but I do think the mentality people have is much more sharing forward. It's like very very selfless. People are willing to kind of yeah let me tell you everything I learned and every good uh resource I have for fundraising or whatever else it might be. Um it was pretty pretty awesome to see that. Uh that was maybe my favorite difference. I could say say more, but I've already blabbed on for a while, so maybe I'll be quiet. That's really interesting because I think a lot of times in games we say like it's about the player, right? It's not about the dev team. It's about the

experience that they're having. Um and uh also I think that we were calling out I think the game industry I think more so than others. Um especially um like uh software like just general tech is extremely collaborative. People are really willing to help one another and share. Um and whereas I think a lot of times in other you know other industries people are pretty closed off. Um, but I love the comparison. I love the kind of thing that I don't write. You don't write songs for radio. You know, you're probably not a fan of those like AI things that just tell you to make the notes where they go. Um, and then so therefore you can manufacture a hit. But, you know, you've talked a little bit about how music is a big differentiator for Last Flag, especially in like a competitive 5v5 game. But, you know, Matthew, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, carving out a niche in the actual shooter market. And this is going to be some context also to anchor some of the distribution questions we'll talk about later on. But I want to talk start with the core of the the game design, right? We've we've I've played Last Flag, but you know, tell the audience about, you know, what Last Flag is and why it's different than any kind of 5v5 other Last Flag shooter

in a more specific way than perhaps we've been talking about so far. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Um, so at highest level, it's it's a a 5v5 hero shooter. uh and at its core it's capture the flag first and everything else second. And so that means that we tried to capture the totality of the experience of capturing uh playing capture the flag which of course means hiding the flag. So you do have this this phase where you and your team are hiding the flag on your side of the map. You have 60 seconds as Mac uh mentioned earlier and then when the match begins you are actively looking for the opposing flag while trying to sort of prevent them from finding your flag and that created some interesting design challenges for us because you need to have a map that's large enough for you to have a lot of space to hide the flags so that it's not found immediately but you don't want to have matches last too long because you're struggling to find the opposing flag.

And while we were in our development phase earlier, the we had wild swings, right? The the some matches you just found the flag right away. So 5 minutes or whatever and the match was, you know, the flag was out. And then other matches, 20, 30, 45 minute matches and that started to feel too long, especially if you were going to lose, right? If you're going to lose and you put so much energy into it, doesn't matter how much fun you had, it it's hard. And so we put in a few mechanics to help you um get to capturing the flag within a 15 to 20 minute time period because we felt that 15 to 20 minutes was the sweet spot for us. And so what we did is we introduced these radar towers that you can control. You capture them and they provide several benefits. One, when you die, you can respawn there, which is great. So it cuts your travel time. That became very strategic. But the other thing is every 30 seconds um almost like you're playing battleship, a radar tower that you control says, "Hey, the enemy flag is not here. It's not here. It's not here." So it's not telling you exactly where it

is, but it's narrowing the search area for you. Um and so by doing this, we really started to make it easier for people to have to find the flag, but still not take too long about it. And then at after 15 minutes, we're like, you know what, we're going to kick in into overtime. And so at 15 minutes, we reveal both flags. you know where it is now, but you still got to get it, bring it back to your home base, and then hold for 60 seconds to win the game. So, those are some of the the decisions we made that, you know, really leaned into this capture the flag idea that has been core uh to to the game from the very beginning. I will tell you one funny anecdote about my last flag experiences very there was no radar and there were no towers. Um, and I think uh at one time we were playing and someone had this I think maybe it was the scout or maybe someone else, but someone could basically like repel with like a like up with using like a the old sniper grapple. Okay. Well, that person um and then we planted the flag in an unreachable spot that only the sniper could get to, but nobody else had the

sniper on the other team, so nobody We found the flag. Nobody could access it. Yeah. So, um which is pretty sick. I had a good time doing that, though. It was obviously um you could not complete the game. Um correct. But it was a great player story. So what's interesting about that is you know that grapple ability that's a fun grapple ability. It was actually in our game until very recently. We had to pull it for reasons. But having big movement abilities, having fun movement, that joy of moon is really important. The So one of the decisions we made at some point was during the flag hiding phase, you do not have access to your abilities. So it doesn't matter which contestant you're going to play, the flag will be in a place that you will reach. We also give you infinite stamina because you need to be able to cover the map, you know, as quickly as you can to find the right spot for the flag. So again, like we we try and not um we lean into the things that make the game special, that make the game unique, that make the game exciting. And and I think that's one of the the big lessons for me on this project. There's two big lessons that

that came to me is you and they're kind of connected. You shouldn't fight others where they're strong. Like don't don't try and out muscle, you know, Overwatch on what make Overwatch great. Like we're never going to beat them that at that. And lean into what makes your game unique. And when you start to do this, it it can be scary cuz you know if people ask you the question, hey, which audience is this for? It's hard to say, well, 15% people who do this and 20% people who do that. And that's never me anyway. I feel always feel a fraud when somebody asks me that question, but you do have a good chance of making something that's unique and that speaks to a core segment of the of the player base that they they they would love to play this and nobody else is doing it. How have you, Alex? Don't wor don't worry. By the way, though, even without abilities, people are still hopping around trying to find their spot. That was super funny. You still get You still get that chance. So funny. I was like, I don't care that we have one. We just all all 10 of us know exactly where this thing is and we're all standing around it. Like the cheesiest spot I've seen recently was it was out in the open so

you could see it real easy, but it was essentially up a basically up a telephone pole so you had to jump onto it. So it was hard to do the jump and you were very exposed trying to pick up the flag while people were defending gun down. Um okay. So you've talked a little bit about some of the big design changes that you made. I'm curious like how often, you know, did you did you did you discern those changes because you were play testing with the community? You know, we talked about how, you know, Mac, you know, maybe music is a little bit more egocentric, but games are for the players, right? How did you hold yourself accountable to players as you've been building and iterating on Last Flag? This is definitely a Matthew question, but I just want to tee it up for him because I have to say this is one of like the greatest things that happened in terms of bringing in a team and being able to have so many more uh so many more different perspectives at the table in our company. And Matthew, I think rightly helped us kind of figure out early on that inconsistency

issue. And we have a play test culture. We've been play testing. thousand plus play tests in easily um on the game and and that's an important part of things. But we had found kind of early on in the play test some challenges and we really paused things almost for a minute and said we're going to spend like six months and we're just going to work on that game loop and figure out like how do we make this fun every time we play and that was maybe the most important part of our dev cycle. Uh, I'd say, um, we learned so much about the game just play testing and talking about it over and over again. And that's when the radar towers emerged. We moved it so like the flags could back to the home base. Uh, you know, we we cut out things that were very almost precious to me but needed to be cut out. The Wendigo, all the other things. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. I'm still working on getting the golden shovel to come back. You know, that's that one's still a fight. But but but really it was great because the more people played the game, the more we saw this is where the fun is. And Matthew just did such an awesome

job of helping guide us in terms of not being precious and being willing to cut out things that that even if they were fun, they weren't they weren't serving that core experience. Sorry, Matthew, this is really a a you question, but I had to give you a little credit where it was. I'll try and find anything left to answer. Um I think Mac touched on something very important is we have a strong internal play test culture. So there's uh two full team play tests per week um on Wednesday and Friday and then on the design team we have two smaller play tests on the off days on Tuesdays and on Thursdays. So we're we're constantly kind of checking on on the the the the features that are going in where we're at. And when especially when we're doing those those larger team play tests we're getting a lot of feedback. you have the play test and then right after it's okay what's everybody's feedback and you just write down all the feedback and it's rarely about bugs it's more this didn't feel good I didn't like this I didn't understand this I wish we could do this right and so it really is a player first feedback now we have

started having a wider play test audience and so that's great because you get different views you get players who don't understand necessarily the game development and so they're they don't have any kind of um filter visually that is kind of going that is blocking and they're just experiencing this should be a game that where I'm having fun. This thing is preventing me from having fun. Let me tell you why. The challenge there is actually absorbing the amount of information. Right? There's two challenges. There's absorbing the amount of information. It's a lot of of data points of feedback and then sorting through those data points and going is this something that we actually think we should fix? Is this something that uh is actually not really a problem? We just think this is how our game works or it is something that we should fix, but is this actually what this person thinks the problem is or is it a symptom of something else? Right? Because when somebody tells you that they didn't enjoy the game for reason X, Y, or Z, they're correct. They didn't

enjoy the game. Like there's nothing that you can challenge there. trying to figure out exactly what was tripping them. That might be very nuanced and it may not be immediately um clear to them what that is. And and and one final point is one of the reasons why it's so tricky is you may have heard this when you were back at Blizzard. You know, there's there was a philosophy that I took with me that was I've always found very important, which is you have to be careful about not erasing all the rough edges because if you remove all the rough edges in a game, you're removing the texture of the game. And so you sort of have to identify, is this a rough edge that's actually good for the game or is this a thing that's actually an impediment to the fun? And when you have a lot of data points, a lot of information, a lot of feedback coming in, it can be hard at time to to filter through all that. Really interesting. Did your players, and this will be our last question before we go to the final topic. Um, and I mean don't mean your I mean your external players, not your internal players. Um, tell you anything that was special about your game that surprised you? you know, something that

you were like, I didn't know that we were on to this, but like this is we're on to this. Um, but we had no idea. That's a really good question. I I I can't think of anything specific in that vein. What I will say is when you're working on a game, at least this is the case for me. I don't like my own work in the sense of I see the matrix in everything I do, right? I'm constantly seeing the the issues, the things that that that I need to to kind of improve. And on a theoretical level, I understand when something is fun, but but it can be sometimes hard to really see the truth of it. And when you have external players play it, when you have people who are just players and they tell you they have a good time or you see them smile or they're excited by something, that is really invigorating because it does help you understand, yeah, the things you believe in, you're on the right path because ultimately it is the players having fun. So to me, it's it's actually that more than anything else. Yeah. And two tiny things that were kind

of fun for us. This isn't like part of our core external play test group, but we had a we were going to play in person with I think it was with an investment group or something and all their kids were home from school. They'd come from some school project or something. There was like I don't know a a handful plus of kids that were like ages like six to 12, right? And they jumped on and played the game. This was an early state for us and it was so interesting to watch um how quickly they just totally understood things that were more difficult for us in the onboarding with some of our external play testers. Um, that was fascinating to me. And then more recently, we had uh, you know, we've started bringing in like some college esports teams and things like that to come try. And I found that the way people play the game is so different and and you learn a lot by seeing how those groups relate to it. In particular, the esports teams, like the communication was like immediate. And it's not just that they're shooting well, whatever. the way that they would shift strategy in real time and and kind of really

quickly see what's happening over a radar tower over here, so we're going to pivot this way or you're gonna hide the flag, you know, don't run the flag across the line yet, like hold the line over here. They think about things in ways that that just it gave me a glimpse of how fun it's going to be to watch the metas that observe that that emerge over the next, you know, six months. And uh and I'm sure some of them will be game-breaking and we'll have to figure things out. But yeah, you learn something every time you watch something. That's awesome. It is it is truly amazing what players the inventiveness of players what they will do once you put this toy into their hands. Um uh I've definitely had similar experiences where you're like, I didn't think about you doing that. Interesting. Okay. Now, if everyone did that, what would happen? Okay. Uh-oh. Let's go back and figure this out. Um but okay so you know you've talked about some of the ch the you know some of the design changes um that you guys have made to to Last Swag over its evolution. We've talked about the history of the studio. Um and now I kind of want talk you know you're at this pivotal point right where your

trailer dropped at GamesFest and you guys are you know in the process of going to market. Um and I would be curious and maybe Mac this I'll start with you if you could break down your kind of strategic approach to you know to finding and reaching players. You know what pillars are you deploying against and and who's leading that at the studio? um or are you working with a partner? It's a really collaborative effort. Let me say that first. And we are totally independent right now. We don't have a publisher partner. Um and so, you know, for us, Matthew kind of touched on this a little bit, but we try to lean in on the strengths of being independent and one of those is we can take creative risks. So, all of our strategies are are we that's kind we try to keep that top of mind and that's for example our social strategy, right? We're just now starting to, you know, get our messaging out. We're creating content. We're thinking about the ways that we express ourselves to the world. Um, but we're able to be super nimble and that's awesome. Uh, you know, we come up with an idea one day and it's out the next day. We don't have to run through like

four levels of approval and then have a publisher tell us it's a stupid idea, which by the way, it might be a stupid idea. But um you know when we look at our prongs in terms of uh you know how we how we try to cut through because that's that's the difficulty right is cutting through the noise. Same thing in music right now right it's like you just have access to so much every single day you're competing what are they 19,000 games what I don't is it a day on Steam a year I can't remember a year. Okay sorry it feels like a day. um the uh you're competing against an incredible incredible amount of content. And so um and so everything we're trying to do is say what makes us different and how do we let people understand that difference as quickly and cleanly as possible so that they can find this is my tribe. This is where I belong. This is this community is me and attached to it. And so that's the mentality we take

from the way we handle press from our you know influencer creator streamer folks uh but particularly on social where we can actually control the messaging and decide you know what is the personality that we're showing what are the aspects of the game that we're showing and uh it's an you know for us I'd love to be able to outline like a 15point plan you know I mean it's not that we don't have plans but we do try very hard to be nimble and you know we we had meetings today where we're sitting down and we're thinking about, you know, what is it that's resonating right now? And for us, we find that to be gameplay. Uh we find, you know, we're competing in a very difficult market in terms of shooters. Uh and even though we're capturing the flag first, not everybody understands that. You see people running around in the third person view with the shooter and you get a lot of comparisons super super quick. And that's, you know, that's totally fair. But, you know, we try to think about how do we get this game into the hands of people as quickly as possible so that

they can understand those differences. And so, pretty much everything that we're doing right now is how do we scale up internally to support that and how do we funnel people into those play tests as quick as we can in hopes that that word of mouth is really the difference maker. uh you know a lot of games live and die by social right now and people when they when they don't know where to you know they don't look as much to you know press to understand what TV show to watch and in the same way people when you hear from your friend that this game is fun that means 10 times more than any kind of ad that you might be able to put in front of them so getting that network effect is our goal um so you mentioned uh you mentioned Steam and you also mentioned socials um and you know how games are basically living and dying on their socials. So, I've got two questions for you guys, but the first is um you know, will you actually and again I have to ask this question, but will you lean on maybe the Imagine Dragons brand to create a distribution edge for

those socials? Um and then after you answer that, we'll talk a little bit about Steam. Well, that's an easy one. I mean, the dragons have been super supportive and letting us kind of share on the socials, and we probably do that a couple of times, but, you know, we always are really kind of cognizant, too, to not do a disservice to the game and the studio, which is, uh, you know, this is a game created by incredibly awesome developers working together for years. And, uh, it it wouldn't really be accurate or fair to kind of call it like it's not an Imagine Dragon side project or something, you know what I mean? That's not what this is. This is Night Street Studios, um, Night Street Games. And so, you know, I I think we try to ride that balance of, you know, it's I think a lot of members of the Dragons community are super excited to see Dan working on a game and, you know, communicating that to them is awesome. Um, but, you know, we don't try to lean too heavily on it. I will say like that it's we've been lucky enough to work in entertainment

for so long that we've met a lot of partners along the way in games in other areas of entertainment you know one of our investors is Live Nation and you know you know they bring kind of their own perspective and marketing experience and so there are definitely some like some helpful you know uh connections and friends we made along the way that have made a big difference for us but honestly for the most part we're doing it like any other studio It's like hand to hand combat. Every every person that you're putting in front of like trying to help them understand the game and get them on the wish list, you know, that's what we're doing. There's there's no real shortcuts to that. The way that I've heard someone say it is that you almost need to like divorce players from like you need to have players divorce their other game and like break up with Apex to try something else, which is obviously a very very hard goal. Um and so I guess that you know I want to talk about Steam. You know you mentioned you know there is a it is a really really deep well of competitive games and it's not across even just AAA double A. It's like schedule one can compete with Call

of Duty. I think that's like the other insane thing about today's gaming market is that it's not just everybody's consolidated in their own orbit is that you can pull from even like this the like you know very you know typically graphically low fidelity games and also reach all the way up into like the Skyrim territory. Um and so there's this general perspective that you know driving wish list is like that that winning Steam is just all about driving wish lists. Um, and I would be curious like what's your guys' approach to to wish list today given that you guys dropped the Summer Games Fest trailer? Um, how are you guys thinking about kind of going in that handhand combat with the with the Steam algorithm? Yeah. Well, let me first say I think it's healthy and awesome that you can have, you know, schedule one competing with Call of Duty. Like, you know, as much as it's really, really competitive right now, the fact that the barrier of entry is so low is amazing. And honestly, Steam gets a lot of credit for that because this is a platform for discoverability where anybody can compete and that's that's pretty awesome

if you're an indie studio knowing that you have access to that. Um, wish list, you know, there is a lot of focus and attention on it. People are always like, well, what's, you know, what's the latest on the algorithm? Is it like bursts? Should I snowball? Should I like everybody's trying to think about those things. Uh we're trying to just think first community and then wish list second. And so you know our call to action for people first and foremost is like hey sign up to play test. Come to lastflag.com/signup. Get get in here. Give us your email address. Be part of our community. If you want to jump into the Discord, great. You want to go wishlist us on Steam. Awesome. We love it. Um but first and foremost, we're trying to get people to connect to what we're making and to opt into being part of the community. And so wish list is an important halo of that. Um but it's not, you know, it's not that everything we're doing is really based around, you know, just that number. Matthew, you probably have some thoughts on this. I'm talking I'm actually very lucky in this that I don't

I don't care because I have to care about something else which is and and this isn't to demean this. Like it's very hard, you know, all the social stuff, all the wish listing stuff. It's very hard and and I'd be completely out of my death trying to do this. My job is to make sure that the game is good. And fundamentally, if the game is good and and players have a good time, there's a greater chance that it finds its audience. We can have all the wish lists we want. If the game doesn't end up being any good, it does it's not going to help us at all. And and that's not to mean that the incredible amount of work that Mac and others, you know, on that side of the fence are deploying to give us the best chance to meet our audience isn't hard. like it's it's it's incredibly hard and it's incredibly valuable. It's more that I'm actually lucky that I don't need to do that. Um, and that I have the freedom to, you know, the luxury really to just focus on trying to make the game as good as possible, which is already pretty hard, but it's it's it's nice that I don't have to do that. And it's great to have a partner like Mac who while I wish he

was focusing on helping me on the game right now cuz his insights and and and creativity is invaluable to us, having him deployed temporarily against this other problem means that I don't need to. Well, you know, Matthew touched on how related the two are though, which is so true. One of the reasons Steam NextFest is so powerful is because nothing is better than getting people in to play your game. You know, that is that's really where the social effect comes in. Uh but we don't have to wait for those moments to start that right we can you know we took a very nonprecious approach where having feedback early and often to us rather than being precious about what we gate is is what we put a premium on. And so that gives us a chance not only to, you know, get that effect of people playing and hopefully sharing how much they're enjoying the game, but also to help us make the game better and also to help us on the dev side with that building those muscles of like feedback, iterate, polish, feedback, iterate,

polish. And we're like deploying builds. We're learning things every time. We're building muscles as a company that are super important. Um that are going to, you know, I I'm super super super proud of our game. Like I love it. I I'm so proud of the team for putting it together. But I think that the most beautiful thing that we've been able to create is this team to be honest. And you know our focus on everything is we want to keep making games together as a team. And so yeah, that means we have to we got to deliver on game one. But uh you know it is also helps you kind of I don't know it puts things in perspective in all the decisions we're making. We're very kind of long-term focused. Okay. Final question before we move on to our conclusion because we're coming up on time, but you know, you mentioned that games today is similar to music, right? Where there's potentially an oversaturation um as similar what's happening in games right now is probably happened to music, you know, 5 years, a decade ago. Um with streaming and you know, cost of distribution and cost of basically content creation going to zero. You

know, I can whip up my you know, Sado or whatever it is and I'm I'm a DJ tomorrow. um what is potentially working in music in terms of distribution and and finding consumers and audiences that you think are thinking about trying in games? Well, I think you you rightly pointed out it does feel in some ways like music's like a little bit ahead of of games in terms of like the dynamic shift happening in terms of barrier to entry and and you know cost of distribution and cost of production. Um, it's a real challenge in music right now. Uh, you know, you could go back 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and pretty reliably say, you know, radio is going to drive sales and then it didn't anymore. And then it was like, well, it's playlisting. Playlisting will drive sales. And then it didn't anymore. And then it was Tik Tok. Tik Tok's going to drive sales. And and it's it's like whack-a-ole in some

ways. Uh, and I think today a lot of people are really unsure of where and what to do. And you can look at that as a terrible challenge or you can look at it as an opportunity. And where you're seeing artists succeed is when they innovate and they and they see the opportunity. You know, we've got uh Ben Senoon on our label who's having a really great experience right now. And it's interesting because he's really succeeded on socials. And I think socials are extremely important in games right now, but also he, you know, I think very wisely didn't um didn't underappreciate the importance of the in-person kind of persontoperson community building like make going to different countries and doing the groundwork, you know, in those countries. it and and putting in the time to kind of build from the ground up and taking time to connect to your community. And so these are like kind of loosely some things that I see as like positive glimmers of hope for when I

look at like the other games around us. You know, my buddy Will Cook, you know, give a shout out, you know, to Brain Jar Games and his game Dead as Disco. He just was this last Nextf Fest really successful. He's done a wonderful job very early on of community building and social was a big part of that for him. I mean he has got a game that just is a lot of fun on Tik Tok but really focused first and foremost on again like where are the people and how am I finding them and how am I connecting them and those tools are going to change every single day. Uh, but I think if you keep your focus there, there's opportunities to outplay people who are outspending you. Um, and you know, that's kind of a vague vague answer because I don't if I had the answers, you know, we'd be number one on on Steam with this. Yeah. Well, I think you're pointing on to something important is that, you know, some people have said to some extent actually some of the stuff that has happened in games has actually

leveled the playing field even more than it ever has been. You know, public dollars in does not equal dollars out. And although it's potentially it's awesome like you said that schedule one can compete with Call of Duty and it's because that is different now. Um but okay let's move on to our conclusion. I think Matthew I have I both have one question for both of you. I think Matthew you might have already addressed this question but for me it was what is success to you um for Last Flag? Um I think there's two parts. One like Matt said Mike said um we do want to make more games right? So, we hope that the game finds its audience and that it's successful enough for us to continue making games at Night Street that continue making game games with one another. The other more personal part to that answer is I've worked on on a lot of games and um it it's a it's a very big world out there and every so often you're very fortunate. You run into somebody who's played a game that you've worked on and if you're extremely lucky they tell you how much they enjoyed it, right? And I'll be honest, like it hasn't happened often. It's a big world,

but every time somebody says, "Oh, you worked on this. I really like that game. Oh, you worked on Space Marine. I really enjoyed Space Marine." You know, it really makes me feel very good inside. You made a thing that brought joy to someone. Even for a brief amount of time, it made them happy. And I know that when I listen to music, read a book, watch a movie, you know, play a video game, it makes me happy. Like, I love being able to kind of meet people who might have worked on those and say, "Oh, this was great. I love this." And so my hope is that you know we deliver last flag to our players and that it brings them joy and actually that trying to find joy in the game has been a driving force for us on this game as well. It's amazing. Okay. And for Mac, um my question is what has been your biggest leadership perspective shift switching from being a leader in music to being a leader in games? Um what have you had to change about yourself? Um and what has remained staunchly the same? That's a that's a tough question to answer. You know, I come from a a

background where uh it's definitely servant leadership, right? Like management, that's the whole name of the game is you are very behind the scenes all the time. You're very uh you know, you don't want to show your face and you're very differential in a lot of ways. And so taking a different role here has been interesting for me. It's been uh both a positive and a negative. I think like a pro and a con in that um you know I think the best idea winning in a game studio is really important and having very you know a kind of flat leadership style can be important. Um, but I've also had to learn like, hey, you know, a like you need to make decisions. You need to be decisive at times and b you need to understand the weight of your words. And Matthew's been really good at kind of keeping me honest on that. I'll have times where, you know, I I also come from a legal background, so I like to see things I like to see ideas fight themselves and

kind of see where they go. And I never take them personally, but sometimes I might throw an opinion out there because I'm like, "Well, let me test this opinion and see how this is." And I have to be really careful that someone doesn't take that and go, "Okay, well, the CEO thinks blah blah blah, so let's go and do it." And, you know, I might not even perceive that that's happening. And be like want to wind it back in, be like, "No, no, no. Fight me on it. I'm probably wrong. In fact, I think I'm wrong. I just wanted to say that." And so I've I've had to kind of uh mitigate that side of me and uh and really think about the the weight of the words that I say. Um, but I I I would just say in general I've been really really lucky because the people I'm standing shoulder-to-shoulder with like Matthew uh and all the other great directors and people on our team have brought a lot of like passion and honesty and heart into the company. you know, when we were hiring people, I think, you know, we were like, well, we we know we want to have make this kind of culture as a game studio, but really

at the end of the day, I think hiring people who already embody that culture is the best thing you could do. And being able to, you know, not inherent all of your partners in the way that often happens in music, but actually choose the people you work alongside and take ownership of those decisions has been super awesome for me. All right. And finally, how can people become fans of Last Flag? Oh, that's an easy one. Come to come to last flag.comsignup and uh join our join our uh play tests. So, we are widening that funnel as quickly as we can. We're bringing people in as fast as we can and uh we'd love to have people come play the game and tell us if they love or hate it. All right. Well, guys, it was such a pleasure. Um, it's been so cool to see the the growth of the studio and the growth of Glass Flag. Um, and thank you guys for sharing your journeys and a little bit about what you're building. Um, as always friends, if you've got feedback or

ideas, hit me up at alexander.co. Um, I am always open. And with that, that's our episode. We're out. Thank you, Mac and Matthew. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. [Music] If you enjoyed today's episode, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a five-star review. And if you want to reach out, or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you want to learn more about what Navic has to offer, make sure to check out our website, www.navic.co. There you can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Navic Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services. Again, that is www.navic.co. [Music] Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.