From Passion to Palia: Unraveling the Gaming Industry with Aidan Karabaich of Singularity 6

when Anthony goes to Germany we've met Mundi and he said oh my investor is actually coming by this evening you should pitch him so the only uh or one of the only Games seed funds that existed at the time basically showed up for that in lvp and 15 minutes into a pitch that we didn't feel we were ready to give or didn't feel like we'd honed in yet like they're calling the rest of the partners and saying you got to get on the phone this evening it's like 8pm or whatever now and hear the pitch and they made an offer like the next day welcome to the gaming Founders podcast a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry I'm Eden Chen the CEO of pragma a back-end game engine founded by engineering leaders that built the platforms for some of the largest live service games like League Legends fortnite Destiny 2

and plants versus zombies 2. pragma power services like accounts matchmaking and player data for the world's most ambitious live service games and I'm Kevin Zane partner at upfront Ventures we're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco I lead game Investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work including pragma we interview Founders on their origin Stories the tactics that help them survive and thrive and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies learn more And subscribe today at pragma.gg gaming founders [Music] welcome to the season one finale of the gaming Founders podcast thank you to all the listeners out there for participating in our little corner of the gaming world and sharing all of your encouragement and feedback so far stay tuned we'll be back with season two very soon now today I'm thrilled to introduce Aidan karabiac co-founder and chief

creative officer of Singularity six Aiden hone his creative skills over the last decade and notable design houses like obsidian and Riot games before striking out to build the multiplayer Community Sim game paleo Singularity 6 is one of the first alumni Studios from Riot has attracted significant funding from Venture Capital investors and strategics and to Minnie's Delight is building in the rather underserved area of cozy games it will not be an understatement to say palius launch on Nintendo switch this holiday season is hotly anticipated Aiden shares many lessons so far from infusing product leadership principles into design and creative work to effective interviewing for critical thinking now on to our conversation with Aiden hey Aiden thanks for joining us on the gaming Founders podcast welcome thanks for having me really excited to be here so just to get started what is your early Story how did you decide to get

into games so it almost depends on how far back uh we're going I mean I think like so many people in the game industry we found that passion really early my grandmother had an Atari an NES and I've still never beaten her at Pac-Man I never super close to able to get that Crown she just stopped playing when she felt like it not when the game could kill her because it couldn't I had a family atmosphere that was frankly really supportive compared to a lot of people's stories that I've heard there when I was in college I did economics a little bit of computer science and I was still honestly at that time not taking I didn't see the path to getting into games and so I was looking at law schools as I was finishing up there and then my father is the one who comes to me and says look at this gaming School part of UCF down in Florida you should go check it out and so I get on a plane and I go check it out and I meet some of the professors and I'm just in love and dazzled by this space and this

atmosphere and what the people are doing who who are there and I just hard pivot on a dime and this is what I'm doing and so I had a great experience at Via Florida Interactive entertainment Academy it was actually started by EA and I think they hire a pretty large percentage of the graduates every year that was just an incredible jump start for me it was really a kind of spending 14 16 hours a day just Jammy on games with people and learning hyper fast with a bunch of other people that were passionate in this space and really making the most of that time and you know that catapulted me into my first job was there any particular track you were studying or focused on or how did it work so they did have three different tracks that you can apply to get into one is production and they kind of include Design Within that which was always really the area I was most passionate about engineering and art as well you really kind of figure out an identity in a place while you're working

there it's a lot of very Hands-On stuff versus just lectures you'll do rapid prototype teams where they put you with two three four other people and you're gonna make a game in a week or two weeks and culminating in a larger group where I actually get to be the Project Lead and they take you through a process where you're going to get green light you're potentially going to get canceled my game got canceled that's life then you get picked up by another team you got to go get another job on another team and find a new role and there was so much about that that I felt like prepared us and prepared me for what work was going to look like my first job felt easy compared to FIA and what was your first thing at a school was it in a game design discipline or at a certain studio so the first full-time job that I had I did a short internship for Cartoon Network was at 38 Studios which was fun to read Jason schreier has a chapter on the 38 Studio events uh if you've read that so it was cool to read that with

some Insider effective on it as you're going through and that was just another great opportunity for me it of course famously blew up in very public way but it was a company that people were extremely passionate about at the end nobody got paid for a significant number of weeks and almost everybody still showed up and worked and so I was actually I had worked on a dungeon a first piece of content in that area for the game with a few other people and I was pitching it to external people as my first job in the industry to try and save us to get financial Capital so I knew it was a real downside for a lot of people but I developed so many great connections and I got an opportunity to to step up and show what I could do and I was in a technical design capacity at the time because I had a pretty good you know more in like a scripting kind of like light coding with good design sensibilities and I got to show that off

there so it was a lot of fun that was like sort of the MMO wave right to some extent I mean 38 was one of them but I think they're yeah I guess you worked at a bunch of Studios obviously you ended up at Riot did Tom Cadwell hire you or how did you end up over at Riot I did speak to Wright a couple times before I actually eventually ended up there even though I played so much League of Legends too much League of Legends I actually again massive respect for the people on that team and and that project but I I wanted to work on something new I was excited to see what Riot was going to do new so I was very much kind of in a space where you know when they're working on something that speaks you know more into the areas that I've been focusing in absolutely let me know and so my significant other at the time eventually started working it right before me so that Nexus started to pull me even stronger in that direction I was at obsidian at the time and I went to GDC and there were just rioters all over the place it felt like that particular year and I a you know sat on the grass

with a few people there and that kind of kicked things off they were you know really kind of investing in the r d department at that time they had at one point a rule where you had to work on League of Legends before you were allowed to work in r d and somehow I was able to subvert that or I got right into it when it was more gray space and so I I jumped into r d and that was a great experience seems like a lot of people get recruited through GDC at right like right that was like a really good pipeline for them I'm just like wow it's crazy they were doing a lot of great talks I saw a talk of Tom cadwell's that I was very impressed by but there were many people from Riot doing those those talks there and honestly you could see the reputation of riots in the game industry really ballooning in a huge way you could feel it and that just became really attractive and the thing that really cemented it for me is the way

they spoke about design and from those early you know sitting on the grass at GDC conversations and from you know the way Tom Cadwell articulated uh you know the way the company thought about these sorts of things it had a real sense of academic rigor to it that was extremely attractive to me I'm uh very analytical and they have a kind of bit more of a scientific rigor to it that was really appealing to me can you tease some of that out like what maybe even before but also during what did you learn from I don't know if how how directly you work with Tom or even just the other designers at in that discipline like what did that rigor look like Tom was my boss for part of the time that I was there my initial manager and team lead was Ryan Scott and I learned just so much from both of those individuals both just really exceptional designers probably the biggest thing that I would start off with is at Riot everyone is

expected to be able to communicate why something is a good decision it's not enough to intuitively feel that you know something is is a good decision that it's just a taste call or something like that those are important elements and it's not that there's not a a strong level of respect for where intuition can can lead you but the real art and craft in a lot of ways is seen in being able to break down these pieces of a design understand why it works at a fundamental level and then thus take that and generate Innovation because you can move this particular piece separate it from these other ones and move it to a different context and you know articulate why you think it's going to work in in that space and you know as you get more senior the expectations you can be more accurate more sophisticated in your ability to do that but they also are very rigorous about the way uh you know if we were doing play testing where you don't approach blade testing again

from this sort of like organic space and just sort of like open-ended what do you feel like you go in that into that play test with a specific hypothesis a set of things that you are trying to prove or disprove validate and you iterate from there but it's a very intentional process and it made the r d component just really exciting to be a part of as well because we're exploring such broad spaces and she we really were taking puzzle pieces apart and putting them back together and just really exciting different ways is there maybe an example you can give on that kind of hypothesis building that is a tricky balance right especially maybe during the earlier days you know of a project like how did you guys what would be like the type of hypothesis you would try to test what's too detailed versus what's too generic to be you know to be useless it might be easier to talk about uh my current project a little bit more without again we haven't revealed a ton yet yet but I

I think there are some areas that I can talk about kind of in a more broad sense one of them is around different projects within the community Sim Space approach time of day and in a different Manner and so you know one option is you could link it very directly with real life and there are certain you know strengths and and challenges associated with that and then you basically have every hour increment you can possibly think or minute increment throughout the entire rest of the spectrum and you could even make it on an individual player or set of player basis and so there are a lot of components associated with that that you can you know dive in and consider and so you know a big part to start is always research understanding your player understanding the current atmosphere what expectations people might be taking into that space when you're trying to work on something in that problem area and then based on what you're trying to achieve you know for us some of our core pillars that we we

developed for the game one of them is hygge it's a Danish concept kind of translates to this sense of coziness comfort contentment and so when we're looking at that decision you know which ones are going to support that kind of feeling which ones are going to create pressure or friction in a way that we think is disruptive kind of from that cozy sense of player flow we approach those play tests and it was very easy to test different kind of time scales and in a white box phase of development around you know what were the specific goals what were the game pillars what were the values around why we think this was going to be the best thing for players and then you know both what by bringing in external players to come to the office and you know through our own play tests and and trying out things on on each other try to validate what that outcome was and certainly went through a lot of iterations but feel like we have in a lot of increased confidence in the

direction we we went through did you all arrive at a time scale outcome or and and maybe that's too specific or like what was the outcome I guess I don't think it's a a crazy spoiler but uh in our case it's an hour in our uh project uh directly is a a full time of day cycle and we did some smooching I guess if that's a real word of what you know how light or dark it is during specific phases of the game experience to optimize again for those kind of high level values that we had and we we wanted to create while still conveying this sense of of a day that was ultimately the decision we we locked it to real life time so you always know as a player oh it's three o'clock I know exactly what time it is on in paleo and I know exactly what I could do at 3 15 or at 3 30 and 3 45 and that that's a pretty powerful understanding when that's an impactful thing in terms of what you can do in a game or how things might be different for how you can kind

of essentially make an appointment with the game even when you're not in it and it also just you know gave enough breadth where say a common mechanic in community Sim experiences would be you know say a certain fish only spawns in the evening or in the morning or something like that he gave enough time associated with those blocks that people could legitimately chase that without feeling an excessive amount of pressure or time pinch to try and Achieve those goals and make progress going back to sort of like your r d experience at Riot before you know I would definitely want to spend a lot of time on Singularity but what did those weekly interactions look like with Tom in terms of he was managing you what was green lighting a project even look like what would that process look like from a week-to-week basis when I was there was still before they had released another project out of r d so it was something that was still being figured out in a lot of ways and you could tell processes were being developed they were being iterated on

and so it definitely did shift in the time that I was there I had basically weekly one-on-ones with Tom some of it was more career-based of course the the manager components and other ones were very project focused and oriented around you know whatever the you know big outcomes or problems that we were trying to solve and so typically I would present the strategy that they were we were thinking for the game framework overall for how we were going to solve specific problems and I would use that as uh you know a feedback loop to get from you know his kind of like Outsider perspective around what things he thought might work or be worth in investing in and you know how that might map to you know the vision and expectations we had from stakeholders and then I guess you met Anthony at Riot is that right so Anthony was my um past

girlfriend's uh manager when I was at obsidian so uh we developed a relationship before I was even at Riot would go on you know out in groups uh Riot hosted a variety of nice social get-togethers that we got to spend a lot of time at and it really just sort of flourished into a friendship outside of work before I was even there and so you know transitioning over to Riot just made all of that so much easier where you know I was no longer commuting down to Irvine from LA taking up all my time during the week and we connected really early on uh we were both super passionate MMO players and you know spoke Ad nauseam uh even you know without Bob trying about all sorts of different great experiences we'd have there and frankly where we felt like there were still tons of innovation opportunity duties that weren't being chased and really as you mentioned earlier we were in an atmosphere where MMOs were not being greenlit in the same

way that they were in the 2000s and maybe even early teens of this past decade what was the process like of deciding to work together on a new company like did those conversations started happening when you were at Riot it was a really kind of crazy thing to me uh where the point where we really decided to jump in and do this felt like 15 doors had all opened at the same time and I was just staring at this opportunity that I always was interested in and then wanted the opportunity to do at some point but I didn't know exactly when or or how so we had always as I said been having conversations about game opportunities I'll list off some of those doors that were open at the same time so you know I was at a bit of a transition point in terms of my role at Riot and so I was kind of considering things pretty broadly we had had you know high level opportunity spaces that we talked about quite a lot that we were very excited about Anthony got more

serious about considering it we spoke at his holiday party the year before we we started it and we're kind of threw around the idea of actually trying to do this for for real and starting to investigate that in a big way and it it was pretty wild what happened once we actually started focusing on it I think that was the big surprise that really like we didn't expect like jet fuel to hit right off the the bat with that in terms of us being able to pursue that quickly but it was something that once we started working on it we got really excited about it and once we started looping in other people to help us to help answer very basic questions and there were so many people in our in our past and and our Riot that were very willing to lend their their insight and their expertise there that helped us answer a lot of questions what do we need to even get this started do we have

to have a prototype do we have to bootstrap this for a period of time or ourselves what opportunities even exist who should we even talk to is 10 000 questions that we kind of loop through at that time again I'd only kind of touched on a couple of the things that I felt like were just perfect timing there are so many things about your personal life is this a good decision I I feel like I'm a little bit on the risk seeking side of things versus risk-averse is a a human and I think that maybe preclude you a little bit to this as well I have to set the stage here actually for listeners because I guess when you guys raised what is it 2018 the first 2018 okay and at the time I don't think there have been like a lot of sort of these cross-platform live service type games that have gone on to raise and I'm gonna put Kevin on the spot because I know you and Anthony at some point pitched him Kevin what was the The Venture view of games at the time what was your what were you thinking you know obviously you got pitched what were you thinking what was

what was the landscape like at the time oh first of all I was stupid and ultimately did not invest so just putting that out there but you know to your point uh I mean Andreessen hasn't even started investing in games right actually you guys became I think their first investment a year later a year and a half later or something like our second investment um there were barely any gaming specific funds to speak of and I think you know we were still coming out of this whole period where investors especially in Silicon Valley thought games are hit driven and really hard to predict and and not a venture investable category frankly um and and all of that would go on to change over the next couple years you know not just because the pandemic I think also because frankly you finally start to see some of these true very long-term cross-platform games get build and continue to draw users in and turns out you know when games work they're they're basically the best retaining consumer products arguably out there and so if you're going to be a consumer investor you might as well invest in games is I think kind of how the how the

rhetoric started to start to change so Aiden you went out in this landscape of VCS being pretty skeptical of games what was your early experience getting that seed round done like so again um extraordinarily Lucky in in a way I do want to talk about the atmosphere a little bit but I feel like it was a pretty wild story for how we got started initially look at the power of having a good manager at a big company Anthony's boss at Riot very well connected individual Ali otarsen who is at make respond now heard that this was something that we were going to pursue you know we kind of intentionally sort of consulted with him and he just dug in immediately and said oh my gosh I think this is like you you all should totally chase this and it was like when are you going to Europe you need to go to Europe now these are the people you need to see I'm going to like create your whole itinerary of you know what's going to happen and how you all are going to get going and I had to convince Anthony a

little bit to to get out the door and and do this kind of wild seeming trip but at the end of the day you know he he did it and met a lot of founders of companies in in Europe like Bosa that were um super helpful in terms of uh helping giving us uh insights there and when Anthony goes to Germany we met uh Mundi and he said oh my investor is actually coming by this evening you should pitch him so the only or one of the only Games seed funds that existed at the time basically showed up for that in lvp and 15 minutes into a pitch that we didn't feel we were ready to give or didn't feel like we'd honed in yet like they're calling the rest of the partners and saying you gotta get on the phone this evening it's like 8pm or whatever now and hear the pitch and they made an

offer like the next day and this is not like the typical thing or not the typical thing in this this atmosphere but I think the concept that we had was something that very much spoke to lvp's investing strategy where they've had a very well articulated sense of where they felt games were going and why and that allowed them to you know when they saw something they could have conviction around it and move really quickly and they've been just an incredible partner throughout this whole experience the whole time like couldn't ask for a a better initial investor come into the company so that was a weird way to get started yeah yeah well I guess I want to hone in on that because I think a lot of times that first round of funding is not necessarily about how shiny your deck is and I mean team is a big part of it but I think your thesis to your point is also a huge part of it and maybe you can walk through like what was your thesis and how did you arrive at that thesis and maybe even how that has shifted over

time or maybe it's just maintained you've maintained that similar Vision throughout the whole thing I think any good thesis you're you're able to look at from a couple different perspectives and try to poke holes in it from different directions and that it basically holds water and so from a player perspective you know we're seeing the community Sim genre have several big hits in it and um have this like growing sense of respect for it even at that time the Indie space is not nearly as as flourished as it has today but it has a sense as a player that this was something that was going to get a lot bigger and that there was so many opportunities on the table associated with these projects that you know when we went and looked at what we're doing every day where we're making live service products we're updating them consistently where are you know offering them to players in a more of like a free to play model where we're operating them

across multiple platforms and making the accessibility bars really open to players and when we're putting this big emphasis on the ability to do this genre this experience and a multiplayer social atmosphere just all seemed like major big components that could create a really incredible opportunity in in this space that was really exciting you kind of switch over to the business components and a lot of those albeit you know kind of like buzzwords almost also really speak to you know the business side to the investor component associated with that opportunity and we were able to look at the audiences associated with each of you know the existing kind of big hits in that space and make some pretty reasonable extrapolations you know if you take a a game that is only on one platform and you make it across these multiple vectors and you add these other components that have these kinds of impacts when they've been applied to

other games other genres The Tam total addressable Market uh on on the business side really spoke to a lot of people and so I I think that was the big thing that that hit people early on and we have made some some pivots but I think the highest level components of that still come up from a place a very strong belief in orientation from us what were the community Sims that inspired you at the time the obvious players um it was not a very well supported genre um if you go back in time in a big way early days you had the Sims where there it was basically a game on its own and there was no other game you could really point to that much that had a ton of similarities uh with with that kind of play experience into that motivation and you know you Ripple through the various Nintendo products in in the space and then you look through at the big Indie

hits and we looked at each of those and you know what we we thought was done really well in each of those spaces so you stardew Animal Crossing Fantasy Life there's a bunch there what was the early building of your team like I guess the first maybe first 10 hires or so what types of people were you looking for did you have hiring principals that you had formed already like what kind of advice can you give people as they build out their early team so we had developed you know a strategic canvas and Company values from the very early days that we continue to iterate on as as we went that was a big part of our hiring practice even early on I think one of the really exciting things about doing a new company was the opportunity to set a new cultural standard and build that up from day one you know figuring out what we thought those company values were that fundamentally that we believed if we were great at these things that it would make us uniquely positioned as a company to take advantage of the kind of

opportunities that we wanted to chase which are you know largely blue ocean untapped or undertapped audiences that we could understand as players and and really Chase and and have a lot of belief in and so that translated a lot into our hiring process it translated a lot into the kind of people we tried to hire we have had two other kind of components a part of that strategy we hired Barry senior early on we also really focused on doers Anthony and I were very much doers uh until frankly probably too late we probably should have stopped being doers in any capacity uh earlier than we did in retrospect in some spaces but that was a really big thing we wanted to hire people that we could trust that were really passionate about the vision and the project that we were trying to achieve and that could take an area of the experience and and work within the vision and this strategy that Anthony and I were working together but really kind of pick up that baton

and run with it and I think we got extraordinarily lucky or fortunate in terms of what some of those hires resulted in can you maybe I mean a lot of people especially when they just left you know great places there's some shortcuts right like you hire people who you already worked with previously at Riot or hey look I'm building a community Sim let me just go find other people who've also worked on community Sims like did you try to use any of those tactics did they were did they not work you know especially in the early days there was definitely a difficulty with hiring people that worked on community Sims if you look across the entire United States and Canada the number of people working on similar projects in that space is very narrow so we had to kind of go like genre adjacent in order to find some people with with relevant experience there was tons of passion and we did really look for that and we looked for people that had a lot of play experience a lot of hours accumulated in the genres that we were looking at but it was difficult to outside of VA at dead Maxis to find places where there was direct experience

we actually in terms of looking at past companies is of course a huge Source referrals are a huge thing having worked with somebody in the past can jump start this sense of trust that you can have with somebody in a really positive way at the same time we didn't want to just be the culture of the place that you know we had just moved on from we wanted to be building up our own thing so we were very conscious about not trying to create an end crowd as a result of the hiring practices and approaches that we had and you know looking at that at all levels that it wasn't a thing where individual contributors on the team might come from diverse places but the leadership or the executive team is like all anchored around this one thing and then you kind of get group think around you know a particular way of approaching things so we were very intentional around trying to diversify those perspectives you know across all you know Dei components everything across

the company from really day one but there were some amazing uh hires the first back-end engineer that we had was basically a referral that's a really difficult thing to hire in in the early days somebody with a lot of strength there that you can trust to make some of the foundational decisions at that time for an MMO and that so that was hugely impactful so who can you get of course is is a big component but what are the areas that are really critical for you to get right and those were areas that we had a lot more Flex on in terms of our you know like diversity of thought goals when something was so critical that we just had to get it right and we had to move quickly it's always a balance between you know those other goals and and moving quickly and getting the right people yeah even more critical because pragma did not exist back then I I know see the timing you get lucky in some ways and unlucky in others so we'll

chalk that one up exactly you guys are now over 180 people I think some it's much bigger and you've hired a lot more designers what makes a great designer how do you hire for that specific discipline especially because I I imagine that's probably something to give lots of opinions about yeah absolutely there's a lot of things I could speak to here and a lot of learnings that had on the past I think we're gonna have to change this this interview right after this podcast goes out because I'm sure everybody's going to Google it now that I say it but um one of the interviews that we really think is very important for the design team is our critical thinking interview we actually do a McKinsey case study that people go through and typically it is the first time people have ever experienced an interview like this and it contributes to the I guess the fact that I'm perceived to be the scary interviewer to have on on the panel I'm

a little steel faced uh in in some ways but also which this very open-ended problem them where you know fundamentally you have to think like a product lead in order to get to good answers there you have to take a step back and and think about so many different perspectives for uh you know the challenges that could go wrong in the given case study and you need to be intentional about the process that you take in order to develop and then get to a good answer there so critical thinking I think is really huge if I'm looking at product leads looking at designers and it's something that I really see even early in career it's it's something where you can see a lot of strength there so I really look for that in a big way there are a lot of other components creativity is of course something that comes up in a big way and I'm a big believer that that's something that can be learned in a big way that you can improve at intentionally and that you know exposing yourself to a

wide variety of media and mediums and and games is just building up this this lexicon of touch points that you have that you can potentially bring together like you need to invest you need to be passionate enough that that's something that you're willing to do and your free time time and the impacts that you get from that in terms of what you can bring to the table and you know how it hones your intuition and other components are really impactful so we we've developed a set of competencies and internally in design those are a couple of them I I always assess designers as product leads as well so everything that you know if you go Google a product lead I think a great designer is a is training to be a great product lead if not one already that makes sense you guys went on and raised you know several rounds of funding I know many Founders are in the position where they've maybe raised their seed round and they're sort of figuring out okay I have to raise my series A and B and whatever it takes to get to production do you have any advice

on the level of resolution or the the components that you might focus on in order to get to a good pitch deck or a pitch in terms of like is it just a really nice vertical slice are you trying to answer certain questions is it maybe those aren't the key milestones but money is important obviously and if you run out then you you can't get to the finish line so any thoughts there advice you guys are one of the few that have gone on and done it you know multiple times now I'll try to answer for you know projects that of course look more familiar or more similar to what we're doing I think there are a lot of other contexts that maybe some of these things wouldn't be true on we still very much raised on Vision more than the game or the project itself in the series a it became less and less true as you went forward over time but absolutely was still a vision raise I think some big things that people looked at during that time you know and what what ways had we been able to validate

any component of the vision in any way that and could look even a little bit like real players in this audience you know having some actual progress associated with that so we did bring in people early on to play the entirely white box prototypes where you could pretend to walk through our game Loop for the most part and you know people could speak to that we've always had a bit of a data leaning at the company and add that as a bit of a strength at the company and so I think the having that in any form that you can provide any of that research I think helps validate that and even show that that's going to be something that you're going to be good at or you're going to care about as you go into later rounds that it's not just going to be based on you know we continue to just believe this is going to be a good idea show in some way that hey we're we're going to be testing our hypotheses and if you put your money into this company it's going to be able to you know increase our effectiveness at doing that as as we grow so audience validation is definitely a big one of

course you need to show that you can build a team a bit in that time can you hire other great people do other great people want to work for you are they excited about this idea there's been such a huge competition for talent across the industry if you can't show that you can pull be a Nexus that is going to pull other people to really be able to fund this we spent 35 percent of our time the entire time across the whole company on hiring Anthony and I both huge dedication to build a team of this side around that and to maintain the kind of like hiring bar that that we're trying to hire at so that's a huge commitment associated with it and yes we had a vertical slice it looked pretty good at the time obviously later things look a lot better one of our early investors said concept art they never believe it it looks nice but only is real when you see it in 3D so we tried to get some things that got pretty close to the concept art to show that you know

hey this is something that we're actually going to be able to achieve so I think that was helpful and then you know like I said you had something you could walk through the game experience even though some parts of it were like hand waved uh famously we had hunting in the game and we didn't have any mechanics for it so all you did is walk up to a creature I made out of like boxes and you hit f on it and you've got me and that was hunting it's better than us our our stuff is like you just push win game because we're just a platform [Music] yeah you guys have been in development since it's been what five years now five years yeah I I was 32 to start 37 now your life changes in that that timeline almost inevitably so yeah I mean MMOs are obviously just monsters and to build what are the we don't know when you're launching it I don't think you're gonna tell us but what kinds of things are you looking for before your quote unquote

ready it's like what are your what is a big sort of moment for you all where you're like okay I think we are we are good to go live with this thing well it does kind of go back to those data components we don't feel like we can fully prove that this product is going to run or what level it is pre but there is a lot of validation we can do that can notably increase confidence we've run a number of alpha tests some of them four weeks six weeks in length because we're trying to get reads around long-term retention obviously we look at that data with a lot of caveats everybody knows we're going to delete their whole character which is a huge part of investing in an MMO at the end and you know they this is they know it's a limited term and experience so you know they know this window is going away but we still think there's a lot of value that we can get out of those things and frankly you still see a lot of Alphas out there where players don't play more than 15 minutes or an hour and

so we're very much looking for having large cohorts of players and you know picking intentionally different groups to come in and try to have this be as an authentic like real audience test as possible to come in that to validate our retention to validate is our monetization strategy working again going back to you know this is the theory where you know we're pursuing free to play we've published a Blog article around our approach to monetization here but we're trying to prove it before we go live that this is something that is is going to work and work at the kind of scale that that we can show Numbers around and the last thing is you know internally is your company ready I think that's a really hard pivot to make we've been developing a game and trying to pretend to be a live service product and doing a whole bunch of things and switching a whole bunch of systems at points we thought were right in order to to be in that space But what is a must and what is a should and what does it could in terms of tools that we have and internal

release processes that we do and how many do we have in the game before we turn the keys on on that particular component so you know do we have com confidence in in each of those components and then is the team ready is the game ready from like a quality perspective each of those things maybe on the corollary side over the last five years what's been some of the biggest challenges you guys have faced especially maybe ones that you know were uh less predictable or ones that you weren't looking out for about 15 things went through my mind when you asked that so we're definitely iterate through things for sure one of the things that was a challenging early you know prototype time decision for us was the overall service structure for the game ultimately a core part of our thesis started from the idea of of really sharing this experience with with other people in a community and parts of the way we wanted to execute against that

early on just proved unfeasible from a technological leading to a cost perspective and so that resulted in a big soul-searching kind of pivot for us to figure out okay well we understand this core this Essence that you know we're trying to create in the game but you know this particular approach that we can even see is getting us where we want to go we just can't actually make into a live product at any scale because it cost us too much on the back-end infrastructure to ship that out and maybe we can do that 10 20 years from now when we subvert the laws of physics in different ways with with new engines or something so still holding on to some of that dream for the future I was going to solve it all there we go that was a big difficult pivot for us because you could feel a lot of it and it was exciting and yet it was not you could not have that it was like the forbidden fruit and um fortunately we did find another way to get towards those experiences in a roundabout way but it was definitely a

lot of Discovery and soul searching to to get around that so that's more of like a product Focus pivot that we had to look at I I mean could talk in any realm what about maybe anything that's I'm just trying to think about things that you know will be more uh that might apply across companies or startups right whether it's maybe more team or timelines or you know budgeting or anything like that hiring is is a big one that I think people maybe haven't thought about the the kind of strength or or lift that that is potentially I wish we had hired a recruiter earlier again think about your your Founders spending 35 percent of their time for five years doing this like I I I sourced a lot of people for some of those early roles so I think finding ways where where you can still uphold your Quality Bar but maintain more of your development time I think would be a really critical thing that uh both Anthony and I would would want to do a little bit differently going through the next time scaling yourself is a huge thing I definitely made some mistakes on

that going through I've often kind of described it like this where you need to have your feet firmly planted on the ground as you scale because if you're scaling from a perspective where you're already on your heels you're always one issue away from being on your butt and being on your butt is really bad for everybody involved in in you know a role like the ones you're coming into as a Founder as a company the kind of impacts they can that can have it could be dramatically different but they can span every possible challenge that you potentially have and you have to kind of uncover um you know recover yourself and your team from so the scaling we went through was really fast I was telling you were hiring five people uh every two weeks at one point about and so I went from feat firm to on my heels to feeling like I went back to you know feet firm but I definitely didn't and then had a couple things happen is they're always going to and a new company and in Game Dev and um

you know then spent three four months that were really rough trying to recover from the fact that I was doing maybe three jobs at that time instead of one and a half or two right can I ask just a quick follow-up you're mentioned kind of scaling yourself how do you guys make sort of quote unquote final calls on design choices right like is that sort of by committee is that by voting is that you know anyone can sort of come in with data against you yourself as kind of the you know the chief designer or you know the the Creator Etc like how do you think about that especially as the game you know balloons it gets bigger and bigger and bigger I very much try to create an environment in which you know if you're coming in as a designer as a product lead on the team that you're going to have agency and what the responsibility is for the person who's above you and in the product lead role or the design role is to give clear enough strategy to align on the goals stakeholder expectations so that people understand the area in which they have the autonomy to be able to move forward

I very much think if I've done a good job communicating the goals and I'm reviewing you know the features and calling out where I think it's missing or not hitting a particular goal experience or a pillar for the game then you know might call it like goal oriented design or something but that's that's the kind of environment that we try to set up ultimately you know the product lead above you or the um the designer and the kind of buck stops with me or Anthony depending on the kind of problem you're talking about it does go to that but we try to make you know vetoes or or blocks be in in the case that they result in us being like okay clearly we've missed articulating some part of the strategy or articulating some part of the goals so let's make sure that's represented and then people can go back and um you know figure out a solution again that works within that and of course you want to be clear about that up front that like hey we're working on a new feature we think these are the goals if you run into something you think maybe one of these goals is

incorrect or many of them are incorrect let's have that discussion and those are living things that we're going to iterate on but we always want to start from from that space going back to the metric conversation because I feel like I actually hear this all the time where maybe somebody reads a lot into metrics in a sort of closed alpha or closed beta setting with a very small sample size and you know live services or meta game that's not there yet or it's just incomplete things like you were talking about how do you make sure that you're not not reading false signals I guess like how much do you trust your intuition on something and your conviction versus like when do you pull in metrics at those early stages when you just don't have enough for sort of like meaningful data I guess it is really hard uh in an MMO there are certain things you're never going to get that chance on yeah and you have to accept some of that and it makes a lot

of people really uncomfortable because we can do and support with a lot of data and a lot of play tests certain things like oh is phishing fun what we can put fishing the entire experience in front of you associated with that or if you play within a play test period you know you can have a sense of how it evolves over time but uh you know guilds and MMOs and Guild like experiences can be very difficult to create an authentic environment associated with some of those things so you know one we exist in a world where there are a lot of other products out there that you can look at and learn from and a lot of great writing and people who developed a lot of expertise around those things so we regularly reach out to other people for expertise and and help and I absolutely encourage people to do that and I found way more often than not that people are you know very willing and often even flattered that you're you know asking for their expertise in a particular area and if the lift is not too high you know oftentimes you don't even necessarily have to um you know pay some consulting

fee for it but sometimes that's worth it too so it really depends what is possible in terms of how you can increase your conviction in a particular space for me the less we are able to test to validate something the more I care about building a strong case for why you know this world or this reality makes sense and could exist and still getting diverse people's perspectives and reviews around what holes or problems they might see in that coming about but it is you know things in that space also need to be protected in some ways too because fundamentally in some cases if you're doing something totally new someone might need to say like hey this is the this is the thing that I have very strong conviction on these are the reasons you know I've done all all the homework that you know you can reasonably be done here and sometimes you're making a bet on someone or something or an idea well we could go on and on I think and uh we're we're

already over I um I I would say you guys are like one of the first up and we are all rooting for you in the in the Venture startup Gaming Community I'm personally very excited about uh paleo and uh it's just just learned a lot we usually end with one question which is if you could go back to the founding of of Singularity six what is the most important piece of advice that you would give someone else that's that's starting with their new studio I'd say the one that was for me that was probably very personal is that you shouldn't try to do it all I think people kind of uh ha the hero is the word that people use for for this particular um you know area of growth you don't want to develop a culture where you know you're essentially just constantly everyone's having to be a hero all the time every second it's just not sustainable and so you know you do coming into it as a Founder you know it's going to be a lot you know it's

going to be more than what you know a regular job is going to ask you and you go into that with that X expectation but figuring out where the line really is for for you is super important and it is a marathon and not a Sprint and you really need to have that mentality thank you so much for uh for joining us on the on the podcast and uh wish you the best of luck as you guys gear up for the launch absolutely really appreciate it thank you foreign foreign [Music]