Games Industry in the Time of COVID-19 (in association with Tamatem) - PocketGamer.biz RoundTable

right we're a couple minutes ahead of schedule but we might as well start appearing so we can get everybody here there we go I'm gonna meet you all I don't bother accidentally meet you then you can meet yourself we go we can meet ourselves if you want because you can manage that where's Rick I'm not actually I'm not actually in charge here how how is everybody while waiting for roaches pop in how is everybody doing we're good fine fine is lovely isn't there My gods nice I'm one of these using the background Kate don't feel pressured don't feel pressured I know you won't oh no Tim is as well look at that lady well I just you know we're playing along but I'm like you're playing along it's like to the temple you know that is really my deep my usual default for zoo meetings is this that's very cool this

this this one I used I don't yet actually ordered one it's coming this week where I can pull it down from the ceiling but this one I used because we had to record our online panel for WonderCon a few days ago so I used this one but I was cause playing as Indiana Jones so well we can do today's one right yeah of course you always you're just sitting right back there and my idols right there and so cool well I'm very grateful people UPS or tipping in with weekly shout out we've people sign up we're also we're doing a bit of a test so you're our test subject so thank you very much for this this is a new thing and you a new a new free thing she's not a full-on PT connects this is just us we'll do a regular roundtables

part of the brand which I don't see if I love you brick County will take over in a minute and yeah this is the first one so we'll just testing a few things out we'll actually me we're live in zoom where people can interact and ask questions and stuff as a progress but also we're gonna meet streaming us on the YouTube as well so you know imagine the scale the scale of your audiences in the huge um I think um I think I'm rate is too sharp really now and I just want to say before I never to break this is the games industry in a time of Kovac 19 it says including working from homes we got a nasty things together so I mean so all related themes Rick's your host this is an association that lovely folk from tama Tim there's house on there with his tomato looking lovely and yeah it should be an interesting interesting panel and obviously we will make this available as well this to be even wider afterwards via our channels and that's it for once

I'm gonna I'm gonna sharp I think and just hand the mic to Rick Rick the floor is yours no ray hello everybody and welcome to the first ever Pocket Gamer adopters roundtable as mentioned a few times now my name is Rick Carelli I am the editor of soccer game adopters and will be leading these roundtable sessions we're trying to do them at least bi-weekly I think we've got quite a few weeks lined up now but we'll focus on the one for today which we will be talking about the games industry in the time of covert nineteen including working from home and the general sort of games industry as a whole we're doing this in association with tomaten and sound if you have any words you want to just back us off with as our partner thank you thank you so much and definitely very excited to be here with you guys I know this time is tough for everyone for the planet but gaming has maybe a different take on that I've seen

a lot of things have improved in the gaming industry a lot of the ignition even from investors from the forks in in beginning industry for that I'm definitely honored to be on the panel with you today and I look forward to a great one hour of chat lovely chat all to enjoy and obviously it wouldn't be a panel without a series of guests so I would love it if everybody could just go around and introduce yourselves who you are what you do and trying to get all my questions lined up in the window probably there we go and if you could just sort of give a given oversight into where you were working before the pandemic broke out and how long you have been sort of remote working if you have been doing it for a longer time let's start with a see thank you and thank you

some for inviting me to the panel I'm a tilting point mobile publisher free-to-play games I'm heading a business development as part of the leadership team and you know for us it has a lot of impact we're 130 people it's not a huge company but we have five offices so both in Europe Korea us and in different times we went into a lockdown mode and we need to do a lot of work remotely in different time zones different regions and we need to adapt very quickly to be efficient and make sure that we can continue game production and publishing and we can talk about it more as we as we go into the conversation yeah Sabrina oh hi I'm Sabrina I am the head of farm here of saga a king that means I'm an executive producer I've been working with games

for about 10 years and been a king for years actually this week so yay thank you I've worked in many different places but I've been in London for two years now and obviously like since the pandemic started the whole King offices all of them have worked from home since March early March so we all be working remotely since then cool Kate hi I'm Kate Edwards I'm the executive director of the global Game Jam and I'm also a geographer and the CEO of my own company geography that does Conte culturalization on games and other stuff and as of last month I've been in the industry for 27 years and for me I've been working from home for over 15 years so yeah and yeah so basically I've been still home the the big difference for me

is because I usually travel 80 percent of the year is I have not been traveling for about the last trip was maybe six seven weeks ago hmm and Sophie hey yeah hi everyone so yeah I'm Sophie and currently I'm working as it gave me that guru and yeah I've been working with so inventory over a decade and in the past have been working at companies like Gameloft Wooga Rocio and I joined last year Buddha opera news you know in Berlin and I would say most of my career in games we didn't work remote so I worked very closely to teams so most of the time we were tight until two months ago where I with the majority of my team join and we were immediately working remote so we formed the team remotely which is a special situation but yeah we had to adapt and run quickly from beds

Tim yeah hi I'm Tim Collins I'm currently at oculus here and Seattle Washington and even though I do work in an office most times my team is spread all over the world so remote working is something that I'm used to I've been working from home since about mid February when we actually had a case in our office so they closed us pretty early and send everybody home I also run Seattle Indies here which is they had nonprofits and for indie game developers we do events and build community for our dependent game developers to help them with their careers it and make their games better and also do you work with IG DEA and global game Jim as well and those are all remotes over slack and whatnot we've already heard from you introduce yourself again yeah my name is Jason I'm CEO of tomaten where mobile games publisher for the Arabic speaking market so we work with

international game developers to localize their games make them culturally relevant before releasing them on iOS and Android in the MENA region remote work has been definitely a challenge because we've never done it before we are a team of 55 people all based in Jordan and we've never done it and we've always been scared of it and the minute it started I felt it was natural which is very exciting actually and I think this will open the door to like a huge change in the future regarding like work from home and being very flexible about it and essentially hire people that are don't mean to be sitting just beside you at the office so definitely tough but but very manageable and very productive I would say so it's good cool excellent great so that's everybody introduced and we can

get onto the meat and bones of this so we're gonna talk about the games industry working from home and have a pandemics affecting things one thing I wanted to sort of just to set the tone of the entire discussion and one thing that I'm particularly interested in because we've heard a lot of stories about developers who are finding success even in these in these difficult times because people are spending more time at home and playing games and spending money in that kind of thing so I was just kind of wondering like as much as we hear all these stories is it actually true that the pandemic is having a positive impact on the games industry or is there more to it than just revenues and that kind of thing does anyone want to jump in on that one well I'd be happy to start I mean I think it's like like most industries I mean but especially in the digital side I mean I think the game industry there's absolutely a positive benefit from the revenue side I mean we're seeing you know stories of games surging and sales and all that kind of

stuff and you know I think that's great but at the same time we're seeing you know certainly a mental health cost for people who are not used to working from home who have been cooped up now for your over you know two months or more and for a lot of people they're not suited for it you know and as as fortunate as we are as an industry to be able to do our work remotely you know and we are very fortunate and frankly privileged to be able to do that I think for a lot of people that I talked to the you know the the feeling of being cooped up and not being able to go out and see people it's it's it is taking its toll and so I think whereas we as an industry from the coat industry side with the revenue and all that are doing fine on the people side you know I think there's gonna be a cost just like there is for much of society yeah Rick I wanted to chime in you know we have a unique perspective a tilting point because we

walk with 30 different developers and the games are from different genres and different different type of games and we definitely see the the boost I mean April was the best month of the company ever a at the same time you know we see it as a short-term revenue boost and you know user acquisition boost that might make change long term you know if there is a recession people will spend less there are the issues that Kate is speaking about so you know we should be very I think very happy that we're in the same industry and we can make games that entertain people under tough conditions but you know it's we need to say the lasting impact the other thing I wanted to quickly mention is that we're very happy also to see initiatives like the you know play a part together so there are things that I think the gaming

industry is coming together people feel a common cause and and this is very positive to see as much yeah if I can add to that I think that's it's very important right I personally feel very humbled to see people around the world connecting through games and through our games like it has triggered like me talking Striga to boost in the industry as millions billions of people are just home and they have more time and they play more we're seeing players competing at a record pace like they're playing levels more and more engagement has risen number game arounds blur day reached his higher level ever but it also I think it's what as he said like we come together as an industry to support people King we did a lumber of unlimited lives campaign so we just gave people for a week in limited life so they could play as much as they wanted to support them spending their time it's a bit of that lock feeling like I I

understand absolutely what Kate is saying I miss people which is super interesting because my partner is very introverts like oh I don't I don't want any of this I'm happy here and I'm like oh my god honey to like I want to go into the London tube and like be squashed sardine yes another thing that I thought it was really nice is a kink partnered with the World Health Organization and we started sharing Public Health guidelines via in-game messages and we were able to reach a quarter of a billion monthly active users with that like I think it's we are very fortunate to have these platforms and to help people connect and stay safe through entertainment because I think we have a we can provide that minute of magic or the little session of fun that they can just escape and and run away because what's happening in the world is it's out of this world right so there

are no words to describe it and I think we are in that very fortunate role that we not only can operate successfully we can also give them the little escape from the nightmares of later that have an impact on people lives yeah yeah if I could chime in on that I think we're you might see some impact the other ways in the triple-eight developments games like you know the Last of Us - already the day it slipped I think you'll see more of that because of those teams rely on like streamlined development pipelines and a lot of collaboration between multi-discipline teams that's a little bit harder to coordinate from home I work on more of the back end tools side of things for our developers at oculus and I'm already seeing effects there of just things not being as effective as if somebody is in the office connected to our network and having the benefits of like distributed network rendering or so something like that for a

high-resolution graphic work that they do it just doesn't work as well on VPN trying to transfer that much data so in that case you'll see some negative effect I think but as you said for positive I think you're seeing a lot more people gaming and you know games as the typical scapegoat for bad things in the world or it's not happening as much and actually people are getting a lot of enjoyment and benefits out of it though yeah actually the interesting that you mentioned getting development pipelines because that's something else I wanted to touch on is there any sort of particular points in the game development pipeline that you mentioned like you've been hurt by the pandemic you've noticed like which ones are hurt most and then on the flipside is there any part of the game dev cycle that is perhaps easier now that people are working remotely and that kind of thing I don't know if that's even possible if

I can start I think that in in our case when theyíve started we had like so many different plans for baby and as you know we are a publisher very similar to what tilting point is doing so we need to close deals and find like good games to publish in the agent and we have the plans to attend conferences and meet people face-to-face because in in so many different cases although this is like a very dynamic young industry but you still need to have like a face to face conversation and meetings with these people just like to build trust and build relationship long-term relationship because for and publishing a game this is like a a - three years at least relationship with someone and sometimes it's five to ten so you cannot just like sign it over an email and done so this is this has

definitely impacted us negatively on that front but I believe the more people I got into depend emic and started getting to use that this is like the new norm I'm starting to see more conversations like these are happening zoom and they feel more natural they feel more like if we are meeting in person and I love like a lot of big conferences are trying to do online conferences for people to get connected to each other and talk to each other we'll still to see what will be DB like the effect on baby for the next few months but stable so far I can comment so more on games inside so for our case we started a brand new studio with a new team remotely and so our first month was focusing on prototyping new ideas

brainstorming and I think for that part it was a a bit challenging because a lot of these brainstorm discussions happened accidentally it's not like okay because we planned that time let's be creative on bats rotten let's make the most of it so a lot of this happen in real life when you're at the coffee or when you have learnt or when you go somewhere and you have to create artificially with movements so as how far you can go and whenever aspects but I would say negatively impact it is also well more the people aspect as well as Kate mentioned in my case as well it's very important at the beginning of forming a team building the trust connections and it's how far you can go as well through video call and seeing the visual cues and all the things that makes you know social connections but you don't even see and value so it's a challenge and it's part of your whole creative work but I would say it has been affected by

so iteration brainstorm just trust something that needs to be done a bit artificially during the time yeah I won't cut to comment on launching games you know T mentioned the last of us and you know the impact it is Aman Qing in the industry we're in Mobile or a PC free-to-play so mostly it's digital but but it still make it still makes a difference right so we actually launched today a big game a spongebob and it's graduation that's cool it's a game that we walked on for 18 months so as you can imagine there was a big discussion you know is it the right timing to launch it and the impact it had on the last two month of you know that the last part of production when you need to be so focused and communication needs to be so efficient

but at the same time there is the flipside that you you launch it in the time that people actually would like to play it right so there was a big discussion trade-off I the positive thing I'm saying is that because people are walk more aware that they need to be better communicators it actually has some instance in the company that communication is going even better like leadership communication to employees right communication across teams because people invest more thought in it you know yeah I would I would agree I've seen what I would I would call you know it was a it's sort of a combination of zoom fatigue which I'm hearing from a lot of people these days which they're getting tired of being on these long video calls so it's like I've heard from several people that they feel like the decision-making processes are becoming more efficient maybe part of that is people just giving in because they're like I just want to get off this camera

and go back to work or it just people are actually figuring out that you know we can you know maybe kind of liked it with Ozzie said you know you're kind of prepped when you get on the call to basically make your case and be ready to you know make decision rather than had the luxury of like hanging around the office room in you know then you wander off to lunch and still argue about it and all that you basically make a decision to move on so I think that that might be introducing some level of efficiency anyone else have anything to ask no good ok it's still on the topic of the pandemic I was kind of threw me off where of my questions were I think it was interesting I was also wondering because we've got quite a lot of people from all over the world here from the US and Europe and at least are we seeing any any like any ways that the the market is being affected by the pandemic in different regions are we seeing like

global uplift are we seeing changes depending on the region I can imagine there's different different changes because of lifting lockdowns in certain areas but I was wondering if anybody had any insights on in that specifically that they've noticed in their regions or regions they're working in I can start maybe a being a specific example right one thing to happen in the early stages of the corona virus outbreak we saw our players in Italy France and Spain reaching out to us they literally reach out to us through our forums and everything saying that our games were helping them while they were in lockdown providing fun and etc and they started they asked like oh can you do something can you give more lives for us can we play like for a little bit more and then we that's how we went from starting experimenting in the cities that had the lockdown first and providing the limited lives for them and etc so that they could engage more and then we did that like motivated us to do for the entire

world eventually because they they responded positively it doesn't mean that giving players and limited lives so removing the in that purchase of buying extra life to continue playing gives us more money as you can probably understand that but I think it was something that it's a small gesture that we can do to help them throughout this time and I think in addition to that our game teams which are I work with brilliant people right they jumped into brainstorming mode and what else could we do just besides giving life so there were specific live ups that we created for people in in different games right like candy had something called a cosy cake climb telephones here which was sorry it's a complicated name but it's it's a candy crush world that's all but like I think the team's eventually what we wanted to do was support players more than anything so I think that was a moment in which we just stopped and and said we didn't think about what was the best

strategy to monetize anything we just said what can we do to keep our user base and our player base saying how can we help them with that that thing said and listening to them so we started like we already had the dialogue but we started bringing even more because they were reaching out to us obviously I think part of it is because everyone is in lockdown and they would like oh I can like message this or I can do this and we create this new routine but that also helped set us up for success in the future right like now we they know that they can reach out to us and we will listen to what they're saying so I think it not necessarily affect the market region but it provided us another channel or another window not only to support players but to listen to them as well and and they understand that if they go through that channel we're listening we're reading their comments Sam have you seen any like major changes in the way that the Middle East is yeah

so we are we have seen in our company in specific we have seen a 30 to 40 percent increase in revenue month over month since since March so I believe that maybe our company since February has doubled in size which is definitely very exciting and maybe the biggest challenge that we are seeing today might be might be something hypothetical and that will not happen but we are a little bit worried about like the situation in the Middle East in specific for that countries like Saudi Arabia and like very oil-dependent countries who will is who are like very very affected by what's happening for the oil prices so we are seeing countries like Saudi Arabia increasing their baat from 5% to 15% which will definitely

have an impact on our revenues because at the end of the day Apple will not deduct that from their share they were deducted from the developer stream which is a different topic that I don't feel that it's very and at the same time you can see that will that affect or have a very drastic impact on the spending behavior and the spending power of the use some other people are saying that it will not and it should not because at the end of the day or no the economy is very much impacted but we are not spending money on anything anymore we're not going out with not dining out we're not buying anything with just like only the essentials the groceries and stuff so maybe that disposable income still going and they will still spend money

and spend and with the more engagement that we are getting maybe that's like a key and the last thing I've seen a huge decline and CPI in the region main reason behind that is other competitors but not gaming competitions like the McDonald's and the who are competing for acquire users are not spending money anymore so that's like lower the cost of user acquisition significant these are like the major trends here in the range one thing I'm seeing a reckoning the u.s. in Europe as a result of the market and an investor's anxiety I see you know one way we are developers is by a funding right and funding marketing is position and we see many more developers coming to us and probably our competitors because other traditional

forms of investment are a bit in named in limbo or pause whether its banks or investors or you know other forms of non-gaming non-endemic investors and and that's something that they will see very clearly you know developers need more support in other well yeah sorry I mean on the ocular side of things uh the quest is sold out pretty much everywhere late because people are home more they want to escape from the world that we're in right now and you can also go in social spaces like rec room or something and actually be close to your friends and play a game and have it seem a little bit like you know the normal life that we are all longing for these days so that's been good and unlike the indie development side I know some people who have launched recently launched games and seen a pretty decent sales number

like I don't know the exact percentage but it's much higher than they were expecting to be sure yeah I've been dying to buy a quest for a long time and awesome so we're gonna move on a little bit from the generalized how the pandemic is affecting the markets and that kind of thing and I want to focus more in on I'm working from home in this kind of remote were working things that I we've gots people who are just new to it people who have been doing it for a while and so I kind of were wondering like other than the bit criticism calls that we're all now in pretty much every day every minute how else have you adapted to working from home and if you've worked from home for a while how it has your routine it's all changed now that everybody else is working from home or is you still sort of doing the same thing okay to know you've been doing this for quite some time quite wondering like has it has your routine changed as other people of adopted remote working or anything it's

changed a little bit I mean my biggest changed my tene is the fact that I'm actually home because like I mentioned I travel a lot so you know not being on a plane every week is a huge shift for me but at the same time I'm kind of I was already traveling a ton earlier this year before the pandemic --it so I kind of feel like I'm it's like on a weird extended stay at home between trips and so the next trip I don't even know I think maybe October we'll see so in that respect it's a lot different for me but otherwise it's like every from a day-to-day basis it's no different from any other day I've worked from home for years what is different though is the the onslaught of all the video calls and everything the phone calls and and the weird scheduling and everything cuz like Tim I'm in Seattle so we're you know we're offset from Europe and Asia quite a bit so you know I'm not that I mean I'm used to that as

well but what the biggest thing I've seen is is like if you kind of scan across social media and everything with among my groups of Industry friends seeing them try to adjust to it is tough because I I know that when I started working from home way back in 2005 it and that was after 13 years working at Microsoft in a pretty intense environment it took me at least six to nine months to sort of decompress and get used to that and kind of develop the self-discipline it takes to work from home and to like wake up every morning and have a routine and make sure you know what you're going to get done that day and all that and I'm seeing so many friends struggling with that and they feel this kind of you know like they they they're kind of wandering almost like they're lost sometimes especially it the longer this goes on so you know some people adapted pretty quickly and others I think are still struggling with it and so I've been trying to help as much as I can you know with that so that that's probably the biggest impact I've seen is just the seeing how others

around me have tried to adjust to it and for some it's been pretty tough yeah I can't relate to a lot of what you said obviously like I never thought that you guys would see my bedroom never thought that I would see my bedroom at all no let alone a bunch people that we in person but that's absolutely fine but I can relate to the to the routine like there were little things that I am I didn't know because that I have never worked from home for more than a period of like two days in a row or something and little things that you do like put a nice t-shirt put some jeans on some days actually affects your mindset I'm like like I said I'm working from the bedroom right so I had to find different ways to not think that this is my workspace because I also need to rest here and that shift and mindset is much more challenging than expected but I think one thing that we also now talking about

and someone that has like I lead a team of 50 people right so it's not just about my routine I have to ensure that there are 50 people that are healthy comfortable safe and feeling okay and productive so obviously we need to shout out the unsung heroes which is the IT teams all around that were able to provide us with the VPNs and all the equipment and everything that we needed and then things that we would take for granted like I didn't have a table I had no table at home so I started working from my bed which obviously like the first day was over and I was like okay so I'm old and I'm gonna like die I'm not gonna be able to do this it's real right all the pain and etc so I mean we're we're currently working on a large scale we have a lot of people that work at King but the company has been providing us a lot of support and finding like we can expense chairs we can try to get the table we you know obviously it's it's a it's something

that we have to be reasonable or not but at the same time we care about that those things as well some things I did with the team I sent an invite for a meeting of 15 minutes in the afternoon at 2:00 p.m. called break so the people just like leave your desk because it's so much easier for you to sit at your desk and then your resume calls and then you just go and they don't look at email it's here no don't worry I'll check it here and even if you just booked half an hour for you to chat you will end up talking about work because things are popping up and slack is puppy and it's always constant information so I picked that for them but then I also needed to take care of myself which as we can all say seems clearly not my best trait but I also like blocked an hour for lunch because I needed to leave this usually when we are in the office a lot of people eat lunch at their desk but you do walk to the meeting rooms and you walk to different floors or you go outside or you commute so that's acceptable but here I'm sitting in this

chair and like looking at the same things and if I eat lunch at my desk then it's just I need to break that pattern to make my brain reset so I think there are just little things that we're doing and obviously we depth take care of health as well mental and physical so we are covering costs of testing and you know anything any treatment that we need but at the same time we're doing mental health sessions more often and it's something that as you mentioned like leadership is a spend any more time so now every two weeks we have a call with the President and everyone in which we can ask questions and it's like a fireside chats not just a business update and I'm hosting sessions as well we have therapists the whole sessions with the team there's Q&A and and we're keeping track of the trends and how people are feeling we literally ask them how is your mental health today how do you feel today that's great and then they they give us a feedback and we're like okay so let's have a conversation and

obviously like a kink we have a bunch of people to relocate it for their jobs and we had people that started in January in February they have no friends they have no family they moved here and that's their I mean at least in my view that's that pressure that they're still on probation they live on a visa what is happening and like they still didn't have that time to you know get to know the team so I'm again very fortunate that my team is almost like my family we hold social interactions we do like cocktail master classes after work or you know we watch movies together and people can just join and each one of them volunteer well oh I know how to make like spaghetti carbonara so let's sign it at 6:00 p.m. and I'm gonna teach everyone and then like half of the team joins in and we just have a laugh because we also need to remember not everyone has a family or friends here and at the same time those that have kids at home I need to do the homeschooling we need to give them flexible hours which is also challenging when you're working from home because you're always here right so it's all

these things that we never took into consideration before at least I didn't like really thought about it in depth our improving because we do want to support them and I think flexibility is is the word that we need in mind when we change now like I'm working from home yeah I think we also tried to do something around these things because mental health is is a very neglected thing in this pandemic everyone is talking about like health but in Georgian for example we had a challenge where there is a lockdown like a curfew between from after 6:00 p.m. until 10:00 a.m. you cannot move you cannot go outside so our working hours used to be from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 so if you are working from 10:00 to 6:00 on your desk at home then at the beginning it was

like okay fine then we discovered that a lot of the people did not see the Sun outside for a week and even they they used to do a complete lockdown on the weekends but completely we cannot move outside that's all so we decided that once a week we will do from 5:00 to 6:00 where like all of us will have a zoom cool while we are walking outside like everyone has to mandatory go walk outside for an hour and while we are at zoom everyday we try to do a 1 hour 15 minutes of stretching together we're trying to make as many ideas every week we have like a quiz night things like these but definitely mental health as you mentioned Sabrina is a neglected topic that has to be addressed like you know in a better way let's talk let's talk about kids for a second who is kids on the panel I

okay my daughter's 32 in lives in California so I have two kids eight and ten so right now for example they're locked in the room with the mat with my wife you know that basically taking care that you're not verging in or anything but but on a more serious note I think that this is something also to consider we have members of the team that are now tending to their kids you know they're not in school it's a lot of work it's very tough it depends also on what you know the men and I mean the men and women are doing in their in their job and how their routine goes I think it demands much more consideration much more transparency you know that if you're not available at certain hours make sure that your teammates know you know and the teammates should be very considerate on those kind of times and

the effort that you're doing beyond work so I see it as a major impact on families for sure Yeah right like we do have members on the team that I mean they have to split right the husband and the wife they need to split who takes care of the child and what time so what I we told them is like yes let you let us know when you can be available and we'll make sure that we will communicate we make you feel included and everything and if there's something that you need to be that's imperative that this person is part of then the team adjusts that person because it's super challenging and it we also encourage people which sounds weird to take time off you need vacation you need a break and I myself was like oh I don't want a book vacation because I'm not traveling it feels like we're gonna waste my days here at home but that's not it you need to rest as well so that's important and I'm sorry team that I said something I just wanted to

add like that yeah I was gonna agree about the flexibility side like I'm used to working from home but a lot of the people that I support or not and their schedules are all different lazy said like they have kids and they're trying to home-school and do all these different things so I have to be a little flexible with when I'm available to help them when they need help and also try to maintain my own sort of Virtanen boundaries of how much work I'm actually doing and keep that in mind so I don't burn my cellphone as well it's been a challenge so far but it's going ok and on the the nonprofit side I've been trying to do regular check-ins with the people that I volunteer for our organizations and make sure that they're still doing good and see if they need anything for me and how we can help support them with their mental health and all that and so you know we've got all the organizations everyone everybody is changing their work but people companies are still growing companies are still hiring

and how is hiring changed in this world like how has that been affected and a question I was kind of wondering is like should companies stopped hiring at the minute now that there's all this uncertainty about the economy and everything like that is it time to stop we hired 10 people during Corona which is which definitely was a big deal because not only hiring interviewing and hiring people onboarding them we needed to learn we talked to so many different mentors and and experts and on remote work to know how do you do like an onboarding remotely especially with this time especially with her own so definitely exciting that gave us a lot of publicity because we were able to attract talent in all the companies a lot of companies here in Jordan and

definitely interesting and but we have to because the companies grew so much in the past two months we cannot do it alone so we need to find a good people to join the company and hire good people I mean I mean I would argue that I mean given given the impact on employment right now I mean here in the US as people probably heard we've got a massive amount of unemployed and you know they're saying the actual rate could be somewhere between 15 and 20 percent right now which is staggering I mean it's the worst even worse than the Great Depression a hundred years ago almost and so to me it's just like you there are people out there who have skills and maybe they weren't actually working in games at the time but they might have the skills that we need for a specific specific role so I think this is a really bad time to stop hiring because

there are people out there who need jobs and they might actually be the people that you want so I my encouragement is that people should still keep the process going you know and you know like like you were mentioning it's make the proper adjustments for how you onboard someone virtually and all that but I would say don't stop yeah hundred percent like if your company's in position to hire and that you should continue and I agree a hundred percent Kate today we haven't you started in my team with someone that never worked in the game industry before and that's exactly it like there were a couple things that we change we haven't stopped because you know we're always looking for the best talent and we are continuing to produce content that doesn't like the pandemic doesn't change but one thing that we did is we reached out to our employees and we made an improved referral scheme because if they have friends or family that has been affected by this then great if you trust them and if they have the skill to set skill the skill set sorry that we need

then we want those referrals and we want those people who want to support the ones that we trust obviously like that can it's a win-win situation right so I think again I agree it's important for us to open our eyes and and like and look and and and try to diversify I think he goes a bit before even without the pandemic we we do need to diversify the experiences we can have it's important for us to have a team of people that have different backgrounds so that we can always attack problems from a different perspective right so I think this is an opportunity for us to bring more talent from different backgrounds into an industry like ours you know before the panel I talked to our HR director to kind of get your view on recruiting and you know she told me just like people here said you know keep hiring if you can but she talked about hiring responsibly in the sense that you know just like we talked about communication earlier so you put more

effort right in the evaluation is it the critical position how it's going to affect other positions and now how to make onboarding successful I mean things that you take for granted otherwise you know you'd need to pay much more attention right and do it much more thoughtful than you did it before yeah I mean for our GD we had actually been planning our big annual job fair for tomorrow which would be like twenty to thirty people companies and 300 people in a room all talking to each other and obviously we can't do that now so we've been pivoting trying to figure out how to do that effectively online and still bring in the same type of numbers and maybe even more since it would only wouldn't be people just here in Seattle we could bring in people from all over the world really if they were able to attend so just trying to figure out how to make that an online event has been a challenge for us as well have you seen

any changes in hiring practices well for us because now we are at I would say quite international it hasn't changed much in our approach we are having everywhere so we have we still considering to hire people from everywhere and even in my own experience we have hired most of people like remotely until we met them once so that is the step that is removed of a process but then during the process we compensate with it by more cones with different people of the team and trying to make the interview a bit more casual where it's not just about inquiring skills but more getting to know the people and these days I'm considering even to hire people remotely so they could stay in their location because we don't know where but we'll change so it's opening up new possibility but before it was a requirement you think oh maybe the

person should join the team on-site and now I'm being more country the idea of that person could actually stay where they are because we are all working from home anyway so a big is that gives the whole world as a possible territory to just recruit all the talents and thinking of when when this all this will end we all hope at some point in the future we are but I imagine people will start returning to our offices and return to work and the new normal and everything that people have been sort of touting and how do you think working lives are going to change post current virus after after we've all got used to remote working and then we all start going back to the office how does that how do you think that's going to affect how people like change their working lives and and structure their lives and that kind of thing well it's it's gonna be strange at first I think people are you know there's gonna be a certain level of elation to see people face to

face again but I think they the trepidation is always gonna be there it's gonna be there for a very long time you know because we're all germ carrying creatures and so you know there's always kind of that little paranoia that's gonna carry with us about I wonder you know I wonder if you've been exposed you know of course when a vaccine eventually shows up and we're all you know we're all immune at some point to a certain degree I mean that's gonna pass until the next fire shows up but you know I think the the biggest thing to me is how much the companies adjust to the people in the needs of the people and I'm hoping in I think I'm seeing at least my view is that a lot of the companies are understanding now the importance of this level of flexibility because people's lives are very different from you know from person to person so you should you know a remote work can actually work and it actually is effective for the right people and it may not work for everybody

but we'll probably see a much more mixed environment in you know and I'm speaking from I remember the days back in the early 90s when I had to try and do some remote work when I was working at Microsoft and it was so vilified and frowned upon and I was to some degree ostracized for even the idea of working from home you know but it's like hey I was you know it was newly married and I had a daughter and all that and it's just like sometimes I had to leave at 3 p.m. to go pick her up from school it's like how dare you leave you know you're supposed to be here until 8 p.m. and you know I'm thankful for that culture has gone away for the most part but I think that's I think we're gonna see a much more mixed environment though you need you may not see as many desks full as there used to be sure which is better mess up for companies in general like it it will definitely lower the cost to set up an office and will allow you to attract

more talents because now you can like hire people at least from our similar time zone unis I don't think this will teach us to hire people like from by like a very distant time zone because that that is still like a different challenge that we need to learn about like how to sold for da and definitely also it will lower the cost only employees themselves because they don't need to spend money on commuting and eating outside because in our office for example people will order food every day and they will lots of like bad habits used to be formed at the office so now it's it is good I think it's a good idea what's happening sorry sorry I just wanted to say that you know mixed environment I think is a kid Kate said is a very good phrase look we all read coders are in New York you know first of

all I don't think the return is going to be one moment you know we're talking unfortunately about possibility of a second wave we're talking about long term consequences and also you know in in a city like New York it's not only about being at the office together it's about you know that's the main risk that you go in a subway with millions of people so I think that the idea that you know all of this is just magically going away is not very realistic you know I already saw last week and this week Facebook and Google spoke about remote work as an optional thing until the end of the year so yeah I think we will see changes and we will see a mixed environment and companies adjusting we do have some audience questions that I just want to quickly touch on thank you everybody for

who's part who's joined in and sending in questions that was one that I was going to ask that sort of yep so an anonymous attendee asks do you think companies will be more open to allowing their employees to work from home when needed after this is all over I know we've kind of touched on that but it also feeds into something like so yeah like more open sniff and should they be more open to this overall with you what do we say yes yeah I can comment quickly on that more when we have we are having this discussion actually these days with my team and company level where people are asking actually finding while they enjoy themselves working from home backwards for them and will they be allowed and at least at Vudu we are we have a lot of flexibility independence by teams so comment more on what is my view on the our team level and we are even discussing these days what makes sense

for us so the question will always come now why do we need to go to the office and it's about meeting necessary oh do we have to all be there so when we look more closely like all the things we are doing by habits and routine are they really necessary so a listener and we are actually revisiting the way of working and which is more legacy than what is modern way of working and that works for the lifestyle of people and also more efficiently in some cases so for us yeah we won't definitely change our way of working after that yeah anybody else super psyched about getting everybody in remote working all the time in the future because Sophie said that this might be like just like a legacy that we we are all like born and raised to think about like work in this way that you need to go to the office you

need to do that and then you need to go back home and live but why like is this like the most efficient way or is this something that we found like people like older than us doing in the past and then we followed so maybe this is like a good time for us to rethink work from home and all of these things it might like actually disrupt but I think it will still need more time we need to spend I hope not but we need to spend like more and more months at home working from home to to realize that and and change the abstraction inside our heads you can ask another questions pops up a couple of times in the chat and in the Q&A I think Ozzy this one is gonna be suitable for you especially another anonymous attendee asks we're looking at launching our first game next month we keep hearing it's a great time but we're not a big studio and worry will get lost any tips on if we should hold off or

what are the best channels to promote and there was another question it was also like do you have any advice on on launching a game during this time Ozzy you've just launched a game today do you have any advice look I think that obviously each game each company is a different context I would say teas in the at least for us decision looking at the overall situation was that it's a good time to launch because of the high heightened engagement because marketing works better because people have much more attention to new things that are coming up and so in our case it was definitely bigger than the disadvantages which are clear you know it's not to do something like this and B is focused and the attentive and the collaborative is a challenge but we thought on the trade-off that the state of the lockdown and the engagement that

the people are hungry for entertainment is a is at the end of the day more important is anybody else looking at launching a game at the moment oh I've noticed quite a few companies are still soft lodging and stuff but is is game launching still yeah we are we are soft launching and launching a couple of titles at the moment I'm not seeing why this will be treated any different from any other time I think it's very similar to launching a game at any other time but you will need to take an advantage today it might be a good time to launch a game the main reason behind that people have free time sleepy eyes are lower and people have the ability to engage with your game and adapt it because you know if you are for example launching an RPG toy or

something that is hard work most people or most users that you are targeting have already been playing and they will not switch to earth so this is why the CPI will be very expensive and the retention will not be as good but today because there is like an extended time for these players so they have the flexibility to still play their game that they are playing already and move to yours as well so I think there is no better time to do anything then now cool I'm just going to take one last question because I know we're kind of coming up to time here and I know some people have to to get on with their days and stuff I thank you all for you and yes ask this question good would like to know so this is sort of a building and then the question at the end working in the gaming industry is always fun but considering the times we're now in regarding situation of covert 19 it's

becoming more and more hard to have fun whilst working very understandable especially if you're working in marketing as they are so what tips do we if the panel have to enjoy working from home to join the during the time working from home or well I I that I have one that I consider to be an easy one that I've told other people that they should consider when I've heard this question is basically try and keep it in perspective first of all you can work from home so you're already in a position which is far beyond most people in most countries around the world so be thankful that you can work from home and do basically do a job that hopefully you love and you can keep doing it even while working from home and I think on top of that it's like yeah some some functions in the game industry like marketing are affected right now but I but I think it's a great opportunity for people to if your job is being slowed down by the pandemic this is a great chance to kind of stand back and think about how can I do certain things better

how can I build new processes how can I build in efficiencies take a you know be a bit introspective about how you do your work what resources you use what resources you need all of that kind of stuff because we're always so heads down and just so driven to do the job in the moment I think it's really important that this is a great chance to actually take a bit of a breather and think on a meta level about your job and in what you can do to do it better especially when things pick up again yeah I agree to that like it's it's almost like you have an opportunity to creatively think of other ways of doing your job we're talking about how is gonna impact the change on being working more remotely and etc but there's also like how do you change your process then through this how do you use that creative juice not just to be able to deliver what your day-to-day is but like how do you improve this how do you make how do you gamify what you're doing if that's something that you you want to do but I think it's about those

interactions that now you have an opportunity to either deepen them or try to do something different which I think it's exciting right anybody else fun ideas to keep the fun alive whilst working from home just try to keep like walking outside every once you know I like trying to change the routine and Sabrina said that try not like to have like that everything in one room like eat and sleep and work in the same room it has to like even like in our case at the office we asked everyone when they started working that try to move to a different room or like work from a different angle at least for you to maintain mental health that that you feel that you are going out to do something else try to go for our small walk take breaks

do fun activities with the team at different times but don't get stuck in a bad mood feeling very negative about it that will like drive you crazy in a couple of months from now yeah I agree there's there's a lot of positive stuff you can you can gain I mean I think that family bonds I mean if you if you are with your family I probably spend much more time with my kids and wife as a result I mean even in reading watching you know I watch things that I always wanted to watch you know for example the wires start to finish right it's a great great opportunity so I think that there are a lot of things in terms of reflection hobbies family even beyond the walk that you can actually you know do things that you've never been able to do in our hectic environment and play a lot of animal crossing that's

what I found my god yes and you add to me everyone let me come and catalogue or your softly thank you list right I think I'm gonna end it there bang on five o'clock for me so I take over take over I was going to say thank you to everyone it's brilliant panel I appreciate you guys are all super important super talented and I really appreciate you giving us an hour of your time from your various beautiful homes around the world and we're all going over to a cease now for a party afterwards Easter but I just wanted to say thanks again see you brick as well I'll just say we have got another one of these round tables coming up about pitching and it's behind myself that they go that's next week made that the 19th we will ping people about that study apparently Met pitching tour tied into our big pitch and then of course coming up because you can't too many digital events or just establish pockemon

connects like a little to use my big thing by the way is coming up in in June in about months time from now and quagga side have a fabulous afternoon evening morning wherever you are in the world stay safe stay well and hope to see you all in person [Laughter] you right