GDC 2022 Main Stage: The Developer's Renaissance

[Music] i'm alana pierce and if you don't know me i'm a video game writer working with sony santa monica studio but i also do podcasts and charity streams and a whole bunch of other stuff that i won't bore you with um mostly just thank you all for joining me here today it's it's so nice to see so many people's faces in person i feel like after the last two years which have felt like an entire decade uh if i'm being honest it's just so nice to actually see people in person even if like maybe it's a little bit weird like it's still not really used to if i'm supposed to shake people's hands or not still figuring it out um yeah i hope i hope you're all having a great time catching up on all the sessions and conversations that i'm sure we've all been missing for the last two years are obviously really important to the industry and yeah i don't want to hop on about this for too long because we've all heard about it constantly and it sucks but it definitely does feel strange to realize that you all have legs i feel like i'm so used to

seeing people on zoom calls or teams meetings just from here up now it's good to to uh remind myself that people are full-bodied and not just the webcams that we see so thank you all for coming obviously a lot of things have changed for game development itself over the past two years not only have indie devs missed out on some of the incredible networking opportunities that events like gdc are so helpful for but we've also all just had to get used to our offices also being in our homes uh i lived in a studio apartment up until november and let me tell you having your bedroom and your living room and your kitchen and your office all being one 300 square foot box is not ideal especially in la it was very hot not would not recommend it um but of course a lot of people had it a lot worse than i did and most developers also had to get used to rebalancing their entire work and personal lives and a whole lot of games got delayed which of course happens frankly as numerous injustices have

racked our world i think we've all just been doing the best that we can to support our colleagues and friends and families and communities going through a whole bunch of difficult times right now i do want to give a really specific shout out to the several game studios in ukraine ubisoft kiev 4a games roommate studio gcs game world beat shapers best way frogwares and vostok games to name a few i can't imagine what they're going through saying something like i hope you're okay really doesn't feel like enough by any stretch but i did want to take the time to acknowledge them somehow in any case that is enough from me today we are celebrating the developers renaissance and the positive forces shaping our industry with a series of three talks our first speaker will break down how idos montreal rethought their balance between well-being and efficiency in a remote hybrid work environment joining us via live stream please welcome david and fosse head of studio at idos montreal

hello do you hear me hello how are you doing i'm good you very good uh glad to confirm this is live thank you so much for joining us i won't take up any more of your time i'm going to head off stage but everybody enjoy thank you [Applause] hi everyone i'm david fosse a los montroll studio head thank you for being here just to reassure you i have a full body evening zoom actually i would have liked to meet you in person but at edos we have decided that it's too early to travel and we are actually facing a new wave a wave here in quebec so be ready and let's start so beyond the expert i am an introvert person who needs preparation analysis and above all listening before

being comfortable expressing my opinion and as you can hear i have a nice french accent so you will understand that today i'm stepping out of my comfort zone please be patient with me and let's start so a bit of context why we decided to shift the organizational culture here at aedos and how and and what kind of results we obtained to date so quickly on that slide as you can read i have some experience in the gaming industry but what is important here is that i have also worked in mature industries like automotive and toys not that i did not want to work in the gaming industry when i finished school but in 1995 it was not that easy in france

actually in foreground atari interactive now refused to let me in thank you guys but in the end it has been a chance to be honest it has a big impact on my approach and vision and i hope you will see that through this this presentation and here are two examples on how my previous experiences can influence me we are currently living in a period of consolidation in our industry but the automotive industry already lived through an era of consolidation decades ago i see it as an opportunity to read into the future and learn from their experience another example the toy industry is a pioneer in exploiting its ips and thus reaching a much wider audience on and amortizing its creation costs on different products more context about quebec

as you can read here on that slide all major studios and publishers have a local branch here especially in montreal with more than 200 studios so nothing no need to say that it's very tough here and it's easy also to understand why a company culture is very strategic and in march 2020 when covet 19 hit we went the final stage here at montreal at aeros module of our testing of a virtual desktop approach a way to counter full employment in quebec so it only took us one day to decide to switch to work from home 500 employees deployed deployed in two weeks even before the recommendations of the public health department from that moment as for the majority of the industry our context

changed making the competition tougher than ever also there is no border anymore with the advent of remote work being separated we quickly implemented wellness surveys highlighting issues related to the pandemic of course like stress isolation family overload to name these but we also realized that we did not really know the edosians and their concerns not that we did not have employee well-being at heart but since we were all working together in one place we assumed we knew each other which is totally wrong as a first step and based on the results of these surveys we implemented some quick actions setting up studio and project showcases for more visibility setting up a weekly studio meeting

named virtual bear time yes before the pandemic every friday at the end of the day we took to get together to have a chat and we decided to replicate that moment with the virtual bear time to see each other to get together to stay informed and answer questions of course we also organize online sessions with a psychologist for people who feel isolated or overloaded with family we improve insurance covering we organize a lot of activities support cooking gardening activities online activities so i i'm very proud that we were able to act quickly to implement these actions but at the end it was not enough how to fix the problem of circulation of information how to get to know each other better with a studio of approximately 500

experts the observation is simple the well-being of the employees and the performance of the studio cannot rest on the 4-5 experts of the upper management it's to pressure not good for their well-being and prove to be unrealistic and ineffective it was time to put into practice a philosophy we had been thinking about for a couple of years an approach based on collective intelligence and accountability we need to move from a standard organization to an ecosystem an environment that supports and promotes self-expression but don't forget we were in the middle of a pandemic so is it the best time to add major changes indeed beyond the technical and logistical challenges of remote work

it was necessary to redefine the development methods too already involving significant changes for everyone so again is now the best time to add major changes for us the answer is yes statistical is not an option we have to be true with the studio values which are people courage business savvy and continuous improvement it was also critical to resolve at least reduce our difficulty in detecting problems so we began our transition from an organization based on common policies rules to a cultural approach based on self-expression but we are to start to create a workspace in which experts can express their ideas and opinions it may seem surprising

but the biggest challenge in this approach is to de-program ourselves forget our old reflex of control hierarchy all artifacts from the industrial era and there is no magic magic recipe everything goes through communication communication and communication encouragement take initiative promoting external and internal initiatives it has been key for us to show that it's not just words but that it's reality and feasible so the studio has led by example by putting into practice two initiatives that promote empowerment and autonomy first flexibility in working hours helping 77 percent of the employees and workplace flexibility so there is nothing perfect

and it will be a long process but there are more and more initiatives and the studio management is no longer the only entity to decide for the studio performance and adolescence well-being the edo students are now more proactive and create working groups on their own and feel encouraged to participate in the life of the studio here are two examples of progress we made example one as mentioned at the beginning of the presentation competition is tough in quebec so during a studio meeting a virtual bear time we were discussing the problem and and adocion decided on the spot to create a retention committee and it quickly grew bringing together a dozen experts initiating surveys meetings and developing proposals the good thing about that initiative is

that no one question it and time no question the initiative sorry and the time spent by the experts in this committee example two after we switched to work from home we detected a drop of productivity several causes fully for it working remotely communication channels have multiplied slack emails from zoom teams just to name this causing a lot of disturbance during the day boundary between private life and work is now blurred but that way is not sustainable in the medium long term stress and fatigue takeover and efficiency productivity are greatly reduced and like every company we also face the great resignation in this case collective intelligence has been key

we all work to propose ideas to improve our efficiency and question our current methods after a month of work we decided to start a test with several action points which aims to improve studio performance and our well-being giving birth to a work program of 32 hours per week over four days because we all work together to find a solution the acceptance rate for this gigantic change was extremely high we monitor the test to learn and adjust of course for example we know that we are in the right direction but there will still work to do few numbers only approximately only nine percent of adolescents are at the moment not able to complete all the work scheduled for their week in four days 32 hours

only six percent of adolescents are not able to ever work with them that allow them to finish their work week without being exhausted and only seven percent of edo students are less productive with this new program so at the end it's great results i'm very very happy it's very positive but we still have to adjust and and and test new things to make sure that everyone feel comfortable at work and have a well-balanced private life of course so all the education have at the earth the studio of performance because edos is an ecosystem where people are linked around the same values valued as human beings and others seen the decisions that affect them in conclusion

our learning shows show that making the system complex and easy by adding more managers as the company growth should not be the first action preparing for growth by building a culture of accountability participation without silos can yield more impressive results there is nothing stronger than collective intelligence and structure and perpetual adjustment according to needs with an an ever increasing collective participation that unites us we continue to learn at eidos explore and test new avenues which i hope to share with you next year quick examples remove job descriptions every adolescent should feel free to participate to the success of the studio by any way remove the management of rest holiday why should we manage the rest time

every expert is better placed to judge train a supportive leadership for greater professional autonomy decentralization of budget to the experts revise the structure towards a more agile and efficient ecosystem etc etc so we still have a lot of work as you can see thank you for listening i hope this will be useful for you to you and thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i wanted to say thank you david for enlightening us as to what worked and what didn't in your studio's journey also i could listen to that accent forever thank you so much thank you very much take care so now we are going to shift gears towards addressing the social factors that affect our daily lives our next speaker will share initiatives that sony interactive entertainment took to

support d e and i efforts please welcome to the stage director of support services and operations and black playstation employee network president davina mackey [Applause] [Music] that was awesome right throughout history we've witnessed many examples of movements when a group of people work together to advance their shared ideas we've been affected by the civil rights movement the women's right movement the right to vote movement the lgbtq plus movement the metoo movement and the black lives matter movement all of these movements make and are making change in our society every industry every company every employee has been impacted by a movement at some

point in time and the video game industry is not exempt so the video game industry is facing its own de i movement and the news media regularly has stories about our industry falling short but there's an opportunity for us to make a significant difference there are people in this room who are immersed in de ni and like me you're committed to creating a better work environment that serves everyone but i've been working in this space for over five years and some of you may be brand new to de ni i want to thank you so much for being here and taking the steps to become active or to become an ally and no matter how new you are or how experienced in the field whatever contribution you can make now it really matters

see we all face the same challenges how do we change our behavior how do we change our practices our procedures how do we change our culture so that every employee knows and feel that diversity equity inclusion and belonging is relevant and carries weight in our organizations at sony interactive entertainment our approach to den required a paradigm shift pre and post pandemic and i'm excited to have a discussion with you and i look forward to hearing your ideas about your own paradigm shifts after the talk so looking back our paradigm pre-pandemic was different our employee networks

were juiced about bringing awareness about their culture to the organization we were great at planning network events with ethnic food and ethnic dancing having keynote speakers who made us aware of current events or taught us about key times in history for a demographic and we visited marginalized schools and told students about opportunities in the video game industry we donated money through our benevity system to nonprofit organizations like the boys and girls club like girls who code and game heads and we were very successful at cultural awareness that paradigm however there is more to deni than cultural awareness we all know this we have action we must have action that moves the needle and that's a new paradigm so

we were starved we didn't have much transparency or access to global demographic data we didn't know the number of women versus men in the company we didn't know how many black or asian or latinx employees were in the company and we barely knew how many people were in the company from a global perspective i'm talking about the general population of sie so we were data starved the u.s they had their own de ni strategy europe their own strategy japan they addressed strategy uh de ni in their own way and our executive leadership was fined with handling de ni locally but we realized we needed a global strategy de ani was driven through e-net initiatives locally

and not embedded into sie's core goals and objectives which are global so how did this play out well what we observed was there was no incentive for middle management to advocate for de ni or even to participate or even encourage participation from their subordinates and what that meant was there was no de ni movement globally so pre-pandemic there were less than three percent of black employees at sony interactive entertainment and at the director and up i would say that i was a pink unicorn i was the highest ranking black female employee in playstation studios and there was no one like me and if you taken into consideration all the population of sie well i graduated to a unicorn because sprinkled throughout the organization there were a

few colleagues just like me and i'm the kind of woman that once i commit to something i follow through so i didn't mind being a trailblazer for our black population and i loved rolling up my sleeves and bringing being a part of the blackout playstation movement and guys i'm sorry i you know there you go pandemic hits it's may 25th 2020 and george floyd's death was a tragedy witnessed by the world now this was a pivotal moment for sony and sie and for most corporations across the globe you all remember where you were on 9 11 and how you felt watching what happened well i can tell you the black community has a similar reaction to may 25 2020

we know what we were doing and how it made us feel watching it and sadly we didn't think anyone would be held accountable like so many times in our history what was unprecedented was sony and sie's reaction and support there was a movement in external communication and sie posted a statement on twitter denouncing systemic racism and violence against the black community and then they placed the hashtag at the end of that statement hashtag black lives matter honestly i thought it was in a parallel universe it was extraordinary and then a month later i get a call from the head of d and i she said davina jim ryan who is our ceo he would like an audience with the black playstation leadership

we were freaking amazed and i'll put an exclamation point at the end of that jim was attentive and authentic he listened to us and surprisingly to those who hear this black at playstation for the first time felt like we finally could ask for what we wanted and needed without retribution well we put a strategy together we asked for programs we asked for sponsorship and we asked for proper funding and we got it now [Applause] written as a response to george floyd's killing john platt who is the first black chairman and ceo of sony atv music publishing wrote an article called a change must

come and in addition to that provocative open letter he had the audacity to ask sony board of directors and convince them to donate a hundred million dollars to organizations dedicated to social justice initiatives and they listened they gave the donation it was split amongst all the sony subsidiaries so that they could support the nonprofit organizations that of their choice and this was a life-altering situation to our movement sie even added another million dollar donation so back at playstation we leveraged this and we facilitated a panel with john platt jim ryan and tiffany hester now this was pivotal because it was the first time the black employees

globally would have a seat at the table or get to hear from a black ceo this was amazing sie also did something phenomenal they approved a black lives matter theme on the ps4 platform so imagine the fist pump black screen yellow piping playstation 4 platform this was huge and unconventional sie's logo and the commitment to quality is so high that this was extraordinary for us but they believed in the black lives matter movement and they did it and they even went further guys there are people walking around globally with a black lives matter t-shirt and playstation symbols again huge and one of the greatest accomplishments

of this next step paradigm was the denis initiative to level the playing field for all e-nets see each e-net was assigned an executive sponsor who reports directly to jim who can advocate on their behalf and ensure goals objectives and challenges are addressed at the highest level for example pre-pandemic blackout playstation's executive sponsor was at the senior director level and jay we love you to death he is now our advisor but after this pivotal moment after the meeting with jim ryan black at playstation was assigned the dopest executive sponsor at playstation who's director jim ryan his name is herman holtz and he is the head of playstation studios and he has been an amazing all-around great leader and i've had the pleasure of being

mentored by him for a year it's been amazing now today today our de i movement and new paradigm is global the deni global operation team well they're now in the u.s they're in europe and they're in japan and together they drive a global strategy today we have data we are no longer data starved and i we appreciate the women at playstation for bringing us being assertive and leading the charge to request for demographic data and each e-net came on board to support this request and the senior vice president of human resources or reit ziv and her team which includes de ni they came through as promised we now have access to demographic data

and having access to this allows sie to set kpis and metrics to move the needle especially for those internal groups who are underrepresented today we drive belonging orrit and the de and i team organized a deep dive meeting to allow all e-nets to present their three-year strategy one of the goals came from pride at playstation and it was to help enhance features in our enterprise systems to allow for non-binary gender identities private playstation was able to advocate for our colleagues who are impacted and a change was made immediately we can add pronouns and name designations to hr systems we have guidelines for our email signatures and collaboration tools

and this was a significant endorsement of de i culture and values today we enable inclusion the de i team facilitated the first global survey to define and enable inclusion and belonging for our global employees this new paradigm ensures all levels in the organization have a voice to express how they feel and they are able to be their whole self at work and still feel included or that they belong go back one please oh sorry today we work to enforce equity we even have a policy that encourages recruiters and hiring managers to execute equitable hiring practices by including quali

qualified diverse talent in the pool of candidates for each interview now we're at the early stages of this and it's working okay so let's let's take a survey what is the percentage of women that represent the consumer base in the video game industry now i'm going to give you four options 15 30 50 or 70 percent by a showing of hands who thinks it's 15 percent about thirty percent how about fifty percent seventy percent all right the most of you sets 50 and you're right it's 50 and what's great our courageous leader jim ryan well he has driven change his leadership team

is 50 women which represents the global consumer base and looking at the entire woman working in the video industry well they represent thirty percent so we have work to do and you may ask yourselves does your executive team reflect your consumer base and what is the percentage of women working at your company these are our these are our e-nets they're doing amazing work within their communities and in collaboration with one another i'm going to point out a few of them that's at playstation well they partner with the wounded warriors project both to raise money and help vet veterans and find employment after their military service black at playstation collaborated with the black collegiate gaming association

to support 16 history historically black colleges and universities to open gaming labs facilities on each of their campuses this is a first for hbcus needles that playstation well they are in liaison with sie and a non-profit organization called latina and tech and they're running recruiting events that advertise open opportunities in the latin community and one of our most encouraging things that i witnessed was watching api at playstation launch their e-net during the pandemic they were able to provide education trainings and most importantly a safe space to process and protect against anti-asian hate and finally i want to recognize abel at playstation they joined valuable 500 and collaborated with the de i team to

benchmark our accessibility and disability inclusion through disability in and their disability equity index sie received top scores of a hundred and earned the title 2021 best place to work for disability inclusion so post-pandemic we're working in our new paradigm and the de i movement is global and strategic however there's still a lot of work to do and i am proud to be a part of the continued movement we don't have a strategy fully ironed out however i do have five points and ideas for the future

we need managers and leaders who are aware of their bias and can use empathy to make better business decisions that are fair now our managers are and leaders are worldwide so to scale this effort we will use training to implement this strategy effectively we want to deploy a sponsorship program for women and underrepresented talent so that they have an advocate to support them in elevating their career we need a rotational leadership program for directors and above to give employees a well-rounded knowledge of the organization which will give them a career path into leadership roles a great idea is a diverse studio that focuses on diverse content and has diverse talent to design compelling stories and games that

represent the consumer base now i'm passionate about number five this is a paradigm a program that focuses on the future generation i imagine that students in the seventh grade would have access to an academy that has sie quality curriculum and from middle school to high school to university they can select a discipline and once in university they have access to internships mentorships and sponsorships and they finish with the certification that puts them above the rest of their peers they then go on to attend an apprenticeship program and then land a job in the video game industry hopefully at sie there's a deni framework that i really

like called the merit worthy framework it was created by dr stephanie creary a professor at the university of pennsylvania it is an acronym that helps elevate de ni work in an organization and it offers structure on how companies can change their de i paradigm to a merit-worthy practice that is valued across the company and there are two topics from the framework that i want to point out m stands for make denied goals actionable measurable evidence-based so leaders they respond to data we all agree and they should make sure that de i goals are inspiring measurable and actionable so that de i work that is expected appears attainable by

everyone in the organization and t stands for work as a core part of the organization rather than peripheral work de i is traditionally nested in hr there are opportunities for paradigm shifts here so marketing is its own function and it's direct to the student to the ceo legal is its own function direct to the ceo hr is its own function that is direct to the ceo and i think de ni should be its own function that is direct to the ceo and to take it further the leader should have a title like chief diversity officer senior vice president of de ni head of de i see salesforce is just a few blocks away from here right

and laura castillo martinez is the chief equity officer at salesforce and she reports directly to the ceo and if salesforce can do it so can companies in the video game industry [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] when i agreed to take on this talk my hope was each of you would leave with one or two ideas that you would think in more depth about and apply them to your own organization so we have a lot of work to do but i am so glad that you are on this journey with me it has been an honor and a pleasure to be with you today and i am so glad that people like you are on the de ni movement with me thank

you [Music] [Applause] a very big thank you to davina um the whole industry is better for having people like her in it 1 000 times over that was awesome um it's it's always good to highlight the importance of organizations taking a stance against injustice and we appreciate our talking here today so we're going to close out our series of talks today with a story about how to elevate games without compromising artistic or business integrity all the while killing it with kindness please welcome to the stage co-founder of devolver digital mike wilson [Music] [Music] hey guys hi my name is mike wilson i am here to

talk to you today about facebook it's worse than that actually i'm here to talk to you about a facebook post of mine from the fall that somebody here read and thought i should come talk about uh i don't usually give talks as i'm sure will become readily apparent to you in the next few moments but i'm here because this one felt like it was maybe worth a story worth telling the post in question was one that i made from my homeland of shreveport louisiana on november 3rd it's from whence i came and from whence id software came actually which is big part of my journey in this industry uh my post was about the fact that this little company i had helped found in 2009 uh devolver digital was somehow not somehow through a lot of hard work from all of my partners going public on the london stock exchange that very night

or the next morning for a ridiculous amount of money a much bigger level of success than uh we ever would have dared dream but you know these days that's not such a big deal right we hear wild numbers all the time and and ludicrous valuations and all this and what i wanted people to know in my post was what i was actually proud of there was we had managed to achieve that level of success without making any compromise to the values that we started off with which is to be honest just kindness respect for the artists who actually make games and generosity so i thought i would take you through a little journey my journey through this industry because that's really the only one i know about and try to explain to you how it was that we came to to that stance as a as a video game publisher uh working with independent studios all over the world it's a long and sordid tale

because i'm getting kind of old uh it started off in shreveport louisiana circa 1983. don't worry i only have 20 minutes [Laughter] my father had just passed away my mom had to go back to work my siblings were all out of the house older than me out trying to make their way and so i was spending a lot of time at home with the internet of the time which was mtv on my television it's my window to all the weirdness and all the possibilities out there that were beyond shreveport louisiana which i was actively trying to figure out how i was going to get out of having promised my dad on his deathbed that i would well i was thinking about developing games i've played a lot of in television at the time some coleco vision and while that seemed fascinating it didn't seem very likely to make me more attractive to the opposite sex

i was 13 this was pretty important to me at the time and so it also seemed a little hard seemed a little challenging like i was probably going to have to read some books or something whereas on mtv a song came out that year called money for nothing by a band called dire straits and for those of you who uh get your musical influences more from this millennium i'll explain briefly the song was generally about a bunch of warehouse workers having a laugh about rock stars with their long hair and their mink coats not really working and getting their money for nothing and their chicks for free as the song went in that time this was interesting to me but i was again perplexed because i was like hey i don't play an instrument and b that sounds pretty hard to learn i don't have i don't have that kind of time or discipline but then came van halen with david lee roth there was a guy who didn't play an instrument at all barely sang all he did was bounce around on the stage

in front of some very talented musicians who had worked all their lives to master their craft just so that they could look at his boisterous ass bouncing around in front of them i was like this might be my guy fast forward to my first job not in the games industry my first full-time job was a place called daiquiri delight in shreveport louisiana for those who have not been to louisiana have not experienced this phenomenon a daiquiri shop is basically a person in front of a row of boozy icy machines pulling icees and dispensing joy of the world the reason i'm boring you with my story of daiquiri delight is because my first week there i i put a tip jar out which had never existed in the history of this business because i guess my predecessors and co-workers didn't feel like doing this was really worthy of someone's gratuity given that they could not even stay in the room after they got it happy trails

the important part there is that's when i learned that not only did i not want to work very hard but i wanted to make a lot of money so i knew i had to be an executive problem is i already had a a daughter and uh had married my high school sweetheart and was uh no longer dreaming of being a rock star i was just dreaming of you know maybe getting out of shreveport and having my daughter have a different life that it seems she was doomed to and uh i luckily after that i realized that the only person that was going to hire an executive with not quite a bachelor of arts from lsu in shreveport was either myself or one of my friends this puts you in a place where it's much harder to both make a lot of money as a startup executive to make a lot of money or not work very hard

i managed to do it did both of them it's true i got a job luckily my uh one of my friends was one of the guys that made uh doom uh he was a pen and paper artist i met in high school and and he became his name is adrian carmack and so i was watching my friends at id software have this success and i believe that i could be part of that because they had come from the same place they had somehow assembled in a lake house in shreveport louisiana before someone lured them off with 10 grand to texas to go make wolfenstein 3d my friends did quite well with that game they people mailed them paper checks and they mailed them back floppy disks with a full version of wolfenstein on it before you know it lo and behold my friends were getting rich they dispatched me to this company i'm sorry i'm skipping ahead right after that these same five guys decided to go ahead and make a game called doom

uh in about six months this time a lot more people mailed in checks and they mailed out a lot more floppy disks and uh well now they were getting properly rich it was around this time that uh the smiling men in suits started to swarm around as they do whenever a new industry is born especially in industry led by artists and and engineers and people that had no representation no guilds no unions still today sadly uh so the smiling men in suits told my friends it did software that you know what that game needs to be in walmart and they were right uh they put the game they put doom 2 and walmart and now there were truckloads of cash being dropped off at my friend's doorstep but what they noticed was there were much bigger truckloads of cash being dropped off at their publisher gt interactive's doorstep at that same time

which seemed odd since these guys really were brand new to the games business their other products at the time were richard simmons dela mill cd-rom and fabio screensaver so i you not and then they got doom and they went public for a billion dollars and my friends at id software were like that that seems odd you know we're doing pretty well for ourselves but man those guys that have that just put the box in the stores really did well for themselves they uh they hired me after a while there was a brief stop at this company called duango which was a way for people to play doom from home against one another uh before you could do that on the internet uh i'll skip over that one pretty quickly but i did learn a couple of things at duane go one was competitive gamers are nuts two was strip clubs are not really my thing important things to learn as you start

your business travel in 1995 luckily my friends at id software were impressed uh with the progress we had made at duango with uh no experience in a brand new industry and uh you know people like myself outselling franchises and they hired me at id and they explained to me that they weren't happy with their publisher they were pretty sure they were getting much less money per unit than they should have and they were pretty sure that these guys and their interactions with them you know were not the geniuses behind why their game was successful so they put me on a plane i came on as vp marketing and distribution id software they put me on a plane i put on my combat boots and i tied my mullet back into a business ponytail and i went to new york city to go do battle with these mysterious kings of industry at good times interactive yep and uh what i

what i met there as uh were some inspiring people they were inspiring in the same way that i hope to be inspiring to you today and that they were just not that impressive because look if they had just been geniuses and a bunch of ivy leaguers you know and and doing things that i could never do i probably would have slunk home and uh tucked my tail and told my friends that their deal was fine but i didn't i didn't because what i found there was a bunch of guys from the record industry in the toy industry that had no idea about video games or how they were made did not really care they just wanted that sweet sweet cash and lots of it they also wanted to take credit for the work that my friends had done luckily my friends were some of the first to fight for their intellectual property rights to put their name on the front of the box of the thing that they made you know things that seemed obvious in retrospect but were pretty uh against the grain at the time

so i set about learning what these guys were doing uh here's the secret it's not that hard publishing i'm sorry for anybody here that works in publishing or marketing or finance but it's not that hard guys it's not that hard certainly not compared to making a game or making a hit game so i was like these guys are they hired a sales force they hired a pr firm they hired an ad agency they hired manufacturing and they hired distribution i learned all of this in roughly a month and i just hired the same people i just hired the same companies they did and uh and i went back and i told my friends i was like okay well good news bad news good news is we can publish your next game quake ourselves we can do it i've got this all the same people lined up the bad news is you were absolutely right and these people were taking roughly four times more per unit than they should have been taking

which did not make my friends very happy we did uh luckily it took a a year longer than we thought to get quake out the door and so i had some time to actually learn what i was doing and uh we we shipped quake shareware ourselves we got it distributed nationwide just like the big bad guys in new york with all their fabio screen saver prowess and we did well enough to be able to renegotiate our deal with gt interactive to what was was more than three times what they had been making off doom 2. so i had done my job id software at that time did not want to become a publisher they were pretty good at making games they wanted to keep making games so i left there and went on the ion storm with john romero which was another meant to be a powerhouse developer i'm going to skip over that one because it was only a year of my life but i did learn a couple of important things there

i learned how disastrous the idea of what we all thought was cool could be in this industry because we really we were you know i was 26 i was the ceo of this new company in the top of a skyscraper in dallas we all had our 90s hair and our combat boots and our attitudes and our arrogance and it was gross it was gross but i'm so glad i went there i'm glad i experienced the full effects of what some ego can do to some bright and hard working young game developers because i also met a guy named doug myers there who i have a son named after now and he was the opposite of that he he really uh redefined what cool was in my head and what success looked like and it wasn't that he preached anything he just demonstrated it he was so kind just naturally so kind and humble and present and made everyone that he interacted with whether it was

for days or weeks or 10 seconds feel seen and appreciated and sadly he passed away at a very young age not too long after that but definitely not just me but my partners uh that formed uh god games gathering of developers after that uh it informed all of us of sort of the goal what we were trying to get to god games gathering of developers was a holy crusade for the artist's side of the industry against these evil bastard publishers that we had struck out against i had now negotiated deals renegotiated with gt interactive moved id over to activision renegotiated there and then negotiated the most lucrative deal in history for ion storm with really nothing to show for it so i knew how far we could go and i knew how much money there was on that other side of things and i was like well here we go what if we banned a few studios together and because most of these publishers

only had one or two hits at the time anyway so we're like we can make those and so we formed gathering of developers which was sort of like a united artists or uh image comics it was artists first staking our claim in the industry putting out to the world what it meant to get a good deal from a publisher and we just made a lot of noise pissed a lot of people off and honestly like yes we wanted to be respectful to artists and we wanted to give them their intellectual property rights we wanted to pay them fairly and we wanted to to make sure they were always credited above us but it wasn't just because we were nice guys it was literally that was the that was the giant hole in the industry if any of the other publishers have been doing that there would have been no need for us so i thank you 90s video game publishers i truly uh feel like i stand on the shoulders of of

[Applause] uh god games like image comics and united artists uh what we well we ended up selling out to the same evil bastards we struck out against uh what i did learn there was uh about sociopathy being real and about those those ideas that we typically associate with business you know the the idea of a shrewd business person um just just meaning that they're going to take advantage of you as quickly as possible and you know the reason that most young people don't want to be a business person it's really hard to identify heroes as business people so here we were uh having fought this crusade on behalf of these developers that left microsoft and ea and activision and gt to join us risking their next projects with us taking a stand

and there i was my partners and i being completely taken advantage of by some proper sharks in in new york by the way all of these companies that i'm naming here out loud and talking about they're i'm sure they're all wonderful people now this was the 90s things were different i had hair uh anyway we sold the company and and i i can tell you without hyperbole when i signed that deal it felt like i was signing my own suicide note it went pretty well as suicides go we all made some money the developers made some money uh unfortunately my friend doug that i talked about died on the way the day that we could cash out really robbing us of any joy there but we you know we had accomplished quite a bit and we we had proven that we could do it and and maybe we would catch our breath one day and do it again

cut to a few years later i had taken a break from games uh i actually went back to work at take two which was really fun because i i left in a blaze of glory as you might imagine from my speech today and i got to learn just how well we had done how well it worked to treat artists with respect to to ship games when they were finished when the artist told told us they were finished to let the artists have signed off on all the pr and marketing to let the game developers choose our games we had eight new million unit selling franchises in the in 18 months two years we existed before take two bought us so i got to learn all that from the inside got out of there as quickly as i could and then you know i did what every group does that has a good run in their 20s we put the band back together in our 30s it's called gamecock media group same principles except our brand our sense of humor was very

much about me at the time and i was angry i was hurt from what happened at god games i was angry at the industry i was angry that everything was getting this rush to get bigger and be taken more seriously uh something in me wasn't it didn't sit right suffice to say midlife crises are real i had mine then and then we had an economic collapse crisis on top of it i recommend doing both of those at the same time by the way if you're planning your midlife crisis go ahead and do it on top of economic collapse it works out better for everybody but at gamecock media group uh while uh our sense of humor was sort of bullyish and like you're all so dumb we're so cool uh i met this guy i hired this guy named nigel lowry nigel lowry uh we rescued from an ad agency and he he wanted to work in the game industry so

badly that he wrote us a letter about it and he said you know i want this from the bottom of my pee pee and that was enough he got the job and and and out of the ashes of that company after the economy collapsed and our billionaires panicked and pulled out our investment devolver was born with just a few of us piecing together what money we had left doing one game at a time making it absolutely not about me big lesson there uh it wasn't about anybody in fact we we had a fictitious company spokesperson because we were so insistent that this didn't become about me or about anyone in the company it was about this mission and this way of doing work and luckily we caught quite a tailwind with the new wave of indies that cropped up around that time and we had a great run for the last 12 years

this is all the things people were uh saying about us um punk rock label death row record sub pop rep basically everything but a game company and then recently somebody called us just just last week the hbo of video games amazing we did it so to pull this back a bit uh this i i learned on the way here that this talk is supposed to be about how we adjusted to the pandemic uh devolver was already working virtually from the time we had a company we were already uh actively supporting one another checking in on each other we had a sort of um innate concern about the well-being of our developers but it wasn't enough uh because while we were having that incredible run and working with all these tiny teams one or two people that made games like hotline miami or enter the gungeon with three people or

reigns with one you know i found out i had learned about depression uh personally after losing my friend doug and losing god games back in the day and i had you know i had been to the depths to where uh some pills probably saved my life in that moment and so ever since then i had a concern and a heightened awareness of mental health issues in my own family and my community and just how common it was in fact i ended up losing my sister her name was dr lisa michelle wilson phd she was a doctor of psychology and she lived with crippling depression most of her life and eventually decided to leave us suffice to say mental health is first and foremost on my mind since then and came to i came to know that several of our star developers including some of the ones i just mentioned that made those hits for us had become so

distressed while making their game or shortly thereafter that they four of them within six months individual stories had become institutionalized like not just i need medicine but literally working on their game from inside a mental health institution so that's when i was just like the this all this this ride started to mean a little bit less to me and it wasn't because i didn't love the devolver family they're they're the absolute best and nothing i ever do will be as fun as working with those guys nigel the guy i mentioned before really took the mission of what we were doing a much kinder uh more self-effacing sense of humor and and you know we had fun with the industry but it was really having fun with ourselves and then uh you know making sure our developers were getting rich and famous but it wasn't enough anymore and so while devolver didn't really make

any big changes during the pandemic other than we couldn't tour anymore and started to really that's when we would get together as all the shows we would do we really started to feel the isolation and i personally um was well aware that not only was the volvo not about me but it really didn't need me anymore if it ever did like the brand was built the vibe was built the games were working the team was in place and while it's not about me and something has to be about me right when you're when you're isolated and working from home and not seeing your people you start to ask some different questions especially i was starting to see my adult daughters have some mental health struggles as well so this led me to my personal adjustment my personal recalibration during the pandemic which was a series of events that led me to announce the company i announced last week it's called deep well digital

therapeutics and this one's also not about me this is a group of i think we're up to 47 or so now gaming developers psychologists neuroscientists clinicians regulatory professionals huge group of people that have been volunteering their time for the last three to 15 months in service of defining a way that where we can medicinalize games and i'm not talking about gamification or edutainment i'm talking about putting rails and understanding and information in your hands about how games are already quite therapeutic for people and how a lot of people are already using them to sort of self-medicate in times of crisis so i won't go too far into that [Applause] but that's that's what i'm doing with my time because you know while it's well it's not about

me what is about me and what is about all of you regardless of whether you're a game developer or you work in publishing or financing or your your phone only takes nfts whatever it is what is about you is what you get up and put your energy into every day and for me i it has been such a gift to myself to my co-workers and to my family to get up every day with a little bit more of a mission something that matters to me a purpose and that's what i wish for all of you as you go forth and doing battle uh to to create the the most compelling entertainment in the history of people um that can also uh we've learned be quite beneficial for people both for those creating them and those playing them and so what we've done over the last 18 months has built a hive and it's up to the indie game developers of the world to bring the honey

which so which is what right now in this very moment we're announcing our first global game jam in in conjunction with global game jam where we are we are inviting indie developers around the world to learn about what we're doing and to figure out how they can participate in uh in making games that are scientifically beneficial for people medically beneficial for people should you so choose so i hope you'll accept our invitation i hope you'll learn about what we're doing and realize the power that you as creators wield and realize how you can change your own relationship with the media that you take in because anything we take in this much of whether it's food or water or air or media it has an effect on us it has a different effect on us and it's it's different for each one of you so i invite you to look into that and figure it out for yourselves my name is mike wilson thank you all for your time see you soon [Music]

a huge thank you to mike for sharing the story of how devolver came together i wonder if that's the first time that anybody at a gdc stage has said the phrase peepee uh there's a first for everything but that is a wrap i hope you all were as uplifted and informed as i was by these transformative stories for more inspiration join us back in this room tonight for the igf and choice awards where we honor the best and brightest in games doors open at 5 30 p.m i look forward to seeing you all here have a great afternoon bye [Music]