GDC Summer Live Podcast - Day 2

[Music] hey we're back and this is the second gdc podcast live episode i'm chris graft editor-in-chief of gamasutra i'm here with uh alyssa yeah hello i'm melissa mcloone i'm news editor associate publisher at yamasutra and they let us do this podcast a second time after yeah i know i want a lot of trust i wonder if anyone except for our co-work like other than our co-workers are watching right now but um welcome and thank you uh thank you for joining us those of you who are here so it's weird alyssa this is like episode 13. and i don't know about our guest mixed with the number 13. it's a recipe there's a lot of interesting timing uh with the live episodes of the podcast like yesterday our guest coincided with an announcement that ablegamers had

and today like lucky number 13 with a special guest mike rose so yeah yeah yeah it is it is mike rose i think do you think did i spoil that no that's not no no because if i like he is the draw people would not be here if they didn't know that uh the mike rose um certainly they're not they're not here for us but yeah uh well let's let's talk about them a little bit so our next guest for episode 13. all right he's taller in person than you'd expect uh once threw an individually wrapped pad of butter at my eye during a dinner with playstation execs while in germany uh he he once worked for a tiny build to publish her tiny build where he wore an orange baseball cap all the time that was what he's most known for uh now he's the founder of indie publisher no more robots and they've published games including descenders

ever hear of it with the bicycles that one game with the bicycles in the hills and they descend they go down it's like really cool yeah and they flip all over the place it's very good um also yes you're graced yes your grace and also the igf finalist hypno space outlaw but there's more he has spoken at gdc multiple times about digital publishing i'm pointing at you like i'm chat studies we're on zoom and i'm not used to my gesticulations being uh broadcast yeah so um and he's talked a lot about digital publishing and game discoverability uh he'll be leading a live skill building series session here at gdc summer we'll talk about that in a little bit and he also used to work with me at gama sutra where we used to give each other endless crap so uh and he's a great guy so let's welcome

my gross hi mike yeah thank you that was a really pleasant and long intro i love these live intros because we can see you on mute in zoom and just like reacting to everything yeah i think i was nodding through most of that yeah i feel like i agreed yeah yeah i mean you really need to update your personal page or get some kind of fact based thing i just need you i just need a recording of everything you just said justify when people want to know yeah so so how have you been mike you you had you've had a busy uh busy past week busy past three months you're always busy that's one of the things about you you're just like seem to have endless amounts of energy for all these projects so how the funny thing is though that uh i really don't like um i actually think i did when i started this i think when i started this i was i was gonna say i was still young i absolutely wasn't but i was uh less

tired and now i am so tired but i'm happy as well so um i'm you know i'm i'm happy about it all but yeah uh the answer is i don't have the energy to do it um i would say i was saying to you guys just before we came on i i'm i'm getting to i'm getting to the end of this year now i'm i'm ready to start winding down uh which is kind of happening with what we're doing uh but yeah uh it's been been busy yeah i'm busy i have bad news for you like there's still quite a bit of this year left yeah but i don't know we time doesn't exist anymore for one so i don't know what you're talking about no no i i yeah i mean for us like we don't launch anything kind of between like october and december because we just get steamrolled by you know aaa uh so those months at least i get to sit back a little bit you know

we've got all the things like steam sales etc uh which is pleasant but yeah in general i get to chill out a little bit more than usual so first of all low energy for you is still up there yeah i would say that yeah yeah and so what has uh like you just had an announcement recently no more robots have a new game yeah yes uh yesterday we announced uh like a new game of publishing called tombstar uh which we're working with an australian team on one of the people involved guy called andy sum who uh made a game a while ago called crossy road is probably like one of the biggest things that people know and before andy also uh the first time we ever interacted was when i tweeted saying why is andy maid crossy road free that's stupid like that's not going to do well and then a couple months later it exploded and then in a gdc

talk he then just had a slide which was just my tweet and that was it um so so that was one of our first interactions but um no it's been it's been really interesting working with them and it's been interesting for me as well because uh for some reason i like additional challenges each time we work with someone working with australians is so strange because when i'm waking up they're going to bed and then anytime we want to do any announcement or anything it's an american time when it's like four in the morning for them so like when we announced the game yesterday they were it was four in the morning for them and i think they were pretty tired um but yeah so we announced that yesterday and then uh and then today we were kind of announcing numbers because we i've been doing this for three years now somehow uh yeah so uh three years as of today right yes yeah uh it's been a long time and i and and like the funny thing is i've watched myself turn gray i know i look ginger right now

but it's just because of the light i i'm i'm actually so gray it's unbelievable i'm glad this was a live like video cast episode so like when you said it's been a long time we could see you like staring off into the distance it's contemplating we should have just let you hang out there with yourself for a little bit hello friend now like yeah i mean you're you're known for you know speaking of gdc and i like i mean i'm pretty i i assume that like 90 of your relationships um you know are sparked from some kind of insult that you hand someone like with a andy some saying like who's this guy doing he's doing it wrong um yeah now uh but you do go to gdc and you do go to other places and you talk about uh digital publishing uh game discoverability is one thing that you talk about a lot and you know no more robots is described as a data driven uh publisher can you talk about that sort of thing and

um like some interesting stuff you're just tweeting today about like uh about some data you're very open with it yeah i think um what when i was at when i was at gama i i remember i was always trying to uh do articles on uh you know numbers i was fascinated by numbers and i was always fascinated the most by like i saw people putting games out and they seemed to just be praying that the games were going to sell well they didn't seem to be using any numbers or anything and they just seem to be going well i hope people are going to like this i'm putting it out and some would be like yeah my game sold and others would be like oh i didn't sell why and i was always like surely there are just ways to just suss out if a game is gonna do well or not it can't just be random when a game comes out uh and that that's part of why uh i ended up going into publishing and stuff just fascinated by this kind of thing and then in the years between like me

stopped working with with you guys and and starting my own thing i just started to just hone in more and more on what were the numbers that were important and there's obvious ones that have come to light now you know everyone just talks about steam wish lists all the time for example uh that's what my gdc talk is on tomorrow actually um so that's like a big one but there's there's so many other little numbers here and there where if you're just gathering all of these things and then looking at big old graphs all the time just like i do every single day i was just looking at grass before i came on this and then and now you're looking at a graft i know i'm looking at agra yeah yeah then then actually uh it's quite i was gonna say it's easy it's not easy but it's it's possible to suss out how game how your games are gonna do you know and and actually be able to be able to build some success piece like at least a level of success

uh that was my theory anyway when i started this thing and i and i feel like i've proven that now of course i would say to to make out like you know well anybody can do this obviously look i i am a massively like privileged human being even just coming from working with you guys in the first place i already knew a bunch of people you know like there were already connections i had so i'm not gonna be like just do what i do and it'll work out great for you i had to put in years and years i was writing about games for like a decade before this you know uh so there is that yeah but uh yeah you should you should use that voice for the rest of uh from you had a pre-show voice too you got like i don't know yeah yeah mike was actually doing some some asmr type stuff right before you went live yeah type stuff yeah

yeah let's do it um all right mike uh do some of your uh some of your findings uh up close and quite a night soothing yeah yeah i mean uh i i i'll talk about one that i have been doing recently and i and i plan to uh i've been i've been kind of building this data up and i plan to do something big about it soon actually uh but one thing that has been fascinating me this year is the nintendo eshop uh it's so it's so weird the nintendo wii shop there isn't really another word for it it's um we started putting games on the eshop and i could just not work out how to make kind of game sell on this thing like we were doing fine on it you know the games were getting the porting toss back and all that but i couldn't really suss it and slowly but surely i realized that the eshop uh is entirely based on

how much crap you can shovel like just straight up like how many copies can you get through the door because the eshop most stores they're based on revenue right and it makes sense that they would be because it's uh you know when you if you heavy disk out your game it balances out you still need to sell a lot of copies then to to be kind of uh climbing charts and getting natural uh like organic featuring on the east shop the eshop does not care if your game is is 90 off uh it's it's level pegging with all the other titles around it so a 25 game and a one dollar game if they both sell one copy they're both in the same place in the chart that's why you may have noticed when you go on the eshop the charts are just 90 off games because a bunch of publishers and devs have realized this and then they just fill the chart uh so is that good or is that good or bad well i mean you can

i'd love to know what you think really but from my perspective it's not fantastic you know because uh i i mean put it this way you know we put out yeshua grace on switch recently and it and it did decently on there i'm i'm happy with how it sold but on the same day a sudoku game came out uh that was three dollars and it was uh 66 off on launch day so it was one dollar and in two days it got to number five in the top in the top charts on switch and i now know how many units that means you're selling because the answer is a lot right so they were selling tons of units and they probably outsold us uh because of how many units they were doing eventually but anyway uh about a month again i've come up with sudoku i should just be putting out sudoku games the the thing is that about a month ago i decided right well uh okay i'm gonna i'm gonna have a go with this and this is the thing i've not really talked about yet and i plan to talk about the future about a month ago i decided screw it i'm gonna put one of our games 90

off just see what happens uh so you may or may not know i have this game uh called not tonight uh which is an anti-brexit simulator um which obviously goes down well with everybody and uh so i talked to dev and he was like yeah let's just go for it uh we stuck the game on 90 off after two days we were in the top sellers and uh right now if you check the eshop on your device you will find the game i think in the uk shop it got to like number two in most of europe it was in the top five and we have just sold bucket loads of units in the last year okay the way that you're talking about this also like it's almost like you're acting like you're getting away with something you're like okay check this out i know but this is the thing that's not how it should work right like i i it just shouldn't work that way and and and the problem for me is that uh i'm obviously not the only one who's realized this i see i see everybody doing this now i i

actually started doing it because i saw curved digital doing it with i saw one of their games over and over again i've seen team 17 doing it so i thought screw it i'll join in but the problem is the more and more people that do this we all know how this goes we've seen this to the bottom right yeah of course yeah see how many times have we seen this and and the thing is me trying to be like well i'm gonna stick to my guns and not do discount my games now then i just don't sell anything so i have to join the race now when you deep discount a game like that on switch and then you discount goes away you're back at full price how does that trend at that point does it still do well from being on those lists or yeah so so we so actually uh the game uh just came off discount in the us and yesterday it definitely didn't sell as many copies as it was while it was on offer but it actually did sell more units yesterday than it normally did before the sale just from being in the top sellers charts so at full price it's now selling decently because it's in the charts uh

but anyway the point is that uh imagine what it's gonna be like in six months on the eshop like once everyone's realized that this is the thing all the people who listen to this now are quickly going into their nintendo watch like incredibly like putting 90 off like it's uh it's gonna be it's gonna be a an s show i i don't know if i can swear on this but it's gonna be it's gonna be bad news uh and uh i mean i don't think nintendo we're gonna do anything about it we're talking it's nintendo we're talking about in there so they're not going to do anything about this have we had a switch apocalypse yet is that a track that we've joined i think we're about to have a special lives i i think by this christmas we we will be uh but anyway that's just one that's just one of the lovely things that i've been experimenting with recently yeah and you do this you do this thing like so for for so many uh publishers and developers you know smaller size they're they have

to do this kind of reverse engineering of it and it's interesting like seeing it and you've always been like this like things are a black box to everyone and then you kind of go to the end point you go to the storefront and then you just and there's like this is like yeah if you're listening i'm making a hand motion like i'm unwrapping a tiny little something yeah yeah yeah but well like this is how this is this is weirdly fun to me doing this like doing this be like wonder what happens when it's 90 percent off i'm watching it every morning like my alarm would go off and the first thing i did was just grab the switch like where are we up to on the e-shell now checking this chart refreshing the storage like and yeah it's like it's working it's working we're there this is my life and i for some reason i love this stuff i love just working out how to break online stuff what's the next marketplace for you after you're done destroying the switch

like what's next initiating the switch yeah yeah yeah i well the one the one i'm currently tussling with is is ps4 we've not we've only got one title on there and we're about to have uh descenders on there as well we're about to do uh our first retail game actually uh in in three weeks uh descenders is out on like august 25th i think so that is massively exciting for me uh but i i guess that's gonna be the next thing i'm tracking is is retail worth it it's written microsoft you have you have an american radio voice too yeah yeah switch apocalypse 2020 please the thing for me though is that like uh every single time i do something my immediate reaction for this kind of stuff is right i can't wait to collect all the data and show everybody in the world whereas i know that that's like i get people telling me from like the publishers like dming would be like why do you keep doing this why do you keep telling everybody how to do everything

every time you tell people they just work it out and then everybody starts doing hey and like platform holders have always appreciated you uh sharing your reverse engineering yourself i love data transparency they love it they love it yeah the platform holders love it yeah yeah i remember like when i used to write about games i was like i don't care i'll just dump any data anywhere because it doesn't bother me now i try to be a little more clever i just try to like try not to be like here's all our sales data for xbox and playstation this one this one easy trick to get to the top of the e-shop nintendo hates it that's what it is that's what it is oh yeah yeah it's it's always it's always perfect but i don't care about giving gatorade because quite frankly the industry changes so quickly the anything i any any guidance i give people six months later it's completely different like the stuff i'm saying about switch now in six months it's not gonna work anymore no but by the end of this show it's gonna be completely awesomely so yeah um

should we let's see should we go to chat alyssa and just get like there's one question those are the questions micro destroyer of worlds uh no um uh gabe asks let me read this make sure it's all on the up and up which you should do before you intro the question yeah yeah um hi mike you're probably familiar with mailing list evangelist chris zukowski who i do know he's a super nice guy uh when i asked him about the discord strategies from your excellent gdc talks he told me quote email kicks everything else is ass referencing 10 times higher open rates care to respond sure sure screw you chris um no so so uh i i don't disagree but i also don't think that the two things are the

same thing uh this is gonna be a very boring next 30 seconds the thing with mailing lists are they're great for just like trying to get a ton of people to quickly go to a thing you know you email them all and then they're all clicking on a link and that's fantastic but uh it's also a very like uh you're like a very specific thing go here now go here they'll go here like this which is great for that use uh for me uh one of the reasons why i build discord communities for our games is because the people who are in the community for your game have are just so much uh they're just incredibly useful people to have around because especially kind of once you kind of get in deep with them all and they feel real like real connection to your game they end up doing so much more uh for your game than just clicking on some links you know they will you'll end up like we always get whenever one of our games launches within the first couple of hours we've got a bunch of positive

uh reviews on steam already because all of these people who are super invested in the game have now all quickly bought it they're all in a discord showing their screenshots of buying the game look how quickly i bought the game and then uh and then two hours later they've all left a steam review and of course they've left a positive one because they've been looking forward to the game so long um it's stuff like that uh like when you want to do some testing uh you can just like grab some people from your disco server who you trust kind of pull them in say hey do you want to just check out this thing we're doing some balancing on the game there's just so many useful ways that you can utilize a community for a game that don't come from the like anonymity of having a bunch of people on a mailing list i guess dig into like your discord stuff when you say like going through discord you don't mean like i set up a server here's one channel and everybody just chat like you do some really intricate discord things like weird tricks and air jeez right yes we do really weird stuff i could probably talk for an hour about it but the the short version is that we do strange like d and d

style arg stuff where we're about to start one for this for tombstar on monday actually where we get people when they join the discord server they all join a team and they all like pledge their allegiance to some teams so like in the new one it's either like the space force or it's this horrible gang but maybe the space force or the bad guys all along you know and then and then we'll have them all doing like things against each other i think for this tombstone one we're doing like some weird like risk style board game where they're gonna be like taking on a map and they're going to have to vote on where they want to take on the map and all this kind of stuff it's nothing to do with the game we always make sure that the weird games that we're doing are actually uh nothing mechanically to do with the video game itself but they have the law of the video game in them so that then when people play the game they know the characters already uh and they know who they care about and

uh and in the meantime it keeps them all entertained and makes them want to stick around in the community rather than just you know you invite them and say gabe's coming out in six months so just chill chill and don't leave please uh it gives them a purpose to stay and it means when other people join as well they're like what the holy heck is going on in here uh and they kind of want to join as well so there's also uh you know since i've known you you've really shown that you can find really obscure games and to what to me seem like obscure places that are actually good games and then i know you did that at tinybuild and i know that you do that at no more robots can you talk about that you know that process where you're you know being proactive and seeking out games and what catches your eye yeah uh i don't

really know how i find them okay a lot of the time a lot of the time it's like so random i uh most of the games like uh i uh i either just like bump i i bumped into people events and they just show me something on the fly because as you imagine i see like a million games every single week you know literally millions of games and uh and and every now and again one just catches my eye i think the big thing for me that i try to tell people the most is that the reason i sign the games that i do is because the moment i see them then my brain goes oh what the heck is this like and if i don't have that reaction then the average person isn't gonna have that reaction either you know like if i don't immediately go what what what am i looking at uh and obviously you know sometimes i have that

reaction and then i dig deeper and there's something uh you know that maybe there's that the pins aren't aligned but but the games i have signed that's happened with every single one of them basically your games are all like different genres different visual styles like there's is there like a consistent thread through all of them besides just that like wow factor in the back of your brain somewhere not really no i i i think i made a conscious decision to not do that in the first place i saw like um i saw people like devolver you know uh the time when i started especially had the sort of uh gritty uh you know that a lot of the games were kind of bloody i know they've kind of moved away from that a bit now uh but i felt like i didn't want to do that uh i felt like i wanted it to be more that i'm just all over the place like well really mountain bike game now i've got this alternate reality 90s internet simulator yeah um i really don't care what genre is if it's if it's weird i like it is

that like a marketing challenge at all like jumping around like that so wildly how do you handle that in a weird way the opposite is a marketing challenge for me when a when a game is uh is like other games it's a marketing challenge but a lot of the time when i first come to write the first press release announcing a game you know one of our games and i'm like oh god like maybe this will be hard and then i sit there and i just start typing i'm like this is this is a piece of piss like i i can just easily talk about this because it's like literally no other game like when i first typing out the sentence hypnos face outlaw new game from no more robots is a 90s alternate reality internet simulator and and that immediately is just like someone's going to click that yes that's it right there yeah yeah like it's just weird and i so i think if anything having more having like signing more generic games is is harder i think because then how do you describe a more generic game that is

like a lot of other games and that's what i've like wanted to touch on too and we're going to get to uh this next question in a second um but uh you know it kind of boils down to the game itself is you know it it's its own marketing material right that's at least that's what it seems like with your stuff that's exactly it like i i obviously i would i love to say that i'm fantastic at what i do of course i do but but the truth is that half the battle is the game itself and and and the truth is i i pick the game specifically because i see something in them where i'm like i'm gonna be able to sell a crap out of this like this is already i can already when i'm first talking to a devon i'm on like the first call with them talking about whether we should work together or not i'm already sat there like scribbling things down oh i could do this and i could say this thing and all this kind of stuff like when we were first talking about hypnos basement we were saying oh when we launched this we should put out like aol style

cds suppress for it that would be hilarious like i i already know when i first started talking to someone if i'm gonna be able to sell this thing just from whether or not my brain is exploding with it or not yeah that's what happens all the time we do have a question from maji singh asking what is the just straightforward uh what is the best what are the best methods for promoting an indie game uh well uh god that's why doesn't it uh i will uh i will say that uh the the best ways uh are the ways where you can actually see the uh let me see how to word this the best ways that i have found when i'm selling things are ones where i can straight up see whether it's having an effect or not rather than just doing things and like hoping oh i hope this is gonna do something uh for example like um

social media stuff quite frankly doesn't do a lot for us to be honest like we i we do obviously we still do social media stuff it would be crazy not to but we do not focus hard on it because tweets and and facebook and all that for our games they don't really do anything we might get like two clicks on a link a tweet or something like that uh it's not fantastic the the stuff that does work for us uh is is the discord stuff uh the the running a a private beta before we before we launch a game you know kind of uh giving away like the first level um of one of our games we normally try to give sort of like 20 to 30 minutes of the game away uh via like a steam key and we then say to people when they sign up for that hey why don't you uh maybe give us a little cheeky steam wish list while you're doing that and that works amazingly you know because then every single person that we're convincing to wishlist the

game on steam is then getting an email on the day that the game launches to say hey remember this game you wish listed it's stuff like that that's actually like tangible like someone is gonna hear that person's now gonna hear about the game the day it launches that's invaluable so it's stuff like that trying to build the numbers that matter uh really is uh is is the most important thing to us i hope i answered the question it was quite a it was quite a wide-ranging question really wasn't it yeah and you could find all of mike's um obsolete talks on gdc youtube yeah but um you know speaking of uh talks and stuff uh you're we've got about four minutes before we have to go to a break it went so fast i did um did you have something you wanted to ask alyssa no i'm just reminded there's a lot there's some other good questions in chat and other good like questions we still got something

uh but uh wish list you mentioned wishlist and yours is gonna be about wish lists yes um just spoil the whole talk in the next three and a half minutes for everyone yeah i can do that so tomorrow i will be giving a talk a gdc summer talk uh about building steam wish list all the ways that we do it uh steam wishlists are important because uh part of what i was just saying there it's a tangible number we know now that for example roughly 25 of steam wishlists end up converting into into sales uh which you know if you if you build 30 000 wish list before you launch your game you already know that you're gonna get you know a decent number of sales which is obviously really useful so uh my talk is essentially going to be going through all of the ways that we attempt to make those wishlist numbers go

up that's it that's the talk hope you liked there's the destiny meme like yes number go up and it's the same for game publishing it's literally the same isn't it life though like life is just the numbers going on that's what it is okay i think that what we can do is take a break and everybody um hanging out in chat um there's going to be a word from our sponsor but stick around we'll hang out with with you and chat for a little bit and uh don't go anywhere and we're going to roll i'll try and answer some questions in the chat as well yeah yeah yeah yeah so stick around great idea all right be back in a little bit up next we'd like to welcome one of our sponsors eric morales gaming segment leader at amazon web services hey eric thanks for joining us all the way from sweden right that's right hey chris thanks for having me yeah um so tell us a little bit about yourself uh your game dev background

and what you do at aws yeah absolutely so um i am a uh an enthusiastic and uh somewhat aggressive gamer in my personal life um i love to avoid warranties and uh um and a bit of a gadget hound as well so um i uh kind of on on the personal side i've been um a a a storied neo geo collector in the past and i've been able uh thankfully you know thanks to the work with i've done with aws over the last few years really kind of pivoted my career to working with game developers all over the world which has been my passion for a long time and i'm thrilled to be able to do it um yeah so my role at aws is i currently lead the commercial business for aws into the video game uh sector which is what we call aws game tech and so my team helps game developers build really fun engaging games with the cloud my background and games is mostly as a

fan uh but i've i've had the the privilege of working with game developers at aws since 2011 when i first joined great a friend of mine actually incidentally worked on the samurai showdown re-release oh my god you should check that out it is fantastic for the record i'll pass that along so uh can you give us a rundown of the ways that the cloud benefits next-gen game development yeah absolutely i think it is starting with sort of the console space right um obviously there's a brand new console generation gen 9 that's right on the cusp of launching in q4 of this year um you know the hardware requirements have been top of mind for a lot of people some of the really innovative uh storage work uh that sony's been doing in the ps5 some of the really you know innovative business model innovations that microsoft's been doing for the xbox there's lots of exciting things happening on the console side but kind of first and foremost uh fidel major fidelity increases are

happening in this major in this next generation um developers are increasingly seeing expectations from consumers thanks to this next wave of hardware to deliver you know super high definition so uhd plus 4k experience is at 60 frames or higher and that's going to require you know more technical capability it's going to require more infrastructure to kind of back that up and and that's just on the console side in addition we actually see beyond just kind of the two workhorse consoles that are on the cusp of launching um there's just a ton of really interesting developments on the business side throughout the rest of the industry think about subscription-based services like apple arcade on that are kind of spanning both mobile and desktop experiences and um you know streaming based services right like like black not out of france or stadia by google there's lots of really interesting things that are happening and uh you know we think that um the the sort of centralized common point

between all of these trends is uh that you know the expectations of consumers for what a game needs to be is going to be impacted by the inputs from the developers over time it's going to change the the way that developers stay productive and it's going to change the the velocity the developers produce and create games and that's an area where the cloud can really help getting access to uh tremendously powerful infrastructure with a single line of code you know one quick api call gets you the ability to have a massive workstation use it for an hour and then throw it away that changes the way that people develop games both you know in the in the hd set as well as for mobile yeah so it sounds very developer centric and you kind of went into some of the answer to this question but some of the uh like the goals that you have when uh working with game developers what are those it seems a lot of it is like ease of use and increased productivity

sure yeah so we come at it from a couple of different angles right so aws is known for you know we have 175 plus services that can be daunting to a lot of people who go to the website and see you know dozens hundreds of individual services but you know fundamentally um the way that we break these down is we wanted to give every developer in the world the same capabilities of a massive enterprise class data center but um with the ability to use as little or as much of those capabilities as you want and on your own terms right so um you know only paying for what you actually use uh and giving uh customers the flexibility and power uh to get access to the infrastructure they need to get their job done and so the way that we interact with this industry is both kind of from the the the back end forward as well as from the from the productivity side and and in right so from a back end perspective we obviously support um the myriad storage options ranging from amazon s3 which is a great way for people to deliver files um to a variety

of database services like amazon aurora which is you know heavily in use by companies like supercell and the pokemon company and then kind of on and that's an example of just the back end work we do we also have a service called amazon game lift that actually manages uh session based game servers so companies like ubisoft have built games like for honor sitting on top of game lift that make it really easy to build multiplayer experiences that are live but on the front end right we also want to speak to the artists the people that are that are selling together polygons and creating art right that's interactive we want to help them make more fun engaging titles right and kind of our belief our goal is that if we can make the lives of individual developers better both from a creative perspective as well as from a technical perspective it's going to result in more fun games and more fun games are much more likely to be successful which benefits everybody yeah very cool so uh as you said there are a lot of services and it can be

daunting but do you see game developers being more receptive to these cloud-based solutions over the past couple years absolutely i think our goal if i can be a little bit a little bit pithy you know our goal is uh to work with with every game developer in the world right they want that's willing to talk to us and if if you're not specifically in the data center or hardware business we want you to shut down your data center right uh we believe the game developers are in the business of making games pretty pretty pretty clear-cut right and so anything that we can do um to uh to expedite that to help increase the quality and the output and the productivity of those teams is something that we want to be a part of and that's the purpose the goal of aws game tech in general is we want to send a signal to the community and to customers all over the world that this team wakes up every single day and exclusively thinks about how to help developers make better games the you know from a reception perspective more than 90 percent of the major game

developers and games publishers game studios in the world use aws today so that spans both mobile including companies like provio and supercell uh and voodoo here in france um and all the way up to kind of more aaa experiences gearbox software built borderlands 3 on top of aws we talked about the pokemon company and and you know literally hundreds of other customers so this is a um a major uh market focus for aws generally and we think we have a a lot that we can help customers deliver yeah so are we talking about uh small medium and large studios that you work with do you work are you willing to work across the board you have services for studios of all sizes studios of all sizes right i mean look one of my favorite games on the planet is stardew valley uh stardew valley uh to my knowledge not running on aws today but stardew valley was made by one passionate person right over time it took several years obviously we would love to work with

developers like that right our goal is regardless of your genre regardless of whether of a game whether a game is single player or multiplayer the cloud can help you get things done right a classic example of this is um you know we work with a customer called who's made a game called ai dungeon and ai dungeon 2. you may be familiar with them right so they're actually using aws uh to build the machine learning models that power that game and that's made by just a couple of guys out of utah and they've made this a really engaging interactive experience that's not using data centers worth of equipment anywhere right but they're using the cloud to build really fun interesting unique engaging experiences which is the goal another example of this just from a productivity perspective is with a medium-sized studio i o interactive uh based out of copenhagen these are the the folks behind the hitman series and they're actually using aws services specifically some of our ai and ml services um to uh to actually uh help build the narrative for hitman levels

right so when they were making hitman 2 they used amazon poly which is the voice engine underneath amazon alexa they were using amazon poly to test out scripts and conversations between characters and what that allowed them to do was develop the levels on the technical and artistic side at the exact same time as they were writing and tweaking the script and the narrative right and it meant that they could actually make changes to the storyline they could do lots of creative work before hiring voice actors to do the final you know print so to speak and so this is a good example of how the cloud can help even single player experiences that aren't necessarily connected all the time and actually help developers impact the narrative experience of their games which is really interesting so yeah that's very cool and last thing for game developers interested in finding out more about aws uh where can they go yeah so uh we've got lots of resources for for game developers all over the world i think the best initial point to go to is aws.amazon.com

gametech all one word and that's a nice collection of all of the games related technology including our services as well as some software capabilities like amazon lumberyard some access to our solutions right so like analytic pipeline solutions for developers that are looking to analyze player behavior we have links to all of that starting on that website we've also got really good deep dives into how our customers uh like supercell like gearbox like rovio like capcom like the pokemon company and hundreds of others are using aws every day so you can dig into those and get a sense of how other developers have used the cloud to make really fun game experiences all right that's great well eric thanks for joining us today and best of luck my pleasure chris thanks so much same to you hey there everybody welcome back to the gdc podcast live over to you christian i thought i thought you were

gonna i thought you're gonna throw that to brian or alex or alyssa or anybody not invite anybody it's everybody's i'm gonna throw this one to uh to alyssa then we're wasting our valuable and limited time uh we're now joined by fellow uh gamma future contributors and editors alex warro and bryant francis say hello and introduce yourself hello i'm brian francis i'm a contributing editor at gama sutra yesterday i was called the hooligan i insisted i was a highwayman i am today still a highway man alex who are you oh i'm just like a general in there do well uh i'm alex morrow with an editor at commonsuture.com and uh i'm excited to get in here and talk about gdc summer how's there where's gdc going how are you feeling i've slept like five hours each day looking at the schedule for just everything going on and how is it like the team behind the scenes please sleep oh mike did you have a good time in uh and chat with with everyone there did you answer everyone's questions i had a friend we're gonna see all these developers

their games are gonna be at the top of anyone who would send it to us yeah this is this is a relevant question because we have now enough gamma suture people here to dominate the conversation why was gamma sutra hacked at the start of the year it was the joke because none of us knew what it was it could be anything the internet's magic and no one knows how it works yeah that's actually the best uh were there any questions you answered during the break you wanted to elaborate on while we're on a hot mic uh no okay i think i think i think i am celebrating i i will say if anybody has any more questions keep throwing them at me uh it's it's half past ten at night here now i'm yeah i'm i'm losing my mind so it's mike i i i have a question for you you started at the set of this you you you identified a mindset which is like oh i hope this game sells you know it's a thing that you saw when you were writing for us um i've met a lot of developers who sometimes sort of go um it's not that oh we hope this sells it's

like oh no we sort of trust that it'll sell you know we sort of trust that like if we get these reviews on steam if we pay for these ads that things will happen um that leads to a different mindset a different kind of release date where either like you know the ad budget is very expensive and yet the numbers are just kind of okay and they may keep the developer alive but it's not like you know it's not the strategy you pitch like have you encountered that mindset with some of the developers you work with how do you sort of uh behoove upon them that no please take this seriously we need to take this seriously that we are in a system and we must succeed yeah i mean i mean that what you've described quite frankly is probably most game developers the thing the thing you got to always remember is people who make games are not video game marketers like they they people who make games went into make games to make games they how many times do you see especially like twitter or something over the years people who make games being like oh no one bloody told me i was gonna have to sell this thing as well like and and to be honest i understand it like it is two completely different mindsets i

started trying to make video games i went to university to to learn how to do it i failed miserably so then i decided i'd jump over and and start crapping on on other people's creations but like this is the thing like like i say it's it's two completely different mindsets it's why so many people do need a publisher when there are when you find those people who make games and they're really like and all that i always think of uh good old uh andy schutz uh he he always uh he's he's the kind of person i'm talking about or like uh nathan bella or someone like that you could tell that they are just also going to be able to sell their game uh but not everybody is is a person like that and so some people need someone to help them sell games that's just how it is like are you just covered in like spreadsheets and things like that uh you know i think i think a lot of people if if data is um key uh you know to kind of reverse engineer

the stuff and get better insight into black boxes um how do you organize the data how like how do you collect it and what's what's your kind of process there oh i just don't i i literally right now have over 20 tabs open and all of them is data from many many different players i've got google analytics here i've got reddit here i've got youtube stuff here i've got google phones here like i i'm actually an incredibly uh unorganized person truth be told it's actually why i have the more games we got i've had to finally admit to myself maybe i actually need some help with this uh and you know there's now there's now seven people who work at no more robots you know okay and it's another point actually like i figure you know a lot of people will see me going ah twitter they're my rabbis but actually there is like six other people who work with me who helped me an incredible amount

i i hired i finally hired a producer earlier this year uh a wonderful lady called sally blake who basically since she started has made me realize how on earth was i running this in the first point like it's it's crazy i do not understand how how i did this before i had her help uh get a producer if you don't have one please do it i just didn't realize but uh yeah there's definitely people who helped me kind of keep this thing going i i want to ask a question from vance baron in the chat yeah who says a lot of people have told me that as an indie dev buying ads is completely useless is that true and if not where are the actually useful places to buy ads that nds could afford or are there like more you know effective ways of promotion than that yes the answer is yes buying ads is useless uh the only place that i have found buying ads to be useful is reddit

and i say this it's good for breaking even on your ads on reddit so i i have worked out how to uh how to the bottom line is on reddit you can choose how much you pay per click so i just worked out the formula for how many clicks do i need before people what what's the percentage of people who click through who then wishlist the game and how many of those people who wish us the game buy the game and then i can reverse engineer that back and work out right i need a click-through rate of 30 and so then i've set it to 30 cents and then we're getting people clicking and as technically those people i'm just breaking even on we're paying for the ads and then those people are paying for the ads with with their purchases but of course the point is that it's making all the holy algorithms uh happier that we're getting more sales and we're getting more views which then organically leads to more so in a way we are getting something outside of reddit ads it's a massive

massive waste of time i i've seen people like oh i've seen people spend so much money on ads i mean i'm not triple a so maybe in triple a it makes sense you know when you see like assassin's creed blasted all over everything i'm sure that must make sense uh for indie for indie people god no i've seen people pay like 40 000 for like a couple of banners at pax you know like those big hanging banners that packs and then when their game comes out i'm like you've sold about 500 copies mate yeah mike um do you have to do you have to rerun that calculation with every new game or do you have like a rate inside that you know roughly like the the cpm is average for you just sort of start spending for every game and figure out what the click-through rate is yeah roughly roughly all our games cost the same so uh and and roughly have all the same rates or at least if they're not getting the same rates we work out why not yeah we swap some k out we change the wording etc uh

this is this is getting extremely close to it sounding like i know what i'm doing but uh i i yeah this that's the kind of uh horrible maths that i love playing with every day really um there's so you actually gave a talk in 2018 and let me get the title right making the world give a damn about your game in 2018 is that about the same as making people give a damn about your game in 2020 that's i mean certainly things have changed in the last couple of years there's some things that have changed uh a lot of it is still is still similar i i think uh some of the things that have massively changed for us uh uh include like stuff that is is currently kind of upcoming and you can feel it you could feel it in the air coming for example stuff like game pass uh game pass and game pass and other things like game pass you know because you know that there's more game passes coming it's not going

to be the only one is it netflix appeared and then how many other netflix is a bit it this is going to be a model that's going to be coming and it's something that we've had to think about a lot uh we we are you know constantly talking to various different platforms about trying to get these these kind of deals uh subscription deals etc um i i would i would advise uh everybody to look into these kind of things because i don't think i think if you've got the right game for these platforms the people behind these platforms are going to care and if you don't ask then you're definitely not going to get on them and then are you concerned at all they're going to devalue games over the next like 5-10 years yeah yes i am i am i uh i was i was a couple of years ago when it started happening we started putting games at titles on game pass and i think right now

it's fine like right in this moment in time the money is there like there's the deals are there etc for it to make sense i think other platforms like game pass are going to appear who are also going to be offering nice deals etc the problem comes in a couple of years two to five years when there are four services and they've all got every game so why do they need your game but also if you're not on the service no one's playing your game and the global economy is being rewritten right now with what people's finances look like so that's uh that's that's those those two things go hand in hand i feel like yeah uh definitely and and but but the the thing is that especially with next-gen about to happen uh i feel like what always happens is whenever there's and a new generation of console that

sort of kicks everyone up the ass a little bit you know it's all of a sudden everything's a bit more exciting and you get that little burst of um of of people caring about the stuff again and i especially feel like uh if we're in an unfortunate circumstance where what's happening in the world right now is still going on as these consoles are coming out which it's seeming like maybe it's going to what are you going to do again i don't know i don't know it feels like that might actually uh really sort of boost that even more i mean everyone's been saying already right that video game sales in general have been up i know ours have uh since all of this horrible stuff has been happening i can only assume i don't know about how it'll affect manufacturing of course but i can only assume that uh the demand for next gen is going to be strong and so i feel like once that kicks off for the next year or so after that

we're going to see sort of uh excitement in video games hype etc which passes to everybody which is good i think it's good uh newt next gen but so so yeah it's just video games isn't it it's always all over the place it's always all over the place every year i have the same conversation with the same people at gdc video games what's gonna happen it's all over by wait what um mike there is a good question in chat i think we should get to but i also want to ask um as a person who gives advice uh you know and is trying to figure out advice and you're sometimes trying to read the bones and like like literally sometimes doing you know like old pagan magic to figure out if your video game will sell or not um there's kind of a phenomenon where like advice is good but the problem is the advice is good for the experience that the advice was already lived through so by the time you're giving it um you know especially if it's marketing advice um the ground is already changing under you um which isn't to say like don't go to mike's talk go to mike's talk but how have you like adapted to

that when talking to your fellow developers and trying to like like uh jam on these ideas together yeah you're definitely right like a lot of the stuff i guess it's what we were kind of touching on a second ago about like you know does a talk that i gave in 2018 still still work yeah a lot of this stuff does change uh very rapidly uh and especially as there's new platforms coming out uh and you know we're talking about like subscriptions etc in the next two years how many talks about that is gonna come out and which ones do you listen to and you know who's and who's just saying nice things about platforms because they're on them etc it's it's a minefield with this kind of stuff uh i i think um when you're looking if someone's looking for advice pretend there's someone listening who the game isn't out for 12 months and they're thinking i'm gonna have to start doing selling stuff in about six months you should definitely in six months at that point then start to look for recent sales figures recent ways people are selling things etc

and maybe not completely rely on talks that that are a year old at that point because yeah stuff moves fast sorry to um captain the ship for a second but uh for g gabe pafker's question before we leave here what convention or show strategy would you recommend for small indies with low sales budgets expectations you have 30 seconds to answer do not get a booth uh i i and when i say that i really to be honest mean at uh i don't want to say names i i i mean at like you know one of the big like shows where you know 60 000 gamers turn up uh those people who see your game are not gonna convert into sales or anything because they're gonna walk past your game or maybe even play a little while and then just move on uh if you are gonna go to a show or you're close to a show or whatever uh just turn up and do meetings with useful people there uh we've done shows uh like booth kind of shows um to be honest

we've stopped doing them now because uh we just haven't seen the benefit of those kind of consumer shows really that was like perfectly timed wow uh we're out of time i'm gonna hijack and sign us off i guess yeah uh so as mentioned before if you want to see some of mike's outdated talks on how to sell your video game uh you can find a lot of them for free on the gdc youtube channel a lot of great content there and then nice content series too so there's that uh mike where should people bother you with questions oh you should uh go on my twitters i am at rave of ravendale on the twits hit me horrible things and useful sometimes it's like one for every five right yeah a lot of horrible tweets you people follow me just to see the horrible thing i'll say next time your advice is so good that they enter the posts yes exactly so pretty

much uh for the rest of us thank you for joining us for our live podcast episode we have another one tomorrow with emily greer correct yeah so we'll see you then bye all right thanks everyone bye everybody