GDC Summer Live Podcast - Day 3

[Music] and we're back for day three day three three of uh gdc podcast live i am your co-host chris graft editor-in-chief of gama sutra i'm here with hello co-host uh news editor and associate publisher kamasutra alyssa mceloon hello hey so why does it feel like you know this is a virtual event you know and it's the last day why does it feel like we were just at physical gdc uh for five days um staying up until three a.m and drinking yeah like my energy level is about the same as it would be on like a final day of gdc uh but like my legs feel a lot better because i'm not like running up and down escalators so notable improvement there yeah yeah my legs are my my legs are doing okay all things considered uh missing out on my yearly workout

though so yeah yeah i didn't get too many uh steps in during the virtual but uh what what do you think i mean i really like it yeah no it's great uh it's not been a great event as someone who uh writes talk coverage the ability to watch an on-demand talk right away or like within 15 minutes is just like i'm not going to be able to come back from this it's i'm spoiled it's too good which is something that more people should be talking about if there was a talk you liked earlier on you can go back and just watch it on demand or if you missed it you can watch it on demand it's great it's amazing yeah we are completely unrestrained by physical boundaries now we have transcended that is right so i am hello everybody in chat uh thanks for joining us uh we have a really great guest uh that i can't wait to get on so i'm not gonna wait uh except i'm gonna make you wait because i want to do this intro uh she co-founded

the highly influential web-based gaming site and publisher congregate with her brother in 2006 and sold it to gamestop as one does she's a free-to-play games expert she's an international game developers association board member uh former and current gdc speaker whose talk should be available for free like right now on the platform uh founder of the newly minted double loop games and according to her twitter profile is a figure skater and according to her just uh because from um like i'm gonna be the judge here she's just a fun person to to hang out with so let's welcome emily greer hey emily hello hello yes thank you enjoyed with you chris it was fun thanks so much for joining us really appreciate it um and uh great great talk by the way

which we will uh get into thank you very much yeah as an aside we've now had a uh pilot and a figure skater on the podcast right do we have skydiver or was it pilot um david gardner yeah david gardner flies planes does not jump out of them okay as far as i know if he didn't bring them up some interesting athletic hobbies you're fitting right in yes i hope that whoever is the pilot is a better pilot than i am a figure skater i have more love than uh capabilities but uh which is not a good thing when you're a pilot but it's just fine when you're a figure theater yeah yeah yeah but airplanes have wings they can kind of coast if the engine dies figure skater just fall on i know what i mean that's the thing that people don't appreciate it actually i've heard so much less to fall on ice than on pavement i look at skateboarders and i'm like how can you do it um if you with a figure skater you just like slide 10 feet and it's not that bad it truly is not that bad

that sounds painful thank everybody everyone for joining us for the uh ice skating uh podcast now i feel like there's a gamedev metaphor there but i'm not gonna go down that whole rap at all yeah sliding sliding sliding on your butt on ice is not that bad uh so okay emily anyway uh can you tell us a little bit about uh your storied history in games how did you uh become involved in the game industry uh yeah i came in a kind of a weird way uh i think well actually that's true of a lot of people but i think mine was particularly weird i had a 10-year career in catalogs and e-commerce doing what would now be called data science and ua before but it was called direct marketing then and then my brother who'd been in the game industry since he dropped out of college to work on ultima seven uh had the idea to start congregate and i started helping him with his business plan and thought this is a good idea this is going to be a lot more fun than mailing the next million catalogs to somebody uh let's why don't i work in games

instead of cutting down trees and uh volunteered as his co-founder so that was my first entry into games and i played games all along but i you know i not i don't have that core game or identity that most people in the industry have which is i think something that is unusual about me but also i think is a has been a strength through the career so yeah we built as we talked about we built up congregate as the web platform after we sold the game stop i ended up taking over as ceo living out you know every younger sibling's fantasy of like toppling their brother you know off the off the throne and then we built a mobile publishing business and and published things like adventure capitalist and animation throwdown and then you know after 13 years i've been in the game industry and i've done platform and i've done publishing but i've never actually made games and i really wanted to make games so i

ended up leaving congregate last year took a little time off and then founded a co-founded a studio with my friend shelby um molodina called double loop games making games for mobile very awesome i mean like congregate like hugely hugely influential like of course so we can we can get back to that um in a little bit but since we don't have unlimited time with you i want to talk about your uh we want to talk about your session that you gave about workplace um trust and team building and really anti-harassment steps that that you can take can you tell us a little bit about the talk for those who weren't able to attend yeah you know we've over the last few years there's been kind of wave after wave maybe about every six months of stories coming out from different companies and really all over the industry of different nicu stories and different

harassment stories and i you know if i had every time one of those came out i was feeling i would feel really depressed and sort of hopeless and then i started thinking about um you know all the things that we did at congregate to make things better and to make employees feel safe and make it a place where we could stop harassment and i was like actually that's probably useful advice for everybody so i wanted to put together a talk that really gives a bigger picture of the problem of abuse and harassment you know why it happens why it's really damaging to the company more than people realize and um just really practical pragmatic things you can do just to make the everyday experience of your employees better but also to prevent abuse and harassment so uh that was sort of the genesis of this talk and um yeah it was good and it also draws on

some of my own experiences uh in the game industry um with uh with harassment that's the crazy thing is even though i've only ever been a founder in my own company i still actually had you know multiple cases of um you know gender and sexual harassment that i've experienced so that combination of being both a leader and you know survivor of it i think is a kind of a gave me a great lens to talk about it and i uh and i and i know the people who watch it really appreciate you know you coming forward about those those things because those are those incidents that happen because i know that's you know difficult to talk about and but it does make people feel uh not alone you know so we all appreciate that um well i know with uh you said that you built this based on or your talk was kind of built around your own experiences and kind of things that you've come to realize from your own time in the industry um why do you i guess why why do you

think that like other companies have maybe not been able to come to the same realizations on their own is there just missing conversations or just the company build up or what's the common factor there you know when you're when you're running a company there is so much day-to-day just to survive and to build and deal with immediate crises it's hard to take that step back and really think about how the system is working more broadly well i did come a lot of it from my own experiences and things that um that we've done at congregate a lot of that was reacting to my own experience and again the fact that i've experienced it i think made it easier for me as a leader to do it what would make what kind of steps would make it um better for employees there's also a lot that i talk about that really with abuse development it's just food practices from team building um i talk about google and their research on psychological

safety and how it makes more effective teams the games outcomes projects which you you guys like masucha had a great series of blog posts and was a gdc talk they've also looked at it so some of these things are people are already figuring out they're just not necessarily connecting it to the abuse and harassment the other thing is i did rely a lot on research i had when i decided to do this talk i took time over actually probably about six months reading as much literature as i could um i got my professor mother to download all sorts of academic uh articles for me off of daystar i didn't link to any of them because they're not freely available but they were helpful for me in terms of understanding it more broadly and in particular there was a us eeoc the equal employment opportunity commission did a a study in 2016 which is just a wealth of knowledge and information and i linked to that on twitter um and

from the talk and that that was a real really big big help uh to sort of get my sort of brain around it are those wider kind of academic articles for other industries and for just like employment as a whole do those have a lot of parallels with game development or is it quite different for the most part it's really similar now there's some situations where they where they talk about you know domestic um domestic workers or you know satellite retail stores which are you know relevant to something like gamestop but not it's it's rare to have sort of two or three person little pods that are remote in game industry so some of that stuff is specific to them some of that stuff is specific to manufacturing but because the the core of the problem comes back to humans desire for power and desire to push people down to raise themselves up that's just incredibly universal

and so it doesn't you know it doesn't matter whether you're looking at you know high fashion or movies or games or a retail store a lot of the same things keep coming out the way that you talked about the power dynamic was really interesting to me um we uh you say that we have uh some misconceptions of what drives harassment can you explain that yeah so especially when you're talking about me too you and all the story a lot of the stories involve kind of sort of lurid sexual type of stuff and it's very easy to think that's about sex and about people being driven by sex and wanting sex because you know again that's a universal thing that we feel but the more that you look at individual stories and you look at the individual patterns sex is almost a symptom rather than the cause it is about

that feeling of power that you have when you force somebody into something when you put them on their feet when you control them and so with women when when when it's male to female in particular it's nearly alway power sort of oppression and power dynamics when you're trying to push somebody down you use sexual language that's it seems to be very common men do men it will often happen as well and then it tends to be you know like homophobic slurs and other other types of things but also pushing men into you know female gender as a way to push them down and then it gets into all sorts of other things so sex and sexual language is often just a uh um just a way similar behavior is expressed i'm trying to keep this clean because it's a podcast it's it's like you know uh you know

when male to male it might be you know you're a total idiot right and you know homophobic slurs and then with women it's it's it's about um sex but it is always about you're less than me i'm making myself bigger in relation so i also want to ask about uh this whole theory of one bad apple which you you talked about uh and you know people say oh the bad apples are gone now you see it happening in companies now there's a little tiny bit of a calling of like people who've been caught uh but what's your what are your thoughts on the one bad apple idea yeah one is that it can't be just one bad apple if we're seeing it in so many companies of so many different sizes and so many different regions it's

coming up again and again it's hard you know uh the actual analogy for uh one bad apple is that one bad apple spoils a whole bunch it's actually about one poisonous thing making everything around it worse and that's actually a better analogy if you think about it that is much more what is going on the other thing is you know there's a lot of denial about about it uh you know when me too really broke in 2017 i think a lot of a lot of people were surprised at how really common these kinds of experiences were and we've been pushing things kind of under the surface for a while and so the um there's a desire and part of that is if there's a real desire for things to be okay for things to not be a problem and to not have to think you know bad

things about your co-worker or bad things about your friend it's also much easier just to blame put things all in one individual than think about systemic problems and how things interact and one of the things i talk about in my talk is that you know harassment isn't binary where you know it exist you know it happens or it hasn't happened it's illegal or it isn't illegal there's a whole spectrum of behavior that con that starts with like you know mean trash talking uh that is it you know nobody would ever consider illegal but is sort of the beginning of that kind of um you know abusive talk and then you can you know get to you know people giving each other ball taps and other things like that before you get to harassment and that's the other problem when you when you say something is one bad apple you can just it's just this easy problem you get rid of them

you find them it's over but when you really look at it and it's this whole spectrum of behavior and a lot of people have behaved that way to some degree then you then it's just much harder to deal with and that's one of the things where i think it's really important to understand is that we all live up or down to our environment and surroundings to some degree you know we're not nobody nobody's a saint nobody is complete people i mean there's probably yeah but most people we're just we're just doing the best that we can in environments that we are in and we're looking around us to figure out what's right and what's wrong and so when things are sort of gradually moving in a bad direction a lot of us will move with it too and but that also means that if we we can move things in a good direction and we can move a lot of people to as well so that's the sort of the upside

and downside there is that we're moving as a group one way or another um group norms are really powerful and that you need to think about the group behavior and not just the individual yeah uh somebody in chat uh cherry said uh almost like we have a systemic problem eh yeah can you talk a little bit about uh emily's general theory of human behavior that was interesting and it's good that you you know name a theory afterwards i haven't done that yet but you know i need to figure mine out well i i i didn't mostly as much as possible uh i try to give references i try to give back back up but this is just me talking and you have graphs

i had a chance to bell curve in of course i'm going to do that uh a spell curve and emily's theory that's uh that that's me um i'm i'm staying on brand even when i'm talking about a heavy subject so so but yeah my i talked about it a little bit before it's essentially that there's some percentage of people that will always be good at most in some situation and there's some people who always be predatory but most of us are in the middle um in a kind of bell curve around whatever the group norms or we're in and group norms are set by leaders and by kind of the culture that we live in and we there's not only so much we can do about the culture that we live in but leaders can have a really disproportionate impact on what how group norms in bringing in bringing them for good in

some cases i talk about big huge games and what they've done there or uber being the example of leaders pulling sort of a law lawlessness and sort of disregard for harm um into to being the norm for that company uh the um and i think you know i i grew up moving all over the world um and living a lot of different places and i think when you have that experience of going seeing people or people but also how they behave organizes really differently in different places um it really helps give you that kind of distance of oh culture is not one thing culture is us coming together and not consciously deciding it's one thing but iteratively deciding it's one thing so i was reading in chat someone's bullying the gamma future website design right now and i was getting defensive but um oh wait let's look at this real quick yeah i want to follow up on that but like

you just gave a really excellent talk on that so the better option would be just to have people get your full thoughts and the thought or full thoughts in your talk yeah that i i had time to rehearse and yeah i was gonna be like all right what are your quick tips for fixing studio cultures like that's not the way to handle it sure it is yeah um yeah okay so i think that maybe we should talk a little bit um about uh you know double double loop games uh and uh things that you know on on the business side of of what you do can you talk about uh uh tell us a little bit about double loop um and what you're trying to do differently there yeah so double loop is sort of comes back to kind of my experience as uh as a gamer somebody who plays games a lot who really enjoys them but doesn't have that um that core identity

um that core gamer identity and for a long time i wanna in the game industry i sort of felt like i had a certain level of imposter syndrome and then we started doing mobile publishing and the the team would joke about the emily test the games that i played more than six or seven sessions were always um our hits i like i i was like the team wasn't gonna sign adventure capitalist for mobile and i was like no we have to i can't stop playing it right uh and that made me realize that what it felt like um you know what was giving me imposter syndrome was actually a strength i represent the big mass market of mobile players who uh play games and love games but don't think of themselves as gamers and you know there's no part of the games industry that's not competitive but if there's one part of the market that's underserved it's that part and i want to make games for that audience i you know i want to do what most people in the games industry want to do i want to make games for myself

and that really focuses a lot around you know why i play games which is when i'm most stressed that's when i'm on my couch playing you know match threes and tower defense and idol games and have basketball or the british baking show in the background and um so i want to make really relaxing games and i want to make games that are really social and that help connect us to people and bring those two things together uh so we're not talking about the title that we're making yet because um of there's a lot of cloning and mobile so when you do something innovative you try to you know keep it close to your chest until you absolutely have to show it um but that's the general sort of mindset that we're taking to it uh we're still a small team which is really fun congregate was like 120 people towards the end and it's lovely to be back to you know the number of people you can fit around a table and and really talk to we're about eight people right now uh and yeah we're we're hoping to launch

sometime in 2021 i feel like when you hear people talk about games in that category that are like the the casual games like the farm bills or like sitting on your couch with your mobile phone kind of like the mom games i don't i don't like that term but i know like kind of where it comes from that you hear about it as like oh here's this untapped market market here's how to get women into games and how to make money off of them but you guys seem to be taking a lot more like personal we just want to create something enjoyable approach with it yeah you know i think the best games are always made with real emotion and real respect and understanding for the audience and i want to take advantage of the fact that i am that sort of mom gamer in the games industry it's you don't there's not a lot of us in the games industry for lots of reasons and and i really think that we um and shelby is also my co-founder is also a mom i'm not a mom actually i'm a mom i love those types of i'm not a mom either but i yeah that term defines me yeah but that um you know that we can but because we're

the audience we can make better games um and more sort of authentic and uh uh more authentic and joyful games because we're not guessing what somebody likes we are we know what we like we know who they are and uh it's a refreshing perspective i'll say that much about it it's nice to like hear uh how you guys have phrased it and like your um press release when you guys announced your seed funding was just like this really heartwarming way of describing a market that i feel like doesn't usually get that kind of loving attention yeah that's i don't i i don't want to call anybody out because there's lots of amazing games out there that i've played a lot of but i also but i bet it but i um it's something that i struggled with in the industry is feeling like the kind of player that i am and that that kind of audience is less respected and i think it's equally it's a it's a great audience and you know

when our needs are just as valid and uh um you know i'm here and i wanna uh uh i wanna make games on that premise yeah when you're going around and you're trying to raise funding for this uh when you tell them what kind of audience you are targeting is there reservation do you have to really like argue for it or no i mean you know the the numbers are just there you know mobile is half of the game industry now i mean and that's just mediocre meteoric growth in the last decade and when you look at surveys of the u.s market um 70 of people who play games on mobile don't think of themselves as gamers you know you're talking about 70 of the market it's you know it's hard to deny it um and i also think that one of the changes that i've seen since we we raised money for congregate um in 2006 is that there is more

appreciation of that the audience game audience is broader than what originally was thought to be and that um uh diverse founders and diverse voices um can help fill that gap um it was i didn't really believe in sexism uh until we raised money for congregate uh and it's actually been really lovely um going through the double loop process to just to feel a big reversal on that now you know it helps that you know i'm a repeat founder dc's always like that but i but i think that there was an attitude shift even independent of that and i have a lot of female friends who are starting studios now and able to raise money in publishing um there's a you know there there's just a whole wave of us that i think um will be helping to change the industry going forward yeah what what parallels do you see right now uh versus 2006 when

you uh founded congregate uh are there any parallels you see with like mobile the mobile game market or is it just a completely different ball game you know it's really it's such a different ball game and you know in 2006 we were all still on on feature phones right like i was playing bejeweled on you know my little nokia and and the the mobile games market was controlled by the carriers and jammed at you know ea had just bought jammed at and mobile was really just like not even a gleam in the eye of uh or barely a gleam in the eye in terms of like you know could being half of the industry and the other thing is that free to play was not was nascent it was really growing in china and korea but it hadn't come to the west yet and so the amount of change that's happened in the industry in 14 years is kind of astounding um

and it's but it's been it's been a fun ride and it's also been one where you know every year it's about it's been about expanding the game industry and expanding the audience and getting bigger um and it's lovely to be in an expanding market um as opposed to one where you know it's a shrinking market where everybody's defensive this is in a in a growing market it's easier to be optimistic and collaborative and lots of things like that that i like i'm kind of like keeping an eye on chad at the same time so i apologize if i'm like re-asking the same like uh same thing that chris just asked but um considering how much experience you have in like the pc and like browser-based games is there are there a lot of parallels to mobile games and those kind of like how the players are how the games are formulated yeah i mean the the browser games in the late 2000s or you know sorry later like 2007 when we launched through

2013 you know that was where you went to play sort of the quick games you know when you wanted to play a game for like 10 minute sessions and to you know to feel that uh see the innovation in terms of mechanics uh and it was it was sort of the most accessible path compared to consoles or you know doing a big heavy download when your your your internet sucked browser games was the accessible format and now mobile is the most accessible format so that's where you see the biggest audience but you know browser games aren't dead they're the most accessible format of pc you know they it's been pretty traumatizing to have flash go away yeah but uh you know html5 and a lot of other technologies have really developed and you can make um you know quite good games um for browser now and as long as the as kids are allowed to

do their schoolwork on computers when but not allowed to play on on phones or consoles uh browser games will never die yeah yeah i think my next game my circle in uh high school definitely got like all of the good like congregate level sites blocked because of just the sheer volume of time we spent out of there so one of the secrets of congregate is i think we we because we didn't have name our name and our title we were less likely to get blocked by school administrators than other sites so we were kind of like the stealth game site you could play generations appreciate that we stumbled into it olivia schwerz and chad agrees i grew up playing browser games i didn't have a console for a while and no handhelds so they were my gaming experiences some really innovative flash games that i remember playing that just had like that really good influence on you but yeah i it's actually kind of heartening is that flash games were such the you know disrespected backwater back when you know congregate was at payday it's like oh

flash games they're not real games but now um with flash dying there's been so much appreciation of how much innovation there was and how much it was really like the birth of indy indies and when you look both at mobile and at uh pc indeed you can there's so many threads of you know uh big hits that came out of flash like um you know uh neat boy being an example or you know angry birds is essentially you know uh a reskin of uh crushed the castle like there's just there's so much flash games gave so much to the rest of the industry um and i feel like it's getting a little bit more appreciated now that it's almost dead because that's sorry i know someone just mentioned elf folding in chat and i just went all the way back oh yeah it's nice to see like the preservation effort instead of like people have stepped up to archive these games and that's really important and it's just it's that same like heartwarming feeling you were just talking about that people do care about these still it's just yeah absolutely

yeah yeah and uh and uh so what's your take on overall on the uh we've got like a couple of minutes here uh what's your take on the mobile game market right now because there is a lot of reach obviously uh but that also means you know there's a lot it's inundated it's very crowded how do you deal with that as a startup um i i'm gonna raise quite a bit of money is the is one you have to break through the noise but there is a lot of opportunity there like you are seeing uh new hits break out every year um and get up into the top 10 and top 20 and if you look at it you know because the market is so big a lot of games are not necessarily famous but are able to break through to a significant level and

you know really sustain a studio and grow but you know you have to you know you have to make a great game that resonates emotionally which is always hard and you have to figure out the marketing side um and both of those are important um it's been used to get a lot more out of featuring um that was one of the things that was sort of uh that's been very hard to watch in the last few years is how much the value of featuring has decreased and you can't just build a business off of that you have to figure out marketing now i've spent my whole career in marketing right like i did that that was what i did for 10 years before i even got into games so it it you know it's sort of comfortable and familiar territory but it's it's challenging um and it requires both you know infrastructure and capital that makes it hard for you know you know small indie to come you know to um to break out um in a big way uh but you know that's

the story unfortunately of you know most of the the game industry you know consoles and other things where you know consolidation towards bigger players uh we were in some ways i think we were kind of spoiled for a while with how much diversity we could kids sustain um but that's not how markets work they tend to to crush that um but it is really great to still see um you know how much diversity and how much interesting stuff goes on in especially the pc world um and you know both on steam and places like it there's you know there's a lot of um there's a lot of good small games i think a lot of games doing well on twitch so there's still a market there um mobile though is definitely pretty dominated by big players well i think that you're going to do great got a pretty good track record and you're pretty good with a bell curve so i think

that uh we want to be on the good side of that and then also we want that hockey thicker that's actually that's the kind of curve i want to i want to draw for today we're going to have you back just to talk about different graphs and things like that but only in the audio format you'll have to describe them verbally yeah the graphs with the chris graft [Laughter] so well thank you so much for joining us um uh just a reminder uh this uh emily's talk is free on this platform so if you're listening to this right now live you can go to it uh just look for emily's talk from thursday uh it's also going to be um i mean it's free for anyone to like register and and watch it too emily's talk which was which was called r-e-s-p-e-c-t practical tips to prevent abuse and build team trust if you want keywords to look for yeah um and that talk uh ever since i learned the uh the name of it

r-e-s-p-e-c-t like that the song has been stuck in my head ever since so effective marketing you are a marketer so uh and also there is a write-up on gamosutra.com uh and uh it's kind of uh touches on a few points but it also includes a link to emily's full presentation deck along with notes so please uh you know take advantage of that show that to your co-workers um you know that that's and that's what it's there for i really had to squeeze to get it into 45 minutes so there's stuff in the notes that i that i had to cut out and not say so there's it's good to watch it talk but it's also good to read the notes and see see what things i had to cut yeah absolutely so well thanks again um so we're going to take our uh uh a break for a few minutes for a word from our sponsor um and then the yamasutra team will be back to just

hang out uh so we'll be in chat please don't go anywhere and thanks again emily really appreciate it thank you i really appreciate the opportunity up next we'd like to welcome one of our sponsors julie shoemaker vp of operate solutions at unity hey julie thanks for joining us thank you so much chris good to be here yeah awesome so can you tell us a little bit about yourself uh your background in the game industry and what you do at unity great um well i've been the i've had the pleasure to be in the game industry now 20 years i joined electronic arts in 2001 uh on the licensing and advertising side and have followed a journey through games um multi-platform from social play and and and mobile uh largely on the game publisher side and in 2016 i was able to take that learning and come over to unity

and help um do those services on behalf of the industry in essence my revenue responsibility in operate solutions spans from monetization products largely the part of the business we're going to talk about today with the covet 19 study as well as cloud services player engagement which was one area where we pulled a lot of data about game behavior and um and finally of course advertising so my primary mission at unity is to enable developer success so that they can build strong and profitable businesses interesting so you mentioned the coven 19 report and of course that's top of mind for a lot of people in games right now and why we're doing this on video so can you talk about that report and how unity gathered that data yes so so chris i think when you and i started this call but before we click the video we were just chatting about

the new normal and and um of course we were watching what was happening in uh predominantly asia as they were sheltering in place in january and february so the week of march 8th when world health organization declared global pandemic is um really when what we consider in the covet report the the bulk of the shift in behavior and some of the data behind this the methodology of the cobin 19 report is that we first started with a baseline growth to um compare against 2019 as our baseline number so in essence to normalize what is already a growing industry of games we took um a normalized data set starting in jan one and then we added um mobile information that we secure from the unity monetization platform on usage in mobile we then

also complemented that data with a source of information on pc and console gaming from our made with unity content as a development platform and finally we took player engagement data anonymized through our delta dna product that helped us see engagement rates as well as um the revenue implications of uh covid19 okay so when you're reviewing this data what was the most surprising aspects of it that jumped out to you well first of all many uh i mean we we were humbled by you know this this very difficult time in the world that games have shown that they're bringing a real bright spot and so a couple of the data points that that jumped out was first of all 46 increase in daily active users in pc and console gaming and that data

jumped out because it really shines a light on families you know what we used to call like the virtual card or board game is now your your xbox in the living room with your family members um the bright spot in even mobile gaming 17 increase in daily active users just showed that um people wanted this sense of community sense of play and uh and and of course um ability to focus on something that might be more positive for their minds here than what was happening in the world at the time and i saw the survey also showed increases in ad viewing and a really like huge increase in app downloads 84 increase uh and increase in downloads so can all like all of this is

you know just because people are at home and having more downtime then is that the conclusion or is there any other factor well i think what we look at is first of all if we think about the ad impressions so ad impressions increase 57 okay and in our category ad impressions are often an opportunity of discovery for players so if you're going to increase impressions you're actually increasing the likelihood that they're discovering new apps and downloading those apps so that's one thing um another uh another area when we go back to that you know 17 increase in daily active players also means new players and new players have more room to grow in their what games i'm gonna play so we we see that um the increase in downloads is connected to many of the behaviors uh combined okay so when you're looking at this data uh what are some practical ways

you know some takeaways that game developers can can take from after you know they look at this report how can they apply the information that they have like to what they're doing well i think first of all we would say um many of the game developers that have benefited greatly have been dual economy and they have iep based revenues which have increased um as well and uh actually iep went up 24 during this window so that means consumer pay increased as did ad pay so the developers that have um both economies did have greater opportunity during this time and of course also greater opportunity to engage the player because often a player who doesn't want to pay has an opportunity to get a new level or or grow their experience and engagement

with the game through the rewarded ad business so that would be one certainly on a forward-looking basis our our biggest guidance is that um this is a this is the opportunity for great game makers to engage this new pandemic player so what do you think happens after things you know hopefully sooner rather than later go back to normal whatever that looks like do these numbers go back down uh you know or do they go back down to where they were before lockdown happened well we see that um the data shows during this now you know what five and a half windows of five and a half months of the window of deep look at the data that um we're the the that the users are continuing to engage so uh our guidance would be we we won't make a forward-looking statement on what players are going to

do in the long run we will but we will encourage our developer economy to take advantage of this opportunity to engage these players thanks that was really interesting uh thank you for joining us and uh best of luck out there and stay safe wonderful thank you chris thanks hey we're back thanks for sticking around uh with julie shoemaker from unity and thank you unity for sponsoring this um i put a link in chat for uh that covet 19 report so make sure to check it out and there will also be a link in the video on demand of this so uh you can you can look at it then so we're actually joined by uh bryant francis and alex can can you all introduce yourselves a little bit that's brian francis sometimes known in the gamma superbowl that's bronte um i'm a contributing editor at gamasutra and as today has shown i

love star wars a lot if you were watching the speed run what nice uh i'm alex warro an editor at gamasutra.com and i gotta say the gamma sutra retro design is about to come back into style yeah let's let's let's uh we had we had a question in the middle of our uh our chat with uh was emily greer which she's amazing isn't she yeah i wish you were able to join us for this last segment but prior engagements and busy important people these are important things yeah i mean we're lucky to have we are neither busy nor important i wasn't going to say it but yeah i know we want to be doing this if we were actually busy um yeah the uh cult zone games that's weird is that on the birth certificate you think cult zone games um uh where uh like when uh when's gamasutra gonna renew the old site um do you have any idea what they're talking about i mean uh i think the blinking eye gamma suture logo that pops up every like six months

in slack should be that should be front and center on our site haven't i haven't i haven't noticed that there's um anything outdated on the site when did our site get named again when did we name it after a southeast asian indian we did not name it we were all later in the name of the team but i was looking this up uh yesterday in 1997 is when conversation was founded so what a fun fact we should have all known that we worked for this freaking studio were you all doing in 1997. yeah let's talk about this bryant you go first bronze uh in 1987 uh let's see seven years old um i may not have even seen star wars yet because i think my mom made maybe wait until i was eight so i would have definitely been playing with uh batman figures i would have been in about second grade which means i moved to lincolnsville maryland by that point and i was getting bullied a lot in school that's what i'm pretty sure of watching anime and eating rocks because

i was like five i don't know what five-year-olds do they're hardcore apparently damn wait alex what were you doing uh you know i was just i was just working a job just punching a clock like any average i must have been 11 12. i don't know i was ready to write content that's right i was just writing content from the day i came out of the uh isn't that the year the symphony that i came out i feel like 97 that's probably what i was doing that's probably just spending my whole summer eating final fantasy 7 and symphony of the night speaking of timely things uh favorite talks so far what have you guys covered what do you like what's going good at the show uh i'll i'm gonna i know emily greer we already she she brought up a lot of points in her talks but i have to make it um put that as one of my favorite talks i covered um she said something here in the podcast that she said specifically in the talk which is uh um uh harassment is sometimes about sex but it's always about power and when she said that and i'm just sitting there you know

that that clacky cocky and i wrote it and i swear to god like mentally my brain like shot backwards across the room into the wall from like linking things um only because like if i can get a little personal here um uh i've lived that over and over again i have been um uh because it happens to men in the workplace too and these aren't mostly gaming companies because i've worked in other places but um i have been sexually harassed while i've been work i've been yelled at and screamed at at different jobs i've had people like i've had different kinds of like threats throat made at me in different contexts and it's so weird because you spend a lot of time going like holy whoa that was rough and like you take a day like you cool off you're back at work for something or another um and uh um and the the line like it's not about it's sometimes about sex it's always about power and her story in the talk which if you go watch is about the um the random game exec who was uh inappropriately hitting on her to dinner um just like like the connection there like finally clicked in my head and like

i think i started like i've spent this year like processing a lot of what happened to me in that context because when the news about um uh a lot of uh game companies uh being called out this year for behavior that people have experienced with them hit like i started like when writing up some of it i was like oh wait i guess i've experienced this too and like that turned out you need you need to like process that and you need to like go deal with that in therapy like you can't just keep acting like oh yeah like it's just something i cover it's not something i live through and it's like oh no i lived through that and her framing of it that way like i think about all the companies that where people were power hungry where people were like fighting for placement or favor um and i'm just like even when it wasn't sexual harassment i was just like oh wow like like like uh um uh lisa simpson's staring.jpg um and uh that that just i cannot stress enough she talked about it earlier in the podcast and that was that's why i was hoping she'd be here um to mention it to her that like whoa like that hit me like a truck but um

you know she's not here so i can just share with you you know some deep dramatic secrets and uh look over to alex alex no pressure what's your favorite talk uh men are garbage that's my favorite talk oh so woke yeah um no that's that's rough buddy i uh i'm sorry to hear that uh it's bad times i uh yeah i agree emily's talk was fantastic uh i have not watched it yet i was watching some other talks today including a really good talk on hard space shipbreaker uh which is just i love that game sharp right turn yeah i don't know i would have mentioned that because i love the game but now that game just like twists my brain are you gonna spoil the end of a game right now that just recently came out what and i can't beat it i'm too busy carving spaceships i can tell you why there's no end because i just watched the talk all about how that team had to uh pivot multiple times including at one point moving from what was maybe going to be a more narrative heavy and shorter game into like a longer and more

broad like uh systemic game and uh i don't know people should go watch that talk on the platform because it's packed it's just really packed with a lot of uh key learnings uh and yeah it's just uh it's it's a remarkable uh chart of how an idea goes from a game jam internally to a ship product that seems to have like a huge fan base uh and i think it's really cool it's really neat it's uh it's nice to see studios thriving you know like the folk star blackbird a key part of the talk was that um they see themselves much in the vein of like a blizzard or or digital extremes or psionics and that you know they work for other companies and they work on another ip but they really are always trying to make their own original games and like strike it big and so go watch that talk because uh it would take me 10 minutes to sum up here but basically they chart the four year journey from original idea to successful original ip and i think that's really relevant these days where so many devs are

trying to get noticed with their own ideas yeah yeah can i talk about mine real quick the one that i was like i uh i covered uh um uh karen stevens uh from ea sports who is the lead accessibility uh accessibility lead uh um and uh the the the point that she kept uh driving home was that um legibility is like she said if you get anything out of this talk uh font like legibility um you know fix that and that's my own that's that's my that's me like like showing my own privilege there because like i've got good you know i got a good site but we're here but i do remember in 2006 when the hd consoles were hitting uh dead rising like nobody nobody could read the text and rising one on

on xbox 360. and here we are in 2020 right are we still yeah yeah yes we will always be in 2020 some part of us so basically when emily greer was getting her uh career started um up until now uh font legibility has been like crap and then what do you mean karen stevens or emily greer no i'm talking about no i'm talking about emily greer's career she started in 2006 oh okay yeah yeah we're trying to figure out like frames of reference for uh for time um so yeah just the fact that that's not a fixed um thing yet um is kind of mind-blowing and of course her point is like you can add all these accessibility options but if i can't you know see the menu or recognize like where those options are living where they're buried in the game

then they don't really matter to so many people uh so yeah i mean and then the thing about comic comic sans like um i think i'd heard that before and forgot about it um but looking up comic sans i know that it's like maligned and stuff and made fun of but uh it's good for dyslexia and like designers you know are like shut up stop making fun of comic sans like this is good design yeah yeah yeah and then to have um and then you know i know that there's probably you know developers and like uh designers out there just imagining their game just covered in comic sans uh you know but yeah she's she said you know the option would be good you know you can have the fancy font and you can turn on a more legible font um as well and she also brought up the point like you know a game like outer worlds it defaults to very small font

and then they released a patch that increases it um but it still defonts to defaults to that original like tiny font and she said just because you add a size option doesn't you know mean that you're off the hook for making it illegible you know from when you start the game uh so i'm like like after watching that that's just you know uh changed my my viewpoint um on uh on on legibility and um and really accessibility overall it's been really enlightening uh this week so yeah that's me um alyssa do you have a talk you want to bring up yeah uh but i also just want to comment is there not a question more of a comment um but it's i love talks like that because they recontextualize uh accessibility it's people have this very like oh it's colorblind settings but no it's this wide range the wider range thing that affects like people who think that they might not need accessibility features but no they they benefit from them too

all right that's done uh so now i will save my piece while we have two minutes left on the clock um i covered a talk uh by private division's kari toyama about um she set up a qa studio um and was talking about how to set that up from scratch to kind of give your your dev team the best chance and get like a really creative really productive environment and i think my working title for when i was writing the article is uh breaking qa or people too because a lot of her talk just comes down to treating developers like human beings and building community yeah it's uh it's a really great talk um that focuses on her five pillars six pillars that i can't find because i didn't organize my notes uh culture diversity relationships advocacy and trust and there's a lot of advice that um is focused on setting up a qa studio to make them feel included in the process because you hear horror stories of like oh they're kept in the basement with no lights and they're not allowed to make eye contact with the programmers uh and that doesn't foster a great

working relationship for people whose jobs actually overlap quite a bit oh god that's so that's so frustrating like especially when you think about what emily said you read stories about how like how activision used to be or other companies and if you uh start at the beginning every talk too uh she talked a lot about how uh emily was talking about her own experiences with sexism even as like a high up in games companies and akari was talking about a lot of her experiences and it's just like you're sitting there kind of like no i can see this happening but that that really sucks and those bad negative and often sexist experiences kind of informed her philosophy for setting up the studio i think there's a lot of really great advice in that talk that applies not only to qa but just to like studio culture in general so please check that out uh it was a really great conversation yeah sounds like it and all these um these like we wrote them up um on gammasutra.com a website with a name [Laughter] so let's uh let's wrap it up um

thank you so much everybody especially people who showed up here and chat i feel like you know that some of you have shown up every time and we really appreciate that this is a first time thing for us doing a live show and hopefully we do it again uh see some of you on twitter and all that so uh i think that uh that's it we're gonna sign off on the very first uh gdc summer jesus podcast live so thanks everybody have a good rest of your day