How One Studio Stays Successful When Shift Happens

[Music] hello world welcome to the Pocket Gamer podcast with your hosts me Brian Bago and our icon of Ip our Warrior queen of work for hire Miss Peggy and Sals hello Peggy always a pleasure how are you doing always a pleasure I was on the road we missed each other a few times but now we are back and as always these meetings they bring a lot a lot of value a lot of Joy I get to meet new people so I came back with guests for us Brian and I went to The Other Extreme I thought you know it's great to talk about UA and admon and all that stuff but let's get real let's get real let's talk about raw and real things in the real world and someone who has done it has seen it and

knows what it's like because shift happens right shift does indeed happen we won't go to what 2025 will be but let's just say as you always say Brian only constant is change our guest today is Ryan filsinger he is the founder and CEO of iron fox games and a little bit like you Brian when I saw him and met him I thought of you because yes a journey in games spanning 17 years but which is like right there you have to say wow that's an impressive track record but it's even better than that because it's been with the iconic IP that we know from The Simpsons to Star Wars to Marvel and he has been able to Pivot endure keep moving forward and join us today all of that together I have to say that is somebody I want to hear from and here he is so good to have you yeah thanks for having me Peggy welcome on board Ryan it's lovely to

have you here and um this sounds like a heck of a journey so I'm looking forward to hearing more yeah in 2008 um the local Province here decided to invest in the games industry uh where I grew up here I'm based in charlott toown prinet Island which is a a small little province of 120,000 people off the east coast of Canada uh we're in a time zone most people don't know does not know exist it's called the Atlantic time zone and um we normally known for fishery tourism ing Green Gables and Agriculture and the government wanted to kind of expand that into the IT market and in the mid early 2000s uh they in started to invest in video games and I has I happened to be one of those people that got one of those early jobs um I had the opportunity to be a tester on the first game that was ever on stage with Steve Jobs which was uh Super Monkey Ball um and got to of the birth of the iPhone

and those early days um right out of the gate in in in the industry um shortly after that the uh company I was working for got acquired by Electronic Arts um we ended up working on uh The Simpsons Tapped Out for five and a half years um we we tried to do a second title uh after that which didn't quite work out um after that happened I ended up partnering with uh Kabam and started a satellite studio for them here in charlot toown with uh with a few of my friends um that's where I had the opportunity to work on Transformers and Marvel and Disney products uh which were amazing times and then uh in 2022 early 2022 uh I had an opportunity sort of fall on my lap um and took that as an as a chance to go start my own studio so we started uh iron fox games um back in March of 2022 and been for two and a

half years now through ups and downs uh and you know in this market the line we say is 2022 was a great year to start a company 2023 was a terrible one year to run one um and somehow we're almost now to 2025 and uh we've been through lots of ups and downs and uh somehow still here on the other side of it you know we we hear from so many people it's like 2024 we don't talk about 2024 it's like Fight Club um it I think it's it's been tough around tell us a little bit more about iron Fox because that's a heck of a track record so it would be lovely to hear what iron fox is doing that that sets it apart from you know your previous work we F what we thought was when we started the company was okay well what do we really know what are we really good at we're well we knew how to handle licenses we had you know worked on some of the biggest ones out there in the world we had ran games for 10 years in live operations and uh we were Mo we had spent 15 years in Mobile so when we started the company

we thought okay those are going to be our three pillars but uh we quickly found out that with the way the market was going that a lot of people who might want to partner with live operation Studios uh were holding on to their IP so instead of going out and investing in new games and then you know Outsourcing their work to other partners um they were going back to their original titles and investing more money because that was proven dollars um and so new games weren't being made and older games weren't being shipped out to Partners quite at the frequency that we had thought um so part of our uh pivot over the last 18 months um has been finding home actually in in web gaming um and and finding also partnering with uh some of some old titles so one of the thesis that we had thought was um you have a situation where early mobile titles are now retro right like uh they're 10 12 years old now and we saw some of the

early games like subway surfers and tupple run do really well on the web and you know there Subway Surfers still sits you know probably in the top 10 downloads um and we went looking around for games that were built around 2009 to 2012 the ones that we had really worked on early before freeo playay kind of had taken over and changed the entire Market um and in that we found uh Mega Jump which was a game that had 100 almost 100 million downloads between 2012 and 2015 um and our good friends at getset in Toronto had moved on and they were working on some VR products and I went to them and happened to meet them at a Pocket Gamer in Toronto and um had lynched with them and said you know are you doing anything with this IP like this we were we had actually tested it my my co-founder and I had actually tested it back in the early days and he's like no it's just sitting there you know we've kind of moved on and and found different home and in different areas and I said would you give us a

chance to have it and he's like sure so we ended up working out a deal um and all through that we were uh introduced to the folks down at Halfbrick um who are amazing people um out of Australia and at the same time they were in the process of thinking a lot on the same lines and they have recently launched half brick plus which is sort of like a it's a subscription service um resurrecting and investing in all their original titles you know Fruit Ninja and Jetpack dry ride and Dan the man and kind of everything that they've built over the last 15 years plus and we happened to uh find a way to work between the three companies and back in late September we launched relaunched Mega Jump uh on half brick plus and now we're in the process of uh porting it and bringing it to the web as well so um our first game and our first title of trying to resurrect those early games from uh our you early careers uh

is is checked and now we're out looking for our second title so um as you can imagine though in that situation most of those games or IPS from the early days are very it's a lot of like archaeological work right it's okay who owns the IP who is the original Dev where's the source code like can I can you license it can you not maybe somebody already else has taken it um so it's a lot a lot of h a lot of misses but you know our first one out of the gate we think a gigantic hit um and it's been doing really well on half Brick's platform and um we're you know anticipating uh what's next for it so means that there's opportunity just if you look at what was working before find it resurrected I mean it's almost like you can go back in top grossing lists or something and you know in some data tool you know there's lots of them sensor Tower apptopia you name it magic and do

some research and find these again yeah we we have a list of about a hundred of them that were like slowly making our way through um and some you know some I've reached out and and never heard back right the original devs don't even answer their email the website hasn't been updated in you know 10 years uh so like I said it's a lot of archaeological work that might not bear as much fruit as you hope but um maybe some of this conversation today we'll have some will be sitting on an IP from 2013 and kind of want to bring it back and reach out to us if you're outside the games industry it's you tend to assume that that games have the same kind of long taale that music and movies you know do through DVD and streaming and it and it's just not the case you know I I've been doing this for quite a while and there are games that I've worked on where I'll be standing up in front of a class of students at a college somewhere and talking about say wild metal country or body Harvest and people go oh my dad

played that which a makes me feel really old but B it's they go oh it would be brilliant you know somebody should bring that back and you're like yes they should um and but it but it's such a a strange industry because obviously you know the the hardware the firmware and everything dates so quickly but but you're absolutely right it must be a little bit more Indiana Jones than your plain vanilla developer ever gets to be in terms of going down and doing the detective work so um I would love to see your top 100 list cuz that just sounds fascinating yeah um one of the other things to keep in mind is that um the video game history museum which is based out of erville California they did a study and I forget what up to what year I think it was 2012 where [Music] 87% of all games that have been made up to 2022 are lost to to the stands of

time and they weren't even counting the digital Revolution which has happened in the last 10 years where people aren't you know buying discs anymore or cartridges they're not sitting them in the closet or you know under their TV and you know and like you said in the situation where Hardware firmware old services do that games were connected to don't exist anymore um and it was a bit of work for us to take because the original game was written in original xcode and so we had to like completely report the product to Unity um but we were lucky that we had a a partner that had amazing you know historical records of everything they had done and had all the art and the original team was still together um so it's kind of like we know that the first one was probably going to be the best chance to like get everything because it kind of checked all the boxes we were looking for um and and we just happened to be lucky but this is going to be a problem now for going forward is all these games uh just won't be able to to be played anymore

and you know you can't take an iPhone out of a closet like you can in Atari and plug it into your television um and expect anything to work because all those services are gone and the hard you know maybe you don't have the charger anymore and um will it even boot um and so it's a concern for us and one that you know we're willing and have been investing our time into another thread on that is um there is a I don't know if you're familiar with it it's called The strong uh Museum of play which is in Buffalo New York and um it's a they are working on mobile and digital preservation of of games as well um they you know their their ethos is about all play um but they have been spending a lot of significant time in this area and we we've made contact with them um and have um chatted with them a couple times um they've put a lot of work into it so but bringing it to the web makes such a huge amount of sense because obviously you know if you're if you're dealing with something that that I take it it's

like uh Unity but HTML 5 that kind of it runs yeah yeah so so you know you're you're kind of almost making it um technology agnostic because the the browsers are so Universal and so sort of multi capable that you can you can kind of take it out to the world yeah and that's sort of our current prevailing uh Theory um is that where and where we're spending our time now is um while we do consider ourselves you know mobile natives um since that's where you know the last 15 years of our lives have been spent um the web we believe is actually catching up really quickly and I think it's setting itself up for a second Renaissance or third Renaissance depending on how many times you want to count it um but this idea of being able to play on any device at any time pick up and play your game um what is the one universal piece of software now that's across you know every Smart TV probably

you know your car uh it's it's a browser right and so we're now spending a lot of our time building all our products um as web first um and we're we have some of our own technology we're using but by and large to we're we're trying to uh wrestle Unity to make sure it works inside a browser at maximum op optimization um and with unity 6's recent release you know we haven't totally D dived into it but it's obvious that they're spending investing their resources to make this a a reality and and a more easy a lot easier for for devs very good point though as well is that because that is sort of the next wave I mean that's what's behind your discussion with um half brick half brick plus I mean it is in a way we'll get to the the you know the difficulties in your journey but the point is finding these opportunities in the middle of all of this so it's about looking at the IP

that we know worked because it has a track record and then it's about bringing it back to the browser as that as the platform because that's something that we will all access so it just it it it's something that Indies can do and Indies can do well yeah and the other the other part of our uh operating thesis is that a lot of Indies are running towards um Steam and PC you know PC traditionally and console um and so that market I think you know it's getting saturated every you know daily the amount of Steam games that are being launched is growing and I don't think it's going to slow down any um you know the web is easier to distribute um and it has some issues in terms of like the monetization isn't quite there yet it's not as mature um most of the revenue comes from ads um but there is a prevailing shift I believe that people

are going to become more and more comfortable with web transactions um and buying games and um through through the web um and then then you don't have installation and DRM issues as well so it's um you know it's a place that we're we're spending more time um doing and we're we're aware too of even um there's a company I don't know if you're familiar with them them called Ray browser and they are a browser startup company that is building a browser specifically for web gaming um and uh there we got a chance to meet them at Pocket Gamer Helsinki and um you know talking to them and seeing their vision is uh quite interesting so they're they're worth a checkout as well I found so many incredible interesting little things from people who never saw themselves as game developers but they made really interesting beautiful things and and put them out for the world so you know could we be coming around everything old is new again yeah I

that's that's our current belief right now is that you know you went through this period where when mobile came up everybody you know a lot of people moved to mobile because that was where the hardware was that's where the monetization was um and now we're we're coming back I think around the other way where the the power of the devices are making it so more significantly more signif uh in complicated and um deeper games um can be played now no matter what device you're on and um what kind of connection you have so it's it's allowing for you know a second wave of of the developers to find their footing um in a very low barrier to entry uh situation it's exciting to look into the future and see what's possible but then also you've had to learn from the past you know and there are moments it's everyone's worst nightmare when you're you have a great client and then something changes either they change

their mind or the person you were speaking with changes and that happens a lot more than you would expect and in the future even more so you people are changing all the time their jobs their responsibility someone's responsible for a project and then not again and so you have to Pivot with them you've done this but I'd love to hear from you your advice on how to do that you know what do you do when a key Revenue Source or a key personal source in the company disappears yeah one of the uh things that we uh did or one of our perspectives when we started iron Fox was to always what we called have a bias towards action um almost anything in a company can be uh redone or fixed at a later date um but not doing anything is unfixable because there's you didn't you didn't actually produce anything and so in those situations that you're mentioning we yeah we had um a a large major client uh that we were six months

into working with them um they were an amazing client and things were going very well but we happened to H end up on the wrong side of a spreadsheet one day um uh of the people we were dealing with um above them made a decision that affected us and and and our project got cancelled and in that moment we had about 48 hours to decide what to do um and so we we came together as a group um we we had we saw three sort of paths in forward in front of us one was okay does this experiment of iron Fox the bootstrapped company where we're all the friends that have been working together for 10 years and and we kind of go our separate ways um two do we end up having to say goodbye to a couple of our friends um and lean the team down to make our Runway last a little longer or three do we just take everything that is remaining and try one big more Hail Mary

at at another product um with what we have left over um and we ended up deciding on option b which was uh we leaned the team down a little bit um unfortunately you know we had to lay off some friends uh but that bought us an extra three months or four months of time and luckily the client was very good at the end of the of the project and gave us um more than they needed to contractually um and you know Finding in partners that are willing to understand the situation and the times uh was a massive help to us and in all of that uh we were able to buy ourselves about six months of time um and you know one of the things is uh you know we I started um Iron fox games a lot later in life than some people you know I I waited till my 40s until I did it but that meant I had 15 years of relationships and friendships and people that I could call and uh I hit the phones hard the first thing to do was called all my

friends and asked them if they needed an artist or an engineer or uh a consult some consultancy and I was able to scrape you know a couple small projects um together which kind of bought us more you know four more weeks six more weeks um and then over the um the course of like three to four months we were able to kind of collect ourselves find again one of the major things that came out of that was the Mega Jump deal um and uh we were able to write kind of write size the team um extend our Runway and then get bought us time to to sign another project which we did um and now we're we're a month into another bigger project which is coming out next May and that was about the same size as the project that we lost um in March of this year uh and so it was it was a combination of you know moving forward um relying on the people that you hired and trusting them and uh building a long a strong network over a long period of time um so you know you have friends to

call you know in in the in in complete emergencies yeah that's so important and and we hear this a lot is that the you know your network and leaning into that Network can help you in times of adversity when when you need to find that resilience you need to dig down and you need to in some cases pivot um and we know from speaking to so many of the guests on this show and from our work over the last you know however many years that some studios find it difficult they have a speciality and they just want to focus on that so is that something that you had kind of built in from the outset or is this something that where you had to essentially at a point of Crisis you had to go okay this is what we started to do this is not going well how do we take this forward and was this a a team thing or was this something you had kind anticipated from the outset it was a leadership thing so

my leadership team um we've been together uh all of us between started working to with each other since 2008 to 2010 and we've been through a lot of adversity over the last um 15 years uh you know you can imagine running a live games as a together as a group for eight to 10 years kind of builds a resilience iny inside of you um you know there's always there's always a fire there's always something there's always an emergency and we were we know we knew how to like react and learn together as those and you know when those fires were happening you know constantly it kind of you know strengthens your resolve a lot um and the fact that I was able to do that with the people I've been working with for so long and are I consider extremely good friends of mine um I wouldn't have been able to through do that without them so it was a it was a leadership team thing um and they we had all decided that we had now been finally

had gotten to a place where we weren't it was you know on our shoulders and that comes with all the glory and all the difficulty uh at the same time so yeah it was H it was a definitely a team decision we've heard this a couple times Brion because we've also talked to people about you know networking and uh and Reinventing yourself we just had a show about Reinventing yourself but you want to be resilient but at the same same time as you said yourself you know you want to build continuity into your client relationships where you can you don't just want to call them necessarily you said you know we had you had an issue and you called and you got your projects together but is there a plan is there something you've learned from that experience now that you can Rec recommend some tactics to say you know I have I will always have these people so to speak on speed dial because I'm doing this this and this for the next time the

the one tactic that helped a lot was um ensuring that you have mentors in place um there was specifically two people who uh I had worked with and uh were my bosses at previous companies um that I trusted a lot and they had sort of been with me through the Journey and so they had been through similar situations and being able to call them up and you know go into a room luckily some of them were local here and go into a whiteboard with a in a room with a whiteboard and just hash out like okay this is what's the situation here's the things I know here's the things that I don't know um and what decisions are going to get me to the outcome that I want and having and hearing their advice and their abilities to help me navigate you know maybe some even local government things that were available to us that I didn't know about to um opening up doors or doing you know warm intros of uh to

other people that might have need work that they had heard about um and those you know those mentors or people of the B down the road uh F farther than you um is important and that's one of our ethos as a company is that we want to invest into the next generation of game developers um and sort of give those hands up and those chances to the people that are coming behind um like someone has had done with to me previously so and that that's where you can see that on our website that that's like our main ethos of of the company not so much just to make games but you know allow and give space to other people to to have and look at that passion because right now it's not you know hasn't looked good in the last two years so we want to try to give back as much as possible as well it it's huge because you know as as big as the games industry is and you know so many figures are batted around you know breaking $200 billion dollars a year and you know 3.05 billion players yeah out of 8 billion people in the

world and all of these headline figures tend to take over but it it is still quite a small community um and even when you go to GDC and there are so many thousands of people or all the PGC events you very quickly find your own kind of community your own network and being able to again lean into that is so so important because there are people there who have gone through if not exactly what you're going through but the same hurdles the same potholes encounter the same issues and being able to learn from that is is huge and we're still a young industry this this is the thing you know I I talk to people from film television uh even animation all the time and they're going well you know back in the 19th century and you're like guys 1980s was basically when we more or less started to Cobble this together so it it's fantastic Ry um and I think the you know

having the ability to to connect with that you know rather than keep it to yourself you know the wider Tech sector is not necessarily known as the most uh collaborative the most engaging um and it's one of the things that that we hear so often Peggy in all of the interviews we do is that the connections that people make the people that they meet I should probably you know # PGC connect right here here but it it's so invaluable in terms of helping you through the tough times getting you the help you need and and you know finding a way forward so it's great to hear Ryan yeah thanks it um well one of the things that we've noticed over the last 15 years or at least especially at iron Fox is we have a line that you either have 15 years experience or 15 months and that the the middle range of um Talent just is not really available to us locally um because because of what has happened over the last 10 years and if

you it's not common for people to make it four or five years right and the a lot of people leave the industry and you're right uh we have it is a small town feel a lot of the time you go to a show and you know we we have a saying at iron Fox it's like going to the farmers market and you know you're seeing all your friends and all your locals and you know um and it's it's a great uh you know homecoming experience especially at the bigger ones like GDC and uh you know Traditions kind of come out of that and um we actually started iron Fox um at GDC pretty much uh in 2022 we we left our jobs on a Friday GDC was on a Monday and it was just myself and Chris glant my co-founder and we we flew down to San Francisco with two people and a dream and you know now and we can we'll go back every year and it's you know the one of my fav it's my favorite show of the year to do so even though it's a very far for TR well it's probably even way F farther for you guys to go so I want to stay with people for a moment because love to hear your thoughts on

exactly the importance of people and to and to articulate that yeah you know you get to a point it's like you get you get seasoned and you understand that there are some things you're going to do and there are some non-negotiables and I think that's a core in your story Ryan what is the non-negotiable that maybe you can communicate that our audience can understand that when they're looking for talent when they're looking for people and they're looking for mentors you know what are they looking really looking for and what shouldn't they put up with what shouldn't they settle for it's kind of interesting I mean it's sort of related to what you're talking about um so we started iron Fox uh you know in 2022 So Co hadn't quite completely uh ended and most of the team i' had been working with had been working remote for a while and so one of our non non-negotiables at iron Fox is that we believe that people should be

able to live where they want to live and be where they want to be and that the work is uh uh available fully remotely so we're a fully remote company um and have been and always will be um you know we've had offices a couple times where they were mostly just Hotel desks to give your ex yourself to excuse to get out of the house a little bit um and we one of the early things that were a question for us about bringing in new Talent was Can you hire new Talent um and people fresh out of school and are you can you train and invest in them remotely and so far either we've been very lucky in who we've hired um because we've hired some amazing talent all of them have um excelled in a remote environment um and one of the things I think attributed to that was a lot of the students that we hired had to do their three or four years of school in covid so they had to learn how to be student students and learn how to deliver products and you know reports

and uh projects um remotely and then once they were able to graduate like they it was a natural transition to how we ran our company um so you know that that's one of our main non-negotiables um another non-negotiable for us is our word is our bond um meaning that like whatever we say we're going to do we do um and that's uh comes across on all facets of the company in terms of of in terms of how we treat our staff um how we H you know manage our clients is that if we say we're going to deliver on a date we deliver on it um and you know there's always stuff that shift happens right um you know there's always things that are going to happen but um being honest and true to yourself and to your people that you work with and and the people it's it all comes back around in karma and so you know it's our our our stance to um ensure that whatever we say we're going to do we deliver and I think that's you know helped us through um some really difficult times so why we

move on to something else that we can celebrate which is actually your success you've recently hit um 10 million plays is what you were telling me um yeah how do you feel when you hit that Mark and how did you tell you know tell your team to like say focus on the wins you know don't overlook the accomplishments we just got through a hard time but hey let us seize this moment yeah so we built a a game uh called up together uh you can check it out at upt together. and it is a a kind of a silly little game uh where you're a vegetable or a fruit or a muffin or a hot dog and your job is to get up and out of the kitchen and it was a small little project that we started in one of those downtimes where we were in transition between things and uh our partner pokey.com said hey we we really need a 3D jumping game can you make one of those and we had never built one and we said sure we can and we went and built

it and it started out as uh popcorn and then it evolved into food um and we one of the ethoses of the company is and we had it today every Friday we get together as a group and we play and we eat you know we eat our own dog food we play our own games we're as critical on our products as anybody else and we take time out and I think over the course of three to four months that we built it um the level kept getting better the tools kept improving um the load optimization was improving and when we launched it it uh performed quite well and it still to this day has about 20 to 25,000 da um and it's you know been live for a little over 10 months almost 11 months and we yeah we hit uh 10 million plays on that last week and you know was quite a success um there's if you go into the game you can see the stats worldwide something like six seven million unique players um hundreds of thousands of deaths um every country in the world has played

it um and one of the most surprising things to us was that um it actually has really caught a Traction in Japan and uh we have as almost as many Japanese players as we do uh us and Canadian players uh and that's probably the most surprising thing to me was that we you know we're not I don't know any the the foreign the Asian market is extremely foreign to me and not something I would even know how to crack but some how it just ended up resonating with that player base and has has done quite well there so that's a big thing that means when you're focusing down on the fun and everybody we talk to talks about putting the player first you know focusing on the fun and if you're designing something where you just think actually this is kind of cool this is really good fun to play it it's Universal you know fun is something that I think every every country can can get on board with so that that's fantastic I mean that that's really phenomenal and congratulations that's a a big big thing but moving forward into

the future what's what's next for you guys do you have a new game in the future and what have you learned so far that's preparing you or helping you get that the next project underway yeah we've got two projects uh again with our with Pokey um that are coming out fairly soon uh one's a lot further along than the other and there are two very different games one is sort of a driving Adventure exploration game um and that one is like very close we're on the kind of the final home stretch of that the thing we learned um building that one was taking a lot of um inspiration from what you see in current Roblox design and so one of the things we're learning is that the way that players and kids especially are interacting with games is significantly changing um the idea of menus and popups and large amounts of uh text um doesn't resonate with you know a

10 to 14 year old kid and so a lot of how we are moving our design to being in World interactions so if you say you know you want to upgrade your car well you drive into the garage and it's more of analogous to what you're doing and there's not necessarily a garage upgrade menu item anymore it's just a place in the world that you go to do that interaction and so we we're in the process of changing our design around to be more handsfree essentially where you don't have to move your hand around off the driving controls to interact with the pro with the game and and with the world um the second one is a completely left field kind of thing we're doing a psychological horror uh Adventure game where it's just you're trying to get home and you're stuck in a Subway and there's lots of like you know flickering lights and jump scares and creepy music um and it was kind of on a whim that we wanted to see if we could get something out by Halloween U we're not going to

quite make Halloween uh but the game's coming along quite well and uh you know the team has a lot of fun you know when people are screaming and uh from the jump scares in your own play tests things are going well um and it's the first time any of us had made a horror game and so it's really quite not in our wheelhouse or typical style of things we do but we've had a lot of fun kind of building that out as sort of a challenge to ourselves as as the father of a Civ year old who's who's mildly obsessed with Roblox um and a former writer on video games I I don't know if you can see I I I started with Grand Theft Auto way back in the day uh the the the lack of text options and basically taking people through and making it really intuitive is is a big big thing and I'm I'm learning so much from basically hating on every Roblox game right now it's like what what what are you doing what um but it is it's an an a really

really fascinating new way of learning and and looking at games from the perspective of new players it it it's phenomenal um and you're never going to go J wrong with a jump scare it it's where games started you know blowing stuff up in jump scares is our wheelhouse so you know I I can't wait to see what you have up your sleeve let's look for forward out onto the Horizon I mean you're looking at new platforms talking about consumer preferences player preferences you know less text more Hands-On emerging Technologies where should Indie Studios Focus their energy going into next year where do you see the big opportunities what excites you this is more of my own personal ends is um I'm actually I've been quite impressed with and I kind of crashed on them a little earlier but uh with the steam deck um it is a device that I

probably do almost all my gaming on now I have a decent PC I have two consoles um you know it's more of a analogous to where my life is because I I travel quite a bit now um and or just being able to play you know console level games um in my hands you know at at night kind of when I'm winding down or on the plane um and so being making sure your game works really well in the handheld format of not just mobile but of a steam deck or you know some of the new ones that are coming out um I think that's going to be the the technology and the power of those machines and the battery lives hopefully you know will continually to get better um so if you're building a game um that's honestly my per when I go to look for games now I look to see if they play well on a steam back um and if they don't I pretty much pass on them uh because that's where I do almost all my gaming uh these

days so build build build for handheld that's going to be my that's my look to the Future comment so R for all the developers Founders you know Studio heads listening in what's the one big piece of advice you'd want to leave them with about building something that in endures the uh one of the things is uh you know you said it earlier shift happens and being able to understand that change and unpredictability is going to be the norm um it's not a week or two weeks go by that something comes out of left field and you need to be able to be flexible reinvent yourself um and don't get too hung up on one path uh forward Because by the time that you think something's going to happen or something will be in a certain place it either won't be or it have passed by you and so uh being flexible is is kind of

the best advice I can give you know as a company now uh we are a mix of work for hire and a work and some we work on some of our own products and I don't believe that that percentage uh will change over time but my hope is that we always or my plan is to always have a little bit of both um and that way we can you know reduce the impact of of large events um and take advantage of of the good ones so be be flexible because a lot of H A Lot happens can a lot can happen very very quickly Ryan every guest who comes on to the show gets asked a couple of questions it brings it right back to the heart of things which is the games themselves so we have two questions we ask all of our visitors uh first of all what game are you playing right now what's obsessing you what's on your steam deck what you playing when you're on that flight second of all favorite game of all time um I'll answer the favorite game of all time uh it's a game

called this this R happens so you go it's a game called star Siege tribes and it was a first person uh shooter a third person shoo first person shooter that was very popular in about 2000 to 2002 um ended up having a couple sequels I think highres owns the IP now um and I played that all through college and I always thought I was better than everybody else because games like Doom were stuck on the ground and the big revelation of this one was that it had a jetpack and so everything was very vertical and the Z access was a huge um Innovation um and I remember Juke Nukem 3D basically blew my mind so I'm I'm with you 100% and that was one of the first games I played in multiplayer so it was team versus Team matching and uh I was on dial up and you know was a whole thing and what I'm playing right now is uh I

picked up sea of stars uh which is a great throwback to the original early RPG games like chrona trigger which is probably my second or third game favorite game of all time um and I also picked up uh the Prince of Persia game um I forget the name of it exactly the one they actually just announced they disbanded the team it was the sidescrolling uh Prince of Persia game so those are the two games I'm playing right now um I'll be be picking those back up on Tuesday when I'm headed to Montreal so before we bring it to an end I just have to say thank you so much for joining us it's been an absolute Joy it's lovely hearing what you guys are doing it it sounds absolutely wonderful and we wish you every every you know success in the future absolutely and I just want to say because I want it possible that one people connect with you because maybe they want to connect with you for some advice but I'm also thinking maybe because they're like my didn't say yes Ryan absolutely because

let's face it you have you have grit but you also have Vision it all comes together with you so what is the best way to connect with you Ryan uh you can reach me at Ryan ironfox games.com or through Linkedin uh Ryan filsinger I'm one of the only ones with that name combination so I'm not too hard to find this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games Market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast at pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in

listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz for/ podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next Edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future