How to Grow a Game Studio Through Challenging Times | Develop:Brighton 2024

First up, I'm going to kick us off now. So, uh, before I start, please can I ask you to turn off your phones? Um, this is definitely going to be more interesting than your dad jokes on your family watchup group. I guarantee it. So, my name's Johnny. I run a studio in Guilford, uh, called Glowade, and I'm going to talk to you about how to grow a studio through challenging times. We're all here. We all think that this is something interesting. Um, but to keep your interest and to guarantee that you're going to pay attention, I've got this very, very exclusive prize, which is a glow lanyard with some pin badges. And throughout the talk, there's going to be scattered a few of these little chaps. This is our art var. This is our company mascot. So, the first person to tell me the correct number of arts in the talk wins this. Uh, very, very alluring. Uh, and so have to pay attention now. So, how to grow a studio through challenging times. The top tip, it's all the times. There's never an

easy bit. Uh, if you're kicking back thinking this is all going well, uh, you're probably missing something. And at the very least, there's always what's happening next. There's a reasonable chance you haven't heard of Glowade. uh unless you've seen some of our excellent uh develop booths over on the left or uh you've been to the play at develop uh events that we sponsored for the last couple of years. Um I started Glowade in 2015 with two friends of mine, Mike Green, who is the creative director and Adam Civic who's our art director. Uh we are two fellow uh Lion Head alumni survivors. Uh we released our first game Wonderorlds in 2017 for iOS. Uh, we signed a deal with EA Originals in 2018 for a game that never saw the light of day. And we signed a deal with Amazon Games in 2021 uh for an as yet unannounced title. So, this company's been going for nine years now. Uh, and we've been operating largely under the radar, but maybe not for much longer. Watch this space. We've

not had a major hit. You probably haven't heard of us. Uh, but we are here and as a company, we are thriving. Together, we're going to take a journey through the timeline of Glow Maid and examine many of the ups and downs that we've seen over the last nine years, looking at how we've grown from three founders in a waspinfested asbestos lined attic uh to a team of 70 making a multi-million pound game. Some smart pants among you will go, "Well, how can you do that without Amazon's money, Johnny? How can you uh could you do that kind of growth without big Amazon giving you big money?" Well, kind of no. Uh, and that's why a lot of this talk is going to boil down to be talking about cash. Uh, by and large things when you're running a business are good when you have it and they're tough when you don't. Uh, so get money, happy days, end of talk. Uh, this isn't a how to pitch your game tutorial or speaking to investors guide. Um, I've done a bunch of that and happy to talk to you about it afterwards if you want. But we do need to destigmatize talking

about money. Uh, somehow it doesn't seem very proper. Um, but we can't be scared of talking about cash or of having enough of it or not having enough of it. Um, because really that's the reality of running a business and making video games. Um, you can't run a business without money. If you don't have money, it's basically a hobby. Um, as a wise rich man told me once, cash is king. Cash has to be the at the forefront of your mind when you are building a game, running a studio, planning for all this. But you know I want to be sensitive about this as well because Glow made are doing quite well. Um it's not the case for a lot of companies around a lot of individuals. Um you wind back a few years and you had these VCs chucking money around. Uh you had this crazy hiring cycle kind of during and just after COVID where uh remote work was normalized and every company was offering these bigger and bigger salaries to try and attract the top talent to rapidly deliver on this huge demand for everybody just having spare time, load of money, wanting to play

games. But as we all know that bubble's burst over the last 12 months. We've seen layoffs across the industry with you know Epic, Sony, Microsoft, everybody's kind of been suffering at that top end. We've gone from this place where cash is readily available to where it's now not. It's much much harder to secure any kind of funding than it was 12 months ago. It's harder to find a job than it was 12 months ago. There's loads of jobs going around, but the competition is so incredibly high. The games industry is tough and right now the reality is there's very little security but you know I'm definitely not here to kind of boast or anything like that. You know you're going to see in a moment that there's been a lot of turbulence and a lot of uh ups and downs and really really quite hairy moments uh in the last nine years for the life of life of Glowmate. I guess a bunch of us have seen uh three body problem or maybe read the books. Um, if you haven't in a story, there's this video game, uh, and there's a planet where they the climate in the

planet rapidly flips between stable and chaotic eras. And if you're in a stable stable area, everything's fine. If you're in a chaotic area, you get burned to death. But there's no way of actually predicting uh how long one of those eras will last or when it will change. But in the story, there's a whole bunch of people uh saying that they can. And I think this is a pretty good analogy for a video games business. The life of a games company, big or small, is a series of stable and chaotic eras. Typically, the larger the business, the longer the stability or the chaos last. And the smaller you are, the more vulnerable you are to change. So, you've got you're flipping more rapidly between stable and chaos. And at Glow Made, like I said, we've had a lot of flips between stability and chaos. So, through this journey, we're going to look at the there's three essential ingredients uh for keeping a business afloat. and I've cleverly called them the three Ps. The first is people. Uh who you are and the team you work with is absolutely critical. The second is

planning. You need to know where you want to be and have a plan to get there. It's no good to just stumble through thinking I want to make a great game uh with cross fingers and stars in your own. And the third one, of course, because it had to start with P, is a big pot of cash. If you had to pick one of those three, that's really the important one because like I said, running a games company or any company uh costs a eye watering amount of money. I've talked about this before and again we'll happily kind of go into this if you want, but you know, the numbers for running a company make logical sense when you add them up, but they are kind of mind-bogglingly large. I'm probably going to say three Ps a lot during the talk, so if you don't giggle a bit, I will. uh if you're lucky enough to have a really wealthy uncle or just like be a multi-millionaire then maybe this bit doesn't apply to you but like I think most of us that is not it's not that and uh you know at some point you're going to be on the hunt for some financial support. So, like I said, I'm going to do a timeline of a company and and I've done

this. This is the kind of mood chart of Glowade going back to 2015 when we started uh kind of the ups and downs through the through the uh through the years. And it's not coincidental uh that this is also fairly analogous to when we did have money and when we didn't um over the years and our cash position has fluctuated. Right now, we're doing okay, but as you can see, we've had some pretty big downs and some reasonable ups. I want to go right back to the start. Why do we want to start a games company? When Mike and Adam and myself were were thinking about this, the things we thought about was we wanted to be creative. We wanted to be our own bosses. We wanted to move fast, make our own decisions. The things we didn't think loads about was it's terrifying and it's really hard and it's really stressful. We kind of knew they were there. Um, but one of the things we kind

of knew innately I think and even if we didn't like write it down or articulate it really really clearly is that if you want people to be creative, you need to give them the environment and the space in which to do that. We look back at places we previously worked and projects we'd done and reflected on what went right, things we want to replicate and what didn't go right, things we'd do differently. So, you know, for me, I love creative freedom, but I didn't like it when there weren't enough constraints to hem it in and set a direction. And but also, I didn't like the opposite. Too many constraints and not enough freedom. I liked it when I felt like a person and felt important. I didn't like it when I didn't feel seen or heard. So even at this early stage um we're trying to figure out how to thread the needle uh between these kind of conflicting pitfalls. No real idea how to do it by the way. Uh but at the very least we were kind of aware of the traps we needed to look out for. This is actually um the waspinfested asbestos line attic um where we had a wasps nest in the cupboard which was a fun discovery and

the asbestos was also another fun discovery. So uh we knocked the wall down and there we go. But let's not overthink this. We're relatively young. We're, you know, in our early 30s. Uh we've only got eight kids between us and what could go wrong? Um we needed to get some money uh from an investor. And we did. We got some seed money. Uh we got 150 grand, which is, you know, that's an enormous sum of money. It was a huge sum of money for us as a a very very fledgling business. Um, and our pitch to these investors was, let's make a cool social media app where you create vignettes of moments or memories and share them with your friends. Um, we had a tech demo. We knew we had the capability and the capacity and the skills to make it and we just needed the funding to get it to market. But what we discovered is that in this social media space, you being absolute noviceses by the way at this, your effects optimizing for time. And the more you optimize for time, the less time you have for the fun. And we were

three game developers. We know hardwired to make fun stuff. So we massively underestimated the task. We massively underestimated how much time and money we'd need to take this thing to market. And you know, to be fair, I'd somehow convinced the investors of this and they'd also massively underestimated this. Um, so we ran out of time, which is the same as running out of money. We hadn't planned very well for this and um the pot of cashache was just too small and had run dry. And you know we like I said we have a tech demo. The whole system works but actually taking that thing to market as a bunch of us will know is incredibly hard work and a load more effort than you possibly even imagine it would be. So we needed to pivot very rapidly. Um let's make games again we said and let's let's like optimize and focus on fun. So it's a kind of classic story here. Maybe some of us have been through this. We run out of our own funding to do the thing we want to do. So I was rapidly hitting up all my kind of contacts

going. You know, I've got this really great team. Have you got any work for us just to keep the lights on, to keep the business afloat while we kind of work out the next steps? And I I phoned up one of my friends and uh I said, "I've got this great little team and you're trying to finish your game. Can can we help?" And he said, "Well, I don't have any work, but we want to do publishing. We've got a bunch of money. Uh what's the game you're going to make?" And I was like, Mike. So Mike did this heroic kind of designer game in about three weeks. And then we pitched it and um we started making this game. And this game uh eventually came out in 2017. It was called Wonderorlds. It's this beautiful little gem of a game. And I got some nice screenshots because I you know, I'm really proud of this game. Uh it's got this amazing visuals. It was on it was on mobile. It was um this really tactile and gentle and life affirming and just it's just this lovely thing. And um you know little quiz uh who's launched a game here? Anybody? Hands up. I've launched a game. Has anybody launched a game that was critically or commercially successful? Has anybody launched one that wasn't?

Yes. Well, um you you get this tremendous elation of like, yes, we've done this thing. We're really proud of it. There's loads of stress because we've got to get to market. We got to get it done on time. And then nothing. We know this is not uncommon. We know the market. We know it's hard, but there's a financial and an emotional toll to this. When the game that you've worked on for however much time, however much money just sinks basically without a trace, you know, I'm not an idiot. I had planned for what do we do after the game? Um, but what happens when that plan comes undone? You know, some of us will know it's not uncommon to do post-launch support for your game. Um, like we knew we'd need that for Wonder. We planned for that. We'd agreed that we we knew what our finances were going to look like. It was it's a decent enough plan for where we were at. Um but you know what happens when the publisher changes course and that plan falls apart. We're still a science tiny

studio. We've got no money to really argue with it in a sort of legal level. Um and we didn't have any headroom to put any money back from the dev budget. So we're basically back to square one again. But you know, we can't stop. We can't give up. um we're trying to navigate what we might be able to do with Wonderorlds. Uh we can't rely on anything coming of that because who knows and so we started looking for more work again and designing and pitching our next project. Um so this is the reactive planning of like okay we need to do something now. Um so this stuff on screen is um some of the amazing kind of art that Adam developed for uh what we call at the time project toast. Uh the tagline being build cool robots, take them on a dangerous missions and explore the universe. Sounds great. And we're building the vibe. We've got this working prototype of this really fun action RPG with a ton of personality and customization. And I had a conversation with my friend James and he said um he's like, "How are you going to pitch it? You going to go to GDC?" And and I'm, you know, being really tight because we're kind of really low on money. I was

like, "Oh, I don't know if we can afford to go to GDC." And he's like, "Well, no, maybe you should think about it." And I suddenly realized like it clicked. I was like, "Oh, yes. We this is the business case for going and pitching and trying to sell this game. you know, I've got a studio to save and this is the way I need to do it. So, we stretched our finances out more than we thought we could do by this point in 2018. Um, and our bank balance is somewhere between £5,000 and minus £5,000 is not we're not in a good place, you know, but we could be completely screwed. Um, and I told the team, you know, I don't know what's going to happen now. I I do know I can't pay you at the end of this month, and if you want to leave, I would respect that because you you there are jobs and you you need money. Um, so we were really really skating on thin ice at this point. So I go to GDC and I pitch project toast and I meet uh Joel who's a very good friend of mine now. He's an agency and they this agency comes to represent us. I work some connections and I pitch the game and it's all going great. But as we

all know this stuff takes time. you meet the bisdev guy who loves your pitch and even if things go super well uh you're looking at like three months maybe six months until you actually get something signed. Friend of mine counted a year and a day from the original initial pitch to actually getting the deal signed for one of his deals. So now we need we've got a plan but we need a plan to support the plan so that we still got a company by the time we actually get the money. It's getting complicated. It's getting stressful. I spend more time on the slides on 2018, by the way, because this is um So, we're back in the UK now. It's April 2018. Uh we've got a bunch of interest for Project Toast, and we're asking for $5 million for this game, which is a reasonable amount of money uh uh for for what we wanted to do. Uh and it felt like a really good thing to be asking for, but like I said, we need to keep the company afloat until we get it, if we get it. So, I've got Mike Green on speed dial for emergency game design at this point. Um Joel's got some meetings

with uh some investors and these guys are, you know, they're financial backers. They're not interested in money to produce a single game. They are interested in the long plays that how do you build the studio? What do you you know, what's your vision? What do you want to do? Like ecosystems and stuff, you know, what what makes the business stand out and valuable because ultimately that's what they're investing in. So, we come up with this uh outrageous Hail Mary pitch called Treehouse, which is uh a series of small games building this kind of game creation platform. We're still seven people, by the way. Um, and it's um it's retail products and it's it's it's bananas. Um I'm not really giving anything away, by the way, but like you can see that all this absurdly aggressive kind of time schedule for 2019, 2020 for three games. Um but uh you know the money guys want to see results. You know they want you they gota got to convince them that you're gonna be really productive and but amazingly someone actually buys this um and they and they give us the money and the time and importantly they give us

some direction. They love the hustle, they love the studio, you know they they can see through through this but they also know what we're trying to achieve. Um and they can see the drive and they see the talent we have in the studio and they most of all can see that actually you know we just need a financial break. um this pitch, you know, is a it's a good long-term goal and it was done with the knowledge that we're also pitching this other game. So, we kind of had these kind of two irons in the fire. And um so at this point, we are we're kind of getting some financial investment that's actually going to keep the company afloat while we try and get Project Toast uh kind of uh kind of landed. And um so I'm I'm pitching uh we're pitching a project toast with EA and finally at the end of 2018 which is uh was a very long year uh we closed the deal with EA Originals for project toast which then became a game called Rust Buckets which then became a game called Rustart which uh I'll tell you more about in a second. But there you know there's this is where we exhale a huge

sigh of relief. It's been a really big long year of turbulence, of uncertainty and instability. So, finally, it feels like we can just relax, just get on with making the game that we really want to make. You know, we we got the people, we had the talent, we we managed to hire some people. We had a plan because we knew what we were going to do. We and uh and we also we had the pot of cash that we needed to get this plan done. So, now, yeah, we can just kick back and just do the thing that we've been wanting to do all along, right? Uh, not really. Sadly not. Uh, here's where we had the money, but our goals didn't align. Uh, it wouldn't even be a stretch to say that we weren't even sure of our goals at this point, I think. Um, we didn't totally know what the game was when we pitched it because we were, you know, rapidly trying to kind of just do something. And as we built the game, the design of it and the direction of it kind of crystallized over here. But you could also see EA's idea of the game kind of crystallizing over here and

we're sort of really diverging. Um about 12 months into production, we ended up with this nasty cycle of just um being on the back foot the whole time being reactive. We wanted to tell nice stories and like have emotions and stuff like that and they wanted stuff to blow up more and more often. Uh they're both totally decent approaches and both could have made completely fine games with what we were doing but um you know ultimately we'd overreached and we didn't have a clear plan from the start. So we ended up just really lacking in confidence what we wanted to do because half the time we didn't even feel like we necessarily knew it and it's very very hard to say no to the guys holding the purse strings when they say we want A or we want B and the best answer you really have is not A not B. And so, you know, if you've been in this situation, you can see where we're headed. Um, I hope I don't offend anybody here, but um, bas publishers are horse traders. They, uh, they're making a bunch of bets and they're going to see which ones work

out. Um, there's a bunch of different strategies for exactly how you do that, but you don't hear of 90% of the games that get signed and don't come to market. And this is a really classic story of big people with big money, big ideas, and if you're not ready for them to come at you, you're going to get chucks all over the place. We weren't ready. We ended up, like I said, constantly on the back foot trying to hit a continually moving target just to keep the sugar daddies happy. They canceled the game uh after a few months of really kind of uh us trying to react and do what they what they wanted to do. But I think ultimately it was like it's just this is too hard. But you know, take a deep breath, no problem. We've got a cool game. It was a good game and it's nearly finished. Uh and we are in February 2020, which is amazing because it's just one month before uh GDC. So I can go uh we rapidly rebranded or rebadged the game into what it had sort of become uh which was it was Giant Stompy Robot Chaos. So that was the

working title of the new game that we were going to go and pitch and go look here's a nearly finished game. Uh it's not going to, you know, doesn't pay much money. It's really good. Got good team. Blah blah blah. Um, you know, that's my upbeat message to the team. That was my sort of feedback sandwich. They've can the game, but um, you know, we're going to go to GDC. We've got all the contacts, got all the connections. Game is looking great. Let's do this, guys. Oh, wait. No, it's it's 2020. Um, so this is where all of the plans fall apart. GC gets canled. Publishers close ranks because there's so much uncertainty. Nobody knows what's going on uh in the world, you know. And I rep this game to everybody under the sun over a few weeks. We doing so many demos. Like I could at that point I could have literally I could have done an hour pitch for this game like blindfolded. I knew it so well. I knew exactly what I was doing and nobody bit. Um it was this was a really hard kind of moment for us because you know if you you if you've got a game out uh you're probably doing relatively well because

everyone's stuck at home. Everyone's playing load of games. They're buying a load of games, filling up their Steen libraries with everything they see. But if you don't have a game out, like we didn't, it's it's really hard. You know, it feels really weird to say out loud, but um because I I don't think I really talked about it much, but we had to furlow our entire team, which is seems like a really weird anomaly in the games industry. Um and so I'm sitting there with this entire team fured. Tremendous sense of failure really. Um, you know, I've got a business that's failing. My wife's a paramedic in London. Uh, I've got a 5-year-old daughter at home. You know, I was pretty convinced that this was now the end of the studio. Um, but I was not going to go down without a fight. I we nearly sold the studio for an absolute pittance just to keep the lights on. But we packed out of that at the last moment, which I'm very glad we did. But you know a pandemic is not your typical plan like nobody can really plan

for that. Um and certainly given the circumstances the being able to furow the team kind of saved the company. Um but I was still extremely worried because I wasn't sure what team we were going to have coming back. Um you know I thought why would anybody want to work for a company that can't afford them? Why would anybody stick about when there's all these other amazing jobs happening over over kind of the summer of 2020? Like everybody's hiring. I thought, well, you know, even if we do make it through this, like what are what are we going to be left with? Um, but amazingly, we we we lost like two people. Um, and we were 2025 at this point. So, you know, when I was thinking about this for the talk and you're bringing it back to the three Ps again, it's not it's not it wasn't the planning and it definitely wasn't the pot of cash, but it really was the people, the team we built, the culture we'd kind of embedded in the studio was and and it was and I think it remains attractive.

People liked working with us and when you've got no plan and you've got no money, that's really something very important. So, got all this stuff going on. We've exhausted all of our options to pitch giant stompy robot chaos. What do we do now? Well, luckily, or I don't know, maybe not luckily, we did actually have a backup plan. Uh, this came in the form of was at that point a little a little UGC game we had two people working on in the background. Um, the actual plan had been to self-publish that at some point. Uh, and it's going to be like a cool little indie game and blah blah blah. Uh, but I said to Sam and Jim, the two people working on it, um, okay guys, we need we've got nothing else. We need to go and pitch this to publishers because, um, you're not our skunk works project now. Uh, we need to make this game look like it's worth $5 million. Uh, and because we need this game to save the company. So, that that was wake up call for them. That was a shocker. Um, the game was was going to

be top down. Um, and this this is a top pitching tip. Um, but I needed it to look a lot more expensive. So, I said, "Can you take the camera and put it behind the player?" And it's a third person action game. And, uh, it looks like it's worth $5 million. Uh, and we did that and it worked. So, we're off. Um so finally we get to 2021 and um we did a bunch of pitching and you know this is where I could got to avoid too many details at the moment sadly but you know Amazon uh came back to us said we love the game uh but we think you should ask for more money. So I said all right yep I can can do that. Um I don't know if you've heard of Amazon they're very very big company they do things like legal stuff very very slowly. Uh, so this was like you just took five or six months to to close this deal deal and and once again the company's on life support because we've we've pitched this game. We've sold this idea to Amazon. They we really like this. You need to have more money because you want to do more with

it. And and I'm thinking we're going to run out of money by the time we actually get to sign the deal again. Like will we even have the team left? Um and we begged and borrowed a fair bit and did a bit of kind of like very careful financial planning but to to get it through. Um but you know when I think back to how that all felt like obviously like a tremendous sigh of relief when I actually had a deal signed. We actually had money coming into the bank. skeptical, you know, been have had had a bumpy ride with publishers before, both with Glow Made and elsewhere and and slightly terrified as well because we actually have to deliver on this now and the expectations are high. You know, we've already been down this road with another publisher and it that didn't end well. So, what did we learn? Well, you know, we knew what we wanted. We knew what we wanted to make. We had incredible clarity of focus with the

game design uh and the pitch. Some might actually call that a plan, which was new at this stage. So now we're in 2022. We're making this excellent game. Um but the expectations for it are getting bigger. Our ambition for it is getting bigger. We need more people. We need more process to manage the people. We need more space. If you look back to Wonderorlds, which was now, you know, five years earlier, we the whole team, seven of us, uh, sitting around a small coffee table to figure out what we're going to do that day, had the whole game on a single Trello board. Uh, and now we've got in 2022, we've got QA, we've got production, we've got other support, we've got Jira, we've got Confluence, we got a billion Slack channels. At this stage, you know, the entire budget for Wonderorlds was about £500,000. We're now doing that every month. It's there's that classic quip that building a game is like building a plane while it's flying. Well, so now we're building the team is the same. So now we're like building the factory that's

building the plane while the plane is flying as well, which is a whole new set of challenges. And as a founder or a leader, you shift from being this hands-on developer to managing the daily needs and challenges of running a studio. And this can happen slowly or super rapidly depending on kind of where your passions are and the speed of your growth and what you kind of want to achieve with your own company. But it's undeniable and it's unavoidable. You know, where your core mission was originally let's make the best game we can, now your core mission becomes well build and enable the team to make the best game we can. You're hiring which takes time. You're doing more managing. You've got more production processes, more formality and rigor to stop everything spiraling out of control. And you've got growth to support the growth. Uh, and as the studio changes, you want to keep an eye that your values are still held. Your team culture is still reflecting those values. Um, I felt like a real grown-up recently because I actually got my own office. And this was but this was not because I really wanted it. I kind of

liked being sat amongst the team. Um, but really needed it. I really needed some of that separation. need that uh uh sense of privacy to you know half the conversations were like hey Johnny Johnny could you come away and we'd scuttle off to a corner to have a private conversation so that was the point I was at uh quite recently but wherever you're at at this point you're doing a very very different job I forgot about that little joke there um so all of this is changing but is there anything that hasn't changed is there anything constant in this journey You know, so much of running our studio is basically squeaking by until we can get the right money in. Um, but you know, we're not robots. We're not omnisient kind of invincible game-making machines. We're people. Money in the bank doesn't fill emotional needs. Money doesn't sit quietly and listen as you stare into your coffee cup and just say, "Can't do this." And that's where you

need the right people around you, the very best people you can. Mike and Adam and myself, we shared a vision in 2015 to build this inclusive studio that gave people the space to be creative and to create amazing things. The cheesy oneliner for Glowade back then uh has uh was and remains the simple phrase joyful creativity. In 2016, we brought in a friend of mine Harvey into the studio to help with the finance. um she's had her hair raising few years as you can imagine. But as the leadership team, the four of us put together Glow Maid's core values which still stand and have been on our website ever since. We want to uh you know we we have to be public because you have to be accountable uh to your team, to yourself and to the sort of the wider world. So we broke down our values into three parts. uh we nurture which is the present uh we fulfill which is the future and we are brave which is the way we want to get there and it sounds kind of a bit tright but the importance of it

is that it's real there's these three headings there's a whole bunch of kind of supporting statements for what they all mean of who we are uh what we do and how we're going to do it and how did it work for us when we went through so much extreme turmoil and so many crazy ups and downs You know, ultimately for me, it's it's relational. These relationships between the founders and the leaders in your organization are absolutely critical because those healthy mature relationships flood downwards and set the tone and become the norm. If your leaders treat each other with respect, that sets the tone for everyone else. If your leaders resolve disagreements maturely, that sets very clear expectations for behaviors. If your m leaders are mature enough to lose an argument, the team can see that the project is more important than the individual. So you can have the best plan and all the money in the world, but ultimately that stuff is worthless if you don't have the people.

So this is where we're at now. We're in a relatively stable area versus the chaos of the previous years. But like I said, we're kidding ourselves if we think it's going to be like that forever. Can't rest on our laurels. We've got to be planning uh where are our projects going? What's our financial plan? What's our backup plan or a disaster plan for when a key person leaves? So on and so on. But you know at least time at this time we we kind of know what the plane is. While I was building the talk I was looking through a bunch of old designs and pitch documents, old materials looking all the way back to 2018. And the game we're building now is so startlingly similar to the original pitch from four even five years ago. It really is a real credit to Mike and Adam for just absolutely honing in on that and sticking with it. So, let's come back to the three Ps just to wrap up. We've got people, we've got planning, and we got a pot of cash. So, we have great people right now. We've got a good plan, and we've got a decent pot of cash to execute it with.

Something's definitely going to go wrong at some point, but we've weathered a bunch of storms. Uh, and I think we're in a good place to weather the next one. Glommy is a very different studio to what it was five years ago and it's going to be different in five years time. Um, but oddly enough, it's still the same studio. It still feels the same, just 10 times bigger and somehow a little less terrifying. And that brings me to the end with the obligatory we are hiring slide. Um, that's it. Uh, any questions? You got about 10 minutes or so. There it is. Right on you. 10 minutes. the guy in the black t-shirt.
Hello. Uh, great conver uh, sorry, great presentation. I work for EA, so hopefully you don't hate me. Um, the question that I had was more about sort of how you handled growth. Um, because you sort of went from quite a small studio, you sort of got up to seven people around sort of 2020 and then you

sort of really expanded. Uh, in the past I found studios expand too quickly. Uh, so I guess I'm just curious how you handle that.
So we went from Yeah, I wasn't super clear on the numbers. We went from like seven people for about two years. Then we went up to about 15 and then 20 in the course of like another year or maybe two. And then so from I think in end of 2020 we were like 25 30 people and and now we've kind of gone you know we've at least doubled over the next sort of since the last four years. I think the um the the trick for us was kind of like do get getting the processes and stuff just in time. You don't want to go too far ahead and put like a bunch of red tape in when you're 10 people because you don't need that. Uh, but you also don't want to be acting like you're 10 people when you're 50 people because you do need to be running stuff in a very very different way. You know, if in my head the company's identical in some ways like when it was just the three of

us, but if you join the company right now, you you're you're going to be expecting a whole bunch of different stuff because you're joining a a 70 person studio which is established and you know stable and whatnot. So suddenly you've got like okay we've got HR stuff and those are the kind of the thorny bits which you need to choose your moment because if you go too fast then it's just really constricting but if you go too slow it's just really frustrating.
Hi Johnny. Uh great presentation. Uh just to to uh to get the jackpot I work for Amazon. So uh I've got uh two questions of course. The first one is how many uh odd works were there?
Well, you tell me. That's why you get the prize.
Well, that's why I want to to tell me.
Well, if I tell you, then uh everyone will get it.
Exactly. Yeah.
Come up to me afterwards and uh and if you get it right, you can.
But the second one is actually a classic Amazonian question actually, which is looking back with what you know now, what would you have done differently? Um

like what what's the biggest kind of change that you would made to maybe get to where you are now or get to a different place? It's a good one. Um, that's a tricky one because I think we we absolutely did the best we could with what we had at the time. I think we'd have if if I was to re redo it all again, I suspect we'd have done something completely different at the very very start. I think um because I think that we wanted to make something creative and fun. We felt like the reason we were going to make an like an a social app was because we knew we could get investment for it. That was basically we we knew that it was going to be hard to find a publisher with because with where we were at in our lives, we didn't have the time to really build the demo and stuff, but we pretty much felt like it was going to be easier for us to actually get some investment to do this thing. So like I don't think that kind of set us wildly wrong, but like I might have approached that differently, I suppose.
Hi Johnny, great speech. Thank you.

Um but let try to be the devil's advocate here. So from what I understand a few years ago uh what got you into a better space was you pitched a game which you're still working on currently which obviously is going to be a great game from what I saw
but what what what helped your studio survive in the last couple of years was basically that one great pitch that you did
and this is where the money is coming from.
Yeah.
Okay. I mean, yeah. I mean, that's that's ultimately the sort of the model of the of um of the studio is we we don't have independent finance kind of coming in at a really like at all. Uh so we we have the sort of pub dev publisher kind of model. Um that's the way we kind of decided we wanted to do it. There's a bunch of different ways of doing it. Um that for us was the one because we wanted to maintain the as much internal control as as we could of the company. say
uh hi yeah uh thanks uh for the speech

Johnny um I wanted to ask about scaling up because in my experience that is like the hardest thing
um you mentioned that you are quite a large studio now was that part of your plan with Amazon um you mentioned that you were and then a second question is just you also mentioned after co you actually ma managed to retain staff
was it the same during scaling up what was the turnover like while scaling up to a 70% is a a person studio.
That's that's good good two questions. Um so what was the first one again?
The first one was was the scale up part of the
So was the scale up plan part of the kind of Amazon thing? So I think certainly they when we pitched the game to those guys they had this they they kind of possibly believed in it maybe even more than we did. They saw some potential where we didn't. And that's why when you know when they said, "Oh, we think you need to ask for more money." It's like, you know, they suddenly saw, "Okay, we could we this could be really really cool. We don't want to underell it." Um, you know, it's

not a stretch to say that the company's bigger now than I ever thought it would be. Uh, I didn't we didn't set out to make a I just thought, "Oh, we'll get to about 30 people. It'll be really fun. We'll kind of sit around make indie games for a while." Um, so yeah, it was but it was, you know, we're definitely scaling to to to deliver the game in the way we want to do it. Um and then in terms of your second question, so retention I think I you know I think we've we've always been quite open internally with like these are the problems you know we you know people people respect you quite a lot when you admit this isn't great but we are sorting it rather than just like pretending like everything's fine. So we we really didn't have tremendous turnover. I mean you know we we we lost uh we lost one person because uh she'd originally joined the company to make the game with EA and we no longer were not making that game. So, you know, after a couple of years, she's like, "Actually, I'm I'm going to gonna go and do something else." And, you know, go with my blessing. And I think the other thing is that we turnover's a weird one. Like, we have

pretty low turnover, which I'm really proud of. I think it's a really people enjoy working here, but I also I don't want people to I don't want people to feel like they have to work for Glow Made forever. I think like a job is just part of your your part of the sort of very rich tapestry of your life, you know, like if people come to us and work for a few a few kind of a few years and then go on and do something else. Brilliant. You go with our blessing because you've you've given us that time. You know, it's a transactional thing. We're paying for your time. You're spending your time of your life in this job and then go and do the next thing. You know, learn from it and go on. So, you know, we we don't lose that many people at all. We've got pretty low turnover. But in general when people people aren't getting something from Glow Maids that they want like either we can turn to try and provide that or we can actually no we're not we're not able to do that because what you want is something that doesn't isn't what we kind of want to do.
Hello thanks for the frank and honest talk. Um my question is regarding the free piece um pot of cash planning.

Okay. Um, regarding people, how do you find the right people and and where do you look for to find the right people?
That's a really good question. I think I I don't know. I sometimes see people like putting Apologies if you've done this putting on on LinkedIn like I'm looking for a a technical director to do my startup with and like I for me I I don't I don't kind of get that because I think you do need some sort of relationship or like at least that's for me. So, you know, like Mike, Adam, and myself, we we are friends. We are we're better friends now than we were seven years ago, but we weren't like amazing best buds. We had worked together, we liked each other, we trusted each other, and we thought we could do the thing. And actually, for us, that's quite a good middle ground because the problem with starting a company with your best friends is what happens if it goes tits up and you suddenly be losing your friendships uh as well as your company. Uh, and the problem with starting a company with unknowns is that you don't really know what you're walking into.

So, it's it's about like finding those people. It's it's ultimately it's about trust. Do I trust these other people that I'm starting the company with that we're trying to do the same thing together? Um, yeah, I don't how how you meet those people is kind of up to you, I guess.
You go to universities for like new graduates or did you post online people that you got?
Okay. So, yeah. So, how do we how do we recruit? Uh so I mean that's a challenge as well because you know I've tried to to give nothing away about what the game is that we're making. Uh so we've you know we we eventually we recruit by going look at how great the company is and then we kind of get people in and talk to them and eventually we show them the game oh that's really cool. Yeah I want to be part of it. But so a lot of that is, you know, we're sort of trading on the cultural element of like people really like working here and when we interview them, everyone really likes being interviewed and those kind of things kind of kind of spread out, I think, you know, but recruiting and meeting people and finding people is is is really hard, especially when you can't actually show what you've got. So

if you've got a thing, you can go this is what I'm making and I need such and such to help me. Uh and then you're going to get like-minded people off social media or whatever to to help you collaborate, I suppose. Okay, one minute left. Maybe time for one more question.
Yeah, it's quick. Uh, oh, is this on? Cool. Um, you said three P's, but I think you've used another P a lot in this one. The word is pitch. You've used the word pitch a lot for why your studio kept going and why you're able to pick yourself back up is because you had to pitch strongly.
Um, I'm sure you, if you've worked with a lot of game devs before, you'll know that most game devs run a mile when in these kind of hight social situations. We're quite an insula bunch. So for game developers who are interested in building a studio who perhaps don't have that strong social skills when putting theirel out there is there a quick piece of advice you can give for someone who is at the start of the journey but getting this strong pitch to get people interested in funding your project
the the most the best way to you're pitching yourself ultimately is is and the best way to do that is just be yourself. I think, you know, the the any of these things start with like a one-to-one conversation. And if the person you're talking to likes

what you're saying, likes the way you're saying it, um, you know, that's that's how these things move on. So, you know, you you're you're not at some point you may be pitching a game to like a a bunch of people at a table or whatever, but most of the time you're sitting around a table with your laptop going, "Hey, this is this thing I'm doing and this is what it's going to be. It's really exciting." You know, that's it's that onetoone thing. So, if you're wondering about that, like that's the thing to practice is you going through your pitch with somebody you trust uh until you're not feeling nervous about actually talking about the game because as soon as you stop wondering about am I going to say the right thing here? Am I going to say exactly the right words? Then yourself will come through and um and really that's kind of what the publishers ultimately are. You know, they're betting on on you and we are time up. Um I'm I'm not going anywhere. So, if you want to kind of um come and ask me some questions afterwards. Uh if anybody does get the number right, you get this trendy thing. I've also got some really cool stickers. So, load of swag, but thanks so much for

coming. Uh [Music]