How to Kill a Game and Pivot Successfully

oh it's recording already well now i have to cut the first part that was a quick counter anyway um welcome everybody to a podcast episode discussing on how to kill a game and pivot successfully before we get into the content i want to introduce the uh the guests the speakers on this podcast so uh first we got sophie bo back on the podcast sophie head of studio at voodoo berlin also founder of rise and play a knowledge sharing platform for leaders in the gaming industry sophie welcome back all right and then nicholas herriger also back on the podcast and um you're based out of san francisco you're coaching startup ceo ctos co-founders tech leads executives investors both in the us and europe you found it before before you started coaching you founded candola that was then acquired by tilting point in 2019 so that's your painful experience with gaming industry welcome back nicholas it it was a lovely experience but thanks

for having me it was a painful lesson let's be honest founding journeys are always been it's very painful so uh they have to be that's the nature of the game they don't have to be but sadly they are uh but the topic of the day as i said like killing uh oh yeah and for those who um most of you don't know me so i'll just introduce myself uh mishkatkov ceo of savage game studios founder of deconstructor fund which is also a knowledge sharing platform uh with an entertainment twist nowadays i don't know why but i just like to say it anyways uh so the topic is very important and and something that i unfortunately have experience with and you have a lot of experience with so i don't know how we're going to structure it but i wanted to hear sophie's story first of your experience of of killing a game and kind of like how do you see this yeah it's actually a great timing that we are having this talk because i was thinking of writing about it uh which takes much more time so it's actually better to

talk about it and it's recent uh because uh two years years ago when i was talking about building a studio starting our own game i think also we went public with our game well surprise surprise we killed it as well and uh we are not considering the game we were working on and talking about last year and so it's the perfect timing starting this year to also talk about it so yeah about the killing of the game i think there are several elements to it i can share so we were working on our merge game plantopia and maybe looking back now thinking of this game it has uh been more of a first project that bonded and created the team maybe that's more the way i look at it now and uh we train uh we form a lot our team on it we took an opportunity in the market when it was it made sense so much game were not like that saturated as it is today but a year after as we were still soft launch

improving the metrics etc very different space and the question started to come like okay after a year of development on the game you also start to look at the energy and the belief of the team on the game will it be great will it fly ever and the context of the market there are these different questions that come into your mind when you start to ask yourself especially as the leader of the team of the studio is this how we are spending our time at best and i think this is really the key point um when you start to ask yourself these questions of course there are signals of a market but some projects you know can go on for years and you can just persist and over iteration in iteration pivot and so on you uh break through and we have seen that but in the end uh it's more a personal question as a team and as the leader of the team is like do you have stamina for it do you have a belief and do you

believe that this is where you should spend your time now with the context uh it is for your team and the market and that's the place we found ourselves of course i can go in detail of like what has happened and so on uh and how did we pivot to take it from there but i wanted to give a context as well how has it been for a studio and uh something maybe i wanted to share uh because this word killing is it's quite brutal right and even these days like people cringe when they hear this gay uh this word killing something we did as a team before we didn't even know if we would continue or not the game we knew we had a milestone review discussion with take orders i would make a decision at a certain date but we plan in our calendar a celebration party no matter what happens if we continue with the game or if we don't and we committed to this and we were there and actually instead of being a sad uh grief uh

i don't know yeah partying or feeling sorry for herself it was actually amazing uh and we it came the day where i announced and shared that we would not continue with the game um and that was a an experience that was very positive like a rebirth instead of something that should be sad and where again you have a lot of regrets so for us it has been a great experience it has bonded even more of a team and we came with more energy and learning for the new projects but i can also talk about like what did we learn um uh how we did we approached development uh from that it was almost a relief actually uh when i made the decision so uh it was actually quite a positive experience and not as as brutal as sometimes we write about because uh nothing came as a surprise at this point i talked about it six months before three months before a month before a week before a few days before so everybody knew that it was possibly coming and for any new game

that we are doing it's always on the line and it should not be ever a surprise so people are prepared mentally and are not getting too attached because this is the hardest thing to you know the game emotionally and think about what's next so instead of thinking of just one game think of the 10 games you will make and that helps to also stay the touch of that particular idea you're working on if i can riff on a little bit before before i let nicolas go like i think i think you mentioned several really interesting points so so first of all like we had yeah like let's i just like using word killing because it's just you know red lighting and all those kind of stuff is like not the same you know i think killing a game is very easy because games tend to fail like most of the games fail let's be honest but what is the most hardest thing and what you've succeeded with is killing a game without killing a team and i think that's that's really the uh the kind of foundation because every studio is really

about the teams it's not really that much about the technology it's really about the people there and the longer you keep the people together having them shipping games or working on different projects moving from one place to another the better that studio becomes and the risk that i've personally experienced and i'll go probably through my story the last one is like is is losing a team while you're trying to pivot while you're seeing these very clear signs for the market like you're unable this is not a smart investment all the logical points are against continuing with the game development but quite often it's very emotional as well because people have invested so much time and so much effort and passion and now they end up in a situation where you if you do the killing in the wrong way you'll just lose the team and then you're at ground zero essentially so um what do you think nicholas uh lots of interesting thoughts here a couple of those i want to comment on so first of all um i think the term killing is somewhat brutal

i think the reason it has established itself is because it is supposed to emphasize that that this is like we're not leaving like the back doors open or something we are making the decision to actually move on from this game from this project from whatever it is that we're working on uh rather than oh yeah we're putting it on the back burner and all of that i think killing says that okay we're shifting our focus once and for all onto something else and and we're moving on from this so yes killing might sound brutal but i think it's necessary um another thing you both talked about that i can very much relate to is the attachment uh it's just like this old dilemma right so first of all whether you're a founder of a company or whether you are you know part of a of a very motivated team um you really work yourself up right you immerse yourself in this project in this game whatever it is that that that you're building um you you bring a lot of passion to the table you're trying to incite passion and the people that work with you and for you

and and this is all necessary in order to fuel the development and to really go after something and then when you're getting to the point that you're realizing that this is not working the way it was supposed to work and i think you know as a side note here we should probably talk about you know whether it is advisable you know to to set success metrics before you embark on a journey rather than you know trying to figure this out along the way which is a mistake that i've been guilty of several times in the past um then uh yeah so you have all of this passion and then all of a sudden you know you have to stop it you have to kill the game and you have to move on and as you said mishka um how do you do that without really demoting or demotivating uh not emoting but demotivating everybody that was so passionately working on this right like how how do you get them that engaged or even more engaged for the next project um i think that's a big challenge and why i certainly do not have as much game

development experience as you guys have from this you know last company that i founded and ran um we also had several pivots one was particularly brutal because we set out to evangelize the idea of dynamic pricing for the games industry and we were actually quite successful at evangelizing it because we came became very attached you know to this term and we became known for it and a couple years down the road we realized that the term in itself was tainted that it would scare product managers that that you know the idea of you know doing price discrimination in a game whether it you know work mathematically or not we had all the proof but it would scare people so we really pumped something up just to abandon it later and then pivot to something else and that was really hard and in retrospect i can say because it was so hard and because we were so passionate about it because we wanted to persevere on all of these things we we pivoted too late we should have done this earlier because um

it at some point wasn't a surprise you know like the metrics were very clear and we were getting the same feedback over and over and over but we didn't engage in the pattern recognition because we were so attached to what we had built and that made it really difficult yeah it's the challenge of that strong self belief and and kind of pushing it through versus versus uh listening to singles so both of you have like you know nicholas doesn't like killing and and kills too late or pivoted too late and sophie killed perfectly so let me be the the person who has not done killing right and so that we have a nice balance of success and failure here so i'll be the failure like the way i'm the way i usually uh construct the killing is is kind of looking at killing so red lighting however you mean it like when you look at the project number one is velocity like is the team able to deliver a milestone so that usually is a pretty important kill gate the second kill gate that may arise is from the market like sophie mentioned there's new competitors there's

disruption or a fundamental shift in the market like you know i don't know like if you built strategy games and clash royale appears and now nobody plays building battle that type of stuff or just simply you're in the market and you're not able to reach your cpi goals you're not able to reach your retention goals you're just not able to make the the uh the ltv versus customer acquisition um formula work so that's of course a killing what are you also what sophie also mentioned was the other conviction part uh this is something that every studio that i've been at i like to do the questionnaire that essentially gouges the conviction on either quarterly or even monthly basis and that is really like how eager the team is to defend their game because if they are not you know eager to defend what they're doing that means we're done like nobody is you know nobody's manning the station so so let's let's move on and then the final one which is equal is important is management or funding so if you don't like if you're running out of funds and

or or if there's a new management or the existing management simply doesn't believe in the direction or in the strategy that was set either by previous management or a couple of years ago when the market was different then that's a kill gate as well and i think those are kind of the the four ones that i tend to look so velocity market conviction and management slash funding now let me talk about a bad killing experience so um i was a head of studio and i killed uh a game that was just stalling like it was just was just poor development it was not going well that's fine everybody was tired of it nobody liked it and it was it was a nice nice mercy kill i came in kind of as a new person to the uh to to the project and was able to say like hey the you know the emperor doesn't have any clothes and the game was done so out of the ashes of that team uh came in another team and the uh the junior they had a game league who wasn't even a game lead before he was quite junior but

he got the team excited and they were really quick to prototype through that they were able to pick up momentum inside the company and also did the right thing of kind of getting everybody to play and get everybody talking about that game in early phases in development so that they got you know got the uh the management talking about them even though they weren't officially green lit as a game to be so kind of like a guerrilla marketing strategy that you can use in a corporation now as the months went on and and the things changed from early prototyping into actual pre-production and and you know heading off towards production things stalled again and there were some weak team members on on the team um ins i don't mean you know personal week they just they just weren't at the uh at the quite the level that that you need and they didn't have all the experts they needed and hiring was very slow so it took them a long time to get some of the key hires done and during this time the market shifted there was another competitor that

emerged and essentially took over the market so the game had no hope they weren't moving forward as fast as they need to and the market that they were aiming for essentially evaporated during that time that also led to to the fact that the new management that that changed during this time didn't have strong conviction in what they were doing and kind of approach it not from the perspective of seeing this team rise from the ashes and come up with prototyping and move fast but just look at it as a new team and sound like well this is not a very strong team they haven't you know they have been doing this for quite a while not understanding why it has been such a long time and what they're doing doesn't really make sense because they again they didn't have the history of why they were doing such a game because the market didn't look like it did back then so it was very logical to end this game and the way i ended was the wrong way so i ended up with in a very logical way like hey guys that here are the cards on the table like what are we doing like doesn't mean let's move on to something next to

something different let's start all over let's do something very exciting and that of course led to over the time loss of majority of the of the team members inside that team because they didn't get to they did not get to um prove that they could have done it it was done for them and that was probably the worst killing of a game experience i had because i essentially uh destroyed all the value that had been built over the time as this team worked together so what would you do different next time so what i would do different is what sophie was talking about so one one thing is important is creating a structure of a very clear milestone gates so that there are very clear deliverables that are um discussed in advance uh the second part is um so that that would have been one that's that's easy that's that's not a big thing the the second part was was defending the team even though it wasn't logical because i did not quite comprehend uh how dangerous it is to

kill a game for the team and just thinking that they will move on something bigger and better when in fact from their perspective it felt that that they don't have the ownership of what they're working on because a game can be killed underneath them based on words so the things that to be differently is explain this to the management to uh to make them understand that i'm not stupid i can see the same things but the value of the team is more important than saving a couple of months because we won't save any months if if we lose half of the team we won't have a team to pivot to another project so i would have rather had a stronger focus on how can we validate what is being done makes sense like yes logically it might not make sense but hey maybe it could what does it take us to enter some sort of market validation whether it's a google private beta or other type

of scenarios where we can actually test the marketability as well as test the viability and the engagement of the game done and that would have given a totally different type of a closure to the team i believe they would have seen either that the game is actually performing as they hoped or that it's not performing as they hoped and it doesn't make sense to continue with it i want to i want to jump on what you have just shared in this car at least for us i think the ownership of the team i mean we have this model also from supercell i think where you know the team decides to kill it's not really the case in many companies i mean as far as i know where there's always a board or something called and something but uh so let's mention this as a reference on the paper um and that's something also i was i was actually that was an inspiration whether it's happening at super saiyan or not uh to give it a try where um

uh when we had these milestones and we were discussing the matrix of the games i've i shared so we shared that through memo i shared that very transparently with the team at each gate so i think we would gather every two three months with the goals and metrics and the progress so we passed several milestones like this but we were always like a bit borderline so the team always knew about it and uh as as nikolas mentioned as well having clear criteria or like this is not making the case then there's no surprises and basically sharing the knowledge with the team where you just agree on common sense right here with the team i was showing the whole business case the finance shows as well how much we were costing you know it's not something you share a lot with a team like we cost already that amount in a year so now we are more negative here and here and this is the business case we are building with this projection over i don't know the next years even if we get there which is already a

stretch it will take x amount three years to pay this back or cost of development and are we invested in this game to work for the next three years do we believe in it are we ready to go through the waves as we have been going like there's so much still to improve so when the team starts to think like yourself as the leader of of course they don't have a final decision making but everybody is intelligent and can comprehend of course this level of business information so sharing more and then we reach the same conclusion right so from when i i announced the decision where i explained all the reasoning and i have explained it already for several weeks giving all the information nobody could argue against the decision because we know why we're here we know our financial goals and so on so uh it's putting basically the team not exposed directly to the stakeholder discussion but like very transparently and we know how much we and we address it as a business

and that has helped a lot because in the end uh i came to the meeting as well um at vaudo with the stakeholders with the decision to kill so in the past i would try to defend and try to be against the leadership and like make the case why uh we should continue it but in vk in this case i put myself in this place of the ceo is like would i invest if i were the ceo in this game and why and with which metrics and then being honest with yourself having this inner dialogue i came like okay i actually personally don't feel like continuing i think we will better use our time in the next six months trying four or six prototype whatever then maybe trying this and even if we manage it will not be as big as maybe starting a new project that can scale etc so um in the end the stakeholders and the ceo nobody was imposing a decision on me because i made the decision and there were actually counter challenges to challenge

me are you sure you want to stop to so it's really interesting is when you come with a decision to kill nobody is stopping you and actually people are trying to convince you to not kill it like what is happening here so then we have we are having a constructive debate just to make sure that i make the right decision so it became more an advisory board discussion and i thought i was owning the decision at the end of the day and with the team we were all aligned so it felt great and then there was no resentment and that's why there was no so thoughts from the team to uh disperse or leave a project or even the studio because everybody was behind the decision and they would have made the same decision as i did so that's also the powerful thing here to share this level of transparency and information if you have not tried that's a nicholas i actually wanted to hear your opinion on on the uh being transparent about the budget now i

it's it's pretty like i understand it to some extent and i'm just thinking about like how is it a good or a bad idea i understand it in the in the terms of a rich company like who do like you know you know you you spend a couple of hundred thousand here and there that's that's nothing but in a context of startup like like nicholas what do you think like what's what's your take because it clearly works with the truth um i i i just took some notes here as you guys were talking the very first term i wrote down was transparency now you asked me um i think they're from my point of view there's no way around it um whether that really means you know you you're you're you're showing every single dollar and cent and what's going on you know yes i can see something like that but um if so if if we zoom out a little and say this team and this company is bigger than this individual game project we

were just working on right and so there's more value in this team staying together as a coherent you know driven unit um then you you have to you know very much consider like what are what are the cornerstones in in order to get out of something like this and style and and i think sophie has just given us a really really good example of how to handle it as opposed to how to not handle it and uh and transparency i think is so important because um you know great leaders really show themselves not when everything is going dandy that's fairly easy great leaders show themselves when the hits the van and um a great leader in a situation where you have to kill off a game where you have to make a dramatic change in the organization whatever it is you know can also mean oh we have to fire 20 of people or something but whenever something that dramatic is happening a great leader is somebody who defines

reality for the rest of the team right because eventually everybody's going to be a little skittish and people are insecure they don't really know what's going on and all of that and um and and not knowing what's going on feeling insecure and all of the those things that's almost mutually exclusive with you know being creative being confident and you know driving something forward so rather than you know beating around the bush and bullshitting might as well tell them exactly what's going on and give them faith in you in the company and in the you know vision that's going on so have people understand what is happening and why i think that's really really crucial as far as the transparency goes now agency is another thing that you guys mentioned and i wanted to quickly respond to that i think agency is equally crucial and it's it's an extension of the transparency make the team part of this process give them agency have them come

to their own conclusions whether you agree with these conclusions or not different story but help them come to their own conclusions that can't be done with leading questions like don't you think this game is doomed right that's not a helpful conversation that's not fruitful um it it has to be more in the spirit of how do you interpret this data um what are what are our options at this point if you were in my shoes right what would you do and and even if there are a lot of different opinions it's much better to get them out in the open and discuss them rather than to just overrule these guys not give these guys a voice and just say hey this is what is it you know no questions asked you know starting next monday we're going to be working on something else that's not a great way to you know keep a team together and keep people motivated so that's the agency part that i think is crucial another one that i always have to bring in is empathy um it doesn't matter if you're a product manager if you're the studio lead if

you're a programmer if you're a graphic designer or if you are a you know ua person or or somebody you know who takes care of the community if you have been working on something passionately for months or years and now that is getting canned that is tough period doesn't matter if it's the right decision or not if you have been really investing yourself into something in any of these contributing roles and that stops that sucks um and i think it's helpful to acknowledge that and it's helpful to tell the graphic designers you know guys i i know you've created all of these characters and all of this great art and and now it's all gonna you know never really be published and you guys port yourself into this and i know this is really hard and i'm sorry it doesn't cost you anything and it makes them feel heard and understood and that goes a really long way when it comes to hey how about you guys create a couple of new monsters for our next prototype here you know and in order to

dilute the feeling of yeah why am i going to pour myself into this again just for all of that to go away six months later and then the last thing i wanted to say which i also think is very important in killing a game and pivoting is how do you structure this moving on process um i think you guys both touched on you know the idea of a post-mortem um like let's all sit down and determine what have we learned right so what went well with this project what didn't go well what assumptions did we make in the beginning which of these assumptions turned out to be true which of these assumptions were you know proven to be wrong by the data what are our beliefs at this point what do we want to try next um what's our time frame for our next project like like how much time are we allowing ourselves for for you know this test period this prototype whatever it is that we want to build and most importantly and that goes back to you know the thing that i wish i would have done many many years ago what are our success metrics that we are measuring

ourselves against right so it's it's so much easier to determine you know what actually makes the cut and what doesn't before you get super involved and and fall in love with your project then if you try to do this when you're six months in and there that all of these other forces you know that pull you back and forth between yeah yeah but i know but i already we spend so much time on that right like the sunk cost idea and all of that makes it so much more difficult so as far as negotiating these success metrics with yourself and with the rest of the team that's a very easy discussion to have ahead of time and it becomes really really difficult uh once you're deep down in the rabbit hole so that's the that's the last thing i wanted to add here i love it i wrote this down so transparency agency empathy learning from the past and setting steps for future success correct wow about the after first morning or when you decide to stop a project kill something

but it's maybe less tactical and the postmortem i think it's more also team mindset i see this tendency i've seen also in my career quite a lot when we uh stop decide to stop a project we have of course because it's it's an ego thing where you have invested a lot in a game and uh you want to believe it's the best game in the world and etcetera and i i see this also i have had that attitude where we tend to blame external external factors so it was the market um not you know like it became saturated or the leadership blah blah blah and this is not helping for the next project because you carry on the same mistakes and i think something at least with our team through the postmortem it was first uh letting the team organize the customer usually it's a producer of the lead organizing it's like by craft each craft would self-organize and make the postmodern and present to the rest of the team their findings so it was instead of a postmodern it was more a collection of all our past mistakes and

the things we shouldn't repeat and it was a big humbling exercise where i was repeating to the team i don't want to hear because it was the management because it was the time because it was the lack of this we we were in this as well and we have to own what has happened what could we have done and what we do we have control on so be honest with ourselves and i think this is one of the most important exercises when we do this um looking at what went wrong to own as well with the mistakes we made like that's on us there's the market and we'll always have factors but we can decide to be in this market or not you know and also see the signals quickly and pivot earlier etc etc so i think there's something with the attitude before jumping to a new project to have over also this humility uh to accept okay there are things we didn't control but there are mistakes we've done it's not just because it was the management i don't know i've heard that as well in some other companies it was the team it

was the market and then i'll do better next time because there will not be this external factor so internalizing the mistakes so yeah that's that's a good point i mean honestly like like even like you mentioned like not blaming anybody and anything that's really important i but i usually blame the team leadership which i'm always a part of like i think i think all the mistakes happen like majority of the mistakes if not all happen on that level and then everything else just cascades from it so it's kind of like the uh it's the source of all the mistakes so that's why the i think retros are so um you know difficult because in the end it's like it's your mistake like everything that happened whether you can you know you could say it's management but it's really your communication towards the management uh it's the market well it's really that you didn't you didn't understand the market correctly or you didn't move fast enough and when it comes to communication or

the team member you know one person did this one well you should have let go of that person earlier or you should have hired uh you know another person for this role like everything is in the end the leader's role which is which makes it so so painful so yeah and there's something definitely with the pride of the team that is touched when you have to stop a project right and it's uh like nicholas ascension like empathy and there are things that are i would say cheap to do to help grief and transition before a new project like making a ritual when you decided to stop it's not something shameful that you have to hide and then you know like some others succeeded because of course we are more vocal about the success story but nobody is like shouting out loud like okay we stopped the game because we just didn't make it but creating more rituals uh around it as for example for us for planetokia what we did too but actually was so meaningful for the team but cost

really nothing for us as a studio and budget uh printing a art book like we did that with all the art and we just uh distributed it actually um the beginning of the year it's few hundred euro and it's nothing but it means so much because you spend a year yeah and and then it's like we were like going through the pages and it's like wow we've done so much and we went through the whole cycle we started something we soft launched it we scaled it we did live ups and then like we did with 360 and there's always a way to look at things you know from the bright side and instead of thinking oh we didn't make it we went through the whole cycle but very quickly in a year and not so many studio and team together can go through this so that was another way to look at it so there's always a reframing you can do in your mind because it's always about perspective and perception and as a leader you can create the narrative you want to tell about what has happened you know that's why the word killing can be brutal and it can be seen as a failure

but there are so many stories you can tell but what it means for you as a leader or as a studio what was this first project that we stopped and and for us uh the main analogy where i was telling the team it doesn't matter if this first game plantoki didn't make it because the main product we created was not this game but it was our studio it was the team the team was the product so we are ready for our next iteration and that's the main thing that remains through time the products they come and go some scale some don't fly some you know but the team is the constant and i think that was the way to see it it's like we upgraded we leveled up together and we will use all this i don't know uh perks for the next project and so on and so on that's so that's really good about that yeah that's a great i i love yeah two of the things that sophie just said first of all the idea of doing this this you know this photo album almost to speak you

know to say like this yearbook like to memorial it is yeah what a fantastic idea i i really i really like that and um you know i wish i had some of those on my shelf you know to look at a couple years later show to the grand chill and all of that no but all joking aside i think that's a great idea and and and also like you know for the team to have that memorial memorialized and then what you said i think actually both guys you both said this you know this tendency to blame external factors um one thing that i want to throw into the mix here is the question and we've touched on it before but how do you actually define success right and i think in defining success in every single certainly business situation but you know not to say every single situation in life is you need to really differentiate between things that you can control and things you can't control and if you actually focus on that it is staggering how many things that could

define your success you actually do not control do you control the market of the players out there even if you have like kick ass ua and you think you hacked and all that do you control if people actually down your load your game and if they do for how long they play and if they play for a while if they actually spend no you don't not at all right so while that is very important because eventually we all need to make money and you know this needs to be worthwhile um going back to what sophie said you know the team is the product as opposed to you know an individual project or an individual game um i think that's very very important so differentiating here you know between the things you can and can't control you know subjecting yourself and get you know the feeling of success exclusively to results like what's our revenue you know what's our chart position what's the number of dau uh what is our d30 retention rate and all of that that's very very fragile and um and it i think it also goes back

to you know blaming external factors because hey there's nothing i could do about those so if you do this exclusively you will almost certainly create disappointments for your team which then discourages your team and uh which from a business point of view is not a good decision because the the the big assets that we have in the game industry is you know the people we have working on on on a game and and for a company so that's something that has to be you know cherished and nourished and uh you know be the priority of what it is that we do so the takeaway i think is focus more on your process rather than on the market response and i think sophie has you know laid this out really nicely already right so how did we get to where we were you know what is the decisions we made along the way what assumptions did we make you know what did we see with the data what could we have done differently and

based on what we have learned how can we evolve and iterate on our process as a team you know as the product that is the team in order to put ourselves in a position where we have a higher chance of success uh next time around um supercell has been mentioned here before i think you know they have a very specific way of going about this also you know celebrating the killing of the game and all of this but i think they have understood early on that in order to like nobody has hacked the ultimate formula how to be guaranteed to make a you know successful free-to-play or console or whatever game yet um if if that was the case we would have you know seen it by now um so your your best advice if you really focus on the process of game development and all of these different factors that are involved in order to improve your chances of success and going back to what i what i said uh you know just a minute ago let those improvements in the process

and the understanding of the process and you know the what elements of this process you control and how you can how you can iterate on those let those be a big part of this success metrics that you subject yourself and the team to as opposed to just what the market response eventually will be because there's you know very little control you have over that yeah i wanted to kind of switch gears and talk about the other successful pivot because we've been talking about killing for half an hour so sophie i'm i'm very you know and as well as nicholas i'm very interested in hear how you guys pivoted successfully because i you know when i think about like my successful pivot i clearly remember i was i was running a studio and um this is a short pivot we were making a game and then a certain supercell game came that was very similar but a thousand times better and i remember it came into soft launch and then we just downloaded that game

and the full day we just played that game like non-stop and then the next day we had a meeting and we were like we need to pivot like this is miles better this is same but just a lot which of the of of the very well-known supercell games this this one was this was brawl stars this was brawl stars yeah we played it non-stop and we kind of like tried to find some holes and yeah there were some holes but we were like this is but but this is you know we're kind of the same but worse so and maybe that was also like the transparency and everything was so easy because everybody just understood it you know we played it eight hours straight and we didn't have to have a you know like should we or like it was a just a very straightforward everybody went into the kitchen we sat down and i was like i think we should pivot everybody's like i think so too and that's it so very successful payment

but i had nothing to do with it so thanks for supercell for making a very successful pivot by just pushing us out uh but but uh but sophie like how are you approaching the pivot yeah so here i pivot we talk about like after you decide to stop or whatever you're doing to yeah go to the next thing right so for uh us of course uh when i knew or i saw that coming as well that uh sorry the cats i decided to stop actually planetopia i had to be honest zero idea of what we would do next so i was thinking first uh we need to close this game properly because we had players we had revenues and so on so it would keep us busy so it was kind of a slow transition like okay we decided

to stop now but we are not stopping tomorrow let's work still on a few weeks make the plan of how we close it so it kept people busy to just accept and grief because this is part of a process you know when we say kill or there's a death of something a loss of something we have to accept and sometimes management they say okay when can you start next like this is we are not robots it's not possible you have to grief and give the time for people to accept the news move on so we use the weeks where we were closing uh the game wrapping things up making postmodern it was few weeks and it was a good time to just process and for me to also figure out what to do next and share a plan there was also something else that forced holidays i said i'm gonna take two weeks off i encourage everybody to do the same because i don't know when our next holidays will be like the good timing so of course everybody did and so

we had two weeks off to just digest and you know it's like that's what i i like and they do the trust so that they give me to organize our time we're not saving anything to just jump on the next train quickly without the learning processing what the mistake we've done so actually a month happened before we started something new um and then pivots i so from an energy of death where you know like okay we stop something we are not very inspired then i like to go with something very different from how we've been working together to create the energy the momentum again so we went with opposite of what we were doing so we were looking okay we it took us uh between development and soft launcher here with plantopia look at how cpi has evolved that was the main findings like let's not have this happening again so we said let's go for quick projects and instead of like going for this uh three four

months production actually that was the time of production with plentopia we say like two months that's really something quickly in two months uh so very short time frame so then it you know it's a different exercise for the team and it's using all the things we have done before but in a new framework and also different type of games so different box um so we we moved away a bit more from casual to go more in what we've seen has been working smaller projects that we can build this uh piece by piece when we collaborate casual and then scale it uh progressively so it's not here to talk about the product part but more let's let's change um i would say the mindset of what we've been doing so then it renewed energy and motivation and inspired creatively people so that was really interesting as well instead of saying let's do another merged game that has a different theme that would have not been so inspiring

and actually all this energy was put into this new framework and instead of going for one game we all invest in i divided the team in two teams and we would build more a game factory instead of focusing on one game so again focusing more on our system as a studio and as a team so what we are building next is not the next game but it's more our system to launch a prototype and test quickly uh 10 games for next year for example so we build a base project which was very exciting for developers how do we templates of art templates of ui etc so we can build game quickly and test like uh so it was really changing strategy and also taking over learnings of what we have had that make the team really excited of on going there and they were not so attached anymore into let's make a big casual game that

looks polished and like oh let's make something that look hyper casual and maybe not so nice quality wise i didn't have any of this comment because everybody is focused on the process and system so that's how we pivoted and i'm surprised myself how well it turned out because we would have started this way i don't have i would have a team behind because there would be really um skeptical about oh it looks like a hyper-casual game it's it when you went through the mistakes and you know how hard it is every nobody was arguing this time let's make it game faster let's be more hacky pragmatic on using existing assets and put it together and test ideas quickly but we had to go through the kill of working and struggling on the game for a year so everybody would be committed to now working this way so that's what i meant as well by the iteration of the team it's part of a process to kill a game and would i do this differently i would just kill a game earlier actually if i

were in the studio with a new team because it's just part of the evolution and not to be attached too much to your first game because it's not about the first game in the end it's it's about how as a team you work and more effectively and do what makes sense but you always have resistance at the start and people need to learn with their own mistakes that's just human so can you tell about your pivoting experience yeah because first of all you know uh uh some of the thumbs up for sophie like for for what you just described you know how they emerge from the situation i think this is you know i mean there are a lot of different ways to skin a cat but i think this is awesome i mean for me this this sounds like close to the ideal you know the the spirit of we're not building the next game but we're building a system actually wrote this down here like we're building a system that will allow us to build and test the next 10 games in a year right it's uh th this is sums up in the sentence was i was trying to say in 10

sentences before right you focus on your process right like so what have we learned and you know and where do we take this and also as sophie said while we all want to believe this oh we have this magic idea you know whether you're an author that writes the book or you make a game or whatever so you always have this idea oh yeah this is like super super secret it's gonna take off and rarely ever does that happen right it's uh it's it's the evolutionary process and it's like all the iterations and that's what's going on another thing that sophie just said that i think is is important is this grieving uh period right this like okay so if we killed it on friday we can't come back on monday and just you know start and you know build something awesome here this is just not gonna happen um i think that's very much the the idea of you need to slow down in order to speed up right you need to really take your foot off the gas you know let everybody calm down you know also you know get a little bit of of distance to you know what has happened you know so that you get a different perspective allow yourself to zoom out

um the whole thing with the forest and the trees and um and so some kind of a grieving period where you say hey so this just happened let's all slow down we are not really jumping into the next project right away we're not even really discussing yet what the next project is going to be i think that is a very good business decision and and then last thing i wanted to say and this is something that you said earlier mishka is um you said i always have this tendency you know if something goes wrong to blame the the team leadership which i'm usually part of right so essentially things tank look at me you know yeah i'm so sorry i screwed up um i'm the source of of all the bad or we are the source of all the bad and i think that is in many ways you know a a great attitude um because the good thing is that you're really trying to shield your team you

know from the criticism and all of that and you you say hey i'm the single throw to choke here you know and and eventually you know this was my decision and um and and so i i should be blamed um that's the good part um the downside is and i've seen this several times in my work recently if you overdo this and that goes back to the grieving um so if you overdo this oh yeah all blame is on me you prevent people from assuming responsibility for what happened right like you you prevent people from going through the process of actually reflecting on so what what could i have done differently you know how did i contribute to whatever the result was and um that is something that i think is very important in order for team members to grow based on uh on a setback and we all know you know the biggest growth always happens when things or after things go

wrong so be careful in assuming all the responsibility i'm not suggesting to do the opposite and just blame you know oh yeah joey and nancy and uh and peter did all of these things wrong um but maybe just talk about hey this is why i assume responsibility you know what i definitely you know didn't do wrong but don't say just you know uh you know with a broad broad brush you know this is all on me let people come to their own conclusions and uh and let them assume responsibility for whatever they want to assume responsibility for yeah i mean i i quite often tend to say that but you know and maybe in the leadership setting rather uh because i want to have the culture of people not blaming the team members uh yeah i really don't like that and you know it's very easy to go into the negativity because oh joey oh nancy oh she sucks oh he sucks oh we need better this or we need better that and it's just like

that's that's a spiral that never leads anywhere so it's more like it's just and and it's such a cop off from from what you're doing to blame either your own team members or the team members of somebody else the same thing as playing in management now i know there's crazy management and so forth uh but it's just it's just not productive because you can't do anything about it or blaming the market it's like well it is what it is so so you kind of have to move on but i want to challenge one thing i finally found something that i disagree with the two of you and you said take a time off don't jump on to the next one in my experience jumping to the next one has been invigorating and it's been exciting and it's been like the prototyping is the best part concepting is the best part of game development and kind of having this love maybe just me personally but having this lull in between of killing a game and be like you know what i need to go and look at the lake for a while personally that doesn't work for me like i'm you know i'm the type of guy who

gets knocked out and be like i want a next fight tomorrow like i'm sure we can get we can get this done so that's where i kind of disagree and in my experience i've had good experiences with not taking the break but just kind of like rolling over to the next one i don't know like like have you had negative experiences with that or or is it just like you've had positive experiences with taking a break i'm not saying taking a break is the wrong thing but i'm just saying like not taking a break i haven't seen it to be a negative thing i can comment i can okay thanks um for me there are two factors why uh uh i cannot jump immediately so first i think it's more i check the pulse of the team and i see fatigue so there's just there's there's nothing we can i don't i don't want to push them and it's more like a long marathon or long-term thinking it's like it's not because i have energy but i get i understand what

you're saying because i i could technically jump uh quickly from usually at least we always have this stamina because we have to so we never rest right but that's not the case of everyone and i've seen by experience as well people who just stretch for too long and too far and either they just you know snap so they just uh jump off the boat completely because it's just too much or when they are gone for a longer time at undesired time so actually forcing to rest is a for me a good thing for the team especially this fatigue where we try to pass several milestones and like osv's roller coaster do we pass or do we kill and more for me personally as a leader i have no clarity or no vision of what i want to do next so i would not feel comfortable or confident to jump on something to just get busy so that's more my way as well where i need distance and take a step back so holidays time off is not really time off for me i say time off but we all know

these things like as long as your brain is like functioning you're not really you know so it's like time away from the computer um but in the end it's more thinking what's next and that's how i came up more with the system of game factory if i because i took this distance but otherwise i would have just jumped on the next game so that depends as well i think it's dependent on your style but for me i wouldn't see it any other way um yeah i just mentioned like it wasn't like that i come in with the next idea i just like to kick off ideation right away oh at the same time as you're doing post-mortem almost uh i just like i i don't know maybe it's my insecurities or whatnot i just want to be like on to the next one let's move on let's learn from this one and let's have fun let's get back into the uh the you know the birth of a project because i've just seen so many games come from ashes and pivots that ended up succeeding uh

without a break and that kind of stayed with me it's like just you know move forward have you know let's drop everything and kick it off it's like restarting a paint a picture or a painting nicholas i have a lot of empathy for the urge to jump right back in because i mean who really wants to bathe in in you know the sorrow of something that just you know went wrong like how much fun is it to commiserate it's like two weeks we're not going crazy you know for a couple weeks and all that but but that's i think where the benefit is because that's what you're describing mishka right like so rather than you know doing this and like oh wow now finally i get to put all of these you know other ideas i have to paper and let's see what comes from it and and that is exciting and interesting and yes and i think it is part of this process so i think it makes a lot of sense what what makes at least as much sense of what sophie just said you know we're um you know taking a break uh as you just

said you know as long as you your brain is still wired and all that you're not really taking a break but at least you're taking a break trying to take a break from the computer from that discussion all of that because there is just a lot of benefit in your own processing from the passage of time right that doesn't mean you don't have to do anything and i think we also have to differentiate here between like what what does jumping right back in right is it like forbidden to tinker around with ideas you know and to create something and to think about no absolutely not especially if that helps you process right like for the one guy this is what helps you process and the other way you know goes in and joins a pottery class for three days and this is how i process the next guy goes on a run where you know sits at the lake um but i think processing is important and then um i think it's just very it's crucial not to have this ideas like okay now that we've you know wasted these six months and all of that money on working on this and this and this and

this just failed you know we have to make up you know for that and jump back right in and and do all of these things that i think where it's really important to you know focus on you need to slow down in order to speed up afterwards and um and you need people to give you you need to give people a chance to you know process themselves come to their own conclusions um do their own grieving and uh and also assume responsibility and then just see what comes from that and i think there's a big big big opportunity you know when you go through this valley um in in coming up with uh with stuff that has a has a lot of potential to eventually succeed and i think this is also what you're saying which i say like i've seen so many great you know successful games you know coming from the ashes and from a pivot and then all of a sudden at work but i think that's a big part of it yeah i think it's not advisable you need to kill something on a friday and on monday say okay this is what we're going to do next and here's the schedule for the next six months um yeah yeah i i

think yeah that's a recipe for maybe we're we're picturing in a different way so what my ideation means is just like all the process are off there's no dailies there's no nothing like you can work in any team start with at any time like like let's go through ideas every day friday at google right you can do whatever you want it's fridays at google it's friday or a month yeah that's awesome so so that's what i meant i didn't mean like hey here's a new plan here's the new you know log into jira i got tickets for everybody so i started cramming in the sprint is already going is that channel created yeah exactly no it meant what i meant more like like you know all the all the processes or daily stuff is gone let's just go into a mode of like let's play games that's a fantastic opportunity right and this is where we can all slow down because we're talking about the same chords yeah yeah i think we're talking about the same thing you know there's like oh wow we don't have to do liveops anymore through these stupid campaigns right exactly just like let's think about something new and then

people actually have a lot of ideas and they can work together all right sophie's cat is getting anxious because we're over time so yeah let's go through like the other the final stuff like i wanted to just ask like what did you learn during this chat actually i'm curious because i i can just kick it off i i personally uh truly enjoy talking to the two of you um great great great uh notions like like sophie your experience is fantastic and and nicholas the way you kind of like summarize everything with the transparency agency empathy learnings from the past setting steps forward so forth that's that's fantastic and and kind of like the key learning if i have to pick only one uh from today was what sophie was talking about the transparency i think that's not not actually transparency i'm not a fan of transparency i'm a fan of clarity about transparency uh but what i what i love is the way you explain how you took the team on your level and you're so also yourself on the level

of a ceo that shows a lot of empathy and that shows just fantastic approach to to communication because after that you know everybody sees eye to eye because you kind of lifted everybody to the to the same level so so that was uh that was a fantastic point and i may or may not take on that advice i will let's be honest uh anyway anyways uh did you guys uh what were the sort of points that that you took away you wanna go first sophie all right go ahead uh yeah for me so the term grieving has never really come up for me in these kind of circumstances um so so and and and and that in many ways just click with me because that is really what summarizes what i think needs to happen right and and what what what ties into a lot of the you know stuff that i said earlier i think that is very important

and and grieving is a is is a good business decision that's my number one big takeaway here and then the other one i mean it was super enjoyable to just it sounds bad just like oh you know your hard stories you know very enjoyable to listen to but no i i i i mean this uh in in the sense of um you know it just to get this kind of context and and and you'll see what it actually is to be in the trenches because i haven't been for a number of years and then what sophie said about you know we we after you know our our kill and our pivot we we didn't set out to build the next game but we set out to build a new system that will allow us to build and test multiple games in a short period of time right so this is what this team and this project is about it is not about one specific game it's it's about a system it's about a concept and how we think

about game development and how we carry this out and uh and that as a conclusion of you know the plantopia story of what happened i think is awesome right so um yeah definitely big takeaway for me thanks um then the takeaway for me is definitely this discussion i'm so happy that we have had so thanks miss carrier for inviting it's perfect timing and it makes me reflect a lot discussion today on uh one thing of killing of the game like what is the main thing what is the goal of what we are improving and in the end it's the process and the team right i never thought about it but when you kill a game it's actually a team also usually disperses and companies especially in all the learnings are lost and which is silly when you think about it it's really counterproductive but that's the reality of what happens and in the end uh

the win of that is like you're improving your process permanently for the next thing and so on the things we talked a lot about and and the team is perfecting their metals and so on so that's that's the main unit that should continue and should not be killed in a way so not trying to preserve too much the game but the team is the main thing to cherish nurture because it's the thing that without it there's no games anyway and we know how hard it is to build first a functioning team and how much time it takes and money so that's the main takeaway or reminder of that it's about the team yeah i'm gonna go as far as to say like the team is the that's the golden asset um to you know get it back to business and out of you know schmoozy you know other kind of of discussions you know to to to all the managers and ceos out there you know think about what really

makes your company run and what you need in order to crank out your products and it's like if you if you don't have a team and a career team you essentially have nothing and and and as as sophie just said it it is so unfortunate and also so expensive if you had a team that came together that worked well together that had you know all of these shared experiences and learnings and then afterwards it disperses so all of these things you know that you have invested in you know time and money you don't get to uh you know see it through and uh and and rake in all the benefits down the road um so you should do everything in your power that you can in order to keep these guys happy and on board and motivated and um sounds like you're doing this really really well sophie so uh i i i want to see where you guys go yeah thanks well on that note uh let's finish up this podcast and in the next podcast we're going to talk about how to build a great team i think that that would be uh

that would be that'll be something that i really want to hear how sophie has has done it and and also nicholas uh your experiences on that point as well so thank you so much for for joining and thanks everybody for listening in the description below you can connect with sophie you can connect with nicholas both of them are professional coaches no sophie you're like you're like a part-time coach yeah yeah let's let's say this for now and um and you know get much deeper conversations with two of them so thank you again for joining and thank you again for listening we're out thanks