Keynote: Embracing Change & Innovation in Game Development: A new era of Flexibility & Creativity.

[Music] [Music] [Music] up next uh we have uh Matthew from solid bash who's going to be talking about embracing change and innovation in game development a new era of flexibility and creativity how's everybody feeling today after last night the extreme ping pong everybody is good had some good fun nobody hung overs yeah yeah little sore heads

but uh yeah so uh we'll just start quickly um I'm not going to stand up here and tell you the the secret recipe there's all sorts of secret recipes for everything uh I'm just going to talk about things that I've learned over the years that I've been in the industry and how that's helping us now in development especially in light of the the way that the industry has been the last little while uh I'm Matthew Zorn as uh as as it was announced I'm the head of solid bash which is a room 8 group Studio we focus on ablea midcore games and with a focus on mobile for live Ops full cycle development and some porting so uh yeah myself I've been in the industry for two decades uh I'm a lot older than I look is what I'm told so uh I started through uh non-traditional ways into the gaming space uh I've come through uh design marketing advertising I worked in the music industry for a while so I've seen a lot lot of different things in the way

that Industries have evolved over time and I use all of that knowledge to try to to to find and do different things uh I've worked in VR I've worked with um mobile uh I've worked in publishing I've worked on pretty much every different type of Technology at this point um with the exception of the Apple Vision Pro which hopefully that will come out very soon and uh we'll be doing some work on that but uh I've I've always tried to do something that was was different because by Nature I'm just a very I don't want to say I'm impatient I get bored with things so I want to try new things I want to try to get out there and just see what we can do so uh just a quick little overview how did we get here I'm not going to sit here and focus on why we're in this state but it it is I think relevant to understand how we got here where we are and some of the things that in my opinion need to change or at least things that we can help do to to help us

have successful titles in the market um to 2020 we were due for a bit of a a recession in the gaming industry and I'm not sure if how many people remember this but it was talked about things were starting to downturn and then covid came along everybody got inside and this was something that was uh obviously uh ran for a very long time people had a lot of extra time on their hands so they started playing games a lot of different companies used this opportunity to build up their their uh Workforce and because there was a lot of money in the market and along with that we have a bit of the crypto bubble starting to to begin so as this continues through into 2021 uh we've seen a lot of the at this point the the largest revenue for the gaming industry um to date was in 2021 and a lot of that was due to um these conditions so then we come into 20 22

2022 we start to see covid restrictions lift uh people start to get out a little bit more and then Along Comes A little bit of the the crypto crash which then has a cascading effect then you have tools from AI like mid Journey coming uh not coming out but starting to get a lot more popularity these are all different things that threaten the industry uh and then the gaming market closes a little bit less than the year before into 2023 more of this we start to see games getting cut back because it takes a little bit of time for these things to carry over and start to to have an effect and an impact on the industry and we've we've seen it uh investment starts to dry up and then we get into a point where we just start seeing Mass layoffs that are even continuing through this week um are we going to recover from this in my opinion we are absolutely going to recover from this um so one of the things that I

think was was very interesting is a buddy of mine reached out to me the other day and was saying dude the industry is crumbling like what's going on and I I think I disagree with that well I don't think I I do disagree with that I think it's changing it's you know you see it in some of the talks that we've had here earlier today the way that we approach development I think is very important for us to understand how we we Source the the game that we make and and entertain our Market because at the end of the day it's the market that makes the the game successful and that makes us money that allows us to do our craft more and more so how can we be more Innovative uh in my opinion I think we we need to look at development approaches um and the and those development approaches my first my first suggestion is we need to restructure our production pipelines I've already seen a lot of talks where everybody's like you

got to you got to get out there you got to do your prototype you got to do your first playable you got to do your Alpha you got to do your beta you got to do all this stuff I don't necessarily agree with that I agree that we do have to have structure I agree that some of these things do need to happen but what I don't agree with is that we have to take an old Arcane way of production and apply that to all game development first playable might work if you're a AAA studio and you've got a team of 150 people it does not work if you're a team of 10 people or 20 people or even a midcore game these are old ways of doing things and we need to look at how the market is changing so with that we have to look at uh how how those all happened we look at the excuse me I'm drawing out we have to look at the way that we are going to look uh going to apply those to development now we take those development strategies we put put those

in front of users right away we get the feedback from the users we don't spend a whole uh chunk of time and investment into these games before we know if they're going to be successful and uh I remember uh uh when I started at EA many years ago one of the things that they said they sat us down and they said what is it that makes us successful and everyone's like oh you've got great games or you've got this or you've got that but the reality is they came back and said it's money it's money that drives this industry it's not greedy money but it is money that drives the industry and we need to be able to approach uh the the market in the way that the users are going to pay for these for these different products you need to understand what your users want early this is something that I'm calling direct to Market prototyping we've seen this on a lot of different ways um we've seen this with um Early Access on Steam we've seen this

in early Alphas you know getting out there but what I'm suggesting is direct to Market prototyping is a way and and I can actually even call out supercell on this that they've done this already and they are probably the pioneers of this they develop a game they don't develop the whole game they've developed a portion of a game you get it out there with the core Loop you understand what it is that your development uh what your your uh audience wants and you use that information to build your game out find out what it is if it's the core experience is collection and character generation then Focus your production and everything on that first don't spend time working on something that's going to be a feature down the road for the vertical slice because the vertical slice says you need to have every single part of your game accessible so that you can test how it is that to me doesn't make sense because you're changing your foundation before you even know what your house is going

to look like you have a good idea but you need to take these in with a bit of a a grain of salt so these you need to validate your ideas through your Market you need to test those assumptions in the market see how people respond do they like my artwork do they like the the battle mechanic of my game before you add all of this meta feature uh on there and then this will help you with the monetization of your game to ultimately help your game be more of a success but you need to be able to reduce those financial risks you need to not get uh stuck in this sunk cost fallacy which is you know I've invested so much and my idea is great you have to look at the environment and understand if this is something that you're that that is kind of a loss cause or looked great on paper but didn't really necessarily give uh an effective result once you actually got it into the market don't focus on cost development strategies I see this over and over

again I've seen this pretty much start on every production that I've ever worked on throughout my my career is you will get people going well we need to create a system that will capacitate for a billion users concurrent that you don't even know what your current rates are going to be for your users you don't know what that's going to be you don't know how your game is going to change now I'm not sitting here and saying you know don't don't uh spend time and effort to to do your development and do it well what I'm saying is don't waste the time on the things that don't make sense for your production that are just going to ultimately waste your time and your money before you even get your hands uh get the the product in the hands of your your um users so consider that the the budgets are are kind of your your your main source it's it's your source of Revenue uh Focus on Creative strategies

look at things that are out there in other in other products don't repeat them find new ways of bringing those forward test them with your Market directly instantly um pre as I said pre uh deprioritize longterm long-term considerations by not wasting your time and the most important in my opinion and this is something that's changing within the industry is stop hiring people that are specialists at one given thing we are not in a point in the industry where we have somebody that can be a tree expert that might have been the case 15 20 years ago but that's not the case now the tools that we have at our disposal are much more powerful the systems that we have with AI that are coming in are much more powerful it's going to cost you a lot of money to have these Specialists that are only useful for 25% of your project or 50% of your your project you want to make your team as

accessible uh I'm sorry as functional as possible so that when you're running through production you actually have uh all of these people that you can keep busy and not having to keep adding more and more to the team if you have something that where you need a specialist to bring into the the the mix you can hire externally you can bring from another team if you're part of a company that has a lot of different developers you bring them in for the things that you need and then you get them out of the project and these are definitely things that I see changing uh I'm looking at artists who understand how to sculpt how to unwrap how to rig so that uh we basically don't have have to have three different people and then you keep this large overhead which is which is ineffective um selfless uh selfish plug here we we've been applying a lot of of these different techniques on a game

that we have uh in production it's very early right now we're starting to see some success with it it's uh were also has led to a lot of changes so going back to the original point that I was talking about where we had these uh idea of what we thought would looked good on paper we put out and then uh when we started looking at it some of these things didn't really mesh as well so we started changing some of this uh this this game so that we could uh engage with our audience a little bit better and it's starting to show a lot of promise and we continue to use these kind of iterative approaches so that we can we can start to um really hone in on the success rates of of our products so ultimately uh this organic approach you want to get to a point where you can get answers as quick as possible get it out into the market to ultimately save you time that ultimately saves you money and uh I want to finish really quickly with a a point which is

uh there's always the saying that is uh that that people say U jack of all trades master of none but the reality of that is that there's actually more to that that no one actually talks about it's Jack of all trades master of none is always better than a master of one you need to get people together you need to get people with lots of different skills to make these games successful and that should hopefully if you've listened to your market and you've really you know done a lot of hard thinking should get you to a point where you are actually getting successes in the market and you're not just hitting these one hit wonders so uh I'm not going to go through the takeaways but I did want to leave some time for questions because there's a lot actually with that uh direct to Market prototyping that I I want to talk specifically about but I want to hear from you guys about some of the challenges that you're having in game development and maybe maybe even some of your uh

Solutions yeah so does anyone have any questions apparently everyone seems does everybody agree everybody disagree no do you have just like any like other final thoughts that you can uh share you know predictions for you know 2024 in general for the games industry or anything like that uh yeah I mean predictions I could sit here and say that the the industry is going to recover and there's definitely things that are showing that it's going to recover but again I think that's kind of the core of of the message that I'm I'm at least trying to get out which is it is changing it's not going to be the same uh as what we've seen before we need to be able to be a bit more flexible we need to find creative ways to approach these um Changing Times and uh uh I've seen it in the music industry in the early 2000s with uh with the Napster with Apple music and that sort of thing they had to

change the way that they approached things because that's how the industry used to work and then with all these new technologies it really did start to change it's happening again with the music uh I'm sorry with the m movie industry Netflix Apple TV all of these companies are having to go through these changes and be flexible and find new ways to get to Their audience and do it in a much more cost-effective way and now we're seeing it in the in the gaming industry and the gaming industry isn't going to go away the music industry isn't going to go away I would argue to say that the music and movie industry are even stronger now for it and that we're going to see a lot of these things in the the coming years that is going to strengthen the the gaming industry at least that's what I hope but you know I can't see the future it would be so much easier if we could yeah so yeah so there's still like you know 2 minutes or whatever like that if anyone does have any questions if anyone's thought of what any yeah one over here

please I can hear you getting a new mic thank you first of all thank you for the talk um when to talk about with my team about early releases and early marketing um it was also mentioned in the previous talk the fair of cop cats um your precious idea being stolen um so to say do you have any advice or any tips around that so this is this is actually it's it's a good very good question because we are very paranoid about our ideas being stolen uh especially in the in the gaming industry in my experience you will actually hurt yourself more by not finding out what the envi by not finding out what the public wants to do in order to keep your idea quiet you should actually be talking about your idea but you have to

be you have to know that your idea is strong don't give everything away but you do need to get it out there and by not talking about it and not getting it in front of people you're not actually finding out what they want and you're not actually getting that information to have a successful product it might be the best idea that you've ever had but if it doesn't resonate with your public and you don't get it out there in front of people you'll never know and I've seen a lot of people that have great ideas that will not talk about it or will not do anything and it literally just dries up on the vine because they don't have the resources and they can't get people engaged because they don't want to talk about it so talk about it don't give everything away but talk about it get people excited you'll actually learn from other people too what they like about it every there there aren't people out there that are just like oh I want to I want to find your idea and then I'm just going to steal that and I'm going to put it out quicker I mean yes there's definitely people that do copycats but those are

usually after something's been successful VCS don't give you money until you've actually invested in doing some of the development and they can actually see what this is all about so why would somebody that you're you're talking to you know just immediately go and and kind of take that and run with it so that that would be what I would I would have to say about that brilliant thank you so much Matthew Round of Applause please thank you