Metaplay’s Teemu Haila On Scaling And Saving Smaller Studios $1 Million/Year With One SDK

[Music] hello world welcome back to the Pocket Gamer podcast with your host me Brian Bago and this week the perfectly Paisley Peggy and Sals perfectly Paisley and Peggy you're into alliteration you were at the top of your game today I think Brian oh listen it's we I have a list of puns that we need to fit into this episode so you're going to have to bear with us Timo because you know it it could take a couple of goals just to fit them all in but um we love a pun on the podcast we love a pun we love a joke it's it's it's good weather it's a good vibe seriously as always um a great guest this time timila he is co-founder and chief product officer at metap playay Brian will hear about that but more importantly our audience will benefit because it's all about how to scale when you're a small studio and

that is a NeverEnding problem he's faced it firsthand that's why we have him on the show thanks for having me I'm excited welcome on board timu um yeah it's I'm I'm familiar with h with met playay I'm familiar with you know quite a lot of the companies that you've uh you've had experience with so so we're really glad to have you here and I just want to dive in so let let's you know dig into this um your journey in games I guess from co-founding play Raven to starting metap play play Raven of course going on to be aced acquired by Rio um tell us more how did you get into games how did it all come to be and how did you end up where you are now that'll take a couple of hours but I I'll try to condense it down into into a few highlights I I actually started with um quote founding finland's first online gaming communities back in the day when like geoc city is was the coolest thing available in the internet I remember well right so was about being in school

and trying to figure out how do we bring people together around all of the things that we love which is was mostly RuneScape and Counter Strike and all that before before Esports was a thing and it this all been downhill since then really so then I went on to uh study games professionally before game studies were a thing in Finland so we ended up then founding finland's first game development Club back in the day then we founded finland's first uh nonprofit sort of co-ops on top of those clubs to make it easier to study games uh went on to work a lot with igda Finland so Finland has a very strong games Community uh pred around igda uh got a lifetime award from there a few years back because it's been it's been a long time with this stuff um and then that actually kind of all leads into um working in games where I entered the industry just around a time when um Facebook gaming was big so we sort of started getting the Western free to play game games and kind of learning how to

do that so I was a game leader at vuga uh working on their first mobile titles when Facebook was still the biggest thing and we nobody knew what mobile was going to be with the first iPhones and all that like it wasn't it wasn't clear at all that mobile is going to be as big as it is today so it's been interesting because then been sort of trying to understand what's next every single time we make a new game or ended up founding play R with the idea that there's this such a large Mass Market the biggest Mass Market of our time you know mobile phones these devices that there must be new forms of games and entertainment that no one's never done before let's let's go and find out what that is nowadays we know it it had a lot to do with the modern free to play on mobile and the kind of games that we've ended up creating there which has to do with live Ops and so on which just did not exist back in the day so it's my career really has been to try and kind of spearhead or explore that with you know talented people from the industry nowadays mostly in my own companies uh

funnily enough so if I kind of narrow that down into the post roio era if you will so um robio acquired play Raven U very grateful of that of course and I was kind of asking myself what's next right like what what do I want to do at this point and I think this was about five years ago now five six years ago and already then for me it kind of became clear at that um this going to be even more about the kind of marketing problem that we have nowadays where you have to have a high LTV to be sustaining your ads to make your own Discovery we can't trust Apple or Google or whoever to just donate Us free players every single day we have to make this work and that means that you have to have a game that has such a long lifespan that's engaging over time that can really grow its own audience and that boils down to say liveops for one thing and like online services or games as a service as

we call it now so for me then as a startup founder I'm thinking okay like what we've done that before let's let's do it again uh what's it going to cost or like what what do we need to build to make that happen What can we buy what do we need to make and um it actually kind of boils down into well it's going to be a lot of millions we spend a lot of millions at plan Raven building our own Tech stack and and roio is incidentally known for their amazing backend technology which they call Beacon which is really the secret Source if you will on how they're able to grow Angry Birds nowadays so it kind of starts from okay let's uh let's build that ourselves and that probably means raising two or three extra Millions that's what we have in in metap playay is exactly that you know building it and to get to that point you talk about games as a service I I think you've got a new one I think we'll call it scale as a service with that sort of

fit what you're doing there I think that yeah I think that's kind of on the money right because we and the way I think about it is that we often talk about time to Market as a sort of this first thing let's make games and let's try to be really quick at getting them to Market but it turns out it's not enough to have a game out there and not be successful like what you really want is time time to scale if you will how do we make something that can be a big game because that's what we need to for the for the business to make sense because of the free toplay d dnamic so yeah exactly then then meta play was exactly founded on that idea of this is a hard problem to solve especially if you're making games at the same time so what if we founded a company that was specifically trying to solve this one problem really well and maybe then we can all focus on making games instead of solving all of these problems at once uh and that's really where kind of metap playay came in from how do we solve the problem of time to scale and cut it I mean cut it by just curious cut it by by by how much do you think

um how much in terms of like how how can we accelerate time scale accelerate the the scale is it a question of like because I'm not familiar with I'm familiar with you but I'm obviously not Studio owner and I'm just curious is it is it more a a time that you're focused on or a money or a bit of both yeah we can put some numbers on it so it it took us um about two to three years to make a a backend that could actually scale to hundreds of millions of players um and it it might take a little bit more or less depending on how much you staff it and if you nowadays would use meta play to kind of do the same thing uh we would get you there in two weeks like that's that's the difference between building it versus taking something that's already been built so that's that's massive and then the other number is do you have to hire people to do this or can you get away with a smaller founding

team so now we're starting to talk about well how much do you save in in salaries and complexity of your studio so I'd want to say you save maybe two or three key hires in the beginning of your studio and then maybe save essentially one team later on in your studio so now we're starting to talk about a million a year of us salaries saved on on a bigger Studio easily because you might be saving uh say five people out of your head count plus overhead and so on so those are we're talking big numbers that's really really interesting and you know it's clear from the outside there's going to be an awful lot involved in this teu um so we're really lucky that you literally wrote this down you call it the four pillars of scaling in your blog series um we'll link to this in the show notes and we encourage every listener out there to to check it out and find out more but can you just give us a little insight you know you know wet their taste buds a little and break down each pillar for us um just even even rough roughly just so so we get a

sense of what it is that you you see as the The crucial aspects of this yeah yeah absolutely so where this four pillars thing really came from was that it's as you say such a complex large topic that it's even difficult to talk about so we tried to spend a little bit of time a little bit I mean the last five years of our time even trying to praktice down into something that we can you know talk a talk about inside the metap playay and with other Studios and it sort of come down to four major things that happen as your as you get your first viral hit number one you start to get a lot of players into your game so number of players goes up dramatically and that means that those players need Service as well as you hit every single technical Tipping Point in a very negative way uh that's possible so anything that can go wrong will go wrong when you have enough players in so that's problem number one um so problem number two is more that your game is never done so usually when you have let's call it the minimum viable product

or whatever that goes into the market that you think is promising and will start to scale but then when you really want to get it to top Crossing then you you kind of have to fill out the rest of your vision so you still need to work on your long-term social metag game features like usually that means adding in Guilds adding in seasonal leaderboard structures all kinds of Event Systems lots of content so the complexity of your game goes up that's the important bit not only do you have all these players but now your game becomes system systemically more complex and it's harder and harder and harder to make the game more intricate if you will so that's problem number two and both of these things if they sound complicated it is because they are and that usually means that then number three your team size starts to go up because of course you need more people to solve all of these problems in parallel and as we know when you get more people then you know you you that's a whole deal of people management and also how to keep that team then productive which is surprisingly difficult because as we

know like more more mothers don't necessarily like give birth to a single baby faster so these things can be difficult to actually scale out and then number four at the same time you're now a revenue generating business which means that we're starting to talk about um op like adding getting more Revenue out of the game to kind of sustain the head count and everything that we're doing we want to start to optimize all of that and we start to talk about boring things like business Contin uity which is obviously really important if we're now talking about the business that's may be generating 200 million a year so you also want certain guarantees that that's not just going to crash and burn tomorrow for a a reason that we could maybe prevent so four things number of players game complexity the team size and then the revenue that we now suddenly have to solve that we didn't necessarily have to solve while we were going to pre-launch or early days of the game very tricky though however maybe I'll start with one and we can sort of tag back and forth here

Brian to dive down a little bit deeper let's just start with something as simple as you have more players right you have more players more to manage so maybe you can name a strategy a technology whatever it is you suggest for keeping the player experience as smooth as possible when the user base is growing yeah so there's maybe two sides of that coin that are like the most important that we just need to every needs to figure out one way or the other um one side is technical meaning that um the source of the way I put it simply is that the source of technical trouble usually is that it's a surprise right like something went wrong meaning we wen't we weren't expecting things to fail but they did so that the kind short way of saying is that not all technology ex behaves at scale as you'd expect it to so what we really need to do is try it out

hopefully not with real players but try to do a massive play test or like simulated play test using Bots that really looks and feels like you had a million players suddenly come into the game and that will just like crash and burn in all kinds of interesting ways that we can now talk about we kind of know where we stand the problem usually is that we don't know where we stand and then we launch a new game and the servers are down but that's the nightmare scenario we don't want to be surprised um so of course from metaplace point of view what what we can do is that we can kind of give you a piece of technology that we've already seen live with hundreds of millions of players so there's all kinds of surprises that we have already had to deal with that so that you don't have to so that that's obviously one way of looking at it then maybe the other side that I think is interesting and often kind of missed is uh less Technical and more customer support So if you now have um again millions of players playing your game every single day and then there's a problem in the game then they will try

to contact you and maybe tell you about it like report the issue so you might be facing tens of thousands of people talking at you at the same time and that is that that kind of how do you m how do you manage that and the answer obviously is that you need all kinds of ticketing systems whether it's like help shift or Zen desk or something to just manage that flood of information coming in but then you need some kind of a way to uh efficiently deal with all the uh requests are coming in and that's usually means you're working with a partner Studio like keywords is a very famous One um so that you can have hundreds and hundreds of customer support agents working with your studio in all languages just answering players and maybe giving them in-game resources and connecting accounts to Lost devices that sort of thing but if you don't have tools to give out in game rewards and connecting things to devices then we have a problem so you do need essentially a like before this happens you need to have a pipeline for just

receiving that player message traffic and then being able to have like an admin tool to actually then resolve it and it's a little bit unfortunate that you have to do it before you have a problem you can't sort of wing it on the spot it just doesn't work um if that makes sense Timmy you mentioned um Team size headcount is one of the these com compounding factors that can cause problems and you know you've just told us that you know the number of players can massively push up the the number of tickets requests for help you know problems Community Management Etc and I'm wondering if this shift and focus away from development into then servicing your players is perhaps one of the factors underlying a lot of the redundancies and layoffs that we've been seeing in the game sector over the last you know 12 to 18 months as as Studios shift from making the thing to then running the thing servicing the thing do do you think that's that's playing a

role yeah so this is something where actually the the mobile industry is I think ahead of the console industry and a lot of the layoffs we're seeing today are happening from the traditional more like PC console Studios so I don't think this is as big of a driver but um what I do see happening which I do think is quite interesting is that the generally the most successful game studios that operate in this very very Advanced kind of games service space you're right that there's a huge let's call it capital investment into building The Upfront game and then the most clever Studios actually have a relatively small skeleton crew that is then driving most of the live Ops because they're using such an efficient tool set that they are they they don't necessarily need like 20 programmers uh to add more content to the game they can have brilliant content designers who are able to using the tools able to push new stuff in so yes there's less of a need for that initial development team but I think what I'm seeing mostly in the industry at the

moment is that those teams that are brilliant at making the new games they generally are then shifted to work on some like the next new title so I I feel like the layoff situation which is really unfortunate I feel like that is more being underlined uh that the the live service style uh industry I think is kind of replacing a lot of the the premium type of making making games so a lot of the games that are getting cancelled that a lot of people are getting laid off are actually from the some more premium projects that don't necessarily have like Financial viability in the Market at the moment I think it's a really interesting Dynamic so so what's the solution for for the companies out there that are facing these four pillars of of um you know complexity and challenge is it is it just down to the tool set is it down to automation or is there something deeper that needs to be understood there in order to let a studio navigate this this you know complexity I'd love to say that

just use metap playay but really yeah it is a little bit deeper I think it comes down to um even even like the founding ethos of the studio itself of like what are we what problems are we here to solve right like it um the best when I say best I mean like the most interesting startups that we work with nowadays that are even in this harsh climate that are able to raise funds and and start new Ventures I feel like they have very very strongly founded with the understanding that they will be a uh aiming for a very large live live service game and because that's is this is true now they are deeply thinking about the four pillars that we are here discussing they're basically saying that they really is deep thought going into them and then deciding who are part of the founding team and who are going to be the first key hires and and what are what are the tradeoffs that you're going to do usually it means things like let's maybe not focus on the graphics much because if we do then the content is

going to be extremely expensive later on it's not that it isn't cool it is but it's going to be impossibly expensive to add more content if if that's sort of the graphics level that you're setting for example so those are more like creative decisions that you're making early on because you're mindful of where those decisions will take you later on um and of course for a lot of it I got to say technology helps of course that we've now spent at metap playay the past five years and I want to say roughly 10 million or so uh working on a tech so far and we'll be spending another 10 million very shortly on it just in salaries so obviously it helps to sort of picky back off of that instead of having to solve it at the same time so yes it's fascinating how many new games are either not released or or or are killed before they are fully launched and so what I'm hearing here is that that trend of not wanting to jump in there with a

new release and then having to get and extract all the value possible out of existing games through liveops you know that works that's what we're seeing that Dynamic but in live Ops it's not just about the content it's about you know planning how can you stretch and grow the game as you grow the player base so I'd like to ask you what you're advising companies you're working with to do that because the way forward is not necessarily to grow the audience through the typical usual live Ops you really have to think outside the box yeah absolutely I think that's a super super interesting question and we actually spend a a huge amount of time in in the Finish industry just the game designers trying to understand this like what do we build what what's meaningful and I think the my kind of number one advice there uh is to fundament Mally design the game around like the entertainment

experience of your game around this concept of new content coming in like it the the game can actually you can you can leave a lot of stuff out of the game and leave it as a sort of placeholder of like we will have events I don't know what those events are going to be but we will have events and they will be amazing like this is a game about events for example and then you don't have to have separate single player progression modes or anything else necess so you can you can kind of save a lot of time and only focus on the thing which basically making live Ops the defining feature of the game instead of a sort of cute Sideshow and I think an amazing example of that is Hell divers 2 incidentally um not even talking about the mobile game in this case but hell divers being a popular thing at the moment where when you play it you strongly feel like you're being um like the developers are almost directly talking to you the player through the game almost like a game master or running an RPG and that

is the experience that I'm here for and thus they don't necessarily need to have a campaign so it's easy to say for me to say a thing like this but it's it's a very very different way of of Designing a game a game as a live service but fundamentally and if we if we do that I think we're already like 70% thinking about exactly the right things because then from there we start to think about okay well what kind of tools do we need and is the content maybe localized does it happen at the same time on every single time zone or should it be more like local to your time zone and this is exactly the right head space to be in uh I feel like yeah and I'm going to stick with with the whole notional liveops Teo and and and ask about that content pipeline you know you've just said keeping the content fresh not necessarily knowing exactly what's going to be in there in terms of events but how how would you advise Studios especially smaller Studios to kind of look at that content pipeline is it is

it just kind of building in the hooks from the initial launch and knowing you know we have the ability to drop things in or do you have to be far more organized and know 6 to 12 months out exactly what you're going to be doing um and does it vary by the sort of the the size and scale of the the project that is an excellent question and it's unironically a $200 million question so and and I want to say this this has not been solved in the games industry yet like we don't know ask me again in 5 years but what I what I think is at the moment The Cutting Edge answer to that is that your content pipeline from us as a team when I say content pipeline that's such a boring word what I mean is that how do we as developers come together to make something new in the game and how do we push it out and do that as efficiently as possible that content pipeline will look very different to for you as a startup for a five person team or a 10 person team to

when you are the same same team when you have a successful game and you are 150 people those 150 people will be falling over each other left and right if you if you have the same sort of working practices as when you were five people and this is not a hypothetical problem because this is literally what we want to solve so um I think what it what the best practice looks like at the moment and I find this really interesting um is that you have three different things in in your game that you need to kind of constantly update first one is your core economy and by by that I mean what is the power of your weapons how how much do you think cost things cost when you upgrade them how quickly do you uh Pro uh progress through Maps so on that is like a holy thing that nobody can mess around with because if you mess up the core economy you mess up every single aspect of the game and usually there's only one or two people who are knowledgeable of how all of that works so there's that old old wise person who

kind of blesses game updates or economy updates now then you have features like content that's um let's call it additive on top of the economy so I'm talking about levels events boss fights whatever is the genre of your game where when you are a small team you have the same person working on the economy and working on the content but when you are a big team you actually have more like that Central person who really thinks about the economy and then you have small feature teams that in parallel work on new aspects of the game that as you say something might ship next week the other thing might ship in half a year who knows like that's why we have separate teams that they can have their own timelines now how do we come together and make sure that they you're able to have these separate teams completely test their own version of the game and maybe publish it without kind of draging or somehow uh stepping on the toes of the other in parallel and the specific challenge there is if I

introduce more content to the end of the game then I might want to rebalance the middle of the game to be a little bit faster so that players get to the new endg game stuff earlier but if I do that then that will literally um affect what the other people are doing in team number two so we have to suddenly very physically break the economy down into multiple separate files let's call them on dis that can be sort of worked on without causing conflict with each other and I can talk for hours and hours about how how you might do that but that's something we have to do and then the third part which I find interesting and this is new the relatively new learnings is that then on top of all of this in parallel we have the live game where we have this new class of employees in the games industry that are sometimes called live Ops producers or maybe live operators that do not work with the Game feature teams that do not work with the central economy they only tweet the game live based on um know yesterday's

analytics so you literally have people who say hey we had a very successful marketing campaign in Brazil over the weekend uh so we should probably put something cool in Brazil for players that have played less than a week like let's let's put something extra in that in that goo so let's on Monday come together have a meeting come up with some graphics upload those quickly and by Wednesday we'll have the event out like that's such a fast cycle that you're just bypassing the the rest of the game development team so now how do we what kind of tools do we build for these liveops people to kind of tweak the game while we're building the features while we're uh doing the economy and we have these kind of three different cadences of updating them live and so on so my complicated answer to your simple question is that it's difficult but once once you know what it looks like I once you can imagine as a game designer what it will look like to

be on top of your live game that is super popular then we can kind of walk backwards from there and self organize to make it possible and easy but if by chance you didn't look forward and you just kind of end up somewhere then can be very very very difficult to kind of reorganize ourselves already on top of a live game and start to kind of build these tools ad hoc and just hope for the best and especially Timo there are a number of companies I won't name them but I've spoken with the people in live Ops and it's really you know that was very very important and they had free reign because it was about marketing and it was about making the game sustainable but then they sort of painted themselves into a bit of a corner and that that direction is more progressed than than the feature so that that split that you're talking about that that that happens a lot how do you how how do you possibly bring that back together if you've got that in a company because there are a number of smaller Studios where that happened maybe even your own

oh absolutely we had multiple teams at play Raven in parallel so luckily enough we were able to learn from each other as like separate teams and and from other studios in the industry try to preempt this a little bit but you're right like at some point you find yourself in a corner that happens so unfortunately it some hard questions need to be asked at that point and I find that the the most difficult thing that needs to be solved first is actually on Studio strategy and Studio culture because it it really means that we have to we have to give up on some idea that we had about what kind of company this is and what kind of things do we build and what kind of teams do we have so it means a pivot of some kind and I find that that can be something where for example the leadership takes a very long time to change their mind even if the people in the field struggle every day because if you feel that the the people struggling are not necessarily the people who make decisions not always and lack of of empathy is a thing so that needs to be

solved but once once you have the Buy in from the people on the field and the people who who make the decisions usually it means that okay let's try a new tool because that's the easiest thing you can do let's let's integrate a new tool that makes it easier for us to try a new way to run liveops in a slightly easier way and if that's successful let's maybe lean on on into it a little bit more and sort of Chip of thesis away from this thing that seems very hard to work with piece by piece turn it into something that is actually very very very efficient to work with over time so instead of doing one big shift do more like many many many small updates and kind of build confidence that yes this is this is a better way and from a metap play point of view we've done that with a couple of customers where they uh they have a very Advanced live game and we would sort of integrate a small corner of metap play if you will and then sort of over time continue pulling thread and make it more and more and more live opsy and whatever

is the goal of the studio in that case whatever they want to build but yeah it's a honestly it's a bit of a it's a tough not to crack especially the cultural part of it what you're talking about or what I'm taking away from that is is the um the ability to be agile the ability to sort of change your mind change those decisions and I guess really Empower your teams to do what's right but within the context of the whole company that's a really tough culture to to you know inculcate and to introduce because um trusting your team without necessarily having to sort of go back for that Central permission you know apologize rather than ask um Can can be challenging for for uh games companies especially those who have successful companies out excuse me successful games out there on the market um are you are you seeing a lot of Studios adopting this are are you seeing them kind of embracing this or is this

um another challenge that they're they're they're kind of struggling with interestingly enough the the answer is sort of it's a it's a live or die market so whatever is the winning strategy no matter your opinion as a studio you will end up adopting the winning strategy at the end because there's just no other way with it's just so competitive meaning if the other people are literally making more money by having a very sort of flexible and agile live Etc culture in all of the liveops is one of the four pillars if you call it but across all of the pillars uh if if other people are better at doing it then they might like price you out of your marketing which means that you're not growing anymore as a studio which means that you gotta shift shift up a gear and get on with the program if you will and that's what I'm seeing so what what we're essentially seeing is new Studios figuring out new better more efficient ways to make you know honestly more fun games longer lasting games and that then

puts a lot of like puts the screws on every other Studio to do the same one way or another so it's painful but we are seeing Studios transition always to the latest best practice one by one whether they want it or not which is interesting I like to follow up on that because you make the point Brian you know what are Studios doing metap playay of course working with Studios so maybe you can give an example of you know what you're doing your Hands-On approach you know is making a difference is putting them on this other pathway and and showing us therefore what a blueprint could look like I mean it's always going to be complex you said to yourself it's going to depend depends on empathy depends on culture a lot of a lot of variables but what does that look like in practice what can you show us of yes this works this is the benefit and this is the blueprint let's pick customer support actually as as a as a thing that usually

game studios don't found themselves on like we're going to build an amazing customer support and then like make a game like usually it's the other way around so I I'll just use that a proxy for something where that's something where uh a really really really well done customer support operation looks roughly similar for all game studios so that just means that we can work with Studios to kind of build it out year after year and and and try to understand what are the most important tools that your customer support agents will need what are the really rarely needed features that you're super glad to have when you need them in a panic uh and sort of bundle all of that in so to give you a concrete example the two biggest sources of customer support like the two most important things you need is the ability to send in-game resources and then number two is the ability for when somebody buys a new phone that they've lost the old one is to reconnect their account into the new phone so they can

continue playing especially if they spend tens of thousands of Euros or something in the game you kind of want them to be able to continue so th those things and more what to your question is that yes we can build those out but now those features what we literally do with our customers very Hands-On is have a call maybe invite them to our office have a beer then just open up our tool set and talk about it of why those tools exist and what kind of problems they're solving and then use that as a very very concrete sort of uh blueprint or or like a forecast of like here's what you're GNA need to do let's talk about how you guys specifically want to do it whether whether by it's by using metap playay or whatever but here's what it's going to look like so we kind of look into the future a little bit just by looking at our tools and and understanding that you will have to solve these problems one way or another and maybe customer support is like an easy neutral one but then we equally talk a lot about um this like game configuration data on

liveops which we already spend some time talking here exact same discussion and ranging into something way more technical into you know Cloud security and backup rotations and even like audit logs and these sort of things which are more when you have a big team then here's how you maybe organize a big team around you know a live game and make sure that your GDP are compliant etc etc let's just like make sure you're aware of this stuff even if it's not difficult we've talked about you know the Community Management servicing the players but I guess the other side of this is making sure that your game is fair evenhanded it's not being you know cheated you're not suffering from swarms of bots um who are just you know and cheating is prolific so what what measures can Studios and partners with with metap play um take to make sure that their games remain fair and secure as as they grow that is absolutely a massive problem and and I'll I'll just

like emphasize it by saying that no top Crossing game can be cheated like it's it is such a thing like if your game can be cheated there's no prior art in the known universe that you could have a game with cheaters and also have that game be one of the the biggest most successful games this this is something about cheating in games that may devalues it over time whether it means that it's not worth spending money on because clearly somebody else is just like cheating their way through or it's easier to cheat than to pay or whatever it means uh it's it's super important so if we assume that it's one technologically one of the most important things that we need to solve in the beginning the way you solve it for like for reals is that you build your game in a way where cheating is impossible it's kind of easy to say a little bit more difficult to do and what that means for us and as far as I know this is the the best practice for all Studios that can do it roughly the same way is that you essentially run a full copy

of the game on a server that you trust that is the server that's in your cloud in your AWS account is infinitely more difficult to hack than the phone that the player has you know in their pocket all the time you can never trust what's running on their phone so essentially you have to build the game in a way that you run a full copy copy of it in a server and then only ever trust whatever the server comes up with and get really prepared that players will try to send junks and run run Bots and so on to try to spoof your server but that's no longer possible if the server runs a full copy so this now what I'm describing is essentially like a programming modu it's very almost like a philosophical level it's a way of building a game which can be complicated and metap playay that's part of what we do it's the core of our product to make that easier but I find that that actually interesting that there's still even today um I was speaking in a conference at Rebo and I had fantastic follow-up conversations some of which were exactly this sort of programmers coming in and asking do I really have to

like do I do I really have to I don't want to it sounds hard um and my answer was I'm sorry you have to so in short I'm sort of saying no no amount of anti-che will work it that just will not work what you have to do is something that's by Design cheat proof to begin with and happily enough mobile games have been doing that forever so I think there's a lot of prior art of how to do it you don't have to in invent anything we just have to sort of do it the difficult way if you will you're doing a lot to help Studios survive succeed innovate which means that you yourself have to be doing that how and where are you going to be innovating at meta playay to keep this going to keep connected with the needs of the studios but also be meeting them or even anticipating them as well yeah absolutely so the way we actually do this is at that at metap Play We very consciously we bootstrap the company so

we don't have any investor money any Venture Capital which means that we essentially live or die on every single paycheck that we get months to month which gives us a very sort of Do or Die focus on working with things that are immediately valuable so we sort of have that need for a very very quick feedback loop with our customers Studios and the way we spe specifically do that is that we we select Studios have this sort of white glove Consulting uh relationship where we might have a weekly meeting literally with the development team every single week kind of sit in and listen to what they're working on and try to understand the dynamic of it and what is it hard is it simple are they are they using the things that we built or are they annoyed at the things that we built or like what's actually going on and then funnily enough that that some often times in fact leads into very very small small technical improvements if you will that might be very impactful

to the people who actually have to live with the thing every single day so that could be things like real examples trying to um make better error messages and like collect them in a place where they're easier to find and more like more uh how would you say more like politely presented that did you know you made a mistake and here's what we know about the mistake and now is the perfect time to fix it while you're still working on the thing and then like keep that sort of very empathetic momentum rolling I'm getting philosophical about this but like I feel like that's exactly the kind of stuff that that we would not get unless we were there just talking with people kind of on a day-to-day level uh and I think that yeah that's that's how we try to keep tabs and the way I see that going in the future at the moment is that there are sort of two things that need need Improvement in like in all Studios one side is how do we make new games faster so it's the that new team five people super talented

extremely motivated let's solve that class of problems for us it's things like quicker easier deployments of servers and like let's get the technical stuff just kind of happening on the background so that you can have a smaller team making you games faster very cool very cool and then at the same time in parallel you have the top grossing games who absolutely do not care about your 5% team problems but instead are asking the question of not how do I get 10% more money how do I double or even 10 x the game over the next few years and then we're talking about very complicated systems like the seasonal leaderboards and so on that kind of have these career modes for players and and like matchmake players in interesting ways and give them like recurring goals and so on and that's very game specific but those are difficult things to build so we're trying to understand what are the sort of Cutting Edge long-term social meta things and how what do we as metap playay build so it would be easier for you as a game developer to go and try

those things out and I think like we're seeing these two extremes over the next year and two kind of develop more and more and more and we we try to keep tabs on both of them if that makes sense before we Before We Say Goodbye it's there are two questions that we ask all of the guests who come on to the show the first is what are you playing right now what's obsessing you what's maybe on your the phone in your pocket even as we speak and the second one favorite game of all time so new pressure so first of all I'm getting notifications right now on my phone about Squad Busters an amazing game by Supercell uh apparently my tickets are full I should should go back and play I've got four 400 uh rounds in on it so far over the past couple of weeks such a good thing we'll talk about that later uh and the favorite game of all time civilization one easy answer such an amazing thing back in the day and that's also how how I learned to cheat in games because I wanted to get infinite money in civilization so I learned hex editing on on my PC back in the

day well there you go you see that that's the sort of insight and that's the sort of like searing geekery that we love um to close out the show on so we we are definitely going to get you back and we're are going to drill down on that but for now thank you so much for coming along speaking to us um we're really grateful and uh yeah so much for our audience to to kind of unpack and and uh think about from that absolutely and a plug for your blog series which we will put in the show notes t a real pleasure and uh we'll be handing those along as well because I'm sure people want to dive in thanks again this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games Market in all its wonderful complexity and

strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shoes and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future