NEW ** Session: Time To Resolve - Raúl Orrego del Río, Gameloft Barcelona.

Uh so next up we have um Raul O'Rego from Raul O'Rego from Gameloft Barcelona with a talk time to resolve. So if you could please make your way to the stage uh please give a round of applause to our next speaker. Thank you.
[applause]

Hello, I'm Raul. Thank you for coming. Um before starting I want to do a disclaimer. I have made a lot of stupid decisions through my life and I will continue to do it. But I hopefully hopefully I can the most important ones I can make it correctly. Today we want to talk about decision-making process to get rid of paperwork. My background is in economics and management. I started my career in product management and corporate banking in Santander. Yes, I come from from the hell. And then I started I moved to production in video games. And right now as the GM of Asphalt Legends in Gameloft Barcelona. All right, so a super important question that I don't think we ask it too much and we don't think too much about it. What problem do video games solve? Do you think about that? Do you ask that

question? We normally talk and build games and cheap games and experiences. I don't think we really contemplate this topic. If we look at the family, other families that also work in entertainment, for example, we pick music, right? Emotional regulation from a biologi- biological point of view. You play a song and you immediately connect with that emotion, right? You are feeling sad, you put the song and you start to feel more sad. Or you want to hype yourself up, right? So, which problem do video games solve? For me, on my experience and my research, is about agency. And here, please, I know we just had lunch, but give me a little bit of your patience. I'm going to explain a little bit of something that I believe is super important. That is a concept that happens in your brain that's called reward prediction error. What is this? It's basically when you are waiting for this video game to be

released. Oh, I will love now it's coming, Starcraft 10, and it's going to be amazing. Then when you get the game and you play it, if the experience is better than the one that you were expecting, you get a hype in your brain and then a party start inside your brain, a Lollapalooza effect with dopamine, opioids, serotonin and so on and so forth. This is the beginning of the experience of video games. To be transparent, this is the reality what that's what's going on in your brain. And this topic, reward prediction error, if you can remember this one thing from this talk, I hope it's this. It's connected to two theories in psychology. One about flow that we use a lot in game design, right? If you as a human are in an effort reward cycle that is healthy, you will feel nice. You will will feel great inside your head.

And another theory that is important for you to understand is self-determination theory. Self-determination theory is the motivation that we have as humans to become what we want to be as a person. It's based on three pillars. First, do I have control of my life? Second, can I become somebody? Can I get better in something? Mastery. And the third one is about do I belong to somebody? Do I belong to our community? Do I belong to our culture? To our country? If reward prediction error, self- determination theory, and also flow is not harmonic inside your brain, basically you will feel you will be feel bad stress in your life. And normally the worst case is that you feel that what you do in your life doesn't have any sense. You you basically don't don't change anything in your life, in your world.

And this is the beautiful thing about video games because they come and solve this gap that you have in your brain and regulate yourself, right? Okay, that's the problem that I believe we solve with video games. To solve it correctly as game developers, we need to do two things right. Choose what to build, features, genre, games. And execute that correctly. Processes, teams, budgets. And to be doing this successfully, we depend on two things. How lucky we are, and how good is our decision-making process. Luck on one side, and decision quality, decision-making process take it as an skill. How good are you prepared to take decisions? And the thing is that do video games are more depends the result of a video game effort depends more on a skill or on luck? Well, we are in between technology and entertainment, right? So, we are very

sensitive to external shocks when a new technology appears like mobile or maybe robots in the future. When changes of cultures or markets appear or hardware get more expensive, we suffer or again get opportunities. So, we are very sensitive to changes in markets. So, we can say there is a big effect on luck. But, let's let's dig it a little bit more on this. Most of the successful games out there in the market come from very powerful IPs that are established already in the market, in the world, and also in in from different uh established studios to say. But, if we really want to be serious about this, I took 10 years on uh financial ratio that is return on assets of companies that have their their financial data open to market. And here the second point that I ask you to to be patient with me. When you evaluate a system

and you see, for example, your favorite sportsman to start becoming better at the at at the sport that he plays or she plays and then get better, better, better, and get to superstars, have have his career here, and then drop out. He finished the career. You can see this behavior of skill being developed very clear, very sustainable, and kind of very clean to say. But, when you see a system that is very luck-based, you will see a lot of return to the mean. What I mean with this is you progress, you get lucky, you get back to the mean, you get not lucky, you get back to the mean, you get super super lucky, you get back to the mean, like this. And when you see return on assets on companies that have 14 years, you see an improvement. So, there is something about skills too, for for sure. But, most of the results come back to the mean. So, there is a heavy element of luck also in game development.

So, what I see is that the industry is in between luck and skill, and we are closer to poker, honestly, based on the data, than chess as an industry. So, that means there is a lot of luck, but we also need to have our skill very good developer today. All right. So, how you navigate this kind of a scenarios? What I do is this a model that I try to use this console of different disciplines is that I not only use mana management theories or project management things or things tools from production or or product management. I try to go to different disciplines and pick models that can help me to solve problems. From economics to biology and others. Let's do a demo. When I started to work as a GM in in Asphalt Legends in Gameloft Barcelona, we have to improve the performance of the project based on three pillars. Making the studios work together better,

optimize a new technology that we ship to the market, and improve how we do product strategy. Very complicated topics, and we did have to do it in one quarter. So, I'm going to do a very soft demo, very fast. For example, what do you do when you want to use this kind of models, a collection of models from different science to solve problems? Okay, you go to economics and you say, "How I can communicate to my team? How I can make sense that coordinating different studios towards one vision is important and makes sense?" Well, in economics you have economics economics of a scale and economies of a scope. That's why you you listen and you hear that many studios, as much as they can, push to have the same team working in the same IP for many years because you develop economies of a scale and economies of a scope. If we talk about engineer or engineering, what I want to pick from that in this example is from natural science

first principles. Instead that happens a lot on creative industries, we focus a lot of what to build. Hey, we I want to do this feature. I want to achieve this kind of game. But we really needs to start with the problem or the opportunity that we want to attack. And this way of viewing the world from science first principles is super helpful. So, instead of being gate one the solution, what you want to build, we shift into identifying and the problem. Gate zero, what is the problem from a quantitative point of view? From psychology, is super difficult for us to generate this process of neuroplasticity and change our brain how we think or beliefs because we are wired to frozen or what we think. It's super difficult. So, imagine what you need to to do with yourself when you want to change an habit, when you want to do it for different studios, different people that have different culture, different education, different goals. So, it is important that we are aware

that our brain is wired to not change in our beliefs and we need to do a super aggressive effort to do it to do that change. And lastly, again as a demo very fast, from biology, the prefrontal cortex that is this part of the brain on top of of your head that makes the logical decisions is one part of the brain that helps you to decide, right? And inside the limbic system inside the the head helps you with the emotions and you need to have both of them in balance. So, here's the thing. When you are in this situation in that you need to take the a lot of decisions in one month, in one week that are critical for the project, you have kind of a mana bar in your prefrontal cortex that you need to use and you need to learn how to administrate to make decisions correctly because you don't have infinite energy from a logical point of view. You have a budget from your brain and that is. So, what you need to do, prioritize, leave things on the side if

they are not important at the moment because every day you have a limit of quantity of decision that you can make. So, the result is that we improve gross margin of the project after improving this year and year, developing this, attacking this those three fronts. Moving out of the console of this uh that I invite you to build different take from different disciplines, not only from the words that you manage. Different models to help you improve your decision-making process is about luck. How do you play with luck? In your favor, right? The third thing is how you position yourself. If you decide that the outcome of what you do is the right thing, you're going to have problems in the long term because you can get lucky one time because we knew already we saw already that our industry is is skill and luck. So, you need to make sure that your decision-making process is right and you will commit error for sure because it's normal we

have a limited capacity to say. And that's is the part that your team needs to help you to to solve, right? So, focus on the process, obviously on the outcome that is super important, but don't say, "Ah, this worked, so that's the right thing to do." Careful with this because we'll work one time and not in the long term. On defend, how do you you defend yourself about luck? And this is uh from military science, if you look at the Cold War, when you have two forces and one was smaller than the other, what they do, they don't go and conflict directly. They open different battlefields so they can put more luck on the table, as happened in the guerrilla wars, for example, and that's what indie games needs to do. If they want to follow the number one in that market, in that genre, with less resources, it's GG already. It's like done. If you're going to do something like this, it's super difficult to make it happen. So, you need to do something crazy in order to change the balance of luck versus skill

on your favor. And if you are the leader of that market, then you need to make the game as clean as possible so you can keep luck on place. Hunt is basically what a lot of studios are doing that they put small teams to try different ideas, and you can be basically more more out there to hunt for for for luck events related. One thing that I want to leave you is that uh luck is not something random. It's there. You can work with it. If you put yourself in motion, you study, you prepare yourself to capture those opportunities because for me, and I think I guess for a lot of people, luck is when preparations meet opportunities. That is One thing to add. So, we were talking about success is luck and decision quality, skill. It's also about curiosity. And recently we were celebrating here the events at the Sagrada Familia, and remember that Gaudi what what he he he used to say.

First, love. Second, technique. Why? Not because of poetry, because if you have the passion, you will try to understand the detail of the detail of the details of the details that is super painful, and you will be curious enough to basically be successful in your genre, in your market. So, that is um last thing is Gameloft Barcelona is an studio with more than 25 years of operation in Spain is one of the original pillars of the cluster here in Spain and in Barcelona. And the studio one of the big hits was Asphalt 8 Airborne that have a metacritic of 91 points. And the Airborne topic is I always remember this this word because is also related to the paratroopers the Airborne troops in the army that they need to be super well prepared they need to know different tactics strategies how to use different vehicles weapons and so on and so forth because they jump sometimes in the dark against

the wind to terrains that they don't know with resources that are uncertain.
[snorts]
And that's us basically we need to be super prepared we jump into chaos prepares basically when it's time to resolve. Thank you.
[applause]
Thank you so much for that talk that was great we appreciate it. Does anyone have any questions we've got time for a question we have one over here.
Hi if you would have to start from scratch in game development what skill that is not most commonly thought of would you try to learn?
Super question. I will start from not picking the skill but rather

what you want to be in 5 years or in 10 years. You want to be a developer you want to be a game designer you want to be a producer and so on and so forth. And then you engineer it back back you turn it back right? Okay I want to be a game designer. Then you pick the skills that you will need to get to game design, you know? So, in your case, do you have clear what you want to be in which kind of discipline, position?
Uh most in the field of narrative design and character and concept art.
Perfect. So, narrative in one side and concept art in another side because you will find both position in different I will what I will invite you is to go to to be super practical. Go to LinkedIn and pick all of those positions and write down what are the requirements that they are having right now in the market in the companies that you would love to be working at. And then you will

say, "Okay, so I need this set of skills." In fact, you can pick this and give it to Cloth and say, "Hey man, I want to be here. Give me a prepared a plan for me based on these skills." And you will have it. But for me, it will be like this. Think what you want to be in 5 years, 10 years and engineer that question back and pick the path that will lead you there.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
All right, thank you so much. Another round of applause, please. That was That was really good.
Thank you.
[applause]