No Man's Sky: Grit

our next speaker will discuss the power of focusing on what you do rather than what you say in the face of adversity please welcome to the stage founder of hello games Shaun Murray [Applause] [Music] hello I'm Sean Murray the folks at GDC asked me to talk about my journey as a game developer and in particular about releasing games and so if this talk goes horribly wrong and you know my slides fail and all that kind of thing it's just a clever analogy for release of games that I have devised but the truth is I've I've never met a developer who

finds releasing games easy it always requires Grist and game development is hard I've been lucky enough to work on a lot of very successful games but I've always found emotionally the lowest point for me in development is releasing a game it's not actually been until our most recent project they went sky that I learned to actually become a lot more Zen about us to enjoy us and to learn how to take a team through it knowing sky was this crazy innovative ambitious game it was a procedural universe something nobody had done before and when we would show it to people we would be excited they would get excited and before we knew it we were building a rocket ship on the way up by blasting towards the Sun no an sky when it

released and also still two years later has sold incredibly well it's gone on to be one of the biggest selling new IPs of all time which sounds really weird to say out loud but our release was also one of the most intense and dramatic that I think the games industry is seen this is something that's becoming increasingly common in the industry and a lot of games have faced this before us and after us but unlike some of those we weren't facing just one technical issue that we could fix and we also were a tiny team we were six people on average making no man sky we were just 15 when we launched and we were a little family and as a family post release we faced some really difficult challenges everything that you

can imagine from like the worst of the internet we hit regular intervention from police and Scotland Yard and things like that and I don't really want to talk about that side of things because I think that kind of toxicity and there's toxic individuals already control too much of the narrative around games instead I'd like to talk about how we move forward as a team because now we find ourselves mentioned as that benchmark for coming back doing no man Skye is now a positive thing right two years out from launch like I said we're selling kind of numbers that I think boast Triple A games would be really proud of for their launch but more importantly we have a very positive probably one of the most positive communities of any game that is launched during those darker days though it would have been very easy to quit it would have been almost expected or the

norm but two things forced me to get out of bed every morning one was that we could see something that others couldn't we could see hundreds of thousands of people playing the game every day an average play time of twenty five hours across millions of players we knew that people were enjoying the game and wanted to enjoy more the second thing that really made me want to get out and fight is that the narrative around games the launch like this becomes about the team being maybe dishonest or lazy or since they are that I've never met a lazy developer you know I've probably made bad mistakes in my time but the teemed team at hella games are incredibly talented and so incredibly hard-working and so I felt like their legacy deserve to be correct so at first the intensity that feedback was overwhelming but I

decided you either had to hide or you had to face it so I did something that I wouldn't recommend but I decided to kind of drink from the firehouse right every mail that you send to hello games goes directly to my folded to my watch right we didn't block or mute people if you talked about no man's sky then I probably read it again I wouldn't really recommend it but it helped me gain a new perspective and that perspective is that everything is just data I sat down to categorize everything I brought in people externally to do it and we learned a lot from that for instance we learned that the most toxic commentary about 80 to 90% of it was coming from people who weren't really invested in the game they were talking online about topics that are very common and very recognizable and and most games become a lightning rod for like pre-orders of marketing or whatever and they aren't providing good data to you as a developer that is where

a lot of press and prominent voices focused but we actually began to uncover the ground truth underneath that the second most negative cohort of players was actually people who had played the game for about a hundred hours in the first week and their feedback was actually incredibly useful suddenly from this overwhelming noise of millions of hot takes we discovered some ground truth some real incredibly clear signals like 37% of people were stopping playing or frustrated and playing just because they didn't like the inventory system and suddenly are like that that I can fix I could sit at my computer I could fix that not just that I agree with you and now we know what we're doing we're back making games for people who want to play them now partly I did all of this gathering and ethnic gathering for the

team to shield them they knew they didn't have to you go out and look at Twitter or whatever because it was being taken care of they could look at Ross spreadsheets of cold hard data we also created this tumblr internally for the team and anything where we found that we were making an impact and people were contacting us we put that on the tumblr nothing is more motivating for you who's going through a hard time than knowing that the work that you do is helping other people who are going through similar things meanwhile we learnt that press wasn't necessarily the best way for us to communicate with our players when I grew up the press kind of led my thinking I read edge or whatever it's tell me how to feel about development and developers in 2016 or 2018 we found for a variety of reasons the press kind of operates downstream from the

community because things have clicked driven as to what stories you get served and things like that we would find the glowing articles would disappear from the front page but a rumor would surface from reddit straight to the front page of every website in like ridiculously quick amount of time so if we want to talk to our players we needed to do it directly so we just shut down all communication with the press and it was fun I really enjoyed that I've never wanted to talk to the press in the first place I've never really got it to games for that and I think I'm terrible a - so it felt like us being true to who we were as a company no obviously yes listen to the community it's very important for problems not necessarily for solutions we change the game radically and we changed it in line with our own vision right someone at valve who is a fan of the game said to me what you do now is more important than what you say I can't tell you how many times I sat down to write a blog post to

explain to people our side of the story or you know kind of calm the storm we set things right however as a developer of a release game I think that there is only one thing that's credible and that's your actions we decided to talk to the community through patch notes alone so if we wanted to say something to our players we had to put something in a build we had to ship that build and then we had to tell people about it and there's something really pure and simple about that and it informs the way we develop it will inform the way we develop going forward it's what we got into games to do it allowed me to do something that I've always done in difficult times whether it was crappy bosses that I've dealt with before or crappy situation to school growing up I got my head down and I sat in front of a computer and I made games which is what I enjoy I think there's this thing I've said to the team

a few times and it's so they have heard elsewhere which is find your metric for success and optimize for that and I love this of a programmer so we're saying words like metric and optimization and that that goes right up my street right it speaks my language sounds cold and clinical but I find a lot of meaning in it perhaps you want critical success perhaps you want the highest number of concurrency whatever it is find your metric and every day is a team you are faced with hundreds of decisions and everything becomes so much simpler when you relate that back to your metric and make decisions optimized for last but remember that comparison can be the thief of joy when you release a game it is so easy to fixate on how another game is achieving your metric better than you are or whatever it doesn't matter focus on you and your game now everyone

on the team has their own metric I said to the team this is something that we should do and they kind of joked that I've been reading too many self-help books or something like that but actually it's been really helpful for us for me it became about enjoying my work and how I enjoy my work is seeing other people enjoying us so that actually led me to this question of like why do I make games which is that they I just hadn't really thought about before but I had the the opportunity and a lot of of a situation that meant that maybe I didn't want to do that going forward and I'm like I said a program race so I only understand human emotions in one way and that's through the use of numbers and graphs so just like any normal person I started plotting my contentment on a month-by-month basis we've all done that

so for day I actually asked a bunch of other friends who were developers to do the same right to draw out their journey as a game developer right and we all largely overlapped right concept is fun it's amazing and it's followed by a more difficult pre-production where you start thinking about okay was that comes up such a good idea and then he kind of climb out of that just in time for production when he realized that everything that you did in pre-production was a terrible idea and things are way tougher and then you just think just focus we'll get this game out and when this game out is to be amazing and won't that be an incredible moment and actually for the the reality is it's kind of davu but for the majority of developers it's a real low point it's kind of an anti-climax and what I've learned is that every part of game development is harder than the last and have this question of like why do we do

it and I've thought about this a lot over the last few years right and studies like consistently show this graph of basic human happiness it starts out like you expect childhood is you know fun and exciting obviously and then you become a teenager and things are a little bit harder and then you climb out of that and you're like 20s then you learn to kind of find your feet and then you have a choice if you choose to go forward and have kids to taste your average happiness decreases quite a lot right during those toddler years then those toddlers become teenagers and now you've got the double whammy they're going through their low point in the graph and you're going through and your low point in the graph right and then the final insult is that they move out and you're

the saddest you could be right so that's why talk making games is terrible don't have kids early thank you for coming no I do have some experience here right I embarked on this crazy stupid project right the most ambitious game we could dream up with this tiny team but I also helped bring three children into the world at the same time during those five years of development and I discovered that there's a secret that those studies unhappiness and my little graph doesn't show right something amazing happens when you zoom in on that graph we tend to measure happiness year by year and months a month but actually when you embark on something like this as an indie dev as a parent whatever you tend to find that day to day your happiness is changing wildly I've come to realize

that what you do in that situation is your trading boring old average happiness for moments of transcendental joy brief glimpses of what this thing you're making could become and as a developer over the last few years I've learnt to take a step back and actually try to enjoy that journey as a whole for me transcendental joy beats average happiness even if it's just that you get those glimpses of it and while we're here and we're comparing you know having kids to making a game because they're pretty much the same thing then it suddenly makes sense to me why I would feel so kind of rudderless once my game comes out it's my empty nest right my games out there in something occasionally calling me right and for me over the last few years

I've learned to love tending my garden gnome and sky for me became the perfect outlet right there's this huge universe filled with players and somewhere where anything could exist if we look at the biggest games in the world right now warframe Rainbow six siege fortnight they all kind of had this slightly rocky or lukewarm launch innovation is in such short supply in the industry and we need it so badly we need to encourage it we need to foster it we need to ask people to shoot for the moon and if they fail on their first attempt we need to be there to support them we focus far too much as an industry on week one sales and so little on long-term impact we're all making games in the most polarized

and intense moment in gaming and it could be scary but there's a simplicity I found in releasing them and sky we've started something new now and I'm loving it I'm in that high part of the grasp right but I know that games and making games is never easy so if we're gonna do it then let's not do it for anything that doesn't make an impact they can't really change things we'll push the boundaries let's make sure it's insanely ambitious and let's make sure that we savor the journey every single step of the way thank you [Applause]