State of the Industry 2020 & Beyond with Brad Hart and Johan Karlsson | Episode 234

[Music] hey what's up everybody welcome to another episode of game dev unchained the number one podcast about game development in the lifestyle thereof i am your host brandon pham and i have two special guests from the perforce team that is joining me this week a welcome return to brad hart and johann carlson i kind of pick up there how are you guys doing good we're doing great all right so uh before we get started this is part of the podcast where i'll let you guys introduce yourself to our listeners out there uh so let's go ahead and start with brad who are you with a short synopsis since you've been on the podcast before yeah air force

um [Music] um [Music] perfect so one of the biggest things of course that has happened this year and seems to be a year that's getting weirder and weirder i don't know if you guys been caught up with the jetpack guy over lax uh i feel like we're just one month away from an alien popping out and saying hello um on top of that of course primarily we got covid and one of the main things i wanted to talk to you guys about because you guys have done

uh a pretty heavy research of the effects of kovid and how it's affecting the workplace and what what is the long-term view of everything so we'd love to kind of just dig into that and and let's go start with johan like can you give a little overview of of what i butchered and give us a little more information about that so what we've seen with situations containing quite a few different things from one part of the business going to change game development for every more lesson and one of the reasons there is no power we can actually work remote you can actually work as distributed teams and the technologies are there now how we can do this there's zoom meetings there's there's good

backlog tools there's good version control where you can move assets around very quickly and so forth so i think we're seeing implications both in terms of how people organize uh their production sequence and then lastly of course what it means for the them is building games for the players what does this mean for or you know the you know when we turn up real sports so to say you can no longer go to real nfl matter things like that the rise of things like esports and and games that are focused on that and the alternatives that games can offer the alternative world the alternative realism that games can offer uh in yeah the code and one of the biggest thing and we kind of touched this a bit brad when the last time you were on uh the realities have changed there's a more dependency on on the internet more than ever before and uh we even talked about net neutrality i think the first time we talked about

um when you were on and i mean how did i mean they're banking hard now uh i think there was like a few months where they kind of had like a forgiveness thing but like at least in california how how they kind of gave back our plastic bags they're charging us again and uh it's it's been kind of weird and awful uh on that front uh now that everyone is on yeah well it's really pushing the limits too i mean the um you know one of the things we've seen with our customers uh in the game development world uh we've got all the big ones right so we're dealing with smaller companies and then really the biggest of the big is the sort of piggyback off what johann was saying too is remote work people were concerned about it and it is now how people are going to do their work right it's here to stay um so from a development perspective there was a lot of our customers were moving massive data massive server farms into

the into the into the cloud that was they had the project to do it and this kind of pushed them all over the edge and that's putting you know limits on bandwidth right um as these things are going all across the globe and people are just trying to do their job not just play a game right they're trying to do their work and they're dealing with bandwidth issues uh where things are being capped and um that's really painful for people you know actually trying to put food on their table um let alone just trying to enjoy themselves on a friday night and play some games and have some fun so it's a it's a challenge right um but we really have seen that trend is that that rocket is lit and running and everything servers everything's going into the cloud uh where traditionally ip was always kept locally on prem people are putting it up there to give access to people globally they have to do it now uh remotely one of our one of our best customers just built the whole environment where the entire game development environment everything they need

is running on a server in the cloud and then people just you know terminal window in and do their work which helps alleviate some of that uh we're you know dealing with the bandwidth to the home right um but yeah i know it's a challenge it's a challenge and you know i think everybody wanted to look like a hero right a lot of these companies uh the in the you know the inner providers you know they want to look like heroes at the beginning of covet and hey look we're going to give you free we're going to you know remove limits and all that um but you know it all comes back to business right and if they can get it they'll they'll take it yeah definitely i think it's um realistically common sense have told us that this would have been longer or as long as it's been right i mean the last vaccine took four years and that was the quickest um optimistically everybody wanted this thing to be over 36 months right which you know the internet companies i mean in a way they were banking on it lasting longer

so in a way that they're doing fine um and i i think uh it's kind of like what the survey and we'll go more into it johan real quick about why um why certain companies kind of had like looking like the hero type of mentality like a lot of companies i felt like um had their wires crossed for a while and then finally finding the grips to to make functionality happen um internally through friends externally uh through context you know it's been a struggle i think today especially to um like the ceo of netflix pretty much you know title-wise that it was a net negative of this whole work from home experience and as soon as they can get back in the office they will uh it is an adjustment it's a different way of thinking and it we might have the time because of how things are playing out

to really force our way through for every company to go on board finally um i don't see that changing but i think it is that type of mentality is like brute force you're just gonna have to deal with this this is the way things are right even with the vaccine so johan like through your research through the things and the paper that you published uh your team has published like what what kind of a subject pertaining to this that you can give a little bit more light on so i mean can just first start by personal anecdote i mean i was scheduled to do a training in in florida in march or late march i think it was and then you know we had a meeting about when this whole thing broke out i think was the end of february or something like that and we were talking about well you know we probably have to push this out to june because as i said i'm in sweden you know they were in the us they were starting to shadow flags and things like that and we all had a mindset that this is probably gonna be something that's gonna be over in a couple of months in one way or another this you know we cannot shut down economies for their people lock them down from their homes for a long period of time and i can tell you

still that training hasn't happened on site but we could start doing things online very quickly and i think that is something that we resonate through the research we've done is that many things that were deemed to be impossible quote unquote you know we have always been a studio where everyone has always worked you know in the studio we have to come in we got our stationary pcs we're working by here through the heroes and many i.t departments that essentially changed overnight so but that means also that you need to change your whole view on innovation that's one of the challenges that several have raised here of the people that we surveyed how do you remain innovative as a game studio if you're not able to have face-to-face conversations and chat and you know try gameplay mechanics and things like that so one thing is now you know so technology works working remotely and working distributed and there are many challenges about that but one relates to for an innovative industry like the gaming dev industry how do we

remain innovative so you know how do we do our you know physical whiteboards well we need to put that on a digital whiteboard instead with kanban poses and so forth how do we do things like um daily stand-ups or how do we do things like like early game testing and so forth if you don't get the look and feel of people doing these kind of things so that has been some of the challenges the collaboration part the things that are removed when you're not together as a team and used to the habits that you have and knowing each other has been one type of challenge and but then there's also been some some people who raised and benefits in terms of how this might help include more people in in game studio how can this improve inclusivity people who cannot make it to get game studio every day uh maybe because they need to take care of small children or maybe because they're far away or for other reasons now we can start to onboard new team members anywhere in the world essentially so that's them

coming in as there's not only problems with with the whole situation here there's also opportunities and for some of these game studios there was a comment from one of them about how actually for some smaller studios the hong kobe situation the fact that people are playing more games it gives a bigger revenue actually gives you know for this specific industry for some titles as it has not had an enormous business impact it had almost been like a positive impact for some of them and open up possibilities in that and so it's i mean it's overall a very sad situation of course but there are definitely studios who are trying to make the best out of it that's what we're learning yeah just kind of jump off that if i may the uh um you know what is obviously a very large problem has become an opportunity uh as you know this remote work challenge maybe there's somebody who lives in a country or a state or a city where they would never get the opportunity to work at their dream job right work with their dream game development company

and it just wasn't an option it was a technology was too difficult especially at the smaller individual person level and this has forced companies to solve that problem so i don't you know the we what we've seen again we so we surveyed over 500 uh 500 game developers for for our state of the you know game game development industry in 2020 you can get to perforce.com website uh some pretty interesting statistics there um that they're happy doing it people like having the option to work remote now that it is actually an option uh because the technology has had to be put into place so that people could work effectively and you know i think the overall net is going to be positive because there will be some flexibility there will be some choice there will be opportunity for people across the globe to collaborate when in this particular type of vertical uh traditionally was very difficult and that's something that we performed focus on the tools and the products that

we're building uh partnering with the cloud companies so that we can offer an environment where people can be extremely productive regardless of where they're sitting yeah i mean it's definitely one of those um bigger issues here like with with people being impacted in such a big way throw in the mix of being full-time teachers now for for parents um if if anything prolongs the process of figuring this out because now you have you're juggling a bunch of things and and it is a thing that we do have to learn to cope even though these companies are very optimistically wanting to get back to work there's always going to be some kind of hybrid version of that because most people are very used to this now um especially they're working towards being productive at it every day and so by the time we get back to the office good chances are companies are going to be really well

off uh with the structure and the taste of freedom uh within the workplace and working at home i think a lot of people have a lot a hard time letting that go and would rather kind of brute force learn how to cope working like this than to go back to what was normal before right so i think there's a lot of resistance um at least on the employee side to kind of let's really iron out the the kinks and figure this out um well for sure you know and i think the uh you know the old argument of well it can't work right we can't communicate we don't have the infrastructure to share these big binary files all over the globe and it'll be communication breakdowns and all that that has proven like completely moot right we so many companies we we work very hard at it i know a lot of the our customers in the game development and film world et

cetera semiconductor world they figured it out through brute force and then now it's only gonna you know the rising tide lifts all boats right so whether it's all remote all in the office or people are doing a hybrid thing and you know as we come out of this there be better efficiency that we've learned to do there's better communication there's better technology that's been put in place so overall i think there will be a great uh advantage that what we have learned how to do how to do better in this environment so then when when the environment loosens up a little bit it's only going to be that much better again again that's you know when we look at the survey you know some of the biggest challenges people have is around velocity right time to market trying to reuse assets things that they just want to go faster to meet their deadlines uh nobody ever has enough people right uh so how do they get more efficient and again it's through working through some of these kinks right the technology the communication

right the sharing of data sharing information it has had to be fixed in this environment so it's just going to help you know overall i mean again those are really three of the top three challenges that people highlighted in the survey uh what yo on so one of the the biggest thing in the survey that i was i was looking at ar vr has always been like a fun thing to watch grow right and one of the highlights have been seeing that space because of people uh wanting to kind of connect more right ar vr seems like the closest thing outside of facebook or something right that we can connect through online interaction um so how has that impacted how has code impacted the acceleration of vr and ar development and and even to take that one step above the the the effect of realism overall digital realism how do we get a a real digital experience and i think that that is something that we i mean many people when we did this survey

highlighted how important and how much of a trend i think this will be now as devices are going down in in cost and that actually people who are at home more and more are able to consume this better and actually maybe are willing to invest more also in in their virtual reality and they are our experiences some people mention potential new devices coming up with with like apple's new glasses i mentioned the focus on realism also outside of the more classical things so like you know the the epics acquisition of quick cell for example and ue5 as something that could enable quite a lot in the space of how do we make more realistic games and how do we make sure that we get a more real experience as we are and yeah building new games right now so that's definitely something that that will have a big impact and i think that's been the search right in the arvr world what's gonna be the the real hit you know what's gonna make this take off but from what we're hearing from these these 500 people who serve it they think that this is this may be it

this time we're in right now yeah this time right now is because that we're we're not distracted with like living life outside of our computer it's really pushing everybody to figure out how to like we we've been saying all throughout this podcast to to cope with living like this um and the earlier the better in my opinion it's very much the same way that you know you you guys probably have friends and family that have been itching like the next month will be the the month where we can exit and and live life again and they are the ones that are always at the breaking points of of snapping right and it's the one that are the healthiest with the outlook being you know we're it's going to be like this the next three years because history goes that's that's how long it takes uh to kind of figure this out are uh finding other ways to kind of cope by just internally uh having introspective

reflections philosophy or anything that can figure out to like hey if i pace from one end of my room to another for the next four years can i be sane enough to continue and if the answer is yes by reading books or self-improvement ar vr any type of game development uh specifically to complete that cycle i see a lot of people having more success uh with that frame of mind uh in general aside from this though i want to throw this question to either of you guys yeah 2020 um don't know if it's covered related it might be but like with 5g streaming uh everything online related have i really do think has been really fast-paced more than the years before uh i mean naturally it was on a uprise but this year alone i feel like every month there's been something internet related uh with elon musk shooting satellites up

in the sky faster with 5g suddenly coming out from all these uh major phone carriers and then uh with esports being announced with every major battle royale game like things seems to be cascading into a bigger thing um is that intuition kind of correct like what is it covet related or what exactly is happening where we're just hearing this cascade of news i mean 5g started long before a pandemic right so we've the interesting thing when you work for a company like air force because we of course work with in companies across a wide range of different industries i've been talking to the people that are actually building the 5g right the radio base station providers and so forth and and you know there's been thousands or tens of thousands of engineers involved building this technology for a long period of time and the interesting thing now when we start seeing these 5d zones coming up and devices and so forth how it all kind of fits together and suddenly now we i mean before i

think the main drive would be you know people are mobile people are moving everywhere that's going to be the big thing and what's happening in mobile games uh that's going to be a huge enabler for 45g and the reduction of latency and also of course tied into how these different streaming services could then be used anywhere ah now actually you know now you can get really really good bandwidth connections while this is being rolled out to work from anywhere how people are maybe you know moving out from the cities to live outside of the cities and be allowed to work from there because 5g could be an enabler of them being being able to both work and play games and do other things at the same quality as they might be used from in the city so there are you know once again the technology is being boosted by the pandemic but it's been a long long long journey on 5g and i think that is also something that's going to be very strong and a very big enabler for many different types of game experiences which is also what we we see in the responses that we're getting from yeah game developers you know and i

think the uh just a tag on that i think the you know it just historically right innovation comes in waves right uh any any you know every five ten years there's just an influx of new technology because everybody's racing they they're racing to become the next big thing and it's going across you know different verticals in the technology industry but it's all kind of tied together and it's all enabled so maybe somebody wants to create the next great you know big streaming platform well they're gonna need 5g to get there right and 5g doesn't mean anything unless people are using that pipe so it's kind of like everybody's being carried together towards sort of that next uh innovation era i mean it's happened in devops it's happened uh in every possible category chip design etc um and i think the uh the thing too is with streaming and again some of the feedback we got you know streaming mobile gaming those

trends are going to continue to rapidly grow and dominate because people want to have experience everywhere right they don't want to be limited to i have to have my cat6 cable plugged into my desktop right and to have a good gaming experience or any kind of exterior work experience etc so the more connectivity we have the more freedom people get to to literally do whatever they could do at home they could do it anywhere um or they don't have to be at the office to be able to you know to to run big data types of operations etc so i think it's uh it's just all blossoming together and i think that's where you know people are getting excited in all these industries the other thing to keep in mind is what's behind this as well is there's a lot of money flowing into these companies right this stuff doesn't just happen um so these companies are taking on all these gaming companies that we deal with all the infrastructure companies we're dealing with they're taking in a lot of funding money uh to accelerate because everybody wants

to be first and grab those consumer dollars right and just to one thing i've noticed there a new term for me at least in the past year has been more and more projects are starting up where they're building aaa mobile games i don't know if that if that's something brandon you're aware of since before but for me that's a kind of new thing that you're having kind of triple a size of the project but you're actually focusing on building a purely mobile experience and of course 5g is one of the enablers of why those kind of projects are in the major yeah definitely i think what's um tying into a lot of this is what you guys are saying at first when people were kind of stuck at home games is a natural entertainment one of the entertainment that people kind of try to pass the time with and of course mobile devices the king of all devices to to play games and of course um naturally we thought freemium games or these cheaper games would succeed pretty well and which shown they have and so we're converting a lot

of non-gamers to gamers in this period which i've discussed with past guests before i mean this is a period where a lot of uh people are new to the gaming space or are taking in games and and then slowly evolving to more mature games like games that we've kind of grown up and love or stay within the mobile space but at least playing you know a little bit more complicated type of games uh as time goes on and so with the mobile device kind of growing we also see the streaming uh aspect of it just people just watching people play games uh explode in a big way to more people i think are just more in tune and constantly having kind of white noise in the background or something because it's so quiet and boring um at times just working from home and hearing the kids yelling in the back and so those two space are definitely working in tandem with each other uh and i i i fully believe too uh a lot of what we've been saying you know last couple years with triple a

kind of paying attention to mobile uh in a big way and of course like fortnite and pubg all these have been having a big impact in the mobile space and seeing a lot of success and uh developers are i've been saying this a long time the future is mobile with mobile just being better every year at a faster rate than our pc upgrades um and aaa are slowly just much like how um you guys are dealing with a lot of non-gaming companies starting to use game engines to produce their work uh a lot of aaa are kind of seeing the mobile spaces that where the mobile space finally catching up to triple a quality uh it's a natural kind of transition for gamer game developers internally to kind of look at mobile as a serious device as one of the next xbox playstation as part of their tiers to kind of release their game

so like all this kind of guesses that we've had like since brett you were on the second time are i've seen i see totally in fruition and um it's great uh in spite of you know what's horrible what's horribly happening it's great for the game industry kind of seeing people not get distracted uh in other ways and just putting the focus on the future game development which is streaming mobile and you know triple a looking at alternative um development methods uh that is a lot more profitable which is the big thing uh it's definitely a new age for sure i mean imagine this pandemic 20 years ago or 30 years ago yeah it would be a very different thing right in terms of the entertainment that you could consume and how it would have been experienced and how likely to be actually been able to keep people in their homes for an extended period of time like like

and adding then on top of this in terms of you know giving a realistic experience adding you know building up the technology that supports all of this and also now if you can add like a sports element or something you know engaging about this to make sure you know this this is something that is all of these trends that were kind of seen they fit very well together and it probably would have happened even without a pandemic supporting but this became like the catalyst now that's fast forwards the whole world you know 10 20 maybe i don't know how far into the future in terms of digitization i don't know if you see in this meme going around on twitter in other places like you know who's the main driver for the digitization of your company or of your firm and so forth there are different choices like the cto or so forth and then it's like covey that's the number one choice in others there hasn't been any any bigger catalyst for these things we're talking about of course and so brad like we we talked about this a bit before about how and even within that beginning of this podcast about how a game development and collaboration is

going to change forever right in my opinion for the better and a lot of it is just talent is kind of spread throughout the world that haven't been able to be fully utilized because we always have these central metro cities pretty much where game development studios kind of like building their studios around which makes it super expensive and of course commute is kind of like our second breath when it comes when it comes to working in the game industry right it's just 45 minute ride today to work and then another 45 minute at least right if i'm lucky um so how has that uh developed uh for the past few months since we talked how are you guys seeing more and more uh ways that these studios are improving their collaboration uh their brute force or kind of coming up with innovative uh ways to kind of work with each other better yeah i mean for sure so the uh you know i think um one of the things i know that we did at perforce and i know other companies are doing it as well

is we we basically said all right people now aren't like you said sitting in the car for 45 minutes my commute used to be an hour and a half into boston um uh each way the instead of wasting your time doing that people are are available they're online and uh with things obviously like slack and zoom um people are trying to people still yearn for that face to face it doesn't have to be like skin close to skin but it's got to be look somebody in the eye and have a conversation and so we definitely and a lot of our customers uh did the same thing where we just amped up the amount of these you know video chats uh people are much better about being on slack um less email it's weird it's it's i've definitely seen a drop in email and an increase in slack and just with the more zoom meetings etc people are staying more real time in their um in their communication so collaboration is very key people feeling

you know even though they're spread apart it's really important for people to still feel like they're part of a team you know i'm sure we're not unique in the fact that you know we had it right from the beginning we have thursday night happy hours right where people are spread out all over the place we're based out of minneapolis i live in new hampshire and you know we're you know having a beer or you know virtually um kind of stuff like that people have have implemented and i don't see i don't see that going away even if people start to come back into the office i think people like uh being connected the other area where we've seen people invest is in tooling right so things like hand soft at johan manages is you know it's a collaboration tool right uh very popular in the gaming industry but getting data instead of it on somebody's whiteboard written down somewhere etc getting it into a system that people can share regardless of the where where they are in the world uh has made a big difference and if

you've solved the problem for people that are 45 minutes away right and no longer driving to the office then you've solved the problem for people that are 4 500 miles away right because it's the same technology so it's really you know it's always everything everything i've ever seen in business comes down to people processing tools and it's with the people uh you know are you taking care of them are they are they set with what they need are you staying in contact with them you know process is how people interact with each other uh are you looking for efficiencies are you trying to break down uh you know barriers getting rid of manual work and operations and automating as much as possible um and then the tools do you have the right tool set to to have the process you need to go faster so people you know like you mentioned brandon earlier a lot of us we have little kids and you know you're trying to teach you're trying to trying to feed them you're trying to get your work done so you have to be really efficient in your job so you're not up till

four o'clock in the morning working just to get your you know everything you need to do done um let alone try to have some fun in there in between so really working smart looking you know automation the right tool set taking care of your people over communicating real time it's helped sort of uh certainly helped our company navigate these uh strange times and i know a lot of the customers that uh that we talked to um from big to small have done the same approach and it's working it's working well for everybody but it just really forced everybody to kind of step back and learn but as a result like i said before once kind of this all dies down those best practices that people learn the tools that people put in place those are going to carry forward and make make them even better ship faster ship higher quality product uh overall so you know the net result is you know be stronger for it and more efficient and i kind of mentioned this before right a lot of these companies

we are in a special time i don't think this if it wasn't coved no companies would spend this much resources to figure this out because they have to get things done right um right i don't think of any scenarios that this would have happened this way and so a lot of people especially with the kids thrown in the mix uh they are really forced employees you know level are are forced to be very efficient with their time you know it's like hey i might only have three hours today so right this and this and this and that so it's going to be a lot of ache and pain for a few weeks to a month to figure that out but because people need to get work done and get paid they are having no choice but to brute force it through i mean it's a really odd advantage to what's happening um and i think this is the only period that we're actually going to walk out of this with a alternative to being on site

this was the only way that we would have done it uh in my opinion um so another question that i have for you guys is that um this year oh a lot of things have happened of course uh let's do new nvidia cards kind of make my fifteen hundred dollars last year kind of useless and then and then ue5 your unreal engine 5 being a huge game-changer that really excited everybody about what's next for game development how how has that factored in to people being stuck at home and now like are are glued to every new tech that is coming out i mean are these things obviously have been planned all right it took years for these things to have happened but it's like kind of brushing on what i was saying before it seems like every month there's 20 20s

feels really long and it seems like a lot of things have been been announced every month in terms of technology um do you feel like it's it's one of those things that they're just just trying to throw it on a news feed because everyone is paying attention to it now or it's because it's been a seller because people are more effective because we need these type of tools out and about uh to continue game development i mean i'll go quick and then johan jump in i mean i think uh you know some of these things take you know years and years like johan said years and years to develop but i think the we're certainly noticing it more right because we have time we're not distracted by other things i think people are that haven't been uh job-wise affected uh uh by coving they're spending their money though you know a lot of years somebody might be like i'm not gonna spend 1500 on graphics cards because i i'm gonna go do this project or i'm gonna go take a trip and a vacation this year well if you've got a vacation in the budget

you're not going on vacation right now miles will use it for something fun on the inside of the house uh so i think people are spending more on these types of things because it's easier to justify um i think they're uh same with the phones and all that i mean you know years ago and i think that's why the gaming didn't the the innovation and the gaming around uh mobile phones wasn't there because the phones couldn't do it yeah maybe you could do fruit ninja right but you're not you know playing a triple game game on there the the phones couldn't handle it uh hard to test right uh that's why like you know with uh at perforce we have the product perfecto that can automate completely automate testing of mobile applications and games right because you got to have that velocity and the quality is getting higher their expectations there um you're going from 99 games because they're kind of worth 99 cents you're trying to sell a high volume to higher tier closer to aaa rated games nobody would spend 60 bucks on a video game for their phone eight years ago right

um and that's that's where we're headed so it's kind of like demand and uh product are are intersecting um i think there's been a lot of visionaries for sure um in in the market and to hear where with some of our customers where the stuff that they're thinking about um that's five years from now it's it's it's amazing so the innovation train is gonna keep running and then when you see things like people taking gaming technologies into other markets you did mention it real quick like with the mandalorian in in virtual production we're taking best practices the ability to deliver something cheaper and faster right than doing it all ourselves or filling around with greased green screens and doing post-production i mean the way they built the mandalorians incredible and you know we're being pulled into that world heavily uh because of our partnership with epic um that was all done in the unreal engine and i think you're going to see more and more of that because people are learning you don't need to have to have all the actors on the set at the same time we don't have to do all this crazy

post-production stuff actors are looking at real screens with real worlds behind them rather than looking at a you know a bunch of green stuff uh so i think quality of things are going up and i think the uh you know a lot of these you know technology companies you know they they it's a it's a big family i mean they compete with each other but they're all pushing each other to go faster and get more stuff to market and the hardware vendors you know it does no good to you know to have uh you know nvidia's latest you know massive influx of uh of video cards that are super high powerful and cheaper if there's nothing to run on them right if we don't have these you know advanced games you know 4k going to 8k then what's the what's the point so they all kind of work together uh for the overall greater experience and it's a it's kind of a cool time right now as far as all these technology advancements like i said it comes in any kind of industry these technology things come in waves

about every five to seven years so i think we're kind of at the beginning of that right now and it's probably also i mean one thing i've noticed and one reason why maybe it feels a bit different this year is also that you don't have the trade shows you don't have e3 and gdc and all of those where you can announce all of these big changes and get like a spike you know this is my week i know all the news are going to come out i can go and listen to microsoft i can listen to all of these and they're going to tell me what's new but now all those marketing department has to find a different way of announcing this and telling us about them and reaching out and i guess that's why we're being fed this continuously digitally and i mean working with many game developments too is what i'm hearing also and we had one of these answers coming back from the survey that resonated very well with that was you know some of these changes comes kind of you know you don't know that as a developer of a game building for you know coming back to the earth for oculus or something that's telling they're making changes to their next generation of something and you know how do we adapt and be agile about when we realize well the underlying technology are going to change and we're in the middle of a

project and we might need to adapt that now to support that next generation technology so the response we're in back is what we need to get in the industry is better cross-organizational collaboration because i mean there's the changes that are being made on the underlying tech and then you know unity or unreal making changes how do you collaborate with the game developers and how do they collaborate with for example their publishers with outsourcing companies and all of these vendors how do you achieve for example cross organizational agility how do you make that collaboration better is something that is is what i'm hearing at least and what we heard also responses about something that that is potentially you know the next kind of level here when it comes to you know moving away from agile being your two week streams to agile being actually we're a value stream here of many different organizations is doing a wide range of different things but it needs to work together for us to be able to that quickly when innovation happens and especially now when we're taking this big leap as brad was talking about

yeah and one of the pushes i think because how like geographically the walls have been torn down that uh inclusivity and and accessibility to a lot of game developers are becoming more and more important where um i think one of the biggest things i think with last of us too right they had like a whole future on making sure that it's playable for for people who um who have issues playing it regularly uh was one of the biggest news that i've heard about accessibility in game development in a triple a game for a long time and i feel like uh and a couple other instances this year uh because everyone's meeting online now that has been increasingly uh [Music] been more uh made aware for for everybody who's doing online conferences especially people hard of hearing or

deaf uh you know all these zoom meetings you know you're gonna have to need an interpreter or a captionist uh to kind of help with getting on with work right so uh these are on other issues that are being brought to attention um how are you guys are seeing that with uh with that increase with game development um uh i think there was a like a like a section in the survey kind of talking more about this if you guys can expand on that part that'd be great on the inclusivity i mean particularly what people talked about the the ability to work like balance i mean not only being allowed to have people working for you that can put in you know 16 hours of work during crunch periods and so forth moving into actually being something that you can do during during normal work hours and also making sure you can do that in a balanced way actually opens up the ability to include many many more people in the game development process in itself and then when it comes to the actual product

side of it that making sure you include accessibility features in the games i don't this is probably not something we've got a clear response but i'm thinking that you know in some ways maybe if you're putting constraints on the things you can do in the sense you know we're going to build a game for for someone with a certain disability here you can't see certain colors or you can't hear or something like that you know that might be something that is pretty intriguing from a game design aspect i'm not an expert on this but it was something that we heard that people were you know putting accessibility features into games is is something that they think is important for them but but why it is important for them in addition to just making sure that more people can play it is is not something that i think we saw a clear reason for you know in just a you know again from sort of the the the perfect side with the mobile testing there is a big push with a lot of uh those customers to uh especially around the online banking because you don't have an option right you have to use that software to do your banking

especially when people aren't allowed to before they could actually go to these you know brick and mortar banks and more and more of these banks are trying to reduce their physical footprint and go more virtual and there are federal guidelines on accessibility uh testing compliance so that people can do something that is important as basic as managing their banking so uh building accessibility into those mobile applications is a critical part of those banking business they have to have it so that's why they put the time into it i think as we see the mobile gaming becoming more whatever even though there's billions of them out there more quote-unquote serious right and it becomes a bigger part of the revenue stream for some of these major players in the gaming industry that has to come along with it you cannot alienate uh a a certain population of your of your customers because they can't see well or they can't hear well there has to be

you know different color contrast models that that have to be there as an option you have to have audio help etc so that they can have uh an enjoyable capable experience so you know i hate to say it but unfortunately that's going to follow along with the revenue potential um that's just kind of the way it works for these the larger companies yeah and speaking of revenue potential there was a funding for for game development projects have always been a major part of game development right i mean there's a million people with great ideas but a small percentage actually has the money to kind of follow through with it um do you guys mind kind of talking more about this and um how this year have decelerated accelerated keep people from getting their projects funded yeah i mean i think you know first off like we recognize that i mean that's why we have our indie studio pack where it's you know all of helix core unlimited you know usage and uh comes along with uh with uh

licenses for hand soft as well so to let them get started because the thing is if you're building a game just because you had a very small team doesn't mean your needs are small you still have big files that you're working with you still might have people uh in sweden and uh in in new hampshire and california right that are trying to collaborate so that's kind of one of the things that that we want to do because we know every every startup gaming company a lot of them are bootstrapping this with their own money their own time they're trying to pay for cloud costs or whatever they're doing um so that's something we see as a great opportunity for us to help uh those folks get started but yeah that was that was the number one challenge that came out of the survey was we just don't have the funding to get moving and people are getting money from friends they're you know some of them are like you know legit investors that they're finding but they just don't know how to go about finding the funding and i think that is an area where um there could be an opportunity to help

uh educate um you know educate your listeners right uh what are the best methods who do you talk to how do you put a business proposal together because it's not about well geez i got this cool you know drawing of a character i want in a game you know give me two million dollars to go build it you really have to you don't get money unless the person giving you the money you can see a clear path to revenue return right um but that's the number one challenge and so there's a lot of talented people out there that have great ideas for the games they want to create but they don't know how to get the money because that's not what they do they weren't taught how to do that so i think that there's a gap from what we're seeing there's a big gap uh in the community uh of knowledge around how to approach you know getting the funds you need to properly build the game i don't know johan you have any other comments on that i mean my main comment is that we did a survey after the pandemic happens and you know it's your biggest problem now to work promoting software no your number one problem is still funding and i mean for in the survey here to be

honest a lot of the respondents for smaller game studios where you typically have more of a funding issue but this despite everything else that is going on in the world this remains you know top of mind when it comes to challenges you need to overcome in the short term might have a great idea but realizing that executing on that having a good plan in place so you can convince for example publishers or others to fund you to realize that vision is is something that it remains a key challenge and i i would be interesting to know if if studios have found it more or less difficult to get you know how do you convince publishers and others to fund you when when with over a zoo meeting in contrast to meeting in a small meeting room at a conference but uh yeah that's that's uh there's a lot of good great game ideas out there that's probably not getting enough attention yeah i mean in the survey 41 of the people said they they weren't even sure how to find a backer they didn't even know where to look to find the money and that's you know i just think there's an opportunity for for someone to be able to kind of

reach this the same audience that you have and kind of help guide guide people i think that would be uh a cool trend if that could kind of pick up yeah it's definitely a a real thing i mean i think the way that we're forced to do zoom meetings for for investment money and asking for money it's like the equivalent of getting a phone call from a telemarketer you just don't trust you know no matter how good the idea is there is like a it's hard to replace the face-to-face interaction because a lot of investors i think get their uh feel for the founders or the game developers by being in person and it's less about the idea but more about how that person is and it's still very hard to do that through a flat screen um and so increasingly like more people are finding it hard you know by even getting to that point with through cold email calls right um and i i did i think there hasn't really been a decrease of interest to

to to for investors to provide funding it's just i think the the problem is still it's the same on both ends it's like investors are having a hard time finding the the studios and the studios are having a hard time finding where the investors hang out it's almost like there needs to be some kind of internet hub uh that match makes these guys because it is a good product idea it's a good product yeah it's increasingly weird that uh we haven't figured this part out yeah um this is the time to figure it out a lot of people with money just want to put the money into something yeah there's still i can tell you for sure there is still tons and tons of investment money out there that hasn't slowed down one drop in a matter of fact in some cases it's picked up because people are they can get better deals when they're investing um there's lots of opportunity there's lots of innovation happening and you know to your point and i really just wanted to echo it um just so you know you know your

listeners can you know when they go down this route think about i was told a long time ago starting a company that uh investors venture capitalists private equity firms etc they don't just invest in the product that's part of it they invest in the team right they have to believe in the team and trust them and know that they're going to do the right thing with their money i mean great product ideas are a dime a dozen but finding a really good solid team is key and if you can come across that you know what you're talking about that you've got a plan um that you can execute on that plan it will go miles and miles and help and convince an investor to you know to trust you with their with their funds it's a it's a it's a really big part of the deal yeah and i think one of the other challenges too and although there is a weird feeling that we have an increase of time where people are at home all the time to figure things out

there is also a feeling of not enough time especially when recruiting new people onto the team before it was kind of more straightforward there's onboarding process you walk into the office you do this and that now you got to do it through a tech and individually you know uh a lot of companies are still figuring it out are doing it person to person on a person-to-person basis which takes a lot of time right to walk through the documentation and even if you hand a documentation that's well documented there's no guarantee that people read it all through i mean how many meetings have we've been through he's like didn't you read paragraph 2.15 it's like no i kind of spend all my days uh that i mean those onboarding is the most boring process and it's the hardest to automate because it's so boring um yeah and there needs to be always a guide uh what have you guys heard that has worked with that with hiring new people during this time even though i see a lot of listing more

and more companies are needing more people there seems to be a huge increase of job listings uh more than before in this period yeah yeah no sure so i mean i i can give you an example i hired uh you know i hired a guy to work with me and it was right in the middle of all this right at the beginning when when it was super you know uh locked down and yeah it was difficult because it really fell on me to do the bulk of the training um but a lot of uh online whiteboard sessions right because of the big aspect of what the folks at me need to learn uh you know not just the product that's easy you could download a product and learn it and read the manual and install it etc but really key concepts right strategy um so there was just hyper communication uh that had to that had to happen and then some people just have to jump in

with both feet one of the things that i know that's the guy's very smart so it worked out very well one of the things that um we've seen some of our gaming customers do is they just make sure that they've got the right environments ready right so that people don't need to figure out how to get this tool they need installed and what port do they have to go to connect to this other product and you know a lot of these gaming environments that people have you know they've got the ide they've got the engine they've got you know connector tools they've got obviously helix core they've got hand soft they've got all kinds of stuff that they need to be set up in and what has helped is the customers that i've talked to are the ones that have that kind of automated right somebody's being onboarded boom they've got a machine that's got everything loaded or one of these virtual environments where everything's loaded and ready to go and then that way they don't have to waste time figuring that out but then it's just it's uh it's honestly

it's it's a lot of brute force right uh taking people through stuff let them get their hands dirty uh and a lot of meetings and a lot of collaboration there's no there's no secret sauce there's no magic because you know somebody might know you know c plus plus that's great but here's how we do it here right here's our coding standard here uh is what our environment looks like and here's why maybe what you did before doesn't directly translate so we have to teach you so this education code reviews those things kind of come into play right um you know reviews of the assets people are creating etc so there's a there's got to be a not a long tail but a short cycle fast feedback loop for these new new employees to help them quickly course correct and and kind of get up to speed but it's it's it's hard work by the employer to hard work by the new employee there's just really no way around that and do you have anything to add to that i mean like sharing i mean skill building and sharing

knowledge within a team is something that was brought up as a big challenge as service and also we can you know probably recognize from many places and there's nothing you know nothing more boring than to get a lengthy document to try to learn something that way so from that perspective i mean it's about learning i guess how to use the digital tools and how to use it in a more democratic way you know actually you have a digital trace of almost everything that we're doing now which we didn't have before you know that conversation that happened over you know a coffee or or you know people just talking to each other that's now you know threaded comments in slack we have you know all the comments in something like hand soft we have people participating maybe doing estimation together to learn from each other but it's just making sure to to use the additional transparency you can get actually from from the way we work now but how can we make that easy to consume so we don't drown in documents for example and make that something living right like you have a single source of truth and it's always something that lives long so when you bring new people on board you know bring in their skills but also

make sure that you as a team can maintain the skill base that seems to be a big a big thing to to learn and to overcome and it's always the people who do it the best are going to get the highest performing team so then it's going to show up in great products so we're about the hour mark and i kind of want to leave you guys off with one last question so uh two big studios in small studios like from everything that we talked to and a lot of gems that you guys kind of handed out those nuggets a lot of developers can can actually take and and improve what was the one thing that you guys uh would advise for developers let's just say the the next two years of this uh what they should they focus on to kind of uh set themselves up for success what would they be we can start with you brad yeah that's a great question i mean there's there's a number of things but i think you know obviously you know the obvious

ones of just you know staying up with the technology are great so i'm gonna give you multiple things i can't just do one um the uh but i think i think really looking at how you do your work um you know around being efficient um and not burning out i think that's a big challenge people have had in this environment because you know what i'm home and can't go see anybody and you know my computer's on and so i might as well just keep chugging away uh so i can get ahead or you know that might i want to do that to try to stand out uh and that's cool that works in short bursts but that's extremely unhealthy uh i think it's really important for people to kind of stay fresh and get a little bit of balance there and you know shut the computer off or you know go play a game or go talk to somebody if you can uh that lives in the house but uh try to stay connected but try to stay in some sense of normalcy so you don't burn out and start resenting what you do because if you do it because you love it you don't want to become you know

something that you resent and you'll be better for you're going to come across better in meetings you're going to do better work if your mind is right and so i just highly encourage everybody to take some time for themselves and work on their communication communication is a lot harder when you're not face to face with somebody those you know quote unquote water cooler conversations that happen that you know in my of course in my career i learned a lot of things about a lot of different people and and and picked up some really good you know nuggets of wisdom um in the water cool car conversations so it's you know it made some quick decisions right um try to have that sort of a mindset even in this remote world like just reach out to somebody ping and say hey let's jump on a quick zoom call and uh or slack call and just i got a question i just need an answer quick or there's a decision don't fret about the decision call somebody make a decision move on with your life right so just to be more efficient in what you're doing

you're probably learning these skills today anyways like you said people are trying to balance their family and you know their personal life along with working um it's really challenging so just i just think try to be as efficient with work as possible and you know keep the communication and collaboration at a super high level and you'll be a better better person for it you're going to be a better employee for it and it's going to help open up your eyes a little bit uh for the future opportunities that you might have all right your turn you on i have a little bit shorter answer i think but i mean my number one advice is to embrace true agility as we learn i mean game development is very much an adapter die industry and what i mean by like true agility is is you know just because you got a thousand year issues and then put them in two week screens you're not agile right so go back read the agile manifesto do things you know there are methods there are structures there are ways in place that people have tried that it's kind of proven

on how you can learn to adapt rather than die so you know make sure that whatever you do don't stop don't stop evolving your methods of building games and think like now we're you know we found it we're satisfied to sit down and do this work in this way you know what we've what we learned during the first three months of kobe let's continue like that forever no you know you continuously need to evolve uh how you work and how the methods that you apply to organize as a team and yeah like we talked about democratize all the information i think that's that's gonna set the winners apart from from the people who's gonna struggle i i completely agree i think that the the the resolving uh calmness uh that has done it for me is that i'm seeing these pockets of success from different companies going through covet that they are figuring this out and like you said johan like i think the more sharing will eventually have this full form functioning studio or

company that just aren't just doing fine there's going to be a lot of outcry like i was very surprised that uh with all the whole netflix i think out of everybody i'm sure you guys have friends over there it's like they're right in the wave right they're enjoying life like it's a streaming companies like you guys should figure this out to hear that they're they're having problems but then i on the other side i hear other companies doing very well and uh peace of mind and employees are enjoying kind of like this for staycation and uh acquiring the skills and discipline most importantly necessary uh that actually extend beyond their the workplace they're at right now that that carries forward to when they go back in the office or they continue to work remotely i think the the the the things that you learn during this period about yourself and how you work is just gonna be a lifelong skill and so um it's very encouraging to see like

different pockets of the industry figuring different parts of the struggle uh separately and again you know hopefully with the podcast with this episode especially with other avenues uh these companies are starting to kind of trade secrets or not really secrets but like trade like ways to kind of make it through and yep um i think that's the very uh it's a very good thing uh industry as a whole have been kind of living in on separate uh sectors like the mobile space never really talked to aaa the indie guys are kind of like in their own weird corner but everyone has been like separated for a long time and if anything this is the perfect time to get together you can trade best practices and tell each other how to get funding you guys figure it out someone figured it out come on let people know but uh yeah i mean that's pretty much it uh before i end though i want to throw the mic over to you guys i want to thank you for your time

to kind of give attention to uh tell people where to go anything that you want to talk about uh the mic is yours go first johan i mean go to perforce.com there's so much to discover that we're doing there's so much happening it performs right now we're so i'm working primarily on on the hands-off side which is a project management tool and it has to do trying to do quite a bit when it comes to backlog management so if if you have any form of needs of really good backlog management practices and and get best practices as you just mentioned brandon i think we have a lot of really good resources there you can find as well as tools you can try out and and so forth yeah and for me it's just uh you know i've kind of plugged our helix core quite a bit the last three times brandon by the way the next time i think i'm gonna do this in studio with you once we can one of these times i got to be in there with you um uh it just you know like i said that

indie studio pack if you're a smaller studio and you want to get started for free you're going to eventually need perforce everybody does that does any kind of large gaming um download for free the indie studio pack comes along with hands-off so you can just get up and running and we you know love to hear from you love to get your feedback um and it will help you do geographically distributed development pushing around big files like i said you're gonna need it at some point anyways everybody does in the gaming industry um so it's uh we're happy to do that for you folks and um again just uh keep cranking keep working hard and keep the innovation coming as a as a recipient of all your hard work it's super enjoyable and um you know it's uh as always brandon great talking to you and uh we always learn stuff you know from you and hopefully your audience can learn some stuff from us absolutely i'm definitely learning more from you than you guys are learning from me uh performs anything has been like a career-long favorite

software obviously uh you guys are keeping professionals connected in a very huge way especially in this world like it's just crappy for people running around with thumb drives uh trying to give you files so it's a good thing it's a good thing to have you guys around i want to thank you again for both of you coming on and sharing the knowledge uh it sounds like everything's getting better despite everything um it's just one of those things you just got to figure it out and i think as an industry we're figuring it out right necessarily we got to figure it out so i want to thank you for your time i want to thank you everybody for listening i want to see you guys next week awesome take care [Music] [Music] you