Streaming Wars, Loot Boxes, Indie Dev Future | GduX.me

[Music] this is the last hour this is the end of the Ducks day - and we're gonna end it with a roundtable discussion with our guests here some that you may be familiar with and some that you will be familiar with tomorrow and so we're gonna talk about various topics trending topics that are affecting Game Developers the last six months or even the past year and this is also a fun way to kind of get involved - if you're viewing this to kind of feed us topics that you want us to discuss so I have topics of my own that I wanted to get us get started but at some point if you guys want to shift gears I want to kind of give your own suggestions and want to know our speakers and my thoughts go ahead and can start feeding them in the twitch jet or Facebook chatter wherever you are watching and we will get to it so without further ado I'm gonna first

unmute our guests here Jay do you hear me yeah but I had made muted - all right I hear ya so I am hearing everybody which also means good bullet ammo wait one second I'm shifting it there we go BAM and this is how we get involved as a group as you can see here we have Jay here yeah we had a date one with Jay and tomorrow you're gonna meet with Alex Alex can you guys actually kind of go over and they miss day one or haven't seen the agenda for tomorrow kind of introduce yourselves to our viewers out there of who you are so people know I'll go first if I go ahead jmj it's the end of the day I'm

having a mush drink the I'm on the business side of the industry I've been doing it for 20 years worked as an agent a publisher a developer and now I run a and so we do business and marketing and licensing consulting for all kinds of companies but more importantly for Qi Ducks we also run the indie game business podcast and online event where you can learn everything you need to know about business and marketing and licensing in the industry and you don't have to spend a dime unless you get one of my beds for cheaper yeah I'm actually on the six years in the industry and I'm mainly not develop games but program for an animation software but I did participate a lot in the technical

details of our games and we have a the company is doing mobile games its mobile fighting games and mobile portal games before that vector and shadow fight 2 and now should fight 3 so probably and I can bring a bit of technical stuff into them podcast into the roundtable so if there are any technical questions I think I can answer and I have an applied math background I think the audio is going yeah yeah so I was about to say like you're probably the technical side that rounds out this roundtable so the first topic I want to propose and I want to know your guys's opinion based on your discipline and this is where it gets really interesting so first and

foremost we're at and then in a year and for the first well since the beginning a year Netflix for games have been the hottest topic that could change the landscape of how we think things or not right it could be a total who cares and I want to know you guys just thought about this how it could affect us does it matter you know the stadia have anything to do with the next year or so is anybody waiting for this to happen I mean this is something that I feel like it has been its ups and downs on a personal level but why don't you guys go ahead and take the mic and let me know your thoughts I'm gonna get comfortable for this one we've been hearing about the Netflix of games for as long as there's been Netflix the problem and and there are at least a dozen of these different services that I know of you

know but if you're going to lump in the streaming and the subscription because one will tell you they're different than other but the reality is you're paying somebody a monthly fee for access to a wide you know range of games none of these are gonna succeed without original content I have right now no faith in the stadium you want people to shell out a hundred and fifty dollars to play games that they already have because the people that are gonna buy this this $150 set up initially are the early adopters the early adopters already have a ps4 and Xbox one you know the PC whatever there's nothing groundbreaking original that you know is coming to the platform between all of them Microsoft game paths I like because I mean it's like yeah Dave one if you're

if you were paying for it you got to play outer world you got to play Gears of War you know basically as part of your package the pirate game as well there's something original there there's original stuff on Playstations and there's original stuff on the Apple arcade that's what if yeah I had to think about what it was called all of these services are going to compete you know continue to compete fighting for a finite share of users but unless they have something really original to bring people there it's just all the same that's like you don't go to Netflix so you can watch friends you go so you can watch house of cards or orange is the new black or the marble shows things that you can only watch there you know these TV services get that that's why HBO pays millions and millions of dollars for Game of Thrones but these streaming and subscription services in the industry haven't they

haven't seem to get that yet with the exception of Apple you know Microsoft is releasing their stuff on there that they already had but apples the ones where I'm actually buying and paying for rights to get this stuff as close to give me them the the other side of it is as an indie dev you have to be very careful about getting involved in one of these because most of them are going to pay you based on the amount of time somebody spends playing your game versus the time they spend playing everybody else's well if you watch people play that are engaged in that you know have these subscription services they may play some indie games here and there but they're generally paying it so they can play out of worlds or even the big circle a title so you know I made a comment on Twitter when Google announced their play pass and I said this is fantastic for Google this is fantastic for consumers it is not fantastic for indie devs and

the guys at Google argued with me that well it's not your payment's aren't just based on the time spent playing and I'm okay with a worldly based on and of course they wouldn't go into it because it's all NBA stuff but the reality is we've been hearing this Netflix of games stuff for a decade you know it's a matter of what when is somebody gonna step up and really start saying okay look I'm going to develop a triple-a product that is only going to be available on this streaming service that's when we'll see a true Netflix of games because otherwise didn't we have the Netflix and what was the service that you could buy this fuel is still exist I saw a commercial for the other day where you can it was literally just like Netflix for movies except you order games through the mail but anyway that was the original Netflix a game it was literally the same thing game fly right was a game fly yes it is game play but

yeah that's my read random because it this has been one of the things that I've seen on and on and on over the years and then you know Google got all excited and they did this a big announcement of GDC which was not an announcement at all and it's just completely underwhelming and then you got a fact of Google has a very good track record of dropping projects so if it doesn't go then they're just gonna pull the plug on and so I think their reputation and their lack of really top-notch exclusive content some think they have exclusive content but it's not like anything anyone's getting excited about I think that's the biggest problem did you talk I think you're muted I am muted so let's end one rant and start another Alex what's your thoughts about this it being such a big subject for

game developers I feel I just don't know that much about that but well probably with game industry having more and more money everyone wants to get into it so and get a higher share Oh it's somebody I have some high expertise in this for me so probably I can almost say as a user for me that doesn't sound that much interesting like I have a I have steam I'm mostly a PC user by the way speaking about games and I have steam I have a big game store right now installed on my PC so I used them and had something like a streaming service I

don't know what what for if I can like I buy more games then I played them already and it's not like I have I just want to try so much games Oh more I just want to try those I already bought half so yeah I I wouldn't say I see it like as something really cool but who knows they have a lot of my toys so if maybe in the future for for Denver people who are gonna try more games in time but so I have a Heights pretty that yeah well I agree I be on the consumer side the difference there and I think J kind of touched on this we're watching a movie or television content you're you're kind of locked within an hour or two that

you're gonna finish it with games it takes days or even months or weeks to finish a game before moving on I think there was another service that was trying to that I'm subscribed to which is Scribd II we don't get sponsored I'm just kind of throwing it out there but it's just the Netflix of reading right you can't get through a book fast enough to really appreciate a subscription based service and so games take way longer than reading a book I feel and I think on a consumer side it's gonna be very difficult for us to really justify the price after certain amount of time so right now this this protest model before you even stadia is something that we're seeing at although there is a streaming element to it but the x-box game past right is something I'm really liking right now but at the same time I think someone on the trip jet is actually kind of sharing this point where Dane Thane saying that with the sub but he feels compelled right to kind

of complete the games otherwise like what you said Alex we most likely kind of just we have so much more games than we can actually play we kind of just let it sit there and so with a streaming service like how much of it are we really playing maybe besides multiplayer games right but that's the main problem with streaming it's uh it's very it could be a very laggy experience where we're not there yet we don't have Korean internet that everybody can play freely so there's a lot of trouble there that I'm seeing mm-hmm that I mean that is the difference between the streaming and the subscription even though I lump them all together they're not exactly the same because you're not actually streaming the game when you're playing it on game pads you're downloading it and didn't play so your internet speed doesn't really matter but I mean it's like Dane said you get the access to this thing and I have access to it me now he's like they announced it at e3 it's like floored I

did not play all these games I'm like yes but you know what do I play the outer worlds you know there are a lot of good eb games on here but like he said when you're paying $4.99 $10.99 you know $14.99 for these things you feel obligated to play the $60 games that are on there and so if that business model back to the developer is based on the amount of time that somebody spends playing it no one's going to spend time playing it and so if that's that's where it gets you know really dicey as an indie developer going and doing one of these things now the other side of that is if you're an indie dev with multiple titles that are already released and you're in the long tail of one of your previous titles including them in one of these streaming services can be a way to market your

other games but it's not something I would look at to actually drive a lot of relative for you and it's actually a the interesting part where I kind of value the upside or possible upside is the indie dev side of it but even then I'm not exactly sure that the streaming platform is gonna fully embrace and help out any developers like you said I think initially because of exclusivity like what you mentioned we go to these streaming movie platforms because of the exclusive content that that's the only place you can get it I definitely agree with you there stadia is not there yet it's gonna take years if they even have the patience to create some first party software that the Playstations and the Xbox's and Nintendo's have built over generations of consoles in iteration they built like these trustworthy studios that are able to kind of kind of

rely on on their experiences to create content or compelling content that people want to buy and it's as we've learned at least two days into this conference game developments hard it's really tough and to think that you can just buy people and bring it into the Google and think that you're gonna have a winning formula even though they have like strong titles under their belt it the team dynamic is such an important element to be able to kind of deliver content that makes sense for everybody to kind of buy into so I do feel unless Google and like what you said Jay has the patience to kind of see this product through which they've shown in history they don't they kind of kill off their own projects pretty quickly I don't know I'm just afraid that the berry is gonna be seeing an influx of game developers that moved out to work

on stadia and are quickly gonna find themselves without jobs because Google doesn't have the the hindsight to uh to look forward how is that different than any other day in the Bay Area I know I know but like I definitely want to see and what the indie front looks like with all this right I mean is there like in a great sense and people complain about Spotify not really paying you know to the smaller music bands out there their rightful amount right but when we talked to more individual artists that actually are you know owned their labels they actually do like a fair cut but it isn't like the Spotify the Spotify model is the model that most creatives want right they always refer to the Netflix which is hey here's some exclusive rights up front create the content and we have

this amount of years instead of like paid percentage per per stream right which is a tougher model to kind of emulate and keep a hold of our keep track of like is there room or hope for any developers out there with this onslaught where everyone seems to be jumping on the streaming thing or is it one of those that's middle okay there's there's no like great rush to get into the streaming model and it's not replacing anything you know so we're not seeing yet anyway we're not seeing drastic reductions in the amount of sales on Steam or epic because Microsoft has this game pass or you know Google or whatever you know is I always tell you know the developers I work with you need to have your game in as many locations as possible you know if you can't sit out there in today's market

and say oh I'm gonna release on Steam and everything will be fine and dandy that's not the way it works you need to be on Steam you need to be on Epic if you can get on there you need to be on God you need to be on humblebundle and if you can get on some of these streaming titles on streaming platforms there's an argument that says you're not really going to cannibalize your own sales but I wouldn't risk it but you always have to be looking for as many different development and sales avenues as you can possibly build and so you know these streaming services and the subscription services they have a role in the ecosystem but you as an indie Daffy cannot look at it and go oh well this is the only place we're gonna go and we're gonna make a lot of money because you're not you know that's just the reality but you we see despite all

of the reddit uproar about epic and their exclusives here's my news for those people exclusives of what we've done in this industry for 30 years it's how companies grow it's a reality and deal with it the we see the news come out from all of these different studios that have worked with epic and they're like yeah we gave them an exclusive because they basically paid our entire development budget and we don't have to worry about where the next paychecks coming from oh and by the way we sold more copies than we have sold in this franchise ever and so you know just that alone tells me you know we're not seeing a Campbell ization of even the the premium stores to each other yet and we're not seeing the streaming services dip into that either it's just a different you know sales evidence that you need to properly slot in in your products appropriate lifecycle this is

actually a perfect segue in the next topic that I want to tie falen J you're kind of touching on it already where we are seeing the epic story versus team right the last year if anything has been dominated with headlines with either outcry or while mostly outcry some applause saying that hey there's finally a competitor outside of steam that is having and throwing a lot of weight around and giving a real choice to consumers but at the same time upsetting early early supporters of a certain game and crowdfunding or whatever by having no ability to download this originally on steam but having to transfer over and essentially go on to a new web link which I really understand it's not that tough but I don't know Alex God what you were mentioning Alex like you know you're a huge steam user like most people are

when we look for new PC games we go usually this team but how are you feeling about this epic change that has been kind of taking over the last year I [Music] think it's great like I think it's always good if there are like two companies competing by I use Firefox and yeah I have sometimes problems like with the VA oh I had it with the screenshare but oh I think you should always support like the next competitor because if you don't then the the industry is dominated and in steam it's like that and like they're the % they're taking from the developers I think it's too high it's like the 30% right okay yeah the the 30%

well it's a lot and I don't know for what like have the interface and again I'm like I'm not I'm not really so professional in this but I really don't understand from the technical side I understand for what they're taking the money they're basically taking the money because they own the store and if for iOS or Android at least they own the operating system and they take relatively the same amount of money then here well I don't know they the problem doesn't look that hard to do to manage probably it is pretty hard and yeah games is not easy as developed in interphase and searching in community stuff but

hope they will evolve and it better be me be more friendly I've written articles that are at games it's not as user friendly after all fast or they won't cashier but the way they went in with the exclusiveness I think it works out good and the hype is over there so I think that now it I hope it will be the two main companies competing with each other and a lot of people using both for example and maybe even both will have to lower their share on the game developers yeah that is definitely hope I don't know how far away we are with that just to give kind of insight of because we've had yes before they kind of expanded on what Steam used to do where they Cana were more hands-on

for that 30% where they really try to help you as a developer to kind of show you in best light in some cases they were kind of changing logos to make it look like more professional to help these in developers in their graphic Department in that way where it's like hey you need to kind of show some more love on this side absolutely true they don't do much of that anymore aside from that they're just making sure that whatever you do put out doesn't you know comp elise create controversy so they're more like fire fire control wait until it does cost controversy and then they go oh well we're not gonna do anything right where we have an open platform you know without a doubt steam absolutely used to be worth 30% yeah but that was in the days when when you release something new it stayed on the new and trending list

for more than 48 minutes you know you get there for a few days and now they open the floodgate and that's not that's not the case anymore and so it's not as much that they're not because they didn't just have a didn't help everybody with their logos you know they they helped who they felt they needed to help with their logos but you could justify it like that because there was a lot of you know passive marketing for lack of a better word that you could get office thing because you would be up there but now that's not the case you know you're gonna be up there for 30 40 minutes and then it's gonna be replaced by something else so it's but keep in mind too 10 years ago you know we used to give big fish games because we did a lot of stuff in the casual hidden-object market and there were you know you're it's a segment of the industry that kind of

gets you know shove the sides do like well it's not triple-a a gaming yeah well those games were making millions of dollars each and they cost about a hundred and fifty grand to make it was a huge market big fish kept 70% and you've got 30% as the developer and so you know when steam came out and said we're only gonna take 30% it was like oh wow it's amazing but you know that like you said in the last segment the industry involves this isn't something that changes like every two or three years you know Tim came in at Tim's been you know extremely critical esteemed for years and he dropped the gauntlet and said you know we're gonna wave you're unreal fees and we're only gonna take 12% because that's all we think we really need and it's gonna at some point there's gonna have to be some pushback from the state from steam and they're gonna have to act with yes but right now epic as I've got enough stuff going on to really you know to calls it yeah but it'll

happen it will happen I think at the the steam that it's going you know I'm finding myself checking epic store like every month because they're giving my free games like solid games I got the Batman trilogy for free for you guys say no like no but I'm just being yes yes I still sit down and play sub 6 you know I keep coming back to and it feeds into the problem that the industry you know bees like big movers the Google or Facebook think that word we're needing the move it's like the reality is we have more games that we can play and this is before before me having like all these steam games that I haven't played yet now I have this epic library that I haven't touched I just have games if I just sit still I have like two or three years of games of if I had eight hours a

day I have to go through before even thinking about going to a subscription route so that fact alone I think a lot of gamers share where on the user front it sounds like a neat idea they would really have to sell the exclusive content for me to want to play on my phone essentially like the biggest benefit that I see what streaming is that I can take my mobile phone and play Triple A games right that's the only hook I feel if they get the lag free experience that they're promising but aside from that it's gonna be a hard convincing buy for me to trust Google to feed into these content that I'll never own I just don't think they have I don't think they have the the longevity to keep with it because you're talking to a guy that has a pixel phone right and it's a successful phone but for until they do like one hello yeah but until the pixel 3 I was like oh maybe they are gonna

stick with this it took 3 phones for me to trust like maybe Google is gonna finally stick with this but that's what the Google brand is to me nowadays it's late are they have this new neat idea but you know you gotta have to wait for a few generations for it to really stick and it's one of the reasons why Carolina where yeah we got Google Google Fiber in some places and then they started doing it in other places and right about that time from there were like well you know what this doesn't really make sense am I gonna do any more and it calls the you know gigantic issue but you know that's my concern is that they sit down then they go well not enough people paid $150 for early access to this so let's just two bit and we'll do something you know different yeah well I kind of want to kind of throw this question around to you guys to like I thought one the steaming streaming wars kind of started with this

promise of like this service that allows you to play unlimited games on a monthly basis right was the answer to that saturated indie development market right there's so many games out there how does anybody hear of them but much less play them right is there hope to kind of fix this on a consumer level if the streaming thing isn't the answer like aside from just good old marketing good old games being the rule of thumb it seems like it just boils down to the streaming is never gonna be the answer for the indie teams I mean if that's just the reality of it but it's like you look at indie musicians and how many hours of gameplay they get on Spotify compared to tambour Swift you know it's it's just it's negligible the one of the reasons we do our podcast is because

I've been getting the same email or phone call for 20 years and it's the developer that calls me and says we've got a game launching next week we don't have a marketing budget how can we promote it and my answer is you can't you know find whatever deity you want to pray to and start because that's the only thing that's going to help you until developers realize that marketing is a very very major component of running an indie studio no amount of streaming and no amount of new stores out there is going to help anything you know if you're an indie dab you have to start thinking about marketing your game the minute you start making your game that's the only way you're gonna make it you know the day like I said earlier the days of we made a game let's put it on Steam and we'll watch the money coming in there dead and gone and and that's not going to be replicated anywhere else

ever you know you as an indie team if you're not gonna go get a publisher and you want to be truly Andy and self-published you absolutely have to market your game build that community and you know handle it on your own nobody else is gonna help you with it's on you you know I think that's the the rule that everyone has to boil back to there's another topic that I want us to kind of discuss about and I want to know your guy's opinion let's say we do crack the duck right let's say we do have a game that is catching at least a community that is interested right and I feel like the bigger bigger game studios have have been in hot waters in the last six months EA it's always seen Z the case with loot boxes so loot boxes actually have been creating new laws the

past year because it's been equated to gambling a lot in the States I don't know Alex if you're familiar with this but the idea is that selling small content for randomized things that the buyer has no idea what they're going to get is causing a lot of parents a lot of headaches because they are fighting bills that are well over hundreds of thousands of dollars by their children trying to get that that FIFA player that they've been trying to get but also other things where they're trying to buy extra content that they have no idea what they're gonna get until they finally get it which is again poor poor business so what do you guys are opinion about this looming looming thing that we used to call DLC but now it's the loot boxes although there's no first well first of all like I come from

a mobile game development where this is very very popular and I think it's mainly here where the little boxes are blooming and spreading and to tell the truth I think I think it's first it's sad that measures from top have to be taken to control this type of behavior but of course there are children first of all that are just they're not ready yet to control the there are not very money and controlling the finance as they can't you understand that this this time kind of lottery it's it's something like a lottery and lottery is something it's always associate it with something bad and that's basically because it makes money out out of nowhere and here

people just found a way to multiply the income by using good old psych psychology strategies that get money out of people because people are not that good with math in their head and they just use it and get a lot of money and what can I say it's like I don't like the idea of this batteries in real life and I wouldn't like them to come to games but their reality for game developers is that if you don't use it other it isn't forbidden and you don't use it another people use it then there's other people they get all the money so and they have more power to market their games for example so they will donate on the market so as for me

for now I think limitations here I mean from the top are okay but it would be great if people just and I think this the stuff is evolving in the community that people see something bad and they say about that and they create interpretation and the game but the sales go down and if there was coming from people I would be more happy but if not okay for now and especially if we good kids then I think it's okay to limit limit the study and that's basically what is happening right now if I understand correctly yeah I think you you are correct on then um there are a lot of like regulations but this is also funny where like the mobile market has been doing this for years but

the last year since the console guys are starting to take hold of it it's suddenly becoming an issue so which is really really weird I don't know I forgot what the explanation is I don't know J if you have some insight on this on why suddenly it's a problem it becomes a problem when somebody stock price gets affected look at when all the loot box crap drama started happening and it was when EA released battlefront was it one that they screwed up so badly or to one of the battle fronts yeah and the loot boxes contained items that actually significantly made your character more powerful which is the problem and it resulted in Bob Iger calling the ei CEO and telling him to put a stop to it and so if you need a scale of zero to oh my god you're in trouble when the CEO of Disney takes time out of his day to

call you and tell you to stop doing something because it's affecting his brand you've gone off the cliff this is what we see in not just in the loot boxes but in all sorts of different areas of the industry and things that aren't in our industry it's not a big deal until one of the big companies that has a stock price that gets screwed with that's when people start paying attention you know because you're right we've been doing loot boxes and mobile games for ten years it's it's never been an issue Blizzard does it this is what gets me EA has a very very successful loot box system with FIFA but they can't seem to figure out how to do it with the first-person shooter even though Blizzard is sitting right down the road has shown them for years how to do it a successful loot block system with a first-person shooter and then they still screw them you know it's

to me it's something that we're not going to see a lot of legal real legal pressure come down because about the time somebody introduces a law it's gonna get shot down by somebody's wall yours because at the end of the day we're basically selling baseball cards you know in packages but because it's digital and because there are parents out there who don't have enough sense to put a password on their iTunes account when we have all these issues pop up but it's like a lot of things in the industry we don't see it it doesn't become a major issue until it comes from take to Activision ea you know one of the companies that's traded on Wall Street and some hedge fund manager goes why did we lose one hundred million dollars yesterday oh it's because Johnny spent 13 grand on FIFA you know cards and his mom did nobody can you tell I'm the old cynical one in

this burg no it totally makes sense because it's the thing that definitely is apparent like the last year suddenly everyone starts caring about this thing that's been a part of the business for a while and without fail he's there to kind of answer to all these accusations they're always pushing the envelope of what's legal what's not it's never any video they caught it was a surprise mechanics surprise Mechanics for true oh yeah yeah we had we had a when one of the episodes I forgot which episode of the game Devon shade podcast we had a lawyer kind of talked about this in particular surprise mechanics and I had to run that through him I was like hey man is that something your legal team would actually think was a good idea to kind of kind of just put it out there in the press as a defense you know does that sound like something that would pass and he said absolutely not it was

just really it was a grenade man it was just just hoping hoping things like alright let's peel this back another layer it absolutely does work with the audience they're talking to a bunch of politicians in London you can do the very same thing in Washington and they would go okay because you watch these proceedings where they have you know Zuckerberg in there talking about Facebook's you know claims and then our senator will sit there and complain that his Gmail doesn't work - Mark Zuckerberg yeah and it's like they don't get it so you can you can say anything you want to some of these people it just depends on what your audience if your audience is a bunch of out of touch with people yeah oh yeah it's a surprise mechanic well that's another testament why Alex you're so much smarter than we are because yeah I did see the difference in at least the

people in authority across the the pond there and it was so different when Zuckerberg was being grilled by the European Union how much more educated people over there are at least up to date and but uh yeah I think those are the type of things that I couldn't get away with really I'm actually Russia so it's way worse than in your face we're talking about people something about the trucks some stuff is very good here for example if you come from Russia to us you will notice that cards are not accepted everywhere and here they're basically everywhere accepted and I was like oh god you have to have cash and stuff like that but

yeah II for speaking about how good are our politicians in technology then I think it's it's not in their favor yeah all right so you're on our level that that's why this roundtable is so equal yeah there is one last topic that I want to kind of dive into and this is kind of more focused on the last year so if I were to look at the last year apart from our last two topics that we kind of Segway through I want to talk about these expose articles about these major game companies and how you know again UJ is probably familiar with this but like how these companies are overworking over-promising and not quite delivering on every front right so I'm gonna name drop again these are opinions of ourselves and not a company that we

represent but there are there yo J freely freely vents despite despite all these expose Elise a little bit more awareness right not just on the game developer front but gamers kind of standing behind game developer and saying hey we can wait a little just take your time don't worry about killing yourself to kind of ship these games have you feel do you guys feel like it well let me know let me know like has there been an impact where are you finding these patient gamers that's what I want to know all more patient than I think most people would give them credit to I think which game in particular what like me yeah someone I know some some company I'm being very fake here but let me just give you a vague example right

there was a company on their social network I think Facebook whereas like hey guys we're gonna work our hardest to make sure this is out we're gonna make sure our guys are in the office the full week or two weeks until this patches out so that you guys to play your game and the response were overwhelmingly hey don't kill your developers and they kind of got in hot waters they have to retract all right so instances like that where I feel like years ago was not something that we would expect but do you feel with all these news the last year overall have made an impact and how employers treat their employees and how gamers expect their games to be on time or not you're gonna go first Alex before I like go on my rant you go ran ran away alright Alex okay okay so well first

first thing I always read on the articles that you know the productivity and the time you spend on work they're not as correlated as it might seem and like stand that when you come to the office and you seal like that not everybody is like sits down and works the eight hours stay at work yes they go for coffee they do that they do this and speaking for myself certainly there are times when like in 1/2 hour I do or in two hours I do more than the other day so I think that the productivity is not correlating that easily with the time people spend at

work although of course yes when you're speaking about the staff view especially about bugfixes yeah it's like something you it's more about the cycle of the development I think because you you do something you at the testers test then they return the results and you have to fit some very minor small stuff and so on so on so yeah probably overworking will help here but largely I like I do understand this idea a whole lot of games have a really bad I can play I'd mean more it's more interesting for me to receive bad well done game them to have a game in this time at this particular time but I'm not sure but it's like that like I think I don't know the percent of people but if I was if

you take me that wasn't school then I I would probably be a guy who says oh come on professor another percent of people who are really supporting that the idea that you can just develop for a longer time but everything better but I do remember connected to this topic that I think epic removed Unreal Engine Trello board Unreal Engine like the troll go ahead oh yeah sure spirit yeah so they removed it because they were sad that they don't make it in time and when an hour hmm I know I did

the paper no yeah I didn't know they remove the trailer board is that real yeah our company like we don't meet the time limit sounds like Oh or somebody's complaining oh and we have a trial board for customer and a public trial portend or like oh but we didn't we didn't put the card as fast as we should I'm like oh come on guys we were like first point group of people doing this complicated stuff don't worry even epic come on they have as much money as they want they give grants like a lot of grants a lot of money to developers I have a lot of money but they still cannot meet the time limits so don't worry guys yeah yeah I mean it's

definitely one of those things that kind of buy things that I'm gonna take the unpopular opinion here and Brandon you've worked in these big triple-a studios I'll never have you've gotten more hands-on experience with this than I do my problem is at the executive level and at the PR level all of these companies go we don't make anybody stay late you know anyone can leave when they want to leave and yes officially in the Emporium look I'm sure that's what it says the reality is there is a systemic issue in this industry with and it comes from all of us up the food chain from the new people in QA to you know engineering art everybody of well we have to crunch because that's what we have to do this is the industry

and I don't want to leave because you know Sarah might see me leave and then they're not gonna like me anymore until we as the people working on the all of these games sit down and say my family is more important than this job they can't literally fire you for it it probably will and they'll find some way but the teams have got to start you know we're standing up for themselves and leaving and going to work and I know it's hard and I'm not blaming the developers for this let me be very clear buddy this is something we've seen for 30 years this isn't like a new fad where you know oh my god what do you mean somebody worked you know all these our 100 hour weeks on on Red Dead Redemption this has been a part of our industry for

as long as we've had an industry and it's a systemic issue that has to start all the way through these companies not like just at the time the companies that are doing it the best are the indie Studios small studios where you can look around and you know everybody and you trust everybody and you know they can say it's five o'clock go home they're not up against some stupid quarterly projection that somebody with an Excel spreadsheet sent to Wall Street last month and that's where a lot of these problems come in you know we live in an industry of digital distribution now that's not the way it used to be this crunch crap started because if you wanted to have a game on the shelf for Christmas it had to be gold mastered August 31st and if it wasn't then you were gonna miss it because it had to go and be manufactured than the boxes had to be made and they had to be sent to the distributors and those distributors to

the stores and all this other crap and you didn't have time before Black Friday now we live in an age of ship it when you want to it's all digital and most of these games are going as a service anyway so you know what if it's not ready then call it early access get it out there and didn't start adding the content to it but I love the fact that these expose days are coming out but then I sit back and shake my head it's like every time Kotaku goes oh we have this exclusive on blah blah blah you know your studio Brendan you know this pick up the phone and call the next to you the same [ __ ] is happening there they just haven't leaked it you know nobody's run out and told Kotaku yet you know it's it's infuriating and I see when the last batch of the stuff came out and I saw it on our own disk or server made the comment about you know

you shouldn't be working 12 hours a day and there was someone and I'm gonna say it's a kid because I'm home and you know they weren't in the industry yet they were in college but he's like I wish I had the opportunity to work 12 hours a day on a game and I'm like that's part of the problem you shouldn't feel like that you know you and I get it you know hours ridiculous hours when I was near early 20s but as you get older you realize that that's not the key it's like you were talking about in the last segment you like to hang out with your kids I like to hang out with my kids kid I only have one you know it's a matter of you don't get to that point until later and unfortunately we burn people out so fast by making them were these ridiculous hours that they never actually stay in the industry to the point where they have a family because either they have decided early on that

their family is more important and they got out of the industry altogether or they decided their career was more important and it tore the family apart and it's ridiculous it's definitely an ongoing issue like the youngins that come in they don't think about five years ahead but don't stuff the young uns where yeah that it's time slowly doesn't become their own anymore I think that's essentially the the problem where it's not the problem is actually a good thing where you're starting to value other things outside of work but you're creating this system where young developers are kind of sought-after to fill out these hot seats and old developers are kind of pushed out for the very fact that they like living life just be in these Triple A industries or triple a developing cycles or studios yet no one can outright say that you have to stay late and do this and do that at least the the smarter ones you

don't want to what they want to scare it around the legal issues you gotta get preapred in a way by producers what's the problem your pressure yeah it's like oh oh Johnny over here is having tuna tomorrow at Saturday lunch what are you having and that's how you get asked to come in the weekends not necessarily hey we got to have to crunch through this weekend I mean we'd be so in some studios and some experience they would say that like hey we're gonna have to really push it in this milestone you know so what we're gonna do it they asked you straight up like that is like and guilt you into thinking like yeah I guess I'll be in for a couple hours or they say hey your whole team's gonna be on especially if you're at a later stage of your career you're most likely more senior or you're even lead right so if anybody on your team is scrunching you're obligated to be there to kind of be a teammate right even though you don't have anything to do so like you said earlier like the peer pressure is definitely the

biggest factor to this but what Alex said the quality again FPN means everything and a lot of times like we said you have Dimity diminishing returns the longer you spend on something throughout the day you can probably I can probably add my age at this stage of my life give like a good 12 hours Monday but that's it that means 3 hours Friday is what gonna get a because it all balances out in that way it's in terms of energy level because I've been in the industry long enough to know that you know how useful I am when I start working like that but also I understand to deadlines won't shift but I make use of the eight hours or the seven hours dedication so that I don't run into problems later where I have to push it or crunch right so this is unfortunately a thing that I think will never end on

the game developer side hopefully I hope it does but like there is just no that's why I'm always I was hopeful with the streaming thing being a solution where technically there's no deadlines or whatever right we're all digital now I remember the time during that transition where like you said we go gold standard because there was a rush to get things in store and because our whole marketing department and a whole future of the studio depends on that but were I remember that shift where we were basically shipping out empty discs with fancy covers because day one patches two gigs of downloads and it was okay it was fine to get to that last hour yes that's what you're saying yes but then her fault that I have to go buy a game three hours installing it in operation nation that's the ghost standard now it's like day one patch but that's the

that's its reality if people if you're gonna fix it no it isn't if anything is it's gonna push us to work to put more content behind it because we can get away with it and that's I think the I like burning producers but that's a very much user mentality right all right so my hope is that over if enough of this stuff comes out and it's gonna have to be like a new studio getting out it every month for about two years probably but if this continues to come out we'll end up with a generation of developers who don't you know look sideways at their co-workers if they work normal hours and we end up with a good batch of middle managers who don't sit there and go oh no you don't have to work this weekend mm-hmm and then walk off because

it's implied that you know you absolutely do have to work this weekend but all of these expose A's are good because this is I mean this is none of this is news to us who work in the industry it's like oh what somebody worked on fortnight for like two weeks straight and didn't sleep not surprised that happens on every game but to the consumers and to the rest of the world it's not normal and and it is new to them so quite frankly I hope they continue to do it and you know I hope they continue to put these things out there because eventually it's gonna have an effect but streaming isn't gonna save it because games as a service absolutely didn't you know save it so you know streaming is not gonna help but it's gonna have to be an internal issue but throughout the entire company not just the executives going oh no you don't have to work you know more than 40 hours a week yep or we min a defender Helen we

can't work more than ground but I'll agree that this stuff about working more mainly I think comes from from the top so that somebody thinks like I mean who puts the deadline there it's the producer that producer deadlines yeah and then he says all of this but this is not good enough this is not working and we have to make this better and then we have the deadlines and so like it's sorry guys another option if it's not always the producer because I've been a producer and I've been an executive producer the deadlines that the producer gives you is based on a deadline the producer has been given

by the executives which typically came from your office a building your other Santillan health of the year and yeah but but it that's the pain it's it's different you know there's somebody and this is wasit it all depends on whose stock price gets screwed up you know that's when we're going to have this thing to pop out there's somebody in that office that is telling you know in their quarterly financials that call of duty modern warfare is going to ship November 1st now they're nine months out when they're telling them this and they're you know hoping it ships November 1st and so that gets passed down to the executive producer and it's like look you got to get call of duty to ship November 1st and so they start building their schedule out and they hand it down with the producer this is what I think you should do and the producer is like holy crap nobody can get all this done by November 1st we

need more resources we don't have more resources and this is the way can we do an entire show about this brand and outsource yes if it's I see that it can be seen as oh it's all the people in the main office but it's not it's straight line from whoever is telling their you know stock owners or investors that it's going to ship on a certain date down to you know the executive producer the producer and and then the people making the game you know it's it's I understand it I'm kind of a producer to actually a bit but and then you know you get a question like and by which time will this be done by which time and then you have to answer that somehow and and that

question is it's rarely asked like like it implies that you can't say oh it will be two years from now and well I answer as I can in these situations and I say well half a year probably or three months but the problem is is that people are optimistic so it's usually like you think but like you think oh it will be like four-month but let's say some problem peer into the six month but you always underestimate the number of problems especially technical problems that will appear so it's usually more and we were we were using agile but I think

nowadays everybody uses that gel and scrum and we did this estimates of the tasks you know and then every every scrum we've underestimated and we took too much and it was going like that for a year and without like very strong-willed without somebody like dedicating to control this people just tend to be optimistic as it is that's how it happened in ours I know maybe we were just optimists out there but we couldn't delay it and we that's what happens actually right now yeah yeah so it's just that people are optimistic and when they are asked to give a time limit they given up to mystic time limit and then of course something happens and we can't make it

and I don't know if I don't think it's very different in other industries it's for some reason giving the streets much more but if you're like and cancer in my English but if you're like like you know how to say it why you do the stuff here flat like the furniture that the ceiling that the walls like I don't know the word in English for it but I mean when you're on other tasks in real life I see the same stuff like my parents say all day like don't come right now we're still doing stuff on the new flat and then we'll be doing it for a month and then a month later they're like oh it's two weeks more just didn't fish everything it's always two weeks since

yeah general contracting it because what you're those guys are very hard to find a good one at least but that's speaking of time and you know we like being on time this rounds out the table for the hour so we've done a successful hour of discussion and we can go on forever I'm sure and I just want to give this opportunity to welcome and thank you to our guests Alex and Jay for jumping on here and giving your opinions before I let you guys go let's go around the table and let people know how to find you guys after this so Jay let's start with you easiest way is our discourse server whether you need like our consulting services or you want to find out more about the indie game business side its discord GG flash indie

game business very simple all right Thank You Jay and thank you again for yesterday for for rounding out our last talk for the day but Alex for people that are tuning in tomorrow can you kind of talk about what time slot and what you're gonna talk about so that people can look forward to hearing your voice again okay the the time slot is I think 10 a.m. or 10:30 a.m. all over Thailand let me help you up it's gonna be 11:30 there you go it's just you know for me it will be 9:00 9:00 p.m. 9:30 p.m. so yeah the most confused it's like I am here by the way so I might be a little sleepy

so yeah yeah I'll be talking about a scooter and it's the animation software for creating action animation so and I'll be telling the history how actually evolved wild evolved it will have a nice bunch of videos coming from 15 years ago 10 years ago and etc the stuff was evolving how it was tested and and why we decided to do it and how we decided to move on from the from the in-house product program it was - right now we're having a closed beta test and we hope for it to evolve in a separate project and I'll be talking about character

action animation what problems are present right now so yeah and then if you're interested but you won't be able to submit tomorrow you can always just Google consider or enter consider calm and very concerned for our closed beta test and we'll send you all the links everything you have with have discovered - and forum etc etc and I'm very much looking forward to that talk the same way that we just finished with our last segment with Jonathan Holmes how photogrammetry is kind of changing the landscape for artists Casca door is the next big thing since mocap I think for animation the animators out there I always make fun of them because they're always uh they haven't changed their workflow for the longest time and until I saw you guys is software whereas like finally let's get these guys back in gear and start learning again

is truly transformative revolutionary so anybody who is wanting to listen or hear more about the history and why it is going to change not just the game industry the movie industry as well or any type of entertainment that's using animation tune in tomorrow to Alice's talk at 11:30 it's gonna be the second talk of the day and that is it guys thank you again for rounding this table would have been lonely without you and I'm sure people would have been not as entertained if I was arguing against myself so I want to thank you guys for taking the time of the day to actually coming to join me [Music] you [Music]