Stuck in the Middle With You: Translating Between Business and Creativity as a Producer

Hi everyone. The doors are closing. None of you can leave anymore. Can you hear me? Okay. Can you hear me at the back? Great. Hello everyone. It's time to start. My name is John Laauo. This is a talk called Stuck in the Middle with You. Translating between business and creativity as a producer. If you're not here for that talk, you need to leave now. You No, you're right. you can't. So, tough tough. Um, so we got 45 minutes together. Um, and the way we're going to spend that time I'm thinking is I'll tell you a little bit about me, why it's, you know, helpful to pay attention to what I to what I have to say. Uh, I'm going to give you a view of production. Uh, because there are several. Um, I'm going to talk you through the different mindsets and different priorities of creativity and business. Um, which is a mad sentence to say. Um, then we're going to get specific. I'll talk you through some example dialogues uh and

then finish up with some reflections on tools uh and then we'll summarize. Um this is a housekeeping slide. So I've been told to ask you to make sure that your phones are off uh and also to rate this talk afterwards. Um and also actually I told my dad that I'd take a selfie but then you're here. I can't really see you so I'm just going to skip that bit actually. So don't worry about that. Um I'll talk to you about me now. Here is a baby picture of me that's designed to get you on my side early in this talk. Um, I am a lead producer currently at US Two Games. Um, and how do we get from A to B from the the left to the right. Uh, so I graduated uh in 2007 with a degree in philosophy of all things. Uh, and I started as uh a production assistant at a new media agency. what was called new media at the time was something which was not print or advert sorry print or film or TV uh

so basically anything digital um so that name didn't last long uh but the important thing to remember about that is that it was an agency which is to say it was operating on a workforire basis that is that we weren't making things and then selling them directly to consumers what we were doing was uh other organizations companies businesses would ask us to make digital things for them we would make them and they would pay us and that would be that and we'd have to keep on doing that uh as uh you know in order to keep the lights on and so that digital stuff were things like websites or uh iPhone apps or um interactive whiteboard software and those clients where people like Creative Review or the British Red Cross or weirdly the band the Kaiser Chiefs which is a whole other story. Um, but I did that between 2007 and 2012. And really what I wanted to do was get into games. And I first did that for a an agency, a studio called Preloaded, who also worked on a work for higher basis, which is to say, organizations would ask them, hey,

we need a game made to meet our business goals or whatever. And Preloaded would make them. Um, and that meant that because we were dealing mostly with the cultural sector and educational sector, we would make um a turnbased strategy based on ant colonies or a collectible card game based on uh characters from children's literature. Really, really lovely stuff. Um, so I did that until 2015. Um, at which point I took a career break uh to do a masters in game design development from the National Film Intelligence School, an institution whose Google rankings have plummeted since NFTTS came on the market. Did that for two years and learned how to program to animate to uh to design um and came out with a portfolio that allowed me to be a freelance game designer. Uh and then I did some weird stuff. I designed the VR component of the Modiglani exhibition at the Tape Modern. Uh, I designed an AR game to support uh the the boys, like I think

season two or three. I made um an iPhone game that allowed you to control pinball flippers with your eyebrows and your mouth and your eyes. Um, lots of like weird and wonderful interesting stuff. Then in 2019 I worked for the wonderful state of play games uh and in over the course of two years as a creative producer shipped their latest title south of the circle which is a uh cinematic narrative adventure. Um and then after that I uh started work at US two games um which you may well know from the Monument Valley games from Assemble with Care from Alba Wildlife Adventure from Desta the Memories and the Memories Between. Um I worked on none of those games. Uh what instead I did was I shipped uh the uh console, no sorry not console, PC uh port of Mon Valley and I'm now working on the next Monument Valley game. The headlines uh and the reason for me going through all of that is to give you an idea that I have been working in the interactive

space for the best part of 17 years. Of those years uh 12 of them have been working in games. I have been a producer, a creative and a creative producer. I learned my craft in work for higher studios specifically where margins are very tight, but also where the turnaround times and production cycles can be like three to six months. And so I'm going through the entire production process a lot more than you might if you were just uh you know if you were working on a 2ear 3ear production cycle in the same amount of time. I now work mostly on what you might call larger budget indie games. Um I have no experience of AAA and no experience of freeto play. If that's what you're looking for, I'm sorry. You're going to have a bad time. Okay. So, I have a confession for you all. I find it difficult to talk about production sometimes. Um, it differs wildly between studios and even within the same studio, it differs between projects. It covers a range of dis disperate responsibilities that it's very difficult to uh to unite under a

single umbrella. And so when you're talking about it, either you're talking in very specific terms that aren't really relevant to large sways of your audience. So here's a great juro workflow. Yeah, I mean sure that might be that might be a very helpful thing for like two people in this room but not the others. Or you're talking at levels of abstraction which are very hard to connect with emotively or meaningfully. Let's maximize delivery of value to the user could literally mean anything. So I have a way of talk thinking about production that I find helpful. Uh and it's a way that I wish that someone had expressed to me when I started. I'm going to start from very very basic uh in very very basic terms and I'm not going to treat it as self-evident and but I also warn you that you should not treat it as authoritative. There are lots of different ways to think about production. This is just one of them. It is meant to help to contextualize uh the content of the the uh presentation that follows. Okay, it's business time. An incredibly

simplistic view of what business is, but it's business time nonetheless. Here is a business. It has income and expenses. I told you it'd be basic. The idea is that if your income is higher than your expenses, uh the remainder is profit, which is wonderful. Like you can spend that on what you want. You can grow the business and more. You can pay yourself some dividends. Uh you can buy a Lamborghini. It doesn't matter. But welcome to capitalism. It's where we've been living this whole time. If your income is lower than your expenses, your business will shrink and eventually disappear. You will not be able to continue trading. If you're a restaurant, for instance, your income comes from serving food to customers. Your expenses are ingredients, staff wages, rent on premises. So far, so straightforward. If you're a game studio, for the sake of argument, let's say your income will come from selling games units, game units. Your expenses will come from staff wages, hardware, rent on premises, etc. So you could think about the cash in the bank of the business as represented by

this graph. As time goes on and you develop the game, you expend you uh incur expenses based on staff wages, hardware, rent on premises, and so on and so forth. The idea is that you will release a game and receive income from selling game units, hopefully increasing the cash in the bank and remaining in the black. Wonderful. The thing you don't want is for the game release to be projected to be after you run out of money because then you won't release a game. This is a situation that many people find themselves in. It's the worst. So if we return back to this model, the idea over the lifetime of a studio is that you end up releasing the game, earning a bit of money, starting to make another game, spending that money, releasing another game again, spending a bit of money, eventually with this overall trend rising. Or if you're really good or you're really lucky or you're really greedy, maybe it looks like this. Now, based on this model, oh, sorry, lots of possives. Based on this model, there are two very important questions that are going to make themselves known

to you. One, when will my game be ready for release so that I can start getting money in? Two, how much game can I make for this amount of money so that people will buy it? If we think about the graphs, when will my game be ready for release is that length over here. If it's too long, we're in a bad situation. How much game can I make for this amount of money is also very very important because if you don't make enough, and when I say enough, I mean quality as well as quantity, uh you might find yourself in a situation where not enough people buy this game and you end up running out of money all the same. These are your two nightmare scenarios, which means that there are two very urgent versions of these questions. At some point in in game development, you will start to ask yourself the question, how can I release my game sooner so that I can start getting money in more quickly? And how can I make more game for this amount of money so that more people will buy it? These are sometimes motivated by

greed. Often they are existential and vital to the survival of your studio. These questions are production questions. the work of answering them is production work. That is how I think about production. And so these two questions really are at the top or are fed into by pretty much every way of thinking about production that I've ever encountered. And that's just speaking to me. So if I talk about my job like it's every making sure everyone knows what they're doing and when they need to do it. It's about how can I make more game. If I'm overseeing and coordinating the delivery of a video game, that's in a lot of uh job descriptions. You are trying to make more game. Being a force multiplier for the other members of your team, people love being force multipliers. You're thinking about how you can release a game sooner or how you can make more game. You're earning the budget and the schedule so you can work out how to make your make more game or to release sooner.

Okay, so that's the context. What are we stuck in the middle of? Um well at the beginning at the top of this talk I described it as a difference between business and creativity and ultimately that's where that's how I start to like think about uh game development in a commercial sense at least you are trying to knit together two very different ways of looking at the world and the best way that I can think of to convey this to you all is via characters from the Phoenix right series business and creative the business mindset optimizes for consistency it's about predictability. It's about efficiency. If you are in the orange juice business, it's very important that uh you know that there's going to be a poor harvest of oranges in the 2027 so that you can move your resources elsewhere and you can make other plans or you can save money and not expand in a big way. This is something that we've all been seeing in a in a in a big way in the games industry. The business mindset wants to predict

things accurately so that you can be ready to take advantage of any opportunities or deal with any crisis. The creative mindset, on the other hand, is exploratory. It's about making room for surprises. It's about human fallibility. A creative wants to follow their nose, iterate, and embrace the unexpected. These are obviously in opposition to one another, and overoptimizing for either mindset will lead you to problems. If you are optimizing solely in terms of business, then actually you're neglecting the quality, the thing that that makes your game great, the quality of the work that that a creative mindset brings to it. And therefore, you're going to find yourself in this kind of a situation. Similarly, if you're overoptimizing for creativity, you're never going to ship. You're always going to be noodling. You're always going to be uh interested in uh exploring new avenues or trying to find that better thing. They have to work together and balance one another out in order to avoid those scenarios that we talked about. As a producer, it's your job to avoid those

scenarios. So, how do we get them talking to one another? Translation. Okay. So, we're on the part where we're talking about example dialogues. I find that when talking about production and production problems often uh I have to rely on soft skills or make reference to soft skills and when you're talking about soft skills like empathy uh that is a lovely word to to kind of you know bandandy around but I think it's uh it helps to give you some specifics which is why I'm going to give into like go into some very very specific scenarios here which are hypothetical. So let's imagine you're operating from a creative mindset and you're talking to a business one. Think about the problems that the business leaders of your organization are trying to solve. And those business leaders might be you, by the way. Like you might be doing it all. Maybe you have to split yourself in two. That's also fine. Maybe you're wearing different hats, but what problems are you trying to solve? And how do you make your decisions? Recurring themes are

likely to be thinking about risk, quantifying things, and thinking about the value that a game delivers to your business rather than just how good the game is. So, here's a hypothetical. Let's imagine you have a feature that's not turning out the way you want to. Your creative team say you need more time that is currently not scheduled. Let's imagine two ways of navigating that conversation. The creator said, "It's not ready. We need some more time to explore some promising avenues." Business says, "How long is that going to take? Because what you're interested in is quantifiability." Creative says, "It's hard to say. You can't rush this stuff. We need to feel our way through it, but the game will be much better when we do." This is a legitimate thing to say. Like, it's true, but it also reaches an impass. It's game over. So, let's give it another try. Creator says, "It's not ready. We need some more time to explore some promising avenues." Business says, "How long is that going

to take?" Production comes in. Thank you, Mike, for helping with that graphic. Um, production says, "Okay, we need four weeks of designer. We could do it in two, but we're confident that we'll deliver the feature in four, but it will impact the budget. That project's forecasted profitability will drop by roughly x%." The key things that I want to point out here are we're talking about time, we're talking about levels of risk, and we're talking about values outside of the game that are relevant to the business, and you're quantifying them all. That is what a a business-minded person is going to hear and understand and translate into their own decision uh decision mechanisms. So, let's try the other way around. From business to creative, let's ask the same question. What are the problems the creative leaders of your project are trying to solve and how do they make their decisions? Personally, as a creative, things that motivate me are quality of execution, originality,

and adherence to a consistent vision that I believe in game pillars. So, let's imagine a hypothetical. We have a problem where it doesn't make commercial sense to include a beloved feature, a feature that we really love. Let's say there isn't enough money in the budget. Other features are being prioritized that have more commercial value than this one. You are now in a business mindset talking to a creative. Sorry, we can't include that feature. Everyone's shouting because of all the pointing. I I don't know why I wrote it like that. We can't include that feature. Why not? It cost too much. We can't sign off the budget for it. Boom. Game over. There's absolutely no way of describing that in in terms that Well, that does not describe the problem in terms that a creative will understand. Let's try it again. We can't include that feature. Why not? Production gets involved and says it would take a month to get it right. Spending that time on it takes away from other things that better serve the game pillars or would

give more value to the user. You're talking in terms of quality. You're referencing the game pillars and you're talking about user value. Now again, I think these are all examples of taking the problems of one's mindset and translating them into the terms and the language that the other mindset understands. So I'm going to try and work all of this into a a longer dialogue to see how we might potentially resolve or navigate a longer conversation between these two mindsets. Let's imagine you're running late. You're not tracking to your deadline. Very familiar situation to all of us. You need to decide what to do. Either you push back your deadline or you cut scope. Creative says we should push back the deadline. The game's features need further development before they're ready. We cannot leave them as they are. Business says we should keep to our current timeline. Let's cut whatever features we cannot complete in time.

Production gets involved. Leaving the game as it is risks bad reviews and reduces sales. Title X, for instance, had a lot of bad reviews because a feature like this was disappointing. Let's hear creative out. So, what you're doing is you're taking creative problem, which is we can't leave things as they are. You're translating them into terms that the business side will understand. Okay. What are you thinking? Creative. How much time would you need to get this to a standard you're happy with? Again, what the business side is looking for is something quantifiable. What the creative is looking for is quality. Okay, we need at least another 6 months with the full team. Production says, "All right, let's call that scenario A. It gets us all of our features to a great standard, but it extends the deadline by 6 months." Then you have the associated effects on the budget and target profitability forecasts.

business now actually engaging with the problem in terms of they understand. They say, "Okay, listen. I get what you're saying. We really can't do that." And the reason we can't do that is because we won't have enough money to concept a new game if we spend it on this. Okay, scenario A is off the table. Let's try another business. What can you do? Is there a drop of in profitability that is acceptable? Okay, maybe we can't handle five, but we can handle two. If we could keep If we do that, we can keep to our hiring targets for next year. It means that we have enough people to start concepting. It's not ideal, but if you feel very strongly about it, that's it. Great. Production gets involved and says, "Right, you know what what 2% gets us? It doesn't get us six months, it gets us 3 months. Let's call that scenario B. Creative. What features can we get to an acceptable standard in that time?" Again, you are taking businesses uh requirements, business's uh success criteria, business's values and translating it into what creative can

do. Okay, let's focus on our favorites. I'm really attached to features X and Y. Business jumps in and says, "Whoa, X and Y is all fine, but we need to include this other feature, feature Zed. It helps to bring in a new type of player that we'd like to appeal to as a company and that will help sales. I think we should prioritize that. This is a scary situation. I think it's the kind of thing where creative business really could come to loggerheads. Production of course gets involved." Well, let's look at the game pillars. One of the game pillars is to create a social experience. Creative, what do you think? Okay, fine. If it appeals to that pillar, but if we do that feature, we definitely have to do feature Y as well because they're interlin. Feature X addresses a pillar that no other feature fulfills. So, we need to include that too. And again, like these are like productive, constructive conversations where you're actually engaging with the problem. They won't all fit. What if we did smaller versions of features Zed and X, etc., etc. etc.

I'm not suggesting this as a I'm not saying all of your conversations going like going to go like this, but hopefully this illustrates in the translation of one term to the other how you might be able to navigate this very very difficult tricky situation. Some notes on this particular hypothetical. Obviously, this is just an illustration. Parts of this conversation will take much longer than is implied here. Uh, sometimes it's weeks, sometimes it days, sometimes they're not even conversations at all. They're just things that happen in your head as you're trying to preempt different potential responses. It also assumes that both creative and business voices in this exchange take one another's concerns seriously. And I think this is really important to linger on. So I have encountered both kinds i.e. a business voice that takes creative that does not take creative voice creatives concerns seriously and I've t I've also met creative voices that have not taken business concern seriously and just as

the trope of the business person who uh is unconcerned with the quality of their product is a very live one and is you know is a very short-term way of thinking. So too is the creative artist who is not interested in engaging with the commercial, logistic, and operational constraints of the business that employs them. That said, whilst it's not always the case, it's very important to acknowledge the power dynamic baked in here. Ultimately, this is not an equal exchange. If the person cutting the checks really really disagrees, then you know there's not a great deal that you can do about it. So I don't mean to present this as a fully equally weighted uh point of view point of view fully equally weighted exchange. Um and I don't really know what to do about that. Um but I think I think it's it's in the room.

The key thing that I really want to draw your attention to is that navigating this situation requires very very swift translation of the priorities of one party into the language of the other and back again. Okay. Going to take some time to drink some water. So that's a way of um that's a hopefully an illustration of how you navigate those conversations in the moment. I think I'd like to linger just a moment on how this affects the tools that you create for yourselves. So the tools like your budget, your schedule, your backlog, all of those things help you to monitor the project progress and help you to understand whether you're on track or not. Fine. Can they help you navigate these conversations better? So you might have a budget but how

easily can you forecast different scenarios and evaluate them? If you remember in the dialogue there's a situation where what's this person's name? Apollo Justice. Apollo Justice talks about scenario A and is very easily able to say right okay if we extend things by 6 months then we need to spend an extra 100K and we dip 5% below target. Also then Apollo Justice is able to say right well there's a scenario B where we only drip drop do drop do drop do drop do drop do drop do drop do drop do drop do drop do drop by drop by two% that gets us three extra months being able to uh agilely that's a terrible word to use here being able to nimly being able to nimly forecast different scenarios helps you a great deal with the that conversation and that involves adding and having a budget sheet that adds allows you to add and remove people easily. It involves having a budget sheet where you distinguish between money that you spent so far on the project and money that you predict you will have to spend

in the remaining time between now and when you ship. Can you easily keep that up to date with your latest understanding? Is your understanding of your forecasted profitability so up to date that if you were pulled into a meeting and people were to say, "All right, where are we tracking because we might need an extra two months?" You'd be able to have that conversation there and there. You might have a backlog, but have you sized those backlog items so that you can prioritize them effectively? You remember there's this exchange between is this guy's name Miles? I haven't actually played these. Yeah, Miles. Yeah. where Miles is talking about, well, we need to do feature zed and feature Y or if we do feature Z, we have to do feature Y, but I also want feature X and Apollo Justice says, well, they won't all fit. Being able to bring that to the conversation involves a size backlog. And it also means that you need a

backlog where you have a clear idea of which game pillars each backlog item supports. Because if it doesn't support a game pillar, then what the hell is it in there for? Wouldn't it be great to tag a backlog item with the pillars it supports so you can look down the backlog and prioritize those items based on their size and their associated pillars? Maybe you've got five backlog items that that that support this one, but only two that support this one. That's fine decision to make, but you need to do it from a position of information. And speaking of game pillars, you might have those, but can you say what commercial goals those game pillars support? You remember when Phoenix says, well, actually, we need to include feature Z because it helps to bring in a new type of player and we want to do that in order to help sales. That is a business translation that is a translation sorry of a business requirement into a game

pillar that is very important to integrate into whatever thinking you do about conceing a new game and that means that you know Apollo Justice can talk about one of the game pillars creating a social experience. So has your business set clear commercial goals for the game? Are those commercial goals supported by an understanding of your audience? You won't have done all of these things. I have actually never got a project to a place where I can do all of those things. However, the more of this thinking that you do, the easier it will be for you to handle those conversations clearly and decisively. And handling those conversations clearly and decisively will let you get back to making the game, which is what you want to do. I'm going to summarize, but it's only been half an hour. Um, commercial game development needs to balance a business mindset and a creative mindset. The ideal situation

for a business is for things to be quantifiable and predictable. That is the absolute opposite of what your team needs to be creative. Reframe conflicts between business and creative as mismatches of language and priority. Always try to translate the priorities of one into the language of the other. That's it. Thanks everyone. Oh god. Um I uh I've left some room for questions. Maybe a bit too much room, but um so yeah uh by all means. Hello Hello. Hello. There we go. Okay. Hi. Hi. Um, fantastic talk. Um, as um, a

producer who's been in the games industry for 12 years now. I used to be in the development role as a game director and then moved into production. Um, and it's a constant balance in my head what you've been talking about already. um being able to see it from both sides but we have a lot of these conversations as we do already. Um I wanted to ask what are your favorite tools for doing this like software? What are the sort of things that help you with this? Like you can't do all that in Jira.
Uh no no no you can't. Um uh I I
just Excel.
No. Yeah. Well, you know what? Yeah. I mean it's weird. It's it's funny. I like doing a production talk and not being expect not expecting to be asked about tools is kind of crazy but I actually didn't prepare for this. I think a lot of my thinking is is about the budget and it's about it's about like a Google sheet honestly. Um so I think us have a a specific finance department and I work

very closely with a um financial controller there to come up with the kind of budget sheet that allows me to do the kind of forecasting that I was telling you about. So like that's that's what I work with. I think if you're dealing with a like a long backlog, God, it could be anything. I mean, I've tried paper cards. Uh I've tried uh Trello. I have tried Jira. Jira is quite unwieldy for like long-term planning, I find. Um so I I tend to stay away from Jira until we're talking about like the next sprint or the or specifically the milestone, but longer than that, I kind of don't get involved.
Yeah. Anyone else?
Hi.
Hi.
Um, we just started out as an indie dev company like for a month ago and set up a nice uh scrum board with like mostly like managing the the ADHD with

like not doing everything at the same time and you know going everywhere.
Nice. And planning wise, um I heard you were talking about like um setting the commercial goals and like bringing them to the like the game goals. Um could you explain that a little more?
Yeah.
Yeah, totally. So um so compared two situations, one is where uh your company says, "Hey, you know what? We just want to make a great game and uh if it does well, great. Um but if it doesn't, that's fine. we've got other jobs we can, you know, we can do that. That's fine. So, you're doing that for the love of the product. Fantastic. If you are running a studio and you you expect to help, you expect to to make more games after you release this one, then I think you need to set yourself some goals about like how many units you want to sell, who you want to appeal to, what area of the market you want to be in. I think it's like it's

overall strategic things like that. Um, and it's something that a lot of game devs don't get into because they're either scared or uninterested. But it's really important if what you want to do is to continue making games beyond the one that you're currently making because you need to be able to plan that business mindset. You need to be able to plan and forecast where you're going to be in like 2 or 3 years time after this game. So I think that's it. It's like um who do we want to appeal to? How many units do we want to sell? like what kind of position do we want to be in in the market?
Does that answer your question?
For sure. Thanks.
Thank you.
Uh hi John. Um
I'm sorry.
Oh right. Sorry. Hey.
Hi. Fantastic talk. Thank you. Um uh it's interesting to see uh production kind of in the way you're presenting it here as this kind of dialogue between the business and the sort of creative side. Um, I think as someone who's at

the beginning of getting into production work, but more more experience on the creative side, I suppose the development side, I've always, it's appeared to me as a sort of mostly a battle between the creative that you're mediating kind of thing. And I'm wondering if this is just what you're choosing to focus on for the talk or if you think that the business versus creative is the kind of more dominant thing that that is that is key in production. Uh so so you're asking um are the majority of conflicts that I encounter are they between business and creative rather than between individual creatives you want to make
well not not most of the conflicts but I suppose in terms of what your pro what you're doing dayto-day or what the key bits of the job are is it more that dialogue or the sort of intercreative dialogue? M yeah I think um I think my experience of day-to-day life is probably yeah mediating uh discussions and dialogue between individual members of the team within the team rather than justifying our decisions up to like our commercial

stakeholders right so it's mostly hey I want to do this we can't do this because I need to move on to this other thing as an artist but the designer wants me to do that like you know Those are the kinds of I'm going to call them conflicts that I have to manage on a day-to-day basis. Um, that's like that's more frequent and it's more low level. I think what I'm talking about here are the big things where we're like, okay, you know what? We're running over and we need six more months. Like those are those are things where those are within the context of a project much more seismic changes which have much longer lasting and uh significant effects on the team because they determine whether whole sways of the game get cut or not. Um so I think that's the level of granularity that I'm kind of talking about in this talk. Um but yes I mean a lot of my time is spent managing the low-level small stuff. Does that answer your question? Uh yeah no definitely I think yeah no it's

interesting to see that that high level perspective I think it's not always discussed as much so yeah very interesting
so in in the the project that I'm working on now I think I've had to have conversations of this kind maybe two or three times in like you know a the same number of years and I think those have been really significant conversations that have altered the trajectory of a project in really really important ways Um, yeah. I think it's in terms of like bang for buck. I think those are the big ones. Thank you.
Anyone else with a question?
I think there's a question at the front here. And then
hello. Um, you were talking about the 2% example. Um is there any instances I'm I'm reading a lot about how um uh those kinds of changes um people might go back on them tomorrow or in six months. Um

how reliable are those conversations and what can you do to kind of mitigate from somebody pulling the plug in quite a drastic way?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean and now we're going back to the the kind of power imbalance that exists between like you know that that business and creative conversation. Um, it really does depend on how your company is run and it depends on the decisions that are made at a business level, at a strategic level for what they want to where they want to be in 5 years time. It's possible just as you could have a director for a game that is uh constantly changing their mind and saying like, "Oh, no, okay, I want it to be like a farming sim. No, I want it to be a first person shooter." Similarly, you can have that kind of that kind of indecision and that kind of flip-flopping at a business level where they say, "Oh, no, you know what? We want to go for this audience. No, actually actually screw that. We want to go for this one instead." And I think so I think the answer to your first question is um it it really does depend

on how the business is run. in terms of insulating yourself and protecting yourself from that. All you can really do is for the functioning of a business, you need to be able to take your directors from those goals and when they are set and I think if you're in a situation where those goals are changing a great deal, that's not a good place to be. I would say does that help?
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. My question is basically related um also the 2% okay if we need two months more we will lose 3% of profitability uh that you stated isn't that impossible for most games that you do because either it's going to fly or not
or yeah or how do you how do you try to measure I I could imagine that's super tough.
Yeah, totally. So, so I think actually one thing that this example glosses over is the fact that you are when you are talking to the um the business kind of

leaders of your organization, they have their own mechanisms for making those predictions that could also then be wrong. Right? So like you know I think we're going into kind of much more business and commercial thinking now but if you're on a game project and you set aside a budget for that you want to be able to justify that budget by saying based on our market research we think that this game will sell x number of units because these other units these other titles like it have sold this number of units and so on and so forth. that thinking could be wrong but you need a mechanism within your company who is specialized in that to be doing that kind of work. So yeah, I would say yes, it is difficult to predict, but also there needs to be someone who's owning that and making those predictions themselves or I mean maybe you're getting funding from a different source. Maybe you're an Apple Arcade title or you know that kind of stuff in which case there is a uh you know a set amount of money that you're

getting for production but it really does depend on where you're getting the money from. Uh hi. Uh great talk. Thank you for that. Uh I really liked uh how you uh compared being a producer to being a translator. Um I just wanted to kind of mention that in order to translate you need to understand the source material first. Um, so I wanted to ask you about like your thoughts um or like advice how to make people make you understand what they need because that's kind of sort of what I'm struggling with sometimes. Some people really have trouble explaining clearly what they want, what they need from you, what they have in their mind. They can get frustrated when you're not getting it right away. Um so if you have any advice.
Yeah. Um okay so

uh there are kind of two lenses to view it through. Uh the first lens is um business versus creativity. And I think then it's about building up a literacy within yourself in the concepts or ideas or languages of either of those different parties. Right? So like it's on you as a translator to become interested in and listen out for the kind of conversations that are happening on the business side and also not to switch off when creative conversations are happening and we all do it right. We all like osmotically absorb turns of phrase and you know decisions that people make based on uh based on their personalities and past experience and vocabulary and things like that. So I think keeping an eye out for that and understanding that everything is relevant to your job is important. So that's the first thing. The second kind of the second aspect of your question that I'm I'm maybe sensing and maybe I've got this wrong is basically a question which is quite fundamental to human communication which is if someone is trying to explain

something to you and you're not getting it and they're getting frustrated what do you do? Right? And that's like not across the business creative divide that is that could be within creatives and that could be within the business that could be within a relationship. So I think there are some kind of basic strategies that I use which is to explain what I think I've understood back to them in my own words which is a really helpful thing to do because then I can say okay that's not quite what I mean it's bit like that which is something that just asking questions won't do and it also shows willing to try and cross the divide and come towards them and shows that you're making an effort. Um, and I think it's I think it's just about like com combining that and asking other questions like to try and tease something out.
Anyone else got any questions?

Hey, brief talk. Um, I like how you framed um, you know, production sitting in between business and creativity. you know essentially uh working to come to a compromise um between the two. Um do you have any tips around how to manage that whenever uh you know especially in small studios where uh people wear multiple hats in my example overseeing the business side and most of the production um and trying to come to that compromise whenever you I sit on one side of that argument. So that's a question about like um if this is a fine situation if you're um if you've got different people wearing those hats, but what if the same person is wearing multiple hats, right?
Essentially direct each directly translating to the other.
Yeah. Um I mean like there are there are benefits and there are disadvantages to that kind of a situation because it speeds up

communication because you're the same person, right? Um, but also actually verbalizing and externalizing these things does something different psychologically in terms of like how people think about it. And having a different person just owning that stuff and not second guessing themselves or thinking about another thing from a different perspective is a very difficult thing to do in terms of like practical tips. Honestly, just say it out loud. Like talk to yourself. Um, it's it's weird, but it works. I mean, like, you know, programmers in the room, like rubber ducking is a is a real thing when you're kind of working out programming problems and like saying these things out loud and expressing them is is an important thing, but I don't think I don't think you necessarily need to see it as a um as something that is hampering you. I think change the space you're in. You know, maybe you only think about business stuff when you're on walks, right? or like there's I don't know there's a

particular toilet cubicle that you go to, right? Like to think about it, but like I think do whatever you need to do to um separate the kind of thinking that you you need to do from in one hat versus another. Maybe you send it, you know, you send yourself notes. Like that's that's legit. It's fine. It sounds crazy, but like mad stuff has happened. But I really think like understanding that what you need is that separation and then doing whatever you need to get that is the most important thing.
I think that's all we have time for for questions if that's all right.
Uh there's one at the back. I see. Maybe I'll talk really quickly. I just wondered if you might be able to just say a few words about about the power between and that balance between creative and business.
Yeah. So

yeah, like I said earlier on, if business is cutting the checks, then there is an inherent financial power that they have over their creative workforce. This is something that we're all feeling very keenly at the moment. Um, I think it is important to understand that a business that wields that kind of power indiscriminately and insensitively uh is a profoundly dysfunctional one, right? And in terms of like practical things that you can do in order to uh protect yourself from something like that, if you can if you find yourself that you're in a in a dysfunctional business like that, if you can get out. Um but if you can't, I think it is it's about trying to trying to speak their language as much as possible in order to survive. I think um there is a very political answer that I can go into

uh in response to that question which would not be appropriate but I think um but I think that's that's probably what I would say given the limited time that I have.
Thank you.
No worries.
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. I'll take the self. Yeah. Okay. Right. Great. Would you mind? Would you mind if I took a selfie? My dad would really love it. Uh okay. Here we go. All right. Yeah. Cheer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone smile. Thank you so much everyone. That was great.