The 2019 Failure Workshop

so we all wear a lot of hats right that's the thing that we say if you're an independent game developer I feel like you're contractually obligated to say it at least once it is a truism in indie games we have less so we need to do more we wear a lot of hats I have worn a lot of hats and they got heavy and they hurt quite a bit that's how I like to introduce myself my name is John Remedios I'm a game designer and developer from Toronto Canada I've been working in video games for just over nine years I went independent in 2015 when I found in my studio actual humans the first game from actual humans is called shoot shoot mega pack it is a modular minimalist party game about rules friendship and shooting like I said it is the only commercial game I've released independently so surprise surprise I goofed up a whole bunch it went way over schedule it did not hit

its sales targets it's not on all the platforms it should be the name is a bit of a hard sell and it doesn't stand out however it did have its fair share of successes it's a good animation I met its design goals like literally every single one that I set out to hit I built a number of professional and personal relationships because of this game and I think it looks and feels quite nice but most importantly to me it found its audience so these are teams in case you are unfamiliar when I showed SS MP for the first time publicly in the mega booth at PAX Prime 2015 before it was even PAX West these three fine folks came and play the demo literally every single day at least once and then they did it again

when I showed 2016 and when the game was in the pac-10 in 2017 even though we had already released in 2018 I was just at paeksang you know and so we became buds when I launched SS MP they bought the game day one put it on the laptop and brought it to school and played it with their friends over lunch throughout the school year they're all in college now I don't know if they're still gonna do this with their fun college friends hopefully they will but in my mind this is what success looks like however the way I made SSP is not a story of success the game was not built sustainably and by that I mean the mental and emotional costs of its development would not have been worth it even if it had been some raging commercial success realistically I could make one maybe two more games the way that I made shoots you've mega pack and that is because I struggle with my

mental health this is left intentionally blank because I could not find an image that felt appropriate I've struggled with my mental health for the majority of my life I don't always like to admit it or accept it but it is something that I know it is in my family history I grew up in a household where it was prevalent to say the least it is part of who I am I understand this now and I understood it then but when I started making shoot shoot mega pack I I actively ignored it so today I would like to talk to you about why I ignored it what that resulted in and how I'm trying trying to move past that and but before I do that I do have a couple disclaimers number one I am NOT a mental health professional I am a goof who makes video games I can listen and empathize or at least try as hard as I can to do those things but I am not qualified to help anyone so please do not take anything I say as an answer or

a solution I only have my own experience and also because we're in the failure workshop I was a little bit of apprehensive but having the stock is part of the failure workshop because I want to make something explicitly clear struggling with your mental health is is not a failure I am NOT saying that I would never say that I think that is gross I think that is harmful so hopefully we're all on the same page about that [Applause] thank you I do have a lot more slides though okay so let's dig into why so I started my my first game job in 2009 I cut my teeth making casual games for a variety of studios across Toronto I was launching games on things like big fish and other casual digital download portals Facebook and a lot of app store work which is not surprising and I'm extremely grateful for this chunk of my

career I learned a lot helped me pay off my student debt which was huge but that was not why I got into the industry right ever since I started making games I wanted to do one thing I wanted to make games the way I wanted to make them I wanted to make them independently and the context of 2008-2009 really only bolstered that desire this is definitely not news to most of you I'm sure but in case it is here's a little quick refresher history lesson things like digital distribution on consoles and early app store flash game portals being a thing that existed and steam actually developing a user base created this weird perfect storm for a new generation of indie games to reach more people and as the audience grew we developed a narrative we celebrated these games for being fresh personal alternatives to the increasingly cold corporate quote-unquote traditional game industry and part of that celebration involved highlighting individuals often white dudes as the sole creative forces

responsible for these passion projects and for some of us myself included this was a nice story to hear I really latched on to it this isn't surprising we have a long history of idolizing loan geniuses often white dudes again we see it in our fiction season our businesses seed in our video games so when I was lucky enough to start making games independently this is really what I was aspiring to whether or not I would admit it or not but by mythologizing this image of the loan game developer and holding this ideal above everything else is what I think is the the core the core reason I'm sorry the core mmm the root cause of making choices that harmed not only myself but others and this isn't important as important as those other two things but also the game so that's a bit broad so let's get out of the heavens and talk about what that looked like in practice

so it looked a lot like this unsurprisingly me wanting to do everything in myself resulted in an unwillingness to accept guidance from others or the outright refusal of help when it was offered to me which is ridiculous because I think that I haven't mentioned is I didn't build SMP on my own I worked with a group of really incredible people who contributed a great deal to the game but and I knew this about myself and I knew this about the project when I was working on it I I was technically collaborating but I didn't ever feel like I was collaborating with them because I was so entrenched in this idea that it was my project right I was the one working full-time I was the only one who could truly fully understand the the vision for my triangle game and so over the course of development I went out of my way to reinforce this idea isolated myself I didn't leave my apartment for long stretches of time I would organize the occasional work day here and there but nothing really stuck

it was hard to justify to myself I should be able to do this I should be able to work from home I also withdrew virtually I would quietly just work on things without telling anyone what I was doing or why I needed to get done and then I would pop up and say hey here's all this stuff I'd done barfing it way more information than anyone needed wanted or could reasonably understand which only made me feel like I could not be understood even more but this isolating behavior extended past just my interactions or more specifically my my lack of interactions with other people it seeped into my process I became disdainful of production methods it felt like a waste of time I was making the game I knew what it I knew what I needed to do I shouldn't need you know some arbitrary schedule or calendar to help me reach my goals it it was a lie obviously this is a ridiculous way to think about building video games but is what I expected for myself but it wasn't real because in reality the

combination of these behaviors left me feeling alone with no sense of direction and I was ashamed which made me withdraw even more which made that feeling stronger until I didn't know where I was or what I was trying to do so this was a cycle of shame and depression with moments of hyper productivity that started really early on in development way earlier than as I was reflecting on it then I actually realized and it continued throughout the development of the game and and well past its launch some of the cycles were fairly short they only lasted about a few days and some of them went much longer than that at its worst I was not eating or bathing or brushing my teeth or shaving some days just getting from my bed to the couch was a good day I'd seen this in myself before right I knew what this was but I thought this should be different

right I I should be different because I am doing the thing that I wanted to do I am doing the thing that I love and the fact that it wasn't loving me back made me feel weak and it made me feel lazy and it made me feel worthless and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with aspiring to become something but when you're too focused on the things that you lack and the things that you are not it becomes really easy to lose track of everything else and that's what happened to me and yeah I ship the game sure but what about the next one or the one after that or the one after that like how many times do I have to go through this before I can't do it anymore before it severely hurts me I don't know and I I don't really want to find out which brings us to how I'm trying to move past this I am trying

to improve my process in my relationship with my work into something that is a little bit healthier this is not this is not all-encompassing this is a very small slice of the things that I'm doing obviously this takes place within a much broader treatment plan for myself like I said I'm not trying to give anyone advice and I wanted to keep this fairly work centric so just please keep that in mind so I've tried making a habit of asking for and accepting help from others it's not something that comes naturally to me but building it into my life is something that I found quite beneficial for example I helped organize just a small peer group of game developers it's not mental health focused but we just get together and we talk about stuff both both good and bad and the point of it is you know we're trying to try to make space for one another trying to make time for each other I'm really just trying to say these things out loud I've also been really conscious of my physical environment and its impact on me keeping

in line with asking others for help I reached out to an old boss of mine who offered me a desk at a studio and I go there a few days a week which is great if I need just a change of environment or to be around other human beings I also brought on collaborators for my next project extremely early because I do not want it to be mine I want it to be ours I'm still guiding the project but the process is a lot more conversational we give each other feedback constantly and who has final say is really dependent on the context obviously it's way too early to say whether or not this is successful or will be successful but I already think the game is at least the process is markedly better for it and finally I've been trying to mend my relationship with production methodologies I found something that is manageable relatively lightweight and you know works for me it's it's beyond the scope of this talk but I'm hopefully gonna write something about that soon the thing that's really important to keep in mind if you are someone who is resentful of production like I don't I

don't know that it's that uncommon for smaller Indies is that it doesn't necessarily need to just be a thing that you're using to make the game it helps cut out and ambiguity and anxiety and just like give you a clearer picture when you know you're in the middle of development and who knows how you're ever gonna make this goddamn thing but I will say one of the things that my my personal methodology does not have is Gantt charts cuz they're the bad thing they suck so yeah that's where I'm at today I'm still working at it I am chipping away at ideals that are doing me way more harm than good I'm a work in progress right I I'm not better I don't know what that means this is something that I'm likely gonna have to deal with for my entire life and that is okay I don't have any answers about how to live like that but in my experience regardless of

whether or not you're struggling with your mental health it's always worth reflecting on the things that you want the things that you purport to want and seeing if it lines up with what you actually need because sometimes it doesn't I didn't for me and I'm saying that because I do not think that I'm particularly unique I have I guess it doesn't really match the tone huh I have no doubt in my mind that there are other people either in this room or at this conference in this industry that have gone through are going through or will go through something similar to what I described not the same but it doesn't really matter and if you are one of those people I just wanted to say that I hope you feel seen you are why I wanted to give this talk I don't think the world needs more games about triangles and shooting but I do think the industry needs your voices and your perspectives and the thought of us not being able to hear them because you are trying to wear too many hats or you're trying to shove yourself into one that doesn't doesn't fit properly

I think that's heartbreaking so I hope something I've said resonated with some of you in some way but please do not listen to me for most things here are some resources it's very GDC centric again both check point and take this have aggregated a lot of really great information for people who are either struggling with mental health or know other people who are struggling with their mental health also there is an IG da-led roundtable on Thursday at 2 p.m. in the South Hall if that is something you feel comfortable going to I went one last year and it was extremely cathartic is hard but I enjoyed it Joy's not the right word and you know but I mean that's not for everybody yeah so that's it thank you so much for your time Thanks there's my contact information if you

want yeah bye my name is Juan I'm 26 years old and I'm the co-founder creative director and business person at a small indie studio based in Spain's Colton Gotham first of all I want to say thank you for having me here it's pretty much an honor for me and second I want to apologize if I made mistakes during my talk English is not my first language so I know I made mistakes so yeah apologize for that this talk is gonna be a post mortem not only on or previous last game release but on on the whole history for a company team Gotham and it's gonna be sorry about making loads of mistakes that led us to make desperate decisions that there's two loads of anxiety and sleepless nights in the past few months as this is pretty

bra still is pretty recent I expect this talk like me being here to be kind of therapy to get some closure but about all these recent events and also help of course others that may be in a similar situation hopefully so the story begins when we founded the studio King Gotham back in 2013 we were starting out University and we were making mobile games prototypes and we quickly jumped into PC development with a game called the guest which is a first-person exploration game a really humble classic thing somewhere between gone home and and the room if you might and and yeah so did we know what we were doing back then kind of yes because we knew how to do 3d modeling we knew

to do programming we knew basics on design so development was covered but he'll now like when we finished college university we didn't know anything about industry we didn't know how to get the game noticed and we were trying everything to to make that happen we were trying to send out press releases go on to even pitch to publishers all the things that weren't working at all so we got into this sense of desperation and we collapsed so we say oh hey my publisher might might help us right like people say publisher can help so that may be a good idea after all this process of desperation where we collapse we travel to many events in back in Europe and and and we landed a publisher in a moment of huge desperation it was like the last resource we had because we

we didn't have like real resources we didn't have any money or savings we were just students so landing a publisher in this situation was a good thing and a bad thing so being desperate is the feeling of showing failing or showing a hopeless sense that the situation is so bad on that is like impossible to deal with and also while filling a great need or desire for for something I would say that we had makes it filling between these two definitions of the word and and and yeah this all situation led us to this desperate decision number one which was signing a good deal in short term with this publisher but it was bad in the in the long run for us so again we had no resources we had nothing was working everything we were trying and and we were collapsed at that time so

when we were negotiating with his publisher we did a lot of things wrong we budget wrong and and sorry and we've rejected to have like any revenue share in short term which means they had Honda person recoup policy which means publisher have to recoup the investment and only then you will see some some profit of it it was good in the short term because it was gonna allow us to do things immediately and you know build the studio properly hired some people stuff like that but this feeling of being anxious about getting money like it wasn't greed I would say but you know we were students and we wanted to like build a thing properly so this anxious feeling and didn't allow us to like sit back and relax and take a

lot of things and ask people that were like more experienced than us and just stop thinking so we were anxious we run into the deal and we signed the deal so three years from that when from from releasing the game and 25,000 copies after lunch we've seen no money from this game yet and he's not expecting to to change anytime soon it's not like the game is a hit and and and we will be rich or something but paying bills it's also it's also nice but yeah that's how we feel now but back then was like hey who cares I can game didn't work out that well but we have plenty of money in the bank let's make a new game whatever so we so we wanted to overlap the ending of the production of the guests with a with a new with a new game with a new pre-production of the game and we asked

ourselves like shouldn't we take a break before that I mean we we've been making this game for two years and it should it should be nice to have a break and just stay away from things from some time but at that time money blinded us badly and we were basically slaves of this money or we were thinking equals money and vacation equals non-sentient which is absolutely wrong and in that had really like bad consequences after that but we didn't allow ourselves to stop at this point because money was running out so we started the production of last games called solo which is introspective puzzle adventure about love relationships and and how love effect or everyday life and what happened since six months into development we spent forty five thousand dollars into a

vertical slice which was kind of like the half of the budget we have and the game was absolute game was boring it's like doing homework so Wow why did this happen because communication was Wes inexistent was really poor we were burned out we never stopped to as I say sit back and think about things we were continuously doing things this anxious feeling of money was running out money's running out we have to do stuff so yeah I remember one day I I came to the studio and and and I asked people like how do you feel about the game and no one was happy about it but we never like talked about it before so yeah it was too late we needed to shift directions now new

design a new like business plan but money was running out for real we spent half of what we had there was no time at all and we really like pitched publishers and they of course rejected that trash game we had so this situation again this action and anxious sorry situation of desperation of collapsing again led us to the desperate decision number two which was making a cross in campaign we were super scared about a crowdfunding campaign but we had no other option to get money as aap so we we approached fig which is a crowdfunding cro the investment platform and and they share the vision of the game we were excited about it so that was great but we were still really

really afraid of doing a crowdfunding campaign so we budget the campaign way below of what we needed because we were scared about not getting to the goal that would let us almost no money left for marketing and PR actions one thing also is that during the campaign in the middle of it we got stuck like money was not rising and the goal was approaching so Fick come out with a kind of a solution he brings an investor and guess what investor wanted Hana person recruit policy again so one year after lunch again we have seen no money from game sales and it's not expected to change anytime soon it's important to understand that we took these decisions thinking that were the best for the studio at that time and that was the

only options we had all the time and well it's not only that it's not only about these deals but it's also the gap you never you know the industry is bad it's really hard to get your game on steam bla bla bla but you never suspect your game to be that bad press is talking great about your game but no one's buying it so that's also something like that emotionally it's it's on you so the thing is that boosts if like hundreds on recoup deals killed us in some way and maybe killing other people all the studios we have no money in the back left in make like a new company account so we all dispensers are out of pockets like being here or go and like the game the games we made wasn't like huge hits but still will be paying some bills which is nice I often asked myself if we would be at the same

point if if that first desperate deal hadn't beat that desperate and honestly I think yes because I mean this stock is not a rant on publishers or handles and recoup deals which I think they suck it's more a rant on us talking out loud about all the stuff we made wrong which is a bunch like I said we budget things wrong we scope things wrong we didn't communicate which is like the most important thing thing that we we didn't do I think good producer is not only the one who is delivering the game on time it's also the one who has like a human approach to the people and a sensitive approach to people who's working with and before asking housework asking how do you feel how's life are you okay all that all the things and and and that's the lesson I I learned and I'm trying to apply in my

everyday life not only in games but with friends and family so I think I think now life would be the same because also we were making games that maybe no one wanted to buy so that's good at all acknowledging that the desperate deals are only like the turning points of the story but our mistakes is what led us to to those points so so right now we have made no money from game sales since 2013 we have made huge mistakes out of huge desperation that us to sign bad deals for us with us one partner one employee in the last year now I dub constantly of my capacities to be even talking here at EDC having like an happy suffering anxiety uncomfortable with myself seems came out last year I don't playing games

anymore actually hate games right now I'm struggling with game def a lot I'm trying to park gamedev for a while in my life and we're trying to keep team Gotham afloat the company but we don't I'm not really sure if it's even even worth it anymore so I'm not sure if I'm surviving failure but I hope that this talk might help you guys if anyone is in a similar situation I hope not what but I really hope it helps so yeah I love you and thank you my name is Charlie price I'm the co-founder and creative director of hidden variable or a small independent studio based down in Los Angeles when we were first founded in 2010 we mostly made mobile puzzle games like baggy attic tactics we worked with servo on Three's to bring to

Android next box among other things but more recently we're most well known for the game Skullgirls mobile trailer here for those who aren't aware the original skullgirls game was developed by lab 0 it's a 2d hand animated fighting game that is you know that was released back in 2012 we approached them about going through and bringing Skullgirls to mobile and part of our goal there was to go through and make fighting games more accessible for folks that otherwise find them intimidating but without compromising their depth and a lot of the creativity that you ultimately have when you're playing fighting games at a high level so as a result while we were able to take over a lot of the animations that they have already built these beautiful animations and some of the combat mechanics we had to make a lot of adjustments to go through and map it over to mobile native controls so mostly taps and swipes no virtual thumb sticks or anything like that in addition to all that stuff the mobile game unlike the console game was a free-to-play RPG so there was a whole host of additional systems we had to go through and build you know progression systems skill trees signature abilities social features like

chat live events like daily events and prize fights and riff battles and all the bells and whistles you would normally expect from a free-to-play game and it's a pretty ambitious thing for a small team and I'm incredibly proud about the stuff that we were able to accomplish however this talk is not about all the things we're proud of instead this talks about the time that we accidentally went and deleted all of our users data so a brief history of how we got there so actually skullgirls started back at 2014 at GDC yay we decided to sign up with autumn games to go through make this happen a year later we were approached by line who are interested in going through and publishing the game particularly to distribute it in Korea and Japan which sounded awesome to us because they're really notoriously difficult territories to crack and you know again fast-forwarding spring 2017 we were able to go through launch the game on the line label in the US and mostly worldwide except for a planned launch in Korea in Japan a little bit later on in the year when we launched everything was going really well the game was really well received good reviews we're getting a lot of organic downloads which is awesome but there

were some challenges lion was going through a little bit of corporate drama at the time they'd recently gone through and acquired a new game studio and as a result they're reshuffling some stuff and so a lot of things were frozen which included our marketing budget so while we're getting good organic users we knew we needed to be kind of figuring out what our user acquisition plan was going to be in order to make sure that we were sustainable moving forward so while we're hopeful that that would resolve itself became pretty evident that it wasn't so we made the tough decision to part ways with line forever so that came with its own set of challenges across the board first off was a technical challenge we had basically originally planned to go through and like kind of pluck a back end off the shelf and be able to use a lot of existing features but when we partnered with line they basically required us to build something from the ground up to all of their exacting requirements and now that we were migrating we had to somehow untangle all of that stuff and migrated over to AWS so that we could go through and manage it ourselves we were fortunate that we were able to find an

expert back-end partner who knew all these things backwards and forwards so we could kind of learn on the go with them and then we could focus on the client side stuff the client side stuff had its own challenges in an ideal world lime would just transfer the game over to us and players you know one day the publisher would change from one company to another and players wouldn't be the wiser they'd just be able to carry on lion was not comfortable doing that for data privacy reasons nor were they comfortable just transferring all of the user data over to us behind the scenes so instead what we had to do was let them opt-in which basically meant that imagine logging into a game and saying hey by the way this game's gonna shut down in two months but it's not going to go away there's gonna be a new game all we need is for you to put in your email address and your password and then later when this game shuts down in the new game you can log in with this stuff and everything's gonna be fine so we did everything we could to try and make that a palatable thing we incentivized a gay people rewards but what has all said and done when we finally did the migration we went from 500,000 total users that we had before down to 50,000 so that was a pretty big hit but they were our most engaged users we told ourselves so that's great and

it's time to move on time to move forward it's a new beginning we're gonna be fine it's gonna be fine so in January of 2018 right after we did this migration things were looking pretty good we had gone through and relaunch successfully the migration which is complicated had turned out a twin okay we were doing some proper user acquisition we've been saving up our marketing dollars when the investment were able to get almost two hundred thousand users in our first month which is awesome and our back-end partner was handling all the different ups and downs that come with running a live game so that was really good and then we heard kind of word through the grapevine that we might have an app store feature that was coming up thank god this is perfect so what we did just to be safe we decided to go through and double our server bandwidth just to make sure that we could handle the hopeful influx of all these new users we're gonna be dealing with so in general things are going really really well so Oh 8 hundred Friday February 2nd 2018 mere days before this purported feature I get a phone call from one of our engineers who regretfully informs me that our back-end partner instead of provisioning a new shard accidentally reprovision dauer

live shard effectively reformatting it and wiping all of our user data so I took a moment and I said ok well we're gonna have we're gonna be down for a bit that's awful Oh what about the backups how long it'll take for us to go through restore from our backups and that was the kicker there were no backups our partner had said they were doing backups but we had never bothered to check and so as a result we were left with no data at all there's a pretty rough day as you might imagine we'd been through so much getting to this point we you know not only building the game which seemingly was like a great game and people dug it and then we had to migrate and then we just rebuilt it we're right on the cusp of this great new moment for us and somehow we just torpedoed ourselves so you know it's pretty disheartening for the team as a whole and there was a very real temptation for us to want to go through and basically absolve ourselves of blame after all we weren't the ones that push the button or pulled the plug or whatever metaphor you want to use however was really important for us to

go through and reflect on the fact that ultimately even though they're our partner they're our responsibility this game is our responsibility we are responsible to our players responsible to our customers to go through and maintain the sanctity of their data and I know a lot of these things can feel like an act of God in the moment but reflecting on it there are always opportunities maybe we couldn't have prevented the action itself oh there's definitely things we could have done in order to go through and prevent the consequences from being as dire so it was our responsibility to go through and make it right so assessing the damage so there was some good news we still had that 50,000 50,000 users worth of data it's a month old but some data is better than no data so that's something and then we had this activity log which was basically a separate server thank god that was used to track anytime someone opened a mystery box or a character leveled up major progression events we realized we could run a script on that server in order to basically go through and roughly reconstruct most of the data for our players so it seemed like maybe okay like we're just gonna get through it it'll be great but there was some bad

news unfortunately because it was from the activity log we had zero authentication data so basically we could reassemble 200,000 accounts but we had no idea who it belonged to so the only way we could ultimately remap it would be to do it manually and as you can imagine that'd be a pretty time-consuming process so in the meantime we've been down for three to four days all of our KPIs obviously tanked we've been kind of keeping people abreast but being a little cagey just as we were figuring out what actually happened and what our options were and what was going on but it was time for us to go through and deliver the news so I wrote this long forum post explaining everything and I won't go through the whole thing but the main tenants were we wanted to take responsibility for what happened let them know what was going on give them kind of the full story of how we got to this point and reassure them that we were going to do everything in our power to go through and regain their trust and obviously apologizing profusely that's kind of a given throughout this entire thing so we basically presented them with two options so one we could go through and manually restore your data as I mentioned before this is a pretty trying

proposition it's kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack we could get clues from players like their account name the last few things that they did the state of their collection there's a number of clues that we could maybe triangulate and try and figure out who it was but we didn't want to give someone access to someone else's account in case they came and asked for it later so it's kind of a tricky proposition we also encountered a strange phenomena where we'd find somewhere were 100% confident this is that person and they say oh actually I'm pretty sure I had two or three gold characters that just don't happen to be part of my collection was a really strange thought we have no idea why that would be the case given everything else as well never the common characters only the rare characters so I'll talk a little later about how we handled that but needless to say this is a very time-consuming exercise so we presented an alternative option which is basically a free starting over gift why would you want your old data when you can get even better new data so basically for 72 hours after we came back up we basically had this bundle waiting for people in their mailbox after they finished the tutorial which would be any new players or anybody who lost their data before and basically the

idea was a lot of these players have been playing for a month and change let's provide them with an offer that is worth about $400 an in-game contents that was way more valuable than most people's progression up until that point unless they were super hardcore because we knew we couldn't go through and handle 200,000 users worth of data hopefully a bunch of people would just go through and take it and run the idea here is that we were comfortable sacrificing revenue for retention we wanted to make sure that at least players would stick around and maybe one day they'll trust us enough again to spend money in our game so during this period right after I made that post we almost overnight we had over 2,000 requests that came in normally we have one per that does customer service part time but this go-around everybody stop what they're doing in the company across multiple projects disciplines everybody was doing customer service you're an artist an engineer producer it doesn't matter you're either in fresh tests talking to rate customers or you were going through and trying to find their data in the database in a strange way this was actually like a great bonding experience for us as a group obviously we just suffered this shared trauma which brought us together in a strange

way but for the first time you know we're at ambitious studio working on multiple things this was actually the first time that literally every single person at the studio was doing the exact same thing being able to go through and see customers that were very upset and then hopefully by the end of the process ultimately be satisfied when it was all said and done we manually resolved over 3,500 requests from people which is good that means a lot of people took the the free bundle instead of going through and reaching out to us but ultimately even though we tried to front-load it it took us months to fully work through all of these these requests so despite all of this stuff there are still people who weren't happy you can't please everyone so lots of colorful comments on the forums and in mails and in reviews and whatnot and frankly they had every right to be upset we kind of broke the fundamental covenant of we will take care of your data so while we were doing everything in our power to try and help folks you can't make everybody happy thankfully there were a lot of people that saw things another way the way we were handling it the way that we were doing kind of one-on-one support for

every single person that we were very communicative people seem to be very appreciative of that approach and frankly we had a very strong relationship put on community beforehand which I think helped set the table to make sure that we would get the benefit of the doubt when some of the stuff ultimately happened so in terms of consequences as I mentioned before all of our kpi's dropped to nothing we had no idea what to expect when the game went live again we were presuming that our revenue was going to go through and take a big hit you know maybe some people would eventually go through and come back but again we didn't really know what to expect thankfully when we relaunched everything bounced back a lot better than we expected so we took a little bit of a hit but when we did our next Taunton update at the end of the month you know our numbers spiked again like they always did the content update and we were able to more or less obviously still had a lot of work to do behind the scenes to make sure that room was satisfied but we were able to keep sailing it didn't sink us in addition we migrated over from the back end partner that will not be named to mission who is an amazing back-end partner that we've been working with now I highly recommend it if you're looking for a game as a service they never delete your data so if you ever find

yourself in a similar situation I hope to god that you don't here are some general takeaways that you can bear in mind if and when that happens so first and foremost is obviously taking responsibility I did not mention the name of the other company that we worked with because ultimately it was our responsibility to deal with this it was our responsibility to test their work our customers don't care who ultimately you know did the actual action it's on us as developers to maintain the sanctity of our environment and their data and everything else as well but it's also important to make sure that you keep your chin up obviously if you ever find yourself in a situation remotely close to this you'll be pretty dark times it's easy to succumb to despair to feel like you're a terrible person or a terrible game developer and really at the end of the day happens you know you're not going to be able to move forward if you're dwelling in the past so you know just try and be open and authentic and genuine with your fans and hopefully they'll give you another shot at it moving forward I mentioned

before that people would make some pretty strange requests of us that really didn't have no foundation in fact however when push came to shove people asked for those gold characters we just gave it to them this was for a number of reasons one it was the fastest way to deal with the situation as I mentioned we had thousands of requests that were coming in and the longer it took for us to go through and respond to one user and satisfy their needs there were dozens of other users that were still waiting for a response we need to move through it quickly it was also because we trusted them even if we didn't always trust them but they deserved it in part because we owed it to them we're the ones that have made the mistake we need to give them the benefit of the doubt and frankly anything we do to go through and make them happy the better off we'll ultimately be a lot of salons with kind of some of the exploitable customer service policies with like companies like Costco and Nordstrom kind of famously that we try to go through an adopt as well as part of this and even if you just look at it from a purely pragmatic perspective while it may seem like players are kind of exploiting you for free stuff another way to look at it is this is a very low cost investment in retention of our highest value users if

they're going to be happy and they're going to go through and stick around giving a few free things that they clearly covet early on really isn't going to move the needle that much in the long term it's much more valuable to have these people stick around for the long haul I mentioned that we have a really strong relationship with our community my in-game handle is mighty zug and whenever i start typing discord someone invariably posts this image we're always doing like little AMAs and whatnot with our fans and the forums discord in our in-game chat and so we're also we all actively play the game we don't play the game with like God level accounts some of us are high level some of us for mid level but as a result people see us in prize fights and other in-game events and as a result you know the community really knows who we are as people they see us as accessible as accessible and relatable as opposed to just representatives of a faceless entity which I think really helped we're also very transparent about our gameplay and business decisions whenever we need to go through and make changes we always post our rationale on the forum if we need to go through and change the way we're distributing content in order to increase revenue so we can reinvest it in the game we tell them hey we're doing

this so we can increase revenue so we can reinvest it in the game and generally fans or our fans are very receptive to that we also respond to every single user review that we get good or bad it's important to remember that your community is not just your most hardcore players that are in your discord they're anyone who's ultimately reaching out to you and your review board is a public facing forum where people can see who you are and how you engage with your fans last but not least being open honest and empathetic beyond just regular updates with folks as I mentioned before when you have people reaching out to you with extremely irate profanity-laden emails it's important to remember that empathy baguettes empathy this is an example of some of the language that we would go through and use when talking with folks we understand that you're upset we would be too putting ourselves in their shoes and showing that we're real people on the other end and you'd be surprised at how many people that started with just completely dark utter material by the time the entire process was over they were apologizing for their past behavior in the first email even though they had every right to be upset obviously

building your faction with your community in advance really goes a long way before the crisis occurs to make sure that you can ultimately weather the storm so in conclusion if you ever want to bring your team together and galvanize the support of your player base simply delete everybody's day that works every time [Music] [Applause] cool so I think this is the time where I remind everyone to go through and make sure that you fill out your surveys but I guess we're gonna do QA so either we'll all come up here you guys are welcome to approach the various mics and either will approach the podium or these mics will turn on or we'll figure it out it'll be great just make sure when you ask your question say the name of whomever it is you're asking it to John Wathan Charlie itself if anyone approaches the my cool I got a

question for you John yeah so my name's Jack no not actually in the game industry just a third party guy here okay there's somebody that's usually blind to some of the things you described today hmm what's advice you could give somebody like me in the crowd to help somebody like that hmm I feel like that is that's a good question thank you that's suffering when you didn't here for those four people who do not who are somewhat blind to to mental health issues or I think this is probably even more broadly applicable to just issues that you may not see what advice do I have to be understanding and comforting for those people yeah I think I think that that from my perspective really has to do with the environment that you're cultivating right and the things that

you are asking I mean it depends on the relationship right like an employer to employee relationship is slightly different than an employee to employer relationship or I know just people within the same industry listening for people who are willing to talk about it is an extremely important thing and listening in a way that is not necessarily like you trying to give a solution to someone else or are you trying to I don't know help them help help them in some way sometimes you just need to sit back and and hear the things that are people people want you to say or people want to say to you and I think just like doing a little bit of research also like the those resources that I pointed to are not I mean there's way more the Internet is a good place be careful like vet your sources obviously but I think there's you know just a little bit of information can go a long way in order to I don't know figure out what sort of signs you are looking for and

lastly just don't don't jump to conclusions I think for a lot of people like if something even if you have like a sneaking suspicion or side I don't know it's very easy to hand wave over certain behaviors to be like that person is just an or this person whatever they're lazy sometimes those things are true but having that as a default response I think is I know just a little callous without like a specific example like I don't know that I could I can give you like a thing necessarily to do but broadly hopefully that is somewhat helpful it is yeah thanks hi my name is Totti and I guess I have something of a comment that you know any of you might like to elaborate on so I found my first company in 97 so and I'm horribly old so you can imagine how many mistakes I've made and for me I never

learned from them that's the problem so so but I've been able to handle them in one way it's trying to go for TTM time to mistake as short as possible the mistake with the vertical slice was taking six months why not six days you know do one in six days and you'll learn two-thirds of what you learn from doing it you know in six months so that's that's I have a plaque let's make spectacular mistakes you know make big ones and make them fast there will be yeah that's my call hey and by the way this is a session like nothing I've been to a GDC and I love it guys you're brave basically he was celebrating the importance of going through and and making mistakes and

talking through it to make sure that you can ultimately move beyond that I'm kind of repeating the question even though it wasn't fully a question but yes we're big proponents of make new mistakes so finding the time to retrospect on what went wrong and not being afraid to ask enough wise to really get to the core of it is super important to be able to move beyond all that stuff hello yeah I actually don't really have a question I just wanted to take the time to thank you guys for speaking it was clearly something that I don't think was easy to talk about so thank you so much for sharing your stories I really do appreciate it I really enjoyed hearing each of your stories thank you thank you so much appreciate it go for it hi so well first off again thank you for sharing all of that with us I know it probably was not easy to have to relive that in front of a crowd of strangers but my question is for flan you

mentioned that you and your teammates were just coming out of university and you hadn't really learned about what the industry was like in order to you know be able to survive what came next better what would you suggest that maybe we can do to learn about that stuff before going into a big venture yeah I think I think I would do what I would do now is just go and email people that I know that have some experience in the past thing in in Spain we don't have like this huge industry we don't have that like we have like a huge community but it's basically people like not like me maybe more successful but is really starting to kick off now so back in 2013 2014 reaching out to

people wasn't that easy as it as it is now but again I think if our a student today I will go and and just bother people that might have some experience that I that I of course don't have yet because in university I think it's not really possible to teach how the industries in some way so yeah I would say just go and bother some people in the GDC or whatever thank you hey this one's for Charlie yeah out of curiosity how did the IP holders actually react if at all they were surprisingly maybe not surprisingly they were very supportive of us during the entire process obviously it's not something that you

ever want to have happen but I mean we've been working with him for years up until that point so you know we built up a lot of trust they understood they were abreast of every decision that we Dalton Utley made the most important thing was for us to go through and try and recover in the long haul as best we ultimately could there's obviously a big investment that we'd all gone through and made in the game so that was always our angle from the get-go so we presented our plan to them and they supported it a hundred percent all right thank you no worries thank you hi this one's for John I think so I have I don't really suffer it from myself but I've got a lot of friends who kind of get into the same game design habits or game development habits where they kind of work from home and they won't leave and they get really stuck in their own head and every time something goes wrong because they're really only working with themselves and they're so isolated you know they're really struggle to get over that do you have any tips on how I can help them kind of get out of working from home all the time and you know being more with people

and kind of helping them get out of such a loop if that makes sense mmm yeah that's hard yeah I've had I've had those people in my life too and I didn't listen to them I I think it's a it's a delicate balance right because it feels like a natural inclination it feels like a helpful natural inclination to reach out when you see someone who's struggling and be like stop doing the things that you're doing they are hurting you but the the the tough potential problem with that is it can almost make that feeling more entrenched like obviously it is dependent on anyone's personal struggle I think I don't know you can make suggestions but I wouldn't necessarily push it and like post things in a way like hey why don't you come join me here and we'll have a work day or something something a little bit more passive that allows them to

still have some agency without feeling like they're being pulled along or they they are I don't know yeah I feel I feel very apprehensive about actually giving you any concrete examples because again I don't know I'm not the guy to do that but if it were me I don't know that I would want someone to say get out of my house you got to do it it's bad for you I would want them to say hey if you if you feel like it please come with me and we will work together or we will you know do something different within this space and try and turn that into a longer form habit that might might result in like a behavioral change aside from that like I don't know just just just stick around and be a good friend I know it's hard but that I think means a lot it does not always feel like you were doing a lot when you were just like being with someone and and listening to them and accepting whatever they're

going through as just a part of their life but it I don't think I would have shipped the game if I didn't have people like that for my for me personally and I don't think shipping the game is the most important thing but it I wouldn't be right here where I am right now if I hadn't done this and been able to reflect on it so sorry that's not super helpful good thank you so much and yet the talks were fantastic so thanks so much is that thank you I'm so sorry they just told us that we're out of time but we're gonna be here so by all means if you guys have any other questions feel free to come up thank you all so much for taking the time remember to fill out your surveys