The Metacast by Naavik: Roundtable #38 - Can AI Tech Innovate Game Development?

[Music] and he's moving super fast and absolutely annihilates me even faster than like the first um the first boss that killed me so i'm like oh my god okay i should probably not be attacking npcs [Music] hi everyone welcome to the metacast roundtable by navik and today i keep talking about the sun the sun's back out again so i'm quite happy and today i'm joined with david aymore um ceo of playment you may know him by the creating uh the loot first game called the crypt and also joined by manu kumar co-founder of navik and matt diane who was on here

last week again a senior product manager at ea mobile thanks for joining everyone nice to be here thank you hello you know matt stepped in at the last minute i mean uh he just jumped in somebody fell out uh and said can't do it for family reasons matt within five minutes is here so unprepared but just threw himself into it i'm impressed by that man well definitely happy to be here happy to help out episode hero yeah what a hero um today i'm i'm pretty excited about the topics i used to work in machine learning and in my past and the first topic we're going to talk about is how can we apply ai to games and then we're going to talk about gentian impacts user generated content which is a liveops event and we're also talking about four day work weeks and games whether it's um possible to happen across the world um

if we think it's a good idea so yeah it would be nice to to dive into that just before we move on i just want to say happy birthday to super sales clash royale sixth anniversary that's pretty big um for happy birthday clash royale man oh and also um man you made me buy elden ring so that we could briefly discuss it so um manu how are you doing in elder ring uh not not so good um i've been telling a couple of people the story but uh my my first uh session of elden ring was uh was really quite quite a surprise uh it's it's my first souls game so i wasn't aware of you know the difficulty uh of these games so i started i started playing um you know immediately get thrown into the open world uh walk a little bit and then meet my first

boss um i'm like okay uh you know it's the first boss uh it's just part of like the intro experience of the game no problem try to attack it you know trying to like get familiar with the uh with the attack sequences and such of course got killed in like two two swoops uh and then i was like okay no problem you know uh it the this monster like threw me down into uh into some kind of pit and then and then i was like okay now i'm finally in the tutorial the real tutorial so i'm like walking around you know killing the skeletons uh all super easy learning my attack sequences it's all good and then i get through that and enter the open world again beautiful like absolutely beautiful visuals and like okay this is the ring experience that i was like kind of waiting hoping for and you know i'm just like standing there enjoying the environment walk a couple of steps further and then

i meet this npc um who starts telling me about you know i should go over here because there's something interesting over there and blah blah blah you know typical npc talk but for some reason i decide to attack this npc [Laughter] why would you do that in preparation for the ai applied to games you know just trying to see whatever is and this npc like i attack him once or twice and then he says are you really sure you want to do this you know i properly attack him and out of nowhere this guy like pulls out a bouquet of roses which is supposed to be his weapon and it's all like you know it has all this blood flowing out from it and he's moving super fast and absolutely annihilates me even faster than like the first um the first boss

that killed me so i'm like oh my god okay i should probably not be attacking npcs and then i reset the game of course reload and i'm telling myself well you know these npcs won't remember anyway ai and then i walk back to the npc and he remembers you know i wasn't able to get past this guy for like three hours in in in my first uh play session man what what lesson did you learn from that what listen uh it'd be nice to npcs yeah that's definitely the first lesson don't attack the npcs uh but yeah the other lesson was uh yeah now i know what a souls game is all about so [Laughter] i don't know why you would choose to play a game that famously punishes you so relentlessly i the first thing i do with any of any one of those kind of games i mean playstation games let's say is turning difficulty down right down to

easy and that's how i like to play it so the idea that it starts at super tough seems insane to me but it's seen people seem to like it i don't know i'm on the complete opposite end of the spectrum i love souls games i have not yet played elden ring um but i've played all the dark souls i'm working on bloodborne right now i uh really really like it they don't hold your hand they don't you know feed you tutorial information like here's where you gotta go and here's what you gotta do next like figure it out use your brain you know i love it it's it's a it's a real challenge and i think it's refreshing compared to a lot of the other games out there no no i i'm in between i have to play it whilst i'm playing something that's nice and fun um just to switch it up but i i had a very different experience to use but i didn't attack an npc oh you played bloodborne before because you were a good person you trained a little bit you you knew what to expect so

yeah i knew that but i always choose my character class without looking at guys so i just i choose who i think looks cool and then i found out i actually chose the hardest character to play with so um i think the real question is like like monu do you always attack nbc is that like your first move uh i think so but now uh even when i think back to my max payne or hitman codename 47 experiences i did go for the npcs and yeah during those times it was even different because the npcs they just had like such a limited vocab or like sentence range and vocabulary change that it was also funny to just hear their response responses but it's not a good look menu it's not a good look it's it's not a lot about it i never thought i would be feeling bad for attacking npcs but you should like you should be

there you go you've learned your lesson well i think we need a full deal dive on understanding money is uh this actually this is a really nice segue into talking about ai applied to games because i think that's something that in your experience of of elden ring that the npc ear quotes remembered that you had attacked it and then it changes its behavior to towards you for for the rest of the game so the the inspiration for this topic came from in world ai's race of 10 million us dollars and according to the website the race was to create brains for virtual characters in immersive realities and what i understand their business vision is that virtual wars worlds require virtual characters that mimic cognitive behavior so that the world feels rich and feels more realistic because the virtual characters and

themselves will be interacting with you and their environment in a more realistic way and another interesting application that they're pitching is that this would also allow brands to have always available brand agents um for example i don't know the sandbox audio central and you always have someone there you trust can represent your brand and talk to real life customers in a more realistic way so i was looking i was actually looking at um gran turismo 7's low poly humans and they did look a little bit odd and once i noticed them i couldn't unsee them so it it does make quite a lot of difference to how native the the imagined and creative world can can feel so as i was thinking um man you have any thoughts on the potential of this company and if you think we'll see more businesses in the same vein of vision popping up um i think i think the potential of this

company is probably captured in um the recent rave party that decentraland hosted um so they had this rave party and i mean you know it's supposed to be a party but they were it was filled first of all it was not even um it didn't even have too many uh real people in the party but it was also filled with a lot of npcs that were supposed to make it feel lively but all these npcs were doing literally nothing so if you're moving to a place where i mean so i mean in short it was the most boring grave party that you know one would witness but but yeah i mean i think the matter was needs npcs and it not just needs like normal npcs but it needs smart npcs and i think that's kind of the opportunity this company is going for but but yeah that said

moving from like today's npcs to fully smart npcs that are you know that are present that are aware that uh that emotionally respond you know have the right thing to say in the right tone all all these kinds of things each one of these aspects is i like it's it's its own very complex machine learning problem you know and and i think where today's uh world is in in terms of you know some of this tech um um and some in terms of just the evolution of this tech that can enable these experiences i don't think i think there's a big gap from you know what we expect from a company like this versus what the tech can fully enable right now so it will be it'll probably be some ways away where you know they're fully um delivered on their promise of inserting a brain into it

into an npc where you know you and i feel like this is a real artificial human you know but but i think yeah there could be smaller steps taken uh to get there so yeah with them my experience with ai and games and i know you're talking about characters and games and so maybe i'm widening it a little bit to saying ai in games i used to work for a company called bullfrog long time ago i remember working on the dungeon keeper franchise and we put a lot of energy into creating an ai experience in the dungeon and we did and most people didn't notice it it was it just wasn't enough of an impact into the game and in fact often didn't work and the things that did work were set pieces that the level designers created and and they were they just worked a lot better than the ai that was created and if i look at how much energy we put into it versus what we actually got from it

it was pretty limited now that was a while ago sorry of course ai is developed on but even more recent things like improbable which is a technology company here in the uk that is the sort of what would you say sort of brain for a game so that the game can live on and the inhabitants live of a every game can live on even when you're away from the game again i haven't really seen anybody point to a bit of gameplay that it's created or indeed a game that uses it that has made that a more enjoyable experience and so you sort of i agree with what man news saying that still feels like we're a little far away from being able to use this in a way that gamers that feels right for gamers can you think you know matt have you seen something that you thought has done this well today i don't i don't think so um i agree with with what's been said about this being a little ways off um i know that there are other companies working on it um in sort of the blockchain space as well um

there's a company called alathea ai that you can have like conversations with um historical figures like um you know like beethoven or joan of arc and they also have like the same technology applied to nfts like a board ape or something so that's one company that's working on it there's another one called altered state machine that's doing something kind of interesting where they have like nft brains that learn through different games that you're playing but just to you know take a step back like there's always going to be this kind of uncanny valley right where like humans are just not going to accept these ais as like a full immersive experience at least we're not there yet and you see that even if you just like talk to chat agents in customer service um and this is adding the visual component on top of it as well which is another layer of complexity um so i think that it's it's very future looking and there's probably a lot of challenges to solve

one one testing point about the uncanny valley is um i mean the uncanny valley was um um hypothesized maybe that's the right word in in 1970 by this computer scientist um but his hypothesis also was that the closer something robotic looks to a human the more its acceptance would actually um uh the more the human would actually accept it as another real real being uh but there's a certain point until which you know you then hit the uncanny valley where it starts to feel a little bit weird because it's a little bit too realistic but then if you cross that then you're safe again but there was a follow-up study done to the uncanny valley later which was it's actually oh you just have to choose one side of being of uh of where you want to live on this uncanny valley so

the more important thing is to be consistent with which side you live or on with this uncanny valley so if your characters are consistently unrealistic you're good but if if they're consistently realistic then you should like deliver it on that promise every uh every minute uh it said i i i'll give you an example of that on my menu which is remember the uh the me's in the wii system which was a long you know that the in known danger of straying into the uncanny valley where they were just representations of people and that was great i felt like all my friends were there i didn't need to see their carefully realized faces now i guess if you're making gran turismo you don't want a bunch of me's up there on the bleachers so i i recognize that it wouldn't work for everything but there's different ways of approaching that i suppose from an art style point of view i do i recognize the need for if you're building a game like gran turismo a way of building realistic

characters with realistic ai and having something that maybe you don't directly get involved with but still fulfill a purpose so there's probably something that you can do there that would be interesting and certainly it's an area that will develop over time yeah and the reason i brought up like this follow-up study is because it's just another way to think about the opportunity this company is going for so not every ai needs to be realistic essentially you know they could still be inserting comical brains com into npcs rather than you know like some super smart highly educated well spoken you know kind of a brain into an npc so uh yeah didn't didn't sound like it's either of those people in december yeah there were no brains existing in those npcs [Laughter] i wouldn't mind going to such a wave everyone's just standing okay

i think i think that's why it's so interesting about having a third party company that's fully focused and this is their vision this is their mission on trying to create this technology that game developers can use because it's just so difficult to have realistic uh virtual virtual characters um because if you i find that if you try to portray humanity exactly sometimes it doesn't feel human you have to find the things that make it feel human that aren't quite human to change that perception um i i was wondering matt do you think that having this technology out there could be a little bit like unreal where it allows smaller studios to develop more realistic open world and complex games um i don't know i don't know enough about the company to know whether they're sort of opening up the tool set to end users you know one of the things that i am

maybe a little bit less clear on is like is the use cases like i understand there can be many but the article talked about not only games but like enterprise applications and other sorts of like metaverse experiences and i don't know i'm just like not really sure maybe i'm just having a hard time visualizing it and like understanding what this is really intended to accomplish it seems like it's you know whatever you need an ai for in the metaverse but you know we have lots of uses for ai right now um that don't have that like visual immersion component of the metaverse virtually assistance or even virtual companions yeah chatbots i'm sure they have something i don't suppose they would get that level of investment without having something well a thesis that was interesting and some technology that would be interesting right so obviously we didn't get to see that stuff yet i'm sure there's something cool that's cooking there i'm sure that there would be like a change

at least for the gaming industry specifically uh for the gaming industry specifically they probably could be a pretty significant cost saving component with just the introduction of more ai for example you know what if um what if you didn't need voice actors basically to you know do your voices anymore um you so there's just a lot of cost saving that could happen why people just write the script out and an ai you can pick and choose you know what kind of tone you want should it be you know beethoven saying it or whatever uh and and you can also choose whenever you want to kind of generate those uh sounds you know and and that's what that's what i kind of meant when i said at the start that there are probably these smaller steps also that you know this company maybe could take to get there um and each of these steps will just um

will just be additive to potentially large cost saving for production in games uh the more ai kind of like permeates but i don't think that it makes great gameplay though i haven't it goes back to my point where i i can't point to any game that i've played where well famously if i'm playing starcraft 2 then the ai is famously weak and just not that much fun to play against and i don't play all games but i can't think of any where i'm going i can just play against the a all day in whatever game it is so i think a lingering the first npc of alan ring i can play all day with that one poor guy yeah but uh so i yeah i guess i i'm you're right it could be a cost saving if you need to build out a lot of characters but does that make the game more fun if i saw examples of like it's got this thing and it's fun and it's all just

built from ai then then i'd feel a little bit more confident in that but i just haven't ever seen anything to date that has been able to be better than what would you call it hand-built gameplay yeah i think maybe it adds depth you know like i agree that it doesn't necessarily equate to fun but in in worlds like um mmo rpgs or like these big open worlds maybe it can just add depth where there are all these virtual characters and like yeah you can talk to them and it might be like a short uninteresting conversation but there's like a lot of them that you can have different conversations with and um it just fills out the world and makes it feel more alive yeah but you know you're sort of watering down an experience you just gave an example where you approached a character that's built by ai and it wasn't very good conversation so you move on but it didn't add depth i don't know that just sounds like a worse game to me it's yeah maybe it's a gimmick i don't know yeah i think uh an example of an ayah i

was very impressed with was alien isolation i honestly felt that the alien was very intelligent i was playing at the highest level of difficulty and it was it was very good i don't know the depth that went into developing it but it was i think it made quite a big difference to my experience but something that makes me really excited about ai being applied in games is a bit what menu was describing about this npc i really hope there's someone out there that's going to develop a game where the npc in the world adapts to your play style the choices that you're making and even changing the dialogue depending i i really want an enemy that knows how to push my buttons they know what to say to make me feel angry and engaged and motivated into fulfilling my destiny in the game i don't know i just i just think it would be really cool um it would be cool how hard can it be i actually think like there have been developers who've attempted attempted that vision um

just yeah i don't think there's any nothing memorable though uh in that space that would be pretty cool though yeah so um yeah i'm waiting if you're if you're out there listening let us know if you're doing that that's maybe exactly what this company is doing maybe you just described their pitch day do you know the name maria i know maybe i'll get a 10 million away um do you think um that i think other applications i was considering do you think that ai will become widely used in terms of qa in games i know that there are some companies out there that are applying some level of ai to help qa for example and end the game is impossible to have one person end-to-end test mmorpg for example david do you think that we'll we'll see this um growing growing use case in in the industry yeah i must

admit i haven't made these kind of games for a while and i'm sure it's developed since i last did it but certainly the kind of testing that was being done the you know automatic testing that was being done for games that i was building was a long way from i mean it's not a substitute from people playing it humans playing it i suppose but it does do a good job of sort of bounce testing and looking out for memory leaks and we would just leave these auto testers on overnight and see what state the xboxes were when we came in the next day so i don't know if it's ai it's more sort of scripted but i think maybe ai is an evolution of that scripting scripted testing so i think that's wouldn't catch everything i wouldn't think but it is i'm sure that's what's happening now with modern testing on console games pc games i haven't seen a third party selling the server so i wonder maybe i've missed it i wonder if there's a company dedicated to to doing this yeah we were bit that was our tech that we built so it wasn't

third party tech but uh i don't know yeah and i was also thinking about potential applications in the web three metaverse space because we have robot advisors nowadays that can invest and disinvest in um in the investment market and so i was thinking maybe we'll see something like that in in the web 3 world where people can optimize the trades that they make on the marketplace and even companies trying to um get cash flow from from their tokens maria you've got to believe that's happening yeah i think so it's happening everywhere yeah i was going to say that [Laughter] really but yeah i mean coming back to like your um your original vision of you know having this character that can like really push my buttons uh that's how you said it so um yeah i mean i think even in the even in

the broader matters like those characters could potentially exist where you're actually if the metaverse is supposed to be the place where you can have a full-fledged digital identity then the need for such characters will probably be pretty high where you can actually form yeah you can actually have companionship with these characters you know um there's i don't know if you guys have uh tried this app called the replica which is uh basically a virtual companion on your phone yeah and yeah um and you can chat with it and like i think in the first 15 minutes you can start to feel like some connection is forming even though you know it's like a artificial character if you start if you in the first 15 minutes you you don't feel lonely you know in a way when you're chatting over there man you did you did you fall in love with one of these characters it sounds like

yeah the attack option was not possible but uh and also before falling in love i just looked to my side my wife was lying down it's pretty good and probably like just showcases you know just showcases like what could also exist in a game world as a character um but um very cool i just found you are correct i'm behind the time there's a a platform called whale analytica that has uh essentially uh an ai applied real-time calculation of the value of land within web3 games so yeah it's not i'm not innovating

that's really cool that's quite exciting to to see hopefully we'll see more in the next few years cool well i think we'll we'll carry on to the the next topic unless you have this bold prediction idea that's going to change the world in terms of ai applied to games this is your good for me no i don't i don't have it um so gentian impact i thought this is really cool they have a time limited event running called divine ingenuity and it consists of traversal this is a difficult word to say in english traversal challenges that players need to complete a quest event to then unlock being able to create their own challenges that other players can play and people can be rewarded by playing um other players creations there's even someone has already created a squid game uh glass walkway challenge of course well i thought this

is this is really interesting i played gangshan impact quite a lot and i was surprised to see a ugc time limited event um what do you think about this um yeah i mean i so i've played games and impact quite a bit uh we also deconstructed it on um on the website um but yeah i eventually did churn so this was pretty interesting to see um and um but i have to say i haven't played it my first thought was i think i think mihoyo is like is working or thinking about its next technical marvel launch you know they they do these like technical marvels in terms of their game launches uh which kind of fits with their uh vision um and once i saw this um i was like i think they're thinking about doing that again um it

it had so many similar like the this feature just had a lot of similarities for me uh when compared to how they open beta tested the open world feature in hong kong impact uh before they did gentian impact um and and if this is anything similar to that kind of an a b test then yeah maybe there's a new game a new you know transmedia uh triple a ugc based cross platform you know uh game that with an acg art style for sure uh you know coming from uh the hoyo voice so that was like my first thought um but but yeah the second thought was oh awesome there's also the squid game in it what do you think

why are they doing it i don't know the game well enough i played a little bit but i was quite surprised it didn't seem to be the kind of game that you would expect to see ugc in why why are they doing it is it to as a way of dealing with a content treadmill or just a way of life operating their game or a push to make it roblox esque at some point in the future i don't know well enough you've got a sense of that yeah i think my take is there's probably like a couple of uh birds they want to hit with one stone um i think one bird is definitely more on just like the pure ugc upside of this so being able to recycle existing content and assets to you know just increase player lifetime uh that i think is definitely something that they're trying to do but yeah i think the other probably bigger bird that they're testing and this is a pure hypothesis is um yeah they're testing whether you know players uh this audience that they that they have

kind of tried to build over time across their entire games portfolio does how does this audience react to ugc-based gameplay whole branding shift to the hoyowas first of all i mean that communicates some kind of a metaverse play and some kind of a transmedia play with their with their next product um and and yeah and then this test would if this is a test of what that next product could be it will be another aaa experience with this acg art style and you know um and a huge ugc component um it just goes back to what their original vision statement is which is um uh tech otaku saved the world uh

which basically means they consider themselves as these otaku's which are um i forget the definition uh fully but it's something about um some kind of experts of some kind i think but yeah these otaku is using technology to save the world through games you know and uh and yeah that's why hongkai impact was created the way it was created that's why gunshin impact came into the world which was just a complete technical novel something that the industry has never really seen and i think yeah the bar is even higher now for themselves with the next one yeah i i agree 100 because when when they announced the brand change i think they they the vision of the company was a vast content-driven immersive world and i think this is exactly what you're saying it's an

experiment just like they did with with hong kong impact for genji and impact they're experimenting i'm sure this technology will be reused it's not throwaway um they'll integrate it into their next game think that's um impact also into the next game so yeah [Music] yeah and then this made me think about whether this might become commonplace if we think that we'll see more and more games apply ugc to to them for example i don't know ma do you think we'll see lost ark having some sort of ugcc element to it um it depends how you define ugc they already have those strongholds that you can like customize your little like island that you can you know place different structures and furniture on but um i think i think many titles will aspire to do something like this but not everyone can pull it off i think you kind of need the

audience and the scale first you know we've seen platforms like manticore for example come out and they're like you know you can make whatever you want in this game and it's really easy just go make a game but like they didn't have the audience built up first and so you know i don't know how successful or unsuccessful they've been but i haven't heard from them in a while i don't think they've achieved the scale of gentian impact um so i think there's kind of a you know sort of a chicken and egg where you need the audience first to have the ugc um uh that said like this is definitely a trend at this point you know it's part of it is about preserving and reusing content as david was saying i think a game like gention is hugely reliant on content to keep its live service going um but um also it's just about keeping players in your sort of digital theme park for as long as possible you know like we want to provide them with different types of experiences so they stick around and hang out and engage with the different systems and maybe they

monetize maybe they don't but you look at like free fire has done ugc fortnite has done ugc there are plenty of other games that are kind of these like digital theme parks or playgrounds or metaverses whatever you want to call them um where they offer ugc modes or elements to keep players engaged and also to like engage with streamers and influencers who then bring in more players to try out their created experience um so i think it's aspirational but it's definitely a trend at this point i would i got going to test gonna test menu on something what sort of dou do they have on this game do you know or mayu no i didn't warn you ask oh don't cheat don't look at me you should just know this one video no problem i just wonder what size i just wonder what size of an audience they have i'm not saying it's small it's not a loaded question i'm just curious as to how it compares with i didn't i did check sensor tower though i mean i could tell you it's like good

oh no i was just going to say what do you think it is yeah go ahead man i'm sorry i was just going to say i can confirm it's like in the top 10 uh from a revenue standpoint uh according to sensor tower like they published their monthly top mobile games and it was like number five last month something like that worldwide it's still big then okay yeah yeah professor david throwing a spanner in the works here with some wild pokemon questions i did i did check sensor tower though before like hopping on just to see if you know this feature had any kind of a revenue impact because when they did the um when they did the um the open world uh feature launch uh in in hong kong impact then that was the highest revenue spike that game saw uh until that point and that of course like further justified you know um creating gentian

impact and investing into it and um so i was wondering like you know did they see kind of a similar revenue impact here but there was nothing um and and since i haven't played the played with this feature i was if you guys have checked it out like did you see any kind of uh monetization any monetization hooks in the future i mean i just looked it up on youtube it looked great but it didn't tell me anything about the monetization obviously yeah i haven't unlocked that adventure level yet so i i didn't get a chance to play it but i also saw some youtube videos and read some guides it didn't seem like there were any it was just live content to engage with with the the general mechanics of how they get players to try to accumulate resources but nothing specific from from what i saw can you impact the eu between three and four million by the way david it's too late too late

too late you miss you you miss your chance [Music] oh david question questions no extra points from the professor [Music] i was thinking how would you prioritize ugc features for for the games that you're developing is it is it something that you would make a must-have uh before before launch how do you feel about no i mean it's a real undertaking to do ugc well to build an editor that anybody can use it's almost as big as building a game sometimes and obviously well not obviously but it is a way of doing it whereby you give the game designers the tools that you to build the content that you ultimately hand over to consumers but the internal tools that you build can be a lot more rough around the edges than something you actually release out and often those tools are built in on a platform that isn't the same as the

one you're playing at so so there's there's definitely a chunk of work to build a good set of tools that motivates people for to to build content and then you have to have an infrastructure that supports it and ways of ranking it so that you surface the right content for people to play so it's just a really it's no question that it adds a lot of value but um not every game i suppose is suitable for using generated content and it's certainly an undertaking that's probably done right it's probably comparable to the size of building a game yeah it just makes me think about the size of the team that um genshin must have in order to be able to develop this feature that's life for less than a month's time in a time limited event i think the total theme size is has already crossed like a thousand or something for genshin right no oh i think so okay i work in a team of 25 people and i think that's good i mean that is big for a mobile game right so i mean that i haven't heard of

a team bigger than that's the biggest i've heard on a mobile okay a thousand people don't want to be wrong with the professor i mean also you can see it let me see it's you can also see it i mean it's writ large where as soon as you start playing that game it's so lush so rich and there's so much to it that uh you know at least you can see where it went you know one thought i had on this um is that it might be an interesting strategic move in the sense that many uh really kind of groundbreaking games have come from ugc modes if you think of dota came from the warcraft map editor you think of auto chess you think of pub g these games that were spin-offs of mods or user-generated creations it's an interesting you know thought from a strategic perspective like gentian creates something like this and maybe maybe something brand new is created and

they have sort of um the first look at it hmm yeah it'd be nice to see that happen i didn't know that judge i came from world of warcraft map editor that's really cool warcraft 3 not world of warcraft oh sorry so i'm not a warcraft player i'm very sorry to all listeners that are into world of warcraft um well i think we'll carry on to the four day work weeks looking at the time and the the idea for this topic uh came from blackbird interactive which is a game development studio based in vancouver canada and they announced that they were going to shift full-time to a four-day working week from april onward they did a trial where productivity didn't decrease and everything else improved such as team morale and work quality and just general happiness of of people working in a studio

and many other gaming companies are starting to make these announcements for example i think montreal has already been doing it for a little while armor games and hutch announced the trial so um i was thinking david since you're ceo of a game studio how what do you think are the pros and cons of four-day working weeks do you think it can become global yeah i think so it would be sad to think that it couldn't right um well in my in my experience there was a period of time oh you know let's say 10 years ago when everybody was crunching like mad like to get things done and it everybody was doing it so it felt like the only way that things could be done and i ran a studio at that time and said i'm not going to do that life's too short i've got young kids and i'm going to finish at five and you're not going to come in at nine do five i reckon it'd be fine and we if you plan it correctly and don't over commit to publishers then we can get a great game done in time and in fact the most successful game i've ever done was created in that environment and it really proved to me you know i'm not

trying to tell anybody else but certainly said to me oh it turns out that you can't it's wrong to conflate the two you know working until 10 o'clock and ordering pizzas is the way to make a great game absolute nonsense in my experience right so i could well believe that um letting go of this idea of a five-day week was that which is another arbitrary thing and if someone tells me as the studies seem to show that you don't seem to lose a lot of productivity by doing four days i could well believe that but you know in setting up a company as i did about a year ago we did talk about it ultimately i wasn't brave enough to do it um and it's awesome in order to attract talent and build a moat around your talent but but equally particularly since we moved into an area that was new and we had a lot to learn a lot to get done i think as a management team we weren't quite ready to pull the trigger and say let's do it but so the setup was sounded like

it was going to be me saying yes to four day weeks but as i say not quite brave not yet did like the whole remote work aspect also like play its own role in that decision because that's also a new ingredient to you know the the working mix yeah i mean i think that one of the phrases that i liked over lockdown was measuring on output not input right doesn't really matter how much you need to get done okay well how people get to do that shouldn't be important you want to do the school run or you want to work you know go away for a week but then make up for it that shouldn't matter if you're just if you plan for it and you're getting the work done um and and so certainly i see more of a trend of measuring on output now partly because it's more difficult to measure on input anyway you don't see when somebody walks through the door anymore so i think all of those things are being challenged and i don't think we've seen the final form of the best way to work yet that makes sense

selfishly i would love to try this out um i think that there are a lot of operational challenges as you guys are rightly pointing out um you know for one you want to make sure that it's applied evenly or equally to all employees like usually when when changes get made it's it's folks like qa or contractors who end up with the short end of the stick and you want to make sure it's not like the execs have four day weeks and everyone else works five days so just from a cultural and like equality standpoint it needs to be evenly applied and then what do you do in those four days right if you have a problem at your company where it's a culture of meetings all day long you're in meetings meetings meetings and nothing gets done um well that you know you have one less day in which to actually do work and not meet um so you need to i think be a little bit more protective of the of your calendar during those four days and then you know to my news point earlier is your company remote uh or do you have an office uh because if you have an office then you're paying for it to sit

empty an extra day of the week um and maybe that doesn't make sense financially i don't know so these are kind of the things that i would want to think through like the cultural impacts operational impacts and financial impacts well to maria i mean i think you said that that's something that's happening at hutch is that does that work what's your experience with that the trial only starts in june so i can't say whether it works yet or not we are hearing well what is the buzz around the office of this people looking forward to it or oh huge huge excitement yeah i think most people if not 99.99 are really looking forward to it it just adds flexibility even the thought of going to the supermarket in the middle of the day there's no one there um seems to create creativity is that what you're going to do with your extra day that seems a shame i'm going to do podcasts on my extra day okay now i think that in terms of all the

quality of life things that you can offer an employee having a three-day weekend is pretty high i mean that's really you know if you on the assumption that you're paying people enough to enjoy their life then what's the next thing that you can do to offer them that something's really valuable i also think that you know the weekends i don't know maybe i'm just talking about my personal life get clogged up with sort of family and social things i think if i had a friday off each week then i'd fight i'd really be able to nerd out on things that i really wanted to you know hobbies and things that i might not get to do when i'm ordinarily over a weekend what would you do with your time menu would it be beat up in npcs yeah if uh if my four day work week starts this week then yeah friday is going to be elden ring day with npc number one um but i i think yeah i'll probably just you know catch up on life mostly uh there's just

like so much to to do uh and everything kind of getting you know um chunked into the weekend it does make it hard and on top of that in germany on sundays everything is closed so you can't like go grocery shopping and stuff so basically your weekend is like one day you know to get some stuff done in the city uh so yeah i mean yeah that's i was gonna say the sad fact is for me at least i find making games really fun so i i probably find myself trying to make games on my fifth day which is slightly ridiculous but it's uh it's nice i enjoy your work you know i'm thinking the same um i just i love making games and i can't imagine just having another day doing nothing when the pandemic started saw i thought ah so much opportunity i'm going to do so many things and be productive with my time and then i watched netflix

yeah i think that ended up being kind of a false promise though right like everyone's like oh you have all this extra time because you're not commuting anymore but i i think at least in my experience i'm working just as much if not more i just like roll out of bed i go to my computer it's right there and i just start working um and maybe that's a me problem but like people talk about having all this free time uh during the pandemic like unless you were laid off or furloughed or something i don't think that's been my experience like i have roughly the same amount of free time i i would think that um i i certainly believe those studies that suggest that comparable amount of work gets done in a shorter work week and i certainly support the idea of society moving to a three-day weekend and i think and i won't pretend i know a lot about this stuff but but you know there's less work to do in the world these days so it doesn't seem necessary to do a five-day work week either if

we're distributing work evenly around society so i'd i'd like i believe that comparable amount of things get done and it ought to be possible and that that sounds like a good thing to me i think my my yeah i think oh oh you go yeah i'm just going to say that uh yeah there's another company that recently did this um it's called mighty kingdom uh based out of australia and and yeah they just they had like it's a it's a publicly listed company on the australian stock exchange so relatively large team um and the ceo basically said you know if you have like two options that kind of yield the same output but one option just makes everyone happier then why wouldn't you take that option uh and that that was kind of the convincing point and the north star for just finding a way to make it work in the company that led to you know um

that led to like changing up processes a lot because the rest of the world does not work on a four day week uh that also both internal and external processes it also to match point about meetings you know it suddenly made meetings more expensive in your calendar so people started cutting down their 60-minute meetings into 30-minute meetings which made them more efficient which is great and um just looking at my notes but yeah but yeah i think these were these were probably like the two two most important things but and the third one was like this it wasn't applied also what the expectation also wasn't to apply it equally across departments i think because there are probably like some service-based departments like customer support etc that cannot really do a four-day week versus other more you know like pm or game design that maybe can do it um so there was some

calibration there but again to match point about you know um the the exacts not like taking all the advantage of this uh something that mighty kingdom did was quite transparent about was any kind of uh um overhead that was caused by by this change in the short term it was absorbed by the leadership team as much as possible versus you know the rest of the company and yeah it's just i mean they were just cognizant about these things and you know successfully i made the transition but yeah also kind of remains to be seen how long it can continue there's an important point that we didn't cover which is do you get paid the same you get paid the same i'm assuming you get paid the same yeah yeah yeah some companies uh you have to work the full week hours in four days and then some companies you work just in normal day hours so you work less hours per week there are different ways to go to go about it and i think that's

something that i found very interesting from the results that blackbird interactive share because 29 percent said that they worked 32 hours per week however 47 said that they worked 32 to 36 hours so they didn't see a loss in productivity however there were people at the company a big percentage um that were working more hours than the than the four days and maybe that's just something that we accept to have that extra free day we'll have to work a few more hours here and there um yeah i think it waits to be seen i think it's definitely very exciting to see more games companies trying trying this out doing trials and trying to find new benefits for their staff i i do have one other point to add which is when we were considering it as a team about this time last year and i remember bringing it up in an investor call and said oh yeah and we're thinking about

doing four days a week and uh they smile and so really but behind the smile they're going well you're doing what what are you doing with my money so you know i think there's plenty of enlightened venture capital investors however i guess that is a consideration if you're setting up your company that at some point you have to have a conversation that says hey we're only going to be working 80 of the time which is an odd conversation that we have when you're taking somebody's money to do something quickly right so i think that culturally it's much much easier to start with that rather than switch from five to four that's a any kind of cultural change is hard but equally if you're venture funded and you're doing at the beginning then you have to make sure you've got an investor that buys into the idea that that's a better way to run a business fair yeah super fair point probably quite difficult to claw that back too right if you if you find that four days is just not working out and then you decide we want to go back to five days i i imagine that

the workforce would not be terribly pleased with that mm-hmm that's it maybe a one-way street unless you describe it as an experiment yeah a hutch is definitely being shared as it's a trial for six months and that may happen i i do agree it'll be quite difficult because people start managing their lives around having yeah working four days and then you have to change it back we'll we'll have to see and we'll wrap up the episode because we're reaching the one hour mark we are on discord you can join the navic discord if you want to share your thoughts on all the topics that we talked about today continue the conversation there and it was lovely to have you all you know discovering manny's interests in npcs and we're never letting this go david is just sticking the professor title matt um yeah nobody noticed my haircut

that's okay you can go to you can go to youtube and check it out yes i did use that as a youtube clip um nice it was oh yeah it was so nice to to have you here and yeah hope to join us in the next episode next week [Music] you