The Pregame | India F2P (Before the Conference Talk)

hey paul do you know manish from nazara one of the uh you know very prominent and very successful indian gaming companies in india i believe this is our first time meeting hi how's it going can you guys hear me okay i just my first time using this uh yeah so we're we're having this tech session just to try everything out make sure we know how to use this before we have like the live conference tomorrow so great so far so good well it's nice to meet you paul i can hear you loud and clear nice to meet you too hi nice to meet you manish hi vinash how are you good good has grown up a lot since i i have seen it go fast yeah manish is the

you know first ceo that i had worked with in the gaming industry uh while i was literally lance oh wow how long ago was that 2014 correct seven years and and he's looking like a grown-up man now from i hope in a good way very good way very good way yeah good to see you good to see you too yeah yeah manish has like the awesome setup you know i'm so i'm so jealous that's great yeah and that your audio is coming in really nicely even though you're a little bit far away but um no that's exactly what we did as i told you right this setup had to be created for the ipo road shows right and this really becomes much easy setup now uh you don't have to fiddle with your microphones your

sound of your computer uh all of that distance so yeah it's very sorted and part of a listed company the pain is to meet investors analysts regularly uh and and and subject yourself to their questioning so this this helps very nice so any any lessons learned or can you talk a little bit about your experience going through the road show and going going public is you know one of the big successes in india i think for us my simple learning was that investors trust companies which deliver on what they have been promising right right uh from from a nazara's perspective um we have been engaging with those investors for last two years right and almost 18 24 months before the ipo and what narrative we said what we deliver when they saw the delivery happening

uh consistently right so that really made my life much easier because you are a known devil there is a comfort and trust you have built there is a consistent delivery update cadence you have set up so they know that you are not an unknown entity and i think that really helps when you are going for such large event hey matt how's it going that's great advice great advice we got meatbox in the house we we're actually getting great advice from manish on you know sort of lessons learned from the roadshow and he was telling us how one of the key things for him was just making sure to deliver upon you know the promises made and things like that something that uh at lila we've been talking about as well in terms of delivery execution making sure that we're a little bit more action oriented and you know whatever it takes to to to get results basically

how can we tell how many people are watching or not uh so it shows two people are watching oh yeah looks like they are on from the youtube all right so yeah where do you see that uh so on top left uh where you see live uh 4 26 that timer going on so you see the i button so there are two people yeah so basically i'm actually not seeing that i don't see that on my screen it just says live at the time yeah i agree with it all the same thing i'm seeing maybe you have a privilege oh maybe [Music] so i used this before uh for one of the live streams maybe i'm one of the admins that's what i can say yeah correct maybe you have the tool to change the number of people watching in real time

that's the plan i'll make it one million so we have one more people and then you kind of take a snapshot of it and put it on twitter what's up guys so just for everybody in the audience watching and it looks like a few more people are jumping into youtube but you know this is essentially we're just here to talk before the conference tomorrow we've got you know a number of folks from the industry just jumping in and and so you know manish and justin and anyone else jumping in you know if you could check your attack to make sure the audio and video camera and stuff like that are working but besides that feel free to hang out otherwise jump off we just wanted to check the tech and otherwise we're just gonna you know between uh paul avinash and myself we're just gonna kind of hang out hi nudes what's up instagram oh nice what's up news

good morning have you had your morning tea actually it's worth it so i've been all night sort of he's been excited since last 12. so i've just set him up with a nintendo switch so he's just nice um i'm just joining for a couple of minutes i want to make sure it's working is audio coming through okay oh yeah it's actually coming in really nicely justin awesome cool uh we just had go psycho from sega join uh he had to pop out he had a meeting as well okay um but just so i understand so um i guess joseph tomorrow for the global panel we'll all log in five minutes early and we'll just be like tuning in here and then you guys will make the four of us live is that right yeah so like i can turn people on and off so for example like i'll remove paul and then add him back in and so if you just need to show up before the time and then i

can add you into the stream or take you off the stream so it's basically as simple as that and yeah and yeah justin if you're busy feel free to drop off otherwise we're just gonna kind of shoot the breeze if any audience questions come in you know folks out there in youtube land i can see you guys are out there if you want to post any comments or questions we'll be happy to answer those but otherwise you know for the speakers feel free to hang out or jump off cool joe just uh just uh comment i'll i'll email you uh some comments for the session tomorrow uh but that's depending on me but otherwise everything's cool yeah awesome great you want to break right here right now i don't know

[Laughter] yeah um but i just wanted to check is my voice uh audible it's very good yeah okay that's very good you guys both sound great okay cool cool yeah thanks uh thanks guys excited for tomorrow yeah and yeah all the best i'll see you guys all right so then it is us and our five viewers on youtube what's up youtubers what's up youtube are you also streaming on linkedin i can say uh yeah we are okay all right next to linkedin also

to facebook and to the leela twitch channel so um for the five viewers on youtube if you have any questions or comments feel free to drop them in we definitely want to try and test that as well so we got a hey guys from uh bhargav krishna and let me actually show that boom all right this works thank you thank you for that comment so yeah i'm kind of liking stream yard you know just just for the audience we were actually testing a number of different streaming uh services streaming software services and uh we actually we're gonna go with riverside.fm but then we had so many problems with the stream quality and with just other things but yeah i'm glad we um there there was an initial recommendation for stream yard from someone else who had been a conference and and i'm glad we kind of uh picked this this definitely seems like the easiest and best software to use but it's working out

all right your linkedin questions for tomorrow sure hey brian what's up what's up brian um yeah if you have any questions drop them in we'll we'll try and ask them tomorrow but um maybe we could also maybe i can ask you guys paul and avinash since we're here and since this is the india free to play conference that we're hosting tomorrow so let's let's maybe tell some of the folks out there about why india so i think what we've seen in terms of the industry is the rise of a few specific geographies in particular china has really really been blowing up with companies like lilith mihoyo who developed genji impact you know there are and this isn't public information since we only have seven people here that you know the riots developing like a mofo out in chiang mai you know

huge teams being developed out in china turkey as well like a lot of the folks that were at peak and then kind of left to develop their own studios like dreamhaven and things like that and so when we look at india maybe i can ask you guys what why are you guys in now avinash being from india is going to be biased but paul maybe you could talk about why you and i were so excited about india and then and then avinash from your perspective being indian you know why you what you think is the future opportunity for india got it well if you know to just be just completely honestly when you were like hey let's try to build a game um i knew that we were willing to go anywhere in the world to do it and um that was uh i don't care if i ended up on a nice beach in some country with all like the best food and traffic and all the best accommodations or if i ended up in somewhere that was completely different and radical and so we were willing to really go

anywhere and the idea of going to india when it came we went to india to ch to see what's up and there were people within india that were in the game space that actually didn't even believe in their own space there were people who said india is not the place there are indian business people that said the talent's not here and i remember thinking this is the place like i'm willing to do whatever it takes wherever it wherever and the people that i was meeting i was like these are just the same type of people i work with anywhere i saw the talent i saw the opportunity and i saw a disbelief in some people's um i even saw disbelief in comments on youtube why india stuff like that and so i think the subtle disbeliefs that are kind of hard to maneuver i can't really say who really said these things or how i interpreted them or in what ways people

like put those into context but in some in some ways some people say why india or the gaming industry is so new or you know it's just like what it doesn't feel like the spot and for some reason it kind of gets me excited it's like i'm gonna show you that you guys were wrong and you know you just you want maybe some easy route maybe you know you want to be in some i don't know what's what it's like in shanghai but it doesn't sound like some of the places that i saw in india so there's definitely different lifestyles so i think some people don't want to go to different areas that may seem harder to be and they just well they they want the they want a lifestyle and they want their their you know the prize i just want the prize you know i just want the game i don't care where it is i don't care where it's at you know i i would literally live in on on a dirt floor to build this product man you know we're already taking the biggest salary cuts possible you know i want i would be

i would be willing to travel anywhere during covid in the most harshest conditions i'm ready to go and um turns out india is actually not even that bad and so it's like let's go you know so i'm just excited about doing something where most people don't think it can't be done right and by the way we will take questions so i've got the next question uh posted and but before we go to avinash maybe i could just say a couple things as well is that true you know i i think um people should realize that before china was china like paul and i were there at fun plus for for example and you know i i think it really does come down to the people the people that create that initial company right and so even when we look at the mobile gaming space when you look look at the early industry right when you had a company like like um offer pal which became tap joy the early people in that company broke off and created stormmate an intern created you know um

uh uh uh why am i like pocket gems and like a lot of people split out and built a bunch of different companies right and so i think that it really just takes that nucleus of talent in a new geography to kind of build something achieve success and then take take some of those capabilities and skills and share that with other companies it happened in china it's it happened in turkey and we believe it's going to happen in india uh avinash do you have any comments right uh so as you said you know i'm from india so my point of view is completely uh different so for me this question is more about why india now so you know india is a new i mean in terms of game development still a growing industry in india like uh if i have to put a number i would say maybe past 20 years have been the most active before that was just you know few people trying out few things so if you see the kind of games uh are being built out of india or have been built out of india so most of them have been um

i would say not that big or ambitious or that's how any industry starts so like when you start building something you don't want to take risks you want to start with the safe bet hey can we do this can we do this and then you become comfortable and what i see now is that i see multiple companies trying something ambitious so i would say we are not just the only one but uh right now we have not seen any top crossing game out of india like what i'm when i say top crossing i mean number one top crossing in the world not only in india and the reason for that is one of the reasons for that is just uh companies not trying to do something which they have not done before which has never been done before in india but now i see like even us we trying to build something you know really ambitious which has never been done it's a risk for us and as you said like you know many people have questions about hey do you find the talent in india to build this kind of stuff and i would say uh you know any game which was built you kind of train the talent to be there and one thing i see when i interview uh candidates when

i talk to indian developers is that everybody aspires to build those kind of games so it's just the opportunity is missing and right now i see many toolbars like you know in our call there were a few founders of the companies there also you know are building something really really cool so we are seeing those kind of games being built and you see lots of other activities happening in india right now lots of you know investment happening uh so i think this is the right time and this is time to actually uh build great games out of india right hey justin how's it going okay nice well that's pretty much it nice yeah your audio is coming in great it's good to see you guys so uh yeah i got like 10 minutes today so i just figured i'd do the test yeah yeah no no absolutely yeah just to be clear just you know um justin if you want to just jump on test your equipment and jump off no worries if you want to hang out for a while and just kind of talk to us we were about to talk about uh the

question coming in hi guys what do you think about zynga's current strategy justin i don't know if you have any thoughts on that i i do and um if there's anyone in the audience from zynga i'll change my answer but well i think you should go first i i definitely think you should go first i'm i'm uh based in tokyo and um okay i've actually had uh only limited interaction with singles so i'm not the best guy to answer that question yeah so in terms of zynga's current strategy so first of all let me be clear in saying that i think zynga is actually a really really good company right they've got you know very strong talent especially oriented around live ops and so you know when it comes to liveops they definitely have a lot of expertise technology capability along those lines i think that you know uh they've had the right strategy from an m and acquisitions perspective over the past you know let's say five years uh especially under you

know being led by chris petrovick at the time but the times are changing right and so with the changing times and did my video freeze all right let me no you're good you're good okay all right yeah with with the changing the the thing that's happened with zynga now is that when you look at zynga's growth essentially a hundred percent of their growth has come from m a and so given that the paradigm is shifting now where the easy pickings in m a is no longer there they are changing their strategy now the thing that i don't like about zynga strategy is that to me it's not clear that they've kind of figured it out like they rode this wave of m a for a long time and now it seems like they're orienting around an app loving strategy which is basically the idea that what people call the netflix of gaming is is a little bit is a little bit of a bad label in the sense that what what applovin means when

they talk about the netflix of gaming is basically to own the audience and to create a walled garden of content and audience right and so basically by having a big portfolio of games and then owning the advertising layer and then using the advertising layer as your recommendation engine that's what they mean by netflix of gaming and so zynga seems to be going towards this strategy but at the same time they're kind of in and they're kind of out on the one hand they're saying that they're going to develop their external you know ads revenue business but at the same time work on this advertising layer applovin is very clear in terms of really orienting around this netflix of gaming vision whereas zynga is kind of doing it kind of not they say a lot of confusing things about uh their approach on you know idfa deprecation what they're trying to do with rolex and idfv so i think right now my honest

my honest thoughts to you about zynga and their current strategy is it's a little bit of a lack of strategy right they're kind of looking at what applovin's doing they're kind of making some moves but to me it's not like a cohesive or or fully baked strategy and the one other thing that they're trying to do in terms of growth is you know not only the vertical integration in terms of you know owning the ad network but then also then thinking right right now where is zing zynga's trying to find growth so either vertical integration with ads and maybe netflix and gaming maybe not but the other area that they're looking at is then cross-platform right and so now they've got efforts and you're you're seeing acquisition of extra the you know the torchlight developer guys based in san francisco you're also seeing things like uh more announcements around cross platform and so the new star wars game which sounds like it's probably gonna be like a brawler is probably gonna be on you know on switch as well as as mobile and

you're i i think you're gonna start to see more and more announcements around cross platforms and i think that part makes sense and you know there there is like a broader market outside of mobile and increasingly the the model of free to play exports cross-platform right and so zynga is well positioned to take to take live operations on against free-to-play to pc to console so i think that part makes sense but then does that mean that they're going to be growing as much as they did before that part is not clear but you know on that second part of the strategy they certainly have the leadership and the dna for it because essentially much of their leadership came from ea justin i don't know if you have any thoughts on uh on on what i just discussed or yeah i mean i think um i don't think zing is particularly unique in in what they're wrestling with

i think a lot of us are you know as the market is shifting and there's a lot of companies with uh the the the wherewithal from a capital and town perspective trying to make pivots on such things as cross-platform and new territory expansion including india of course and right um uh no single organization is truly a global gaming company at this point arguably i think we're all uh uh you know the the top tier and maybe the the next tier below are all have areas of particular expertise but this industry tends to stay at a stepper or too ahead of the gaming companies in terms of the things that that are possible right so cross-platform you're going to start seeing a lot more investment in meta metaverses and even things like nft or recently getting a lot of headlines and companies are trying to figure out between their m a strategy and their organic growth strategy like which particular disciplines to hone in

on to ride the next wave of growth and so you're going to see companies like zynga and like a lot of other gaming companies including mine is trying to figure out which areas to hone in on and build that competitive advantage as the new growth areas become more and more uh obvious right um so i i you know like a lot of people i respect zing a great deal i think they've done a tremendous job and i i think you know the the issues they're wrestling with are very familiar to me and probably all of us um yeah yeah and so um i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing your name correctly but you know but one other thing that i i think you should you should think about is like when you think about like different when i i think it's kind of instructive to to think about companies and growth from different perspectives right and so i think what justin said is absolutely right i i think you know when when companies think about growth they think

about areas right and so whether it's you know vertical um integration whether it's you know geo or console or cross platform or and i i think justin is absolutely right the next wave is that a lot of people are talking about crypto and nfts and we're gonna see there's a bunch of stuff unannounced and a lot of rumors but you're gonna see some of the major companies out there you know the the bigger companies with with the games and ip that you probably think make sense to have nfts they're going to be announcing stuff in the next year or two so you'll start to see that but then also think about other perspectives so for for for those of you in the audience who have seen or who read the game makers newsletter i also recommend that you read the latest one on structural advantage and then i like kind of highlighted some of the ways in which you can think about competitive advantage because i think that's what we're going to start to see that we're seeing a lot of structural shifts right and i think a big one too is just like the recent news

about korea and um and how they are going to allow different alternative payment systems on the app stores and so you know worse you know there's been there's obviously obviously been movement around that in europe and there's the there's a new legislation in the u.s and so that has the ability to potentially you know disrupt markets in specific ways and create new opportunities for for somebody i mean right now it looks like you know the big winners are probably likely going to be companies like unity xola and other companies like that but i'm sure i'm sure there's it's going to open up the space for for new players well one thing i'll say is both you know india specific and asia more broadly is some of the movement that's happening in the west cross platform uh alternative payment solutions already commonly in this part of the world so so it's interesting a lot of the western

companies that are wrestling with this and obviously being the headquarters for apple and google and and a lot of the industry leadership in the us that it's a more sensitive topic over there but like southeast asia alternative payment has been the norm for like forever so so it's not taboo down there right it's just it's just standard operating procedure uh even on mobile and um you know cross platform in northern asia korea china that's where it really was born out of and where it's still executed the best right um so some of the the the key topics right now are um asia's well-positioned i think india if you look at it less mature as a development community but on wrestling with things like how do you tell it to allow for pay payment on all the different channels how to how to get mass consumer adoption when you're talking about all different devices and different levels of

connectivity you know indian developers and publishers are used to wrestling with that so again well positioned i would argue for the next phase of growth in the industry this part of the world hey celine how's it going hey guys hi justin how are you doing very well great to see you i'm very nice to see you and hi hi guys i was just dropping in for the check check i believe everything's okay okay we're good yeah everything's good coming in yeah awesome awesome okay um feel free to hang out we're just kind of shooting the breeze or you can drop off because sounds like your your tech's doing great yes okay perfect yeah i haven't i have a meeting starting in two minutes so i will tune in then tomorrow and uh look forward to seeing uh all the panels we'll see you guys all right see ya thank you so much and for our audience that was celony from lumikai they're investing in the next generation of

entrepreneurs here in in in india so definitely check out her panel tomorrow um i'm gonna drop off as well i've got to uh make a presentation in about a minute and a half so uh but i'll see you guys tomorrow all right sounds good bye all right cheers thanks guys all right and the next question yeah i think all right so uh hey sonu uh so this is a good question basically but uh just to answer uh the most important part about this question is it goes hands-on end so you know are you you should never stop learning you should never stop upgrading your skills because and this is a very big mistake i have seen not only in gaming industry but in other industries also like uh when when you are just you know finishing your college or just finishing your education your only focus is to get job but then once you get the job you just do the work which is needed there but you never focus on you know

becoming better and that's that's the same mistake people do in gaming industry as well and i'm telling you from my experience of interviewing so many developers so what you should do is first of all you have to have enough skills to get a job and then once you get that job you have to make sure that you are able to make significant contributions to the game you are going to work on and never stop learning because you know that will help your organization which you are going to join and this will help you as well to grow as a professional developer so do you guys also have any thoughts jk paul um i would say that uh most of the engineers that i've met throughout my career um some of the best ones uh make up for some some of the some of the best ones that don't have a lot of skill make up for it and a lot of heart working at on top grossing games there were plenty of engineers who seemed really smart super sharp you know maybe they were like you know clean cut girl or like a buff asian dude who

stopped eating dinner at 8 p.m ate his chicken did worked out really strong graduated top of the class uh but they were gone by like 8 30 for sure and then there were people who would be there uh trying to make it work even if they weren't the most talented and they ended up to surpass some of the promising at least initial hires who came through the door with the big expectations of bright ideas and all these things and so i saw people who were had broken english and were from different countries who were just so grateful to have the job and from an engineering standpoint even though i've never been an engineer i can tell you that i have seen people with a great attitudes rise far above people who um have you know 10 years experience stuff like that so where you lacking experience uh attitude is it will always help yeah and i think in addition to like the dedication and commitment to the craft

you know trying to get your 10 000 hours in to become great at something you know one of the things that we have been talking about it's not just putting in the time and the commitment and the dedications it's also how you spend that time and so in my experience the best developers and engineers are not the ones who just kind of hack stuff together and just like oh i want to finish this thing let me just kind of figure it out oh it works great no no i would recommend you really try to understand the why the fundamentals of you know the coding standards when you use different kinds of you know data structures or the way in which you code really try to fundamentally understand best practice and do things the right way and so it really is about going slow before you go fast right and so as somebody who's new but so you know three three recommendations for me is one really dedicate and put in that effort as as paul said but then

secondly learn it the right way learn the fundamentals if you spend you know a bunch of time doing things in a crap way just to get done that's not gonna that's not gonna advance you beyond the other developers out there and then finally is really around trying to create a brand for yourself if you're new create a blog post create a unity or sorry create a a youtube channel that shows your projects whether it's in unity or unreal or whatever good points okay and i think second point is the most important one where i see developers not trying to understand uh how things work they just get it done so right yep right all right next question is your bet on being able to make games in india or even make for india so we're we're actually focusing on the global market but that's not to say that we're not excited about india you know i think

india is surprisingly a pretty big market you know despite the lack of you know some people say there's you know a lack of monetization but even you know when pub g before the relaunch uh was in india it was doing something like 8 million net a month which is you know not bad and what we're seeing is that with things like geo and like um you know unlimited data and things like that the market is just becoming more and more and more attractive but for us in particular we are going for a global audience but that's not to say that if the right opportunity comes for a game i know three or four or five if it makes sense i mean we'd love to be able to play to our strengths so if there's a specific game you know we want to make uh ludo black or something like that maybe maybe we'll do that i have a different uh take on this okay i feel uh most of the indian gaming audience is global so i don't think like

you know indian gamers would play a game because it is built in india because now their quality standard is already set they will play a game if it is a good game if the quality is good there uh if if you make a battle royale for example and it's worse than pubg or free fire they are not going to play because that game is built out of india they will play the better quality game so you know just a thought like you know even if you are building it for international audience actually we are building for indian audience also right so next question what sort of differences or sensibilities have you seen between game devs in india versus the us i have some thoughts but do you guys want to start or should i go so okay i okay this is gonna sound like a knock okay but um i will say this so i think that if you look at the indian gaming market it's characterized by a certain kind of gaming studio okay it's the gaming

studio that's because the indian indian free-to-play gaming market is still emerging right and so what we've seen are we've seen players that are still learning which means that they're launching like games that they can build quickly but with more of a portfolio-based strategy right so you have some indian gaming studios making five games 10 games there was somebody from a studio that was working on 20 games right and the the teams were not that big right and so so you've got companies that are working on you know basically game production life cycles of let's say three to six months against multiple titles right and so the difference in sensibility then is one of depth right and then of what i would say is first principles types of thinking so what what i think is coming right and so it's not there yet in india but whether it's you know development whether it's pms whether it's you know

data infrastructure what isn't there yet is the depth or the the kind of the the real fundamental understanding of why and so a lot of whether it's a pm or producer may may know why what will may know about a process but they don't know why they're doing that way and if you don't know why you're doing things a certain way then you can't ask the question how can i make it better right and so that's one of the things when we for you know anyone in the audience who's who's potentially you know interviewed with us that's what we really really look for is do you understand something or are you going to ask questions at a very fundamental level because if you don't understand those fundamentals you can't improve them and uh for i would highly recommend paul's going to be giving a talk tomorrow but one thing that you'll always see from paul is he really tries to break down things at a very fundamental basis and the

depth of his research is really really extensive and so for me that's like the main difference and then uh avinash and pod and if you guys have have any thoughts as well i would say that uh for the on the positive side of things that i've seen in india is that some of the engineers were just super excited to work on something uh unique and different as opposed to some of the engineers in san francisco they're really excited to go do yoga and get out of the office there's a people who are getting paid an extreme amount in the bay area uh they're getting paid like salaries i've never even been able to even get close to by you know a hundred thousand dollars a year right and they you know they're so so far gone and they have such they know some companies serve lunch and um some companies have massages they have massages some companies have kombucha on tap some companies have kombucha on tap

full refrigerators full of drinks and snacks everything man everything huge parking lots vacations and uh you know so you know somewhere along the line i think that uh you know that things kind of got less exciting for some and uh you know maybe they feel like they can relax a little bit until something happens with the company and then they can find their little exit in their career or something like that or maybe they're a distinguished engineer who's launched a lot of titles so now they're focusing on having kids or something like that but when i was in india i can say that there was an excitement that i remember that existed in engineers that i felt was more common in like 2013 2014 when we'd come into the office and we would have the biggest perk we would have is like we got a discount at a gym that was the company perk you know and no one would even accept it and people would work uh pretty hard so i felt

sometimes uh when i was in india just for the brief time that i was there i felt a little bit of that some from the art team some from the engineers but i would say that the india teams do feel early um startup like and some some of the teams i felt in in in the states like in san francisco felt really bougie fruit water 15-story building view of the ocean and everyone's like wow it's such a tough day it's like now this is not a tough day you know this is actually pretty easy you know so i i think there is potential for a lot of the indian uh developers to have an edge that some of the world may be losing okay yeah oh go ahead i just have one thought uh not for the developers but for the leadership of gaming companies in india and that is uh most of the leadership they don't understand the complexity of building a

great game so that's why you will see uh people set out to build good games but at the end the result is not that good and that's the lack of experience or lack of or whatever it is like you know they will always try to plan things in a very shortest way possible and that's not how you build dead games so you know there is a level of depth level of effort needed to build those kind of things so okay then we have a comment that came in from riya ska one reason why india i feel this young generation is more here other reason is telecom industry is booming in india right now so in coming years people in rural areas will be playing more games 100 percent agree with that um one of the challenges though with the rural areas is we know from experience trying to like talk to people in some of the rural areas that the internet isn't so great so it's just i kind of have a zoom call it's like very very tough but otherwise yeah i definitely agree with that sentiment in terms of uh having a lot of the rule areas light up play more games potentially be able to

to become uh customers of new games in the future and then la hong kai again another comment they bought a golf game in china i guess by they you mean zynga golf rivals is probably what you're talking about and i don't know if that helps them tap to the market there or not hopefully they can execute their new farmville or star wars games thanks for perspective guys yeah no problem on the perspectives yeah i i think that you know right now everything's just getting acquired right that we're we're kind of running towards the the end of the kind of uh you know that that wave of m a and i mean there's still m a happening now but it's it's just getting more and more difficult to find targets that are that are easy pickups all the all the easy ones have been taken uh i mean i i don't have any specific perspectives in terms of whether that particular acquisition was good or bad but you know i i would say that most acquisitions in the current environment are fully

priced right and you're fully pricing with a little bit of additional risk generally speaking okay next question from wings of fire all right and i like your i like your icon wings of fire our our game project is actually called black but hello jk why limit leela to mobile games why not ps or xbox platforms we are doing that we are am i not supposed to announce this our product makes sense make sense yeah we're we're announcing pc for now and then um the other platforms yeah well i forgot what i just said but they'll come over time uh and let's see indian work culture and salaries are so bad any thoughts and why and how we can change that shavan um could you expand a little bit

what what do you mean by work culture and salaries are so bad i mean uh i i think from our perspective i would say that um one so there's a couple of ways that i personally think about this i i think that the compensation strategy is strange right and so we're we're kind of trying to adapt to the compensation strategy in india but generally like what we're saying is that this the compensation strategy and salaries to your point is really based upon you know how much you jump around like if you jump around then you get like plus whatever x percent to your last ctc and so if you just keep jumping you're going to have a pretty pretty high salary but at the end of it um i do think that i would expect that the at least on the salaries side that that you know with globalization and things of that nature that that kind of fixes itself and with companies like like ours that come into

india where you know we will be offering you know fairly competitive salaries as well as equity so i think that that should help the situation and um and then i think in terms of the work culture so i mean i have a little bit of different perspective on work culture right and so you did post uh another okay he elaborated a little bit for you when you get to the culture there you go the crunch culture it's much worse over here i feel when it comes to work culture uh that's not what i've seen can you talk to you can you talk to guys so yeah i hear about this i hear about this now i would say that um one of the most painful things about some of the crunches that i've had in my career are on products you know just straight up suck and also product also visions that you know you're not a part of and

so at least at leela one of the things that we're trying to do is bring sort of a silicon valley approach to our company where we want people to be owners of the product and we do want to work like a winning team and i know for a fact that creating an mvp of a product is basically creating almost everything i mean from the the game has been down for maintenance screen to the player profile screen to the settings screen to the push notifications to the chat there's just so much to get done in order to be competitive from the start so for the most part i think making a game from scratch requires a ton of work maybe not later for a real season company like uh experience supercell or a big zynga company maybe you can relax then uh but it in the beginning of a project where people have dedication and feel like they're part of it i mean what band member of a band who makes music would you know want to let

them let the band down whether you're a drummer or the bassist or the guitarist and stuff like that but you're part of the show so you feel it so i think one of the things where my heart breaks in india is that i can tell that a lot of people don't want to take equity or they're offered it or they know or they don't know about it and they're just getting paid whatever they felt they deserved and you know working on projects that kind of suck and i think that's where it starts to hurt in my opinion yeah and trevor i i think the just to add a little bit of nuance to to one of the points that paul was was mentioning is that there's a little bit of a difference in terms of of crunch versus not crunch or like the i would say work intensity depending on where you are in in your in the life cycle of your company if you're working on new game development zero to one and the life of your company depends upon success you should expect crunch and at supercell originally they did crunch they probably don't crunch now but when they were trying to get success and the fate of the company depended

upon it of course they were crunching at zynga and live ops when you've got stable revenues are they crunching i don't know many many people many of my friends at zynga who are crunchy okay that's that's just the nature of having a live operated business with predictable stable revenues in a very predictable business but when you're working on zero to one instead of one to n in this phase there you should expect a greater amount of of work the the other thought that that i wanted to just just talk to you about is like i think that you should also the the thing that i think is a mistake is for companies not to be clear or transparent about what their work culture is like right and so for us i personally don't believe in work life balance i just don't believe in it that's a personal choice right and the the analogy like a lot of people have heard me say this a million times who are at leela or who have interviewed at leela is i kind of like in

this choice to kind of like flavors of ice cream there's vanilla ice cream which is kind of like work-life balance i have a lot of respect for work-life balance i have a lot of respect for people who choose work-life balance that's a choice right and so i think it's more about you personally what kind of lifestyle do you want do you want a company that's on a mission to do something very ambitious in which you might have to crunch or work a lot but then the only thing that i have to say is that if a company is going to is is going to look for people that are quote unquote crunching that they should share the rewards and they should make it clear what that what their work culture and company is like would be my my thoughts on that uh avanash do you have any comments yeah i mean uh one mistake i can talk about from company's point of view is that whenever they imagine productivity they imagine

productivity from point of view of number of hours somebody puts in the work but that's i think that's if you just do that that's a mistake what you have to do you have to have goals and timelines at the same time so no set ambitious goals and if the developer can be like really efficient you know uh or whatever like if he can do that work you know in 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day then he doesn't have to put 15 hours a day so uh and i'll tell you like uh game development is not easy it takes lots of effort so at the end you you will have to work hard if you are working on something ambitious but from planning point of view these things can be also addressed you know plan it better not only see like a 15 hours a day but you have to have uh ambitious goals as well so that you know the person who is working out there he also feels like yeah i'm working on something and that's the i think the last question which shawn also said that there is no appreciation for the work also so that's the mistake like you know you there should be visibility in terms

of what you are doing and you know there should be performance plan whatever the companies do yeah no and i i have seen like there are companies that ask employees to crunch and you know do it in a bad way and again i i absolutely feel bad about those situations and i think that's not right but i do think if a company is transparent about what their culture is like if they have a specific mission and i would probably disagree with avinash a little bit in the sense that i actually think like one one of the things that somebody somebody i talked to today who interviewed with me today was like in terms of work ethic what i told them is like you know even if you don't have work i want you to be working not on the company not on a product but on yourself improve your skills right like like spend that time building up your own skills because what i want our guys to be i want everyone at leela to be

striving to become the best at their craft right so i'm looking for master craftsmen and a master craftsman is someone who works on their craft even if they're not working at the company and if they're at home working on themselves learning then you know that's fine with me because that will eventually lead to you know benefits for the company later on as well all right let's see see i am an indian indie dev creating an indie game it's really going good with development i'm planning a release for pc mac and maybe android all right strix awesome uh let us know you know whenever you're ready if we can help you promote it please let us know we'd be happy to you know talk about it if it's good if it's not good i'll pretend i didn't see your email all right let's see uh right and then travon also mentioned that he'd like some appreciation give

this man some appreciation for working those 15-hour days guys come on uh rius basically a company should appreciate their each members and motivate them at the end it's all about teamwork absolutely agree that teamwork is critical for us we believe in you know teamwork over um over individualism but also you know another concept we have is really that the teamwork works by also having direct feedback and communication with one another direct feedback with respect anyway see what do you guys think when some company three months of notice period in their contract how can the developer find good opportunity well we think we think it sucks right like the the two three month notice period thing we think that's terrible um we personally don't do it so we did have one person uh leave leela about a month ago and

um we basically told them you know the notice beard you know if you want to go go you know and we wish you the best so we we think it's a stupid policy and we personally like if you joined leela and you wanted to leave we will not enforce uh you know some kind of ridiculous like so long as you know we're leaving on good terms and things are you know you didn't like you didn't like steal any ip or anything where you could just be gone all right we need oh thank you siobhan i appreciate that appreciate that um what do you think about games like echo it's a game that was published by strange loot games you know i i thought it was cool i thought it was interesting did you guys see it i i have it i could speak upon it a little bit um i don't think there was um something that you know i don't wanna i don't know how to talk about a game that i haven't played extensively

but i would say that it's it's it's really it was a really tasteful game okay and it's basically sort of like a a very organized minecraft where you can play it with others there's a lot of cooperation uh independent base building and even mayors i think to some degree mayors and ownership of certain areas trades and things like this worlds that are so beautiful that it's hard for the game to load uh proximity chat so when someone walks by you can kind of hear them talk you can ask them a question and people building out these things some really interesting views of like the globe spinning around like if you see that that uh that that it's the image that's this on the right the second row this one up one this one yeah it has a globe view and that globe view is really interesting this looks mirrored but

basically you can see i thought the globe was just super awesome and it's like this miniature kind of big chunky world i don't see much of it anymore you know i saw it blow up on on steam but i i'd be proud of that game and uh i'd work on that game and i i don't know what the numbers are like and what's going on but there's certainly an emerging um need for stuff like this you see a tremendous amount of people playing grand theft auto 5 and they're not really playing grand theft auto 5 they're playing role play role playing no pixel role playing out on these big in these big worlds and they have apartments they have cars and this game kind of does that and um i'm not sure if it's as successful as it deserves to be and i'm actually not quite sure how to say what makes a game like this fail or succeed but i can say that huge open world have a role run around

and do stuff have a job build stuff and be somebody with customization is just it's it's exploding and the people who have the ability to do this really can't control it like the the the the grand theft auto game it uses all that ip and i don't even know how how legal it is i mean there's nike shoes and jordan shirts and real cars and it's using grand theft auto's game and they're plugging into servers and it's this real big hacky thing so to make your own ip that is doing its own thing i think it's really special and i'd love to play more of that game it's it's pretty high tech jk you can build stuff and have electricity and water like i said it's like a it's like a really well done mature minecraft role-playing world building experience it's pretty dope okay and we have one we'll probably take this

one last question uh did you ever feel we have a creative saturation in the market considering fps right from from doom 93 to pub g so uh so i i can take a crack at it so i i actually think that there's always room for innovation and i think when if we're successful i think some of the design concepts that paul has is going to blow your minds guys you guys are going to be like what or maybe you guys will say what the are these guys doing but yeah it'll be different it will be different so but creatively yes i mean we've seen you know a lot of permutations as a team death match we've seen a lot of you know various flavors of battle royale do we need another battle royale i i think there probably is room for a few more but i mean we are kind of to your point on creative saturation you could make the argument that unless you do something

what what i would like to see is more innovation around how can you make this better and again just to kind of pimp the game maker's newsletter again if you if you go to gamemakers.substance.com there is a post on designing with emotion and so that's one of the things that i mean i can trace back um you know this game and how paul thinks about design back to a conversation we were having when we were at fun plus working on king of avalon and you know the question that was that paul had you know talked about with respect to games is how can you make somebody famous right and so you know not to not to give away too much about our game but that's one of the key things that we think about in terms of user needs in terms of emotion in terms of human desires that we believe that the manifestation of some of these needs emotions things

like that like that get manifested within games so so that would be the way that i would address the creative uh saturation point is to think about not only like what are the little different features and things that we could do but then taking it back to the player to the user what different kind of emotion or user need can the player connect to if we're designing a new kind of game any thoughts guys no i think you know match three is pretty saturated but then uh that match royale game launched i don't know and it's doing it's doing well people are enjoying it so i don't know i don't know if the question is like i think from a creative standpoint like do you say well from a business standpoint maybe you say you know what let's go i want to take on match three and then maybe from a creative standpoint you go you know what i'm tired of match three man there's too

many different which ways it's already been done you know and so that's what you if that's if that's where you are with shooters we're like man it's here we go they got the sniper class and then the defense class and then the pub you know the team death match and then it's all the same you know if that's where you're at then that's where you're at but i i do agree with joseph that it's possible to make a product that's seemingly it's possible to make a product that's seemingly impossible like match three for example that recent game well matched by dream games yeah royal map game guys super execution yeah and who would you know you know i bet you i would imagine the ceo of king like right you you get everyone that you pay all the highest paid guys in the room and you would say guys what what's going on i give you everything you got all the data we talked to everyone we went to parties we know everyone's rpos kpis we got all the data

in the world and now what's this smash royale crap or crap what is this royal match they'd be like oh well you know yeah oh you guys want christmas bonus too huh you guys want diwali bonus and all this stuff it's like crazy so how did someone come up with that amongst the powerful match three gods how do they do that you know they believed in something that uh that was uh you know wasn't right in that right in the zone it wasn't too saturated they just got right in there all right all right guys i think we're a few minutes over time thank you thanks for jumping on with us we're gonna have the actual conference tomorrow so yeah i really appreciate the audience thank you guys for coming it was fun it was really cool yeah this was really good and thanks for the questions yeah it was awesome thanks guys make sure to come tomorrow connect connect see you guys later