The Way We Work: Embracing Human Sustainability in Game Development

[Music] welcome to the way we work five micro talks breaking down the science of work culture in the game industry what works what definitely doesn't and more importantly how all of us all of us can remake it the goal here is to shift leaders from a conversation from conversation to action we want you to leave armed with the knowledge to enact practical Solutions the empathy to consider people first culture and the will to bet on long-term human sustainability in our industry so if you may as surmised we're not going to waste your time trying to convince you that things need to change in our industry from layoffs to burnout to abuse and more the average shelf life of a game developer is only 3 to S years less than a decade we're seeing the burnout of entire Generations entire micro generations of developers so for the purposes of today consider the need

to change as an accepted premise settled science what we're instead going to focus on is what to change and more most importantly how to change because now that we see the problem the next step is solving it so let's meet our speakers uh we're going to start off with LTE teacher Montgomery she'll be speaking on the front of the pipeline and hiring standards Dr JC La will be speaking on developing from IC to leadership I will be speaking on building or rebuilding healthy work culture Latoya Peterson on my left will be speaking on funding and eka will be speaking on how to put this all together in your IND studio now let's hear from LTE welcome everyone it's clear by the turnout that we've all really believe that this is important at this critical time in their industry so I think it's speaks to all of us that we here because

we want to see a change I'll do a quick intro my name is l cha Montgomery I've been making games for over 23 years um I've shipped 15 titles um won several Awards and nominations for Game of the Year for Psychonauts uh South Park Sims and Transformers so some of the things I'm talking about today are a reflection of my 23 years of experience as an art director but also is my 10 years experience uh on the board developing game heads uh local well now an online worldwide accelerator so the first area we want to focus on is talent development and retention that's what my talk is going to be focused on and we'll be focusing on curriculum standardization enti level requirements hiring challenges and success stories we found through gam heads tackling some of these issues talent development and retention has never been more challenging for all roles but especially in technical roles and

programming my talk will cover my experience as an art director a founding member of gam heads and someone who has worked diligently to make the future of games more accessible to all so let's start with game schools game schools are quite frankly simply under trining the next generation of devs most schools don't set people up for success and even if you do do go to a notable school there's no guarantee that you'll be ready to work day one one I attribute this to two main factors poor teacher hiring and salaries and secondly Dev process knowledge most game School teachers are underpaid for example when I was working as a a teacher at Expressions I was getting $50 an hour and only part-time now if you compare that to the salar or hourly game pay you get it most Studios you're already getting underpaid just trying to work part-time

that creates a situation where most teachers have little to know in studio or product development experience and the side effect of that is that now tools are mostly taught and not the process of actual game development programming and development processes need standardization and fundamental curriculum driven by industry experts with a recent Game Dev experience primarily driven by on on-site project learning with teams you should be making games in school I can't really understand how important this is you can't really understand how games are actually made without building at least one yourself and several before you graduate adding to this is that most employers do not provide entry-level training of any sort so you literally have to learn all of this on your own if you're not getting from your University

degree in programs one of the solutions that I found to be successful is when students spend their extra time the little they do have going to game jams game jams like mated kitchen um Global game jam and several others you can see the link here of some options so if you don't have the necessarily support you're getting from your University program you can reach out to game jams and participate in them to get the experience you need in actually development next challenge entry level requirements um quite frankly they're insane three years minimum is not a realistic entry level requirement employers are better served looking for students with demonstratable capacity games they've created and gave absence they've made work on their own proven that they're aable to work one of the side of effects of this is outsourcing Outsourcing began in Earnest in 2004 after the EA spouse lawsuit

and here we are 20 years later and the effects are hitting the industry very hard we've seen major burnout of our mid-level talent and some of our most a lot of our senior Talent so most devs quit between three to five or seven years this had Les has led to Mid and Junior devs without proper mentorship or support who then burn out adding to that Outsourcing artists are also underpaid overwork and rarely get to work in engine or are part of a Dev team and understand what processes are they're a lot of our our new and entry-level Talent are just not learning the whole product development pipeline this has created a limited experience talent pool and a lack of technical expertise and this has had a very total negative impact on black brown and fame G um fem game developers it has qually been devastating the numbers have not moved despite all the Optics and the

pr when I started in the industry black game devs represented 4% of the industry and now we are anywhere between 1 and 3% depending on what stat you look at the industry has grown but not along with us we black females are less than one a fraction of 1% of the industry the next challenge is hiring and talent development quite frankly more internship and mentorship programs with studios are needed ideally partnering with nonprofit schools and accelerators along with game studios to help build long-term pathway programs like gam heads are the solution the other opportunities that we can provide are internships they provide valuable on theground training and expose entry-level talent to current de processes on the slift side unpaid internships are extremely

and quite frankly illegal very few people are independently wealthy wealthy enough to work for free please people need to pay their bills this whole model is unsustainable please do not take an unpaid internship instead look for pathway programs like gam heads and pathway programs of schools like carnegi melon and University programs that actually work alongside Studios to develop pipelines a game as we work with industry professionals and creating a curriculum teaching up-to-date skills and to build relationships for their internship opportunities and finally we'll have a a lighter note and that is our success stories with gameheads um the the purpose of gam heads is that we paper over the cracks for our students so they have a supported Pathway to careers in games and Tech we don't replace a four-year University we are a compliment to them by providing standard enery training and

game development support and internships our students are pared with mentors and they are training alongside of them as a develop their games throughout the years and um especially during our summer intensive program this continued relationship and recurring game development experience year-over-year has helped our students create a portfolios and resumés that show demonstratable capacity to potential employers they help us build valuable connections with Studios like Sony for example um this recent uh last month we released a skin pack that actually benefits gam heads 100% and our students work directly with Insomniac to develop the skins and in turn that has given them practical Dave experience and their first shipping credit so these are the type of programs that we feel can help bridge the gap and help use the public

and private sector in order to improve our talent pipelines and with that I will hand it over to The Talented Dr JC [Applause] R hello I'm standing on a box this is great I for my my ass is for for 11 so yeah anyways hello I am Dr JC Lao I am a producer at Pro prob monsters and I've been in the games industry for about 8 years now so I think I'm the baby on this panel but here's a bit about me so here are some of the studios I've worked at and some of the leadership accelerators that I've been part of but before I got into games at all I was a college professor I my areas of expertise was political philosophy and I spent a lot of time studying po structures and Collective decision-making processes so for today's talk I'm going to take some of my learning from that past life and apply

it to the way we work now I don't need to tell you that a lot of things suck really hard for a lot of people right now but when toxic workplace practices or cold business decisions drive people out of the industry this is a loss for us all like functional teams are broken up and for the survivors we have to reinvent Wheels train up new people and often we're doing this against existing timelines which effectively means you're more behind than you were before because you had to redo work and that sucks so so far we've heard lazette talk about strategies for getting diverse Talent into the industry but what do you do when they're here I'm currently moving into leadership roles and sometimes it's really hard to look at this industry and think this is what I'm inheriting like what how can I help my reports feel confident about their career choices and their work like how can we all feel confident about our career choices how can we collectively transform this

industry's future into something safe and sustainable it's really easy to despair at the scale of the problem but while you cannot fix the entire industry you can make a difference in the space where you have the most impact that is the space that is immediately around you and I think the way to do this is to intentionally and proactively grow and become better leaders who can support a better culture so think back on your careers are there people who you thought were like yeah I would love to work with that person again you know people that were like good communicators and collaborators and people who were just able to work with all kinds of personalities what did those people have in common fundamentally those are people who have built connections and empathy and psychological safety with their peers and as Leaders we should want to be those people and we should also want to grow those people so I think there are three ways that this applies firstly we do this through Collective action so

we all do our part to grow people and our teams secondly we do this through leadership that is informed by Soft power that is we lead through empathy and co-opting and finally we do this through incremental progress that is we work on getting better every day so let's talk about Collective action first you may have heard of a little game good hell divers too as a single hell diver you can't win the galactic War by yourself but if enough other hell divers all did their individual missions and you all like brought democracy to your regions you can solve this sector by sector and that's how you win the war it has a larger effect than what any individual can achieve so this is actually an example of a collective action to solve a problem other examples might be things like you know we all collectively follow driving laws things like boycotts unionization is a collective action coming together a conference is a collective action these are actions that

require coordination and working together and the idea here is I can support my reports and my team and you can support your reports and your team and if we all do this and there's enough of us doing this in our own little spheres of influence we might collectively make the industry a little bit better so keep that in mind let's look at leadership informed by Soft power now what do I mean by Soft power normally when we talk about power we talk about hard leadership power that is you have the coercive power of your title or role to drive change organizational structures are just by definition structures of hard power like you've got hierarchy you have directors you have managers and so on and hard power is often imposed by people who have it on people who don't and in a lot of these cases saying things like well do this because I say so is like a acceptable justification to do something but by contrast soft power

appeals to your values or culture to drive change rather than rigid Authority so it's the ability to co-opt rather than coer and this is what you do as peers or like you know when you manage upwards like when you talk to managers soft power actually allows for the democratization of your company culture because it is what everyone experiences like it's how you treat each other regardless of what your or structure is or where you are in your company hierarchy so if you're a leader you have both and you might see soft power as a threat to your hard power but I argue that soft power necessarily coexists with hard power because remember before you had hard power you had soft power and by its very nature even in the largest organizations with the hardest hierarchical power your entire operation would just fall apart if you didn't have people feeling empowered to influence each other and do their work so as an example if you're in a meeting and everyone has

the same title and the same level of experience that is you all have the same hard power you still need to make decisions through soft power and influence and finally soft power isn't a limited resource there's plenty to go around and giving some to others doesn't actually take away from your hard power So Soft power and hard power are therefore both tools you can use in different situations and if you have both which one you use will impact how open safe and engaged your team is that is your culture so as an example in times of disruptive behavior it's easier just to use your hard power to shut it down like if you're a leader you can just come in and say stop it but does that really bring about the long-term change that you want doing that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem of why someone was behaving that way in the first place so it might stop the behavior but then they might also stop engaging and participating on your team and then you've just lost a perspective from someone on your team and you've

become less psychologically safe but instead framing the behavior as an opportunity for a conversation helps to address the root cause of the issue so you can say something like why is this so important to you I want to know so I can better understand even if I don't agree and this invites people to discuss and engage while acknowledging what their needs are and then once you've understood what the underlying issue is we can go and solve that so here's an example of how we practice soft power on my team we have this weekly ritual called open forum and once a week we have this opt-in meeting where people can bring up any issues they want about like gameplay or culture or company policy and open forum is one of the biggest cultural touchstones for our studio we all come to the conversation as peers with soft power and we have a director that facilitates it but the vast majority of the conversation is driven by the team we all hold space for each other and it's really transparent like the most

Junior person on the team has the same voice or this as much of a voice as someone who is more close to with leadership it's technically an often meeting but we consistently have a 90% or higher attendance rate and the goal of open Forum isn't actually like agreement the goal is engagement because remember soft power is about making change through co-opting and shared values and this naturally puts gu rails around how you want to give feedback so for example if you're in a play test and you didn't like how the character's jump ability felt you can't just come to open forum and say hey jump sucks because that's not effective for change when you say that to your peers but if you trust that your peers are you know skilled at what they do and they're experts and knowledgeable about their craft you could try to understand why jump was implemented that way so you might say something like hey jump they feel good to me like why does the arc do this good designs and good you need to be challenged to become great so give

your team the space and power to do exactly that so when you can have open honest and psychologically safe conversations around your work and culture it creates more effective teams by reducing the cognitive cost of interactions so effective teams spend less time in deliberation resolving process issues or tripping over issues with communication so at this point you don't have to like have a conversation to just have the conversation and this might seem really granular but it adds up in terms of project time and energy so you can practice soft power and still get results but because soft power relies on things like trust and bravery and psychological safety it takes time and effort to fostter through incremental and regular practice so this is an idea that I am taking from James clear's Books Atomic habits the idea here is you basically if you want to win a Marathon you don't just win a marathon

you have to you know get up and practice and it takes time anding habit and this is similar to like you know if you use agile for constant Improvement in your deliverables take the same principle here and use it to improve your team so much of this industry is focused on short-term goals like we get the next update out the door we hire to meet scope and then when we ship the game we cut that team and then the next time you need a bunch of people for a project you have to rehire them and retrain them and this is just really ineffective so what I want to propose is that intentionally taking small amounts of time regularly to hold space for your team and encourage them to connect with each other is this is a leadership skill you can develop in everyone regardless of the title or role and this makes everyone better across successive projects so here is an interesting point from clear's book if you improve 1% every day over the course of a year you end up 37 times better by the time

you're done and conversely if you get 1% worse every day for a year you go down to nearly zero so what starts out as a small win or a minor setback actually accumulates into something much more so think about what this could look like if we all work to improve our industry by improving the way that we lead like as an example Super Mario Brothers came out in 1985 and it was made by a team of five people and this was what 39 years ago Super Mario Wonder came out last year in 2023 and of those five original people that worked on Super Mario Brothers four of them worked on Super Mario Wonder so imagine what that level of collaboration could look like in our industry and imagine what we could have if we could have that across the entire industry and we could just say game development is a forever career think of how we could use all that institutional knowledge just to make our projects even better so as a quick wrap up I I hope I've shown you a lens by which you can

look at sustainability by practicing soft power and empowering a team to do so it creates a Kinder engaging human- centered industry which is one where we can create leaders and cultures that we can be proud of again this is not a magical like on siiz fits all solve but by thinking about what you can do to positively impact the people around you and by Leading with soft power we can all do a small part in improving the way we work okay I'm J L thank you for listening this is where you can find me on the internet and next up is Chan Brent to talk about [Applause] culture thank you JC changing the way we work requires changing hearts and Minds from the IC level to the leadership level we just heard from JC about soft power and incremental progress in the day-to-day I'm here to talk about driving long-term culture change that is turning that day-to-day into the year over year let's talk about workplace culture and

building sustainability into the business I had an old manager once he did not want to talk about culture he wanted to talk about game mechanics he wanted to talk about pnls and break evens he even wanted to talk about the art that we had hanging on the wall but he did not want to talk about culture didn't want to think about it he always say chenet all we have to do is hire the right people and we'll get a good culture and it's understandable right like work rep Place culture those are two of the most terrifying words that you can hear as a leader chances are if someone's talking to you about culture it's because something has already gone horribly horribly wrong and we've already seen the ways that workplace cultures can go wrong in work in recent years I mean we were already in the midst of a cultural earthquake even before the studio consolidations and mass layoffs of the last year plus something's got to give but good culture doesn't just happen to build it you have to talk about it So today we're going to talk about it

I'm going to challenge you to talk and think about your company's culture and we're going to get proactive about fixing the culture problem that you probably know that you have so my name is chenet Bryant I'm an executive producer over at Oculus publishing uh I've been in professional game development for more than 20 years um here's some of the stuff I do some of the stuff I've written some of the games I've shipped you know over the years I've worked at companies from Xbox and take 2 to Capcom and Midway Home Entertainment on projects with simply massive budgets to those with barely uh two Rupees to rub together I've seen how a lot of teams work and how a lot of companies run and I'm excited to talk about the way we work now when it comes to making a new culture or remaking an old one I want you to keep three guiding principles in mind number one what do you value number two culture is not one siiz fits all number three values first

hiring more on those later now uh I like to get interactive so quick show of hands who here works at a company with less than 10 people anyone okay we've got a few folks all right now who here works at a company with more than 10 people that's what I thought okay so the majority of folks more than 10 people now what if I told you that your first 10 hires decide or decided your company's culture your first 10 now let's break that down like at a shiny new company a bold statement about your first 10 hires can be a blueprint something to keep in mind as you're developing hiring strategy but what if you're not hiring your first 10 what if you've already hired them what if you're hiring employee number 110 or number 1,0 that bold statement feels more like another Bolder that you're being asked to push up yet another Hill so what do you do well let's start talking about Culture by first defining workplace

culture now to me culture is the shared values behaviors and beliefs that you want your team to Rally behind to achieve organizational goals now there are many ways in which culture shows up in the workplace it can Encompass everything from who you hire to the balance between work and life uh from the speed at which people get promoted to how many types of cereal you offer in your micro kitchen it can be open door policies or open Office floor plans put another way culture is the name of the blanket that we throw over the mystery that creates the day-to-day experience your people have at work and yes that was me paraphrasing ACDC in a GDC talk now I've described what culture is to me let's get back to you how would someone describe the workplace culture at your company or actually let me put that a different way how would you want people to describe your culture do you want them to say it's empowering that they feel respected that the work they

do is valued that management cares about them as people and not just as human resources good cultures healthy cultures like that don't just happen they require deliberate decision and deliberate planning and sometimes difficult conversations now we've talked about the good let's talk about the not so good here's how the culture has been described at a few prominent places in the industry and don't worry names have been changed so we all have jobs tomorrow one Studio was described as the poster child for poor work life balance sorry Travis Kelce for another I was advised that only 50% of the job is actually knowing how to do the job the other 50% politics another still was described as a as a blank slate but is it a good thing if no one knows who you are or what you stand

for whether it's obsessed with heroics uh hyper competitive or hierarchical greedy competitive combative clicky people will describe your company by how your culture made them feel and they're trusting you as competent leaders is directly proportional to the how big of a gap there is between the truth and the brochure so now let's fix it let's talk about making or remaking a deliberate workplace culture number one what do you value remember our definition of culture uh the shared values behaviors and beliefs the the blanket the mystery the key word in all that is shared culture picks up where the employee handbook leaves off and a team will lean on a good set of shared values to direct them through the course of the many many decisions that they make every day ask my team how often I used our difficult conversations value as reminder that consensus and collaboration aren't always

easy so here's what I want you to do before you leave when you leave here today talk about it talk about your culture talk about your values to each other as Leaders but most importantly to your peers your directs your teams don't just talk about it to the HR to HR the Dei director or the marginalized folks in your office who already have too much to do a good rule of thumb for culture change you should be talking about your culture and your values as much or more than you talk about the cool game that you're all making together and certainly more than you talk about the wall art number two culture is not one siiz fits all even as an expression of shared values people can experience Quirk culture very differently consider the team value Work Hard Play Hard that's an especially common one in the game industry no idea why but just as common is is forgetting that there's no Universal definition of play if you

don't believe me let me tell you A Tale of surprise off his kittens day quick show of hands who here loves kittens all right yes this is a kitten kitten friendly Zone who here isn't a big fan of cats or kittens oh there's a couple people okay I'm talking to the kitten folks though so so like most people like most game developers I love kittens so when my job decided they were going to surprise us all with a hey there's kittens over in the conference room you can play with all day I should have been ecstatic right well one thing to know about me is I'm also horribly allergic to cats so while an office kitten day sounds like a dream come true a surprise office kitten day just sort of was a whole lot of this by the way I do take daily meds for my allergies now so if Zuck would like to surprise us with kittens I would not

complain but shared values different experiences so here's what I want you to do when you leave today ask yourself what are some of the ways our company culture might be experienced in different ways by different people ask why that is and then lastly ask what can we do about it how can we make make sure our culture is more deliberately inclusive oh and speaking of inclusive can we all agree to stop playing that team building guess the baby picture game I always lose and if you ask why I'm going to guess you've never been the only black woman on a team before lastly number three values first hiring in other words hire for values first and I know I know that this sounds backwards but hear me out companies tend to hire for skills first and everything else after but when you're building or rebuilding a culture values are the skill that you most need one mistake larger companies often

make is trying to skip all the work by just hiring a single Dei director to be accountable for everything to fix everything and I don't even have to tell you that doesn't work whether it's a culture you built or one that you inherited it's not solely up to them to fix your culture problem leaders it is up to you your next 10 hires can radically change your company culture done right these culture carriers bring skills and value-based Leadership and can Aid in recalibrating even resetting your culture but you can't skip to the end you can't skip the hard work so here's what I want you to do when you leave here today take everything you've learned about your company values in number one and your team's consumption of those values in number two and then rethink who and how you would hire if your only job requirements were value based what would the job description look like what would the candidate pool look like I can

imagine it would look very different from who you're courting right now remember culture work is collective action in action it takes an entire team working together pushing the same direction to make or remake a culture our job as Leaders is not merely to direct products but to direct the people who make the products and in speaking of people it has to be said the way that you hire and the way that you fire are part of your culture too to say this last year has been challenging is an understatement 56% of of surveyed devs are worried about upcoming layoffs and with almost 18,000 game jobs gone in just the last 14 months it's no surprise people are struggling and many leaders seem to think the solution is in figuring out how to have good layoffs or to fire perfectly as a certain Tech CEO just coined but the truth is you can't perfect trauma and we're applauding ourselves

while doing little to understand how to actually support our former and future colleagues that's your culture too leaders we can do better we can do better today we can support our former current and future colleagues by building cultures centered on psychological safety empathetic management with the tools to weather even this instability now I started my talk by saying your culture is decided in your first 10 hires let me end it by paraphrasing another popular phrase culture eats your studio strategy for breakfast so be culture minded rethinking the way we work is the way we win thank you very much my name is Shen Bryant um here's how to find and follow me and next up let's hear from Latoya Peterson with games funding all right hello hello good afternoon um so we've just heard three wonderful micro talks and we have one coming up after me from the fabulous

eeka um I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about something slightly different we normally focus on what's Happening internally at the workplace um but gaming is for folks who don't know me sorry I'm Latoya Peterson co-founder in cxo of glowup games one of the first all wom of color founded game studios and gaming is my third career so first I was a writer blogger and um radio host uh did a lot of those things a little bit of TV hosting as well then I transitioned out of that went into Newsroom management did news and then Sports um worked at Al jaaz uh Fusion Univision and ESPN and Disney and then uh after that my good friend matw asked if I wanted to co-found a studio and we started glowup games uh back in 2019 and so I've been a leader and a manager and executive for about 10 years now and there are some common threads that I started seeing industry over industry and I have to admit I'm struggling a little bit this talk today because I presented the award uh for the Indie Studio award Indie developer award to ziv Nelson at the blacks and gaming Awards and he delivered have you guys

seen that talk on Twitter please look up ziv's talk where he exhorts this audience to not lay ourselves at the mercy of this industry that is going to take so much from us and give so little as Chen just pointed out uh we've lost 18,000 game jobs 18,000 people's lives were upended 18,000 little points of institutional knowledge have been eliminated so when I look at this issue and I start thinking about what I've seen what happened what we were able to build at glow up what we never had the money to properly do we started thinking about let's talk about the macro influences that influence your studio culture that are far outside of what's Happening day-to-day so there's an article in Mother Jones that I really love called the smash and grab economy and it talks a lot about the entrance of private Equity into what happens when we are looking at the ways in which funding models are designed to exploit specifically to look at what they feel

like is the most valuable piece the IP generally never the people but we'll get to that in a second but what's the most valuable piece of the corporation of the organization strip that out take it away from the people who help build that and then turn it into another commodity and so as you think about that and you think about the ways in which games funding is structured you start seeing a lot of similarities but I mentioned before I came from another industry before this I came from journalism and a lot of Journalism over the last 10 years was managing through downturns managing layoffs managing just the distruction over and over again when I was at ESPN uh I was there for three years and there were five distinct rounds of layoffs it's a really tough environment to be in um but I really resonated with uh Chen's point that you can't perfect trauma um up there on the screen is the Hollywood reporters uh reporting on one of the most traumatic days of my life as a manager when I arrived to work and realized my entire team was laid off and

no one had told us beforehand so all of the talent I had nurtured all the Juniors all the folks who had moved had to break leases all the things that happened all the chaos the executives at aler at the time um were planning to come down from New York to make the announcement but they never made it and so everyone was just sitting there key cards not working freaking out what was happening finding out that uh of the team of 50 I was one of nine left and those kind of experiences change you as Chen pointed out a layoff is not something that happens just on a balance sheet it's not just numbers it also impacts the people both who have to leave and those who stay and so after that I took my career as an executive a lot more seriously figuring that if I was in charge of the pnls if I was the one that could help figure out how to raise the money if I was one to do this I could do this differently that people wouldn't have to suffer the way that I saw my team suffer that day however what's been interesting after going into

news watching that collapse going into sports and entertainment which is kind of on its last legs and then coming into gaming a lot of things just feel eerily familiar if you've been through this before um you can look at the headlines from Politico to the headlines of games daily Biz uh you can see all of these different headlines coming through where time and time again we are seeing layoffs are the solution to cash flow problems we are going to fix our balance sheet we are going to make our shareholders happy we're going to move to our investors by making sure that we are cutting jobs cutting labor because labor is expensive and so the argument that I'm making today is that you know we have this whole theory about the invisible hand that controls the markets in particularly there's a lot that we can talk about in capitalism free market economy we can talk about that later um but in the games industry funding is that invisible hand that is controlling labor um JC had mentioned unions being a powerful form of collective action and they are are um but for those of us who came from again journalism or film where

unions are plentiful and we have many of them one of the things you learn is that unions don't fix cash flow they cannot help in that respect and in that regard they might be able to negotiate a better sance package but they can't fix a structural issue like funding so we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on and what's impacting the labor market how games are funded how Indie studios are funded and how even large studios are still at the mercy of this house of cards that is a funding system that we have built so first there's publishing I'm not going to go too deeply into that one um glow up was never formally published so it's not something I could speak to Eko will talk a little bit more um in his talk about what happened with outerloop but what was interesting about publishing was understanding does your game fit into our preferred box one of the big things that you see is that there's so many ideas there's so many talented folks who want to create games but when you're trying to find someone that is going to fund your game a lot of times you are to fit into their vision for what they want and if your vision is

too far outside of that you might not ever get funding regardless of the quality of your idea uh one of my favorite publisher rejections was essentially all green lights they love the concept they love what they're doing they agreed that the market that we were serving we were looking at uh Gamers of color and women in particular were underserved they knew this was important they could see the cultural impact but their response to us was we have never tried to speak to this audience we're not going to be able to help you we hope it works so we ended up with Venture Capital which is a whole other type of conversation and in Venture Capital the question that they tend to ask the most is do you fit the pattern and if you all look at the headlines and uh and look at who is getting funded one you'll start to notice it's very win or take all I believe last year it was uh there was a huge drop in the indw which we'll talk about in a little bit but there were 572 deals done representing about $ 14 billion but that was poured into 500

Studios it's a very very small percentage of who's active who's operating what's currently happening the other thing that's very interesting oh sorry one of the things to to also remember is that they're looking for a profile that they feel like is going to be successful you'll notice if you look at who has been funded there's a disproportionate amount of people who have led large game studios and so back to Chen's presentation when you're talking about gender discrimination when you're talking about people being forced out before they get to mid-level management before they get to upper level management you see that then reflected when we go out to try to get funding and we go out to raise for our Studios if you have not led a large game if you have not led a large studio you are seen as a risk and if the culture doesn't allow for folks like us to come up right there becomes that uh intractable issue it's very hard to solve it the other issue is that in the eyes of venture capital labor is not an asset now if you look at any of the history of video games if you look at the team the

beautiful team building that JC was talking about um lett's you know love for the students that she has at game heads which is so obvious every time she talks about it um we invest a lot in our people we invest a lot in our institutional knowledge but that's actually a detriment in funding the more employees you have the more vulnerable you look the more funders are going to wonder why you're not using contractors why are you trying to offer people benefits all right one of the running jokes I have about founding glowup is that uh starting a for-profit studio in America is going to turn me into a socialist the amount of questions you get about health insurance how can you help people is difficult especially when you're just a small Studio owner trying to make sure you have enough Runway to get to the end of the project but what's interesting is while we fought this out in the Indie space and while we fought through all of different hardships and headwinds that come from there we're seeing the same thing in other avenues as well so when volition shut down I found that to be

very interesting Saints Row is an enormous franchise well known and if you look in the commentary what happened well a $2 billion deal with the Savvy games group fell through and that took out the studio once again gaming funding is essentially a house of cards where you're jumping from deal to deal hoping that you can get enough Runway to last get to a hit or cash back out before you run out of of money and opportunity and for most people when they play that game we lose in addition we're looking at one of the hardest markets in a long time if you've noticed again I'm sure all of us are looking around thinking about the friends that should be here and didn't make it through the layoffs the friends that we saw last year the studios that we saw last year I Clos some of our investors Studios have closed and we're looking at friends and mentors trying to weather this in huge downturn that just happened so if games funding dries up

and if we're looking at the ways in which um LPS and people who are essentially the larger funders are sitting on Capital at the same time where we have you know Millions at this point which feels like Millions probably tens of thousands of extremely talented designers narative designers technical artists things like that who cannot get jobs because everyone is unsure what is going to happen in the fate of their project from the Indies to the m tees we are facing a crisis level and this crisis is being sparked by funding so I went in search to try to try to explain this a little bit more and again I have at least the benefit of working in different Industries so when I looked for okay so how are we talking about funding and financing games this was a chart that was on a blog post and I looked at this chart and I was like oh Lord no this is not this is not remotely accurate number one there's a spelling error I just it was just I had to like fix that real quick but two these things are presented as equal

options which they are not okay the vast majority of people will never get Venture Capital funding project Diane talks about particularly for black women entrepreneurs uh we got and this was last year when it was still okay uh 0.67% of all venture capital funding that number is smaller in games when I look at black women who have raised money LTE will be the next but when I look at black women have raise money it's me it's Jessica from Wicked Saints it's Kai from Ramen VR it's not a lot there are more men from Riot that will ever be able to raise we have this joke at ESPN there's more men named John on the management team than women and I feel like we're starting to develop one for funding and game so we'll get there but anyway these sources are not equal not remotely equal the vast majority of of developers and Studio will never get Venture funding and Angel funding only goes so far

you're really looking at friends and family cash flow from other games crowdfunding the other ways you Cobble together which again creates that constant cycle of instability where it's really hard to plan to say yes I can guarantee you 18 months of wages yes I can guarantee you health insurance yes I can guarantee that I can do these things for you that I can give you a 40 monk that we can contribute to your financial stability as a thank you for what you are contributing to our work in our studio but contrast that to film and not to say that film is perfect we have all kinds of drama on that side as well but this is just from one year of funding that was a data analysis done by a group looking at how films are funded and the diversity of funding sources that you see on the left allows for a little bit more stability in these projects so even as I've explained in other game devs things about just like finishing funds A lot of times in Game Dev that comes through a publisher who still wants to take 50 to 70% of your game's profits for help helping you distribute even they didn't necessarily put the cash down to help you make it versus in film

a lot of times that's just a grant it's unrestricted right here's the 25,000 50,000 100,000 that you will need to finish your documentary there are different ways that we can look at other types of funding structures other countries uh particularly like the UK uh have different types of funding and investment schemes that allow for more stability and allow for us to have a more predictable and more Equitable funding system that will allow for a lot of these things to start being solved once start asking harder questions about why we have allowed the funding to be so shaky and so focused on win or takes all so just a conclude um I think one of the big things that we have to remember talking about is that we can always sit and try to improve our interior Studio cultures and figure out where we can improve but until we start looking at the funding landscape and asking hard questions of why is it only certain people that get funded why is it that everyone else has to fight for scraps as we are trying to create cultures that we believe in many of us are refugees from Studios that burnt us

out that treated us terribly And yet when it comes time to fund things and to do things differently we are starving for the capital that we need I love the idea of soft power and being able to look at the ways in which um we run our studio culture but soft power still answers to hard money and we have to figure out a more Equitable way of Distributing funding in the games industry before we will see this change so now I'll pass it off to eka to wrap up what a successful Indie studio uh that is funded by Publishers can [Applause] do hello let me adjust this okay hi I'm cha I'm the co-founder and Crea director of AR Loop games I want to talk about our approach to long-term sustainability uh as an studio and the way you know we do it I guess uh before we started out our loop

I spent 20 years working in traditional Studios um but never felt like it was sustainable there was a lot of crunching shifts in Direction chasing Trends restarts cancel projects lots of cancel projects um it was always moving to I was always moving to cities that I had other game studios just in case I lost my job I wanted to figure out how to do I survive another 20 years because I I still like making games with a better work life balance and a different approach while focusing on games about underrepresented uh themes and stories and to work with folks in the US and also outside the US so we started a fully remote studio in 2017 um at a necessity um let's go we're going to talk about our approaches what went well and what didn't go so well uh we've been in business for 7 years now and we're starting on our third project want to look at how we got there we'll talk about our two Shi Games first one that

took two years and the second one that was in development for three and a half what we what we learn on each project and about the process and what we adjusted between projects for longer term Focus the first game we released was called Falcon H it's a first- person action adventure game about raising a falcon and fighting colonizers uh with this project we saw uh we saw our culture and Valu as a way to stand out of course we couldn't start the studio without funding we didn't we didn't have any money um so that was the first step myself and my two co-founders worked on a pitch and prototype in our spare time while working full-time jobs in a game studio uh with the goal idea that we could make us make a really small and shitty game if we had to with three people um our Ambitions were very realistic uh at that time uh we were going to scale the game an idea to fit the team size depending on on the funding amount and we budgeted to pay livable wages uh with benefits and that

was a must after 5 months of work we pitched our five-minute demo at GDC in 2017 to various Publishers and platforms we're able to get Project funding for a npers team for two years to make the first game happen Falcon age was released in 2019 uh had decent reviews but we also made a ton of mistakes after the project things needed to change uh [Music] while we did focus on cultural perspective and themes our process was still lacking in certain areas let's talk about what went right and what didn't we overs scoped as all teams do even after 20 years of uh experience started a VR game but also released a non-vr version while also trying to build the studio I as a lead was doing too many jobs design art production bizdev lawyers uh various admin tasks we ended up trying to do too much with a team of dying our girl was still to have a better work

life balance and do stories about marginalized them uh themes we need to grow the studio that our Ambitions and goals align better with our capabilities as Chen mentioned in our talk we focused refocused on hiring for our values and culture we knew we needed time to figure out our next steps which meant bringing in more money we use Falcon age age as a way to expand Beyond VR to non-vr platforms we also took in some work for did some platform deals with Falcon age that money gave us time to figure out what we were going to do to hit our goals and that we suffer ourselves it was important for us to have a mixture of senior mid level and new Talent as a team gr to 14 currently we're spread across eight cities and four continents we're spending more time mentoring one on one-on ones using more async work methods and tools like Muro slack and Discord as needed sharing knowledge is part of our weekly workflow with show and tells and as a remote team

communication became so much more uh crucial to everything we do talking to team members uh we also spend a lot of time talking to team members about long-term goals in their current projects and testing out ideas doing pitching so I'll do like uh almost like a play test for pitches when I go out before we actually figure out what we do next as part of our process we so we'll do multiple pitches at Dice and GDC things like that uh and then really we're thinking about how do we stand out as we're growing the team what we decided to build in Prototype was thirsty suitors a game about a quer brown woman coming back to her Small Town in Washington and having to face her past mistakes and fighting her exes in a narrative serial turnbas combat uh cooking with their parents to repair that relationship and also skating U we started this in March 20120 as the world shut down it's important for us to keep the team together over multiple projects as long as they want to of course we

believe the teams that work together over multiple projects make for better games how do we make sure folks aren't burnt out our approach has been more time to rest and also work on interesting uh projects and problems we initially switched to a halfday Fridays for several months over the summer and then that went well and then we s fully switched to a 4-day work week three years ago and Shi thirsty suitors that way last November we were realistic about shipping and working with external Partners at the end of production we switch back to a five days per week for several of us on the project for the last two months over the last 3 years we found that folks were more rested and more focused during the week and were able to be more productive meaningful individual contribution is an important part of Team Health on any project we do monthly one-on-ones to give space to talk about whatever team members want to talk about the team drives what goes into the game anyone the team can point to something on the game and say I made that happen we treat our team members as adults uh

we set goals and expectations uh trust the individuals that will manage their time to hit those goals if it's not working we talk through make adjustments not just for sort of the the labor part of it but also the design part of it and expectations and and timeline offer support and change as needed so how do we stand out as a 14 14 person IND Studio there are thousands of games released every year I think it was 14,000 on Steam last year what makes us different we ask ourselves what unique perspectives can we bring to our games and Bal and balance that with Market expectations why is this the game the one we should make we incorporate incorporate uh talent and wants from the focus on the team into the game we believe specificity of Team experience and talent leads to a game an audience can emotionally connect with we look at genre conventions and expectations in the case of turn-based combat like uh thirsty suitors it was the theming humor drama the cultural perspective

packaged together in a tighter visually engaging experience I made it standout we assume the current game sells zero copies uh we start to think about our next project before shipping the current one out of necessity out out of need to survive we start planning and pitching and have the next project lined up our approach has been Project funding and retaining control of our IP again it's more Focus for long term we work with various platform deals and see what lines up with our needs we want to pay people well and try to keep our size of game to match the size of team we're a lifestyle company like we're not looking to grow and you know return a 3X or sell a company and not focus on you know really having some kind of exit we our our goal is to can we make another one anything beyond that is is gravy we want to control our Destiny without too many external Cooks in the kitchen part of that is working with publishing partners that are aligned with our values and also self-publishing when that makes

sense we Shi thirsty suitors on all PCN console Platforms in November we took all of December off uh started back in January and talked through as a team what worked in our process and what didn't uh I read every comment watch every review it's probably not healthy but that's just the way I work um what worked in the game and what didn't and um and we're starting on our next project we've already seen the benefits of rest and adjustments we're making more progress already more than we did in the beginning of the previous project we're hopeful and understand that we'll keep making adjustments and improvements going forward thank [Applause] you all right thank you eka so let's recap you heard from LTE about how we need to commit to training and realistic job requirements you heard from JC about

hard power and soft power both skills needed to be effective leaders you heard from me chenet about making and remaking your work culture and thinking more about culture than your wall art you heard from Latoya about the challenges of game industry funding structures and lastly you heard from eeka about running an indie Studio where you put people first embracing human sustainability is about making better games but it's also about making games better we can absolutely do this leaders let's make game development a forever career thank you so much for joining us uh come on over to the wrap-up room if you have questions for the speakers don't forget to fill out your feedback surveys and have a wonderful rest of your GDC [Music]