Top Secrets to Build Better Games

if you have low comfort with uncertainty you I hope you're working on like a sequel somewhere or a live service game because if you're doing anything new you're going to be in a lot of trouble and the especially as as leaders and and so then I go okay so so I want to know what your comfort is with uncertainty is then I want to know what's the quality of your leadership team and specifically them how comfortable are they with that uncertainty I think all the problems that I'm going to list relate to uncertainty and they relate to leadership and so those are the two underlying things and that a Leader's job you can view the leaders drop through different roles one thing I think that leaders do is they resolve the uncertainty of those they lead hey Ben I thought we could just get right into it you have had a career in production at Riot a military career and currently you're working with game studios and Advising on both leadership training as well as game studio

production problems you're with a consultancy called building better games Y and I think when we look at our industry we've recently seen some pretty high-profile failures and um and potentially maybe even more of a structural problem with the way that game development is is occurring and probably more so with Western game studios especially when we see the lack of successes in terms of new game releases so I thought uh for our audience maybe we could kind of jump right into into it in terms of like what do you think is wrong or do would you characterize it as a problem and from your experience working with these different game studios what have been some of the biggest problems that you've seen we know that the amount of money people pay for games uh can only go so high right and so there's this Revenue line and it goes up at some rate you know it's just like okay it's climbing up it's climbing up into the right because more players are playing or what whatever it might be it

does it does seem to be that for a lot of games like you do have this like wow look we growing up and to the right when it comes to revenue and you want to capitalize on that and so what do you do well we're going to bring in more people we're going to like build more stuff and you have the second line and it's how much do you does it cost to make a game or to run a game and that line also tends to go up and to the right over time the revenue line in my opinion for most games will eventually start to at least flatten out the cost line if it continues to go up and to the right is going to eventually reach your Revenue line and it's sort of a narrow the twain shall meet because once that happens once how much you are spending to make the game reaches or crosses how much you're making you have a serious problem um now suddenly we're in a place we like wait a minute how do we get this down below because I'm no longer making money I'm losing it even if I have a big game that lots of people are playing and so you have have to do stuff to try to keep

you I call it the red line and the green line you got to try to keep the red line below the green line um now I answered your question from the perspective of live service I think that's impacting a lot of the live service games right now where they're trying to figure out how do I run profitably while continuing to meet all the player needs now we go over to new game development so new game development is inherently a risk most games fail um I I joke that like it's easy to be Nostradamus in the games industry all you have to do is just predict everything to fail and you'll be right like 95 to 99% of the time um what what you're doing then is you're playing a risky game you're playing a long odds game and you're trying to stack everything in your favor how do you do that I think we don't know how to do that that's one of the problems for new game development um and I think when I look at the the big games that have come out I also say wow they were really expensive to make new game development especially at the aleaa

has just you look at like a cost of a AAA game 15 years ago compared to now it's a huge Delta right we've we've added a digit um and players are not we're not making that much more money from the players that play the game and so to take it to new game development in the AAA space with major Publishers and Studios and things like that you imagine in the old world I'm going to spend let's let's say 30 40 million on a AAA game well I spend some of that money um not all those games succeed but some of them do the ones that do make back more than enough to cover the failures of the studios that don't make it and I don't have to like lay off the studio that didn't make it necessarily maybe it was a good shot but hey most games fail that's okay um give them another chance they try again now imagine a world where it's not 30 to 50 million it's I don't know 150 to 400 million right well has player Revenue in

that I'll call it that AAA space gone up by that same amount over that period of time absolutely not so now when you get the occasional hit which still happens like Hogwarts Legacy popped out Elden ring popped out you know there there've been games that have hit um in in the last few years uh balers Gate 3 right um when you get one that hits does it pay for everything else not not really not as much as it used to and so I think that there's a problem in the portfolio which is that we used to be able to rely on a couple big hits to make everything else okay and fund the company and now suddenly you're no longer getting 10 100x Returns on a new game you're getting two to five to 10 and so you can't fund as much as you used to be able to um so I think that's massively impacting the new Game Dev world when it comes to the big like the big uh producer like the big AAA companies the giant Studios and then again live service you just have these two lines

and you've got to be really careful with them um there's underlying Trends there as well yeah let and maybe we can also dig into some of the underlying Trends because it sounds like and I agree with you like costs are kind of getting out of control and costs have risen a lot but but would you say that that's the only major change in in terms of like Western Studios not being as successful as before or would you even agree that it does seem like when we look at the more recent hits many of are coming from China for example is that China Japan yep yeah is that really just a cost issue or do you think there might be other other things that play so great question I don't think it's just a cost issue I think it's highlighting something which is we didn't really know we didn't really know what we were doing before but we were able to paper over it right and and as again the green line isn't as steep as we want and the red line is steeper than we want uh you know as as costs start going above

revenues um we're being forced to confront the fact that wait a minute the things that we do maybe don't work as well and we have to do better and that's where I do look at um Japan and China and I see them taking some different approaches I'm not as familiar with some of those things but when I see games like Elden ring or what Nintendo manages to do like with um with their Zelda games things like that like they're they're doing something differently they're approaching the problem in a different way right um because yeah yeah in West in the western world like how did we try to solve the problem of we want we're constantly raising the bar and what a AAA game is we focused heavily like really heavily on Craft quality individual craft quality does the art look really good is the design really strong uh is the audio just the best it could possibly be you know like there was there was a strong focus on visual Fidelity I think as this measure of how good a game was if you could have a really really goodlooking

game um then that meant that that game was more likely to be wildly successful or something and there's probably some truth to that but if the fundamental game isn't any good doesn't matter how pretty it is if no one wants to play the core Loop and so but to get to that extra little bit of quality takes more and more time and so you see timelines for big games have gone up um you know again not that long ago two to three years that what it took you to make a AAA game nowadays it's not uncommon to see Dev cycle sitting between 5 and 10 years right um cost to developer size of team I mean how many games 15 years ago at a 400 person team working on them before release it's like no they didn't it didn't happen um it was that would be ridiculous so time to develop has gone up cost to developer is gone gone up and total number of developers has gone up this means that again we see this huge increase in cost and it's revealing something which is we don't have actually I don't think um we are not

focusing on what actually makes a game great we are focusing we thought that it was just you know the thing I've heard so much is like oh if we just get all the best people and we put them in a room to make a game that'll make the best game I don't believe that's true um and where I see I'll pick on Japan specifically with some of again their bigger successes I'm sure they've had plenty of failures too but with the Nintendos um and like from soft and some of those things when I see what they're doing is they're actually less concerned in some ways about visual Fidelity and more concerned about delivering an experience um and that's their focus and there yes they they do have more of a we'll give it the time it needs to be ready uh approach then often in the west we get we we screw ourselves up by setting somewhat arbitrary deadlines around when something absolutely has to ship you know to hit particular windows or whatever and I feel like um there are companies both in the west but especially in the East that are like

it's not ready yet we're not going to do that so not not to oversimplify but it does seem like the main arguments that you're making for a lot of and and maybe we can say Western Studios having a greater number of failures is just the increase in production costs as well as in probably an overemphasis on production quality versus other aspects of game design or development that could potentially allow these games to be successful and you know from my perspective I also think that there were a couple of macro trends that also are are basically leading to more failures one of which is just that the rise of live operated games right and so whether it's like a League of Legends or a valerant or a fortnite like trying to steal time from those games is very difficult because you've already got these really incredible games with a really fantastic core Loop that's really just sucking in the players and so to get them off of those games you really

need to my you know from my perspective provide a differentiated experience rather than the same experience at that you know that NeverEnding race towards higher production quality so I don't know if you would agree with that but also the one other thing too is that we've also seen just a proliferation of new game development as well like you can see the number of new games launched on Steam I mean it's it's going up like crazy yeah oh man 18,000 last year yeah right which which was like a 30% increase from the previous but I I I think the good news though is that what we're seeing is one we're seeing some success from China where there's something that they're doing maybe it's a cost issue maybe it's something else but they seem to be having more success than the us or Western Studios and I would say that we've also seen kind of like like really small developers so whether it's you

know valheim battle bit lethal company we we've seen like these games that are actually able to achieve a lot of success on very low production budgets and with very small teams that have kind of somehow been able to figure things out and I I think it's because we have people that really understand the player well and are not kind of going towards we just want to make the same thing but higher production quality with maybe a different theme yeah yeah no I I agree with all that um the when I see like a PO world or something like that where with a very small budget and even something that's interesting to me is like what makes a a studio a triple a studio because did did people consider Larry and triaa prior to balers Gate 3 probably not right Divinity original sin one Divinity original sin 2 some people might say well it's just pure budget size That's What Makes You AAA but the thing is this

how do you define the studio now does everybody view bg3 as this triaa game and Lan as this aleaa studio absolutely why they had a huge success did they have a huge success because they were triple no the tri the success happened to hit and why did it hit and I actually got to talk to a couple people on their team and they were so focused to your point around understanding who the player was and what would actually work for this and how do we really deliver this fantasy we're creating this fantasy world how do we make this so compelling and again not the focus on you know is this all Pixel Perfect or is it the most realistic we could anything like that and also not I think focused on what's all the stuff we could throw into this but what's the overall experience we're trying to create that felt like it just rained at that studio and I see that at many of the studios and even like small you know the solo Dev efforts like lethal company there's an experience that is trying to be created right the focus is on that

experience for the player and if I can nail that then it everything else I can solve later you know once my game is wildly successful if I want to I can do a V2 and it'll have better graphics um but we we get the cart before the horse I think a bit in in the west and we lose the vision or we don't have a Clear Vision um at many of those big studios and there I I did a I had a conversation with a guy named grah mallister he's very worth talking to uh and you should go check him out he's writing a book right now about game vision and I agree with him on this the number one problem we're seeing in game development is that if you go in and ask all the developers working on a game do you know what game you're making you get all kinds of different answers some people just say I don't the alignment problem yeah um yeah and it's a fundamental alignment problem and who's responsible for that but the leadership of that studio to say no this is the game we're making this is what it is this is what it isn't when I've heard uh

people describe Sven over at laran for balers Gate 3 he did that um I think Arrow has another example of like hell divers 2 where did that come from there was a game called hell divers because hell divers 2 clearly had a prequel um and that game did okay it was fine but it was like it was a small Studio you know and then suddenly boom hell divers 2 is out and now again whoa what a massive hit all these different things and this is where I I I agree with your assessment and a lot of people have been talking about this idea of like look there's a single digit percentage of time that all new games are fighting for and there's a lot more new games and by the way it's not just you're not just fighting with the 19,000 other games on Steam and the however many way more than that games that come out on mobile you're also fighting with like Roblox and ufn and like game like all these are sucking time and I was thinking about this a lot the last couple of weeks and one of the things I would say is hey we got to be careful about you know I've heard the number like six% you're fighting for like six or six and a half percent right but let's just say it's a single digit percentage the reality is that if nobody made any

games then all the old games would get 100% you're not fighting for the six and a half percent you're fighting to expand the percentage of new games that people spend time on right that's what you're doing when you're making a new game and next year if everybody that was making a new game did a really good job maybe it would be 20% or 30% because everybody would be drawn away from those games to play these new amazing experiences now if we do see a stable number there over time you might say it's hard to move that number but the other thing is you don't need to move that number a ton because 6% is a lot like 6 and half% is a lot of hours a lot of money spent a lot of players enjoying themselves with that whatever your new experience is so I get like it's you know when you look at at that macro level there absolutely is um I think Matthew Bell called them like black hole games where people just get sucked in like players are just sucked in they're like this is the game I'm going to play right and and I'll be honest if you were to tell me right now like hey what kind of game should I try to make Part of Me

Goes make a game that players will play enjoy and then move on from yeah because it's right it's an interesting point that you're raising because I I think I I I think I know the statistics you're talking about which was the the statistics released by steam about the percentage of players that play games that are of a certain vintage right yeah so like new games in the previous year versus three plus years old or even six plus years old and it was pretty dramatic in terms of how few players and uh I I remember the number being more like eight% but what whatever that number is yeah yeah somewhere in there but to your point I think that's kind of a pessimistic interpretation because to some degree yes that if you create a new kind of game experience I think it can expand the audience for it I I and I actually think that Path of Exile too is a good example of this where there weren't a lot of people playing the these these kind of like arpg Diablo light games I mean there was an audience

but it seems like pathway Exile 2 seems to have expanded the audience where a lot of my friends and people I know who typically weren't Diablo players are now into that game a lot yeah yes and just to kind of circle all the way back to the original question we talked about problems in the industry and then also problems in terms of production and execution I would also argue that maybe what we're seeing in terms of problems in the west as far as the lack of success is also tied to the way in which we do production there's a and this is kind of a Pandora's Box in terms of why or what are the specific issues you mentioned alignment I also think to some degree because the the bigger one of the impacts of the trend that you talked about in terms of having bigger and bigger budgets is that now all the business guys when we're talking about 100 million 200 million plus budgets all these business guys start getting involved the the NBAs who will tell you

what can be green lit what can't be green lit and from the NBA perspective of what's low risk or high risk and show me that this Innovative game design is going to be successful show me the data that proves that right and it's like asking like if if someone like that were to try to approve lethal company or some of these other games it'd be very hard to prove yes yes there's a there's a smaller publisher by the way named hooded horse they did manner Lords um across the storm a few and and one of the things that's fascina about them is they're they're actually making these smaller bets and they're doing them really smartly not all their games are hits but some of them are and they're doing all these like really smart tactical bets and I think it's a very intelligent strategy um for for right now but yes you're correct you're correct like we see scale we see 200 million we have expectations right but I think to some degree even with like a um let's say you know Path of Exile too I would argue

that grinding gear basically outdid um blizzard and making a Diablo light game right and so to some degree if you have a great team I think regardless of kind of like the general direction I think you can still make a successful game and I I wanted to maybe um also talk about for some games you just never make it because you have so many problems in production that you don't actually even get a game out in addition to the other problems you mentioned as far as like alignment and whether the design is right or things like that but maybe we can kind of uh shift to this issue around production problems so you've been advising number of studios and I'd love to hear from you what are the most common problems that you've been facing in Your Capacity in advisory whether it's a leadership problem or whether it's specific production issues what are the top let's say two or three

problems that you've encountered so I'm going to answer this I'm going to sort of tear this down because I was you know I I've been thinking about this question a lot and like what is it you know if I were go and advice I I'm going to put a roote and this is very multivariant but I'm going to put a main route as how comfortable are you with the uncertainty that is part of game development if you have low comfort with uncertainty you I hope you're working on like a sequel somewhere or a live service game because if you're doing anything new you're going to be in a lot of trouble and the especially as as leaders and and so then I go okay so so I want to know what your comfort with uncertainty is then I want to know what's the quality of your leadership team and specifically them how comfortable are they with that uncertainty I think all the problems that I'm going to list relate to uncertainty and they relate to leadership and so

those are the two underlying things and that a Leader's job you can view the leader job through different roles one thing I think that leaders do is they resolve the uncertainty of those they lead that's not like that's not why they're there necessarily I don't define leadership that way but it is something that they do they resolve the uncertainty of those they lead and the question is how and I think a lot of leaders in game development attempt to resolve the uncertainty by pretending it doesn't exist or by acting as though it doesn't exist or by saying well I'll just just say that this is true now so it will be true and then we will no longer be uncertain and when you see that across an organization everybody might feel better in the moment of like oh we've got a plan now someone made a choice okay got it that uncertainty is out of the way but maybe you've just failed to accept reality right Which is far more important than just having a plan we can all get on the same page about why do you think that happens though Ben I mean I have my own Theory which is like I think it's because of fear but do you think that's it that's it um it is for

me it's absolutely so there's this question around like what motivates human beings are we motivated by um wanting to thrive as much as we can yeah kind of not actually as much as you'd think we're motivated to not die we prefer avoidance of pain to thriving right and so if you can so when when a lot of people and this is like how you see people behave I act in a way that puts me in a sometimes not great environment but that at least it's comfortable I'm familiar with it and I don't have any I don't have too much pain anywhere in my life and what we're actually optimizing there for is the reduction of anxiety and uncertainty is a huge driver of anxiety for human beings um it's it's not the only one but it's like a the more uncertain things are the more our brains are trying to solve that uncertainty and figure out like wait a minute uncertainty is is threat which makes a lot of sense you know if you go back through time um so the more certain I can make things

the more control I have of the environment the more I will be okay and that's actually what so many people optimize for they think they're trying to be happy they're not they're just trying not to be in pain they're trying not to suffer right um so I think that's the that's where that uncertainty dat a base level comes from and if people don't under if people can't look at their own lives and reflect on that and understand that one of the problems is it's happening anyway it's happening in the background and it's impacting these leaders um so that's that's my ideas exactly and and by the way fear is just one of those like anxiety is a whole plethora of emotions and fear is one one way that that manifests yeah kind of like fear and maybe even Pride right which is to say that yeah on the fear side I I I can't name how many times working with a game designer and it's just it's very clear what the biggest design problem is and it's like okay we have a major design problem but they're solving every other little thing around it it's like why aren you solving this yeah and it's just like oh because then you know I I

don't know if I can solve that problem but it's so important to address your biggest risks first and then I think also from a studio leadership perspective whether it's talking to investors or if you're in a company talking to you know like a publishing team or uh higher ups and admitting hey we screwed up we're in trouble to show weakness rather than hey everything's fine and you know like um yes it's it's almost like uh you know um there somebody described it to me once as like you know some of these well from an investment perspective as well as you could apply this to game studios like you know there's a bird flying in the sky and all of a sudden it just drops out of the sky and dies and because you never knew it was in trouble because no one wants to admit that there this is a project in trouble but I think and see for oh go ahead I was say yeah yeah go ahead I also going to say ironically in my experience as an old guy working on a bunch of different game

projects it seems like the pattern that I've seen is that the that the game pro uh game projects with the most problems where people were yelling and screaming at each other where people had to be let go where there were so many issues and and and problems those were the most successful games and the games where we hit every deadline and we launched and the game just went whoop all the way to zero right yeah seems like um the studios and and my theory on this is that the reason why that has been the case at least in in my experience has been that it's those Studios that have the kind of culture where they care they're having direct conversations and they're addressing big problems versus the studios that try to hide the problems sweep them under the rug and you launch with those problems yes yeah yeah um I I I I've seen a

similar pattern and I don't know if I was like hey it's not like the most you know well let me go create the most dysfunctional Studio I possibly can um so that I can be successful like no no no but it is this idea of the fact that uncertainty exists and I think it's inherent to game development doesn't mean you don't try to resolve it the question is how and one of the best ways to resolve it is to be comfortable with a conflict that different perspectives on the same thing might bring right and so when you know I I have a a model and one of my principles I mentioned this earlier is accept reality you want everybody in the studio focused on accepting reality you want the leaders encouraging people to accept reality and say the hard things the problem is when you say the hard things they're hard for a reason um like I you know if it was I've said this recently to someone else but if it was easy to do the right thing like morally or ethically or whatever like for the good of the people around you then we wouldn't celebrate as much as we do it's hard to do the right thing it's why it's

a big deal when you see someone so consistently do the right thing and because we recognize that they're taking a risk because if I do the right thing and I call out problems big problems in a in a studio or a team in an R&D environment inside of a big publisher or something I go in and I'm like hey I see some big problems here there are not a few Studios that will immediately eject me from that Organization for pointing out the issues absolutely and I think to those to th to your point a lot of of those studios are going to go on to hit every Milestone make every little thing justify every mistake without actually admitting it was a mistake and and they're going to ship something that's terrible there's this question I pick on Concord so much I feel bad but I mean gosh what an example in our industry mistake yeah exactly like you you look at that you go are you telling me nobody in that studio knew there was a problem and I know that's not true because I've talked to people who were close to that studio right they there were people that knew there there was a problem there were

they able to talk about that problem explain that problem challenge what was going on not really by the way I've heard also people have given Sony a hard time I've heard Sony was an amazing publisher for that game they gave them money Runway time space they were like we're here for you we want to support you I mean I don't know like right at the end it was probably a bit different but um it wasn't like Sony was in there all the time meddling from what I've heard they did what they're supposed to do we had the smart people making the game and we backed off and we let them work right what happened and it's I think it's what you said were we able to have the hard conversations and so there's two things you mentioned Pride I think Pride's one I think the other that can look like pride and it and it'll manifest in a very similar ways um it's kind of like impostor syndrome but it's basically I want to be perceived as competent and I'm worried I won't be and so I have to hide things I have to protect myself Y and and honestly I can say that most of the people myself included I struggle with pride quite a bit um most of the

people that I found who are Pride or prideful are have a lot of proudness that they have to use it's almost always a shield for their own insecurity not not exclusively there's some people that I think are just that I'm the best um and I don't want them on my team uh generally speaking but but there's a lot of um the pride is a shield the pride is protecting me from my own insecurity if I don't know like you said I don't know how to solve this I don't know how to solve this so I'll solve everything I know how to solve and nor the biggest problem um and I think that like that just is it is across our industry it is in a lot of these a lot of these you know big companies with their very senior leaders we know what's going on no you don't and it and it it's not like it's bad that you don't know it would be fine if you could admit you don't know because then you could actually embrace that uncertainty and go through the problems and the disagreements and the arguments and the tests and you would frame your whole development differently

around like not seeing game development as a step-by-step process to get to the end point but as an experimentation of like well what will be a good time for the player what will engage them what will make them want to come back and play her game more and tell their friends this was a great game you should go play it too um we're we're not answering the right questions uh so this kind of gets me all the way around to like what are the big three things so I said uncertainty leadership how they relate to uncertainty that sets the culture three things first one we already talked about Vision not having an aligned Vision not KN what a vision is um and a vision is not a statement somebody made once that told us what the game was it's uh it's got to be living and you the leaders all have to be just to your point arguing about it and then aligning on like okay this is the path okay this is the path and then disseminating that throughout the organization so we can all go in the same direction um number two for me is what I'd call The Rush rush to production well we got a big budget

we're supposed to be you know finishing up ideation According to some arbitrary road map somebody made at some point in the past I guess it's time to hire more people and justify a bigger budget sometimes this is because a VC is pushing um not always but sometimes VC's push for like well you know you got to be growing you got to be like we want we want the next round to increase our relative value and so the bigger you are the more we can claim that you're worth more um and so we rush in the VC side on the in the R&D side on large Publishers or larger Studios uh what you'll see is I have to get through the next gate once I get through the next gate it unlocks money for me and you you'll see I just read a a great post um like an article written by a guy named Jonathan Z and he described his mindset when he was leading a game was so I'm just supposed to get to the next gate I'm just supposed to get to the next gate because every gate I unlock like more money and I can make my team bigger and all this different stuff and so in in almost

every area you get this rush to production um to the production phase is what I mean there if you think about like ideation pre-production production post- production sustainment if you think about those phases you're rushing to get to production and and again I think this ties into that uncertainty I think it's because the when we're in production things are supposed to be certain because we got a lot of people and we're now we're just we're executing against the known vision and so we want to get there because if we just lock everything down even though it actually is wrong like you said we're bringing our problems with us forward um this rush to production makes us pretend or helps us to pretend that like don't worry we know what's going on we're in production now and so you asked about some of my experiences I've seen over a 100 person Studios working on games that didn't have functional core Loops yep and like I'm sure you've seen this too and you're you go in and you ask them um uh yeah I I I I you go in and you ask them like well wait AE minute like tell me what your game is and they're like oh well

it's you know it's my my always example is like it's Master Chief uh Halo like crossed with Candy Crush and I'm like what does that mean like why is that fun what how does that work and they're like oh well you know we're still figuring that out and I'm like well where are you in development they're like we're in production you know and I'm and I'm watching them like produce production quality assets I'm like you don't know what your game is and yet you have over 100 people out here doing a lot of stuff and the challenge with this rush to production this this scaling to too fast if I need to Pivot my game because I learned something it is exponentially easier to Pivot a five person or 10 person team than it is to Pivot a 30 50 70 100 person team that that is a months long exercise of like okay how are we going to message it like how are we going to go through the hierarchy of our organization all these different things you can do that you can work on doing that faster but the reality is that once you get to a certain scale it becomes hard to Pivot

you said always like are you a dingy or are you the Titanic both have advantages but the Titanic couldn't turn um and it sunk and that's where a lot of you are headed if you become a Titanic before your core game is in a good state so I think that this that there's a lot of pressure pushing leaders to rush to production to rush to scale to get too many people um on the boat way too fast and that makes everything way harder they don't acknowledge that they just pretend that they know more than they do and then you know they end up in production and I think this is what happened with things like Anthem and Concord never knew like why would someone keep playing this game I don't know I it kind of all works together it's like that's not good enough in the modern world you can't just have a game that kind of works and have that be good enough right and I I think that so in my experience I can't even remember a time where we actually had a really great pre-production phase in game development and I've worked on many many game projects and I think I I think to a large degree what

you're saying is a root cause but there I think there's other issues as well because I have been on teams with you know with game leads who are relatively humble and who who would not rush to production just to show that you know uh we're we're not in trouble I I I think there's other pressures and factors that work there but um yeah well I I can list one you have a limited budget and we're making a game somebody is doing the intelligent thing and tracking how much money we have versus where we're supposed to be when you scale up you increase burn rate but you also move towards a ship yeah if we endlessly iterate in ideation we will eventually run out of money or the patience of our stakeholders depending on your context and the think that that for many of these Studios they are looking at that

Runway and going like I mean we don't really have a choice we have to be in pre-production we have to be in production now like we we we just have to make a call and go right um and even someone who's aware of these traps might go like I accept the Trap I take the risk we're going to make the best decision we know in the moment and we're going to hope it works and this comes back to I think all of game development is not how do I make a sure thing you can't best thing you can do is stack the odds in your favor and someone who made a game that didn't work out you know they did something very hard by shipping a game in the first place but it's also not like well they must all be bad at their job because their game didn't work this is hard this is incredibly difficult and there's no test environment you have that mirrors the reality so that's one one thing I would say is like there's a pra there's a pragmatic dollar based or or monetary B like how much you have in the bank will determine when you might need to go forward in order to achieve what you're trying to achieve I'm just thinking out

loud but I think maybe another issue that does happen at times is that even if you've characterized what your hypothesis of a workable core loop is and characterized it well and you move into production you may realize later especially with external player validation and things like that that yeah maybe you were wrong and so now you're in production with a false thesis yep and so then what do you do then yeah do you just stop we're gonna lay off three4 of the team and go back PR production or what what do you do right I yes exactly and by the way I don't have an answer to that question um I think it I think that there's the there is the brutal answer that is what you just said which is like oh shoot our core thesis is not valid right well it's time to go back to ideation and like whoa you know like again that is you it's very difficult to do that while maintaining all that extra

staff that is going to be both crushing your your burn rate um and need to be aligned at every step of the way so I think that there are times where yeah maybe the right call would be like I'm sorry we we weren't ready and that's a mistake we made but to to save the studio and to save the game idea um or really ReDiscover it we have to go back to a smaller team I that's not a popular opin but that might be the right move for for everybody involved versus like well let's just hope we manage to solve it in production I mean how much does that happen like and how how many times does that work out like it's not that one's that's a lower again thinking about the odds and stacking the odds it's a lower odds play a third one so I talked about um Vision I talked about scaling too fast basically again the rush to production I think a third one is the obsession with planning that we have we want to know and and by the way conceding that you do have so much money in the bank you do want to roughly try

to understand how it's being spent and at what point you should probably be at what phase and how that's going to shift like you know when you hire people and these sorts of things that is a relevant Factor I'm not saying you don't do planning but man I see our us go and basically pretend that game development is this known quantity where all we need to do is like do the well build the right widgets build the right pieces put them together at the the analogy I use it's like you're you're a bunch of people and you're making car parts and whenever you finish one someone like opens the garage door and tosses it into the garage and they're just like oh I'll just toss the here's another car part here's another car part and then you like at some point you go around you open up the garage door and you were expecting to see a Ferrari or at least like a pinto or something in there and instead it's just like a pile of parts and there's three steering wheels and seven tires and like there's no suspension and and I think we do this more than we realize which is we focus heavily on the stuff of games and

that's by the way something that I think there's an overlap there with the scale we scale so that we can build more stuff well why are you building this stuff do you know and I think often the answer is I don't actually know I just know I'm supposed to build the stuff and so you and this happens this is easier at bigger companies with more money who can hire more talent because they think like oh the problem is how are we going to get it all done in time it's like that's not the problem the problem is how is it going to be something that players want to play in time and if you reframe that slightly it's a value Focus to the player rather than well just let's make sure we have more NPCs or more assets or more weapons or more this like that's how that's that's not it that won't make your game succeed if Concord had had more characters and more weapons and more maps would it have been a successful game no um and and so I think that that this is there's also this obsession with those plans the obsession of break trying to break it all down and then pretending again except reality we pretend that those plans are actually going to play out we we we we go into

this fiction like you described of like we're hitting every Milestone are you really were your Milestones a bunch of assets created because if so I understand you made a plan that was a bunch of assets created at every step you managed to make all those assets so you thought you were winning and nobody ever went and said like wait what kind of car is this going to be do we do we need three Mufflers maybe we don't um so so those those are the big three I see there's a fourth that is not it's not production directly um but I like to throw it out there and engine Engineers will appreciate this everything we do in games is built on code it's a bunch of different code Stacks whether you're using an engine and you never touch code as a development team or like you're in Roblox or whatever it's like it's all you know you're interacting with it through a different format it's all code how quickly and easily do can your devs build new things and test them and understand if they're good or not the faster they can do that the faster you can mine through the uncertainty that around you and actually get real answers and reduce that in a

healthy way not artificially um the slower that is the harder it's going to be and I hear horror I still hear horror stories absolute horror stories about um iteration cycles and like what it takes to release a test build and all this different stuff and the harder you make that stuff the less it's going to happen um and and so again this isn't necessarily production directly but this would be like my fourth one is you have to take the fact that we're all that all video games are built on code and that this is like a giant engineering effort um you have to take that seriously if your artists uh tools are terrible and art is an important part of your game that's a serious problem if it takes forever to build an environment or a new level because the tools just take forever to compile and break all the time and you have like an entire team of tech artists who just try to troubleshoot all the issues that happen because you can't afford a team to go and like actually improve the tool set these things all play a big role in uh slowing down the

resolution of the uncertainty and the Align again the sort of maintaining that Vision like moving towards the right Vision so anyway that that would be it so Vision um scaling too quickly obsession with plans overv value uh plans over prioritization might be one way to say it and then uh not building a healthy technical stack that your teams can operate off of right and maybe we could dive into a little bit more Nuance on on your third major issue around planning because I I do feel like part of what part of the issue where planning goes off the rails is a few potential sources so if we were to like root cause analyze some of the issues that major Studios have when it comes to why why is the planning wrong I would say from my experience it could have been like for example we talked about the potential scenario in which you had an initial thesis behind the game you're in

production it turns out that thesis is wrong but then maybe you also realize that the person is wrong that the vision holder that was behind that thesis is not the right person and maybe like whether it's a genre or there's a specific issue so then what happens when you don't have the right person the tast maker making the decisions you don't have the Steve Jobs or the Janie IV telling you exactly what to make would you then you're just trying a bunch of different things you don't know how to direct the the design of the game for example um and I I also think that the other thing in in terms of what could derail the plans could be around are you making the right decisions we're going to focus on this area not this area but maybe this was a more important issue and I think from from my experience it feels like so many Studios because of the pressures of

production and budgets and because of the the sheer number of people involved that I I really do feel like there are so few game studios that do proper decision analysis like okay we're gonna focus on this why yeah and it's just like well because because of this and it's it's and the way that I describe it is is kind of like that I know the the the parable or the story of the elephant and The Five Blind guys who are touching different parts of the oh yeah yeah yeah and there may be different aspects to identifying what this thing is it's an elephant but everyone has like you know they may be saying well we're doing making this decision because of this or this or this but they don't have the whole picture you may be making a suboptimal decision or the the the thinking behind the decision that is made is like there's just not enough time spent on it but I also want your take on this Ben yeah

when when the planning and the schedule goes off what are some of the other things that you see do do you agree with some of those issues that I've raised and yeah yeah oh yeah yeah um so first one I think is more actually about the vision really it's like what what happens when the vision collapses what do you do and especially if you don't have the jobssan figure who's like I'm I'm holding it um because I don't think you need a Steve Jobs I know game studios have been successful without that one person who is trying to hold it all in their game and in fact that brings with it a set of risks that like if they're wrong you're all wrong um add a little bit of nuance there so because I think you can have alignment but the alignment is wrong because the person is wrong yes exactly yeah right right so that's that's the um I call this the creative artour model OKAY is there's one person who's the creative artour and they it's their job to have the whole game in their head and they the the work of production is

to like get the game out of their head and into a plan I don't like this model at all um because of what you just said if they're wrong we're wrong period now some games have been very successful with this model um but I think there's a blend you can do I think you do need leaders who are Vision holders and they are looking at the plan and going I I or we have an understanding of what this game should be and we are thinking about what the most important parts of it are and are not and this is where I said it's a prioritization versus planning our job as Leaders isn't necessarily to make sure it's all planned out and the production team's job isn't to necessarily make sure it's all planned out it's to make sure that we are focusing on the most important things that we know of today and ideally we're testing those things we're validating that those are actually the most important things over time so as we start making the game the first thing you're asking isn't like well what are all the things going to do in pre-production or something like that it's what is the most important question

or problem I have to solve for the player of this game to make the it more compelling and then what would I need to add to whatever that solution was like what are the things I would need to build and the thing is you you ask the question earlier in development in ideation and pre-production and you and you solve it by building that stuff usually in production it's not to say you won't ask questions in production you will they should be smaller questions if you get a giant question in production that like you said a world where we're in production and suddenly realize our core thesis is bad um that actually to me immediately means you're no longer in production and so how do you determine all those things it's the Judgment of the leaders who are responsible for holding that Vision again be it one or several um so that was the first one what was the second thing you brought up because I remember I wanted to I agreed with that as well one was like having the right person and then second is the decision analysis like making decisions yes again to me this is a prioritization question um all all aspects of process to include

planning and estimation and prioritization all these different things all they're there to do is to help people make good decisions you you can think of like I think of work systems as a whole as they're primarily there to solve alignment problems and they're secondarily there to solve or to to really help people build relationships with each other that's it you're trying to get alignment and relationships what you choose to align on will depend on what you do the process and what relationships you build will depend on who you put in the room at the same time and how they end up working together and all these different things but that's what you're trying to do why is it important to do that because if we're not aligned then we'll make contradictory decisions to each other and this is one of those things where um my military background on a battlefield the wrong decision made violently and fast can often be better than the right decision made too late y now we do have more time fortunately than a battle battle field and the stakes are also fortunately lower but the same principle can apply if you're

all going together in a direction uh you're you're likely to have more success even if it's not a great Direction um now it's also possible you just run yourselves off a cliff and that's going to happen too but it wasn't like us all going in different directions but somebody being right someday was a better option and this is again you're stacking the odds with all this and I think prioritization instead of planning is a way to do that the interesting thing is once you prioritize you can then plan but you recognize that your prioritization of what's most valuable for the player is how we evaluate whether we're being successful or not not percentage of assets completed or percentage through phase whatever that is less important than did we actually meet the need and one of the reasons plans so often fail they don't take that into serious consideration I remember making a huge it was a big big project environment related um and like it was going to take a while to get done but we thought you know oh somewhere 6 months or whatever it ended up taking way longer than that um and there was

this breakdown that the leads did of like how long each asset should take to make and their thought was if I can just make all the assets then we'll be done the problem is you try to make an asset and then you go talk to stakeholders and then they're like oh that's kind of cool but this I'd like this different or I'd like that different I like this different and you go back and you have to remake the asset well you only put time in the schedule for one shot at that thing and you buffered it a little bit you you know you thought like well maybe sometime we'll have to like redo some stuff but what you don't realize is you're going to have to not just redo everything most likely or almost everything um you'll also you're also going to have to continue to realign everybody around why and all of that takes time and so you you go through this process when you're actually building something of not just like I a feature shows up on an engineer's desk and through jira or favro or whatever and he's like okay or she's you know I'm going me just run through this I'm going to build my my feature oh it's done I move on to the next no you have to okay cool feature

shows up who do I need to talk to to know why exactly this what this feature is for and how it's supposed to help the player so this designer okay I'm going to go talk to that Designer let me go talk to hi designer what's going on with this thing oh I was thinking this blah blah blah blah blah we start talking about it oh that's not quite what was I was thinking about okay that well that'll probably take a different amount of time than I originally thought let's go back I'll start working on it I start building it you start testing it we find out not quite right okay it doesn't feel good you do this a couple of times suddenly your plan is so far out of date um that it's it's like irrelevant to the project overall outside of confusing everybody and especially senior stakeholders who are going like wait I thought the plan said blah and blah I was going to be done by now and you're like no no no we haven't even started those we're still trying to figure out this one well like wait that was supposed to take two weeks like we're three months in what's going on it's like well we've been aligning around what's important your plans your PL screwed but if you're focused on the prioritization that is a shared understanding you have of look until we can know we can solve the most important thing for the game building a ton more

stuff actually doesn't help us being higher percentage through the plan from an asset perspective is less valuable than being further through the player experience as a compelling engaging thing to you know emotionally hook them or to help them get into puzzle salt whatever it is you're trying to do with a player why they would continue to play your game yeah I mean I I kind of call that the oo oo oo problem at at our studio which is like there's like we haven't even finish the core Loop and all these guys are like oh I got an idea I got an idea we should do this we should do this we should do this and and I literally have to say guys shut the up we are doing this first you have to earn the right for your oo oo oo ideas yeah we yes yeah you get the core in first yes until then write down your ideas you can share it we're not doing any of that once we finished now we talk about those ideas yeah and see that what you're describing is you know the classic like scope creep of oh I got I've got in the military we had

this idea the good idea fairy M um the good idea fairy was someone usually hit somebody at like the staff level in Brigade uh so this was someone who was like reasonably up the hierarchy like a major or something like that and and they were operating in a world where they were somewhat disconnected from the reality on the ground and they would have a good idea like you know it would be really good I think I think I I'll give some real examples that just drove me crazy when I was in Afghanistan um or I'll give one real example we need to make sure that we trim we trim basically the Hedge we trim the grass and the growth around certain buildings on a base in a war zone that's really important and I was just like I don't have a lot of time over here and you're asking me to basically give my so I had one soldier working with me in my shop at that time we were pretty distributed you want me to be sending him out to go basically trim the

Hedge so that we look our our Administration and Logistics Operation Center looks nicer because it wasn't like oh the weeds are going to get interfere with it was just like no we just want to look we want it to like look professional and we want to be disciplined and all I'm like we are in a war zone I do not care about the weeds coming out of the side of this conx box that I happen to call my office um but there but they had to go do it and and so there's this there's this idea in the military like the good idea fair and that person always has like wait wouldn't it be cool if and then they go off and it's again it's scope creep and it's like everybody who's actually on the ground is like what no please stop having ideas like just stop having ideas we have you know life and death decisions we're making every day I don't want to have an extra form I need to fill out so that you know it's supposed to save somebody somewhere time right I think it's to your point it's scope creep and then maybe a level of additional Nuance is also what what I call biggest fire right like even within the feature list or list of things that

you need to do there are inherently going to be some things that are more important than the others yes and too many times people want to work on some of these things but it's like no this is most important we got to work on this first and then you move down the stack yes exactly and that's where what what you're describing is like hey we will find out if we need that later in order for us to understand if that's even worthwhile we have to actually have a core Loop like let's prove or disprove the core Loop and then let's move over to doing that other thing Ryan Scott I worked with him uh on the champion team on League of Legends for a while I loved it he just said it very simply he's like ideas are waste and we think they're not because we're like it's just ideas but they they fill up time they fill up brain space people go have conversations about them they think about and he's like look I'm not saying I can stop my designers from having ideas he was a lead designer um but we have to recognize that ideas are waste because I cannot ship ideas I can only ship what I

make and um and so yeah you prioritize what's most important you get everybody focused on that if you get really good at doing that the cool thing is you will actually get to more of those other good ideas um but if you are constantly distracted and split like you know I let's say you have a big live service team because your game is successful one of the obnoxious things even though it's very helpful uh is when you create a stack list of all the teams and what they're working on because somebody's at the bottom it doesn't mean you have to shut that team down maybe they're all doing stuff that's worth investing people and resources in but it's probably helpful to know that the team you know I I actually won't give an example but that that there's a team out there that has people on it that is less important than all the other teams on the game and probably doesn't feel great when they hear that like hey just so you know you're the least important simultaneously you are

more important than all the other teams that don't exist that could exist so you're still relatively important we did choose to fund you but the reason I need you to know this is because if you start having a big problem I might not be that concerned because you're working on low priority stuff relative to everybody else and when a high priority thing gets into big trouble do not rush to this solution because you will absolutely ruin your studio but you can look at the lower priority teams and say is there anybody on those lower priority teams that can help the faster like the higher priority thing get done or be solved or whatever when you don't do that prioritization stack and you just assume and pretend that all the teams are equal value which is never true um you can't it's much harder to have those conversations and and I've been on very I've been on the highest priority team at the company and I've been on much lower priority teams and when I first moved from the highest priority team to the much lower priority team I was like wait a minute why do we keep giving our resources away and I was working with someone um named Jessica n

she's a great producer she never actually answered that question she just kept giving our our our Engineers away some of our best Engineers kept giving them to other projects and and I realized after not too long a time I was like wait a minute she's doing the right thing she's helping the game succeed and I'm here trying to make sure I get my stuff done for my low PRI relatively lower priority thing now maybe you think your thing is higher priority that's fine you can have that debate and disagreement but the leaders will set the priority and if they've decided that you're lower priority that's okay again you're still funded most teams aren't there's an infinite number of things basically that could be being done and you're on the list of like we have a team we can do work but recognize that yeah if like team number 10 on the priority stack ends up being a little bit late because team number one needed to get it done on time that's a worthwhile trade in many uh circumstances and so anyway yeah just expanding on your idea you know I wanted to maybe expand a little bit more on you

you mentioned your military experience and certainly I actually study a lot actually from from two areas uh from the military books like extreme ownership by jao willink who was a former Navy steel as well as like I I really studied football coaches a lot and in fact uh you know Bill Walsh has a great book The Score takes care of itself I'm a big fan of Jim Harbaugh of Dan Campbell and certain football coaches that have like these philosophies that I just feel are so relevant when it comes to business generally but also when you're leading a game Studio or game team and so I wanted to maybe dig into that a little bit from your experience in the military what do you think has that been helpful for you I mean you you did just relate an anecdote from the military that seems like you've been able to apply but you know maybe you could speak a little bit more about about your military background and how you think that whether it's a military or other

areas outside of gaming that as game Studio leaders we could draw from in terms of lessons to apply to uh game development yeah I so one huge fan of looking outside of gamedev for lessons about leadership um also read extreme ownership I think is great I like turn the ship around as well it's another like military story there's um One mission and team of teams those are both really good as well if people are out there looking for book recommendations um those last two especially cover cascading Vision in chaotic environments which applies to Game Dev more than we'd think um so for me I think one of the advantages of being from the military and being an officer in my uh first career basically was that the military is one of the only organizations I know out there that really deliberately trains for leadership um and I it makes sense why

they do uh but they but I went through a bunch of training and they had a philosophy and I don't agree with everything that that the way that they approach every problem in the world but I have massive respect for the broad organization um and actually the longer I've been out of it the more respect I've had for what for the unbelievable challenge that they have to overcome and like the ways that they have to set up both systems and leaders to succeed because they run the G from you know we're in Garrison and like sorry we're let's say we're State Side in a base we're not deployed we're not in a war zone or anything like that and we we have a bunch of people and we're trying to make them ready for the next time they might have to deploy and this can be very boring and and they're just like okay we're going to go do this training and we're going to make sure we do enough training every year and we're going to make sure that people go get to go to the range and shoot the rifles so we remember how to do that we're going to disassemble we're going do it's just you're training you're training you're training you're training you're training and then you go into a war zone and you go from this very sort of regimented Almost Boring environment

into boring is not the right word that's for sure into the chaos of war and in the background there's still this logistical I was I was a logistician um I was combat arms person who ended up doing mostly Logistics and and when I was doing Logistics it's like this is a regiment this is a regimented process that's very clean but at any time something on the battlefield might happen that changes what's going on and sometimes that's because of an enemy uh like a literal enemy you you not in the way we normally think of like ah I've got an enemy at work like no no no no like someone who's trying to kill you with a gun you know and if you're not ready for it it's a nightmare and even if you are sometimes it's a nightmare but in all in all cases it's like you how do you lead in these contrasting environments and so what I would say I was observant of and I think many of us were what were the leaders that seem to be effective in either environment and both environments doing and what were the leaders that were ineffective in either or both environments doing and learning from that right and I I actually think that the reason why and

and I kind of wondered why why are there so many great lessons from the military and from Sports and and my hypothesis on on this is because unlike in business I think a lot of biases exist especially if you're working for an existing company that's profitable that's already achieved product Market fit to scale that's operating so many mistakes can be made in an often times because of politics and because of biases you don't have to face reality you can hide you can blame all these games can be played where it kind of doesn't matter in the military if you make a mistake people die yeah so the stakes are very high and there is zero room for yeah because will kill somebody yeah and I think also say in sports example you're all on display there's no hiding you you ran the wrong route you ran the wrong route there's consequen it's your

problem yeah there's a score and in in sports like head football coaches sometimes only have a single year you you perform on on and you show what you what performance on the field or there's a change right to your to your point it's all on display the stakes are high and unlike in game one of the problems with game development is like the the cycle times are so along yes whereas it's learning yeah right in in sports and Military cycle climes can be very fast there's a game every week you see your mistakes on display every week a game development project might be two years and you know for some of these big budget games might be six or seven years yeah you could be hiding a ma major major mistakes and biases for like five plus years yeah and you wouldn't even know by the way because this is this is one of the things again like when you say hiding it's not like somebody's like oh let me make sure nobody know sometimes it's literally

like we've rationalized this we our brains are rationalization machines within our whatever our environment are we there's a there's a book called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan hey he talks about this idea of we have like an emotional elephant that leans in a particular way and then our brain goes into overdrive trying to rationalize whatever our emotional leaning was and if you don't even when you recognize that it's still happening but you can kind of like be like wait a minute I think I'm leaning in a way but it's like we are so our brains rationalize everything around us no no that's not that big a deal wait me a minute I think it is a big deal no no no here's five good reasons why it's not a big deal there I've convinced myself it's not a big deal and now your game's dead because like you said you're going to carry that with you and this this I yeah so what yeah sorry I jumped in but this is it's this is it this like it's it is how how fast can you iterate how fast can you be learning and growing and you're right in the military I got a lot like I led badly and and I led badley a lot in training and hopefully not so much when

it was real right um but I got some time like I I had the most embarrassing Mission like it was a simple movement to contact and so you're just like walking a unit through the woods and I'm the squad leader so I got two squads around me you know and I'm walking my unit through the woods right and we take contact and uh this has been this was a really impactful uh mission for me really shifted a lot of how I thought I knew that when you took an ambush um what you were supposed to do in the case of a close Ambush which is what we had experienced we couldn't see the threat really if you've ever played paintball or airsoft or been in the woods or anything you understand like it's not like in the movies where you're just like there they are it's like even though they're gun is supposedly flashing and all this like it's really hard to tell where things are at and like who's allies and who's not it's very very it's way harder than you'd think um there's a reason this stuff is difficult but anyway what FM 7-8 which is Field Manual 7-8 the infantry tactics book basically says is like on in the case of an ambush what you're going to

do is throw a grenade and after the grenade explodes you charge through the enemy because usually if you're in an ambush it means that you're in the Kill Zone you got to get out of the Kill Zone but you throw the grenade first to disrupt the enemy maybe if they're all running away from the grenade it'll help make your charge easier I I don't know I don't know exactly what was on everybody's mind behind it you can kind of see it makes a little bit of sense here's the problem in a real unit how who has grenades maybe most people well we were in training environment we had one tennis ball that was a pretend grenade and for some reason and again things things to think about for me the tennis ball was in the back of the unit so we took am we took started taking fire everybody got down like they're supposed to the instructors are watching and they're watching me what I what I'm responding with and I'm like well FM 7-8 says we should throw the grenade and then charge through so I start this I'm not kidding multi-e mess of trying to have the person all the way in the back pass the grenade forward to the next person to the next person to the next person so that eventually the grenade would get to the front and then we' throw the grenade and then we charge

through you could say I followed the letter of the law and entirely missed the spirit and this taught a really valuable lesson because the instructors just kept telling me like this person's injured this person's dead and every time that happened it meant like I was going to have to Evac them in the training environment and all it was a mess I I did a horrible job of leading the unit and I remembered something that someone who had been deployed overseas had said which is whenever you're in the environment you have to do what makes sense within that environment yes that's it you have to do what makes sense in the environment period and so I looked at my lesson and I said what did I do wrong I followed the rules you know I grew up I followed the rules like I was an engineer you read the rule book I could solve anything just tell me what the rules are show me the manual I can fix your computer um and what I realized is like in that moment I'd followed the manual and if it had been real a lot of people would have died if that had been a environment and so the next time I actually had the same a very similar thing happened in a more complex mission

mission we were supposed to go pick up a box basically and we took near fire and when they when they so was another another near Ambush when they did that they dropped a smoke grenade too to add chaos but I realized that the smoke grenade obscured the opponent from us and I immediately charged straight through the smoke and so you hear like this loud bang and we start taking shots and I was just like up go and I brought my unit up we we popped the guy like not really you know we came through with our everything was um blanks you so we basically bang bang bang because he was too close you you can hurt someone with blanks even but we went bang bang bang and we got him and we kept moving and there was another thing that we had to solve that so that first one I barely qualified as like you did not fail I don't I actually did in my opinion I did and I learned a valuable lesson the second one the guy who did that he did this all day he said no one's ever come through the smoke of me like I've been doing this day after day for I don't know how long I've been running this exact same Mission with

Cadets coming through coming through coming through this the first time anybody ever got me before I got to my second position like he knew the routine and it was because I knew in that moment smoke means cover I go and I could I have been wrong and could I have run my forward element into like 80 guns pointed at us maybe with the information I had I didn't think that was likely with the Intel I had on the area I didn't think that was likely I made a a a move right and that move meant that we actually like isolated and destroyed the threat almost instantly to the unit now like yay go me I learned something how many cycles of leadership do you get the military G gave me a whole ton and I got to watch a lot of other people do the same thing because I was in like that time I was leading there were other times where I was following and I got to watch people freeze and I got to watch people make bad mistakes and I got to watch people do a really good job and I got to like look at how they're doing that I don't think we get a ton of leadership Cycles to your point in game development even if you like how many teams is someone going to be on in a

given year and how many times are they going to say I'm leading let me make a decision um and let me see what happens there's a lag time right uh and it's easy to not pay attention to what happened to move on to the next thing like this is you know one of my issues with all governments everywhere and all time is they tend to make a decision and then they don't actually evaluate what the consequences of that decision were um and sometimes exactly the opposite of what they wanted have happened happened right like simple example we talking about planning yeah oh we don't know what's going to happen well let's plan okay that seems to make sense now not only do we not know what's going to happen but we're tricking ourselves into thinking something that's not going to happen is going to happen you end up worse off than you were you would be better off in some ways without the plan um because at least you're not lying to yourself if if I recognize both of those things I can say what would it look like to try to make a plan that may be accurate and where we know how to reevaluate it as we go um that last option though you have to learn through experience that like your

first attempt at a plan is probably going to be bad and this is you know the whole like planning or plans are useless planning is invaluable of maybe I'm going off on a little bit of a tangent but to some degree what we see increasingly in western game development is a very pretty plan with a huge budget and because of the huge budget you bring in this the smart talking ba who can talk really really smart who has no cycle times but because of how well this guy can speak makes the call right yes so yeah and so I that's that that's the uh one of the one of the production traps I talk about is the person I describe it as like always has an answer there's there's a belief that I think leaders and producers especially but I consider producers primarily leaders um there's a belief that they can fall into that your job is to always have the answer and a lot of times the

reason you think that isn't necessarily because you're an egotistical narcissist sometimes that's the case but more often it's because throughout your whole career what you've seen from leaders is people who are able to confidently stand up in front of the room and make assertive statements right and maybe you've been this person I know I've been this person I think we had a conversation once where I think you you have been this person who's like sitting in the room while someone goes up and makes the Asser statement and you're like that's not right and I know that's not right but you said it so confidently that everybody in the room was like oh thank heaven somebody knows what's going on it's like no they no they don't they they just made that up that doesn't even make like none of that that was that was ridiculous but the first few times that happens you'll probably notice like your response was if you had any humility at all maybe they know something I don't man they are so confident and so confidence gets you along way and this is you right now I'm a consultant but I look at other places in the Consulting in uh industry like the McKenzies and

the deits and Bane and stuff like that and I look at them and I'm wondering like they figured out how to monetize their confidence to an incredible degree and to go in and tell people to some extent what they wanted to hear and charge millions of dollars for it yeah and like you said they're they're high highly highly highly paid NBAs with no practical experience in many cases but there's smart they can put a PowerPoint slide together like a presentation together they can be compelling and convincing they can talk faster than you think faster than you like I'm not a fast thinker you know I've no noticed that about myself uh for a long time if you get me in a room with a fast thinker the fast thinker will eviscerate me in a debate I can't that's not my strength but I can once I understand something deeply I can actually talk hopefully with some clarity about it and hopefully that's actually grounded in reality but like do I ever get that chance well if you got a lot of you know fast talking highly confident people you

know like you said the NBA who's really smart and believes that their job is to exercise that intelligence through the lens of projecting confidence and knowing what to do like I said I don't I and it's easy for that to come off as like I'm angry at them or mad at I know why they do it now like I think I think for most of them I know why I do it it's their own like this is what I'm supposed to do right yeah this is my job and is well yeah the the problem is yeah it is but that doesn't actually help anybody yeah and I can actually very specifically think of I won't Nam the studios but there were two major Studios with extremely big budget games and they did exactly what you were saying they brought in I I won't say which consulting company but you know there's probably two or three options one of those companies and they were having problems with with like the the traction of the current game design that they were going after and so they literally went and did surveys and focus groups with players

and say okay what kind of game do you like do you like you know do you like this RPS do you like mobile do you like this and the players all came back and they said they like all of it and so the game design wound up being three games in one there's another game that was like four games in one from I'm talking I know I'm very specifically thinking of one um HD game project and a mobile game project and so like to your point like when you get the NBAs making these kind of weird decisions from the lack of cycle times and experience and knowing some of these lessons you don't just ask players what they want they'll just tell you everything and then you just kind of create this Frankenstein you know design and to the point that you know this team clearly then also lacked that you know the The Taste maker the the person who held the Clear Vision of what the players really wanted and so they outsourc the design to play player

tests so yeah iig and you know one thing I also wanted to mention is like to your point also about when you said you were just following standard procedures we also have our number one rule at our game Studio which is the number one rule we have is common sense rules meaning if there's anything that we do that does not meet Common Sense forget about the role just break it break the practice we got that from uh from one experience but also uh Jeff Bezos used to write these Amazon shareholder newsletters and one of the one in one of those shareholders newsletters he he wrote you know uh he wrote about how you have to always watch out to become a slave of the process because then that leads to bad outcomes yeah there's there's a frame around this you know since since I'm in the production side that I've I've liked I've picked up recently which is whenever you create something and make it a standard whenever you like say this

is our process this is what we follow a way to think about it is it has immediately died it was alive when you were thinking about it and talking about it and trying to figure out what it was now you've made it you've you've integrated it or you've you've made it a reality like everybody now needs to follow this rule it is now dead recognize it's dead because when it comes to process the process you use in ideation are going to look different than the processes you use in post production and should but if you put some process in place when you were an ideation and you never Revisited it the fact that it's dead and continued to exist while the environment changed around it made it go from being something that might have been helpful to something that was very definitely not again some processes don't follow this um and some are more stable over time like oh we you know like let's say in the US our process process for paying people is we use direct deposit cool that's probably stable it's probably going to be stable for a while right like sorry Bitcoin and crypto folks like

I don't think I'm going to be paid in crypto anytime soon in in as like a W2 employee um probably stable doing something else right uh or sorry sticking to that Norm but there are a lot of things that as processes become dead and then hang around and you keep them well past their expiration date and what this implies is that while the process might become dead you have to stay alive and the leaders have to stay alive and they have to be watching the process and say oop that that bit of process needs to be revivified and and reinvented a little bit and changed or removed or something and then uh and then we can move forward but if you're not doing that I think all human organizations tend to almost like be gravity Wells for bureaucracy to slowly flow in just as ever increasing amount of uh what each individual one makes sense but in aggregate you end up with this massive quantity of red tape and all of that

requires backends filled with people and it's very expensive and it slows everything down and we thought we were getting an advantage and again if you look at any individual one of those it's like it makes sense why this existed there was a time where somebody was not crazy to implement this policy to solve a particular problem that they thought was a big deal is that circumstance still true today or has this become something that's hurting us more than it's helping us right we we do not do a good job of tracking that over the lifetime and it's because it takes time it takes effort like one of the things I encourage leaders to do and producers especially where's your time to think in the day because if you're just running from meeting to meeting to meeting I know you're a very busy guy um like where how are you C I ask this very seriously how are you creating time to go okay all day every day I get a lot of to-dos from a lot of meetings things I'm supposed to talk to this person go do this solve this write this thing all this different stuff how do I prevent my

day from just becoming all I'm doing is like nearest term thought around my next task so that I can go wait a minute what's my job what's my role what do people need from me as a leader and how could I actually maximally help this organization I don't think people do that so anyway I'll ask that question like how do you create space yeah so one I think unfortunately I may or may not be doing a great job of it I I literally only slept three hours last night so not like I'm doing a great job of it but one of the things I like to do is I like to zero based budget my time so essentially you know I kind of mentioned this issue of biggest fire so on Sunday I try to plan out my week and I just try to think week to week and I have these lists of biggest fires in different departments and so I oversee HR I also oversee design I'm now starting to get into engineering um oversee my product team

and so then I basically just try to fill in okay what can I reasonably accomplish this week and I fill in my schedule so then I start with the biggest fires put those into my um into my like task stack first and then when I get to a reasonable amount then I cut it now throughout the week things up plans change and so I might have to readjust but at the very least I have a good idea for this week where is my most um where's the biggest operational leverage that I can have on the organization so um you know we we call it like a bullseye framework biggest fires framework but this is the kind of way in which I try to prioritize my time and that also means that there are many problems I just can't get to and so like yeah no I just had a conversation the other day hey here's all these problems and and why aren't we doing anything about it and and you know what I what I

told her is like I said I am very aware of those problems it's on my list I cannot we have to let it go um but I think the good news is and one of the things that I learned when I worked at fun plus working on U king of avyon is that and just actually generally um what I think is Maybe surpris surprising to so many people is that even the game studios where we had a lot of success we had hundreds of problems yeah so I don't actually I don't think it's actually your ability to solve every problem in the game Studio but your ability to solve the biggest problems that are actually going to move the needle if you can solve those you can survive with hundreds of smaller to mediumsized problems yes and you just got to again biggest fire go down the list but always

start with the biggest problem two thoughts come to mind as you say all that let me see if I can hold both of them in my head um when they've studied marriages that are successful over a long period of time one of the interesting outcomes of that is that some of the most successful marriages You' think like oh they the people who like best resolve all the conflicts it's like nope I think it's over half of the conflicts that exist in the successful marriages are never resolved and they continue they remain throughout the whole relationship and it's okay because everybody's heard what was important is that everybody has heard now obviously it's not 0% of problems get resolved but it's less than half less than half the problems get resolved and perhaps the ones that are most important um to your point at least I would hope so um so I I think that frame of like there's going to be problems no matter where you are there are always always going there's going to be so many like something I I advise Junior producers to do cuz um I when I was at

Riot I was in the discipline development space and sometimes they'd like oh we got a new producer coming in like go talk to bed and he'll you know provide some guidance around I how to how to operate as a producer here at Riot or wherever um and one of the things I would say is you need to create a picture of what good is because there are an infinite number of ways for you as a producer to make things better and I know producers who spent who like worked themselves to death making things better and they really did but in ways that weren't the most impactful to the team or project or game or feature whatever they were working on and so they were just like snipping away at SM oh I made the the retrospective format better oh I I you know I got rid of this meeting on the calendar oh I got oh I I I helped us you know have a really I don't know we we went out to a nice restaurant this month we spent our our you know uh morale budget or something like we hadn't done that in a while that was good look at that I solve that problem it's like hey nobody knows what you're making and

how it's going to help the game you there are an infinite number again virtually infinite number of things you can improve you have to pick and you should pick based on your environment I can't give you a list of like first focus on making sure everybody collaborates well then focus on making sure everyone's align then Focus I can't do that um what I can say is you need to think about your team and its current context and where you want it to be and some people go like that's overwhelming I don't know where I want it to be and I say okay cool you need to go figure it out go read extreme ownership or other books about all different kinds of Industries about sports teams about the what would good look like what does a high functioning team look like that's what you want when you have an image of that in your head you're going to be wrong don't worry about that Delta where you are from that high functioning team and then go what would be the biggest thing I could do what's the biggest like Gap I could cross to get to that high

functioning team and I'll tell you something right now you're never going to get there you're never going to get to that point that's okay it's a journey you're on the journey the team's on the journey the reason you're not going to get there it's not because you're bad or the team's bad it's because everything's going to keep changing and so what there is will keep changing too and you're going to have to continue to adapt to it and update and update but you can get close and man when you're on a team that's close when you've actually closed a lot of those gaps and your team is actually truly high functioning oh my gosh like it's it's unreal how smooth that can feel compared to when you're in the mess of just like oh but like I can make this little thing better oh I can make this little oh I found this opportunity to do this oh let me you're wasting your time you're spreading your effort around and it's not you know some people like you know you push one Boulder a foot instead of a ton of Pebbles an inch or something like that or whatever the the analogies are it's not even necessarily that it might be you move a bunch of things but you move them with with intention towards an end and that's what matters the second thing I wanted to say um and I don't know if you do this when I hear you describe

that weak thing that one that sounds really cool um and I'm glad that that helps you go like here's my stack list I would go you've covered the short term from your from like a a CEO frame well my next question would be what are you doing mid to long term to think about that big picture even even to go this is where I want to be this is where we are and here's the delta um because when if you're solving the shortterm well it usually means you're dealing with important urgent in an effective way and then the next thing would be how do you deal with important non-urgent how do you create time for that because if you can't get into the important non-urgent block you will always have a ton of important urgent and just a lot of urgent generally and so like that would be the next question for me so I'm curious do you have a good solution for the mid I I think just maybe because of the way I'm wired I actually do spend a lot of time thinking about the longterm but the issue for me is around okay how do I resource this

like I do have ideas about longer term projects capabilities or people that or things that we need to have later but then the problem I have is deciding okay when are we going to spend resources for that when am I going to shift resources so I you generally have a pretty goodidea idea of where I want the company to go and what we need to do longer term but the the you know I I think I still need to improve on how to how to prioritize it when we've got all these fires and and so that that's kind of like the general um conflict that I that I have with that yeah that makes it that makes a lot of sense it's it's um i' I've managed this once well maybe maybe twice and it was more at the Team level one was like a 50 person team and the other was much smaller it was like an engineering team where I I got to and by

the way I've been on a lot more teams than two and so most of the time I haven't gotten here that's why I'm saying that like this is not this isn't easy it was I reached a point where um as one of the either the leader or one of the senior leaders of that space um all of the like the day-to-day fires and stuff was actually handled by the people around me and I was like it was really weird the first time this happened to me it was really really weird because in the military I'd always just I was always in the middle of it you know mostly I was an officer in logistics and I was like mostly doing paperwork all the time uh but like I got to this place where it was like wow the teams kind of run and they run on their own and I don't need to like do any like even if I don't show up they still do all the meetings and they still stay aligned and they still and I'm I'm sort of there but I'm not active and it like opened up my mind to go what's possible and this is not something you

get to quickly it's something you get to over a very long for me at least maybe some people can get there much faster I don't wouldn't doubt it there's some people I think they're really really good at this but for me it took a long time like a year would be a short one of these like six months would be pretty optimistic for me to try to get to this place even with like a single team um but I got to this place and it was like whoa I can now think almost entirely about medium long term and it was crazy it was crazy again it's only happened to me twice but it's now it's like that's the goal that's where I want to be if I'm if I'm leading something is how do I set this up it's weird some people get annoyed at me they're like wait a minute you're just telling telling me like like you had a job and you offload the job to everybody else on your team that doesn't sound very fair and it's like kind of the reality is that I am like my job as a producer is inherently overhead it's waste if you if the whole team could just stay focused and do it all on their own and they need me that's actually a great thing if I have a high functioning team like that that's amazing and so if I can manage to to help build the team

and usually by the way they were excited by the time they got to this point because they recognized the high function if I could help them get there and then I can actually step back and now I'm just going like okay let me look big picture let me look at like what are the risk factors how do we set this up for Success what's the big and not be stressed because um I know that they can handle basically all the day-to-day stuff it's an amazing spot to be and I I think think I think more people should have that as the goal like when I think about that that Delta I was talking about you should have that as the end State not that everything relies on you but that almost nothing does and then you get to advance in your thinking as a leader because you get to deal with the problems that most leaders never get to encounter which are the big picture how do I think long what is it my job as a long-term leader it's it's actually very different from my job as a short-term leader and um there's unique value to be given to the team through taking that stance anyway just something no no I I think when it comes to the longer term planning and thinking generally think

about one new game projects and you know when we should start even planning for those second is I know there are very specific live Ops capabilities that we're going to need when we actually launch the game when do I work on that and also to the to the point that I think you were getting at organizationally I mean one of the ways that I think about the company is in three layers indiv ual contributors managers leadership and then how do I build especially because we're weak in the management and Leadership stack how do I build capability people in those layers so that to your point I can have more free time I don't have to go to India 50% of the time yeah and so when do I like and I am working on some of those areas at times like less so the new game stuff but more like the live Ops and the organizational stuff right now but you know yeah when I spend time trying to develop those things is is a tricky

problem but um oh absolutely yeah yeah I mean and I I by the way right now I'm a I have a chief of staff and I'm a a oneman shop at building better games outside of my chief of staff and like some sort of external contract support that I get to help with you know video editing and different things like that and it's I mean I yeah I sometimes it just feels like I'm treading water all day and I've got big dreams about like I want to get this thing out and I want to do that and I want to do and it's like yeah but you know the the podcast right and the oh gotta get the newsletter oh gota make the LinkedIn post oh taxes you got to deal with taxes because who else is going to deal taxes right and and it's just like over and over and over again so I definitely feel you I I have felt more like I am trapped in the now uh in the last probably two years than than I ever have and that's been really educational for me just like yeah I have a lot more respect for people who start businesses now I I wasn't like I didn't

before but now I'm like oh my gosh this is like I'm running a oneperson shop you know and with again Chief of Staff you know I got some help I've got some really good help actually um but this is it's harder than you think so it's way it's way harder yeah and maybe I I know we've been talking for a while but I I do want to like cover a topic that's a little bit more optimistic in nature because we've been talking about all these problems and issues and I I don't but in reality for me when I look at the games industry today I am probably more optimistic in terms of the number of opportunities than I have ever been before and it's because of you know new capabilities whether it's AI or others but I also think that there's so much space for innovation in in in a lot of games and game genres and so I'm really excited about that but maybe in terms of the optim istic discussion that we can have is yeah so you've worked at you know very successful game Studio Riot

and with the other game studios that you've worked with I'm wondering if you could also just talk about some of the general patterns or characteristics that you've seen from some of the more successful game studios what are what would you say are two or three characteristics that you think would be common amongst the studios that actually do find success and that that are able to have great games however you would Define that it's an interesting question the the thing that comes to mind for me actually is that it's possible to over over obsess about culture but I think for most of Game Dev game dev's history we didn't really think about it at all and it's now okay to talk about culture to talk about how do we create create an environment where people can be successful um and there's a human centricity that is

growing um and I I hate I almost hate to bring it up because it comes with like comes with baggage when I say that uh around you know maybe some stuff I'm not I'm not as excited about or don't think he's as effective like you know I'm not I'm not talking about we all got to get in a circle talk about our feelings twice a week or something like that but I mean just this idea of imagine if you had a team of people that were engaged in the meaning of what you were doing not just like we're passionate game developers and we're just so happy and excited we get to work in games but really like locally I am excited about how I am contributing to the development of this game whether it's a live service game or a sequel or a new game I think we're caring more about that um and I think even and I say this in in a time where there's a lot of layoffs for sure

but I actually see a lot of Studios that te seem to care about this when they didn't before they just didn't and um and they so they're caring about their people they're caring about doing better um it's not just a a grind to get the game done with endless crunch you don't see that as much anymore and I think that that's all positive and I don't think you know some people might say that's why I work going downhill cuz we're not crunching all the time anymore and I'm like no yeah I'm sure there's some people that could probably have worked harder but man some of the death crunches and death marches that certain game studios have experienced I don't think they were benefiting anybody and they were destroying lives and potentially even the game because people were doing subpar work after working way way way way too much over way too short time uh to the point where they they didn't have any energy or juice left and so they were just they were just you know I mean they've done studies around this with engineers and stuff like that I think we care about that stuff now and I'm I'm positive about that so in terms of Trends around successful

Studios um I think that's one I think we also are we're learning better so I don't know how else to say that not everybody but like I see a lot of I see a lot of the most successful Studios actually value the learning so when we evaluate whether something is successful or not it's not as simple as did it achieve whatever be it an Roi goal or whatever whatever whatever is also like this element of was like what did we learn from this and I I mentioned earlier that idea of like the more learning loops you can go through the better off you're likely to be uh no guarantees but it Stacks the odds I see more companies valuing learning and I see them more companies um encouraging their teams to try stuff and to learn not necessarily at the AAA level at the smaller levels at like at your doublea's um single a your Indies like they're taking to your point they're taking bigger bets and the

tools are now out there to support them and and so the iteration Loop is no longer as awful as when every studio is relying on a proprietary set of tools to build something like you you get so much you can get so much speed and learning from doing something in a non-ideal setting but just like Thro it and unreal throat and unity throat and Game Maker whatever you know and and see what happens um and I actually see Studios Tak I see the best Studios taking advantage of that um last one I'll say I think video games will always well always I think video games is likely to continue to be a volatile industry for some time and that's because we do have compared to software development um we have a lower hit great because we fight for people's attention and people have a lot of

things that are doing that right um and so I think that will lead to that continues to lead to like I said you want to be nostrom in games just predict everything will fail and you'll be right you know 95 plus percent of the time that said I think that as we iterate faster people are taking learnings from past Studios and bringing them forward like we're having this conversation I didn't invent the games industry and I'm not some genius guy I'm just a guy who like likes observing things and trying to analyze what's going on and when I see myself and you and others sharing insight about like wait a minute these things are happening at the leadership layers of organizations or how we're approaching Game Dev we don't agree on everything but we're having conversations that nobody had 15 years ago right in Game Dev and so we are learning and this is where I say I don't know if it will always be a volatile

industry I think we had a little bit of time there where it didn't seem to be as volatile depending on where you were but there's other people I know that like there's never been a period where they weren't their project didn't fail or this studio wasn't shut down every couple years and so that's nested into this and we're getting better and I think that's like that's the encouragement I have to anybody because I feel you know I I really appreciate you pointing out like ah it's easy to like I and I can I can get focused on the problems but whenever I'm talking to someone I'm never like yeah it's just all problems we're all screwed it's like it's all problems but it's always going to be all problems that's life Welcome to life life is that's what life is life is a whole ton of problems and your job is to navigate through and take on that challenge and you can and whether you're a leader just starting out like with only a couple of people that you lead or you're in charge of a studio you going what can I do to make the world better tomorrow than I did today that is always at you always have that option you're not always going to be right you're

going to mess it up but like start taking those chances and keep just making wherever you are better and honestly the the studios that enable that in the people inside of the company like like you were talking about enable that that the conflict the challenge the autonomy to go try things I think those Studios tend to do better um and I I've seen that in some AAA places I've seen that in some indie places like they they're there is a a value to be had from just going like I can't fix all the problems but I can fix some of them let me try and the cool thing is the more you fix the more in reach the bigger ones become so there's there's kind of a rambly answer to your question great um maybe I could also give you some of my thoughts and get get your you know get your honest feedback on um on on you know kind of what I

think well I I'll actually start with one that I actually got from well you were at Riot maybe you know slim that for our audience the guy who's basically the Creator originator of valerant but I was having dinner with him about a year and a half ago and and basically I asked him slim what does it take to build a successful shooter game into today's market and his response to me was um he he said you know this is going to sound a little bit strange but I think the answer is love and what he meant by that is that uh there are so many decisions that have to be made on a game thousands and thousands of decisions and like the team that loves the game that loves what they're doing will make the right decisions and will do what it takes to make the game successful and I I thought that was um you know interesting because I never had thought about it or framed it in that way um so

there's one characteristic um one Char one characteristics where where I may disagree well we may have a different opinion is that in my experience just working with a lot of game studios I do think that a hardcore work ethic has outperformed like the studios that really like work a lot the probability of a successful outcome I felt was dramatically higher it's not it's not 100% but I I felt in my experience it was dramatically higher um and the only thing there too though that I would add some Nuance is that I think that there's a little bit of nuance and framing to this and I think the the framing is that having a hardcore work ethic is inherently bad and that the framing especially within the last few years is that any any company or any game Studio that has a hardcore work ethic is

evil but I I I've never really thought about it that way you know kind of coming as as an older guy having grown up in you know or having spent my career in Silicon Valley um there's there's a kind of a different framing to hardcore work ethic which is that one when you work that hard it's because because you like it you have a passion for it also there's there's kind of like the the the Victor Franco nich sort of concept that growth and you know even value for your life comes from pain and suffering and even Jensen from Nvidia says you know he was I think he was talking to Stanford he and he basically said I hope and and he said I say this with Glee that pain and suff in happens to you because of the character that it builds and like the advantages that it has yeah and so there we may have a little bit of a of a

difference I I don't know or maybe not um not probably not as much as yeah yeah sorry I finish yeah um a third concept so there's a there's a Biblical verse and I'm not Christian but there's a Biblical verse about Shepherds in The Hired Hand and I don't remember the the biblical verse exactly but it's something like you know when the wolf comes to attack the flock of sheep The Hired Hand scatters but the shepher protects the flock so to the extent that you have people that care about the game and I think this takes many forms by you know by not because there there's a way of implementing hardcore work where you're like you guys gotta work and you know and there have been plenty of really evil leaders that don't share in success you know yes where it's like oh my God we made millions and millions and millions of dollars and now I'm rich and

guys I really hope you appreciate the iPad I got for you guys congratulations yeah yeah exactly so bad so unfair yeah so I I do think that being able to build a team of Shepherds that care but you have to also give them a reason to care also a characteristic I think of success and then just the two other things is that just time right like I've noticed that the teams that have worked together for four plus years dramatically higher outcome of of success a probability of success as well as the teams that generally have Focus that aren't doing like 10 different games but focus in a specific area in genre but I I'll I'll pass yeah I I think I think all of that um so the idea of of Love Actually I really like that um and I think it's it's there's there's a set of concerns that we have as game developers and especially as leaders in Game Dev you have to love the game the game is made by the company you

have to love the company the company is made up of devs you have to love the G devs and ultimately there's the player and you have to love the player and you're constantly balancing these four things and I love that frame of love because love when I think about love love is you know it's a it's a poorly defined word I guess might be how I'd say in the modern world but it's like you want what is best for the other both now and into the future so if that if you come from that place I think that Maxim I think I agree with you I think that maximizes your chance in terms of the other stuff the reason I was even so hesitant when I was talking about is I'm not I don't like how work life balance has been co-opted to mean to your point like well that just means that when it's 5:00 I have to go home it's like well what if you're not done it isn't that a judgment call that you should make about what's

important to you in life and you know and well like your family or your personal time or you should always be the most important I'm like h no of those your your family maybe um if the work gets in the way of your family I think that's depending on who you are that might be a that might be a no-o but you know there's a time I go home or I go downstairs see dinner and sometimes when everything's not done that means I come back up once the kids are in bed my wife you know heads to bed or whatever in the evening and I get back to work it's like well wait a minute Ben that's that's you time it's like yeah but you time is spent working sometimes why because it's important because I care about what I do right what like maybe if I didn't I wouldn't do that but and you I'm I'm an ex-military guy right I was deployed well sorry I don't

want to work right now it's a war like I when I got to Afghanistan there was a I was the only person there my my I told said earlier that like I had one other start first class Jamal White he was brilliant I learned so much from him he didn't show up till about a month and a half in because he was working somewhere else he came on a later flight over and we had convoys coming in like I said I was doing Logistics and I was moving all these trucks around and they would come in at all times of the day or night and they would either fly in or drive in uh on on these convoys um and someone had to meet them and I was the only person there there was a good two weeks when I first got to Afghanistan where me getting three hours of sleep in a row was uncommon the Army trained me for that and I was glad they did I had to keep functioning and then I had to go do you know after those two weeks I had to do another 50 without a break you know I I there

was a I I shouldn't say that there was a twoe period where I got to come back for for leave um you know about nine months in um but that was it I was I was in Afghanistan I was in a war zone I didn't get to like hey everybody like I'm just not feeling it today I think that that's an extreme example but we I I like what you said about both Victor Frankle and and N I love N Beyond Good and Evil he talks about I love his when he talks about suffering he's like we got to be careful trying to remove suffering nothing good in your life or anybody's life has come except through suffering and the solving of it um and so there I think you and I are probably more aligned there's probably some edges we like I I am cautious and creative work at how hard because they have done I've looked at a lot of the studies around output over time and crunching for extended periods of time um reduces rather than increases team

output um we it's hard to measure outcome exactly in a lot of these but like at least we can measure output and there's not a one to one link but you know there's something there where I think it's the studies I've seen and they're they're older now um are you have about a couple you have a couple weeks where you get a decent J Jump in productivity and then it starts tapering off and by the time you get to about six to eight weeks into hard like crunching everybody really really overworking everyone for a long period of time you have not just gone to a place of you're getting less output than if you hadn't crunched you've also taken the team to a place uh where you've lost any benefit that you would have gained from the couple week push um and you're even more screwed because not only have you lost relative output over time but also to return back to normal you have to go even slower you can't just like oh let's just bring it back to normal nope now you'll be at a decreased indefinite

now there's there's subtleties to this every person is different I know one guy who works 90 to 100 hours a week and he's just like I just what I do I love it I wouldn't I don't know what else to do this is and I'm like hey you need to get a hobby or something but like hey dude it's your life man and if this is what you love doing I some people can do that most people will experience some consequence of of long-term over work and this is where like I actually like the idea of work life balance but I don't like how it's been co-opted into a place of we no longer get to make judgments we no longer get to have that hard push of a couple of weeks or we no longer get to make the call of like you know I'm going to do a little bit of extra work today so that I make sure that we're ready for next week um and I think it's actually so one of the things that's interesting about that the love concept that you were talking about um Love is an external thing I think went when operating well it's like I'm I'm interested in the best for others and even if I'm interested in the best for myself it's almost myself as an

other and so when you're thinking about like what would be the best for others in the longterm way maybe it's that I do some extra work right now and that's in some sense that's so that I can look at myself in the mirror and say I did what I could to make this work um but it's also because like dude that's how I can add the most I can I can I can have a meaningful life and I can add the most to the world and trying to strike that balance for is an individual thing for each person um I I something I've said is I don't know many people who have a meaningful life who are not tired right I think there's a there's a connection there and I think to people who are like I got to make sure I get my eight hours of sleep every night it's like cool I think you might be sacrificing your meaningful life a little bit and and you might not even realize it you may think that that is a meaningful life is a life that not tired yeah I from my perspective I just wish or just choice right because I think in earlier in your career you might choose

for more push more hardcore later in life you might not or if you have a start a family or you have a you know you have a baby or something like that and so you might have periods where you're going hardcore you're going work life balance you're going hardcore work life balance or you might you know but you you choose based on your personal situation and um and by the way I'll say one thing further when you first start your career when you're young that's time to push exactly I'm I like I don't know if you were just going to go there but like that's when you push please please please please don't buy the like oh I need to get paid a lot of money when I'm not I haven't been doing this job for very long or the you know like oh I need like push live in the apartment with the roommates Drive the beater car don't get paid enough TH those are your 5 to 10 years to learn and to become a valuable member of society um please go do that and you know not everybody has to make that choice but man I wish more people would um

because I'm not telling everybody to become a workaholic but it is like dude that's your window if you walk out if you hit if you hit 35 and you're like wow I'm really proficient at something that not many people are proficient at suddenly you have the option to not work as hard because you can outthink everybody because you're because of the experiences you've had you want to be there you do not want to be in the situation where you're 35 and you don't have a valuable skill set you haven't learned how to learn you haven't learned how to go hard um because yeah push early I've seen that you know as an older guy in the industry I have and I won't call out specific people but I've seen some people who were incredibly intelligent super smart they went to company a and this other person who was kind of okay went to Company B company a was a bigger company fixed processes did not have much challenge couple years out they come out there's a big gap there is a huge gap between

skills capability mental mindset all of that becomes challenge causes growth yes as you were talking Ben I actually um remembered a quote I don't know if you've seen the the the old movie called the third man but I I just want to read this quote for our audience yeah so from this movie um one of the characters States in Italy for 30 years under the borgius they had Warfare Terror murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance in Switzerland they had Brotherly Love they had 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce the cuckoo clock so any on that note I thought we could maybe end this discussion we've been talking for quite a while but I do want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit more about building better

games you could talk a little bit about why you created the company how the companies changed what you're what you're up to all that kind of stuff I'd love to hear a little bit more okay so building better games um it was born out of this idea I had I I joined priot out of the military I started as an associate producer and I asked like what should I go read and research cuz I've never never done game development I just like games what do I do and people were like yeah I don't really know some of them gave me some books to some agile related stuff or some general leadership stuff there wasn't anything that was from game development outside of I think Clinton Keith's book which I would still say is the best one of the best Game Dev specific resources maybe the best Game Dev specific resource out there for a leader entering game development and his book is very focused on um agility applied and scrum and Pro stuff I wanted to solve that problem because I knew that there were a bunch of other producers that have joined companies since I did who had that same

issue and then we're left often trying to figure out well okay so I'm getting some mentorship I'm getting some leadership but is that any good I don't know how do I tell I can't I don't know what I don't know could somebody please provide me some resources building better games is an attempt to answer that so I do some training um I've created an online course I'm working on another one actually on estimation of all things um and I need that one yeah uh it's it was one that I wasn't originally I wasn't that excited about it and then I saw how many people were like I yes I want the estimation course please thank you um so I'm like okay all right never mind literally gonna sign up for that right after it's not out yet nothing's out yet yeah we'll do so I yeah I did another one on how to be a successful game producer I talk a lot about leadership um I try to work with companies uh to improve their leadership and to work through how do you do those things how do you avoid the scaling trap how do you avoid the planning trap how do you avoid leaders who aren't

comfortable with uncertainty how do you avoid not having an aligned Vision or tell that that's happening I work with companies try to resolve that to get them to a place where they are going in the same direction they are dealing with reality um and their leaders are actually being trained to be cultural beacons and vision beacons within the company not just you know filling out spreadsheets and reports and so um yeah so that's what I'm trying to do I want to help leaders lead better in game development I see it as a huge opportunity for our industry a lot of room for growth there are so many more things we could have talked about today but so many of them come back to how are leaders acting because they set the tone um they are like producers and leaders they're Force multipliers and their organizations and so if they're bad then that Force multiplication is really bad like you get you get division rather than multiplication but if they're good oh my goodness they can be such a a help a Bo they they can drive you towards success um I started the company uh almost 5 years ago with a cooworker or who had

worked with me at Riot uh Aaron Smith he helped with a ton of the early stuff around models and all stuff only this last year did he depart it just it was something where he had some other stuff he needed to go do in life and uh I was sad to see him go um I loved working with him if you actually go listen to some of the old podcasts that we did he was he I mean you can hear like the guy knows what he's doing um and he helped come up with like the holistic Leadership Model he did the training with me he's a great guy um but he's he's left now so I'm picking it up and moving it Forward um I do a podcast called building better games the building better games podcast where I focus on leaders who are frustrated with solving the wrong problems and I try to help us get towards solving the right problems uh there's a newsletter I do I post on LinkedIn you can find me there and then yeah I have the I have the courses and some other stuff I've done I've done different trainings and a lot of it's been B2B consult style engagements um but honestly my preferences for the teaching and the training and the helping people grow um that's always been like even when I was at Riot and that was where I just I

loved doing that I loved managing I loved leading uh helping other leaders lead I always felt like I was so much more impactful when I was sort of sitting on someone's shoulder helping them think through a situation um I could I could do it but it was like that wasn't as fun it's weird I was a weird guy because I would like I got to be on these projects and some of them were really cool and fun but it was that weird that like I would ship it and I'd be like okay cool that's done and everybody else would be like yes this is so amazing I'm like well on to the next thing you know and I just it was but man when I help someone succeed when I help someone grow that just but I just love that so that's what I'm trying to do all right awesome well I'll uh actually include some information in terms of links to your website maybe ways in which they can contact you in the show notes but Ben we've had a pretty long conversation today thank you so much pretty wide but yeah we certainly left a lot of stuff you know um uncovered so oh my goodness yeah hopefully we'll be able to have more discussions in the future our audience if you made it this long uh

congratulations and uh we will catch you next time thanks Ben cheers byebye thank you [Music] [Music]