Venture into AAA | BITKRAFT Summit 2024

hey everyone um I think this might be the last long panel of the day so I encourage all of you to have a seat turns out I have 45 minutes to talk I thought I only had 30 so hopefully I don't run out of questions um the topic of today's panel is the intersection of AAA investing or AAA games and Venture Capital investing which is a relatively new category um when bit craft started investing in the space back in 2018 we were one of the first funds to commit to fund a new type of of a new type of game um games that would take longer games that would take more dollars more time um but ultimately had perhaps bigger potential or different potential to compete with some of the biggest games in the world um I'm joined today by smed um who has made a number of games in particular

two genre innovating games um H1Z1 the first battle royale um EverQuest the first major MMO to be popular in the west um Planet Side um so5 $500 million games in total um and is currently building Fusion Point Studios a portfolio company of our uh crypto funds um we then have Steven Lim slim um slim has also built many games for a long time um I think most famously he is The Mastermind or one of the masterminds behind valerant the most most successful or the very successful shooter um out of Riot recently um and then we have chia who also has been building games for a long time um and most recently was working as well at Riot um on the wild drift side so um you know thank you all for joining and I'll start off with some questions and um we'll I don't know keep it interactive so let's start off with this um I don't know if you guys saw but on the app some people submitted questions beforehand um and I think one of the questions that lined up with my first

question is people said if Wukong is double A then what is AAA I wanted to start because you know a lot of people use the word AAA um I've been pitched so many AAA metaverses that will take 18 months to build and will cost $2 million um and no one really knows what AAA means I think so do you have a definition of AAA is it something that you know it when you see it or are there unique features that if it doesn't have it it's not AAA it's mad first sure um I think it's very much you know it when you see it because there are games like Minecraft for example I would actually call that AAA now um back then when it first came out it was in Indie but when a game reaches the adoption level of you know 250 to 500 million players it's easy to call that AAA even though the production value may not be the the sole determining factor I think we're used to AAA being something where um you know larger studios are funding games over

hundred million and I don't think that's true anymore when I saw that question I was like shocked because I was like dude if wukong's double A we're all [ __ ] out of luck like what the [ __ ] um I was like okay uh but it begs the question you know like what what is AAA then I I don't know if triaa should be so um strictly defined I think the intent of the question is it meant to imply certain quality production value uh a serious effort I think is what it's meant to imply but to your point like I think it's been way over abused and um I do think there's if I can soap boxers for a second like I think everyone needs to chill the [ __ ] out and just like deescalate because how much more can we push that like oh we're going to be the best thing ever and then now everyone expects the best thing ever and all you can do is go down from there so like how many games have we been disappointed by in the last I was going to say a year but two years 10 years like once the last

how many games are we proud of that are made in America that's a hard question for me to answer I think I can count them on like one hand um and uh I mean new offerings like obviously there's a lot of big existing franchises but uh so where does this road go and so I would argue for like in a deescalation from that look at look at some of the breakout hits that we all been talking about all year they're actually you find that everyone's rooting for the underdog right so I think um there's going to be a way wave of that I think a lot of people are like reware of like indie games or like double a double A games and stuff like that but or games coming out of different countries um you know next year maybe the pendulum will swing back when GTA 6 comes out we're all going to buy it and so that'll re energize you know big games and I think what's awesome right now is that there's games throughout that spectrum that we can enjoy for different reasons and I think we need we as developers and investors I think should reflect on

whether or not setting those expectations pumping more money into game equals a better outcome or not and I think they're are certainly examples throughout the Spectrum but I don't know if there's a correlation like I think not only games but a lot of Creative Media I think there's it's hard to argue that there's like a definitive like we pump more money in we get a better outcome like there's an intuition to that and so it keeps happening but I think if you actually look at outcomes and you look at different examples it's hard to find a reliable correlation um I have a more religious view about this and I think it partly comes from uh becoming a convert like I I sold my company to I sold my first company to Zinga I didn't I learned a lot at Zinga but I didn't become religious about certain kinds of game development at Zinga I sold my second company to Riot and partly due to this guy who's one of my favorite game developers alive today I think I became became a convert in a

different kind of way which is to say um I think often we Define AAA historically by the inputs so a developer focused a developer Centric perspective of how much it costs to make a game that's really what we mean by AAA historically I think the religious shift is to be more player focused about it and just ask how good is the game not how much not how much did it cost to make it but how much player value is delivered in the thing um and I don't mean to be pedantic about it I'll give you a couple of sharp examples um Wukong is interesting I call it double A honestly because it didn't deliver a lot of value to me as a player this is my genre open world games that are action oriented like action forward open world games are totally my genre Wukong was really not a very open world game from my perspective and most of the gameplay was really like I think gets a bad rap as being a Boss Rush it's not

just that it's more than that and it's a beautiful game and the team deserves to be [ __ ] proud of what they did but from my perspective as a player who adores this genre it wasn't what I would call a triaa game it was like a worse version of God of War but in a completely different and a groundbreaking IP from a team that you know and and an ecosystem of developers that needed to make this game and prove it to themselves and each other that they can make this game there's so much about it that's awesome but it's still not a disruptive amount of new player value which to me is what AAA represents and AAA should be it should correspond to the genre that you're talking about this interesting point you made about the um groundbreaking aspect to it I found over the years maybe this is more true 2000 to 2010 I feel like a lot of people use that word used to associate Legacy to it so it's like a pride and like a bunge or like a blizzard and like that kind of thing

yeah I don't like that I mean I don't think that's the important part because I think you can still do a AAA game that doesn't break ground like Horizon forbidden West didn't break as much ground as Horizon zero Dawn but it's still a wonderful game tremendous amount of player value the new God of War Ragnarok versus God of War 2018 same thing not a lot of new stuff but still absolutely a AAA game GTA 6 is not going to be that honestly it's just not going to be that groundbreaking if you haven't seen it you should look up a video uh where it's a series of videos called GTA 6 but it's GTA 5 it's basically after after players saw the trailer for GTA 6 they're just like this is the same old [ __ ] so we're just going to make a bunch of trailers of it out of GTA 5 footage and it's hilarious it's a AAA game it's not going to be groundbreaking and I think that's okay but maybe as a note that to me is like one of the reasons we should be up here and trying to make groundbreaking AAA games because it's hard for the studios who are trying to go from G GTA 5 to GTA 6 to be

groundbreaking if it is important to be groundbreaking which I think at least you and I think that I don't know what you're working on but I uh sure we're we're working on a blockchainbased persistent World shooter and you know I agree with you about the the groundbreaking part that's why I referenced Minecraft look at um look at a game like fortnite for example um I'm talking about the original fortnite not not what it became when that thing launched it was kind of a dud it it actually wasn't doing well until they they um added the Battle Royale piece the production value was decent but it wasn't wasn't a particularly groundbreaking game and yet look what it became one of the advantages to live service games is you have the opportunity to take a direction that you started and and change it but where the AAA thing comes in is that companies like ours that that are making trying to bring something really new to the space we can punch in the same weight class as a Call of Duty for example why um because we now have tools that are just

light years ahead of what we used to have so that that democratization of of the tool chain is changing is fundamentally changing how we make games so I to me uh you can have AAA aspirations even as an indie now because of the production value cost is coming down in in if you're trying to make something truly new if you have to make a game with a ton of content that's that's much more difficult and so stay away from that if you're trying to um keep your cost down you guys just rush through my next two questions with this answer and I have no idea of what to say from now but let's try so so let's start by defining the opportunity I think for each one of your games but also for AAA more broadly from a top- down perspective um all of you have worked in big companies um obviously Riot initially a smaller company and now much bigger company smed you've been with all due respect around a lot of companies over the years um so what what is going on in the world today

that opens up the opportunity for startups to go into AAA like what is preventing or or or um tampering with Innovation at the big company level and how do you guys think about the macro opportunity that you play into um just because I was talking about it last I'll key off that and then pass the mic I do think it is difficult this innovator's dilemma problem is a challenge for big companies you have to feed the beast you have to continue to run the machine it's really difficult to do big disruptive things to the product um and make big swings I in my opinion Riot is one of the last big games companies that is still has The Bravery to do that um and and I think that's but it's still hard and it gets harder um and so I think as that shifts and as the investment Community gets smarter which like this is dope bcrafty didn't exist you know the first

two-thirds of my career um but the second phase of my career when I did when I was pitching VCS there's a v a very famous VC I won't mention the his name there's a very famous VC that I was pitching and I was trying to describe the size of the games market and he just didn't believe me he just didn't believe that the games Market was as big as it was the investor community at that time this was 2016 didn't [ __ ] get it didn't know how big and important games were nor how big and important they would be you guys have leveled that up um so the cost of failure has gone up for big companies that makes it easier for insurgents the investment Community for independent companies has vastly improved that makes it a lot better for insurgents like us and then the last thing I would say is I do believe that the the technological shift that we're on the precipice of right now which is AI and machine learning is the single biggest technological shift for game developers

since the PC I started my first games company around mobile and that was a big shift but I think it's nothing compared to AI um and that was like one of the core founding thesis for our company but I do think that's still hard and I think um nobody still nobody gets it and I think it's going to take 10 years before most people do so insurgents are in a good spot now Michael covered a lot of ground that I'm uh totally agree with uh one thing I'll kind of zoom in on is um what he mentions there about Insurgency about um ultimately risk-taking I think is um really the main blocker like we are our own blockers to that um today tools are perpetually getting better than ever right now it's even let's say an acceleration of that today um those are less the blockers Graphics is less the blocker performance is less the blocker tool chains are less the blocker um today we are our own blockers I'd

argue because I think there's a correlation this is should be true of either the big companies and also of the well-funded startups some of which we are fortunate enough to be um where the higher the stakes get the more aversion to risk you naturally feel because you don't want to let people down of course we all want to do right by people do right by our investors do right by our team d by the players um and as the stakes climb you end up in these design conversations that go somewhat like this like you go in a meeting bunch of smart people on the room really experienced and somebody will pitch a thing like if we go path a um we're going to piss off so and so if we go path B we're going to piss them off less and they'll watching that meeting bunch of smart experienced people go no duh let's go path B we'll walk out of that meeting Pat ourselves on the back good days work you do this three times a day 15 times a week 100 times a month a thousand times a year thousands of times over multiple years that we're making the game and for sure

we will end up with vanilla for sure for all the hopes and dreams and Pitch decks and everything it's a it's a death by a th000 or 3,000 Cuts in my opinion and I you you you no one conversation will make you think that that is at risk but if you look back at how much ground we did or didn't cover in the last week in the last month in the last year you look at we did all this work all these check-ins we're all proud did all these Big Show and tells and I'm like is the game is anyone any more excited about this game it's like eh and like you see that all the time and I think like we walk ourselves down that path when we feel when we succumb to the feeling of not taking a stand for something now obviously I'm not arguing for The Other Extreme I think either extreme is detrimental um overly constricted overly like loose there is a tight rope to walk that's probably different per genre or per audience that we're trying to serve but I think it's something that haunts me to be honest like with every conversation like did we go too far on

this do we not go far enough um are we making a compromise that we cannot reverse um are we setting a precedent that will lead to the next 20 conversations that will everyone's like pulling back following my lead or someone else's lead on this um it's something that haunts me like daily basically on this topic so I it's something I thought a lot about that I don't have full resolution on but it's something I think about frequently and that's the thing that is most on my mind is like we are now in our own way the most I think yeah my my take on this is um I I've been fortunate enough in my career to work at couple of bigger companies um Sony Online Entertainment and then at Amazon what is interesting is I feel like both those both those companies took real risks real risk creatively and you know when we were making EverQuest there were some you know like heavy discussions like a subscription based 3D only game there was only one other 3D game at the time the same is the same thing happens just

fast forward to whatever uh whatever genre and whatever time you're in when you're doing it there's always new technological things and I think the um the risk aversion that bigger companies like I'll I'll take an Electronic Arts where they're very focused on making sequels there's a lot of emphasis on that but I do see across the industry I see a lot of um companies that are willing to innovate and try stuff that just uh you're like whoa you know even even companies like valve I'm playing there l this game deadlock quite a bit um and you see these companies that are willing to try things and really even disrupt their own um their own companies games so to me what what the the advantage to being you know a small startup um lucky enough to be well funded with with bigcraft and and you know we feel really strongly that the Innovation that we the opportunities we get is how to do things differently with less money than when you're when you're at a big company and you have a hundred

million dollar game budget and you come up with better Solutions in my opinion and it it forces that that innovation in both how you make the game how you're going to distribute the game for example that's why I think something like web 3 is very disruptive um because it actually brings a new ecosystem around the game and I and I think when you're making a AAA game you want to have as many shots on goal as you possibly can with with your own game I I I see this is the Advent of a new a new golden age for gaming if if that ever left actually I don't know so so now let's take the opportunity to set Bottoms Up um with as much as we can talk about what you guys are building in a little bit of time think you know perhaps talk to PE to us all of us a minute or two about what you're building and in the context of other games that exist in the market like what is the market Gap that you're playing for right so it's mad I'm a little bit more familiar with yours I understand in the sort landscape of Call of Duty and whatever else like what the

Gap that you think is there but I'd love to hear from the three of you like here's the Gap in AAA gaming perhaps from Big Publishers here's what those games kind of look like and we're doing something else that looks like this and here's why you should start whoever whoever you should start um we are working on a PVP sandbox game is like um it's hard to describe the genre because the genre you could include a lot of things uh in the space that we're looking at is maybe easier to U mention the games that we're referencing so I want to go after group versus group dynamics um in an economically kind of uh envir an economically driven environment so you can look at games like Eve for that in terms of momentto moment gameplay uh we like isometric so this like V Rising League of Legends with WD uh and we were also referencing like Ultima Online albon online rust um you can kind of see how games that appear so differently

that many people would put into different genres or categories we think have something in common that we've witnessed over 20 plus years and you could even include Travian derivative games and muds that are like literally text based so what would appear to be very different games we think there's a a string of games that we reference that scratch a similar itch which is ultimately in a group versus group setting you can call out certain people by name you can call out certain Crews by name and they have bear a certain personality they run a certain way they behave a certain way that um that that contributes to that personality where they earn that personality and some of these personalities transcend games actually so some of the crews we run with uh as players um they'll take their rivalries like there was a crew I was playing with it's like about a two or 300 um person Clan and they've been at war with this other Clan and um I found out I've joined this like mid stride I found out that they've been Waring for

over five years across 10 different games they just bring their fight from game to game doesn't matter what the game looks like they'll just go at it it's like blood versus Crips they don't even know why they're fighting anymore they just like they see the other tag and they're like [ __ ] those guys and they just like go after them um we want to make an environment where people can go nuts like that not just for fighting though like ideally like you know some of these games we mentioned you know like ultim online thanks raap and wherever you are in here um like some of these games are some of those experiences and stories are very positive like there are Partnerships there some of them are neutral um some of them you know someone will recognize like someone are trying to contribute to the community and set up a Tavern that's like uh really makes the game friendlier for new players because they had a certain they were compelled to because they had a certain bad experience um we want that possibility space eventually obviously it will take a lot of work to build up to that to today's standard and all that um but that's what we're chasing um and uh the opportunity we we we my my uh co-founder and I

we've thought about the space played in the space of PVP MMOs and PVP soundbox games for like the better part of 20 years and we've been Cur that's built up a long lasting curiosity because every year that we play and check into it we are never fully satiated and we still have a hunger and thirst for it that's been relatively Timeless um I mean this desire to build up a reputation uh I think is pretty classic to humans like you look back hundreds or thousands of years like I think that's not going to go out of style for people like just think Game of Thrones right like it'll just go on forever if you let it um so we see that as individuals then as we started to develop valerant in parallel we were discussing like should we be doing that game instead and valerant almost died several times because we almost just all wholesal con uh joined another team that was pursuing that um and then similarly as I started to probe interest in this um through investors and and Publishers

we found that nearly every publisher I mean think both tenson and netes have stated publicly from the CEO on down that they were interested in something in this space um we know Riot has Riot has two um internal projects that came and have since been cancelled in an attempt in the space um and uh so I think uh blizzard recently had a blizzard survival project chasing something similar or at least Under the Umbrella uh that was recently canceled so I think there's been interest in this and there's been this like conundrum where there simultaneously it appears that this space has some of the remaining the words that a lot of people use like blue ocean opportunity that's like kind of untapped I think what people are really trying to say but that it currently appears Niche um you can you know look at any of these examples that I mentioned from rust to private servers EQ to private server uo and all that and like you'll find like the best of these like 50 to 150k CCU something like that right and there's a bunch that are private and have you have no access

to data um so they've been kind of always like half in half out with the bigger companies um now what I'm not fully aware of is like I'm pretty certain that there are versions coming out from like Ultra Omega funded like Korean and Chinese Studios out there right now I'm sure they will land something very different from what I can land in a you know startup budget but um so I see I think a lot of us have been hovering around an opportunity like that for a long time and we are just going to have our take on it in a place where there's in my opinion no known blueprint so we have to we have to I think I feel compelled to take an approach where we can't assume that just because we came from wherever from riah from valerant like uh like I notably like on our website we don't say like from The X makers of valerant because not the least of which is we're not even a shooter anymore but I don't think any of that lends any higher chance that we're going to land a formula at the at the start of

our beta so part of what we're optimizing for is building for tooling and and options to like tune the [ __ ] out of us to create this economic environment like we don't know certain big looming questions like how big should our service be how long between wipes like etc etc so there's some really hairy things to work through that have no answers right now sorry I went too long for that I'm not pitching everyone right now just sorry I just I I mean so first of all I love it because I'm going to play the hell out of that game not because I'm his Bullseye Target but I'm like one of the concentric circles outside of it that hasn't been sucked in by one of these games but almost [ __ ] did like 15 times and I thought you should say it first because you have this really you have a poetic and and sophisticated way of thinking about it ours is is like completely the opposite we have a very simple thesis that is much more extreme in in other ways which is that

um uh we just uh so whereas slim thinks that it takes an incredible amount of time to like tune and develop the game with the with the audience and be responsive Etc we think we have to get it right from the get-go we think so we're making an open what we would call what we do call a AAA open world game um and the the reason for that is if you there's a huge supply and demand Gap in the market for this which is to say for me the rough Mark of AAA for open world is a genre I said it's genre dependent is around $200 million in development budget not marketing budget like you need to have talented developers working for a really long period of time those two things multiplied together get to around 200 plus million dollars if you hit that you have like an 89% win rate historically so we're doing that and it's not easy and it costs a lot of money but we do have to get it right the first time we can't get it wrong because if you get it

wrong you'll be one of the you know one of you'll be one of that 11% of games that you know [ __ ] it up and that we can't do um but we do believe that that Landing that right and building the team from scratch and planning to go big on this is is a strategy and it's a viable strategy the reason that we think there's space that that players don't just want another one but they should want one that's different is I love The Witcher I love cyber punk I love breath of the wild but I want to play it with my friends and that's just not an experience that we have in those games and it's really hard and it's hard for like four to five really important reasons and if we build the company around solving two of those and right now we're we're trying to tackle all of them but we'll eventually have to cut and cut but if we strongly solve two or three of those reasons that it's hard to make an open world game that you can share with your a AAA open world game you can share with with your friends then we think that'll be a

transformative experience um we think it'll live somewhere between you know right now a place for you to hang out with your friends in games is either really narrowed by player skill like which I player skill or game knowledge or play type which I think is the game that that you're making it's not it's not a place that you can invite all your friends to hang out right now you kind of got Roblox in Minecraft and the players are aging out of that then you have this massive Gulf of games that just don't have you just don't hang out with your friends there in a way that is Rich and deep and game gamey and then you got like wow in Final Fantasy 14 and man are those showing their age at this point um and so we're we're not setting out to make an MMO we're really conscious not to call it that because we don't think it should be that we think it should be really intimate um you know two to eight players maybe maybe 12 maybe um but we do think if we start with that core of a AAA open world game that you just want to [ __ ] live in

like you do with Zelda or cyber Punk or The Witcher but you can share it with your friends and have that just last for years and years as a game is a service we think that's transformative so sure um if Call of Duty DMZ and um Rainbow Six Siege or Clash of Clans you know take your pick there had a baby that would be our game it's set in an open world um a massive open world actually and it's fully pvpve um I like to make games where people can kill each other I'm very much a believer in PvP um and it's fine when you play together and group up that's that part is great but mostly the killing each other is what what I'm interested in making um and my team is so for us um it was a lot about you know combining some things that we see out in the market that are clear indicators um that there's a market for the kind of game that we're making and we we gave that a lot of thought but

we also talked a lot internally about making a game that we want to play because we're the target audience it's always a risk when you're making games but at the end of the day that's why we're game makers you know we all like to work on stuff that we want to work on I'm sure all three of us have worked on things we didn't want to work on too um you know we're just blessed to have you know Partners like bigcraft um to be able to help us achieve a dream there and from my perspective that can be achieved even though we're not you know a $200 million funded company we can we can really use the tools that we do have to make an experience that's just radically different than anything on the market today so that's kind of our perspective on it I'm going to ask one very big open-ended question in the 15 minutes we have left and my estimation will end up 10 minutes over just by like how deep the respones have been so far so I was having a conversation once with one senior designer at Apple that had been there for like over 20 years and I asked

him what was the hardest product that he had to design in his time there and he said it was the pencil and I asked him why and he said it's because it's so simple just how do you design something so simple when we get pitch AAA the ones we don't fund the ones that we fund have good answers but when we get pitch AAA I think a lot of times there's the sense that it's going to be very expensive it's going to have a lot of features it's going to have a lot of realism it's like these very big Visions but when we look at some of the most successful products be it a game that unlocks a core mechanic be a consumer product um it's it's in the end it was something quite simple right it was it was addition by subtraction right like adding to the quality of the product by subtracting the feature set so when you all think about building in AAA how do you thread the line between building something that is disruptive that is special that is big and Venture worthy but not spending all your time and money adding features that don't matter spending I don't know realism that

doesn't matter so yeah can I I so realism is a good one um I think realism to me is one of the things the first thing we were talking about what defines like what's good or bad AAA I do think I'll just keep saying you know offensive things up here but I do think Red Dead Redemption 2 is bad triaa I think that you they they spent so much time and energy getting the horses just [ __ ] physically you know High ver similitude but then it takes like three minutes to get on and off the horse yes it like the best horse in the world just the mountain is and this so that's my point is it's that's measured by the developers sense of I think investment I don't think that's real player value and so I think you know Red Dead one to Red Dead 2 was like you know eight nine years of development and they went down in user score on Metacritic um and that to me is the wrong kind of investment

it's the wrong kind of AAA um uh yeah I would start I would start there and say like that's at least the first [ __ ] that you have to cut if you deeply understand your audience so going back to what John said I do think I slightly disagree which is like I don't this is one of the things I'm religious about is I try not to make I we try we say at believer we don't make our Dream our game we make our our Dream game we make our players dream game but it requ to make our players dream game we have to try and strive to be our players as much as possible and if we can deeply deeply empathize we'll never be as smart as them we'll never know as much about our game as they will but if we can try to then we'll know what those things are and honestly in my opinion realism is almost always the thing that every trip conventional AAA developer over over over uh emphasizes and blows [ __ ] tons of of time and money on I'll added that and say um I think you should juice the thing that

the players are asking for so in the battle we all have to make choices no matter smaller or bigger budgets even if we had a relatively unlimited budget you're still limited by time and energy and your team's trust in you I guess um so we always have a limitation of some kind and that means picking your battles and I would say of the battles you pick like it's easy the more Juiced you are the more you're able to uh get distracted by a lot of things that don't actually contribute to the reason why the player came to your game in the first place um just for funsies I'll uh Counterpoint one of the things that Michael just said as that example I'm never been a cowboy but they delivered to me in true Rockstar fashion my movie Driven Cowboy fantasy so like maybe in that sense walking backward from that it

might make sense that you like invest that much into a horse because you're on your horse all the time C doing horse things all the time maybe it makes sense to like spend three minutes getting off and off that horse you're like is this part of that experience or you know I'll I an it more to like um GTA 5 California incline that street that goes up to Santa Monica I don't know how a thousand people in the UK nailed the feeling of driving up that street like with hip hop on the radio the sunset right there like it's not about realism or exactness they replicated the feeling driving through those Venice with those like I forgot there the name of it those like apartments that are over a garage that are open just seeing those little elements you're like I'm in LA right and you know like I guess none of us know what it's like to be a cowboy but I think that was the right thing I think they got it right in GTA 5 I don't think the horse I don't think the horse I won't die on that Hilla of the horse for sure won't die on that hill but the Point still stands like I think

chasing uh anything including realism if it's not I think uh actually contributing to the main reason uh that people are coming to your game for which is predicated by you better know what why they're coming to your game and I think that's another trap often that often if you're working on an existing franchise you can really easily lose your way and think your game is about X but actually people are playing y um that happens a lot um obviously we're all trying to make uh uh groundbreaking games in various ways and we could be very much wrong so that leads to like the paranoia I have like checking if everything else we're predicating on is like that experience if that's still valid uh for thesis is still valid um but but yeah I think chasing something fruitlessly we have to be kind of we have to watch like a hawk because it's really easy to waste energy on that stuff even if we have unlimited funding yeah so um I look at this as you know when you're making a game one of

the most important parts is knowing knowing roughly speaking how much it's going to the cost how much time it's going to take and if you have a clear idea of what you're making and all of us would probably agree that our games don't always come out exactly you know like we envision them in our heads along the way uh and when you're lucky and it does but I look at things like what are we innovating on and what are we not innovating up here's a great example um our control system is any Call of Duty player will feel right at home why did we do that well it works and we're going after that audience or part of that audience so we better make it simple and easy for the players that we're going to go after to to do that we're we're picking and choosing where we're fighting our Innovation battles and when you talk about realism for example we actually chose a realistic art style why it's actually easier to do um if you

have the the team to do it than trying to invent an entire new art style which uh which I think um there's a lot of things that I mean I love stylized games valerant is definitely one of them right um but they're we're picking where we are spending our time and our money and we're picking an art style that we all like better than than um stylized and on a technical basis once you learn you know some of the the techniques that are um needed for it like photogrametry it's it's easier for us because we have experience with it from from our perspective The Innovation stuff that we're trying to do is bringing all this into a persistent world so that tends to be where we spend the most amount of time on design like making the guns feel good is obviously the most important thing in a shooter but we we all we've done that before we know how to making this open world persistent world that has bases that can be rated in in real time making that part that's new so

we're we're choosing where we want to spend our time and money uh specifically based on the the hard parts for us that we haven't made before so that's the way we think about it anyways last question for me and maybe we can even fit in one from the audience how has the expectation of starting your startup been different from the reality of starting your startup oh [ __ ] I'll answer this one real quick it's better than I thought and and Carlos is on our board so um but I'm actually being serious like like I this is my first vent Venture funded company and what I will say is um it's been a lot of fun and and it's you get good support and I there are also aspects that one side that that you know I've not done before raising money before this way that's that's new um not always the best part but it is a super important and crucial part have to make sure because we're very transparent our

entire team knows exactly how much we have in the bank so thinking thinking about how transparent you are to your team making sure that's a priority um that's a new part of making the game uh for me but honestly it's been terrific for real you know it's enjoying it a lot um things have been better than I expected in general uh I I'd like to think I'm neither overly optimistic nor certainly not pessimistic um but I generally try to be conservative on a lot of fronts and um and maybe because of that like things turned out better than I personally expected and thank the gods for that um uh and I'll take it where we can get it because I feel I told to them all the time like we need all this energy we need all this like every bit we can get because um and it's not to say that have been challenges there but our challenges is I want to keep concentrated again um

on the part that actually affects the player experience like everything else is a distraction so when people ask me many friends here in the audience like um have asked like how it's going um I I this is how I say it and that what I genu think is going on it's like it's really weird the unsexy tree chopping building part of our game and everything I can do to keep the road ahead smooth to keep the drama low hopefully makes it so our team can make a game that's Max drama ingame like everything else is like just friction to that and I yeah so I'll take it wherever I can get it but thankfully it surprised me that I know like in especially I know in this environment that's like really hard for a lot of our our friends and our peers both that startups and a big companies um you know everyone kind of went to ham two years ago now everyone's getting Slam in the face like two years later like if we just chill out a little bit like it can be more steady and I think we can think more clearly so anything I can say to to emphasize that I'll take the

opportunity um I'll give you a negative one um because you know just to counterbalance and also hopefully this will be useful for some people out there um when we started believer uh we had four cultural pillars we believe in games we believe in players we believe in one another and we believe in the future we believe in the future was like one of the critical reasons that we decided to make the company an independent company rather than go like being a like a holy owned subsidiary or Flagship studio for another big company because we didn't think that anybody would like you know believe in AI the way that we did because at the time it was very unpopular it was um open AI had done Dolly one and nobody had any idea what GPT was um Mid Journey hadn't come out uh the qu the the question that everybody asked us is like like who cares about AI what's your web three strategy that's what everybody wanted to know when we were starting the

company and when we built the sort of that intellectual and the the cultural foundation for the company most Believers were like excited and on board that fourth pillar of course like we believe in the future we want to make better games than we ever have before we want to use bleeding edge technology to make our video games and then all of a sudden AI turned a corner um gpt3 came out doy 2 came out mid Journey grew and then all of a sudden we had this huge [ __ ] culture War about the about AI it's a there and it's interesting it actually has real problems with it there are big philosophical and moral problems um with it that by the way I agree with um but we we always had the aspiration to do it the right way in a way that we would be proud of that we thought would always Elevate the bar and yet still despite how hard we we worked to get the culture right to get recruiting right to get onboarding right we still had half of the company fighting with half of the

company about what is the nature of this thing that we're doing and why and it was really hard um and I basically spent half a year being disappointed Asian Dad and getting everybody to talk to each other and eat their [ __ ] vegetables like you get got it we think you think mid journey is evil great but you have to spend 40 hours using mid Journey first and then come to the other side of it and then tell me what you think by the way I don't think mid journey is good for game development I don't think generative 2D art I think generative AI in general is not that useful for great making great video games this is my opinion happy to talk more about that in Greater detail but there are many other kinds of machine learning in AI that will completely transform how we make games still going through that 40 hours and learning how to write your prompts and learning how to work with a computer to make something that you want to make is a meaningful experience for every artist to go through at our company and we force them to do it um because once they get to the other side of it their

their hearts are opened up a little bit their minds are opened up a little bit and then they realize what the potential is even if they're not going to use this thing this particular thing that was way harder than I expected um way harder because people said with their mouths that this is something they really cared about and then when the reality came around and it was scary and threatening um yeah we had like a basically an internal of of emotions um around the thing I do think we're on the other side of it but it was a lot of hard work it was a lot of hard work I think we're 10 seconds over which is pretty much perfect timing thank you very much [Applause]