What Does a “Good Game Studio Culture” Actually Look Like in 2025?

[Music] Phil had something to say about my interview with former head of Blizzard Boston.
Mishka, I am I'm exhausted talking about culture.
I am I am exhausted. That being said, this is one of your best podcasts in my opinion and I really encourage people to go out and listen to it. to give you a teaser, like one of the things you guys are willing to talk about is the idea that like low morale doesn't mean poor performance or doesn't mean not hitting the company's goals. And so like you spend a moment and ponder like whether or not low morale even matters. And so I thought those were moments that like kept coming up in the podcast, which I thought was awesome. But I also couldn't help but think that there's a difference between what people actually want to talk about when they talk about culture is not culture. And I think Kim Nordstrom's definition and up down up which I know everyone read was that culture is patterns of behavior over time but I don't think people want to

talk about that. I think what they want to talk about is institutional policy right they want to talk about rules that they can create which ultimately shape a behavior. And when I kind of look at like revealed preference rather than stated preference, founders spend very little time thinking about organizational design, like they aren't out there thinking about like who should report to who, how should I set up my titling system or not have a titling system. Like very little time is spent doing that beyond like I would argue a couple of self-help books. And I do think like the reason that Netflix is like no rules rules one is because it actually told it like it is which is that like we play to win and we hire and fire and operate like it and ultimately like people understand over time that ultimately action and incentives drive institutional behavior and they just let it rip. I think anything less than that is not a sufficient institutional policy. But that's what we should talk about is like policy not not really cult culture is an outcome of policy or at least it's it's one of the things that we think you're the most important

factor and you heard it in the podcast right like that's something that he felt that he had misunderstood which is that you can influence it he's like no you absolutely can
I'm equally tired cuz like the success of a company I think it's like a three-legged stool you got the culture naturally meaning like how people work but then there's really important part which is capital and then equally important part which is timing and every time there's a successful founder or CEO, they just focus on the culture because that's the one where they had the most effect on and then you kind of forget like, oh yeah, yeah, and then we raised, you know, a couple of billion dollars and yeah, it was a perfect timing. Market was going 20% year-over-year and so forth. But I'm really curious to hear what you think about this next investment, Phil, which is Distinct Possibility Studio raising $30 million funding from Bedcraft for a launch of Reaper Actual, an openw world AAA shooter with web 3 elements. Is this Godzilla's off the grid, but instead of a battle royale, you go open world?

I don't think Off the Grid got enough credit to be honest with you because I think what it did prove is now that they have EGS which oh boy if EGS is the thing you're holding up you're in deep but at least they have EGS now which is a mainstream distribution platform for these type of games. I still think without Steam everyone has bowed to Steam and web 3 will bow eventually too. So I think this is really in Gab's hands right now. Gab Gab's game over at at Valve I think really holds the future 3 but there's been nothing interesting in this space. Like we've basically stopped covering it and I think that's for sufficient reason. They haven't given us, you know, something to cover like off the grid. You know, if we want to look at an update, I think it's probably doing fine. Is it, you know, a crazy big success? No. They had this weird subscription thing. You know, let's see how much capital they're going to burn by continuing to operate this thing. Why are you doing this? I have no idea.
Yeah. And and it's $30 million
in this economy.
Just wasting money.
Wait, they just raised this recently.

Yeah. $30 million in a triple AAA shooter. Not to just build, but also
No, no, no, no, no, no. They've raised 30.5 million to date.
This is led by John Smmedley who was really uh big MMO figure early on and also helped set up some internal studios at Amazon Games.
Yeah. Okay.
It's not no one. There's a track record here. Like I think that's the most important thing. his team rather than business model. Business model can always change.
Mhm. All right. Well, on the other news, Kotaku has been acquired by a Swissbased conglomerate for a cash sum that is undisclosed. So, I guess good for them. And Google has launched an indie game fund initiative targeting LATAM region. The where they give between 150 to 200K to indie game studios based in Latin America. It's pretty admirable that Google is doing funding. Like we talk about how challenging it is that VC and PE are kind of drying up in the money

they're handing out. So
it's always great when somebody's bringing money into the gaming industry. I just wonder what are the incentives for Google to write checks and actually these checks are so tiny. So I'm trying to understand like just how does this make sense? But I guess I I don't know, maybe they're working on some kind of a PC platform or something.
Yeah, they do have their their PC platform initiative.
You know, you can build on Android on mobile and it automatically goes to PC. It's also specifically to the Latam region. So that's kind of interesting. [Music]