Studio Design: Building a Foundation for Success and Avoiding Business Disaster

[Music] i've been uh lecturing a bunch around funding and pitching actually last year i did a session on on funding models in particular i've really tried to do a lot around educating developers uh primarily on the the business side of things we got some attention a few years ago with execution labs because we were one of the first uh precedes the early stage Investors in game studios we did 25 investments and it was a tremendous learning opportunity for us in terms of understanding the challenges of indies and startups and a lot of the learnings that

i tend to talk about come from that that experience and and these days i spend much more time on mentorship and advisory stuff Consulting work uh with studios but also helping um sort of regions and and sort of upgrading the business knowledge and skills uh in in regions around the world uh one of the fun things that i'm involved with is uh gameplay space gameplay space was founded about four years ago and it was done as a kind of complementary entity to execution labs execution labs was a private fund and so We were quite mean

in that we told we said no to almost everyone who pitched and since we were investing others peop other people's monies we had to be really focused on commercial viability uh and the growth potential of studios and yet we constantly got requests for um for mentorship and support and help and connections and we always had to say no because we were focused on the studios in the portfolio and so we created gameplay space which is a Co-working space uh dedicated to game development it's a 10 000 square foot space with over 100 developers working in

the same space it's a non-profit uh so much different kind of mindset it's a very open environment where we say yes to everyone in terms of coming to share and exchange and inspire each other and it's uh let's see i mean it's just a big open space this was during construction when All the developers weren't there but we host lectures and we often invite publishers or platform holders to come and give give presentations we run more detailed workshops and host networking events and showcase nights and all this kind of stuff it's a really kind of

powerful entity but most importantly it is my channel by which i force developers to eat broccoli and for those who are paying attention and reading the session description You may recall that i snuck in there a broccoli lover a little quote and in part it's because um i often times i think of all the business entrepreneurship stuff as the broccoli that we all need to eat but very few of us actually like broccoli or brussels sprouts or whatever even though it's nutritious and good for us and makes us healthy and live long it's like i

just want a hamburger and i you know i don't want to deal with those Issues in the same way that many developers just want to code and design and do all the cool fun stuff but really don't want to deal with the business stuff or don't understand how critical the broccoli is to their health and long-term viability and so and so also a lot of the lessons that i see not only comes from execution labs as well as sort of you know going around and doing a bunch of consulting work but also in this sort

of test environment of Gameplay space where i try out a lot of these uh concepts and and working with the teams and i mean i don't have a sort of a report to give you but overall the studios that operate from gameplay space uh are are quite successful and doing i would say uh better than average relative to most uh startups uh or indies uh so before we get too deep this is where i warn you that i'm not a lawyer and and so you know obviously everyone Is in a different uh country and has

different legal and corporate law contacts and tax issues and all that kind of stuff and so i'm not a legal or or or tax expert so uh you know all obviously you have to do some conversion in your own brain in terms of what's relevant uh to your own uh region um that's my sort of universal image for lawyers um anyways uh all right so if we look at The uh the title uh today was called studio design uh building a foundation for success and avoiding disaster uh we went through various uh more kind of

click-baity uh versions but uh we settled on this sort of mid-point title and let's break it down so first of all studio design and i think what's important here is this notion that a Studio is something to design there is sort of things to do and decisions to make and and it matters and this is not generally what we see oftentimes you see that it's kind of a mistake or not a mistake but a byproduct we're working on a game and like oh i guess we need a tax id to fill up these forms for

steam oh well we have to incorporate or get a company to get a tax id and it's sort of like a byproduct of wanting to to to make a game so if i Say a show of hands like who who kind of like ended up sort of happening into a game company like sort of not by mistake but like i guess we need this thing all right everybody else was like super laser focused all right well you're surprising me uh because most of the time it's it's it's like it's like we don't even know what's

going on and we had to do it and and they don't and developers don't necessarily realize kind of all the elements and things uh To think about and so you can kind of do i mean a word cloud if you know normally our word cloud is focused on all the design and gameplay issues not necessarily all the questions and things around business and and marketing and all of that stuff and i think what i've certainly seen is that the more successful studios it tends to be intentional it tends to be deliberate decisions around these elements

and questions They tend to do well often times when i say that i sort of get the remarks like oh well it's chicken and egg and you know once you become successful then you can go back and think about a road map and you know treating your employees right and and strategy and all this kind of stuff uh and and people tend to think that the success comes first and then all the sort of more intentional choices come after uh and while that may happen i Mean lightning can strike at any point it is much

more common when uh you make intentional and deliberate decisions to begin with and that sort of puts you on the path for uh success uh with a higher degree of of probability um so i think i think even just accepting that there is intentional and deliberate choices that you have to design the business and design the studio and put the effort uh and resources into that i think is already You know you're way ahead of most studios are developers who kind of it's all very tertiary and aren't even thinking about it um so that's just

sort of the first part uh the next part is this idea of building a foundation for success and i think success is a very tricky word that if we went around the room and asked people well how do you define success what does the success look like we may have all slightly different Versions of that success maybe we can kind of buck it into certain categories uh you know why i want to be profitable or i want to make an award-winning game or you know i want to pursue my dreams you know so maybe we

can start bucketing it but but it's dangerous to kind of talk about success without defining it and i think there's no right or wrong answer here i mean if you look at runners uh you know the things that the sprinter does is much different than the Things that the marathoner might do you know they're both athletes they're both runners uh but they are training and eating and preparing and being coached with very specific definitions of success uh in mind uh and i think i think many developers it's like oh we think we have to go

to the gym and maybe do something and they're not quite sort of understanding what direction they're Going in or there's conflict there's conflict between uh founders definitions of success i mean we we've seen this firsthand with execution labs uh where you know we would invest in a team and as as we worked together and went further we would uncover sort of deep rooted conflicts in terms of what each of the founders was trying to achieve uh and uh and so that's sort of an interesting process to to get to that One of the best examples

i've seen of this issue actually comes from uh henry smith who famously did a game called space team a few years ago uh coincidentally enough henry works from from gameplay space uh but this was actually before gameplay space uh existed so i can't take any kind of uh credit for for his achievements there but um so it was a cool for the new space team it's a Mobile game uh and it's a multiplayer mobile game uh kind of local in the sense that we're all holding our phone and it's telling or we have to like

scream at each other and say okay push this button and turn this wheel we're trying to like not have our spaceship crash uh and it's a really kind of wacky innovative game and he's won tons of awards and got a lot of attention uh and one of the things people would say to him is like oh aren't you disappointed Uh because your game was a failure uh henry had released the game for free without any monetization i mean there was a little like donate somewhere deep in the menu but essentially the game was not set

up to make money and and they would say oh yeah henry you're really sorry like you know you failed and and and he's like well no i didn't fail it was a huge success because uh making money was not my Priority i had these specific priorities so this was his definition of success he had been a aaa developer he worked at bioware and a bunch of other cool studios and so he wanted to become an indie and he had never done that so he said well my my goals are to you know learn how to

program in ios and deal with the app store i want to make something small so i can kind of have a better sense of judgment for my future games get my name Out there and so he went on to say that actually despite the fact that he didn't make money the game was a huge success because it far out outpaced what he had set as his own definition of success so that's just a really nice example and if you want to read that case study and see all the numbers you can just google space team

retrospective but in the case of this lecture we're going to assume that everyone here wants To to make money this is the the business track after all uh and a lot of the stuff that i do tends to be this kind of uh intersection of doing cool stuff making great games but also being entrepreneurial about it and generating revenue and being successful from a commercial financial point of view i just gave the henry example as one of the few cases where developers kind of clearly outlined what they were trying To achieve but we're going to

focus more so on the business success type definition all right so um the last part of the the the title is this idea of avoiding business disaster that's the more clickbaity piece uh and i can tell you an endless amount of horror stories and disaster stories and all kinds of craziness uh but all be more positive and and sort of Turn it into uh lessons uh and i guess sort of uh tips or or advice so we'll frame this as as lessons uh without necessarily getting into all the the the dirty juicy bits of of

of how we learned those uh lessons but uh all right so so lesson number one is that finding your co-founders is more important than that initial cool concept so now we're going back really at the very initial uh phases of of of the startup process Uh and oftentimes uh developers are kind of frozen uh in one or in being able to move forward because they feel the burden to come up with the cool awesome idea you know before they have the confidence to go ask people to join in their journey or become part of a

studio et cetera and in fact it should be the the reverse right you should find the people that you want to work with and quote unquote get married to and build something with And then together you figure out you know what that amazing amazing thing is uh and generally when we were investing we really saw it as a as a sort of three uh three-team uh co-founding team minimum necessary it was always we wanted to be someone in a creative leadership role someone in a technical leadership role and someone in a business leadership role now

the business leadership role tended to be the harder one and in fact in in Some of the deals we wanted to do we actually turned back the team and said you need to find your tech uh your um your business co-founder uh and they would be oh but we're so talented and so skilled and our art is amazing yeah you are but you need someone at that sort of same same leadership level that can fight with you about the business stuff the same way that the creative and technical people can kind of fight with each

other and and debate um and so and So uh and then they would go out and come back with their you know business co-founder and then those studios would perform uh phenomenally well um and so um i see this also with students right i said as a student i mean sure you're working on your portfolio and you're you know building interesting projects but really you should be spending that time finding the people that you want to collaborate with and build a company with And so you know this idea of finding your founders or your partners

first before finding that one awesome little cool idea is an important lesson and i've seen that a lot with different studios all right lesson number two is to set up the studio right the first time and this is kind of uh Related to the the issue we mentioned before which is like we're setting companies up as a byproduct of needing a tax id to fill in our steam you know forms or whatever and so what tends to happen is that companies are formed in the cheapest quickest easiest way possible now this is highly dependent on

what part of the world you're in and certainly some regions of the world are much more difficult And much more expensive to set up companies are much more painful but you know certainly in canada or or u.s uh you know oftentimes you see people setting up you know just sort of a sole proprietorship type structure or an llc and then that structure doesn't serve them well as they move forward uh and so you do have to think about what are you trying to achieve Or what that success path looks like and for example if you

think you're going to go out in a future date and start raising funds through venture capitalists or angels generally they will only invest in a corp in a c corp just because it's easier from a tax point of view and the issuance of shares is much easier and so if you're not a c corp in that particular case then it becomes a burden or hurdle For them to do the deal and then they'll force you to convert your llc into a c corp which is easier to do in certain cases or others and so you

know having uh made deliberate decisions and not sort of doing it as a oh by accident uh you can think ahead in terms of what you're actually trying to achieve uh and and setting up uh the right corporate forms of course this is where our lawyer friends come in again Uh and this is also um kind of a you know of always use professionals right unless unless your mom or dad are are accountants and lawyers uh or or that you were one in a past life um i cannot overstate the the benefit of actually working

with proper professionals to set your companies up straight and and the you know the the shareholder agreements and co-founder agreements and contracts and all that kind of stuff i mean we can Spend a whole day talking about um you know setting things up uh properly and for those who watched uh indie game the movie a few years back and all the drama with phil fish and fez and all that kind of stuff uh that whole movie wouldn't exist if phil had used a lawyer is basically the sort of the the key uh the key lesson

lesson there because they didn't set things up right and they didn't have contracts and ip assignment and all that kind of stuff so um So i'll stop there because it's a fairly deep topic but but setting things up right is uh critical and i see it all the time where it doesn't happen all right next one is lesson three is pursue project design for success from the start now of course this has that that loaded term success so that means we actually had a discussion amongst ourselves as a team as co-founders what is the success

we're trying to achieve And then we're designing a project or roadmap of projects to achieve that kind of success and so what gen generally happens is we sit around we think about okay what games do we want to make so i like ninjas and robots let's make that you know and what games can we make so what skills do we have what resources are available and we stop there and it tends to be That the games that we want to make and can make generally are a commercial disaster that the chances that those ones actually

have uh commercial potential and a chance to succeed uh is is i don't say nil but but very very difficult and so many many developers don't continue to say what games should we make uh and and trying to and this is where you're sort of matching the question relative to your definition of success And of course that's a much harder bullseye to hit is the intersection of the things that we want to make that we can make and that we should make and here should being you know that allow us to achieve our definition of

success i will often see this particularly with younger teams uh coming out of school so oftentimes uh schools that have game programs they might have like a senior project or a group project and you have A bunch of the students working together in a cool game and then they're having so much fun or the or the game is getting a lot of praise and they're like oh let's go be a startup and and live the indie life and work on this game and and ship the game uh and then i'll go in and look at

the game and say well listen that is a fantastic student project like you know great like yeah we got a plus and it was amazing i said that game will sell zero Copies because it was not designed it was not set up to be a commercial success it was designed for the parameters of the course it was designed to get an a plus you know from the teacher and so that's what i mean that you have to think about the projects you're working on uh and and they have to be sort of designed to achieve

the success you want from the beginning it's a similar story with uh game jam Games right you'll do a game jam and you'll have a you know this burst of creativity over over the weekend and you'll make a super cool prototype and you may maybe win the game jammer you get a lot of praise but it's very difficult then to take the game jam game and turn that into something that's commercially viable it has happened uh but i mean i haven't looked at the numbers but there are literally tens of Thousands of games now that

have been made through the game jam over you know the span of whatever it is 10 years but i i mean i can probably only count a handful that have actually have gone on to um being commercial release so the so the percentage is extremely extremely small but it's excusable because you're not sort of doing the game jam to make something that's the nugget for a commercially viable sustainable business oriented game you're there to innovate And be creative and have fun with your friends right so the context of a game jam is just a different

context so that's again the sort of the point of thinking about what you're creating and does that actually link to what your definition of success is and and many studios don't uh don't do that all right next lesson is and related to this previous point is do your competitive and market analysis and and do it often Um you know this comes up as part of the pitching process when you're pitching publishers when you're pitching investors they tend to want to have a sense of where you position yourself relative to the competition if you're going into

the marketplace who's already there what are what are gamers playing uh et cetera because they're trying to gauge what your chances of success are and uh and Also the whole genre or category is that a generally successful category is it a less successful uh category um and and many developers won't do that until like i forced them to eat the broccoli and like oh i guess i have to have that slide and they'll go off and sort of do some some analysis on app annie if they're mobile or steam spy and and so on um

one of the best examples of this was uh ryan clark uh down in the corner there He he ran uh um his uh a twitch and youtube show called the clark tank um and he was sort of broadcasting his competitive analysis so he had had great success with crypt of the necrodancer uh which sold a ton of copies and so he was a you know an indie success and uh and then he realized well jesus you know i i'm gonna spend another two three years of my life and a bunch of my Resources and money

like i better not screw this up and i need to think about what kind of game is selling what's not you know what genres are going up which ones are going down um and so he embarked on this process of competitive and landscape analysis and he sort of did this weekly show where he would go through the steam sort of best sellers list and look look at the ones that were going up and the ones going down and kind of think through why was that and You know what trends were going on and and thankfully

he you know shared that process uh with his viewers and he he paused a bit uh when i think he he went deep on his new game uh industries of titan but industries of titan is a direct result of that process now i really hope the game is a massive success and then i'll sort of use that as a continuation of of the value of Doing that um uh but but he's sort of been the most visible example of this competitive analysis process last year at gdc in the indie game summit there was another lecture

i thought was really good called know your market making indie games that sell there's an indie developer named eric johnson from infinite monkey it's available on the vault i think it's one of the free ones And he did some really deep crunching on on numbers and was looking at median sales uh relative to certain tags and genres uh and i guess this font is a bit small um uh i can barely even see it uh so so you know action rpg is the tallest uh bar as one of the examples of a genre that's performing

well uh i mean this is data from a year ago so maybe that's sort of higher or lower i mean this is why you want to do Competitive analysis frequently rpgs and so on but like puzzle platformer is this tiny little tiny little slice at the end and so this is an example where a lot of developers will say oh let's make a puzzle platform it's a genre that we're fans of there's so many classic great examples of puzzle platforms we all love uh and it's relatively easy to make all right let's go make it

and then you don't realize that in fact you know the landscape for puzzle platform is hyper Competitive super saturated uh and and from a revenue point of view just does not represent a meaningful uh opportunity to generate sales uh just as an example uh and then he did another one where he was looking at um this wasn't genres i think it was like specific attributes or tags uh and uh you know again here the really high bar is it's moddable uh or team-based uh online multiplayer etc but on the far end whether you can barely

See like one line of pixels of blue is four player co-op and this was um you know i wasn't surprised by this because if any of you watched some of my past lectures i always beat up on four player co-op even though even though it's a fun style of game from a from a commercial perspective it's a very challenging genre to to be in uh it doesn't lend itself well to um to sales because again it assumes that i have friends and that I have a sofa and i have four controllers and et cetera but

here with some of the data to kind of validate that so now if we were sitting around saying let's make a party game a four-player co-op we love those games we remember towerfall from you know years ago let's go do it and it all sounds great and fun but you never stop to do your analysis it's like you're going to have a hard time getting investors getting Publishers getting people to to back the game unless you're independently wealthy and can just do whatever you want that's going to be a really hard time to sort of

build a successful studio behind anyway so that's from last year uh just a great example of doing this kind of deeper uh deeper analysis uh that we rarely see from from developers all right lesson number five Accept that you are not in the game making business you are now in the fan building business and this is a very deep very fundamental philosophical shift uh that i try to uh you know again force the broccoli on but again if you've determined or have you set commercial success in building a sustainable viable studio generating revenue uh and

making great games you're almost not in the game making business right you're not just sort of Sitting there making a game you are really making a community you're making a fan base i mean this year gdc is the first year we have the discoverability series of of lectures uh a lot of the stuff that we hear about tends to be about community engagement and and and using all kinds of tools uh to engage a community but i think actually it goes way deeper than that and it's about thinking about your business primarily as a fan

base building business then Everything you do really is about capturing uh that fan base delighting the fan base engaging with that fan base and then sort of having them follow you through the journey of the studio and a great example of that is a montreal bay studio uh kit fox games actually tanya who's the one here in the black cardigan uh is giving a couple of lectures at gdc and so is victoria uh the one doing the sort of debish movement Um and and uh uh their current game is boyfriend dungeon which has been getting

a lot of buzz and hype that a massive kickstarter but it didn't happen overnight they started i think it was 2013 they did a barely break even mobile game called shatter planet moon hunters did moderately better uh shrouded isle did better still now boyfriend dungeons their their next game uh but importantly Um they uh were sort of focusing all of their fans on kit fox and that kit fox itself was having this sort of a sense of identity and a brand and a focus a lot of the games they do or all the games they

do are based on procedural uh procedural technology procedural level generation uh tanya is a former mmo aaa writer and so their games are very writerly and narrative focused uh and so even though their games you know look different different Style different genre uh they were able to sort of go after fans who like those kinds of games uh and sort of funnel them into the kit fox world such that those fans were ready for the next one and ready for the next one and ready for the next one so so when they launched the boyfriend

dungeon kickstarter all of their fans just sort of piled in and you know within i think it was like four hours they had more than uh surpassed their kickstarter goal And so this is kind of a part of a long-term uh planning process uh and and um last year at devcom there was a great quote from saralyn smith who's the senior director of global community at blizzard and she had this great line about you know embrace the great fandom frontier and how blizzard sees or they believe that game building is community building and so uh

what we often see whether it's community or marketing it's that thing that you do After you're done with your game making or it's the thing you make a little tweet on saturday when you're not busy making the game and so i think you really have to see it as as sort of inseparable it is completely coupled the process of making the game is the process of making the community and vice versa and so that means that you need to have the right people have the right resources implement the right tools you Know plan that labor

it's not the other stuff that you do when you have a spare moment you know it is central and core to the to the success of your game but more importantly the success of the of the studio so it may seem like a slight sort of i you know maybe it's a shift in my thinking uh but but understanding that you know building community or building fan base uh is your your business All right related to that lesson six uh and i've talked about this before build momentum by building scaffolding uh and so um the

idea of scaffolding is that you are building that kind of momentum so kid fox again serves as a great example in that they had a vision they had a road map all of the games they were working on were procedural narrative driven etc they had a target audience in mind and were able to sort of funnel that towards Them they come to gdc and get invited to other conferences that talk about procedural stuff when investors or publishers want to look at studios that do that kind of thing they go see tanya and the kid fox

team because they've built a reputation for it within the industry uh you know for for um you know whenever there's a articles on kotaku or polygon that want to talk about the trend of procedural Games they give kit fox a call you know the tools that they build the technology that they work on evolves and grows over time when they hire people they hire people that have that the right mindset or experience to do those kinds of games and so there's all kinds of momentum that's built on many different fronts that that sort of builds

um or increases the probability of ongoing success for the students this is the idea of like you're building the Scaffolding uh to support the the foundation of the of the studio um and you don't get that if one day we start a company and say i like racing games let's make a racing vr game and that doesn't work well because vr is not selling all right let's do we hear pokemon goes cool so let's do a you know a ninjas ninjas go like this lego but uh whatever ninjas ar uh and so we abandon all

the racing stuff and all the vr stuff and then we Go do you know ninjas running around the street and then well it doesn't work because we're not pokemon so uh let's go do a steam game and and so you're just sort of resetting restarting different tools different technology different talent set different fan base you know you're not really building any any momentum um as a tangible example of that uh i think it was last week or the week before kit fox announced that they were publishing dwarf fortress the um The one with the sort

of the graphical tile set uh dwarf fortress for those who don't know is i think it's like a 15 year old game it's like an ascii based super deep procedural simulation based game uh it's it's only available through the developer's website and as a patreon thing uh but tanya met tarn who's the creator of the game at some of the gdc panels and they both are working on deep uh procedural simulations and it was a really natural Fit then for kit fox to work with uh the studio behind dwarf fortress uh and they communicated that

wonderfully to to the fan base and i was like this is a match made in heaven this is wonderful you know i will buy it immediately as soon as it's available on steam as opposed to any kind of backlash or what the hell is going on because of that scaffolding because of that momentum because of the sort of the The cohesion of of the vision roadmap lent itself to that you know just as an example or manifestation of that all right lesson number seven uh is to always pitch opportunities not problems uh and this was

a kind of a fundamental point at my lecture uh on my on my funding lecture last year in that so many developers see funding and pitching as a solution to their missing money problem right we're all working Hard we're problem solvers we're working on our code and then we wake up one day oh crap we're missing money we got to go solve our our lack of money problem and they just go out into the world they come to gdc and they look for the people with the money and say hey i have this problem i'm

missing money do you want to give me a bag of money and everyone's like i don't care about your missing money problem and so last year If this particular area is of interest to you i did this kind of deep deep look of the the forking of of of opportunity relative to investor and the first fork is really the split between are we talking about a commercial opportunity or non-commercial and i gave examples of what a non-commercial right you're working on a piece of art or or something to a more serious game or social impact

game and so there's other sources of funding For that but if you're looking at a commercial project or commercial opportunity then you really have to decide whether this is the projects that the thing that represents the opportunity or is it the company that represents the opportunity and the important thing to understand is that that fork uh dramatically shifts how you pitch who you pitch to how the deals are structured terms sources all that kind of stuff And so 99 of the developers who are trying to solve their missing money problem don't understand that that second

fork even exists right to them it's i'm missing money i go get a bag of cash and you first have to understand you know what is it is it the project or is it the company um my whole lecture from last year is specifically about that so i'd encourage you to go see that but just quick quick quick on the project side this tends to be Games's products it tends to be things that are premium it tends to be things that are consumable uh often steam or pc and and console and so it sort of

represents a linear success curve you know i sell units and i sort of succeed in a linear manner whereas on the company side this tends to be things that are games as a service that are highly scalable multiplayer kind of In theory are endless and infinite in in their consumption so stuff like fortnight and league of legends and hearthstone etc often this means free to play but it doesn't have to mean free to play um and so so just super quick unless you are pursuing projects and your vision is to do things that are highly

scalable of exponential growth potential like don't even bother trying to get equity vc angel investment in Your company because they won't even listen to you uh if the product if it's really about the project and it's sort of a product then you want to look at project sources which is publishers and kickstarter and government funds and all that kind of stuff but i'll stop there because there's a whole lecture on that from from last year uh all right lesson number eight match your business model to the game's Needs not your preference uh i'm business model

agnostic premium is great if they make sense free to play is great if it makes sense ad driven is great if it makes sense this really is a question of what business model will enable the game to succeed and more often than not i see the reverse which is which business model does the developer want to implement often or historically this has been sort Of the issue of people not being comfortable with free to play or not having the experience for free to play but the most sort of tangible example i see of that now

is multiplayer only games that are premium right a multiplayer only game is screaming to be free it's screaming to be free to play because as a developer the most critical thing is getting Players into the game so your lobbies aren't empty that there's matches or whatever the game format is and if you don't get those players in the lobby then your game is gonna take a quick nose dive and it's sort of a spiral of death uh and it's the it's the it's the multiplayer only premium pricing spiral of death um there's other examples but

that's sort of the most uh obvious one and then oftentimes i'll all you know Advise a student i say hey like why are you doing that like this game really should be free to play like ah well that's tricky and we don't really know how to do it and you know we need to make some money so we're going to put 20 bucks on it it's like dude nobody cares like that's not how you're supposed to make that decision you have to make the decision based on the model that will actually enable the game to

succeed once you Figure that out then you go back and say well geez how do we make this work how do we deliver it who do we have to hire what expertise what do we have to learn and then you sort of solve that problem but the end user the marketplace doesn't care what your internal challenges are or what you like or don't like or which you know which one you worked on on your last game um and so and so i see this mistake quite often is that you're Making sort of you're making your

business model decisions based on excuses or sort of lack of understanding as opposed to looking at the game saying what do i really need to do to make that game game succeed all right lesson number nine do not focus on launching focus on launching successfully right so so game developers uh trained as artists and programmers and designers uh are so focused on the product and Sort of delivering or developing it and then shipping it and they forget that they have to do the marketing or they don't have the time or resources or understanding how to

do the marketing uh and and so they're like well hey my job is a game developer and my business is a game making business so i'm focused on making the game and getting it out the door and sometimes they'll rely on publishers to worry about the sort of the marketing Piece sometimes they'll just sort of pray to the gods of walmart or or steam that it all works out uh and and you know this is the whole sort of sort of joke about uh you know if my game goes out into the world will anybody

even notice it and that's the whole discoverability uh challenge and so the point is as a studio since we've already sort of accepted that we're in the fan base building business we're not just in the i make Games and put them out the door business you have to be thinking about all these things you have to be thinking about what do i need to do in order for the launch to be a successful launch and getting the game out the door you know will not achieve that listen making games is difficult it's a great accomplishment

to get a game released you know high fives pop the champagne i mean it really is not easy to do that But again if you're trying to build a successful business a successful studio a viable studio uh that's not enough right you have to be thinking about the successful launch that also means you need to be thinking about that from a budgeting and scheduling point of view and so i often talk about this in this sort of metaphor of of the the bridge halfway built this bridge is completely useless right well the goal is to

get to the Other side of the river and so we need to plan the timing the resources the labor the you know the beams whatever to get to the other side and so many studios don't see the other side as the goal they see the middle which is finishing the game and then they're there in the middle of the river they're like oh crap we did not plan for there to be a soft launcher we thought early access was Only going to be one month but now it's going to need to last six months and

we have no more cash flow and no more uh you know we can't pay our staff or or whatever the case may be because they didn't they didn't realize that they're not trying to be in the middle of the river they're trying to be on the other side of the river so so um this one you know can surprise you at the last minute and everyone's feeling happy that they've made a game And then it goes out there and then you blame the indie apocalypse and all this kind of nonsense but the reality is is

you build half a bridge and and you can't like like that's not success and so you have to be planning scheduling budgeting uh uh you know to get to the fully across to the other side of the river all right the tenth lesson Final lesson uh is this idea of having a giving or ecosystem mindset so i've been in the game industry uh well 23 24 this is my 23rd gdc and i believe deeply in the passion and the drive and the love of games and the love of game making that the industry has i've

always been very giving and and sort of you know sharing and a lot of things that i've built like execution labs and gameplay space and previously i was actually the the head Of the um the igda the international game developers association for for many years uh and so i i sort of have this deep sense of of community and and ecosystem uh and in montreal where i'm based we have that everyone is so supportive everyone is helping and and ready to give advice and and feedback and and help each other out uh and i'm saddened

when i do go to other parts of the world where that sort of Ethos is not there and in particular you see that sometimes where one studio has some success and they go off in the mountains and hide and they want to protect that success from the rest of the the ecosystem and so i'd encourage you you know as you build successful businesses as you grow and learn uh to share that with the other developers in the community whether that's virtual or down the street uh and sort of help the whole the Whole thing grow

i mean systems are such complicated uh sort of black boxes with so many inputs and outputs uh and and having this kind of uh giving and ecosystem mindset uh well that one while that may sound a bit sort of fluffy and soft i think it actually does contribute to the success of a studio uh sort of being a um uh uh you know part of the the fabric of the of the community uh and then i'll throw in related to that sort of a bonus lesson Don't don't be an uh i mean we we see

that uh often these days i mean there's a lot of sort of uh tension around uh um you know labor and crunch and studio shutting down and all that kind of stuff and people making bad decisions or you know surprising hundreds of staff that oops tomorrow we're shutting down this kind of stuff and so even though this talk has been more of a you know it has been a Business oriented uh you know commercially oriented talk uh i i think you know we can all do that in a in a less asshole-ish uh way there's

a great book the no rule and actually robert sutton has written a bunch of books on on this stuff but i'm gonna assume everyone in here is not an and super super nice um but i guess the sort of the ultimate uh lesson and so i don't have to end on the uh comment but really the ultimate thing of course is to make great games uh that ultimately you know even if you make all these deliberate choices and decisions and think about your business all that kind of stuff um you know none of that replaces

the need to make great visionary compelling games it's just what we see today is making the great games isn't enough you do need to think In this much more holistic uh you know get to the other side of the river mindset but fundamentally it starts with making great games thank you very much all right so we do have some time for questions if you have questions can you just uh line up in the the center there's a mic on the floor uh i'm happy to address uh any of the points or lessons that i made

here uh But of course if you have sort of slightly different uh questions i'm happy to dig into that as as well all right we have someone uh don't don't be shy all right go ahead hello so um you mentioned about the three co-founders um the technical guy the artist tech guy and the business guy and like i My studio is exactly like the example you gave in blacking the business co-founder um what would the business co-founder do at the first like one year of development of a game okay i may be making a full

out of myself by just by this question but i think that i'm okay with that yeah listen it's it's it's a great uh It's a great question and um that that business person and oftentimes the business person may not actually have a business background it could be another designer program or the producer is taking on the business responsibility so i'm not saying you got to go get an mba student and like okay you're the business person put a suit on and so so i should have said like someone taking on the role of the business

leadership responsibility i mean ideally they have Some uh business uh background or marketing background uh and so uh it's a great question because this sort of uh hints to the notion that you are not accepting yet or understanding yet that you are a fan based building business right so that person not only has to start thinking about uh the branding of the company in the studio already has to be thinking about the audience of the project should already be doing competitive analysis before you even Start coding and having that sort of debate amongst the teams

saying i think we're going to do a ninja game all right have we done a search and looked at ninja games let's dig into the numbers and see what what makes what makes sense or not or you do a prototype and so then they're going to start running you know user group or play test nights to get you know user like real user input and um and then they're going To go to the shows to talk to publishers and investors so so that that person is a fundamental to the whole start of the business the

whole start of the company and the whole start of the project and needs to be there from the start it's not someone that you bring in two years later so okay make some tweets and go market this thing because chances are that you've not made something that's relevant or marketable or doesn't have the right hooks uh to Get you there so you need that person sort of arguing with you from the from the very beginning yeah and just to to be sure you do recommend that person to be not one of the other two like

taking on the role do you do yeah because it's right being a separate person yeah because it's hard to argue with yourself right because if fundamentally you're a designer and then you're like i'll i'll Put the suit on from time to time then you're like oh we should make it this we should put free to play but no let's make like like the designer and you will always win that argument um so so there needs to be another person that sort of says well i'm going to fight for what's you know viable and dig into

the numbers and sort of so it has to be someone else thank you very much all right thank you go go ahead mr mike Hi jason mike lynch from rensselaer polytechnic good to see you um good to see you too um question for people who would be doing teaching uh the schools i think are coming up really short on conveying these kinds of lessons to seniors who are about to go out there and maybe start a studio uh what can schools be doing more to make that kind of mindset happen among game designers yeah what

wonderful wonderful question so so uh i mean obviously academia is Its own kind of complex system uh ideally what i'd like to see is that schools that do have a kind of a senior or final project that the end goal of that project is to ship it like i think i think they should actually go through that some schools might do that i don't think many do the university of indiana does i just found out okay so they're trying to put that in place that's a problem for us because it's infrastructural and There's there's copyright

issues and business and like whatever but just the process of a bit like henry where he said oh my goal was to learn and make estimates and sort of go through the whole cycle and stuff so i think i think actually having the student ship it uh is an important learning step but it's also the idea of including sessions on marketing community management entrepreneurship and ideally that's for all of the students Not just the ones that are taking sort of a marketing minor or something it's like everyone in game development game whatever in the school

should all be taking like a fundamentals of of game economics and business and marketing i think thank you very much yeah all right next hi uh thanks for the talk my name is uh my name's kyle and i i recently started an llc by myself so i know that's one thing i shouldn't be doing Uh but it depends what your your goals are depends how you might find success but um in terms of my own skill set i am a business person first i'm probably the person that everyone hates like hey i got this idea

um but i have a little bit of technical expertise and i have a little bit of creative expertise and it seems like when you were talking about rule number one it seems like everyone has predefined roles one person just technical one person is business one Person does creative is there an opportunity for blended roles and if there are blended roles do you think there's different rules if you're starting a studio which has blended roles rather than defined roles yeah i think i think blended roles is fine and the reality is when you're a three-person studio

just getting started like everyone's doing some mixture of everything or things that they're not Sort of trained to do um the the main it's more about um called the arguments or the debates that the leadership has to have it's less about on the ground who's doing the coding and who's doing the art asset like i'm less concerned about that it's more about when the the founders are debating with each other what the road map should be you know who our audience is and what kind of genres or platforms Do we go after uh you know

when you have those debates you you need someone sort of taking the perspective from a creative point of view you know what's going to be beautiful what's going to be interesting what's going to make a great game you need someone from the technical point of view says well that may be interesting but there's no way we can build that or unreal doesn't support that yet or it's you know we need this tool that we can't afford like so they Have to sort of fight from the technical perspective and then you need the business person to

fight say well that sounds crazy but it's going to cost us 20 million it's never going to work like like so that it's more about the sort of the tension and debate amongst those people when you're making those kind of high-level uh company level vision level decisions it's less about we're sitting around doing the day-to-day work of making a Game i'm less concerned about the blended blendedness at that level okay thank you cool thanks all right go ahead uh hi thanks for the talk i have two questions but i think we may have time one

uh out of curiosity what do you see is the role of agents in starting up a company is that something that you'd like to see something that you don't Like to see from an investment point of view are you an agent no are there any agents in the room um yeah i mean i mean there are some agents that are are great super super uh uh valuable that have huge networks uh and so on uh and then other agents which are maybe less reputable um but you know that's fairly common um i think ultimately it

depends what you're trying to achieve Uh and you know an agent is not really going to help you build community and worry about your fan base and make those hard decisions about what's you know competitive analysis all that kind of stuff and you know if you want the agent to go after a publisher or investor i mean that's always a little bit tricky but in the right context could help and i think i think the issue is um you know when you're sitting around Saying oh we don't know anyone and we don't know how to

get the publisher let's go ask an agent to help us i mean the agent vets you first and they're trying to determine whether or not they can sell you and and sort of find a deal for you and so on uh and unless you know you're some rock star or have a huge track record or or or the game has progressed far enough that it's something really beautiful or something really interesting or a huge opportunity Then the agent's not going to take you on anyways or or or they shouldn't i mean it's like it's like

the the joke about like i don't want to be part of a club any club that would have me as a member so it's like a little bit of of that because the point where the agent looks at you says oh yeah you've got something amazing i'll represent you that should be the very moment where you say you know what i think i'll represent myself Uh but that's i mean that's just me and sort of having confidence in in what i do um so so oftentimes uh agents can be very powerful but you really have

to think about the context you're in whether or not you need them or whether they'll even take you on so they're they're not always the quick quick fix uh okay cool and then um just a second question um i know a couple other people have also asked about it but is uh when You're looking at investing is three really the goldilocks number um in terms of just ownership in the company like if there's like five or seven you're like what is this socialist combine versus if there's like soul owners like well this guy's clearly just

going to be a dictator um if if there is um a group that has a more diverse um ownership group but they still have the clear like we have one person leading the business one person Leading the creative and one person lean the tech is that okay yeah i mean so so um another another great great question i mean uh yeah three is kind of the goldilocks number uh two tends to be too few uh and and and then you don't have the sort of this this try like this the balance of the triangle in

sort of those those those fights uh one is definitely a red flag uh in that in that many investors Will not back a solo uh entrepreneur just because there's so much burden so much work that's that's just like it's a herculean effort uh alone uh i mean publishers it's a different story because they're not investing in the company they're just like hey can your team deliver the project and so it's a different discussion um i mean if it's four founders or five i mean it's fine what tends to happen is the more founders you have

the the Smaller the slice of ownership of each founder uh and so the cap table the capitalization table gets quite messy uh and then if you took some money from your uncle and he's sitting on there and you know whatever um the main thing the investor wants to see is that the founding team still own a significant portion of the company such that you're motivated to to put in the blood sweat and tears to make the company succeed and if each of you Owns you know 1 18th of the company then really how committed is

each of the founders and so on i mean like that's my response there is in a very traditional business sense and certainly we're starting to see other implementations like i think there's a lecture i don't know if it was yesterday about like a a collective like a like an employee-owned collective but that's a completely different structure and that's tuned for their success to Have a more sort of democratic you know employee-led uh thing and that's beautiful but also they will never ever get vc money because it's incompatible uh with that structure but my guess is

they would never even ask for like they're just on a different path and so that so that different structure was suitable for their definition of success whereas if you do think you want to build a business and take on investors etc You know then you're sort of playing by the more traditional rules and you don't want to have you know 25 co-founders each owning you know 125th like it just it looks weird when i look at that cap table i want to see that you and the other two co-founders each own you know a significant

portion so that you're you know you're going to go to hell and back and this is going to succeed and you're committed and you have skin in the game and and so on yeah Thank you thank you all right another question thanks for the talk jason appreciate it uh so traditionally in that that sort of structure talking about we have three co-founders but usually there's one that's really strong like a strong personality right oh or no not so much maybe maybe so i guess that's the question is is What has been your findings as far

as like like the the balance the balance of personalities the balance of yeah i mean now we're getting into sort of uh you know i can tell you endless stories about uh sort of the the interpersonal dynamics of the of the co-founders and where it's been amazing and where it's been very sort of toxic um i mean i think i think the idea is that the co-founders are on relatively equal Footing so that when you're having these debates about the future and vision and so on that it's not just one person that says well i'm

the star here so you shut up and you know we're gonna do it my way because then now now that you have that more dictatorship model um so so th this goes back to the notion of finding your co-founders first uh in that you really i mean this is a marriage and and you want to find the people that at a personality level you Combine with uh at a skills level your comp your complementary uh and that you feel like you can actually rely on each other and trust each other and build a company together

and it's not just my my buddy or my brother or you know whatever it's it's i'm really being deliberate about finding those people and and it's not easy it's not easy to find those kinds of people that sort of plug in nicely to make that that co-founding team uh and and i've seen it where one Person is sort of a little more toxic and but they were buddies in high school and so they kind of do it anyways and then you're like five years in and one's trying to buy the other one out the other

one's trying to soothe you and it's just it's just a nightmare so that really goes back to like like find the co-founders first uh before that but uh yeah i don't know go see a counselor if you're having sort of No that's great intermarital uh issues and stuff so all right well i guess uh we're mostly out of time thank you everyone i hope you go out there and eat a lot of broccoli enjoy the rest of the show and fill out your surveys please