Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1530: That’s Why They Play the Games

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

With MLB in limbo, Ben Lindbergh investigates virtual baseball, talking to the designers of three new baseball video games—Ramone Russell of Sony San Diego, makers of MLB The Show 20, Markus Heinsohn of Out of the Park Developments, makers of Out of the Park Baseball 21 (37:56), and Scott Drader of Metalhead Software, makers of […]

I don't wanna live here no more I don't wanna stay Ain't gonna spend the rest of my life Quietly fading away Game people play You take it or you leave it Things that they say just don't make it right If I'm telling you the truth right now

Do you believe it? Game people play in the middle of the night? Hello and welcome to episode 1530 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from the Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, and today I am bringing you a special episode on three baseball video game franchises that have recently released or are about to release new additions. MLB The Show, Out of the Park, and Super Mega Baseball. Sam and Meg aren't gamers, so I'm flying solo today. I was scheduled to be joined by Owen Good of Polygon, who covers sports games, and joined me previously on episode 427 to talk about some of the best baseball video games and the history of baseball video games. But Owen was

among the many employees of Vox and Vox Sites that were furloughed because of the pandemic, and so he was not able to join me as planned, obviously hoping for the best for him and for everyone else affected. But that really just highlights how tough these times have been for many and how many industries have been affected by the cessation of sports and everyone working from home. And video games are the rare industry that is fairly unaffected by these strange circumstances and in fact may benefit as people have more time to themselves and are streaming and gaming more than they typically do. And as many of you know, I am a lifelong gamer. I cover games at The Ringer. people have more time to themselves and are streaming and gaming more than they typically do. And as many of you know, I am a lifelong gamer. I cover games at The Ringer. I have hosted a video game podcast there. I write about video games. And when I can cover baseball and video games at the

same time, I'm happy to have those interests dovetail. And really, the fact that all of us are coping with life without baseball, and many of us, like Owen, are coping with trying professional circumstances, has made baseball video games a source of solace. If you're missing real baseball, and many of us, like Owen, are coping with trying professional circumstances, has made baseball video games a source of solace. If you're missing real baseball, if you have extra time on your hands, which I understand not everyone does, but if you do fit those descriptions, then virtual baseball may be a comfort and a distraction to you. And I wanted to talk today about each of these new games, because each is providing comfort to fans in different ways.

Each is very different, stylistically speaking. MLB The Show is very realistic. It's meant to look like real baseball. It has the real players, all their mannerisms, the most lifelike graphics possible. Out of the Park is more of a simulation game. It's less about actually playing baseball virtually, but planning and operating a team, simulating a season. And Super Mega Baseball is probably more like the show than Out of the Park, but it's a little bit more arcadey and cartoony. It features original characters, not the actual players, but it's still a fairly sophisticated representation of the sport. So each of these different approaches to producing a baseball game demands different developmental skills and schedules, and a balance between fun and realism. And I'm fascinated by the process of making games.

So I'm going to talk to someone who works on each of these series. First up will be Ramon Russell to talk about MLB The Show. Then we'll be Marcus Heinsohn, the creator of Out of the Park, to talk about his long involvement with that series. And last will be Scott Drader, the co-founder of Metalhead Software, which makes Super Mega Baseball. And I'll be going in order of seniority. So oldest franchise first, MLB The Show, followed by Out of the Park, followed by Super Mega Baseball. And obviously we will be touching on all of the ways that these games are being used to simulate the season and provide a diversion, whether it's for fans or players themselves, who have in some cases participated in tournaments using these games.

So let's get to it. I am joined now by Ramon Russell, who has been on the show in the past. He is the community manager and game designer for MLB The Show. And as always, there is a new edition of MLB The Show that's a tradition that extends back to, I guess, 1997. It's been a while, but the new show is, of course, called MLB The Show 20, and Ramon, always happy to have you on to talk about it. Welcome back. Hey, glad to be back. Thank you for having me.

So I want to ask you about the new game, of course, and the development process, but I guess we can start with just the environment that this game was released in for the first time. environment that this game was released in for the first time. The game came out, but baseball didn't. So usually you time the release of the game to coincide with the start of the baseball season. And this time you are, pardon the pun, I guess the only show in town. And that has led to some interesting opportunities, obviously, and some nice silver liningsings It's obviously a very difficult time For many reasons but I wonder how that has changed the Whole post-release process Obviously the way it's been embraced by

People who are looking for some Form of baseball in the absence of real life Baseball and then the participation Of the players first sort of Informally streaming and now In a more formal way via the MLB Players Tournament. So tell me how it's been for you and for the studio to release a game in this unique condition.

It's definitely been a double-edged sword on the, I'll start with the negatives first and then we'll go through all the positives. We happened to just get lucky and finish the game, you know, right as the world started to change. And so we quickly as a company tried to pivot to get ready for, okay, we're probably not going to be able to come into the studio. How do we set everybody up to work from home so we can continue to support this franchise, which is what we're known for.

You don't just launch games anymore. You have to continuously support them throughout the years that they're out. Video game development is already incredibly difficult. And then you have a 100 person development team who needs to now work from home. And that's a very difficult thing to accomplish because there's so many things that need to be said in person, like it's so much easier to just leave my office

and work to somebody else's office and we can tackle an issue in 20 seconds. Those easy issues now become that much harder. So supporting the game has been definitely a challenge. And I think we've done a pretty decent job of trying to pivot as quickly as we can while also being very mindful of how the world changing like this affects people and their families because it's going to affect everybody differently. On the other side of that sword, some other things have came out of it that have been actually quite positive. The engagement for the game has been as high as it's ever been because people are kind of stuck inside. So they're looking for escapism. And, you know, one of the biggest and best things about video games is that they are escapism.

It's a participatory medium. If you want to go away and not think about anything you can do that in a video game whether it's playing you know mlb the show or the new final fantasy that came out there's always something out there for everybody so if you're a sports fan everybody seems to just be really gravitating towards the video game aspect right now which which is awesome to see um it's unfortunate that it took x for y to happen um also on the flip side we have the players league which you alluded to and the mlb um the players association uh san angelo studio on playstation we kind of came together to collaborate on the players league and it's been it's been a great tool for people really to get to know the players better uh trevor may

is the commissioner of the custom league that the players in, and we have one representative from all 30 teams. And you're getting to see these guys' personalities. You're getting to hear stories that you kind of never hear, or you only hear until much later in the guy's career when they start to retire and the story starts to come out. So it's been a wonderful thing for sports fans and for baseball fans in general, just to get to know, you know, a little bit more about Hunter Pence,

you know, a little bit more about Fernando Tatis Jr. Getting to know that Joey Gallo is really good at MLB The Show. It's really, and it's also really awesome to see guys play well with themselves, which is just so weird to see Joey Gallo hitting so many home runs with Joey Gallo. Like those have been definitely one of the silver linings to all of this is watching the fun and engagement and how much, how much knowledge and how much personality we're getting to see come out from the players in the Players League. Yeah, I was going to ask what you could tell me about how that came together. Was it an organic thing where you just noticed a lot of people streaming and players playing and you thought maybe we can make something out of this? Or did it come from your end or from the league or the Players Association?

We can make something out of this. Or did it come from your end or from the league or the Players Association? It was a collaboration between Major League Baseball, the Players Association, San Diego Studio, and PlayStation. The dominoes kind of just fell that way. It was like, here's a wonderful opportunity to let MLB fans get a deeper look at the players because it's all about the players. That's why it's called the Players League. It's just another way for us to showcase their personalities more. And I think people have really been seeing that happen. Yeah, and you mentioned Gallo dominating,

and he's kind of a hustler because he came in underselling his abilities and he was like, other guys who play much more than I do are going to wipe the floor with me. And he has been wiping the floor with them thus far. And it's been funny to see that he's just like launching bombs the way that he does in real life. And I'm curious about whether you think the real life abilities map on to video game abilities. Is there a correlation there? I mean, first of all, do players tend to be good at the game, all else being equal aside from their experience? Does it

prepare them to play the digital version in any way? And beyond that, do you find that players' actual skill sets tend to be represented in the game or not really? I think it depends upon the player. I mean, we've heard over the years that different players and sometimes even managers use MLB The Show as a tool. Let's say they can't really get a scouting report or somebody's just getting calls like, oh, I don't know what this guy throws, but my PlayStation is right here let me turn it on and see okay he's got a four seamer a change up in a fastball and this slider is it's a 90 miles per hour slider and he's got a 98 miles per hour fastball so we've definitely heard stories like that i also after watching the players league i will never play pool or poker with joey gallo yeah i would would never do that because, I mean, he is really, really good at

the game. And yeah, him downplaying his skills, I wonder how much of that was him just trying to lull everybody to sleep. Right, exactly. So one thing that I've written about and talked about and thought about is the way that video games have kind of come to a cultural prominence with sports stopping with a lot of TV shows and movies being delayed. Games have sort of been a source of solace for a lot of people, and maybe people who were not already dedicated gamers have gotten back into it or tried it for the first time. And I've been curious about that when it comes to esports, because of course, I think there's some resistance among some traditional sports fans to the idea that, A, maybe they haven't played games at all and they're not interested,

or B, maybe they play games, but they don't understand why anyone would want to watch games. And I've been wondering whether digital versions of the sports that we're all missing right now could be a bridge for people to that world where they miss baseball. And so they figure, well, I don't normally watch people stream MLB the show but there's no real baseball on right now so I guess I'll try it and maybe they'll like it and get hooked and so I've been curious whether you've heard that from anyone is it mostly people who were already on board spending more time with the game or is it new people who normally wouldn't be into playing or watching this that are doing it out of desperation perhaps at

first but then finding that they like it i think it's d all of the above um i mean we've seen like the padres uh the mets actual they've actually been using the game and commentating on those games live like simulated first day uh i'd never in a million years thought that I would see something like that. I also think it's the biggest thing right now is that a lot of people on the outside who kind of aren't as inundated in the video game community as we are, they're realizing what we've known our entire lives. Video games are pretty cool and they're pretty fun. And they're pretty fun to watch if it's something that you're interested in and it's watching when it comes to esports i think it's the thing you're watching somebody who is so good at something right but also so accessible um when you're watching an esports league you can

watch x be very very good at that game and as soon as that event is over you can turn on your playstation or your console of choice and you can play that exact same game. And I think that's one of the reasons why people resonate with video games so much. Like, oh, I can do this too. Like, there's no real barrier of entry for me to get into this. And I just think people are falling in love and getting reacquainted with video games. And it's something that we've already known. We've always known video games are fun and cool. And it's a great way to escape from a long day at work or when the kids go to bed to get your hour of gaming. We've always known that and just now more people are starting

to realize what we've already known. Yeah. And I have heard some actual baseball broadcasters calling games that are being played in MLB The Show. I know the Giants broadcast team did it. I know the Mets broadcast team did it. And it's a lot of fun to watch that. Obviously, the canned commentary that comes with games has gotten unimaginably better over the years and it's a lot of fun to watch that obviously the canned commentary that comes with games is gotten unimaginably better over the years and it's recorded by real broadcasters and there's so much dialogue that's recorded in an effort to make it sound natural and it has gotten better by leaps and bounds but there's no perfect substitute for actually having in the moment organic commentary and i wonder whether there's anything

you could potentially learn about that, perhaps for future editions of the game based on hearing actual broadcasters call these games in real time, or whether that's something that you've tried before as part of the development process. You know, the broadcasters who participate in the game, do they ever just kind of call a game that's being played

and you record that as opposed to pre-recorded commentary that is actually exactly how our commentary is recorded um kirby saint john who leads the commentary team they basically have our commentators watch the game being played and they just organically talk about what they're seeing like kirby will have a giant excel list of here are the areas of need, here are the areas that we need to feel commentary-wise, and then they will spend hundreds of hours just getting guys to organically react to what they're seeing.

Because with video game development, everything might seem easy, but it's difficult for a commentator to have the same excitement and have his voice sound the exact same when you're reading off of a line as opposed to watching something live there's something about that or the organicness of oh my god this just happened because that comes through in his voice it's kind of hard to get that if you're reading off of a sheet of paper right but by them watching the game and commentating on the game live when those awesome moments have happened in the video game, they're able to express themselves with the exact same amount of excitement as they were if they were in real life. So for the past few years, Kirby and the commentary team, a very vast majority of our commentary is recorded live as they're watching the game playing itself.

So we're in a situation now where if real baseball does come Back it will likely be in Empty stadiums without crowds without Fans and that's going to be a strange Experience and it'll sound different On broadcasts and we got a question From a listener Anton in Minnesota Who asked a question about this that I Will relay to you now he says I

Really enjoyed your conversation mulling the idea Of piping in crowd noises into The stadium or broadcast if games are played to empty stadiums. That's something we discussed. It might be a good jumping off point to talk to the game designers of MLB The Show to see how they determine what crowd noises should sound like. I'm sure a big hit sounds different depending if it actually goes out, is caught at the warning track, or stolen over the wall. Whether it's the beginning, middle, or end of the game probably matters too, but how much? Do Dodgers crowds sound different than Padres crowds? It'd be neat to hear what factors they consider when they're designing sound stages

for the game. So I'd be interested in how you do that, and I guess whether any of it could possibly be applicable if networks decided we want to simulate crowds just to be comforting to people who are used to that. Yes, the answer to that question would be definitely yes. The person who asked that question had, they're thinking right too. Everything sounds different in different stadiums because none of the stadiums have the same geometry. They're all different. They're all unique. Most of our sounds are from actual baseball games. We send a microphone crew to baseball games all throughout the year to record bat and ball sounds, like the sound of the ball hitting mitt, the sound of an outfielder catching a ball,

the different types of bat cracks, like a foul ball should sound differently than a 100 miles per hour exit velocity line drive. And so all of those things are coded in the game. What's also really important is the ambient noise you know hearing the popcorn vendor or hearing the hot dog vendor making sure we have those ambient noises there and also we have to we basically the way that they code the game is that depending upon who the team is their geography how like the boston red sox for you sold out every game so if you played the game during that time it we would mimic that um we also in our season modes we have dynamic crowds where

if the home team starts to get blown out more people will start to leave the game in real time as opposed to waiting so it's something that we're always trying to improve upon is making the game and the crowd as lively and as human-like as possible. So I'm curious about just the normal development process, independent of the strange circumstances we're in right now, especially always interested in the answer to this question from people who work on annual sports games that are always on a tight schedule and the game comes out at roughly the same time every year. How do you develop the roadmap to decide what's going to be in the next edition? What can wait for future editions? And what were the big things that you wanted to accomplish with MLB The Show 20? Well, so all of that kind of starts with the creative director, who's Nick

Livingston, and Chris Gill and Chris Cutliffe. Everybody basically, there are things that have to be done in a year where it doesn't matter what we do, we need to do X, Y, and Z. And those really aren't really voted upon, those things that just needs to happen. And in our feature set, we'll start with, you know, 30, 50, 100 features, you know, during pre-production. We've got to whittle that down to 25 features, right? You know, and that's just an arbitrary number because we have a finite amount of time and a finite amount of resources. So we're always looking at how do we improve the game for people that have been playing this game for years on end? And how do we do things to make the game more accessible and appealing to people that maybe haven't picked it up? And how do we continue to build bridges and roads and extend upon the core systems in the game that people love? core systems in the game that people love. For instance, Road to the Show is an RPG where you use your character trying to get him to the Hall of Fame. Every single year, we need to make improvements to Road to the Show while also listening to consumer feedback to figure out,

you know, which exits do we need to get off on? What do we need to do to continue to make this experience fun for people? Gameplay is huge. Like every single year, we're always going to spend a lot of time on core gameplay systems. We also, every single year, we're always going to spend a lot of time on core gameplay systems. We also every single year want to put something new in the game. For instance, Showdown is a brand new mode that Kyle Blake worked on and people are really enjoying and engaging Showdown. And at the same time, we want to make sure that we're trying to touch every area of the game to make sure that if I only do play now, there's something there for me. If I'm only a role to the show player, there's something new there for me. If I play Diamond Dynasty, there there's something there for me. If I'm only a role to the show player, there's something new there for me. If I play Diamond Dynasty, there's new content there for me. So it's a collaborative effort.

It's definitely a labor of love. It's also a very difficult one. And I think over the years, we've gotten better and better at doing the things we need to do while also surprising people and while also listening to community feedback and trying to iron out those sore spots. And that's something that we'll continue to do in the future. Right. And this is, I think, the 24th edition of the game. So at this point, there's a built-in fan base that some proportion of the people are just going to buy the show every year at the same time. It's just a habit. It's a reflex. You put it in front of them and they'll snap it up. And of course, you can't disappoint them or they'll abandon you, but you expect them to be kind of the loyalists. And then you also want to add new things to attract new players. And I wonder whether there are any particular additions of the game. Obviously, you don't go back to the beginning of the series yourself, but were there any years that you thought we really leveled up this year?

You know, this is the year when we really became modern MLB The Show, or this was not just an incremental improvement. This is really taking a large leap. Well, I like to think we do that every year, right? I think that's the goal of every video game developer. I think it's a little harder for annual franchises because we've only got one year and we've got to pump enough new fresh content changes and fixes and new things into the game to make it appealing for our core and for new people and so it it it'll come back to that risk versus rewards like well we we've got these 25 core features do we push for 30 because if we push for 30 uh we might not be able to test them and iron them out and they might not be as good as we want them to be so maybe it's let's

back this up to 25 and make these 25 the best they possibly can be um and that's basically what we do every year like we want to do everything but we also have to be very mindful that we work on a very short cycle and we can't grab more time we only lose time so as soon as pre-production is over that train has left the station and it's going to like it's coming home late in March, like the game's going to get released. So we have to make sure we do everything strategically to make sure that we're putting the right things in the game and hopefully making them fun enough for people to enjoy them. And then the game comes out and all bets are off because people are gonna play the game and see things that we don't see because our team is just a certain amount of size.

And we try to quickly pivot to be able to make the game live. Like, okay, this is, people really aren't engaging with this the way you want to. So what do we need to do to fix it? Oh, we thought people would love this feature, but if we tweaked it a little bit more, they would like it a little bit more because we're not psychic, right?

We hope that we're psychic, but I think our team has done a really good job the last few years of really listening to how people play the game through community feedback and through our telemetry uh data tracking seeing how people engage with the game and being able to make those strategic tweaks and tinks here and there while the game's already out to continue to have people enjoy it and during this time it's been extremely a lot harder and more difficult to have people enjoy it. And during this time, it's been extremely a lot harder and more difficult to do that, but it's still something that we're doing every year. So I spoke to you, I think it was after the 2017 season going into the 2018 edition of the game. And I wrote something then about how you were trying to kind of keep up with the changes in

the game. And we were coming off a record home run rate that year, of course. And now we're coming off an even higher record home run rate. And again, the reasons for that are still sort of mysterious. And it's partly the ball and it's partly players' mechanics changing. And I know that you always sort of want to mirror real life, but real life baseball has been yo-yoing back and forth more so than it has historically. has been yo-yoing back and forth more so than it has historically. So how are you trying to keep up and make sure that even as baseball fluctuates from season to season, the show is mirroring that reality? Right. So Chris Gill, who's the gameplay director, we have tools in the game that we use all the time. We're able to make the game play itself incredibly fast.

So when we leave for the day uh chris gill will basically set up one of the development kits on basically what we call them like infinite sims where he'll leave the game on and it will just play itself in an infinite inning game and he'll come back to the next morning and the score will be like 762 to 1023. And the game just continues to play itself. And then we'll take all of that data that happened in that game and we're dumping it to a program and it'll spit out numbers. And then Chris Gill and Brian Ma and the gameplay team, they'll basically look at our numbers and we'll compare them to real MLB life

numbers to see how accurate and close we are. And every single year about the time at release, we want our numbers to mirror very closely to what the real MLB numbers are like. So yeah, that's exactly what we do. The game has gotten very home run heavy. So when we run these Sims, we do want to see that uptick in home run rate

and fly ball rate, because it's all about launch angle now. Like everybody's trying to put the ball in the air because the players are so much stronger now. The pitches are thrown so much harder. You want to get the ball in there and hopefully drive it out of the stadium. So it's definitely something that we look at and do every single year. How is it decided which settings to use in the players league? That's a good question. I don't exactly remember who decided on the settings. We definitely wanted to make it accessible to people because we had a lot of players who were new to the game while also at the same time making it challenging.

So I believe they're on veteran. Everybody had to use their own home team, which is great because you get to see Fernando Tatis Jr. playing with himself and going crazy when he hits three home runs in the game. But it was definitely a collaborative effort with everything involved in the players league. And again, it was all about the players. We wanted to showcase the players and their personalities. So I know that the show and its previous iterations have been exclusive to PlayStation platforms since the start, and that's still the case. And that's obviously been a very fruitful relationship. But it was announced late last year that in the future, perhaps as soon as next year's edition, the show would be appearing on other platforms. And I don't know if you've announced the exact timing or details about that yet, but in general, how do you expect that to change the

development process? Because of course you still have to stick to the annual schedule and yet you'll be presumably producing multiple versions of the game instead of just one right it's definitely going to be uh different and it's definitely going to be a challenge but it's a challenge that we're up to and something that we're already planning for and we'll talk a lot more about that later on in the future well i do want to ask about the fact that we're getting a new generation of consoles later this year. And maybe the show will continue to appear on the current generation for a little while, but eventually there will be a leap to the next gen. And I wonder, you know, without necessarily getting into specifics, I suppose, but just in

general, what will that added horsepower mean to baseball games? In what way will the simulations get more realistic or the look get more realistic? Because I know that there are people who maybe haven't seen a baseball video game for a while and they see the current version of the show and they think, whoa, that is really lifelike. But of course, someday the graphics will only get better and we'll look back at this edition of the game and think, gee, the graphics are not nearly as good as they are now. So what will the next leap look like, do you think? What will the next generation of baseball games enable us to do that the past generations haven't? Well, I think for us, it's going to be the exact same approach when we went from PS2 to PS3, we went from PS3 to PS4, and going from PS4 to eventually the next-gen consoles. It's going to present itself with a new set of challenges, and it's going to present itself with a new set of opportunities. And both of those things are something that we've dealt with a few times going from new console generations, and it's going to be the exact same thing.

We've been making baseball games for a very long time, and slow and steady wins the race that we're running, and I think you're going to see that moving forward. Are there things that you sort of table and think we'll get to that when we have PlayStation 5 or whatever the next generation is? Because technically speaking, we're not there yet. Or looking back even at the previous leaps between generations, is it just the fidelity, the graphics, or are there things kind of under the hood that you can do with more power? Yeah, I think that's something that happens with every generational

elite, but I can't really give you specifics right now. Okay. I'm curious where you think the show falls on the spectrum of realism to sort of arcadey pick-up-and-play type gameplay. Again, not that realism and just the experience of being able to play it in a casual way are mutually exclusive, but there are some games that are very hardcore simulations and some games that are not necessarily trying to model every aspect of baseball. And the show strives for realism, but I wonder if there have been times where you implemented something or thought about implementing something and it just wasn't fun. And so the trade-off between fun and realism just didn't make it worthwhile. That's a great question. You kind of hit the nail on the

head. If something is very realistic, but it's not fun, nobody's going to play it, right? So it's all, it's definitely a balance of realism and fun factor uh if the game was too realistic you would get too frustrated you probably wouldn't want to play it which people probably already get now with the game uh baseball is a it's a sport of failure you fail a lot you fail more often than you succeed which is i think very unique to baseball you know if you succeed three out of ten times that kind of gets you into the Hall of Fame. So we want to always keep that core aspect about baseball, that it's a game of failure and large sample sizes while at the same time, we don't want to make it too realistic because it's not fun. Nobody wants to play it. So that's a needle that we try to thread every

single year. And sometimes we might not hit that mark dead on, but it is never because of Ken Griffey Jr. baseball, for instance, and that's always the same player. Is there a benefit to the franchise to having a different face every year as opposed to having someone who you have a long-term relationship with and it's sort of built around that person? Is the concern that it would be too closely associated with that person if something goes awry in their career the the great thing about having a new cover athlete every single year is we get to tell the new story yeah you know when bryce harper was on the cover he had a very unique story he was a very young free agent who everybody knew was going to get a monstrous deal and that that was the talk of the sports town and he signed

so late that you weren't sure what uniform to use. Yeah, absolutely. With Ken Griffey Jr. putting him on the cover, that was this nostalgia that surrounded Ken. And Ken's been a friend of the studio ever since then. And we still work very closely. We're still friends with all of our previous cover athletes and highlight athletes. So having a different cover athlete every year, it allows us to tell a different story and give a little bit back a little bit more backstory on every player like with Aaron Judge it was he won rookie of the year but he he's like he's a humongous human being and he broke the home run record he had an interesting story to tell and we we were a part of that conversation and that's what it's all about we want to tell a unique story and be

able to pull pull the curtain back a little bit on the player so they can showcase their personality so we can learn more about them on and off the field. You'll have Spike Lee or someone will write a storyline and it'll be all sort of scripted out in advance. Obviously, some of it is scripted, but is that restrictive in some ways because you have to stick to that pre-written story? Or, you know, obviously in terms of the quality of kind of the storytelling and the narrative, that could be a benefit. But I wonder if there's a bit of a tradeoff there, too. Yeah, I don't think there's a bit of a trade-off there too. Yeah, I don't think there's a wrong answer. I don't think there's a wrong way to go about single player careers in sports video games. With Road to the Show and how baseball works and with the minor leagues, you kind of create your own narrative because you're the ones playing the game. You're the

ones playing in these AA and AAA stadiums and you're getting called up and your friends are changing, you're getting traded. So there's this internal monologue that you kind of have that you create your own story. And a part of us, we don't really want to take too much of that away and make it too linear. But at the same time, there are great benefits to every approach. Having a curated story, that is amazing. Also, at the same time, it's amazing the way that we do it, where you're creating your own narrative because you don't know what's going to happen. And when we try to leave it open and organic, there are these situations that just happen organically that maybe can't happen if the story is a little bit more scripted. But again, there's no wrong answer

there. Both avenues are wonderful for video gamers. And I think lastly, you know, I've asked you this before, but MLB The Show has kind of been the only game of its type for several years now. It's been a while since there was really a rival of this type of simulation. And, you know, you've kind of vanquished the competition, I guess. And in general, competition can be a healthy thing because you look at what the competitor is doing and you think we have to keep up. We have to be better than them. Or if they have some great idea, maybe we can adapt it ourselves. And you don't really have that. You don't have a natural foil that you're playing off against and going head to head with.

And you're kind of competing with yourself. yourself and yet it doesn't seem as if there's been any drop-off or notable complacency where it's like oh they're just coasting on the fact that they have this uh market to themselves so how do you sort of stay vigilant and and maintain that competitiveness when you're not really competing against anyone else well i think it's it's largely due to the fact to every individual on our team and you know chris cutliffe who's the director of the studio and i think it's it's largely due to the fact to every individual on our team and you know Chris Cutliffe who's the director of the studio and I think that's with any industry you have to be your own worst critic we will always look at our game harder and more harshly than anybody in the public will if you don't like the game or if there's an issue that you have please

believe we have 10 times as many more issues with the game. And that's what we've always done. We've been making this game for a long time. When people tell us they like the game, it's always surprising because all we see is what's wrong with it. It was like, oh man, I wish I could have done this feature. I wish I had another week to work on X. And we've always looked at the game that way. We never really stopped to smell the roses. We maybe take a week or two to do that but after that it's back to okay we need to do x we need to do y we need to we need to go faster we need to go bigger and we've never strayed away from that uh we've always been our our biggest critic and i don't think that's ever going to change um as far as competition is concerned the competition is

every other game that comes out around us and all the other sports games. Like we look at we look at games of all genres like we don't we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves to just looking at other sports games. We look at all the great games because there's something to learn from all of them. So at the same time, we spend a lot of focus on looking internally to see what we can do to make our games and franchises better and better as years goes on. But also same time, we're very mindful of the waves and the changes that happen in the video game industry and see how other games are doing things. Because when you're making this pot of soup, which is basically a video game, you want to have the best ingredients and the most ingredients in there so it appeals to the widest range of people.

And I think over these past 15 plus years, we've consistently done that. And we start every pre-production and we end every production cycle with the same exact notes. Like we don't change. It's always improvement, improvement, improvement. How do we get better? If we miss marks and every video game misses marks,

nothing is perfect. It is never because of a lack of effort. It's just some things you can't control and you don't know how people are going to engage with your game but luckily games now are you continue to work on them after their release and that's something that we pride ourselves on it's been a little bit more difficult now and how the world has changed but we're still working very hard to continue to prove upon the game even after it's out yeah by the way is there any small change or addition to this year's

game that you particularly liked or enjoyed? And I don't mean even one of the major modes or one of the big headline items, but something as small or simple as an animation that was added that is very lifelike or some player mannerism or a sign in a stadium or some little evidence of attention to detail that you remember about this year's version? It's everything. It's really hard to pinpoint one change or one feature. Something that's been really amazing to see is when we do player personalized celebrations and things that players do and having the players play the game now and see those things for the first time and go crazy uh like it just puts a smile on everybody's faces because we remember being in the motion capture facility trying to capture that dance that fernando tatis was doing

and to see him do it in game and to see him to react the way he did that just makes it all worth it all right well i will link to where you can find the players league i know effectively wild listeners have their own league and tournament going on. You can, of course, find Ramon on Twitter at Ramon underscore Russell. So, thanks. It's always a pleasure, and it's nice that having this game come out every year gives us an excuse to keep bringing

you back. So, thanks, Ramon, as always. Oh, thank you for having us, man. We really appreciate it. All right. I'll return in a moment with my second guest, Marcus Heinsohn of Out of the Park Baseball. I am joined now by Marcus Heinsohn. He is the creator and still, after all these years, lead developer of Out of the Park Baseball, a game that has meant a lot to many of my listeners and is definitely up the alley of

any of our listeners who haven't tried it yet. Marcus, hello and thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Hope you're doing well. So I want to ask about the origin story of the series because I think many people would probably be surprised to learn that one of the most in-depth baseball games out there is developed by someone from Germany. And this is obviously going back to the late 1990s. So I know that there are some simulations or games that proceeded out of the

park, whether it's Diamond Mind or Baseball Mogul, but how did you get interested at baseball and how did you decide that there was a niche that wasn't being filled and that you should take it upon yourself to design a game yeah it's it's a weird story actually because usually when you're young here in germany all sports that you really care about is soccer and and baseball. Honestly, when I was 14 years old, I didn't even know that baseball existed. So never even heard about it. Just in some obscure movies, then I didn't really understand the sport. But then something happened. We were a group of friends and we were hanging out at the schoolyard of our old elementary school back then. and it had a soccer field and we were playing soccer there or playing table tennis and one of my friends during the summer he was invited

to miami to visit some relatives so and when he returned they gave him a gift and that gift was a couple of baseball gloves and a baseball bat and one single baseball and yeah and he introduced us to this and we were like okay what's this and we tried it and obviously that the ball didn't last longer than 10 minutes it ended up in some neighbor's garden somewhere we didn't find it but then we decided that was fun. Let's get some tennis balls. And so we started hitting tennis balls into gardens and yeah, that was just so much fun. And then we decided, okay, we need to do something. We need to build on this. And we went to the next big city, which is Hamburg. And every one of us bought a glove and we bought a couple of balls.

And then the father of the guy who brought everything back from Miami, he was working for Dow Chemical. We have a big plant here, a big chemical plant. And there are lots of Americans working there. So we asked him maybe if he could ask around if there is somebody who knows baseball and who could teach us, right? And he found somebody from Colombia. His name was Nelson Castro. And he taught us the basics of baseball.

And he also had a son in our age and he played with us. And then we decided to form our own baseball club and participate in an organized league play in Germany. And that was the beginning. And I think the first Major League Baseball game that I actually saw live on TV, that was 1995. I still remember as it was yesterday. And it was the Yankees against the Mariners. And it was just a great game. And we had to stay up until the middle of the night to watch it. I actually did play baseball for almost 15 years in the German league system. I also got a coaching license, so I taught baseball a little bit as well.

I don't know, I love the sport. I love everything about it. I love to play it. I just I don't know I love the sport I love everything about it I love to play it I love reading about it I love its history and so when I was studying computer science at the University of Hamburg I figured okay I want to play some sort of strategy management game because those types of games are very very big here in Europe mainly about soccer right football manager or I guess championship manager or yes at that point yeah exactly and there was there was nothing like that for baseball as far as I knew and I was always a little bit of a nerd so I taught myself software coding back on my Commodore VC20 when I was like 11 years old and took it from there. So I was already quite capable in programming when I started to develop OTP, the first version.

That was in 1997 and it took me about one and a half years. So 1999, I released the first version it was still for Microsoft DOS no Windows back then and yeah I did everything by myself the graphics the development the database and the text which was a little bit awkward because obviously I'm not an American and so the play-by-play text must have read a little bit weird back then, I guess. Yeah, that's the origin story. And from there, we grew on a very steady pace. And yeah, now we have several full-time employees and the game is available for many different platforms. We also have the hockey game.

It's been quite a journey. During these weird times, I really consider myself to be extra lucky that I was able to turn my hobby into my career, basically. To work in an industry where things are quite safe right now how quickly did you find an audience and was the game embraced and how long were you sort of a one man show for it at what point did you bring on additional developers to help you with the project? The first person who helped me was Shawn Lehman. He actually had that website, baseball1.com, where he had his own database. So when I had the first version done, the problem for me was, okay, how am I going to sell this?

And the internet was pretty much still in its infancy and so i looked up software companies who had anything to do with sports and i contacted them and i got two replies number one was from sean basically and the other one it was a horse betting on horses kind of software thing. I don't know. And the reply was, yeah, that's all nice. But can you do something for betting as well? And I was like, no, sorry, this is space one. I have no idea about horses.

And yeah, so Sean and I, we had a little partnership going. And he basically burned those CDs and shipped them. And I did the development work. And then about a year later, Sean stepped down because he didn't have much time anymore. And Steve Caffrey, who I met in our community back then, he was one of the first customers he took over. And yeah, he was there from the beginning and he was then burning the CDs until we switched to electronic software distribution in 2000, I think. Yeah, it was late 2000.

And what were some of the major milestones when it came to either the game itself and the features that you were able to include, or maybe the sophistication of the simulation? Because Out of the Park now is often used to simulate hypothetical events and seasons, and we'll talk about that. But at what point did it really achieve that level of realism, and what were some of the keys to doing so? I think that was the first big one was when we went to version 3, so in 2001. It was kind of like the first DIPS engine, defensive independent pitching. And what was his name?

Zoros McCracken? Yes. Yes, right. Zoros, yeah. Yeah, so it was kind of funny because I stumbled upon the same concept while initially developing OOTP. But I really couldn't wrap my head around it. So when I developed the rating system initially, I separated case and home runs and everything from the events when the ball is actually hit into the field.

But the resulting pitching ratings, they were so volatile over the different seasons. You had like Craig Maddox, one season he was like amazing, the next season he was far below average and I was like, no, no, this is something is not right. This doesn't make any sense so I scrapped it and I rebuilt the rating system again so that things looked normal and believable and I was like okay that's that's fine and but then for version three when dips was all the rage I was like okay I was like, okay, I have to revisit this and I have to present it in a different way so that it's believable for the user

and easy to understand. And yeah, I think that was a big step. And have you ever been contacted by teams or do you know if teams have ever used out of the park? Because I know that, for instance, Tom Tippett, who developed Diamondmind, he went on to lead the Red Sox stat department for years. And I know that that simulation has sometimes been used by teams. And I know that out of the park is often used by

media members, for instance, who want to consider some sort of hypothetical. But do you know whether teams have ever used it? Or have you heard from many people who work from teams and maybe use it as part of their work or just recreation or maybe even got interested in working in baseball because of out of the park yeah there are some teams who are actually using it but i can't name them because it's confidential what i can say though is that john henry the red socks owner he's he's a huge fan. And we sometimes exchange emails and he's like a beta tester. He even finds issues with the historical database and has suggestions on how to improve certain things. And he's an incredibly friendly and smart person. And yeah, when he first contacted us a few years ago, we were we were like okay this has to be a fake

right and but we were able to verify his email address and uh yeah it turned out it was him and yeah it's it has been a great relationship a virtual relationship we have never personally met i hope that will happen in the future someday but But yeah, that's probably our most famous fan. And there are also a few ex-players and a few current players who know the game and like the game. And as I said, internally, a few teams are using it as well,

but I can't name them right now. I wonder if he used Out of the Park to simulate the backlash to the Mookie Betts trade and if so whether he was taken back by the response to that trade although it may work out very well in the Red Sox favor if there's no season this year. Yeah that's

true right but on the other hand I mean I don't know what I would give to see live baseball right now I miss it so much. And it was the last spring training game. Basically, the day they canceled spring training, I caught the last spring training game on MLB TV,

and it was like a weird feeling. I felt like, okay, this might be the last time for a long time that you can enjoy live baseball. And that was very sad. So let's hope that this is over soon. So I know that over the years, you've become more interested in the user interface and in presenting a more eye-pleasing version of the game, I guess. Maybe the text and the simulation and the sophistication came first,

but over the years you've made the game a lot prettier and you've added sort of virtual representations of the action. So how do you balance that? Because you're not trying to do the same thing that, say, MLB The Show is. You're not going for perfect realism and recreations of what a game looked like, but you also don't want to make this an eyesore and strain people who are playing the game for dozens or hundreds of hours. So how do you balance those things, the cleanliness of the user interface, but also the depth and the detail and the number of options available? Yeah, the good thing that we have several people working

for us now is that we have like small teams who can focus on different things and my job is basically to oversee everything and bring everything together and for example for the 3d representation we have matt who is yeah he's basically the most advanced developer and has been around the longest for us. And he's also working on the core engine and AI. And Matt works together with Jorin. Jorin is a 3D developer and 3D modeler. And they are working together all the time to improve the 3D and it's a lot of work when we started this I had no idea what we just got ourselves into everything 3D is incredibly complex and incredibly work intensive. So, I mean, if you want 3D graphics with the quality of MLB The Show, for example, I mean, you need dozens of people who work like thousands and thousands of hours each.

It's crazy. And for us, two guys doing this and what we have accomplished so far, of course it looks like a computer game from 2001 maybe, I don't know. But we are making steady progress, right? And we are doing the best we can. And it's fun, and it adds a new dimension to the game. When we announced 3D back then, we had a few voices in the community who were like, oh no, I'm never going to use this.

And it totally takes away from the imagination. But right now, most of the people like it very much because you have both, right? You have the 3D and you also have the commentary text. Sometimes they don't match up 100% because it's really, really tough for us to generate text and also have the 3D look at the text and look at what just happened and recreate it entirely the same way that the text reads. That's very, very challenging. There are many spots still left where things simply don't match. But that's one of the areas we are working on every year and we're making progress. For me, the interface is me and Daniel, our graphics designer, who designs the interface

in terms of aesthetics. I'm the one who's building the screens in terms of, okay, the functionality, which buttons do I need? Where do I put them? And which buttons can I hide inside a menu? Because they are advanced functions so that maybe a beginner isn't completely overwhelmed. I mean, the game is very complex and there are endless possibilities you can do with it. So it's hard to not overwhelm. You can must, while on the other hand,

give the veteran users all the tools that they need. And was it difficult at all for you as someone who started this game and it's clearly been a labor of love for you for decades now? Is it hard for you to be a little bit more hands-off or to delegate tasks to other people and welcome other people into the tent and give them the keys and let them work on the game

or has it been a relief for you to have the help i'm i'm a perfectionist and it was very very hard for me to let go and but we were also incredibly lucky that we found the team members that we currently have working for the company. They are all great and extremely talented. And over time, I got more relaxed. And now we are at the point where I can sleep at night without waking from a nightmare that somebody broke the game engine or something. And of course, everybody makes mistakes. I mean, I made incredible mistakes in the past. One of my favorite bugs of all time was in the release version of OOTP version number 5.

And back then, on every release day, we had a little release party. So we were having a barbecue with friends and we were looking at the forums for feedback and we were counting the copies that we've sold and things like that. And so we released that. And then shortly after the first bug reports on the forum popped up. And there was one bug which was really bad because basically every run that happened in the first inning was automatically unearned. So there was a variable in the code that wasn't properly initialized. And I had no idea how that slipped through beta testing.

But obviously for the integrity of the statistics in the game, it's super important that things like that work. And I was super upset. I already had three beers. I was like, man, I need to fix this bug right now. So I headed home, fixed that bug, and after that I was a little bit more relaxed and returned to the party. And the next day we released a patch to fix this.

But that was a hard moment for me. Yeah. And after all this time, you're on the 21st edition of the game, and there must at least be relics of the code that date back to the beginning. So how well do you feel like you know the game? I assume you know it better than anyone else, but there must be aspects of it and features and details that are almost new to you after all this time or that you come across and forgot that you ever did. Or do you have to sort of relearn certain things that you did a dozen years ago because it's been a while, but something breaks

or you have to add something and you end up revisiting work that you did long ago the last really complete rewrite was from 2004 to 2006 back then we worked with sports interactive the company who does football manager which is so successful europe Europe and worldwide. And so all the code, the oldest code right now that we use is from 2004. And yes, you are right. There are sometimes things that I don't even remember that I ever coded them. And on the other hand, there are also things that I discovered that other parts of the development team just did on their own without notifying me and sometimes it's like yeah me browsing through the game and discovering new features and i'm like

wow that's neat it's it's really cool and it's always a big surprise and i i just love it right i mean we are we're a very good good team and all our guys are totally motivated and sometimes they are so into it that they just feel like they have to add this little feature which isn't a lot of work but is incredibly useful and they do and they don't tell me. I don't read every change log that we have. That's the way it works.

And I absolutely love it. And over the years, what are some of the new statistics or data sources that you've incorporated? Because you want to make every league ever available. And so maybe you've had to go digging for some of that data. Or I know that a couple of years ago, for instance, you partnered with Dan Zaborski, my kind of colleague at Fangraphs and his Zips projection system, so that that could be incorporated into the game. And obviously, there's just so much more data available and so much more granular data available than there was when you started programming this game.

So in what way has that changed your process? And have you gone looking for new partners and new sources of information that weren't available when you began? All the statistical research and our player rating research led by Lukas. Lukas has been around for many, many years as well. And he essentially works independently. He has this team of volunteers who do amazing work and they look up all the statistics

for international leagues, for example, and the minor league stats and historical stats. And it's incredible. And to be honest, I have no idea where they get all their data from. It's incredible. And to be honest, I have no idea where they get all their data from. It's like magic. And in terms of modern statistics, that's mainly what MET does. So if there are any statistics that pick up steam that people talk about,

and then we feel like, okay, we need something like this, and we can it can incorporate the statistics into the engine in a meaningful manner then we we jump all over it and i think there are like a dozen stats that we have added uh in the past three or four years i guess very advanced statistics that i can't even pronounce so So it's, yeah, that's Matt doing his stats magic, basically. Yeah, the thing that amazes me is that if you're going to simulate baseball, then you have to model baseball and understand baseball at a very fundamental level, or it won't be realistic.

And so that's how you, for instance, stumble across dips theory before it's even well known publicly, even if you don't realize it at the time, because you come across these aspects's something that isn't all that well understood. We have a hard time projecting who's going to get injured or what factors lead to injury. Teams have a hard time with that. And yet you have to answer that question when you're building this game in order for it to be a viable simulation of baseball. So how do you or your team members do that research into questions that may be very opaque and difficult to answer and that teams themselves may have a hard time answering? Yeah, things like that are incredibly complex, of course. And the whole system inside OOTP, there are so many different variables and so many different screws that you can turn, right?

And injuries is one of those things. First of all, you need data. How many players get injured during the season? What kind of injuries? How long do they need to recover? How many players have setbacks. There obviously have been medical advancements made in the last decade and all these things. First of all, we need to analyze the raw data, then we need to put this into the simulation engine, and then what takes

the longest is running long-term tests. What we do is we create a Major League Baseball with all the minor leagues and then we let it run for 50 seasons. And after those 50 seasons, we have a pretty good data set. And we look at things like, okay, how do players develop? How many player ratings were affected by injuries. Were they affected enough or too much? And we can see this by the statistical output and by the average ratings of the players, how they develop over time.

And in the end, we have like a big data set and we look at this and what we strive for is balance, that things stay relatively balanced over time. For example, you don't want players hitting 78 home runs every season 50 years down the line because pitcher injuries were too severe and suddenly there are no good pitches anymore. You need to really make sure that things stay balanced and that's what we do. And we also need to balance things like player development and player aging. How many young players come up through the draft? How many of those get injured early and lose their talent? And how many older pitchers are injured and lose their talent because of that? And then it's always different if an old pitcher gets

injured compared to a young pitcher who gets injured, right? Because the old pitcher recovers in a longer time period. And yeah, it's mainly about doing tons of long-term simulations and then looking at the data and then tweaking things so that in the end, after 50 or 100 years, things are rather stable. So at what point did you get the license from MLB and the MLB Players Association? And how did that come about? And how did that change the game and the business for you? Oh, that changed a lot. That was 2015.

So out of the park, baseball version 16. So we are always one version number ahead of the year, which is kind of confusing for some people because they think it's a year, but it's actually the version number. And yeah, I tried to get the MLB license actually a couple of years earlier already, but back then we weren't big enough for them to care about us basically because obviously for every licensee they need to spend time, they need to approve all the artwork that we put out and they need to review the game and the content and the website and everything. So they need to make sure that what they earn of us is enough to at least cover their costs. In 2013, we weren't at that point. They said, yeah, let's stay in touch.

But right now, it doesn't make much sense for us. In 2015, we grew and we were at a point where they said, okay, let's do this for one year, see how it goes, see how we work together, because obviously they also have requirements in terms of the quality standard of the products that they give the license to. And they wanted to see how we are in terms of are we a good bunch to work with, right? And that worked out quite well, and we also saw a sizable increase in revenue because of the license. And a year later, the MLB PA wanted a piece of the cake as well, so they said, okay, you get the MLB license, now please take the MLB PA license as well. So they said, okay, you get the MLB license. Now please take the MLBPA

license as well. And we said, yeah, okay, let's do it. And yeah. And so OTP 17 was the first version, which was licensed by both MLB and MLBPA. Yeah. And both teams are incredibly great people, and it's a lot of fun to work with them. And yeah, we're just blessed because after getting the license, we felt like, okay, now we are officially part of the baseball universe. And that was a very, very satisfying feeling. time feeding cap. And so after 21 years and additions, how do you plan out future additions? And what's your developmental roadmap look like? Because you've had so many features added over the years. I'm sure there's a very long list of features you would like to add. And some additions of the game are dramatic reinventions and some are incremental improvements. And so how far into the future do you plan out? Do you know, here's a feature that we'd like to add for OTP 26, you know,

five editions from now? And how do you decide how big a chunk to bite off for each edition and say, this is what we'll be adding this time, this is what we'll be adding next time? each edition and say, this is what we'll be adding this time, this is what we'll be adding next time. Yeah, we usually plan about two, two and a half years in advance. And we have a huge list of feature suggestions from the forums and the community in general. We probably have another 20 years to work to get this all done. And of course, the game is very, very complex and very big already. And it's kind of hard to think about massive new, brand new features. For example, the 3D ballpark construction kit in this year's version, that was one of those things that I

wanted to do for ages, but it's incredibly complex. And only now we had the resources and Jorin had some time and Matt had some time to actually go into it and get it done for version one. And we want to improve this over the years, of course. But sometimes it's hard to decide which things you want to add or improve first, but we usually try to listen to our community and we just ask them questions and we follow the discussions and then we get a feel for what they want and what they need. And that's what we base our decisions on. Is there anything that's been on your to-do list for many years that you haven't been able to implement yet?

Either because it's so complicated and you found it difficult or you just haven't had the time or the resources. But something that's been in the back of your mind, this is something the game is lacking or something I'd love to try to do that just hasn't happened yet. love to try to do that just hasn't happened yet actually i'm waiting for the technology to produce an ai that is good at actually speaking text or reading text in a in a proper manner that doesn't sound like a robot i mean voice voice talent is a and B, we have so much text. I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of lines of play-by-play text, and it would just be impossible to record it all, right? And I wouldn't want to have proper play-by-play commentary if it's repetitive. That's the perfectionist in me.

I just couldn't stand it. And so an AI which would actually be able to pronounce player names properly and get some emotion into translating the text to voice, that would be awesome. But I think that's probably still, I don't know, like six or seven or eight years away, I guess. But that's one of the last things that I wish we could do. And Perfect Team was something similar. I always wanted to have an always online baseball universe where you can compete against others. And nowadays, the technology is available for a price that we can afford. So when that happened, we felt like felt like okay we need to do this and we hired an additional developer and worked with him to

get perfect team done and it took almost two years but that was worth it people love it and it's a new revenue stream for us as well that allowed us to expand further and hire more people revenue stream for us as well that allowed us to expand further and hire more people and yeah so sometimes things take a little bit and sometimes we have to wait for the technology so that it's available and cheap enough because we are not i don't know rock star games right i mean we don't have billions on the bank so we we have to pick our spots. Yeah, and before Perfect Team, before online play, everyone played against the computer, which means that you had to have the computer play accurately and seem like a reasonably real opponent.

And that's something that I think over the years, many baseball fans in many games have had the experience of, you know, they're playing a franchise mode and an opponent recommends a trade or something that seems totally unrealistic, or they approve a trade that is just a complete swindling, you know, and it would never happen in real life. And that's something that can really take you out of it and, you know, disrupt your suspension of disbelief when it's too easy or far-fetched in that way. And so you not only had to make it possible for humans to play the game, but you also needed to have an opponent that would be a good match and actually act the way that a

real team would and real players would. So how difficult has that been to program the computer and the ai to act in a way that it's a worthy opponent uh yeah the trade ai that that was there was a massive pain in the rear seriously it was i mean the the general concept is easy to think about right you want your team to be better after the trade than before the trade and if that is true for both teams, then it's a good trade for both teams. And the evaluation, okay, when is a team actually better than before after players traded places? That can be massively complex because you not only have the individual player evaluation AI who can say, okay, in this context, my speedy center fielder is more valuable than my number four starter,

because my number five and my number six are almost as good as my number four, right? And things like that, they add up up and there's also the financial side i mean contracts and arbitration values estimates things like that everything needs to be factored into whether this trade makes sense for my organization yeah and i think right now the trade ai is decent people still manage to find certain trades that make absolutely zero sense. And sometimes we debug them and we feel like, okay, the AI thinks it makes sense and we know why it does, but sometimes it's hard to come up with the argument why it actually feels like it's a crappy trade so um yeah yeah it's a challenge

it's a challenge yeah but we're making progress every single year yeah to have that be realistic you have to value every player involved in the proposal and project how they're going to be and would a team actually do this and factor in not just the performance, but the salary and the economic aspects. And so that gets incredibly complicated. So you mentioned early on that the community has led to many ideas about future features. And I know that in your update to the game, the most recent edition, you mentioned that there are some community-driven user interface improvements. So how do you get ideas from the community? How do you kind of crowdsource things that should be done? And how many beta testers do you have that are actually directly giving you feedback?

We have a dedicated forum for future suggestions. And of course, the entire team reads the forum. Not every single post, but big parts of it. So sometimes you miss something, but most of it we read and we evaluate if it's a very good suggestion and then we just write it down. And beta testers, we have 150 beta testers right now. Of course, not all of them are always incredibly active. I mean, we are just thankful that they give us a small chunk of their time. Others are incredibly useful.

And I don't know, they don't have a different hobby than OTP, I guess. And they just spend hours upon hours and give us so much valuable feedback. And yes, it's a good mix, I think. And this is a process which has worked well for us for almost 20 years now. Yeah. So in the absence of real life baseball, out of the park has really been a substitute and a solace for a lot of people. And the game itself is powering many efforts to sort of simulate the season.

Maybe most prominently now, MLB and sponsored by DraftKings has announced this dream bracket of all time teams, a tournament that's about to start that features out of the park and is powered by out of the park. And then other entities like Baseball Reference is using out of the park to simulate the season day by day. Baseball Prospectus is doing that. Some of our listeners have gotten together and started a league and are doing that. So what has it been like for you in these extraordinary circumstances to see the game that you built kind of be the best substitute for people until baseball comes back? It's crazy. We still can't believe it. all, we are so incredibly thankful that in these hard times, we live and work in an industry that is doing fine, right?

So we are so incredibly lucky and we are so thankful. And now that there is no real baseball, that put us a little bit into the spotlight. And for a niche product like ours i mean it's it's still a niche product right i mean compared to maybe the show we just sell a fraction of the number of copies that they do but now we are a little bit in the spotlight and we get all this press and media coverage and yeah of course we see this in our revenue numbers as well. And we never really had a big advertising budget because we just don't make that much revenue that we can just put away 20% of our revenue to advertising because we want to pay fair salaries to our employees.

So we always had like around, I don't know, like 5% of the net revenue we spent on advertising, which is like a tiny number compared to other companies. And now we are getting all this advertisement for free, basically. It's kind of a mixed feeling because we are getting this because of the pandemic, which is like one of the worst things which could have happened ever to anyone. But on the other hand, it's like, okay, we've been around for over 20 years and we put our heart and soul into this product. And now finally we are getting the attention that we have hoped.

Yeah. And like I said, it's a mixed bag of feelings. But of course, we are happy that we can bring people a little bit of joy in these hard times and that they can forget terrible things that are happening out there for a moment. And yeah. And I guess lastly, I'm sure you're asked this a lot, but can you ever envision stepping involved from the start and is as deeply invested in it as you are. And clearly the perfectionism that you bring to the project, I'm sure many OTP fans would be upset if you ever did decide to step away. fans would be upset if you ever did decide to step away but i wonder if there is any scenario that you can even consider where you would not be working on the game or at least directly

involved in it the way that you still are yeah that's exactly one scenario me being run over by So, no, this is my baby. And, of course, I'm not the programmer I used to be because when you are 22, you easily program 12, 15 hours a day when you are very passionate about it. I'm still very passionate, but nowadays when I code eight hours a day, I fall asleep. And then after that, I need a day break or something like that. So I need to see in terms of work-life balance, what makes sense for me and how can I still be useful without distracting people from their actual work and without killing myself right yeah so it's yeah i i hope to do this when i'm 65

but i'm probably gonna do it then i don't know three or four hours a day and I won't be doing full-time C++ development anymore. Well, it's an incredible creation and I know that it's something that some of our listeners have sunk an incalculable number of hours into, which I think they probably are mostly grateful for. So thank you for your efforts and for coming on today to talk about it. Yeah, thank you for the kind words. I really appreciate it. Okay, one more guest to go. Stay tuned for Scott Drader of Metalhead Software, makers of Super Mega Baseball. I'll never see them again Until I know what happened back then Until someone takes the blame

So I drink again And I play the game Like I did yesterday Are you the same? Are you the same? Well, way back on episode 589, I spoke to Scott Drader of Metalhead Software about the development of a recently released baseball video game, Super Mega Baseball. And it was very well received. video game Super Mega Baseball, and it was very well received. And now Metalhead is on the verge of releasing Super Mega Baseball 3, having already released a successful sequel back in 2018. So I wanted to have Scott back on to talk about the development and evolution of the series. Scott,

welcome back. It's great to be back on here again. You know, still doing this after all these years. Yeah. Well, you're the newcomer when it comes to at least some baseball games when you compare to the show or even to something like Out of the Park or, you know, some of the other games that have been around for decades, but you've made your mark and you've kind of carved out a niche for the series that wasn't really being filled. But that's partly what I want to ask you about. And I'm sure I did ask you years ago when we spoke, but for people who haven't listened to that, what is the origin story of the studio and the series? And what made you think there is an opening here? There is a place for a new type of baseball game? Yeah, going way back, I grew up playing sports and mostly baseball. And my dad coached a lot,

well, coached virtually all of my teams all the way through. So I was exposed to the sport, not just as a player, but to the coaching side of it as well, all through my early life. I went to school out in Vancouver, actually to play baseball for the UBC baseball team that was spinning up at the time. I blew my arm out the summer before that first year of university, so I never threw a pitch in collegiate baseball. I was kind of doing engineering, got into some programming stuff, just thought that might be interesting. Playing a lot of games with my friends, you know,

in like dorms and Quake. Quake was a, you know, popular game at the time. That was kind of when I was like, oh, you know, you know, working in games might be something that is for me. I applied to work in games shortly after finishing university. Didn't get in, didn't get a job right away, did various other things, you know, but it was in kind of engineering, programming, that kind of thing. And eventually, I think it was around when I was about 27, I had a beer with a close friend and kind of former co-worker. And we decided we were going to start saving money to do a startup. And, you know, we didn't know if it was going to be a game studio up front, but it was something we both had interest in. Ultimately, that's what we decided to take a shot at. And, you know, why Startup became Baseball Video Game was that,

you know, it was something that I thought that I knew a lot about. And we figured that that was one, you know, risk we could take away was let's do something that we at least know something about if we're going to take a shot at an industry that we haven't worked in yet. So that's kind of how the studio got started. And in terms of, you know, why was there room for something new? I had kind of had the feeling that with video games, especially sports video games, there had been a bit of a push into realism and direction. The direction sports games had started to go in general wasn't something that I necessarily

liked. I love that old experience of just sitting down and playing those kind of classic 80s and 90s, more arcade games where you could play quickly, and they were super well-suited to playing with your friends. And I wanted to see that experience a little, you know, I wanted to see sports games go in that direction, and I thought we could do that with baseball. And this was actually before, like, we didn't make our decision to do baseball video games, you know, knowing that, you know, when the 2K series stopped being made. I think that was like 2013.

We didn't know any of that was going to happen. It was more like, let's just make a fun kind of classic video game about baseball, and we'll see how it goes. Yeah. And how did the reception to the first game and the fact that it was so well-reviewed and that it was widely embraced, how did that widen the scope of what you were able to do? And were you able to expand? Were you able to tackle things that previously you didn't have the resources for? Because it's so risky, of course, to have a startup and to have a debut game. And so with those sales and that reception,

did that give you some certainty and a player base that enabled you to do things that you weren't able to do the first time around? Yeah. Well, thank goodness there was a pretty strong critical reception in the game because the launch of the first game actually went really poorly. We didn't – well, commercially. People that tried it really liked it it but nobody knew it was coming um we shipped a baseball that game came out at pretty much christmas time which is a pretty ridiculous time to ship a baseball themed product in hindsight but you know we needed to ship it was you know it was kind of we were at the end of our you know budget and whatnot so it was it had to go

had to go out but uh over time though you, you know, people started to discover it and it started to do a lot better later in its lifetime and fortunately afforded us the opportunity to hire some additional help and to take the series a little bit further. But it was kind of a slow burn, started slow and picked up and eventually, you know, did well enough that we were able to take it further. Yeah. And I think one of the things we talked about last time was that even though your initial goal was not to go toward the realism end of the spectrum, in order to have a satisfying,

fun baseball game that feels like baseball, you do have to do a lot of modeling and have a lot of real physics that comes into play. And maybe it's sort of deceptive because at least with the look of the initial game, you think, okay, this is going to be kind of cartoony or arcadey. And yet if you want it to feel fun and satisfying and like a reasonable facsimile of the sport, you have to do a lot of things under the hood that maybe are kind of complicated. So how do you build a baseball physics engine from scratch, or I guess, adapt the engine that you were using to produce a baseball game? Yeah, for sure. The early days, you know, we were actually talking about doing

something that was more of like a two dimensional game that would have looked a bit more like the games we played on Nintendo back in the day. But then it slowly evolved and the scope kind of grew to be more of a full 3D simulator, which kind of diverged from the graphical style a bit. It became kind of more of a sophisticated baseball simulator than we were originally planning. And then, of course, we had the very cartoony graphics where we're just selling a match. But in terms of how it came together, some of the early prototypes, the very first thing you start working on in terms of baseball is the hitting contact simulation. So let's get the pitcher throwing pitches and let's start trying to make it fun to hit the ball

and have those outcomes make sense given when you swung and where the bat was and where the ball was and that kind of thing. So I think that was some of the first stuff that we started putting together. And then you just build out from there. You start with, okay, we can hit the ball. The ball's in play. Now let's make sure that the infielders are covering the bases and taking the right route to the ball to make the play. And you just go out from there. So it sort of took form like that. Yeah. And so it was about four years between the first game and its sequel. And now it's been about two years since Super Mega Baseball 2. And does that reflect the financial aspect of things that

it took a while for, as you said, Super Mega Base baseball to catch on and make it possible for a sequel or is that also a product of your experience and the fact that this is take two and not the first time you're trying to do this for sure so yeah the first version of the game took forever to make the second one though so that gap between i guess it was you know and very end of 2014 and then the sequel came out in May of 2018. A lot of that time in between there, though, was actually bringing the game to new platforms because the first one launched only on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. So a lot of that time in between was actually taking the game and making it a multi-platform game.

And then adding online play was a big thing there. In terms of two years between 2 and 3, that absolutely is a product of... I think we were three full-time employees when one shipped, and we're 17 now. So that makes a real big difference in terms of how quickly you can move forward. And the wonderful thing about working on a third version of a product is just that you've got a foundation to work off of and each new increasingly ambitious thing that you want to put in there has a better foundation to build on. And that's feeling very gratifying at this stage after

grinding out the early years with nothing to base things on. Right. And so if you're out of the park baseball and you've made 21 additions, you're generally not reinventing yourself dramatically every time you're adding on to that base that you already have. But when you're on the second or third edition of a game, it's maybe not quite as set in stone. You can experiment, you can go in different directions. So what were the big shifts the the big additions or subtractions or just philosophical differences between one and two and now between two and three yeah yeah i think i think you touched on something interesting there which is

you know like in the early days it's like you know how do we how do we change this thing like how are we going to do this and then when you get further into a product uh lifetime it's more like you know what are we going to do to make it different uh and what do people like you know what what's something we can put in there that's going to attract people to the next version of this thing and you know so the decision making criteria for sure changes over time one to two and in smb's case was you know really from the first game to the second game it was very much uh we have this game that is a pretty good baseball simulator, but doesn't necessarily sell that with its appearance. You know, the graphical style of that first game was pretty polarizing. So we knew we had to take it in a direction.

If we wanted to sell it to people that are into baseball, you know, the audience of this podcast, for example, it would be helpful if it looked a little bit more, like it's taking the sport a little bit more seriously, at least. It's still obviously having fun. So that was a big part of the evolution from 1 to 2, was changing the visuals to try to support the idea that this is actually quite a sophisticated baseball simulator. We also, with that second version, it was all about taking it from a single-player experience

to a game that was built as a single player experience to something that's going to work as a an online game that you can play with your friends you can play competitively so from two to three actually you know putting online in that second game honestly it was just that that was really brutal and really hard and took a long time and we missed a lot of the things on that second game that we really wanted to have in that one and doing this third development cycle was awesome because we didn't do any massive technical changes under the hood or wildly rework the art style for example and that let us actually come back to gameplay and game modes and really flesh that stuff out so we got to put in you know a pretty comprehensive franchise mode

with player development and you know free agency and and that kind of thing that's a brand new mode in the game what we're super stoked to get that out there see what people think of it and and uh and you know perhaps we're looking at doing some changes after launch based on feedback on that so i'm really excited about that um and then then also just to fill in all the little things in the baseball simulation that we're missing in the previous versions of the game. So little things like pick-off plays, more advanced, more interesting stealing mechanics. We didn't have designated hitters in there in two, so we got those in there. Little things like the drop-through strike rule. And just a general, beyond those things, a refinement of a lot of what was happening on the field.

And I guess when you're not a game that has an MLB license and actual MLB players, its original creations and characters, there is a little less pressure maybe to release a new version every year than there is with those games where maybe now those updates are downloadable, but at least in old editions, you had to get the new game every year or else players would be on the wrong team and they'd have old stats and it would be sort of outdated. But with Super Mega Baseball, it's kind of timeless. And I guess that's a plus and the minus because on the one hand people aren't necessarily going to pick up the game just to get the new uniforms and faces and stadiums and that sort of thing but on the other hand you can play the game indefinitely and it never necessarily

feels old it's not super mega baseball 2019 or something it's you know super mega baseball two or three hey hey you'd fit right into like our product direction meetings with that instead of Mega Baseball 2019 or something. It's, you know, Super Mega Baseball 2 or 3. Hey, hey, you'd fit right into, like, our product direction meetings with that set of comments. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no, the whole, you know, you don't have the newest thing idea is not, doesn't apply here. So we have to convince fans of the game that we've done, that we've put in, you know, that we've changed the experience enough that it's worth picking it up again. And, you know, I certainly hope that the two years that we put into this one have convinced people of that. Yeah. Yeah. And I am curious how you've balanced, as we've been talking about that, I guess, dichotomy between realism and fun, not that they're mutually exclusive but you know the ability to just

pick up and play a game and maybe not have to master all the mechanics or consider every little minor aspect of baseball and yet you have built this fairly sophisticated game and i wonder whether that's something that you kind of have to check yourself or whether there's sort of a feature creep that comes in where you think, well, we didn't model this specific aspect of baseball, but then another part of your brain is thinking, well, this wasn't really the original goal for the series. This is just supposed to be sort of a successor to the slightly more simplistic games that people remember from their youth.

So is there a tension there? Do you have to constantly be thinking this is too much or this is not enough? Absolutely, yeah. From the beginning, kind of the design philosophy of the series was to treat the thing as a, you know, this is a first and foremost a video game that's meant to be as fun as possible and a you know a pure simulator second so we've always you know and you're right realism and gameplay aren't mutually exclusive but they absolutely do butt heads sometimes and uh that definitely is factored into a lot of our design decisions and we with this series we said you know we're always going to treat gameplay, user experience, and just fun as number one.

And if taking the game in a more realistic direction starts to compete with that, then we start to think about backing off on that a little bit. It's always been about just one thing I like to talk about to try to explain that idea is motion capture, for example. I have a really mixed relationship with motion capture in games because for how great it can look and for how close to broadcast presentation you can get with motion capture, it tends to make video games not feel like they're responding to you in the direct way that some of the older games that didn't use motion capture do. So that's an example of an area where, you know, do we get into that? Maybe we'll think about using motion capture in some situations, but I think that the most important thing in terms of having fun with a video game is that when you give input to the game, it does what you think it's going to do, and the output that comes out of the game makes sense, and you learn from that, and you're able get better at it and that's that's kind of the

core reward cycle um in our game and and yeah so there's a lot to think about there in terms of realism versus versus uh just sort of pure video game fun are there any specific instances you can remember of features that you tried to implement or explored implementing and you found that, no, this is kind of contrary to the ethos of the game or the actual experience isn't quite what we envisioned? just felt like they were throwing an input to a statistical simulator and didn't necessarily ask that much of you as a you know person holding a video game controller they weren't asking enough of you on that front so i'm trying to think if there's any other examples that's the first one that comes to mind yeah i think i think most of that stuff though is it's probably that dealt with at the design stage more than like we try it and then it didn't work. Sometimes you can tell up front, it's like, well, if I have to wait five seconds for this thing to happen, or if the animation is going to take over for two seconds, that's too long.

So we're just going to scrap that idea before we even try it kind of thing. And one of the advantages that the series has had is that it is available for such a wide ass game to other platforms. Now you're bringing those versions roughly simultaneously to all of those platforms. And Super Mega Baseball supports cross-platform play, which is unusual, I think, for an independent title and for a sports title, frankly. So how difficult has it been to manage those things at the same time and also to make those versions play nicely together? Yeah, for sure. Taking the game, well, we're not using one of the modern Unreal Engine or Unity, which we see pretty heavily used throughout the industry at this point that help with some of that cross-platform stuff. So we've kind of independently implemented ports

to each platform over time. And once you have that, it's the first version on a new platform that really kills you. And then once you've got it, it's not too bad to keep things going. But certainly the challenges of actually having to have four versions on four different platforms be be synced up and

ready to go and well tested and so on all at the same time that that's absolutely a new challenge and all all the stuff that surrounds that too you know the coordination that needs to happen with the various companies we we work with to to ship the game that's a new challenge for us and i'm excited to be on the other side of that challenge, no doubt. But yeah, it's definitely changing. Getting it going on each platform is tough. And it really just becomes almost like a massive project management challenge at this stage. Yeah. And is there a challenge when it comes to balancing the different versions for head-to-head play? Because obviously it's not a first-person shooter, let's say, where there's a dramatically different experience when you're talking about mouse and keyboard versus gamepad or controller.

And in many cases, one version may have a bit of a leg up when they're going head-to-head. That's probably not quite the case for Super Mike Baseball, but is that a concern that there could be an advantage to one platform or another?ball, but is that a concern that there could be an advantage to one platform or another? Yeah, it's absolutely a concern, but we did make a set of decisions that level that off. So things like does the game run

at the same frame rate? The frame rate's going to affect how quickly you can respond to hitting a fastball, for example. But we've made sure the frame rate is locked to the same rate on all platforms. And we don't allow on the PC, we don't allow mouse and keyboard input to be competing against. I wish there was a fair way to do that because obviously we'd like to have that experience available. But at the end of the day, we do want that competitive balance. And we want everyone to be as close to possible as starting from the same

fair platform when they're playing against each other. And is there a reason that you've remained independent and continued to develop and publish the game yourself? I don't know whether you've had the opportunity to team up with, let's say, a larger publisher because of the series' success. When you do that, maybe you get greater resources or you get something of a safety net, but you also maybe cede some control over the game that you have created. So has that been a consideration for you? Have you had to weigh those things? Yes, there's ongoing consideration of that type of thing and opportunities have popped up and we've continually you know tried to to weigh between you know

these opportunities could provide the ability to grow faster and do more and more quickly versus you know as you know as an independent studio you're more in control of your ultimate fate and that kind of thing. And it's a thing that's, for years, it's been a thing we've been considering and we're still open-minded about it, but, you know, only if the time is right. And it was never a goal from the beginning necessarily to be doing, you know, to become like a AAA studio or to be bought or to do licensed games. We didn't, you know, those weren't part of the kind of initial mission and we're a bootstrapped company.

So we're not under pressure to be, you know, trying to sell the studio for investors or anything like that. So we think about it, but, you know, if and when the time is right, maybe that'll happen and maybe it won't. Yeah. What would you consider to be the biggest additions to super mega baseball 3 and are there are there things that you wanted to do from the beginning and they just didn't fit into your plans or are they things that you hadn't even

considered previously but maybe you heard from the community or they were very often requested features yeah the the third version is is is the stuff that we've put in there is almost 100% driven by feedback from the community of the previous games. So it actually made the product decisions up front, what are we going to do with this thing, relatively easy. But franchise mode, the expansion and rounding out of the baseball simulation, and honestly a big improvement in presentation and graphics too because those do matter and they're they're huge

in terms of bringing new players into the game so uh all those areas we've done a lot of work in and there's some big stuff coming in terms of online play we've actually got a really cool thing to to release that will be part of a post-launch update that I'm looking forward to announcing as soon as we can. How has that changed things? I guess, you know, it's kind of been part for the course since you started, but the ability to update things after release, to patch, to add features, to provide DLC, how much less pressure do you feel knowing that the game that you're shipping is not necessarily the final product that you can never fix or add to you know compared to in the past when if a game was out it was out and it was done and whatever bugs were in it were pretty much there to stay yeah no doubt that this whole model of kind of you know iterative development iterative development and going as far as early access development models on Steam, no doubt that's completely changed the industry.

And I think it's allowed developers to be more ambitious than they would have been knowing that version 1.0 is the last version of the game in the past. We can try to do some pretty crazy stuff. in the past you know we can try to do some pretty crazy stuff and you know as long as it's it's there at launch we know we've got or or or it doesn't matter that it's there at launch is basically we've got that time after launch to take feedback change things and make it work so you can you can you can push out some more ambitious uh ideas than you might have been comfortable doing knowing that you wouldn't have had the opportunity to change them. It's for sure changed the industry. Yeah, yeah. There are some cases, of course,

where a game ships in sort of a sloppy buggy state and you wonder whether that happened because the developers knew that there was some recourse that they could do something after the fact. Then again, so many developers are so swamped and there's so much crunch to get to that release point, even if you know that you can possibly tweak things after the fact. And that's something I wanted to ask you about since this is not as long running a series as some and you don't have this sort of assembly line where you know that, okay, the game has to be at this stage by this point and it has to be out by this date every single year, like clockwork. How do you handle as a somewhat smaller independent studio,

the crunch and the need to work hard on a game, but not overwork people to the point that it becomes such a slog that it affects people's lives outside of work if they get outside of work at all? Yeah. Just going back to the beginning of what you said there, I think that balance of, you know, in terms of putting games out and trying to have that right balance, but you know, what you want to be iterating on after launch is the game design and the game mechanics, not on the stability of the game and whether the game works or not, right? So it's about striking that right balance between we put as much into this thing as we can by launch date and we're ready to kind of deal with any fallout that happens there.

But you want the fallout that you're dealing with to be mechanics and changes to the game itself, not to whether it works or not kind of thing. On that second kind of idea of how do we deal with scheduling and crunch and that kind of idea of, you know, like how, how do we deal with scheduling and, and, and crunch and that kind of thing. You know, I, I empathize with the development teams there that are on kind of really rigid yearly or annual release schedules. Cause that's a really short, you know, when they're after they've done, you know,

after they've dealt with their kind of post-launch stuff, you know, they're looking at and, and, you know, factoring in that they need to have a game done a couple months, you know, more or less a couple months before it ships. Those six or eight-month development cycles or whatever they're on, I can imagine that would be really brutal. And our shortest development cycle now at this point has been SMB3, and we've been working on that for close to two years. So that's a lot easier to deal with.

And yeah, we would have maybe liked to ship, in the year than we did this year, but ultimately we were a bit more on the camp of, you know, ship it when it's done kind of thing, try to have a reasonable schedule in mind. And we've honestly gotten better at, at scheduling that that was something that I think we struggled with and struggled with balancing uh scope and ambition with you know an actual ability to complete that or to you know fulfill that ambition and the time that we allocated for that was something that i think we've gotten a lot better at um and you know this is the first time that we've that we've not you know missed a date by a really long time on a game so it's something you live and you learn with over time and you know

as far as we don't have that you you know, we talked about being independent versus being, you know, non-independent. And that's one thing, you know, we're in a situation where we can, you know, instead of driving our employees crazy, you know, we just push the date out or cut the scope a little bit and make it work. How long a feature list or a to-do list do you have? Because you don't have that pressure or knowledge that you have to deliver a game next year. And yet I'm sure there are things that you considered for this version that maybe you tabled for the time being and said, well, if we get to do SMB4, that'll be at the top of the list.

So is there a roadmap for future versions or do you just kind of take it title to title? There's an infinite backlog, I think. Just this week, we were actually trying to, you know, trying to take some of the, we've got a database of the stuff we want to do. And sometimes it's nice to actually set it aside so you can focus on what you're working on right now and not be looking at this, like,

something that looks like this treacherous backlog. We have to do all of this eventually. It's like, OK, let's don't worry about it. Let's just focus on what we're trying to do the next few months and be happy with what we're working on. But for now, the to do list is is literally infinite. And I saw that after you announced SMB3, for instance, there was a lot of clamor from people who wanted to be able to import their teams from SMB2 into the new game. And so you've decided to do that and add that feature, I guess, sort of at the last minute. So how heavy a lift was that? Was

that something that you had considered adding to the game but didn't realize was so important? Or had it not occurred to you? And I guess, what does it mean that people are so invested in the teams that they played with in the last game that they want those to be a part of their experience with the sequel? Yeah, usually we'll have kind of our own internal calibration of how important things are. And we make our decisions about what's going to go in the game based on that. But every time you do an announcement or put more information about the game or ship the game, then you get, like, a huge influx of information that lets you kind of recalibrate what your priorities are.

And we had not, like, we had absolutely considered, you know, people are going to want to be able to take their teams forward. But I think just, you know, the amount of feedback that we got on that right after launch just, you know, we knew that that was going to be an issue for some people, but it kind of just amplified the, that particular feature in terms of our priorities. And it's like, all right, well, let's have a look and see if we can, we can get this in there soon. Yeah. And so if you could go back to the beginning when you were just a fledgling studio trying to build its first game having had

three games now under your belt what would you tell yourself whether it's about the process of developing a game or this specific series and things that people didn't like or didn't like as much as you thought or weren't worth the time that you invested in them yeah i mean i guess i'd tell my younger self that, you know, don't worry too much about, like, planning for the future because you just don't know how it's going to go. And, you know, race ahead and let's just get as much into this game as we can. And, you know, try not to worry about looking past one year out.

Get as much done as you can. Get it out there. Get some feedback and move it forward based on that feedback kind of thing. And has there been anything that's especially surprising or gratifying to you about the way that the game has been received and the people who have become very invested in it, the community that's sprung up around it? I imagine that that's been heartening to see, that there's a very loyal fan base that's been built up around this game yeah it's a really satisfying kind of thing if you you know when you when you see the the results of several years of work doing something that isn't you know it's it's to some extent off the beaten path and but to see that that that really kind of connects for

for a group of people and and you know we're looking on Steam there and seeing people playing the game for 200, 300, 500 hours. And it's like, all right, well, they're probably having a good time. And that's really awesome to see. Because with this game, back when we started, you really don't know what, whether, if you're doing something that's pretty far off of what's out there and what's popular, you really don't know if it's going to catch on or not. So to see when it does catch on, that's really satisfying for sure. Yeah. And so lastly, I guess these aren't the circumstances that you envisioned the game coming out during. You timed this to coincide roughly with the start of the baseball season and there is no baseball season at least this year thus far so in some ways i imagine that's an opportunity for anyone who's making games because

there's no actual baseball happening that means there's more time for simulated baseball and i know that people have spent a lot of time playing other games i'm sure many people are looking forward to the release of smb3 so that they can get their baseball fix from somewhere. On the other hand, it's a very strange environment and there's all this madness going on that I know it's somewhat strange just talking to people who have baseball books coming out. For instance, they of course want people to pay attention to the thing that they spent years working on. And yet at the same time, you realize that people are distracted and they're worried about other things and they're worried about their own jobs and all of that. So this is not what you envisioned, but I guess what are the downsides or the silver

linings or what is it like to release a game in this environment? Yeah, obviously some pretty wild circumstances. I think the day that we announced the game was the same day, or at least adjacent to the day that the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. So yeah, pretty strange. Honestly, we have absolutely zero to complain about, let alone being fortunate to be in an industry that we can more or less go home and do our work from home, which is not the case for a huge percentage of the population.

We're also in an industry that maybe actually benefits from the amount of time people are spending at home. So we're super fortunate, and I feel very lucky that we're more or less able to keep doing things the way we do them. And yeah, I really hope that our game can definitely provide kind of a bridge for people that are missing out on baseball and normal life right now. All right. Well, we wish you the best of luck with the launch of the game.

I know a lot of people are really eagerly anticipating it, and they will have it in their hands or on their system soon. So thanks again for joining us and good luck with SMB3. I really appreciate you having me. I saw your book that is just coming out here and I was like, I mean, maybe we should have asked Ben to audit our franchise mode here. But thanks for having me and good luck with that as well. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks to all of my guests.

And I will note these are obviously not all of the baseball games, not even all of the good baseball games. And I want to single out one, which I alluded to earlier, but Baseball Mogul, which is a very long running series in the same genre as Out of the Park, the baseball management simulation type game, but it actually predates Out of the Park, and it was created and continues to be maintained by Clay Dreslow, who is actually an Effectively Wild listener, and he has been kind enough to provide free copies of prior versions of Baseball Mogul to our Patreon supporters. So Baseball Mogul 2020 was recently released. I will link to where you can get that as well as all the other games, and Baseball Mogul 2020 was recently released. I will link to where you can get that as well as all the other games, and Baseball Mogul itself is beloved and revered. A lot of people have played both Baseball Mogul and Out of the Park.

I had a college roommate who seemingly spent an entire semester glued to the screen playing Baseball Mogul, so I have witnessed its power and appeal. My impression is that even though these are somewhat similar games, I think Baseball Mogul is generally perceived to be a little less intimidating, a little more accessible perhaps. The trade-off being that Out of the Park is maybe more fully featured if you want to get into the real nitty-gritty and minutiae and simulate a season precisely. It's well-suited to that and quite comprehensive, but both games are worthy of your attention if you're looking for something to pick up. One more matter, we got a request from

Patreon supporter Keith to discuss the fact that the latest edition of MLB The Show uses minor league players' names and likenesses. I believe for the first time, I think last year's edition used some real minor leaguers and some fake ones. And prior to that, they were all fake ones. Out of the Park also uses real minor leaguers, but I think just names, not likenesses. So I think among many players of MLB The Show, there was great rejoicing that there are actual real minor leaguers in the game this year. Previously, there had been some community-led efforts to design those players and make them available to download, essentially. This year, Sony San Diego partnered with one of those people who does that every year and just made it part of the game. So your average MLB the show player thinks, hey, this is great. I've got minor

leaguers now because previously you didn't even have top prospects in the game until they made the majors. Obviously, though, this may be a bit more concerning to some fans who have listened to a lot of Effectively Wild and are more aware of the plight of minor leaguers. So the deal with Sony San Diego getting to put minor leaguers in the game, and this has been reported on by a couple of people, including the aforementioned Owen Good at Polygon and J.J. Cooper at Baseball America, the studio is within its rights to do this, and the mystery is actually why they haven't done it before,

because legally speaking, nothing seems to have changed. But there is, of course, no minor league players union, as we have discussed quite a bit, and so there's no body to negotiate for the minor leaguers' rights en masse. So Sony pays MLB for the rights to team names and logos and the MLB Players Association for the rights to names and likenesses of the major league players, and it pays minor league baseball for the rights to names and likenesses of the Major League players, and it pays Minor League Baseball for the rights to team logos and nicknames and such. But when it comes to the Minor League players, they're out of luck. So if they're not on 40-man rosters, they get nothing for being in the show,

other than, I guess, getting to play as themselves. And this is because when a player signs his first pro contract with an MLB organization, they sign something called the Uniform Player Contract, which means basically that everyone signs it. And one of the things that they sign away is their right to profit from video games and baseball cards and other uses of their names and likenesses. And unless and until they make the majors, they're out of luck. The contract says players' name, voice, signature, biographical information, and likeness shall belong to club, and they may be used, reproduced, sold, licensed, or otherwise disseminated or published by club or its licensees, assignees, and or other designees, directly or indirectly, in any medium whatsoever, for any purpose, etc., etc. Further legalese basically says, we own you, and we can use your name and likeness for whatever the heck we want and i suppose it's possible that if you were a top prospect maybe

you could hold out if you have enough leverage michael jordan did when he was a minor league baseball player but i don't know that anyone else has it's just a standard thing you signed most minor leaguers may not even realize what they're signing away there's a lot of pressure to sign it and no one is advocating on their behalf, so this is just the way it works. And so Sony technically isn't violating anyone's rights, but this is just another example of minor leaguers getting exploited because they don't have any sort of protection and anyone to negotiate for them when it comes to these matters like the major leaguers do. So file this under exhibit Z of minor leaguers. Have it pretty rough financially speaking compared to big leaguers. I suppose Sony could have opted to pay them. It would have been a nice gesture. It would have been unusual. It's not surprising that they didn't. So you can be mad at Sony, but you could also be mad at the system. This is the sort of thing that if our recent guest Garrett Brocious gets his way and there's a minor league players union or other protections built in, maybe this won't

happen and minor leaguers will actually get a cut, as they should for being in the video game and helping Sony sell copies of its video game. So if the show is getting you through a tough time right now, I don't mean to guilt you into not enjoying one of life's few pleasures during social distancing, but be aware that when people talk about minor league pay or the lack thereof, this is yet another manifestation of that imbalance in baseball. You can, of course, donate to minor leaguers via various means that we've discussed on the podcast, and you can support the podcast itself by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help us keep podcasting and get themselves access to some perks such as a free download of baseball mogul if you're supporting at a certain level manny diaz dylan feltman casey only gordon constock and aj schreier thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance as always. You can buy my book, which is out now in paperback, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It's got a brand new afterword with a lot of new information about the latest developments in player development.

This may have been a bonus episode. I'm not entirely sure whether there will be three or four this week, but either way, we will be back with a new episode soon. Talk to you then. Sweet home Alabama, play that dead man's song. Turn them speakers up full glass, play it all night long. Sweet home Alabama, play that dead man's song. Turn them speakers up full glass, play it all night long.