Think Like A Game Designer - Alexander Seropian — From Halo to Fortnite: Mastering Team Dynamics, Entrepreneurial Resilience, and User Generated Content (#74)

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Alexander Seropian joins us on today’s episode, bringing his vast expertise from decades in the video game industry. Alex is the founder of several influential game companies, including Bungie, Wideload Games, Industrial Toys, and Glenslinger Studios. He has also held leadership roles at Disney and Microsoft, overseeing teams of more than 100 people. Among his many accomplishments, Alex is best known for co-creating the iconic game Halo and for being a driving force in game design and industry innovation. In addition to his executive work, Alex has served as an advisor and investor in numerous startups.In this episode, Alex shares his journey, from his early days growing up in the 80s and programming on an original Mac, to founding Bungie and navigating the challenges of building and leading teams. He dives into what it takes to manage through failure, the lessons learned from his entrepreneurial ventures, and his thoughts on the future of gaming, including the roles of VR, AI, and Web3. Alex’s insights into game development, team building, and navigating the ever-evolving game industry provide invaluable wisdom for creators at every stage of their careers. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, we speak with Alex Soropian. Alex has started four major companies, including Bungee, Wide Load, Industrial Toys and Gunslinger Studios. He has managed over 100 people on his teams. He's created iconic games like Halo. He's been an executive and manager at Disney and Microsoft.

He also has been an advisor and investor in numerous startups. He is a part of the fabric of game design and the industry as much as anybody. And it was a real honor to get to talk with him on this podcast. We get into a lot of really great details. We talk about the value of how you manage it when you hit the wall. What do you do when you confront failure? We talk about the reflections and the specific questions that Alex uses when he hits projects that don't work and hits things that definitely fail and runs out of money and runs out of time. All the problems that anybody out there that's ever tried to start a publishing studio or build games knows about.

We talk about the future of the industry and how things like VR, AI, Web3 and other aspects might take the future of gaming. And we talk about his new company, which is really focused on building mods. And user-generated content, specifically at this point for the game Fortnite, and we talk about how this trend in being able to build games for other games. Build games within games has become such a dominant part of the marketplace and the bet that he's making with his Look North World company. It's a fascinating discussion. Honestly, I could have kept talking to him for at least another hour. He really puts a lot of great thought into the way that he structures things. He has his own podcast, which we talk about in the episode.

It's an incredible guest with incredible lessons that are. immediately applicable to you no matter where you are in the industry. So I will end this introduction. And without any further ado, here is Alex Seropian. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Alexander Seropian. Alex, it's great to have me on the podcast. A pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, so you have been a legend in the industry for some time. You have created games that have everybody listening has heard of. And you've been on all different sides of the industry, including working for companies like Disney and EA and starting founding

Bungee and a variety of other companies, including your new one. But I don't know how you got into gaming in the first place. What drew you to be this kind of, you know, to be in this space? I'd love to know some of the origin story. You know, I grew up in, I guess I'm going to date myself, grew up in the 80s, and I very much remember when the day my dad brought home an Atari 2,600. And it wasn't exactly the Atari 2,600. It was the Sears Telegames, which is kind of like the rebrand.

It was like the supermarket black label generic equivalent of a 2,600. But it played all the 2,600 carts. But he brought that home, and I just fell in love. I mean, and we're talking like, like 16 colors, pixels, the size of your fist, you know? And it was just, it hooked me. It hooked me hard. I would play, you know, on my own. I play with my brother.

I play with my friends. I remember playing adventure in Indiana Jones games. And we didn't have internet. So our hint books were just like talking to each other at lunch in middle school. And that's kind of how I got, I guess that's how I kind of. of love at first sighted video games. And then we got a Mac. Yeah, I see it. I see it. Yeah.

I don't know if you do video, but if you're just listening, I've got an original 128K Mac from 1984 behind me. That's the computer I learned how to program on. Pascal back in the day, followed by C. Tried writing my own games. Did some few simple things, ambitious things. ambitious things didn't quite get to the finish line. Yeah, yeah.

But that was sort of my pathway into technology. And I had always, I think there's some entrepreneurship just in the DNA for my, my grandfather had his own business, both grandfathers on both sides of the family. My dad did too. My mom was an independent writer. They had day jobs, but they all had side hustle, you know. and always we wanted to pursue that route too. So that that trifecta of my entrepreneurial DNA plus my love of video games and just the craft of programming was sort of how I mean, that's exactly why I started bungee.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great. I got out of college. That's a great trifecta. So there's a few things that I want to pull out of this. and I'm curious if you're able to articulate it because it's not always easy in terms of, you know, entrepreneurial DNA. What is it that makes that? What's the key to that DNA?

Is there some variation of just being more accepting of risk? Is it that there's a, you know, you default don't look at the normal paths that society tells you? Because my parents were both lawyers and I was very much put into the, you know, this is the path that you should be on, son, you should be a lawyer. And it took me a while to realize. I realize I could break from that path. So what is different about the way you were brought up or what principles maybe people could derive from that? I really love that question because this is something that I've thought about a lot. I have a lot of opinions. What makes an entrepreneur, why entrepreneurs

behave the way that they do. I don't think there's one exact answer here. I will say I listen to, like, if you ever watch that TV show Silicon Valley, or you just listen to, you just listen to anybody who's kind of come out of that, you know, stereotypical mold, talk about wanting to change the world. I'm a little jaded. I kind of think that's BS. I think those folks want to get phenomenally wealthy. And changing the world is their pathway to get there. And I think there's a little bit of that in any entrepreneur, because you don't, as Jordan Weissman told me, being an entrepreneur is just like getting punched in the face repeatedly. And that is absolutely. the truth.

Oh, yeah. I work with Jordan regularly now and he's an advisor. And so, yes, I get that. Yes, a lot. Yeah. He said, entrepreneurs are the stupidest people in the world because they're willing to do like the thing that, you know, it shouldn't be done or can't be done. And it's true.

It is true. I will say, though, for me, I've always been very independent-minded. I'm the, I come from, both my grandsets of grandparents fled. They had to leave their homes during two different genocides in the, you know, in the early 20th century. And I think, you know, I'm one generation removed from that, but I think there's this aspect of the world isn't going to give anything to you. In fact, the world's going to try and take from you. so you got to go and make your own way.

That's an important. That was a, nobody ever said those words to me, but just watching how my parents, my grandparents acted. I think really sort of put that in my head. And I've always been that way. You know,

I would always prefer to go and try and figure out my own path over, you know, just showing up for a job kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. So there's, you know, as a kind of way to reframe the way I hear what you said, like this,

you know, we, we, we have to be willing to have this, you know, this belief that you can do things other people can't, right? That you, and this willingness to hit, get punched in the face, as Jordan put it. And, and so it requires some kind of, some kind of fire and fuel there. And it sounds like in this case, it's, you know, whether it's people that want to change the world and how much we believe that. Whether it's people that want to get rich or it's this fear. I know, it sounds like almost.

a sort of a little bit of a fear impulse that there's, you know, the world is not necessarily a safe place and I can't just trust the paths that are around me. I've got to make my own way. It's kind of an interesting, almost dark side kind of twist for the motivation. I think that's all true. I honestly, like I get a lot of enjoyment, a lot of positive reinforcement for myself just out of making things, you know. I have a wood shop where I build stuff. I don't sell it, but I love the process of creating. I still write code. I still make games. This company that we're building right now is unlike anything I've ever done and treading that new ground and creating something new is it's, I think that's kind of like the creativity aspect of it as well,

which wouldn't choose anything different, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Well, and this is the thing as a creator and a kind of founder and executive, right? There's two different pieces to this, right? Because, you know, look, we all had these choices to make. Like, I love making games. I started off as a game designer working for somebody else. And then I realized I would rather, you know, kind of control my own destiny and start my own company and launch my own games. But there's so much, so much that comes with that. So you have to kind of love not just the creative process, but in a sense, creating the creative process, right? Like building the team and building the system. and there's a certain game design aspect to how you structure a company.

100%. Yeah, it's a lot of system design. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you have done this to a degree that's kind of an unimaginable level of success from my perspective.

So it's a, I want to understand both the good and the bad, right? What have you learned about team formation and system design when it comes to companies and building something like bungee or any of your other companies or, you know, of course, we'll talk about your new company as well. But what have you learned over these many iterations as well as,

you know, advising other companies, it's got to be a lot of great gold in there. Yeah. Well, another nugget that I kind of taken from, this one came from a friend of mine, Frederick Marcus, who was at Ubisoft for a long time. He had this phrase that was the project as the team, which I think kind of sums up one of the, I think, pretty important aspects of creating a game studio is like, often, I talk to people a lot who want to start a studio because they want to make a game.

And those are two pretty different endeavors. I mean, maybe you do one to make the other possible, but making a game is different from running a business. And when you're starting a studio, which I've done deliberately a few times, you really do have to spend some time thinking about the team. You know, the, like I said it's kind of like a lot of system design and it's true. It's like it's who you hire, how you organize, what roles you're going to have, how you, how you organize the responsibilities of the various folks who are part of that team, the culture that emerges from that, the strategy of what products you choose to make and on what platforms and with what business model. All of those are like design elements.

to your studio. And a lot of those choices are important. And like anything, you know, the execution of how you deliver on those choices, like how good is your hire, are the people that you're hiring, you know? And when I say how good are they, it's like, you know, what's their experience level? What's their talent level? What's their person, you know, the, their, I don't know, what's the word for like, if they're awesome.

Oral fit or yeah. Wait, listen. I'm with it. Yeah. Part. Yeah. You know, like the execution of like, you know, so I've gone from at the very beginning of my career

when we started Bunchy from the perspective of, I want to, I just want to make a game and I want to make a business out of this because I want to be independent. And the first two games we made didn't really do anything. The third one was an incremental success, enough to hire some people. The fourth one was a pretty big success.

I mean, just kind of grew and grew and grew that way, or very organically, without a strategy other than we're getting. to make excellent games. But the execution of that simple plan was at a very high level. The people that we had at the studio were excellent. The strategy, like we turned out we didn't plan this, but because we focused on the Mac,

nobody else was making games on the Mac. So we had like a great market share, et cetera. You know, and as I've learned, you know, you kind of add in some, hopefully it's smarter, strategic choices at the beginning when you get going. And I'm fast forward to today. And I'm operating in a space that didn't exist even two years ago, let alone 20 years ago when we got started. And that is entirely, obviously, that's entirely deliberate. And the team that we've built in the way that we've structured is also very unique. And all those choices are very deliberate. And we're focusing now on trying to execute at the highest level. So I mean, I guess that's a very long-winded answer to

to part, like part of an answer to your question, like, what have I learned along the way? It's like there are definitely conscious choices that you make when you're thinking about creating a game studio to enable you to make a game. That are fairly fundamental to how your company looks and how it performs and how successful it can be. Yeah. So there's, it's a great answer with a lot of things I want to unpack as well, right? So one, I resonate with this. So our company motto that we repeat every week at our team meetings is work with awesome people, make awesome things, help each other grow.

Like this is like, you know, these are the important things like finding, surrounding yourself with awesome people is number one, making great stuff. And then hopefully you're learning and iterating. And it sounds like some of that is built in. I'm curious because what I heard and correct me if I'm wrong is that, you know, kind of early, it was really more about, you know, you hired good people and kind of figured out your strategy as you went later with this new company. It sounds like you had a kind of core strategy as the as the lead domino.

And I'm curious because I have found my experience, it, you know, it sort of went the opposite where I had a project I knew I wanted to do and started on that. And then I started hiring good people who then opened up different interests and opportunities. And then we kind of angled that way. So now we have a game that is, you know, we started with just doing tabletop games. Then we started doing some, you know, mobile and web two games. Now we have a kind of web three connected game that connects all three of them. And that never would have happened if not for like the somewhat organic growth of the people and talents and interests of the people that we have.

And I'm curious if that's how it's spread for you or how you think about those things differently, whether it's strategy first, people first, how that evolved for you. Well, I'll tell you that no plan ever goes as planned. Yeah, yeah. Very rare. Everybody's the plan until they get punched in the face. Exactly. And the punches, the punches are nonstop. So the ability to adjust and to pivot or to lean into strengths or to organize, reorganize around solving for challenges is critical.

And that always happens. And I'll tell you it's very easy to fall in love with an idea and to follow it to its grave, you know. And that's an important thing to kind of try to de-emotionalize yourself from like just kind of. It's like sticking to. When we started industrial toys, we did start with very simple idea, which was mobile is, at the time, it was on the cusp of becoming the biggest game platform. But it seemed like it was growing like bonkers. And my charts at the time were super like, like look back today and they were like, you know, it grew way faster than even we optimistically thought mobile would grow. So the thesis was super simple.

nobody's making games for my for me you know for the core gamer let's make games for the core gamer and what we decided to do was kind of go all in on one game which in hindsight i i would go back and advise myself to um you know crawl walk run not like dog pile in on you know a little maybe a little bit of hubris thinking like oh mobile is kind of a subset of these other platforms we worked on. We kind of know what we're doing. So let's bring us, I think at some points we were even saying, hey, we're, we're going to bring a,

we're, I remember what it was the, we're bringing a canon to this fight. Yeah. And, and nobody wanted a cannon. You know, and so, um, I totally relate to what you're saying. You can, you can have a, you know, it's like scientific method. And I, I,

I kind of like to think there's a decent amount of crossover between the business method and the scientific method where you can have a thesis, you know, but you kind of have to prove it. And you got to give yourself the space to react to adjusting that thesis when, you know, the data, your results aren't necessarily, you know, what you theorize they would be. 100%. Yeah, this is the principle. I call it the core design loop in my book. And it's the same idea that you basically, you need to create whatever your hypothesis, your innovation is, figure out what the frame is that you could test it, and then try to test it as cheaply and quickly as possible, right? Because we just never know if we're right. Absolutely. Cheaply and

quickly as possible. Like even when we started Look North, so Look North World, the studio that's building the UGC space, we're starting on Fortnite. We had an idea of what like a successful or prototypical UEFN island should look like. and it was close maybe, but it certainly wasn't right, you know, at the beginning. So, you know, we've been lucky from the perspective of having gotten punched in the face so many times that we, you know, we knew not to, we knew to try some. In fact, we said to ourselves, let's do the quickest thing we could possibly do to see if this will work, you know, and that's been sort of the method. And, you know, we're, I think we're, we're shipping our 12th game this week.

And in like less than a year and a half. That's amazing. Yeah. And it's all about that, that it's, you know, it's iteration. You call it the core, your core design loop, but it's, it's, you know, that's how you get to great is by iterating. Yeah. Yeah.

So, okay, let's, let's back up a second here because we're going to be weaving in, look, look North World and everything else that you're doing. I think some of our audience will know what you mean when you say things like UGC, but some will not. So why don't you go ahead and tee this one up to make sure people understand what you're up to? Yeah, well, you know, this is a part of the industry now that didn't, I mean, it's UGC is user generated content. It has been around forever. It started as like, oh, you can hack and mod your game. When the original Doom came out, there were these Wad files, people can make their own Doom levels.

in fact one of the most successful games of the last 10 years PubG was a mod of a different game League of Legends was inspired by that too Yeah the League of Legends started It was kind of like Dota

You know and yeah so This is not a new concept in the game industry That the original creators of a game Have produced a piece of technology Along with their game that You know whether it's easy or not You know other people can make their own sort of experiences using that tech.

It has become, that concept in itself has evolved in the last couple of years with the release of Roblox, which is a product that was designed purely for that. It's like a game engine with a whole content library and a marketplace and all the games on there are created by the users. Minecraft has gone through a similar kind of evolution, and then Fortnite is doing the same thing as of last year with the release of their very popular Unreal Engine that targets Fortnite.

So when I say we're a studio that makes UDC games, we're a studio that makes games on these platforms like Fortnite, like Roblox, like Minecraft, where there are literally hundreds of millions of people playing. every month. And because we don't have to, you know, create our own back end with services and servers or game engine or in a lot of cases, even any content, because there's a whole library of content that already exists. The games can be made way more quickly than, say, your average standalone game as a reference point. The game I worked on before this, which is a battlefield game, we worked on for over three years with a over 120 people on it. And I just ship my 12th game on you and EDUDs.

So it's a very different level of productivity, which really is what attracted to me to this space in the first time in the first place, simply because of this concept that we're talking about, which is the more shots on goal you get, or the shorter your iteration loops are the quicker you can go from your thesis to a fantastic execution of that thesis. So as a game developer and somebody that creates original worlds and stories and IP, having a platform like this is going to let me go from idea to good to great an order of magnitude faster than if I were doing this in sort of the standalone marketplace. Do you find yourself constrained by these systems? I mean, you talk about original IP and original gameplay.

And here you're really playing in somebody else's sandbox. How much room do you have to? to play or how do you find creating and playing in somebody else's sandbox for that? Yeah, there's definitely constraints. I look at any project that I've ever done, has had some design constraints to it. You know, like if those constraints were either, either came from, well, we have this much time so we can only do this much. Or we're going to use this engine. So this is the kind of genre that is appropriate for it.

or we're working with this partner, and this is sort of the rules of engagement. Typically, if you have a project that's sort of, you know, completely clean sheet with no constraints, you know, that could be fun, but sometimes the constraints are really the grist for the middle, the fuel for, you know, focusing a design. So it really, you know, it is,

you kind of do have to get used to it because the constraints are maybe a little bit more severe here. Like we didn't have the ability to save a game until about six months in. You would think that's kind of like a core thing, right? Yeah, yeah. But you know, you couldn't save when you went to the arcade and played space invaders. So it's not like you can't make games in that environment.

And it, you know, it's a vaught. But there are some real constraints on these platforms for sure. And yeah, I mean, I'm always been a big believer that constraints breed creativity. And one of the things why I was interested, excited to have you as a guest is actually one of the pieces of advice I've given a long time to people who are aspiring designers is start by modding some of your favorite games, right? Start by building in those sandboxes because it's way easier as you've sent you, way faster to get up from running.

You've got an audience that's already somewhat interested in what's happening, and you can kind of get a lot of reps under your belt more easily. So it's really fascinating to see you going kind of full circle in your career to coming back to this. It is, it's, I've had to do a lot of interest, along the way. You know, having started from where I started to, you know, being involved in some, you know, pretty big IP to now building inside of, basically somebody else's game. It is a, it's not a place where you, where, like, I didn't even, if you went back in time,

18 months and told me this is what I would be doing. I would have said, well, that's not even a thing. What do you mean? But I got to tell you, it's one of the more, it's, A, I'm having more fun than I have had, I can remember. And B, it's, this is one of the parts of the industry right now that has, like, just a lot of energy around it. There's a fuse that's been lit and you can feel it, you know?

It's like, in other parts, other parts of the industry, you know, like big AAA games, There's just a lot of challenges out there right now. A lot of studios that are shrinking, a lot of games that have come out that have, that either took longer because of, you know, whatever we're working from home or whatever it is. And this is a part of the industry. It's got a lot of energy, a lot of young people involved here. There's a lot more accessibility to these kinds of platforms. So you tend to meet folks from all over the world.

All different backgrounds, walks of life. And, you know, I love it. I'm really loving. it. Yeah. And then is your part of your thesis is not just to be a creator of these things, but you're providing additional tools and platforms for others. Is that is that right? Or am I, did I miss? Yeah. I mean, that's, no, that's, I mean, part of what we're doing is, I mean, we're making games, but we're also, you know, building a publishing expertise and playbook around, like, well, how do we build communities, not just games, but, you know, how do we, how do we bring

people together. And then also, how do we help new developers become successful? I 100% believe that this will be pretty important entry point for talent. Future talent in our industry, you've already seen it with like, I don't know if you ever played lethal company. That developer kind of grew up on Roblox, making Roblox games, really broke out with a Steam game lethal company. And we're going to see more of that as kind of like that, you know, a funnel, you know, of creative talents sort of like comes into the industry. There's like 10,000 developers in UEFN already. And some of those folks we're already working with in our creative label,

which is it's like a micro publisher, but it's also, I guess, I don't know if incubator or mentorship is the right word, but those folks are, they're like on our team. They're in our Discord. We work together. We help, you know, we're, we're, we're, helping to build their games and level them up, etc. And I really think that's where the next generation of game makers are going to come from

are things like that. Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I think I agree with that. I think I want to double click on this, the publisher playbook that you're developing because to me, this is the area that has been the most painful and troublesome. You know, I come, again, I come from a tabletop gaming background. most of my games are physical games or digital adaptations of my physical games. And now we have digital productions where I've partnered with the creator of Magic the Gathering and we've got a game on Steam and we're working on other aspects to it.

And man has like discovery and community building and growth and those platforms been a challenge. I mean, especially as somebody who's a small team without a lot of budget to commit to that kind of marketing and growth. What are the lessons that you've learned or what advice would you have? well, frankly, for people like me or others that want to get started or grow a nascent base of players. Well, discovery in general, pretty much anywhere has just gotten challenging because we're all online and there's a lot more content and choice for folks. So yet the advice I have in what we're building at Look North World is kind of like two things. One is, you know, our approach to building community is it's really about making it possible for conversations to happen.

So that's providing places and tools for people that are playing our games to talk to us and to talk to each other. So whether that's like a discord that is active and supportive in where we participate in, we run regular community play tests there. we even pitch games to that audience. And it's an opportunity for conversations to start. And when conversations are happening, that's where you get your highest value. You know, they call it K-factor, but really it's like, you know, that's word of mouth, you know.

And creating community is a lot about, you know, putting some authenticity and human face and fire around. conversations that are happening. And it's not just a Discord, but if you have channels that you can use, that's how you can help build those channels and keep an audience engaged and grow. So that's one aspect.

The other is about understanding the context in which your game's available. So if you're on a platform and you're marketing on other platforms, they all have their own unique discovery systems, and they're almost all algorithmically run. And the better a student you are of those algorithms, how they work, where the values are,

it's really, it's not, it's not any different from any aspect of doing business with a partner. You kind of have to align your goals. So if you understand what the goals of the platforms are and how the algorithms are set up, so the platform achieves their goals, then you can do things either by product fit or by whatever tactics you're doing off platform to feed into those

algorithms so that your game is supporting that platform and in turn that platform is supporting your product. So it was kind of like the two fundamental approaches to developing a playbook for us. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, the community building, yeah, 100% agree. And that's a pretty common understanding. obviously, you know, understanding about the different channels you're on is valuable. I've never heard it said the way you said it, which I like, which is aligning your goals with the

goals of the platform. If their interests are aligned, then that will work as a way to frame kind of gaming the algorithm or whatever, which is the way I think a lot of people will put it. So what, can you give an example of a platform or channel and how you would have, how you've adjusted your strategy or how you would propose a strategy for approaching that particular? I think the one just to make this a little bit more concrete for people. Oh, sure, 100%. I mean, so when we started, we basically, we had a theory that we would focus on making

what we would call first-person shooter game mods. So, like, you're making games inside of the Fortnite ecosystem. We know first-person shooters. I know, you know, Fortnite's third person, but, like, you can just think of, like, okay, we'll make, like, a team deathmatch game. We'll make a game that's, like, a tactical shooter. And those are great. But the reality is what the platform really values are games where players are playing those

games for a long period of time. Like that's an important, you know, KPI, you know, key performance indicate. That's what KPI is, right. Keep performance indicator. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, there's so many acronyms.

Oh, yes. I know. That's why I always try to, thank you for breaking it down because, yeah, there's so much jargon and like half my job is like break down the jargon. people. Yeah. So, so, so, so you know, so if you discover, if you figure out that, oh, okay, well, really, games that have a long play time, you know, session time, you know, somebody will get into the game and they'll play it for an hour. If that's really, uh, if that's important to the platform, well, are there anything that we can do with either the games that we have or the kind of games we

might make next that might lean into that. And you know, I know that's that sometimes, you know, if you're a purest game developer, you might hear that and go, well, I just want to make the games that I think are fun. Like, can't we just optimize for fun? Well, okay, that's art and that's cool. But, you know, if you're in a particular environment where the success of the product and you care about the sector product is based on things like these KPIs, well, then you kind of have to pay attention, right? So we decided to broaden our focus of games to include other genres. Whereas some of the next couple of games we made were tycoon games, you know. And tycoon games typically have longer playtimes. And when you design them with that in mind, you just end up, you know, it's like a, the opposite of a design constraint, I guess. It's a design goal. And that is energizing just as much as a constraint.

Or is, oh, okay. Well, I got some ideas for how we can do that. And that's just a real simple example. of trying to optimize our slate for what the platform really cares about. Yeah. And how did you learn that this is the Fortnite platform specifically in this case, right? How did you learn that time played was the most important metric for you to pay attention to?

Research. So, you know, that's some of some of that information comes from looking at data of what games are succeeding. and then looking at where possible. Some of this data is not always publicly available, but there are ways to get after data that matters. There are sites that scrape data that you can look at. You can form relationships with other developers to sort of share information.

You can talk to the platform holders about where to look for data and what data is available wherever. But when you get data, this is why, you know, that core loop that you're talking about, it applies to not just your game making, not just running a studio, but also how you publish games, maybe even the most about how you publish games. You're able to get some market data, real data about games. Then you're able to figure out at least some quantification of success or some similarities between successful things.

So you can start to form some patterns out of the noise of data. And when you have some patterns to look at that seem to match up with success, and it informs your thesis for what you do next. Yeah. So this is something I'm fascinated by because I will self-admit that we are, we're bad at using data to make decisions as well as I would like in the digital space. Like I get some data in and it's a variety of different things. I have my daily active users.

I've got retention. I've got monetization. I've got all these things. And we're, where our audience is small. So we're not necessarily having enough players to be A, B, testing all of the solutions. So we're trying different things and we're having to kind of make correlations and guesses.

Is it, is that, is that still what it's like in with a small company building things forward? Or are you, you know, do you have economists that are breaking these things down and showing you these different patterns between other games and the industry and you, or is it still like a guise?

but informed by data or is there like more definitive things? I want to sort of unpack how you're drawing these correlations, how it feels and works for you and someone who's done this successfully. Well, this is another, I would say this is another real benefit about being an environment where we can move quickly and we can, you know, a typical game development cycle is three to six months. So on the three months side, that's like incredibly short, right? So your time from like, oh, maybe X, try it, look at the results of X, is short.

is short enough that we can do experiments like that with games. But so, I mean, we're doing a combination. I say we're doing three things. That's one. We have a hunch and we'll make a game and we'll look at the result. We are also testing things in other contexts. So, you know, on a platform like Fortnite, the way the, tell me if these terms are too technical, but the way the customer acquisition funnel works, you know, and that's basically just,

that's the journey a player takes from us telling them about the game to them playing our game. The way that funnel works is they will see our game in Fortnite. They'll see a picture of it. I'll see a thumbnail. And then they'll click on that thumbnail and then they'll enter the game. That thumbnail is one of the first things they see.

So that's like the top of the funnel. So it's really important. And when you're a game maker, you don't always think that this one image that's like two inches wide by one inch tall on the screen next to a bunch of others is one of the most important parts of the success of your game. In fact, if you think that way, you get bitter and angry because you just spend all this time making your game. But those thumbnails actually matter and the rate at which people, because they're next to 100 others, right? So is there a context in which you can learn how to produce those thumbnails with as much care and craft and quality as you would put into the creation of your game? Well, if it's that important and it's the first impression, the first thing people see, I always would tell, I always would really obsess over the very first screen people would see in the game.

Like the first impression, the first scene, the first thing they do. And, you know, when you make a mobile game, you know how important that is. It's the first time user experience and this free. But in this context where everything is free, that concierge moment is so, so important, translates to the thumbnail. So we do a lot of testing on thumbnails, you know, off platform because it's the very first thing our players see. What does what does testing thumbnails off platform look like? Like, what are you doing? You're showing them to different people on an ad or you're post them in your Discord and have a people vote.

We'll make 10 thumbnails or X number of versions based on what we think will work. And we put each of them in front of many users. And we simulate the click through rate. Interesting. So you'll create, you'll put them in front of users. And we pay to do that. Okay. We pay to do that.

We run them as ads. We pay to do that. Got it. Okay. Yeah. And so this is, I just, forgive me if this is going to in the week. weeds on this piece of it. But I think it's like stuff that people don't realize how important these things are as part of the creative process. And whatever that means, whether that's your

discovery, you know, I think about this in terms of what does the box look like on a tabletop game and what are people going to see when they interact with it? What is the, you know, your Steam homepage look like, what's the first click open thing has? Like all that stuff matters. The concepts are not new. You know, it's like when we used to make games, we put them in a box and the box would go to a store, You know, and so we would do things like by the end cap at Walmart because you walk into Walmart and you'd see like a hundred copies of the box and it, you know, it's like, oh, I got to have that. That's the coolest thing. We would pay for embossing in gold foil on the front of the box, which is like, really? Okay, yeah, we're doing that. Yeah, of course we're doing that because it like it, it makes this game better than the one next to it, you know, just by feel, you know, and it's the same concept, the same concept. It's just all digital now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just a different storefront. So, okay, I've fascinated by all this stuff. There was one topic I took a note on that I wanted to be able to circle back to,

but we kind of went down your new project, Rabbit Hall, which is great, which is this, when you talked about founding Bungy and that you launched multiple projects that failed or didn't succeed at the level that you'd hoped and that you would still keep going and keep learning. I'd love to have a clearer picture painted of that time and moment because this is the kind of thing that a lot of people I know that write in or that, you know, give feedback. It's like, oh, I did the thing. It didn't work. Like, this sucks. And they lose, they lose hope and they give up.

And I think giving some more context around this story and what got you to keep going or how you were able to manage overhead and how you're able to manage morale and like all that would be, I'd love to get a little bit more out of that. Yeah. this is such a you know who Randy Pausch is yeah Poush was uh he was a director of the entertainment technology program at Carnegie Mellon he has this very famous lecture called the last lecture I highly recommend this to everybody if they haven't seen it yeah it's a it's a it's a great talk I think it was before TED talks and and he talks about the wall and going through the wall. And the wall really, it's not everything goes as planned.

Things are harder than we think. How do we react when we confront failure? And lots of people react different ways. And, you know, it's all okay. But that wall, that moment of failure is a filter. and you cannot succeed at what you set out to do without going through the wall. You can tap out and give up and go do something else. That's okay for you.

But there's no success without going through the wall. And I've experienced the wall in almost everything I've ever done to one degree or another. You know, we started, Bungi was started. I was a senior in college. I made a game. I made a VHS tape wearing a tie to beg for money from my dad's rich doctor friends. And I got $10,000, which was enough to print a box. And I didn't know what to do beyond that.

I called the places I bought my games from. And some of them bought some copies of the games. We sold enough. It paid me back for the boxes. basically enough I could try it again. And that's when I met Jason in one of my computer classes. He had a game and I, you know, I convinced him, oh, let's do this and we tried it again. Same thing.

You know, maybe we sold a little bit more, not much, enough to pay for what we just did. And I absolutely had, you know, we started working on the third one. And, you know, the internal conversation, I'm like, I'm just out of college, living with my girlfriend, the basement apartment in the south side of Chicago. She's paying the rent. And I gave up two job offers coming out of college, you know, to try this. I'm driving, like, my dad's old minivan, you know, it's like 12 years old. Meat and ramen. Like, the other half of the basement is filled.

It's got a shrink wrap machine. and it's just filled with inventory. It's like how many times I can do this? And I distinctly remember being on, I had an exercise bike in my basement apartment, and my desk was right next to it, had my fax machine on the desk. For those of you who don't know what a fax machine is,

it can send paper documents through a phone line, high tech. And we had been working on, the third game was Pathways in the Darkness. and I had been introduced to, no, what would they call it? I wasn't Triambite, it was in Australia. I blank it on the name of the distributor, but they were a distributor that they sold computer games. I got an introduction to them.

They said that they would carry the game, and I didn't really think much of it, but I'm on my exercise bike, and the fax machine rings, and it's their first order, and it's like a $50,000 order, which was more than we had made in the first two years.

And I got jumped off the bike. I'm jumping around. I was like, I'm going to get through the wall. I didn't say that. But I was like, okay, okay,

but I don't have to quit. Yeah. And to one degree or another, like on every project I've done, on the first marathon game, on the myth games, on the only games, on pretty much any,

anytime you're trying to do something you've never done before, it's really easy to get to points along the way where you're, you think you're going to fail or something's not working or you're stumped. And my advice is to, you know, I tell folks who like are fellow entrepreneurs, you just got to find a way to survive because there's always a solution. There's always a path. You just need to find a way to survive long enough that you can get to that path. So I am so glad I dug back into the story. That was fantastic. So, it. It is both a great piece of advice and a visceral, brought us in very viscerally to the experience.

So I'm going to bring up the obvious kind of follow-up here, right? This is the expression of the wall. I like to use the phrase the dark forest. I think I got that from Tim Urban originally, right? You're just kind of wandering around. You don't really know how to get out. You don't know where you're going exactly. But you know that there is a way out.

You just don't know it. And then how do you deal with being in the dark forest? and I don't get into the dark forest any less after doing this for 20 plus years. I just have more confidence that I will figure it out at something. But the question I get asked often when I talk about the dark forest and I'll put to you as a similar concept of busting through the wall is how do you know, right? Some advice is just keep going, persevere, whatever it takes. And then there's other times we're like, hey, this idea is not working.

The world is telling you it's not working. You should be changing gears. You should be pivoting. and how do you know when you're the guy that's supposed to push through the wall and just one more step forward and you're going to get that order and you're going to get that thing and every time it's like hey bro take the data make a different decision it's not quitting it's it's pivoting people like the word pivot right how do you how do you wrestle with that distinction that that is a really good question i mean i i i i try to think about things

both from a like what am I learning point of view and what are my options. So when when I'm faced with like a challenge like that, you know, existential challenge, design challenge, cash flow challenge, I, A, reflect on what I just learned. Why isn't this working? Like is there a reason why this isn't working? And then what are my. options, like, do I just need more time? Do I need a different approach? Do I need

different people? You know, somebody like a different context, you know, can I change my context to make this work? And then try to move from there. Often, you know, often the challenge is time. You know, in our industry, you know, we have chosen the most difficult thing to do. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, artistic and subjective, you know, but it's also, it's technical, you know? And so I think it was, it was Jordan who said, said this to me as well, like, because I was asking, but you do pen stuff, pen and paper. I was like, what's the, how's the different pen and paper and games? And he's like, well, you know, when you're making a book, it's usually, you know, you usually don't come in and hear, well, the pages didn't want to stay in the book today, you know, but in game development,

shit like that happens all the time, right? You know, um, so we've, chosen something that's very hard to do. Often we're faced with challenges related to time. Like, hey, this had to be done by this point of time, either because of cash flow or because there's a release date or there's a promotion date or whatever. And we run into unknowns and solving those unknowns take longer than we expect. How do we approach not having enough time? And often, you know, and that's where, you know, you can develop a play, you know, a plan around different options. Typically, it's like, well, can you change your scope? Can you get more time by raising more money, having more money involved?

Time. And time is a proxy for money in our industry, you know, like when we're making something, you know, we have people. You know, we don't have a factory. We don't have inventory anymore. We just have people. So if you need another month, well, it's easy math, you know, what that's going to cost. So often things just boil down to that triangle, you know, that, that production triangle

where you've got like quality, scope, and time or budget. Yeah, yeah. The good, cheap, fast, as the triangle, as I refer to it. Generally speaking, you get two. And if you're lucky. Maybe, maybe. If you're lucky. And, okay.

Great. Yeah. And then just to dig in a little bit more on this one, when you're, I love the structure, right, asking these questions, what am I learning?

What are my options? How do you, can you think and shift context? Is that process for you, like a formal process? Like you're writing these things down or is it just like you're going off into the woods or you're taught, you're brainstorming with the team?

Like what is it on the ground level when you're in this crisis moment? You're a face in the wall or the dark forest. Is it how do you, how do you make sure that you go through these questions and you optimize your, your chance of finding the good result. Usually they begin as introspection. That's a personal journey that then turns into a conversation with the team. And sometimes we take that a step further and actually try and kind of iterate it out,

iterate out like, okay, let's make a pro-cons list on here. Let's actually think about, you know, how viable are some of these options. sometimes when money is involved, here's a great example. At Industrial Choice, we had shipped our first game. We'd raised a bunch of venture capital. We had gone all in on our first game.

It didn't return. And we were working on taking what we learned from that and putting it into our second game. And we basically started two games at once. Like, okay, here's a second game in this genre. that we learned a bunch about, and here's a new game in a new genre. And that's a thing that we did when we kind of staffed up

to finish the first game and we're starting a new game. And through that process, we had to figure out how to get those games to the finish line, which meant more time or a partner. And in that climate, looking through what was actually doable, raising another round of venture was much higher risk. And what we ended up doing was divesting one of those games so that the game that we wanted

to make was going to be less expensive to make. And that's not a thing that we would have, you know, that wasn't like an obvious choice. That was a choice that came out of a bunch of introspection and a bunch of brainstorming about like what are our options here. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's a great, a great illustrative example. Yeah. One of the things I'll do is we'll go through like an assumptions challenging exercise with the team where we'll literally put down like all of the fundamental beliefs down to the basics of like we're making a game right now.

And then just like try to go through the exercise like, all right, what if that wasn't true? And then a bunch of times it's like nothing comes of it. But with inevitably, after, you know, 30, 45 minutes of this, we'll find something that was like we took for granted that clearly is not the case. And if we go a different route, there's some new door open to us. So different tactics to try to get at that seem really valuable. The next topic I wanted to cover is the future of the industry, right? You've, you've, you already mentioned that your new company exists because of, you know, a trend that you wouldn't even have dreamed of two years ago, right, where user generated content

and being able to play with these tools that exist is now, you know, potentially the future of games and certainly the breeding ground for the next generation of designers. There's a lot of trends that are moving forward in the world. both with AI, VR, AR, Web3, there's a million different technological and kind of cultural trends that are putting us in a direction that it's not clear what's next.

Since you've seemed to have a pretty good handle on being at the forefront of a lot of these things, I'd love to get your take on how you see the gaming and industry evolving over the next three to five years. Yeah, well, if I had a crystal ball and I could tell you with any certainty, what the world was going to be like in three years,

I'd be much richer. Yes. So take everything with a grain of salt. But it, you know, it's, I'm always amazed at like you can take any moment in time from the 80s through today. And,

you know, if you're going in that direction. And you could say the following sentence and it would be true. And the sentence is, it's a freaking great time to be making games. Just the opportunities in this industry, it's up and to the right, you know, there's always something new.

Not all of them pan out, but because technology is such a fundamental aspect of the creative work that we do, and technology is a train that doesn't stop, there's always new ways for, Folks who are making games are folks who are playing games to, like if you're making games, new kinds of experiences to make, and you're playing games, new things to try and enjoy.

So I think that's why games have been eating the world as we go. If you look at what's happening right now, some of the things, trends that you've mentioned from UGC to AI to Web3, those three things have put a lot of energy into the industry. And, you know, over the last couple of years, that energy has taken the form of venture capital, which means there's a lot of new projects. And VR is in that category too,

but VR sort of got on board way earlier. But just that investment just means that there's a lot of experimentation happening and a lot of new kinds of experiences for players to enjoy. And I'll give you a little bit of thought on some of those. VR, I think, is just a freaking amazing technology, like getting in a headset and experiencing that level of immersion. That's clearly a thing. The accessibility has always been holding it back from becoming more mainstream. If you look at what meta is doing with Orion, I think they're just kicking apples butt and just in terms of.

terms of VR from that perspective in AR. I see that form factor getting way more adoption, especially on the AR side. So I think we're going to see a lot of really interesting things come from that piece of technology. You mean, you don't think people want to wear giant ski goggles everywhere they go in the world? Well, I mean, putting those on does it does create an exceptional experience. But yeah, I was in Vegas for the Dice conference the beginning of the year. And I walked by, I was in the bar and I walked by two people sitting on a bench having a meeting. They were both wearing Apple Vision pros.

And I can be honest, I didn't know how to feel about that. I didn't have good feelings about that. It was very weird. Yeah. And even like looking at that, have you seen the Orion prototype? You know, that it's a area set. Yeah.

I mean, they look. They're bigger and goofier than a set of glasses, but, you know, they're, they're closer to Google glass than they are to a headset. And you look at that and, I mean, simultaneously, my two thoughts simultaneously were, wow, it's really going to happen. This is amazing. And two, we're freaking doomed. We're so doomed.

You know, it's like, my kids spend so much time on social media. And now if the next generation is just going to be so that much jacked in, humanity fundamentally is going to change. We can hope it's for the better, but who knows. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the part where we get into the, you know, who can predict the future, right? And I'm generally comforted by the fact that if you look back at every single generation looking at the next generation's technology, they were worried that that would be the death of society, right? TV is going to rock your brain. Social media will be the end of us.

Video games are going to rot your brain. There's even records from the earliest books that people were worried that would destroy our ability to tell stories and connect through the oral tradition. You know, like everybody's worried about every level of technology. Who knows what it's going to look like. I will take comfort in that fact. Yeah. I'll take comfort in that fact. Although, you know, when my dad was shaking his fist at the universe, I thought he was just an old man.

But when I shake my fist at the universe, I really think it's crumbly. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah. But that's me, you know, that's, that's VR. AI is absolutely a thing. It's like we have no idea how that's going to change our relationship with technology and each other. I mean, just think about in the, like the internet really just started kind of like becoming a thing in the 90s, late 90s.

If you were around pre-internet, you would not have predicted just what our lives, like the impact the internet has had on our lives. And it's not in any way that science fiction wrote books about. It's in very different, more fundamental and subtle ways about how we communicate with each other, the speed at which we do, how we navigate our world, how we engage with not just each other, but can't. communities, culture, and commerce, it's woven into everything. And it has made us in some ways exceptionally more productive and in some ways exceptionally more destructive, you know. I think AI is going to have an even bigger impact on us. You can't write the script for it today.

But even today, you can sit down at your computer and you can tell your life story to chat GPT. And then you can ask you questions about yourself. and it can write your book for you. And that's just mind-boggling. And it's just getting started. You know, this is baby. Right. Today's AI is the worst AI you will ever have, right?

It's only going to get better. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so whether you think it's like a fad or what, you're wrong, it's this, it's, it is the fundamental technology that will, you know, reshape society just like the internet. I believe that. What it means for games, I think it's going to be a tool.

and it will weave itself into features, just like multiplayer was an output of connectivity. I think we'll have things like global context inside games, which is a fascinating concept to me, where there's characters in a game that know what every single player in the game has done, and it can tell you things, you know? That's an amazing design feature, you know, having a sort of like an NPC LLM.

There's three acronyms for you if you want to. But, So AI, I think, is a really big game changer. No pun intended. Web 3, I mean, it's, we'll see. I got a lot of friends that are building in the Web 3 space. I see the benefit. I think just blockchain in general is an incredibly interesting bit of technology.

It seems less fundamentally game changing to me. but I think they'll certainly be interesting things that come out of it. And I think UGC, like what's happening with UGC is really, it's an output of player behavior. It's, I read an article at the beginning of this year about how it's like something like 60% of playtime is in games that are seven years old or older. You know, so like what we're seeing is the development of these communities around games that are growing.

and continue to grow. Look at Valerant. You look at Roblox. You look at Fortnite. These are games that have been around for years and years. Fortnite's over seven years old. And it's hitting, you know, all-time highs still because these are enduring communities that, um, uh, it can continue to keep and attract players.

And there's, there's an investment that players make into these games that, uh, they're, you know, the, the switching cost, you know, is, is high. enough that there's a real incentive to stay with your friends and stay with your ecosystem. And I think what that provides is it provides the opportunity to build these new kinds of platforms. So like the game is the platform, as opposed to a piece of hardware being the platform or a piece of software being a platform, the game and the vocabulary that goes with it, the culture that goes with it, like how the Friends Graph work and how the content presentation is,

all of that is part of that platform, which is giving rise to new, new kinds of opportunities for people to build and engage players, entertainment, advertising even. And that's kind of fascinating to me. Yeah. No,

I find it, I find it unbelievably fascinating. And it's like, it's again, an interesting inverse of the, of the take, right? You've seen this sort of kind of lock-in function of these big older games.

And they are, you know, like the mobile game top 10 list is, you know, used to change all the time, right, when mobile games were first launching. And now they're pretty much static for many, many years now. And so these, these megalith games have taken over in a way that makes it, in some sense, harder for new games to break through.

But in another sense, in so far as they allow for this sort of creatively playing in the sandbox, maybe this is this whole other industry that, you know, people make a living, making Roblox, you know, UGC and potentially with what you guys are doing, which is an interesting reverse take on that trend, I guess, a more empowering take, I guess. Well, the kind of engagement that exists in a platform like Fortnite is, it's different. In some ways, it's a lot more powerful because the players that are in that ecosystem, they choose to be in that ecosystem and they've been in that ecosystem for a long time. And if you're making games or you want to be part of that community, you know where to find them.

Whereas if you're trying to build a community from scratch, you have to invent how to find those players, you know. Yeah. And then you have to recruit them and then you have to keep them. So in some ways, you know, I had this realization. I'm a dummy. The Fortnite's programming language is called Verse, which, which is a way. which is kind of a shortcut for Metaverse, I guess. Well.

So I think they, in some ways, they don't really call for, you know, what they're doing with Fortnite, the Metaverse. But, you know, if you've read Ready Player 1 or if you've read any Neil Stevenson, you see the, you see that trend line, you know? Yes. Well, and this is actually, so this is a really interesting topic because that, right, this is where the Web3 piece, I think, is the most interesting because, you know, web three is very directly trying to build a kind of interoperable.

Metaverse, which is very, very difficult to do. Whereas a centralized space like a Fortnite or a meta, you know, Facebook proper, that has a large audience can build that world and let you play within it, but then they have all the control and you're, you know, you're playing in their world. Whereas I view the project of most of the Web3 games as a trying to build a system that allows for far more interoperability. And, you know, again, you know, you say you try to find the players in Web3, you know, the wallets of everybody that's playing a game, right?

Everybody that has the objects in that game or tokens in that game. And so you can actually reach them directly in a way that's potentially very interesting with things like airdrops, et cetera. So I think, like in many ways, leaving AI aside for a second, a lot of these puzzles are we're trying to solve with UGC and this other thing are, you know, how do you solve the discovery problem, which is the, it's easier than ever and better than ever to make games. It's harder than ever to kind of get discovered and build a community, right? That's true. That's true.

And, okay, well, we've, we've, we've run long time. I could, I could talk about this stuff forever. And I really appreciate you being very forthcoming with a lot of your, you know, the stories and some of the hardships that you've gone through. And you've really distilled a lot of these lessons in great ways. I want to make sure that people that want to find your cool new stuff and participate in your, in your, in your world, in the UGC world, where should they go? How can they find you?

How can they play your, your awesome new games? Yeah, well, so if you'd like to check out any of the work that we're doing at Look North World, you can visit our website, looknorth. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on TikTok or Instagram. Just come on into Fortnite. You can find us in there, too. And if it's okay for me to plug my podcast, please do it. Also host a podcast called The Fourth Curtain.

It's a show that brings you stories from some of the biggest creators in video games, and you can find us at the fourth curtain.com or wherever you find your podcast. Yeah, I had done a little research and had only discovered the podcast about an hour before we started talking. So I am definitely going to be listening to it. This is right up my alley. So I'm, I'm excited. And I love what you're doing. And I love that you're spreading this knowledge and opportunity for new creators. So this has been just such a wonderful chat. So thank you so much for coming on. Oh, thank you. It's been awesome. And great to hang out with you. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you.

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with a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book

with the same title as this podcast, think like a game design. In it, I get a good. step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think click at game designer.com or wherever find books or something.