Think Like A Game Designer - Nate Heiss — Removing Ego from Design, The Magic of Roguelikes, and Building Across Digital and Tabletop (#104)

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

About Nate HeissNate Heiss is a true game design chameleon. His 25-plus year career spans from competitive Magic: The Gathering play to designing iconic cards like Goblin Guide at Wizards of the Coast. He then took those skills into the AAA video game world, working as a designer and creative director at studios like LucasArts and PopCap on massive mobile hits like Plants vs. Zombies Heroes. Nate and I have been geeking out about game design since we met on the Magic Pro Tour in the late 90s, and now we’re finally teaming up on Gundam Assemble, an upcoming tabletop skirmish miniatures game. In this episode, we dive deep into the differences between physical and digital design, the ethics and realities of free-to-play business models, and how to capture the elusive magic of discovery in an internet age. Nate delivers profound insights that will resonate with anyone building games or trying to navigate a creative career.Justin’s Ah-Ha! Moments* The Shift From Player to Designer Mindset: Nate and I discuss a classic trap many pro players fall into when they start designing: trying to "beat" the players. It's easy to bring a competitive ego into R&D and focus on squashing dominant strategies to prove how smart you are. But great design isn't about winning; it's about crafting a fun experience. Once you soften that competitive edge, you realize your true goal is to empower players to make their own discoveries.* The Economics of Free-to-Play Dictate Design: We tackle the controversial topic of free-to-play games. Nate points out that companies succeeding in this space aren't necessarily making "better" games; they are mastering live service and content costs. If a studio can "turn the crank" and produce engaging content at a fraction of the cost, they gain a massive competitive advantage. It shifts the design problem from just making an great game (which is table stakes) to efficiently delivering ongoing value over time.* Roguelikes are the Modern Gold Rush: I've always wanted to recreate the feeling of opening an early Magic pack—when nobody knew the optimal strategies and everything felt like an untamed frontier. Nate brilliantly identifies that roguelikes are where this feeling lives today. By taking a core loop and exploding it into a massive, randomized possibility space on every run, roguelikes force players to adapt and experiment, capturing that communal feeling of discovery over and over again. 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 speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective, whether it's inside the gaming realm or beyond.

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Today's podcast, I'm thrilled to welcome Nate Heiss, a veteran game designer with over 25 years experience across trading card games, video games, board games, and more. Nate got his start as I did as a competitive Magic of the Gathering pro tour player before joining Wizards of the Coast where he helped design sets like Even Tide, develop digital titles and even created iconic cards like Goblin Guide, a card he recently described as fulfilling one of his biggest dreams in game design. And then he moved into producing AAA video games at studios like LucasArts, Sucker Punch, Pop Cap, and EA, where he worked on hits like Plants versus Zombies Heroes. He has been an incredible designer and thinker and gamer. And most recently,

he is now working with me directly on one of the exciting new recently announced project, Gundam Assemble, a tabletop scrimmish miniatures game, which is launching in October of 2026. I've been working on this project for over two years, and I haven't been able to talk about it until recently. So it's very exciting. We go into some of the deep dives about that game, about what working together is like,

about working at Stoneblades like. We go into a lot of details around the general principles of game design and how game design and business models overlap. We get into the controversial topic of AI and game design and product creation and what the likely results are of that advancing technology and how we can leverage the classic fun of game design, the classic principles of design that we talk about every month on this podcast and a world that has a constantly evolving frontier of new technology. I always love talking to Nate. And as I mentioned in the podcast, he is like one of the core examples of the people why I started this podcast because he and I will have deep dive conversations like this all the time whenever we see each other.

And now it's an opportunity for me to share those insights with you. So without any further ado, here is Nate Heiss. Hello and welcome. I am here with Nate Heiss. Nate, buddy. So great to see you. Oh, hello. Oh, hello. Well, yeah, yeah.

So this is, as we were saying right before we started recording, this is a little bit of a different kind of interview for me because, well, you and I see each other all the time. We've been working together now for the last, what, four months or so directly, something like that? At least. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. So it's been great. And, you know, but you and I've been friends for far longer than that, going back 25 some odd years from the Magic Pro Tour days. And we have stayed connected throughout your career into game design, even though this is our first chance to kind of directly work together, which is long overdue. But we have had, you're one of the people who is like exemplary of why I started the podcast, right?

Like you and I would, whenever we'd meet each other, we would like magnetize to each other at like a conference. And we would just start talking about game design and just geeking out about things in life. And I love those conversations so much. And the podcast is an opportunity to share some of that, you know, wit and wisdom with the world. Yeah. I mean, it's super fun to talk to you, obviously. Yeah, it's crazy thinking back. It was like PT Rome or something and like magic.

but I think I met you or somewhere around there. Yeah, that's right. Travel around then, travel around now. Yeah, so we're looking, you know, Pro Tour Rome that's flashing us back to 1998 to date us both. It was a key pivotal moment in my magic career. So at that time, I was just starting college and I had won the national championships before, but I hadn't made a ton of money playing. It was just kind of a cool thing.

and I was intending to stop playing magic and just go to college. And my dad was really excited about taking to go see Rome with me and have that experience, which was like, okay, that's cool. So he was like, helped to kind of fund the trip. And so this would be like, what's going to be my last hurrah as a magic player? And then, of course, I made the top eight and things went really well. And it was like, oh, well, I guess maybe this isn't the last thing that I'll be doing. And and and and but I will I'll tell you it was that and people that want can actually read my pro tour report is still up on the dojo the classic dojo.org I think it is now that's like the old it's on the front page. And so it's really funny for me to look at. And so the dojo for those that don't know listening was it was the original like back in those days when the internet was young and magic strategy was like a new forming evolving thing. The dojo was where you went to.

go find things. And so people would post strategy analysis and tournament reports and that's where like the original kind of online community of pros I think really kind of formed and came in. Do you have memories or experiences of that, Nate? Yeah, I mean, I wrote for the dojo.

Actually, I wrote for pretty much all the sites moving forward. Like, I think I was the most prolific magic writer for a while. It was like me and Mark Roswell. I think he's taking the title. since that. Yeah, I haven't

for anything in probably 15 years. But, yeah, I was writing for, like, you know, the Tojo and Mind Ripper and Scry and Bramers. Remember those names. Yeah, exactly. It all comes flooding back.

Well, Brambers turned into TCG player. Yep. Yep, which turned out to be quite a successful multi-million dollar enterprise. And so, yes, there are, there is, so it's, it's sort of interesting to see how these online communities inform the game experience and inform what our job is as designers, right? So there's some interesting hooks here, right?

Because one of the things I try to do now with a lot of my designs, and you and I've had this conversation explicitly, is like try to recreate that experience that we used to have when you're like cracking open a pack of magic and you didn't know what was in the pack. Right? Like that was possible back then. It was this really cool, really innovative thing. But then nowadays, because information is so prolific on the internet, because everything is available, spoilers are available before the set is out, the entire format has been figured out,

and the best decks are pretty clear within two weeks, often of the set being out. That process of discovery is not what it used to be. There's different opportunities for community and people to share, but how do you think about that in the modern era compared to back in the day? And how does that inform how you think about games? Yeah, so anything was possible back then, and nobody knew anything. And so it was kind of like the gold rush, right? You're going to, like, race out to this mountain over there.

You know, nobody knows what's over there. Maybe there's wild animals that'll get you, who knows. You know, I'll just start digging in the ground and see what happens. And it was super fun. People were experimenting with different strategies. people didn't know how the game really worked. They mostly knew the rules, although the rules didn't understand

how the rules worked sometimes. That was always interesting. But yeah, like the sort of like science and experimentation and just trying things and the camaraderie and community and the teams that formed out of all of that was really exemplary of that age. And I do think

as the internet got more mature, a lot of that magic is kind of lost, and there's still a community. There's great community and all that stuff, but it's very rare. I don't know. I feel like those moments were like, oh, my gosh, somebody discovered some new technology in the game, and now everybody's adjusting and, you know, trying to figure out how to capitalize on that thing. It just doesn't happen all that often anymore.

It's kind of sad, and I think... Yeah. Maybe I was she trying to figure out how to capture that feeling. Yeah, well, it's very tricky to do, right? And again, I'm living proof of this, right? Like, when I won the U.S. national championships in 97, like, I was a kid that didn't have access to any of this stuff. And I just, like, discovered thawing glaciers as a card that existed.

And I realized that that was totally usable. And just to fill in people that were, that are not as familiar. So thawing glaciers was a land in magic where you could as a resource card. It came into play tap, meaning you couldn't use the turn you played it, but then the turn afterwards, you could use it to go get an extra resource out of your deck and put it directly in the play and then

return thawing glaciers to your hands. You could keep reusing it. And they had just recently introduced the, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, well, they had just, I don't think it was miserable. I thought it was great. It was strong, but like, it's like, oh, okay, let me shuffle my deck again. Let me shuffle my deck again. It's like, the opponents will just fall asleep sometimes.

Yeah, okay. So now we're, yeah, now we're getting into some of the game design lessons here, right? Which is, yeah, things that, things that the, the mechanics of that card, where you have to go and search your deck and shuffle and pull out a card and then reshuffle again. And so that certainly slows games down, which I agree with. As a player, it allowed me to morph my entire strategy around it. And then, you know, my goal is, the goal as a player is like, I want them to have to ban a card because of me. Like, I want to like beat the game designers, you know.

Like, you guys messed up. And I'm going to show you how you messed up. badly that you don't break this thing and happen you will have to ban it uh i've succeeded a couple times but uh you know well and then and so and and you know so uh anyway to you know that to finish off that story that that that ability to use that card and leverage the brand new mulligan rule of uh at the time where you could mulligan down you know one less card and keep mulliganinglingling. Because thawing glaciers would make up any card advantage. I could aggressively do that. So that was fun. But I think that the shift, which you made right now,

is an interesting one that I want to talk about because you and I both got to go through this, right, which is the player mindset, which is like, I want to break this game. I want to win. I want to figure out how to do this as the pro player mindset specifically. And then to the, when I first started working as a game designer, I wanted to make sure that the players didn't beat me, right? Like, I wanted to make sure that the game wasn't broken. And I was very, very good at making sure it wasn't broken to the point that I, I over-nerfed the set, the first, yeah, this is one of the early versus system TCGs, which is the first

thing I started working on. And then I realized I actually took the player's mindset and I messed up the game because of it. And then I had to learn the designer's mindset, which you already illustrated, which is like, thinking about how do you craft a great player experience? And that, and developing a game is not about making everything balanced and making sure nothing is broken for sure. But it's about, honestly, you want to push the envelope sometimes

and give players that sense of discovery and excitement and maybe there's something cool here kind of thing. So how do you think about that transition? Does that arc, do you follow that similar arc? Yeah, I would say, I never like over-nerfed a set, but I definitely, it took that adjustment. Because I was in R&D at Wizards. I was like, oh, I'm going to show these guys.

Like, I'm hot shit, right? So, you know, I'd like be bashing them all at the playtest thing or whatever. And, I mean, there are no slouches, right? Like, you know, you got Matt plays and MacTurian, you know, like all these, like, Hall of Fame magic players in R&D that are very good at magic. But it turns out, like, once you've been at Wizards a few years, you kind of soften up a little because your priorities change. You're now thinking about design.

You're not thinking about like cut through it winning, that kind of thing. So if you come in with that kind of mindset, yeah, you're going to win games. But that wasn't really the point. The point was to like, like if you're doing well, your toys get taken away. That's true. It is a funny experience. When you're working on a design team, you having a strategy that you love and being really good at it, just guarantees that they're going to nerve your strategy because you're winning all the time.

So it is a perverse, a perverse incentive in that situation. But, but yeah, that, that idea that, you know, and it's,

it's one of the reasons why it's actually pretty hard for me to play magic these days. Because I'm not, you know, I'm just nowhere near as good as I was. I don't focus on it. I don't know the cards. I don't have that same edge. And so while I can,

you know, yeah, say it again. It's a different mindset. Yeah. It's a different mindset. And I love playing games to like break them apart and understand their constituent pieces and how does this work and how does this create this emotional impact or how could this have been optimized or streamline. And you know, I still love to win as you and I, as you know from our, you know, we still play games.

But it's like that's so secondary to what is important in games and why we play them now. It's a, it's just, yeah, it's definitely an interesting shift. Do you miss the competitive days? sort of I mean I still compete but I just do it at board games instead so like I would go into the World World War Championships and I would do that you know for many years and it's like okay these are some of the best board gamers in the world

ostensibly I mean I've had a hard time finding better ones so I think they're pretty freaking good and you know just competing at that level and having that sort of like strategy that strategy where like the conversation it kind of reminds me like the early team days of magic

we're like okay how do we break this format how do we it's like okay what is the best you know three turns you can have in game X you know what is the value of this room and the castles of Mad King Ludwig you know weird things like that

so I still do get to scratch that itch but, you know, obviously not at magic. I'm not interested in competing at magic anymore. It's, my favorite thing about working on magic was just trying to make the craziest cards. Like, how insane can I make whoever the rules manager is at this moment? And will they quit because of these cards I'm making? That would be a victory, basically. Okay, so I was trying to beat the players and you were trying to beat the rules manager.

Got it. Yeah. All right. All right, rules manager. Here's witch's mirror. Good luck with that. Yeah. So we basically, we can't stop being competitive.

We just do it in really bizarre ways now. All right. All right. Well, yeah. So, so, you know, it's one of these things because I, I've, I actually, you know, this was a path not taken for me, right? Like, I never got to go work at Watsy and go work on magic. I was, you know, magic was such a big part of my life.

I ended up going down a different road. Actually, Mark Roosevelt wrote, Missouri, he wrote the introduction for my, my think like a game designer book. And it's a short introduction, but it's a really sweet story of just him like, assuming that he was going to get me to go work for him at Wizards. And then, you know, once I kind of released ascension and it, you know,

became a runaway success. He's like, damn it, I lost my chance. like, all right, unless you get to learn from whom in the book. And he and I have stayed friends for all this time. And he was one of the first guests on the podcast. He's going to come back on the podcast to talk about a brand new project soon. But yeah, I often wonder, right, there's a different set of skills that you learn in that environment.

You're surrounded by so many brilliant people. There's also some, you know, some politics and personalities and things like that to navigate. So what do you think you took out of that experience? How did it change you as a designer? How did it prep you for future work and having that kind of battleground, if you will? And wizards? Yeah.

So I don't think there's ever been a point in my life where I had been surrounded by a smarter group of people at work. You know, like I would walk into the room and often I'd be like, I'm the dumbest person here. which is like, I don't know, for guys like us, right? Like that's not a thing we think a lot. You know, maybe it's a little bit of ego, but, you know, just generally, it's like, wow, these people are like really, really smart, and I can learn a lot from them.

And so soaking it, soaking it all up, and then the discourse, right? I mean, well, Wizards was famous for its loud, combative discourse, I'll say. and sometimes the loudest person in the room was the victor but often it was like just really good game design discussion and through that it kind of lays bare all of the ins and outs of why you may want to do a thing or not do a thing and the effects it's going to have on the players or how to even understand how it's going to affect players things like that also debate and some of the stuff you don't get to learn until a year plus later. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is another area where, you know, so the realities of those

lessons and the, you know, the ground truth lessons of game design where we learn like, okay, what does it mean? Like, why are we, why are we choosing to make this card powerful and this one not? What does it mean to have a color pie? What's the advantages of distinguishings, right? Which is all stuff that, you know, a lot of lessons that I've, we've talked about and I've talked about previous podcast in my book, et cetera. But I want to linger a little bit on the debating side of things, right? Because this is one of those interesting areas that, again, one of the reasons why we're such good friends is we love to sort of talk about these things and can debate these subjects.

But there's a different type of debate, right? The way that the things have happened at Watsi, a lot of the times what I've heard is, you know, again, is people, you know, sometimes literally screaming at each other and trying to prove that they are right. and one of the things that I have learned is, you know, I ideally want to find out that I'm wrong. Like, if I can like, you know, so I want to because that's the opportunity I get to learn. I mean, honestly, I think that's like, that's been one of my superpowers is like, I love it when somebody proves me that I'm wrong. Like it's like it's so great because I've just gotten better.

And I think that's something that you, you share. And I, you know, but I think like, as you mentioned, like you never overnerved to set in part because you were surrounded by smart people who were senior. to you who were never going to let that happen. Right. And I, when I was working, I was, you know, a good debater and felt very sure of myself. I was able to get my way a few more times that I probably should have. No, no, it's not. It's not.

And so I realized over time that I actually need to overcorrect the other way. Like, I will, and, you know, you'll correct me if I'm wrong because you're seeing this in the room, right? Like, I will try to steal man the opposing, you know, argument and make sure that the other side is like presented as well as it can be or that the person presenting their side feels understood and heard that we get it. And then, only then will I then kind of present the alternatives or, you know, what, what is the underlying principles and how do we get there? Like, it's a really important shift that is, is not necessarily easy to do, but has pretty big impacts in the, in the R&D room, I think. Yeah, I always say that's generally true. You know, we all have our things where we're like, oh, yeah, this has got to be that way. I'm just like, that's the way things make sense.

And then it's like, yep. Yeah. But, you know, I think, I think from what I've seen, you know, you walk the walk. Yeah. Oh, yeah, believe me, I fall down plenty of times. And, you know, we all have hills we die on that are really dumb. But, you know, sometimes, whatever, it is what it is. the lesson I take it from this is like I have you know there was back in my 20s I was very sure I was

right about everything right I was just like confident in everything couldn't be wrong I maybe some listeners can relate to this you know this is just the reality and then you know turn 30 I realized I was wrong about a lot of things then another five years I was wrong about a lot of things I was sure when I was 30 and then 40 said every five years I could look back on my life and look at some beliefs I was really, really sure of that now I'm very sure dead wrong. That happens enough times you start to have a little bit of humility, like a lot of time, but a little bit. Yeah, yeah. It's funny how often that can keep happening, right?

You know, like, oh, it's another five years. Oh, another five years. Oh, yeah. Again. Well, and, and, and, and let's, you know, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, which is to say, like, when you are making a new game, or in my case, like, it's running a company or you're trying to build a new project. You've been part of startups and stuff as well, which we can dig into, right? You have to have some level of confidence slash arrogance slash hubris, whatever, that like, I'm going to be able to do this thing better than anybody else, right? I'm going to make a thing that's new that people are going to want more than they want

to spend their money on any other damn thing or time, even more precious. And so you have to have some level of like overconfidence, if you will, to be willing to take risks and create stuff. Yes, absolutely. I think running a business or like diving into the arena with a thousand other competitors, like you have to be kind of crazy. Like it doesn't work otherwise. And I'm not saying it's a bad idea,

but it's like you've got to throw all this caution to the wind and just tackle it head on and just be like, yeah, it's going to be great. Let's just keep going. It's amazing. And I think the people who are really strong at that and keeping positive attitudes around it, their success rate is higher than the people who are more negative on their chances, basically. Like confidence works. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

There's a degree to which it's better to be, like, confident and able to move forward and take risks and then fall on your face and learn and get, you know, as long as you have the skills to learn from the losses and get back up. than to be overly conservative and not sure. And, you know, this was, so this is the big lesson for me. And I've told the story on the podcast before and maybe I've told it to you. But, you know, when I was working at Upper Deck and I started working on the World of Warcraft Ministers game and I kind of had to become a product manager and I presented

it to the, to the board, like, and to the CEO and like had this big presentation. So I'm like, a kid in my mind. I'm like 27. And I've now moved from just game designer to business guy. and I'm presenting to this, you know, half a billion dollar CEO and their whole rich mahogany table and everything. And I did all my research and I'm like, you know, super nervous. And I go and I give this presentation. And then they, you know, there's this pause when I'm done.

And I'm like, what's happening? And then they start talking about the idea and they talk about the game. And then it's like, at first, like, okay, I think they like it. I think they're going to go forward. And then I start listening in more detail because it, you know, it was a little fuzzy at first. And they were just saying things that I now knew because I'd done enough research. They were just dead wrong. Like they had no clue what they were talking about.

But they just acted so sure. And it was like, and, you know, my first response was terror because it was like, oh, oh my God. Like this is like a multi-million dollar project and nobody knows what they're doing. And then split second later, like this like icy calm comes over. And it's just like, oh, nobody knows what they're doing. Like got it. Like they're just making this up.

Like I could totally do that and a year later once I'd launched that game I quit and started my company and you know So it was a there's a degree that that you know you just got to learn the lesson that you know I made plenty of mistakes but it's better to make the mistakes that push you in the path of your you know what you want out of life Then then then to not make mistakes and be trapped in somebody else's game Yeah, I that sounds great I've actually said this I said this to Aaron Forsy from the past most like Nobody knows what they're doing. Everybody is, like, acts confident, but like, no.

None of us know. And I was like, I was like, oh, was that a mistake to say? Because now I'm not acting confident, right? I mean, this was back in my, you know, like teens or early 20 years or not. But it's very comforting. That's, you know, to know that, well, like when the entire. like a team CMEU Pittsburgh crew decided to like go a whole hog

into the professional magic players was when Randy Buehler won for Chicago that one year, 97 I think. And our thought was this. He's like the worst guy in our

player group, right? They can all do it was better than him, right? And like, of course he's in a big player, you know, like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's great. they can't do it. Well, I can do it. If they're doing that, you know, it gives you such a leg up and your ability to like not freeze under these conditions.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. This meant that this quote may be apocryphly, uh, credited to Winston Churchill, but I love it anyway, which is a failure, uh, success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Uh, and, uh, you know, I just like, I do, I do. I think it's like, I mean, It's just just, you get to choose the attitude that you want to take to life. It's like the character class that you're like adopting for life. You know, it's just like the kind of warrior that's just going to go forward and charge into battle. Like, as it turns out, you're going to be more successful as long as you can also bring a, you know, maybe bring a mage along that can help you understand why you've made a mistake and change directions every now.

You know, but it is. It's that, that, that, you know, take a frame of, you know, being willing to take risks that are calculated risks and be willing to put a stake at the ground and say, you know, I'm willing to take, like leadership is not knowing what to do. It's being willing to like make an assertion and stand behind the consequences, right? Like I'm going to say that, you know, I'm going to believe in this. Here it is. Like, let's go. And if it's on, if it's wrong, it's on me and I'll deal with it. And like that, that to me is like the shift that I had to make. And, and, you know, you can either sort of comment on that or or just we could pivoted towards like, how do you think about how you then directed your career, right?

So the path from I'm a magic pro player to I work on magic and design, that's like pretty easy job. Like, get it. We all thought about it. Then, you know, from there, you've worked on so many big projects and digital games and IPs and whatever. Like, how do you think about when you're, you know, steering your own ship? How does that, how did that process work for you?

So I'll answer that. But first I want to dovetail on something about what you were just saying. And it's a similar thing, but I think it's like super important, so it's worth saying, which is the success metrics involved matter. Like a lot of people are really oriented in business and games and things like that towards making a lot of money or, you know, having a success or, you know, a big release. But at the end of the day, I think it's really important for all of us to keep in mind. Like, why are we doing this in the first place?

It's like, we enjoy getting games, right? Let's just have fun and enjoy, you know, smell the roses along the way. And that is a success in itself. If I am able to sustain myself and make games the whole time, like, I'm going pretty good. That's not bad. So maybe I'll have great success along the way too. But I think framing your success metric as how are you spending your time? Is that quality?

Are you being fulfilled? by it is a huge part of it. And so it's like, it's important for folks not to get like too mired in the like, oh my God, is this going to like work and stress and like all the things? Like there's a million of things to be worried about and making things.

But yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. This is what is it, yeah, what is it that what does success look like in life, you know? And what is it that you're really afraid of on the flip side, right?

Like a lot of times people, when they think about making these leaps, you know, like for me, you know, dropping out of law school and becoming a game designer, or quitting my job at Upper Deck and starting a game company. Like those are scary things. But if they work out, my life is amazing. And if they don't work out, like once I actually like got down to the like real like

granular level, well, okay, what happens? I lost a year. Maybe I lost a little bit of money. And then I just go back and go back to law school or go get another job or whatever. Like I've lost very little in fact. And so knowing what you should be afraid of and knowing what you're trying to play for. Yeah, both are key. And they are great, great points to kind of talk about us for people.

that are out there thinking about how to navigate their own life. And so the other question, so being at Wizards, I had a great opportunity to work on a variety of kinds of games. I worked on magic, obviously. But I also worked on pretty much everything else they made during my tenure there. And I ran stuff like for Avalon Hill, making Axis and Allies games and movies games, you know,

S-S-S-Sin-Ly, where I'd see, you know, Guadop Canal, Battle of the Bulge, anniversary edition. Some of these games have been re-released,

actually just like last few minutes or something by Renegade, which was really sweet to see them on the shelves again. I'm like, yay, yeah,

go. So, like, getting that wide breadth of experience in both card game design, minis game design,

and then, you know, some digital game design with the whole, like, remix thing. They were doing at the time. time.

I was able to kind of get a sampler platter, right? Of all the different kinds of things and really think about what fills my cup. And from there, I wanted to go into video games and made the leap to go work at Sony after that, Denver working on. I mean, it was still card games, but they were video game card games, right? Yeah, it's an easy, an easy jump, a natural, natural, move over. And so how did you think about, you know, as someone who's also done the, you know, both sides of the digital physical game space, how do you think about working on digital games

and that side of the world versus physical games? Well, uh, I think that the digital games pay way better for one. Yeah. It's just way more money that make more money than bigger games unless you're magic of Pokemon or something. Right. The ceiling is just way higher. So it's easier to make a career out of it, I guess. I worked on mobile games for a really long time, like 10 years or something. I still work on them, I guess.

But I work on a variety of things. It's harder in some ways and it's easier in some ways. It's harder because you can't just write words on a piece of paper and say, yeah, it means that. That's how it works. And then it just, now magically, it's somehow it all works fine because it's a physical game. And we have brains. We can understand it. It's like, no, somebody has to go coded or whatever.

I mean, maybe things are going to change now with, like, you know, by coding or whatever. And the AI can just, like, make your cards actually work. I don't know. It's all so crazy. It is a crazy time. I had literally one of the other, one of the people from, I think, like, a game to have a class said, like, hey, look, I made ascension tactics. a digital game in less than 30 minutes that just works and plays the game

was like, are you kidding me right now? Like that is a very complicated game engine. Like that's insane. Yeah, but does that work because they fed his sentient tactics into it, right? Like, it's like, well, it already exists. So it could make it again, but if it didn't exist, but...

Well, but yeah, but the different, yeah, the idea that, you know, certainly, well, whatever, we can go down this rabbit hole because I do find it really interesting, but, but, you know, the fact that when, you know, when this is a barrier for building digital games, when I think about them, it's like it's so much more money to make,

potential to make, but it's also so much more money, you know, to produce, right, to create it. And so you have to have engineers and the iteration cycles take longer. And so if I build it,

you know, I have to program a thing and it doesn't work, then, wow, I've wasted months of engineering time or, you know, the game engine's not good. So you have to like,

it's a, it's a much, you know, higher risk, higher reward, just like, very cumbersome process a lot of times to get to results. And so, you know, the idea that, like, AI can help cut that down.

And so I could just design a game and iterate way faster is something I'm very excited about. Yeah, I will be interested to see how things shake out over the next few years in that realm. I think that, yeah, games, I think like designing games. is really hard, and so I don't think it's going to help with that so much, but in the execution of games, there's definitely a lot of things that people can do with it. But there's also a lot of

like ethical quandaries and backlash and that's right. Yeah, yeah. What things is it okay to use AI for, which one isn't? What's the right balance there? You know, I've written a, you know, I've talked about this a bunch. I've written

about it. I've had AI experts on the podcast and I'm planning to have more, you know, I think it's very interesting because I'm, you know, my whole life is about, you know, empowering creatives and helping people to, you know, be able to live more creative, fulfilling lives. And I think a lot of the people who are back, you know, a lot of the backlash against AI is that it's taking away creative jobs. Though, yeah, I would contend I think it's actually going to create way more over time. Because there's more opportunities to create than you would have, you know, maybe if,

whether it's jobs or not, I'm not sure, but the opportunity. to be creative and make your visions come to life is, is I think the real, uh, exciting part for me. Yeah. I don't know. Like,

I think it's different if you're like a digital artist or like, you know, like a painter versus like, you know, a writer or like, uh, you know, a game designer or something like that.

There's different, there's different struggles. Um, and I don't know. So, so like, I'm trying to, I always try for it like,

okay, well, really we'll have like, have full quadratures with this, but like, where's the line? Because, you know, I'm like, thinking like a game designer, right? I'm like, where's the line? You know, I want to understand this. So, like, you know, when you're using like Adobe Photoshop or something,

there's like content-aware fills and those like use AI now or whatever. So it's like, okay, well, everybody uses Photoshop, but nobody is great thing about that. So there's like some use of it people seem to be fine with and others aren't. Yeah, it's funny. We talked about the programming side of it. Most programmers I know that are actually like, they're like thrilled. They're like, you know, some of them are scared, but a lot of them are like, yeah, great. This could do so much of the coding work.

That's fantastic. Whereas, you know, artists don't feel that way. And, you know, I don't know, I, you know, I have like I have like attorneys that, you know, I have massive contracts. I have to review and I have pay, you know, I did go to law school so I can do it myself somewhat, but I still pay attorneys a lot of money. And now the idea that AI could do that for way less. Like that sounds pretty good to me.

Maybe not to the attorneys. But it's like it's just a very, you know, is the world better off with a lot more attorneys getting paid a lot more money to these things? Or is it better off with like more of that money being able to use towards the creative projects or to run the company properly? You know, it's no easy answers. When you put it in terms of attorneys, I think people might think differently of it. But when it's like, oh, you know, the person who's right anime character or whatever,

and like they want to draw the lines as opposed to like the engineers they don't want to break the lines different kind of lines it's complex like anything right so it's just it's pretty cute play out but we don't need to get too rabbit hole on that

no no yeah it's it's a topic I do cover again as I cover those that are interested I cover it in my my podcast with Ethan Malik some articles I've written on the substack about this process. I think it's, I think it's an important debate to have. I understand that, you know, all different sides of it. I think it's like, you know, I want to, I think there is a, there is a utopian world that could potentially be here where we're all empowered to do creative

things and the kinds of upstream art that would never be possible, right? Like, you and I could create a Marvel level production movie, you know, using tools that are available to us for a few hundred dollars instead of, you know, millions of dollars. That's awesome. But also the person who was, you know, going to be creating those visuals is not there. So anyway, there's more to that, but we, We could get back into the process of building digital games, you know, pre- I think everybody had enough money to just, like, live their life comfortably. I don't think this debate would be so. Yeah, that's the ideal world, right, is that we move into a space where the value of, like,

what AI and robots eventually will allow us to do is like the cost of goods for everything drops dramatically because everything is so cheap. and you know, intelligence is on tap. And the value that's produced from that gets distributed well enough so that nobody has to work. We're in the Star Trek future, right? Nobody has to work to live. You don't money is a foreign concept. We just are fine. And then we can pursue things that even if the AI is better than me at drawing a picture, better than us eventually at game design and every other damn thing. Let's just posit that. That's true. That's fine. We could still have like artisan game design projects where it's like humans that get to make things and look what I did or an

artisan, you know, drawing a fit, I'm human drawing a painting because you love to draw, right? Like, I cook for my family, not because it's better than what a chef could do or because I'm going to make money from it. It's because I enjoy that process and I like to be able to provide for my family. You know, the computers are better than the best humans at chess and have been for some time, but we still love to play chess and we still admire the best human chess players. So it doesn't, just because the machines are better than us and everything, doesn't mean like we don't have room to enjoy life. And I actually think games and the communities that we build through games and the ability to have like challenges and competition within these protected spheres is actually a key

to that successful future being an enjoyable, challenging, meaningful space. Yeah, I agree with all that. I hope it does get distributed, you know, fairly and equally. It's a big if. It's a big if, I will give you that. But I, so I think I, you know, and I have written about this stuff, but I do think it's like having these conversations, you know, and having the culture shift to realize it, right? I don't think there's a way to stop this like takeover in some sense. Like the ability, like it's just they're going to keep getting better. Even if AI didn't get any better than it is today, just its capabilities are pretty

amazing. And once those like disseminate through society and people can start actually using them, you know, again, this is you getting a world class doctor in your pocket and, you know, access to incredible, you know, therapists and coach and doctor. and, you know, like, key resources in your life, in addition to, you know, fun things like being able to make a, you know, I made a, I made a custom song for my mom for her birthday, which is like a full Broadway production level song that's like very custom tailored to her, which I could never do, but brought so much joy to her, you know, like I can do that sort of

stuff in a way that was never, you know, that's, that stuff is here today. And, and it's, it's just once you get past that, we have to be able to, as a culture, get ready for, the disruption that's coming, which we have to be able to address, being able to distribute those resources, being able to protect ourselves from the, you know, make sure that the AI stays aligned with our interests and that the companies that run the AI stay aligned with cultural interests and then understand where we drive meaning from. Starly. What could go wrong?

No, listen, I'm still, I'm still 80, 20, you know, positive, positive. outcome to negative outcome, but, but 20% negative outcome in this case is, is pretty, we should do everything in our power to reduce that. And that is, you know, just having, being willing to have real conversations, like, not just like demonizing the other side or, you know, understanding where we're coming from. There's going to be real positives, real benefits. There's going to be real harms. And as game designers and in living in this space where we're very lucky to be like,

creatively fulfilled and able to like, you know, we kind of can do what we want. want with our lives, right? You've followed me in the path of being a digital nomad, right? So you can literally live anywhere as well as create things that people enjoy and literally our job is to make people happy. Like, the more that people can have that, those kinds of freedoms, the better world we're in. Yeah, remember that. All right. We got down that rabbit hole pretty far. So that's all right. It is, well, it's, you know, it's like, it's just, it's an, it's, it's one of the more interesting things is happening in the world that impacts everything that we do. But when we think back to sort of zooming back to working on kind of digital games and, uh, what the hell? While we're in the, the subjects, while we're in the, the dangerous waters of controversial subjects, uh, let's talk about, let's talk about business models for games, right?

You're working on these mobile games and, uh, you, you know, you worked at, you worked at Zinka also or no? I did run design, game design and monetization at Machine Zone for about a year. Got it. Yeah, they're one of them were, I guess. Okay, so you've been on the dark side of this as well as on the light side. And so how do you think about that sort of thing? Because, you know, to some extent, you know, leveraging these game design tools, psychological tools to help make your game more fun, you know, and more, you know,

engaging and get people to come back more often, that could be a positive thing. Also, as we all know, it can be a negative and exploitative thing. How do you think about that in your own work or even areas where you maybe got pulled to the dark side because of the place you were at and what was going on? Yeah, I mean, I do always advocate for the light as much as I can, you know, see it. it is tricky sometimes because like I was talking about like hey where's the line we're talking about like Photoshop

and the content malware filter right like you know I say like okay well gambling isn't the greatest thing in the world here like we should probably try to avoid gambling and like putting that in the hands of children and things like that but you know it's like game design in psychology and

reward structures like these are all very tightly linked and have, you know, they're all in the same family. So where's the line is a little hard sometimes. And it can really just depend on your perspective or the type of game it is. I think it's not actually the first time I have this conversation today weirdly. but so you know

we kind of show ourselves in a put in some way where we had it great you know we have this like you can buy a product and you know you spend some money

and you get a product you get the whole game and developers like happy to get this money players happy to get this product but then you know somebody's like what if it was free though

and they were much more successful with this premium microtransaction kind of model and that's held up it's still more successful it's always more successful people

are like ah I hate these free to play games but they keep just crushing it in the marketplace and so it's really hard for game devs to say yeah we aren't going to do that many do and you know like in one of the indie games I'm working on I'm giving it as a single purchase model like not free to play I specifically didn't want to do a free to play model because like I'm just tired of that I want to just deliver some

amazing gameplay value for your you know whatever it is 20 bucks and you know 25 bucks whatever and we get it go from there sure yeah well well all right let me let me let me let me let me steal man the other side of this here so we can have a proper discussion of it right In principle, the old version, the old model says, hey, you got to give me 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks, whatever the game costs up front to hope that you could, hope that it's good, and hope that you enjoy it. And you don't get to find out so after you give me the money.

And then that's it. It's over. You're stuck whether you like it or not. And that's not that great for the consumer. It's also a huge barrier to getting your game discovered. And in the free to play version, it allows anybody to just try. it and see if they like it. If they like it, they can spend money and congratulations.

You get to spend as much as is right for you personally. You don't have to spend anything. Yeah, I agree. That's why it's so successful. I mean, it's brilliant and it works. I would highly recommend people to do it if you are trying to succeed in this. And then, and then just to flip to jump back to the other side of the fence, one of the other things that people maybe don't realize is like the expectations of players in those free to

play games is very different. Right. So a paid game experience, be it physical or digital, it's a complete, you know, game in itself. I pay for it. I expect to have that experience. Maybe there's expansions, which I kind of want to have, but there may be this not and it's okay. But with a free to play game, especially these ones that, you know, are trying to sort of monetize, well, the expectation is that there's a live operations and there's tons of content and it's continuous. continually ongoing. And so the support and the cost to run those games is pretty astronomical. As someone currently running one of those games, I could say it to you directly. One of the competitive advantages of companies who do free-to-play games is the companies

that think about live service like content costs and like what's going to take to the turn the crank, those are the companies that end up succeeding more. Not necessarily. because their game is better, but it's because they can turn the crank more at a cheaper cost. So even if their content's only half as engaging, if they're making it at one time for cost, then they're in a good spot. So it's like a weird,

it's a different kind of business problem to be thinking about that doesn't really relate to how much fun the players having exactly, but it does kind of try to quantize that a bit, which is strange from your typical, like, how we make this game awesome sort of viewpoints. How do we deliver the best nuggets of value, given the costs involved over time? Yeah.

A very different problem. Yeah, I mean, the problem exists in all different places, right? Like, I think, you know, and this is something I like to be able to share because I'm somewhat uniquely positioned is like, you know, starting as a game designer, but also running a company that launches physical games, digital games. And because they all have those cost problems, right? Like I'm we're preparing for our grass fed deck building game prototype available to follow on game found now for those that are listening, which is a game I'm excited about because it like helps teach these principles of regenerative farming and a portion of the proceeds are going back to help like actually save the planet.

And then I started doing the math on like what it costs to produce that and which components I can fit in. And we've got like a cool cooperative game mode that we want to throw in. But the cost of goods is just a lot higher, especially with tariff uncertainty and nonsense going on. So I may have to like break that out into another product. And so like, you know, there's a cost to produce and you know, that calculation still happens in the physical game world, just like it does in the digital game world. I think it's just, I think it's sort of naive for, you know, it's understandable, but it's a sort of naive perspective as a game designer to think like, oh, well, I just want to make the most awesome thing. I don't care what it costs. I don't care how it presents to the player.

I think those things have to, you know, maybe there's a portion of game development where you should just like, you know, blue sky. guy, do whatever you want and see what the most fun thing you come up with is. But at some point, the rubber has to meet the road if you're going to make a product that people actually buy and want and you can continue to make. So game companies have, like digital game companies have solved this by creating two different roles. Right. So there's the game designer role whose job is to be like, no, I want all the things and have to be fun as possible. Right. And then there's the product manager role.

It was like, we've got to eat, though. And so we need to like, you know, pay the paycheck. So how are we going to make some money? How are we going to make this cost, you know, efficient? And what kind of like live service are we going to run? Like, what is the value we're delivering to the player? Because the thing about critical play games is they don't make any money unless the player thinks it's worth spending their money on it.

So, like, it has to be good in a way. otherwise they'll spend money and then they'll just be like well this was terrible I quit and that's it so they are sort of held to a higher standard than the box products like you were saying even though

they feel cheaper in some ways you know you play some of these games like oh is this a really game or is this just like a scarebox or something and I just like happy a thing and numbers are going on well yeah and that Yeah, there's there's a, it's interesting that it came, it came from this individual, but

Elon Musk, talked about the, the, he, his goal with, with Twitter slash X is, you know, maximize unregregated minutes, right? Which is, we can leave aside whether you're, you know, you agree with this or not, but this idea that like optimizing for engagement has all of these perverse effects, right? optimizing for keeping somebody coming back. And so there's all these different things where social media can do this with, you know, rage and clickbaits things and things that enrage you. Games can do this with like, you know, these kind of slot machine and, and kind of, you know, addictive cycle things.

Or you could do it with, you know, really fun gameplay and really interesting mechanics and things that like, you know, like I give every, it's rare that I get addicted to a game nowadays, right? Because I will usually play games and just like work and just to learn about them and then I play games that I'm working on. But you know, when Marvel Snap came out, I got freaking addicted to that for like a couple months where I was just like play every day because it was really, really fun. Like the gameplay, like it was a very tight gameplay loop, really well done. For anybody that has not heard my episode with Ben Brod, you know, the chief creative officer to build that game, you should definitely listen to it. But the, or you know, Slate the Spire, you know, like there's

just games that just like, this is fun and that's okay to get people, hooked and addicted to a loop that's like enjoyable and fun that you can look back on and tell stories about. Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned Slate As Fire. I want to talk about roguelikes a little bit here. Okay. Let's talk about roguelikes.

All right. So like we let off with talking about like how do we create that sort of exploration and that sort of wonderment of like anything can happen. And I think that roguelike games are the, that's where it's happening these days. at least. You play a roguidic game and it starts small and then it just kind of explodes into this possibility space that so many different things can happen. And every time you play, it's like different and interesting. I think that's like really cool. Yeah, I think that's a great answer. So do you mind defining roguelikes? I think most of the audience will be familiar with it,

but just for those that aren't, how do you define a roguelike what's happening here that makes it so unique. I once wrote a white paper on road likes for Project Horseshoe, so I theoretically should be qualified to do this. We'll see if I do. Okay, let's see how you do, theoretically. So, you know, a road lake is a game with some core gameplay loop, and then it's cyclical. So you're going to play that same gameplay loop over and over and over again, but new elements are added to the loop in a randomized fashion, usually, so that each time you run the loop, you experience a new set of combinatorics of randomized elements. And then often those loops are set into larger loops.

And so it kind of creates the sort of engine of loops where all sorts of explosion of possibilities are happening and you progress through them in that way. So it's like smaller years, turning larger years is what you think about it. Interesting. That's definitely a more abstract and formal way to describe that than I've heard before. So I do like it. I think, yeah, when I think about roguelikes, I think you're right to identify, like, it's that the game experience is, you know, encapsulated such that, you know,

there's so much variance within that single run through that you get to experience the entirety of this arc of like kind of growth and discovery and then it's over and then for the most part your progress is reset and the randomize you know the scenario is randomized sufficiently so that you could just run it again and it's a totally new experience right that's a little bit of progress that's the bigger gear that's true yeah yeah yeah and so that's it's a it's a because we do as a species, you know, and we want to make feelings of progress. And so the world where my game is entirely reset at the end,

and I get no progress and no, you know, cookie or, you know, progress bar or something is a little bit discouraging for me continuing to play, even though the vast, vast majority of the experience can be, you know, completely reset there. Yeah, I mean, it's extremely discouraging. I played a lot of road back. in like the late 80s or whatever it was, no, early 90s, I think it was, that I was playing it.

And that was, I mean, that's where it started, kind of like the game completely reset when you die. And you get as far as you can when you're dying, like, oh my gosh, let's do the whole thing over again. Yeah. Yeah, it's always fascinating. I mean, you know, at least it was a success and it spawned this entire genre,

even if, yeah, it's a really funny space. So I think you're right. right, that that's, that is where that, that, that special sauce that magic had back in the day does kind of live now because it's, because it's encapsulated in this box, you get that like what's in the box, what's in the pack kind of experience. And you have to adapt to whatever it is that's happening. You're intentionally constrained, uh, within that space. Um, and so yeah, we've, I've, I have many, many projects, uh, in the Rogelike space that I have, um, uh, incubated and started thinking about.

we actually added a roguelike mode into SoulForge Fusion because you could take your customized deck into a, you know, randomized campaign set of battles. And then your deck still earns experience and, you know, gain some bonuses, but otherwise it's, you know, back to square one when you start over. And so I do think that kind of thing is a is a very deep and interesting hook. I've been working on a Petrus Roadlight. I'm like super excited about. as an indie project. And it's really fun to be able to put all these things into motion and, like, apply all of my learnings over the years of playing all these games

and thinking about them and this could explode. But I think the thing that a lot of the roadlights are missing is that Magic had is the community multiplayer sort of aspect around them. Yes. It sort of lives in the streaming space. So you see people streaming volatro or something. Right. You know,

they're walking. So there is still some of that like, wow, this is crazy. Everybody check this out. But it's in this kind of like asyncness way. It's like less of a communal experience, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. So I have, I've had a project that's been in my, my back burner for a while now, which whatever. I don't know if I've talked about it publicly, but I think I've talked about it to you, but I've, like, I really want to make a, a, uh, uh, a rogue like a, uh, the, uh, like a fortnight style like arena, rogue like.

Like so there's this, yeah, so this, this, this, this ability to like, imagine like, slay the spire meets fortnight. And so there's, you know, some, in the, the, the global map that you're going through, you're, you know, you can be battling different monsters and bad and upgrading your deck, but a, but, but the map is shrinking. And eventually you're going to start running into other players and fighting them. Like, I've wanted to make that for so long. I think it would be so cool. Yeah, that would be pretty cool.

Like, on some level, the, um, the auto battlers have like, you know, a slice of that feeling, but they're not, it's not the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you think about, how do you think about auto battlers in that, in that space? And this, so this is basically, and again, maybe we should sort of describe that too. It's like, you know, it takes a lot of the idea of like, you know, you're, you know, the drafting for magic.

and so you kind of can draft your deck and the effects you have, but then the play is, you know, as obviously in the name, automatically battled and played through. So all of it is in that selection process, discovery process. What do you think the magic is there? I mean, I think it's great to, like, make your choices and then watch the stuff play out. I had actually had built a prototype for this kind of game.

Back when I was at Wizards, Clemax had come out. Maybe we would have been way too early for the auto-battelter trend. But I think that, what I put this? Like, you know, Hurstone came out with the Autoblr mode for their game, right? And it was so fun, it hurt Hurstow. Yeah. Because nobody knows how to monetize an automobler. Like, not really.

That's not something anybody's ever, like, they've been cracked that nut yet. And they're really fun. Yeah, it's an interesting thing where I mean, both both rogue likes and auto battlers sort of have this problem where the very nature that you're resetting to zero and then, you know, playing this experience again means that you can't, you know, most of these free to play games, you're sort of buying power or buying collectible objects or buying cosmetics and permanence of some kind. and the very nature of these games is no permanence or, you know, very, very limited permanence. Yes. It's very hard to monetize them. Like, I think the rogue, like, pre-to-play games that have done, like, best in the market are, they monetize mostly through ads and things. But, you know, you can buy power.

It's like the Archerow kind of games. You can buy power, but then you're just shooting yourself. in the foot, like you're taking away the enjoyment of the game. Right. Yeah. It's, it's one thing to say I'm buying power and bonuses to battle against other players where there's this arms race, which creates a lot of the monetization for a lot of these games. And it's another thing to buy power when you're just, you know, in this sort of PVE experience, this kind of solo experience. You're just kind of, yeah, you're taking, like, the fun of like seeing what you get and having to make the best of the cards and abilities

and things available and like that the unique permutations of that is exactly where the fun is so if i always bring a bazooka when i discover the bow and arrow i just don't care and that's no longer fun for me right yeah yeah because it takes away the variance and the mystery and the like the common at torques is not reduced yeah yeah yeah it's a fascinating fascinating space when we talk about the free to play games And I'm like, well, there's many games that are not getting made that would be really fun because they don't work with free to play. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, this is this is the, and this is one of the areas not to get back in the rabbihole where like I am excited about what AI allows us to do, right?

Because there are many games that I will for sure want to make, but cannot monetize well enough to justify the cost to produce them. And I think there's a lot of games like that out there. There's a lot of people that are listening to this podcast that have games. and game ideas like this. And if they, you can just reduce that cost of production enough, then there's, I think it's going to be an explosion of some really cool, really niche games that would, you know, just are impractical in today's environment. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years for sure. I think like 100,000 games came out last year or something. So, you know, a scene of an explosion from where we are yet. Then my question is like, okay, how does anybody find what they're looking for? Well, that's, you know, I literally just did a, I just had a conversation about this, the right, right, right, where it was another guest, a podcast I double recorded today. And it was about this subject in the tabletop game space, right? Where there was like, you know, there was the numbers like an order of magnitude last.

It was like 10,000 tabletop games got released last year, right? Which is an insane number for the tabletop game space, but, and now, yeah, 10, that for for digital games and I think it's not unreasonable to see those numbers like 10x again over the next five years and so I don't want to get 24 hours a day though right but I don't know maybe you can just get the AI to play the games for you too oh man um tell me how fun they are yeah just tell me off on there did it did I win did I have a good time awesome thank you appreciate you uh Well, so what will happen, so what I think, what I would predict is, is a couplefold, right? One, you know, there's the challenge and I encourage people to listen to the other podcasts with Ross Thompson because the mark, we literally talk about the marketing and how you get discovered and how do you break through the noise and like we go through all that stuff in detail because

that's like his, that's his expertise. And, and so I won't rehash that here. but I will say that like what I think will happen in this world, which again, to reiterate, I think is a good thing. Like what it means like the cost to produce it goes down, which means more people get to create cool stuff, which means more cool stuff exists. But it has the natural downside of, okay, there's so much cool stuff. How do I find the right things for me? And I think what we're going to see is like a lot more of these like niche products,

a lot of things that like this is a game that I personally would really, really, they love because I, you know, I love, you know, EDM music and TGs and turtles or, you know, whatever. And there's a game that is just a, you know, rock and roll tour, you know, or, you know, like a rave turtle TG or, you know, whatever, right? Like, that can, that can exist in a world where the cost of production are low enough. And so I think you're going to see, you know, it's, it's, you know, and this has, this has positive and negative effects for the culture, right? Like, just like with, you know, TV and social media and streaming, broadcasting. So now you can have channels that are, you know, very niche to whatever you're interested in.

It's great. You can watch whatever you want. But it also means that we don't have that same shared narrative, that same shared infrastructure, the same, you know, no, no band is going to be as big as the Beatles ever again, right? Because there's no, like, the fact there was only a few channels and a few bands and a few things to discover. Like, that's just not, I don't think. Maybe Taylor Swift proves that. I'm not sure.

the counter side of that argument. Great. So, I mean, you could talk about like Taylor Swift or whatever. And like, I think the power shifts more into the platforms, right? So Steam or Apple or Google or Epic or whoever holds the keys to the platform just gets so much power in the situation to spotlight, you know, certain things, whatever it makes sense for them to spotlight. And I'm not saying that they're using this power.

or anything. I'm just saying it's just the nature of the situation is when discoverability is like the number one like let's just like take it that of the 100,000 games that are released, let's say a thousand of them are really, really good. They're 1% the best games. Yeah, by definition, the one percent of the one percenters. Right, they're the one percenters. And so like even amongst those really really good games, there's a thousand of them right. These platforms have to pick what to be pushing. And so I think because everybody's aggregated

to these centralized platforms, like we all kind of do all play. Everybody's playing Fortnite. Everybody's playing Roblox. It's like these are ubiquitous kind of games. Well, yeah, but I mean,

those games are pretty old now, right? I mean, they're both like a decade old or more, right? Like they're pretty insanely. And so I actually think that's one of those areas of like audience capture that may not be replicable in the in the modern world. Like it's not like, you know, I had a guest on the on the podcast who, you know, previously designed, like created like Halo and now he makes mods for Fortnite because it's so much easier to get

discovery and to produce for Fortnite than he is to produce a new game. Like that's a big deal. That's a big ship. So so I think Fortnite and Roblox, et cetera, have become platforms in themselves in a way that that I think is hard to replicate now. So to a sense that reinforces your point, and I agree that the power does move to these platforms. But we're also seeing a trend, and not to harp on AI as both the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.

But AI is now, like social media very much used to be, and it's kind of in this transition period of being about followers and influencers and saying, like, I'm paying attention to you. And it's now in this process of sort of shifting into like from social media to interest media where things like TikTok, it's not really a lot about who you follow. It's about the things that you're interested in and it will, the algorithm will show you the stuff that you're more interested in. And so these platforms,

yes, they have a lot of power, but they're incentivized to show you the stuff that you would genuinely love because that's what's going to keep you there. And so Steam showing you games on there or you know, TikTok showing you videos that you're, that appeal to you, like they are, in principle, those algorithms are going to be way better at being able to even dissect the very details of your game and say, oh, actually, I'm sending this to the rave turtle guy. He's going to love this one. Yeah, I mean, hopefully. I mean, I think Steam is a pretty fair platform altogether,

but it seems that what the game devs are mostly concerned about is, like, how do I optimize my Steam algorithm? Like, it's just people are obsessed over it because that is what is mattering. than almost anything else that's why for making a good game obviously for it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and not to get into it because we do covered a lot more in the other in the other podcasts, but I think, you know,

there's always, there's always a underpriced channel for attention, right? Like what we care about, I think the resources, the resources that matter in this world are,

are attention and trust. That I can, if I can, if I can get your attention and I can earn your trust, then like, there's a lot of that. That's what an influencer is, basically, right? And that that's why they have influence. It's by, you know, because they've created some trustworthy persona or they provided

enough value to you. And so finding ways to do that, you know, that allow you to reach an audience, that allow you to, you know, produce and continue to deliver things that are hopefully serving that audience. Like there's, we don't know what the next thing is or how that works. Like I'm actually, I'm actually making a bet on like more physical stuff, like being in physical locations and like having you know, real connections that are not replicable by robots. Not yet anyway. That would be encouraging. I mean, I do love an escape room.

I've done hundreds of escape rooms. Yeah, escape room is a great example of that. Actually, let's use this as an opportunity to pivot before we run out of time to the physical game that you and I work on together that I've only recently been allowed to talk about. So I just got back from the Bandai Card Fest in. Las Vegas where I was able to demo for the first time to the public, Gundam Assemble, the coolest freaking thing I've probably ever worked on with the, you know, a giant, you know, global anime brand where they have already been making,

they have Gunplaw, which is a people, a massive community that builds these robots and paints them. And then they just put them on a shelf. They don't do anything with it. And what I learned about this, I thought that was crazy. Like now we have a whole game that you can actually play. And so that's like something I'm very excited about. It's not coming out until, October of this year, 2026 is we're recording this, but more details and things are coming out about it and we'll have a video.

By the time this post is live, there'll be a video of me on YouTube somewhere explaining the game and talking about all the stuff. So what's it been like to work with this project and you've done other miniatures games? What's like working on this team? Keep in mind that

your future employment depends upon your answer. I'll be hard. The team is great. You put together a good crew. You know, everybody's very dedicated. They're like leaning into the work. I think that's awesome.

They're always eager to learn and sponge up, you know, everything. When I'm like, hey, you know, you guys can be like doing these seven things. I'm like, well, I don't care. Let's do it. But I do eight. Yeah. Yeah, we have a great crew.

It's a great good to work with. It's been fun. I mean, you know, any excuse to, you know, go and watch some anime. I love anime, my giant, but most aspects of my life. So that's been really cool. You know, moving the minis around, blasting each other, it's, you know, it's a good time. And for me, I don't know, it's like any time I get to, Like, kind of like workshop and improved, like, the base, like, system of the game, that makes me super happy.

Like, at my, at my, at the center of my being, like, there's a systems designer that really was. So it's hard for me not to do that even when it's, you know, past the point of should be doing that. But then you're like, oh, damn, it wouldn't make it better. And so, you know, you got to do stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Our hearts are in the same place there. that process of sort of, you know, building the engine and the system and making it all work and having all the components fit nicely within it.

It really is that it's my favorite part of the design process, the zero to one, you know, kind of completion and refinement. Yeah, and it's been fun to, like, get back to some of my roots of, like, just completely breaking things and a half in terms of, like, power level. I just be like, yeah, this is not fair. And, you know, it's like, I felt like, I was like playing games. I was like, yep, I mean, played another squad. It's time to, like, change these minis. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty fun.

Yeah, well, and this is part of why I brought you into the team, right? It's like I wanted to make sure, like, Gundam Assemble is designed to not just be like a game that is fun out of the box that people can play and just like giant robots battling and roll dice for combat. But we wanted it to be a very robust, successful, competitive game where you can have squad-based battles and 3V3 battles and as well as giant epic 5vives and other cool. modes that I'm not allowed to talk about yet. But like and and so I needed I need to pull in the big guns right and that's a part of why I brought you in here because I think it's like I want it's not you know I can I enjoy this process myself but it needs a you know we need a strong team and that's strong development instincts and and that's I guess part of the thing to tell you it's like you know one of one

of the things I love having you in the room and I love working with you because like you know we we see eye to eye on a lot of different things and I I can trust that your going to not just like find the things that are broken because they're broken, but to be able to push the philosophy that allows us to build the games that are fun and make the projects, make the most powerful stuff, the most fun stuff, and, you know, make sure that there's enough discovery and counterplay. And so I don't know if there's like specific things that have come to mind in terms of how you've approached this category of game or things that have come up that have, you know,

that have worked well in the engine or anything that comes to mind about this project that where a lot of talking, without talking about the specifics of the units and stuff, and won't be revealed yet. Yeah, I think I can speak generally to all of this. So I think that the important thing is to get the unfund complexity out of the way. And there are certain abilities you can put in games like this that are interesting and complex, but they don't add fun to the end. They remove fun from the game

and they make your brain hurt and, you know, like, like, spying coming out of your ears, like, just, like, trying to figure it out. So getting those things out of the game and putting the more funny kinds of abilities in the game, it doesn't mean that you're losing richness to the end. It's about, like, selecting the right kinds of complexity.

And things that will remove feel bad moments as well. So if your opponent has, like some onboard trick that if you were just paying more attention to every single thing that was going on, you're like, oh, I wouldn't have fallen face first into that. That feels really bad because you should have known about that. But really those kinds of things from the game really enhance the, you know, it feels more streamlined and smooth and fun and fun and you're just like having a good time with it. And the game is not asking you to do a kind of fun thinking.

So I think that's a really important aspect. for it. Another thing is the combinatorics of how the minis work together and the possibilities of the team space. Something that I think that the team really

did a great job with on this game in particular because there's only so many minis in each set. And when you're comparing a minis game to a trading card game, a trading card game is going to always have a lot more card, lots more combinations. The deck sizes are bigger.

all that kind of stuff. So it's hard to get the same feelings out of the minis game as you would out of the TCG, even though fundamentally they have a lot in common with each other. But I think the team did a really great job of having enough cross-over prominent torts across the set that, you know, or the first few sets, like the pool that's there, to, like, wow,

there's a lot of possibilities here. And I can build this this way, I can build this this way, I can build this way. You get a lot of mileage out of it. I think that's really awesome. Yeah, yeah. We've been able to do a lot with a, you know, the core competitive version of this game is typically going to be like you pick three units

and you have nine tactics cards, which are kind of like a little mini TCG deck you get to play with to give you a couple more, a couple more strategic aspects to it, but it's really a lot about the minis. And then the fact that, you know, with a lot of these minis games, when we talk about, you know, complexity, areas like you know you have to building a minis army can be really complex right you have a certain point totals and you have to build like you know how these different things work out and we wanted

to make it way simple and that just hey pick any three guys and go all the guys that you buy will come with enough cards you could just take the cards to come with them and shuffle it and play but then from there have enough that we're like oh if i combine this and this it's a totally different experience and these there's synergies here so that you get to have that fun of discovery And it's also an interesting problem because we've talked about, you know, business models here, right? And unlike a TCG where I buy randomized packs of cards and I'm hunting for the rare or the cool thing I want, there's no randomization in this product. It's totally you buy what you get, which creates a really interesting game design and development challenge too because you've got to make every product appealing on its own because otherwise it just doesn't sell and it sits on a shelf. And for game stores, it's like a disaster.

and we're pacing them out so that there's product every, you know, every month or two, depending upon the part of the year we're in. So you've got new stuff that needs to like reinvigorate the community and like change the environment. And so there's this all of these really interesting challenges that come with building this kind of product that's been really fun to work through together. Yeah, I wasn't sure if I was wanted to talk about like in the way the business model was working. But I think that's one of the things that's really cool about the game. people have a little bit of fatigue around like the whole blind box you know booster pack kind of model and yeah

see what you get and you're only buying it if it's kind of like the free-to-play on the mobile game it's yeah very very similar so you better put some value in there for you yeah yeah and and you know and you know what you're getting and you you know your spend is capped right I mean Matt you know trading card games were the precursor to free to play games, right? It's not free, but it was, you know, cheap. A booster pack was way cheaper than a full game, but it was also going to cost you way more to get what you actually wanted. I have a story about that. So, so this was like GDC, like, I don't know, 15 years ago or something

like that, right? It's a game developer's conference for those that not familiar with the acronym. Yeah, go ahead. Maybe it was more like 20 years ago at this point. Anyhow, so, you know, everybody's like, oh my gosh, these Korean games or like, you know, they're, they just, they make some of these Korean games that are free to play, and they have these, like, like your transaction,

they're making all this money, because that's where it started, right? It was like in that, that's what they kind of, it was like, the cart racer games and stuff like that. And so, you know, go to the GBC,

and, you know, this is like, Wizards going to GBC for the first time. We're rolling, we're like, oh, we're all these things from all these game developers. And I'm like, oh, this free to play thing is like so crazy. And we all look at each other, we've been doing this for years, guys. Like, this is how it works.

And so, like, oh, yeah, tell us all the things about how booster packs work. And we were like, okay, we were trying to learn for you guys. That's sort of quite a lot of what we expected. But the market just shifted so dramatically at that point. Yeah. So I was sorry about it. No, yeah. It's, I mean, look, it's one of the nice things about having this conversation

because we can, you know, kind of intercept. all the different areas, like where physical games informed digital design, where digital is informed physical, where the different modes and how business models and game design intersect. Like, you know, we love geeking out about this sort of thing, and there's not a lot of people that have been on so many different sides of the industry to be able to kind of have these insights and see the crossovers. Yeah, it's funny how it's like, well, at the end of the day,

this is just entertainment for people. And, you know, regardless of how you're playing your games, it's still the same like brain we're appealing to do. Yeah, what is it that makes games appealing? Why do we play games? You know, what is it that, you know, the sort of joy of, you know, discovery and connection and, you know, exploration and, you know, competition and aspiration and all these things, you know, that have, you know, codified in various places, including my book for anybody

that hasn't actually read it by now. But the, but it's just, it's as the frontier develops and, like, new technology drives our ability to serve those needs, right? That's what leads to these changes, right? So whether it's, you know, a mobile phone allowing you to play games in the, you know, in a different environment, whether it's, you know, a digital printing allowing us to have different types of product that couldn't exist before or blockchain or VR or AI. You know, we haven't seen a lot. AI incorporated, forget AI building games. So like, what does it mean to have AI inside of games, right?

Is there something that, you know, is available there? I'm sure there will be, but I don't, you know, that's, that's coming. Like, I think it's, I love to live on that edge of like, what does the new frontier of technology allow us to do with the same classic gameplay desires. Like, those don't change, but how they can be expressed does change. Yeah, yeah. We're just, I'm thinking, like, oh, really, you stick AI and for like, you know, we'll just, 3 or something.

And it's like, if they announce to DM and it's, you know, directing all, you know, because like, it goes like that about like all the possibilities

and it's like, oh, you do all that. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's the, there's definitely an obvious space there of like, you know,

the, when I'm in an immersive open world, like role playing game, the fact that the characters feel so alive and that there's so many different things that we could do and so many different ways we could direct. That's part of what the appeal is.

In principle, you know, generative AI of some type could allow for that to, space to open up more and I'm sure get really crazy and I'll turn into Nazis or whatever. But still, well, done well, I think there's something really fun. But I also just try to think about it in terms of like other lighter touch things, like other other ways. Like, you know, we talked about how cool roguelikes are.

And that's because there's an algorithm that generates infinite possibilities within a, you know, constrained space that makes it really fun. You know, again, that's a form of primitive AI that, you know, you're trying to like, what is that, how does this intel, how does this generate stuff in a way that's smart and well done? I think there are, I think there will be fun experiments to run in this space.

You know, I think I could, I even imagine a tabletop game with like a dark tower type, you know, centerpiece that has some, you know, uncertain output based on based on a rudimentary AI. Yeah. Anyway, so we are, we have been chatting for

almost an hour and a half here. So I do think we want to wrap it up. I think, you know, It is such a pleasure to finally get to work with you on such an awesome project and get to work together on so many things. Every time we chat, I love it. Obviously, you're a smart, good human who is able to also kind of push the boundaries and thinks about life and Mitch the same ways that I do. So grateful to have you as a friend, grateful to have you now as a coworker, and finally, long overdue guest on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's grateful, I'm grateful for you as a friend, you know,

showing me the ways of the digital nomad and the, you know, sometimes the federality or things like that. It's, you know, getting to work together. It does feel overdue, right? Yeah, yeah. It feels like we kind of should have already done it by now, but I'm glad some, you know, good things are worth waiting for. And now that you are also a digital nomad,

we have to actually plan a time where we meet up in some crazy part of the world together and do some face-to-face things and hang out there, because most of our interactions are still still the digital space. And I think that would be a lot of fun too. So maybe we'll do another podcast live from, you know, Costa Rica or somewhere and share, share more with a guests that want to know about how to live as a digital nomad, how to work as a digital nomad. I have alluded to that plenty of times on the podcast, but I haven't really talked about it. And after almost five years for me now, living this life, I've gotten pretty good at being able to be, you know, productive and, you know,

and build the habits and routines that make life work no matter where you are in the world. So if anybody that's listened this far as interested in the conversation about that, hit me up on your favorite social media platform and we'll work on that next. All right. All right, man. Great chat with you. Cheers. Game design is a craft.

And like any craft, it gets better with structure, feedback, and repetition. You're able to learn better when you're surrounded by like-minded people who support each other and lift each other up. The Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab is designed to give you all of that. Over 60 lessons from idea to publishing, a private game design discord, and exclusive bonuses for those who join now and have been long-time podcast listeners. It's also the lowest price I've ever offered these exclusive lessons. And so you don't need to wait for a new class or wait for another opportunity. This is the opportunity. If you're ready to level up, if you're ready to build a career that you're passionate about, build the game you've been dreaming of, this is your time.

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