Think Like A Game Designer - Scott Gaeta — From Comics to Card Games, The Art of Forecasting, Driving Growth Through Organized Play, and Lessons from Decades in Game Industry (#19)

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Scott Gaeta has been in the game industry for over 20 years. He’s the founder of Renegade Game Studios. Scott started as a comics and game store owner before shifting into game design, cutting his teeth on popular products such as the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings CCGs. He’s worked as the Senior Vice President of Decipher and Senior Director at Upper Deck (that’s where we first met!). At Upper Deck, Scott worked on Yu-Gi-Oh!, DC Comics, World of Warcraft, Marvel Comics, Hello Kitty, and more. I was super excited to catch up and learn some lessons from the veteran of the industry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Scott Gata. Scott has been in the game industry for over 20 years, and not only is he the CEO and founder of Renegade Game Studios,

But he's also been all over the industry, including as a comics and game store owner, a designer and developer giving feedback on properties for Decipher. And his feedback was so good that he actually ended up becoming a senior vice president at Decipher working on things like Star Wars, Star Trek, and the Lord of the Rings CCG. And he spent some time working at Upper Deck Entertainment, where he and I first met. And we worked together on properties like World of Warcraft, Marvel and DC Comics Game versus system, and much more. Scott has taught me a ton over the years, and I really am excited to be able to bring his perspective to the podcast because you're going to see from this conversation how Scott has a really great business mind, much more so than a lot of people that get into the industry. Let's be honest. And so you're able to see that we can talk about things like forecasting, building communities through organized play, which Scott has a ton of experience with, as well as how you want to get hired for a job in the industry. What are the sort of do's and don'ts of getting a career and getting started in the industry? So it's really a great perspective from someone who can speak about things at a high level about game design,

but also about all of the other aspects of the business because he's been there and done it all. So there's a ton of great lessons here. And I want to highlight two more things before we get started. One, if you're listening to this podcast right when it launches, these are the last couple of days of the Ascension Tactics Kickstarter that is taking the 10-year anniversary of Ascension. rolling it all into a brand new, exciting game with its own cool miniatures exclusive to that game, taking the best of tactical miniatures games and combining it with deck building games, which is super awesome and something I've worked really hard on.

We're already way overfunded. It's been fantastic, but if you want to be a part of it, now is your last chance. So please check that out on Kickstarter. And while you're a Kickstarter, there's another project I want you to check out, which is Scott's new project. We don't talk about it in the podcast because we recorded this a while ago, But Scott is actually launching a brand new Vampire the Masquerade game, which is a new card game that he's building using this really popular IP.

Vampire the Masquerade is something I used to play as a role-playing game back in the day. There used to be the TCG back in the day that I loved. So I'm actually so excited to see this game come to life. So I'm going to be backing it. If you're listening to this any time in August of 2020, you guys should back it and check that out on Kickstarter after you check out Essential Tactics, of course. But yeah, it's really great.

Scott's an incredible month. and I learned, I've always learned a lot from him, and I know you guys are going to learn a lot during this conversation. So without any further delay, I give you Scott Gata. Hello and welcome. I am here with Scott Gata. Scott's great to get to chat with you, man. Hey, yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm excited. Yeah. So, you know, you and I have a long history of, you know, we work together back at the the upper deck days, which was really my first, my first job, my only real kind of job, I guess. and I learned a lot from you during my time there, and I'm actually really excited to kind of deep dive on all the things that have happened both before and since then with you. Yeah, that sounds good.

Those were interesting times, I think, for both of us. I think we both learned a lot there. Yes, yes, and we'll dig into that. But I want to start the same way I always start these episodes. You know, you've been in the industry for a long time now, I think more than 20 years or so, and you've accomplished a lot and worn a lot of hats. How did you get started?

What brought you to the gaming industry? What's your origin story? Well, I mean, as a kid, I think my story is pretty typical, right? Playing D&D and magic and other games as a kid. But then really getting into the industry, my first, I guess you could say, professional role in the industry is I opened up a retail store. So I was out of school and I had worked some other jobs and things like that. And I got a little disenfranchised with working for other people.

And I always had this kind of side business selling collectibles and things like that. And I opened up a game store in Colorado. And that store carried comic books and posters and games. And these players walked into the store one day. And, you know, I carried magic. And they came in and they said, you carry Star Wars CCG, Star Wars Collectible Card game. And at the time I said no, but I personally love Star Wars.

So I brought that in. And this was maybe a year or so after the game had launched. Brought it in, we became a big, a strong player base for Star Wars. We typically would have about 50 people every Saturday playing in a weekly event and that sort of stuff. And I got on the radar of a company called DeCypher that made Star Wars. And after a little bit of time, I wound up contracting for them, helping them with organizations. play and marketing program that would be relevant to retailers. Can I want to pause a little bit?

There's a couple of things I want to pick apart here. So before you become a store owner, you said you started to sell collectibles kind of on the side. What, talk to me about that a little bit. When did you start that? What was that like? So the very first time I sold collectibles on the side, I think I was a freshman or sophomore in high school.

And my brother and I talked my parents. into fronting us the money to open up an account with Topps baseball cards. And we opened up a dealer account and got cards wholesale and sold them at a flea market on the weekend. So that was my first side hustle. Right. I like it. It's darn young. That's right. And then from there, you know, comic books and things like that.

I did comic book conventions and stuff like that just kind of on the side for fun. So you were doing that for fun. And then when you started your store, did you have your, own cash you'd saved up from this selling and trading and things? Or did you, did your parents help you? Or did you have like, how did you, it seems like a big jump to be able to like, all right, I'm going to own my own store and buy my stock and go through all that stuff. So I was still pretty active like on the side. I was actually importing and exporting toys from Japan on the side. So I learned a lot about that. And so I was able to self-funded. So I didn't have to take out a loan.

I didn't use a lot of money. I think, you know, I also did the typical thing where, you know, everybody has a credit card. So it's tapped into that a little bit. Sure. You know, my first store was very small. It was 600 square feet. It was, it was tiny.

So really didn't have organized play space. It was just a small retail shop. And so when you're, you're importing and exporting, again, this sounds for, I think, to a lot of our audience, like, you know, I'm an importer exporter as a, you know, kind of cliched, mysterious job to have. What did you just take trips out there originally and started doing it? It was in your collectibles experience. You found that those were valuable.

So you just started bringing them in. What had that come about? Yeah. So this was the 90s. And you have to remember at this point, toys from Japan were really kind of hot, but they were also very mysterious. They weren't imported the way they are now. So people that wanted vinyl toys,

I remember there was a gizmo, a Gremlin's plush toy, right, that was out in Japan in the 90s that, that was popular here. But the thing that really got my relationship with Japanese stores going was the Nightmare Before Christmas came out in the U.S. And the Nightmare Before Christmas flopped right in the U.S. when it initially came out. It was a box office disaster. And all these toys came out. And the toys were almost instantly clearanced. Well, in Japan, the Nightmare for Christmas was a huge hit. That that all, audience, like, picked up on it initially and just really loved it. So there was a massive demand

for all the American toys in the U.S. over in Japan. So my first crazy thing, first I started off going to, like, these toy liquidator places and buying all the night before Christmas cases of toys that I could find, and I would ship them over to Japan. And then it got even a little crazier Burger King. You know, like how they do, they do those, you know, happy meal type things, but that's not Burger King, right? Like you buy food and you get a thing. So they did four nightmare before Christmas watches. And those watches were, you know, free with a meal.

Well, the movie flopped. So those watches really didn't make it out into distribution in any meaningful way. And a lot of them just wound up sitting at distribution centers and never even made it to stores. Well, those watches, I could wholesale them for $5 a watch. and I was buying them from Burger Kings, they were getting rid of them to me for like 25 cents. Wow. So, yeah, so it was crazy.

I was buying like pallets of them and shipping as many cases as I could over to Japan. It was hilarious. It's fascinating. So just, you know, I really, I always try to sort of dissect from these stories, like what are the principles and the traits and the things that kind of lead to your, you know, success and into sort of the path that you take? And it seems like you just had this intrinsic, you know, desire or identification of where these

business opportunities and these arbitrage opportunities showed up, which is obviously, you know, served you well and made, you know, when any time I hear that somebody wants to open up a game store, you know, typically I'm, I advise them against it because it's such a difficult, profession, you know, a difficult thing to do. But when you're able to sort of leverage, you know, selling and buying, you know, across the globe and find these huge margin advantages. It really, it really moves the needle quite a bit. Yeah, I think that I would attribute that to. So growing up in my teens, my stepfather had a had an import business, importing perfume.

And I grew up kind of in that. So I grew up like doing retail and sales. And so the sales side of it was always something that I had experienced with. But what I really learned from that was forecasting and margin. and because that business is really tough. So you're importing things. You know, every percentage point matters. You're dealing with international trade.

So growing up kind of in that environment and flipping large quantities of things for small percentages, really kind of ingrained to me that that margin is very important, right? And without it, you can't support the enterprise. So maybe talk a little bit more about that. because I think for a lot of people, you know, that, you know, especially in the audience here, they think of themselves as game designers or maybe they want to start a business. Forecasting and margin may not mean anything to them. What can you, can you give a little one-on-one brief overview of that?

Sure. I mean, so like, you know, in the game world, it comes up every day for us where we're, we're looking at a game design that we've developed and, you know, taken that from a design to a product, right? Created the packaging and everything else. But then at some point, we have to look at it and say, well, how much, many of these are we going to print? And forecasting, I actually wrote an article on this once, and I kind of attribute forecasting. It's kind of 50% art, 50% science. So a lot of people, forecasting starts with sales history. And you'll look at the numbers and you'll look at

what are the past experiences for things that are similar to what you're trying to predict, right? Like a forecast is just a prediction. But then there's all those intangibles in there too. Right. So like is this a game, does this have Spider-Man in it? Does it, is it coming out during fourth quarter? Is it a family game coming out during fourth quarter? Is it a heavy Euro game coming out during fourth quarter? It's probably going to sell less. You know, so all those things and kind of learning, learning that you have to look at all the different data points and then kind of boil that down to something. And then ultimately you have to make a decision and interpret those data points. Yeah. And it's, and it's very, you know, just sort of to echo with.

some of my own experiences, like the ability to do this well or poorly can mean the entirety of the success or failure of your entire organization and product lines. I mean, the differences of, you know, when you, if you print, you know, a game at, you know, 10,000 units or 50,000 units is, you know, that money is gone until you recover, recoup it. And if you're, you know, you're overshooting, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, I mean, you could just completely run out of cash. And if you shoot too low and you print a very small amount and it runs out, you can't capitalize on your, you know, with the product or you can't get a good enough margin

because your print runs are too small, then certain products can never get made or they'll never, they'll never get traction. So it becomes a really challenging and very momentous kind of decision that you have to make on a regular basis as a manufacturer and a publisher. And even when you're designing games thinking about the kinds of things you can make. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And you can, you can, you can kind of suffer on the flip side too.

You might print too little. You're under capitalized, right? And, you know, like there's that old adage like nobody ever went out of business by selling out. That's not entirely true. You know, if you have a game that's a breakout hit and just runs away, you may have sold it all, but not made enough margin to actually exist and reprint it. Right. Right. So, so great.

You had, you had massive, you had massive success and now what? Yeah. Yeah. You could still die on the vine with the success that you can't afford to keep, you know, feeding yourself and reprinting. Right. Exactly. So, so those things are, those things are tough.

But like, to me, that's, that's a game in and of itself. And I kind of really enjoy that game. So. Yeah. No, that's, and that's, I think the best way to think about it. And my experiences as sort of a, you know, businessman and game designer. like the business side is absolutely a game with some really fascinating stakes you know really keeps things interesting all right so let's let's uh thanks for for digging into that so now we've gotten to the

you know from collectibles to importer exporter to game store owner to now you're sort of you you said you were you were noticed by by decipher for your not only for sort of having significant sales of star wars um ccg but also for some other things it sounds like yeah so um I think I got on their radar because there was a fan vote that Decipher held a contest and it allowed the player base to vote for their favorite store. And our store won one like store of the year or something in the U.S. So our Star Wars CCG player base specifically really was invigorated and we won this thing. And that got me on the radar of a woman called Monica Jones.

She was the VP of marketing at the time at DeCypher. And I started talking to people like her and Kyle Hoyer and Kendrick Summers. And these were all people in the marketing department over at DeCyfer. We just started talking and occasionally, you know, I was, I kind of, I think started off as one of those retailers that they would go like, hey, we're thinking of this. What do you think? And they would just bounce ideas off of. I'm sure there was myself and several others. And that eventually led to a job.

So with this contest, let's talk about that. So what do you think made you the number one store in the country? What was so energizing about the way you ran things or the community you built? Like, you know, maybe there's principles. Other people could emulate if they want to build their own communities. Yeah. So, you know, I doubt we were by far the best store in the whole country. I think my player base was probably just very vocal.

And, you know, this system was probably not, not. not difficult the game. But I do think that one of the things that we did that went over really well is we lived in an area that had a very competitive player base for this game. So I think at one time we had the number one, the number two and number five player or three, number one, two and five in the world that lived in Colorado. You know, we had one player that hadn't lost a game in like a year. So he was terrified of losing a game because if he lost the game to number two that also happened to live in the area, he'd lose a lot of rating points. So people were still operating on that like archaic ELO system. So other stores in the area were running events and the Cypher was pretty generous with their prize support.

They would send a box of boosters for sanctioned tournament. And the store across town would give the entire box of boosters to the winner. Well, when you have the number one and number two and number five players in the world playing in that area, those three guys win the box of boosters every single week. Sure. So it was pretty messed up. Oh, they also had these really cool shirts with cards on them. So those guys would just always get the shirts. So we started running tournaments and we flattened out prize support.

And I remember one of the players wasn't very happy about that. And I explained to them and I said, listen, if we give you all the prizes every week, first of all, you don't need any more. cards. You don't need any more shirts. But if you win the prizes every single week, you're just not going to have anybody to play with in a year from now. Nobody's going to want to participate anymore. Why would they want to play in these tournaments if they can't participate in the goods? So that was, I mean, I don't think that's very innovative. Honestly, especially nowadays, I think people have figured out that that organized play needs to serve many different masters and be a good experience for everybody. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting thing.

to dig in because you know i think we've we've both built a lot of organized play programs over the years and it's a it's a real it's a real interesting challenge that that that only gets harder i think over time as you're trying to sort of create these communities build enough um you know of a player base for people to want to play give people reasons to go to the stores um you know when we're allowed to go into physical places anyway um and uh you know i think that uh you know building that community of people that are like fun and exciting and you want to be around and have a good time even if you're losing is, you know, the thing that decides whether a game succeeds or fails. Like it's all, to me it seems like in generally CCGs, it's all on the micro level. Like if I go into the store, are there people that I want to be hanging out with that are playing that game?

If that's true, I'm going to play that game. If it's not true, I'm not going to play that game. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, nobody will buy a game that there's nobody to play with. And CCGs tend to need more than one or two people to play with to keep them in. interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting other topic we could we could dive into too, which is like, yeah, the sort of evolution of gaming culture over time, right? The window of time you're talking about is when this sort of, you know, whether you want to call it a golden age or a dark age of CCGs and that everyone was, you know, there were a million different CCGs everywhere, all vying for attention. And it created a very difficult time for most to survive because they would end up fracturing the player bases. Nowadays,

is it seems like there's way, way less tolerance for a CCG. And so you have more of the sort of LCG model, which a lot of the games you mentioned have now converted over to, and other deck building games and other types of games where the sort of entire experience is much more palatable in a box so that you can potentially have less investment and therefore potentially less need to have as many players or have as much, you know, be able to overlap with other games more successfully.

Do you have thoughts on that kind of transition and maybe what's happening with that these days? Yeah, for sure. I mean, right? So like organized playwise back in those early days in the 90s, too, it was, I think it was the, it was the predictable reaction that you would expect of saying, what's run tournaments? So everybody ran tournaments and they were very cut throat, right? Like this was back when people, there were still people out there that thought that magic should be played with an anti-card. Right. the good old days.

Right, yeah, exactly. You know, and then mothers coming into your store thinking that it's gambling. So, but yeah, I agree. Like the evolution of those types of games to something that is a lower, a lower maintenance cost, right? Not just in the number of players, but financially, too. Like, we always used to say that at most, a card game player could play one and a half games.

That's it. right they would spend 80 to 90% of their budget on their primary game whether it was magic or star wars or l5r whatever it was and then they might dabble in another game but that's about it and the most you could really do would be dabble and that's very limiting right like and it's it puts really high stakes on on your game too right you have to retain customers you can't lose them because losing that customer is a huge financial hit but also replacing that customer is extremely expensive too. So you want to keep those players engaged.

And I just think the stakes, you know, the stakes were really high as a player too, right? Like your blind reveal, collectible model, it's a bit punishing and wears people down. And I think, you know, it works for magic. But back then there was, you know, like you were saying, I think there was one year where there was 38 new collectible card games that came out in the same year.

Yeah. Yeah, madness. Yeah, it's just not sustainable. Yeah, and there's this other psychological thing that comes with these games that I found to be interesting, which is, you know, when the game stops being produced, well, that game's dead, so you can't play it anymore. You still have the exact game. You still have all the cards. You could still theoretically play, but there's this perception of like when the expansion stop,

when the new releases stop on a CG impotent. particular, then it becomes this sort of graveyard game that people don't want to play anymore, which is there are some elements of that in, in, you know, other, other tabletop games. But, you know, if I have, I have Monopoly or have Settlers of Caton, I don't need new versions of it. I can just play and have no problem busting those things out. And so there's this weird psychological burden that, like, if your game is succeeding in doing well, it can be a virtuous cycle. but once it starts to kind of go downhill, it goes down very fast.

Yeah. You know, I feel the same way, but I do understand where people are coming from when they kind of say it's a dead game. It's not that you can't play it anymore, especially with an expandable game like a card game. I think what people are really feeling, they may not even realize that this is where that sentiment's coming from, is that the puzzle is over. Right. Every time a new expansion comes out, the meta changes, and then there's new puzzles to solve. Like, how am I going to incorporate these cards? Cards from the past all of a sudden become valuable and desirable

because now they interact differently with new cards. And I think that a lot of those types of games, a big part of the fun is solving that puzzle and that creativity of trying to come up with a deck that nobody's expected or nobody is seen before. And when the game stops having new product releases, like that part of the game does it. Yeah, that's true. I mean, to some extent, I think design is about, you know, like games are interesting in so far as there are new things to learn, right?

You have new experiences and are able to sort of uncover new things, right? That's where when we, you know, we start off as a kid, tick-tac-toe is, is fun and interesting, but then you eventually solve it. And it's like, okay, well, there's no new space to explore here. That game, I'm not going to play that anymore. I'm going to move on to something else. Yeah. And so I think your point is well taken that for for collectible games in particular, there is one aspect of of discovery that is okay, every time I get exposed to new cards,

now I can craft this whole new subset of the game that when that goes away, if that's your major draw for those kinds of games, then, then, you know, it could be a good reason to move on and check out. Yeah, for sure. But I agree too. Like it was always frustrating being on the on the publishing side of one of those games And it was like, well, it's run its course

And then people would get mad and go, But you've killed my game. And it's like, well, there's no more content left. Like especially if it was a licensed game. Sometimes you just run out of content And the life cycle is done. There's no more else to go with it. Well, there's few things more painful.

I mean, I've had the different experiences. You know, there's some games that I've made that like, you know, I made them. They went out of print. But people still message me all the time. It's like, hey, I still have this game. I still play it. It's cool.

And it's like a great thing that I can like have, you know, I have in my closet and other people can have and play. And when there's a collectible game that you've made that then goes out of print and stops, then it's like sometimes that happens. But yeah, less often, people are more like now it's, that thing's dead. The worst case scenario in my experience has been the digital game world, because especially the online games, right? Where now when it's dead, it's dead.

It's gone. You can't, you can't even play it anymore, even if that's all you ever want to do. And that, and it's like there's, there's, this, even the artifacts of all the work that you've done and the sort of thing that you've created are just, are just gone. And that was, that was one of the most painful experiences I've had as, uh, in that space. It's like, well, that we, you know, you're, you take the game away from people. And of course, people get upset, but, you know, costs money to run the servers, cost money to keep things going and you just can't, you can't keep them going forever.

So it's, it's a, it's an unfortunate, uh, part of the, of the design process is having to watch your babies die. Yeah. No, that's really tough. And it's, it's interesting to from like, from a gamer's, you know, customer's point of view, that there's not more of a tolerance for that. I think that I think the tolerance for that will probably increase over time, just as we get used to not having physical, tangible representations of everything in our lives. Yeah. You know, like this, some things just kind of go away.

You know, we've transitioned to music now. I think, you know, we pretty much as a society transition to video. I guess it's always there. I think people were having a hard time mentally a little bit, even as much as five years ago, like transitioning to the cloud. It's like, yes, it's now, it's not even on your hard drive. It's just in the cloud. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean, I'm, I'm an old fogy still. So I still have a, you know, one of my shells with like old DVDs that I love, even though I almost never watch them because I could just stream stuff. But like having that physical totem of like my favorite movies and favorite shows.

still has a sentimental value to me, but I agree that's a, I'm a dying breed at this point, I'm a weirdo. Well, I mean, I think it's generational too, right? But then again, you know, so my youngest is 13 years old and he's discovered vinyl. And, you know, when he's buying vinyl albums, which I think is, you know, is hilarious. But, you know, he's into it. Well, so let's let's dig, let's unpack that a little bit more too, right? So there's, there's, you know, in the, in the industry, there's both the, um, there's,

nostalgia plays a big part in a lot of, you know, I mean, tons of, of, of modern games end up taking, you know, old, old IP and old stories and bringing them back or, or the, the restoration games is basically their entire business model is taking, taking old games, bringing them back in, in new forms. And, and then there's also the, the other aspect that is, you know, what is the place for tabletop gaming in the modern world, right? And, you know, obviously as things are now even more rapidly accelerating into being all digital and online, you know, where does tabletop gaming fit into that? How does it integrate into the new world? Like, what is it that, that, that, you know, we focus on and bring and what, what, what does the future look like for the tabletop gaming world, especially now? Yeah. No, I think that's, that's really interesting, right? It's kind of ironic where the world is going so, so much in a digital direction and technology is such a almost dominant,

part of our lives, right, especially with smartphones. But then on the other hand, tabletop gaming is having the biggest years that it's had in ever. Yeah. Right. Like it's just, it's booming. I mean, magic has been booming, but board games have been booming. Role playing games are just like bigger than they've ever been. And I don't know.

I don't know if this is right. But my take on that is that people still crave human interaction and social experiences. And I think it touches on something that you said earlier too, right? Like if I want to get together with friends, the game that I'm playing is probably less important than it being a catalyst for that social experience and getting together with my friends. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that there's elements of what, you know, the sort of tabletop gaming experience brings that, you know, both from a nostalgia factor and from a just a, you know, a very concrete factor gives us ways to, you know, connect and socialize in ways that are sort of,

you know, safe and accessible and provide a whole bunch of different kinds of interesting, you know, excitement and challenges. And, you know, even now when I'm getting together with family virtually and we're doing, you know, Zoom calls or whatever, we will be playing, you know, certain types of tabletop games that we can play now in different locations and play remotely. We play just one and code names and a variety of other games where we can kind of still have these kinds of interactions, even though we're not physically in the same place, but the game provides this, this, this, this fun context for us to connect. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's, right, and, you know, it's, it's broken out of the traditional demographic, too. It's not the, what we, what in the past,

10, 15, 20 years ago that we would consider a gamer. Now it's, it's become much more mainstream. And, and the lines of board between what used to be like the mass market games, right? Of course, you had like kids games which are tend to be you know the family family kids games tend to be a punishment for the parents right and then you had things like trivial pursuit that were mainstream and an adult

party games and apples apples and stuff like that but and then you had hobby games and those worlds have really kind of collided um yeah I mean it's been it's amazing I mean the number of like great games that exist in the world now and that are being made all the time is just it's awesome I mean you know back back back in the 90s you had to be you had to be hunting for a lot of

things and now it's there's just there are so many you can't you just can't even play them all right yep all right so i uh we went on a fun a fun divergence here uh but and we'll probably continue to do so but i want to get back to your uh your story uh so you were you got hired by decipher um after you know having great success in your store with some of their products and giving them really insightful marketing advice so they then hired you on as a as a as a marketing director or as a what What was your role then when they brought you on board? So my very first job there was a sales manager, actually. So, you know, I came on as a sales manager and had, you know, a handful.

I think I had something like 20 accounts. They used a lot of distributors. It was crazy. Sure. Yeah, but yeah, did sales. And then eventually marketing and sales kind of got merged together. And my initial boss, Monica Jones, moved. into another area and I filled her role and eventually became the VP of sales and marketing

at the company and then eventually moved into product and product fell under me as well. Great. So then and then from there, is that when you went from there directly to Upper Deck or I'm not actually sure I know the full transition story there? Yeah. So so so was it deciphered for quite a while and then I was interested. So first of all, I moved to the East Coast to go work for Decipher, and I love Decipher. It was a great company. I learned a lot there, and I really enjoyed it. But it was on the East Coast.

I'm not a big fan of living on the East Coast. I used to live on the East Coast. I then discovered the West Coast and said, that's where I want to live. So I was actually interviewing at two different companies. I was interviewing at Wiz Kids, and I was interviewing at Upper Deck. And Upper Deck offered. me the job. WizzKids Act didn't offer me the job that I interviewed for, actually. I like to tease Lax Chandra about it a lot. So, but anyway, so yeah, I wound up while working at Upper Deck,

another decipher guy, Dan Bojanowski, was out there before me. He was the decipher guy, and he went out, and he was there maybe about a year before I got there. Yeah. Yeah, he was, he was my, he was my boss during that period. So he, yeah, he, you know, he and I had kept in tight. And at one point, what was it, Jerry Bennington had called me before he had left and was interested in me coming out. And then that kind of like, you know, didn't go anywhere for a few months. And then he wound up leaving. And then I got contacted again. So wound up out there.

And it was, in all honesty, you know, I can say this now. I really wanted the Wiz Kids job. But I wanted to live in California more than Seattle. battle either. So it kind of worked out. I was disappointed that I didn't get offered the WizKids job, but I was, I was happy that I got offered the Upper Deck job because I really wanted to live in San Diego. Yeah. Yeah. So I had, I had a, you know, a similar transition in the sense I was going, you know, I was in New York. I was going to law school at the time. And I got a, you know, I did a summer, a little summer internship at Upper Deck and in San Diego. And like, going from New York

winters to San Diego summers was just like, oh, okay, well, I'm making stupid. decisions in life. And so when they offered me the job, I quit law school and moved to California right away. Yeah. Yeah. My very first, oh, sorry, my very first San Diego Comic Con was 1992. It was the first time that I had ever been to San Diego in my life. And I remember coming back from it and saying to Robin, um, we had just gotten married. I was like, we're going to live in San Diego someday. like that's where I want to live. So it took about a decade, but we got there. Yeah, no, that's great.

So Upper Deck, you know, was an interesting place. And, you know, you and I have had had many conversations about this. You know, I think to one extent, it was such an incredible collection of talented people. I mean, so many of whom who, you know, we still work with today that have all gone on to sort of really interesting places throughout the industry. And another, it was this very, you know, sort of disfutable. functional work environment with a lot of people who really didn't know what they were doing or who were, you know, being controlled by different, different regions. And I think it ended up inspiring both of us in our, in our entrepreneurial bent afterwards. You want to talk about a little bit about how

that, how that story unfolded for you? Sure. I mean, yeah, I think I think you hit it. The upper deck was, and still is, really like a great place for talented people. Like when we got there, I think it was probably at the height of its, I mean, height of its resources for sure. Yu-Gi-Oh had just hit. It was doing, you know, crazy, crazy amounts of money and really gave the company the resources to invest heavily on the game side, right? Because, but it was always weird, I think, for people like us there, because as huge as entertainment was, as much as we were selling in things like Yu-Gi-O and Verses and, you know, World Warcraft. and everything else that came, we were still this weird, weird part of the company that the sports side of the company kind of didn't get and kind of looked down on, I think, in certain circles,

too. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. It was a weird, it was a weird culture for sure. I think that, you know, they kind of looked at the entertainment side of the building is like, you know, what the hell are those people doing over there? But that said, I mean, it really did. Like, we just had phenomenal resources.

is a fantastic amount of people. And, you know, it was a little bit of a, you know, maybe not the healthiest culture in some ways, but in other ways, we were owned by an entrepreneur who was not very risk adverse, which was very, very nice. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, from my perspective, I mean, I was given the opportunity to do things that are kind of crazy. I mean, I had never had a job before. I ended up, you know, taking over the project as a designer for the for the world of work our managers game and then they you know made me a product manager and a brand manager and I got to do all these things I just had no rights and no experience

to do because you know they were willing to take risks and I was able to learn a ton of things and you know just being just asking questions and you know talking to smart people and people who had done it before and reaching out it was like it was it was amazing like that the kind of education and opportunity that was presented in this sort of wild west environment that was there yeah it Yeah, Wild West is definitely a good way to put it. But it was the type of thing. Like if you were, if you were smart and hardworking and could identify the opportunity,

you could really grab it and take advantage of it. Because, yeah, we did some crazy, crazy things. I mean, one of the very first things, when I got there, I was given verses. And they said, they said, it's not doing as well as we'd like, fix it. You know, and it's like, oh, okay. But the people there were passionate about what they did. And I mean, that went like, you know, went a long way. But again, like being owned by an entrepreneur and somebody that does think

entrepreneurally and isn't as risk averse did allow us to do some great things. Like I remember one time having a conversation with our owner at the time. and he had asked an opinion on a license. And I think this was before we did Wow Minis, but as a company, we were thinking about moving into miniatures. And he said, this was about Halo.

And he said, well, what do you think about Halo? And I said, oh, I think Halo has, you know, decent potential to be a tactical miniatures game.

I mean, that's essentially what the game is, or what the IP is all about. And, you know, we can create troops and, and there's lots of different models. And they've got, you know,

actually, I think I had just come back from a trip up to Microsoft, and they showed me a bunch of stuff behind the scenes and what they had in the plans for the next several years and things like that. And he goes, well, would you do it? And I said, yeah, I think I would do it. If we want to get into the miniature space in a meaningful way, I think this IP is solid and we could do much worse. And as long as the deal works out and the deal is reasonable, I think this is the IP is solid for this. And he goes, would you bet your job on it? And I said, sure, I bet my job on things I do every,

day around here. You know, it was like, it was such a weird kind of aggressive question to ask, but it was also, like, it wasn't intimidating. I actually, to some ways even appreciate it, because he's asking you, you know, do you really believe in this thing? Or you, you know. Yeah. And actually, I think this is, this is a great topic to sort of dig into, right? Like, how do you, you know, how do you motivate your employees and how do you, you know, sort of identify and cultivate talent. And I think, you know, this is sort of one, one approach, which is, you know, put somebody on the spot and make them put skin in the game, you know, I think is a real, is a real thing, right? I mean, it's to some extent, you know, you, you, you want to be bringing in people who are,

who are very motivated and that are willing to sort of take those risks and take a stand. If people are just going to kind of follow along and just sort of coast or take risks with, you know, your money as the, as the sort of owner-entrepreneur, you really, you really, really want them to feel that sense of investment in the upside and the risks. And so I'm curious how you approach that. So maybe some lessons to take away and some not to do is from upper deck also. But how do you think about that now running your own company? Yeah.

I mean, I do think that I don't think my mindset is any different in that regard. I think that starting from early on, whether I was it Decipher or Upper DeK, I did always think of what we were going to do as, you know, as if it was my own money or at least with that sort of mentality, I did want to make the best decisions that would be good for, good for us, right? Like, you know, apathy is the worst possible thing that you'd want from anybody on your team is if they just don't care and they just will go with the flow and like, I get it though, too. I don't even necessarily think that that's that person's fault. I think that your corporate and your company culture will create that in most cases.

But you want people to be invested in care because if they do, it's good for everybody, right? It's good for them. It's good for the organization. And of course, it's the order. It's going to be good for you too. Yeah. But that's where I think it's worth like digging into those principles because I agree with you completely that it is less about the person, although obviously having the right people

matters, but it's more about that culture and the culture comes from the top. I mean, I think about this a lot. And, you know, there was one period where I had grown my company quite a bit, you know, and we were, you know, more than five times the size that we are now. And I had grown too big, too fast and didn't have the right skill, frankly, the right, you know, skills and approach. And I, and our culture got got bad. Like people started infighting, people started having, you know, just very becoming less productive. Like we had more people and they, everyone got less done total. And I had to kind of take a step back and was forced to do so in many ways, but then, you know, have now spent a lot of time on how do you build a culture that's going to keep people passionate and engaged and excited and honest, like, right, and willing to take risks, not just risks with, you know, sort of financially and product and socially, right, like you, you know, to be able to challenge ideas to people in a way that's productive and have those kinds of discussions because a lot of what happens in a design team and on a product team too is, right, you're, you're clashing constantly. over different directions and ideas and being able to do that productively.

Do you do you have things that you have learned over the years or things you're trying to implement that help create that culture? Yeah, for sure. So like one of the first things that I learned, I've learned it the hard way, was that if you do have the right person and you're doing things right or is like, you know, as best you think you can be doing them. And the people are doing well around you, then I think that's good. But sometimes you do get that person that no matter what the culture is, they're just not right.

And after a certain amount of time, I do think that sometimes you just have to, you know, have that conversation and say, like, this isn't, this isn't the right fit for either of us. Because what I did learn is that when you do have a culture that's working and the team is very productive and really working together, if one of, person can really ruin the whole thing. 100%. Yeah. And I've made that mistake in the past where I've wanted to fix that person and that person didn't want to be fixed. So really, and you know what? And I'm using the word fix that person. There's nothing wrong with that person. They just weren't right for our culture. We weren't right for them. You know, there's no harm, no foul, but they really, they were going to, they were bringing down the whole team. And I would, And I let that happen because I was too stubborn or, you know, my ego would say, no, no, no, I can I can make this person to what I want them to be. And they'll thank me for it. And no, not really. I'm going to make them miserable.

Well, yeah. And I mean, I think there's just a, I think every, every, you know, employer sort of feels it's to, to one degree or another. It's, it's hard to let people go. Right. I mean, it's hard to, you know, nobody wants to get fired. Nobody wants to. And it's hard to sort of make that call. And, but I agree with you that. It's something that, you know, you have to be willing to do or you make everybody suffer. I mean, you can bring the entire team down and hurt not just morale, but of course, your bottom line and all kinds of things that can create a real problem. So it's something I've learned that making those difficult decisions up front saves you a lot more pain down the road. It does. And kind of the reason why I start with that is because if you are lucky enough to build a culture that really does work and is thriving, you have to protect it. So, and at least in my experience, that's the number one way you kind of wind up undermining yourself is, is not making those hard decisions because, I mean, they do. They suck, right? Like, you don't want to have to deal with it. But outside of that, like, so some of the things that I've, so like when I started renegade, if I jump, jump ahead, I did kind of look back and say, like, what worked and what didn't work in the environments that I had experienced previously. And, um,

And some of the things that I really liked that work, like I liked at my time at Decipher that people felt like they were part of something that they had contributed to. Credit was easily given, right? So like an example that I believe in is rulebook credit. it costs us nothing. Put everybody that contributed or even everybody in the company, put them in the rulebook. Give them credit. Give them recognition for what they did to make this thing happen. Like sometimes those little tiny things mean the world to people.

You know, having that sort of flat environment where somebody in sales that might be a Eurogamer can get involved and playtest the game that's in development. that's in their wheelhouse that they're a fan of and really contribute and feel like that they're not just they're not just told to stay in their lane um you know and and and be be part of the team yeah that's that's that's that's both great as a uh you know as a culture to create from the top but it also is something that i i talk to people a lot um about you know coming in at the bottom right i mean a lot of that want to become in the game industry and want to be game designers. You know, most companies that I've experienced work like this, where, you know, if you get in, if you're in, regardless of what department you're in,

and you're excited about helping work on games, like, you could do that. And if you show talent in that ability and you start, you know, you start making an impact there, then you can, you know, that's a great way to become a game designer and become part of whatever, whatever parts of the industry you want to be a part of. I think that it's a very, you know, open and fun part of the, of the field that we work in anyway. Yeah, I will say if you are, I've had this experience many, many times where I think it's become a bit of a trend, is if you are interviewing at a company for a job that's not game design, but during your interview, you express way too often that you really just want to be a game designer. That's a red flag.

Yeah, fair, fair. Like, unfortunately, I've made that mistake a few times too, and you bring that person in, and they really don't want to do the job that you hired. Sure, sure. Yeah, that's fair. Don't tip your hand too early, everybody out there. You got to be able to do the actual job. Yeah, do the actual.

And look at it this way. Like, if you were hired to do a customer service job, but you want to get into game design, if you do a poor job in customer service, that's going to reflect on what type of game designer you're going to be too, right? Like if they just look at you and go like, well, that guy can never, he just can't do his stuff. Why do they think that those behaviors are going to change in another area? So, you know, just keep that in mind. Displaying excellence at your job, being a great person for people to work with and, you know, being someone that your word can be trusted, whether that's, you know, showing up on time doing the things you say. Those three things,

you really just, a baseline if you want to be succeeding in any industry. So I highly recommend that to everybody. Everybody that's listening. Yeah. So, but yeah, but outside of that, I, I think it's pretty good. Like, I think the other thing culturally that, um, it's, I don't think it's unique to, to what I do. Um, but I don't think it's that easy is that I've, I have a pretty thick skin. So in the, in the game design product development area, kind of just business in general, I really don't take anything personally. Um, and I want, I don't like yes, men, like I want people to voice their opinions and be part of the collaborative process and and kind of, you know, get out of their lanes occasionally and that sort of thing too.

But on the flip side, at least for me personally, one of the things that I've identified is that I lose sight of that sometimes. And just because I don't take things personally, doesn't mean other people don't either. And I can be extremely candid. I've experienced this. So I can be very candid. And this has taken me quite a while to like that self-realization. And I have, I will tell people now like when they come to work for me. I literally just tell them like, hey, listen, this is the way I am.

At some point, I am going to probably hurt your feelings. And I will not even realize that I hurt your feelings. Just I want you to know, number one, you can tell me that I did. and that's absolutely fine. And number two, I really, that's not what I meant. I'm just trying to get the thing done. And I want us all to be able to talk openly and freely and not be hurt. But I'm probably going to do that at some point.

I'm going to shock you a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is one of those cases where, you know, your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. And I share, I share this one with you. You know, the ability to challenge preconceived notions and push back on what, you know, what other people are going to say or what the extent.

the beliefs are is critical to like being an entrepreneur and and being a designer, frankly. But of course, it's going to it's going to rub people the wrong way as a contrarian. I was in high school. I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. And I describe myself as having a broken, pissed off a meter because I actually really, I really like debating. I really like what people challenge me. Like I, it's like awesome because if somebody shows me that I'm wrong, that means I've learned.

And I'm, I get better. And if somebody challenges me and I'm able to convince them of my position, then I feel more secure in my position because I was able to figure out what was going on there. The things that I have, I have worked on adapting my own communication styles over the years to try to get better at this. Very much like the best thing that I have found on this is the steel man strategy where I before I will say a contrary opinion, I will I will say their position. in a better way than they, like it's a better way than they did, right? Make their position as strong as possible. And then, you know, talk about why you would shift in another way.

I find people very often get most upset when you contradict them and they just don't feel like you understand, right? They just feel like you're. And so I find that. And again, it also helps in a pure practice sense because when you go through that steel man process, you'll often find, okay, wait, there are principles here that are relevant and maybe I do want to shift my position or we can find the third way that's going to move us all forward, you know, finding the principles.

as that underlie the positions is another key key part. Yeah. Well, and I do the same thing. And I also find myself sometimes exploring or even arguing sides or are scenarios that I don't even believe in. Right. You know, because I think this kind of gets back to like my, that forecasting mentality. Every data point is a good data point.

And I want to make sure that we've explored all possibilities before we move forward. And there are times I know when I frustrate people in the team because I want to spend time exploring other things. And I'll even start off by saying, I think this is bad. But maybe it's not. And I'd like your opinion on it. Like, let's talk it through. You know, and to me, that's just like, let's just check the box and say that, you know, like, yeah, we've confirmed. That sucks.

Yeah. And there's actually a lot of data to support that strategy. So we do work with the Wharton School of Business and have designed sort of games and processes, both for brainstorming and ideation as well as team formation and functioning that use the sort of research that they're doing. And some of the principles like for functioning, high functioning teams is that you're, you know, ensuring that everybody, everybody has a chance to speak and be heard, that somebody takes devil's advocates positions, like intentionally takes positions that they're not, you know, are contrary to force that kind of conflict and then to make sure that, you know,

people capture those ideas and and carry them forward. And so there's a, there's a lot of, of support for, for that being a good way to run your, to run your business. Right. But if, so here's the, here's the trap. If you don't have a culture where people will question you and participate in that process,

you can be, you know, being the boss, right? Um, whatever your role is, if you start going down this path, the danger is if they go along with you, just because they think they're trying to figure you out. Oh, I think this is what he wants to do. I think this is what he wants.

Let's make it happen. Let's just do it that way. He knows what he's doing. He must be right. No, actually, I'm probably wrong. Like, don't do that. Yeah, yeah. And it's, and it's that is, you know, that that is, there's a,

they call the halo effect around, you know, the people who are perceived as higher status, that all of their ideas are just naturally perceived as better. or if you're the loudest person in the room or the most certain sounding person in the room, people will rally around that. And so other principles that we use in our breakthrough ideation process are like, we'll have when there's a new discussion to have or something, everybody will write down their own ideas independently first and have those things available.

And only then will you sort of combine them and present them and start discussing them so that those don't get drowned out. And then there's another thing that a lot of leaders did like, you know, where you'll you want to couch your own language all the time and like I like the things you said were you know this is probably a bad idea but or I could be wrong but or I'm not really sure but what about you know as as a high status kind of person or a boss in these situations you always want to be couching your language very carefully to try to help circumvent or you know counteract that that halo effect yeah I use the word maybe a lot maybe we should think about this maybe

Maybe we shouldn't. And they can push back and go, no, we already thought of that. We didn't like it. All right. You know. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I am trying, this is where this is my, my active project that I'm very bad

is I'm trying to increase the amount of time I don't talk when new things come up. Like I want to like, like even forcing like awkward amounts of pauses. It's amazing how short a pause is to be awkward. you know, even like five or ten seconds of just nobody talking. My instinct is always to sort of jump in and start saying something. And I've been trying to slowly delay more to give other people more opportunities to independently bring things up before I start saying things, which can often, you know, inadvertently drown out other ideas and conversation.

Yeah. No, I can relate to that too because I'm immediately trying to think of all these different ideas. And I just, I'm like in brainstorm mode and just want to start rattling off a bunch of stuff, but I may just squash somebody else's thought process. Yeah. Yeah, cool. All right. Well, this is a fascinating discussion.

Let's maybe talk about how this works in some specific examples. Like, what about, you know, you have a ton of games as Renegade games. I mean, you have a ton of different kinds of games. You got solo games. You got RPGs. You got card games. You got board games. You got, you know, partnership games, license games, regular.

You have a whole gamut of products. A pretty impressive. Greg, what's your process look like for how do you pick the projects that you guys are going to go forward with? And what do you think about sort of building that portfolio is, you know, maybe how some of these discussion principles apply to that part of your business? So initially, the strategy at Renegade was that for the first about two years, we focused on what a lot of people would call gateway games. And for two reasons. So number one, they're easier to develop and produce and we could turn them around faster than say, you know, a big heavy euro or a card game. And then number two, that's where all the market growth was, right?

So all the new people coming into board games are going to buy a $20 to $35 kind of light-ish type game. So that was our strategy initially. But then that, but that's not where I wanted to stay. you know, we would get a lot of the like, well, what kind of games does Renegade make? And I was like, just games we want to make. Like, don't, and I don't, we're not going to be the miniature game company. We're not going to be the, you know, trip taking game company. So we started dabbling in other areas and really just trying them out.

So it was, let's, let's do, let's do some heavier games and see what the market is like and what we can do in that space and can we do things any differently. You know, license games were probably the thing that I stayed away from purposely for the longest amount of time just because I'd done them my entire career up until that point. And I just wanted to break from it. And I wanted to be able to, I wanted to be able to explore sandboxes that were ours. Makes sense. So, because, you know, when you're in somebody else's sandbox, they make the rules and you're going to, you're going to, you know, have to live within those parameters. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm very, very biased towards building my own games and IP.

I think, first of all, I love the process of story creating and building the worlds and like building everything that comes with it. And so when I give that up because I'm building for somebody else, it's fine. I mean, there's still cool challenges and being a part of something that's bigger, but it's not nearly as engaging to me as when we can build something from the ground up. Right. It's really fun for me being in a world that I'm a big fan. of, that's different, right? I get to play in George Lucas's sandbox. That's not so bad.

Even with all the restrictions. Like, that's pretty cool. But yeah, I mean, as far as the behind, like the, a big part of it too was the creativity piece. You know, we get to flex different muscles internally by doing different types of games. You know, role-playing games are entirely world building, right? They're very low on the mechanics side. It's all about building a world and a brand and really it's like a story, you know, you're putting together a story bible for other people then to go play in that sandbox. So all that stuff is really cool. I would also say a big part of the factor is who are the people. You know, we try to, we work with a lot of the same people over and over once we find people that we really enjoy working with.

and they really kind of gel with our process, we go back to that well, especially if they're the types of people that have lots of different ideas. Yeah, no, that's what I've found. A lot of the projects that I pick end up being that, you know, sort of, what are, you know, what are, you know,

myself and people working with most excited about? What does the sort of skill set that we have now kind of lend itself towards? What's a cool new challenge that we haven't faced yet? But, you know, that kind of mesh of things. I rarely find myself chasing the kind of what the trend is, you know, what's sort of popular per se. But if I find a new game or a new concept or something that's like, oh, my God, this is so exciting to me, I want to do my version of this or I want to, you know, I can take this and bring it in a new direction kind of thing. Those will be a big driver. Yep.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, we work in an industry where we're making fun things. Yeah, it doesn't suck. No. So when you're, you know, one of the biggest challenges that come with this and actually sort of ties into the licensing part of it, right? The reason why in general you want to work licensed games is because they come with this sort of pre-built audience and you're, you know, you're going to get attention. When you're building your own things, especially in a variety of categories, you're not even necessarily just known for one thing. The discovery of your games becomes a real problem, right?

That's one of the major challenges in the industry right now is how do you get people to pick up your game when? there's, you know, hundreds or thousands of games that are, you know, constantly vying for attention. How do you, how do you think about that problem now, both as sort of renegade and maybe also for for other people out there that are trying to figure out how to get their games noticed? Yeah. I mean, I can't, I can't emphasize enough that marketing and building community around either your, you know, around your games, around your company, how important that is. We kind of look at our catalog in a similar. way to like the way Disney looks at their consumer.

Disney looks at Disney fans as as this will this will sound kind of callous, but they look at them as cradle to grave Disney people. There is something for you as an infant and for your parents from the moment you're born to right up until you die, right? There are experiences, IP, just there's something in your life that can entertain you and be part of your life within their world, even more so now, with the acquisition of like Marvel and Star Wars. And on a smaller scale, we kind of look at our games catalog that way.

So you might find us and discover us through a $15 trick-taking game like Fox in the Forest. And that might be fine. You may never go beyond that. But if you are interested in going beyond that, there are other things within our family of games that you'll be able to, might want to explore. So we worked pretty hard to cross promote between those different audiences and to show people that there are other opportunities and there are other things for them to experience. But engaging with those people and then being able to have them listen to us.

So, right, there's two ways to make money from your customer. You can sell them more stuff or you can get more customers. And you really should always be doing both. So it's interesting because it's sort of, to some extent, you're marrying those two concepts, right? The fact that you make more stuff is this way that you're getting other customers, the sort of your user acquisition strategy also, right? You bring people in with a gateway game and then you give them the opportunity to get into whatever, a Euro game or an RPG or whatever might draw them in. That the casting a wider net gives you more recruitment possibilities is somewhat,

It seems like a little bit of an unorthodox strategy to some extent. A lot of times the conventional wisdom is like pick a lane, right? My company is about this. So you know if you buy a, you know, a renegade game, you're going to get this. But you seem like that's almost to take an opposite approach. Yeah. So my thinking was that the pick a lane strategy was good when you're just, when our hobby was kind of was smaller.

But now I think with the opportunity with so many things, people discovering tabletop games in some ways. I mean, look at cards against humanity alone, the number of people that have had the light bulb go off in their head that you can play tabletop games, even if they're just very, very light, social party type games, that you can just do that. And it's an experience, right? A lot of us, and I would say like kind of like that muggle mainstream person, they're, the way they think of board games is they think of, you know, their childhood games.

Monopoly and Game of Life and shoots and ladders and all that sort of stuff. And it never even enters their mind again is something that's even an option for them as adults. So that's why we've taken more of a varied approach. And some of it is trial and error. You know, there's always going to kind of be that opportunity cost as well. Because if we're doing things in different categories, the risk is that you aren't giving enough attention to the things that are doing well. and you can potentially go too far. Yeah.

No, I've, I've, I've, I've wrestled with this a lot when it's, you know, do you sort of double down on the things that you're known for and you're good at? Or do you shift, you know, and try new things? And I have such an intrinsic bias to doing new things. I mean, to be fair, I'm still making a sense in 10 years later. But, you know, I love, I love doing new things. And each of those sets, you know, find, find ways to be new for me. But it's a, it's an interesting, it's an interesting.

dichotomy to have to face yeah yeah it's a balance for sure um so i want to shift to another topic i recently uh learned uh that uh you know at the time we're recording this hasn't happened yet but it'll have happened already by the time this goes live you guys are going to be ordering your own online convention um uh renegate con uh and that's something i've put a lot of thought into recently is obviously most of the conventions in the world have been shut down and will be for for the foreseeable future what what's gone into that and what's been your thinking about how you can kind of bring the best of what you used to get at a physical convention into into your own online event yeah so so ironically this this the mentality behind this actually had started before um the whole covid

pandemic um we about a year or so ago we identified something that you'll you'll relate to right Like so back in the day coming from a from a card game background like we both do card card game communities and the connection between a card game community and the company that produces that card name was was really pretty solid right like you you had a relationship with the people at that company you went to that company's website for information you just you just they they were the focal point in that in that world right as a fan of that game And about a year or two ago, we identified that board games blowing up, third-party media is absolutely necessary and wonderful. But I think that in some cases, companies like ours took too much of a step back and almost gave up those relationships.

And there was this void. and people didn't necessarily have the relationships or the community around the company, which, again, was not in line with our strategy of if you enter our family of games through one game, we want to expose you to all the other games. So to do that, we have to have a relationship. So we had been actively kind of building towards building more community around our family of games already. And we were, you know, watching our Twitch channel and just kind of ramping that up in the last six months.

So then the pandemic, not the game, and conventions everywhere being canceled. So that was a really easy next step for us to say, because we had even talked about doing a physical convention that was just around us. And we were like, I don't know if we're big enough to do that, maybe. It could be small and intimate. That could be cool. Because that was something back at DeCyper. Every year DeCyper had DeCypercon. And it would get a couple thousand people, and it was really awesome.

You would, you know, once a year get together and it was a couple thousand people that just played the games that you played. So we had debated doing that. So this was an easy transition to say, all right, we're going to do this digitally. And then we looked at other digital events out in the world and how that content is delivered and how, you know, what kind of things people experience. Like, you know, again, I'm a big Blizzard fan. And right, we both worked on their games. games. And I looked at like the BlizzCon model. And, you know, we were both around through the evolution, like where BlizzCon started off as just a physical event. And then slowly they

started to introduce, right, the digital ticket and everything else. And it's really evolved to a very robust digital experience. You don't even have to go to the convention. In some ways, you can see the content in a more direct way, in a better way if you just do it online. So we kind of looked things like Blizzard is doing and other companies too. So we're going to try it in June. It's obviously not at a blizzcon type scale and there's no physical event, but we want people to be able to demo games and experience games and try out new things. So we've been testing things like Tabletopia and training demo staff to work in that space

and provide a quality demo and RPG demos on Roll 20 and that sort of thing. So I think that sort of stuff is really fascinating to me. And it's something I started doing a fair amount of research for for my own company. And I'm actually just sort of paying close attention to everything that's happening in the other conventions that are going on. Because I do think that there's this opportunity, you know, tying into your earlier comment, you know, one of the most important things you can do. I don't care if you're running your own company or you're a designer or frankly, just anybody in the industry, building that community around yourself, adding value, finding ways to connect people is just one of the most important. things that you can be doing and, you know, anybody can be putting together a little mini online convention. If convention is too big a word, it can be, you know, organizing virtual

game nights and rallying people around, you know, interesting talks or, you know, it's part one of the reasons why I do this podcast, right, is to sort of create these conversations and connect people and let everybody kind of learn from each other. And I think that that is just the sort of thing that I don't care what happens to the world, right? How things change, what types of games are popular or not or where things are heading, building community, getting people together, letting people sort of learn from each other and find ways to connect and do the things they love is always going to be valuable. And so that's something I always sort of advise people, find ways to do that in whatever way suits you. And you'll be amazed at sort of the long-term

benefits that accrue over it. And the kinds of things you're doing that, you know, building these online events, it can be a lot of work. And, you know, you learn a lot, especially when you first start running them for yourself. But I'm, I'm intrigued and we'll be, we'll be participating. Cool. Yeah, it sounds good. I mean, we'll see how it goes, right? Like, we don't know. I will tell you that we launched it and it's a free ticket. And the reason why we have tickets is so people can register, we know what to expect. And then they can, they can sign up for different. So we have workshops. We have panels. And then there's a, there's a couple tournaments. And then there's demos that they have to pre-register for and book time slots so they can get into

the demos. On the first day, we had over 400 people register. So, you know, that was encouraging. It's not 65,000 like GenCon. But I would argue, I tell this to really small starting publishers all the time, not to fall into that trap of thinking that you have to go to the big expensive convention because, you know, and they'll kind of give me the argument. They'll say, will, you know, over 100,000 people go to Essen. I'm like, that's great. You're 10 by 10 booth. How many people do you get to have a meaningful interaction with over those four days?

It doesn't matter that 100,000 people get to go. How many people do you actually get to interact with in those four days? That's the only thing that really matters. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I'm a big fan of the Thousand True Fans concept of Kevin Kelly and that, you know, you don't need to be everything to everybody. In fact, you can't be, and it's a mistake to try if you're just starting out, especially.

You want to find, you know, have real meaningful interactions with those few people who are going to love what you do. And building relationships with those people is the most important benefit you can get, right? Because they're, use your phrase, the cradle to grave fans, right? Those are the ones that you really want to be able to hold on to and serve. And so finding a way to have those even small-scale things, right? I'll do occasionally, I'll do a little, you know, Q&A streams and videos. and we'll have, you know, maybe 30 to 100 people or something on there. But it's a, it's a, it's a model where I can have like real interactions and answer their questions and really all interact.

And I find those things to be really, you know, far more rewarding than even, you know, we've both done some of those big talks at ComicCon or whatever. And you've got thousands of people in the audience. And it's like, you know, those are cool too, but you're not, you're not able to talk and real have interactions with most of them. Right. Yeah. They're not, they're not personal. They're fun, but they're not very personal. Well, this, this has been awesome, Scott. I mean, I, you know, I've, you know, I've, I've, always love when we get to hang out, but we've never really been able to do such a wide-ranging conversation like this. In fact, we didn't get to dive into the deep, deep philosophy stuff we were chatting about before

we started recording, but we may have to have a part two on that if people want to hear it. But before we close out, we've given a lot of tips, but if there's something else specific that you'd want people to know, especially, again, someone that's out there that's sort of starting out, whether they want to start out as a designer or starting their own company, or getting a job in the industry, if they were, you know, one to three tips that you would give, whether it could be some emphasizing stuff you've already said or something else that advice you would give today. What would you say to those people? Well, I mean, number one, I would say, don't feel

like it's binary. It's not the type of thing where I'm either doing it or I'm not. You know, I have to quit my day job to go jump into this thing. Like, burn the candle at both ends. Like, do it on the side. Start off with something small, but just do something. thing that gets you closer to your goal. You know, it's, it doesn't all happen in one fell swoop. Like, you know, myself or Justin or any, anybody like us, like we didn't, we didn't get here overnight. It takes time.

You know, don't be afraid to fail. Fail. What I like to say is try to fail safely. Don't, don't mortgage your house and bet your house. Like, don't do that. You know, I won't tell you to do that. But, you know, I may have done that once. But I don't want to be responsible for what you do.

But I would say, you know, try to fail safely, but don't be afraid to fail. Like I've learned, you know, this is very cliche, but I have learned much more from failures that I've either been directly involved with or adjacent to than the successes. Successes are easy and a lot of times you can't really quantify fully how that success came to be. Here, here. I wish there was a better way to learn, but I haven't found it yet. No, not at all. I like to say now, you know, like I think I'm hitting that point. Like, what is it? Malcolm Gladwell says you do something for 10,000 hours and you're an expert at it. I don't know if it's that you do it for 10,000 hours and you're an expert at it. I think that you've been doing it for 10,000 hours and you've seen enough that you just make less mistakes. You know, and that might come off as expertise, right? Like, yes, I might make slightly better decisions than some.

that has less experience. But it doesn't mean that you won't get to that same point down the road. Right. Well, this, as I said, has been amazing. There's tons of great valuable stuff in here. For people that want to find more from you, Renegade, cool things you're putting out there. What's the best way for them to do that? Renegadegames.com.

That's the best place. Awesome. Well, Scott, thank you again for taking the time. I look forward to the next time. can actually have a conversation, you know, face to face with a drink in our hands. But this has been wonderful. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. It was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device

you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com

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