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 can find episodes and more at thinklikeagamedesigner.com. In today's episode, we speak with Alex Saropian.
Alex has started four major companies, including Bungie, Wide Load, Industrial Toys, and Gunslinger Studios. He has managed... over 100 people on his teams. He's created iconic games like Halo. He's been an executive and manager at Disney and Microsoft. He also has been an advisor and investor in numerous startups. He is a part of the fabric of game design. and the industry as much as anybody. And it was a real honor to get to talk with him.
on this podcast we get into a lot of really great details we talk about the value of how you manage it when you hit the wall what do you do when you confront failure we talk about the reflections and the specific questions that alex uses when he hits projects that don't work and hits things that
definitely fail and runs out of money and runs out of time. All the problems that anybody out there that's ever tried to start a publishing studio or build games knows about. We talk about the future of the industry and how things like VR, AI, Web3 and other aspects might take the future. of gaming and we talk about his new company which is really focused on building
mods and user-generated content, specifically at this point for the game Fortnite. And we talk about how this trend in being able to build games for other games, build games within games, has become such a dominant part of the marketplace. And the bet that he's making with...
his Look North World company. It's a fascinating discussion. Honestly, I could have kept talking to him for at least another hour. He really puts a lot of great thought into the way that he structures things. He has his own podcast, which we talk about. in the episode it's an incredible guest with incredible lessons that are immediately applicable to you no matter where you are in the industry so i will end this introduction and without any further ado here is alex seropian you
Hello and welcome. I'm here with Alexander Seropian. Alex, it's great to have you on the podcast. A pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, so you have been a legend in the industry for some time. You have created games that have everybody listening has heard of and you've. Been on all different sides of the industry, including working for companies like Disney and EA and started, you know, founding Bungie and a variety of other companies, including your new one. I.
But I don't know how you got into gaming in the first place. What drew you to be in this space? I'd love to know some of the origin story. You know, I grew up. in i guess i'm going to date myself grew up in the 80s and i very much remember when the day
my dad brought home an Atari 2600. And it wasn't exactly the Atari 2600. It was the Sears Telegames, which is kind of like the... the the rebrand it was like the the supermarket black label generic equivalent of a 2600 but it played all the 2600 cards but he brought that home and um i just fell in love i mean and we're talking like uh like 16 colors pixels the size of your fist you know
And it was just, it hooked me. It hooked me hard. I would play, you know, on my own. I play with my brother. I play with my friends. I remember playing adventure in Indiana Jones games and we didn't have internet. So our hint books were just like. talking to each other at lunch in middle school. And that's kind of how I got, I guess that's how I kind of love at first sighted video games. And then we got a Mac.
Yeah, I see it. I don't know if you do video, but if you're just listening, I've got an original 128K Mac from 1984 behind me. That's the computer I learned how to program on. Pascal, back in the day, followed by C. Tried writing my own games, did a few simple things, ambitious things. Didn't quite get to the finish line. Yeah, yeah. But that was sort of my pathway into technology. And I had always, I think there's some entrepreneurship just in the DNA.
My grandfather had his own business, both grandfathers on both sides of the family. My dad did too. My mom was an independent writer. They had day jobs, but they all had side hustle. always wanted to pursue that route too so that that trifecta of my entrepreneurial dna plus my love of video games and just the craft of programming um was sort of how i I mean, that's exactly why I started Bungie.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great, I got out of college. That's a great trifecta. So there's a few things that I want to, I want to pull out of this. And I'm curious if you, if you're able to articulate it, cause it's not always easy in terms of, you know, entrepreneurial DNA. What is it that makes that? What's the key to that?
dna is there some variation of just being more accepting of risk is it that there's a you know you default don't look at the normal paths that society tells you because my parents were both lawyers and i was very much put into the you know this is the path that you should be on, son. You should be a lawyer. And it took me a while to realize I could break from that path. So what is different about the way you were brought up or what principles maybe people could derive from that?
I really love that question because this is something that I've thought about a lot. I have a lot of opinions on what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur, why entrepreneurs behave the way that they do. I don't think there's one. exact answer here. I will say I listen to, like if you've ever watched that TV show, Silicon Valley, or you just listen to anybody who's kind of come out of that.
you know, stereotypical mold talk about wanting to change the world. I'm a little jaded. I kind of think that's BS. I think those folks want to get phenomenally wealthy. And changing the world is their pathway to get there. And I think there's a little bit of that in any entrepreneur because you don't.
As Jordan Weissman told me, being an entrepreneur is just like getting punched in the face repeatedly. And that is absolutely... the truth oh yeah you know i work with jordan regularly now and he's an advisor and so yes i get that yes a lot yeah He said entrepreneurs are the stupidest people in the world because they're willing to do the thing that shouldn't be done or can't be done. And it's true. It is true. I will say, though, for me.
I've always been very independent minded. I come from both my sets of grandparents fled. They had to leave their homes during two different genocides in the early 20th century. And I think... You know, I'm one generation removed from that, but I think there's this aspect of the world isn't going to give anything to you. In fact, the world's going to try and take from you.
You got to go and make your own way. That's an important, that was, that was a, nobody ever said those words to me, but just watching how my parents, my grandparents acted, I think really sort of put that in my head. And I've always been that way. I would always prefer to go and try and figure out my own path over just showing up for a job kind of thing. Yeah.
yeah it's it's it's really interesting so there's you know as a kind of way to reframe the way i hear what you said like this you know we we have to be willing to have this you know this belief that you can do things other people can't right that you and this willingness to hit uh get punched in the face as as jordan put it and and so it requires some kind of some kind of fire and fuel there and it sounds like in this case it's you know whether it's
people that want to change the world and how much we believe that with those people that want to get rich or it's this fear. I know it sounds like almost a sort of a little bit of a fear impulse that there's, you know, the world is not necessarily a safe place and I can't just trust.
the the paths that are around me i've got to make my own way uh it's kind of an interesting almost dark side kind of twist i think that's all true and i i honestly like i get a lot of enjoyment a lot of a lot of um positive reinforcement for myself just out of making things. I have a wood shop where I build stuff. I don't sell it, but I love the process of creating. I still write code.
I still make games. This company that we're building right now is unlike anything I've ever done. And treading that new ground and creating something new is... I think that's kind of like the creativity aspect of it as well, which...
Wouldn't choose anything different, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Well, and this is the thing as a creator and a kind of founder and executive, right? There's two different pieces to this, right? Because, you know, look, we all had these choices to make. Like, I love making games. I started off as a game designer.
working for somebody else and then i realized i would rather you know kind of control my own destiny and start my own company and launch my own games but there's so much so much that comes with that uh so you have to kind of love not just the creative process but in a sense
creating the creative process, right? Like building the team and building the system. And there's a certain game design aspect to how you structure a company. 100%. Yeah. It's a lot of system design. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you have done this. to a degree that's kind of an unimaginable level of success from my perspective. So I want to understand both the good and the bad, right? What have you learned about team formation and system design?
when it comes to companies and building something like Bungie or any of your other companies, or, you know, of course we'll talk about your new company as well, but what, what have you learned over these many iterations as well as, you know, advising other companies? It's gotta be a lot of great gold in there. Yeah. Well, um, Another nugget that I kind of have taken from, this one came from a friend of mine, Frederick Marcus, who was at Ubisoft for a long time. He had this phrase.
That was the project is the team, which I think kind of sums up one of the, I think, pretty important aspects of creating a game studio is like often. I talk to people a lot who want to start a studio because they want to make a game. And those are two pretty different endeavors. I mean, maybe you do one to make the other possible, but...
Making a game is different from running a business. And when you're starting a studio, which I've done deliberately a few times, you really do have to spend some time thinking about the team. Like I said, it's kind of like a lot of system design and it's true. It's like it's who you hire, how you organize, what roles you're going to have, how you.
how you organize the responsibilities of the various folks who are part of that team, the culture that emerges from that, the strategy of what products you choose to make and on what platforms and with what business model.
All of those are design elements to your studio. And a lot of those choices are important. And like anything, the execution of how you... deliver on those choices like like how good is your are the people that you're hiring you know and when i say how good are they it's like you know where what's their experience level what's their talent level what's their person you know the their
I don't know what's the word for like if they're awesome. Ultra fit or yeah. No, listen. Ultra fit. Yeah. Part. Yeah. You know, like the execution of like, you know, so. I've gone from at the very beginning of my career, we started Bungie from the perspective of.
I just want to make a game and I want to make a business out of this because I want to be independent. And the first two games we made didn't really do anything. The third one was an incremental success, enough to hire some people. The fourth one was a pretty big success. We just kind of grew.
grew and grew that way or very organically without a strategy other than we're going to make excellent games. But the execution of that simple plan was at a very high level. The people that we had at the studio were excellent. um the the strategy uh like like we we turned out we didn't plan this but because we focused on the mac nobody else was making games on the mac so we we had like a great market share, et cetera. And as I've learned, you kind of add in some...
Hopefully, it's smarter strategic choices at the beginning when you get going. Fast forward to today, and I'm operating in a space that didn't exist even two years ago, let alone 20 years ago when we got started. That is entirely, obviously, that's entirely deliberate. And the team that we've built in the way that we've structured is also very unique. And all those choices are very deliberate. And we're focusing now on trying to execute at the highest level.
So, I mean, I guess that's a very long-winded answer to part of an answer to your question, like what have I learned along the way? It's like there are... Definitely conscious choices that you make when you're thinking about creating a game studio to enable you to make a game that are fairly fundamental to how your company looks and how it performs and how successful it can be.
Yeah, so it's a great answer with a lot of things I want to unpack as well, right? So one, I resonate with this. So our company motto that we repeat every week at our team meetings is work with awesome people, make awesome things, help each other grow, right? Like this is like, you know, these are the important things like finding, surrounding yourself with lots of people is number one.
making great stuff and then hopefully you're learning and iterating um and it sounds like some of that is built in i i'm curious because what i heard and correct me if i'm wrong is that you know kind of early It was really more about, you know, you hired good people and kind of figured out your strategy as you went. Later, with this new company, it sounds like you had a kind of core strategy as the lead domino.
And I'm curious because I have found my experience, it sort of went the opposite where I had a project I knew I wanted to do and started on that. And then I started hiring good people who then opened up different interests and opportunities. And then we kind of...
angled that way so now we have a game that is you know we started with just doing tabletop games then we started doing some you know mobile and web 2 games now we have a kind of web 3 connected game that connects all three of them and that never would have happened if not for like
the somewhat organic growth of the people and talents and interests of the people that we have and i'm curious if that's how it spread for you or how you think about those things differently whether it's strategy first people first how that evolved for you well i i'll tell you that um No plan ever goes as planned. Yeah. Yeah. Very rare. Everybody's going to get punched in the face. Yeah, exactly. And the punches, the punches are nonstop.
The ability to adjust and to pivot or to lean into strengths or to reorganize around solving for challenges is critical and that always happens. And I'll tell you, it's very easy to fall in love with an idea and to follow it to its grave. And that's an important thing to kind of try to de-emotionalize yourself from like...
just kind of like sticking to. When we started Industrial Toys, we did start with a very simple idea, which was mobile is at the time, it was on the cusp of becoming the biggest game platform. uh but it seemed like it was growing like bonkers and my charts at the time were super like like look back today and they were like you know it grew way faster than even we optimistically thought mobile would grow so the the thesis was super simple um
nobody's making games for me, for the core gamer. Let's make games for the core gamer. And what we decided to do was kind of go all in on one game, which in hindsight, I... I would go back and advise myself to, you know, crawl, walk, run, not like dog pile in on, you know, a little, maybe a little bit of hubris thinking like, oh.
mobile is kind of a subset of these other platforms we worked on. We kind of know what we're doing. So let's bring us, I think at some point we were even saying, hey, we're going to bring a, we're. I remember it was the, we're bringing a cannon to this fight, you know, and, and nobody wanted a cannon, you know? And so, um,
I totally relate to what you're saying. You can have a, you know, it's like scientific method. And I kind of like to think there's a decent amount of crossover between the business method and the scientific method where you can have a thesis.
But you kind of have to prove it. And you got to give yourself the space to react to adjusting that thesis when the data, your results aren't necessarily... what you theorize they would be 100 yeah this is the the principle i i call it the core design loop in my in my book and it's the same idea that you basically you need to create whatever your hypothesis your innovation is figure out what the frame is that you could test it and then try
to test it as cheaply and quickly as possible right because we just never know if we're right absolutely cheaply and quickly as possible like even when we started look north so look north world It's a studio that's building in the UGC space. We're starting on Fortnite. We had an idea of what a successful or prototypical UEFN island should look like. It was close, maybe, but it certainly wasn't right at the beginning. So we've been lucky from the perspective of...
Having gotten punched in the face so many times that we knew not to, we knew to try some, in fact, we said to ourselves, let's do the quickest thing we could possibly do. To see if this will work, you know, and that's been sort of the methodology. And, you know, we're, I think we're, we're shipping our 12th game this week. And in like less than a year and a half. That's amazing.
Yeah, and it's all about that. It's iteration. You call it your core design loop, but that's how you get to great is by iterating. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, let's back up a second here because we're going to be... weaving in Look North World and everything else that you're doing. I think some of our audience will know what you mean when you say things like UGC, but some will not. So why don't you go ahead and tee this one up to make sure people understand what you're up to.
Yeah, well, you know, this is a part of the industry now that didn't, I mean, it's UGC is user generated content. It has been around forever. It started as like, oh, you can hack and mod your game. When the original Doom came out, there were these WOD files. People can make their own Doom levels. In fact, one of the most successful games of the last 10 years, PUBG.
was a mod of a different game um league of legends was created was inspired by that too yeah league of legends started it's kind of like dota you know and yeah so this is not a new concept in the game industry that the original creators of a game have produced a piece of technology along with their game that, whether it's easy or not, other people can make their own experiences using that tech. It has become...
That concept in itself has evolved in the last couple of years with the release of Roblox, which is... a product that was designed purely for that. It's like a game engine with a whole content library and a marketplace and all the games on there are created by the users. Minecraft has gone through a similar kind of evolution. And then Fortnite is doing the same thing as of last year with the release of their...
very popular Unreal Engine that targets Fortnite. So when I say we're a studio that makes UGC games, we're a studio that makes games on these platforms. like Fortnite, like Roblox, like Minecraft, where there are literally hundreds of millions of people playing every month.
uh because we don't have to you know create our own back end with services and servers or game engine or in a lot of cases even any content because there's a whole library of content that already exists the games can be made uh way more quickly than say your your average standalone game as a reference point the game i worked on before this which is a battlefield game we worked on for over three years with over 120 people on it.
And I just shipped my 12th game on UEF and ET Buds. So it's a very different level of productivity, which really is what attracted me to this space in the first place. Simply because of this concept that we're talking about, which is the more shots on goal you get or the shorter your iteration loops are, the quicker you can go from your thesis to a fantastic execution of that thesis.
So as a game developer and somebody that creates original worlds and stories and IP, having a platform like this is going to let me go from idea to good to great. an order of magnitude faster than if i were doing this in sort of the standalone marketplace do you find yourself um constrained by these systems right i mean you talk about original ip and original gameplay and here you're really playing in somebody else's sandbox
How much room do you have to play or how do you find creating and playing in somebody else's sandbox for that? Yeah, there's definitely constraints. I look at... Any project that I've ever done has had some design constraints to it. If those constraints either came from, well, we have this much time, so we can only do this much, or we're going to use this engine, so this is the kind of genre that...
is appropriate for it, or we're working with this partner and this is sort of the rules of engagement. Typically, if you have a project that's sort of, you know, completely clean sheet with no constraints. You know, that could be fun, but sometimes the constraints are really the grist for the mill, the fuel for...
you know, focusing a design. So it really, you know, it is, you kind of do have to get used to it because the constraints are maybe a little bit more severe here. Like we didn't have the ability to save a game until about six months in. You would think that's kind of like a core thing, right? Yeah, yeah. But you couldn't save when you went to the arcade and played Space Invaders. So it's not like you can't make games in that environment.
you know it's evolved but there are there are some real constraints uh on these platforms for sure And yeah, I mean, I'm always been a big believer that constraints breed creativity. And one of the things why I was interested, excited to have you as a guest is actually one of the pieces of advice I've given a long time to people who are aspiring designers is start by modding some of your favorite games.
right start by building in those sandboxes because it's way easier as you said it's way faster to get up and running you've got an audience that's already somewhat interested in what's happening and you can kind of get a lot of reps under your belt more easily so it's really fascinating to see you
going kind of full circle in your career to coming back to this. I've had to do a lot of introspection along the way. Having started from... where I started to being involved in some pretty big IP to now building inside of basically somebody else's game. It is a, it's not a place where you, where, like, I didn't even, if you went back in time 18 months and told me this is what I would be doing, I would.
I would have said, well, that's not even a thing. What do you mean? But I got to tell you, it's one of the more, A, I'm having more fun than I can remember. And B, this is one of the parts of the industry right now that has just a lot of energy around it. There's a fuse that's been lit and you can feel it.
In other parts of the industry, you know, like big AAA games, there's a lot of challenges out there right now. A lot of studios that are shrinking, a lot of games that have come out that have... that either took longer because of, you know, when we're working from home or whatever it is. And this is a part of the industry. It's got a lot of energy, a lot of young people involved here. There's a lot more accessibility to these kinds of platforms. So you tend to meet folks from all over the world.
um all different backgrounds walks of life and uh you know i i love it i'm really loving it yeah and and then is your part of your thesis is not just to be a creator of these things but you're providing additional tools and platforms for others is that is that right or am i did i miss yeah i mean that that's no that's i mean part of what we're doing is i mean we're making games but we're also
you know, building a publishing expertise and playbook around like, well, how do we build communities, not just games, but, you know, how do we bring people together? And then also, how do we help? new developers become successful. I 100% believe that this will be pretty important entry point for talent.
Future talent in our industry, you've already seen it with like, I don't know if you ever played Lethal Company, that developer kind of grew up on Roblox, making Roblox games, really broke out with a Steam game, Lethal Company. And we're going to see more of that as kind of like that. you know, a funnel, you know, of, of creative talents sort of like comes into the industry. There's like 10,000 developers in UEFN already.
Some of those folks we're already working with in our creative label, which is, it's like a micro publisher, but it's also, I guess, I don't know if incubator or mentorship is the right word, but those folks are. They're like on our team. They're in our Discord. We work together. helping to build their games and level them up, et cetera. And I really think that's where the next generation of game makers are going to come from, are things like that.
Yeah, I think I agree with that. I want to double click on the publisher playbook that you're developing because to me, this is the area that has been the most... painful and troublesome um you know i come again i come from a tabletop gaming background most of my most of my games are physical games or or digital adaptations of my my physical games and now we have digital
productions where i've partnered with the creator match the gathering and we've got a you know a game on steam and we're working on other aspects to it and man has like discovery and community building and growth and those platforms been I mean, especially as somebody who's a small team without a lot of budget to commit to.
to that kind of marketing and growth what are the lessons that you've learned or what advice would you have well frankly for people like me or others that want to get started uh or or grow a nascent uh base of players well Discovery in general, pretty much anywhere, has just gotten challenging because we're all online and there's a lot more content and choice for folks. So yet the advice I have and what we're...
building at Look North World is kind of like two things. One is our approach to building community is it's really about making it possible for conversations to happen. So that's providing places and tools for people that are playing our games to... talk to us and to talk to each other so whether that's uh like a discord that is active and supportive and where we participate in we run regular community play tests there uh we even pitch games to that audience
And it's an opportunity for conversations to start. And when conversations are happening, that's where you get your highest value. you know, they call it K factor, but really it's like, you know, that's word of mouth, you know? And creating community is, is, is a lot about, you know, put, putting some. authenticity and human face and fire around conversations that are happening. And it's not just at Discord, but if you have channels that you can...
That's how you can help build those channels and keep an audience engaged and grow. So that's one aspect. The other is about understanding the context in which your game's available. So if you're on a... a platform and you're marketing on other platforms, they all have their own unique discovery systems and they're almost all algorithmically run. better a student you are of those algorithms, how they work, where the values are. It's really, it's not.
It's not any different from any aspect of doing business with a partner. You kind of have to align your goals. So if you understand what the goals of the platforms are and how the algorithms are set up. so the platform achieves their goals, then you can do things either by product fit or by whatever tactics you're doing off platform to feed into those algorithms so that your game is...
supporting that platform and in turn, that platform is supporting your product. And so it was kind of like the two fundamental approaches. to developing a playbook for us yeah that's fascinating i mean the community building uh yeah 100 agree and that's a pretty common uh understanding obviously you know understanding about the different channels you're on uh is valuable i've never heard it
said the way you said it which i like which is aligning your goals with the goals of the platform um if their interests are aligned then uh that will work as a way to frame kind of gaming the algorithm or whatever which is the way i think a lot of people will put it
uh so what can you give an example of uh of a platform or channel and how you would have how you've adjusted your strategy or how you would propose a strategy for for approaching that particular one just to make this a little bit more concrete for people
Oh, sure. 100%. I mean, so when we started, we basically, we had a theory that we would focus on making what we would call... first-person shooter game mod so like you're making games inside of the fortnite ecosystem we know first-person shooters i know you know fortnite's third person but like you could just think of like okay we'll make like a team deathmatch game we'll make a game that's uh like
tactical shooter and those are great um but the reality is um what the platform really values are games where players are playing those games for a long period of time like like That's an important, you know.
KPI, you know, Key Performance Indicator. That's what KPI is, right? Key Performance Indicator? Key Performance Indicator, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, there's so many acronyms. Oh, yes, I know. That's why I always try to thank you for breaking it down because, yeah, there's so much jargon in like half.
my job there's a lot of jargon break down the jargon for people yeah so so so you know so if you discover if you figure out that oh okay well really games that have a long play time you know session time you know somebody will get into the game and they'll play it for an hour if that's really uh if that's important to the platform well, is there anything that we can do with either the games that we have or the kind of games we might make next that might lean into that? And I know that's...
That sometimes, you know, if you're a purist game developer, you might hear that and go, well, I just want to make the games that I think are fun. Like, can't we just optimize for fun? Well, okay, that's art and that's cool. But...
If you're in a particular environment where the success of the product and you care about the success of the product is based on things like these KPIs, you kind of have to pay attention, right? So we decided to... broaden our focus of games to include other genres like some of the next couple of games we made were tycoon games you know and tycoon games typically have longer play times and when you design them
with that in mind, you just end up, you know, it's, it's, it's like a, the opposite of a design constraint, I guess it's a design goal.
And that is energizing just as much as a constraint where it's like, oh, okay, well, I got some ideas for how we can do that. And that's just a real simple example of... kind of trying to optimize our slate for what the platform really cares about yeah and and how did you learn that that that's this is the fortnight platform specifically in this case right that how did you learn that time played was the most important metric for you to pay attention to
Research. So some of that information comes from looking at data of what games are succeeding. and then looking at where possible. Some of this data is not always publicly available, but there are ways to get after data that matters.
There are sites that scrape data that you can look at. You can form relationships with other developers to share information. You can talk to the platform holders about where... uh where to look for data and what data is available wherever but when you when you get data this is why you know that core loop that you're talking about it applies to not just your game making
not just running a studio but also how you publish games maybe even the most about how you publish games you're able to get some market data real data about games then you're able to figure out at least some quantification of success or some similarities between successful things so you can start to form some patterns.
out of the noise of data. And when you have some patterns to look at that seem to match up with success, then it informs your thesis for what you do next. Yeah. So this is something I'm fascinated by because I will self-admit that we are... We're bad at using data to make decisions as well as I would like in the digital space. Like I get some data in and it's a variety of different things. I have my daily active users. I've got retention. I've got monetization. I've got all these things.
you know, we're, we're, our audience is small, so we're not necessarily having enough players to be A, B testing all of the solutions. So we're trying different things and we're having to kind of make correlations and guesses. Is it, is that. is that still what it's like in with a small company building things forward or are you you know do you have
economists that are breaking these things down and showing you these different patterns between other games in the industry? Or is it still like a gut informed by data? Or is there like more definitive things? I want to sort of unpack how you're drawing these correlations, how it feels.
and works for you as someone who's done this successfully. Well, this is another, I would say this is another real benefit about being in an environment where we can move quickly and we can, you know, a typical game development cycle is three. to six months. So on the three-month side, that's incredibly short, right? So your time from like, oh, maybe X, try it, look at the results of X, is short enough that we can do experiments like that.
with games. So, I mean, we're doing a combination. I say we're doing three things. That's one. We have a hunch and we'll make a game and we'll look at the result. We are also testing things in other contexts. You know, on a platform like Fortnite, the way the, tell me if these terms are too technical, but like the way the customer acquisition funnel works, you know, and that's basically just.
That's the journey a player takes from us telling them about the game to them playing our game. The way that funnel works is they will see our game in Fortnite. They'll see a picture of it. I see a thumbnail and then they'll click on that thumbnail and then they'll enter the game. That thumbnail is one of the first things they see. So that's like the top of the funnel. It's really important.
And when you're a game maker, you don't always think that this one image that's like two inches wide by one inch tall on the screen next to a bunch of others is... one of the most important parts of the success of your game. In fact, if you think that way, you get bitter and angry because you just spent all this time making your game. But those thumbnails actually matter and the rate at which people, because it's there.
they're next to a hundred others, right? So is there a context in which you can learn how to produce those thumbnails as with as much? care and craft and quality as you would put into the creation of your game. Well, if it's that important and it's the first impression, the first thing people see, I always would tell. I always would really obsess over the very first screen people would see in the game, like the first impression, the first scene, the first thing they do.
you know, when you make a mobile game, you know how important that is. It's the first time user experience in this free, in this context where everything is free, that concierge moment is so, so important. translates to the thumbnail so we do a lot of testing on thumbnails you know off platform because it's the very first thing our players see what does what does testing thumbnails off platform look like
Like, what are you doing? You're showing them to different people on an ad or you're posting them in your Discord and having people vote? We'll make 10... thumbnails or X number of versions based on what we think will work. And we put each of them in front of many users and we simulate the click-through rate. Interesting. So you'll put them in front of you. We pay to do that. We pay to do that. We run them as ads. We pay to do that. Got it. Okay.
Yeah. And so this is, I just, I, you know, forgive me if this is going too in the weeds on this piece of it, but I think it's like stuff that people don't realize how important these things are as part of the creative process and whatever that means, whether that's your discovery, you know, I think about this in terms of what is the box. look like on a tabletop game and how what are people going to see when they interact with it what is the
you know, your steam homepage look like? What's the first click open thing has like all that stuff matters. The concepts are not new. You know, it's like when you use, we used to make games, we put them in a box and the box would go to a store, you know? And so we, would do things like buy the end cap at Walmart because you walk into Walmart and you'd see like 100 copies of the box and it's like, oh, I got to have that. That's the coolest thing. We would.
pay for embossing in gold foil on the front of the box, which is like, really? Okay, we're doing that? Yeah, of course we're doing that because it makes this game better than the one next to it, just by feel. And it's the same concept. the same concept it's just all digital now yeah yeah yeah just a different storefront um so okay i've uh
I'm fascinated by all this stuff. There was one topic I took a note on that I wanted to be able to circle back to, but we kind of went down your new project rabbit hole, which is great, which is this, when you talked about founding Bungie and that you launched multiple projects that...
failed or didn't succeed at the level that you'd hoped and that you would still keep going and keep learning. I'd love to have a... clearer picture painted of that time and moment because this is the kind of thing that a lot of people i know that write in or that you know give feedback it's like oh i did the thing it didn't work like this sucks and they lose they lose hope and they give up and i think giving
some more context around this story and what got you to keep going or how you were able to manage overhead and how you're able to manage morale and like all that uh it would be would be i'd love to get a little bit more out of that yeah this is such a You know who Randy Pausch is? Yes. He was a director of the entertainment technology program at Carnegie Mellon. He has this very famous lecture called The Last Lecture. I highly recommend this to everybody if they haven't seen it. Yeah.
It's a great talk. I think it was before TED Talks. And he talks about the wall and going through the wall. And the wall really, it's not everything goes as planned. Things are harder than we think. How do we react when we confront failure? And lots of people react different ways and it's all okay. But that wall, that moment of failure is a filter. And you cannot succeed at what you set out to do without going through the wall.
You can tap out and give up and go do something else. That's okay for you. But there's no success without going through the wall. And I've experienced the wall. in almost everything I've ever done to one degree or another. Bungie was started. I was a senior in college. I made a game. I made a VHS tape. wearing a tie to beg for money from my dad's rich doctor friends. And I got $10,000, which was enough to print a box.
And I didn't know what to do beyond that. I called the places I bought my games from, and some of them bought some copies of the games. We sold enough. It paid me back for the boxes. Basically, enough I could try it again. And that's when I met Jason in one of my computer classes. He had a game and I convinced him, oh, let's do this. And we tried it again. Same thing.
You know, maybe we sold a little bit more, not much, enough to pay for what we just did. And I absolutely had, you know, we started working on the third one. The internal conversation, I'm like, I'm just out of college, living with my girlfriend, the basement apartment in South Side of Chicago. She's paying the rent. And I gave up two job offers coming out of college to try this. I'm driving my dad's old minivan. It's like 12 years old. Meat and ramen.
Like the other half of the basement is filled. It's got a shrink wrap machine and it's just filled with inventory. It's like, how many times I can do this? And I distinctly remember. I had an exercise bike in my basement apartment and my desk was right next to it. I had my fax machine on the desk. For those of you who don't know what a fax machine is, it can send paper documents through a phone line. High tech. And we had been working on, the third game was Pathways in the Darkness.
And I had been introduced to, no, what were they called? It wasn't Tri-Byte, it was in Australia. I blanked on the name of the distributor. But they were a distributor that they sold computer games. I got an introduction to them. They said that they would carry the game and I didn't really think much of it, but I'm on my exercise bike and the fax machine rings and it's their first order. And it's like a $50,000 order.
which was more than we had made in, you know, the first two years that I like got jumped off the bike. I'm jumping around. I was like, I'm going to get through the wall. I didn't say that, but it was like, OK, OK, but I don't have to quit. Yeah. And. To one degree or another, like on every project I've done, on the first marathon game, on the myth games, on the Oni games, on pretty much any time you're trying to do something you've never done before.
It's really easy to get to points along the way where you're, you think you're going to fail or something's not working or you're stumped. And my advice is to, you know, and I tell folks who like are. who are fellow entrepreneurs, you just got to find a way to survive because there's always a solution. There's always a path. You just need to find a way to survive long enough that you can get to that path. So I.
I'm so glad I dug back into the story. That was fantastic. So it is both a great piece of advice and a visceral. brought us in very viscerally to the experience so i'm going to bring up the the obvious kind of follow-up here right this is the um you know this the expression of the wall uh i use i like to use the phrase the dark forest uh i think i got that from tim urban originally right that you're just kind of wandering around you don't really know
how to get out. You don't know where you're going exactly, but you know that there is a way out. You just don't know it. And then how do you deal with being in the dark forest? I don't get into the dark forest any less after doing this for 20 plus years. I just have more confidence that I will figure it out at some point. But the question I get asked often when I talk about the dark forest, and I'll put to you as a similar concept.
busting through the wall is how do you know right some some advice is just keep going persevere whatever it takes and then there's other times we're like hey this idea is not working the world is telling you it's not working
You should be changing gears. You should be pivoting. And how do you know when you're the guy that's supposed to push through the wall if just one more step forward and you're going to get that order and you're going to get that thing. And every time it's like, hey, bro, take the data. make a different decision it's not quitting it's it's pivoting people like the word pivot right um how do you how do you wrestle with that uh distinction that that is a really good question i mean i i
I try to think about things both from a, like, what am I learning point of view and what are my options? So when I'm faced with like a challenge like that, you know. existential challenge, design challenge, cash flow challenge. I reflect on what I just learned. Why isn't this working? Is there a reason why this isn't working? And then what are my options? Do I just need more time? Do I need a different approach? Do I need...
different people, you know, somebody like a different context, you know, can I change my context to make this work? And then try to move from there. Often, you know, often the challenge is time. In our industry, we have chosen the most difficult thing to do. It's artistic, it's subjective, but it's also technical.
I think it was Jordan who said this to me as well, because I was asking him, you do pen and stuff, pen and paper. I was like, how's the different pen and paper and games? And he's like, well... you know, when you're making a book, it's usually, you know, you usually don't come in and hear, well, the pages didn't want to stay in the book today, you know? But in game development, shit like that happens all the time, right? You know?
So we've chosen something that's very hard to do. Often we're faced with challenges related to time, like, hey, this had to be done by this point in time. either because of cash flow or because there's a release date or there's a promotion date or whatever. And we run into unknowns and solving those unknowns take longer than we expect. How do we approach...
not having enough time. And that's where you can develop a plan around different options. Typically, it's like, well, can you change your scope? Can you get more time by raising more money, having more money involved? Time is a proxy for money in our industry. When we're making something, we have people. We don't have a factory.
We don't have inventory anymore. We just have people. So if you need another month, well, it's easy math. You know what that's going to cost. So often things just boil down to that triangle. you know that that that that production triangle where you've got like quality scope and time or budget yeah yeah the uh good cheap fast as the triangle as i refer to it generally speaking you get two and you're lucky maybe yeah maybe you're lucky uh uh and um
Okay, great. Yeah. So, and, and then just, just to dig in a little bit more on this one, when you're, I love the structure, right? Asking these questions, what am I learning? What are my options? How do you, can you think and shift context?
uh is that process for you like a formal process like you're writing these things down or is it just like you're going off into the woods or you're taught you're brainstorming with the team like what is it on the ground level when you're in this crisis moment you're facing the wall or the dark forest is it how do you how do you make sure that you go through these questions and you optimize your your chance of finding a good result usually they begin as introspection
And that's a personal journey that then turns into a conversation with the team. And sometimes we take that a step further and actually try and... kind of iterate it out, iterate out like, okay, let's make a pro cons list on here. Let's, let's actually think about, you know, how viable are some of these options? So, you know, sometimes when money's involved,
So, I mean, here's a great example. When at Industrial Toys, we had shipped our first game, we'd raised a bunch of venture capital, we had gone all in on our first game, it didn't return. And we were working on taking what we learned from that and putting it into our second game. And we basically started two games at once. You're like, okay, here's a second game in this genre that...
We learned a bunch about, and here's a game in a new genre. And that's a thing that we did when we kind of staffed up to finish the first game, and we're starting a new game. And through that process, we had to figure out how to get those games to the finish line. which meant more time for a partner. And in that climate, looking through what was actually doable, raising another round of... venture was a much higher risk. And what we ended up doing was divesting one of those games so that the...
the game that we wanted to make was going to be less expensive to make. And that's not a thing that we would have, you know, that wasn't like an obvious choice. That was a choice that came out of a bunch of introspection. and a bunch of brainstorming about what are our options here. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great, great illustrated example. Yeah, one of the things I'll do is we'll go through like an assumptions challenging exercise with the team, where we'll literally put down like all of the fundamental beliefs down to the... basics of like we're making a game right now right and then just like try to go through the exercise like all right what if that wasn't true and then a bunch of times it's like nothing comes of it but with it inevitably after you know
30, 45 minutes of this, we'll find something that was like we took for granted that clearly is not the case. And if we go a different route, there's some new door open to us. So different tactics to try to get at that seem really valuable. The next topic I wanted to cover is the future of the industry. You already mentioned that your new company exists because of a trend that...
you wouldn't even have dreamed of two years ago, right? Where user-generated content and being able to play with these tools that exist is now potentially the future of games and certainly the breeding ground for the next generation of designers. There's a lot of trends that are moving forward.
uh in the world both with ai vr ar web3 you know there's a million different technological and you know kind of cultural trends that are putting us in a direction that it's not clear what's next uh since you've seemed to have a pretty good handle on uh being at the forefront of a lot of these things i'd love to get your take on how you see the gaming and industry evolving over the next three to five years. Yeah, well.
If I had a crystal ball and I could tell you with any certainty what the world was going to be like in three years, I'd be much richer. So take everything with a grain of salt. But I'm always amazed at you can take any moment in time from the 80s through today, if you're going in that direction. You could say the following sentence and it would be true. And the sentence is, it's a freaking great time to be making games. Just the opportunities in this industry.
It's up and to the right, you know, there's always something new. Now, not all of them pan out, but because technology is.
such a fundamental aspect of the creative work that we do. And technology is a train that doesn't stop. There's always new ways for... um folks who are making games are folks who are playing games to um like if you're making games new kinds of experiences to make and you're playing games new things to try and enjoy so i think it's why games have have been eating the world um as we go
If you look at what's happening right now, some of the things, trends that you mentioned from UGC to AI to Web3, those three things have put a lot of energy into... the industry. And over the last couple of years, that energy has taken the form of venture capital, which means there's a lot of new projects. And VR is in that category too, but VR sort of got on board way earlier.
But just that investment just means that there's a lot of experimentation happening and a lot of new kinds of experiences for players to enjoy. I'll give you a little bit of thought on some of those. VR, I think, is just a freaking amazing technology, like getting in a headset and experiencing that level of immersion.
That's clearly a thing. The accessibility has always been holding it back from becoming more mainstream. If you look at what Meta's doing with Orion, I think... i think they're you know they're just kicking apple's butt uh and just in terms of vr from that perspective in ar um i i see that form factor um getting way more adoption
especially on the AR side. So I think we're going to see a lot of really interesting things come from that piece of technology. You don't think people want to wear giant ski goggles everywhere they go in the world? Well, I mean, putting those on, does it... it does create an exceptional experience. But yeah, I was at, I was in Vegas for the DICE conference the beginning of the year. And I walked by, I was in the bar and I walked by.
two people sitting on a bench having a meeting. They were both wearing Apple Vision Pros. I can be honest. I didn't know how to feel about that. It was, I didn't have good feelings about that. It was very weird. Yeah. Yeah. And even like looking at that, have you seen the Orion prototype? You know, that it's an AR set. Yeah.
I mean, they look they're bigger and goofier than a set of glasses, but, you know, they're they're closer to Google Glass than they are to a headset. And you look at that and I mean, simultaneously. My two thoughts simultaneously were, wow, it's really going to happen. This is amazing. And two, we're freaking doomed. We're so doomed. You know, it's like.
My kids spend so much time on social media. And now it's like the next generation is just going to be that much jacked in. Humanity fundamentally is going to change. Hope, you know, we can hope it's for the better, but.
Who knows? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the part where we get into the, you know, who can predict the future, right? And I'm generally comforted by the fact that if you look back at every single generation looking at the next generation's technology, they were worried that that would be the death of society.
TV is going to rot your brain. Social media will be the end of us. Video games are going to rot your brain. There's even records from the earliest books that people were worried that would destroy our ability to tell stories and connect through the oral tradition. Everybody's worried about every level of technology.
Who knows what it's going to look like. I will take comfort in that fact. I'll take comfort in that fact. Although, you know, when my dad was shaking his fist at the universe, I thought he was just an old man. But when I shake my fist at the universe, I really think it's crumbling. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah. But that's VR. AI is absolutely a thing. We have no idea. how that's going to change our relationship with technology and each other. I mean, just think about in the...
The internet really just started kind of like becoming a thing in the 90s, late 90s. If you were around pre-internet, you would not have predicted. just what our lives, the impact the internet has had on our lives. And it's not in any way that science fiction wrote books about. It's in very different, more fundamental.
and subtle ways about how we communicate with each other, the speed at which we do, how we navigate our world, how we engage with not just each other, but communities, culture, and commerce. It's woven into everything and it has made us in some ways exceptionally more productive and in some ways exceptionally more destructive. I think AI is going to have an even bigger impact on us. You can't write the script for it today. But even today, you can sit down at your computer.
And you can tell your life story to ChatGPT. And then you can ask it questions about yourself. And it can write your book for you. And that's just mind-boggling. And it's just getting started. This is baby. Right. Today's AI is the worst AI you will ever have, right? It's only going to get better. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so whether you think it's like a fad or what, you're wrong. It is the fundamental.
technology that will reshape society just like the internet did. I believe that. What it means for games, I think it's going to be a tool. and it will weave itself into features, just like multiplayer was an output of connectivity. I think we'll have things like global context inside games, which is a fascinating concept to me, where...
There's characters in the games that know what every single player in the game has done. And it could tell you things, you know, that's that's an amazing design feature, you know, having a sort of like a NPC. LLM. There's three acronyms for you if you want to. But so AI, I think, is a really big game changer. No pun intended. Web3, I mean, it's... We'll see. I got a lot of friends that are building in the Web3 space. I see the benefit. I think the...
Just blockchain in general is an incredibly interesting bit of technology. It seems less fundamentally game-changing to me, but I think there'll certainly be interesting things that come out of it. And I think UGC, like what's happening with UGC is really, it's an output of player behavior. I read an article at the beginning of this year about how it's like something like 60% of playtime.
is in games that are seven years old or older you know so like what what we're seeing is the development of these communities around games that are growing and continue to grow. You look at Valorant, you look at Roblox, you look at Fortnite. These are games that have been around for years and years. Fortnite's over seven years old and it's hitting all-time highs still.
because these are enduring communities that can continue to keep and attract players. And there's an investment that players make into these games that they're... the switching cost is high enough that... There's a real incentive to stay with your friends and stay with your ecosystem. And I think what that provides is it provides the opportunity to build these new kinds of platforms. So like the game is the platform.
as opposed to a piece of hardware being the platform or a piece of software being a platform, the game and the vocabulary that goes with it, the culture that goes with it. like how the friends graph work and how the content presentation is. All of that is part of that platform, which is giving rise to new kinds of opportunities for people to build and engage players.
entertainment advertising even um and that's kind of fascinating to me yeah no i find it i find it unbelievably fascinating and it's like it's again an interesting inverse of the of the take right you've seen this sort of kind of lock-in function of these big older games and uh they are
you know like the mobile game top 10 list is you know used to change all the time right when mobile games were first launching and now they're pretty much static for for many many years now uh and so these these these megalith games have taken over in a way that is makes it.
in some sense harder for new games to break through um but in another sense in so far as they allow for this sort of creatively playing in the sandbox maybe this is this whole other industry that you know people make a living making roblox smart you know ugc and potentially with what you guys are doing, which is an interesting reverse take on that trend, I guess. A more empowering take, I guess. Well, the kind of engagement that exists in a platform like Fortnite is...
It's different. In some ways, it's a lot more powerful because the players that are in that ecosystem, they choose to be in that ecosystem. And they've been in that ecosystem for a long time. And if you're making games or you want to be part of that community, you know where to find them. Whereas if you're trying to build a community from scratch, you have to.
invent how to find those players you know yeah and then you have to recruit them and then you have to keep them so in some ways you know i i had this realization i'm this this this i'm a dummy um Fortnite's programming language is called Verse, which is kind of a shortcut for metaverse, I guess. So I think in some ways, they don't really call what they're doing with Fortnite.
metaverse but you know if you've read ready player one or if you've read any neil stevenson um it you see the you see that trend line you know yes well and this is actually so this is a really interesting topic because that
This is where the Web3 piece, I think, is the most interesting because Web3 is very directly trying to build a kind of interoperable metaverse, which is very, very difficult to do. Whereas a centralized space like a Fortnite or a... meta you know facebook proper that has a large audience can build that
world and let you play within it but then they have all the control and you're you know you're playing in their world whereas i see i view the project of most of the web 3 games as a trying to build a system that allows for far more interoperability
And, you know, again, you know, you say you try to find the players in Web3, you know, the wallets of everybody that's playing a game, right? Everybody that has the objects in that game or tokens in that game. And so you can actually reach them directly in a way that's.
potentially very interesting with things like airdrops etc so i think like in many ways leaving ai aside for a second a lot of these puzzles are we're trying to solve with ugc and um and and this other thing are you know how do you solve the discovery problem which is the it's it's easier than ever and better than ever to make games it's harder than ever to kind of get discovered and build a community right
that's true that's true um and okay well we've we've we've run a long time i could i could talk about this stuff forever and i really appreciate you being uh very uh forthcoming with a lot of your you know the stories and some of the hardships that you've gone through and you've really distilled a lot of these lessons in great ways. I want to make sure that people that want to find your cool new stuff and participate in your world, in the UGC world, where should they go? How can they find you?
and they play your awesome new games? Yeah, well, so if you'd like to check out any of the work that we're doing at Look North World, you can visit our website, looknorth.world. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on TikTok or Instagram. Just come on into Fortnite. You can find us in there too. And if it's okay for me to plug my podcast, please do also host a podcast called the fourth curtain. And it's, it's a show that.
Brings you stories from some of the biggest creators in video games. And you can find us at theforthcurtain.com or wherever you find your podcasts. Yeah, I had done a little research and had only discovered the podcast about an hour before we started talking. So I am definitely going to be listening to it. This is right up my alley. So I'm excited. And I love what you're doing. And I love that you're spreading this knowledge.
and opportunity for new creators. So this has been just such a wonderful chat. So thank you so much for coming on. Oh, thank you. It's been awesome and great to hang out with you. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast.
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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 thinklikeagamedesigner.com or wherever fine books are sold.