Jordan: 00:00

You are listening to Playmaker's Podcast, the podcast by and for game industry professionals. On every episode, I talk to a legend or leader, or both, in the game industry, and I dive deep with them into their areas of expertise and experience to suss out information that you can use to do your work in the game industry better and to give you a bigger perspective on the industry as a whole so you can adapt and succeed in your career, your game, or your game business venture.

This week, another lost episode. It's a good one. So make sure you've got those Bluetooth headphones snugly in place, and let's do this. I realize I cheese it up a little bit in those intros. You know I do that with love, right? Speaking of love, I would love it if you would write a review of Playmaker's Podcast. That is the primary way people find out about the show and validate that it's good stuff. When they hear it helps people like you, they realize it could help them too. So if you're feeling it, write it. If not, that’s cool too. I'm gonna win you over. I am. I'm gonna make this show better and better until you're like, "Dang! Okay, you know what? I will write a review." Sure, that may not be today. That may not be tomorrow, but until that day comes, I'll be here producing the interviews that give you what you need. And if you're not getting what you need from these interviews, I want to hear about that too. Shoot me an email at jordan@brightblack.co so I can find out what you do need and produce that content.

Now, with all that said, let's get into the introduction of this week's epic guest. When I worked at Zynga, I have to be honest, I went through some pretty stressful and difficult times, and I was so lucky to sit next to, for a brief period, this week's guest.

Not only was he someone who I was able to learn from a lot just by working with him, but his presence was very calming to me. He would do things like remind me that things were going to be alright. He would do things like, maybe on a Friday after work hours, offer me a glass of wine—stuff like that. And it really stuck with me that there's such an impact to be made, not just by what you do, but how you do it. But this guest has certainly done a lot that's very impressive in the "what" category as well. He was a game designer at Monolith Productions, working on The Matrix Online. He worked as a senior developer at Sigil Games, was a senior game designer at LucasArts, a mission designer at NCSoft.

He was a lead game designer at Zynga, a lead game designer at Bigpoint, a lead systems designer at Sega, and the director of game design at TinyCo. He currently works as lead systems designer at Hangar 13. Now, when we conducted this interview, because it is a lost episode, he hadn’t yet started at Hangar 13, so we don’t talk about that in particular. But what we do talk about is the journey from tabletop role-playing design all the way to live operations on free-to-play and mobile. If you do, or plan to do, live operations, this interview is can't miss. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Bruce Harlick.

Bruce, welcome to PlayMakers.

Bruce: 03:48

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jordan: 03:50

Let’s start off with a little bit about your background in the industry, how you got into the industry. I know you’ve been [in the industry] for a while, so I’d like to hear a little bit about that.

Bruce: 03:59

Yeah, I mean, I’ve actually been around for longer than I like to say. I got my start making pen and paper role-playing games way back in 1981, working on a superhero role-playing game called Champions. And superhero kind of, became a recurring theme in my career. I stumbled into that because people I went to high school with made a role-playing game. I went to work for them, learned how to design games, and did a lot for that company.

Jordan: 04:28

So you went to work for a company that was started by people you went to highschool with?

Bruce: 04:33

Yeah. One high school classmate and then another person from our gaming group.

Jordan: 04:37

And how old were they when they started this company?

Bruce: 04:40

Oh, George McDonald must have been about 21 or 22, and Steve Peterson, maybe a year older. I was 18 at the time, literally right out of high school.

Jordan: 04:53

So is this just after—when did Dungeons and Dragons come out and kind of explode the scene?

Bruce: 04:59

D&D first came out, I think, in 1973. I think I got into it in 1974.

Jordan: 05:09

So not at all close, actually, to the early 80s.

Bruce: 05:13

We’re probably considered a second-generation role-playing system, if D&D and that ilk were the first. Maybe third generation, depending on how you slice that kind of stuff. But we were very systematic, very balanced. You kind of spent points to buy whatever you wanted. We removed the randomness from character generation, and that, I think, informed a lot of my system design sensibilities as the years went by.

Jordan: 05:43

How did you learn that stuff? How did you and George figure out how to do that sort of balance?

Bruce: 05:49

Well, George is a brilliant designer, as is Steve. But the genesis of the idea for this role-playing game was George's, and he came up with the basic idea. It kind of took over our D&D group, and we did a lot of playtesting for a few years. We went through many iterations of the rules until finally, he and Steve decided they wanted to publish this in 1981, and it turned out to be a big hit. But there was just a lot of trial and error.

You learn by doing, which is probably the best way, if you're fortunate enough to be able to do so. So I did everything for the company, from shipping boxes to— the last thing I did was act as company president for about six months. But mostly what I did was manage the game line for Champions, which involved developing a product, managing game books for the role-playing game, which was a tabletop experience for those of you who aren't familiar with the analog version of those things. These books had the information people needed to create scenarios that they would run their friends through, and the information that the players needed to create characters to play in those scenarios.

Jordan: 06:55

So how many books came out and what was the kind of span of time?

Bruce: 06:59

Gosh, a lot of books came out.

Jordan: 07:03

And let me tell you where my head is at. I'm thinking about live operations, and I know that's something you've had a lot of experience with. And how, when you have a system like this and you're creating these books, it’s sort of like content updates to a live product.

Bruce: 07:18

That's a great comparison, Jordan, and you're 100% right. When the company was going, we tried to put out about a book a month. We probably hit 10 a year.

Jordan: 07:30

That's amazing.

Bruce: 07:31

And some of these ranged from small adventure books to large rule supplement books. You see the same pattern if you look at Dungeons and Dragons or any of the successful role-playing games today. They'll put out the core rulebooks and then have a regular cadence of support material—new class books, adventures, bestiaries, grimoires, monster and magic item books—if they're for fantasy games. It's just to keep the players buying and to keep the money going in. Because once you've bought the core rulebook, you could theoretically never need more books after that. You have what you need to play the game. It's kind of like buying a game and then not buying any more downloadable content or sequels or anything like that. That's great for the publisher for a year or two, but they need to keep more stuff coming out.

Jordan: 08:24

Right. It's the same problem we run into with just having a product versus having a business. You can put out this one thing, but to have a sustainable business, you've got to figure out ways to continue to have new things. Did you guys do like a leapfrog-style development on these books? You'd have one coming out and one earlier in development, kind of at the same time?

Bruce: 08:42

We would have a lot in development at the same time. I mostly worked with freelancers. For the freelancers, it wasn't their day job, and they weren't always really good at hitting deadlines. A lot of people, first-time writers—it's hard to write books, whether they're game books, novels, or strategy guides. So, we would have a bunch of irons in the fire. As we got better at things, we tried to have a more planned calendar and work to that schedule. But, fortune throws you slings and arrows, and sometimes you needed to adjust. It was not unlike building a cadence calendar for a live game. You wanted to make sure that you had major books coming out at specific times, like for Gen Con, which was the biggest gaming convention at the time, and you always wanted a major release there.

You would want to do a major book, then follow up with a couple of lighter books, and then another major book. The major books would have higher price points, and the minor books would have lower price points. But you'd also want to make sure you didn't end up having four big, hefty rulebooks in a row because that could overwhelm your players' wallets. Or three adventures in a row, which only the game master would need—those appeal to a very small subset of your player base.

Jordan: 10:01

How similar that is to what we would do on a content calendar, wanting to balance some features against each other and not have too many similar mechanics one after another.

Bruce: 10:12

It's interesting, Jordan, because I've never actually made that comparison before.

Jordan: 10:15

Me neither.

Bruce: 10:16

But you are 100% right. And it kind of explains maybe why I enjoy live game ops so much.

Jordan: 10:23

Okay, we're going to get to that. Before we do, take me from that pen and paper kind of work—or it sounds like a lot of editorial and business work—to your video game career.

Bruce: 10:34

Yeah. So, we made a stab at doing Champions: The Computer Game, which at one time was one of the most legendary pieces of vaporware in the industry. We actually got the cover of Computer Gaming World, and it never came out—which was the first time that had happened. I think not the last. But after Champions, I wandered over to work for...

Jordan: 10:59

Champions did get made.

Bruce: 11:01

Oh, it did, but that was much later.

Jordan: 11:03

Okay.

Bruce: 11:04

Much later, and we weren’t involved.

Jordan: 11:06

Okay.

Bruce: 11:07

After Hero Games, I wandered over to work for Accolade/Infogrames.

Jordan: 11:13

What was the game—was it Test Drive? The one where you were, like, escaping the cops in a Ferrari?

Bruce: 11:19

No, I didn’t do that one, but we did do a lot of racing games, a lot of Looney Tunes games, a bunch of console games.

Jordan: 11:29

I was like a kid consuming and playing those games that you were working on there.

Bruce: 11:33

Yeah, we did stuff for the Dreamcast. I think I did some documentation for some Xbox titles around the Xbox launch—the original Xbox—some PS1, PC, all that kind of good stuff, which was good. That was a good couple of years, but it wasn’t actually making games, it was making things that were peripheral to games.

Jordan: 11:55

And what was that like, emotionally, working on that stuff? Was it like, they should have done these things? What was the experience?

Bruce: 12:03

Sometimes, mostly you’re very aware because you’re working very closely with the dev teams, most of whom were in-house, in the South Bay of California—what’s now Silicon Valley. It wasn’t called that back then, but there was some of that. And sometimes you could offer suggestions, like, “Hey, I’ve been playing the build,” but by the time I got my hands on it, it was too late to really affect any changes.

Jordan: 12:31

That probably made you very hungry—that’s what I would imagine from that kind of role.

Bruce: 12:36

It did. And so, Hero Games got acquired and I jumped back to work for Hero Games. This was during the height of the dot-com boom and everything. When the parent company of Hero Games—when I was running the company—kind of blew up, I got fed up with working on games and quit gaming forever, professionally. I’ve always been a game player all my life. I went to go do technical writing and technical editing for a tech startup and then Sun Microsystems on their coursework.

And that’s what I was doing when I kind of accidentally got pulled back into the game industry—this time into video games. Yeah, I think my career sometimes can be defined by a series of accidents or coincidences rather than any kind of real planning. But one of my good friends and ex-bosses, Mike Pondsmith of R. Talsorian Games, was up in Seattle working at Monolith on The Matrix Online.

And I happened to be popping up to Seattle for a vacation, got in touch with Mike—I hadn’t seen him for a little while—and Mike said in his mysterious way, “Hey, we were just talking about you. We should chat.” And so my vacation kind of turned into a job interview because Monolith was also going to be doing the DC Comics Online game. And Mike had been out with the lead designer of that game, Jeff Zatkin.

Jordan: 13:58

I’m sorry, who’s Mike?

Bruce: 13:59

Mike Pondsmith is the creator of Cyberpunk 2020 and Mekton. He ran a company called R. Talsorian Games. He also worked for Microsoft, where he worked on Crimson Skies and a number of other titles. He worked on The Matrix Online.

Jordan: 14:11

That’s a great game. Crimson Skies is a classic.

Bruce: 14:13

He is an amazingly, amazingly talented designer, and I learned so much when I was working with him at R. Talsorian. Anyway, Jeff Zatkin, who is one of the old EverQuest designers, would later go on to be one of the co-founders of EEDAR. If you’re familiar with EEDAR, Jeff now has a VR startup, Experiment 7. Anyway, yeah.

Jordan: 14:34

EEDAR does metrics and sales data and stuff like that.

Bruce: 14:39

Right, right. They kind of could break down a game's performance and match it against Metacritic and other scores, and companies would consult with them about feature sets and potentially how this game will do in the market and whatnot, right? Yeah, I think they sold last year to another data analytics company. Jeff was an old Champions player and said, “Hey, I need one of those Champions guys.” And Mike said, “I know exactly who you should talk to. He used to work for me.” I literally called Mike the next day. Long story short, I ended up at Monolith working on The Matrix Online. And this was my first in-house development job on a PC game, as opposed to...

Jordan: 15:20

I’m so sorry for you.

Bruce: 15:22

It was a great experience. It was a learning experience. And one of the great takeaways from it was that a team of really smart, intelligent people can make a crappy game.

Jordan: 15:34

Yeah. Well, I was just kidding about being sorry for you, of course. But sometimes that sentence is followed by, “It was a death march.”

Bruce: 15:42

Right? Oh, it was game development. We had our period of crunch, ostensibly. They hired me for the DC game, and the thought was The Matrix was going to launch in a couple of months. I would work on that for a couple of months to learn the technology, which was shared with the DC game, and then roll on to DC. Of course, that couple of months stretched out to almost two years. And I got to do a lot of great stuff on that game, probably more than I should have. But, like I said, I got a chance to work with some great people. Toby was the lead designer on Asheron's Call.

Jordan: 16:16

Wow. Very interesting. Some very interesting designs in that game.

Bruce: 16:19

Yeah. And just a really great outside-of-the-box design thinker. A super great guy. And again, someone I learned a lot from. The Matrix had a number of failings, some in the design, some in the production, some in the fact that we came out around the time that World of Warcraft launched.

Jordan: 16:40

What about on the licensing side? Did that present challenges? Because it certainly could, especially on a game that big and that live.

Bruce: 16:48

There were some, from what I understand, licensing challenges. That was above my pay grade at that point, so I didn’t have to deal with it. There were some interesting things, like I think they found out maybe a couple of years into the project, when the art director was showing some stuff, and the Wachowskis said, “Those look great, but there’s no blue in The Matrix.” Well, and it’s true. If you look at the movies...

Jordan: 17:12

It's all green.

Bruce: 17:13

It's all green until whatever happens, and there’s the clear sky in the third movie, I think it is. So yeah, that apparently required a lot of rejiggering on the art of the game and gave it kind of a very green...

Jordan: 17:30

What year is this?

Bruce: 17:32

That was 2003. I was there from the very end of 2003 to 2005.

Jordan: 17:38

I'm curious how it lines up with... because I've always been blown away by that. Have you ever seen the Matrix game that has that totally insane, nonsense ending where the Wachowski brothers are sitting in a chair and talking about stories? It’s Path of Neo.

Steve: 17:52

Path of Neo, yeah.

Jordan: 17:54

And it's just this crazy thing that totally... I mean, I didn’t play it at the time. I saw it years later in an article or something. But I’m just curious, because I know if I was working on a Matrix game and I saw that, my head would explode.

Bruce: 18:08

Yeah. We didn’t have a lot of interaction in the studio with the Wachowskis. We mostly worked with a writer they designated, whose name I’m spacing on... Paul Chadwick, I think. Again, super nice guy, very creative, but not a game writer. So we would need to take what Paul was doing and translate it over to game stories. But mostly I was working on systems on that game. I was working on the ability systems, the crafting system, and the itemization system. We were a little under-designered on that game, as you might tell by everything that was on my plate there.

Jordan: 18:50

I like that, under-designered.

Bruce: 18:52

Another lesson to take away from that project. But we launched, which I think was a success. And the game was not. It certainly did not meet expectations. There was a layoff in there—those happen quite often in the game industry. And so, I went to LucasArts after that. Got to work with a couple of my Matrix Online coworkers. We were working on an Indiana Jones console game. We were in pre-production on that game my entire two and a half years at LucasArts.

Jordan: 19:27

I remember that. I don't remember what it was called, but I do remember that game.

Bruce: 19:30

We never announced the title for the next-gen version, which is what we were doing in-house, but I think a DS, PlayStation Portable, or Game Boy version came out that was Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. But yeah, we made a big splash at E3 with the cable car chase, and then I think showing off some of NaturalMotion’s Euphoria technology and the hit reactions and stuff with that. But it was an interesting and kind of another problematic project. From there, I actually moved back towards live games when I joined the City of Heroes team at NCSoft, which later became Paragon Studios. There, I joined as a senior mission writer, creating mission content. Which I did for about six months, and then I stepped up to be lead designer of the live project. And that was great. That was a fantastic team, fantastic project. It was a superhero game. The best fan base ever. Those players were so awesome, so loyal, and knew the lore better than I think anyone at the company. They were just a joy to create for.

Jordan: 20:38

And that game was around for a long time, right? It really kind of stood the test of time.

Bruce: 20:43

I think it lasted seven years before NCSoft shut it down. And it probably could have kept going. I think it was still making some money on that. They had converted over to a free-to-play model, and this was after I had left.

Jordan: 20:58

And that must have been a bit of a relief from these projects that were in development for all this time to a live game that’s already out, and you know that what you're working on is going to be seen, going to get played, and going to get enjoyed.

Bruce: 21:09

Right. I mean, within the first couple of weeks of me joining there, I got to do some content that came out just a couple of months later, which was considered fast in those days for a PC game. I thought that was great because I got to see how the players reacted to what I was creating. It helped me know what to pay attention to and how to create better stuff for the players’ desires. I got to work on some good game systems with them. We worked on a boxed expansion called Going Rogue while I was there. And this was in 2008 and 2009. In 2009, something very strange started to happen: these Facebook games were coming along and blowing up, and this little game called FarmVille was getting millions of players a day.

Jordan: 21:57

I heard of that.

Bruce: 21:58

Yeah, yeah. And one of my ex-LucasArts coworkers, Bill Mooney, who I was playing D&D with, had taken over as general manager of FarmVille. After I spent one evening complaining about the crop balance and the crop ramp in FarmVille, he recruited me over to join Zynga to work on FarmVille. So, I did that at the end of 2009, and that was a crazy, crazy time.

Jordan: 22:27

Yeah, that’s where we met.

Bruce: 22:28

Exactly. Exactly. You know, Zynga in those days, man, it was the wild west. FarmVille had little process. When I joined, it was pretty much possible to come up with an idea on a Monday and have it in the game by Thursday. I mean, just insane.

Jordan: 22:50

And have that idea played by 20 million people by Friday.

Bruce: 22:55

And we were enjoying the same crazy growth. I mean, I think when I joined, it was about 18, 20 million people. I think we peaked in March at about 32 million. That's daily players, not monthly or lifetime or anything like that. So just, it was finally...

Jordan: 23:14

I mean, it's, it's insane. It's absolutely unheard of.

Bruce: 23:17

A chance to reach the mass market. And that's where I fell in love with free-to-play game design and where I kind of fell in love with casual game design and certainly a fast-paced live game, live ops environment.

Bruce: 23:34

I was at Zynga all told for four and a half years, working on FarmVille as a senior designer and lead designer, working on CastleVille as a senior designer and lead, and lead designer. I think I did some time on Sheffield as well. All those great invest-and-express style games, and that came to an end in 2014.

I took a flyer on going over to Germany, to a company called Bigpoint, to help them work on mobile games. And I did that for about seven months and came back here, joining Sega Networks in their Three Rings studio. Three Rings, people might recall Puzzle Pirates, which was, I think, Three Rings' greatest creation back in the day, which was a web-based game. But Sega Networks had bought them and was doing mobile games with them. And we were working on a lane battler that was based on the Spiral Knights game that Three Rings had done.

Jordan: 24:33

And you kind of brought your LiveOps experiences from Zynga, and really from what you had done even way back at Heroes in some sense, to Bigpoint and presumably to some other companies.

Bruce: 24:45

Yeah, interestingly though, I was working more on live games when I did that. It was a chance to go back—I mean live games, I'm sorry, on new games. A chance to go back and work on some new games.

Jordan: 24:57

I think, I kind of think if you've done live stuff, you really want to do some games from the ground up. Because now you know all this stuff that's going to happen in those games and you want to make sure to like prepare the teams beforehand, you know what I mean?

Bruce: 25:10

Right? You want to say, "Hey, why aren't we paying attention to what we're going to do the week after we launch, the month after we launch, and the three months after we launch? And how are we going to be keeping content going? What kind of evergreen systems do we have?" All those types of things when you're working on the new games. Why aren't we paying attention to our operations before we even know what kind of game?

Jordan: 25:32

So let's talk about that a little bit, the kind of live ops and how to prepare a game for live ops. Like, imagine there's someone listening who's got a game coming out, mobile, PC, but it's kind of a live, maybe free-to-play game. What kinds of stuff should they be thinking about?

Bruce: 25:49

First of all, the amount of content they're launching with. There was an old rule of thumb in the MMORPG space that said players will consume the content twice as fast as you think they will. And this was true. Even if you accounted for that, players will consume your content as quickly as they possibly can—much more quickly than you think they can.

This is magnified by the free-to-play model, where players have ways to accelerate the process through the game in return for premium currency, a lot of times. So, you want to make sure that you have enough content, that there's some repeatable content, that there are evergreen systems in there that will continue to spin and provide a baseline of activity even without you needing to release any new features after the game has gone live. Now, PvP-style games, competitive games are fantastic for this because, in effect, the players are creating their own content. If I'm playing a game of war, my evergreen content is the other players that I'm attacking or that are attacking me.

And that's that struggle for power. But if you're a more casual game, if you're a bubble popper or a match-three or a farming game or something like that, eventually your players are going to get to the end of the levels that you have crafted or maxed out their farm and their crops or whatever. And it becomes a question of what do they do then? How are we going to continue to support this game, this game design while it's live and introduce new things for the players to do and extend the content?

Jordan: 27:31

Right? And also, what's the cost of making that content, right? Like, can you get it done on time and on a budget that actually makes sense to continue with this product?

Bruce: 27:40

Exactly. And I think at Zynga, we were kind of always trapped by what we called the cadence treadmill. We needed to put out a certain amount of content to keep our players engaged every week, and it was just like running fast, but just to stay in place. And as your game got older...

Jordan: 28:01

Yeah, but if staying in place is like a million dollars a day...

Bruce: 28:06

That's fantastic.

Jordan: 28:06

...it's a pretty good place to stay.

Bruce: 28:08

And you can afford a big team when you're doing that, when you're generating a million dollars a day or a hundred million dollars a quarter or whatever. But there comes a time where you need to be doing more and more content in order to keep the players who are remaining in your game engaged. And they get faster and faster at completing this stuff, and your treadmill is speeding up and speeding up. Eventually, it comes to a point where it's probably not cost-effective. That's when you end up sunsetting a game or offshoring it, or...

Jordan: 28:40

The mythical man month, right? So it gets more... the cost of a bigger team doesn't scale linearly. You don't start making an equivalent amount of content just because you add twice as many people to a team.

Bruce: 28:52

Exactly. And there's a cost in talent as well. People get bored doing the same thing over and over again, and these people are...

Jordan: 29:00

Exhausted.

Bruce: 29:00

Exhausted. People who are working on these successful games, they're developing this incredible skill set, and that skill set is transportable to the other games at your company. So, you want these people to be able to move on and probably move up to better roles and bring these lessons that they've learned to your other games.

So, these experienced creators are moving off, and you're needing to train up and mentor new creators who maybe aren't as fast at doing this stuff. The upside is that you're bringing in people with new ideas and fresh eyes. The downside is that you're moving out the experience.

Jordan: 29:46

Well, and I think something that we saw at Zynga is you're kind of training everyone that leaving a project is success, and staying with a project for a long time is like not as good. That’s a challenging precedent long-term.

Bruce: 30:01

Yeah, I think everybody feels like they want to create the new thing, and they don't understand that if you're on a live game, you're creating the new thing every week or every month. Like when we were on CastleVille, we got a chance to introduce new stories, new systems, and new features every six weeks for each of the designers on that game. That's a chance to not spend three years working on a new game or 18 months working on a new game, but just to spend half of a quarter working on a major feature. Then you get to see it in the game, see how the players react to it, see how successful it is, learn from it, and make yourself a better designer for the next time. It's incredibly educational.

Jordan: 30:51

Yeah. The amount that I learned at Zynga is very high. It was an extreme educational experience, that’s for sure. But at the same time, this thing with people kind of moving on all the time, especially a lot of leads constantly moving to new projects, it’s sort of like... If you gave someone a plot of land to farm and you said, “Your goal is to farm as much fruit from this as possible, but only for a month, and then it's going to be someone else's problem,” are they going to take care of that land?

Bruce: 31:21

Yeah. Are they going to pay attention to crop rotation, etc.? It’s the same thing. If you have a bunch of highly motivated and talented product managers, producers, general managers, and designers, and your goal is to make as much money as possible and hit your revenue targets, and you know you're going to be moving on in three or six months to another project or game, are you paying attention to the other indicators of your game’s health? Your retention, your long-term retention, and trying to stem off a live game's inevitable decline?

Jordan: 32:02

And obviously, Zynga’s... look, they've paid the price. One of the big learnings you brought is, hey, we have to prepare while making the game for what it’s going to be like to produce content on an ongoing basis. What kinds of systems have you found to be really helpful for doing that?

Bruce: 32:20

So that will vary from game to game. You want to look at things that are going to run without the need for you to put any kind of content in there. The traditional things are...

Jordan: 32:33

So PvP is one thing you mentioned.

Bruce: 32:35

PvP, but that doesn’t work in every game. But leaderboards, that type of weekly contest, that kind of thing, works in a lot of games.

Jordan: 32:43

Mm-hmm.

Bruce: 32:44

And those types of things are very useful.

Jordan: 32:48

Leaderboards are almost like the lightest form of PvP you can do, right?

Bruce: 32:51

Exactly. Friendly competitions, like who can be the most helpful, are useful in games that appeal to a more casual audience. Along those lines, collections are good. They’ve been even good on console games to a great extent—100% on the Xbox or PlayStation, right? Getting all the trophies, all the achievements, that’s kind of a collection, a long-term grind for those games. It keeps people engaged hopefully long enough so that when the downloadable content comes out, they’re still around, and then they buy that. And there are some more achievements to get from that, keeping them engaged for the lifespan of the game. I think the same works on mobile games and on the web games, that type of stuff. The collection instinct within us is very strong, and that works well.

Jordan: 33:42

Which is why listeners need to listen to every episode of the PlayMakers podcast to sort of collect them all.

Bruce: 33:48

Yes. You also want to pay attention to how you design your content tools so that it’s easy to put in new content. And that content can be added with a minimum of programmer intervention. Look at systems that you're going to repeat and templatize them, so you don’t need to do any programming. You, the designer, or the content implementer can just fill out the template, change what they need to change, and get something that looks new—with new art—but still has the same underlying systems.

Jordan: 34:23

That's a really good point because if you need to apply your engineering resources to just maintaining content, then how are you going to apply them to the new stuff, the new features that you want to have in addition to just more content?

Bruce: 34:36

Right. Or the big unspoken thing about live ops—the tech debt you're accumulating every time you're adding something. And you need to make sure that some of your engineers are there to keep your codebase stable and optimized. One of the problems we ran into with FarmVille was that as players got more and more stuff on their farm, the performance started to choke. It was Flash-based, and it was terrible. But expanding the farm was a great driver of revenue. And there was this constant battle between our operations pod, which would find optimizations to make the game run better, and we’d say, “Okay, great, thanks for making it run fantastic!” Then we’d ask, “Does that mean we can do another farm expansion?” I guess so. And there was this constant cycle.

Jordan: 35:17

I think the same thing was happening with just the team sizes. Expanding the size of the team also helps you develop more, but whatever kind of procedural debt you have as a studio is also going to be impacted, compounded really, every time you grow.

Bruce: 35:34

Yeah, I think tools are very important. I think it’s something that most games don’t pay enough attention to until far too late in the process. And it’s wonderful when you can get something implemented and suddenly what used to take you 10 hours is taking you two hours to do. That means you can probably still do that level of content creation and go on to think of, "What’s the next thing I want to add?" Because none of these mobile games are ever released complete. No game, really, I think, has ever released complete. It’s always a question of, "We’ve got to release it. What are we going to scope? What do we think we’re going to add in later?"

And if you’re good, you’re preparing that roadmap post-launch that says, "Okay, two months later we’re going to have this feature that we had to scope out. Three months after launch, there’s this other feature." And that way you’ve got some kind of planned cadence so you aren’t scrambling, trying to think, "Oh God, the game’s launched, everything’s doing great. We’re running out of content. We need to do something. Jordan, go!" Which is the way a lot of live ops seems to run.

Jordan: 36:37

And I think a lot of people still think, "Hey, free to play, anyone can get on the app store and anyone can make a game free to download." But the reality is, all these bits and bobs that we’re talking about make free-to-play actually have a pretty high barrier to entry to come in and be successful. You need to play a pretty high-level game. You need to be thinking about the future, your processes, and be ready for a big, long haul.

Bruce: 37:03

Yeah, they used to say a lot about making MMOs that they weren’t a sprint, they were a marathon. But it’s not really a marathon because just crossing the finish line doesn’t finish the race—it kind of starts it.

Jordan: 37:15

Right?

Bruce: 37:16

That’s just your first milestone. After that, you need to maintain it and keep going. You definitely want those roadmaps. You want to balance your features, much like I had to balance the types of books I was putting out when I was managing the Champions game line. You want to manage the types of features that you’re putting out so they aren’t all the same type.

The features you’re putting out generally are designed to enhance your revenue, enhance your retention, or provide some kind of player joy or satisfaction. And if you have a quarter where you’ve done nothing but hard revenue features or grinds for the players, then you’re probably going to really suffer in your retention metrics. If you just concentrate on retention, you may well suffer on revenue. Although there is something to be said that retention will lead to revenue over the long run, you still need those revenue features.

Jordan: 38:15

That’s, I would just point out, there’s a fractal kind of nature to that, where within retention or within monetization, you have the same issue. If you try to monetize the same way over and over again, that’s going to have diminishing payoff. If you try to retain with the same surprise and delight features, then the surprise and delight is going to be less and less each time. So, you have to constantly be pushing yourself to do new things.

Bruce: 38:37

Right, and these new things happen and they work, and then you probably repeat them a while later and they work. Then maybe they become part of your content cadence, where you rotate them in with your other features. So, you have a longer period between features to keep them fresh. And it also turns out that stuff that was old reliable—oh, this feature is fantastic, and it always does great for us in revenue and retention, and we could do it about every four weeks—starts to lose effectiveness. And it’s like, "Okay, so maybe now we’re doing them every six weeks. Maybe we need to do them every two months. Maybe we just need to retire that feature type for a while." And so, hopefully, you’re coming up with these new features that you’re trying out, and the ones that work are slotting into that cadence rotation. Just try to keep it all fresh for the players.

Jordan: 39:28

Let’s talk a little bit about the kind of cadence calendar. Do you have a system that you’ve used at several companies? Like, "Hey, I like to make a spreadsheet that kind of works like this. Here’s how I think about what should be in development. What’s coming up in two months, six months." How do you kind of manage that?

Bruce: 39:43

So that's very interesting because mostly it’s a collaborative process. It's not just the designer sitting down and thinking of it. It’s probably somebody who's running the business side, and that might be a producer at a company or a product manager, sometimes a designer. But whoever is in charge of that, the design lead sits down and says, "Okay, we need to plan out what our quarterly calendar looks like." We would do that maybe a month before the previous quarter expired or six weeks, halfway through a quarter. Let’s look at the next quarter: what do we want to do? What kind of features do we want? There are a number of ways to come up with the features idea, but you might have a basket of those or you might just say, "Okay, we really need to concentrate on revenue this quarter." So, about 60% of what we’re going to do is going to be revenue features, about 35% or 40% are going to be aimed towards retention, and we’ll do 10% user love, because user love doesn’t really make us money or move the metrics that we can measure. And then you try to pace them out on the calendar.

So again, you aren’t slamming people with similar things in a row so that things feel fresh. When you’re looking at kind of a longer term, you're looking at each quarter and saying, "What’s our big new innovative thing going to be this quarter? Where are we going to invest a lot of our risk in dev dollars? What do we want to do?" And, yeah, you try to avoid that, but we’re publishing a bold beat, and that hopefully would lead to a golden mechanic, which is something that could be repeatable both in your game and maybe in other games at your company. You want to slot those in too and make sure that those are well staffed and well funded, and you know when they’re going to come out. If they’re risky, you want to make sure that you have support features around them that bolster the areas in which they’re risky. So, if they don’t work, you’re not completely missing your target numbers, because there’s nothing worse for a live game than missing its target numbers. The executives start to get very nervous.

Jordan: 41:44

And yet the best you can really do is hit your target numbers.

Bruce: 41:47

Yeah. You can exceed them, and then they get really nervous.

Jordan: 41:49

Yeah. You can, you can exceed them, and then that’s your new target numbers.

Bruce: 41:53

Yeah, exactly. You get a pat on the back, and then the next quarter you have big KPIs to try to meet because of that.

Jordan: 42:03

So, okay. So what about… You’re talking about, you kind of create this plan in advance, but no plan survives contact with the users of the game, right? And so presumably, something you want to do doesn’t work, something you didn’t expect to work works really well, and now suddenly you’ve got to make some adjustments.

Bruce: 42:24

Right, pivots. It’s all about pivoting. Like I think a couple of shows ago, Mike was talking about pivoting, and as stuff comes up, you need to pivot in your ops.

Jordan: 42:34

That’s episode two with Mike Mika, right?

Bruce: 42:36

An excellent episode. You need to pivot in your live ops plan as well. It could be—God forbid—one of your architects has a motorcycle accident and breaks their coding arm, and suddenly you're going to be two or three months behind on the project.

Jordan: 42:54

Has that happened to you?

Bruce: 42:56

That actually happened to us on Matrix Online, in the middle of crunch, on our one day off, one of our senior guys did that, and it was interesting for a while. Or it could be that your revenues are falling, or your retention is falling, or some other key metric is falling, and you need to divert some of your development efforts to investigate and try to plug those holes. Or it could be that your big bold beat is taking longer, just longer to do—it’s not working. Sometimes you look at it three weeks into development, two weeks in, and say, "Yeah, this isn’t going to work the way we thought it would." We need to go back to the drawing board, and we need to throw the towel in on it.

Bruce: 43:38

And then hopefully you’ve got backup stuff that you can slot in to those release dates. If you’ve ever watched any television shows about the production of sketch comedy shows or news shows or whatever, and they have the big board with all the segments on there, and they need to scramble them around to see what’s going to fill—that’s the same kind of thing. But instead of filling an hour's worth of content, you’re trying to fill a quarter’s worth of content.

Jordan: 44:08

On Frontierville I used to have basically a room full of Post-it notes, like hundreds. Yeah. And sometimes they would want them out of the room, and I would just take all the Post-it notes and stick them in a drawer. And then when it was free, I’d just put them back up.

Bruce: 44:20

It is a luxury to have a dedicated war room for a live game, or a war area if you can’t afford a room. But where you can keep that stuff up there—where you could have your Post-it notes of stuff that’s in development, your ideas, and everything—just be it a whiteboard, whatever. A place where you could go and take a look, where the execs could go and take a look and just give you that snapshot of what’s going on. But also that working surface for when you need to rejigger things. It’s there, and it’s live for you to move around.

Jordan: 44:53

So, Bruce, now, as you’re kind of doing this and you’re working on this calendar, you’re getting feedback from the audience about what works. How do you design for them? How do you kind of understand the audience and do stuff that they’re going to love, that they’re going to respond to?

Bruce: 45:07

You’re going to have a lot of tools at your disposal, probably at your company. There are fan forums, official forums. Hopefully, you have some kind of community manager working there that’s bubbling up data, possibly verbatim from player forums and whatnot.

But the most important thing you could do is play the game and play the game without using any of your advantages as a developer. So don’t give yourself a bunch of free premium currency or advance yourself. Try to make sure that you have an account where you’re playing like a legitimate player and that you play that one every day. And get passionate about your game.

A lot of times in the game industry, you’re not fortunate enough to work on a game that you would play in your leisure time. You may be a big Call of Duty fan, but you’ll never work on a first-person shooter type, and instead, you’re working on a match-three game. Become a match-three fan. You need to. You need to have, as a designer, a passion for that game. And get to know your audience, really get to know your audience, so you know what’s appropriate for them.

I think one of the big problems that less experienced, newer designers have is that they’ll come in full of great passion and great ideas, but they’re not thinking about the target audience. So they’ll come up with ideas that would work great among their peer group—ideas for features, complex systems, things that would be perfect for them or their friends—but not necessarily for, say, the 45-year-old woman or the 50-year-old man who’s playing that game and is not a hardcore gamer. So you really need to learn your audience and make sure that you’re designing for them.

Jordan: 46:52

So if I’m understanding you correctly, your point is, hey, there’s this young game designer, he’s like, "I wouldn’t play this game, but here are the features that I would like in it." And you can see there’s something mismatched there. You have to get into the mind of the person who would play the game and then design the features that that person wants.

Bruce: 47:11

Right. Like on FarmVille, there was a running joke about doing a tractor jousting thing, and we all thought that was cool and whatnot, but it probably would not have played to our target demographic. A lot of times during our brainstorms, we’d be planning out our quest theme calendar, and a lot of the subjects or themes that were suggested would be like, "That’s interesting, but I don’t think our audience really cares about a FarmVille questline that celebrates Harry Houdini’s birthday." You really want to find things that are more on point and more in line with what your audience wants.

Jordan: 47:42

Absolutely. Well, thank you for giving the audience of PlayMakers so much to think about today in terms of live ops and free-to-play.

Bruce: 47:49

Thank you very much for having me, Jordan. It was a real pleasure. It’s a great show. I’m really enjoying it.

Jordan: 47:55

Big ups to Bruce for coming on the show and sharing so much of his experience and knowledge with our community. If you enjoyed it, then you’re going to want to see what’s coming next, because we’ve got interviews coming that are fresh and are going to be amazing. I don’t want to give anything away right now, but I have a very, very special guest coming up, possibly in the next episode—certainly in the next one or two episodes—and I know you’re going to love it. He’s a legend, some might say a god, possibly a god, possibly a legend, possibly I’m just making this up. You don’t know, and you won’t know unless you subscribe to see what is coming up.

And I want to say something else, which is this: you’ve made it to the end of the episode. That makes you special. That makes you part of the inner circle. This is the end-of-episode inner circle area, and you’re here—you made it here, and you didn’t even know it was here. And you got here, which shows me that you truly belong to the end-of-episode Inner Circle Club. This is a club that holds its meetings at the end of episodes of PlayMakers, and we talk about things relevant to us as a group—kind of our inner circle stuff. Right now, the agenda for this week’s session is the announcement of the club, which we’ve done. So, I think we can strike the gavel and call this one over. I will see you in the next episode of PlayMakers and then in the post-episode session of the Inner Circle Club. Until then, I bid you adieu. Stay playful, my friends.