Inside a Game Design Consultancy, with Adrian Crook

Jordan: 00:00

What’s up, this is Jordan Blackman. You’re listening to the Playmakers Podcast, where I interview game industry legends and luminaries and suss out things that are going to be useful to you in your business, in the game industry, and in your craft of making games. This week, Adrian Crook, founder of Adrian Crook and Associates, one of the biggest free-to-play game consultancies in the biz. We get deep into the biz on this week’s episode. Stay tuned because it’s on now.

So Adrian and I go way back. When I was design producer at Zynga, he and I worked together on Frontierville, and we became good friends, and we’ve really worked together ever since. I spent a lot of time working with Adrian Crook and Associates, and Adrian is an incredible producer who actually, I think, won Producer of the Year in Canada some moons back. He’s created and grown Adrian Crook and Associates, a free-to-play consultancy that you’re going to learn all about in this episode. They’ve had most of the big companies as their clients, worked with over a hundred studios, and you’re going to hear more about that. That includes companies like Microsoft, Zynga, Capcom, EA, and so on—a lot of the big ones. And Adrian gets into a lot of really useful business subjects in this episode.

We talk about the tools he uses to create a performance dashboard for his business and also the tools he likes to use to run his business, all the software-as-a-service tools.

And Adrian, having seen so many different studios and so many different free-to-play games, walks us through some of the biggest common mistakes he sees teams making in the domain of free-to-play, both on the design side and on the business side. We also talk about how to approach the galaxy of third-party tools that are out there. This is something I’ve really been diving headfirst into myself because this landscape is constantly changing and evolving. There are so many different sophisticated partners and third-party tool providers that you can work with, not just analytics, but advertising and acquisition as well. There’s a lot of tools now that are doing AI for helping you—basically the next evolution of split testing is AI-assisted split testing design and testing. So we talk about that, and we also talk about what’s next for the industry. Adrian gives his outlook on virtual reality, and we also talk about what’s next for the freemium model.

Now, Adrian and I recorded this interview a few months back now, and I actually think some things that we talk about have evolved. So I think in the VR funding space, I do think that investors have taken a step back, and we’re kind of—that pendulum has sort of swung back a little bit. Maybe the next thing is it’s going to break through, possibly in the next year or so. And obviously, that would accelerate things again. So I do think that has changed a little bit. Also, Hempire, the game that we talk about, is actually out in worldwide launch, and is really climbing up the ranks in the simulation category, both on iOS and Android. It’s doing fantastic. So it’s not in soft launch anymore—you can still check it out.

And with that, I will let us get into the interview with Adrian.

Jordan: 03:45

Hey, what’s up, Adrian? Welcome to Playmakers.

Adrian: 03:48

Hey, thanks for having me.

Jordan: 03:49

Really good to have you on.

Adrian: 03:52

Definitely.

Jordan: 03:53

So, you and I go way, way back and I know that your design work goes back even further than that. And you’ve been running your consultancy since what, 2008?

Adrian: 04:04

Yeah, like January 2008, when I left Relic Entertainment, which is a strategy game developer here in Vancouver. That was the last full-time gig I had.

Jordan: 04:13

Yeah, one of the best strategy game developers of all time, no big deal.

Adrian: 04:18

Yeah, but I think the games I made for them weren’t some of their best. I made The Outfit for the Xbox 360, which was like a squad-based third-person action game. That was a real tough one. We took a PC RTS engine and crammed it onto an Xbox 360 launch title, and it was non-trivial. So, anyway, we tried our best. A lot of innovative stuff, but very Apple Newton in its success. That’s not something you want to be in your success. Which is to say, not much success.

Jordan: 04:48

Ahead of your time, ahead of your time.

Adrian: 04:50

Oh, totally.

Jordan: 04:50

Yeah. Okay, so you’re one of the first people I—actually the first person I know—who was playing in that design consultancy space, especially in mobile. What made you pick that up after the Relic stuff?

Adrian: 05:04

Actually, that—I didn’t intend for this to be a good segue, but I’ve always been…

Jordan: 05:10

Did you intend for it to be a bad segue?

Adrian: 05:12

Yeah, I really wanted to make it a train wreck of a segue. I've always been kind of, like, going back into the 90s, more, more web-oriented than most of my game industry colleagues. I started at EA in 1995. And I, on the side, was really fascinated by the internet and was always the guy that had his own sites and bought and sold domain names and all that kind of stuff. So it wasn't until around 2006 that some of this started to come together with the free-to-play movement, sort of washing up on North American shores.

o the Virtual Goods Summit in: 2006

Jordan: 06:22

Was that while you were still at Relic or...?

Adrian: 06:24

Yeah, like 2006 to 2008 was when I was doing that. And so the last couple of years when I was at Relic, I was pretty much blogging about that stuff and going to conferences about that. And then I spoke at GDC in 2008 in front of like four or five hundred people about freemium. And I think that might have been like the first freemium talk at GDC North America at least. And that was at, I think, two months into kicking off my consultancy. And I think that is what gave us, us, me at the time, a bit of momentum. We sort of became known as having some early mover advantage in freemium, at least at that point, but it was a way different industry than what it is today.

Jordan: 07:05

In that it was just nobody knew what was going on, what it was gonna be. I mean, I think it's amazing that you were working on a pretty hardcore RTS on Xbox while writing freetoplay.biz.

Adrian: 07:18

Yeah, and then the last couple of years at Relic, I was working on new product development. So just like, what could we do? There was sort of the "small furry animals"—like, can we make cool new concepts? And can we use maybe a stage-gate methodology, where you develop multiple concepts and then you're doubling down on every second one that makes the cut at certain milestones. Yeah, we were trying out techniques like that to make better decisions about new product design. So I was doing that at the same time as I was doing the blogging on the side, more just out of passion.

And then Leigh Alexander, who was back then doing Worlds in Motion—that was the name of the blog, and that was all about... She was also running that—I think it might have even been called Worlds in Motion Summit, or basically like the Freemium Summit portion of GDC that year. And that's why she had reached out to me to speak at that. So I kind of have to credit her with giving me that opportunity there.

Jordan: 08:15

So having been incredibly early to the kind of free-to-play mobile party, has it worked out kind of the way you expected? What surprised you along the way? Arnold Schwarzenegger advertising at the Super Bowl.

Adrian: 08:29

Yeah, I don't know if I ever thought it would quite get that big, but it was pretty plainly evident that it's hard to beat free as a price. So there—I think there were more sort of holdouts in the early days in North America, at least when it came to freemium gaming, than there were in other parts of the world. But it was just a matter of the culture changing. And I think, for the most part, obviously it has, no matter what. So maybe some of the more core gamers still think about freemium, but I think that's pretty much tipped. So I'm not sure if much has surprised me in terms of how it's rolled out. I mean, like I said, just mostly the scale. But I didn't have any doubt—I remember recalling some articles being written up debating whether or not freemium would really catch on in the early days, and I don't think I ever had any doubt that it would catch on. That seemed pretty obvious.

Jordan: 09:17

And what about going out on your own? What was that like for you?

Adrian: 09:22

People always ask me, like, "Well, what should I have? Or what should I get or whatever? Like, what should I do when I want to start out on my own?" And I always tell them, "You should get a—"

Jordan: 09:31

Can I ask you that one?

Adrian: 09:32

Yeah. Probably. A lot of people ask me that. I say, well, you should definitely have a good line of credit. Like, that’s the number one thing. I think for the first two years of starting out on my own, I had, like, well, I had a house at the time, and we used that as the line of credit. And I think I probably went 80 grand in the hole, then dug out of it, and then 80 grand in the hole again, and dug out of it. It was very real. Yeah, I don't think I've ever said that number out loud, but it was pretty up and down. Like, at the time I wanted to get out of the house—or, I simultaneously wanted to stay in the house and get out of the house. I had my second kid arrive, we had just bought a big house.

Jordan: 10:10

Second of five.

Adrian: 10:11

Second of five. That's right. I have five kids. And we had just bought a big house in a nearby suburb of Vancouver. And I would leave in the morning, maybe just after the kids woke up, and then get back from work just after, or just before, they went to bed. And it was just like, “This is just no way to live.” I wanted to see my kids actually grow up, and I wanted more control over my time. I found it odd that in the games industry, your effort really isn't correlated with a reward. So, if the studio is really busy, you have to show up and do unpaid overtime. If it's really slack, you're still expected to show up nine to five and sit at your desk. It just made no sense to me.

So now I probably work more, but I work at unpredictable hours. I may decide to hang out with a kid during the day for a little bit, but then work after they go to bed. It’s a mix of everything. And it's been vastly more rewarding to be on my own, even though it's a lot more stressful, I would say overall.

Jordan: 11:15

Right. Well, I think, knowing you a little bit, I think it's also a personality thing where like, you may be working more, but you know that you're working in the way that you choose on the deals that you choose for the company that you've created.

Adrian: 11:26

Oh yeah, you're right. And I think it's probably maybe specific to my personality where I just don't relax as much as I could. I've tried to solve this lately just through numbers—that's sort of how I try to solve a lot of things, even though I'm generally terrible at numbers. But I've created an internal dashboard that shows me our runway. So like a function of the business we have now—cash in the bank, accounts receivable, payable, all that kind of stuff—basically represented in the number of months until we run out of money. So I can look at that and go, “Okay, I can sleep tonight.”

Because for years, I didn’t have that and you just kind of had this sense that, “Oh, if we don't get business, I don't know, tomorrow or the next week, then maybe we'll be out of business next month.” That got a little stressful. So this is taking a bit of the stress off, you know.

Jordan: 12:16

And you have to run some special calculations for each child, just adding on top there.

Adrian: 12:20

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I can't exactly ask them to eat ramen noodles to get by. I can do it myself, but they demand a certain amount of Cheerios and a certain amount of chicken fingers and, you know, dad food basically, but still.

Jordan: 12:36

So what tool are you actually using for that? Because I've seen some dashboards that you have, and I'm curious what you're running.

Adrian: 12:42

So I looked at a few. I've used things like Cyfe before—C-Y-F-E—and that was okay, but I found there were some constraints on the amount of data you could display in terms of screen real estate. And I still find that with Klipfolio, which is what we're using now—K-L-I-P-F-O-L-I-O dot com—but I found Klipfolio to just be a little bit tighter.

What I've done now is I'm using—I believe he's based in Russia—I think I found him via whatever Elance is called now, Upwork. Probably found him via Upwork, searching for a Klipfolio specialist. And I mean, maybe we've spent like—I bet you we haven't spent more than 400 bucks so far on dashboard development, because their hourly rate is so low, and it's just been so worth it, because it's the kind of stuff that if I was farting around with it myself, I would burn days or weeks of my time trying to get what I need done.

And now I can just write up some specs in a Google Doc. He's also in my Skype, and we can just go back and forth until we have all the metrics we need. So we've got a key metrics for the business dashboard, and we've also got—like, we've just brought on a communications associate.

And so he's developing his own—I was just on the phone last night with our dashboard developer—he's developing his own dashboard to track all of our metrics, like followers and website visits, and more in-depth stuff than that.

Jordan: 14:08

Okay, so we'll put Klipfolio and Upwork up on the tools for this episode. What have been some other challenges that you've run into being out on, “on your own,” although you have a team around you now?

Adrian: 14:22

You know what I'll do is I've got a whole spreadsheet of all the tools we use, and I'd be happy to get into some of the more successful ones later on if you wanted, or we could do that now.

Jordan: 14:34

Let's do it. Yeah. Let's talk about your favorite tools. I would love to do that, and we can post links to them.

Adrian: 14:39

Yeah. So one of the more expensive tools for us, which is not saying much, because we don’t actually, on a per-tool basis, have to spend that much these days. SaaS tools, like software as a service tools, are pretty inexpensive, but we’ve started using Intercom.

So if you go to our website—you’ll see like a little chat—our website is Adriancrook.com. You’ll see a little chat bubble pop up. It might have my face in it; it might have Tony, my business partner’s face in it. And the great thing about that is, each of those messages can be customized depending on what page a user has entered the site from.

And a lot of times, people believe it’s actually a human messaging them, so they’ll write back and engage with it, and that immediately goes to my phone, my desktop, everything. So it just becomes like a chat, and I can find myself chatting with Microsoft or—you name it—Pokémon, any of our larger clients, right down to smaller clients. And because I’m such a creature of chat—I grew up on ICQ and all that kind of stuff—I really enjoy establishing rapport via chat. And I find it breaks down a lot of the formality barriers that might come with certainly email, and to a lesser extent, phone.

So I’ve found that—I can’t remember what it cost us—I think it cost us about 75 bucks a month or something, but it paid for itself almost instantly. We had a deal come in that was probably worth, I don’t know, about $40,000 or $50,000 or so. And that came in by Intercom.

Jordan: 16:16

So if you’re doing kind of B2B sort of stuff, this is a tool that puts a little icon on the bottom of your website and people can click on it and basically start a conversation with you or someone else on your team that will come to your phone, come to your email, wherever you are.

Adrian: 16:33

Yeah. So I mean, Tony, my business partner, and I—we both have Intercom installed on our phones. So basically one of us is going to grab that incoming chat as soon as it happens, and then a conversation gets assigned to that person. And then, I’m usually driving them towards a phone conversation, and we use a whole other tool called—oh geez, let me find the name for it here.

Jordan: 16:59

ScheduleOnce?

Adrian: 17:01

No, no, YouCanBook.me.

Jordan: 17:02

Calendly? Okay, YouCanBook.me.

Adrian: 17:04

YouCanBook.me, yeah. So we drive to my custom YouCanBook.me link, which is embedded on our website. It won’t say the URL here, but like—

Jordan: 17:12

I used that to schedule this podcast.

Adrian: 17:13

Oh, brilliant. There you go. So, yeah, that takes away that back and forth. A lot of times when we’re dealing with overseas clients, we’ve gotta—you’ll be like, “How does Monday at 3:00 work?” And then 24 hours later, they’ll respond and say, “No, I can’t do that. How about Tuesday at 4:00?” And you’ll spend two or three days trying to book a phone call, whereas giving them a calendar link cuts that right down to hours. So those are probably two of the more useful tools. I mean, we use about 20 different ones at least.

Jordan: 17:43

So I think people, if you want to meet with you, it’s Adriancrook.com/meet.

Adrian: 17:47

How are you giving away the URL?

Jordan: 17:49

That’s right, right?

Adrian: 17:51

Yeah, sure.

Jordan: 17:51

That’s just off the dome. That’s just off the dome, AP.

Adrian: 17:54

Yeah, sure. Well, it’s meant to be rememberable, or memorable rather. But yeah, so yeah, M-E-E-T, Adriancrook.com/meet, and then you can just book a phone call right in there and I’ll call you on your Skype. I’ve obviously blocked off all the times I’ve got to take the kids to and from school, or I’m going to the gym or something. Don’t worry, you’re not going to book a phone call over my gym appointment, but it’s all just—it’s all on autopilot that way. It works pretty well.

Jordan: 18:22

All right. Any other tools that you’re finding really valuable in your work?

Adrian: 18:29

That are truly unique, I would say—unique to—well, obviously everyone uses Slack. I’m not going to bother covering Slack. And that’s a Vancouver company, so we’re happy to represent them. But BidSketch, if you’re at all doing proposals—if you’re a freelancer doing proposals in any sort of creative field and you need to be able to put together proposals quickly with sort of dynamic fields and maybe have a few different templates, and then you want to track like open and close and won and lost and all that sort of stuff—BidSketch is a fantastic way to do that, and it’s quite economical. I think it’s about $270 a year or something. So like about $30 Canadian a month. Yeah.

Jordan: 19:18

Not bad. Yeah, I use a pretty cool tool called Qwilr.

Adrian: 19:23

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Jordan: 19:23

It’s like Q-W-L-R. There might be an “I” in there. There might be a vowel in there. I don’t know exactly.

Adrian: 19:29

Oh, that’s cool.

Jordan: 19:31

It’s not as feature-rich as BidSketch, but it creates very beautiful proposals.

Adrian: 19:37

Oh, nice. I’ll have to check that out.

Jordan: 19:39

It’s nice. So those are some great tools. What about some of the rewards of kind of breaking out and doing your own thing the way you have? How’s it been for you now that you’ve been doing it for almost 10 years? Which is crazy.

Adrian: 19:53

Yeah, I don't know where that time went. I mean, I'm sort of ruined for full-time work. I'm sure maybe one day this will all just crash and burn and I'll have to go get a full-time job, but I'm not sure I know how to function in that environment anymore.

Jordan: 20:06

You've been saying that for like five years, man.

Adrian: 20:08

Yes, I know! Like a broken record. But, yeah. I mean, I love it. Obviously, it comes with, like I said before, its own set of stresses, but the ability to be flexible with your time... I love the idea that the effort I put in is directly correlated with the reward. I mean, I can't control necessarily the amount of clients that we get. I mean, I can certainly step up my efforts in that regard, but I can't make people do business with us. But generally, there is a correlation between effort and reward that is really pleasing—that isn't necessarily true in a full-time environment, where if you work more, you're just sort of given more work. Or if maybe you're not playing the political game right, you're still going to get passed up. I was never the best at going out for drinks afterwards with the guys and doing all that kind of soft politicking that really gets you ahead in an employment scenario. It's just nice not to have to give a shit about that anymore, because it's not my personality and it never will be.

Jordan: 21:10

I totally know what you mean. I mean, I am absolutely the same way, and I've had a couple of jobs where not doing that stuff was... it was completely mission-critical to do it, and it just was not my thing.

Adrian: 21:23

No, can't bring myself to do it, exactly. So, I mean, the rewards are like—I see my kids more than most dads would, I would think, because I can take them to school in the morning, I can pick them up from school afterwards. I have a lot of flexibility in my time, I can work from anywhere. We don't have an office. We haven't had an office the whole time we've been in business. We have like a co-working space that can also receive our mail, and we can host meetings there when clients come into town. But because my business partner and I are in the same city, but our associates are all over the place—that’s part of the reason why they work with us: they're allowed to be all over the place. It doesn't make any sense to have an office and then start insisting that people come into an office, because I don't even want to go into an office, and neither does Tony.

Jordan: 22:12

I mean, when I first worked with you, I was running a design team at Zynga, and you were living in Mexico.

Adrian: 22:20

Yeah, I lived in Playa del Carmen for three years. And so we met because I came up and started consulting for Zynga and would sort of live in San Francisco. I think I was consulting with Zynga and iWin at the same time, if I'm not mistaken. I think I was still consulting with iWin, or maybe it was the year before. In any case, I would just sort of live out of hotels for two or three weeks at a time, working for one or both of those companies. And that was back when I was still very much a one-man band. I might've had one other sort of part-time associate at the time, but yeah, that’s when we met on Frontier. And you were like the producer of the design team.

Jordan: 22:58

Other than Zynga and iWin, what kinds of studios come to you?

Adrian: 23:05

Mm-hmm.

Jordan: 23:06

Who is a good fit for working with Adrian Crook and Associates?

Adrian: 23:11

We try our best to help out indies, but I would say that at this point, where we're at, we're probably less useful to indies. Like, the few indies that we do work with, we've developed a build review service where we can spend like one week every month, spending about 15 to 20 hours just drilling down on a build that they've generated, circling back on feedback we've given them last time, or generating new feedback, and sort of just nudging them back on course or giving them some targeted feedback. But that's probably the lowest tier thing we can do, and that's what we've done for some indies. But otherwise, we're kind of like a medium to large studio consultancy. And I would say 25% or 30% of our clients fall in that large category, and they're the EA's and Microsoft's and Zynga's and what have you, of the world. Pokemon, that sort of stuff. And then we work with some smaller ones. We're working with Boss Fight.

Jordan: 24:17

Who's your perfect client? What studio or what developer is like the right person to get help from you and your team?

Adrian: 24:26

Yeah, I mean, what we do is design and product management for mobile freemium. And we also do some development. We're working on a couple things right now where we've been responsible for the development of those products. One is a game called HempireGame.com—H-E-M-P-I-R-E.

Jordan: 24:45

Never heard of it.

Adrian: 24:47

Yeah, well, you worked on that. You and I sat down at the napkin sketch phase, and you designed the original concept and like GDD, basically, for that game. And we were on it for quite a while, if I remember correctly. So, yeah. We do product management and design—on, like, I would say half of our products we work on are pre-launch. So clients are bringing us on to validate what they’re heading to soft launch with, and half of them are post-launch. Maybe they've launched and it hasn’t really gone as well as they'd like, and they’re trying to figure out why, or if they can improve it and turn it around. Or sometimes, they want us to make a recommendation as to whether or not they should continue investing in it at all or just kill it.

Adrian: 25:32

So, it really depends, but I would say any studio that has sort of an open mind and is willing to work with outside help are people we enjoy working with.

Jordan: 25:46

Okay, so since 2008, can you guess about how many studios you've worked with?

Adrian: 25:51

Yeah, I mean, I sort of stopped counting a year or two ago when we were up over 100. So it's been a lot. These days, I’ll sometimes get asked on a call, like, “Whoa, have you ever worked on such and such type of game?” And I feel bad because often I can’t even remember all the examples of games in that particular genre that we’ve worked on, because it has been a lot over a long time.

So yeah, we’ve worked with a ton of different studios. I think we worked on some weird stuff too, like, Panasonic was launching a handheld freemium MMO player way back in the day, and we worked on that for like two years before they killed it at the 11th hour. I don’t think that’s secret or anything—I think there were some public images out there. They had already announced it, but that was a weird experience, basically working on the launch of a hardware platform.

Jordan: 26:43

Yeah, I can think of a project that I worked with you guys on, and I actually don’t know how much I can say, but Intel was the client and they had a huge brand for a game that never saw the light of day.

Adrian: 26:57

Oh yeah, I remember that one.

Jordan: 26:58

Do you know what happened to that?

Adrian: 27:01

No, I don’t know what happened with that.

Jordan: 27:03

It’s dead, right? I mean, that’s not coming out.

Adrian: 27:05

It’s nothing that we’ve been roped back into, that’s for sure. It’s a shame because that looked really cool. But yeah, it’s not public knowledge as far as I know. And there are lots of things like that where we’re not supposed to talk about what we work on. So we’ve worked with some of the really biggest brands, and I can’t really mention them. I might maybe be able to mention it in like a one-on-one conversation, but I certainly can’t publicize it.

Jordan: 27:32

Okay, so after working with over a hundred studios, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see studios making, either from a design standpoint, from a production standpoint, or in terms of just their thinking about what they need to be doing to be successful?

Adrian: 27:48

Oh man, there are a few. So, smaller studios I see all the time not, that whole like, well, just launching is like the tip of the iceberg, the rest of the iceberg is live operations and going from there.

Jordan: 28:02

They don’t realize that.

Adrian: 28:03

Yeah, they don’t realize that. Most of those smaller studios... a mistake typical of a smaller studio is launching and then really kind of betting the farm on starting to get those checks rolling through the door like 60 days after the product is out. It’s like, oh geez. I think there’s probably a whole business in just picking up and salvaging games where companies have just run out of gas because of poor production planning and spending in that regard. And then, another mistake I see companies make, of every size, is...

Jordan: 28:36

You actually sort of defined two mistakes there. One was not planning for the long soft launch period to get the product right. But the other was not having the kind of publishing side pieces in place—to do the analytics, create a roadmap, understand the customer, get acquisition channels set up. Am I getting that right?

Adrian: 28:57

Yeah, I mean, I should really go into more depth with that answer because it’s funny, I was just looking at... Tony and I were meeting, I don’t know, yesterday or the day before, and there was a client that had come to us wanting us to build out... they had a game on web that they wanted to build out on mobile, and we had quoted them on building it out, doing the design and the development ourselves. And they just decided to do it internally, which is fine, and then we saw it released a few months ago. So we went back the other day and took a look at it, and it was rated like 3.3 or something terrible on...

Jordan: 29:27

Oh man, beat Mario Run.

Adrian: 29:29

Yeah, on Google Play. And I think it had like 500 downloads or something, like, oh exactly. So, I mean, if they even spent... I’m sure it'd be tough to spend less than like 60k, let’s say, internally, of internal time developing that. So I hope that those two or three hundred unique people that maybe are still playing that game enjoyed what you gave them essentially for free. Because you failed to launch that with the kind of support you mentioned there. There’s very much still this idea among some studios that if you build it, they will come, which is something that hasn’t existed in the app store since like 2010, '09, right?

Jordan: 30:13

I mean, we are in the opposite of that.

Adrian: 30:16

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that's why if you can get a license, if you can partner with someone that has any sort of digital reach to get like organic user acquisition to average down your UA costs, then that's kind of what you have to do. There's almost no other way to cut above the clutter. I mean, you can hope for some word of mouth hit like 2048 or Flappy Bird or whatever, but that's like playing the lottery.

Jordan: 30:40

Right. I mean, you need some sort of, obviously you need a product strategy, but I think people fail to realize that they also need some kind of special acquisition strategy to be competitive because most of your competitors do have one.

Adrian: 30:54

Yeah, and I think they don't understand how long they might have to spend in soft launch as well to, you know, to be tuning up the game so that whatever the strategy they do have for growing that game isn't just sort of pouring water into a leaky bucket. You know, like that game has to be ready when you actually go worldwide with a hard launch, and that's just a step that we're working with.

I would say we have a client right now that is, because they have a hard ship date tied to a license, the soft launch will effectively be non-existent. And that's beyond everybody's control, definitely beyond our control. So we're doing our best to implement an economy for them that is not going to fail. But you run into these situations all the time, and unfortunately, they're not always under your control.

Jordan: 31:43

That's an interesting thing, because, okay, so you need some sort of acquisition strategy. Let's say it's a license. Now you need the experience to know what you need in that licensing deal, because you do that wrong, you could get a hard date on your license that isn't going to work with what it takes to kind of make free-to-play work these days.

Adrian: 32:02

Yeah. Well, and in fact, you were good enough to direct us to one of your guys. I don't know if you want to give him a shout-out here.

Jordan: 32:09

Lev, we interviewed him on the show.

Adrian: 32:10

Oh, sweet. So one of our clients needed that specific type of licensing help, and Lev was amazing and still is amazing working with us on that. But yeah, sometimes if that license is a movie, there's not much you can do about the movie when it's going to launch.

So, but yeah, if it's another type of license, it's perhaps a bit more flexible. But as far as other types of mistakes, I mean, there are plenty. Not asking for money soon enough, asking for money too soon from your players—those sorts of mistakes. We see monetization still shuffled off too late in the game.

So, again, similar to this project we're working on currently, where we're implementing monetization with two months to go in the project, you know. It's like, yes, we're going to—if you want to trust anyone with it, it should be us because we've done it a bunch of times, but that's not how product development should work. I mean, especially in freemium, you need that monetization strategy right from the start, right from the top, and it needs to be developed into the product from the get-go.

Jordan: 33:21

What about third-party tools? Because I think this is an area where people might tend to go awry too—either choosing poor third-party partners for analytics or some of these other publishing pieces we're talking about, or just trying to do everything themselves.

Adrian: 33:38

There should be no reason why you're doing tools yourself in this day and age. I mean, the price of tools—like just looking at my spreadsheet that we were going over before in terms of SaaS stuff that we use, and you know, some of our most expensive things are like seventy-three dollars a month. I mean, I understand that's different in a B2B sense than some of the tools you might—

Jordan: 33:58

Golytics or something like that.

Adrian: 34:00

Yeah, sure. But I mean, for very few companies does it make sense to roll your own? I mean, I think you'd have to be very large before that started to make sense because if you—certainly if you're a company that measures their staff in two or even three digits in terms of staff size, I still don't think it's worth developing your own tools unless it's a specific tool to accomplish something that isn’t catered to in the market. But certainly there are so many freemium tool options there. If you've ever been to a conference, all the sponsor banners are—Yeah, for us, we're often asked—we're in the middle of an engagement right now for a large media company, where we're basically just doing a metrics and tools audit.

So they've got a bunch of stuff that has been implemented across several titles, and they need us to come in, take a look at what's working and what isn't. They've got some internal goals that we have to absorb and factor into our decisions. But basically, they need to emerge on the other side confident that the tools we're recommending are going to deliver the best results. It's such a crazy world out there right now in terms of third-party tools that some of our work is becoming helping people curate that.

Jordan: 35:20

Obviously, a lot of that is kind of a case-by-case basis. I don't know if you guys have any go-to tools that you like to use?

Adrian: 35:27

No, I would say not at this point. We're looking into developing our own specific tool. I won’t get into what that is, but it’s something we just don’t see out there right now. Some of the tools we use more on the business side might be things like Priora data, just to help buttress some of our observations when we’re doing, say, design audits and making recommendations around comparable titles. As far as the actual tools related to monetization, no, we’ve worked with pretty much everything, so I wouldn’t say there’s a go-to tool. It’s never really in our purview anyway to select and implement that tool, because we’re usually coming into an environment where it’s already been chosen for us.

Jordan: 36:10

So how do you see your company and your service evolving from here?

Adrian: 36:16

That’s sort of my focus, and it’s been my focus for years. I think now that we’re about a dozen designers and product managers and other types of staff, my role for the company is really business development, talent acquisition, and leadership. Tony’s role is operations and finance. We both play account management roles in terms of interfacing with clients, but really it’s about trying to stay ahead of where the industry is going.

One way to do that is to hire people that are vastly more smart—smarter than I am. That is so illustrative of what I was about to say. Virtually everyone who works for us is a real genius in what they do and does their job probably better than I would’ve ever been able to do it.

It was a different world when I started. Now we have one of our guys, Peter, who’s basically like a Harvard economist. He went to Harvard and studied economics. That’s the kind of talent you need these days to be able to reverse engineer in-game economies. And knowing that’s where the market was headed a few years ago—towards that really granular in-game analysis and away from the softer stuff—back at the beginning of free-to-play, you’d go to conferences, and the kind of nuggets of wisdom people were dispensing, probably myself included, were like, “Well, you need to treat your free players as well as you treat your paying players.” And people would be furiously writing that down. That stuff does not count these days. That’s like fireside wisdom or something.

Jordan: 38:01

It's the table stakes. Knowledge is pretty high.

Adrian: 38:04

It's super high. Yeah, exactly. And that’s where we’ve just gotten more and more specialized. We really are freemium monetization specialists. Obviously, we can design fun games—you did a great job with Hempire—that game’s in soft launch right now, and it's a beautiful game. So, like, you need to have the table stakes, to use your term, solid game design ability, and really awareness of where that bar is. But then, you gotta know how to design a business as well.

And I think that's the magic of freemium—you're not just like a console designer where it's, “Is this fun? Yes, my job’s done, I’m going home.” You’re thinking, “Is this fun and will it make money?” Finding those two skills wrapped up in one person is not easy, and that’s why a lot of companies come to us. Finding that type of skill set is difficult, and maybe they’re located in a place where they can’t get top-flight talent to come to them, or they’re just not at that level yet. We get calls from Zynga, based in San Francisco, or EA...

Jordan: 39:12

They’ve already hired all the top-flight talent.

Adrian: 39:13

Yeah, it’s just bizarre. I remember asking Zynga... I was woken up one morning at like 8 a.m. on a Sunday from Zynga calling. It was so bizarre. This was in the last couple of years. And I’m like, “Why are you calling us?” I think I asked the same question of EA out in Burnaby when they called us to work on FIFA Ultimate Team for mobile and online—which you also worked on. I’m like, “Why do you need us? You acquired Playfish.” But that knowledge doesn’t all get assimilated instantly across the organization. All of a sudden, they're not instantly freemium experts, so there’s always a need for people like us.

But staying ahead of where the industry is going—it’s not trivial. Like things like VR. Knowing how much of your company to bet on investing in VR knowledge? I don’t have the answer to that. Will VR be what freemium was to our company, or for another company? Like if I suddenly started speaking on VR at conferences now, could I grow a whole VR specialty out of that? Do I want to? Maybe. But I don’t think it will have the same immediate widespread effect that freemium had. It'll grow more slowly, but it will be a business—and it already is a business for some. I don’t know if I’d bet my company on it at this point. But we’ve done a VR project—one. It won a bunch of awards, and it was cool. But that was early days, like two years ago now. And we still haven’t really pivoted to focus on VR as a thing.

Jordan: 40:52

I think there's a lot of cash right now in VR. There’s a lot of jobs right now in VR. But there's not necessarily a lot of real business in games VR. So, there will be one day. But I do think there’s the potential for a dip from here to there.

Adrian: 41:09

I think you're right. I think there will be a shakeout period. There’s a bunch of early cash, and maybe there are some people trying to establish a beachhead for when that consolidation wave comes along, and everyone’s price goes down, and some people can be snapped up.

I met with a company in L.A. actually, a couple times ago when I was down there, I think it might have been in the fall. They seemed to have a good early mover advantage in that area, and they needed our design help because they’d done hundreds of hours of VR development but didn’t have strong design chops in terms of making monetizable games. So, I think there’s still... like, I’m not sure we need to dive too heavily into VR to still have all of our skills apply. I think there are obviously some aspects of design that are unique to VR, but monetization is probably more transferable between just pure mobile and VR.

Jordan: 42:05

I totally agree. I mean, I think that we’re going to see free to play take over more channels. And I think console is next.

Adrian: 42:13

Yeah, and we haven’t really done much console stuff. We’ve done some Steam stuff, some Kongregate stuff. I know some people who have done some console stuff, but it hasn’t been a focus of ours. The first 13 years of my career were all console producing and designing console games. It’s definitely a fun space. What I didn’t like about console was the limited audience, the high barrier to entry in terms of the device purchase itself. So, those are probably two things that’ll inhibit free to play’s growth on those platforms. But as you get into like the tail end of a platform’s life cycle—remember when the PlayStation 2 or 3 or whatever, they were into like tens of millions of installed units—then it becomes less of an issue being able to do freemium at scale on a console.

But these days, I think you’re still going to see a lot of first-party support for a freemium title being what’s driving its success, because they’re going to want to showcase that this is something that, here’s this new channel that can be done. And that could cause some people to follow suit. And the real market is probably something slightly below that, which is supported by the first party.

Jordan: 43:24

I think that's true. I mean, the other thing is, you'll see a market, like you said, you’ll see a market kind of a down market when the console is at the end of its life cycle. I think the first console to really have a serious free-to-play component was the Xbox 360 at the end of its life. World of Tanks came out when it was basically done after Xbox One was out.

Adrian: 43:45

Yeah, where you got a bunch of people with the hardware in their living rooms and they’re looking for what to do with it next, and so you have a wide enough install base that maybe, like, a free product has a chance of doing well.

Jordan: 43:57

It's getting passed down to the kids or something like that.

Adrian: 44:00

Mm-hmm.

Jordan: 44:02

It sounds like you want to really focus on kind of this freemium business.

Adrian: 44:07

I mean, that’s been the focus for now almost 10 years. We used to have more Facebook titles that we worked on when Facebook was more of a platform, equal to mobile or better than mobile for a few years there for freemium titles.

But now, really, when we have clients come to us that have a Facebook game as part of their mix, or maybe it’s Kongregate, they’re using those platforms to deploy and iterate quickly on a particular design with the thinking that it’s going to end up on mobile. It’s just a quick test bed sort of area. So, we don’t see Facebook as strong in the mix as it used to be, but we’re still... so we’re pretty much purely mobile, freemium. We do have some non-game clients, which has been interesting. Nothing that I don’t think I can mention any of them, but really cool stuff with, like, large media company sort of stuff. So that’s been kind of fascinating.

I used to work in interactive advertising myself, just for like five minutes in the middle of my career, which was probably enough, but there’s a lot of that market where the creatives in the advertising agencies are selling into their clients, the big brands, game executions that they don’t know how to fully design and develop. And that’s where we’ve sort of come in a couple times, picked up the slack, run with the full design, and developed it. And that sort of stuff is pretty interesting as well. Obviously, games are our first love, but right now, that's kind of where we sit, and we're really enjoying it—the freemium mobile stuff.

And we’re sort of playing around with other types of ways to serve. So we launched a service called TeardownClub.com, which is basically weekly game design deconstructions that you can subscribe to. These are the kind of game deconstructions that product managers inside EA and Microsoft would do to serve their internal product group. So, maybe they’d break down how the latest mobile racing game monetizes and they would share that with their other racing game studios. And that’s not the kind of information that is widely circulated outside of those organizations.

So we started to offer that as a service and saw some early success with that in terms of getting that out to people. So that’s something we’re going to continue to look into and play around with, Teardown Club. It should be teardownclub.com. And then we’ve got some other ideas in terms of tools. I think we’ve reached the point where we have so much internal knowledge, and we have an idea of what we’d love to have at our fingertips in terms of being able to call up information that we need quickly to make excellent design and monetization decisions. And we’re putting some investment behind developing that out into an internal tool first and then maybe thinking about making it an external tool.

Jordan: 47:05

Well, we will put links to all that stuff on the show notes page. And maybe when you've got that tool ready to go, you want to come back on Playmakers.

Adrian: 47:16

That'd be awesome. Yeah. Thanks, Jordan.

Jordan: 47:17

Thanks for coming on. It’s been great to shoot the breeze, Adrian.

Adrian: 47:22

Sweet, sweet hanging.

Jordan: 47:24

Sweet, sweet hanging. Am I going to see you at GDC?

Adrian: 47:28

We're not sure. I go to GDC every year and I think it’s one of those things where we look at the ROI of GDC. We spend like, at a typical conference, five to ten thousand dollars attending, depending on how many people we bring. I just find I’m much more successful visiting clients outside of conferences or potential clients outside of conferences. There's just so much going on at conferences that you sit down at a hurried 23-minute meeting at a coffee shop, and it's one of 40 or 50 meetings you're doing in a three or four day period. And I don’t enjoy it as much, and I don’t think the people that attend enjoy it as much. It’s a great class reunion, but for us, I’m not sure the numbers are there. So, when you can spend that money on stuff like content marketing or investing directly into your business, it makes sense to think twice about attending every last industry conference.

Jordan: 48:23

Adrian Crook, always doing it his own way. Thanks for coming on, Adrian. It’s been great.

Adrian: 48:27

Thanks, Jordan. Take care.

Jordan: 48:29

Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Playmakers. You can find links to all the tools, all the games, and anything else that came up in the episode at playmakerspodcast.com. That’s also where we’ll put links to how to contact Adrian. And of course, that’s where you can find other episodes and subscribe to the show.

And you know I’m going to hit you up for a review because that’s what I really need. So, if you’re enjoying the show and if you’re getting something out of it, please do write me a review. I really appreciate it. And that’s all for this episode. See you soon on the next episode of Playmakers.