Shots On Goal, with Jon Radoff

Jordan: 00:00

Welcome to Playmakers, the game industry podcast, whether you work at a studio, publisher, service provider, or startup, this is the podcast that will give you all the information and entertainment you need to succeed in the game industry. Who am I? Just your friendly neighborhood veteran designer and producer, Jordan Blackman. In each episode of Playmakers, I go to work uncovering insights, tactics, and know-how from a wide range of game industry luminaries. My goal? To help you win the game of making games. Are you ready? Then let's begin.

We got a good one today. We have the wise, the knowledgeable, the savvy, the thoughtful Jon Radoff. Jon is the founder of Beamable, but he's also a serial entrepreneur with many different companies under his belt. He built one of the first commercial games on the internet. He took a web content management company public. He's grown an advertising network and launched mobile games played by millions of people, including Game of Thrones, Ascent and Star Trek Timelines. He's also a leading thinker in the realm of the metaverse and he's just like a really great guy to talk to about making games, about the business of games, about the future of games.

And those are the things we talk about in this episode. I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to talk to Jon, get a bit of his backstory and also some strategies and tips on how to succeed making games, how to succeed by taking multiple shots on goal at many different levels of the product, how to balance creativity and data, how to get data from users early on and so much more.

And on top of all that, at the end, we just put a big fat dollop of talking about the metaverse on top. This is a great interview. If you are interested in creating games, building studios in the metaverse and getting early data in balancing some of the key considerations that entrepreneurs have to think about in terms of multiple games, timelines-all of that are topics we cover in this wide ranging interview. Before we get into it, though, I just want to remind you to please share this with someone who you think would get value out of it. That certainly is something that they will appreciate and something that I would appreciate, too. That is how we do, if you like what we do, right here on PlayMakers. With all that said, let's get into the interview with Jon Radoff.

Jon, welcome to PlayMakers. I'm excited to have you on the show.

Jon: 02:52

Thanks Jordan. I'm glad to be here.

Jordan: 02:53

I first connected with you and got to know you through LinkedIn where you are absolutely prolific. And I want to talk a little bit about that because I've gotten to see some of your wide ranging interests you have, which I think is really cool. But before we get into that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you and your story and the story of Beamable. Tell me a little bit about your background in games.

Jon: 03:16

Sure. I'll start way back, with my personal story. How'd I get into games? I was a teenager in high school programming games. I had a couple shareware games in the early days of the internet, early online games, text based competitive games. I also made a bulletin board system program, but went off to college. Didn't last too long there because I met my future wife in an online game. And we decided to start a game studio to compete with the game that we were playing together.

Jordan: 03:46

What game were you playing?

Jon: 03:47

We were playing Gemstone.

Jordan: 03:48

Oh yeah. Isn't that still around?

Jon: 03:50

It is still around. Yeah. I haven't played it in such a long time. And of course it's probably changed a lot since the time we were playing, but play gemstone and we. Wanted to do a couple of things. One was to build this very story driven, immersive experience, similar to that, but launch it on the internet, not just be a, purely proprietary online service platform. So we did that. We created a game called Legends Of Future Past. The game ran for a decade. So an amazing experience, got to start a business, learned some stuff that works, learned a lot of stuff that doesn't work in business and in marriage. all of the above and it all survived. I'm still in business and I'm still married to the same person.

Jordan: 04:34

So congratulations.

Jon: 04:35

Thanks. Yeah. That's how I got my start. And then along the way, did some other things. I've done stuff outside of games as well. So I started a company called EPrize where we made software to help automate the process of creating content on websites. So business people and marketers really wanted to get content online.

So we created technology to do that. You could think of it as like blog or wiki software. EPrize we took public on NASDAQ. So that was just another amazing experience. Grew that company to 20 million ARR and hired lots of people. Put a management team together. So really great experience.

Jordan: 05:16

Was that like a content management system kind of thing?

Jon: 05:19

Yeah, exactly. You could call it content management. Went from that to started a company called gamerDNA. So gamerDNA, the original idea was to build like Pandora for games. So we had all this live data coming into us from Xbox and some MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and various data sources that we would use to try to understand what you really like about games and then we would recommend other games that you could play.

I think Pandora found that the way you monetize that is best done through advertising so built an ad network around it. That reached like 20, 30 million users a month on websites.

Jordan: 05:57

What data are we talking about?

Jon: 05:59

We would look at how you play the game. So for example, on Xbox, we would look at the achievements that you're earning. So Microsoft was sending us a real time feed of all the achievements earned across the Xbox platform.

Jordan: 06:12

Was that through a relationship or is that public data? How did that work?

Jon: 06:15

It wasn't public. We were able to get access to that data. There was a period of time where they sought out a few developers to try to figure out things like, “Hey, do you have interesting ideas about what you could do with xbox achievement data?" and they opened it up to a small number of developers. We were one of them and we were able to make use of this information to essentially do recommendations. But what we would see from that was not just what game you're playing, but how deep into the game you're getting and the types of things that you like to do in the game. Achievements were a little bit of a proxy for things like, were you interested in the multiplayer aspects? Are you more of an explorer? Do you want to figure out how to do the interesting tricks within the game? And we would use that to build up essentially a profile of your interests. And that could be used to recommend other games that you'd really enjoy.

Jordan: 07:07

And when was this?

Jon: 07:08

That was like 10 years ago.

Jordan: 07:09

So it seems pretty ahead of the curve.

Jon: 07:11

Yeah, it was a little bit ahead of its time for sure. Although interestingly enough, that's where I met my co-founder Trapper Markelz. He's the co-founder with me now at Beamable, what I'm doing today. So yeah, I met him in the course of building that company. In fact, he owned the domain name GamerDNA. A very weird story of how we came together. I actually wanted to buy the domain name. GamerDNA.com from him. And then I ended up getting to talk to him and he was a brilliant guy with really interesting product ideas.

And it was like, I don't want to just buy your domain name. Like we should be working together on this. So actually I had a different company name at the time and acquired the .com address from him and we rebranded actually as GamerDNA and he became head of product for the company that we were doing anyway, ended up selling that company to Live Gamer, which is now called like Emergent Payments or something. They were an ad network at the time. Then we went our separate ways. He went off to do gamified health and I started Disruptor Beam, which is a game studio that was built around this idea of very immersive story driven game experiences on platforms where story and immersion is not a thing yet.

So that is to say mobile and social network games So got started actually with a social network game on Facebook called Game Of Thrones Ascent, of course built on Game of Thrones. So got to meet George R Martin. Got to know him. He's the creator of Game of Thrones and then HBO. Our first game was that and then it did pretty well and had over 40 million views, 11 million installs or something.

Jordan: 08:51

and what kind of game was that? Was that like a kind of kingdom sim?

Jon: 08:56

it was kind of a kingdom sim, but it wasn't what you had in mind. The games you're probably talking about are like Kingdom of Camelot, which came from this tradition of games that started, Evony, and then even before that, like games called Travian is the genealogy of that type.

Our kind of game didn't come from that. Ours was actually about making story decisions along the way. So it was really a character collecting game, where you'd collect what we called sworn swords in that game. Because that's the lore of Game of Thrones, like you're henchmen in the characters.

And you'd collect these characters and then you would encounter dilemmas in the story, for example, what would you do in this particular situation? And you could send a care off and it would require them while they're away from you to go and do it. And you'd level up that character and they could specialize in different kinds of abilities that would give them better chances of succeeding in the story in the way that you wanted to resolve it.

So that was the first. We ended up specializing around character collecting of various kinds, did a Walking Dead game, did a Star Trek game, which is still running today, a very successful game called Star Trek Timelines, and another game called Archer Danger Phone based on the Archer cartoon series on FX also that game is running today. In the course of that I got to work with really big IP, got really immersed in live operations and seeing what really goes into making a successful game and how to make it sustainable and generating revenue, not just for a quick blip launch, but how do you turn it into a sustainable business?

And that's what we really learned from that. But ultimately along the way, what I really found I had a passion for was how we do not just do live operations, but how do we retool game development generally so that you have more shots on goal and could just be more successful with it. And I felt that keeping that knowledge and that practice inside Disruptor Beam as a game studio, doing one game after another wasn't really the right thing for me because I had experience building games But also building enterprise technologies and software companies and ad networks. So I had seen this industry through a whole bunch of lenses, the software side, demand gen, and actual, game making.

So I had experienced what it is to be a game maker over many games. And I just saw an opportunity to take that out into the world and help hopefully millions of game makers out there, thousands of game studios. And that's what I found I really needed to do. So we ended up selling Star Trek Timelines to Tilting Point, which is a published game publisher. And we sold Archer or Danger Phone to Eastside Games and decided to completely reorg the company, pivot away from being a game company, and relaunch the business as a new business, Beamable. Really just totally committed to this problem of helping game makers bring products to market. Get them out there faster, give them more chances, help them iterate faster on a platform that would help them do that.

And the real essence of it is though, what we realized is a lot of people have tried to do this, frankly, like there's a cottage industry of what some people call backend as a service where they've created like these component modules that, that you can then buy and plug into your game. The problem with all of them is that they just moved the labor away from coding those services to a systems integration project.

And it didn't really fundamentally change the workflow or how you can approach game development. And I, of course, had a pretty successful experience building a content management platform, not for games, but for websites and things like that. And I just saw the fundamental problem was about empowering, enabling creators.

And in game making, the creators are the game designers, the people who sit in front of something like Unity every day, and are responsible for really crafting the experience of a game. And it just occurred to me that there's other platforms doing this. They're just in walled gardens, right? So Roblox, for example, has made game creation really easy to the point that an eight year old kid can sit down and make a game in Roblox because they don't have to know anything about DevOps and servers and things like that. Now, that said. Not really a fit for a lot of the commercial developers or the people with commercial aspirations out there, but that was the seed of the idea for me.

Jordan: 13:41

Although there are some doing that now.

Jon: 13:42

Yeah, there is. The game industry is so big. You're going to find success all across the map. But what I just got totally obsessed with was could we retool, not just back end as a service and giving people some components to draw from, but could we retool the process of game creation so that it's literally as easy to make a game, a live game, one that has social connections and in game monetization, all that stuff that we associate with the live games market.

Could we make that as easy as it is to do in Roblox right now, but with the freedom to deliver your game anywhere you want, monetize it how you want, choose the best in class 3D engine for your game, and really just be able to actually build a sustainable business around it. So that was the compelling vision that, at least I was obsessed with, and now I think our team and our investors are obsessed with.

That was the vision, and we've been going from there, and we've been very fortunate because we're signing up a lot of games on the platform now. So I, our competitive advantage today is just the hundreds of games that have already signed up for it. And we've just had a lot, so many coming into us now that it lets us really home in on sort of two layers of the problem.

One is like from a pure workflow standpoint, how do you make it super easy? no code, easy drag and drop visual prefabs for the game creator, but also back that with a platform architecture, which is totally scalable and all of that, but very adaptive to change and customization. We had to actually create a new serverless architecture for games that our developers really love, which is that they don't have to learn new programming languages.

All of their code base can be within one code package. This is the inspiration from Roblox. So in Roblox, you get this Lua code stack where every, the server code, the client code, it's all within one package. So we figured out a way to do that for the commercial developer. We're starting with Unity. Just let them do that. If you're doing Unity, you're doing it. You're doing your coding in C sharp, give them all of that customization and the ability to do whatever they want within the environment, but not really have to understand or focus on things like dev ops, scaling servers, making sure that backend really can meet all your needs yet.

Give them the customization so that it's not just pure cookie cutter. Like they can add server authoritative logic and quote unquote server components to their game. but thinking of it as a serverless process and serverless architecture where their entire effort is going to be geared towards the game experience, the creative experience of making the game, which now means they're going to get to market faster. They're certainly going to save a ton on OpEx, but I think the hidden piece of all that, the disruptive piece, is actually lowering team size so that you can have smaller teams that can actually iterate a lot faster and try more things through the process of game creation.

Jordan: 16:44

And that kind of gets to your idea of having more shots on goal.

Jon: 16:48

Exactly. I think that's the biggest factor in game success. It's to make a game that you can start exposing to whatever the right audience for your game is. Be able to try a lot of things, meaning different features, variations on things. Start getting feedback for your game and incorporate that feedback into your game before you get into even say soft launch.

And certainly before going live, you really want to use that opportunity with smaller groups to make sure you've got the fundamentals of the game locked down. You can change things later, right? We live in a world where, it's software, you can keep changing it as much as you want, but you do get to an event horizon and your development process where a lot of the fundamentals of the game is established once you go to say, soft launch with a game. And we want to just give people that opportunity to do more variation, more creative variance and whatnot before. And also just additional games. It's if you can make the game creation process faster, more capital efficient, you can parallelize more games.

You can get to a point and say, “Hey, this game isn't working for whatever reason. What did we learn from that? Let's reboot and maybe think about it a whole different way." That's how I think you enable game teams to be successful.

Jordan: 18:05

I think that's a great idea to dive into that a little bit for listeners who are maybe wondering how they can implement that and when in the process.

So when would you start encouraging developers to get out there, get users when in the process and what kind of techniques would you recommend for getting those initial users and getting that feedback?

Jon: 18:26

I think you want to start testing your ideas off of the relevant audience super early. Like even before you've got a playable game is okay. I think you just have to understand your audience and who they are, at least start socializing some of the ideas with those people and see how they react to it. I always learn something when I expose an idea. I think one mistake game developers make is they hold ideas very tightly and totally very close to the vest. And the reality is ideas aren't actually super valuable in game development. What's valuable is teams that can execute really well. And it just builds stuff. And part of building stuff is learning rapidly, if it works. I just encourage people to get exposure to ideas really early.

you can even, frankly, get exposure to ideas even before you've built a game. if you know conceptually what it is, for example, there's nothing stopping you from throwing up a Facebook ad for a game concept. Throw a few hundred bucks into it, and with some concept art and a landing page somewhere, be like, “hey, thanks for your interest in this game concept. We would love for you to get in line for our beta program,” and here's what we want to do and have them fill out a survey and start building a community like it could be that early like we literally did that with Star Trek Timelines, for example, first of all, we built five completely different game prototypes before we settled on one that we thought would work.

And then we wanted to figure out the narrative and the name of the game and how it would fit with the game design system we had in so we had Facebook ads testing different names. And we'd bring people in and we learned stuff just about like radical variation, even in click throughs purely based on a name variation, stuff like that. And then starting to build the community, getting people who we weren't new. In this case, we had the benefit of Star Trek as an IP. So we were getting people who were interested in Star Trek, giving us feedback on it, but that was the seed of a community. And you can do that for a game. Long before you've built the vertical slice or whatever it is that's the fully playable functionality of the game. Just to start engaging with people and learning what your audience cares about. And it's really valuable to have those audiences there and with you for the journey through this process.

Because as game makers, I find that while we're working on a game and we're doing it over a long period of time, we start taking certain actions, it's just the natural. process to start taking for granted certain things, becoming our own elder player audience. And the older player audience doesn't tell you how people engage, say with early games, first time user experiences and things like that. They tell you What it's like to continue retaining after a year and you become that customer over time and it's hard to avoid it because you can never really look at those early experiences of a game in the same way as a truly new audience, so you can start before you've got playables. Before you go to soft launch, you can set up alpha groups with hundreds of people, select audiences out of that community you've been building along the way who you've been selling the story and the mission of the game to.

I'm a big fan of sit down people, sit people down in front of the earlier versions of the game when it actually does start to become playable and watch how they play and take notes and just do direct observation. You learn a surprising amount. Just watching someone play for the first time, I'm a big believer in player feedback.

Jordan: 22:17

Got it. Yeah. So what we're talking about here is finding ways to get as much data about what you're making as early as possible and quite often. So when we say shots on goal, we don't mean make a bunch of games. We mean, as you're taking your shots. Or the way that I think about that is that the whole game is a shot. And if you're like a smart missile, the way a smart missile works is it's constantly evaluating its trajectory, right? And that's how it gets to the right spot. It doesn't plan everything in advance. And you're saying, “Hey, get data and adjust every single step of the way,” And that's how you're going to land in the right spot. Not by coming up with the perfect plan, this perfect design that you're holding close and then releasing it to the audience. Surprise. It's amazing. That's very unlikely to happen, especially in mobile.

Jon: 23:02

And I think the lesson extends beyond mobile into a lot, into really every kind of game development, PC, console, et cetera, web browser games. So shots on goal means both levels of that, right? And if you're a game publisher, you can even take shots on goal to mean a whole other layer, even above that. So if you think of it like at the micro level, shots on goal means features of the game design decisions within the game, right?

Jordan: 23:27

cycles, within cycles.

Jon: 23:29

Yeah, so that's agile development within a game and using customer player feedback to Prioritize features and refine features that they're really a fit for the vision of the game now usually though game vision unless you just discovered your way off the way you were thinking about this market. I'm not a big fan of like vision radically changing within a game project Now, if it needs to, that tells me maybe that's a different game than we were originally intending.

So I really do advise the studio, when you're thinking of it as a studio and not just a, “here's our one big bet we're making with the one game that's going to come to market” and it's all just going to be escape velocity off this one game. I really counsel a studio to be thinking in terms of, not necessarily conceive of all the games that you're going to try because I think that's a little unreasonable to say here's the portfolio of five shots we're going to be taking. You start with your one idea, but have that runway and the capacity to be able to look at a game and figure out relatively quickly in the process of the game whether you want to fully commit to bringing that to market.

And if not, then do you have the capacity to try some other things or even in the best case scenario, like yes, you'll bring that game to market and still have capacity to try a second or third game. I think people look at the most incredible successes in the market today and they forget, of course, Rovio. I forget how many dozens of games they worked on before there was Angry Birds. People forget about the three forgettable games that Supercell made before Hay Day was a hit. And then of course, Clash of Clans was a mega hit. Like they tried three things that really just didn't work before that, or Among Us. Like that team has been slogging it out for years.

Jordan: 25:22

Rocket League. Same story. That's the story of success.

Jon: 25:26

Game development is about persistence and trying things. And I think it's totally fine to throw in the towel on an idea just like we did with Star Trek Timelines, right? So Star Trek Timelines, there were four other ideas that we put an effort in. Each one of them was a couple of months prototype effort. We looked at the game and we're like, that doesn't seem like it's going to be it. The fifth one that we came up with, we felt really good because there was just an inherent fun to the game experience.

What did we do? We did this crazy thing, which frankly, I think if you can pull it off, do it. We took our game prototype, which was way far off from being able to be a commercial product at that point, definitely not a soft launch, but we took, but there was a core thing that was playable. We took it to PAX. We had a pavilion. We used it as a chance to demo the game and also just build the community, get people who were interested in what we were building. We did a thousand user tests essentially in the course of a Penny Arcade Expo where we were directly observing people playing the game on all these iPads that we set up.

We recorded information about it. After day one of PAX, we actually had some useful data already. We rebuilt the game, changed a few key properties. Second day of PAX, it was a little bit different. And then we learned some really key things through those thousand user tests. We said to ourselves, “okay, here's what people like, and here's where people are confused. We seem to be getting the core vision of the product. Right? Fantastic. let's finish the game for sure,” which is going to take another year plus. But, here's some stuff that people are totally not getting in the game, and that's gotta evolve. We learned from it and ended up shipping a game that 'll certainly pass over a couple hundred million in aggregate revenue.

It's done well. you gotta have the shots on goal. I think you can do it at multiple levels. It's at the feature level. It's as if you have an IP you're working with, I think giving yourself the space, as we did in Star Trek, to say, here's multiple approaches to the IP. At the studio level, it can be, here's our shots at a few different IP or completely different games. And if you're at the publisher level, it's the same thing. Plus, maybe, here's some teams we really believe in, but recognizing that even great teams, like sometimes for whatever set of reasons, they can't really even pull it off after multiple attempts.

So being able to diversify your risk across multiple teams is useful. So I think that the game business is really giving people opportunities for iteration. learning and taking a lot of shots. And if you give yourself enough time with the right team that really understands the products and the markets you're going after, then you have a real chance of creating hit products and making a sustainable business out of it. And when I say it, like it's the sustainable piece that's actually important there. It's like the game that can get enough of an audience that wants to keep coming back regularly.

Jordan: 28:34

Yeah, I love that, Jon. There was so much good stuff in that right there. So I think the audience is really going to benefit from that. there's a lot of different directions we could go. It got me thinking that you, having done all these businesses, there's also that aspect of shots on goal, right? Like the whole enterprise, you keep taking different angles at it and keep growing and exiting and having all these different shots yourself, but I wanted to dive into something a little bit more specific, which is the balance between these shots on goal.

So at different levels. So for example, and I think the one that I think might be most relevant to listeners is balancing between iterations on a concept and iterations of concepts or between concepts, because both those things cost money, right? That, and cost time and so on. So how do you think about that balance between getting the idea? Iterating the idea and you've already given some clues about this, but I'd love to hear more about it.

Jon: 29:32

huge domain, but you can think of it also as risk management in your game dev project. So I think there's two main categories of risks that you're taking in a lot of games and it's a little bit shaped like a barbell right, so there's a lot of the little things you have to do in a game which are not actually very high risk but also not super high reward. You just got to get through them and you got to identify them and get through it and then a lot of your incremental changes along the way that add one, two, five, ten percent better performance on a metric probably do mean a lot for you in the business over the long course of lifetime values for a player. There are easy risks to take because, “hey, you're gonna add a little bit of retention here or a little bit of monetization here.” That's one class of risks. There's a whole other class of risks which are much higher risk, greater reward.

Because if it's at the level of a game, a feature in a game, they may be a feature that you don't ship, for example. you'll try a feature and it's this, after we really tried it, doesn't seem to work. So here's one of the lessons I've learned from building several games, the games where I actually removed the most and we didn't go with a lot of thing., On the one hand, I had team members, annoyed with me, wow, I worked on these pieces and we didn't ship them and I'm sad basically that we didn't get to ship this thing, and I understand that because people pour their heart and soul into a game and they don't see their, all their work manifest at the end. That's a bummer. So I totally get that. That said, the games where I've exited the most along the way have done the best performance. And the ones that sort of, it was more of a kitchen sink, and everything found its way into the final version for the most part.

Those actually didn't perform as well, right? So I think it's not so much an argument in terms of minimalism as it is in terms of not everything has to be there at the end. Like everything has to serve an important purpose in the game and maybe if everything is surviving, that's an indication to me in looking at a game that there's a lack of sufficient, either vision, which is the worst case, vision, or maybe just not the right set of metrics, helping you define what truly is in or out that then aligns back to that vision for the game.

Jordan: 32:09

How do you balance the amount of time and effort to put into iterating on concepts or early? Iterations versus the time spent on, “okay, we should move on to a new concept. We should make sure to save time and budget for the next thing.”

Jon: 32:24

Yeah. I think, because when you see how players engage with the game, and I think sometimes teams are just in denial about it, there's two bad things that happen in game development. There's a lot more than two, but here's a two that come up a lot, which team is in denial about just how fun the experience is and whether people seriously will be engaging it the way you want. Why does that happen? For a lot of reasons. Sometimes it's because the team isn't really even playing their own game.

Sometimes teams get tasked with building a game that they're not passionate about. Like this just happens all the time in game dev for whatever reason. And they don't have that empathy with the audience that's actively informing them. I think that's a good thing, an important root cause. And sometimes it's just pragmatic, like you're running out of money.

Studios and then individual games are kind of time and capital boxes that you're going to be constrained to, which is again, why I really point to capital efficiency, which is sort of what I'm pointing at when I say shots on goal, it's a capital efficiency model. Use your capital, your human resources, your time, your money that you've got for a game really wisely so that you can try new things. But I think the best way to do it just comes down to having empathy with the audience and being willing to listen and learn from those audiences.

Jordan: 33:49

Excellent. I think there's so much useful stuff in there for people. So I appreciate that.

Jon: 33:52

There's just another aspect to it because you're also asking like, how much resource and time do you put between a feature? So my friend, Paul Stefanuk, who works at, King on Candy Crush has a great quote that I love to use, which is ‘magic is a stepped function’, right? So what does that mean? The magic of a game experience. There's a certain level you got to get to with a lot of games where if you're not there, if you don't hit the bar, it's not like you're just a percentage worse. You're like not even there, right? So if you do half as much as the market expects for a category of game, it's not like you're going to make half the revenue. You might make zero percent. The revenue, or 1 percent of the revenue or something like that.

Jordan: 34:36

We know how many people have been like, “Oh, we'll make a match three and it'll make 10%, if it only makes 10 percent of Candy Crush, we'll be billionaires.”

Jon: 34:43

Yeah, great. And spend the, I don't know how many, surely they've spent over a hundred million dollars just straight up R and D into that game at this point. I don't know how much, but some huge amount because it's made billions, right? So you've got to take seriously what the market is telling you and whether your game hits that bar.

Now, sometimes you can hit completely new audiences on different platforms where the bar is very different and the bar is still being figured out. And it might be very different from even a comparable category game. Like on a whole, on a mature platform, for example, like the expectations of a game on console is different than the expectations of a game on mobile, but maybe in very different ways, like the, “production values might be lower on mobile, but the social features might have to be way better thought out.”

Jordan: 35:37

How do you think about, cause I know you're passionate about empowering creativity and about this kind of iterative data driven or data informed approach. How do you think about the right time in that process to really develop that vision? Like presumably if you're running ads on different ideas, you're only investing so much in the vision. How do you think about that process when you're doing it? Let's say it's a mobile game or if you think it's relevant to other categories. I'm really curious about your thoughts on this.

Jon: 36:06

I think when you're early in that process, you're just trying to ask yourself, “okay, I've got a vision, but are other people connecting with this vision I have?” And everyone I've known that has had visions for games, they've got a lot of them, right? So you're trying to inform yourself about “hey, I've got ideas, which of those ideas could connect with enough of a market? And also how can I learn really pragmatic considerations like, Maybe my vision's fantastic, but finding that market is really hard.”

Like finding the people who will connect with it is going to be the hard piece. So just using that early information, I don't think it ever makes sense to have a continuously morphing vision. So you've got to get to a point with a game where there's conviction around it. And there's got to be a strong vision holder through the process because I've also seen games go sideways where the vision holding really wasn't happening and then you get like fiefdom in a larger team fiefdoms of different conflicting views of how the game should play out that's never good.

Jordan: 37:13

That doesn't end well.

Jon: 37:14

Yeah you got to have strong vision through the course of that game so, you know, the early stuff, the things like with ad testing and stuff is to inform vision, or maybe you move on to a different vision while you're a few hundred bucks of capital and an ad campaign into it is a good time to determine is to do the gut check. “Okay, do I actually have conviction on this?” Because once you start going down the path, then I think you have to stick with that vision and you're trying different things.

To go back to your earlier question of like, when do you throw in the towel? It's like when you no longer believe in the vision. You thought you had, or the team doesn't believe in the vision anymore. As long as you think the vision is strong and the market is showing you things that you should believe in as well, that's okay. Like you just haven't figured out the precise formula for delivering that vision. Which is why agile development and rapid iteration and lots of shots on goal is just a way to solve for that.

Jordan: 38:07

Yeah, I'll tell you for me what I find for myself personally is that when I have an idea it often starts with It's very inchoate. It's not like a complete vision pops into my head. It's like a feeling with maybe a couple pieces that come along and then it's going to be some work for me to develop it further. And at some point it starts to like click into place and be more complete. Does that make sense?

Jon: 38:31

Yeah, totally. If I think back to early Disruptor Beam, my vision was really simplistic, frankly, which is I knew people love stories. And I wanted to deliver stories through a game. And at the time, most of the market was puzzle games and things like that. And you can have stories in those games as well. So I don't want to take anything away from them and they've built huge businesses around that.

But I just wanted to do something different, which was to deliver an immersive story experience on these platforms where no one had really tried that yet. And that was just the core of the idea. Now we had to discover things along the way, like what does that mean? Our first game did that with a lot of text and a lot of dialogue.

We had a really great team of Bioware writers who had worked on things like Star Wars The Old Republic and Dragon Age and games like that. And so our first pass was to bring a lot of dialogue trees in. And we shipped a game with tons and tons of dialogue, and it did work for a particular audience. We did discover it was also too much for the broader audience. So we refined it, figured out a little more game mechanical ways to do that. By the time we got to Star Trek Timelines, it still had a lot of dialogue, just not nearly as much as we had in that first version, but the vision of storytelling remained true through that.

My vision wasn't, “hey, we're going to do a game studio that's going to go after Hollywood and television IP and monetize Hollywood through games,” basically, it was, about storytelling. There was an early aha moment, which is attention spans, just the reality of mobile and social network games, very short attention span.

You get a very short period of time before that customer decides that they're going to stick with it. So if we're going to do storytelling, it's different than a console game where you've just spent 60 bucks or whatever. And you'll just stick it out for a couple of hours at least to see if you're really going to keep playing it. And by the way, you've already caught they're 60 bucks and if they don't, you probably won't hurt and most people don't return. So it's just a different market where we have to tell that story and get them into that story experience. So we figured out that it was just going to be super hard to do that on mobile with just the way the market functions with our own original IP.

We realized that, “okay, if we do this experience, but it's set in Game of Thrones, then, people already know Game of Thrones. They can connect with the world and the universe of the game and they're more receptive to the storytelling rather than the gate.” Now, and frankly, we also got lucky with Game of Thrones because we were just shipping around the time the first season was coming out. No one knew it was going to take off.

Jordan: 41:14

Jon, I can already tell we're not going to get through everything I wanted to ask you in our interview today, I'm really glad that we dove into that topic. I think it's something that you have a lot to share and people can get a lot out of. I don't want to let you go before talking a little bit about the future that as you see it and technologies such as the metaverse that you seem from what I can tell to have a lot of interest in, I'm really interested in as we've been coming out of this, Coronavirus world, how leaders like you and people who have successfully, you, I can tell from what your story is that you are very good at seeing where the kind of business and the market is heading and developing businesses and games, Game of Thrones, perfect example at the game level of that, that are going to where the puck is.

So I'm very interested in your thoughts about what's changed or what's changing. And particularly, anything you want to say about the metaverse as well. And feel free to take that where you will.

Jon: 42:10

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of different versions of “the metaverse” and what that means. So I have my version, which is it's, to me, it's the next generation of the internet, but it's the evolution of the internet in a way that's much more creator led. I look at the internet really as a place for creativity. It's a creative palette where you can make experiences for people. Thus far in the internet that we've had, though it's largely technology driven, there's creators out there who say here's what I want, but then there's an enormous amount of technology work that has to happen to bring things to market. Whether that's a game or E-commerce experience, things like that. Where we're going is game creation, immersive experiences, which are just about the most complex thing that you can craft, I believe is going to become not only much more creator led, but really creators are going to build all of it.

And it's going to be less, much less about technology dependence on teams of people working on database code and things like that. And what has shown us the way there, like e-commerce, is an interesting one to just look at. So there was once a day when, you know, to build your e-commerce site, the way you do it is you'd buy an application server and wire up databases and there'd be components like shopping carts and stuff, but you'd have to hook it all together and build this thing. And it was just monstrously complex. So it limited participation to established big brands or people with access to a lot of capital or the very few super lucky ones like Amazon who saw it so early on that they could build it and now of course have built the biggest businesses in the world around it.

Now then comes Shopify. Which said, “Hey, let's make it a top down experience for creators to just come in” And then if you want to customize it, we've got a whole ecosystem of developers and theme creators and plugin creators that you can then tap into to enhance the experience, but it's no longer going to be like provision, your sass platform in the cloud and get your engineers lined up to figure out how to put the pieces together.

And unfortunately, games have not caught up to that other than the cases, which I talked about really early in this, which is like Roblox, for example, like Roblox is a kind of metaverse in which it's not the metaverse, right? no one's going to be the metaverse, the one place that defines it all. The internet is what the metaverse is. But Roblox, what they did a really good job at is bringing together in one place a set of things that you need as a game maker. One, audience, right? So they've got access to an audience, which is really big now. They have the social architecture around it. They've got this layer which is like YouTube for games to do discovery of the game products in there. But underneath that the developer tools are built around one language and it's pretty easy to do and it's got an integration with a marketplace to tap into the things you need.

I just think we need that level of simplicity, for the actual metaverse, the internet, generally speaking. The vision that I have for the metaverse, and one that we're working on super hard at Beamable, is that future where if you're someone with a creative idea for a game, that you're going to be able to sit down and start building live game functionality, with the support you need to turn it into a real business, like a Shopify for games kind of experience where you can monetize it, have social features, have access to audiences, have events and tournaments and matchmaking and all that stuff really just second nature without thinking of it, where you spend your time on creative iteration and thinking about what's the real fun of the game experience.

Jordan: 46:07

Do you think that some of these new technologies around decentralization are a part of this? Do they play a role? things like cryptocurrencies and mostly that sort of crypto technology, NFTs, wallets, interoperability.

Jon: 46:24

Yeah, I think it's part of it. I have this set of writing that I put up on my blog that listeners are welcome to take a look at where I really expand on this stuff. But I see decentralization as a core part of the technology stack as well as the market structure for this stuff, and I should say, though, like blockchain, which is what you are getting at with NFTs and currencies, that's a part of it, but also when I talk about decentralization, I think of that as a return to the just the inherent structure of the Internet.

When the Internet was made, it was made as a decentralized architecture for connecting computers and resources together in which any part of that network could be removed and you'd still have a functional internet. So that's where decentralization comes from. And since then we've had blockchain, over the last decade is a way to exchange assets in a decentralized way.

And I think decentralized asset exchange opens up new categories of games. And on top of that, just decentralized and distributed computing are a big part of it, but also just open source development. Being able to have access to open platforms where there aren't gatekeepers saying who can come into the platform.

That's why I love PC game development, frankly. PC and web based game development is the last bastion of truly permissionless development. Where you can sit down as a game developer and choose how you're going to distribute. Microsoft doesn't decide whether you get to ship a game or not. They just, they can decide whether you get to be on the Windows Store. And Valve gets to decide if you're allowed to be on Steam, for example. But you can put a game out there and you can figure out what the right business model is for it. And the web is still that way as well. But then separate from that, we've got all these permissioned platforms, which are not going to go away. And I think they have their usefulness in harnessing audiences. And for a lot of people, it's worth paying a significant premium to get audience access essentially, because they do bring that to the table. That's their business. They're controlling distribution for these audiences.

But I think ultimately the market is going to have a lot of options for developers to do it in a way that's. Much more decentralized, not just in a crypto way that you're describing, but also just the access to platforms, distribution points, programming, ecosystems, access to open source components that you can roll into your game. And that's going to be super important for the future. And ultimately that's what will make the market really big. And when we talk about it being creator centric in the future, which is how I think of the next generation of the metaverse, we've got to make the economics of this whole thing. Work for creators as well as the technology so that the technology doesn't get in the way, but also the business models don't get in the way of individuals and small teams being successful.

Jordan: 49:18

We will make sure to put a link to your blog posts about this. And also you have a kind of like a metaverse weekly roundup thing I've seen. Is there a way that people can get access to that? Would that also be on your blog?

Jon: 49:30

Yep, on building the metaverse blog that I run on medium. It's all there. We do a weekly roundup. Usually I'm posting one or two articles each week. I'm posting decks, so it's all out there. But my vision for the metaverse is that it's very creator led and really opened up to people to not have the technology or the business impediments that currently exist. That makes it harder for small teams to really make it.

Jordan: 49:56

We'll make sure to get a link to it in the show notes. And Jon, I feel like I could do this for another hour with you. There are definitely topics that I was hoping to chat with you about that we didn't get to, but.

Jon: 50:05

We'll do part two then.

Jordan: 50:06

Yeah, we'll definitely schedule something for in the future. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great having you.

Jon: 50:11

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jordan: 50:18

Another episode of Playmakers Podcast is in the bag and if you want the show notes with all the links wrapped up with a bow for you, you can find all that at playmakerspodcast.com. If you're interested in giving some feedback on what you'd like to see on future episodes, you can also reach out to me there.

And in the meantime, if you want to support what we do, the way to do that is to write us a review and subscribe. I will see you on the next episode. We have some great stuff coming your way. So I will catch you then on Playmakers.