Same values, new design
introducing the new abstraction
the Abstraction rebrand
why and how we did it
crossing boundaries since
branding beyond boundaries Brand new
The outcome
The world around us is constantly evolving. And if you want to stay relevant as an organization, your brand must too. Especially in a fast-paced market such as ours, moments of reinvention and growth ask for an unbiased overhaul. Our branding no longer represented who we are, what we do and how we make a difference. And with the organization expanding, that's a huge red flag. We were in need of true and honest introspection.
Combining conceptual thinking with sharp aesthetics, led us to the creation of a meaningful brand that has both surface and substance.
Not too much later and as fate would have it, we were approached by a Branding & Digital Agency called Stuurmen. Its 'kill off the average' belief is what somehow triggered our interest. Skip ahead a few days and there we are, having a cold one at our weekly 'Friday Drinks'. Discussing possible approaches, collaborative processes and an overall partnership.
The process A logo is not a brand. A brand is everything and everything is a brand. It's the sum of all interaction that constitutes a brand's emotional experience. It's how you behave, the way you speak, how your people represent it, and so on. Therefore, it was of utter importance to embrace an inside-out approach. Expose our DNA right down to our roots and build from there. Because only when we know who we are can we become what we want.
abstraction.games
The most visual change is in the name. We have lost our tail: it's no longer Abstraction Games, just Abstraction. And as mentioned earlier, there's a clear reason for that. Game development is and always will be our core, but now there's more. Online and offline, software and hardware: we embrace it all. An 'identification name' like Abstraction Games, is simply in the way of that. We needed a more abstract (no pun intended) name that is able to accommodate different endeavours, without being confusing or misleading. The name is of course accompanied by a new, simple, bold and above all, balanced logo. The new logo makes a reference to the ‘beyond boundaries’ pay-off that we’re embracing, but it also refers to where it all started for us 11 years ago. Read the full story on the new abstraction.games website, which is packed with innovative goodies!
Issue 3 Find out how to be a better place to work… Anita Sarkeesian discusses E3’s gender problem
The State of Play Exclusive data on what gamers are really playing right now
Plus! Warren Spector, Amy Hennig, Christine Burgess-Quémard, Chris Charla & loads more…
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COME JOIN OUR TEAM!
GET IN TOUCH
Frontier is the independent publisher and developer behind Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution™ and Planet Zoo. We employ amazing people to work on triple-A games that have defined genres, received critical acclaim and sold millions of copies around the world.
Find out more and apply: frontier.co.uk/careers
A career at Frontier is rewarding in every sense. We recognize the amazing work done by people on our team and offer a range of benefits for everyone to share in the studio’s success. Frontier is growing, and we’re looking for people who share our passion for making games that will put both Frontier and gaming itself at the forefront of the global entertainment industry. Come and speak to us at E3 above the west lobby in meeting room 501C to find out more about our games and what it’s like to work at Frontier.
For general enquiries: recruitment@frontier.co.uk
FOLLOW US Find us on Twitter: @FrontierDev @EliteDangerous @PlanetCoaster @JW_Evolution @PlanetZooGame
We currently have vacancies at our Cambridge, UK studio in Programming, Art, Publishing and more.
© 2018 Universal City Studios LLC and Amblin Entertainment, Inc. Planet Coaster © 2018 Frontier Developments plc. Planet Zoo © 2019 Frontier Developments plc. All rights reserved. Elite © 1984 D avid Braben & Ian Bell. Frontier © 1993 David Braben, Frontier: First Encounters © 1995 David Braben and Elite Dangerous © 1984 - 2018 Frontier Developments Plc. All rights reserved. ‘Elite’, the Elite logo, the Elite Dangerous logo, ‘Frontier’ and the Frontier logo are registered trademarks of Frontier Developments plc. Elite Dangerous: Horizons is a trademark of Frontier Developments plc.
Growing Pains If you read the press these days, you’d think that the games industry is a pretty horrible place to be. It’s full of greedy execs who are getting gamers hooked, encouraging them to gamble, and mistreating their employees. Meanwhile, indie creators are being ripped off by platforms and publishers alike. And nobody is doing anything about toxic gamer communities. There will be some mis-management and nefarious goings-on. But many of the issues impacting the industry today is down to this simple fact: making successful games is really hard. It constantly changes. The goalposts are always moving. You could be a free-to-play sage, a AAA veteran or a HR wizard, and you could still end up with a poorly monetised app, a cancelled multi-million dollar production or a serious crunch situation.
P4
P12
The State Of Games
E3 Representation Must Improve
P24
P33
What Gaming Can Learn From Wrestling
How To Be A Better Place To Work
P45
P53
How To Get Your Game Funded
Why I Love: Game developers discuss the titles that changed their worlds
We live in an industry that is constantly pushing forwards with new ideas and technology. To be a success, you must be fearless and unafraid of failure. Yet failure in games today can have serious repercussions, not just financially but ethically, emotionally and on the people who have put their trust in you. The world’s eyes are on us at E3. We hope to leave the week with a lot of excited consumers who want to get hands on with the latest products. But there will be journalists ready to ask the tough questions on loot boxes, unionisation, crunch and community. I know we will be. But we are a little different to our peers. We don’t just want to expose failings, but fix them. We’re your media. We want to help you eradicate crunch, silence toxic gamers, get monetisation right and yes, we want you to make more money. We do that through our website, every day. Our global events – including the Best Places To Work Awards, Investment Summits and Career Fairs – are all designed to solve problems and bring the industry together. And, indeed, with this magazine. We think we have a cracking issue for you this year, no matter who you are. From advice on being a better studio, to tips on getting a Kickstarter off the ground, to exclusive data on the state of the games industry – this is just another way we hope we can help you. Overall, the games industry is not a horrible place to be. It’s exciting and cool and dramatic and it’s changing and improving all the time. But it is hard, which makes our job – as your business press – even more important.
GAMESINDUSTRY.BIZ MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 A Gamer Network/ReedPOP Production
EDITORIAL Publisher Christopher Dring Christopher.Dring@gamesindustry.biz
Sales Manager Chris Buckley Chris.Buckley@gamesindustry.biz Trade Events Manager: Charlotte Nangle Charlotte.Nangle@gamesindustry.biz
MANAGEMENT
Editor-In-Chief Matt Handrahan
Gamer Network MD/VP ReedPOP UK Simon Maxwell
US Editor Brendan Sinclair
Gamer Network Founder/ Global Games Strategy Rupert Loman
UK Editor James Batchelor Staff Writer Rebekah Valentine Staff Writer Haydn Taylor
DESIGN Art Direction Karl Cox
Christopher Dring Publisher GamesIndustry.biz
ADVERTISING
Design Karl Cox / Jacob Jones
President Lance Fensterman
SPECIAL THANKS Adam Buter • Alexi Cafelle • Liz Prince Lisa Carter • Piers Harding-Rolls • Simon Little Mat Piscatella • Jennifer McLean • Russell Kay Hinako Tsunoda • Jamie Smith • Nina Collins Dan Marshall • Emily Knox
PRINTING & DISTRIBUTION Publication Printers
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2019…THE STORY SO FAR Summer 19
THE HEADLINES
VOL.3
GOOGLE DECLARES WAR ON PHYSICAL CONSOLES
ACTIVISION SLASHES 800 JOBS FOLLOWING BUNGIE DIVORCE
Tech giant Google announced that “the future of gaming is not a box” at GDC after it revealedits new cloud streaming service. Google Stadia will utilise the firm’s strong cloud technology and even tie with YouTube so that gamers can play the latest titles with just a click of a button. However, no details were revealed regarding content and pricing.
Call of Duty publisher Activision has cut 8% of its staff as part of a wider company restructure. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said the move is in order to remove unnecessary spending and focus back on core franchises. It follows Activision’s break up with Bungie and the Destiny franchise in January. Meanwhile, rival super publisher EA suffered poor financial results, and announced that it too would be cutting some 350 roles – including heavily reducing its presence in Russia and Japan.
US GAMES STUDIOS UNDER FIRE FROM FURIOUS EMPLOYEES
Game developers in North America have condemned their employers for a culture of over-working staff. BioWare, Epic Games, and NetherRealm all came under fire from staff speaking to various media outlets. It followed similar criticism against Rockstar last year for apparent tough working conditions during the completion of Red Dead Redemption II. It has resulted in renewed calls for the games development community to unionise in the US.
The State Of Play
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NINTENDO SIMULTANEOUSLY MISSES AND BEATS SWITCH SALES TARGETS Nintendo Switch sold just shy of 17 million units during its last financial year, three million lower than initially estimated. However, the console smashed its software target. The firm initially expected to sell 100 million Switch games during the financial year, a number it hit by the end of its third quarter. By the end of its financial year, the company sold just shy of 111 million Switch games. Surprised shareholders have been unsure of how to react to the performance, and Nintendo’s share price continues to fluctuate.
APEX LEGENDS LANDS OUT OF NOWHERE TO BECOME THIS YEAR’S BIGGEST NEW GAME EA shock launched a new freeto-play battle royale game from Titanfall developers Respawn Entertainment in February. Apex Legends was announced and launched on the same day, and reached 50 million players in under 30 days. EA said that almost a third of the game’s players are new to the company’s business. CEO Andrew Wilson described it as the “fastestgrowing new game we’ve ever had.”
However, despite its early success, EA still posted disappointing financial results following the under-performance of its other big new IP, Anthem.
Epic Games spends big to end Steam’s PC dominance The Epic Store continues to spend significant sums of money in attracting major games to its platform, and away from Steam. Metro Exodus, The Division 2, The Walking Dead: The Final Season, Borderlands 3 and more than 30 other titles have been signed to the platform. Epic has discussed how three exclusive titles – Metro Exodus, World War Z and Satisfactory – have gone on to sell better than expected.
World War Z shifted 320,000 units on the store during its opening two weeks alone. However, some studios have come under fire from gamers for cancelling planned Steam versions in favour of Epic Store exclusivity. The likes of Koch Media with Metro Exodus and Snapshot Games with Phoenix Point have had to address dissatisfied fans and contend with refund requests and review bombing.
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13.9m
EUROPEAN TOP 10 CONSOLE/PC GAMES (Q1 2019)* 1. Grand Theft Auto V
AAA PC/CONSOLE DOWNLOADS*
2. FIFA 19 3. Resident Evil 2
The number of AAA PC/console downloads** sold in the UK between April 1, 2018 and March 31, 2019 – making it Europe’s biggest digital territory
4. Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
Around the world
5. Red Dead Redemption II 6. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
(Source: GSD)
7. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege 8. Anthem 9. Kingdom Hearts III 10. Battlefield V
-2
% 1/6
DROP IN GAMES SPENDING A steep drop in hardware sales means that total spending on games in the US dropped 2% to $3.2 billion for Q1 2019
ONE IN EVERY SIX GAMES SOLD IN ITALY IS A FIFA TITLE
(Source: NPD)
(Source: GSD)
Only in Denmark is that figure higher, where one fifth of all games sold is a FIFA product
US
TOP FIVE SMARTPHONE GAMES (REVENUE) January 1, 2019 - April 15, 2019
Candy Crush Saga
$75,061,176
Clash of Clans
$53,724,022
Toon Blast
$47,690,230
Pokémon Go
$44,662,448
Slotmania, Vegas Casino Slots
$40,947,952
(Source: Apptopia)
$13m
The amount of money generated by AAA PC and console downloads** in Africa (Source: GSD)
France is the only country in Europe where Nintendo Switch overtook PS4 as the No.1 console.* It outsold PS4 by 37%
*Physical sales counted from France, UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Denmark, Austria, Finally Norway. Digital sales from Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kuwait Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar,
Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and UAE. ** Digital sales supplied by Activision Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Codemasters, EA, Focus Home Interactive, Koch Media, Microsoft, Milestone, Paradox Interactive, Sega, Sony, Square Enix, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Warner Bros. Nintendo, Bethesda, and Konami digital sales are not included.
The State Of Play
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1/3 Finland is the only market in Europe* that sells more Xbox One games than Switch games (between April 1, 2018 - March 31, 2019). The country’s love of Ice Hockey means that NHL 19 is also the second best-selling game in the territory (behind Red Dead Redemption II)
A THIRD OF ALL GAMES SOLD IN THE NETHERLANDS HAVE A PEGI 18 RATING
69% of console/PC games sold in Denmark are PS4 titles (Source: GSD)
The highest share of 18-rated games across EMEAA*
(Source: GSD)
KINGDOM HEARTS III Kingdom Hearts III was the best-selling game in Japan for two months running ( January and February), selling over 780,000 copies
969,223
SWITCH CONSOLES SOLD IN JAPAN The number of Switch consoles sold in Japan between January 1 2019 to March 31 2019. Nintendo alone has sold 2.32 million games over the quarter
62%
(Source: Famitsu)
THE MAJORITY OF CHINESE GAMERS ARE STRONGLY DRAWN TO ESPORTS China is the No.1 market worldwide for professional gaming (Source: Niko Partners)
$15.6b The revenue from mobile games in China during 2018, eclipsing PC games’ $15.21 billion
TOP TEN PC/CONSOLE DOWNLOADS (2018) **
India
TOP FIVE SMARTPHONE GAMES (REVENUE)
1. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege 2. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 3. Grand Theft Auto V
January 1, 2019 - April 15, 2019
4. Red Dead Redemption II
PUBG Mobile
$8,986,355
5. Far Cry 5
Coin Master
$1,960,783
6. Monster Hunter: World
Teen Patti by Octro
$805,455
7. FIFA 19
Candy Crush Saga
$629,973
Lords Mobile: War Kingdom $605,762 (Source: Apptopia)
8. Just Cause 3 9. NBA 2K19 10. Spider-Man (Source: GSD)
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AAA CONSOLE DOWNLOAD SALES SPIKE ACROSS EUROPE Exclusive figures reveal rapid digitisation as consumers drop physical in favour or digital AAA console sales in two European markets are now primarily digital, GamesIndustry.biz can reveal. The latest figures from GSD highlight how consumers are rapidly moving away from buying games on a disc. The data firm took a selection of major AAA franchises – including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Star Wars, Batman, Battlefield, Monster Hunter, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, FIFA, Dragon Ball, Need for Speed and Tom Clancy – and compared their digital/physical sales split during the first quarter of 2019 with the same period in 2018. The most digital friendly region is the Nordics, where 66% of AAA console games (PS4 and Xbox One only) are now sold as downloads – a rise of 13% compared with the same period in 2018. The UK is in second place, with 56% of its 1.36m games being sold via Xbox Live and PlayStation Network (UK data for 2018 is not available). The most physical friendly market is Italy, where just a third of console game sales are digital. However, in Q1 2018 only a quarter of AAA game sales in Italy were downloads. The fastest rising digital market is France. In 2018, 31% of the selected franchises were sold digitally, with the rest being sold in a box. However, by 2019 that has increased to 47%. The next market to become predominantly digital will be ‘GSA’ (Germany, Switzerland and Austria). The market is currently 50/50 between physical and digital AAA game sales.
Despite the rapid change, physical games remain the dominant market for the time being. Across all European territories, 52% of AAA console games were sold in a box during Q1 2019. The study was conducted by ISFE’s GSD charts project on behalf of GamesIndustry.biz.
UK Best Places To Work Awards returns The GamesIndustry.biz Best Places To Work Awards will return to London on Friday, September 20. The event will once again be held at London’s Ham Yard Hotel. UK games companies looking to take part in the awards can do so now by contacting: bestplacestowork@ gamesindustry.biz. This is the third year of the awards, which has seen big winners such as Creative Assembly, Criterion, Frontier and PlayStation London Studio,
plus smaller outfits such as Mojiworks and ustwo Games. The awards judging involves two in-depth surveys (and no judging panel) – one for the employer to fill in and another one for the employees. Both surveys combine to create an overall company score, with the highest results winning the coveted Best Places To Work Awards badge. Only the winners will be announced. Participants who enter the awards but do not win can still request
a free staff feedback report, enabling them to identify areas of improvement. Alongside the Best Places badge winners, the awards will also identify excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility, Diversity, Health and Wellbeing and more. Meanwhile, the event itself will also feature talks on topics such as working culture, training and diversity. The GamesIndustry.biz Best Places To Work Awards 2019 is sponsored by Amiqus and Playground Games.
The State Of Play
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Cloud gaming expected to reach $2.5bn by 2023 IHS Markit has raised its estimates for cloud gaming following the reveal of Google Stadia. The firm says that cloud gaming in 2018 generated $387 million, primarily through Sony’s PlayStation Now service and various individual gaming offers through Nintendo Switch. It now anticipates such services will generate $630 million this year, and exceed $1.2 billion by 2021. Currently, the firm projects cloud gaming will reach $2.5 billion by 2023. IHS states that, in 2018, there were 16 different cloud services – including cloud gaming content services and cloud gaming PC services like Shadow. And this is expected to riseconsiderably over the next two years.
“We expect the introduction of 5G to have a positive impact on the adoption of cloud gaming services,” said IHS Markit’s head of games research Piers Harding-Rolls. “5G technology will be broadly adopted when the infrastructure, devices and operator plans becomes commonplace. In terms of the five year outlook, we expect the positive impact to be felt from 2021 onwards, with the biggest impact coming in 2023. “Cloud gaming content subscription services are expected to make up a majority of consumer spending over the forecast period. This will increasingly be supplemented by in-game monetisation.”
GI.biz Investment Summit is back at PAX in August A second GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit for the US market will take place on August 28 during PAX Dev. The Investment Summit is an event that connects games investors and publishers with indie creators, featuring a series of talks, networking, and oneto-one meetings. Millions of dollars have exchanged hands due to the event, which has been running for ten years in the UK before it made its US debut at PAX East in March. The PAX East event featured talks from Epic Games, Kickstarter, Humble Bundle and Xbox,
with more than 30 investors and publishers and over 120 developers. The next event is sponsored by Xsolla. For more details, visit: w w w. g a m e s i n d u s t r y. biz/events/investmentsummit-2019
… meanwhile VR growth will be slow VR game sales will rise gradually over the next five years, estimates IHS Markit. The firm expects VR games to surpass $1 billion this year, an increase of $100 million over last year. The data firm currently expects VR games to reach $1.94 billion by 2023. IHS believes that monetisation of VR content will gradually improve, and that standalone headsets (like
Oculus Quest) will establish the largest installed base across all headset types during the forecasted period. “We forecast continued slow adoption of virtual reality headsets over the next five years,” said IHS Markit’s head of games research Piers Harding-Rolls. “Standalone headset adoption will accelerate during the forecast period, which will help grow the content market opportunity.”
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No more excuses for the lack of women at E3 Critic Anita Sarkeesian on the need for better representation, both with games characters and on-stage presenters
James Batchelor UK Editor
Leading feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian
E3 2015, some declared, was the year of the woman. The return of Tomb Raider and Mirror’s Edge was complemented by the debut of new female-led IPs like Horizon: Zero Dawn and ReCore. The diversity of gaming protagonists seemed to be improving. Anita Sarkeesian was not so sure. “Studies show that if 15% of background characters are female, you think it’s 50/50 – our brains just add that in,” she says. “I thought that’s what was happening – we have such a lack of female protagonists that these felt like a bigger deal than these actually were. So, being the Debbie Downer that I am, I was like, ‘Let’s just count’.” And count she did. The first of Feminist Frequency’s gender breakdowns for E3 showed that female characters only made up 9% of all announcements at the 2015 event. Males made up 32%. It was not the year of the woman. Since then, Sarkeesian and her team have done the same analysis every year and – with the exception of 2016 – games with exclusively female protagonists have only ever accounted for 7% to 9% of announcements. In 2016 – “a very dark moment for the industry” – there were only two female-led games: Horizon and ReCore, again. E3 2016 had no new female protagonists. Sarkeesian acknowledges the limits of her analysis; it focuses on games at the major press conferences, and separates titles where you can design or choose from multiple characters. But she maintains this study can be a useful look at wider trends. “E3 is the annual state of the industry,” she says. “This is where studios and publishers decide what’s worth showing and sharing. So while [our study] doesn’t take into account every game released in a year, it shows what the industry thinks is most important.”
GLOBAL REPRESENTATION E3 is also the wider world’s window into games. With TV crews as abundant as traditional games journalists, no other event in the industry calendar is covered by as wide a range of press. It can be argued the event primarily targets a hardcore audience, but there’s no escaping the way it represents video games on a global scale. “Until something takes the place of E3, this is what we’ve got and we need to recognise it holds weight,” says Sarkeesian. It doesn’t help that E3 focuses primarily on AAA console titles which, again, cater to a specific audience. Broader representation can be found in the indie space but while Xbox and PlayStation feature some of these games, it’s usually in a montage. They are shown so briefly, with so little information, that Feminist Frequency is often unable to include them in its analysis. Meanwhile, the shift towards multiplayer titles with customisable avatars like Fortnite means there has been “less resources and room for narrative games, which means there weren’t more solo female characters.” By the time you read this, E3 2019’s press conferences will have passed but Sarkeesian doesn’t expect much improvement. “I’m not giving up, but I’m looking at four years’ worth of data telling me the exact same thing,” she says. “I’m really curious to see what happens this year because my best guess, based on the facts, is it’s not going to change. The industry hasn’t changed in four years in terms of this particular issue. “There are other areas in which we need to look at growth and change for the industry, but right now, the sheer baseline of ‘have more female characters’ is failing.” NO EXCUSES Change was always going to be slow. AAA games take three to four years to develop, but the conversation about the lack of female characters has become louder over the years – particularly since the Kickstarter campaign for Sarkeesian’s critique series, Tropes vs Women in Video Games. “That was seven years ago,” Sarkeesian says. “Developers have had seven years to educate
No more excuses for the lack of women at E3 13
At E3 press conferences in 2016, only Horizon: Zero Dawn and ReCore featured a female lead character
“Developers have had seven years to educate themselves and be better” Anita Sarkeesian
E3 2018 was another male-dominated show
themselves and be better. I had conversations about this two years after [the series launched], and I said, ‘We need to give them more time.’ But it’s been seven fucking years. There are no more excuses.” She’s pleased to see representation in games has improved in some ways, but it’s often a case of one step forwards, two steps back. Sarkeesian cites Watch Dogs 2: a game about a black man fighting injustice and police brutality, but it’s unable to explore these issues because it’s limited by the mechanics of its genre. Still, she remains hopeful now that people who have traditionally been marginalised are making their voices heard as writers, developers and media critics. “Because of the people who have gotten the courage or space to talk about these issues, the conversation has changed and so we have seen progress,” she says. “I know these data sets haven’t changed, but there are other ways to assess this: there are big AAA games with females who don’t look like the old Lara Croft, black men as protagonists, or trans sidekicks that are done in honest, healthy ways and not as a joke. They’re not the majority, but they exist. There are teams trying to be better with representation. “The Last of Us’ DLC about Ellie being queer would never have happened ten years ago. But we created a mainstream conversation forcing studios to reflect and people to look at their own values. And the people in those studios that are queer, trans, women, people of colour, disabled – all these other identity markers – are able to be seen more and speak up in ways that aren’t going to hurt them.”
Sadly, those people rarely make it to the big stages at E3. Feminist Frequency’s analysis shows that Bethesda, for example, had 12 male presenters on stage during its 2018 conference and only one woman. Ubisoft had two women, but 14 men. Sarkeesian notes there are many reasons for this, such as the lack of women in leadership positions, but also the audience reactions that come from stepping into such a wide-reaching media spotlight. “Some parts of the gaming community is horribly toxic and treats women like shit,” she says, adding that social media platforms aren’t doing their due diligence in cracking down on such behaviour. “Why would marginalised folks want to put themselves out there?” The E3 gender breakdown is just one part of a much larger conversation, and Sarkeesian acknowledges that large systemic issues like this can make it seem impossible for anyone to feel like they can contribute to its solution. “But it’s the people reading this article right now that need to fix it,” she concludes. “Too often we look at it and think, ‘yeah, but I’m not a bad guy, I can’t do anything about it’ or ‘Well, what can I do in my space?’ “From a base level, you can just speak up for people being marginalised in your work space. You can bring up these issues in your next creative meetings, work to advocate the hiring of a more inclusive staff. There’s so many things that can be done and I think too often we feel like the problem is so big, we don’t have a role in it. But all of us have to participate in it.”
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AAA games are at “an interesting crossroads”with storytelling Revered creator Amy Hennig feels “overwhelmed” by the scale of AAA games, which have grown too big for their own stories
Matt Handrahan Editor-In-Chief
Millions of Red Dead Redemption II players will never finish the story
Consider every story-driven game that you’ve never completed; the cities left to ruin in the hands of a crazed villain, the hostages not rescued, the life-changing secrets undiscovered. Now consider how many of those were made by the industry’s AAA publishers and developers, too bloated to be digestible. This was the opening topic of a fascinating talk by Amy Hennig at the Reboot Develop Blue conference in Croatia. After long stints at both Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog, Hennig is widely considered to be one of the industry’s most important storytellers, and yet she confessed to feelings of alienation from the very games she has so skilfully made.
“We’re at an interesting crossroads in the industry, and I’m at a personal crossroads in terms of figuring out where I want to land next,” Hennig said. “I feel that those two things are related a little bit.” The period for which Hennig is best known is her ten years at Naughty Dog, which encompassed a trilogy of Uncharted games and The Last of Us. Both Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (2007) and The Last of Us (2013) were released on PlayStation 3, and Hennig marvelled at how much progress in terms of storytelling is evident when those games are viewed side-by-side now. But something else is just as evident; a change less in Naughty Dog than in the sector of the games industry in which the studio operated. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was a single-player game, Hennig said, with no multiplayer and just a handful of collectables.
The Challenge of AAA Storytelling 15
Most players could finish the whole thing in eight or nine hours. “Compare that against Uncharted 4, which is double the size,” she added. “The same thing for God of War versus God of War 2018, the same thing for Insomniac’s games from the mid-2000s versus Spider-Man. Across the board, we’ve doubled everything in size; we’ve also doubled our development time, and doubled our team sizes – probably more than doubled in each of these cases – and yet our price-point hasn’t changed. “Some of the pressures and the controversies that we see inside the industry “What dismays me are coming from that; the fact that the scope of right now is that it what we’re working on has doesn’t feel like we’re increased to such a huge making the whole degree, but the price-point spectrum of games that of our product hasn’t.”
Amy Hennig speaking at Reboot Develop
we could be making” Amy Hennig
PRICE IS WRONG
That price-point – the $60 tag broadly associated with big-budget games – has been in place since “the cartridge days,” Hennig said, and she acknowledged that, “nobody wants that [price] to go up.” Publishers have been just as reluctant to enforce a higher baseline price-point on consumers as the consumers themselves would have been to accept the need to pay more. “If you made a finite game, it was perceived as a rental,” Hennig said. “Online forums would say, ‘Rent it, or buy it used, or buy it and sell it back.’ Publishers’ response was, ‘How do we create value?’ – or even just the illusion of value?
Where you see games with multiplayer tacked on, that was trying to create this illusion of value, where you didn’t want to trade it in.” The spread of games-as-aservice and monetisation tools like loot boxes are a direct result of this unresolvable tension; between satisfying consumer demand for bigger and more sophisticated games, and the difficulty of charging more upfront to recoup that extra investment. One of the casualties of this shift is the kind of game that Hennig really wants to make – games like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. “A lot of where we’re at now in terms of scope and complexity and cost is sort of self-inflicted,” Hennig said. “We’ve changed from intentionally creating these finite experiences to creating experiences that just don’t end. “That’s very hard for me as a storyteller. It’s a very weird place to be, because story, for me, is by definition finite and intentionally authored. It’s not something that just happens through a series of events that unspool procedurally... It has landmarks and a deliberate end. “We’re in a world where we’re not even making finite games, and when we are they’re 20, 40 or 100 hours, and the common wisdom is that most players don’t finish them. We have these statistics inside the industry; some publishers, they realise that 10% of their audience is going to see the entire story. And that’s upsetting.” STORY TIME Behaviour that would be damning toward the product in a medium like cinema – walking away from a film halfway through – is now a common reaction with big-budget, narrative-driven games. Even as developers are becoming more and more skilled at telling stories, market trends are pushing those games in a direction where the story itself will rarely be experienced in full. “This may seem like we’re laying it at the players’ feet, and I don’t mean it that way at all,” Hennig said. “What I’m saying is that, as a gamer, I’m so drawn to the games we’re making now, but I know that we’ll never get to the end of them. I won’t have the time. “We’re sort of loathe to talk about this as long-time gamers, because it seems like when you talk about feeling a little distanced or disenfranchised from your hobby, it can
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The Challenge of AAA Storytelling
Amy Hennig is famous for her work with the Uncharted series
seem like you’re somehow losing your gamer cred. But privately, my entire group of gamer friends and colleagues, we all privately confess to each other that we’re sort of overwhelmed. “Sometimes this gets misinterpreted as a dogmatic call to arms, or a response like, ‘We shouldn’t be making these games’ – of course we should. I just think that what dismays me right now is that it doesn’t feel like we’re making the whole spectrum of games that we could be making – at least not in mainstream, publishing and developing, AAA. “Everything is just doubled down on mega blockbusters, which are way more massive in scope than they used to be... They are all Hail Mary bets now.” PLAYER’S DIGEST This appears to be the “crossroads” at which Hennig finds herself as a creator; one whose entire career has been spent making the kind of single-player game that has appeared on the brink of extinction over the last few years. Indeed, much of that debate was fuelled by EA’s decision to close Visceral Games, where Hennig was deeply involved in a “story-based, linear adventure game” set in the Star Wars universe. At the time, EA cited the need to alter the project’s course, “to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come.”
“ Across the board, we’ve doubled everything in size; we’ve also doubled our development time, and doubled our team sizes – and yet our price-point hasn’t changed” Amy Hennig
However, while this trend has made an apparent impact on her career trajectory, it is just as keenly felt by Hennig as a player. More and more, she said, it has been necessary to turn to indie games to find the “finite experiences” that satisfy her appetite for good stories. “I’m finding the greatest reward in playing games from that space, even though I’m absolutely dumbstruck with admiration at the big games that have been winning awards this year,” she said. “God of War, and SpiderMan, and Red Dead [Redemption II]; I’m full of admiration for them, but there’s also this sense of regret that I know I’ll never get to experience them fully. “And then, as a creator, I think about how that would make me feel.” In that sense, Hennig argued, the industry’s biggest publishers are increasingly out of step with major companies in other screen-based media. In television, platforms like Netflix have effectively removed the factors that once limited episodes to 25-minute and 45-minute lengths, and yet creators and consumers continue to embrace them – “partly because that’s what we’re used to, but also because that’s what’s digestible.” “That’s how Uncharted was structured. Each of those chapters was about the size of a half-hour of television, or an hour of television... There was an opportunity for the player to go, ‘Okay, that’s good, more tomorrow.’ Or go, ‘One more, one more.’ Nobody [in television] is going, ‘Open wide, here’s ten hours of television,’ because the viewer might go, ‘I can’t.’ But in games we’re saying, ‘You gotta play Red Dead, it gets really good about 30 hours in.’ You hear that and don’t you just die inside? I don’t have 30 hours.”
Insomniac’s Spider-Man is huge compared with games it was making ten years ago
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The recent sales of immersive sims like Deus Ex have been underwhelming
If immersive sims disappear, then I disappear System Shock developer explains why the struggles of Dishonored and Deus Ex won’t deter him from his chosen genre
James Batchelor UK Editor
Immersive sims is a genre all about choice, but fans are rapidly running out of them. Deus Ex, Thief and Dishonored are all on hiatus following the disappointing performance of their latest outings, and the poor reception for Underworld Ascendant (the spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld, deemed by many to be the first immersive sim) makes a follow-up unlikely. It would be easy to argue the genre is dying, at least at the “We’re not even competing level of major publishers, with System Shock and although the scope of System Shock 2; we’re such projects also makes competing with people’s them difficult for indies memories of them. And to deliver. We asked Warren Spector – their memories are not of terrible 2D animation, blocky known for immersive sims including Deus graphics and simple levels” Ex, Thief and System Warren Spector, OtherSide Entertainment Shock – why the segment is struggling.
“The reality is we ask people to work,” he told GamesIndustry.biz. “It’s an interesting thing. The immersive simulation is not the kind of game where if you keep moving forward, like a shark, you’ll eventually win. It’s not the kind of genre where you just solve a puzzle the designer created for you, or kill everything that moves and you win. It’s a genre where you have to decide what to do, you have to choose how to interact with the world. That is work, it requires brain power. So I suspect that’s part of it.” But surely that’s integral to the genre’s appeal? These games are all about choice. If a player wants to treat Deus Ex, for example, as a shooter and go in all guns blazing, they can. Alternatively, they can approach it like a stealth game, or concentrate on hacking and other non-combat abilities to find new avenues forward. Essentially, it’s like an RPG but without number-crunching or the grind. “That’s exactly right,” said Spector. “The odd thing is I always thought, and still think, that’s the most mainstream idea you could possibly think of. If I play a shooter or a stealth game and I’m not good enough, all I can do is stop playing. Same if I’m playing a puzzle
The Future Of Immersive Sims 19 game and I’m not clever enough. In the immersive simulation, if the combat or stealth is too hard you try something else.” IMMERSIVE EVOLUTION Spector suggested that part of the genre’s decline might be because elements, even the entire ethos, can be found in other games. While he’s careful not to claim direct influence, he cited Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a game with, “some of the tenets of immersive simulation.” Similarly, the Far Cry series has been built around enabling players to adapt their playstyle how they see fit. With immersive sims’ key pillars being adopted by shooters, RPGs and more, could the end be nigh for the genre itself ? “It’s not going to disappear,” said Spector. “Well, if it does, I’m going to disappear. By choice. “One of the ways to address this on System Shock 3 and at OtherSide in general is we’re trying to keep our budgets in line with our expected sales. Given our budget, we don’t have to sell 100 million copies, we don’t have to make $1 billion for a major publisher to succeed and to make money. Our budgets now are, by choice, more modest, and that means we don’t have to sell as many copies. We have a dedicated audience, people who love these games. We have people who love making them. So all we have to do is adjust our thinking to reach that audience.” Under the circumstances, it would be tempting for a developer to pivot, or at least adapt its design to somehow address whatever it is about other titles in this space that disappoints players. But Spector insisted the woes experienced by so many similar franchises have not had an impact on his vision for his current project. “It probably should have affected the way I think about System Shock 3, but honestly it hasn’t,” he said. “I’ve been saying for years I make the games I want to make, the way I want to make them. If you don’t want that, let’s part ways now and stay friends. I’ve got a picture in my head [of System Shock 3], I’ve got a team that buys into that who are going to make that picture a reality, and we’ll let the chips fall where they may.” SHOCK FACTOR The real challenge with System Shock 3 is living up to the legacy of its forebears. It’s been 20 years since System Shock 2, and striking the balance between staying true to the old games but adopting the advancements of newer ones is “terrifying,” says Spector. “We’re not even competing with System Shock and System Shock 2; we’re competing
with people’s memories of them. And their memories are not of terrible-looking 2D animation, blocky graphics and simple levels.” System Shock 3 and Underworld Ascendant have given Spector the chance to revisit and improve on some of his earliest creations, although the rights to his other past works now lie in the hands of other publishers. The veteran has in the past described the original Deus Ex as his dream project, yet while you might expect he would be upset to no longer have control over it, he instead offered praise for Square Enix’s handling of the franchise so far. “Not many people get the opportunity to work on something that’s bigger than they are, so it’s kinda like, ‘Oh look, my baby is growing up.’ And the people who worked on Deus Ex: Human Revolution respected the franchise, they got what we were trying to do. “There were things I would have done differently, and I told them – and they ignored me, which is probably the right thing to do because it’s their game now.” As mentioned, Spector remains confident that immersive sims won’t disappear. Instead, he believes developers’ ability to create more complex simulations of things like physics and other elements of the world will only improve the scope of them. Players will be able to “apply actual logic” to a world and the decisions they make, using these simulated systems as a tool to solve the in-game problems they face. “Also, it’s probably time for us to go multiplayer,” he concluded. “I think we have to see that. We’ve been talking about it for years, nobody’s done it right.” The history of the immersive sim is one of single-player campaigns, so how on Earth would a multiplayer version work? “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” Spector said. Or perhaps use a stealth takedown, or hack our website – there’s always another choice.
Warren Spector is currently working on a new System Shock
OtherSide Entertainment released Underworld Ascendant in November last year
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Why life after Dead Cells does not mean growth Motion Twin’s Steve Filby and Sébastien Bénard on why the studio will remain small after the roguelike’s success
Rebekah Valentine Staff Writer
Motion Twin didn’t come out of nowhere with 2017’s hit Dead Cells, even if it seemed that way to players not familiar with web browser games. Rather, the game was a last-ditch effort at survival from a team that has existed for nearly two decades. Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, Motion Twin designer Sébastien Bénard refers to Dead Cells as “the last chance for our studio.” Motion Twin was founded in 2001 and for years mostly made web games with considerable success. But as the market for such games declined, the studio knew it needed to change. Which is where marketing manager Steve Filby came in. “They brought me on to help with the transfer from web to mobile,” Filby says. “They were seriously ready to hang themselves by the end of it. But mobile games didn’t work, and we hadn’t been able to reproduce our web success. And it’s a worker’s cooperative, so they were like: ‘If we’re going to go to hell in a handcart, let’s do it doing something we want to do.’” Two and a half years later, that decision paid off. Dead Cells fully launched in April of 2018 to critical praise, numerous awards, and over one million units sold.
WORKING CO-OPERATIVELY Both Bénard and Filby are adamant that while Dead Cells’ success has given Motion Twin the ability to scale up its operation, hire more, and think bigger, that’s not what the studio wants. As a worker co-operative, every employee at Motion Twin has equal pay and equal say in the decisions made, and for them a smaller size is ideal to keep that structure functioning as well as it has. But Motion Twin doesn’t have a boss who can lay off employees whenever they feel things have become too large. While the staff certainly will shrink whenever someone leaves of their own volition, the team also has a process by which employees can voice concerns with others. Group discussions are used to resolve disputes, and any layoff decisions are made just like all other decisions – as a team. “If we wanted to grow and be 30 people or 50 people, that might work,” Filby says. “But Motion Twin is a worker’s cooperative with no hierarchy and no desire to impose any kind of structural team-based leadership. That naturally limits the size of the team. Eight for us is good, if we get to ten that’s pushing it.Aside from wanting to keep the structure of the cooperative functioning well, Bénard and Filby say that they’ve seen a trend in the industry of teams having major successes with a game, then hiring lots of employees to
Dead Cells has been a big hit, selling over one million units
Life After Dead Cells work on the next big project without scaling their organization and communication protocols to fit the size. Bénard notes that keeping things small avoids problems like feature creep and, as he puts it, “growing in a stupid way just because we have money.” “It’s possible to do [a co-op] in larger systems, but most of the time when you have “If you’re not a worker in that kind of equality, Motion Twin, you’re out. you need many more You can’t sit back, kick your systems than in a normal legs up, and collect the company,” he says. “You dividends” have to make sure people really communicate, Steve Filby, Motion Twin no information is lost, and everyone can express their feelings. Because we’re small, we can just talk to each other. But if you scale larger, even to 15, you have to think what happens when a decision is made and someone is not there.” A JOINT FUTURE Bénard and Filby say that when Motion Twin was formed, its goal was never specifically to make a co-op. The founders wanted to avoid grave issues they had seen elsewhere, and the co-op structure seemed an effective solution. “Motion Twin’s founders were former developer interns in [Kalisto Entertainment],” Bénard says. “It ended up being a good example of a big company going really bad, really quickly. They were traumatized by that experience and they wanted to make a company that was not about making sure it would survive just long enough to pay them. They wanted to make a company which was strong enough to survive as long as possible.
Filby adds: “When they first started the company, it was a traditional company. But when you own shares in a company and you make money, those shares go up in value and then you don’t necessarily have to be there and work. You can just skim money off the top. And they said, ‘This doesn’t feel right.’ So for example, if you’re not a worker in Motion Twin, you’re out. You buy your shares when you come in, and when you leave you sell them for the same amount. You can’t sit back, kick your legs up, and collect the dividends. “And there are still problems with it. It forces us, for example, not to have a lot of money in a stockpile. The money goes to the people who work in the company, and that means we’re always in a situation where we’re like, ‘What are we going to make?’ Because if we stop making games, then that’s it.” “What are we going to make?” is indeed the question Motion Twin is asking itself once again. Bénard says the studio will certainly not go back to mobile, but that it also doesn’t want to make a game similar to Dead Cells or a Dead Cells 2. Though the team is still brainstorming ideas, one thing the developers at Motion Twin do know for sure is that they want to be challenged in the same way they were with Dead Cells. “The studio structure allows everyone to have an idea,” Filby says. “Because of that, if you come with an idea, you have to convince seven other people that your idea is better than everybody else’s and that that’s the idea everyone wants to work on.” Bénard concludes: “Dead Cells was quite a challenge to make with eight people – most games like that have more like 20-people teams. We don’t know what our next game will be, but we know that we want this kind of challenge again, to make something which is a little too big for us, but make sure we find ways to squeeze it into a very small team.”
Motion Twin’s Sébastien Bénard (above left) and Steve Filby (above)
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The long decline of the “narrative paramedic” in games writing Rhianna Pratchett and Ubisoft’s Melissa MacCoubrey outline the journey of writing in game production, from afterthought to essential
Matthew Handrahan Editor in Chief
Game production has changed in myriad ways over the last 15 years, but few aspects of development have been elevated more than the craft of writing. That idea shone through in the juxtaposition of two talks at the Fun & Serious Festival in Bilbao, Spain; the first given by one of the industry’s most experienced and publicfacing writers, and the second by a relatively new talent fresh off her biggest project to date. The first speaker was Rhianna Pratchett, who scarcely needs an introduction, but is probably best known for the reinvention of Lara Croft in the rebooted Tomb Raider series. In that case, Pratchett was given the time and freedom necessary to rejuvenate one of gaming’s true icons. It wasn’t always the case. Pratchett recalled her first job writing on a game with Larian Studios, which she picked up after leaving a full-time position on PC Zone magazine. It was 2002, and writing was rarely even acknowledged as part of how games were made. “I didn’t know anything about games writing at the time,” Pratchett said. “In all the time I’d been a journalist, there was no need; nobody had sat me down and said ‘here’s the writer,’ or even ‘here’s the designer, who also does some writing.’ Nobody talked about it at all. It was really uncharted territory. “I had no mentors because most of the time I was the only writer on a team. I was very rarely in a situation where there was somebody on the team who knew more than I did. I had to cut through the narrative jungle on my own, and fail and succeed on my own.” EMERGENCY SERVICE Even as Pratchett found her feet and started to understand the specifics of writing for games, the industry itself was slow to catch up. She coined a term that encapsulates what the majority of her jobs at that time asked her to do: “narrative paramedic,” an emergency
worker brought in to surgically attach stories to games in need of meaning. The one example that stands out from all of the others is Mirror’s Edge, she said, the stylish parkour game that EA DICE released in 2010. “Everything had already been designed with no narrative in mind when I was brought in,”she explained. “The levels had all been designed,the look of the world had been designed, the way the character moved through the world and the way the character looked had been designed… But nobody had thought about why. “Basically, a lot of it was done because it was cool, or it felt right. I had to go in and wrap a narrative around what was there, which would be a completely backward way of working in other entertainment mediums.” Pratchett assured the audience that there are worse stories, which tumble from the mouths of games writers any time enough alcohol has passed their lips. One writer, she said, was asked to produce 100,000 words in a single week for a game nearing completion. Another was, “brought in to rewrite every cut-scene, but each line had to be the exact length of the line it was replacing.” “Writing and narrative were not given the same love and attention as other aspects of game development,” she added. “It was seen as a second class citizen; as something that anyone could do, that you didn’t need to be particularly skilled. If you could write words and you’d read a book or seen a TV show, it meant that you could write the story. “It was the only part of game development that, for a long time, was not done by professionals skilled in that field.” Mirror’s Edge was barely ten years ago, but Pratchett said that writing and narrative now play a major part in the creation of a wide range of video games. Not only are there more professional writers specialising in this form of entertainment, the industry is also generating its own talent.
The Decline Of The ‘Narrative Paramedic’ “Writing was the only part of game development that, for a long time, was not done by professionals skilled in that field” Rhianna Pratchett
The narrative team on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey featured 23 people
Writing is not only recognised as a skill, there are now prestigious awards dedicated to the best examples of the craft. “It makes me feel like an aged veteran,” Pratchett added. “A little bit like Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner. ‘I’ve seen narrative designs on fire on the shoulder of Lara Croft’ -- that kind of thing.” A NEW ERA Ubisoft’s Melissa MacCoubrey, the second speaker, is an example of the industry nurturing its own writing talent, having joined Ubisoft Montreal as a scriptwriting intern in 2013. Since then, she has worked on the Assassin’s Creed series -- including Black Flag and Syndicate -- and was the director of narrative design for last year’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It is an impressive title after just five years in the industry, and it should be noted that, five years into Pratchett’s writing career, job titles like that barely existed. Where Pratchett talked about being the only writer on a given project in her early years, MacCoubrey emphasised how collaborative the writing process is now -- not only with the various disciplines involved in making games,
but with the other people working on writing and narrative within the company. In fact, Ubisoft hosts an internal “narrative conference” each year, which MacCoubrey joked was akin to a UFC-style showdown between writers. “It’s where we give presentations to narrative people on other teams, to show how we did things, why we did things, how we move forward,” she said, unwittingly echoing Pratchett’s description of what EA DICE didn’t do on Mirror’s Edge. “It’s always very helpful.” For the most part, the days of the “narrative paramedic” are over. When asked at what point writers are brought on to a project at Ubisoft, MacCoubrey suggested that they are in place virtually from day one. “The story comes in very early [in the development process],” she said. “When you’re developing systems to put into a game, you’re thinking at the same time about how it’s going to service the story, and how the story is going to lift those systems up.” This is the kind of joined-up thinking between writing and design that was entirely absent during Pratchett’s early career. In Odyssey, MacCoubrey said, even NPCs that the player never interacts with were created in conjunction with the animation team, to be sure that both their movements and their words evoked the various groups that comprised the society and culture of ancient Greece. “With all of those characters, we really try to give them lines that help build the world around you,” she said. “They’re always talking about culturally relevant things.” In AAA games, writing and narrative are now key areas of investment in a way that would have been difficult to imagine 15 years ago. The narrative team on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey comprised 23 people, with a dedicated writing team in all three main studios that worked on the project. “Which is big,” she said, laughing. “But we knew it would have to be big, because we were making a beast. We were making an Odyssey.”
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Narrative design and body slams Former Ubisoft scriptwriter Kim Belair discusses what games developers can learn from professional wrestling
Hayden Taylor Staff Writer
THE ART OF WRESTLING
In his 1957 essay titled The World of Wrestling, French philosopher Roland Barthe explored the mechanics of language and compared wrestling to the grandiloquence of ancient theatre, but Nathan Drake is one of gaming’s most-loved Belair outlined how its strange depth goes heroes. He’s handsome, he’s got perfect hair, much further, and what game developers stand to learn from it. he’s charming, delightful, and a remarkably competent mass murderer who appears “It’s a narrative game centred on largely unphased by his tremendous crimes. one core mechanic,” she said, suggesting that characters like Nathan Drake, who rejects Pointing out the ludonarrative dissonance violence, would be the equivalent of a in Uncharted isn’t exactly the hottest take in “wrestler who hates wrestling”. 2019, but it’s perhaps the best example of the problem in games. Every sequence where “A lot of the time the audience/player Drake kills a dozen people before casually is there to experience your core mechanic,” she continued. “And so if you want to align steeling himself for the next inevitable massacre your values with those of the protagonist, is a moment where his surface level rejection of violence as a necessary evil conflicts you can’t have someone who abhors exactly what they’re doing.” with the player’s embrace of violence She used examples like Insomniac’s as a core mechanic. At the root of this problem is that Spider-Man which, despite featuring violence, avoids murder. When Peter Parker kicks a goon games like Uncharted lack any real means off a building, he also catches them in a web. to further the story or explore character through their mechanics. Wolfenstein is a “I think that the biggest success of wrestling is they are mandated by their nature rare example where this to come back to wrestling as the is less of a problem; the actions of BJ core mechanic,” she added. “We’re not ready to Blazkowicz are informed “So if they want to tell a story give up on murder, by his trauma, violence is of tragedy, if they want to tell but we’re not ready his means of expression. a story of comedy, if they want to create characters It’s how the world has to tell a story of a breakup, interacted with him since if they want to tell a story of who are murderers” childhood, and it’s how a relationship... They all have Kim Belair, Sweet Baby he interacts in return. to rely on wrestling. Speaking with “So the way that they approach GamesIndustry.biz at the given match, the way they Ludicious game festival in Zurich, founder of move and the way they set it up has to convey narrative development company Sweet Baby, a given feeling. That’s where they excel, but we and former Ubisoft Montreal scriptwriter keep trying to pack our games with cutscenes, Kim Belair outlined how professional with a bunch of little devices unrelated to the wrestling succeeds in one core way where core mechanic... In a game that’s primarily about games like Uncharted have always struggled: shooting, how do we express the story? That’s it tells a story through its mechanics. Wrestling going to have to be a cutscene because is the only means through which its writers nothing in the mechanic allows for expression. can spin a narrative, but those constraints Because wrestling is so constrained, they’ve had have let creativity flourish. to be very, very creative with how they do it.”
Narrative design & body slams 25
WITHIN THE SQUARED CIRCLED
Kim Belair, founder of narrative specialist Sweet Baby
One example Belair provided in how intrinsically the narrative of wrestling is tied to its conceit is the entrance of wrestlers into the ring. They arrive accompanied by a theme tune and bombastic display that reflects their individual character, and the ways in which it might change over the years are tied to how the writers want audiences to perceive a given character. Belar used the example of Shinsuke Nakamura, a hugely popular Japanese wrestler who the writers wanted to turn into a villain. However, his popularity made this difficult, and so the writers changed his entrance to be less accessible to American audiences by including a Japanese rap as part of the routine. This left audiences unable to hum along in the same way they had been able to with his previous wordless theme tune. “All of a sudden that feeling of disconnection makes you feel less for that guy, and it’s the same thing where if you have a character that you’re playing and you perform a combo and it’s perfect,
you feel aligned,” said Belair. “But if you were to do one thing and it doesn’t respond, or it doesn’t do quite what you think it’s going to, all of a sudden you’re frustrated, you’re confused, you’re unfulfilled. And I think we can stand to use that a lot more, to not just use the ability but to use the actual connection to the game and the mechanics and the way you approach them.” An example Belair used here was The Last of Us, where protagonist Joel shoots a doctor during the game’s final moments. If you, the player, don’t want to shoot that doctor then you cannot progress, because Joel has intent and a relationship to his actions. In that moment, we see beyond all doubt who Joel is, and his actions reflect that. That disconnection that separated audiences from Nakamura is the exact reason Drake’s wanton murder is left largely unaddressed in the Uncharted series. Drake has actions, not ideals. His position as a vessel for the player to complete the game means that he cannot have an opinion on how he saves the day. “We’re not ready to give up on murder, but we’re not ready to create characters who are murderers,” said Belair. “And when we do, we have the Max Paynes of the world.” Wrestling, however, is almost entirely about a given character’s feelings towards wrestling. From the Face who loves the art of it, to the “Chickenshit Heel” who will try and avoid wrestling at all costs in case they get hurt, wrestling is about wrestling and its stories are conveyed through that central conceit.
The games industry can learn a lot from how the WWE tells stories
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Kicking off the streaming wars Industry giants have decided that the medium’s future lies in streaming – but success is far from assured even for enormous players like Google and Amazon
Rob Fahey Contributing Editor
That streaming services will play some kind of role in the next generation of video games is already a given. The industry’s biggest players have made that decision and stepped up the enormous investment in technology and infrastructure required to make it into a reality. Sony’s PlayStation Now has been slowly evolving in the background with fairly little fanfare, GDC was all about Google Stadia, and Microsoft’s xCloud has also taken an important step forward. As the notion of a ‘Netflix for Games’ service takes root, all of the major players are positioning themselves to make sure they get their slice of the pie. On the surface, this puts Sony and Microsoft right onto a collision course with Google – and it also raises big questions about what other market players will do to ensure they’re not left out. If Google and Microsoft – two of the biggest cloud services providers in the world thanks to Google’s Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure – are using their infrastructure to these ends, surely Amazon – whose AWS platform dwarfs them both – can’t be far behind? And, while it’s not such a player in cloud services (aside from the infrastructure it’s built for its own systems), Apple surely won’t let Google steal such an important march on it, and it has already developed its own games subscription service.
Having four of the world’s biggest tech companies (a line-up in which Sony actually ends up looking like something of a minnow) all competing for the same prize looks like a recipe for bloodied noses, bruised egos and ravaged bank balances. SNACKS VS MEALS Just as the video streaming market is getting ready for an almighty showdown as both Apple and Disney take aim at Netflix’s market share, the games industry could also see its streaming services becoming a battleground for giant companies with far broader ambitions. Ironically, the last time major industry players tried to make gaming into a key battleground for a broader conflict the most tangible result was the Xbox – a console designed in no small part to give Microsoft a beachhead in what it feared could become a major battle for consumer hearts and minds with Sony. Now both of those firms look set to be in direct conflict with even bigger companies for dominance of game streaming. Or are they? Looking at the substance of what both Sony and Microsoft are doing in this space, something very striking emerges. Both companies are pitching game streaming as a ‘fill in the gaps’ kind of service. At least for the foreseeable future, PlayStation Now and xCloud are both positioned as being a way to extend your gaming experience so that you can pass some time while you’re commuting on a tablet, laptop or mobile device. They are snacks between meals.
Games veteran Phil Harrison revealing Google Stadia at GDC
The Streaming Showdown 27
consumers at peak times. Meanwhile, a large and influential part of the culture around games is focused on latency and visual quality (let alone the whole question of ownership itself). There is probably a solid audience that’s willing to consider streaming as an extra for long train rides or hooking up to the hotel TV. But willing to ditch their console or PC? Not so much. CLOUD SCEPTICS
If you’re Google (or Amazon, or Apple), then the pitch has to be different. Google doesn’t have any previous skin in the gaming space – its function as creator of Android arguably gives it even less actual industry involvement than Microsoft did back in 2001, when at least it had experience as a platform holder and publisher of Windows games. Amazon and Apple are even more distant, despite Amazon’s recent efforts in becoming a games publisher. For each of these companies, pitching a snack between meals isn’t worthwhile; they have to convince consumers that any streaming service they launch is really a meal in itself, a credible outright replacement for their Xbox, PlayStation or PC. That’s a hell of a tough sell. The pared-back, filling-in-thegaps nature of what Microsoft “The lack of and Sony is offering isn’t down noise around the to a lack of ambition; it’s a fairly commercial impact of realistic pitch given the technical and cultural obstacles standing PS Now tells you a lot in the way. There remain a lot about how consumers of places, including plenty of have responded” wealthy first-world urban areas, where broadband and mobile speeds are not up to the task of consistently providing high-quality game streaming, or where data capping and charging remain in place. 5G and ongoing fibre optic rollouts will help a lot, but we’re still a long way from being able to say mission accomplished on this front. Even 4K movie streaming – a far less technically demanding task – is a pipe dream for many
A controller, screen and internet connection is all you’ll need to play Google Stadia
That creates a fairly tricky economic environment for streaming services. PS Now is presently offered as a $19.99 per month (or, more reasonably, $99.99 per year, though that whopping 58.3% discount tells you a fair bit about how much the service actually gets used by annual subscribers) subscription independently of PS Plus, which has almost certainly not been working very well for the service. PS Now was specced out initially as a full-bore Netflix-for-games offering, and the relative lack of noise around its commercial impact thus far tells you a lot about how consumers have responded. We don’t know how xCloud will be priced, but it’s likely to end up being an ancillary service that plugs into an Xbox Game Pass subscription. Sony at some point is also going to have to rationalise the existence of PS Plus and PS Now as separate services, and will likely end up with a similar model. Without the ability to do that – with no existing subscription to tag a Google or Amazon video games streaming service into – the new entrants into the market are going to face an uphill struggle. The new services will need to convince rightly dubious consumers of the technical strengths of the streaming approach and get them to fork over a significant fee. Existing players can make far less extravagant technical claims and market streaming as a cheap add-on to existing subscription fees, not dissimilar to how Netflix charges a few extra dollars for more devices or 4K content. This isn’t to say that the entry of players like Google into the market won’t shake things up, but Microsoft and Sony will still be the players to beat. It’s worth bearing in mind what happened the last time a huge industry giant set its eyes on this industry; the Xbox may have its admirers but it was hardly a commercial knockout, with Microsoft only finding its feet in its second generation. Neither Google nor Amazon is likely to do much better with their first attempts, especially when their point of entry is a technology that still has a long way to go in convincing consumers of its value.
Gaming mirrors Facebook’s crisis of credibility On addiction and loot boxes, the industry’s lack of transparency will prevent it from getting the benefit of the doubt
Brendan Sinclair
North American Editor
“This model can feel opaque, and we’re all distrustful of systems we don’t understand. Sometimes this means people assume we do things that we don’t do.” That’s Mark Zuckerberg, writing in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece earlier this year to mark the 15th anniversary of Facebook. It’s the editorial’s most substantial defense against criticisms of the company, and it’s essentially true. When people can’t see for themselves that everything’s on the up and up, some will infer all sorts of shenanigans going on behind the curtain, even when there’s nothing underhanded going on at all. That said, Zuckerberg was asking for the benefit of the doubt in his editorial, but he had very little credibility to make such a request. For the unfamiliar, Facebook has been under fire for privacy issues after a data breach that allowed consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (which worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the pro-Brexit Leave. EU organization) to access the personal data of some 70 million Facebook users. As if the breach
itself weren’t bad press enough, Facebook is expected to face a record fine from the Federal Trade Commission over it. And technically, that fine won’t be for the breach itself so much as it will be for the company violating a 2011 settlement with the FTC over previous charges that it deceived consumers by failing to keep its promises to protect their privacy. Given the company’s repeated failings, Zuckerberg asking for the benefit of the doubt was already a stretch. But it became bold to the point of laughable coming the same week The Centre for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal outlet reported on the company’s practices regarding “friendly fraud.” That’s the term Facebook used in an internal memo to describe unauthorized charges made by kids using their parents’ credit cards, one that went on to explain “what it is, why it’s challenging, and why you shouldn’t try to block it.” The memo was part of 135 pages of unsealed documents in a class-action lawsuit against Facebook that show the company refused to deter friendly fraud because it would hurt revenue. This is something the games industry as a whole should look closely at, because Zuckerberg’s quote applies directly to how people perceive it in the current debate over gaming addiction and loot boxes.
Facebook wants the benefit of the doubt, but has little credibility
Gaming’s Credibility Crisis 29
A MATTER OF TRUST Publishers can now track user behaviour in unprecedented ways. They are researching and patenting ways of altering the play experience, putting a finger on the scale here and there in order to maximize people playing longer and spending more. They’ve refused to comply in good faith with even the laxest regulations of loot boxes, finding loop holes to continue business as usual or simply pulling games from sale in the markets where legislators insist on changes. They’ve publicly talked about a person playing a game for 5,000 hours in a single year (an average of nearly 14 hours a day, every single day) as a roaring success. In my mind, the Zuckerberg defense is no more convincing for the games industry than it is for Facebook because there’s a lack of credibility, because games have too often betrayed customers’ trust, and sometimes for what I imagine must be minimal gain. I recognize this isn’t entirely fair, because it’s painting the entire industry with the same brush because of the actions of just a few companies. But it’s not just sketchy fly-by-night operations undermining the industry’s credibility. The previous paragraph’s actions were all accounted for by Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard. And trade groups formed to represent the industry’s interests have achieved a Raymanlike level of ‘hands off’ when it comes to loot boxes and addiction. “The industry’s The Entertainment arguments would be Software Association’s big more persuasive if solution to the loot box furor it wasn’t embracing was to introduce a label to let business models that people know that a game has in-game purchases and gesture not only benefit from in the direction of parental what we might think control functions. As for the loot of as addictive play, box-adjacent question of game but require it to addiction, the industry may be viable” have a stronger argument to make in saying that the science isn’t clear. Perhaps as UKIE head Jo Twist said, some media coverage of the issue has been irresponsible, and perhaps as the ESA believes, there should be more conversation and study before excessive gaming is added to an international list of addictive disorders used for diagnosis. At the risk of being cynical about trade groups, I’ll just say it seems convenient that they believe the fault is someone else’s, and the answer is to do absolutely nothing that would require a change to the way the business is done today or in the near future.
The industry’s arguments would also be more persuasive if it hadn’t spent much of the last decade embracing business models that not only benefit from what we might think of as addictive play, but essentially require it to be viable. A recent report from DeltaDNA found that only 4% of free-to-play gamers in North America ever spend money in those games, and less than 2.5% do in Europe. Let’s say that actual gaming addiction is rare, like less than 1% of the population rare. So in that case, as much as a quarter of the paying user base for free-to-play games in North America are addicts, and more like 40% in Europe. Actual gaming addiction may be rarer, but odds disclosures for rare loot box items in games like FIFA 19 Ultimate Team have taught us that percentages lower than 1% areall functionally identical, so I guess we’ll have to go with the information we have. Deliberately unfair math aside, when you have a business model driven by a relatively small portion of players, exploiting the addiction of a relative few becomes a larger part of the business than it might appear at first glance. AN INDUSTRY AT ODDS When Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas inspired a wave of legislation against violent games over a decade ago, the industry put up a unified front against it. But this time around, on this issue, there’s much more division on whether there’s a problem with loot boxes and addiction in games, particularly among players and the press. The industry should see it as a red flag that a number of its staunchest defenders then have become vocal critics. Where the criticisms on violence were coming from groups largely ignorant of gaming, many of today’s critics are entrenched in gaming and perfectly aware of what loot boxes are and how they work. If the industry can’t convince its informed supporters, what chance does it have with legislators arriving to the discussion armed with only the idea that games are exploiting children and the ability to regulate business in almost any way they see fit? The way forward here should be for the industry to build its credibility back up, but it can’t really do that as long as people are assuming the worst about its practices. So if we work backwards from that Zuckerberg quote, the place to start is with the opaque. From what people get for their money to how companies use the information collected from them to the code determining just what a loot box contains, the entire industry must tack towards transparency.
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Is it all over for pre-owned games? Second-hand game sales remain significant, but the recent decline is by no means temporary
Christopher Dring Publisher
The pre-owned games market has been rapidly declining over the past three years. To be clear, people are still buying secondhand games. Retro games, eBay, even your local car-boot sale; there’s a community of active consumers picking up classic titles that have been previously owned. What we’re talking about is the trade-in economy. Professional retail chains like GAME, CEX and GameStop, which will take your games and give you credit against the next one. It’s the practice that one former publishing boss described to me as the, “great evil in video games.” Even former EA executive Peter Moore acknowledged that legacy sales of games were almost non-existent because of the trade-in market. One of my first big stories when working for the British trade publication MCV was on Asda (the Walmart-owned UK supermarket) moving into pre-owned. The head of Asda’s games department hadn’t meant to tell me, because he had yet to discuss it with the company’s partners, including games publishers. The reaction was so angry, I had a distraught Asda PR representative begging for me to clarify that the company wasn’t going to sell second-hand games – six months later, that’s exactly what it did. The hatred publishers have shown toward the pre-owned market centred on the fact that retailers were no-longer purchasing older (legacy) stock from distributors, and were instead buying it from consumers and selling it on. Developers and publishers weren’t seeing a single penny from those sales. If you want a reason why publishers became wary of short, single-player experiences, this is one of them. But not everyone hated it. Indeed, some smaller publishers acknowledged it as a necessary evil. With consumers unwilling to pay full price for boxed games, retailers had to sell products for below recommended retail
price to compete (and still do). Pre-owned was a means for specialists to still bring in a healthy profit. And then there was the argument from the retailers, which was that second-hand trading increased sales of new games. Consumers would effectively buy a game, play it until completion, and then trade it against the next one. It was effectively a glorified rental system, and there are a community of gamers who do this frequently. Now, however, pre-owned is in sharp decline. In the UK, Kantar reports that pre-owned software was worth £123 million in 2015. That dropped by 3.3% in 2016, then a further 15% in 2017, and more than 30% in 2018. According to Kantar, sales of pre-owned games are now worth £67.9 million. The data firm told GamesIndustry.biz that the proportion of pre-owned video games is 20.6% of total physical games sold over the past 52 weeks, compared to 27.2% last year (UK market only). In its last financial report, the UK retailer GAME reported that pre-owned (including hardware) dropped 20.9% over the prior year.
Pre-owned revenue dropped by 30% in the UK last year
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Future Of Used Games
In the US, second-hand sales are also dropping, albeit at a slightly slower pace. In 2017, GameStop’s pre-owned sales fell by 4.6%. And for it’s latest financial year, pre-owned sales are down 13.2%. That decline has been accelerating, with pre-owned falling 21.3% during its fourth quarter. The firm states that this is driven by a drop in pre-owned software, as pre-owned hardware actually increased year-on-year. WHAT IS CAUSING THE DECLINE? Fewer gamers are trading-in products, and therefore there are fewer second-hand games and consoles to sell. This is partially linked to the decline in physical sales, and the shift towards digital – a trend GameStop also cited in its latest financial report – but also the rising popularity of games-as-a-service. Consumers are playing games for longer, with fewer reasons to trade them in. But there’s another big reason, and one that GameStop’s Shane Kim places front and centre. “It does have to do with how customers can get some “We are being really clear of those older titles, the very with the market and inexpensive titles that you shareholders that this can get through either subscription memberships is a structural decline” or online in a pretty heavily Martyn Gibbs, GAME discounted mode.” Indeed, aggressive digital sales means that consumers are increasingly buying legacy titles as downloads. This is forcing retailers to target other business areas for growth, reducing their activity in the used games space.
Plus, with the rise in subscription services (like Xbox Game Pass) and the launch of new streaming platforms (like Google Stadia), pre-owned is likely to decline further in the years to come. IS IT HURTING NEW GAME SALES? This is obviously difficult to judge, but it seems unlikely. Instead, pre-owned’s decline is indicative of the fact that gamers are playing titles for longer, increasingly buying digitally, and purchasing fewer products generally. New game sales are being hurt by the same phenomenon, but that’s not explicitly to do with pre-owned. Pre-owned is also still a high margin business, and there’s certainly a market for it. In the UK, there are still 1.8 million pre-owned customers (Kantar data), and in the US it’s worth in excess of $1.86 billion for one retailer alone (GameStop financials). Nevertheless, you can expect it to decline further and for the focus to switch onto hardware in the short-term. PlayStation 4 trade-ins against the next PlayStation console will certainly still be a big part of retail’s efforts to upgrade customers. But with pre-owned unlikely to improve outside of new hardware launches, stores are now switching their attention to more reliable growth areas. GameStop expects growth to come from its collectables business, while GAME is focused on its Belong pay-to-play gaming areas and PC accessories and hardware. Ultimately, shelf space and promotions for pre-owned games will continue to drop. And the once “great evil in video games” will become little more than a nagging annoyance.
CAN IT BE TURNED AROUND? Interestingly, the word from retail is no – at least, not in the long-term, though the arrival of new consoles in 2020 might cause a temporary uplift. “There are things that we can do, and we are doing, in terms of better promoting our trade-in offers,” GAME CEO Martyn Gibbs told us. “But this is a structural decline, and management isn’t going to put its head in the sand and pretend this isn’t going to continue. “Obviously, if new consoles come to market, we will see trade-in and pre-owned become a materially important part of the market again. There are things we can do, and we are doing, to soften that decline. But we are being really clear with the market and shareholders that this is a structural decline. If you have less people trading in games, you have less stock to sell, and those numbers will decrease.”
Martyn Gibbs, GAME CEO
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How To Be A Better Place To Work The winners of the GamesIndustry.biz Best Places To Work Awards share their advice on how to be an excellent employer
DEVELOP STAFF, NOT JUST GAMES
LOOK AFTER THE BODY AND THE MIND
What separated the winners of the Best Places To Work Awards from those that missed out was, more often than not, how they develop their staff.
A lot of great companies offer plenty of health incentives – healthcare packages, cycle schemes, gym memberships, free fruit, yoga and so on. But the best businesses were the ones that also look after the mental wellbeing of the teams, too.
Big publisher-owned studios are the ones that have the capacity to really deliver on this front, offering courses, internal summits (like Ubisoft’s Developer Conference) and other advanced initiatives that smaller companies would struggle to deliver. “Beenox collaborates with different Activision studios on various projects,” said Thomas Wilson,
creative director and co-studio head at the firm.
“Our studio is used to jumping on new AAA game titles, year after year. This means that artists must juggle with different visual styles, programmers get to explore new engines, and everyone has to learn new development methods. To support employees, we need to continuously invest time, energy and resources in developing skills and exploring new tools and methods. This is by far our greatest challenge and, interestingly, our biggest strength. In the long run, working on so many titles allowed our employees to gain a large spectrum of skills and to explore a vast array of methods and tools.”
He continues: “We offer training, one-on-ones and coaching to help [staff] progress.
“With the feedback provided by supervisors and peers, all employees know where they stand in their career path and what they need to improve. “We also foster leadership development through our Beenox University program, which allows employees to take leadership classes that will make them better leaders in their current and future roles.”
These are concepts that are only really possible in larger outfits, but there are things smaller firms can do, too. Personal development allowances, visits to local conferences, access to online training tools – these all make a difference. But simply having guidelines so that staff know what they need to achieve and learn in order to step up, is something employees value highly.
“Wellbeing is something we take very seriously and I believe it is key to our success,” argues Matt Webster,
GM, Criterion.
“Mindfulness is one area we have specifically invested in. We employ a mindfulness teacher who is also a qualified executive coach who works with 35 individuals on a 1:1 basis. She also runs half hour meditation sessions open to all, three times a week, inside core hours. In addition, 44% of the team have participated in a 16 hour, eight week mindfulness course that is offered inside core hours.”
Working with mental health charities, such as Mind, is something that companies are increasingly doing. Numerous studios, including UK firm Jagex, utilise an employee assistance programme. This is a confidential service that employees can contact 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It provides free access to a range of specialist support and information, including a life management service, telephone and face-to-face counselling and an online portal. Jagex has even launched on-site counselling sessions where people can confidentially explore personal issues and dilemmas. Mental health first aid training for managers is also an option, and selecting ‘health champions’ across the business to become advocates for health and wellbeing (both physical and mental) will help support these initiatives. There are also various mental health days – including World Mental Health Day, Mental Health Awareness Week and Time To Talk Day, which are opportunities to host talks and launch internal campaigns. One thing that a few companies offer are duvet days, which are an unscheduled extra day’s leave from work designed to alleviate stress.
34 PLACE FAMILY AND FINANCE OVER FREE PIZZA AND BEER Employees do, of course, love gym memberships, cycle schemes, trips and other perks. And parties, special outings, cinema nights, and social gatherings are a great way to encourage camaraderie between the team. But make no mistake, they all come behind the two most important benefits – financial compensation and free time. “We offer a great variety of benefits but the one that we are really proud of is the quality of work-life balance we offer,” says Rémi Racine,
CEO and executive producer at Behaviour.
“Overtime is strictly limited, and if they really must work overtime, we offer them compensatory vacation time in return.”
Double Eleven is one studio that is obsessed with the work-life balance. The firm offers flexible start, finish, and lunch times, and staff can even take additional hours off for specific situations. The company gives birthdays off, plus moving days, and where it can, it goes even further. “When we have a good year and the schedule permits we give the team the entirety of December off,”
says Mark South, COO .
“When some people come back in the New Year they come back with a sense of it being a new job, that they’re familiar with.”
Financial compensation is also (unsurprisingly) crucial. Good pay, insurance options and pensions are important, but many of our Best Places winners also offer bonuses and profit sharing – including Playground Games, Rocksteady, ustwo and Ubisoft. “Our Profit Sharing Scheme truly embodies the philosophy of ustwo,” says studio manager
Jane Campbell.
“It enables us to reward all employees when we have a healthy financial year. It’s a scheme that demonstrates that every employee is valued for the contribution they make no matter their job title, role or department. We are all part of the studio ecosystem supporting the development, marketing and maintenance of successful games.”
Rocksteady studio director Jamie Walker adds: “We offer a great bonus that compensates for the high cost of living in London. Each person is allocated an annual, minimum bonus percentage that can then be multiplied by the success of our games and can be up to a pretty significant amount – and can be used in mortgage applications. “Our aim is to hire and keep the world’s best developers over the long run as there is such a shared amount of knowledge you gain from keeping great people together.”
THINK DIVERSE THOUGHTS
The CSR team from UK award-winning studio NaturalMotion Games
It’s improving, but the games industry is not a diverse business and attracting female applicants continues to be a challenge. G Into Gaming research found that women respond well to other women working at a company. Even another woman present at the interview can have an enormous bearing on how the candidate could see herself fitting in. In fact, having a woman involved from the beginning of the hiring process can be hugely beneficial. Research has shown that, in general, women tend to underestimate their abilities while men overestimate. Therefore having a female eye on CVs can make a real difference. Furthermore, women are more likely to be interested in a job advertisement if the language is gender neutral, and doesn’t feature excessive job requirements. Some women won’t always respond to a job opening unless they feel they 100% qualify, while men will often still apply if they fulfil around 60% of the criteria. Flexible working arrangements are also important. According to research by Working Families, six out of ten women will consider childcare responsibilities before applying for a promotion or new job. Truly flexible working arrangements and the improvement of parental benefits can help attract and retain women and men into (and beyond) parenthood.
“Each person in the studio is given two days per year where they can volunteer to do work outside the office for a charity of their choice” Jamie Walker, Rocksteady
How To Be A Better Place To Work TALK, SHARE, LISTEN, ACT One thing that smaller studios have an advantage over is making employees - irrespective of role – feel included, informed and that they can impact the direction of the company. Listening to employees, understanding their concerns and utilising their ideas is mutually beneficial and something that can come naturally to a small team. But there are ways this can work for bigger businesses, too. “We are focused on making our culture as inclusive as possible,” says Alexander Bell,
Recruitment Coordinator at Unity.
“We constantly repeat the mantra ‘best idea wins’, above seniority or job title of those behind the idea. This leads to plenty of reflection about the merits and consequences of enacting certain ideas and it’s completely normal to see discussions take place in the company’s public communication channels, with employees worldwide inputting. Decisions that are critical to Unity’s future are taken by the entire organisation. “Empowering everyone to feel they can make a difference has been a guiding principle for us from day one. Employees are free to contribute to projects around the organisation. For example, we run a global hack-week for hundreds of people to get together and bootstrap new ideas, many of which make their way into the Unity Editor itself.”
It’s not just involving employees in the discussion, but also keeping staff updated. Playground Games studio head Gavin Raeburn said that “openness, honesty and transparency” was the number one reason why staff are happy at his studio, based on a recent survey. Speaking of which, regular staff surveys is a great way of getting feedback from the team (as long as that feedback is implemented). Beenox surveys its staff constantly to gauge
“Following every major milestone, the team goes ‘Off-The-Grid’ for two days to work on whatever they choose” Matt Webster, Criterion
Playground Games staff receive a share of the profits from its games
BE SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE mood, tools, processes, collaboration and ideas. And the firm also involves employees in reviews, townhalls, breakfasts with the studio heads and in post-mortems. Meanwhile, John Earner, CEO at Space Ape Games, says the company is
“radically transparent”.
“All our finances, our stats, our triumphs and our struggles, are all shared,” he says. “We have a flat org structure and I’m no more than two degrees of separation from every employee. We give our teams autonomy. If a team can successfully answer three difficult questions about their projects, then only they can make a decision about whether to kill or continue with their own project. Finally, our game ideas come from employees, not management. This results in riskier, more ambitious projects being pursued.”
Criterion’s Webster details how the EA studio empowers its staff:
“Working in seven-week cycles, our people form their own teams working towards clearly aligned priorities and goals. They have autonomy over team, task and technique. Our working environment supports the way in which our teams want to work. Open daily and planning areas, desks that have just two cables – power and network - lead to an environment that changes frequently. We have also introduced pure autonomy for our people. Following every major milestone, the team goes ‘Off-The-Grid’ for two days to work on whatever they choose. This often takes the form of game jams, learning new skills and tools, or addressing technical debt that a particular person may be passionate about.”
It may not seem that important, but being engaged with local communities and charities is something that employees do notice and appreciate. “In 2017 we got feedback from the team that we should do more CSR [corporate social responsibility] work and so we have been improving what we offer to local charities,” says Rocksteady’s Jamie Walker. “We started RockCare, which is that each person in the studio is given two days per year where they can volunteer to do work outside the office for a charity of their choice. Since there are around 200 people at Rocksteady this equates to 400 days of help that we are now offering charities around North London.”
Space Ape, meanwhile, offers financial support for charitable endeavours. It will match whatever fundraising efforts its employees engage in. Yet it’s not just about charitable and community efforts, but also how games companies are supporting the wider industry. For instance, Creative Assembly runs its Legacy Project, which wants to create the game development talent of the future. The project includes partnering with the likes of BAFTA, Digital Schoolhouse, and the East London Arts and Music Academy to support games-related subjects within the curriculum and promote future careers in games. It also works across younger pupils (ages five to 16) through schools, offering developer-led workshops, studio tours and game jams. Other large studios invite and support local indie studios where possible (even offering up work space), while some have facilities to host local industry events – including talks and game jams. Yet even for smaller studios, a way of giving back to the industry can come in the form of talking at conferences – locally and nationally.
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How To Be A Better Place To Work KILL CRUNCH Crunch is one of the great struggles of games development. Yet there are many studios that have successfully eradicated excessive overtime, and they have advice to share.
“In the games industry we think we’re special and that this research doesn’t apply to us. But it does. We’re seduced by crunch in finishing our products, but it’s dangerous and if unchecked it will bring real harm to your people, and your business.
“We also use lean methodology, we find the value for our business and players as quickly as possible, if we are working on something that takes a long time, we break it into manageable pieces of work. Our teams are encouraged to estimate honestly, it’s this honest bottom-up approach to planning that enables the team to make the right choices and manage their own work and time.
“If we commit to respecting the time, livelihood, and continued growth of our teams, we will not only avoid crunch but rule out its existence entirely.”
“Bottom-up planning means staff are defining how long it takes. Sprint retrospectives enable the teams to reflect on their planning accuracy, which then makes planning in future better.”
Indie game creator Casper Field adds:
Trusting your staff, avoiding feature creep and not celebrating bad behaviours – such as working late – is something Criterion also advise.
“There’s a wealth of research that shows crunch reduces output,” begins Criterion’s Webster.
“When we have a good year and the schedule permits we give the team December off” Mark South, Double Eleven
“And these leaders need to lead by example, avoid sending important emails at night or weekends and encourage holidays. Your next big idea will come from rested and motivated staff.
“Starting out in journalism in the ‘90s, I was normalised to 12 to 14-hour days. As I’ve learned over the years, the issue was down to a combination of commonly occurring issues: poor planning by managers; under-staffing of the team; over-specification of the product; and refusal or inability of middle management to push back on demands from above. “The solution is to plan sensibly, to trim specifications, to hire enough people, and to learn that it’s okay to say no to external forces now and then.”
Shaun Rutland, CEO of mobile game developer Hutch, says that avoiding crunch is essential for running a successful games-asa-service company. “There’s always enough work and urgency from our players that we could easily ask our staff to work 12 hour days, seven days a week. There’s just no let up in our opportunities so we simply never allow it to happen, its zero tolerance attitude towards crunch. “Ultimately, crunching is a result of feature creep, design iteration, poor planning or, most commonly, an all-or-nothing approach to design, which is often mandated from the top down. “You need leadership that fundamentally understands that crunch doesn’t work as a planning option. When developing games-as-aservice the workload increases and evolves after launch once you are supporting a community. If you’ve burnt out the team by launch, you’re not putting yourself in position to succeed.
“Choosing not to start work on a feature that you can’t finish is behaving ‘player first’, because you focus on finishing the rest of the features to higher quality,” Webster says. “There’s a big fear out there about whether a product is good enough, and this fear leads to management just putting in more features, more hours and more people onto a product. It’s important to keep the faith in the original vision. “And make decisions early. Make them, make them, make them. An incorrect decision made is a lot better than not making any decision at all. It helps to move you forward quickly and make other decisions that stem from this. It also lets you see a lot sooner whether you’ve made a bad decision or not.”
He adds: “Trust your people. If they say it takes an amount of time to do something then don’t push them to halve it. “Be aware of people working late or at weekends. Don’t celebrate or reward bad behaviours, and live the behaviours you want to see. If you believe everyone should leave at six... then leave at six. “Teams are passionate. Teams will add every single idea and feature they can think of if you let them. It’s up to leadership to have the responsibility and discipline to know what they are making, and to not bite off more than they can chew.”
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38
“At Ubisoft you always have a second chance” Ubisoft’s Christine Burgess-Quémard on how the company maintains its unique culture with 15,000 employees
Christopher Dring Publisher
Christine BurgessQuémard was the fifth employee to join Ubisoft
If you want a clear example of why a culturally diverse team can be hugely successful, just look at Ubisoft. Those of us with long memories will recall a time when it was a distinctly French company making distinctly French games. A company that was popular in its home market, but struggling for traction worldwide. “Ubisoft games had a French touch, and when you have a French touch, you’re not necessarily a success in America or England,” explains Christine BurgessQuémard, executive director for Ubisoft’s Worldwide Studios. “It helped us to keep some of our French touches, but to be successful in this industry we needed to give our games more of an international feel. When we opened our Montreal studio we suddenly developed a North American feel, and we became successful in North America.” This experience – from being a big company in France, to a company with an audience in other Western nations – is why it continually opens new studios in other countries, including Eastern Europe, China and India. Yet there are challenges that come with doing this. These territories have significant cultural differences. They might not be as experienced as the talent available in Canada or in Western Europe, for instance, and perhaps not as open to Ubisoft’s philosophy, either. Burgess-Quémard says this gets to the heart of Ubisoft’s unique development structure. “We are a Western company, and we have this Western culture and an openness to new things and new arts,” she explains. “But many years ago we decided we wanted to go into other territories.
“One of the first studios we opened up was in Bucharest in Romania. That was almost 30 years ago; 30 years ago, going into Romania was a real challenge. We realised very quickly that it was not easy for some studios to bring in developers who are able to be creative just like that. We knew it was going to take a lot of time. “One way to help these people to grow was to make them work with other studios. That is when we started to build the system of lead studios and associate studios. We can have a large team in Montreal, for example, but they work with a studio in Bucharest or Sofia or Singapore. It’s a great way for these people to learn.” NOT FOR SALE Burgess-Quémard is one of several senior managers at Ubisoft who has been with the publisher since the very start. She was Ubisoft’s fifth employee. It now boasts more than 15,000 – 2,000 of which joined in the last year. Despite the scale of Ubisoft’s operation, it has never really felt like a corporate goliath. In fact, the company likes to describe itself as an independent. It’s why it was so vehement in its rejection of Vivendi’s efforts to acquire the company. Burgess-Quémard tells us that Ubisoft simply wouldn’t work as part of a larger corporate entity. “We are not a company that bases everything on financials,” she argues. “We put the human in the centre of our company. This is the video game industry, we don’t have machines like other industries have. Our power and our wealth is in people’s creativity. It is their brains. What makes our success is the people’s motivation and creativity.” She continues: “Each project is now so big, it’s a company in of itself. When I started with Yves 33 years ago, the projects were so small. We had five people on Zombi. Now, when you have 900 people and over on one project, we are looking at a completely different scale. But the spirit is pretty much the same. We want people to win, so we make sure they lead their teams to success as well.”
How Ubisoft Retains Its Culture
To allow its teams to win, Ubisoft does invest in them, and if sometimes things don’t work out – such as with Ubisoft’s recent efforts in VR, for instance – it makes sure not to punish the creators. After all, that’s hardly going to encourage that all-important risk taking. “It’s not so much that we say don’t worry if you get it wrong; because of the budgets involved, we don’t want people to get it wrong,” Burgess-Quémard admits. “But we have a saying: at Ubisoft you always have a second chance. We don’t cut people’s heads [off] if they make a mistake first time. “But what is rewarded, obviously, is the success. When you have a successful project, you will have all these people behind you who will feel and share the success as well. That’s why we also have incentive programmes, to make sure that people feel really part of the project.” It’s not all about financial rewards. Over the years we’ve written about Ubisoft’s efforts to avoid team fatigue if they’ve been working on a single franchise for so long. Enabling its creators, if it can, to try new projects, work on different things, and even to develop indie-style games.
We don’t do too much science fiction, because we are not sending people to the Moon, or to Mars... yet... Maybe it will happen sooner than you think. Maybe we should work with Richard Branson.” Burgess-Quémard is only half joking. Ubisoft’s culture may not have changed as drastically as you might expect after growing from five to 15,000, employees but it has changed. It used to make distinctly French games, and now it builds international IN THE FIELD projects made by teams in every continent. It’s adding new voices and ideas through Like most studios, new studios in different territories. It’s continually Ubisoft invests in the investing in the latest consoles team’s education, too. and technology. It was a It runs the Ubisoft Ubisoft game (Assassin’s “One of the first Developer Conference, Creed Odyssey) that was studios we opened which is in its tenth year front and centre at the up was in Bucharest.. in 2019, plus a series of Google Stadia reveal at other specialists courses. GDC, for example. 30 years ago, going That’s all pretty normal Of course, as any gamer into Romania was a stuff for a large business, will tell you, Ubisoft isn’t real challenge” but one of Ubisoft’s more perfect. It makes mistakes and Christine Burgess-Quémard, Ubisoft surprising education gets things wrong, and does initiatives is in sending its so frequently. But it is always teams around the world so trying. Perhaps that’s what they can learn about different cultures makes Ubisoft feel so different. and make their games as realistic as possible. “A lot of companies have disappeared from The Far Cry team, for instance, spent three the industry because maybe sometimes you think weeks in Montana to get a feel for the place you’ve reached the top,” concludes Burgessthey were re-creating. Quémard. “But it’s not difficult to “Each new world that we are creating, reach the top. It’s staying there that is difficult. we make sure that the team is exposed to it. “We never think we have made it.”
Ubisoft continues to open studios in different countries, including India
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Amiqus and G Into Gaming backed the GamesIndustry.biz 100: Women In Games list
Putting The G Into Gaming: An Update G Into Gaming’s Liz Prince on the mision to get more women making games
Last year we launched Putting the G into Gaming – we call it G Into Gaming, or GIG – and it’s an initiative focused on accelerating gender diversity in games. Just one in five of the games workforce is female, and even fewer are involved directly in development. When we look at the causes of these numbers we’re faced with perception issues: • Low visibility of games as a career for entry level and experienced women • Parental influence to go into ‘proper jobs’ • Games being seen as a niche choice perhaps only for gamers • Is it a ‘boys thing’? • Girls don’t think they’re any good at maths • The hours aren’t family friendly • There’s inherent sexism in games All of this and more impact our ability to build pipelines of female talent and to retain them. We wanted GIG to drive practical steps to address these challenges and to help studios prioritise diversity when their list of priorities may be long – and may include their survival. We’ve reached out to thousands of experienced UK women developers who are working outside of games. We want to attract them to our industry by raising the profile of games and to highlight the sector’s creativity – which we know is appealing to women. We’ve talked at events and put our support behind great initiatives like the Best Places To Work Awards, the W.IN conference and the GamesIndusty.biz: 100 Women In Games. And we’ve rolled out a series of G Into… talks at studios. Personally, I spent time getting to grips with how to organise the issues and our response
to them. I realised that all of the activities we needed to do fell broadly into four key areas – the Attraction, Selection, Development and Retention of women (ASDR). In attraction alone there’s a lot to be done. By the age of 17, a huge proportion of girls have already dropped STEM subjects, so the industry has to start earlier – we need to introduce games as a career to junior school children and parents. A report from Accenture revealed that although the majority of young people believe that many future jobs will involve STEM subjects, girls believe that STEM jobs lack the creativity they seek. The study suggested that 60% of girls aged 14 or over wish they had studied STEM subjects for longer, with around 30% of those realising that they had limited their career choices. Parents and teachers also agreed that children need guidance from businesses. 36% of the teachers surveyed said they believe that talks in schools from industry professionals would help to make STEM subjects more appealing. Government is taking action to encourage more women into STEM careers, identifying interventions that schools can implement to improve girls‘ take-up of computer science. But we need an industry-wide effort to get ourselves noticed. GIG can play a part in the educational pipeline before children start to choose their GCSE subjects by getting ‘we the industry’ in front of kids. We’ve also partnered with learning and development organisation Right Track. We’re developing best practice in each of the four ASDR areas to give practical ideas to help studios broaden their workforce and focus on inclusion. We’ve also worked with Right Track on an industry charter to showcase studios who commit to change. We have a busy schedule of G Into Gaming workshops planned this year and we continue to reach out to experienced women outside of games. So please join in – we’re looking for GIG Champions of Change to help us. And we’re looking for studios to sign up to our Charter. This is an initiative for the industry. It’s not a business venture, an Amiqus thing or a Liz Prince thing, it’s a shared endeavour to focus on real change. It’s completely pro-bono and we invest Amiqus money because it’s the right thing to do. By pulling together, we can attract, develop and retain professionals in our wonderful industry, regardless of gender.
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45
Ten tips for pitching from the head of ID@Xbox Chris Charla gives developers a crash course on the dos and don’ts of selling potential partners on game ideas
Brendan Sinclair
North American Editor As the head of Microsoft’s ID@Xbox program since its inception in 2013, Chris Charla has heard a lot of pitches. In his opening address at the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit event at PAX East, Charla offered developers 10 pieces of advice that should help regardless of who they are pitching. 1. Take a shower, brush your teeth, dress for confidence Charla said developers often ask him where the bar is set for personal grooming and appearance when pitching games. While there definitely is one, it’s relatively easy to clear. “There’s never been a case where we signed a game because a person was welldressed at the pitch. And there’s also never been a case where we didn’t sign a game because the person was dressed as a slob.” That doesn’t mean developers should wear sweatpants to pitch their game, asCharla advised prioritizing clothing that helps them feel confident over clothing that helps them feel comfortable. 2. Have a well-developed elevator pitch “You should be able to explain the top concept of your game in 30 seconds. Last night I was trying to think of counterexamples where you couldn’t explain the concept of a great game in 30 seconds, and I can’t think of one.”
3. Don’t pitch the kitchen sink – have a focused concept The people who hear pitches more interested in the key innovation a developer has centered a game around than a pastiche of various things the pitcher thinks they want to hear. “If you’re making a cool innovation in a first-person shooter, focus on that innovation. Don’t feel obligated to add crafting and a battle royale mode, or level creation. If those things fit with the concept and help, feel free to add them. But don’t just try to pitch us a buzzword soup.” 4. Don’t be wishy-washy in the pitch If somebody asks about an element your game doesn’t have, don’t feel obligated to say it does have that then twist the pitch into what you think they might be looking for on the fly. “We understand that things change in development. And when you are focused on one or two key gameplay innovations, there may be a lot of stuff that just isn’t developed yet. That’s totally OK.” 5. Don’t lead with the backstory, ever! Lead with the elevator pitch. “It’s not that we don’t want to hear the backstory or what happened 10,000 years ago when Kraytor was first unearthed and all that kind of stuff. That stuff is really important. I’m not trying to dismiss it. I’m just saying most of the people you’re going to talk to in a lot of pitch situations are hearing 20 pitches a day… You will start to lose them [with backstory], and they’re going to be like, ‘Get to the meat of the gameplay.’”
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Top Tips For Pitching ID@Xbox head Chris Charla speaking at the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit during PAX East
8. Demo > Video > Concept Art > Words “Demos are awesome. They can be grayboxed or whiteboxed. We’re used to looking at stuff really, really early in development... If you show up with a playable demo, that’s going to be the best possible thing.” Failing that, video is preferred to concept art, which is preferred to a simple written description of the game. For developers who haven’t established a track record of being able to follow through on what they have promised, it can be particularly difficult to convince an audience that they can achieve their goals if all they have to show are words on a page.
6. L isten while you pitch; read the room, don’t be on a talk train In his previous career as a developer, Charla was one of three or four people that would handle his studio’s pitching. And sometimes he could see mid-pitch that he wasn’t “clicking” with the people in the room. When the other people pitching seemed to be making a better connection with the audience, he would back off and let those developers take over the pitch. “It comes with practice, but learn to read the room and understand how to talk so that people can understand you.”
“There’s never been a case where we didn’t sign a game because the person was dressed as a slob” Chris Charla, ID@Xbox
7. It’s OK not to have all the answers This part was so tied in to the fourth point above that Charla actually covered it out of order in his talk, building on the same example of a developer being asked about a system or mechanic that isn’t in the game and then committing to it and making up a detailed explanation of it during the pitch itself. While Charla acknowledged particularly skilled pitchers and designers may be able to do this on the fly, it’s obvious to everyone in the room what’s happening and it would be better for the developer to simply say: “We’ll get back to you.”
9. Pitch early, pitch often, practice your pitch a lot “Pitch to everybody. Pitch to your roommates, your dog, your cat, your mom. The reason you do that is not so that when you come into a pitch you’re well-practiced and say the exact same words every time. It’s so that you know your game inside and out. You know the pitch, you know the concepts inside and out. And when you come in, you’re super passionate about your concept. You can just have a conversation about it. You can feel really natural and relaxed.” 10. Find and cultivate your internal champion “You want to find one person inside Microsoft, or Nintendo, or [Sony], or Apple, or Epic, or Google who loves your game. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to be able to get the game greenlit all by themselves, but it means you know that inside that company, that person is always bringing up your game in meetings, always talking about your game.” However, Charla cautioned this isn’t a magic bullet, noting that even he champions games that don’t get deals. “There is no guarantee that we’re going to sign the game. It takes a lot more than one person being super into the game. But it’s rare that a game gets signed if it doesn’t have someone internally championing it.”
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What makes a good Kickstarter campaign? Anya Combs talks about ideal video length, the right number of .gifs, and one mistake that will keep any project from being featured
Brendan Sinclair
North American Editor The days of every veteran developer launching a Kickstarter to make spiritual successors to their greatest hits may be behind us, but the crowdfunding platform is still a viable option for plenty of developers in need of funding. At the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit at PAX East, Kickstarter’s Anya Combs offered those developers some context on how video game projects are doing, and advice on how they can maximize their projects’ chances of success. Combs began with an overview of the games category on Kickstarter, which passed a cumulative $1 billion pledged in April. Between video games, tabletop games, card games, live-action role-playing projects and others, the games category has attracted 3.2 million backers, with 38% of projects reaching their funding goal.
As for video game projects specifically, Combs said they reach their funding goals about 21% of the time, a rate that has been mostly consistent since 2012. Video game projects have also seen 1.6 million backers pledge a total of $234 million to roughly 12,800 projects. Compare those figures to tabletop games on Kickstarter, which Combs said have also seen 1.6 million backers, but boast a pledge total of $675 million across 18,900 projects, not to mention a significantly higher 58% success rate. GAMEPLAY IS KEY So how can game developers ensure they’re among those successfully funded projects? It starts with a good pitch video, and a good pitch video needs to showcase the game. “Gameplay is key on Kickstarter,” Combs said. “You need to show your gameplay, especially for a video game. You don’t need to show hours of footage or anything like that. 30 seconds is all you need. But you need to be able to show it.”
The Night In The Woods Kickstarter video was particularly effective in raising funds
Making A Success Of Kickstarter
Developers don’t need professional video production – “You can anticipate filming it on an iPhone is “totally about 30% of your fine,” Combs said – but they pledges are going do need to sell the game and to come in through themselves efficiently. Combs Kickstarter. That means suggested two minutes as an ideal length for a pitch video, split 70% of your pledges between 30 seconds of gameplay, need to come from a 30 seconds explaining who the community you build” people behind the game are, Anya Combs, Kickstarter 30 seconds explaining why the team is on Kickstarter, and a final 30 seconds of more gameplay, bloopers, or other miscellaneous content about the game. Sometimes a developer doesn’t even need to hit all those bases. Combs pointed to the pitch video for Night in the Woods as a particularly effective example of the form, even though it runs a lean 1:14 and doesn’t bother explaining why the developers turned to Kickstarter for funding at all. COMMUNITY SERVICE Community building is also essential for any project on Kickstarter. “You can anticipate about 30% of your pledges are going to come in through Kickstarter,” Combs said. “That means 70% of your pledges need to come from a community you build. If you are here at PAX, you’re building a community. Get people to sign up for your mailing list. Get people to come to your Discord. Get people to follow you on Twitter. Build that community.” Crowdfunding campaigns can also be arduous affairs, and Combs suggested limiting their length. “Your project should only be 30-35 days,” she said. “The 60-day project nonsense? Don’t do it. It’s so long. 60 days is too long for your backers and it’s too long for you.” The reason Combs gave that range of length is because developers may want to shorten or lengthen their campaigns to avoid beginning or ending them on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or major US holiday – even for projects that aren’t based in the US. Combs said most of the Kickstarter community comes from the US, so Memorial Day, Indigenous People’s Day, and other holidays are bad times to start or end a campaign because most people aren’t going to be online for it. KEEP UPDATING She also advised against launching a project with stretch goals already posted, and suggested
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that developers update their projects for backers every other day, even if it’s just to share what they worked on that day or a piece of concept art from earlier in development. “It can be very, very simple updates,” Combs said. “Basically what you’re saying to your community is, ‘Hey, I’m giving you information. I’m a part of this. I’m still working on it.’” Naturally it also helps to become a featured project on Kickstarter, and while Combs is not part of the editorial team that makes those decisions, she knows what that group is looking for. For example, Combs said the editorial team likes to see a strong top project image, something that highlights an awesome game rather than a photo of the developers involved. She also endorsed the use of gameplay .gifs, perhaps four or five of them scattered throughout the page. ENGAGE WITH KICKSTARTER Combs also recommended developers speak with her and the rest of the games team early and often. She explained, “If you get me your project page three weeks before you launch, that means I can go to our editorial team and say, ‘Hey, what can we do fora promotional page for this creator?’” As for things to avoid, badges that say “now live on Kickstarter,” “funded on Kickstarter,”or similar are frowned upon as redundant. “Our editorial team hates them,” Combs stressed. “If you put these types of badges on your project page, our editorial team will completely ignore you. Please do not put them on your project page.” Finally, Combs cautioned developers not to get discouraged if their projects aren’t instantly funded. Every project hits a plateau after the first couple of days, often bringing in the bulk of their money in the final two days of the campaign. But even if a funding goal isn’t reached, the campaign doesn’t have to be a total wash. “The only time you fail on Kickstarter is if you haven’t learned something from running your project,” Combs said. “I’ve had multiple people who weren’t funded the first time around, but maybe they were funded the second time, found a publisher, or realized they needed to build community.”
Anya Combs at the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit
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Gaming is not a meritocracy Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail pokes holes in the notion of cream rising to the top, explains why devs and platforms may believe in it anyway
Brendan Sinclair
North American Editor In a ‘fireside chat’ session during the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit at PAX East, Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail grilled Epic Games’ David Stelzer and Sergey Galyonkin for details on the Epic Games store that would be most relevant to independent developers. When asked what indie developers looking to make it through Epic’s curation process could do, Stelzer’s response raised some eyebrows. “The cream always rises to the top at the end of the day,” Stelzer said. “If you make a crappy game, then there are places where you can put crappy games.” Given widespread agreement on the significant challenge of discoverability, the idea of the industry as a meritocracy where “the cream always rises to the top” might not sit “It’s something a lot of well with some creators. GamesIndustry.biz caught people would like to up with Ismail the following believe, that just good day, and he was not quite work would set you a believer in the inevitable apart... That’s not how elevation of cream. the world works” “It’s something a lot of people would like to believe, Rami Ismail, Vlambeer that just good work would set you apart,” Ismail said. “Because I think a lot of people are doing good work, and it’s easy to believe that’s all you need. That there’s no further parts of life that affect that, like your resources, your upbringing, or anything else that affects that. But it’s obviously and pertinently untrue. That’s not how the world works. “The world works with privilege. It works with access, with resources, where you’re born, what languages you speak, the amount of money you have, what previous games you’ve made the network you have... There are tons of factors that play into whether or not your game will be successful.”
MORE THAN QUALITY Even when there’s a game that people think “came out of nowhere” (think Motion Twin’s Dead Cells or Mike Bithell’s Thomas Was Alone), Ismail noted that the actual story involves creators who’ve worked for years but simply hadn’t had a high profile until their breakthrough game. “People ask, ‘Well isn’t that meritocracy?’ And no, it means the right person with a good game was in the right place at the right time with the right resources,” Ismail said. “But they say only good games rise to the top. And the games that rise to the top tend to be good, but it doesn’t mean a game that’s good will automatically rise to the top. It’s a combination of factors.” He added that an industry that was truly a meritocracy is incompatible with the idea of a hidden gem, or of games that go unnoticed for years but breakthrough on Twitch years later when a popular streamer discovers them. “One of the reasons it’s such a common myth is because a) developers want it to be true, and b) for platforms, distributors, stores, it’s an easy way out,” Ismail said. “’It’s a meritocracy. If your game didn’t do well, you have to make a better game next time.’” Ismail says he and many other developers can see that in the receptions of their own titles. The games a developer is most proud of or believes to be their best don’t always line up with the critical or commercial reception they receive. For example, Ismail said one his favourites is Glitchhiker, a Global Game Jam entry made with five other developers in which everyone who played the game drew from (and contributed to) the same pool of lives, and which became permanently unplayable after that pool was exhausted. All told, the game existed for less than seven hours. “I think what developers want to do and what players want to play are very different things,” Ismail said. “I’m trying to make interesting things around the state of my life, where I’m at, and the work I’ve done already. So a lot of my work is a response to things that happened in my life.”
Gaming Is Not A Meritocracy 51
Rami Ismail hosted a fireside chat at the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit at PAX East
Vlambeer’s next game, Ultrabugs, is in some ways a response to its last game, Nuclear Throne. Where Nuclear Throne was a sprawling project that took four or five years to put together, Ultrabugs is intended to go small, the first of a series of smaller-scope games that will be collected under the Vlambeer Arcade banner. “Everybody is making bigger games,” Ismail said. “Across the space, people are making bigger games, spending more resources, more time, more budget making things that are bigger because it’s one of the easiest ways of standing out right now. There’s a very clear distinction between the haves and the have nots in the space.” THE ARMS RACE Even in the indie space, production values are increasing, studios are growing, and people are devoting more resources into polished visuals, top-notch voice actors, and other resource-intensive pursuits. “I’ve seen that race before,” Ismail said. “Because AAA did the exact same thing...
I just want to make some smaller stuff, and I hope maybe if we can prove there’s an audience for that, that developers who make work like that feel encouraged to try really polishing a game like that up and releasing it. Because right now the market is just really leaning toward bigger.” Ismail has heard plenty of stories of developers who risked it all to make their dream project. Now he wants to hear a different kind of story. “We’re just more interested in how can a studio keep their head above water without having to blow everything on it,” Ismail said. “That’s how this should work. You should be able to make interesting games you’re really proud of that don’t require you to sell your house, or get a second mortgage, or get rid of your healthcare. But those are the stories we keep telling. We just want to tell the story of, ‘We’re a studio in a good spot. We have a great audience. We have a community. We’re making games, doing it without betting the bank, and we’re doing it in a way that we’re still making work we’re very proud of that we think our fans will like.’”
Ultrabugs is the first in a series of smaller-scope games from Vlambeer
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P59 Top video game makers discuss the titles that influenced them
Metal Gear Solid Sumo’s Emily Knox on the power of Solid Snake’s PS1 debut
Infamous Auroch Digital’s Nina Collins digs into the guided open-world of Sucker Punch’s PS3 hit
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Portal The original is the best, argues YoYo Games’ Russell Kay
Persona 5 Marketer Michal Napora on how the flashy RPG stole his heart
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Minit
Game developer Dan Marshall discusses this concise retro marvel
Diddy Kong Racing Better than Mario Kart? Sumo’s Jamie Smith thinks so
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Metal Gear Solid was ahead of its time Sumo Digital designer Emily Knox explores how the PSone classic shaped and inspired her childhood self
Emily Knox Level Designer, Sumo Digital PREVIOUS ROLES Level Designer/Associate Designer, CCP • Track Design, Eutechnyx
SELECTED WORKS Eve Valkyrie NASCAR franchise
It was 1999, I was nine years old. I would never have been able to articulate at the time (although I’m sure I did try) why I loved Metal Gear Solid so much. After purchasing issue 42 of the Official UK PlayStation Magazine and playing the accompanying Metal Gear Solid demo countless times, I bought the game. I also bought every magazine I could find with Metal Gear Solid on the cover. As an adult, I can now look back and say with confidence that I wasn’t enjoying this game solely on the traits of being an impressionable child. Metal Gear Solid earned its place in my imagination for years to come because it was truly ground-breaking. STEALTH GAMEPLAY Metal Gear Solid was coined in some magazines as a ‘stealth ‘em up.’ Your objective is to infiltrate a guarded base, and while your character has lethal capabilities, greater success is found by remaining unseen. Metal Gear Solid paved the way with functionality that lends itself to the stealth style of play. The unusual top-down camera
angle allows you to observe the movement patterns of nearby enemies, and the Soliton Radar, a small mini-map in the top right corner, builds on this information with clearly defined visuals to display walls for cover and enemy line of sight in the form of a small cone of vision. With these ingredients, you have everything needed to progress through an area, and beginning with no weapons, it is in this fashion you must initially proceed. These mechanics were showcased in the demo, along with additional nuances, such as the sound of walking through a puddle which can be heard by nearby guards. It sounds quaint now, but only because for the next 20 years other games followed in these footsteps. Then there’s your ability to ‘hug’ the wall, now a staple ingredient in third-person shooters and stealth games alike. Pressing yourself against a wall edge causes the camera to swing down, giving a dramatic straight-ahead view. It’s a brilliant way to ‘peep’ down a corridor. In the game and demo, after crawling under an obstacle, the most likely course of action is to run straight ahead. Conveniently, this leads the player into a wall edge, which results in
Why I Love: Metal Gear Solid the wall hug, the camera swings down to show a guard walking towards the player, while Snake remains hidden out of sight. The beauty is that this capability isn’t ever explained; we’re simply led into this wonderful mechanic, which went on to become a convention across genres. CUTSCENES & CODEC This was one of the earliest games where we saw the same characters we controlled during game play become animated and voiced in cutscenes. In Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, a 2004 remake on the GameCube, one of the most notable changes is that the cutscenes became much more elaborate. I still feel there’s an immersive simplicity to the original – there’s virtually nothing Snake does in a cutscene that the player can’t do in-game. The perfect example of this is after breaking into DARPA chief Donald Anderson’s cell. During this cutscene as the characters are talking, a guard looks in through the cell window, Snake hugs the door, evading view. In The Twin Snakes, Snake instead performs a ceiling cling, an impossible feat for the player, which breaks the game’s immersion somewhat. Outside of conventional cutscenes, we also had the Codec. The Codec gave players all the time they desire to scrape more information out of available characters by calling them. Every time there was a story development, I would ring each character and see what they had to say. For this I was rewarded with titbits of backstory, perhaps a comical moment, even useful tips. Ring Master Miller while you’re crawling through an air duct and he’ll advise that you can follow the mice to reach the exit. Delivering information in this style pulls the player further into the world than the more commonly used loading screen tips we see today. Using the Codec is conveyed with a simple call screen; it shows the number you’re calling, the portraits of characters in the call, and subtitles. With a masterful soundtrack to build tension, create drama or evoke sadness, a huge amount of story was told in this way and to great effect. The elevator scene, Master Miller’s reveal, and Naomi Hunter’s past are wonderfully memorable moments each encapsulated in this primitive format. CHARACTERS The characters of Metal Gear Solid are wonderful: villainous, deceptive, conniving, skilled, and almost always better informed than Snake. Roles in the story were dished out to male and female characters alike. We had Nastasha Romanenko, Mei Ling, Dr Naomi Hunter,
Sniper Wolf, and my personal favourite, Meryl Silverburgh, the somewhat naïve ginger tomboy and combat rookie. As a redhead and, at the time, an overly proud tomboy myself, a few seemingly inconsequential statements her character made really spoke to me. “I don’t use make-up the way other women do, I hardly ever look at myself in the mirror. I’ve always despised that kind of woman.” It may be a bit aggressive, but her goals are bigger than vanity, vanity and appearance being sold to us as critical aspects of being female, especially when we are young. And as childish as it sounds, I clung onto some of those words throughout my teenage life. Another perhaps insignificant moment I appreciated was Snake noticing that Meryl uses a Desert Eagle. He opines, “Isn’t that gun a little big for a girl?” I still think about this one today because it’s a phrase at least one man has said to me about every motorcycle I have owned. Meryl’s response? “I’m more comfortable with it than I am with a bra.” To this day the players, press, and developers of video games continue to verbally wrestle over the inclusion of female characters in games, their roles and how they are portrayed, but Metal Gear Solid knocked it out the park all those years ago. Regretfully, women of the series would go on to have less clothes to wear and fewer words to say. For me this hasn’t damped the impact of the earlier instalments, but instead further illustrates how brilliant they were. On top of its technical and artistic achievements, Metal Gear Solid broke the fourth wall in creative ways that completely evaded me as a child. At one point to progress the story, Snake is instructed to call Meryl on the Codec. He doesn’t know the frequency to dial, but you are told it’s written on the back of the CD case in Snake’s item inventory. I never figured this out myself – the number is on the back of the actual Metal Gear Solid CD case. Embarrassingly my only discovery at the time was that if you waited long enough, Meryl’s frequency would eventually just appear in your contact list. There’s also Psycho Mantis, a boss you must fight who can read your mind. The trick to this one is to unplug your controller from port 1 and insert it into port 2. I didn’t figure this out either and found this fight rather challenging and confusing. To my knowledge, no other game has undertaken such inventive endeavours with the use of system features, no other game that is other than later instalments in the Metal Gear Solid series. Thank you to all the talent behind Metal Gear Solid, for entertaining, challenging, and inspiring me.
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Portal was a classic from out of nowhere YoYo Games’ Russell Kay remembers how The Orange Box toss-in stole the whole Half-Life show
Russell Kay Chief Technology Officer, YoYo Games PREVIOUS ROLES Senior Software Architect, Realtime Worlds • CEO, Visual Sciences • Co-Founder and Head of PC Programming, DMA Design
SELECTED WORKS GameMaker • Project My World • Lemmings Grand Theft Auto • Myst
I didn’t see Portal coming. I don’t think anyone saw Portal coming. The four-hour puzzle adventure tossed into Valve’s Half-Life 2 anthology, The Orange Box, presented itself as little more than a neat little curio. A fun side dish to Gordon Freeman’s entrée. So when I picked up The Orange Box upon its release, I occupied my nights exploring City 17 and shooting headcrabs. It was during lunch at the office, however, where I dipped into Portal. And good god do those orange and blue ovals have a way of transporting you! There’s so much to love about Portal – its puzzle design, writing, art direction, etc. – and gush about it I will, but before I get to all of that, it’s important to note just how mesmerizing the portals are in terms of concept, tech, and just playfulness. The fact that Valve was rendering two different places at once – and that you could even watch yourself from almost anywhere in the room – was a technical marvel and immediately gratifying to simply tinker around with. That it even incorporated physics into the equation, so that one’s velocity affects their propulsion coming out the other side, was simply masterful.
I could have played around with banal blocks all day, tossing them into these whimsical gateways. It’s little wonder then that your biggest ally in the game is an inanimate ‘companion’ cube. (Who needs friends when you’ve got portals?!) PLAYING WITH PORTALS Yet Valve didn’t just stop there. The portals were the starting point, not the ending one. Instead of simply giving us some joyful little puzzles and calling it a day, Valve fleshed this concept out with the same level of craft and personality that made Half-Life 2 such an immersive experience. While set entirely within the confines of a singular science facility, Portal fleshes out its cast in a way that not only matches what the studio accomplished in its Half-Life saga, but in many ways bested it. At no point in Portal is the player forced to sit through a talking heads segment of NPCs blathering exposition at you. Instead, the most talkative character is a demented AI that begins as an unassuming entity that’s seemingly little more than the futuristic equivalent of the Microsoft Office anthropomorphic paper clip
Why I Love: Portal
helper, and ends up as one of gaming’s most beloved antagonists. Indeed GLaDOS subverts the stereotype of the ominous AI, by having a strong personality with laughably obvious desires as they go about their feeble attempts to diminish your spirits, through comically inept verbal abuse. GLaDOS may not have a heart, but she wears whatever the machine equivalent of that “Following Portal is a tall is on her sleeve. order, not just because And it’s not just GLaDOS that offers this left-field whimsy, it’s an amazing game, but the entirety of Aperture but because it defied Science is filled with these kinds every expectation of of amusing details. The turrets themselves speak, with innocent, what a game could be childish worry – the exact at the time” opposite of what one expects a talking machine gun to sound like. It’s not just goofy robots either, as Portal contains one human character NPC, even if they’re never seen. Since dubbed the ‘Rat Man’, there’s another person who has undergone these trials before you, offering such sage advice as “the cake is a lie” scrawled in mad graffiti found in abandoned maintenance shafts. It’s funny, sure, but it also offers an extra layer of intrigue to the proceedings, as well as adding The first Portal was a sense of raw, human panic to this isolating, a lean experience antiseptic facility (plus it’s just funny to imagine and didn’t overstep previous Aperture test subjects being that its ambition motivated by cake.)
SURPRISE PACKAGE While Portal fired on all cylinders, it was smart enough to not overstep its ambition. It’s a very tight package at a mere few hours long, with no fat on its bones. As much as I enjoyed its sequel, something was lost in translation, going from a fresh novelty to a bombastic AAA blockbuster, even if the writing and puzzles remained as sharp as ever. It was like going from The Matrix – something exciting and new – to its well produced, but ultimately familiar and bloated sequels. Following Portal is a tall order, not just because it’s an amazing game, but because it defied every expectation of what a game could be at the time. This was 2007, when games came in two categories: full-priced retail affairs, and very small arcade games (think Geometry Wars). We didn’t really have modestly-priced, four-hour games back then. That wasn’t really a thing. And it certainly wasn’t a thing for a major studio like Valve that specialized in high end spectacles. The fact that Portal had almost no marketing behind it and wasn’t even being sold à la carte further suggested that it would be a mere bonus feature in the larger collection that was The Orange Box. Slowly discovering that it was so much more than that made it among the most pleasant surprises I’ve ever encountered in gaming. Portal may have only been a few hours long, but over a decade later it’s still a part of me.
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Brevity is the soul of Minit Size Five Games’ Dan Marshall explains why the 60-second adventure game represents “streamlining at its best”
Dan Marshall Director, Size Five Games SELECTED WORKS Ben There, Dan That! • Time Gentlemen, Please! The Swindle • Behold the Kickmen
When I first picked up Minit, I fell in love with the BBC Micro-ness of the whole thing – the graphics, presentation, music and sound took me to a place I haven’t seen since Palace of Magic or Castle Quest. That’s 1987, which must be, what? Over 20 years ago now (shut up shut up yes it is). “I need a pencil and graph paper,” I thought. Before long, I was in a sprawling desert, and my ageing brain was struggling to remember the path back. “I need to map this out, old-school.” The thing is, Minit is better than that. It’s a crunched, compacted-in-on-itself version of all these disparate elements – this is an old-school adventure without the trekking for trekking’s sake. The map almost seamlessly doubles back on itself, opening new paths organically as you find and use the inventory items scattered around. At times you’ll feel far from home base, only to find you’re just around the corner. Minit’s central concept – you die every 60 seconds – forces the game to boil down each core element into a microcosm of the concept. Indie games have always lived by the mantra “necessity is the mother of all invention,” and I think it’s really inspirational how Minit, forced to reduce so many of its core gameplay elements to fit its own self-imposed logic, somehow manages to do something fresh, innovative and tightly designed with all this stuff we as designers have sort of bloated beyond recognition. All this shines, despite being so bare-bones it’s laughable. Normally game design is nebulous, or so built up upon the work of others it feels ‘obvious.’ A superfluous job. You just do whatever the last person did and add some bells and whistles to suit what you’re making. But with Minit, you appreciate the craft so much more. Minit was sold as a sort of Zelda-inmicrocosm, but to me, it’s a point-and-click adventure. I’ve never played the original Zelda, so maybe that’s why, but there’s something in the way the game distils its core gameplay into
ultra -manageable 60-second chunks that makes you realise someone has sat, agonised, and chewed over every moment of gameplay to perfection. MASTER OF DESIGN The puzzles are frequently placed at the edge of a run’s 60-second limit, but they’re laid bare in a way that lets you identify the different elements in a split second, ready to be tackled on your next run through. Likewise, your inventory is boiled down, idiot-free. Sword. Watering can. Coffee. Flashlight. No fiddling about combining stuff; grab it and it’s good to go. It works in context – you’ve got the thing, you’re through. No fuss, no cutscene. The relentless pace drives that decision, of course, but it’s a testament to Minit’s design. The snappy dialogue is a hint at what to do next contained within a single speech bubble. There’s more character to these tiny sprites and their single sentence all-caps outbursts than most games manage in 15 hours of cutscenes. It’s led by necessity. There’s no room for branching dialogue trees, but the care with which every syllable is chosen has worked wonders. Often, you can read and run, with characters shouting their singular summed-up purpose at you while you navigate the world as quickly as possible. So it is with action, the game’s take on sword fighting crunched down to a singular, satisfying hit process. For a game about a cursed sword there’s just the right amount of hitting being done. There are no insurmountable encounters, just quick, clunky bashing and you’re away. It’s streamlining at its best. It’s working within the parameters of your budget, scope, art style, the works. Minit is a weird little masterclass of design because it feels like there’s so little of it. They said 2,000 words for this, but using that many feels thematically disingenuous.
Striking the balance of autonomy and narrative Auroch Digital’s Nina Collins digs into the guided open-world of Sucker Punch’s Infamous
Nina Collins Production Manager, Auroch Digital SELECTED WORKS Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics • Ogre Jack the Ripper: Shadow of Whitechapel
What makes a game really sing for me is when the developers strike a balance between guiding you through a great story and giving you the freedom to make choices and go off track. I find that going too far in either direction can ruin a game. I’ve played titles where there’s no chance for you to figure out things for yourself because no sooner have you entered a new area before your ‘companion’ runs ahead and declares ‘oh look, some stairs!’ Then there’s the other end of the spectrum (which I fully appreciate some people love): when a game is so open that you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing and end up sailing round the seas aimlessly looking for a cause… There are a few a games that, for me, have really managed to get the balance right between narrative strength and autonomy, and Sucker Punch’s 2009 title Infamous really nailed it. Let’s start with the narrative, a strong comic book-esque story with a well-balanced protagonist named Cole, who reflects both the good and evil routes you can choose. The narrative is clearly signposted in the open map, which you can easily follow and come back to no matter how many side missions you run off and get distracted by. The open world is managed well by the mechanic of unlocking areas. (Cole must unlock each of the city’s three main boroughs by restoring the power grid first, as he needs electricity nearby to charge his powers and heal his wounds.) So by the end of the game you have a vast map to run around, go back and complete side missions and explore areas you may have missed. This helps in guiding you through the story whilst not overly holding your hand.
For those players who lean more into structured levels, the underground tunnels are there specially for you! The nature of these areas means you have one route to take with a clear objective at the end. These are nicely spaced throughout the game and stop any fatigue in running around the city. Importantly, they’re usually linked to powering up your skills and act as a tantalising palate cleanser from the rest of the gameplay. REWARDING EXPLORATION One of my favourite things about this game, which adds to this balance of narrative and autonomy, is your ability to climb anything. When your objective is to get to the top of a frighteningly tall building (I’m terrified of heights and this game seriously made my feet go wobbly at certain points), you have to spend time figuring out which way to go whilst considering all possibilities. Inevitably, you’ll make some mistakes along the way, maybe even get stuck or make a misstep and fall from the building. Sucker Punch makes this process fun, though, making exploration and the possibility of getting lost rewarding for the player. It’s a lot more entertaining than having your character climb up a rock face, only using surfaces which look suspiciously different from the rest of the terrain. You might want to throw the controller at your TV, but what’s not fun about that!? There are lots of other reasons why I love Infamous but this is the core of why I find it such a rewarding experience. Signing off now to go and set my Playstation 3 up, as after writing this I need to play it again.
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Persona 5 and the merger of style and substance Marketer Michal Napora was sold by the Atlus RPG’s flashy exterior, but hooked by its substantial heart
Michal Napora Founder, 32-33 Video Games Marketing Agency PREVIOUS ROLES Social Media Manager, Techland • Marketing Strategy and Creative, TEDxPerth
SELECTED WORKS Dying Light • The Sinking City • Dying Light: The Following • TEDx Events (Australia)
A quick preface before I begin. I am a video games marketer. I am the guy that makes hype. For me, it’s all about showcasing a game’s ‘features and benefits’ and making sure that it gets talked about as much as it can. I want my game to be on your mind constantly before it comes out, and when it does, I want you to go and buy it straight away on day one. And I will keep reminding you of my game with as many stories, beats, and opportunities that I physically and mentally can. When I look at other games, I analyze what my fellow marketing peeps are thinking and doing, and I know quite a lot about all the other games that are coming out. It’s part of my job. But with Persona 5, it was different. With that game I only knew three things: it’s Japanese, it’s about high school kids, and it’s stylish as hell. And I only saw around 20 seconds of marketing materials before I knew I wanted it. TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL So, what was it that made me first fall in love with this game? Well, first was definitely the visual style. The styling and branding of Persona 5 is just… sick. It’s a Nike Air Jordan, a Ferrari 458, it’s 808s & Heartbreak, and Into the Spider Verse. It just looks and feels cool. The black, red,
and white comic-book-meets-manga aesthetic stands out from anything else that’s out in the market. When I first saw it, it caught my eye. And I can’t explain this design x-factor in words, but it made me feel like I’m about to play the coolest game ever, without needing to know what it is about. I know, I sound shallow… but it gets deeper. The looks of Persona 5 drew me in (it was my buying decision factor), but it was the soul of the game that made me fall in love with it. However, it took me a while to get it. At first, the game was weird – I had no idea what I was playing. In the first two hours I’m seeing Japanese kids running around in an imaginary castle being chased by a man that’s only in his underpants. It’s not what I expected. And to be completely honest, I felt disappointed. But I kept going, and when I understood what the castle means and what the first story is about, I cracked. I had to put down my controller so that I could grab my head and yell inside of my mind “OMG, this is genius.” From there, it kept getting better and better. I won’t go into too much detail about what the game is about. There are a lot of articles, blogs, and videos that talk about the meaning of Persona 5. However, this was the moment
Why I Love: Persona 5
“It made me realize that when promoting a game, it’s good to leave some things to discover for the players”
realized that games can be a medium to discuss mature and emotionally heavy topics. The first story that is centred around the high school’s PE teacher felt like a personal account of the people that worked on the game. It was the most real and emotional story that I’ve ever encountered in a video game. It also showed me a side of the Japanese culture that I’ve never imagined existed. To me, no other game comes close to the way Persona 5 handled such mature themes. LIFE IMITATES ART The gameplay side of Persona 5 is just as unusual as the rest of the package; it’s alife simulator plus a dungeon crawler with a layer of turn-based combat.
The combat is fun, but not revolutionary. It does what it supposed to do, and it does it well. However, it is the life sim part that made me fall deeper into the game. Going to school, having a job, seeing friends, getting myself better at life’s tasks is what I loved the most. And it also hit me with a bit of a truth: there is a limited
Persona 5 is full of surprises that were not spoiled by the PR campaign
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number of things that you can do during the day, so make it count. (Also, cats will control your sleeping patterns.) I know that this might sound a bit outrageous, but thanks to Persona 5, I started to take care of my life a little bit better. Because of it, I started to read more books (I always carry one in my backpack when I’m catching public transport), I try to catch up with my friends, and I take my wife more often for dinner dates – and sauna. THE JOY OF DISCOVERY There are a lot more of other things that make me geek-out when I think of Persona 5: its soundtrack is some of the best music you will ever hear (Last Surprise is one of my favourite ‘get hyped’ songs of all time), the faithful reproduction of Tokyo, the characters and their relationships, and more. But I guess what makes me love this game so, so much is the fact that I feel like I’ve discovered a hidden gem. It wasn’t sold to me – I found it myself. I didn’t get hyped by marketing talk, by trailers, or by reviews. I wasn’t part of the hype machine. It was purely: this looks nice and interesting – let me try it. And that made the whole experience even better. So where does this leave me? Well, looking at my example with Persona 5, all marketing people should be fired - we might even be detrimental to the overall experience (Please don’t do that – we still serve a purpose.) I guess it made me realize that when promoting a game, it’s good to leave some things to discover for the players. It’s so tempting to showcase as much of the game as possible so you can show people just how much, how big, and how awesome the game is. “Just look at all things you will be able to see, do, and play! OMG this is nuts!!!” But once we showcase everything, bar the ending, there isn’t much discovery left for the player – there’s no magic and surprise left. And I guess, that’s what we play games for – for those moments.
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Diddy Kong was my Dark Souls Sumo Digital’s Jamie Smith says Rare’s N64 kart racer left the competition in the dust
Jamie Smith Senior Game Designer, Sumo Digital PREVIOUS ROLES Game Designer, Ubisoft Reflections Data Editor, EA • Senior Lecturer in Game Design, Teeside University
SELECTED WORKS The Division • FIFA 19
“...It’s better than Mario Kart” - Controversial ‘90s gamer For me, Diddy Kong Racing (DKR) reflects the pinnacle of high-quality UK game development in the mid-to-late ‘90s and proudly stands in my Top Five games of all time even today. More specifically, it’s an archetypal title that also helped cement Rare as one of the best studios in the world. Preceded by GoldenEye and succeeded by Banjo-Kazooie, DKR was one of many fantastic games that compared favourably to their Japanese counterparts, and in an era where hidden gems were abundant. It was safe to say that anything Nintendo could do, Rare could do better. Firstly, there is a strong cast of characters and this is testament to the creativity and originality of the “ It bought so much team: Donkey Kong’s nephew, an credit with me that I evil warthog, a chipper squirrel, continue to buy Rare and a clumsy bear (both titular characters in their own right products even to this shortly after) were just a fraction day and I don’t even of the playable cast. But how can own an Xbox.” anyone forget the level of fondness for Tiptup and Pipsy? They were
clearly overpowered but that wasn’t to the detriment of the game’s balance. Though I fondly remember the “fastest-fingerfirst” metagame played by me, my dad and my sister on the character select screen, with the loser blaming their inevitable defeat on having to pick any of the other quirky characters with inferior attributes. But that was also the beauty of the game. I can recall daring myself to do a lap in reverse before challenging for first position to keep things interesting – a change in playstyle inspired by many suggestions in N64 magazines of that time to keep things fresh. Then there was the game world itself, Timber’s Island, a hub-and-spoke environment that was typical of platforming games around that time, except it was applied to a racing game instead. The hub is the central starting area where the player is able to become accustomed to the controls without fear of failure, and the spokes are a series of themed levels which are accessible through any of the many doors scattered around the world and propose a series of race challenges to complete. Even now, I still find that a pretty unique design decision as it was one of several precursor approaches to the modern open world genre.
Why I Love: Diddy Kong Racing
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THE DARK SOULS OF…’
THE OPEN ROAD The game has been compared favourably to Mario Kart
Each of the island’s regions were fairly diverse and accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack that adapted to your location. Still, in order to get around you had to first frantically beep at Taj, the resident elephant genie (of course), to grab his attention and transform your vehicle into a car, airplane or hovercraft. I was blown away by the sense of freedom enabled by this ability as inaccessible collectibles were often teased behind obstacles, secret locations were unveiled through exploration, and what other game disguises a bonus character as a squishable frog that splashes around near the waterfalls? Genius. This sense of mystery was also consistent throughout adventure mode, the core progression path. Keys and amulet pieces were littered throughout each of the tracks that would grant access to new content, but this was only after having completed the silver coin challenge; a great addition that significantly increased the difficulty of a given race. Each of the game’s unorthodox boss characters proposed that eight coins must be collected, in addition to winning a race, before further progress could be made. However, the initial test was to actually seek out the coins as they were placed in awkward positions away from the optimum racing line. This was probably the first time I remember being absolutely hooked on such a simple challenge, replaying it over and over until perfection was achieved or blisters had set in. Weeding out the muscle memory I’d gained from almost mastering the time trials, I hammered each race over and over, constantly scouring for shiny loot. And what happened when I finally did manage to acquire them all? Well, then I had to make up for lost racing time as the AI had ramped up several gears from the previous encounter, too. This pressure was further compounded by the fast-paced music played throughout the final lap. Unfortunately for me, even 20 years after first picking it up, I never did quite manage to unlock the elusive TT character – that was a challenge too far for my tenderised digits.
If it hasn’t sunk in by this point, I’ll put the game in context: a wealth of playable avatars with differing attributes, a uniquely structured game world promoting freedom and exploration, a variety of mysterious secrets waiting to be discovered, a series of memorable boss encounters, a level of difficulty unlike anything else within the genre, and a limited amount of guidance provided throughout. Make no mistake, this was my Dark Souls Outside of playing games, I think DKR was the first time that I truly became aware of brand loyalty, much less a disciple of it. It bought so much credit with me that I continue to buy Rare products even to this day and I don’t even own an Xbox. The same natural affinity can be said for those associated
with Playtonic Games and Free Radical Design, offshoots of the original Rare dev teams. There are names associated with each of these studios that instantly trigger an impulse purchase and I know I’m not alone in saying that I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a couple of my heroes throughout my time working in games. I’m thankful to both the individual and collective developers involved in creating this masterpiece as it definitely pushed me towards being a designer within the industry today. Still, speaking as such, I’m eager to see more investment and experimentation in the karting genre outside of Nintendo’s platforms. Sure, there’s inevitably going to be a new Mario Kart but it would be nice to see a contemporary take on the original hub-based formula, inspired by recent successes from games outside the karting subset. I’m convinced there’s a market salivating at the prospect of franchise innovation. One day, maybe I’ll get the chance to pay homage to those that inspired me. Praise the mon(key)...
Diddy Kong Racing launched on N64 in 1997
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The GamesIndustry.biz Crossword Can you work out the games or franchises from the synonyms below?
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6. Berserk Uber (5,4) 7. Changed animal (7,5) 9. Two weeks (8) 11. Bad inhabitant (8,4) 14. Art of digging (9) 15. Burglar’s ocean (3.2.7) 16. Angry avenues (7,2,4) 17. Flawless absence of light (7,4) 20. Summoning of obligation (4,2,4) 21. Wooden fragment, confined room (8.4) 23. Gateway (6) 24. Inedible because burned (10) 25. Look canines (5,4) 26. Large consequence (4,6) 27. Region between territories (11)
1. Distant sob (3,3) 2. Above a wrist-mounted timepiece (9) 3. Politely requested parchments (6,6) 4. Fate (7) 5. Pace required (4,3,5) 8. Mausoleum bandit (4,6) 10. Atonement of scarlet corpse (3,4,10) 12. Ancient documents (5,7) 13. Commemoration of chivalrous conduct (5,2,5) 18. Single remaining group member (3,4,2,2) 19. Fractional existence (4,4) 20. Low Fracture (9) 22. Hilly (5)
successful adaptations
we think games deserve adaptations that strive to surpass the original Abstraction is best known for accurately and faithfully adapting titles across multiple platforms. Our adaptations feel like they were originally made for the target platform. No compromises, just cutting-edge results. Our clients trust us because of our problem-solving attitude and our proven ability to work across a wide range of genres and geographic locations.
Conversion Automation One reason behind our ability to deliver faithful adaptions is the way we carefully isolate platform dependent and independent code. Over the years we’ve been able to automate progressively bigger chunks of the work involved. For instance, our Silverware platform sits so close to the hardware that it’s as if it represents a platform specific SDK, but one that does not really exist. So, when we ‘normalise’ your platform dependent code to Silverware, it will instantly just work on all target platforms already covered by Silverware, which means frankly all relevant platforms in existence. The next step we’re working on is instead of touching your platform dependent code, we’re automating the process of replacing the implementation behind all currently relevant source platform APIs by our own implementation that is built on top of Silverware. Once we’re done with this, all straightforward ports will run with a button click. Not only will this accelerate conversions, it will make our products even more reliable and faithful to the originals.
a three-phase approach
01 Discover After an RFP comes in, it takes about two weeks to do a thorough technical assessment of the project in order to provide a well informed proposal to our potential client. We are flexible and happy to either take full risk and work with a fixed price or royalty based and everything in between, or to work on a monthly retainer basis.
02 Create The straightforward port is the first deliverable. It is the game running “as is” on the target platform. The game is playable, but not tailored to the target platform or heavily optimized yet. If, for instance, the game relies on mouse input and we were adapting it to console, we would at this stage simulate a mouse on the target console with a gamepad. After that, the game is tailored to what players and first parties expect from a game running on the target platform, leveraging platform specific features and take them as far as we can.
03 Release and aftercare Any and all major bugs have been fixed, performance is on target and the game is ready for first party submission. After the game has been approved by first party, it is ready for release. We provide tailored aftercare ranging from simply making sure issues discovered post launch are addressed in a timely fashion to full maintenance / live ops where we keep the game on par with the source platform as it evolves through patches and DLC.
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