Game Dev Livestream: From Platforms to People: Adam Boyes on Reinventing Game Studios

Game Dev Livestream: Welcome back everybody. This is the game development live stream. We are live from

Jon Radoff: Gamescom. So kind of first time that we've done exactly this, we started doing some of these live from South by Southwest, we kind of like swooped in and secretly set up, we didn't have any permission, we did it anyway. Now we've actually got a booth. So this is the beamable booth here at Gamescom. It's actually the first real booth that we've had at a convention or conference. Yeah, we're here talking to people about live games, servers, multiplayer social systems, all the stuff that beamable does. So my name is Jon Radoff, the oven that we before. I am one of the founders in the CEO of beamable. We help people with all of the live technology you need to launch a live game. And today, I'm here with Adam Boyz. And we're going to be talking about Gamescom, the state of the industry, the trends, Adam's new business, what they're doing, the problems you're seeing, we're going to kind of cover it all because we're here at Gamescom. And this is one of the biggest events in the gaming world for both consumers as well as developers. So it's a lot of fun to be here. And it's really fucking awesome to be here in the middle of this event with our own booth, doing a live stream. Okay, but let's introduce Adam here. So Adam, yeah, tell us a little bit about your background, how you got to be at this point in your life doing what you're doing. We'll get into your business and everything in a little bit. But like, who are you, Adam? Yeah, sure thing, John. Well, thanks

Adam Boyes: for having me, Adam. Super excited to be here. Gamescom on the show floor in your booth. First time ever, so many firsts. So I, so it's starting a small town in Canada called Abyss for British Columbia. So that's where I was born and raised. But my first job in the games industry was 1996 as a QA test or DA. I was one of those people that like, as a kid was super into BDSs and a lot of OG sort of, you know, PC games and text-based games, my Tandy, my TRS 80. And then just always fat was passing with the video games. Never knew that I would be able to work in video games. So what I found out that EA Canada was based about a 45 minute drive from my house, story up. I started applying when I was, you know, graduated high school. And luckily one time I got a phone call back, I was house into my grandmother's house. And the EA call said, we'd like to offer your job. So that was the beginning of it throughout my career, though, moved up into production through my career. I worked at Midway. So started the A, then worked at Midway. Then the other companies in between Capcom's was where I started running product development, learning more about production, and then business development. And then that transition into starting my own company called VP Media, which then got me to PlayStation. Whereas the VP of third party content. Does it have a launch to PS4? Do a lot of fun things there. Maybe a little sharing video that some viewers might be familiar with. And then after four years there, I decided to go back to my roots of development. Join our Galaxy Studios as a Co-CEO. And for eight and a half years, work with Chelsea Dave and an amazing crew of people to work on incredibly amazing products like Uncharted PC and last was two and League of Legends and Starrim and two games you may have heard about. And called Doody and Overwatch and Valorant. And anyway, good to run it around. Nice. Nice. And then about eight months ago, I decided to start my new consultancy to sort of like spread the good word of best practice in the industry and help make it different. So it's sort of like the concatenated version we could dig in any slice of that. But from QA to here, 29 years later.