GameDev Livestream: Tech Meets Tactics: The FRAMEWORK of Stratosphere Games’ Success

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Jon Radoff: Welcome back everybody. You have tuned in to the game development live stream. This is the stream where I talk to game developers, game publishers, people actually building games. This is like reviewers, pundits, fans, people that build games for a living and what we try to unearth is success in this industry. Game designs, game publishing strategies, go-to-market strategies, financing strategies from the people who are in the trenches of this industry. My name is Jon Radoff. I am one of the founders and the CEO of a company called Beamable. We make live services and infrastructure. If you build an online game, we can help. Social systems, online systems, everything from real-time multiplayer to blockchain integration, Web2, Web3, all of it. We help with all of that stuff. That's what my company does. I have a background in game development. I shipped about 20 million copies of games like Game of Thrones, Star Trek, Walking Dead, Archer, to free-to-play mobile customers before I started Beamable. I have lived the pain and the joy of building games. It's the greatest art form. It's the greatest commercial entertainment industry that we've got. I'm proud to be part of it. Today, I have got a couple of people with me. First of all, I've got Oscar, Oscar who teams up with me, has been doing this for, I don't know how long we've been doing this all year long at this point. Oscar keeps this on track. He is going to watch the questions and the comments from you. We are on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch, X, and a hell of a lot of people on X. We're watching all those channels. Post your questions, ask questions because we do this in a live format so that you get to actually be actively involved instead of just watching a YouTube video like you get to ask the question. So that's cool. Makes my life a little bit easier, but it makes it a lot more interesting for you because you get to learn a little bit of what exactly you wanted. Like I said, we love to bring on people in the trenches of this industry building games. So I'm super excited here today because we've got an awesome guest, Christian Metzger. And he has launched a game today. We'll get that to that in a moment. This is amazing to me that someone even has time to stream with us on a day that a game has launched. My Christian has a background in publishing games, a bunch of games, MMO games, has been in this industry for a while. Actually, let's start there, Christian. Share with us what has gotten you to this point in time and space on this live stream today, shipping a game today. Like what is your background? And then I want to go right into the game

Guest: because that's exciting news. Cool. Yeah, thanks John for having me and Oscar. Yeah, I am in the industry forever. I think my first ever article I was a game journalist many, many years ago was 1999 and I did an article about homeworld. Finally, the game that I 20 years later were happy to make a mobile version of for gearbox. I come to that later in a bit. And I started my career as a game journalist and then slowly, basically became bigger, worked for your gamer. Before that, I was a big e-spotler, Counter Strike, German championships, stuff like that. So I was always games was in my DNA since the beginning. And so game journalism, after game journalism, I switched to the typical way I switched to communications. I worked at Splash Damage, Big Studio in the UK, did a dirty bomb and a lot of cool games. I worked on big IP like years of war. And then at one point I thought, yeah, sure, why not? I do my own studio. And knowing back then, I thought, yeah, how hard can it be? And believe me, last 10 years had a lot of ups, but also quite a bit of downs. Let's say like that. We were there when there was no money at the beginning, that we were there when there was a lot of money in the middle. And we are now here where there is also less money again. So I think I have a quite good understanding is like what made what happened in the last 10 years. And it was quite a ride so far. I can tell you, it's something that the game industry is astonishing me every day when it's on the good side and on the bad side. So that's where I am. So like a long career in gaming. And yeah, now we are at the studio having three life games. And yeah, so and now I'm ended up with you, John. And that's that's a pleasure.

Jon Radoff: And I'll know as well. Awesome. Okay. So first of all, I am odd and pressed that you literally launched a game today. And you have time to be on this live stream. So first of all, I think that I'm not saying it wasn't stressful. I bet it was because I've been through game launches. But must have gone pretty well if you have time to be here today. So yeah, so tell us about the game.

Guest: Yeah. So the game is called the Kingdom of Evil Life. It hails which is basically a game that it's taking. It's a little bit like you can't imagine it. Oh yeah, there you see. It is a fantasy universe. I don't know if you know the Sims Medieval. That was one of the ideas that we based the hard, basically trying to show what kind of like what kind of life you have in this medieval world. And you fight a little bit, but you also grow stuff. You build your tailor, you have you fight monsters, but also you can, yeah, you see a fight monsters and dragons. And then but also you tailor clothes, you bake bakery stuff. There's a lot of fantasy in it. And the reason why I can't be here because it's based on a day down of ages. So down of ages was our last big title, which was released last year. And down of ages is also far most successful title over three and a half million downloads. We have been total. And the game and what we did is for the first time, we took basically dawn of ages and then used this technical framework to build to build now the Kingdom. And the cool bit about that was it just took us around eight months from zero, like a few concepts and ideas to release. And that was just possible because we just basically took the all the basics that we had all the frameworks that we had the ECS systems behind that the fighting system. And we basically changed the core gameplay loop. But overall, we reused a lot of these systems and that allowed us to basically be so quick to the market. And that's why it is not a new new system. It's not a new tech. It is existing tech that you build up. It is an Azure based cloud services that run in the background. We had a little hiccup in the morning where one of the databases were anyways was a bit too, was bottleneck. But after we had that out of the way, also Apple took a little bit longer to review, like always. But now, yeah, I know. That's a good point. Yeah, but basically what happened is everything basically got solved by midday. Now, we will monitor tomorrow. There's an event going live. And next week, we'll do some follow-up patches with like, but this is like I said, it is very well used to us. And the tech is basically built by the same team. And this is something that we did in this current situation that is so important is we now a lot of the games are built on a similar tech so that we can share and distribute because when it comes to art, but also on the tech side, super important. When you have smaller teams, you have not the same financial background anymore. You have smaller teams, then it's really, really good to be able to share these resources. And also have fallback when there's fucking holidays and stuff like that. So yeah, that's that's basically the special thing about the kingdom. It is based on an existing game. And we had one interesting other thing. It is also a co-production with a TV company here in Germany. There's a big TV company and they have this TV show. And it's part of the TV narrative. There's basically a guy that has a game studio and they created this game. So it's that you got a trans media element too. There's a trans media element. Yeah, yeah, we all dream of the trans media. I don't know what it would do. I sold trans media quite quite a few times, but this time it quite basically worked out. So yeah, that's why I'm here. Tomorrow morning is a new day. We'll see what the first numbers bring in. But yeah, so far,

Jon Radoff: everything is stable. So let's zoom out the camera lens a little bit. So we just described the game and you reused a lot of tech that you had in place in another game. Describe the studio for

Unknown: us. Like how do you explain to the rest of the world, whether it's your customers, whether it's

Jon Radoff: to publishers, like what's the studio? What's your core expertise? What kind of games do you make?

Guest: Yeah, so our games are all economy, social multiplayer games. That's the core components. Cross platform is another element that is important for us. Don't have ages on steam. Our shooter desulation is on steam. And the core expertise that we have is everything that's economy drifting, crafting, RPG elements, looter, loot elements, these kind of things that is what makes us tick. And all our games are made to a hardcore. So we don't do a hard cook, very casual games. All of them have complex systems that is what is driving us. And I would explain it like that. So like in the in the in the golden years, on the years where we all got lots of money, we were able to extend our expertise. So we started with mainly doing homeworld was our first big title building that. But basically with the funding that we got and functionality is called a German Games Fund. That is that was from Germany, basically additional development funding. We were able to basically build something like frameworks. One is the strategy framework and one is a shooter framework, shooter RPG framework. And these two frameworks is currently the baseline of what's driving us. And now in the current environment where the getting getting money is much much harder. What we basically do is like we're now focusing on these kind of core elements where we are good at and where we have to tag and where we can quickly iterate. I mean, we built, we just built for one hour next titles, we built a prototype in three weeks. We just basically took the the core battle element of dawn of ages and made a prototype for that. And that that kind of things is super important as a studio. I think nowadays to be flexible to be adapting constantly to the market. I mean, using more and I but like I said, there could be another AI conversation is probably a bigger one. I can tell you that we are we are using it now more. But overall, I would say we still the key component is being effective. And that's that's something that drives us being not because you don't have that money anymore. You have to focus on being effective with your with

Jon Radoff: your time and your people. All right. So you see this. This is the Pandora's box. That you just opened up. So we're going to come back. No, no, no, it's not. We always are interested in like understanding how studios are approaching. Yeah. So we will come back to that. And the other piece that I definitely want to come back to is funding because you have been very successful funding your games with traditional publishers. They've been published with boom bit. Okay, we'll come back to that. But before I even get back to that, since so many people are just game developers who tune in here, I really want to get down to what are some of the big life lessons you have earned. And to say not only learned, but you've earned them because we all suffer through a lot of pain here in this industry to learn any of these things. But what are some of those life lessons about game development generally? Or if you want to be specific, like you are kind of economy driven MMO type things that they can share with everybody that they could like, save some people some pain here. Like I think just listen to a guy who's actually built this stuff

Guest: successfully. Let's say like that. I think I think one of the core things is everyone is underestimating timing. My experience in 10 years is the timing. So like I think the baseline is you have to be good. You have to be kick ass. I think that's the baseline that everyone in the games industry and in any industry has to be. But the other point is fucking timing. And a lot of times when I talk to other founders that are super, super successful, they sometimes when you talk with them like privately, they say, yeah, it was just some of that was pure luck. Again, baseline is you have to be fucking good. And you have to be sometimes have to have to have the right the right feeling. But so many times it's timing. And whenever someone tells you, no, I have it figured out. I don't need timing. I'm just that good. I think 99% of the people lying is like, even in my surrounding, I have super successful. I have a friend which did it like 300 million dollar an euro exit. And he tried to replicate it. And after he tried to replicate it in a thought, how hard can it be? Because I did it. So I mastered it. And but the timing was different. That was when he did his exit was the peak of funding coming into there was the interest rates that allow low. There was no other investments there. So he was at peak and he tried to replicate it now. And he just survived the whole deal and made his money back that he invested. So that is for him now the success, but he was not able to fully replicate. And these kind of things are really important to understand. I think timing is crucial. The problem is, and now comes the next wisdom, it's hard to predict something. So it means you start something now. As an example, you go now into AI. The moment you have something out, it could be that AI will be not going away, but AI will be not at the same space it is now anymore. So that's the second problem that you have. It's super hard. It's even with game development. You do, when you start a game, you're doing the game based on how is the genre currently doing? Yeah, we are one of our next games planned to be in 4X game because 4X is doing kick-ass at the moment on mobile. They were one of the most successful last year. And they have one of the few genres where they still make where they break in the top 50 in the first year. And that's really, really rare nowadays. But the point is, it can be when we are talking when the game is coming out, end of next year or something like that, it could be that for X genre. You can still support it with good work, good UA, all these other things, but there's also timing, like with idle games, idle games were the shit for a while. They made shit tons of money. They were super, super successful. Now they are not that hard anymore. And because it has all influence on your mechanics, because certain things are not found, but also other elements, how you get funding, all these kind of things come together. So overall, I would say, you just have to work hard and have to have a portion of luck. And without the luck, it's very, very tough to survive out there because it is hard to make games anyways. I think we can all agree. But then also fitting it in the right time slot, fitting like being lucky, not releasing at the same time, like what was the big controversy Hollow Knight, silk song? Yeah. And like all these kind of things, and it's so hard to predict. And if you have to work hard, anyways, it's super hard to keep your eyes everywhere. So at the end, yeah, a little bit of luck you need if not your can be. So I think that's the biggest one. It's like, just work hard. Don't think too much about the timing, but be aware that timing is not something and this kind of form of luck. It's very, very, very tough to measure. It could be in two years, it's very different to now. And that's the main issue is like, when you do big games, it is even tougher. When you do short games, you can fail fast, but if you do big games, you can just miss the gap or the right timing.

Jon Radoff: How do you mitigate against the risks of time? And since none of us can time the market, and we don't know what our competition is going to be, and we certainly don't even know what the market's going to look like. That's what I've years to build. Yeah, that's what I basically did.

Guest: It's like when I got so just a little bit of a background. So in the in the high phase, we got investment by a ride games, one-up wrenches and a skycatcher. And we doubled that funding that we got with the German Games Fund. So we raised around seven million dollars. We had that money, we were doing more risky games. So we basically stepped out of our comfort zone, yeah, stepped out of our comfort zone and then started as a strategy company. We also started a building shooter. And getting out of these comfort zones and doing something else is always cost more cost effective, cost problematic, but also you can, it can take longer and so on and so on. And but now when there's less funding available, we go back and do less risky projects, smaller projects, shorter time frames. I think that's the key component. It's like you have, that's the only thing that you can read. And this is your reality. You either have a lot of funding or you see there's easy funding for you, then you can be, you can be more risky. But the moment you are basically getting, when you see there's like like the last two years, which were pretty tough on the funding side, you have to try to do smaller, smaller titles and less risky approaches there. Because that's the point. It's like our last game here, the Kingdom, we did it exactly on time. We didn't waste one month. We said it, we take us eight months and we exactly finished eight months. And that's what you have to do. You have to basically do this stuff in time. If you don't do this, you can, you can run out of money very fast.

Jon Radoff: You have an interesting approach at the studio level to essentially risk, because it's the way I'm thinking of it. So it seems like you have almost this idea of risk on versus risk off game projects. And things that add to risk would be, if the, if the delivery schedule looks like it's going to take a lot longer, if it needs new tech, if it's a genre you haven't exactly done before, like all the things that are outside of the core. And time, of course, is one of these things. You said timing, which is partly like when it ships and like just market timing a little bit, not just runway, but like runway for the title, keep it tight so that you don't start adding more and more risk, more and more capital to the equation by running it out further and further and further. And in a capital constrained environment, sounds like you're, you get pretty conservative. If you figure out what can you ship faster, kind of risk off projects, things that are maybe like the

Guest: current game. Yeah, I mean, that's, I'm, and to a certain extent, it's probably also a background. So it's funny, because the same stands that I have now, I had before 2020, when the big, the big craziness happened. And it's probably also because this is, I mean, for us as a, at first, probably also the background, we're here in Europe. For us, we have a lot of positive things here in Europe, but also when it comes to making, it's like when you have employees, you can't high and fire. That's not doable in Europe. So these kind of things, and this is something, by the way, that we share with a lot of other Swedish studios and so on and so on. It's not that simple to do. So I think that's the point where when we had, when we don't have massive funding, we have to be also careful. This is something that, I mean, it's really positive for our employees and they love it for that, but it's also difficult as an entrepreneur to understand. It's like in Europe, it's not that simple to just scale up and down. You can't do it that instantly. I had to scale down when, a little bit scaled down when it took over gearbox and then basically the game was sunset. So a homeworld where tree worked on and then I had to scale down. And these kind of things are time-intensive and costly in Germany. Not as expensive as someone would think, but nevertheless, it is not a simple thing. Probably I don't know a little bit like in California or so. So like in one of the more regulated states, but these kind of things are really important to understand. And that's why I have to adapt. And I think that's the key component. And another thing that probably you can learn is like constantly have to adapt to the market situation and see what is out there. I think that's the key component and have to be and try to minimize risk and cost. I mean, this is why, like as an example, with our current game that has so much, we have so much experience with the tech around it. So I feel really comfortable just releasing it in a state where I know normally we would be much longer in soft launch, but here we can afford it.

Jon Radoff: When you talk about that adaptability, that's not just tech, that's like culture of a studio. How do you breed that kind of adaptability into the culture of the studio so that you get the team kind of on the same page in terms of, yeah, we got to pivot quickly or change the design. Yeah, because in some studios would be like, no way we planned this for a year. Of course,

Unknown: like we wouldn't want to change anything now. For me, it's honesty and directness. I mean,

Guest: I always share every Monday where we have a tonnehole. I share how much money we have from the bank account. I share what deals I'm working on. I share what kind of deals falling through. I try to be as honest as possible. It's not always perfect. Don't get me wrong. There are people there sometimes skitterage around it. There are people that are then also a little bit worried. But that's the point. If I want from people to work hard for me and work for a great farce, I think I also have to be honest to them. I think this honesty then also helps basically building a clear goals inside of the studio. So like I said, when we had growing pains,

Unknown: I was honest as well. We have to get together again. Because like I said, when you grow,

Guest: I think we started at 25 people or so. And then we went up I think at peak of 70. The point there is like, there's a lot of growing pains when you do these kind of things. And if you're honest, you can try to cut through bullshit that happens when you grow bigger. I think that's the key component. I'm pretty happy that we never grow much bigger because the problem is that kind of strategy works kind of well when you're not too big. But because I think, yes, I don't know if you've ever heard of like this, this kind of break points for a company around 30 people, around 70 people. I think I have 20, 300 and so on. And then all these break points are based on what kind of relationship you have with your employees, what kind of relationship you have with how you basically communicate. And I think this is why I felt pretty happy, even with the 70 people. But I know when you grow bigger, it becomes hotter because they're yeah, to adapt. Yeah, I had a theory that every time you

Unknown: go to a new Fibonacci number of headcounts, that you end up with a fundamentally, not fundamentally

Jon Radoff: different. Like you always inherit a lot of the company. But like important structural things around communication, politics, culture can change a lot. And those are sort of like the danger zones. So ideally you carry forth all of the culture to each stage, but it requires a lot of effort. And it's as simple as like, yeah, when you go from one to two people suddenly that's different than you being by yourself. And on two to three people, like it's different. Like now there's one person that can persuade the other two people. And then the second thing is, yeah, and the second

Guest: thing is I think this is really key for all of us is like, and this is this is then also on the on the business side of level. As an example, when I saw that a lot of, I mean, we were very close to serious A in end of 22. We had some term like at least verbal term sheets. And then I decided to wait a little bit longer. And then some of that was the serious A was falling through. I got funding later, but not as much. But what I then learned after then I tried and for one year the whole BC route again to get a serious A. And it was just very, very tough market. And so I got back to, and this is what what you started at the beginning, the discussion. Then I basically looked into publishers because the good thing about publishers, it is, it's just a different kind of want from them. They, depending on the publisher's size, and we can't talk about that as well, they have very different needs of how big a game has to be and how big you have to be. And if we see these sun, where fine before and thought, oh yeah, the 100 million will be easy for everyone. And now it's not the case anymore, but you still find publishers or someone that is supporting you financially and on a publishing side that is also have not the same expectation. And so the good thing for that is you can't basically adapt them to that, trying to get funding from people that are that have a different outlook. The only problem is they have their own needs and they have their own things they want from KPIs to other things. And you have to do pitch the right project to the right publisher. Similar to we see, but it's just a different setup there. And it's much more about what is there already than when you do a pre-seed with the VC. I totally want to get into the

Jon Radoff: publisher, the funding conversation. We've had some comments from the audience already that we want to get into that. But I just want to drill into the culture piece a little bit more because I think it's really interesting and it doesn't get talked about enough in the game industry. So first of all, I love this, I'd call it radical transparency that you have with your team. You're telling them the cash in the bank account every week. I personally love that. I like even the aspect of like, I mean, there are some people that that's just too stressful for. And that's okay. Like if that's too stressful, then it's also fine that like not every company is for every person. So like, yeah, exactly. If that's too stressful to know how much cash is in the account and you just want to put your blinders on in work, certainly there are other places to go for that. But I personally found that like people get you establish a super high level of trust. And when the bank accounts low and you just clear about it, and here's what we got to do to reverse that trend, then everybody hits on the same page and is on the same team about fixing that instead of like suddenly the crisis where everybody's shopping their resume every time things aren't going exactly the right way. So I like it. Sounds like what you are thinking though is like, that doesn't scale past a certain point. Like you get too big. Maybe that doesn't work as is one of the takeaways that I had from you. But like, can you just sort of drill down into this radical transparency aspect a little bit and give people advice? Because this is this is something people talk about. But I think most studios that I speak to, they're terrified of that. They're like, that's the job of CEO and the head of finance. And then like, you guys just work on the game. We'll figure that out. So I think I think that's the point.

Guest: It's like a radical transparency works if people trust in you as a person. And the problem is when you're small, when you have a certain size, you hide every person there probably very likely. And after certain size, that can get out of the way. So people don't know you. And I mean, I'm also quite often, I mean, I have my own office, sure. But I'm very often, we are a hybrid. I mean, like many do nowadays, two days a week. And then I go over to the team and we discuss, we have meetings there and so on and so on. And also I go for lunch with them. This is a big thing in Germany. We all go for lunch together. That's a really weird thing that a lot of Americans didn't understand. But it's like literally slab. You have to go at lunch between one and two. You can't do it shorter. You're not allowed to do it on your desk. Literally, there's lots. There's literally lots for that. And so I often go with the whole team. And so when they know me and understand me and we have a personal connection. And that works kind of fine with like 30, 40 people. That is then when I dance, be radically honest and explain to them things, they understand it and trust me. If you're bigger, it's hard to trust. If someone is just far away in the office. And that's the problem. Even with the 70 people, I had a CEO, I had a CEO all back then, I had operations manager back then. I had a much bigger admin team. And so I really feel the difference even. And that's the only good thing about scaling down. I mean, it's not the only good thing. There's also other things like cash flow and stuff like that. But having a smaller studio is just getting back that personal collection that you kind of even lost. And like I said, at the 70 people mark, there was for sure a few people. I know them all show by name, but at the end, because at the end, I do a lot of times the final discussion with them. But I had really, but you don't have close connections. And that's where it felt a little bit loose. And I think 60, 70 is really the absolute maximum to connect at least on some personal level. But the real personal connection, I think that that basically is like these 30, 40 people is a good one. So it sounds like one of your team members is

Jon Radoff: tuning in to endorse what you're saying. So you just, you just, you just earned some online points from that. Well, let's talk about publishing because we're halfway through. And I definitely want to spend time on this. So publishing financing, like you said, it was easy in 2021 when we had zero interest financing. And capital was just flowing in. Then it got hard. And it got a little easier again. Then it got hard again. You first of all, do you agree that it's kind of harder right now? And like, how would people go to finance their studio? It's different. I think there was,

Guest: I think it already stopped being easy in in 22. But in 23, we still had the web 3 wave. And I, I mean, I have web 3 game and I'm happy to have it. Don't get me wrong. But I'm honest to you is like that was where there was still some funding left and some opportunities left. But then 24 and 25 now looking into these years, it got tougher and tougher at the moment. We had the lowest part of our VCs in studios is even lower. It's the lowest ever in studios, I think since 2015 or 2016 or something like that. And I think what changed also is like, and that was the big, why it gets a little bit easier nowadays is that in 2024, there was so much studios that had nearly finished games. And so from publishers to other people, just could pick them up. So it was even tougher to get new games funded because there was so many half finished or nearly finished games. So now slowly, I think the market starts a bit again. And in our case, like I said, publishing the publishers need more games. And I think now there's a bit more there. The only problem is if you have original IP, and that's, I mean, the golden, the golden goal for every one of us, original IP, it's very, very tough without a lot of testing, a lot of data to get a publisher for. I think that's the key component is like, if you do work for hire, that's still running. We got it offered. We did that before. I mean, the whole world was basically, it was a code development, basically, but it was also kind of a work for hire. So that is still, and this is now kind of still working, but original IP at the moment is the toughest. The only thing you can do is to be doing very small titles, doing titles that are easy to reproduce easy. I make that in air quotes. Yeah, that was a whole world. And it's really interesting because like I said, this was the first game I ever reviewed on PC, and we were tasked to do a mobile game for it. And this was, I mean, I have to be honest, that was the cool thing I were to work on one of the most beloved IP that you ever did yourself. And I think it was a fantastic game. And I'm sad that it's not running anymore. We had a very dedicated community. But yeah, but that was, but that was in 2019, I think we got that deal. And I think nowadays, even publishers are risk-averse. And now we have the last bit, which are a bit more complicated and publishers. They are the really big ones. I talk about the Scoplees, the Lilith games, the Century games. For them, a successful game looks much, much bigger. So like, they're, I mean, most mobile games that are built by them are made by hundreds of people. And there's not a lot of studios that are up for that small team, but still ambitious. I think that's the biggest challenge to find the right. So like, as an example, I can't tell you what, but I had a really big license and I made a really cool prototype last year. Really, really big license. And I got to go from the license holder and I pitched that to a lot of studios and a lot of publishers. And it was this kind of size, like 5, 10 million, something like that. And it was really frustrating that in this size, a lot of there's not a lot of rooms. So that we have that quieter in other places as well. You see that even in normal premium development, you have either the really, really big guys or the really, really small ones. It got a little bit better in the help of the lot and stuff like that, they're going to be wrong. And a really, a lot of big, big fails also helped concords as an example. But I think that's the sad thing is like, at the moment, this, and that's also because of the Cs. We see as good as it was to get all that money. We see also they were basically all targeting this target size and that money is now gone. And there's not a lot of publishers that cover that kind of medium sized development, especially in mobile because in mobile, it's either very quirky, intelligent use of 2D games or it's the really, really big guy. It's like the tensens, Timmy games, it's like the Delta forces and all these kind of ones. There's not a lot of room for the middle ground at the moment.

Jon Radoff: All right. So first of all, on a personal level, I love your story about you played homeworld, you reviewed it 20 years later, you got to make the game. But I was a teenager. I grew up with Star Trek. I loved Star Trek. And actually at 14 years old, I made a shareware game called Final Frontier. It's obvious where that name came from, from Star Trek. But I did not dream. I did not dream as a kid of ever making a Star Trek game. So about 10 years ago, I got to make a Star Trek game, which was amazing. And the game is still running. Star Trek timelines.

Guest: Timeline. Yeah, no timelines. Pretty well. Yeah, it's a good game. It's about, it's at 6 million

Jon Radoff: installs. It's done reasonably well. And people are still playing it every, every single day. It's got a very devoted audience. Maybe not scopely scale, like you were saying, but big enough to keep it going for a decade now. But that's, yeah. But even games like Star Trek timelines.

Guest: I mean, like I said, one of the reasons why I didn't get that IP game made was also, yeah, there's minimum guarantees and stuff like that. And it was not just the development budget. That was one problem. But another problem was also minimum guarantees, all the other things that are around licenses. And I think, again, this is like at the moment, there's, there's for any mobile and development teams, there's, it's especially tough, I think. In the indie market, I think there's a lot of project financing. There's a lot of diverse market for this kind of smaller ones. But on mobile, it's quite tough. You either make a game alone. And that's what you can do, even with five, six people, you can make a successful game on mobile if you're good enough. And you choose the right target. But like for this medium size at the moment, there's not tons of room. Again, it's still sometimes, like I said, dawn of ages. But again, dawn of ages was also with the support of German games fund, and the VCs. I'm not sure we could have financed it with a publisher normally. I know there's some people that get these kind of bigger deals. I know people that that really got to this really big ones, but it's very rare. And normally they do it with internal teams. That's most, most big publishers, they use internal teams for these kind of things. And they don't outsource a whole project anymore. Scobly did this pretty cleverly with Star Trek Fleet Command, the first one or other ones where they basically, they did, they did a really great job of using external teams. Silting point did quite a bit. And then they invested in it and stuff like that. So that's a really good way of basically how they do that. But sadly, at the moment, it's not as easy to do anymore. And also, yeah, because there's so many studios out there

Jon Radoff: that need work. Yeah. Well, so let's do some real talk, though, for game studios that are out there

Unknown: looking for financing. So if we look across the landscape of sources of capital, Web 3 has largely

Jon Radoff: dried up. Yep. Because not a lot of, first of all, the blockchains themselves don't really have any money to grant anymore. And there's very few people who will fund it because scale hasn't been proven yet. Yeah. But I should say, like, we support a lot of Web 3 games that be able, like, mythical games with FIFA rivals and Pudgy Party, a good example of someone who's doing that right well in Web 3. But that's now the exception, not the role. And a lot of it is internally funded at the stage. Are people who raised a lot of money years ago, not currently? So, okay, so Web 3, really challenging. VCEs, just the, it's just, I guess, the reality that they just don't have as much capital anymore because they're funds by a large of struggle. Then they've struggled to get the next fund set up to fund games. So if you go after VCEs, mostly, I mean, and of course, there's differences between different funds and some of the very, very top tier guys can still do whatever they want. But for the most part, you're chasing like the smaller and smaller funds that they've got, which they're kind of reserving for existing investments to keep, keep a lot of incentives. So then we've got publishers and you made an interesting point, though, which is publishers are in the business of shipping games. So in some ways, they have to ship games. That's the goodness, right? Like, so that's as a market we can go after because if they don't ship games, they're out of business. And some of them definitely are still out there for third party game developers. Sounds like that's where you see the opportunity right now to fund things is aligning the right publisher and like the scale of game that they need because you made a good point, which is like a very, very super large publisher doesn't not necessarily want games that are going to make $10 million a year. They need it to be $100 million a year. So finding the right publisher for the scale of the game that you can actually call off is an important piece of advice just to be aware of that. What else, first of all, do you agree with my assessment

Guest: of fund excuses? Yeah, I mean, the second thing is you don't get any money anymore for decks or stuff like that. Most publishers on mobile. And that's why I said that the Indies have a little bit better because there the game needs to be fun. Sure, I mean, that's a given, I would say. But there if the game is fun and there's people on the other side who believe in it, they ship the game. But most publishers on the mobile side, they want to see KPIs. And what we do already, we do things like art tests where we basically we did this or not new next title that are currently in last discussion with publishers. Again, where we basically did we did even art styles. We did different art styles. We ran it through Facebook and the Facebook campaign went into a survey and then we looked at click through rates and stuff like that. So what we did, we have to basically provide more and more data to basically be able for them to say, okay, I want to invest in that. I want to do that because for them, it's all a lot of times also big investment time resources on there and so on and so on. So in the more data, you have the better. So what we did already for the next game, we provided half of the funding through the German games fund. We provided an artist to see what kind of art is working. Full high level game design, a prototype that is playable. So all of that and and and that is for some publishers not enough because they want more KPIs because for them is also about the risking like everyone is doing at the moment. So if you have a game in soft launch and you have good KPIs, then it becomes really interesting. As an example, Donovan ages was kind of medium successful and then we added one or two features which basically exploded the KPIs. Return on Edspan was high, retention was much higher, day seven of like 17 to 18%. And then we are on this weird path. So then finally, I could have asked investors to invest in it and then build your own thing, but that could have taken months and months and months or you talk to a publisher where you know they can scale. They don't give you as much money, but you have assert the security through because you know they can scale the game because you know they have enough financial so they will not go go under and they can support the burn of the studio. And there's basically where some of these decisions then happen. So like for me, every game is like a journey. You started zero and you have to basically go through several steps before you can start approaching publishers. You can go to more steps to then approach different investors. It's basically and that's now dependent on the style, the genre and the platform. And these kind of things you have to if you map it out, you basically have every game has its own journey and a point in time where it would be potentially financial would have to be financial. And that's the point how you have to look at your game. It's like where could that be? And again, when you're in the studio and you do a really nice vertical slice and it looks good and it triggers the right point, that is where you can potentially get funding and get in. But for mobile game, going outside of having hard KPIs and even if it's like retention KPIs, it's super, super tough to see most studios out there. And the funny bit is like I want to make that clear as we had hyper casual that was you know another thing that happened and then a little bit went away. They're still there, don't get me wrong. But that was funnily also one opportunity where even small studio can make could make some box mostly together with the big guys. But there you can just test the prototype and then see the KPIs and then have that opportunity. But now when when at a room you want a little bit down, now we're in a situation again where this gets tough again. So you have to look at your game, check where could be a good point in time where you approach it and the more stuff you have, the wider the more people you can approach. I think that's the the most important thing and for that you have to have either experience of someone helping you with basically understanding what is the drivers for a positive decision on the market.

Jon Radoff: Okay so again real talk for game developers here, struggling to figure out what to do. Number one,

Unknown: PowerPoint decks are not getting funded. Games are getting funded, right? At least a vertical slice like games get funded, not ideas. Ideas that fit up with ideas. Everyone can you go to

Jon Radoff: Genie, I make a beautiful looking deck in five minutes. That's not as important as it might have been 10 years ago. Aligning to the publisher and their platform at the size of game genre expertise important. Number three, particularly in mobile, but probably for everybody I would think is identifying the KPIs that are important for that publisher and being able to express some understanding of where your KPIs are already even if it's sort of like art tests with ads

Unknown: and stuff can still be useful for that. So that's really important. The thing I see in a lot of

Jon Radoff: decks from game developers is they just love their idea, they love their product idea, they like to talk about the product and so much of the deck is here's our product idea and the cool features in it. And of course anyone likes to see that passion but I mean it's important for people to remember this is my advice to people. I try to to advise them that usually the people who look at these decks they like games too, but they're ultimately financial professionals kind of making a decision about like money in, money out, how do I make money with this? Like and there has to be a fairly coherent business case presented before you can even wow them with your

Guest: cool game ideas. Yeah, exactly and I have to say, doing the wrong there's some really good examples out there, but even they have a tough time. Remember we had from Colu Nights, Kepli Interactive, I don't know you know these guys they were like big investors into indie studios in also around 22, but even for them it's like even in the premium market it's got tough and tough, you know so many high profile premium titles failed lately, especially even the life of ones, even the big ones like from the big investments. So I think that's why overall this is like like keeping in mind when you want to make your dream game is just keeping in mind, can you can you support that? Are you able to make so like having a great vision is good, but that's why people want to see these vertical slides because you want to see can you make that game a reality and because that because game developer is so hard, especially in multiplayer and stuff like that, like especially when it goes online service, I don't I mean beamable is a good example, life ops is fucking hard, I mean we have three life ops games, it is tough as nails, keeping the people excited content, getting content, events, everything going and I think and this is the point, it's like if you don't show this kind of experience, stay small, stay stay focus on what you know you can ship and and sure there's always this example is out there of people that oh I just started a little bit game development and now I sold 10 million copies, but this is sadly 99% of the reality, if you depend on the money and if you have besides all your your energy and your excitement about game industry, you also want to make some some money, you're you'll be able to hopefully do that and focus on a smaller project.

Jon Radoff: So we might be able to now converge the topic between AI and what we've been talking about, I do want to come back to live ops in a moment, but Ryan had this comment like what are your thoughts and publishers versus AI powered marketing publishing, but I want to thanks for the question, Ryan, but I want to expand that question even bigger because you mentioned AI and we didn't get to talk about it in the beginning, you said that maybe it's helpful in some ways, so just

Unknown: perspective, interest in your perspective on where AI can currently be applied to help studios build

Jon Radoff: market any aspect of business of game production. I mean that's why Ryan's point is not that bad,

Guest: if you have and this is the point and but it's the sad that some of these opportunities are going away again. So I know quite a few studios here in Berlin, they came out of some bigger mobile studios, Colibre, pop core stuff like that, Bougain and so on and they did like small teams, five people that won your AI guy and they were able to scale the games quite quite quite good alone because that your AI and and their had the opportunity to basically scale it properly. The only problem that you had a lot of these games were scaled based on one core element, some of them were getting really nice deals from some of the ad providers. There were deals out there back then, so if you didn't get investment money or you didn't get publisher money, there was some opportunities in the in the in the core years like it was a bit later, so I think 2223 was good years for these kind of deals where you and I love in and all these other big guys, they gave you a big credit line and so if you showed with small money that you were profitable, they gave you a big credit line and you could scale and now it comes, I know a lot of these teams, creatives is not a problem anymore, that's the good thing about AI, so per se you don't need shittons of people anymore to do it, but you still need cash. I think that's the key component to say when it comes to the publishing part, AI is great now for content and honestly if you're like a video cutter or an ad creative producer, you know you're one guy and you do the job of 10, something like that, especially this is one of the best examples by the way for AI, because linear content AI content is super easy to do, super easy to do, like always, not that easy but it's much easier to do with AI than a lot of the other things out there, everything from text to video to pictures, everything which is not interactive, this is the things that AI can help you tremendously with and that's what he's right, if you have cash or you're already at the right point in time, I think you don't need a massive publishing team anymore, that's the good thing, but you still need cash to be able to run the ads and everything, all the optimization with the AI helps, but it doesn't change the fact that without the access to the cash, it's very hard to scale because payment periods are long, I mean, an hour game is just like five, six months to get your money back and fronting that alone is very, very tough.

Jon Radoff: Okay, well let's bring it back to live apps now which you just were touching on with AI and we were talking about earlier, as you put it, live apps is fucking hard, I'll start with just my own observation and one piece that I think is important, but I'd love you to share your thoughts on live apps and some of your learnings that you have earned in this industry that people ought to be thinking about, now you pointed at some interesting things, like live apps is also very broad, what happens in the game, but it's also things like user acquisition and aligning that back to the game. One of the biggest overall lessons I have learned from game development is that velocity of development is really important and having that high velocity informed by data, so we talked a lot about KPIs earlier, so actually using that data to change your game in important ways or add new content that reflects the things that people pay for, for example, ends up being really important. So that's a takeaway that I would share, that's kind of why I started B-Mobile, just to give people the velocity so that they can react to things instead of what I see in a lot of studios where everyone talks about the KPIs and they're like, okay, but what do we do about it? We can't move fast enough. What are your takeaways, Christian? I mean, you're correct,

Guest: and I think that is the holy grail. I'm honest to you, I have to look deeper into B-Mobile because I know what it is. I don't get me wrong, but honestly, it would be interesting to look at it because we use our own tools. We have different tools. Expensive to do. Yeah, it's expensive to do, but we were able to afford it for some time, and we have something called a Game Master Tool where we have a lot of these stuff in basically build ourself, but even there, the problem that you have is like, you can have a lot of times, the main issue is you have a game and a client which needs stability, and you have lifehops tools and online services which need flexibility. And what we have quite a bit

Unknown: is the problem that we currently even have with our games is that either you have to stability,

Guest: but then it's much harder to do lifehops because you do have a lot of do a lot of things very hard, or you have to flexibility, but then you have to be careful what you do with the client. And so for us, this is one of the key components being honest going forward is like that we try to find a good middle ground. At the moment, we have to do too much ourselves because, and this is even when you start to develop and our lead programmer that built our base system was very programmer friendly. So he made sure that we can't break the game too much, but that basically had the downside that when we do lifehops, it is much more, it's like all the hard core tools, besides exporting and importing, when it comes to balancing and everything, live in unity to make sure that you don't break shit. And I think these kind of things are super important. And I haven't found a good solution yet, probably I have to look into being mobile to basically check out how can you can you fix that situation, making sure that your game doesn't break and making sure you're flexible enough. At the moment, it takes us too much time to set up events. It is taking us too much time to react to data sometimes. And sometimes we have to find out, okay, we did a new event and it doesn't perform as we know. And when we repeat the event, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So like a lot of these data are things, it is about experimentation and game we wrong. But if you need to stay profitable, and that's one of the goals that we have in our also our publisher, it's just a very tough thing to do a lifehops the right way, spending the right amount of money, using it at the right point in time for the right things. I think that's

Jon Radoff: the toughest bit of all. Yeah, so I kind of learned a lot about live-ops when I ship Game of Thrones and every time an episode of games. So we were updating right after every episode of Game of Thrones. So yeah, so it would come out on Sunday, Monday, we shipped an update with items, characters, things you actually saw on the show so that we could form that connection between it. We did this every week during the time of the live season. And then we continued it off season and kind of

Unknown: told other stories outside of the main story loop. But we had to kind of create that high velocity

Jon Radoff: system where events, content, everything could be dropped in and updated over time. Where we ultimately landed with Beemable is creating a platform that you mentioned Unity. So we made it so that you can code your back end with C-Sharp just like your front end to keep the languages all the same up and down the stack and have just lots and lots of tools that manage all the data structures and things for the typical live-ops cases like events and tournaments and and characters and all the things that happens. So we invested heavily in that. We love to share it with studios like you and sometimes you find places where you've already built a lot of stuff and maybe we just start helping with one little piece. And then if we can help with there, you can grow it over time. I'm also very curious. And also I'm very curious about these kind of

Guest: things because for me I want to understand what makes you tick, what makes you your live-ops tool tick because I think that's the biggest thing for me personally. It's like I love and breathe live-ops. I really love. I'm still every day for one and a half an hour. So in our Discord, I chat with the people there. We have like 25,000 people in a lot of ages alone and I still love to chat with them. I want to understand how they are ticking because that's the point. Besides the quantitative analytics, you also need the qualitative stuff from directives.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, you need it all. And Christian, well speaking of live-ops, you launched the game today and we're at the hour, right? One minute over. So I'm going to let you get back to all the stuff that you have to do with the game launch. Congratulations on it again. Wish you only great success. I think you have so many nuggets of wisdom from this conversation that I'm imagining lots of this V sound bites being spread all over the internet. And I hope game developers benefit from it. But Christian, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, all of you. Yeah, and thank you, Christian. Thank you, Oscar for being here and thanks everybody in the audience for tuning in. You're time so valuable, but you spent it with us, me and Christian and Oscar. So congratulations on doing that. Hope you found it useful and we'll see you on the next one.

Guest: Thank you. Bye-bye.