Rebroadcast GameDev Livestream- Built in India, Built Better: LILA’s Mission to Reinvent Game Dev

Jon Radoff: You are back at the game development live stream. This is where we talk to a game industry audience, but hey, everybody is welcome to participate in this. If you're a game curious industry curious, if you're a game developer of any kind, programmer, artist, QA publisher, even, and we might talk a little bit about that, because I brought in Joseph Kim, my good friend over many years now. We've interacted at a whole bunch of studios. We just have a gravitational pull that reconnects us. Periodically, through this industry, I'll give JK Joseph an opportunity to introduce himself in a moment. But he said something to me just as we were getting ready. He said he's been in both publishing as well as game development. He said publishing is kind of easy compared to being a game developer. So we're gonna let him talk about that a little bit more. But I am Jon Radoff. I am the CEO of a company called Beamable. We build game infrastructure. We help with all the server side stuff, cloud code, multiplayer, online services, social systems, economic systems, blockchain integration, generative AI plugins, we've done all of that stuff. So we're here just to make your life easy, help you get your game up and running and live. So you focus on the fun of the game, instead of all that boring plumbing that is what we do. So that plumbing, by the way, really important you get it wrong. Your game doesn't launch, falls over, breaks, you go out of business. So we want to prevent that too. All right, without further ado, Jake, why don't you introduce yourself. Let's start with like just your journey through the industry and then maybe we'll talk about Lila and then we'll talk about your comment about publishing versus game development. We can talk about macro conditions in the industry. We can talk about generative AI, all the hot subjects today. So, well, it's just, yeah.

Guest: Yeah, in, but I know you were gonna use my LinkedIn fix. I've been switching that up as kind of a joke, but anyway, I thought that was funny. Yeah, you know, I don't want to bore the audience too much with like a lengthy discussion on my background, but just to kind of simplify a bit, I would say like, I kind of got started in games after having a career in others, like software development, management consulting, and then kind of like around 2010, 2011, during the MySpace and kind of Facebook gaming period, I attended a talk by somebody who had launched a Facebook game and I thought, ah, that seems kind of easy. And then I bumped into somebody who was doing game development or not game development, but just dev services out of China. And so I thought, huh, here might be an interesting game and so I kind of wrote up a spec on a game that I called League of Heroes and sent it to them. We made it and then kind of during those early days when Facebook, when everything kind of takes off, you know, it did reasonably well. And from what I heard from some of my ad partners is that it had like the highest arpeo of many other games on Facebook that they have seen.

Unknown: So that kind of gave me the confidence that,

Guest: wait a minute, maybe game development isn't that big of a deal. Like, I'm not not big of a deal, but not that hard to get into. And so from there, I tried to start a game studio and got some initial funding. So kind of, you know, that timeframe, 2011, in the San Francisco Bay Area, right time, right place, but I really, really screwed up. And so, you know, having a software development background and having a management consulting background. So like being good at strategy,

Unknown: but not necessarily like execution turned out to be a,

Guest: you know, fiddle flaw. So great timing, right place, wrong person. And so I did not succeed in what could arguably be like one of the easiest times to find success in game development ever. So from there, I went into consulting and well, consulting for some big Asian publishers like Smallgate, Remrun Games, help them kind of launch games in the Western market from Asia, mobile games. And then I would say, I'm gonna skip a lot of boring parts, but I would say my big success came when, joined a company called Thumb Plus and led the development of a game called King of Avalon that would help, but plus become the number one publisher in 4X. I think since then, you know, the number one is now like probably first fun or century games, but century was actually a spin out from Thumb Plus. But yeah, that's kind of like from there,

Unknown: that was my game studio experience.

Guest: And then from there, I kind of had an interest in publishing and I actually wanted to get more opportunities to be involved in UA. And so I wasn't involved in UA at Sega, but I'm joined Sega, got promoted to, you know, Chief Product Officer kind of managing Western game publishing. And from there, I think where we met John was when I joined NBC Universal and joined as SVP of, I forgot what they call it, Games and Digital Publishing, but basically game publishing. And so that experience was great in the sense that I was able to see not only mobile game development,

Unknown: but HD game development and also got to manage user acquisition,

Guest: which was pretty fun for me. Since NBC Universal, I then had a existential midlife crisis

Unknown: and thought about, well, I won't go into this too much,

Guest: but just really briefly, I was massively impacted by this essay written by Clayton Christianson called, How Will You Make Your Life? I wrote it. Being about how, like as an old guy and thinking,

Unknown: oh my God, am I just gonna die with nothing?

Guest: Like sure, I helped some people get extremely wealthy. And I was very comfortable too, but okay, if I were to you, if I were all my death that looking back on my life, which is an exercise that both Jeff Bezos and Clayton Christians didn't have talked about, how will I measure the value of my life? And I just, I was like, man, okay, so I can join another, you know, publisher or big studio, have work life balance,

Unknown: make lots of money, but then what?

Guest: Then I die. And man, would that be a bummer? So, just to compress this, because I think I'm boring the audience.

Jon Radoff: So I think we're going into the most philosophical conversation that we have on the end of the development livestream at this point.

Guest: Okay, okay. So then I went to India to a conference called IGDC and just skipping fast forwarding the last over four and a half years, I have basically, I started a studio in India, kind of like the objective is to try to build very similar to what I did at Fun Plus. So in Fun Plus, we built a studio out of Beijing. And basically, at that time, China was not, I mean, today they're dominant, but at that time they weren't. But we had something that I now call a leads-based model. I didn't come up with a model, although I named it, but the CEO Andy Zong had this model of like building in China, bringing in key leads where you, where there was a lack of expertise

Unknown: at that time in China from globally.

Guest: And then, and then having those leads work on the game as well as help train the local talent. And so that's what I'm trying to do in India. And so I would say I would, I would feel I'm successful more in life if we were able to build a company that basically makes great products, but not just the product, but a great organization, and one in which we're able to help people find opportunities. Because one of the things that I found when I did go to IGDC were a number of people who told me, man, I want to get better. I want to learn about where do I go. How do I build my skills? And they didn't feel like there was a company in India that was doing that.

Unknown: So that's for today.

Guest: That's where we are. Basically, we have been working on in extraction shooter game for the last over four and a half years. And the long story short on that is it's been kicking my ass. I like, I have, it's been brutal for the last four and a half years, trying to be like shooters are tough. Even huge western teams are not finding much success. Even the big Chinese teams are having problems in the mobile shooter space and particularly in extraction shooter, which has been very difficult. So I would say, you know, over the last four and a half years, I have just been getting my ass kicked almost daily. And that's why to the point you were just circling back John to your point about, you know, publishing versus dev. Dude, dev is so hard. And I think we should make a distinction here. I mean, I do think live ops, you can have work life balance. And I think live ops, it's a lot easier to kind of manage and existing, you know, kind of preset pipeline. But when it comes to new game development, I think that's where it's, it becomes a lot more difficult. And where, especially when you're trying to work with a team that's not so experienced, a lot of people that are doing things for the first time. And when you've got problems across like multiple disciplines, right? And you're trying to point calls everywhere. It's brutal.

Unknown: But I will say, this is the year 2025.

Guest: This is the year where there's still a lot of work. I'm not sure if it's going to be a lot of work. I don't think it's going to be a lot of work.

Jon Radoff: But I definitely feel a lot more optimistic than I ever have since starting the company. All right. Well, you just laid out a whole agenda for us to talk about there that we can run with everything from. Leveling up a talent ecosystem, basically, and bringing in the skills to create a studio. Or maybe not all of the talent existed before. And I think that's a lot more interesting. I think it's a lot more interesting. I think it's a lot more interesting. I think it's a lot more interesting. I'm interested in also talking about more of the broad macro issues that have happened over the last few years, which generative AI is one. But there's a lot going on. I'm curious what it's like to build that before we turn it back to that whole list of questions, though. I want to also make sure that it's clear to everyone who tuning in here. We got almost 300 people who have tuned in live to watch this already. And you could be asking all the questions, because I would like nothing more than to just sit back and just start pressing which question I want to display on the screen and reading it off. I might make my life so much easier here. But fortunately, I can come up with questions and I'll do it through the whole program. But if this was on YouTube as like a canned video, you'd only have me asking the questions. The cool thing about doing this is a live stream is you get to jump in, ask your question. And there's a lot of experience in the room right now from publishing. I've built a lot of games based on licensed IP in particular, and helping people with infrastructure. But you got JK here can talk about many aspects, both the publishing side as well as the development side of the industry, building a studio in India and everything that we're going to talk about. So jump in with your questions, riff off the questions. And by the way, we could even bring you in live. Oscar is hanging out on all these channels, X Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch, all the places that we're streaming to right now. And if you want to join the conversation and actually be here on camera, we can even do that. We'll send you a Streamyard link. You can join us online. We love that when that happens. It happens about one out of five or six streams or so, maybe less than that. But when it happens, it's a joy. So we'd love to have that happen today. Let's start with just the macro picture though. So you started in, you know, against a whole bunch of weird macro trends. I mean, first of all, there was COVID in the whole shift towards largely development of games happening on remote. So I guess that's one aspect. I don't know personally kind of dealt with it.

Unknown: Yeah.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. So Adam, what else has been going on?

Guest: Yeah. So I think there are a number of key macro trends that have been significantly impacting the games industry. So one is COVID. And I think one of the things that COVID led to was an excess, right? But even before COVID, what we were seeing was kind of the world living off of zero, basically zero interest rate, kind of environment, right? And so we saw all these excesses in terms of investment and a lot of kind of over investment in games and things of that nature. And COVID just hyper accelerated that. And what we're dealing with now is a rationalization of the games industry, because what we're seeing is that the numbers are actually up. But a lot of people feel like the games industry is in decline. And it's, but if you look at the longer term picture, the games industry is actually quite healthy. But it's because of that over investment and over exuberance that we're starting to feel this rationalization that's starting to impact people and kind of like a negative sentiment in the gaming industry. I think a second macro trend that we saw was something that I call. Well, I think other people have talked about this, but it's essentially the attention economy, right? And basically what's happened with respect to this macro trend is that we have things like. For example, the search, the kind of increase in live operated games. And so whether it's games like League of Legends or Fortnite, what we've seen is that the games that were live operated and taking player attention were increasing. So if you're a new game trying to compete against these other games, it's harder. And it's not just an entertainment. I think that the former Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had talked about with the rise of Fortnite that they were seeing declines in their in the Netflix service, right? What we're seeing now is like the convergence of entertainment vying for people's time. And so whether it's TikTok or its services like Netflix or it's live operated games. I believe steam kind of came out about a few months ago with some statistics that showed that, you know, some small percentage of of their players are actually playing new games in the last year. And a significant amount are playing games that are like three plus years old, right? And so that speaks to this new kind of attention economy that we're in. And what you need to do, at least if you're working on new games to be able to break through and gain share from players. The third thing was the rise of China, right? And so I was one of those guys in the mix helping build that ecosystem in China. By the way, I'm not Chinese. I'm Korean, but you know, definitely have a lot of Chinese friends.

Unknown: But like, you know, the rise of China and what we've seen is we've seen a country that are freaking killers, right?

Guest: Like working 996 and really dedicated with a lot of passion and probably I would say they are underappreciated for their creativity. But you know, the ability for the Chinese to really go in and dominate specific genres, right?

Unknown: So I would say in the mobile gaming space today, shooters is all Chinese like all Chinese studios.

Guest: And a lot of the RPG space and kind of some of these genres are completely dominated by Chinese development teams that they're doing a fantastic job. So we saw the rise of China. I would say on top of that, there's also there was also a shift to big budget production. And I think that's one of the things that has been negatively impacting the Western game development market, which is that there was there has been a shift. And especially I think COVID accelerated this, but towards bigger and bigger budgets. And as we move to these bigger budgets, the impact of that is like you now change the risk profile of a game. So when you when you move from like a 20 or 40 million dollar budget to 100 200 Concord 400 million dollar budget, the decision makers change. And so when you have like these NBAs who are making calls on games, it's like you're not, they're not going to, they're not going to approve something that they're going to say, OK, show me the data show, show me how this 200 million budget game is going to be successful.

Unknown: And when you have this kind of situation, then you're going to really orient towards what has already been done. Right. And so that's what we've seen in the market.

Guest: And when you compound that with a lot of that stuff that happened with remote work and with work life bounce and you know, please don't hate me, but it's just unfortunately with new game development. It's it is. In my experience, the outcomes, you have significantly higher outcomes when you have a hardcore team all working in the same office. And that's one of the things, even for me when I was working at fun plus, you know, we had a Beijing team, we had San Francisco team, we had a candidate team, we had some folks in Australia. And I was like, no, we're bringing everything to Beijing. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. So those were some of the things I would say maybe one other macro trend. There's there's others. I don't want I think I've been talking for too long on macro, but there's a lot of macro stuff that has happened. And I would call this the first that kind of like this big wave of stuff that has just impacted the entire games industry. And so it's, it's, it's caused a lot of confusion and a lot of uncertainty in the market. But the one other thing I would probably state is, is a trend that was kind of playing out, but didn't fully. But one of the reasons why I decided to build out of India. And that is splinter net, right. And so I felt. From five years ago, I felt that there was going to be a potential rift in geopolitics and not to go not not to be political or anything like that. But I felt like there would be a split between China and the US is somebody who reads a lot of radalio. For, you know, many years. And so I felt like if we wound up with splinter net and it became like we almost got there during like the last Trump administration when he was going to ban tech talk and things like that. And who knows we may get there soon. But if we did, then I wanted to be on the US side of the splinter net. And, and if, if a lot of these games got banned like many games are banned in China from the US. But if that would vice versa, then I would want to be on the US India side. And my belief at that time was that India would be on the US side. So that's kind of like some of the macro stuff that I had been thinking about. And what we're seeing in terms of like this big wave of stuff that has been impacting us for the last call it three to five years. And just real quick one one of the thing is that I would say the next wave that's starting to hit us is away from AI. And there's a lot of like different opinions and thoughts about AI and the impact to the world and the games industry. And I would say where where I come out on this is that I feel like the impact of AI and game development is way over hyped for now. There are reasons for that there are technical reasons right like for example, like AI is not really good at statically typed languages right now. It will be. And when you think about how AI impacts but like in the web, you're seeing a lot of AI have significant impact right and I think famously Google and meta have stated that a lot of production code is being impacted by AI and of the white, not let why combinator companies like virtually all of them are developing applications and prototypes using AI. And the game development is different right because you have 2d 3d you have different kinds of games you got physics like how do you even validate the output things like that. But what I'm saying is like I do think will get there. And I believe AI is the biggest technological innovation in the history of the world. Like you know much bigger than the internet and so once we get there, I think that's going to be that the next macro trend that just completely revolutionizes our industry.

Jon Radoff: We'll talk a little bit more about AI will come back to live services to because that's a topic that keeps coming up a lot recently. But I want to focus in a little bit on India building a studio there, the culture of India. We've got a bunch of questions that have already come in from the audience. So maybe just to get started, we've got this question from the audience here. Thanks, Affle tun for your question. What are the differences you're seeing between Indian and US teams because part of what you're doing is also bringing or essentially importing skills into India. That's what you saw happen favorably within your experience in China.

Guest: Yeah, I would say that one thing is well, first let me let me preface by saying I think people are people and so I actually think that one positive aspect of Indian culture is it's so open and warm. And so I have never felt in danger when I've been in India and I felt that so many people have been very friendly and very open. I think that maybe some of the other things that I've had to learn to deal with is that there is a strong negotiating culture in India. And so when it comes to things like comp and things related to those kinds of things, there's a much greater fixation on that. And I would say like sometimes in the US, if you like if you have like if you're hiring for a role, it's more straightforward. But I think there are some people who think I'm just going to say whatever it takes to get in the door. And then once I'm in the door, then then we're going to start to negotiate. It's like no, no, no, we told you these things before you joined. And now you're trying to negotiate it's it's a anyway, so those are some of the things.

Unknown: But I would say like, I don't know, I felt like the cultural differences are probably not I don't know, I don't think there's any major issues from cultural differences.

Guest: And I would say even within India, there are big cultural differences like we we started our office in Bangalore. And I have had the opportunity to visit Mumbai. And I would say that there's a big difference like, you know, like Bangalore is seen as more kind of laid back more. You know, maybe even lazier than Mumbai where it's it's you know kind of known as a city of dreamers, a lot more hustle culture. And a lot of people who are to be frank, a little bit more entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial minded from my from my perspective.

Jon Radoff: JK earlier, you were talking about the culture in China. And you were for 996 culture, which not everyone may be familiar with that. I might want to just comment on like what that means. Yeah, so you see more divergence with China to the US than India and the US.

Guest: Yeah, I would say that China that so 996 means 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. And I would say that yes, when I. So one of the reasons why I actually even wanted to go anywhere else, you know, kind of five years ago when I was thinking about starting a new studio is. So I have many friends in the games industry just as an old guy, somewhere to you, John. And when I. I was feeling a little bit uncomfortable. Again, look, I. I love work life balance. It's not for me at least at this point in my time. And in my life, but I would say when it comes to new game development, I just felt there needed to be a certain amount of focus attention. And like hardcore work ethic. And when I was talking to many of my friends in, in, you know, kind of game development in San Francisco, Los Angeles. I did not think we could be successful given the cost structure, given where production budget, some of the macro trends that we were talking about we're going. And, and so I felt like it had to like it wasn't for me. And I think you can make an argument you take, you know, extremely experienced team from California. Can you be successful? Sure. But in the general case, I couldn't see a path forward for myself. I will say Chinese in particular, generally it's, it's, it's much easier to find kind of hardcore workers. I will say the US and India are a little bit more similar in that it's harder to fight.

Jon Radoff: Interesting. So you brought up AI before and you're in this mission to level up the skill set within India. So that may be another difference though, which is just at least in game development currently a lot of hit games have come out of the US obviously China has been ascended not really a huge, you know, experience backlog of that in India is generative AI going to level up people faster there or is it going to leap frog them entirely. You said that it hasn't quite happened.

Guest: So I, yeah, yeah, I hope so, but it's also I think AI represents both a huge opportunity for India, but also a massive risk. Right, because a lot of the, a lot of the work that's getting outsourced to India and a lot of this kinds of work that have helped really elevate India, India's middle class and lift up, you know, the people out of poverty is exactly the kind of work that is good, right. And so, you know, we talk about different kinds of work that's being like if you think about different kinds of work that's being done on hit games in China. So, for example, the game has a hit works game called a white out survival and they have 300 people just in their ad creatives team. Now that serves as a massive area of competitive advantage for them because, you know, I've spoken to a number of heads of studios here in the west and there, you know, and they asked me for advice on on forks just because I I worked on a successful one.

Unknown: And there, one of the things they told me is like there's no way we can hire 300 people here, right. But then when you think about AI, does that mitigate that advantage that you have from having the 300 people in China or in India.

Guest: So, but at the same time, I do think that AI can help level set some folks like what if you're weak at writing, if you're weak at coding, maybe it helps you become a better coder or writer. And I think it's still unclear where this is one of the reasons why I think we're living in, you know, such interesting times that and I'm so glad to be living at this point in history today is because there's so much uncertainty and there will be new winners and losers. And it really is going to come down to what are the fundamental limitations of AI going to be is it creativity? Is it there's going to be like when you think about like kind of convergence there, right, like you have different inputs to build a product. And so, from the perspective of somebody thinking about a career, whether it's in games or anything else, you should be thinking about and you should be playing with AI tools now for sure, but you should really understand, you know, how to use AI as effectively as possible. And where is AI weak so you can double down on where you provide value so that you can increase, you know, I, I, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. So that you can increase, you know, I, I'm really, really like talking to my team right now a lot about this concept of product velocity, right, because ultimately AI is a massive accelerator in terms of like whether it's creating art assets or code or docs or whatever. So then the companies that are going to succeed in this new age are ones that can really massively increase product velocity. So where are those choke points that AI can't address very well. What can you as a human because hopefully, and I really hope that we don't get to super intelligence because in that that's not a world I want to live in. But to the extent that there are limits with AI, then what are those points in product velocity that you can address to help your team help your company succeed and to make you extremely valuable as an employee or as a founder of your own company.

Jon Radoff: So while we're on the subject of AI, there was another question from the audience, this is just sort of like a fun use case. You were kind of questioning JK like where is AI really going to be applied within games and the question is about will we be able to have games without already made ending. And it strikes me that that's actually what the kind of thing that LMS are reasonably good at. The question is, I guess will those endings be super satisfying like I really loved like the fallout style games not just as a few games that played with this. You kind of play through there's a few different kinds of endings, but then you get the whole recap that tells you how you impacted the world. I can certainly imagine a lot of games that capture, for example, story as you go records it in a little narrative book and then just pulls up pulls out an LLM looks at that and says, OK, and here's what happened in the aftermath. I definitely think that's possible and I think there could probably be good games with that one answer Andre, I think is like like there's there's no shortage of ideas in the game industry, the the magic happens when the idea just gets refined and iterated and made really, really cool and relates back to the engagement loops so that you felt that like you were working towards something really interesting. But sure why not like LMS do that well, I don't know if you have anything you'd want to add to that JK or about storytelling more properly.

Guest: Yeah, I mean, I think people are already talking about that for movies right where an AI can understand you as a person and then customize the content to give you the kind of characters and ending that would be that would that would be better for you. And I think there are companies even today that are working on these kinds of games, I think one in particular if I if I remember correctly, I was on a panel with Aaron far CT of jam and tea and I believe their game is similar in that regard where they don't even have specific rules on what you can do. And the AI kind of figures out different kinds of behavior and as far as I know there was no specific ending to that game that it tried to adapt to you. So I think we'll probably continue to see different kinds of experiments in that in that area. Again, this is going to come down to what are the limits in terms of creativity and end of AI. So I definitely think that's a space to watch for. I personally, you know, as an old guy, I kind of like the idea of a set story, what for a game like, you know, there's some games that that I will remember forever or craft three final fantasy 10.

Jon Radoff: And then we share that if we both played it will.

Guest: Yes, there's a shared context. I remember that character in this and that. And so I do think there's an advantage to having a unified or, you know, a constant story. But, you know, I can also see, you know, that if you have alternative endings or endings in kind of content and flow that's customized to you, I can also see that and maybe, you know, the world would be a better place with both.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. So earlier on, there was a question from Kwame about recent layoffs and triple A and wondering, is this a renaissance for indie game development have my own ideas about that.

Unknown: But first of all, premise of the question is that entirely accurate and light of what you were saying about, you know, the trend line is actually pretty positive overall is this just a blip.

Guest: I mean, I think we've been seeing it right that both indie and double A, I think the case for double A is clear obscure. If you haven't played that, I mean, they've done an excellent job and whether you believe them when they see their budget was 10 or no kind of word on the street from some insiders, they're telling me it was close to 40, but even then. Call it 40 big deal, right. It's a freaking fantastic game and has been doing extremely well. And then on the indie side, I mean, we've seen this right over and over again, whether it's battle bit or valheim or more recently schedule a or lethal company, we've got like these teams of like one to four developers building these games that have just really resonated with with an audience and it kind of comes back to. This issue where we're now starting to live in a world where there's a lot of things that you can do something that I call like long vector to small vector development and by vector, I mean like their resources, time, energy, effort, budget, all that kind of stuff that's required to make something. But we first saw this with roadblocks, right, because they basically integrated a lot of things that is a pain in the ass for a developer like back in and this and that rendering all sorts of complicated stuff and they opened up the aperture, they opened up the funnel for anyone with a creative idea to build something and to get it into the hands of players. AI will also accelerate that on a broader basis. And so the renaissance in my view is just starting and to the extent that we have we continue have this triple A model where some NBA being counter makes a call on a creative project. But I think triple A is going to be in trouble.

Jon Radoff: It is kind of the paradox of these moments in time where you see a downturn in an industry and a shift of people and capital as well. He mentioned layoffs, but also there's there frankly is just less capital, particularly from venture capital right now going around.

Guest: Yeah, I think the layoffs is just a symptom of a model that's not working. And so I think the market is saying, hey, this model is not working. Change the frickin model.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Yeah, but ironically, it's at those times where it's a little bit more capital constrained is sort of what the fundamental last happen as a result of a capital constraint. Because the capital isn't being as efficient or productive as it otherwise could see you decrease your costs and try to kind of retreat a little bit and figure it out. It's in those more capital constrained environments where conversely suddenly there's a whole bunch of people available on the market to join a studio that actually lots and lots and lots of great startups happen.

Unknown: Yeah.

Jon Radoff: That's my experience anyway. So I always tell people don't lose hope but be willing to really fight the good fight for a long time to realize your vision because you may not get capital as fast as you want. And you may have to kind of live the 996 lifestyle or more. I don't know what I was doing when I was building Game of Thrones years ago, it disrupted me.

Unknown: I think it was more like a 12 12 7 lifestyle was.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Well, that was a front plus. I was hard for 996. Yeah. Yeah. I felt like 996. Wow. That would be great. And I know we've got 500 people here watching live and a lot of you are game developers. You know what I'm talking about. Like, and I'm not talking about crunch at a big studio where it's just like this cycle of kind of like resource mismanagement to some degree. But like when you were in a real startup and it's just a handful of people, like you did it because it's an obsession. You wanted to be successful. You probably poured everything you have into it. So of course you're going to expand all the energy you've got available to try to make that successful.

Unknown: Yeah. I do think that the one thing in the industry that we have to address with respect to hard core work is that there's too many executive teams taking all of the upside and not sharing with the guys who are actually working hard core.

Guest: So I think that's bullshit. Right. Like, oh, we launched this very successful game. Congrats, everyone. You all get an iPad. Come on. And by the way, yeah, don't worry about my $20 million bonus. Just, you know, it's like, what did you do, motherfucker? Yeah, it's like, I don't know. So I think that's one area where the game industry does need to kind of recalibrate in terms of having more equitable outcomes for folks who are actually doing the work and providing the value.

Unknown: Yeah, agreed. Everyone should share on what they create. And it's a great incentive too. And I, you know, I was always surprised at disruptor beam.

Jon Radoff: Like, people seem to be getting equity for the first time in their career, which I, which I'd never really seen that in other non gaming startups that I've been involved in. It was like the structures in the background that had been learned from a lot of other kind of startup companies hadn't been applied to games, which were kind of came, I guess, partly responsible for the publishing model that that created this very cash flow oriented structure for how you get returns out of the project.

Guest: Oh, and speaking about like China and other, you know, differences between like us in China, I will say like one other key point of differentiation is like the compensation strategy. And so the China does not work on a lot of like equity based deals. Yeah, but they do have extremely aggressive cash bonuses. Yeah. And so, for example, like 60% of comp, at least on my team when I worked at FUN Plus was based upon a bonus, right. So that's variable variable comp that you get. And so there's like a greater alignment towards. And the incentives are aligned towards outcomes. And then key leads were given extremely attract like you could make a million dollars if you launch a game, not an equity, but just in like cash.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, well, that's I mean, the other flip side of equity is like bonus programs in the US are designed to never pay out bonuses.

Guest: Yeah, when I was at FUN Plus, we had somebody making over 100 K a month, just in like, you know, Repshare.

Jon Radoff: Nice. I love to hear it. Well, let's maybe pivot to an almost related question, which is down Z's question here, which is how do you measure the success of a game? I mean, cash flow obviously would be one, but I guess he's asking what he what means a game has been successful. I also ask a little bit of a long term question to like those cash flow metrics are great and a live ops company where you got to turn out the revenue every month. But how do you know whether you're creating something with a lot of value? I don't know longer have you created the next Baldur's gate or not?

Guest: Yeah, yeah. So I think this really comes down to your company and the culture of the company. You know, one of the things that, you know, and for a lot of people who say investors are vultures and this and that, I would say one thing I told our investors is I don't give a fuck about revenue. I just want to build a great organization and we want to create over time. We're not there yet, but we want to create very culturally relevant and great products. And if we're probably and you know, of course profitability first, but it's not to like maximize revenue and things like that. And I can because if you're building a company in particular game studio over the long term, you want to build a player relationship that you lock in for years. Yeah. And so I just don't I think if you pursue maximum revenue from the start, I think you're kind of setting yourself up for for failure to some degree. And so I think having a longer term perspective and just focusing because we're in a world that write the attention economy. If you you have breaking through the attention economy means that you have a brand and means you have a very high quality product and just trying to take short term, you know, short cuts to try and just squeeze out more money from players. It's going to it's it's not going to turn out well in my opinion.

Jon Radoff: So my my favorite game of all time, which is Baldur's Gate three, I think is a good example, though, of the foundation that led to that because why do people play Baldur's Gate three? Well, because Baldur's Gate one and two were really great, culturally relevant games created by buy aware and Larry was was just lucky enough to be able to take a take over. The same path of exile too. Yeah. Yeah, but also Larry and themselves have previously made the Divinity series and people really of the storytelling and that. And it was Dungeons and Dragons, right? So then you have the Dungeons and Dragons audience where if they were, I don't know, not born yet at the point that the Baldur's Gate came along. Here is their chance to jump in and try a Dungeons and like a really big, you know, Dungeons and Dragons game for the first time ever. So there were a lot of forces there that were not just about game as cash flow machine, even though I think they did pretty well with the title. They did well because it was a great game built on trust in all these brands that had been developed over a long period of time and that that trust in the brand is sort of what game studios really have.

Unknown: This is just my own opinion. I'm interested. I agree. Like a studio is ultimately a brand that represents the kind of games you can make and that kind of trust you have with the player.

Jon Radoff: And you set certain expectations with the player about what they will then be able to enjoy and even the business model. This is why when I've looked at like business model changes, why do business model changes frequently fail for a developer like why did, why did star wars battlefield and shifting to a free like a hardcore, it wasn't even hardcore free play was like a very light free to play frankly like you and I have built hardcore free games that really tried to ring every dollar out, frankly, but like it wasn't it was just like some a few little add-ons. But it's really hard when you built a brand around just you buy the premium title and you play the hell out of it and suddenly it drops in free to play mechanics. I think it can be done once in a while, but really, really hard to do that as a general rule. Also, I think the devil three struggled with the auction house trying to add real money trading. It wasn't that like real money trading in any game was a terrible idea. It was that like people didn't want that in a jobable game. They didn't have it and if they did it before was because they did gray market trading of stone of Jordans when they were playing earlier titles and they liked that but don't put it actually in the game. So those pivots and business model can can be really, really damaging to a brand and the trust that you have with your players and it has little to do with like even the business model itself is bad.

Unknown: It's just that that audience that you had was not compatible with it.

Jon Radoff: Yeah.

Guest: I think there's two ways of thinking about how you monetize a game and on the on the front end is willingness to pay on the back end is payment optimization right all of the tricks and levers and sales and sales and merchandising tactics and things you can do to just maximize the amount of money you make. But on the willingness to pay it's by having a trusted brand by knowing that this is a company that you want to support because of the focus on quality on the focus on making something great like I have so many people I know where any new supercell game they're just going to auto down download right. And it's because they've done a good job in creating quality products and in terms of building that trust to your point, John, of with the players and so to the extent that you can do that, you know, you're going to I think, you know, and one thing Elon must said I know Elon's controversial I have a newsletter anytime I post something about Elon then like I lose like you know hundreds I've lost like 2000 subscribers. Like one thing he said is like it when you have enough people who want you to succeed you generally have a much higher chance of success and I think that's true and that goes to the players when when your players are are rooting for you, then you dramatically increase your chance of success.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. So down he asked another question and I realized I pronounced your name down Z before and that's I believe my eyes for that not on purpose and I but I don't know if you're down E or down but he has another question like what's the future of the gaming is my my my instant reaction to it is any time the future of the game industry has been declared it's usually wrong. So I try to avoid those declarations personally, but the question is it's going to be more cinematic as it can be sandboxes something else that we can't even think of. I know all of the above I think like the game industry growing like old genres don't go away we just keep having more.

Unknown: What do you think?

Guest: Yeah, I mean, I think that I think that a lot of games that are not super high production value are still very successful. So and especially on different platforms, right? And so I think it's going to differ based upon the platform. I would say on console things are going to continue to become even grander more cinematic more dramatic more immersive. I think on phones, you know, we are getting to a point where you have, you know, higher performance in terms of, you know, the that the tactile functions and precision and things like that.

Unknown: So you're able to get more console experiences on phone, but I think we're going to continue to see a lot of simple games that are very successful and the most successful games are extremely simple like, you know, offline games and games like that, the simple match games and those type of games that are the most popular on phone are not high production value in comparison to HD.

Guest: And then on the VR side, I think like there's been a number of starts and stops on that end. The technology is basically just not there yet. And but I mean, I can totally imagine like wouldn't it be so cool if you could play, you know, dungeons and dragons that's more like where you're seeing things you're seeing the combat it's more immersive in that way with VR or you go, right?

Unknown: You know, you know, I summon my whatever steal I dragon blah blah blah and then you can kind of see it kind of emerge. And so I can totally imagine that kind of game experience being something that really moves the needle for for a platform like VR.

Guest: But I would say that when you think about the kinds of games that are going to be successful and in the kinds of games that you want to develop, I think you've got to take kind of more of a platform approach. And there has been this religion around cross play and cross platform will have passed, you know, five plus years, but I don't know, I still think it's better to optimize for the platform. And certainly there's going to be some games that are that are good cross platform, but I wouldn't say that's the majority, right? I mean, certainly fortnight and some other games, I think are doing well on both. But it's not it's not everything. And I would say that the better experiences are the ones that are kind of somewhat tuned for mobile and somewhat tuned for HD.

Jon Radoff: JK really on we talked about live services and you talked about the macro trajectory of live services and the importance of it within games. It's something you've written about a lot in the past or the last few years. It's something that I that I did it disruptor beam and now platform a beamable is essentially to help people stand up live services. So something we've both been connected to for a while. I have been in a lot of like, spaces and stuff lately where the topic has basically been live services is that even something that a startup studio can do because I think there's just a general attitude out there like Supercell one, a few other people one like it's just really hard to crack in until you've got that level of expertise data science. Fully baked out platforms to enable you. Now clearly I have a certain view on that, but what do you think like is live services something that new game studios should be thinking about or is that for like when you've already showed something.

Guest: Yeah, no, I think I mean live ops is critical right when like. When you think about it, we're getting back to the roots of what enables a mobile game to be successful. And so it's really these three pillars right it's the product and the quality of the product it's live ops and its growth. So you so for any game studio who's just going to say we're not big enough we're going to ignore live ops. Probably not going to make it. So you have to be good at all three in the modern age and where we currently are in the market today. And I also think there's been a little bit of a renaissance within live ops in the sense that the thing you mentioned Supercell right the thing that Brawl Stars proved is that if you put enough effort and energy to live ops you can really drive even massively old games. And so Brawl Stars last year six X to revenue from the two the two Franks at the time who kind of drove the improvements in live ops. And in after that you saw like a shock wave go throughout the industry where now it's like okay, wait a minute we've got our our B team or C team running live ops on this game. What if we put a better team on because clearly Brawl Stars has shown you can dramatically improve revenue if you take live ops more seriously. And I don't know if you need a huge team like I know one of the Franks and I think you mentioned for that Godzilla event they had one engineer that that made those changes right so like do you need a huge team. I don't know if you if you do, but I think you have to do it smart and I think that you know we've spoken about AI but this is where I think AI can be a little bit of help in leveling the playing field where through automation and for the folks who embrace AI. I think you're going to be able to reduce the amount of people that you need to be competitive and so you can imagine there's a lot of workflows that are fairly structured right and that's what AI is good at talking again about knowing where to lean in and what what AI is good at and what it's bad at. It's good at at looking at things that are well structured and then replicating them so for example you can imagine a workflow for a battle pass. It's very structured same same tier structure same pricing structure same kinds of items that are given away. And then you could try to have AI integrated into the workflow and take that over and so then how much time does that save for your team and then and so taking a lot of these processes that are relatively well structured and having AI run those processes and then freeing up the team to then think more about okay what did brought us do what can we do. How do we move the needle on our live operating game.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, my one of the things that I try to advise people is when you look at your this is your game development overall but you need to increase you just have to have a high velocity of development you have to have a high velocity of trying things. Yep, and what something live services or live ops can do I like that that those three pillars you provided so lives live ops great product growth. Live ops is actually what connects those things together because if you can develop with a high level of velocity and collect evidence of what people actually do and enjoy and pay for whatever it engage whatever is important within your particular game. You can tighten up the feedback loop and the action loop not just learning not just looking at an analytics but dashboard but seeing how that data can drive change that you can then add quickly to introduce the right kind of content the right kind of feature upgrades. If you can do that fast then you're in a much better position to actually succeed financially with that product in a game that doesn't do that so it I had the same kind of reaction you did around not going to make it for people that kind of say they're not going to bother with live ops because what you're basically saying is you're going to develop in a vacuum. And sure maybe you've got a smart vacuum i'm sure you're smart developer you can do that some people do that for five seven 10 years before they ship and there's a zillion counter examples in the industry as well where everything just worked out in the end but the general case though is you got to learn fast and you got to be able to act fast and you got to have live ops system that doesn't have a lot of bottlenecks and one that lets you learn for your players and then given what they want and that starts in the earliest days of alpha well past the time. You ship and that's why to be able is to help people actually accomplish that but any other thoughts on just sort of like. Live ops.

Guest: Yeah, I would say that you know if you believe in that framework that I described in terms of product live ops and growth and if you think about what's coming with AI then I would say that from a career perspective and for people in the in the. In the audience who are thinking about a career in game development or wanting to be more successful in game development I would really think about trying to. Trying to calibrate or develop your skills in a t structure right so you have to like the people that are going to be the most successful are those that aren't just a product or on the product guy or on the live ops guy i'm the growth guy no no no you have to know about all three but maybe your your specific focus. It's specific focus could be in one of those areas but you you're going to have to have breath across all three. If you want to have like the cross pollination and the ability to really understand from a holistic perspective, how do you make this game successful.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, excellent. So we're running out to the end of the hour but we've got one last thing that I have to throw in here I didn't I didn't realize even at the start of the program but I've got so many communication channels coming in we've got a code to give away in the audience today so we're actually doing our own live ops even in this live stream. So we give out a code and you can earn some points on the demable leaderboard towards the the token launch we're going to be doing in a few months so. If you've been waiting for that now's your moment you're going to have two minutes to enter it in so the word is create CR EAT and you can see it in the ticker on the bottom of the screen right now create.

Unknown: So go to beamable network go to the discord server get that code come and plugged in and you're going to get your points towards the leaderboard and you know that's coming sooner and sooner so if you're not on beamable network by the way beamable.network go there sign up for the hub check out the white paper that's all coming soon.

Jon Radoff: So JK thank you so much for participating in the conversation today this was long time it's been a little bit since we've since we've last talked so it's great to catch up with you. Yeah and and the fun thing is we could have broken any of those topics down I had to keep things moving a little bit but like we could have spent a whole hour on any one of like live ops we could have just spent an hour on. Maybe we will be a lot of fun back a few people who are experts and and live ops and have almost a live ops panel that would be a fun one to talk about. Yeah that's good but I want to thank you for being here and I especially want to thank all of the audience who showed up today we've got almost 700 people in the live audience watching that is awesome. If you're one of the people one of the most of you it turns out we're watching the sun replay we love you as well we love that you sat through this whole program and listen to us. But we'd love you to also come and actually join in post your questions we had a really lively conversation today a lot of input from the community with really good questions so I love to see that I'd love to see all of you watching on YouTube replays or x replays come on in to the next one while it's live and take part because it's a really unique opportunity to meet people. Like JK who've been in the trenches building games as a publisher. I think it's a mask kicked going to development because it's you know harder than being a publisher apparently harder than cutting checks. It's been a fun conversation JK until next time everybody thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again.