BLUE MOON PRODUCTION COMPANY

Ah the days of old . . .

One shall be attending the Game Developers Conference and will mostly be found at one's Palace Hotel Lobby.

At the recent DICE show I sat with a good friend of mine who’s in the early stages of designing a new game.? He passionately went on about the design which sounded interesting and unique, but then told me of a mechanic that required the player to return in order to limit the damage caused while they’re offline.? Immediately I retorted to him that this was a bad idea.? We are in the Era of Carrots.? If you want that player to come back, make them come back because something GOOD has happened, not something BAD.? The light went on above his head. This is just a plain reality of where we are in a market that is struggling with growth, fighting for attention, player time and money.? Where discoverability is an everyday challenge, where options for entertainment are far and wide, every minute of every day is more precious than the last.? Whether you are a game mechanic, a game, a community or a service, we are in the era of carrots.? You have to value a person's time and reward THEM for rewarding YOU with it.? Mobile and F2P games have done this forever, and the more successful ones make it meaningful. My good friend Jen did a fabulous podcast recently with Chris on the AIAS podcast (https://lnkd.in/gwnuGzkX) where she said it was imperative to ensure a game has an incredibly compelling first hour or two.? I actually think this is highly optimistic, I think you need to have an incredibly compelling 5, 10 or 15 MINUTES.? In a World where streaming is an option, players will literally dip in and dip out like they do Netflix shows.? I may lament the devaluation of our industry and our art that brings, but we have to embrace it. Make your game as accessible as possible.? Demo’s are back in vogue and it's a great thing.? Back in the 80’s and 90’s “cover tapes/discs” were all the range.? We used carrots extensively.? We learned back then if you’re going to do a demo - design and “master” the demo.? Don’t just throw out a segment of your game.? It is the ultimate sales tool, make it instant, polished and ensure it has an ending that drives a call to action (buy, wishlist/subscribe).? New technology is also allowing rapid access to engagement, technology like Ludeo is a great engagement tool used smartly and with care. Want to build a community, offer the people a reason to be there. Exclusive access to tests, builds or items are the greatest carrots here but it’s not a one off thing - many Discord channels go dormant because there’s no benefit to return.? Curating a pleasant environment and experience and managing the community well goes without saying. If you want me to come to your service - entice me with the content, not with the service.? Content is king, it's why I subscribe and stick to services.? Don’t beat me with a stick about the service itself. Marketing has always been about carrots, that's never changed.?? Games need carrots. Leave the stick behind.

My roundtable this year was “How We Return to Sustainable Development Practices”. It was well attended by some wonderful people and their thoughts and feedback were very valuable.? In doing this I was predominantly focusing on the US.? The manpower and the length of time needed to create games has been growing ever larger year over year.? Expectations for AAA games are sky high, running a 300 person team at $20k a man month is simply unrealistic, especially when doing that for multiple years.? We’ve dug ourselves into a hole of cyclical failure, even in success, when the industry is at its height, a team running under this system is prohibitively expensive and unsustainable.? So how do we fix it? Team Structure is the major change people to come to terms with in the coming years.? Dropping team sizes to under 50/60 people as a core is going to become a necessity.? Finding co-development teams that seamlessly integrate as and when needed will be key, and predominantly the understanding is this has to happen in low cost regions of the planet.? On one table we had people from Poland, China and Spain ; all of these locales have cost structures a half, a third or even a quarter of the most expensive US Cities.? In order to amortize costs across a project at a lower rate, using teams like this is vital.? Current co-development teams based in the US are going to have to look at partnering in this way to achieve cost savings as well.? There is a great advantage of being in the same time zone, in the same currency and tax system, and speaking the same language - but it doesn’t offset thousands of dollars a month. Scope and Scale.? The other core part of the conversation was about how we stop taking six years to build a game.? The market changes far too quickly and far too drastically for anyone to realistically say they know what will work over that period of time.? There are many games that have come and gone over the past year after hitting the oversaturated live service market.? Or arrived in a genre that had been redefined.? What seemed like a great idea in 2018 isn't so great in 2024.? I’ve been very vocal in my belief that we have to go back to producing solid 12-20 hour games, games that respect players time.? Now more than ever I think this is just a necessity, and the good news is they don’t have to all be built at the pinnacle of technology.? The fact is the majority of the player base today don’t care about how many rays you’re tracing.? They want entertainment.? The gamers of today grew up with Minecraft and Roblox.? They like stylistic art, but realism isn’t the draw. We can be sustainable with smarter development and starting with singles and doubles.? Beach head an IP, don’t expect a movie with the first outing.? But do publishers and funding sources agree?? Growth is slowing down, that’s just the market reality today.? CEO’s won’t say that though.? If they keep swinging for a non-existent market, I truly worry where we all end up.

See you in San Francisco!

There was definitely a more positive tone around DICE this year after last year's “we’re all doomed” subtext.? The business is in a very difficult spot, there’s a lot of wound licking still going on and we’re absolutely not through the bloodletting and layoffs that began a couple of years ago.? I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that this year is going to be much different than last in that respect ; Amir's tracker is slightly under but it could well be higher from what I’m seeing.? There did seem to be a lot more interest in signing titles again, the worry of quiet years in 26/27 was definitely evident.? The big question is . .what? Right now simply having a deck is no good.? No matter how revolutionary the idea, nobody is signing a game without a demo and to listen to some it was almost a need for a vertical slice.? That goes for start up teams, established teams and even people with great track records.? Money will start to move this year, but the level of risk people are willing to take is smaller than ever.? For many this is of course a Catch 22 situation, you like my deck, you like my demo, you want to see more but you aren’t willing to help fund that.? For many the runway isn’t there to achieve that.? There are avenues to explore to get that funding, the Angel and VC routes aren’t closed off, but again they are very, very narrow. There was also a great deal of talk around shorter, high quality games, lower budgets, multiplayer where it makes sense and less and less talk of live service games.? There seems to be a general belief that AAA games are truly the domain of the few (large publisher teams, first parties) and live service games are absolutely in the same boat.? The mobile industry has always led the way in the F2P GaaS games and we’re seeing the market there replicated ; it will take an insane amount of money, an incredible product and probably a license or known franchise to break through to a sustainable live service player base today.? Marvel Rivals was a great culmination of these three things, hats off for NetEase for knocking it out the park.? Others without this recipe are going to fall on hard times this year. Where that leaves everyone else is smaller, tighter, more nimble teams who utilize low cost partners in other parts of the world to ensure they can deliver quality games in a timely manner at a budget that’s realistic to recoup through premium sales.? We can lean on the fact that resell is no longer a significant factor to produce shorter games that leave players wanting more.? We can supply that through DLC and ongoing support while ramping up a sequel to iterate on learnings and grow the community around that IP.? Everyone is still looking for “UNIQUE!” though.? The next this, the next that.? Something that’s never easy to define, and never easy to achieve.? Just make sure when you pitch a game you stick to my first slide rule : What is it? WHY IS IT DIFFERENT? Why do I care And have a GREAT demo.

LIVE service vs ONGOING service . . . Not the first post I anticipated out of DICE, but one I think warrants addressing as it came up multiple times when discussing sustainability and new structures of development teams while in Vegas.? Shout out to Joe Shochet ?? GDC for reminding me about this. To me these two terms are very different yet as an industry we tend to lean on the former as a catch all for everything.? But Live Service for me is something very few people do and very people should attempt to do.? It’s extremely expensive and requires a completely different approach to how a development team operates.? Live Service means running your game on servers 24/7/365 with no down time and no hiccups (or as few as possible).? It means hotfixing and updating and adding content on a very regular cadence to keep the community and player base enthused and enthralled.? The cost of any significant downtime or slowdown can mean an exodus of players.? In short, live service is damn hard and expensive. Ongoing service for me is a catch all term for what almost everybody else SHOULD be doing.? It comes in various different guises, it can capture a lot of what live service does and to a degree should be as methodically planned out.? While it requires the focus of the team it doesn’t necessarily need the entire team on it.? Ongoing service means title updates, listening to community and feedback and making tweaks, releasing updates as best suits the title but with an understanding that these updates are also MARKETING BEATS.? Ongoing service is one for your current players, but every update is an opportunity to find a new audience, a new group of players, to stick a little machine that goes PING on your game.? Much of the time these opportunities are often reactionary rather than actively planned.? Obviously if something is needs fixing with the game you have to react, but the opportunity for growth occurs when you look at a calendar and plan out when and how you’re going to address longer term adjustments, updates and content drops.? If I’ve got a game about sharks, and I’m doing updates dropping a couple more sharks . . look across the spectrum of entertainment and see if there may be an opportunity to boost attention.? Shark Week on Discovery channel?? Awesome.? Jaws 9 appearing in theaters?? GREAT WHITE!? Ongoing service games are the norm for the industry today.? Keep the chatter going, keep the sales tail running.? Do whatever you can to be opportunistic.? Games these days are often not overnight successes but earned over time as goodwill and word of mouth spread.? Service the community, service your players.? But do it while also working on what’s next. Curious if others see this the same way?

ONE WEEK.

Something that came out of a morning prompt by Bertrand ; I wanted to touch on the moonshot investing of the past five years and why it’s generally not worked out so well.? In 2019 as COVID took hold and investors went crazy and we saw a lot of moonshot studios start up.? Generally pitched around as the best and brightest of Studio X, Y and Z - they collaborated across video streams, put together great pitches and sold a dream based on their experience of being part of multi-million selling franchises or billion dollar studios. I saw a lot of these pitches and mostly wrote them off instantly.? No matter what you have worked prior, no matter what games you have shipped, unless you were all together as a cohesive team your next game is your first game.? There’s nothing to iterate on.? No code base.? There’s no experience of navigating the highs and lows together, there’s no knowing how you will react.? Beyond all of that, this was generally being navigated while at times not even in the same State or Country. The best scenario for a developer in that situation would be to build something together.? Quickly.? Go through the process, learn the rhythms, strengths and weaknesses of the team, understand what works and what doesn’t.? Do something within a limited scope, limited time, $20-30m budget, prove out the core mechanics, the IP, create something to build and iterate on toward that original killer pitch.? But that’s not what happened because there’s no 10x return on a $40 single player/co-op game.? It had to be the Moonshot, it had to be the ever-lasting billion dollar game that would knock CoD, LoL, Fortnite, PubG off their perch. Strangely enough this didn’t happen, and it's not because the talent involved aren’t capable.? Eventually.? But games rarely are exceptional on version one. Teams need stability and the ability to build slowly and grow organically and iterate to version two and beyond.? Building a one to two hundred person team because that’s what the pitch demands to be built is usually a path to disaster. As an industry we need to step back from these Moonshots, we need to be realistic about growth.? Focus on profitability, yes, but team cohesion, long term stability and iteration of skills is key to long term growth. ? Boom and bust is a dreadful path and it's one we’ve taken far too often over the past ten years and we have paid and continue to pay a terrible price for doing so.? I’m hoping working with Adam, and with the teams and publishers that Vivrato engages with, we can restore this sense of balance to the industry.? I’m not saying there’s no room for huge quad A products, with proven teams building on proven IP these aren’t anywhere near as risky as a start up Moonshot.? But the path to the next Quad A IP lies through investing in AA games today, smaller teams who can grow together, iterate together and scale over multiple titles.? Just as Naughty Dog, Insomniac, From, Team Asobi and many others have in the past.

Well a weekend of fantastic American “throw the ball and run some”, the Superb Owl is just around the corner, so is DICE 2025 (see you there) and thus I thought I’d share some thoughts on the wonderful process that is - The Monday Morning Quarterback.? Because there is a LOT of it going on in our business right now. The games industry changes at a pretty rapid pace, albeit slower today than in years gone by.? Technology advances have slowed and innovation with it.? Games take longer to develop now by multiple factors than they did ten years ago.? Beyond that what has shifted more than anything has been the way users interact with games.? My Jam Jar and Cookie Jar theme is obviously ever present here, but the majority of player time these days is locked up in a live service game (or platform) that keeps them walled in for hour after hour, day after day. Which is why some time ago a lot of people started building them.? Around 2018 the live service model started to hit everyone.? There were enough successes in the marketplace to say it was a model worth chasing, the upside of the model was proving to be hard to resist, many teams across the globe started learning the construct of live service, designing GAAS games and building technology that would service such a model.? Seven years later it's very easy to sit here and suggest this was a bad idea, but having been there at the time it clearly wasn’t.? There was a huge appetite for these games, and the benefits of being successful in that space was impossible to ignore. Markets change. Those live service games haven’t gone away, they are more successful than ever, but the battle for player time and attention has focused the understanding on the fact that only a limited number of these games can co-exist and be successful to the level required to continue to sustain them.? Too many games chased the same space, too many people had the same idea at the same time.? Following trends isn’t usually the worst case scenario for a business, in this case it has been disastrous for many.? It’s very easy to sit at a table six or seven years later and say “well we could’ve seen that coming”, but the truth is, at the time, they were smart business decisions. The real trick is knowing when to change direction.? When the challenges present themselves and the obvious becomes clear, that’s when the real crux comes.? Because sunk cost fallacy is a real thing, and that is something we are seeing a lot of in the industry right now.? It’s also where the problem with teams of hundreds becomes a real issue and why sustainable development cannot be achieved with such large groups.? When the iceberg appears on the horizon a small nimble team can adapt, change and plot a new path.? The Titanic sinks. Let's understand the challenges and react rather than point fingers. Let's chart a new path that steers away from the mistakes of the past and toward a more nimble future.