#5 Gaming Bits with Florent Castelnarac, Founder & Managing Director at Ubisoft Nadeo
Welcome back to the Gaming Bits by Replai! A series of short interviews with leaders discussing the present and future of gaming and esports, opportunities around the corner and how can industry participants play a significant role on its expansion. Want to add to the discussion or know someone whose input you’d really want to see featured on this series? Tag them on the comments or email at [email protected]
Today we are joined by Florent Castelnarac, who founded Nadeo in 2000. Their flagship racing series, Trackmania, are available on multiple platforms and have become a staple for racing game fans worldwide, leading to the acquisition of Nadeo by Ubisoft in 2009. The latest instalment of Trackmania has recently launched to great reception, and as such it's a pleasure to discuss with Florent the impact of the Trackmania series.
"[...] on Twitch, I will not look at the 5 million hours in a month, I will look at the quality of these hours. [...] Our job is to make quality, and let the consequence of that happen."
You founded Nadeo in 2000. Looking back the past twenty years and several games later what do you perceive to have been the fundamental changes within the gaming industry? What are the biggest challenges for studios to publish new titles now compared to back then?
Before, both game developers and gamers were early adopters somehow. Would you be in one or the other category, that was not that usual. With the wider audience, it brings new challenges.
The first obvious is the competition. When we released Trackmania Nations ESWC in 2006, there were only a small number of online games, let alone UGC, esport and free ones altogether. Since then, a lot of now popular games with creation, like Minecraft, or competitive games like LoL have been released, and often free such as Fortnite or others. And even more importantly, social networks, netflix like services, mobiles bring additional ways to spend time, especially with everything that is free. So, you have to offer something that is worth the time of the player and the player has to find yours as well among so many offers everywhere.
The second one, is the fact that with a wider audience, it attracts people that play or work with a different mindset somehow. So, if you want to connect with them, you need to adapt yourself and open your mind to it. It does not mean to remove things that are so fundamental to your games and passion, it means to increase an additional layer that is more welcoming for all. And the difficulty is to combine both together because ultimately, you want people to be able to share with their friends whatever is their engagement.
According to data from Twitchmetrics.net, Trackmania 2020 already holds over 5.5 million viewer hours on Twitch for the month of August – that’s extremely impressive. Trackmania games have always been shared by players on the internet with exciting, addictive and tense gameplay so the livestream transition feels obvious. How important is the community being involved in “spreading the word” about Trackmania to your marketing efforts?
The same way I wished to reinvent Trackmania, I wished to reinvent our way to communicate. And the big difference is that we want to talk to people who know the game or are already interested in it instead of people who are not aware. There is so much information nowadays, that there is little value if you give it to anybody. I would rather spend ten times more quality time explaining our work to somebody that is already interested than ten times more people that may not be. And indeed, thanks to all social relays, it's more people who are interested that may bring more players in. But my focus is mainly that people that are playing or watching are happy.
So, on Twitch, I will not look at the 5 million hours in a month, I will look at the quality of these hours. And on that aspect, we still have great things to do. And hopefully, if it is of great quality, numbers will be bigger in 3 years or later, but if they are not, it should not change my goal: make as good an experience as possible to play or to watch. Our job is to make quality, and let the consequence of that happen.
Racing games are starting to become a staple in an esports environment traditionally dominated by FPS and MOBA games. In 2014, you even mentioned “Trackmania was designed for Esports”. What are your plans to take Trackmania even further in this environment?
The team started to work together when it was games like Quake or Warcraft III that were popular in esport. Today, team based esports are much more popular, also because the games are more popular. When we released the Trackmania Nations Electronic Sports World Cup in 2006, our intention was clear : to make a free to play racing game designed for esport. With this Trackmania, we have learned from these 15 years, in order to include as much as the components required to have a solid esport activity.
Trackmania is already easy to follow for spectators, and with the recent ZeratoR Cup with 145K viewers simultaneously, in french, he demonstrated that you can reach an even wider audience than the game itself, because you really don't have 145K french players connected at the same time. And it is something that we saw coming for ten years. I made this presentation internally where I explained that like music/sport/cinema, more people are going to listen/spectate/watch than to play.
And there are new incoming components that should make Nadeo again on the forefront of innovation, like we did in 2006. In the decade of 2010 to 2020, we tried more to improve instead of inventing stuff. And so, my goal is now that people that will watch our esport show will say "that's the first time I see something made for esport like that with a game", and I like it. And it should be the same for competitors and clubs that support them.
In my opinion the gameplay for Trackmania strikes a great balance in gameplay: easy to pick up but with a huge skill ceiling to master it and become one of the best. How do you communicate this aspect into getting more casual players involved in the competitive side of the game? Is content marketing the main way to promote Trackmania as an Esport?
In fact, we do not communicate a lot on the "easy to pick up" aspect, even if it is well represented in the game with the little training tracks, because it is still "hard" to test games. But when some solutions like streaming will be mature and that you will have the youtube or netflix of video games, Trackmania is much more likely to benefit tremendously from this aspect. Imagine if you can click on a link and do your first race. That would be different from doing your first match of Starcraft II or LoL that were the pillars of esport growth in the early 2010's.
So, maybe we are preparing for a much bigger wave were people play a game like they go in a sport club, and that these esports clubs will have an even wider audience than today's audience. And this is why the punchline of Trackmania is that we develop so much the club aspect in the current edition, and that's the tagline of the game is: Welcome to the club!