Martin Hultberg - A Gamer's Journey

Today I have the tremendous honor to present to you an exclusive interview with Martin Hultberg, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Sharkmob Studios. Join both of us on this journey as we go through Martin's remarkable career, his creative vision, and the secrets behind some of the most immersive gaming experiences of our time. From his early days shaping iconic titles like World in Conflict and The Division to his current role at Sharkmob and his newest AAA endeavor Exoborne. Martin's passion for gaming and his dedication to crafting unforgettable experiences shines through. Prepare to be inspired as we uncover the insights, challenges, and wins that have defined Martin's extraordinary journey in the gaming industry.

Zoran Roso: Hi Martin, thank you for taking the time to really dive a little bit into your career and what you're doing right now. So to start things off, you're Martin Hultberg, the CMCO of Sharkmob. I'm going to ask you about this later - but what does CMCO actually mean? I've stumbled upon this and I have ideas, but I will ask you in a second what that means. But first things first, maybe we want to start with your earlier career and how you ended up where you are now, because we want to take people on the journey here. You started your career in the games industry with Ubisoft. Can you tell us about your early roles there and what key lessons you learned during that time?

Martin Hultberg: I actually did not start at Ubisoft. I started working as a freelancer for a German MMO developer called Reakktor. They made a game called Neocron. That's my first job, although it was one of those early gaming industry jobs that didn't pay at all - you did it for fun. And actually, it helped me get into the industry. But after that, I got a job with Ubisoft Nordic. At the time, I was actually doing something completely different. I was working in the manufacturing industry with quality assurance. It was an okay job - good coworkers, good salary, but I didn't really enjoy the work too much. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, told me I should do something that I actually wanted to do. She saw an ad for a job at Ubisoft Nordic, had me apply for that job, and I got it. So thank you for hiring me Peter Weile and S?ren Lass? if you read this. I ended up in my first real job doing PR for the entire Nordic region, which I had no real business doing, to be honest. I had no relevant education, I had no formal experience doing PR, but I knew a lot about games, and I've always been pretty good at talking and writing. That's pretty much how I got that job. The first couple of years were learning on the job, I guess. I had a co-worker, Lene, who was properly schooled in PR. She wasn't that into games though, so she taught me the craft of PR, and I tried to educate her on games. There were a lot of good learnings, a lot of interesting mistakes made. It was also an interesting era for Ubisoft, where they were coming out with Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, lots of Clancy games. They were just kind of getting their own new IPs out the door, which was very interesting.

Zoran Roso: So it was a lot of learning by doing, I would assume?

Martin Hultberg: Absolutely, yeah.

Zoran Roso: But then you changed sides and you went over to a developer Massive Entertainment, one of the now premier developers in Sweden. With Massive, there was World in Conflict. World in Conflict was in itself a groundbreaking RTS with its approach to less base building, or no base building, getting straight into the action. What are some of your fondest memories working on that project, and how did it shape your approach to game development?

Martin Hultberg: When I started at Massive, we were less than 40 people. It was a very tight group, same age, same interests - classic game studio, early 2000. Just as I joined, is when they started developing the concept for World in Conflict. I joined as a community manager and user researcher, then I eventually worked my way up to Head of Communications and ended up being IP Director for The Division.?

Early on, I was working a lot with user research, user feedback. I worked with everyone on the team. That was quite a journey, very interesting. I got to learn a lot out of pure necessity. Again, it was learning by doing, learning on the job. Ubisoft Montreal where I had been before this was very, very different from Massive. There were a lot of cool things that happened, a lot of learning, but I think the most interesting thing for me early on was setting up the user research lab and instilling that culture within the rest of the studio. Actually getting outsiders to come in and play the games and try it. It hurts a lot initially when you watch people play your game because you are not as smart as you think. Developers like to blame users, or did in the past at least, but we? often make the mistake of assuming too much or simply making errors in the design. You get to face your fears as you watch your work get manhandled by someone for the first time. It's a very good lesson, a very good way to increase the quality of your game. That was very, very fun. Lots of good collaborations with the university in Malm? as well and professor Simon Niedenthal, who was working with user research on games.

Zoran Roso: Those are definitely some great insights. It seems like some of the insights that are now common knowledge, you were laying the foundations for in the industry.

Martin Hultberg: Yes. That was really early on Bigger publishers had UR labs, but it was quite uncommon for it to be present with indies andsmaller developers. From that perspective, it was actually a very interesting journey to do on a smaller scale operation.

Zoran Roso: I know for a little while, Massive was part of the Vivendi Group, but then got acquired by Ubisoft. So back into the arms of your first employer, you could almost say. I think you also worked on Assassin's Creed Revelations. How did your experience and understanding of managing and expanding upon an established IP influence what you did, for instance, for The Division during your time at Massive Entertainment? What were the biggest challenges in bringing that game to life with such an IP behind it?

Martin Hultberg: My theory, of course, is that Ubisoft acquired Massive to get me back, not to get the studio. That is my favorite theory of all my crazy theories in life.

All jokes aside, the transition from Vivendi over to Ubisoft was quite turbulent. When we ended up in the arms of the welcoming Ubisoft family, we initially had to integrate ourselves by collaborating on a bunch of different projects. We worked together with other Ubisoft studios on Far Cry 3, for example. We also did a part of Assassin's Creed Revelations, where I pitched in as Associate Producer. I also did some of the narrative work on that. That was an interesting journey because at that point, Assassin's Creed was already a big franchise. You are a part of this existing universe with a wide range of creative collaborators on it. That was new to me in that sense. Where Far Cry is always different - each installment is its own, in a way. Assassin's Creed is tied together by a quite intricate fabric of lore and timelines and stories. It was a very interesting deep dive into a form of franchise that I wasn't used to working with before. All the other games I worked on had been fairly independent.

The carryover to The Division, has been a steady stream of lessons. Revelations added its part, for sure, but there was also a lot of World in Conflict lessons, World in Conflict thinking, that went into The Division. I think one of the main things from Assassin's Creed was probably the importance and the benefit of a deep and rich lore. Even if you present just a small part of it in the game you make, having that deep understanding allows you to build a foundation for your a wider range of products and stories. If you can put that there from the start, it makes everything a bit easier later on. That was always clear to me in Assassin's Creed, they could go in many directions at any given time. That was probably one of the main lessons I still take with me to this day as well. Ubisoft at that timewas a good school to learn about game development, that's for sure.

Zoran Roso: Ultimately, The Division was a huge success. It blended online elements with a compelling narrative. How did your experience during that time at Massive shape your views on the future of online gaming? Is there anything that you still carry with you, for instance, in your current products?

Martin Hultberg: Yes, absolutely. Massive, to me, has always been a premier world-class multiplayer studio. That's deeply rooted in the Massive DNA, and I hope it continues to be like that because that is one of the legacies of Martin Walfisz, who was the founder and CEO for a long time,. Upon my arrival, a profound understanding and respect for maintaining a close connection with players was already in place. The primary reason for my recruitment as a community and user research manager was to engage directly with players.

This mindset, which we now refer to as "Community First" at Sharkmob, is something I've consciously cultivated and refined over the years, and it's highly significant.

Zoran Roso: That's a perfect segue to my next question, actually. We talked about the past, but now let's talk about the present and the future. I'm excited to talk about Sharkmob Studios. What inspired you to co-found Sharkmob Studios? What were your initial goals and vision for the company?

Martin Hultberg: Sharkmob was founded back in 2017, not long after we had shipped The Division at Massive. It was me and four other people that I worked with for about a decade. We functioned very well as a team because we complemented each other. Anders Holmquist, our CTO and Tech Director. He was in charge of Snowdrop and The Division back when we worked on that. Rodrigo Cortes was Art Director, and is now our Studio Art Director. Petter Mannerfelt has been both Producer and Game Director and is now our Creative Director. Fredrik Rundqvist was first COO at Massive and then Executive Producer on The Division, and he's our CEO now. He has the business sense and strategic overview, and then me on communications, marketing, and narrative. We make a good team, and that was one of the inspirational things - to do it together with that group of people. That made a lot of sense at the time. If you're going to start something, make sure you cover all your bases, so you're not lacking something in the initial phase.

The main thing that made us all do it, I think, was that we were all fairly high up in the hierarchy. We were directors, we had been at the company for a long time. When you've done that for a while, you get ideas of how you want to do things. You're already like, "If I could do whatever I wanted, what would I do? How would I do it?" Obviously, that's hard to do when you're working for someone else and when you're on someone else's IP. The best way to do it is to start your own thing, so that's why we did it.

Zoran Roso: Sharkmob obviously currently works on Exoborne, but that wasn't the first game that you guys put out. To much critical acclaim, you did Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt first, which featured some unique elements and brought some new perspectives to the Battle Royale genre. How do you see Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt these days? What are the learnings that you took out of that??

Martin Hultberg: Bloodhunt was our first game. When we started the studio, we knew from the start that we wanted to make our own original IPs, like Exoborne. But we also knew that to be able to do that, we needed to set up our studio first. We needed to build some type of name for ourselves, and we needed support from either another developer, a big publisher, or an owner. You can't do the projects we like to do on your own. So we figured let's start with licensing a game. We reached out to some friends at Paradox, Fredrik Wester and Tobias Sj?gren,? and checked with them if they had any cool IPs that could be licensed. They said they had Vampire: The Masquerade, and they had a desire to make a more action-oriented experience for that franchise to try to broaden the audience a bit and reach a bigger target group. They thought focusing on the action aspect could do that. We were, of course, very excited. We played Vampire: The Masquerade as kids, and we know how to do action games. We love shooting and the idea of being like a supernatural vampire with a gun, killing people on the streets of Prague was just too good to pass up.. So we did that.

From my perspective, we had three very important goals. One of them was to create a quality game that gave a name to the studio. The other goal was to basically set up the studio, hire people, create a pipeline, learn a new engine, learn new technology. The third one is the business goal you always have when you run a business: a commercially viable product. On the first one, I would argue we did that. We have a very loyal, still-playing fanbase. We still have a review average on Steam at around 86% or 87%. Highest we had was like 91% I think. From a marketing and PR point of view, whenever users tell you what they feel about your game and you land around those scores, it's a testament to the quality of your game and the work of your team. We had a very good release. Technically, everything went well. We set up the development process and pipeline. We managed to build our studio on the back of Bloodhunt. We managed to get the backing we needed through Paradox and then later Tencent. All of that was very good.

What didn't really work out, of course, was the commercial part. It is a Battle Royale game, and when it came out, that market was already quite densely populated by bigcompetitors. I don't even have to name them, but they are some of the biggest games in the world now, and they had very big marketing teams, very big publishers behind them. We were self-publishing, using our own marketing team of six or seven people under the leadership of a man named André Persson, who is another amazing person I've had the honor to come across in my career. But even André and his marketing musketeers weren’t able to beat majorglobal publishers. It was also quite a hardcore game, which further narrowed the potential audience to a degree. In retrospect there were a bunch of reasons it didn't go as well as we had hoped, but at the same time, it went well enough for us to be where we are today, and that's a pretty good place to be. There are a lot of legacies and a lot of stuff carried over from Bloodhunt onto Exoborne that I think will be quite visible. People who played Bloodhunt are going to recognize a lot of cool stuff, but in a new skin, if you will.

Zoran Roso: Talking about Exoborne. Exoborne represents a different direction for Sharkmo while still reflecting your DNA. Can you tell us more about this open-world extraction shooter and what players can expect?

Martin Hultberg: I would argue that for us, Exoborne has always been a natural continuation or extension of what we do.It started with shooters back at Massive, and then we worked on a game that had one of the first extraction shooter modes in it, The Division, which was called the Dark Zone.. When we then started to make our own original IP survival / apocalypse game we explored a lot of different options, and then we discussed with our publisher, did some exploration and eventually landed in what everyone agreed has the strongest potential for the audience we want to target.

What we have today is a competent extraction shooter. A lot of the DNA and? influences from Bloodhunt, like fluid mobility and it's explosive combat has carried over into Exoborne. We talk a lot about emergent gameplay or emergent player stories, these unexpected moments that you didn't know were going to happen when you booted up the game, didn't even understand were going to happen, like, twenty seconds ago, and now all of a sudden you're in a very cool action sequence. That is what Exoborne is built around. The basic premise is that it takes place in America. In the very near future. America has suffered a disaster, the entire world actually, which was something we figured out when we decided on making a new game and we asked ourselves:, "In The Division, we got to break New York. If you break New York, what's the next thing? That's breaking the world. So let's go for an extinction-level event."

So, global disaster, you're one of the survivors, and you have these exo-rigs, these powerful mechanical tools that give you supernatural powers almost. And with that we get this fantastic flow of traversal, of powerful leaps. You can soar on the winds in a tornado using your glider. It's very action-packed and dynamic, but still tense, experience where you move from these moments of stealth or moving slowly to understand where the enemy is, and then all of a sudden you're in this intense firefight. If you're good or lucky, you win. If you're unlucky, you might die and lose everything you have. You get this very powerful adrenaline kick in every session.

Zoran Roso: So, high risk, high reward?

Martin Hultberg: Very high risk, very high reward. Of course, this is a genre that already has plenty of games like this. We're in no way first, but what we hope to be able to achieve is to learn from those that came before us and make an experience that may be a bit more approachable for a bigger audience. Typically, these games are very unforgiving, and they are focused on a very specific sub-audience of the shooter genre, of the grander shooter audience. We want to see if we can make it more accessible to a larger audience. That's part of the challenge and one of the day-to-day goals we have..

Zoran Roso: You're taking a AAA swing at the genre, with adjusting it a little bit towards a more approachable and more digestible kind of risk scenario. Something along the lines of high risk short term, but low risk long term I assume?

Martin Hultberg: Yes. If you look at risk, in many classic survival games, the thing that really makes people drop off is the fact that if you die and lose everything, you are reset to zero. We're looking at making sure we protect your long-term progression, but still, in a session, you have to lose a substantial amount to get that exciting adrenaline kick. The loss still needs to be felt, but you need to feel also like you got something from that loss, like that session still gave you something. We have a lot of supporting systems focused on that to make sure that even when you lose, you feel like you gained something.

Zoran Roso: Let's talk a bit about leadership and the future. First of all, what is a CMCO? How would you describe your leadership style and how do you foster a creative and collaborative environment at Sharkmob?

Martin Hultberg: The CMCO is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. I couldn't decide if I wanted to do marketing or communications, so I simply did both. The benefit of being a co-founder I guess. That means I lead our marketing efforts, I lead our corporate communications team. I also lead the office team which we consider to be an integral part of studio branding and culture. And in addition to that, I do narrative direction on Exoborne because I like to wear many hats. But that's not part of the CMCO role.

The reality of my leadership style is that to have anychance of pulling all of this off, I need to rely on very competent, very good, very hardworking people. I've been fortunate to hire some people directly below me who are exactly that. My three department heads are very helpful to me. It's Natalia Cyluk on Marketing, it's Rachelle Lacharité on Communications, and then Camilla Sk?ldeborn on Office. I would not be able to do what I do without those three and their teams. The key to good leadership is to surround yourself with good people and give them enough guidance and direction to understand what they're expected to do, and? then get out of the way and let them do it. If and when they start to falter, you're there to lean on. If they run into trouble, you back them up. Always.

Zoran Roso: The industry right now is in quite a bit of turmoil. How is Sharkmob positioned to address those challenges that the industry is facing?

Martin Hultberg: I think first off, we're facing more than one specific challenge. There's a lot of things going on in the world right now which impact game development. Depending on what genre you make and what part of the industry you're in, you face different challenges. To me, one of the biggest things I see is where basically, AAA is going through a very big change. I'm not going to even claim to have a full understanding of where things are headed, but we can see things happening that we haven't seen, or at least I haven't seen in my career. It's like the middle layer for the kind of games we make has been completely knocked out just below top AAA. We have pretty strong indies, and then if you're not top-tier AAA, you're in trouble. By top-tier, I mean there's almost only room for one or two big games at a time. It used to be that maybe five or ten could survive in parallel next to each other, but that space is very, very small now. I think that's what we're seeing having a lot of negative impact on traditional AAA development studios.

Zoran Roso: To close things out, looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of gaming and what kind of projects do you hope Sharkmob will tackle next?

Martin Hultberg: That's a very good question. I don't have the mind space to think about anything beyond Exoborne because Exoborne is a live project. If we succeed with Exoborne, we will be working on Exoborne for a long time. So making assumptions about? Sharkmob's future is difficult beyond the launch of Exoborne, but as for the industry in general... This is another one of those big question marks.?

AI is going to impact our industry significantly.I think it's obvious we're going to have to master AI in development somehow, and we're going to have to master how we implement AI for the user in games. That, to me, sounds like a very interesting journey. I think there's going to be a lot of cool things happening there, and I'm happy to be a part of it since it's happening now.

Zoran Roso: That closes out our session. Thank you so much for your time Martin and the many insights on your career and work that you have shared!