Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Building Safer Multiplayer Spaces with Nodecraft’s Jon Yarbor
37 Plays22 days ago
Summary:
In this episode, Greg sits down with Jon Yarbor, co-founder of Nodecraft, to discuss how private servers, accessibility, and player-focused design are reshaping multiplayer gaming. Jon shares his entrepreneurial journey, explains why privacy is the future of online play, and reveals how Nodecraft makes server hosting simple and accessible. If you're an indie or mid-sized game developer—or just a gamer who loves multiplayer—you’ll want to tune in!
Key Topics:
- The Importance of Privacy in Multiplayer Gaming Jon highlights the demand for private gaming spaces, contrasting them with chaotic public lobbies.
Notable Quote: “Most players just want to game with their friends in a safe space—they don’t want the noise of public lobbies.” - Empowering Players Through Accessibility Nodecraft eliminates technical barriers, allowing anyone to create and manage their own servers.
Notable Quote: “You shouldn’t need to be an IT expert to host a Minecraft server for your kids or community.” - Jon’s Unconventional Journey to Founding Nodecraft From working at Subway to starting Nodecraft, Jon shares how his passion for gaming drove his entrepreneurial path.
Notable Quote: “I didn’t want to spend all my mental energy at a software job—I needed to save it for building something I believed in.” - The Role of Support in Player Satisfaction Jon discusses why investing in front-line support reps is critical for gaming platforms.
Notable Quote: “Great support reps are the unsung heroes of the gaming world.” - How Accessibility Fuels Player and Developer Success Jon explores how user-generated content (UGC) and easy-to-use servers can transform engagement for players and revenue for studios.
Fascinating Stat: Only 2% of active players create servers when traditional hosting tools are used—Nodecraft is changing that.
Major Moments:
- [00:01] Introduction: Meet Jon Yarbor and learn about Nodecraft.
- [12:20] The shift to private multiplayer spaces and why it matters.
- [33:00] Jon’s Subway-to-Startup journey: A founder’s story.
- [50:00] Accessibility as the key to success for players and developers alike.
- [55:00] Jon’s advice for game developers tackling multiplayer challenges.
Resources & Links:
- Nodecraft Official Website
- Follow Jon on social: @CaptainYarb on BlueSky and LinkedIn
- Watch the podcast with Scott from Mod.io for more on UGC.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to John Yarber and NodeCraft
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everybody, welcome to Player Driven. Greg here, and here's what you're about to listen to. Today we're listening to John Yarber, one of the founders of NodeCraft, and we're going to talk about subjects such as making multiplayer games more accessible and private for players. We talk about the value of human-centered support, and we also talk about building a team with complementary skills. It's a really fun episode with John, I hope you guys enjoy it, and let us know what you think.
00:00:30
Speaker
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Player Driven. Greg here. Today we're joined by John Yarber. He is the founder of Nodecraft, and we are going to learn more about hosting and why it's important and how kids can find a safe space online through other tools that exist online. So I'm excited to learn more. And John, welcome to the show. Is there anything you want to say about yourself?
The Importance of Team Balance and Skills
00:00:52
Speaker
Hey Greg, no, thanks for having me. And, you know, I think it's super fun. and Like you said, I'm the founder. I'm like one of three founders. Actually, I'm just the more outspoken one. Everybody else's, you know, nose of the grindstone. But very excited to be on here. Very excited to talk about, you know, server infrastructure and what its role is in the modern UGC ecosystem. Because, you know, also I think it's one of those things where we're kind of like the power company, like Nobody really cares about the power company until you go to flip the light on and the light didn't come on. Suddenly they're furious, right? But ah yeah, let's just dig into this.
00:01:31
Speaker
I love even what you just said that you're one of three co-founders. And I think it's important for founders to have a technical side as well as someone that is the business, the outspoken side. I think things become more powerful when you have both because, you know, it's the whole, if you build it, they will come. But that's not really true because people need to figure out about your product. So when you're building this product with your co-founders, were these are the known roles coming in or did you just kind of figure it out as you roll?
00:01:56
Speaker
No, so my background actually is I'm a self-taught software engineer. In fact, I tell most people I'm really more of a software engineer who's cost playing as a CEO, which is a very affectionate way of saying like, I'm only doing this because nobody else decided they wanted to be the CEO. And I was foolish enough to be like, I think I could do that. But I mean, reality at the end of the day, like I'm not like a genius software engineer. Like I can, you know, build some okay software. I can certainly like get it done in the early days. Like in the early days where like standards didn't matter and we were just like hacking stuff together. Hell yeah, it was great. But at the end of the day, I'm much more of a balanced, like a little bit of business, a little bit of software, and like I'm pretty good at team building actually. So like it's kind of worked out for a high tech company to have someone that's got a technical mind.
00:02:51
Speaker
And so between myself, so I will balance that, but I'm having to put some of that software engineer down, right? We've got a CTO, James Ross, who's incredible, like world-class. He does a lot of software security. um He like literally is very involved with Cloudflare and a lot of their products, like in advisory format. And then we've got our third co-founder, Benjamin Riffey, who's our communication and ah marketing, which does a lot of the like,
00:03:22
Speaker
how do you brand the power company? right like How do you brand the infrastructure company, which is the other critical part. like You can business all day long, but if it doesn't look appealing, again, like you said, nobody's going to care. Yeah. Yeah. And you said it best, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, where you surround yourself with people who are better at some of the skills where you may not be best at. And I think as a founder, it's good to know a little bit about everything, but you don't need to be an expert. right You need to make sure you're hiring people that are better at this and know what
Human-Centered Support in Server Hosting
00:03:50
Speaker
they're talking about. it It's team building. It's communication. It's kind of like riding a bike. Everything's got to work on that bike. And and it's your job as the founder or one of the founders, right, to kind of make sure that everything is greased up, everything's working. Everyone has the tools available to them to exceed or excel. A hundred percent. Like i I think it's really funny because, you know, growing up, I'm i'm just old enough that like I remember the old Dilbert comics where you had the pointy haired boss, right, who's kind of an idiot.
00:04:18
Speaker
And when I was young, I was like, why is this guy in charge? And as I've gotten older, I'm like, it's kind of like you're a good boss. If you can walk in the room and understand just enough to sound like an idiot, but that means that you kind of understand what's going on, but you've still delegated that task to a team that understands that process through and through. And I think that's actually critical because the alternative in my experience is that, especially founders like myself, and its something that everybody has to learn.
00:04:46
Speaker
that if if you continue to be the expert, you're never going to hand the reins to somebody else. And inevitably, you're the speed limit for your organization, right? Because there's only so many hours in the day.
00:04:59
Speaker
And I think that goes for any role in the company, not just the founder, if you are a manager, right? like ah When I was a manager, when I would see people excel, like if I can help enable people to move to QA or to product management outside of the role we were in, it was the most exciting thing to me as as a manager because I get to see these people succeed in something they love. But as the greedy side of me, I also got excited because if I needed an ally in product or if I needed an ally in QA, these people that would have come from our are part of the company, right? Those would be the people I can go to. And I know I have an ally there. So it's kind of a way to kind of make sure that, and again, a little bit greedy here, just to make sure that you have allies that will help enable you to kind of get what you need done throughout the company. Yeah, and it's obviously, you know, there's, there's a, there's a different dynamic depending on your team size. So like, I obviously were running a team of like around a dozen. Um, and so like, there's not nearly the same level of like power dynamics are involved.
00:05:56
Speaker
much more tight-knit team. And so some of those things still are really critical. So I mean, you're going to have folks that are high-powered engineers. You're going to have folks that are working on the critical marketing and product. But you're also going to have those front-level support reps that are just talking to customers every day. And oh my god, everybody's critical, even though sometimes soft engineers think that they're the bee's knees.
00:06:24
Speaker
come to support for a week and tell me how you feel. I always love the support role because I think they have the best visibility of what's happening in the company, even though they may not see what's happening exactly either the way at the top. But you know, they hear from the customer, they can go back to development or engineering and be like, hey, this is what's happening right there. They're pretty much the eyes and ears of the company. And there's so much knowledge there that needs to be dissected from that, that support agent, because even though they might be lower on the totem pole, the knowledge there is vast. And being able to tap into that is extremely important.
00:06:55
Speaker
100%. And i think I think that's actually one of the ah more difficult parts to bring this back to to game server hosting for a moment here that so many people forget. At the end of the day, like if you can't provide great support and you aren't building those engineers, those support wraps up, right? And giving them the support they need so they can have that visibility and they can have the agency to advocate on the customer's behalf. You end up in a situation where you've got a lot of great capacity as a hosting company, but if you're not advocating for those users, you're not getting giving that support the agency to like say, Hey, this is a real problem. And like letting the rest of the team support them. Like again, you're just abandoning your users effectively. And the funny thing is, is that what I find more often than not is as companies like our scale, this becomes the obvious next step is I'll outsource support. I will.
00:07:51
Speaker
Uh, make them contract to 99. I will do whatever it takes to remove it from my cost center because people are obviously expensive. Great support reps are not cheap, by the way. Um, made retinium for years is, is an art by the way. Like if you want to have someone who's going to be loyal to your team for years and can really build that wealth of knowledge for their customers. Like that's not a process where you can whittle them down by wage or by all these other cost centers that you have.
00:08:20
Speaker
And so like that's something we, that's a stance we took really early on the company actually was that we were going to not only hire like, uh, our reps, which is, believe it or not at the time, very like, like it made a lot of my competitors a gas to the fact that we would hire them instead of just pay them and as contractors, much less give them benefits, much less, you know, have things like we can pay where like we have a problem where our support reps wouldn't didn't want to come in for the weekends. Like.
00:08:49
Speaker
Who would have guessed? And it's as simple as making the wage higher on the weekends. And as I didn't invent this, this is something that's pretty standard across a ton of industries. But when it comes back to software, like game server hosting, it isn't the norm. But it still comes back to giving them the base support. And we do that not just at wages, but from an organization standpoint as well.
NodeCraft's Mission for Accessibility and Privacy
00:09:10
Speaker
I like how you identify kind of the fact that needing to outsource, or wanting to outsource support. I think that's an important realization that some people try and shy away from because they think outsourced support is going to give them a lower quality support. But the truth is there's BPOs, which are business processing outsourced.
00:09:29
Speaker
ah Which offers great customer service right it really comes down to how you want to spend your money right there's support agents you can hire in other countries right it doesn't have to be. Foreign countries ah but there's other people you can hire that will work these hours will work these times and give your customers that that.
00:09:47
Speaker
that great sense of hey there's always someone here looking after me if there's a if i'm playing minecraft and the server goes down i can reach out and i'll be i'll hear something right away and i think that's important for it customers know hey i always have someone looking out for me from the company whether or not they're outsourced or not they don't really care at the end of the day as long as they're getting support as long as they're getting human support that's the important part actually like as long as like they can see the other person as a person yeah Like, well, they feel like the support is good. and It doesn't matter that there's a fast response time, actually. Like, initial response time maybe is important to like, make sure someone's on the other end, like helping you. yeah They're not a bot. um But I think, you know, come back to that VPO comment you made there, I think there's a lot of businesses that makes a ton of sense. If you're doing generalized IT work, like the work is standardized. There's so little that can be nuanced and specific to the business that you can't outsource that. But when it comes to
00:10:43
Speaker
you know, more niche markets like game server hosting with Minecraft, for example, if you don't know a ton about Java JVMs, if you don't know a ton about ah the ins and outs of running a server or or all the plugins, all these micro ecosystems that you just get built around this game, like what VPO company are you going to hire that knows those things? Right, exactly.
00:11:05
Speaker
And so at the end of the day, like the support role for a company like ours ends up being much more akin to like DevOps for like in consumers, which is really weird, but it's a really weird product to be in where you're like, I'm going to help you do your application configuration, your application being a game server, the configuration and being like how your server is set up, right? And making sure it stays online and help you resolve issues when it goes down. and It's like,
00:11:35
Speaker
You know, at the end of the day, businesses charge tens of thousands of dollars to other businesses to provide the type of support. And we're doing this for in consumers for, you know, 10, 20 bucks a month. Yeah. At scale. it so It's a very different paradigm, right? Yeah, it is. It's crazy. and I mean, you must need a specific type of support agent, right? When I was at a BPO, right, we were kind of had all different layers of support agents, right? You're, you're level one that we're kind of your, your basic support agents. And then yeah, you're you're more technicals to do server hosting and stuff like that. Like, it's not plug and play that kind of got to understand what is happening on the back end, making sure they're supporting the right things. It's, it's a challenge. I could see that.
00:12:22
Speaker
Well, it's, it's a lot of the same structures. So, I mean, like we're still going to have folks that are going to be more people friendly on the front end. They're going to have, you know, fairly technical minded in the mid level. And then we're going to have like engineers backing them at the end of the day is but all those same support structures are still identically the same. Let's, uh, let's spin it back around to server hosting, right? And let's, as you mentioned, let's try and get back to the topic at hand here. What is node craft?
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, so Notecraft helps game developers launch multiplayer, where players are creating their own ecosystems, their own servers. And you know that's a whole dichotomy of ah multiplayer, where it could just be as simple as you and a couple friends that just want to play you know a modern version of Minecraft that you saw on YouTube. That could be you're a large server owner. You have a Discord server. You have a Twitch stream, maybe. and You've got hundreds of members that are playing on your servers. Well, that's more community-driven, right? um But at the end of the day, NoCraft helps this game studios connect with those end users and gives them a platform to create those servers. And so we have two core products. One is we have NoCraftPro.com, where any consumer can go spin up a game server for over 30 games.
00:13:46
Speaker
where they can actually, like, create a game server, save it, and swap to a different game under one subscription. And then we have a separate product that's more B2B-focused called Minecraft Studio, where it's more in line with the the game developers, where it's a plug-and-play SDK that brings the ability to create a server directly in-game and helps monetize that whole process, as well as helping players discover other servers, again, with that dichotomy of, like, where are your friends privately playing? Where is the public Internet playing separately?
00:14:14
Speaker
And altogether, it's the same infrastructure in the back end for us. But what we're trying to really solve with Node Craft is the accessibility of how do players create that server if they're not a high-level like software wizard, effectively, right?
Creating Safe Gaming Environments for Kids
00:14:34
Speaker
Or they're not the like IT t help at home. What if they're just a kid who wants to play a game? What if they're a parent that wants to protect their kid and who they're playing with? and All these other folks that just like it's the same accessibility you see on modern products like the Mac or the iPhone where there's a lot of technical engineering going into making this a simple solution. And so our whole North Star is how do we make sure any player can play any game they want to with whom they want to.
00:15:00
Speaker
i So I was ah browsing my my town's Facebook page right the other day, and there was ah people asking questions. Hey, we want to set up a ah Minecraft server for the kids in town. like Is that the ideal use case? like Hey, you have a group of individuals that want to have a private server where maybe adults or strangers, for lack of a better words, don't come in. They can have their own privatized version of Minecraft right ah in NodeCraft by paying a small amount of money each month to to to host that server. is that
00:15:31
Speaker
online. So I actually love this question. And the reason I love your question is that you're you're touching on something that I think really has been underdeveloped in how modern games are multiplayer today. And what i what I mean by that is if you look at games like Fortnite, you look at games like Call of Duty, more often than not, you are public first, public by default, where you're playing with randoms, internet strangers,
00:16:00
Speaker
And usually when you say that, everybody has to kind of like like distaste as they say it. They're like, Oh no, that's where I'm going to get like yelled at in voice chat or called slurs or all these. It's all the like Fox newsification of what online gaming could look like kind of happens. Everybody's mind. And when you stop and look at how people play multi play online and in general, most of it's privately with your just a couple of friends. Right. And I feel like so many games haven't focused down on that.
00:16:30
Speaker
And a lot of it comes down to its business metrics. like they can't make a You can't make a profitable call of duty that's just you and three friends. You can squat up, and then you're, again, thrown into the public lobby, right? And so we are able to really kind of shake that up a little bit by saying, we can make this profitable for the studios.
00:16:49
Speaker
by focusing on privacy. you know If you have a Minecraft server for this town, for example, you want to make sure that just the kids are there. Or if there's you know a problem player, you can say, you don't get to come play with everybody else. right And you kind of want to have this walled garden of play that happens in this privacy. And that happens very differently than that Twitch stream we were talking about earlier, who kind of needs everybody to show up and to be a part of this like song and dance.
00:17:16
Speaker
as they're streaming their content, right? And so there are very different needs, but I fundamentally believe that this privacy focus is going to continue to be a trend, not only in gaming, but I think in almost technology moving forward, but there's it's just a completely untapped space in gaming. where I like your answer there, right? I think it makes a lot of sense. I'm trying to talk to a few friends playing Call of Duty, like, no, I don't want to be yelled at, blah, blah, blah. Like, all right, that's not going to happen because we're in a party, right? ah The people that are signing up to host servers on nodecraft, is it do you see typically one use case or yeah like is one use case come up more often than the rest when when you when you see people building these out? So um the direct answer is like the folks that want their own private space to play dramatically outnumber everybody else. But there's this interesting
00:18:10
Speaker
ah
00:18:13
Speaker
There's this interesting ecosystem where everybody kind of aspires to be a little bit more. Like everybody creates their own private server. But if they get enough friends, they might think about opening it up to making it a bigger server. And so everybody kind of looks ahead to what we call the next customer persona, where it's like you start with just a private server. The next persona is a small community server. The small community servers obviously want to be a bigger server. And they have to figure out how do I grow this? Maybe it is we have to have a Discord server. Maybe we have to have events. and all these are the things and eventually they like we should be streaming, right? And that's the next customer persona is to be like a personality attached to this community. And they obviously like are looking at like your larger organization, like esports organizations where they want to have a bigger community.
00:19:01
Speaker
But when you can still come down to like what's happening in the game, it's all pretty much the same. It's just a matter of volume of customers. And like, can you meet the needs of those communities? And so for us, the vast majority, still it's just people who want to replicate those servers. And so there's a lot of our time that's focused on helping make sure that those users are served first, while a lot of the more advanced tools can be there for everybody else who knows what they're doing, um but isn't a core focus of the initial product.
Ease of Server Setup and User-Friendliness
00:19:37
Speaker
What is the benefit of using a service like nodecraft compared to just hosting it on Minecraft? So that that that that's a great question, but it really depends on two things. Number one, it depends on what's the accessibility of multiplayer in the game you're playing. And then once you figure out that problem, like how easy is it to play? So for example, Fortnite, when you want to play multiplayer,
00:20:01
Speaker
anybody can do it. In fact, it's it's such a low barrier that they have kids that are probably too young to play in the game, right? It's just that easy. When you look at games, let's look at like Terraria, for example, when you go to a multiplayer, it's like direct connect, and it's like enter an IP address. And I know plenty of adults that have no idea when IP addresses, understandably, like It's like that network connection of like where, what you're, how to get to your computer to know the computer is complex and try to figure out how to route that is something that most end users don't have. You know, they don't have to but to know how to go like modify the router, have to know how to do all that network infrastructure set up just to play a game. And so that game has like almost no accessibility built into how that occurs. And what's worse is it doesn't even have like a
00:20:55
Speaker
Well, why is it this way button, right? There's no like, how do I do this? And so those users have to actually be so interested in this idea. They're willing to go explore and research this. Like again, an engineer would like, how do I spin the server up and not to do all this effort? You know, you could go buy a server, not to say a no craft, but at a different like BPS hosting company or a dedicated server hosting company.
00:21:19
Speaker
Uh, more often than not, you're going to be spending a lot of money and then you're getting like this, like one, two prompts and you're like, now what do I do? This is even worse than running it at home. Right. Like, and so like more often than not, that's been the traditional model for like, since the beginning of online multiplayer back with quake, like this is exactly how servers were set up. Then it's still a dominant force now. And.
00:21:44
Speaker
You know, that's where our product no craft studio really is shaking this up, where not only is it giving users the ability to create the server in game, like the Fortnite button lets them join and squad up in game, but it helps them uncover the content. And so we're pushing this shift away from this traditional model of go figure it out yourself. And just again, helping users have this level accessibility they didn't have, you know, for decades.
Ensuring Privacy and Safety for Children in Gaming
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's awesome. you know I guess I don't know why that use case didn't come to me that a lot of the ah games just aren't built. for ease of going online, right? And there are definitely tools, as Nodecraft is mentioning, to help enable, like, I think to my son, my son is six, and I'm not letting him really go online with games yet, but, like, he plays Marvel Rivals now, and he knows how to let him play online, and so he'll he'll go to, like, verse, and he'll get his way to kind of playing just computer components, upon this but I love the idea of, like,
00:22:46
Speaker
making it easier for him to figure out what to do right and some of these niche games that are smaller that weren't built to kind of go online like how do you make sure he's playing games safely online I don't necessarily want him hopping into Fortnite right and it's easy it's extremely easy like you mentioned right but there's games that he and his friends play that it's a much safer space right but they don't play together but enabling that I think as a parent is something that's exciting to me because kids are going to game, whether I want them to or not. And if I could give them a safe place to play, right, something where even they can pick games, right. And they they know they're in a safe server, whether it be their friends or the town or something else. I think it's a great way to kind of keep an eye on what people are doing and especially with the parental controls that are included in some of these things as well. You know,
00:23:32
Speaker
As a parent as well, who I've got a, my my daughter's three, almost four now, so before in just a few weeks actually. um I find that the simpler the technology, the scarier it usually is for like how, you know, interested they are in technologies like this, where, you know, to give an example, like she, she really loves YouTube. And like, I was really hesitant to let her get into YouTube.
00:24:00
Speaker
And a lot of that comes down to like, I was very rigorous about like, it can only do these channels. It's going to be miss Rachel. It's going to be this blue channel and it's going to be like this wholesome awesome. Like it's still YouTube, but it's like, it's like close enough. And and invariably what i've I've watched it do is drift. Where like now it's on this other weird channel. And I'm like, I i locked this down. And, you know,
00:24:29
Speaker
the The software engineering meeting, the cynical software engineer comes back out and goes, you know how this sausage is made. When you lock this down and you're not getting to all the you know profitable parts of like YouTube, which they're a business. They have to make money. You can't figure out how they're making money. right And that's the uncomfortable question is, how are they making money off your kids? That's the parental question nobody wants to talk about. right um That's still going to be the the The business case, every game has for your kids. If you like it or not, you know, that could be V bucks. That could be, um, you know, rob robots. It could be all these monetization efforts that they put to what kids either pie initially, or they're selling data. You know, it's going to be one of those two. And I think when you have the opportunity with something like node craft to say, it's pretty straightforward. I pay for this. I get privacy.
00:25:24
Speaker
Like, there's the business model. You're paying for the server. It's built in. And in fact, when I own the server, it means I own my own data. And so there's no you know upsells. There's no third parties. There's none of that. It's kind of my own space. you know For a lot of non-technical folks, we love to use this analogy. ah That's just, it's the basketball court you install on your driveway. Because without the basketball court, you can't play basketball. Obviously, dad, right? you know Otherwise, you have to let someone go plant someone else's house or maybe it's the community, you know, basketball court. And maybe there's a bully there, right? And it's just like all of these things concerns come down to like, how can you really reduce that, you know, risk that you have with your kids of like how they're being treated online.
00:26:11
Speaker
I think that was brilliantly said, ah other than you giving me flashbacks of me trying to block YouTube channels on my Amazon fire and new Chinese videos coming up, is watching my kids watch videos in Chinese thinking like, what what are you doing? um But i I love the basketball analogy. I think that's such a great way to explain it. i think Yeah, this if you can't visualize that, just understanding the basketball court at home, right? I think it makes so much sense and it's such a great way to make sure that your kids are safe and still playing and still have accessibility to have people come over and and still play and have access to stuff like that. So I think that's so well said. But taking a quick break here, let's lighten up the mood here. um Are you still a gamer? And if so, what game are you playing these days?
00:26:59
Speaker
So I really keep the parental vibes here. So like I obviously don't game as nearly as much as I used to as of three, almost four years ago, right? um I don't have a PC tower, which I think a young teenage me is like, what the hell, man? You grew up and you turned into an adult. ah but But I actually did get a r ROG ally. It's a little handheld gaming PC. And so I've been able to do a lot more of that recently.
00:27:28
Speaker
I've been playing the new Power Roll update that just recently came out a few weeks ago. um My partner and I have gotten back into Baldur's Gate with all the mods they've added with mod.io. um You know, we tried to do like a ah evil run and just like couldn't stomach it. ah So we're back to doing like what we want to do ourselves.
00:27:49
Speaker
But a lot of the gameplay I play these days is very, very much like couch co-op style multiplayer games with my partner, or I'm really looking forward to the next couple of years where my daughter starts getting more into games, but she's just not quite there yet. Yeah, we just gave my four-year-old daughter access to the Switch, and she plays a bluey game, and it's fun to watch her kind of jump around the bluey game figuring it out. It's very, it's a...
00:28:17
Speaker
happiness inside when you can see your kid navigating a 3d environment so so quickly and it's just like all right like we're getting somewhere now i love it yeah we we tried that one and it's she's not there yet yeah about six months ago so we'll see Yeah, we also did this pa Paw Patrol game as a side scroller. That was ah kind of how to how to move your character. Then we went 3D. Question I always like to ask my guests are, what did you eat for breakfast? I'm fasting this morning, so nothing. There you go. um Do you have a dream vacation? A dream vacation? ah Nothing is specific. um I am very and very much to answer the answer to a
00:29:02
Speaker
Atypical traveler. I don't love the resorts. I don't love like going on to like cruise liners. like I prefer to go to a place and experience like the local scene. And so I'll give you an example. like my My first marriage I had, we like had a honeymoon out to Cancun. And like the worst best thing happened, which was our luggage did not make the flight to Cancun with us.
00:29:32
Speaker
And so we had the clothes we were wearing. And they were like, it might be a few days before we get this. And so we got to go into town and leave the like resort, the all inclusive resort, which like sounds nice, like bringing home to the place you're going, in my opinion. But we got to go there and I got to like use the three or four years of Spanish I had that still broken American Spanish, right? But I got to still experience some of that different part of the world. so And that's what I love about travel. I want to go experience the world somebody else is living in. I want to talk to those people and see their experience and eat their food. I'm not a big food guy, ah but like that's the type of travel I love. And so it's less destination driven and more experience driven.
Founding NodeCraft and Early Inspirations
00:30:20
Speaker
Cool, man. I love that as well. I think getting down with the local scene, how how people operate, I think it's important learning to understand what else is happening in the world outside of the resorts.
00:30:30
Speaker
it It radically changes your worldview every time, every time. And it should, like, that's, I think the thing that I think I get frustrated about Americans, especially. Um, cause I've got i' got an international team with no crafts. And so it's not just us, but every time like I travel, I'm just like, why are more Americans not traveling? I get that we have this giant colossal size country, but still there's a lot of the world to go see a lot of things out there worth taking a look at.
00:30:58
Speaker
So back to NodeCraft. Can you kind of walk me through how the idea was formed with you and your co-founders? We were really our own customers at the end of the day. So I originally met James, our CTO, from an online community. He had ran back in Gary's Mod, back when that was a big game. It was the a major game to get online and play. It was like Counter Strike. source and Gary's mod back in like 2008, 2009, 2010, somewhere in that timeframe. And he had run a number of servers there and I just loved his community. And I kind of forced my way into it. Like I do a lot of times. It's just like, hey, you need help. I'm not gonna help you if you like it or not. um And the reality is we ah actually formed a really great working relationship where ah James is very detail oriented.
00:31:55
Speaker
I am a pie in the sky. I'm very much big vision. I can get a project started. So I'm not just like, I want to do this aspirationally. It's like, I want to do this. And here's how we're going to get going. And when we start getting to the detail work, I start losing like my ability to continue being this like inexhaustible force of energy. like I start like losing some of that traction. And that's actually where James really picks up his traction, by the way, when there's a you you know a decent allow amount of ah framework and directions clear. And so he and I had worked on a few projects inside of his community for his ah servers. And like at the time, I was doing consulting work for small businesses, some governments, and it's just all web-driven applications. And I consistently found myself ignoring my work and working on his project instead.
00:32:55
Speaker
And at the time I was getting pretty burned out of being like a solo entrepreneur. um I was really tired of like beating myself up for not working on my work projects. And it kind of came to a head. and I was like, why am I living this life where I'm upset about the work I do and I'm my own entrepreneurial like self. I can change this if I just decide to.
00:33:19
Speaker
Um, and so, uh, you know, I, I quit working for other folks like that. I said that to James, like, Hey, I want to start something different. Um, you know, we keep struggling with the service part of this and I, we keep tooling around it. Why don't we just build a product for this? Like we could, we could be that solution. And for me, I want to work on something that will let me like have any amount of focus and excitement around it, which even in gaming will.
00:33:50
Speaker
And that was 19 at the time. So I had like nothing to lose. like It feels like everything to lose when you start a business, especially that young, but there's no risk. The risk is you go work for somebody else afterwards, right? And that's probably the biggest risk for me, by the way, because I'm not a great employee. um And so we did the weirdest thing. And so like everybody like always loves talking about how they just had this immediate success. And I will say for a business that started, we had a decent amount of moderate success initially.
00:34:20
Speaker
But it wasn't enough to pay us. We were we able to piggyback on Minecraft being this huge explosive game you know back. This is 2012, basically. So not quite the peak of Minecraft yet, but it's headed that direction. So we had customers immediately. We had a product we didn't build immediately. We used an off-the-shelf product. And we're like, let's just learn to figure it out. We'll build our own product on the on the fly.
00:34:45
Speaker
and so i Oh, we was working on that and I went and picked up a job at Subway, like the sandwich shop at the same time. And every software engineer engineer I knew, every friend I had in this software engineering was like, what the hell are you doing? Why are you working at Subway? Why are you slinging sandwiches?
00:35:02
Speaker
um And it comes down to, I know in my head, there's only so much you can do mentally in a day. And everything we had to do to build this new system that would become what NoCraft is today is a huge amount of engineering. Like if you were to build this today, you would need a dozen folks if you wanted to build it in the next year or two, by the way, it's literally that much complexity. And so I'm 19. I don't have the type of parents that can just fund that type of life, right? I have working parents who didn't go to college.
00:35:40
Speaker
ah from my background, and so I've had to make everything myself. But I knew that if I worked a software job instead of Subway, I would spend all my mental acuity on that job. I can't not. like I'm authentic of myself. I will put 110% into anything I do, for better or worse, by the way. And if again if I had that software engineering job, I would just come home and be exhausted and be like, I'll do it tomorrow. And that would be in perpetuity, right?
00:36:08
Speaker
But if I had a subway job, that's going to kind of suck. It's near minimum wage. That's a lot of A, like reason to make this work so you can stop seeing sandwiches. But the other answer is like, duty gave me a free sandwich every day. I'm 19. Like that's not nothing, right? Bills got paid. I got fed and it was only like two or three hours a day, like for the lunch rush and I got to go home.
00:36:34
Speaker
And there's no mental acuity required to make a sandwich. You can only make the same, like too many olives, too much ranch sandwiches every day. And you can like plan what you're going to do when you get home. And so I did that for, I want to say like 18 months, roughly while we were building the company, I had to force James, Hey, you and i are going to go quit and we're going to like make this work. And that ended up being like us able to go full time.
00:37:02
Speaker
And that next year was an explosive amount of growth for us, just being able to dedicate all of our resources towards it. I guess working at Subway really helped you learn how to deal with customers and kind of shows your respect for the customer service side of things and having to deal with ah people in some wild requests sometimes. You know, I 100% think that is it should be the default for a lot of folks.
00:37:27
Speaker
and You know, I think there's something in having that service mindset. It needs to be an experience. Everybody has in their life at some point where you're at the whim of somebody else. And it should never be seen as this. Like you are less than you are giving yourself to this other person. And what does that mean? I think that really is something that gets overlooked in today's society. Like when I'm making a sandwich for somebody else.
00:37:56
Speaker
they could be having a busy day where they don't have time to. And there's there's nothing wrong with that. But if you can't stop and empathize with what they need, how are you supposed to empathize with that later with any of the product you're building? It's emotional intelligence that like I think is something that will last for your career if you can make the best of it. That's beautifully said.
00:38:18
Speaker
Um, you went going back to what you said a little earlier, you said you kind of launched on Minecraft. You had an audience pretty much right then in there. I assume it's because you had a server with people in there already and you kind of helped that. But can you kind of, and maybe I'm wrong, but can you talk to me about how you actually make that first dollar? Um, so there's a lot of companies that will spin up, you know, Minecraft or other games server hosting, because there's these off the shelf products that you can go just by.
00:38:47
Speaker
that could be multi-craft, it could be pterodactyl. There's tons of software out that other folks have built. That's what I would call in the realm of good enough to get started, where you can buy this, you buy this billing platform, and you can Frankenstein these two things together. You then go buy some live chat service, park it on a website, you can build a website, and like, boom, you have a hosting company. And the reality is back in 2012,
00:39:15
Speaker
That happened all the time, by the way, where these like teenagers would have a summer off and they would come figure out like, I could do this in the company. And like so many of these, like what we call summer hosts would show up because it's that simple to get into the market. Now the downside is when you're Frankenstein software like this together, that you don't maintain yourself. um You're at the whim of the updates of the software, but it's also means you have the same commodity, the same thing everybody else is selling. And so.
00:39:43
Speaker
You're all trying to basically race to the bottom to have the least amount of like profit for the most amount of customers. And the more customers means the more support you have to do. And so there's usually this break point that occurs in so many of these companies where they aren't able to support that much customers or on the other half, tax season comes around and these teenagers realize their mom has to pay this tax bill and mom's not happy, right?
00:40:11
Speaker
And so getting started was really easy because we would just use that same like literal ah blueprint of like, we can kick this off and put this all together. The difference is that we could immediately start making changes to that product and having a built in differentiator from launch. And so for us, that was adding things like the one click installer, which we still have today, where you say, I want to play this type of modern Minecraft, this UGC content over here, and just add it to my server.
00:40:41
Speaker
where I don't have to go install those files. We both think like that into the product. Initially in day one, that was an immediate differentiator for us.
Supporting User-Generated Content and Modding
00:40:49
Speaker
And it's something that continues to be what we use today in a graph.
00:40:53
Speaker
It's very cool. and You said earlier that you were doing when Baldur's Gate 3 with the Mod.io stuff, and and we did a podcast with the founder of Mod.io a few weeks ago, Scott. And it sounds like nodecraft, like the type of tool nodecraft is, and UGC are probably really good friends because you have the ability to really push a lot of this in-game content that people are creating to the masses when people are on the service. It seems like it's really nice marriage together there.
00:41:21
Speaker
I think it's funny you say that. um Scott and I are actually pretty close friends. He's actually an investor of Netcraft. So a very direct relationship, harry as you've alluded to. um But ah we've had a lot of conversations about this, where it's a lot of a similar problem set. And you know actually, I think if you take a step back and look at the industry itself, making a video game on its own is in extraordinary feat. Like it is every piece of media smashed together. It has to be cohesive somehow. It has to be easy to use somehow. It has to be drop dead gorgeous. There's just so many requirements that goes into this piece of software. Like I don't, how many like terrible web apps have you used? Paid for him and been like, I hate this, but it does the thing mechanically and you just pay for it anyway. Tell me how many gamers do the same thing. Almost none, right?
00:42:20
Speaker
The level of expectation and how you build those games is just not the same. And so, you know, I think Maraeon and Nokraft have a very similar mindset that says, dude, focus on your game. We'll take care of like, you know, Maraeos can take care of like a CDN, and discovery and all those parts of like how you just see content becomes available to the user.
00:42:41
Speaker
Um, and the same way that no craft helps those studios say, Hey, spinning big game server is really, really hard and like making sure it's configurable and can hook into that UGC by the way. And like, make sure like you, Mario and no craft are working together to build a cohesive product. Despite being separate companies. Um, all these things really matter because it still comes down to what we were talking about earlier. Accessibility to the player is everything. If they can't figure it out, they will not do it.
00:43:10
Speaker
In fact, there's a stat that we constantly are like beating into our skull at node craft where like roughly 2% or less of a active player base will ever create a server. And that's what the traditional, you know, third party service provider or you have to go set it up yourself. And we think everything about that comes down to just accessibility and there's a very similar stat in modding where if you don't have a product like mod.io built into your game and you just have to go like install files like a ah fraction of your users will do it and it's only gonna be your most hardcore fans. Like i I think a good example of this is like you know one of my favorite games of all time is Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
00:44:00
Speaker
And it's not like what, 20 some odd year old game. It's it's getting up there. If you play it today, it's still like at like 800 by 600 resolution. If you have a modern modern year, you're like, oh no, I'm getting old. There's a remake coming out apparently, right? Or remastered. I haven't been following that directly, but there's there's a ton of mods that actually modernize the game with new textures, new like higher resolution models.
00:44:28
Speaker
It actually like finds some content that was like broke. But in order to set this up, you have to go to, you have to go find the the the Reddit thread that has the master list of mods. And you have to go through each one of these and patch your game one mod at a time. And four hours later, you can play your game unless you mess something up in that large hundred list of mods. And then you work your whole game and nothing works.
00:44:53
Speaker
And you know that's the thing that a lot of i a lot of gamers can empathize and understand. That exact process is one to one the same when it comes to creating servers. You have to figure out where these mod files are that you want. You have to build and configure them in a way that they don't conflict and create issues. And it's all software development. like it's It's software DevOps is what that really comes down to, right? And in consumers don't want it, understandably, right?
00:45:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's too much work, right? I mean, even trying to troubleshoot something like that, I remember the old days of modding, like going into deep, deep into folders, trying to find the right folder to modify the right file. It's just like, all right, if it works great, if it doesn't, it's going to be hours of troubleshooting and reverse engineering, trying to figure out what which step went wrong, where, and it's a pain in the ass. Now we're back to you have no customer support, right? Yeah, exactly.
00:45:48
Speaker
what Last question I have for you today. ah You mentioned earlier about all the data. All the data is private to the server, which is great. I'm curious from your perspective in the node graph perspective, are there KPIs or metrics you measure and you keep an eye on? You need to the company, the industry. Can you help me like understand? but To server hosting in general. I mean, are you watching how long people are spending in games? What games are playing? Do you have an idea of the trend of where you think games are going? I guess No, general question. Answer however you want. So you heard that sigh a second ago, right? You love metrics, I guess. I really do, actually. I actually really do. The the problem that we have in the current way the industry is built is that data is structured in one end for every game. like You could find some similarities with like games built on Unreal. You could find similarities with games that are built on Unity.
00:46:46
Speaker
Um, but everybody has their own system for how they track when players join servers. Everybody has their own system that tracks how authentication works in the game server. And it's all these different, you know, solutions to the same problem that so many game developers have had to say, I've made my beautiful game. It's wonderful. Now I have to be in a server and I have to make those two talk to one another. And what's the fastest, most efficient way I could clobber those things two together.
00:47:16
Speaker
to make sure that it's a cohesive online product. and There's no standard for it. And so what you end up having is even once you've built all these systems out, you have to ah create these wrappers around every game that says like, this is the type of game I can track players this way, I can track events this way, I can do all these different things unique to this individual game, which means trying to create same formats of data for every game practically impossible to give a cat a mouse, right? And so I get really frustrated because like everybody thinks that this private server hosting market is this tiny little niche. And I'm like, we're not tracking it. So of course it looks small, right? We can't say uniformly, this is a big deal until you have games like power will come out and go from zero to 19 million players on Steam plus
00:48:14
Speaker
you know, an estimated eight to nine more million on Xbox. That's a huge deal for this tiny little game developer, right? They still have a million active users today. That's phenomenal, but we can't track things like session time in a server. We can't track things like how many users, are actually creating we can create estimates, we can scrape their data and like look at this uniquely for this game, but it's this problem I think in the industry where ah it just hasn't been given the serious treatment it deserves. And so that's actually one of the things we really focused on when we built NoCraft Studio was if we're going to be a product that gets embedded into the game, we are going to be the first party to all of that data.
00:49:01
Speaker
And we take that very seriously. I mean, part of the benefit we have of James Ross, our CTO, being based in the UK, the GDPR laws he's very familiar with, he's also a huge privacy advocate, which is a huge pain in the ass, by the way. Like, if you've ever had a a privacy advocate on your own team, it's the greatest and worst thing ever, because they're going to be like, no, you can't do that in certification on your business. And you're like, dang it.
00:49:29
Speaker
But I said jokingly, because at the end other day, it's that's still what's going to be best for your end consumer. And it's also going to be what I think the direction the law is still headed, um even with the minor setbacks we've had in the last couple of years. But what we really wanted to find out was, is this product successful? And if it is, we have to be able to measure things like how many players are creating servers, duh. We obviously care about that as a business that sells servers.
00:49:58
Speaker
But the other side of that is like we want to track like players that are engaging with communities. We can then say, like oh, you Greg here really doesn't like PVP. He does PVE servers all the time. um And we can track that um in a way that is not going to track you uniquely. But we can throw your data that you're playing PVP into a larger analytics platform that we've built.
00:50:21
Speaker
And then give that to the game developer and say, hey, you know, PvE is really taking me off or your game. Here's all users are playing and engaging with this type of content. um Here's some people creating this with the servers and give it to them in a way that's not going to violate your privacy. Even if it's your kid creating the server, you know, you've been, ah that has been, a phenomena and not anonymized in a way that they can only access the global report of like trends, basically.
00:50:47
Speaker
And so for us, we really care about all of those things. We want to know like how many players are playing, how long are they playing. um More importantly, what happens when they disconnect from a server? Do they just go from that play session and cease? Or are they able to skip into another server? um And that was something that I actually like was able to witness and think about for this product because of COVID, actually, which is a super weird like thing that would never would have happened if we didn't have lockdown.
00:51:17
Speaker
And I wasn't sitting there like trying to think about this product and watching our 16-year-old sit there and play. He wasn't 16 at the time. He was like 12, 13 at the time. And he was sitting there playing Roblox, and he's just like jumping from game to game to game. And I'm like, most game developers don't have this built into their game. They have no idea. And in the wake of all of these you know large lawsuits you've seen with like you know, the ah epic games and Sony where they're talking about like the marketing going forward of how Apex Legends is fighting for Fortnite users, which is fighting for Call of Duty. These huge AAA studios are fighting for the masses and most game developers aren' aren't really fighting for much. they I just want my game to be mildly successful, right? But they're still not same stage.
00:52:10
Speaker
And so if they don't have access to this data, they can't really dig into this. Most of the time, they're making guttural checks, and just saying, like I think it's this way. And so like to me, i I get really excited about the analytics, because I think it's something that can really like drive home how important these communities are. It can drive home how important the updates you are making for your game can actually show you what the trends are, because again, I think most folks are flying completely blind.
00:52:39
Speaker
Yeah, not not only that, right? You can learn valuable insights about players, right? That's what all this data leads to. I love your point of jumping from one game to the next to the next, right? It'd be interesting to know if there's a genre of game that, hey, i'm after I'm playing this game, I'm going to go to this game, right? And if you can start to see some trends on, hey, what how does stickiness work? How long are players playing?
00:53:00
Speaker
Lots of cool things you can do with that data. It's interesting. In the world of podcasts, it's not so different, and whereas like Apple has a bunch of proprietary stats that they don't share with everyone. Spotify has a bunch of proprietary stats that they don't share with everyone. YouTube, same thing. It's just kind of like, all right, well, like what's the truth here? And you're just trying to make these guesses. like I think this is where I'm landing right now. And you can make a very educated guess, but you don't have the real data to really kind of show what's working and what's not working. I find it fascinating and I guess it makes sense in gaming. Everyone's very private with their stuff and they don't necessarily want to share, but everyone becomes a little bit smarter once you can start to see the trends and what's happening. Well, what I find more often than not is most game developers aren't tracking it because again, it comes down to that surface area of like, what are they going to get accomplished for this launch? And they already have so many promises to fulfill to make the game fun, right?
00:53:51
Speaker
And so many, I mean, there's a load of analytics products out there, but, you know, you have to start dealing with privacy laws. You have to start dealing with costs. You know, it's not free. Have you ever looked at the stats of like the amount of data they collect around the LEGO games? No. ah Like trillions of data points, by the way. Really? Everything you do inside that game they're tracking to see like how you engage.
00:54:19
Speaker
Um, and I think it's, it shows in like how they built their games. Like I don't love that style of gameplay, but if you've picked up a Lego games, they're all like incredibly fun. And that only comes from iteration. You only get that type of, uh, you know, consistent. Upward progress when you continue tracking everything that's happening in your game and you see what you just are and aren't engaging with. And you know, that's.
00:54:47
Speaker
Like I was saying earlier, ultimately what we feel is going to be critical to the success of games that using products like node craft where they have to be able to like track how these users are engaging and like not make fearful decisions. That's unfortunately still what it comes down to.
00:55:06
Speaker
I think no matter what, the decision is going to be fearful at the end of the day, right? You make a decision, you just make a switch, but it can be an educated decision and you have a little more confidence in what you're doing when you make that decision. So I think that's extremely well said. Well, if you have plenty of information, it shouldn't be fearful. You might have anxiety about change. That's very different than making a fear-based decision. That's a fair point. Anxiety.
00:55:30
Speaker
ah John, this was awesome. I've learned so much more than I thought, and I don't mean to be offensive on that, but just hearing everything about the privacy, building servers, why, even how you just manage a team and you grow a team. I think it's amazing stuff, and I think you're doing really cool stuff at NodeCraft. Before we do end today, can you let us know anything else you want to share and let us know where we can find yourself at NodeCraft?
00:55:54
Speaker
Yeah, so if you're heading to GDC this year, any game developers that are listening to this, happy to chat with you or you know hear about some of the challenges that you're running through as you build a game, because everybody knows the the challenges of of multiplayer, or they're about to find out and get an education. I did a talk of this at MDev this year. I've just had multiplayer, and I think most of the crowd I had was either trying to figure that out or was hate-watching to see what kind of BS I was about to sling, for example.
00:56:25
Speaker
But I'm happy to chat with anybody that's running those struggles. Anywhere you want to find me online, my handle is usually at Captain Yar. That's at Captain Yar Y-A-R-B, like my last name. um And these days it's mostly blue sky, like blue sky and LinkedIn. Very, very boring way to get in touch with me.
00:56:49
Speaker
Otherwise, go make a server at NodeCraft, man. like we We'd be happy to help you guys set up a server, your neighborhood, your kid, you and you you and your kids, or any game you're playing. Cool. We will have information on John and NodeCraft at our player-driven website. Check them out at nodecraft dot.com. Again, great stuff, John. I think you're doing amazing stuff. Hopefully we bump into each other or plan to bump into each other at at GDC. And I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys do. Thank you so much for jumping on today.
00:57:17
Speaker
ah Thanks for having me, Greg. Cheers. Take care.