Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Player Driven, where we pull back the curtain the world of gaming, live operations, and the strategies powering player engagement. Today, I'm really excited to bring you a guest who's been shaping how studios think about live services, sustainable game economies.
Speaker: He just returned from Pocket Gamers Helsinki is already pushing new ideas on his LinkedIn's hashtag lightning lessons, where he shares bite-size informational nuggets to learn and help progress your career online.
Speaker: Meet Oscar Clark, the founder of Arcanics, and a veteran services strategist in the gaming industry. Today's podcast is a little different. We started recording it and the video messed up in the beginning and I thought I could save and it turns out I couldn't.
Speaker: So we're going to kind of jump right into things. But today we're going to talk about industry regulations and ethics. There was a big announcement in the EU of what can go on with gaming in the next couple of weeks. So it's important to be talking about what's going on.
Speaker: We're going to about player value and live ops design. We're gonna break down education and knowledge sharing in industry. And finally, we're gonna talk about career development in games. I really love this conversation. I first met Oscar at GDC at Community Clubhouse, and he is just such a great staple in the industry.
Speaker: I'm really excited to jump into this conversation. We're gonna start by talking about these industry regulations and ethics. Enjoy the episode. So I want to talk about one of the more current events. that I'm trying to really wrap my head around and understand how it impacts the industry and what it should be. ah And this is a too modern or too too new of a topic. We won't tackle it. But Supercell CEO recently put ah some notice out there about regulation change in the industry. And when I take a look at the gaming industry, I think I don't like to use this word, but it's becoming a bit predatory on the way people are monetizing it and getting stuff from players. And there has to be a way to protect our players. And
Speaker: Supercell put out a great notice that the the gaming industry is booming it in Europe right now. They're doing great, but they're worried about this new regulation that's coming up. Do you know much about this? Can you break it down in simplistic?
Speaker: Oh, boy, do i So this is a massive issue, massive, massive issue. And the trouble is people are getting lost in the weeds. So i'm goingnna I'm going to take you back in time into the time machine of GDC 2015. I'm giving a talk called The Magic of...
Speaker: what's the magic of habit, I think I called it, which was basically me doing a talk about our, that we, and well, with let me summarize it.
Speaker: Is free to play evil or not? That was the fundamental premise I was working on. I think that habit forming experiences can be incredible and amazing. However, we have a responsibility, particularly to vulnerable players.
Speaker: That was my premise. Now, bear in mind, this is the this is the talk I've had the lowest ratings on. But bear this in mind, I had more ones than I've ever had more fives than I ever had. And it was literally 50-50.
Speaker: So I must have done something right because I annoyed all the people in the room who thought Free to Play was evil and annoyed all the people in the room who thought Free to Play was pure as snow.
Speaker: So that to me is a massive triumph. Now, why what why does that matter? Why am I ref referring to that now? So right now we actually are genuinely facing an existential threat. But people think it's about free to play.
Speaker: It's not. It's about people who are making legislation without understanding the implications. Now, you talked about predatory spaces. I totally understand that that that reaction.
Speaker: We have had a history, like every industry, by the way. This is not new to games. This is every industry. A history of bad actors. And those bad actors need to be reined in. Now, do how do you deal with bad actors? Well, there's one way, which is regulation. The other way, which is you you have a self-regulatory but framework.
Speaker: Now, we've had some of this self-regulatory framework in place. One example is loot crates. Now, obviously, bad things happened, or at least bad things were interpreted about what was happening. I'm...
Speaker: I think it's worth a stepping back a bit about Battlefront 2 and the way it was implemented. It was a bad design. It was badly implemented and there was a disconnect between the monetization team and the design team and the player experience.
Speaker: That had an impact on the performance of the game and actually you could argue was self-writing because there was a revolt about how bad it was.
Speaker: That should be a lesson for everybody in the industry. Don't do that. Now, unfortunately, other people had done that and got away with that in ways that maybe not necessarily and other people were happy about.
Speaker: But on top of that, there is a whole bunch of people who don't believe that free to play can be done well, and who literally have an allergic reaction to the whole idea of in-app purchase because they hearken back to a golden age.
Speaker: Let's make gaming great again. Oh, and I shouldn't say that. That's going to get me into trouble. um But they were golden age where we used to buy our games up front. Do you remember that we used to put like a 25 cent, you know, a quarter coin in arcade machines?
Speaker: For us, it was 50p. and And we would do that every two minutes. And that's actually part of the golden age a lot of people talk about. and and that's it That's an aside.
Speaker: My point is that we're messing we're mixing the streams. Why is Ilker's letter so important? In my opinion, is that he's highlighting that there is some absolutely really damaging stuff in this EU paper.
Speaker: And it's allowing us to have subjective phrase it framing put onto game design, which will be used to punish everybody, to so prevent game development and innovation, regardless of its ethical sustainability.
Speaker: I believe we have ah ah ah have a ah duty of care. I think we should exercise that duty of care. What I don't want is for people to wrongly label things as evil or problematic that aren't. For example, is FOMO inherently evil?
Speaker: well Of course, exploiting FOMO to inappropriately and inadvertently extend people spending money or taking more time than they could realistically or should realistically engage with.
Speaker: Sure, sure. But actually, what happens if you take FOMO away completely is no one acts.
Speaker: This is the problem with the kinds of use of language. Now, the actual specific one that I'm, now, I'm not a lawyer. I'm going to be doing a podcast later today, actually, as it happens, with somebody who has legal training and who is a lobbyist on this topic, where I'm going to ask her exactly about this stuff.
Speaker: But my understanding in this new regulation that's being proposed, there is a ah principle around virtual currency where you have to declare a real money value. On the surface, that sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?
Speaker: Perfectly reasonable. Except one of the things that free-to-play has unlocked is the ability to continue playing a game, whether you're going to invest time or to decide to fast track it by boosting up your account with in-game currency.
Speaker: This is a established, normal, enjoyed mechanic when done reasonably. Now, this is the this is the caveat when done reasonably.
Speaker: However, what's reasonable to me is not necessarily reasonable to you. And if you are not a player and you are casting judgment on what you think is reasonable, you're not going to have the same framing as that player.
Speaker: Why is this a problem? Well, because when we talk about reasonable people, we're generally talking about adults or non-vulnerable people who can make a personal judgment about the balance of their their their value of time versus the amount of money and disposable income they have.
Speaker: These are all factors. It's incredibly difficult to define what that is for a child and how we protect children. Personally, when I did the best practice advice for data collection for the age appropriate design code in the example I gave, there were no microtransactions in that example because i was asked specifically to design a concept for a target audience of eight years old.
Speaker: I'm not going to include microtransactions in an audience target of eight years old personally. In fact, there's other games, for example, on PC, where I generally won't be doing the nickel and diming microtransactions.
Speaker: I'll be coming up with larger bundles of more discrete in-game experiences. But this currency top-up thing is the problem.
Speaker: Because if I've got to put a real money value to it and I can earn all of my currency through play for zero, am I actually attributing a cost to your work playing the game?
Speaker: What is the ramifications of that? Am I now setting the value of your game account should you sell it to somebody else? And other the way Terms of Service generally says you're not allowed to do this, but people have and do.
Speaker: you were to sell your account for a game, have you just made me as a game developer commit fraud? Because I'm now valuing your pool of virtual currency at a real money price that is not actually true You're making us lie. Now, again, this is my understanding, interpretation of what I've read. It may not be true. So please, if you're if you know more about the act than me, please don't don't point fingers at me. I'm not trying.
Speaker: I'm just trying to illustrate the kinds of problems we're facing. But Greg, this is the problem we've got, is the people in the room aren't game designers. There aren't any game designers in the room in making this legislation.
Speaker: And we're seeing a pattern of this. And guess who's going to pay the price? ah The smaller indie game developers are going to be the ones caught on this, who can't afford the lawyers, who can't afford that understanding, who don't understand the nuance, who don't understand that somebody may decide that the way you have stars in your game is a currency, something you never intended.
Speaker: You know, there's a lot of great points you brought up, and I'm not going to say it clarified my thoughts on it because I don't know how I feel about it because I don't fully wrap my head around it. right my The few points that I love that you brought up is FOMO drives demand.
Speaker: If there's no FOMO, no one's going to play the game, right? you You almost need to build that. And there's some games, like you said, Battlefront's a gi great example where they kind of exploited that. And then there's also the time-based. Hey, you only have one month to collect this character or you're going to miss it forever. And that's not really fair to gamers. I understand why people want to do it from a business side, right? You want to drive to demand. It's Halloween. I want to sell the Scream guy. And he's not going to sell in December, right? So so build up that demand.
Speaker: why Why is that a problem? I mean, and i mean just i mean didn me guy there are balancing acts here, right? So let's take that example, right? Halloween seasonal update. I'm going to make you a special offer for the Halloween period. I'm going to make art that I'm only going to make available during the Halloween period.
Speaker: Hang on, is there any other industry you would prevent having a seasonal limited edition? Any other industry in the universe you would enforce...
Speaker: Prevention of that. Now, I'm not, um what we're talking about here is the difference between I'm going to make you an offer on my store for my assets for this game for a limited period of time.
Speaker: I'm going to create a sense of scarcity around that, scarcity being another factor of FOMO. And i'm I think it's not unreasonable for me to have this year's Halloween thing to have a time-limited capacity to it.
Speaker: But where we get into just another example of why time limited is so nuanced. Let's give you another example. You can get your piggy bank to get you 10% of every um coin you earn through play. You get another 10% of them added into a piggy bank in addition.
Speaker: And if you don't claim it by 30 hours from the start of play, you lose it. Now that's a different case. Because that is a pure um time-based incentive that drives only spend.
Speaker: There's no social capital. There's no engagement. There's no story. And and also, when I'm talking about like Halloween content, I think the kinds of content I want to do for Halloween is going to include free content.
Speaker: And then I'm going to make it available to people who didn't manage to unlock it for free during play to be able to buy it after the season has passed, should they really want to do the catch up part. And I think that's, for me, that sounds perfectly reasonable and fair.
Speaker: In fact, as a player, I want that. I want that choice. Why are you taking that from it? But again, I'm going to sound like an absolute evil moustachio twirling, top hat wielding monetization idiot to some people.
Speaker: It's not like that. It's the I want to create delight. I want to create experiences that you value. And if I don't have scarcity there, i'm I'm undermining the value. If I don't create time ah relevant content, I undermine the value.
Speaker: Let's stop undermining value. Let's try to make sure we've got guardrails of ethics. So I love – I make it sound like I'm taking one side of this argument. Oh, no, no. I'm playing devil's advocate for the listeners, right? And this is not related, but I remember – this happens every few years. Mark Zuckerberg has to go in front of Congress and talk about Facebook. And I remember watching it one year and watching the congressmembers ask questions about Facebook.
Speaker: And there were some of the silliest questions in the world, like, how do you monetize on Facebook? Why are you marketing like this? Like these people don't understand this industry, yet they're trying to lead it. And it sounds like that's what's going on over there with the industry kind of trying to put regulation in.
Speaker: The other side I would take similar to the fact that you just said is years ago, I read a fact that Samsung refrigerators are the most broken down refrigerators, that they have the most problems. And was looking at it and I was reading why. And then someone said they are by far the most selling refrigerators.
Speaker: The one that you sell the most of is going to be the one you hear of most likely breaking down because most people have it. And when you say this about gaming, gaming is a monster industry, right? And movies don't compare. Music doesn't compare, right? And maybe you need to take a look at the biggest interest in the industry and say, how do we put regulations in for this so there's a trickle-down effect? And I'm not saying they're going about it the right way, but maybe that's the way you got to take a look at it.
Speaker: You have this behemoth. How do we protect people from this so other industries see that as well? But I think that premise is coming from the wrong place. And also, we have to remember this isn't happening in isolation. we are it games Games industry has it is an industry that has spent decades...
Speaker: being attacked to for existing as was film before it as was music you know reefer madness was a massive thing you know the the films are corrupting our youth it's a i think even books have had this um you know i mean they're going to take too much time out of farming in the field or something like that or they're going to make give people to the ability to have ideas how dare they um Any industry that is trying to introduce thought and innovation, creativity, is going to have backlashes. Now, we are, unfortunately, ah just another industry that's going to face a backlash.
Speaker: We had accusations of games being the cause of violence, which, when you turned out to look at the metadata of that, theyre the meg meta-analysis sorry of that,
Speaker: It turned out the correlation was that the the increase in um ah use ah of of games, particularly violent games, a growth of violent games, was inversely proportional to gun violence.
Speaker: So, you know, there's some yeah clear counterintuitive ideas that are going on. So we have to actually look at the data. We have to actually look at what's going on.
Speaker: And like you say, when you have such a huge, the largest form of digital entertainment on the planet, the only one that's a verb then no wonder we've got to think about it.
Speaker: And if your only parallel in your mind as somebody who isn't a gamer is going to be gambling, there is an assumption that they're the same vector. Now, one of the reasons why that's become even harder is the World Health Organization making gaming addiction something that's in the DSM-6.
Speaker: there seven six Anyway, I'm not a psychologist. um But that is incredibly controversial. Because what that is doing, in from what I and understand, again, not not a psychologist, that is labeling a behavioral addiction pathway as causal when all of the evidence is it is just one of many pathways to, ah like a crutch that people who have a behavioral addiction issue happen to have used.
Speaker: as is using social media, as is workaholism, as is other forms of addiction, but that are behavioral based. The difference between gambling and games in terms of addiction is there is a physiological impact, which is causal in a gambling process. The adrenaline response from a gambling process has a causal impact.
Speaker: Now, that's not me saying it. I took that from the Harvard Medical Review. You know, that was a direct quote out of what they talked about in terms of what was the difference. I can't remember the quote. I did it 10 years ago. So please do.
Speaker: Please forgive me. And there may be better papers out there. I might have been updated. you know what's really important, though, is if someone gives me more information, I'm going to change my mind.
Speaker: So anyway, point about all of that is the issue we have right now is fundamental about um what's happening into this industry. And we are we're actually being attacked from a whole whole bunch of sides, not intentionally.
Speaker: I think it's it's inadvertently. So the first thing, um you know, if you look at the the way the digital markets acts are going on, we're still waiting to see what happens. Epic have won their case against Apple in terms of the ah use of like Apple ah Things outside of a game, that's potentially great. But the opposite seems to be happening in the in Europe. We don't know what's happening there.
Speaker: But let's think about things like the Online Safety Act in the UK. And I think there's going to be some Texas regulations do something similar. This is ah requiring us to have facial recognition or some sort ah of true identity to ensure that we are over a certain age.
Speaker: Sounds great, doesn't it? Fantastic. Except 90% – well, sorry, I forgot the number. There's some fantastic stats out there about how badly these facial recognition systems perform and how they will often over- and underage people.
Speaker: So we're not actually safe making people any safer. When we're using real identity documents, we are requiring the developer – to hold the data. So if you're an indie developer, you're going to be held to the same costs and security standards as a larger platform.
Speaker: Now, there's one outcome that happens with this. It's called the largest scale of identity theft in history.
Speaker: So my objection is not about wanting to keep the kids safe. I i want and want children to be safe. Because the the way where the Online Safety Act in the UK came from was an attempt to save the kids from pornography.
Speaker: Sure. I get that. But do you know how many kids are going saved from pornography through this act? Not many. None. None. Because there's a thing called a VPN. Yeah.
Speaker: That's it. Done. And I'm not allowed to tell you there's a thing called a VPN because that's part of the act i'm goingnna I've now got myself. but But my point is that there's and there' ah there a hysteria and a lack of clarity.
Speaker: And do you know what? There are ways that we could have solved that had there been proper consultation that actually involved people who understood how technology worked. And this, since this is taking us all the way back, so I've done a long ramble, but this is taking all the way back to Ilka's letter.
Speaker: This is what Ilka's asking for. Let's have some proper consultation. By the way, I've got some track record with Ilka. Ilka is one of the best humans I know. um I've known him since like 2003 for one of the first mobile games I ever put live was one of his when he was doing a company called Sumir.
Speaker: um I still occasionally get hugs when I see him. haven't seen him since COVID, so I hope I still get hugs from him when I see him next. He's genuinely one of the nicest people I know, and he has a passion for making great player experiences.
Speaker: They didn't go to make Clash of Clans to make an exploitative game. They made a game that people would love, and it still has something like 58% day one retention. There are almost no games out there with that level of retention that have long-term retention as well.
Speaker: So there's something special about what they did. There's something special that players continue to play and and continue to love. Does that mean that they're perfect? I don't know. I'm not going to make that judgment.
Speaker: But what I do know is that that is that is a person who is genuinely trying to have a conversation about how we may make people have better experiences, not someone who is trying to wiggle out of any kind of legislative hook.
Speaker: there was There's a lot there to digest. I think kind of to sum up what you said at the end, right? ah Because I spoke with, ah when I went to school, when I was in college, it was right near where Zynga started. And I went there every once in a while and got to talk to people there. Like, make a fun game at the end of the day. Then people will join your community. The game will grow. And yeah, then it becomes a problem when you're big is you're making money. And how do you do that? And you're going to have things like people selling accounts.
Speaker: Yeah. At the end of the day, you just need to make something fun with an engaging loop that will draw people back, which is we'll talk tackle next because that's what you're trying to share. I think the two other things that you mentioned, which I love, just to kind of... Earlier, you you likened the golden days of ah gaming to the arcade, and I think that's awesome. I didn't even think about quarters in the machine. Me and my son the other day, there's an arcade by us that you pay to get in and you can play whatever, and we were playing the Simpsons arcade game. and just like When you have unlimited lives...
Speaker: it's kind of boring. And I think that's kind of homo there, right? Like you want to have that edge. You want to have that like, Oh my God, I only have one quarter left. How am I going to play this?
Speaker: And adding onto that, I think on a different side, sports gambling is really hurting how people look at gaming and things like that. And I think it's also ruining parts of sports as well as like everything's becoming gamified. And just because it's gamified doesn't mean it's a game, but you're looking at these regulations saying, how do we tackle all this? And and it's a tough,
Speaker: nut to crack i think no matter what industry starts to boom years ago i worked in the email industry and spam was a problem spam is still a problem but whenever you create a solution to something someone's here to break it and figure out what's going on so the idea is to innovate but collaborate with the people who are creating the stuff because they have better visibility than anyone else and the irony is the platforms have the capacity to solve it and what happens in physical retail is the retail store, the point where the transaction is happening, are the people responsible for managing the experience.
Speaker: And guess what? Now we've got the storefronts who are taking their 30%, or whatever it number is, not being held accountable for doing that part of the job.
Speaker: And to me, that is absolute hypocrisy.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure. So let's transition this to a lighter note. that's like um i I don't always just rant to people, by the way. i do i and You know this, but the but audience, please. i' im um i'm um You can tell look I'm a mostly jolly person.
Speaker: People love to listen. We love a good ranter because people don't like to talk like myself. um yeah Well, let's continue talking about this younger generation that is getting into gaming. They're experiencing this stuff for the first time, or maybe they're in school and learning, right?
Speaker: You started doing your lightning lessons on LinkedIn and I fell in love with them. i think educating younger generations, as well as enabling those who are currently in the industry to continue that career development, understand how things work is fantastic.
Speaker: What gave you the thought of starting to put out those lightning lessons as bite-sized chunks of information on LinkedIn? And how do you kind of go through that process of deciding what should I be putting out there? It's a tough one because one of the issues is I have too many things I want to talk about.
Speaker: And, you know, being old and having done live ops forever, and there are lots of lessons that go with that. And and um one of the things I find an interesting struggle is we don't always have a common set of language to describe it. And there's very few people able in a position to share experiences across multiple platforms. So i'm yeah I'm sure there are other people out there who will be better at coming up with discrete examples of games that do certain things. But what I think I'm hopefully good at, or at least interested in, is finding the patterns, finding the fundamentals.
Speaker: And so one thing I thought about is that I've been doing these hour-long sessions. And if you think about it, the formats... generally out there have not have moved away from the hour-long thing they're still long format video essays which are ironically getting longer on youtube uh which i think fascinating but also shorts often taken from snippets out of a longer piece and i was i was uh so i i do an actual player kind of like a fun game thing where i have um
Speaker: know, four people in the room, i I put them through a dilemma in 20 minutes time. I then kind of like do a debrief afterwards to say what shenanigans they got up with, that kind of thing. So it's it's a fun little thing. It's called anything can happen.
Speaker: And as I was doing that, it occurred to me, I'm using like minute snippets or 30 second snippets from that show to promote that show. What if I took some of the webinars I did and actually broke them down into single topics, right?
Speaker: that could be done in a minute, you know, as a short. And and it's a minute long because shorts but have to be less than 60 seconds. So I looked back at some of the decks I did, some of the talks I've done, and thought actually each of the slides generally takes something like a minute.
Speaker: So um what can I do? Can I take a topic? Can I break it down? And what I found is that Well, again, I love the fact you think it might be for a younger audiences. That's fantastic. I hope that's true. I'm going to try and put some of these out on TikTok as well. But and I've got to get the quality bar up. I mean, that's one of the things. At the moment, it's just like I've got my rubbish camera old webcam camera. I've got a rubbish old green screen. I'm going to to myself out of the bar.
Speaker: But I do think there's something in trying have a conversation with people about actually what goes on. You know, like i one I did recently was about data. How often do we talk about why we're doing certain things with data?
Speaker: You might often have somebody like a paid user acquisition person talk about attribution. But do you know what attribution means? I mean, yeah, it's how we work out who the audience is and where they came from. We can attribute this ad to that person, to that install. That's great.
Speaker: But not everybody has a history of understanding how data works. And that's an example of one, the reason why i thought, well, let's get, let's go, what can I say about data in 60 seconds?
Speaker: And that's kind of where it came Yeah. what What I like about it is when you're on LinkedIn, you see a lot of influencers talk about the data, the data, the data, this is important. Why is your user acquisition need to be higher? Like, that's great. How many times do I need to see Clash of Clans is doing really well here. They they have the top whatever, right?
Speaker: But you're you're making actionable data, something you can chew on, something you can learn. and And something you said again in the beginning of this conversation was that we need to collaborate more in the industry, right? wherere We're the gaming industry and and what we make is great for the gamers and the more gamers that play, the better. And ah Same thing for the people that create content around this, right? There's no reason you need to go compete with other people. The more we can share our message together, the more you can spend that right information. and And the way I take a look at is you're collaborating with those other gamers behind the, you're showing them behind the curtain. How do you do this? What is LiveOps? Why is this important? What is this game design there for, right? It's, i I say younger because i I love Duolingo. I think Duolingo is a,
Speaker: maybe Maybe it's not great, but the gamification, again, of learning is exciting. And you can get awards and you can unlock medals and stuff like that. And if we can have something like that in gaming where I can say, hey, I want to learn more about trust and safety or I want to learn more about community management.
Speaker: Let me swipe through all these and quickly learn that stuff. I think when you look at Gen A and Gen Z who are spending all their time on short form videos, right? It's a no brainer. I like to think it's doom scrolling for good. How do you how do you change that mindset instead of watching people...
Speaker: make funny Sora videos, let's learn something. And I think you, you the do scrolling for good, I think is ah um something that's underestimated when people talk about TikTok because they see the dances, they see things. They don't always see the cooking videos. They don't always see the how to plumb videos.
Speaker: And I wasn't, I had ignored TikTok as an audience and I haven't started this yet. It's my intention try it. ah But I had someone who said to me, look, this actual this format could work potentially on these other formats. We'll find out. I mean, um maybe ask me in a few months' time if I've actually managed to put on TikTok and if it's hadn't had any effect. But ah what I want to try and do is distill these moments of questions. And if if, as well as helping people aspiring to work in games, can get some sense of, like, what is the scale of this?
Speaker: Think about it. Games is incredibly complicated to make. We've got to have an art form that's also a coding. And therefore, we've got to think about physics. And we also have to think about narrative. And we also have to think about deployment. We also have to think about testing robustly.
Speaker: We also have to think about audiences. We have to think about monetization. We have to think about economy design. we have to think about balance. but Oh, my God, the list goes on. And it doesn't end. And the more players understand what's going on under the under the pond water, the duck's legs flapping away, that is the game maker. You know, we're not just beautiful swans that you you look at. We are pumping away under the bonnet. And, and you know, it's exhausting work.
Speaker: So if we can at least help communicate some of those questions, why? mean, the classic one, I'm not going to go into it now, but ah Paul Kilduff-Taylor did a fantastic piece on the weis issues around the stop-killing games debate and why that's problematic or it's lacking nuance.
Speaker: You know, the amount of work that's involved in building, designing, developing, and sustaining a game in live is mind blowing, mind blowing.
Speaker: And so when you see some of the reactions people have about why, was why, did why did they have to shut that down? Well, because it costs money to run the thing and you haven't got enough people playing it to pay for it. What do you think?
Speaker: think we Do we'd stop if we had enough people who wanted to play it? mean, I mean, don't wrong, there are other things going on there, but you get my drift. There's a lot to be explained, and if we can do it in a way that is appealing, great. i I'm trying. I don't know if I've hit the number yet. I love the fact that you seem to like I'm doing.
Speaker: Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to my son last night. He's seven, and we were talking about K-pop Demon Hunters, and he's like, why is no K-pop Demon Hunters game? I'm like, dude, games take a long time to make and create. yeah And it's funny because it made me think back in the day, and I was reading a Reddit thread about this the other day, like,
Speaker: movie games came out right as the movie came out i'm thinking back to like the original spider-man games and they were perfectly timed with the movie but you got this not great game right it's like cobbled and no offense to anyone making it right you were a rushed things have to go quick you have to design that stuff like these things take so much time to build that i mean again you look at the size of the gaming world compared to movies and television it's bigger and and people just demand this content and then you need to create communities these days and you got to put out that consistent videos as well, right? Like this is a giant machine that needs to work and it's not easy to do it. And credit to any solo dev that's doing any of this work because you know,
Speaker: It's a lot. And this is why you should collaborate with others. i love to see that in the industry, people like to help one another, like reach out to people. It's a, it takes Well, Bellatro.
Speaker: I mean, that's a one man dev that did an amazing thing. I mean, I've got other devs who made solitaire games who are going, word but but, but, and, but at the end of the day, you can never know what's going to hit the zeitgeist.
Speaker: And, you know, that game did. i i can I think I can see why it did, because, you know, when you basically you cross um Texas Holden with um essentially evil ah character out of Saw type mind mindset, I mean, i'm not quite that bad, but you know saying.
Speaker: That's quite funny. It kind of works. Yeah. But there was thing you were saying I thought was interesting about yeah this this idea of the scale of the games industry and with movies in particular. So historically, we were seen as the poor little cousin, even though we were making more money than movies.
Speaker: The movie industry is more established, more prestigious. Oh, I've got a movie. So it would be almost impossible to get them the rights And the cost of the rights has to come from somewhere.
Speaker: Well, if you're going to build a game, your cost base is for making the game. Well, if I've got to take half of the cost base for making the game out to pay for the IP, I'm going to make a less good game.
Speaker: Inevitably. And if I don't get the scripts until the marketing team are pushing the get the film out, I mean, it's not going to happen. um I did pitch a fund.
Speaker: it it wasn't me to pitch this, somebody else's idea, but I loved the idea. ah For the second Matrix film, um they were trying to see if they could get mobile operators to basically fund the phones, but never quite happened.
Speaker: ah We pitched the idea of a location-based game for the Matrix where you had to run to a phone box. Yeah. I'm glad we didn't do it because we you don't want people running in the streets.
Speaker: But wouldn't that have been a cool game idea? Anyway, never mind. hey You could have been the original Pokemon Go, man. Get people out of the house moving around. that's ah Exactly. That's what you've got to do. Yeah.
Speaker: um Sorry, I lost pace here. um How do you want to continue to see the education or career development side grow? Do you have bigger plans? you Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. So this is a massive area. So I'm ah so one of the issues we have right now in the games industry, if you're not in the industry, you might not know this, but and we're not very good at training juniors to become seniors, seniors to become, you know, like leads. Now,
Speaker: Actually, the leads part isn't so much of a problem because we do have people understanding that management training is an important thing. But think about it this way. If your best coder is going to become a manager of people, that's a different set of skills. And you're you're taking less of their time and their expertise in coding and putting more of their time in their probably less expert area of managing.
Speaker: So that's an issue. But also the fact that we're not training people, we don't even have common definitions of what the roles are and what the skills need to be. Now, if you work in mainstream IT, you'll know this exists.
Speaker: If you work in most other industries, this exists. But games has decided it wasn't invented here. We didn't do it. Now, there are a bunch of initiatives around that. So a friend of mine, Christian Roberts at Nordicity, has been trying to do this work with a bunch of people, including the UK's screen skills teams, but that has yet to happen.
Speaker: But there's a team in Helsinki, a university in Helsinki, that's doing a thing called game badges. Why am I interested in game badges? I'm not saying it's the perfect answer, but I'm really interested in what they're trying to do because they've at least had a stab at saying a common definition of the roles in the industry.
Speaker: And they've had a stab at what skills, what common skills to have in the industry and mapping them to those roles with a bronze, silver and gold ranking to them.
Speaker: Now, if you think about what does that do, that means that we can unlock an understanding of what skill level are you at? And therefore, what skills are you missing if you want the next job?
Speaker: um How can you get that? Well, if you've got these discrete mechanisms, it's a lot easier for government to provide grants, to give tax exemptions, to give all sorts of things. It's a lot easier for training companies to to offer companies pathways and for companies to use it as a recruitment technique as well as ability for them to be able to give incentives to their staff to remain with them Because they got measurable improvements in their skills.
Speaker: As I say, maybe I'm a bit utopian about it. Maybe this is just me be aspirational. But I genuinely think this is the stuff that we need. Because the number of times you have somebody who's been a junior.
Speaker: Someone leaves. now has to do someone else's job. But because game teams, particularly in the UK, but more generally, don't tend to be huge, they don't tend to have the capacity to have a learning and development team inside the company.
Speaker: A 30-person company generally can't afford to do that, whereas a 500-person company generally needs to do that. So given that we have the smaller teams, generally in game studios, that's an issue.
Speaker: But it gets worse because we're now seeing a wave of redundancies in the games industry, or we've we've been through a wave over several years, probably the largest downturn I've ever seen in my entire career of nearly 30 years.
Speaker: But at the same time, we're now starting to see seeds of growth. And that growth, though, is going through ah external and codev companies so we're seeing a change in the fundamental structure of how games are built but who's training the expertise who's investing in the skills and that's why you know i am ah i mean i my my job isn't that anymore. I, I've, uh, I'm, I'm building a, a live op strategy platform, a software platform. That's what Arcanics is. That's what we do is we try to help teams self-serve that process.
Speaker: But my legacy of oh my history has been trying to help people and train people to do those things. For example, wrote a book on games the service 10 years ago. I've just finished a new book on, ah game economy design called playing with balance. That's going to come out in February next year.
Speaker: So, I believe in this stuff because I happen to have a ridiculous ego that wants to talk about it. But I think it's interesting.
Speaker: The topics we do are interesting. And anyone who's not even in games can learn. Like you talk about gamifying. Now, gamifying is a term that's been misused, misapplied, but actually playful learning.
Speaker: Well, even if you read Raph Costa's theory of fun, you'll see one of the first things he talks about is how where play comes from. Play is how we learn.
Speaker: why on earth are we not using more playful techniques even in the games industry and what more gamified could you get than game badges anyway that's me it's funny you say that i i helped coach my son's baseball team and yeah i was talking to the other coach because the other team was much better than ours and i hope none of my kids are listening um and was just like what do you do and he's like we try to make practices fun so they stay engaged i'm like That makes so much sense because I'm sitting there trying to coach these kids and they're all wrestling each other and I want to rip my hair out. I'm just like...
Speaker: if you make it fun, they'll want to play more. and It's mind blowing. And going back to the bigger theory of what you said, you mentioned skills mapping. And I think skills mapping is the coolest part of this. It's, you don't realize the skills of people who are in the gaming industry and what it, what they do on a day-to-day basis. And that was mind blowing to me. I spoke to Thad Sasser at the time he was the studio director at Marvel rivals. And Yeah, it was just he told me he's a product manager at heart. And that just blew my mind. And, you know, a lot of people want to be managers and directors, like you mentioned, but if you actually see the skills on what a manager and director does.
Speaker: For me personally, that's miserable. You got to manage people, you got to do this, you got like, if you're a coder, and you think you want to be a manager, that is wildly different. I'm not saying you should be worried about it. But just understand that like, if you're not a people person, isn't going to be great for you. you're going be doing a lot more paperwork than coding it. And it's something you got to learn. Like, what is your passion versus what is your career? Right. And yeah kind of understand where you want to be.
Speaker: But it's also what you good at. So, for example, I am at heart a gamer designer. That's what I want to do. That's what I love. But I'm better at telling other people what to do.
Speaker: That's to I'm good at the theory. I'm good at the structure. I'm good at the framing. I'm not as good at doing the level of detail that's necessary for a level design, for example. That being said, I do love getting into an economy design. Well, I think that's people should realize that if I'm good at something, maybe I do that to fund my passion.
Speaker: Maybe I'm a good, maybe I'm good at doing something, but I want to play video games. Great. I'm going to go do my job so I could get paid so I can then go home and buy video games and do stuff like that. Like, you know, when you do something every day, may not be as fun anymore. It becomes a career rather than just pleasure. So you understand that maybe it's not always best.
Speaker: And I think this is important for people i also want to get out of gaming. I think they have to understand that, hey, I can go to the finance world because I know product management or I know product marketing. And they have roles there that fit that. I think the visibility is what's important.
Speaker: And there's so many things that come out of game design, particularly usability, user flow. i mean, the loop, there's a a great book called Hooked by Naira, I think it is, Naira, I can't pronounce it properly, but ah but actually that's a game loop.
Speaker: It's game loop. The idea is you're encouraging people and by giving them yeah know triggers and then you're giving them actions and rewards and then you're encouraging them to reinvest. That's a game loop.
Speaker: And the the level of um things that we do in games in terms of code development, in terms of narrative writing, in terms of like art, All of these have applications so far beyond games.
Speaker: And there are a number of economies in the world, they are Jordan, various other countries, where they absolutely see games as the way to bring up their debt economy more generally.
Speaker: Because people love the idea of understanding the skills involved in making games and the fact that can be applied elsewhere is amazing. Yeah. So on a bit of a lighter note, Oscar, and any new games you're playing?
Speaker: ah Actually, what am I playing at the moment? I can't remember what I'm playing at the moment. was picking up... I just finished playing ah the Assassin's Creed, the one in Baghdad. and Name escapes me. Anyway, but I find myself at the moment... Whatever's been in Game Pass, and i it's terrible. Game Pass is the laziest way to find games.
Speaker: um But in terms games I play for myself... I find myself, I'm either on my on my Xbox or I'm using my PlayStation like freebie game and or I'm going back to an old favourite. And the classic one for me is always going to be Slay the Spy.
Speaker: I don't know what it is, but if I have like 20 minutes that turns into an hour and a half... And I want to just let my brain stop. That's what do. But of course, I'm a little bit weird because obviously I'm a little bit weird anyway. But um in general, um I'm often being asked to review people's games.
Speaker: So I probably play a thousand games every year anyway, minimum. Yeah. because I'm going to be looking at what's new, what's fresh, what's exciting. But I've got to make judgment calls and feedback and insight on those games.
Speaker: Sometimes that insight's on the core game design. Sometimes it's on the first time user your experience. Sometimes that insight's based on long-term retention. ah But at the end of the day, I do find that I still am lucky enough to be be able to enjoy a game and still provide that kind of feedback. And not everybody can retain their love of play and their love of good game design, if that makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely. I was a judge in a games competition and yeah over a course of a couple of months, I had to play 30 games. And to some people you're like, Oh, that's awesome. That's super cool. And I realized like that is a ton of work. Like,
Speaker: Yeah. from Something as silly as installing the game, getting it set up, playing it, taking notes, next game, right? right It is so much work. And Oscar, you go everywhere. if you If you're not following Oscar on LinkedIn, we'll have a link in our ah blog post as long as well as all the books he mentioned. But he is everywhere at every conference. ah And I...
Speaker: give you so much kudos to be able to make the time to do all this. It is a nonstop job and people are oh, you're working games. That must be a fun job. It's fun, but it is work nonstop. it's Oh, and I love travel.
Speaker: i mean I mean, don't get me wrong. I do love travel, but I do spend an awful lot of time in airports. um And that's not that's not riveting. That's not exciting. But i think it's important because um i i do not want to think about my carbon footprint, but my my point is more that I get to sit in front of people who are making games and hopefully inspire them to want to make better experiences for players.
Speaker: And to be able to do that profitably. I mean, this is the thing is I don't think... I don't think it we we I think we underestimate the value of creating good commercial games.
Speaker: um There's a it's a different value than creating art. Creating art games is art is fabulous. Please do it. No problem at all. But it's different from creating good commercial games. And the challenge of you making a good commercial game is to make it so it still retains one thing, which is player value.
Speaker: And the irony is that the games that make the most money are the ones where you can point at what the player value is most cleanly. We have lot of people talking about the bad actors, talking about the bad games, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: But actually, i think there's a lot of fantastic games out there that people genuinely love. And when you see the queues at Gamescom of people waiting two and a half hours to see a trailer that's coming out next week,
Speaker: and It doesn't sound like much fun, but honestly, the camaraderie of those people, the passion of those people, the desire, the fact that that game is meaningful to them.
Speaker: Honestly, that's why we do it. I love it. And so before we go today, can you help us understand what you guys are doing at Arcanics and how you're helping studios build out? Yeah, so we recently got funded for a LiveOps strategy platform, LiveOps insight platform, if you like.
Speaker: ah Yeah, so really really exciting. We just got funded by incredible bunch people, Fours VC based in Belgium and also a Belgium-based um text incubator accelerator program ah called iMac, iStart. Amazing people.
Speaker: It's always good when you've got smart people who understand the space you're in working with you as investors. Absolutely recommend working with those guys. So what we're doing is we're building essentially a self-service tool that encapsulates all of the experience we've had of what it takes to make sure you can deliver sustainably, reliably and profitably live experiences.
Speaker: The issue we've got in the games industry at the moment is that we're all very good at tracking the tasks we do. We're not necessarily as good at tracking the deliverables. So if you're going to do a tournament, you've got to take that through design, development, deployment, delivery, and then do the analysis of the impact.
Speaker: got to track that all the way through and where the problems that happen, where the issues, risks happen. We've got to understand that. But more importantly, we've got to understand the impact that that has on the player experience in terms of the engagement, retention, and the revenue.
Speaker: And only by having this holistic view can we actually do that predictably, efficiently, and profitably. So that's what we're trying to build is a platform to help teams save them from the pain and let them take control of their live ops.
Speaker: I think ah history plays a big part in this in experience. I did a podcast with Adam Boyes from Virado, and he said the same thing is we learned a lot over history from gaming. And yes, gaming is changing, but it doesn't mean the history is irrelevant. so you can learn these lessons from old and translate it to new. But I think you could also look at the reverse is learn some new history from the the future as well. Right. ah And infuse that as well to help judge where we should going. Exactly.
Speaker: And we're trying to, i mean, I know the ai and ML are are, well, machine learning is not particularly controversial, but AI is is quite controversial. But we're trying to take an ethical view about how to use those tools. Because I think one of the things that that's clear is that whilst there might be some issues with the financial models around AI at the moment, so the way that voice actors are compensated for the use their voice, I think is a massive issue, which is being discussed very openly at the moment.
Speaker: are obviously similar problems. But when we're talking about, you know, the ability to be able to use your data and to understand your data in the context of other people's data without having any risk of compromising either private data or commercially sensitive data, there is an opportunity there to create insight that human beings cannot find.
Speaker: And I think that when we can unlock the ability for machine learning to track patterns around, you know, what happens if you do a tournament? What impact does that have on sentiment? What impact does it have on player engagement retention?
Speaker: How long they spend playing the game in that particular period of time? How likely they are to want to go buy something? The beauty of that is that we can actually provide framing for how we build experiences that better match what players want.
Speaker: And you know what? We're back to that thing. Player value is what drives the best games. Not trying to focus and fixate on revenue. Fixating on player value drives engagement.
Speaker: Engagement drives retention. And it's retention that drives revenue at the end of the day. And it's like compound interest. The longer we retain players, the more engaged they are, the more they'll want to spend money in the passionate experience that they love.
Speaker: And if we focus on that, we can create better experiences without these problematic situations that a lot of people worry about. and no That's my kind of vision for my utopia anyway.
Speaker: I feel like we've come full circle now, right? It's the perfect place where we we can wrap it up. I think, you know, you You build a game to be fun. The golden age of gaming is gamings were fun and we wanted to play. And we didn't mind putting another quarter into the Simpsons arcade machine because we were having fun with it. And yeah if you build something that people want to play, people will come back and they'll reward you. But don't exploit people. Understand why they want to play. Break down what's keeping them engaged and keep building into those core loops.
Speaker: One of my favorite things I learned was find the fun. And if you find the fun, build on it. It's a great line. But it's also like, find the fun, but also, why am I going to come back tomorrow? Yeah.
Speaker: i I genuinely, I'm a massive believer that retention, the reason I love live ops games, it's not why i don't like narrative games. I love narrative games. But look at soap operas.
Speaker: Soap operas are stories that can last decades. So why are we limiting ourselves by trying to create a story with a beginning, middle, and end? ah Yeah, there are games great games like that. Fantastic. Do more that. you know What became of Edith's Finch, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: There's so many different kind of ways of looking at it And then we don't even have to go down the branching narrative, although there's some great examples of that. yeah But actually thinking about what is the game for?
Speaker: And often, you know, you only have to look at some Nuzu data. Last year, I think it was something like 12% of player time was spent on new games. The rest was spent on older games.
Speaker: Why? because we actually have things that we we want to enjoy and carry on with. And I think that's really important, you know, to recognize that retention matters. And actually, ah the end of the day, what drives these retention games isn't just gameplay, isn't just fun.
Speaker: It's about building a community. And probably the weirdest game I've ever played that exemplifies that is a game called Tribal Wars by Inner Games, where I played that for about 18 months.
Speaker: And it was such an intense experience. you had You were going to have your tribe destroyed at some point, but you worked with other people to keep your village going, even if it meant you getting up at four in the morning to do raids.
Speaker: I am not kidding you. That is insane. But we did it. We even started to use external comms tools because we were worried that there were spies in our clan.
Speaker: Insane. Anyway, this is the point. People are passionate about games. Let's focus on that. Let's create marvellous games that they love, but also that's part of who they are, part of your identity.
Speaker: You look at somebody carrying, I don't know, a backpack with a yeah Zelda shield on it. It's part of their identity. I love it. Oscar, I can't thank you enough for taking the time on the day you got back or the day after you got back from Helsinki.
Speaker: Thank you so much. There's so much great information. that It's going to make some great content. We will have links to everything Oscar has spoken about, his books, his site, his LinkedIn.
Speaker: Is there anything you want to say before we do wrap up today? No, I think the bottom line is that, you know most game developers want to make great experiences for players. And what we're not being what we haven't been good at doing recently is encouraging the wider um regulatory framework to to trust us and to understand us.
Speaker: And we've actually let ourselves down by not holding people who are bad actors to account yeah ourselves. And I think part of the problem with we're currently not sharing any data. So we can't, for example, prove that we've actually got a handle on the loot crate problem.
Speaker: We've actually resolved it. well Most of the reasonable, respectable teams have actually removed that as a problem. And yet we still have it brought up and thrown in our face because we're not proving that we've done that.
Speaker: Beautiful. I love it. Once again, Oscar, I can't thank you enough. We'll have links on the Player Driven IO blog. ah Yeah. Welcome home. Thank you again. And I hope you have a great rest of your day.
