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Crafting Immersive Experiences in the Warhammer Universe with Andres Tallos
244 Plays2 years ago
Join us as we dive into the career journey of Andres Tallos, co-founder and CEO of Everguild. From his early days at McKinsey & Company to co-founding Mintsprint and eventually Everguild, Andres shares valuable insights and experiences gained along the way. Discover how he navigated the development and publishing of acclaimed titles like Drakenlords and The Horus Heresy: Legions, and how his strategic vision and passion for customer experience have driven Everguild's success. Explore the unique challenges and opportunities of creating immersive experiences within the Warhammer universe.
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Transcript
Introduction to Player Engage Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engage podcast, where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keyword Studios and HelpShift. Here is your host, Greg Posner.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Player Engaged podcast.
Andres Taos' Career Journey
00:00:19
Speaker
Today, we're going to dive into the career journey of Andres Taos, co-founder and CEO of Everguild. From his early day at McKinsey & Company to co-founding Mint Sprint and eventually Everguild, Andres shares valuable insights and experiences gained along the way. Discover how he navigated development and publishing of acclaimed titles like Dragon Lords and The Horse, Heresy, Legion.
Creating Immersive Experiences in Warhammer
00:00:42
Speaker
and how his strategic vision and passion for customer experience has driven Everguild's success. Explore the unique challenges and opportunities of creating an immersive experience within the Warhammer universe. Andres, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm excited about our conversation. Anything I have left out that you'd like to touch on about yourself?
00:00:59
Speaker
No, that's a great intro. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I think creating a player experience around a really well-known IP like Warhammer is going to be a very interesting conversation. But before we even get there, my favorite question to ask is, are you a gamer? And if so, what games are you playing these days?
00:01:17
Speaker
Yes, I think I'm pretty much a gamer, although I must say I don't play as much since I started working in the industry because now it's very hard to play a game without at the same time taking notes of how they've solved issues or how they've handled the UI or the monetization or anything and everything. So I would say, yeah, I don't play as much as I used to.
00:01:42
Speaker
But yeah, that seems common, no matter what industry you're in, right? Yeah, I've met some people on film, and they just go to movies now and critique it. It's like ripping your hair out, trying to go to watch a movie with them. We understand maybe Transformers isn't accurate, but whatever.
Founding and Early Games of Everguild
00:01:57
Speaker
Before we get really into our conversation, can you kind of give us the background of what Everguild is kind of talk about?
00:02:03
Speaker
Absolutely. So Everguild is the studio that, well, my sister Isabelle and myself founded together about eight years ago now. We both had some experience by creating an earlier video games studio called Mint Sprint, but that one didn't work out that well. So we tried again. We managed to get some angel funding. We did the first card game.
00:02:28
Speaker
So just to set up, this was the time when Hearthstone had just come out of Vita and it was not available on mobile yet, but it was obviously a massive success on PC and iPad. And we figured out, we loved that genre, that type of game. We figured out we'd try to do our own version of a card game, taking many of the learnings from Hearthstone, but at the same time making it way more optimized for mobile devices.
00:02:55
Speaker
And so that's how our first game came along called Dragon Lords. That helped us secure a licensing agreement with Games Workshop to do a game based on the horse heresy, which is an IP, like part of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
Licensing and Game Development with Games Workshop
00:03:09
Speaker
And that's the legions that came out about five years ago. It's been quite successful, has been growing steadily since its release. And now we've managed to get another licensing agreement again with Games Workshop this time for the main Warhammer 40,000 IP.
00:03:25
Speaker
It's a much bigger game. It's going to be cross-platform, but PC first this time. And yeah, we have a bigger team and a bigger budget this time and a much more ambitious game. So that one is coming out this year. It's actually in closed alpha already. So people are already playing like an early version of it. And we are very optimistic and very, well, yeah.
00:03:51
Speaker
I'm thinking a whole bunch of notes here, because you're saying some interesting things that I want to delve into, and it's fascinating. The one you just mentioned, I just want to ask first, and it makes no sense in the order of questions, is it's great that you got the bigger IP to Warhammer exactly,
Platform Strategy: PC First Approach
00:04:05
Speaker
right? But why PC first? It seems like an interesting choice with the big mobile trend going on. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, well, with the Horace currency legions already, we started out on mobile.
00:04:18
Speaker
But after a year or so, we released a PC version on Steam as well. And we put a lot of effort into making it.
00:04:26
Speaker
feel as native as possible, so rather than just a port from mobile, right? But there was always this sense that I think there's two things. One is the kind of stamp of the credibility and the stamp of quality that you get from going all out on PC with a game that can stand its own against, obviously, the big, well-known games like Hearthstone or Lens of Runeterra or even Magic the Gathering.
00:04:54
Speaker
So we are trying to convey this idea that, hey, the quality that we are putting into the game, the finished production values are up there with the best. And second, one thing which is very important nowadays is if we want to have content creators cover the game, like on Twitch and YouTube, putting out videos or streaming the game, it's way easier to convince them to try the game on PC.
00:05:21
Speaker
than it is on mobile.
Balancing PC and Mobile Presence
00:05:23
Speaker
Many content creators are nowadays already covering mobile games, but it's still, I think, just a fraction of all the content creators out there. That's fascinating. And I completely see where you're coming from, right? I mean, when you think AAA games, you think PC, you think console, right? But we're in this day where a lot of indie gaming companies that are creating mobile first titles are being acquired by these AAA titles because AAA titles are having trouble creating
00:05:50
Speaker
these mobile games. So it's like this, you want a stamp of quality, you want to build PC, but what the money in the player base is all on the mobile side. So it's an interesting kind of almost A-B test on where you're seeing more users. Yeah, I mean, in our case, it's interesting because it depends a lot on the market. I think there are some countries where PC
00:06:10
Speaker
is very big, even if it's not as big as mobile. But certainly for this genre and for relatively hardcore games rather than the more casual genres, I think the PC is large enough. So we are not doing this just as a PR stunt. We actually think that the PC will be a very important platform.
00:06:36
Speaker
for workforce but at the same time we want like we know there's a lot of players who are very much into car games and into Warhammer. Who don't play on PC they just play on mobile and we want to make the game available to those as well and we are fortunate that nowadays the high quality models are like super powerful as well and they can run like a very high quality games and play smoothly.
00:07:05
Speaker
And it's becoming more and more
Lessons from Mint Sprint
00:07:06
Speaker
affordable. When it comes to your, I want to talk about your journey as an entrepreneur because it's interesting, right? Because you did start with mint sprint, which you said didn't quite work out. What, what, I guess when you look back at that experience, I'm sure there's many people that learn, right? Obviously. So what did you learn from mint sprint that when you started ever yield, you said, Hey, we got to do this differently this time or I guess lessons learned. Yeah. So.
00:07:31
Speaker
Well, Mint Sprint, it was set up by three of us. It was Isabel, my sister, myself, and there was also Joe Waller, a good friend who was more like a technical person. He had actually worked in PC gaming before at Bullfrog, so he had a lot of industry experience, and then he had become a pretty senior person at another company, and he decided he also wanted to set up a game studio.
00:07:57
Speaker
And so we partner. And I think the biggest mistake we made was to be too innovative. I think this is a lesson. It's often thought like this suggestion to people starting out with a new game, saying, hey, you have to be very innovative. You have to do something that no other game has done before. And I think when you are starting out with your first game as a studio with a pretty small team like we were at the time,
00:08:25
Speaker
Obviously you have to do something different and something unique but if you are trying to innovate in too many dimensions and too many axes then it just becomes unmanageable. So in our case the game we were trying to make was very innovative at the technological level so it was like streaming it running on the server and it was streaming the game to mobile devices that had never
00:08:48
Speaker
actually been done on iOS to that point. We were innovating on the gameplay, we were innovating on the monetization, we were innovating on too many fronts and it just became too much to handle. We would have needed a much bigger team, much more time than we had to really experiment and do AD tests and do focus groups and really learn to get all these things to a place where it really worked.
00:09:16
Speaker
Are there any things that you took from those learnings that you did implement in Everguild? Maybe it's all of it, right? But are there key things that you remember transitioning, for lack of better words?
Adapting Game Mechanics for Mobile
00:09:26
Speaker
Well, yeah. I guess one of those was precisely trying not to innovate too much and instead say, okay, let's take something that works, that we like, that we think we want to keep.
00:09:39
Speaker
But let's change something to target the niche or to offer something which others don't offer. So in this case, for example, it was taking a lot of the ideas on gameplay and monetization from Hearthstone, but making it really optimized for mobile. So we changed the game mechanics, we changed the UI, we changed a lot of things in terms of like
00:10:03
Speaker
the game, but with a very clear starting point and a very clear focus of what we were trying to achieve, how we want it to be better than Hearthstone. Obviously, we couldn't compete on production values or we couldn't compete on having established fan base for the AP, but we could compete, for example, on having a way smaller build size for mobile, which is obviously quite important for many players.
00:10:26
Speaker
we could compete on having much better performance in low-spec devices. We could compete on having a UI that was actually designed for mobile, for a more landscape and more elongated screen versus the PC where you have more space. So we approach it in that way. We say, okay, let's try to innovate in one thing rather than in everything.
00:10:51
Speaker
It's interesting. And I'm just trying to think of kind of the experience that you're talking about. And I remember if I look back in my past, when I used to go to camp, we used to play Magic the Gathering. That's the thing that we used to just kind of love sitting around the tables, playing Magic. And at that point, after that, I stopped playing card games until a few years ago, I started playing Gwent and now Marvel Snap and all these different experiences are coming up. When you're building the new game, right, and you're looking at it compared to
00:11:15
Speaker
to the previous games, right? Like, is mobile a shorter time span? When you create Horace heresy, right? And you say, hey, the average game span because this user's on mobile is probably gonna be five minutes compared to the new IP coming out of PC, maybe we can make that 15 minutes. Is that something that is real or am I making that up in my mind?
00:11:33
Speaker
No, that's absolutely real. And that was, for example, one of the things that we changed clearly compared to Hearthstone. So in Hearthstone at the time, the matches could very easily go into the 15 or 20 minutes. And we were very clear that was not fine for mobile. And so we made sure that matches in legions were
00:11:52
Speaker
five to six minutes long on average and it's also important interesting because it's both the it's a predictability of it that matters so it's not just the average but it's also what's the maximum time that the match could go on so if you even if the average is just five minutes if you know that.
00:12:12
Speaker
maybe there's some deck out there that you can get paired against that it plays very slowly and then your match could go into 15 minutes. Maybe you will not start the match because you don't want to run the risk of having to abandon midway just because you run all
Maintaining Player Engagement
00:12:27
Speaker
the time.
00:12:27
Speaker
So it's a very important thing to consider on mobile. And that said, I think some games manage to handle this very nicely. If you want to have gameplay that requires more than, say, five minutes, sometimes there's a trick of just having something meaningful you can do in the game, which will take less than five minutes.
00:12:53
Speaker
so that maybe you don't come in and play like a full raid with your friends because that's going to take, I don't know, half an hour. But if you have something that you can come in and do, that's something that mobile games, some mobile games have done really well. So I mean Clash of Clans, you can come in and just like collect your resources and maybe you don't have time to be like playing battles, but there's an incentive for you to come back to the game when you have a minute or two.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm trying to think some of the other games I've played where they've done that they started off with this small premise and then just added and then it almost feels like it's too much. There's certain games I just stopped playing because they've added so many different mechanics to it where it was this easy game I could pick up and I could start doing all of a sudden it's like homework every day I had to go and I had to do like
00:13:37
Speaker
15 different tasks and I think there's almost this sprawl of too much of that I like your what you're going it's almost like an escape point certain periods of time right like five minutes almost like a checkpoint save this come back later and finish it but some of them I think just I don't know maybe I'm just talking about like you almost create another game with these mechanics because you've turned a match three game into
00:13:56
Speaker
a whole other monster. Well, I think that's sort of inevitable. I mean, one trend that I see happening certainly with free to play games, whether it's mobile or PC, I don't think in this sense it makes a massive difference. It's really hard nowadays to get players into your game. There's just too many games out there. And so it's very important
00:14:20
Speaker
Like once a player comes in and they like the game and they enjoy playing it, just to make sure that you can keep these players coming back and playing the game for a long time. Very often, you need a lot of depth in the game for that to happen. So if you very quickly just understand everything and then after a month, two months, however long, well, you've kind of seen everything there is to the game, right?
00:14:46
Speaker
So having depth in one way or another, so that even after months of playing the game, you're still enjoying it because you're discovering new ways to play. Obviously, releasing content regularly helps a lot because, for example, in our card games, we make regular expansions while having new armies and new cards to play with. Also, it's a great way to keep players coming back to see what's new and enjoying it
Managing Player Feedback
00:15:10
Speaker
again. But I think there's this element of saying, hey, once you have
00:15:14
Speaker
players that enjoy your game, there's so much focus on how do I keep these players engaged and enjoying the game and coming back for more.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like what you're kind of talking through just makes it sound like different seasons to me, right? We see seasons getting games now, right? And I think with a card game, it's pivotal, right? Because you update cards, you create new cards, there's new actions that are taken. So I'm curious about the different types of metrics that you measure. We kind of talked about screen time. I'm not sure if you truly measure how long someone's in a game or how long a match takes. I'm sure it's all common metrics that exist. But
00:15:47
Speaker
I'm also thinking out loud, right? You can nerf cards, you can buff cards based on actions you're seeing. Are these things that you measure and what types of tools do you have to help you understand what's happening? Because it seems to get quite complex.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yes. Well, so I think it's always a mix of the qualitative feedback that we get through the different channels where we can see what players are saying, whether it's on the Discord channel or the feedback that they sometimes send us directly through the support channels or what we see, for example, when content creators are covering the game. So we see the stuff that you're saying about the game, if they are enjoying it or which parts they are not.
00:16:28
Speaker
enjoying the comments from their viewers so we try to get all this qualitative feedback and then we try to compare that against the quantitative feedback so we obviously look at the analytics and we say okay like how many players are coming back that's like the most important metric how much are they playing and which game modes they are playing because we have
00:16:51
Speaker
multiple different game modes. Some of them are against the AI, so like PBE modes and others are PPP. So we are trying to keep our needs, even though there's a lot of data and KPIs in there.
00:17:06
Speaker
Ultimately, you also need this intuition. And that's where the qualitative data comes in. I'm saying, what's going on here? It's also because the numbers will sometimes lack the problem. So if you, for example, it's happened before. We released a new army and it has some mechanic that players are not enjoying.
00:17:28
Speaker
They are not liking it and they are complaining about it. It doesn't necessarily get reflected in the figures straight away. Because, like, hey, someone is enjoying the game, suddenly something he doesn't like doesn't mean he'll leave immediately.
00:17:42
Speaker
But if you don't address that complaint or that issue or that mechanic that players are not enjoying, then probably like a few weeks down the line, you will lose that pleasure. And by then, it may be too late to do anything about it. So it's really a mix of the two things and ultimately also, you know, a sort of intuition, I guess, of saying, okay, it's like, because ultimately what we do is, to a large extent, it's just managing players' frustration.
00:18:12
Speaker
in a sense, right? There's a certain level of frustration which is desirable. If everything is too easy, people get everything too fast, they understand all the mechanics immediately, then there's no challenge, there's no fun. But if there's too much frustration, it's a bit of a problem, right? So there's an element I think of subjective judgment and say, hey, are we in the right spot?
00:18:39
Speaker
or do we have a problem that we have to address? It's funny. We get asked that a lot. We collect a lot of data and we have a lot of information. People want more and more. It's one thing to have data, but you have to make insights and understand what this is.
00:18:58
Speaker
doesn't really help and I always like to tell people and everyone blows me off like you have to trust your gut sometimes and I think that's kind of where you're going like trust your intuition trust your gut like this something seems off with this and I can't quite measure it I can't quite tell what's up I think what's important to you say is you mentioned you listen to your feedback on discord I saw you also have a very active subreddit as well right so
00:19:17
Speaker
I want to continue on that conversation. But my question is, how are you managing this feedback from all these different noisy channels? I imagine there's like a sense of fear of, Oh my God, what's gonna happen on Reddit or Discord today? It's just nonstop. Yeah. I mean, for the most part, I wouldn't say there's fear necessarily.
Credibility with Warhammer Fans
00:19:37
Speaker
I mean, we've had some episodes sometimes when we've done something that a lot of players really
00:19:42
Speaker
didn't like. And then we've had some backlash. And then it's like, well, the important thing there is to really recognize when something like that happens and react as quickly as possible. Because generally, the players who complain the most are also the most engaged. They are also the most like, they really like in love with the game, or maybe they hate the game, but they still have like a very
00:20:10
Speaker
active involvement and engagement in the game and in the community and so it's important to recognize when you've messed up and try to address it as quickly as possible and it happens it happens inevitably because we are releasing new content every friday inevitably we sometimes get things wrong and so it's it's being able to tell that apart from the more
00:20:33
Speaker
usual situation where there's always some vocal people who complain about stuff and it's fine. Sometimes they have a point, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the majority of players are feeling the same way or that there is a problem you have to address. So, you know, it's, uh, it does require a filter saying when, when there is a fire versus, well, it's just a normal day to day.
00:20:59
Speaker
And I think the way we do that to some extent is obviously a lot of our team members are also players themselves. And they are also somehow like with the finger on the pulse of what people are saying on the different channels. And the advantage we have is that the different
00:21:15
Speaker
People in the team are engaged in different channels. So we know what's going on in credit. We know what's going on in this court We know what it's going on like on the BK. We have like a big Russian-speaking community of players as well. We have pretty sizable number of Chinese players as well who don't communicate with us as often and it's harder to know what they are and
00:21:37
Speaker
talking about, but sometimes if something is really problematic, they will actually reach out as well. So sometimes what we do is simply triangulate. Like, okay, like some people are complaining a lot on Discord about something, but it hasn't come up on Reddit, or it hasn't come up in the Russian community, or it hasn't come up with, it's like, well, maybe it's not so bad, right?
00:21:59
Speaker
It's not that we don't pay attention to it, but the fear is where that intuition has to come in and say, OK, to what extent is this really a problem versus just a very loud minority? Yeah, it's one of those things where if there's smoke, there could be fire, but you don't want to overreact beforehand. And you mentioned kind of some people might hate the game, and I truly think if people hate the game, it means they actually love it and they're just frustrated, right? I mean, if someone takes the time to truly hate something, it means that they spend enough time in it to get to know it and understanding that.
00:22:29
Speaker
I guess my question is, when you have different users that are monitoring these different channels, do you have like a central repository where you and the Everguild team just kind of share this information? Like I heard this on VK, I heard this on Twitter, I heard this on... How do you... No, so we don't have such a structured process. It's something that happens a bit more naturally. So, I mean, we have no hands every day, where every time we release something new, we'll spend like a few minutes saying, okay, like how
00:22:59
Speaker
How has been the reaction to this? What have you guys seen in the different social media and the different channels? Have you seen many complaints? And then if we see that there's been problems or complaints in one place and the other say, yeah, I've also seen that in this other place, then we'll obviously dig deeper into that. And then we'll look at the KPIs as well and say, OK, is this like
00:23:21
Speaker
For example, if they are complaining about a certain mechanic or a certain deck or warbler being too strong or too toxic, well, the first thing we do is go and check how often it has been played. Because if it has suddenly become super popular and everybody's playing that toxic deck, then we have a problem. If it's still something that's niche, that's kind of an edge case,
00:23:48
Speaker
then do we really need to address that? Or maybe we do, but not urgently. We just leave it for the next balance patch. So we do have a bit of a process, but it's nothing super structured, I guess. And with these channels, you have an IP that has a passionate fan base, and they can be very protective of their IP wanting to make sure that no one's
00:24:13
Speaker
doing it wrong, right? And how do you how do I ask this question? Right? How do you manage the pressure of dealing with the Warhammer IP? Do the fans come after you at all? Do they make recommendations? Do they sometimes? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's a we've never had too much of a problem with that because we are fans and ourselves most majority of the team is very
00:24:42
Speaker
a dedicated part of Warhammer. Obviously, we've been doing Warhammer games for years now so that there's a bit of a self-selection when it comes to applying to work with us. Obviously, we attract people who like the Warhammer universe themselves. That's not really too much of a problem. I think what really matters is to show that appreciation for the IP yourself.
00:25:12
Speaker
There are, and that very often comes down to details which you didn't need to put effort into, but you've done nevertheless. Like one example, for example, like that we have in legions is that all the characters have these voiceovers, right? When they come into the match, they have like some lines you can use. And we created some Easter eggs, which is that certain matches, certain pairs of characters, if they have an interesting backstory in the novels,
00:25:42
Speaker
then we created a special introductory line for those two characters that you can only hear when they happen to be matched against each other. So when you do things like that, when you go that extra mile and showing that, hey,
00:25:57
Speaker
Like, we care about this as well. We've read these novels. We like these characters. And so we want to convey that. I think that gives you a lot of credibility with the community. It doesn't keep them from telling you every time you get something wrong. And, you know, we do our best not to like to get everything right. But sometimes we've made some mistakes, like maybe, I don't know, we've put the wrong helmet.
00:26:19
Speaker
with certain armor and you know we've missed that and against Workshop who reviews all these they've missed that too somehow and then players tell us like within a minute of the new content coming up we just fix it I think
00:26:34
Speaker
This is, again, something that is easy to say, but I think you have to prove it every day that when you make some mistake, you just go in and fix it as quickly as possible. That's what we try to do. It's fun. It sounds like it's like a little Easter exit in the game when you find the right two people to match and you get that fun, fun thing. As a fan, you'd be like, oh, that's awesome.
00:26:56
Speaker
Kind of that's fun. And when you talk about you created a dragon Lords, right? And then from that point, you said you heard from the Warhammer IP. Do you reach out to them? Do they reach out to you? How does that conversation actually happen? So in this case, it wasn't so difficult because a games workshop has the licensing team that they've set up like long ago. They've been doing licensed video games for many years.
00:27:21
Speaker
And they tend to go to a lot of the conferences, like games conferences and licensing conferences around the world, but especially in Europe and especially in the UK.
Joining Stillfront Group
00:27:32
Speaker
So yeah, we just met them at one of these conferences. We actually met them when we were developing Dragon Lords to see if we could, and we pitched like using one of their IPs, but it didn't fly at that time. But then after we had released the first card game and we have proven that
00:27:49
Speaker
you know, we could make a game of that genre of decent quality, then that gave them, I think, more confidence to partner with us to do another card game. I want to think back to something you said a little earlier, right? With you and your co-founder, Isabella, you guys make all these games, and I'm just curious, like, two of you sit down and actually play these card games, so you guys pick up other competitor games, and other competitor games, like Snap and the other ones, and talk about the mechanics that you like and you don't like,
00:28:17
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah. That we have to do. I mean, I've been playing a lot of Snap as well lately. I mean, it's not, it's again, both for work purposes, because we need to understand every time like one of these new games, Snap is a great example, they always innovate, they always bring something new to the table. And I think understanding how that works and understanding how that makes you feel as a player, like what's the experience of going through it, it's quite important.
00:28:45
Speaker
But even more than that, we love these kind of games. I used to play a lot of Magic the Gathering and many other physical card games like Vampire, Spellhammer, Doomtrooper back in the day many years ago. So yeah, it's obviously a type of game that we enjoy. So it's easy to play these new games when they come up. Who's better between you and Isabel? Who gets more of the wins?
00:29:12
Speaker
I think that could land me in trouble. Fair enough. I'm going to ask this next question. If I can't ask this, I'll edit all this out. But you are a part of...
00:29:39
Speaker
All of the above? I mean, all of it has...
00:29:42
Speaker
So, yeah, just to give a bit of background on that. So, we joined Steel from Group in the middle of the lockdowns during the pandemic. And, well, it was a difficult decision, but I think we found a company where we could really fit in. And by that, I mean one thing that really sets Steel from the part is that it's very decentralized and each studio has a lot of autonomy.
00:30:10
Speaker
So it allowed us to keep doing what we wanted to do, but with more resources. Like, for example, when it comes to scaling the game via marketing rather than doing the marketing ourselves, which is quite both an art and a science. And it's hard. And it's something where if you are a small studio, it's very hard to compete with big players.
00:30:37
Speaker
So while in part of Steelfront allows us to leverage a lot of their expertise and there's a marketing hub that can either take over these activities for us or just give us advice on how to do it. And it also gives you credibility. And like when, for example, like coming up with this bigger deal with Games Workshop, obviously having the backing of a large company helps a lot.
00:31:02
Speaker
So I would say generally we've been quite happy with joining Silicon. Yeah, it's good to know. I think a lot of companies want to look at that, right? And you hear about different stories about different parent organizations, right? Whether it be in Electronic Arts or Microsoft or something else, how to handle it, I guess.
00:31:20
Speaker
there's positives to both sides, right? Decentralization, you're still able to do whatever you want to do rather than use this tool, use that technology, use this, right? Then you're kind of forced into a square hole. Yeah, but it sounds like you still have that freedom to do what you want to do with that safety net behind you. I mean, it inevitably adds a bit of extra overhead, extra reporting, extra, I mean, still from this, it's like a trade it
00:31:47
Speaker
companies in the stock exchange. So it has some like, additional like accounting becomes more important, you have to do it faster and better. And obviously, there's some reporting lines. But generally, certainly for us, it hasn't been much of a draw. That's great. It's good to hear.
Attracting New Audiences
00:32:08
Speaker
Let's talk more about kind of this new IP or the new project you're working on. We don't have to go too much into details about it. But when you start alpha testing, beta testing these games, you take a look at games like Legion and see who your top players are. And are they the ones you want to invite to the alpha or do you go about a different way to kind of approach how you want to do that? Yeah, it's a mix. It's a mix. So with obviously with Warp Forge, we have many of the
00:32:15
Speaker
And
00:32:31
Speaker
I would say most of the long-term players of horror series legions, they are also very interested in playing waterforged as well because they love the AP, they see it's going to be a... I would say certainly when it comes to production values, it's going to be a better game than legions. There are things which are great about legions and we certainly plan to keep supporting that game because we think it's, in many ways, it's quite unique and waterforged will not necessarily
00:32:57
Speaker
replicate a lot of the things that make it unique. And we are aiming to create two games which kind of live in parallel and even have like players playing both.
00:33:08
Speaker
and enjoying them for different reasons. So we don't want to completely cannibalize legions when we release Waterforge. But yeah, so we've had a lot of players obviously being very interested in taking part in the alpha and the demos that we've done before. But at the same time, we want to make sure that we reach out to other audiences.
00:33:28
Speaker
making a very conscious effort, both the Warhammer fans who may not have played Legions before, but even beyond that, we want to reach players of Magic, of Gwent or Runeterra and show them, hey, this is a card game that actually brings a lot of new things to the table. And even if you are not a fan of Warhammer, you'll probably become one.
00:33:50
Speaker
But, you know, coming for the card game, not only for the Warhammer brand, because we think you'll enjoy it. It's interesting. I didn't really think about the cannibalization of kind of your player base by offering a new game, right? A lot of times you think of like Call of Duty versus the next iteration of Call of Duty, and you want that player base to migrate to the newer game and keep that. But in this case, you probably still want people to play both games. So if you
00:34:15
Speaker
send too many people the invite to the new game that play the old game, it might just completely diminish that player base. It may or may not happen. So what our expectation is that there are players who are super engaged, trying to compete to be the best in the game, and they are playing eight hours a day. Obviously, it's very hard to do that on more than one game at a time.
00:34:38
Speaker
But that is not the majority of players. The majority of players play a bit more casually. They may play one hour a day, half an hour, two hours, it depends. But I think the majority of our players play other games as well. It's not only Legion. Some of them play Marvel Snap or they play many other, not only card games, other genres as well.
00:34:57
Speaker
So we don't see why these players, if they are playing four or five games, two of them could be workforce and legions, because they will offer somewhat different things.
Challenges of Card Games on Consoles
00:35:09
Speaker
When you are building it,
00:35:12
Speaker
You said multi-platform. Do you think about console? Because now I think out loud as well. Do I want to play a card game on a console? I don't know. But PC makes sense. Are you looking at console? Is it still being built in Unity? I guess there's a whole bunch of different questions there. Yeah. Console is an interesting world that we haven't really explored much. We have checked a couple of times about the idea of launching legions on the Switch.
00:35:40
Speaker
because it does feel like the more natural fit like playing on the screen. It's a bit like a tablet in that sense and that would run really well. But console does pose like a serious challenge that we are not used to and it's like the approval times of getting updates.
00:35:58
Speaker
It's even if you just distribute digitally, even leaving aside all the challenges of actually creating disks or cartridges with your game. But even if you distribute digitally, the speed that we are used to on mobile and on PC where we can compile a new client, an update.
00:36:19
Speaker
and have it in players' hands in a day or two. That's not something you can do on console. And so that's something that we have to be very, very careful of. Because if we release, for example, we are a very dynamic company. We have very dynamic games. We release content all the time. And we sometimes make mistakes or have bugs or even a mechanic that is not playing out, as we expected.
00:36:48
Speaker
And we're used to being able to react very quickly. So console, in that sense, poses a big challenge. And that's been the main thing that's been keeping us or holding us back. It's funny. I'm sitting here thinking, like, do I really want to use my controller to play a card game? And I didn't even.
00:37:05
Speaker
come to me. I've heard people complain about the approval times from Microsoft or from Sony to be able to push updates. And yeah, I mean, the amount of times that you don't even realize you release an update with a card that's just not balanced properly. And all of a sudden, if you have to wait on console, that's gonna be a terrible experience for the player itself. I mean, there are there are card games on console. There's like when there's a Pokemon, Jugioh, there are card games which are doing relatively well. So it's not that I think that obviously the controllers are
00:37:33
Speaker
something we haven't really figured out, but I think there's probably a solution for that. But the more behind the scenes part of getting the updates, that's what for us so far has really held us back. If you could go back to Andres in 2000, so 23 years ago, and give yourself some advice of things that you've learned over the years, is there something specific you would tell yourself then?
Andres' Career Reflection
00:38:00
Speaker
Oh, it's a good one.
00:38:03
Speaker
First of all, back when I finished, 23 years ago, I was at university, I never really considered gaming as a career prospect, which is strange because it's not like the industry in Spain is not huge, but it's not that small. And I had even some friends working there, but I was quite keen to become an entrepreneur and gaming was my hobby, but never really thought of that as a career path.
00:38:31
Speaker
And so I went to consulting to learn a bit more about like business in general, did my MBA. And I think, you know, in a way, I probably came into the industry at the right time where I could bring together not just my, my passion about games, but also the, my learnings about business in general, because with free to play.
00:38:54
Speaker
you really have to merge the two into the game. Before you could just develop a great game without having to worry too much about the economics. There was a publisher who cared about doing the marketing and just trying to sell as many units as possible. But now with pre-to-play, the game itself, you have to
00:39:14
Speaker
to worry about how the economy is balanced, how did you manage it long term. Even the marketing becomes very integrated with the game development itself. So you do the marketing not just at launch to get as many players to try it as possible.
00:39:30
Speaker
but you do marketing throughout the lifetime whenever you have a big update or whenever you release a new feature. Many marketing campaigns are focused on re-engagement, bringing back players who have played and enjoyed your game for a while, but then they disengage at some point. Very often,
00:39:49
Speaker
not because they wanted to stop playing, not because they decided that they no longer want to play the game. Very often players stop playing simply because they start trying a new game or a new Netflix show comes up or they just won't go on holidays and they come back and for some reason it stops being part of their daily routine. And so very often
00:40:14
Speaker
just letting them know that, hey, there's a new army that just came into the game and it's enough to bring them back and to re-engage them. So, you know, all the business elements, the marketing, the monetization, the economy are now very integrated with the core game.
00:40:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting how, I mean, in the 2000s, right, we're talking Dreamcast and PS2 era, and that's like the first kick of online gaming, I remember, because I had the Dreamcast end. I mean, then we had the rise of mobile, which changed gaming forever, right? Then we started seeing the free to play, like you said, right, where it's less about creating the game. Well, it's less about creating the perfect game and just getting something enjoyable to the market, then fix it once it's launched. And
00:41:00
Speaker
For better or worse, that's where we are today. It seems like a pivotal time in history for gaming. Yeah, I think the expectations have been rising steadily on what people expect, even on mobile games on release.
Gaming Industry's Service Model Evolution
00:41:14
Speaker
But yeah, there's certainly, I see it much more as a service nowadays. It's not enough to just release the best possible game. You have to think, hey, you're going to be providing a service, hopefully for many years. And so you have to have this long-term plan
00:41:30
Speaker
in place of how you plan to grow and keep your game.
00:41:33
Speaker
I think it's a mix between the two, or a bound, so you have to understand what you're creating. And I go back to the game Redfall, because I was very excited about Redfall, which didn't want to be a game to the service, right? Like, Arkane was known for their single-player, for their immersive experience, but they were kind of forced to go down a route that just didn't fit. So, if you look at a single-player game, maybe you do want to create that immersive experience. You don't care about the service side of it. Just know what you're building, and don't try and conquer the whole world, I guess, with a single game.
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, we've chosen the genre, which is like the in a way that path was set for us, because obviously magic had created the genre and also showed how to manage it long term. And like one anecdote, I remember that surprised me, but initially, but then I completely understand.
00:42:22
Speaker
When we were releasing our first game, Dragon Lords, our first card game, and we were showing it to players. We did a prayer release where we showed it at a trade fair in person. And a lot of players were asking us, before it was released,
00:42:38
Speaker
what the long-term plan was they wanted to know hey how often are you going to do expansion how certain can i be basically that you will not just die out in a few months and how are you planning to do like rotations things like that i think that comes from the fact that.
00:42:55
Speaker
You know, after the success of Magic for a while, there were lots of card games being launched, physical card games being launched, and lots of players, myself included sometimes, getting very excited about the new card game. I remember buying a lot of Star Wars CCG cards, and then there was only like one expansion.
00:43:13
Speaker
And then they stopped releasing more expansions and suddenly it's like, okay, I enjoyed this game. I invested a lot of time and money in playing this game. And suddenly the moment it stops being supported, then there's no more tournaments and people stop playing. And you know, I think a lot of long-term or old car game players have been burned by that. And so they really care about how you are planning to run the game in the long-term.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah, right. If you're gonna make an investment, you want to make sure it's a fairly sound investment. It's probably intimidating questions to be asked before you even launch like, I'm hoping we're here forever. But it's up to you guys. Does having your sister, Isabella, as a co-founder help you in that case, where you could bounce ideas between each other? Yeah, absolutely. I think in our case, in particular, we also have like a very, very different perspective. I'm way more like
00:44:11
Speaker
analytical and kind of pragmatic. And I'm more concerned about just the mechanics at the very abstract level. And she's more of an artist. I mean, she wasn't an artist before doing artistic photography. And so she brings a very different perspective, much more about, hey, how does this actually feel when you
00:44:34
Speaker
What impression do you convey? How do we make this look good? So when it comes to the UI, to the UX, to the artistic part, but also to the game mechanics, I think she sees them differently. So we argue a lot, but I think that's for the better.
00:44:55
Speaker
I have one last question, because I just want to be conscious of your time today. And I think we could talk forever. I'm really enjoying this conversation.
Potential of AI in Gaming
00:45:02
Speaker
But my last question I'd like to ask from all my guests are what current technologies are out there that you see that you're excited about? Yeah, I mean, AI, I think is the answer. It's been the common answer. Yeah, it's hard. Like once you start dipping your toes into it, it's hard not to be both, I think, excited and scared at the same time.
00:45:24
Speaker
I'm both excited at the things I see it doing. I mean, in our case, we are not using it, for example, to generate art or text assets for the games, because we use the Game Sports Shop license.
00:45:41
Speaker
all the copyright and the intellectual property issues around AI are still extremely unclear how that works. So obviously that's something we are not even exploring at the professional level, but at the personal level, I'm really looking into this because I think this is going to change our industry and our world. We are very keen to at least see it coming as far as we can.
00:46:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting thing, right? I understand, obviously, your game is very big about artwork, right? Because it's a card game. And you want to make that original, you want to make that yours, but it's curious on where you can use the different parts of AI. I mean, even just analyzing data, like we talked about in the beginning of the podcast, like what trends do you see? It would be interesting to see what types of thoughts AI can come up with before we can actually see. And I don't think we're going to be in a quite place yet where we see true things coming out of it. But it'll be an interesting future to come across.
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think certainly for gaming, I see some ideas being floated around. I don't know if I mean, there's the obvious, very basic ones of saying, hey, let's try to save costs by doing this through AI. That's obviously very something very obvious. And I think some games are doing that.
00:46:57
Speaker
But I'm way more interested in the things that you simply couldn't do before, and you can suddenly do now. Like, for example, just having the NPCs controlled by AI, so rather than you having to program all the possible interactions, if you could bring that level of intelligence into the game, suddenly
00:47:19
Speaker
It opens up possibilities that didn't exist before and that's what I'm much more interested in. Is there new games we could do that didn't exist? I'm excited about playing a game one day and just talking to an NPC for hours and having just a unique conversation that's generating on the fly. I think it's going to be
00:47:40
Speaker
amazingly immersive as a technology that really helped pull you into it, especially when it knows who your character is, it knows what your stats are, it will know who you are. It's a cool thought about what the future can be of video games.
00:47:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. A bit scary as well. Yeah, that's my kid's problem. That's what I like to think. But Andres, thank you so much. I think this was a great conversation. As I said, I think we can keep talking. But before you go, is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience or anything in general?
00:48:12
Speaker
No, I mean, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. I think, well, just a reminder that we have like Workforge coming up and it's going to be a great card game based in the 140,000 universe and it's already in closed alpha. So we do invite anyone who could be interested to join like the waylist to sign up for the closed alpha and we're distributing keys proudly, hopefully launching the game before the end of the year. Cool.
00:48:39
Speaker
And we'll post all of Andres and Workforge and hearsay on our Player Engage website. So we'll have all that information again. Andres, thank you so much for that. And I hope you have a good rest of your day. Thank you very much. Don't actually leave yet.