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Love, Power, Wealth: The True Drivers of Player Behavior
45 Plays10 days ago
Episode Summary:
Mark Otero (CEO of Azra Games, creator of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes) joins Player Driven to break down the real reason most games fail — they ignore what players actually want. In this raw, philosophical, and brutally honest conversation, Mark introduces the Hierarchy of Fun — a 5-layer model for building long-lasting emotional engagement in games.
From escaping poverty through fantasy as a child in South Korea, to scaling a yogurt shop to fund his first game studio, to building billion-dollar RPGs at EA, Mark’s story is a masterclass in design thinking, human behavior, and creative conviction. He also shares why AI will either multiply your creativity or expose your culture — and how his new title Ungodly aims to reset the bar for 4th-gen RPGs.
This episode is for game devs, LiveOps leaders, publishing execs, and anyone asking: Why do some games stick... and others don’t?
📌 Key Takeaways
1. The Hierarchy of Fun
Mark breaks down his 5-layer framework for sustainable game engagement:
- First impression
- Core loop
- Progression
- Meta mastery
- Emotional connection
Each layer must make the player feel something — and if you flip it, it becomes your funnel for long-term retention.
2. Design for Primal Desires, Not Personas
Mark argues that all player motivation maps back to love, power, or wealth. Most games try to broaden appeal and end up designing for no one. Pick one fantasy — and serve it ruthlessly.
3. 4th-Gen RPGs and the 9-Second Rule
With mobile phones now as powerful as last-gen consoles, we’ve entered a new generation of RPGs. Ungodly is designed to immerse players in 9 seconds, not 9 minutes — a 60x improvement over the old model.
⏱️ Timestamps
01:00 — Mark’s origin story: poverty, fantasy, and Dungeons & Dragons as a lifeline
14:00 — The Hierarchy of Fun: a new model for player experience
31:00 — Why most games fail when they abandon their core fantasy
44:00 — What makes a 4th-gen RPG, and how Ungodly is redefining immersion
58:00 — AI, culture, and the edge small studios have (if they move fast)
🧠 SEO Keywords (for search + episode description)
- game design philosophy
- hierarchy of fun
- player motivation design
- RPG design frameworks
- mobile RPG engagement
- Azra Games Ungodly
- retention in game design
- AI in game development
- game publishing strategy
- Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes insights
🎙️ Guest
Mark Otero
CEO & Founder of Azra Games. Former GM at EA Capital Games, creator of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Veteran in collectible RPGs and systems design.
🔗 Azra Games
🔗 Mark on LinkedIn
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Mark Otero
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Player Driven, everyone. Today, we are joined by Mark Otero. He is the CEO and founder of Azure Games, and he has got a really cool background I'm excited to dig into. Some other of his achievements that we're going to kind of talk about is that he co-founded Kick Nation and helped grow that studio to over 70 people.
00:00:17
Speaker
ah He got that, he launched eight collectibles and combat RPG games, and he helped built out EA Capital Games, which helped launch Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, which generated over $1 billion dollars in revenue.
00:00:31
Speaker
It had over 100 million players playing the game and download, and it was one of the top mobile games for over six years in a row. And not many people can say that they had a part or a piece to do with that. So I'm so excited to dig more into this.
00:00:44
Speaker
Mark, sorry for that lengthy intro. Thank you so much for joining us today. How are you? I'm doing great.
Career Shift from Finance to Gaming
00:00:50
Speaker
um Usually when i when I have these type of conversations, I go through a ritual.
00:00:56
Speaker
you know Some people who play sports, you know they they may put some bubble gum in their left pocket or they do some ritual. I have coffee, tea, and a Coke. ah Beautiful. so Tell me, how do you take your coffee? Coffee is a very big ritual to me as well.
00:01:11
Speaker
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I take my coffee only black. i take I take my black tea sometimes with a twist of lemon ah with some honey on some days.
00:01:22
Speaker
And then I like i like my Coke, um just a regular Coke. So you like your caffeine. Caffeine is what helps kind of drive you, you might say. Yeah, it's definitely a great stimulate.
00:01:34
Speaker
yeah That's for sure. but um I want to talk about your journey, right? um Many people might just kind of go through the recap of saying, hey, here's my resume here of what I've done. But when we did our pre-call the other day, you made this really interesting statement, which was by the time you choose a game, that game already has chosen you And you built a monster game, one of the biggest games we've seen. You decided to leave gaming and work for a hedge fund.
00:02:02
Speaker
And then you decided to get pulled back in. And I'm curious, you went through that. So can you kind of give us your story of kind of how that all came to be and what brought you back here? Yeah. So...
00:02:14
Speaker
You know, i um I started my career, um you know, after going to graduate school. um i was studying, i was getting a dual master's at the time in AI and then decided to also get an MBA.
00:02:27
Speaker
I wanted to pick something that I knew nothing about. And so my first career was actually in finance um as as an analyst. And so I started there and I realized that, you know,
00:02:41
Speaker
I had a ah tendency to utilize technology for understanding data and grew ah an incredible appreciation for that, how data can inform financial decision-making and performance of a variety of fund managers. and But I've always wanted to make video games, specifically role-playing games.
00:03:02
Speaker
And the reason for that is it goes back really, I think, to my childhood in South Korea, growing up in the 70s. I grew up in a... you know, at the time, a a place called Wee Jon Bu, which had a U.S. military base there.
00:03:16
Speaker
And so, you know, at the time, it was a small shanty town that we lived in. And I got exposure to Western literature, like Dungeons and Dragons and Conan, and gore, which I think is partly censored now.
00:03:32
Speaker
And I didn't speak English. And so I wanted to understand what this incredible um literature was. And so started to learn English. English is my second language.
00:03:43
Speaker
And it was an incredible escape for me. you know a lot of people don't know this, but in the 60s and 70s for South Korea, it was one of the poorest countries in the world.
00:03:57
Speaker
It had all sorts of issues, specifically with famine and a lack of job opportunities. And so, you know, we fit that statistic. And Dungeons and Dragons and role-playing games provided an escape for me.
00:04:13
Speaker
It was very empowering. I was able to escape into these fantasy worlds and then ended up mastering the rule set, the second edition. And I knew...
00:04:24
Speaker
you know, I needed this to help, you know, manage, you know, some of the suffering at that time. And I look back and I'm very grateful for that because it opened up my imagination.
00:04:36
Speaker
Then I became a dungeon master for over 10 years. Yes, I was one of those nerds in high school that lugged around this big backpack, not necessarily with school books because we had lockers back then, but with three to four dungeon dragon books and my binders.
00:04:51
Speaker
worth of material. And I would, we would play Dungeon Dragons in high school and all the way through college, I'd manage two different groups of parties. And i
Building Click Nation and Acquisition by EA
00:05:00
Speaker
was like, this is what I want to do.
00:05:01
Speaker
But then life takes over. You know, you graduate from undergraduate with a computer science degree, needed to get, you know, a real job, And then Frankl Templeton Investment, which is a great company, and they ended up hiring me.
00:05:17
Speaker
And I did well enough to eventually manage a department in three years. um But I wasn't fully happy. And I thought I had it all. I had a house.
00:05:29
Speaker
I was dating on a regular basis. I was a young man in his mid to late 20s at this point in time. but I was really unsatisfied because I felt like my life should have taken a different turn.
00:05:43
Speaker
And, um, so sold my house, moved in with my mom, spent six months, um, revisiting my purpose in life. ah My mom thought I was absolutely batshit crazy.
00:05:58
Speaker
Um, and open up a yogurt shop, you're like, wow, that has nothing to with role playing games. You're right, has nothing to do with role playing games. But it has everything to do with my story.
00:06:10
Speaker
And so i ended up creating this yogurt shop, formulated my own frozen yogurt, hired a food chemist, and it became a hit. It was the most popular yogurt shop in Sacramento. Why did I do that?
00:06:22
Speaker
Because I knew I needed some cash flow to to build a game. um or to to pursue what I wanted to do. And thankfully, the yogurt shop was a huge hit. It was called Mochi Yogurt.
00:06:37
Speaker
um And then i created a bunch of apps that no one will ever remember, about 30 of them. They all failed, by the way, miserably failed. Because I was chasing what I thought I should be doing as a tech entrepreneur.
00:06:51
Speaker
And on my 30th app, I decided, you know what, I'm about ready to run out of money. um I've got to pursue something that I'm going to really care about.
00:07:04
Speaker
was like, how about I make a game? And so I read every single game design book that was available in the market at the time. It was around 2008. And I found them and incredibly lacking.
00:07:15
Speaker
In fact, most were pretty terrible. And a lot of them just gave really bad advice. And so coming from a financial background of understanding and analyzing models and construction. So models are things that you construct that you can help predict either behavior or the future um of the market. And so i created models for role-playing games, my own inventions and um study the market, put the models to work and identified an opportunity in role-play. And my first game was a hit game.
00:07:52
Speaker
So in between serving yogurt shops, um I was writing up a 30-page game design document for my first game, which was called Superhero City, a free-to-play game on Facebook. It was my first collectibles and combat RPG game.
00:08:06
Speaker
The game went from making few hundred dollars a day after the game's launch to making $1,000 a day two months later to making over $20,000 day in six months to $40,000 a day year.
00:08:19
Speaker
to forty thousand dollars a day in a year Now, at this point in time, I thought I just got lucky. And I had incredible self-doubt.
00:08:30
Speaker
And so I designed my second RPG game in two weeks this time, utilizing my models. Made some changes. That game became an instant hit. It was making $20,000 to $40,000 every day, two months after launch.
00:08:49
Speaker
And so now you have this bootstrap company from a guy who's never made games before, but who has a passion for role play. And we're able to recruit people who've never made games before.
00:09:02
Speaker
And we got into a really good position. It was a very profitable company where Electronic Arts and two other companies decide to competitively bid to acquire our company, Click Nation.
00:09:17
Speaker
And so decided to go with Electronic Arts because BioWare was the um the acquiring ah company within Electronic Arts. And as you know, BioWare has a storied history in role-playing games.
00:09:32
Speaker
And Baldur's Gate, ah the first one, was my favorite RPG game in the 2000s. And so working for Dr. Ray Mazzucca, one of the co-founders there, was a dream come true.
00:09:47
Speaker
And what was really funny about meeting him and going through this process of being acquired was I had written down in a private journal of mine, as well as journaled at that time on a Google document. So you can see the timestamps where our goal was to become the Bioware of Sacramento.
00:10:09
Speaker
And this was a year before we engaged Electronic Arts. And when I showed him that, he was absolutely blown away because it was very prophetic. And so I learned tremendously under his mentorship about quality storytelling, not the mathematics of gaming or the models of gaming, but more of the the quality of of gaming itself.
00:10:34
Speaker
And so I know that was a very ah long-winded response to your question, but role play you know, for me, is very, very personal, because as a child, it was an antidote to my own suffering.
00:10:53
Speaker
And
Storytelling and Emotional Engagement in Games
00:10:54
Speaker
role playing games allowed me to explore fantasies and aspirations that I didn't have the power to, to, um to fully see through in real life. And so This is why I think role-playing games are so important for mankind.
00:11:17
Speaker
All right. I'm going to try and read some of this back here. I took a lot of notes, loved a lot of what you said, and I'm not going to be able to remember everything word for word and go for it, but I love A, the childhood core memories, right? This comes from what you have access and the ability to. I think we talk often a lot, we've been talking more these days about how making video games is becoming more accessible to more people in the world.
00:11:40
Speaker
And that's allowing new types of games to come out because now more people have access to that. And it's kind of ah along the lines of what you were mentioning. It was like, this is what we had access to at the time. And this is what you did. And you used your imagination and you built these tools out. And I think that was so cool. And then going to just keep going. I'm sorry.
00:11:56
Speaker
ah You talked about your apps... failed. And I thought it was interesting you chose the word failed. I think some people, I don't like the word failed as long as you learn something from it, but I get it at the end of the day, it did fail. But if you learn something from it you kept building, you kept going, right? Like failures, if you stop and you just give up and you didn't stop and you didn't give up. And and I liked that. And then The finance background I want to come to again because this is a big one, but I also love the ice cream shop. I think, again, you opening probably something you learned is, again, something you mentioned yesterday was that, and you didn't quite mention it like this, but you need to make a game that you want to play, right? You don't want to just follow trends, and that's what you said about your first game.
00:12:35
Speaker
29 apps where like you were following what was the trend. And then that last one, you were like, you know what? Screw the trends. And it's kind of like ice cream. It's like, I make ice cream too. And I love making ice cream. And you want to make all these funky flavors that make you happy at the end of the day. And like, you want to make it, I make cookie monster, super blue. And it makes my kids all happy. And it gets me happy. Like you want to make these things. And when you see other people get happy with your stuff that you make, you get excited and you started making money from that. And I think that's awesome. And you got into the, the, um,
00:13:04
Speaker
the acquired by BioWare, which is a great story. And I think the name was Ray Mazzucca and i apologize if I'm messing it up, but it sounds like, and I want to come back to the finance part because a lot of people I've talked to recently have been talking about economic modeling and then making games. And there's a correlation there that I can't quite put together yet, but it sounds like Ray taught you about,
00:13:24
Speaker
the experience of making games and the feeling, not the models, the feeling. And I think when you can put the feeling and the models together, then you have something that's going to be a hit. You're going to have something that people want to play. And I think ah think that's most of what I wrote down here. um I think that's super cool. And I'll stop here for a second again make sure I got that all right.
00:13:47
Speaker
That is very astute of you and very, very accurate. um The one thing I want to add to is the feel part. That is probably one of the most important things in game design.
00:14:00
Speaker
um But let me go into a bit more detail.
00:14:05
Speaker
And so something here at Osro games is we have something called what I created called the Osro games hierarchy of fun. And you could think of this as Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
00:14:20
Speaker
And it has five layers. each layer actually makes you feel something at different parts of the game. And so when, if you look at this Ozra's hierarchy of of fun, the the first layer, um,
00:14:36
Speaker
is the moment to moment experience. And that is what people see immediately. Having never played your game, they they see it. It's how most people describe games. What's the combat like? What's the world like? What's the graphics? What's the art style?
00:14:50
Speaker
You know, what's the theme? What's the lore? All that is the moment to moment. That's like like dating. It's the first impression. The layer, um and that makes you feel something like you either love the art or you hate the art.
00:15:01
Speaker
You love the music or you hate the music or you're indifferent to either one, which is terrible, by the way. um At least from a game's perspective, you don't want people to feel indifferent. You want them to feel one or the other. um Then above that layer is your core loop, which you hear a lot of people talking about.
00:15:16
Speaker
But that also makes you feel something too, because as you're engaging the game loop, you're beyond the superficial stage of the game. And the game now is is is facilitating, understanding the rules of the game.
00:15:30
Speaker
And people feel something too, by the way. they They can often feel excited. They feel competent. They're excitedly competent, right? So those are all feelings. Once they do that, they go up to the the next layer, which is the progression.
00:15:45
Speaker
The progression is when they generally are starting to have some semblance of rules mastery of the game, you know? And usually the player becomes very aware of how much effort they have to put in within the game to experience the rewards of the game as set out by the core loop.
00:16:03
Speaker
that's the third layer, the progression layer. The fourth layer is called the meta layer or mastery. The fourth layer when the player goes, I understand how this game works. I understand all the nuances of the two to 3% of the game that can help me perform even better within the game.
00:16:21
Speaker
That's called a meta layer. It's a fourth layer. The fifth layer is the emotional layer. This is a layer when you hear words like, I love this game. And more importantly, you can see that in the behavior of the player.
00:16:36
Speaker
how Often do they play every day. What's their session length? When they talk about the game to their friends, families, and loved ones, I share that hierarchy with you, because if you were to flip it, you could think of that as the player's funnel into loving your game.
00:16:57
Speaker
And so, in every stage of that funnel, of the player's experience, they will feel something along the way. So it's very important that the player feels something at the different stages of the game for different reasons.
00:17:14
Speaker
for them to truly love the game. And so I'm really glad that you brought that up. What Ray taught me was the moment to moment layer. He taught me the quality standards of how to elevate that to a world-class level.
00:17:35
Speaker
When it came to the other layers, I had developed a form of competency and in some cases mastery mathematically. of how game systems are constructed and put together because I was self-taught.
00:17:48
Speaker
But it was the top of the funnel experience that I truly am grateful for my experience at BioWare.
00:17:56
Speaker
it was You were talking about the meta mastery, that level four, and I had a conversation with another gentleman, again, economist the other day that was talking about The real mastery of an RPG isn't when you're good at making money on the market. It's when you realize how the market works and how it functions. And then all of a sudden you become the master of the universe and you can do what you want in the game.
00:18:19
Speaker
And that kind of boggled my mind. In one sense, it's kind of like a no shit type of thing. Like, yeah, no... Shit, but is that just in hindsight? Like, all of these loops make sense, and I want to try and say, no, that's not right. This is only ah applicable to RPGs, but, like, I'm thinking of even Candy Crush, and it's the same thing. You've got that core loop. You've got that progression. You've got all that stuff there, and and, I mean, we talked about this the other day, of like...
00:18:43
Speaker
This, it seems, and I'm not saying in a common sense way, like these five things have never changed in gaming. This has always been there, whether you know it or not. And a successful game nails these layers, whether they know it or not, right? Like this, again, comes down to economics and just being a model. Like you you look at this as a math equation.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yes, i I look at it a... a a model that can help facilitate and i use that word very carefully i see it as a facilitating a player's fantasy for whatever the fantasy may be and most if not all games do that, whether you're a first person shooter, you know, whether you're role playing game, whether you're candy crush, whether you're clash of clans, they're all facilitating some incredible primal need of yours that is not being fully realized in your real life.
00:19:45
Speaker
And so games in many ways, they they're different than traditional media like TV and movies in that you can interact with them.
00:19:56
Speaker
You can interact with your fantasy and pursue it. With a movie, when you watch it once, you probably receive 70% of the entertaining value from that medium. With games, the entertaining value of that medium is interactive and progressive over time.
00:20:11
Speaker
It adopts and changes with you, especially as a live service free-to-play game ah will do. And so this is what I mean by the game has chosen you.
00:20:24
Speaker
You think you have
Role-Playing Games and Cultural Reflections
00:20:25
Speaker
chosen the game. No, no, no, no. The game has the game has chosen you. And you have both found each other. And in many ways, they need each other.
00:20:36
Speaker
I think more than ever, you know, I'm 51 years old now. have two children. I have nine-year-old and a four-and-a-half-year-old. And I see how they play.
00:20:52
Speaker
um I see what entertainment that they gravitate towards. And I also see too that they have their own aspiration fantasies. Like one wants to be a robot and role play, you know, what we call trash can robot, where he gets a box and he cuts out things and he's role playing.
00:21:09
Speaker
ah no one ah Another one role plays, he loves Roblox. And he role plays the amount of Robux that he can get from his father ah when he completes his job, which he has a job at the house.
00:21:21
Speaker
I share that with you because those are really cute stories. But as adults, we role play all the time. Maybe we role play about the date we're going to have. Maybe we role play about the future that we would like to create for ourselves and our family or for yourself or whoever you want to do it for.
00:21:41
Speaker
Role play is essential for humans, whether you're an athlete, whether you're a podcaster, whether you're father or mother, whatever it is, it is a necessary component, in in in my opinion, for humans to have.
00:21:59
Speaker
Otherwise, how do we deal with all of our misery and trauma and hardships if we don't have role play, which gives us an alternate reality where we can project our future.
00:22:14
Speaker
It's fundamental to humans.
00:22:18
Speaker
It's like role-playing is another word for like faking it, even though it's not a bad thing, right? like I always meet people. I've never played Dungeons & Dragons. I'm not opposed to it. i would love to go play it. it's just I know people are afraid to play it because they get...
00:22:33
Speaker
anxiety, right? Like you need to be able to help people put their guards down, right? I think you're not going to get someone that's shy to step out of their comfort zone, and or how do you help enable someone to do that? And this may be a question that doesn't really have an ending here.
00:22:49
Speaker
You know, it's, um it's interesting, you know, when we talk about role play,
00:22:57
Speaker
I think as as as ah civilization, Western civilization, has gotten more complex, I think as humans, we've also gotten much more sophisticated in not saying anything at all to each other anymore.
00:23:14
Speaker
Where the authenticity of conversations is obfuscated, where we're incredibly kind. And so we make up all sorts of words or stretch words to mean different things. where And I think the reason for that is because in this incredibly polite Western society, there is fear of repercussions if you say something that offends anyone.
00:23:46
Speaker
But here's the thing. Because of that reality for many people,
00:23:53
Speaker
That's an even more important role where role play comes in. Where in the darkness of your room alone, from prying eyes and ears, you get to fully express and explore fantasies that would otherwise potentially be shameful to others.
00:24:12
Speaker
Or they might cast judgment. And so there is a need for role play now, even more so, than before because we we're just an incredibly over polite society.
00:24:28
Speaker
um At least from from my experience, from what I see, and what I've seen change over the last 20 to 30 years. It's hard to have
Design Philosophy: Primal Human Needs
00:24:36
Speaker
authentic conversations with people now. do Do you think part of the blame could be just accessibility to the internet and people being able to hide behind these masks of being online? And you know you can look at a game as an emotional mirror. And I hate this conversation because people... i was talking to someone yesterday. i was talking about Grand Theft Auto and how kids get the bad ideas from being playing GTA. I'm just like, no one that's ever played GTA was like, oh I'm going to go steal that car over there and drive down the street. like No one thinks like that. But the same time, if you have...
00:25:07
Speaker
this introverted child that just stays in the room all day playing boulders gate. And then like when they do leave their room, they get this anxiety, right? Like I don't want to get too deep on this, but do you think there's kind of a but cyclical nature here that not necessarily great for humanity?
00:25:25
Speaker
So, well, let's explore that for just a moment. Um, let me ask you a question. Are you human?
00:25:37
Speaker
I like to believe so. Yes. my my kids might argue that, but yes.
00:25:42
Speaker
That answer is so profound. It's profound for, for several reasons. One, there was a man and a woman who brought you into this world. Most likely they conceived and your parents also had a man and a woman who also conceived.
00:26:06
Speaker
Going back 10,000 years ago, there was a man and a woman who conceived and and had your ancestry. Why am I sharing that with you? I'm sharing that with you because as sophisticated and smart as as we believe we are, the the time span of this modern civilization age is not even a blip on the written and non-written history of mankind. It goes back hundreds of thousands of years.
00:26:42
Speaker
And so if you zoom out and take a look at that, you'll look back and go, holy shit.
00:26:52
Speaker
Humans have evolved and adopted adapted to survive from a very harsh environment trying to kill them and eat them. And if you fast forward to today, modern ideology against your primal nature that has been fine tuned for survival, by the way, it's no match against that.
00:27:18
Speaker
And so we we have these primal needs and instincts. I'm not saying to act on all of them, obviously. like But we still have these primal instincts. But at times we live in a world as if they, as if our history did not exist.
00:27:34
Speaker
Of course it did. There's a reason why people have certain preferences to certain body sizes. You know, if you were to go on Tinder and a dating profile as a man, ah you know, I'm very happily married now, been with my partner for almost a decade, but every person,
00:27:52
Speaker
Well, most men would lie about their height, right? They would add two or three inches. You'd have height inflation. And many men did that because the opposite sex preferred that. But why did they prefer that?
00:28:06
Speaker
Well, it's, these are easy answers, right? If you're a stronger, more powerful build and a bit dangerous, you can protect your family and provide food. And then if you go by the romance section at Barnes and Nobles, if they're still around, there's one in my neighborhood.
00:28:24
Speaker
And you go by the romance aisle, it's the same type of patterns where women fall in love with a dangerous, inaccessible man, whether he's a pirate or a billionaire or a doctor or a vampire.
00:28:38
Speaker
And it's because that's rooted in our human adaptation for survival. And so when you bring that to the present time of modern of the modern age, you can define that as the industrial revolution, maybe the computer age, maybe the TikTok, whatever it is.
00:28:56
Speaker
It's so insignificant against the evolution of our history that we lose sight of that and we try to pretend like that doesn't matter. And it does.
00:29:08
Speaker
And role play games is an antidote not only to suffering, but it's an antidote to to help relieve some of the feelings and thoughts that you have as a human, validating some of your desires that you don't get to fully express in your real world.
00:29:32
Speaker
And so I'm very, very fascinated and have spent my career in games just making role-playing games because I care about people.
00:29:44
Speaker
I care about servicing their needs at the end of the day. The better we service the needs, the better they reward us.
00:29:53
Speaker
It works quite well when that happens. Where we get into trouble is when we say that the adaptation and the natural evolution of humans and their natural instincts and desires, and we say those things are not natural desires.
00:30:11
Speaker
You shouldn't want these things. No, that's not true. um I think when you realize that within a video game, in a role-playing game, you have a small fraction of players um you know who advocate for something that I believe is, that goes against most people's nature.
00:30:33
Speaker
And those games oftentimes fail. And we've seen this over the last 10 years. where games are coming out and they're critically rated, except players or a large percentage of them hate them, hate those type of games and what's happened.
00:30:52
Speaker
And so it's happened this way because I think we're so used to lying and being dishonest to try to keep a polite society that it's come at at the expense of servicing the fantasies that players want to indulge in role play.
00:31:09
Speaker
I liked the wording of natural desires. I think that's a ah great way to kind of things have been whitewashed over the years. And now a lot of the natural desires are kind of blended into one where you take a game and you think, Hey, if we open this up to the male audience, we'll make double the money. But in reality, you're, you're jeopardizing the initial audience. People think you make more money widespread. Whereas if you focus on,
00:31:35
Speaker
your audience, there's potential to make more money and also a happier audience because you're making the game that they want. And I want to shift this to more on the gaming side when we talk about RPGs. Because so I didn't really understand the generation of RPGs before I had this conversation. Then once I learned about them, I looked into it and I found this fascinating because not only there are multiple generations of RPGs,
00:31:56
Speaker
all of them are still going. They just have different types of things going to it. So I'd love to get a better understanding from you kind of how you view these different generations of RPGs. What mechanics have they added? And kind of ah kind of relate this back to this human nature. are Are new generations of RPGs evolving because of how human nature is evolving?
00:32:19
Speaker
So evolving is a key choice word. um Here's some good news and bad news. We can always trick our mind that our human nature is evolving faster than nature itself. okay but But having said that, most people would probably feel cognitive dissonance when they're trying to basically say if they have these primal desires or instincts,
00:32:53
Speaker
that, that they're just, they're just, they're not real, right? So anytime you you come across a situation where you have these instincts, um you likely have a conversation your head, saying, I have to believe these other things, because that's what we're taught.
00:33:12
Speaker
And that's what we're um perhaps subjugated to by the media, whatever the media is, right, or by our peer group, But once again, the question then becomes why?
00:33:23
Speaker
Why? why why are Why are we made to believe these things? And and it really comes down to a really simple observation for me is that we like to be polite and we don't like to offend anyone.
00:33:36
Speaker
um But i I want to get back to one of my principles that I invented years ago. And one of the, of all the game design books that I read, I found them almost all universally lacking um because a game design book will focus on one layer of the hierarchy of fun, but they won't they won't put it together.
00:33:56
Speaker
And so when i when I decide to think about making a role-playing game, I go back to the philosophy of fun and it's a very simple construct. And it's basically that, one, are you human?
00:34:09
Speaker
Yes or no? Okay, once we have that answer is yes, it then goes to the next, um it it goes to the philosophy fun, which is, as a human, we oftentimes optimize across three three different aspirations, love, power, and wealth.
00:34:34
Speaker
That if you were to go and talk to anyone on the streets or your your wife, your neighbor, whoever, you can effectively get a weighted function mathematically of how they've prioritized these three things, right?
00:34:49
Speaker
And so some people prioritize love above all else and as a higher degree of a ratio relative to the other two. Why am I sharing that with you? It's because as a role play game maker, I know that.
00:35:03
Speaker
And so when I'm designing a game, if it's a power fantasy, then we're going to facilitate that fantasy ruthlessly. So if we decide to pursue a love fantasy, then we were prioritized facilitating that love fantasy.
00:35:22
Speaker
But here's something that I'm going to say that's controversial next, but it's, I think, pretty common sense.
00:35:31
Speaker
Men and women as a population group, not and not at the individual level, as a population group, If you were to look at the weighted average of men across love, power, and wealth, and you would give them 10 points to allocate, you will see a pattern.
00:35:51
Speaker
You do that for women, give them 10 points of love, power, and wealth, you will also see a pattern. I guarantee it. Once you have those patterns, you can then start designing an experience that serves those patterns.
00:36:10
Speaker
And so it just so happens for men as a general population group, they like to wait very heavily on power and wealth.
00:36:26
Speaker
In other words, for men, if you're going to make a game, you should probably prioritize that fantasy across one of those two fantasies. For women, they have an overwhelming...
00:36:41
Speaker
um trend towards love. Not all. And so when I'm designing a role-playing game, I know this.
00:36:53
Speaker
Role-playing games, the ones we make, are power fantasies. And it just so happens that 70% of the male population as a group, they enjoy that fantasy. But it also means 20% 30% women also enjoy that fantasy as well too, just not the majority.
00:37:12
Speaker
And I think going back to your earlier point of you know corporate decisions to say, hey, let's take this IP or this franchise and let's double the audience, right?
00:37:24
Speaker
Because this audience, let's say it's mostly made up of women. Let's go with The Sims as an example from EA. I bet you most of the players of that game are women. if the If there was a...
00:37:37
Speaker
decision saying, hey, we can double the revenue of the Sims by appealing to men. The next question then becomes, are you sure about that?
00:37:49
Speaker
Is that the fantasy that they want to facilitate in their lives? The answer to that question, in my opinion, is there's already a version of Sims for men.
00:38:01
Speaker
It's called Grand Theft Auto.
00:38:05
Speaker
And so let's take that to role-playing games now. Many dark fantasy role-playing games are played by men. And there was a desire to be more inclusive to include women and say, okay, how do we take this franchise and how do we double the user base, right? Double the profits, double the gross revenue.
00:38:25
Speaker
And now suddenly we've got twice the user base. But there's one problem with that.
00:38:31
Speaker
The philosophy of fun, love, power, and wealth, if you were to take a population sample of woman, love would be very highly rated, highly um allocated in terms of points.
00:38:43
Speaker
For men, power or wealth to be highly highly allocated. And so in doing that, in trying to appeal to a wider audience, they oftentimes, without realizing it, they alienate the audience that they have for their IP.
00:38:59
Speaker
And so many players feel disenfranchised um about the direction of a certain specific IP that's taken. Now, the noble intent to broaden the audience was noble.
00:39:14
Speaker
But the process by which they arrived at incorporating and changing the game You lose both audiences. You have an audience who doesn't want to play that type of game. And then you have another audience who love that game and no longer want to play it because it doesn't serve their primal needs.
00:39:30
Speaker
and So
Impact of Technology on Game Design
00:39:31
Speaker
I think the right approach would be just to be honest and say, what type of role-playing games do women want to play? As a general population sample, what type of role-playing games do men want to play?
00:39:44
Speaker
And you service their needs appropriately.
00:39:50
Speaker
I want to move this into the nine seconds of to find fun because I feel like you've built this game now with that core audience in mind, right? And how do you start to measure that success and understand who's playing these types of games? And it sounds like another thing that we talked about on our our pre-call that you brought up here, so I'm trying to pull up my notes here because I got things all over the place, was...
00:40:14
Speaker
um failure rate, it's typically high when making a new game because people don't ask the basic questions. And I think everything you were just talking about, the power, love, money, is that almost that first basic question of who are you? Well, it's who are you building a game for and what fantasy or what, what, where do they, what's their aspiration, right?
00:40:35
Speaker
um So I think that's that set failure rate is people not asking that basic questions, but can you tell me more about this nine seconds to find fun and kind of how this all meshes together? Yeah. Yeah, and so the nine seconds of fun is actually tied to your first question about the generation of collectibles and combat RPGs, specifically on mobile, specifically on mobile.
00:40:57
Speaker
um If you go back to the generation one of collectibles and combat RPGs, they're effectively the user experience. The moment to moment was largely 2D menu where you click to combat, click to activity. In a lot of cases, you didn't see the combat.
00:41:15
Speaker
You saw the stats and you also felt the stats as you accumulated power over over over the ah over over the time ah that you spend within the game, right? Improving your sword from a sword plus one to a sword plus 10 to a sword plus 100.
00:41:30
Speaker
um Generation one games, you know, generally took about 30 to 45 minutes to understand the moment to moment. Just think about that for a moment.
00:41:41
Speaker
So that's when I started making games, was right at the beginning of the free to play, as that was just beginning to take off. And Generation 2 games, as the mobile phones became more powerful, had more powerful graphical capabilities.
00:41:56
Speaker
But there were still 2D interfaces where you click to activity, click to combat, click to assemble your party of heroes and send them into combat. And you could you could see the combat play without it being interactive.
00:42:09
Speaker
But the core loop remained the durable pattern. It was the same as the Gen 1, where you have a party of of heroes, you take them into combat, you get rewards, you collect new party members or upgrade party members, you go into combat. So that core loop remained the same, right?
00:42:26
Speaker
Then Generation 3 came along in about 2011 to 2013. And it made combat...
00:42:31
Speaker
and it made combat interactive where you had turn-based combat for the first time on mobile. And it's because the the capabilities of smartphones became more powerful. However, the core loop and the progression and the meta of building your party, the most powerful party, to destroy the most powerful enemies, all of that remained durable.
00:42:58
Speaker
Third-generation collectibles and RPGs, like Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, was six to nine minutes to understand the moment to moment within the game.
00:43:10
Speaker
So generation one took 30 to 45 minutes. Generation two took half that time. Generation three took six to nine minutes. The breakthrough for generation four is that technology is once again playing a major role in this, which it generally does, is that your mobile phone, in fact, 80% eighty percent of mobile phones in tier one Western markets, their power is equivalent or greater than the previous generation of consoles.
00:43:46
Speaker
Why is that important? Well, that is important, but I'll tell you what's even more important than that is the insight of that reality.
00:43:57
Speaker
The great insight of that reality is that if you go back 20 years on PC and console gaming, something incredible happened with the moment-to-moment experience that has remained a durable pattern for most blockbuster games.
00:44:12
Speaker
And that was the camera angle changed from isometric view to behind the head. Why is that important? And why has that remained a durable, user-facing moment-to-moment breakthrough?
00:44:27
Speaker
because it gives you instant immersion.
00:44:31
Speaker
Now, let's take that insight and pair that with the reality of what I just shared earlier, that 80% of mobile phones in tier one Western markets are more powerful than the previous generation of consoles.
00:44:45
Speaker
You can take that best practice. You could bring that to mobile. And now, instead of it being six to nine minutes to fun, like the third generation game, ah collectibles and combat RPG games, you get nine seconds to fun.
00:45:01
Speaker
That is a 40 to a 60 X improvement at the top of the funnel and Azure games hierarchy of fun to get into the game immediately.
00:45:14
Speaker
You're instantly immersed.
00:45:18
Speaker
Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, by the way, was the first third gen collectibles and combat RPG game in the West, the first. As much as i love Star Wars, which is a great IP, did you know there are over 50 Star Wars mobile games and none of them, except for Star Wars Galaxy Heroes, cracked 100 million.
00:45:41
Speaker
Wow, that's crazy. Do you know why? I'll tell you two reasons. One, it's more important that you identify how technology and insights create an inflection point called a generational cycle.
00:46:05
Speaker
That is the most important decision a game maker must make. What has changed? What insight do I have? that can capitalize on this on this technology evolution or breakthrough to improve the user experience?
00:46:23
Speaker
That is the most important question to ask. And that is one of two reasons why star Wars Galaxy of Heroes did so well. The second reason is because most Star Wars games actually break the philosophy of fun.
00:46:40
Speaker
What is Star Wars? What is the fantasy of Star Wars? I'm talking about the original trilogy. What is the fantasy? If you were to ask most Star Wars people, they would give you all sorts of reasons, but I'm going to give you the answer.
00:46:56
Speaker
Using the philosophy of fun, of love, power, and wealth, you will quickly realize that Star Wars was always a power fantasy between the forces of light and the forces of dark.
00:47:07
Speaker
You know that's true. I know that's true. Once I say that, you're like, of course, that's obvious. But there's another truth with Star Wars. Prior to 2015, the collectible action figures grossed more than the sum of all movies, games, and books combined, the toys.
00:47:27
Speaker
So what does that mean? It means the movies were there to sell the collectible action figures. Why? Because collectible action figures are unlimited role-playing tools.
00:47:41
Speaker
So now, when you recognize that Star Wars is a power fantasy, and you recognize that it's about collecting toys or digital action figures, and you put those two together, you get a perfect, perfect match for collectibles and combat RPGs.
00:48:02
Speaker
And so that's what, so encapsulating that for just a moment, you have to know what you're working with here in terms of you're working with an established IP. You have to dissect it at its most fundamental first principles approach to create an authentic experience.
00:48:19
Speaker
But even more important than that, you have to identify, or you should, generational cycles. where technology and insights create an inflection point for new improved gaming experiences.
00:48:36
Speaker
And so when I'm designing a game, these are all things I invented back in 2008, 2009 that I thought were just, I got lucky, but I spent an enormous amount of time because I had limited resources and I couldn't miss.
00:48:51
Speaker
I invented all of these frameworks from the philosophy of fun to identify market cycles to before I even began designing the game.
00:49:03
Speaker
and I think most startups and game makers, they don't ask these incredible fundamental questions. What is their philosophy of fun from a primal human nature perspective?
00:49:18
Speaker
Two, what is idea the market cycle where it could be by the time your game is done? And are you at the beginning of the cycle or are you at the late cycle?
00:49:31
Speaker
I'll give you guys a hint. If there is a lot of supporting data for a market cycle, it means you're doomed. It means youre you're you're heading to a red ocean with a lot of competitors more powerful than you.
00:49:47
Speaker
who have been doing it for years and maintaining a game for years, you have almost no hope to make a break within that cycle. So anytime there's a huge cluster of data, run.
00:50:00
Speaker
Instead, ask yourself one question.
00:50:05
Speaker
What has fundamentally changed
00:50:11
Speaker
that you can improve the user experience dramatically And so 4chan, the user experience, the time to fun improved by 40 to 60 X. Nine seconds to fun is superior than six to nine minutes to fun.
00:50:34
Speaker
It's superior if you make the better game, right? If you.
Principles of Successful Game Development
00:50:38
Speaker
Yes, but you have to identify first the opportunity. Mm hmm. you must first identify the opportunity first.
00:50:46
Speaker
If you want to increase your odds, okay, as a general rule.
00:50:54
Speaker
So you're taking a look at Ungodly, right? You came back to build this fourth generation of RPG. So to your point, you're looking at the generational cycle and you're telling yourself, there's something new that I want to build. This is why I'm building Ungodly. There's something that no one has seen before. There's something I want to introduce we don't have to dig into that, but I love is that what you're, while you were talking about that, you're still just talking about those initial five loops, that first impression, that core loop, the progression, like it all comes back to that. And this is what I'm learning to love about this industry. And again, the conversation I had with Adam Boyes, he talked about, you need to learn from the experience of the people have done it before, right? You have done this, you know what it looks like, you know what failure looks like, you know what success looks like, like,
00:51:36
Speaker
I could sit here and I could listen to every one of my podcasts and be an expert. I could read every pod or book and be an expert. But until you do it, you're not going to know. And that's why i love hearing these stories because someone might come at you and don't like that. I don't agree with you, but you have done it.
00:51:50
Speaker
Right. So who are you to say anything until you have actually done it as well? And I think, I don't know, everything that you're saying just checks off so many things that I've heard before. And it's so cool to hear it all come together. So,
00:52:02
Speaker
If you want to answer it, you can. If not, we can cut it. But what what is Ungodly bringing to the table that excites you about this fourth generation of RPGs? Okay. So I'm going to enumerate them in order of priority.
00:52:16
Speaker
So I'll start at the top. The 4th generation cycle excites me a lot. um There are no 4th gen collectibles and combat RPGs in the West.
00:52:29
Speaker
Zero. Zero. So that's one.
00:52:34
Speaker
Two, over the last 10 years, there's been this incredible movement for inclusivity within games, which is noble, by the way. But the implementation and the execution and the thinking that went behind that was very poor, in my opinion.
00:52:52
Speaker
And so there's an opportunity here to go back to the beginning of dark fantasy RPG games and to deliver a masculine, heroic dark fantasy adventure and fantasy.
00:53:12
Speaker
And so we we call this internally a divine crusade.
00:53:20
Speaker
We call this a divine crusade because this isn't a game that we want to make. We believe it's a game we need to make. And so when I founded the company back in 2022, the overwhelming consensus was you have to build an all-inclusive game that basically offends no one and oftentimes lectures you about topics that are very nuanced and perhaps should be should be done in the privacy of your home.
00:53:48
Speaker
um Or maybe it's nuanced and maybe you should create a game just for that nuance to serve that audience, whatever that is. And so I saw this as an opportunity to be non-consensus, that I believe that primal nature and desire for population groups is more predictable
00:54:11
Speaker
than modern trends. In other words, will a masculine dark fantasy game still be desired in 10 years. Yes.
00:54:22
Speaker
In 20 years. Yes. In 50 years, probably so. In a hundred years, I don't know, but maybe we're androids then, but over the next 10 to 50 years, I would bank that masculine power fantasies will still be desired by a majority of men and some woman in that order.
00:54:41
Speaker
And so to come back and two and to build a masculine dark fantasy game, the type of games that inspired me as a child, where I ended up falling in love what some of these very you know with some of these very masculine role models and myths and heroes.
00:55:00
Speaker
And these weren't perfect people, okay? And so pick a hero from 30, 40 years ago, a masculine hero, and that person is is not all good, right? It's a gradient.
00:55:11
Speaker
And so all heroes are imperfect. And so this was an opportunity to to to come back and pay homage and respect to the type of myth telling that we grew up loving and looking up to in terms of heroes.
00:55:29
Speaker
And so the main hero in our game, is his name is Vander. He is a ah bloody mercenary, but he was also once a father, a failed father.
00:55:41
Speaker
And he was also once a son who experienced tremendous tragedy in his family life. And so I share all that with you is because in Ungodly, the world that we're building, it is very familiar in terms of the archetypes, the myth telling, the characters, the story.
00:56:02
Speaker
And It's a reflection of the type of art and creatives that inspired Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and 80s and 90s and even the early 2000s.
00:56:14
Speaker
So we're going back in time and we're creatively transform transforming that to make it our own. In other words, the game starts off with our world is broken.
00:56:30
Speaker
And when Vander says that,
00:56:35
Speaker
We hope that for many people, that's actually what they actually feel in the modern world, where they feel like it's broken. Maybe they can't pay their bills. Maybe the partner they're with doesn't respect them and like them.
00:56:49
Speaker
Maybe there're they have shortcomings in terms of their career where they feel disempowered, whatever it is. There is something very wrong in our current world. And so we take that that idea,
00:57:04
Speaker
It's an empathetic idea. And we creatively translate that into a fictional world that's broken. In this fictional world, there's drug abuse.
00:57:16
Speaker
There are people in this fictional world who supposed to be ruling ruling us, who are utterly corrupt.
00:57:27
Speaker
And so we bring all this not by telling you, but by having you experience these things as a form of validation that we see you and you get to do something about it.
00:57:42
Speaker
We empower you.
00:57:45
Speaker
That is the inspiration for ungodly. And that is why its title is called that name. We live in a world that feels broken.
00:57:59
Speaker
Lot there. Love it. It's going to exciting. And i want to be i want be ah conscious of time here. And want to take up too much of your time here. um i wanted to ask a last question. If there's anything else you want to talk about, please, by all means, you can let me know and we can bring it up. I and want to be conscious of time.
00:58:17
Speaker
This all started years ago with you being interested in tech and realizing that you weren't loving, you were at Franklin Templeton and you said that you wanted to get more into technology. AI is coming in now and I've been using it more recently. I've been building apps with it and seeing the power of it.
00:58:33
Speaker
Your game making has changed over the years and are you still playing around with these new tools and utilizing it? And are you excited about where things are going or nervous?
00:58:45
Speaker
I think of um if we're not nervous, I think we we lose sight of seeing the true benefit of of what's going on. And so it's good to be nervous.
00:58:57
Speaker
you know I say there are three fears in life. And these are you know there's what's called the dumb fear, which is you know don't run on the side of a cliff on a rainy day on a mountain because you might slip and fall and die.
00:59:08
Speaker
So that's called you know the the dumb fear. Just don't do those things. Next is the existential fear where Is Russia or North Korea gonna start a nuclear war, right?
00:59:20
Speaker
Well, we can't we can't change that, can we? so that's an existential fear. So why you even put energy to that? The third fear is the most important fear, in my opinion. It's the performance fear, anxiety fear. So what we're really talking about is individual performance.
00:59:36
Speaker
How does AI affect our individual performance? And so the way I think about AI is, yes, one, it is exciting and scary. Two, what's incredible about AI is I see it as as a lever.
00:59:52
Speaker
And so if you're a creative, whether you're an engineer, whether you're an artist, an illustrator, UX, UI, doesn't matter. Your creative skills and your talent becomes magnified where AI serves you, the creator.
01:00:12
Speaker
So it's actually empowering because it's all based on how you direct the performance of AI to serve your individual needs as a professional or as a non-professional.
01:00:25
Speaker
And so I can share with you that, you know, when we talk about fourth generation collectibles and combat RPGs, if you were not to utilize AI, it would likely cost you, assuming you know what you're doing,
01:00:40
Speaker
it will likely cost you over $100 million. And that assumes you know what you're doing to build a fourth generation collectibles and combat RPG game because you have to create an entire world.
01:00:54
Speaker
The camera behind the head, you're effectively absorbing the costs that are common within creating these world experiences, these open world experiences that you have on AAA console PC games.
01:01:07
Speaker
How do you as a small studio who doesn't have $100 million, dollars create a 4th gen. You have to revisit and rethink how to allocate your talent for maximum productivity impact.
01:01:27
Speaker
In other words, you have to rethink your entire pipelines, all of them. And it it's uncomfortable. It's so uncomfortable for two reasons. One, you're dealing with humans.
01:01:38
Speaker
who may not agree with you that AI is a production lever for leverage of performance. they Many people see it as a competitor. And so you have a cultural change that has to happen.
01:01:53
Speaker
That's one. And two, AI is moving at such a rate and a pace of improvement that it's staggering where we are today than where we're 2022. And in 2022, you couldn't even get 2D images to show up the way you wanted them prompted, right?
01:02:13
Speaker
And now 2023, there's to the predictability of AI outcomes and now we're entering two thousand and twenty four when these the predictability of ai outcomes is about 70 to 80% directionally good.
01:02:28
Speaker
The amount of change that has happened has exceeded, i think, the cultural capacity for many creators to appreciate the benefits.
01:02:42
Speaker
And it took us time. It took us time, even within, we're a 120 person company. It took us time to to make that transition. It was not easy.
01:02:55
Speaker
And so when you think of these large companies like Ubisoft, EA, and all these other companies, you know, who say they're going to, you know, fully embrace ai it's one thing for an executive to say it at these giant companies with 5, 10, 20,000 employees.
01:03:09
Speaker
It's another thing culturally at the individual contributed layer for that belief system to be fully saturated so you can gain those benefits. And so I think that's one huge advantage a smaller startup has.
01:03:25
Speaker
is that they can they can accelerate and speed run through the cultural resistance of AI and fully adopt it. Now, I think in three to five years, the larger companies will eventually get there, but it's gonna be hard.
01:03:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny you brought up EA in that statement. I know it's not related, but it almost seems to me kind of like when mobile games entered the market and EA was just not great at mobile games. They ended up acquiring a bunch of companies to build their own mobile game unit rather than build a unit from the ground up. And it kind of shows how it's really hard to back into a technology, even if you're an expert at it, when you have such a ah system built out. And I don't know if that's related at all, but ah but I think all your points are right. Neither either let the tools that are being built control you or you can grab them and control them. Right. And we're at the stage right now where we're lucky to be at a place where we can actually learn how these tools work now and we can get ahead of it. And I think that's the most exciting part of it. Like I'm building an app and I don't want it to be my final app, but i want to build an MVP.
01:04:28
Speaker
I can go into an a tool and type in the app I want and I can refine it. Like I can't do these, but I can do this. And I think for MVP, for that base level, it's, it's so cool. it It is, it is. And, you know, the, what was really interesting about star Wars of galaxy of heroes is, you know, this is, you know, this is not my first startup.
01:04:53
Speaker
Um, and one of the things that I've done now, that's definitely, that I've done in the past is they call me professor Mark now. And so, you know, internally within the company,
01:05:06
Speaker
um We have a teaching atmosphere where all a lot of these first principles um that were invented when I started out in gaming, they are now documented in these in some of these memos, these internal memos, that's a required read for for all the leaders.
01:05:25
Speaker
And I didn't do that before in the past. And so you know EA Capital Games was ClickNation. We just renamed it.
01:05:36
Speaker
And i didn't teach these fundamental first principles of how to identify generational cycles. What truly are these games?
01:05:49
Speaker
What is the hierarchy of fun? And how does each layer contribute to the layer before it and the layer after it? What does familiar yet unique mean creatively?
01:06:01
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These are all In my opinion, the most important first principle frameworks that a game maker has to master if they want repeat success.
01:06:15
Speaker
It's different when you inherit a game and you work on it. Like most people in the industry where they learn the best practices of insights and that they didn't realize contributed to a game's success because they never learned the insights.
01:06:33
Speaker
They learned the maintenance. And so I say that you know with sadness because when I look back and I think about the you know the the history ah of that studio, the storied history, is that seven to eight years later, they created a reskin of Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes.
01:06:56
Speaker
at the tail end of the third generational cycle. And it's because they didn't have first principle frameworks taught on why that was likely a suboptimal decision. And that game failed immediately.
01:07:14
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And so I share this with you because it goes to show that just because you worked on a very successful game, ask yourself truly,
01:07:26
Speaker
What was the state of the market when this game came out? If you don't have those insights to what truly was the game. I know these sound like dumb questions, but they are so important because most people have never worked on a zero to one successful IP zero to one successful game before.
01:07:50
Speaker
So they don't have those insights. They don't have that training to ask these fundamental questions.
01:07:58
Speaker
Well, Professor Mark Otero, I can't thank you enough. I've
Final Insights on Game Development
01:08:04
Speaker
been the part of almost a little over 100 podcasts now, and I've been learning more about the insights of game designs, things like the three C's, the hierarchy of fun, pillars.
01:08:13
Speaker
ah And it's I'm not going to be a game designer, but being able to learn all this and hear these stories just opens my brain in a way of thinking that just I can't even put it into words because I like my brain's running ah a million miles a minute. But but the more philosophies that I can learn, I think, are just so good, especially being able to share them with people because.
01:08:32
Speaker
There's people creating these experiences in UEFN and Roblox that don't know this stuff, but maybe if they think about it a little bit, they can make a little more ah educated decisions on what they want to do or build with purpose. And I thank you very much for your stories and sharing all this information with us. Before we do go today, is there anything you want to talk about, plug or share?
01:08:54
Speaker
Yeah, just a a few points.
01:08:58
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If you are a zero to one independent game studio, um And there is consensus that your idea is great. Consensus from the market in terms of what people tell you.
01:09:10
Speaker
Consensus within your team. See that as a red flag.
01:09:18
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the The hit commercial games, they're all non-consensus. Because they take advantage of technology and deep insights about what that technology can offer.
01:09:30
Speaker
Okay. Two. Know your audience's fantasy. Know who they are. Ignore what's going on in modern ideology and focus on primal nature because you can always bank on primal nature being more true than what you are taught.
01:09:52
Speaker
Trust yourself. And thirdly, if you're crazy enough to found a zero to one company, you can say goodbye to your friends. You can say goodbye to your family, your dog, your pets, because this is going to be your life for the next four to five years, assuming you survive it.
01:10:10
Speaker
And lastly, know the difference between stubbornness and persistence. Stubbornness is when you get new information, you continue to persist doing the same things.
01:10:23
Speaker
No. Persistence is when you get new information, you decide to continue to press forward, but you adapt the new information and you're humble about it.
01:10:35
Speaker
Remember those four things because they can dramatically improve the chances of you achieving your goal.
01:10:45
Speaker
Mark, thank you so much again. we will have links to Mark as well as azuregames.com, their website. We're going to have all this information broken down as well on our player-driven website. So you want to find a way to keep it digestible, remember, you could download it. We'll have all that content out there.
01:11:01
Speaker
Again, I can't thank you enough for joining us. they'll Mark and his team will be at Gamescom. You can check them out at Community Clubhouse as well as Gamescom in general. So again, Mark, thank you so much. And everyone listening, thank you. And I hope you have a great rest of your day.