Read Time: 5 Minutes

Welcome to 2025!

I’ve got two pieces of content for you today, the book “Play Nice” by Jason Schreier, and a video by Laura Fryer about the AAA Game Dev Bubble. These both give explanations of how and why game dev ended up where it did, especially at the “AAA” level.

“Play Nice” by Jason Schreier

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Play-Nice-Future-Blizzard-Entertainment/dp/1538725428/

Review Link: https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/this-new-book-gave-me-far-better-insight-into-blizzard-entertainments-history

This isn’t the first Jason Schreier book I’ve read, but it is the best. It feels like a story about more than just Blizzard. It is about the evolution of games and game dev over the last several decades, told through the lens of one particularly famous studio.

Blizzard started with a dream of making the best games for players, often after playing other somewhat successful games and realizing they had far more potential than was captured. Whether watching Dune inspire StarCraft, or early MMOs and especially Everquest inspire WoW, Blizzard was uncompromising in the dream of crafting experiences players would love to play.

But money matters. It matters a lot, and the bigger your company, the more of it you need to keep working. While Blizzard became a ubiquitous and honored name among gamers, the requirement to keep producing large quantities of money never stopped. As the company scaled with both successes and size, you might have expected all the problems to go away. Instead, they multiplied. Expectations, egos, and economics would not be tamed.

The story of the humble but passionate beginnings all the way to the behemoth that Blizzard has become today reflect so many trends that game devs can relate to. 

• Every win means the next win has to be bigger. 

• Every new leader or merger presents a risk to the culture that got a studio where it is today. 

• Every flawed trait at the senior level is magnified over time throughout the organization. 

• Prestige may come from the place you work, but pay won’t necessarily follow.

There’s a lot of value to mine out of this book. Jason Schreier may not be a game dev, but he’s told a story that we game devs can relate to. Often (too often!) as I went from chapter to chapter I felt an eerie familiarity come over me reflecting my own journey through a successful and scaling AAA game studio. I connected to the fire and passion of some stories, and relived the nausea and disappointment of others.

Each game company is different, and in some ways perhaps we’re all the same too.

The Games Industry Bubble by Laura Fryer

Link: Games Industry Bubble

Laura Fryer takes us back in time to talk about how game studios and publishers wound up creating a cordoned off area for media and reviews that disconnected them from their customers, the gamers. Every step of the way things made sense, but when you string them all together, you end up in a place no game dev should ever be: surrounded by overly positive and friendly “allies” and separated from real players.

What I loved about this take is that it didn’t mindlessly attack the studios or leadership. It was an empathetic perspective that accepted the self-preservation behind why we ended up where we did. But Laura is also unapologetic in saying that where we are today is not great, and if we don’t figure out how to get out of it, there will be more failed products and studio closures headed our way.

To me, this take reinforces the importance of staying close to your players, whether you’ve got them in your game already or are hoping they will show up later. It’s not claiming they are always right - that’s impossible, different players often have opposite opinions - but it is saying that your failure to interact, understand, and respect your players will come back to haunt you.

Hope you enjoy!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

I’m going to tell you one major way I think AAA studios could make strides away from the maw they find themselves teetering over (spoiler: Stop thinking high “Production Quality” equals amazing player value). But first, I want to give some CONTEXT! I’m a game producer after all.

Games Are Expensive To Make

The costs of game development have gone up dramatically in the last 15 years. When I go look at titles like God of War 3, Assassin’s Creed 2, Resident Evil 5, Shogun 2: Total War, Bioshock, Borderlands, and the list could go on, it is rare to see numbers over $50m.

Many of those titles were in the dozens of millions for dev cost, somewhere between $20-$40m. 

Compare that to today, where not a few startups have raised that much OR MORE in their early (Series A) rounds of funding. For the big studios, a modern AAA game is expected to have a budget in the hundreds of millions, with the biggest titles potentially cresting past $500m or even in the billions!

Acknowledging that marketing is often a huge part of these budgets and isn’t always included in estimates, there has still been a giant increase in how much we spend to make AAA games. The teams building them have higher salaries than they used to, the teams are bigger than they were, and the time to go from ideation to ship has increased. 

The cost of premium games has gone from $60 to $70 in those same 15 years. We’re relying on more purchases and other ways of monetizing to make up the difference.

And while revenue in the AAA gaming space has gone up, it has not risen at the “5-10x” rate of budgets in that same time period to deal with the compounding challenges of more people, being paid more, working for longer.

But revenue has gone up enough for everyone to talk about the large increase in sales and (assumed) profits in our industry. Questions get asked like, “In a world of record gaming revenue, why does it seem like the game industry is struggling?”

Fair question, but it has some good answers, and that without even discussing power law curves. Game dev costs outpacing that increasing revenue are just one of them.

Another is that much of the revenue going towards games is landing with existing live service products that have been around for awhile like Fortnite, Warframe, Counterstrike, and so on, while the next biggest chunk is spent on sequels like the EA Sports franchises and Call of Duty.

Supporting this trend, If you look back at the last decade or so, the “best selling game of the year” is mostly Call of Duty plus a couple of Rockstar games, and the exception of Hogwart’s Legacy (not exactly an unknown IP) in 2023.

Today though, even the sequels are starting to struggle. Rising dev costs means that a mediocre release of a sequel doesn’t mean a studio covers costs like it used to. It means it loses money. If a studio loses money long enough, it goes out of business.

Last thing I’ll mention: a massive part of the rise in total gaming revenue relates to mostly F2P mobile gaming via in-app purchases and ads. Very few AAA studios are seriously playing in the mobile space, sticking to what they have historically been good at.

The result of all this? Despite our record gaming revenues, the studios actually making the AAA games are often not seeing that revenue turn into meaningful profits. We can argue about how money is being mismanaged or how C-level people are being greedy, and both of those things are happening (because they always are), but there are underlying problems that are worse today than they were 15 years ago for a AAA studio making new games. That’s an important thing to realize.

The Expectations of AAA

Based on that context, the underlying crucial question is how do I reduce the cost to develop a game, so the rising gaming revenue I’m receiving more than covers my costs.

And here, we get into how expectations are skewing dev costs up.

When someone says, “AAA game,” that means something to them. It’s likely not just about having a particular budget or reputation. “AAA” implies high quality, lots of polish, large scope, and great feel. These aren’t rough indie titles that might be fun but are obviously “low quality,” these are the big fish in the big pond, putting their stamp on what it means to make the best possible games a group of humans can make.

I’ve never met a studio that didn’t claim they’d hired and retained the best possible talent in the industry, but man is that true for AAA studios. Just being there means you must be one of the best, or you’d never have made it. There’s a strong belief that that’s one of the big deltas, and that the people who can do the best work across every discipline work in AAA. 

Between the expectations and the people, AAA studios are understandably incredibly focused on creating the highest production quality in gaming. And by production quality, I’m talking visual fidelity, UI design, audio, realism, and more. They are supposed to push the bar of just how amazing games can look and how polished they can feel.

To make the challenge more difficult, players have come to expect this of certain companies. If you hang around the gaming community at all, you’ve probably seen something like a comparison between the visual quality of a game like the 10 year old AC4: Black Flag and the recent Skull and Bones. Players will lambast the loss of quality of water effects or something else.

That Skull and Bones and AC$: Black Flag were fundamentally different games with different characters, camera, and many other things get lost. And what else is lost: if Skull and Bones was as much fun as Black Flag was for players, far fewer of them would care about these kinds of complaints. Skull and Bones didn’t struggle because it had less refined water effects than other games. It struggled because players didn’t find it engaging.

But we (and players) can trick ourselves into thinking that the problem was just a bit of visual polish. Even if we intellectually know that’s not going to move the needle, we still gravitate towards it as some sort of solution to the problem of the modern AAA game.

Why? Because when we don’t know what to do, activating our insane expertise at creating high production quality assets is at least something we have control over. If I’m an artist, or art heavy team, maybe I can’t solve the underlying gameplay problems and the lack of stickiness my product has. But gosh darnit I can make some great art such that people will never be able to say the game failed because of bad art.

I’m oversimplifying this, I’ll admit it. But I do believe our obsession with production quality leads to many game experiences that end up less than the sum of their parts. Contrasting this, the mark of great games is that they end up more than the sum of their parts.

AAA games with big teams can easily fall into the trap of sub-optimization. Art is taking care of art, engineering of engineering, design of design. The whole experience slowly becomes secondary to the individual craft expression. Sorry to pick on one studio, as they are not alone in this, but Blizzard has not produced a game with low production quality since I’ve been playing games. They have produced games people didn’t find that engaging.

We’re Getting Lost

AAA is falling into a trap of thinking that making more good stuff will naturally lead to a better game. And by the way, I don’t think you can make a compelling argument for high production quality HURTING a game (though the ARMA II DayZ mod might dispute that…). But too many people act as if high production quality is what makes a great player experience, when the counter-examples to that are numerous.

Having high production quality does NOT mean you’re adding a lot of player value. Always pushing for higher quality doesn’t equate to being player focused. And in many cases, you end up with a lot of high quality work in a game that isn’t that great.

If AAA studios want to lower their costs, they have to step back a second from their obsession with production quality at all costs, and engage with a philosophy that is about creating the best possible player experience at all costs, followed by quality sometime after.

Even better, they need to realize what types of quality are going to move the needle the most, and focus there, and be ok with other things being lower quality because they don’t matter as much. 

I have seen too many large teams or studios stacked with amazing people all spinning their wheels, working hard every day while fundamental issues about how they work together, or what game they are even trying to make go entirely unanswered. Everyone is busy with their own tree and no one is taking care of the forest. Disciplines become almost defensive and adversarial towards each other, as each attempts to make sure they get the time and resources they need to do the absolute best job anyone could ever do.

The team size expands as all disciplines need more people to meet these insane expectations, and everyone burrows deeper into their own craft. The leaders and producers that should be taking care of the big picture end up lost in their plans and budgets, sub-optimizing Favro or JIRA as if that’ll be the difference maker.

The irony is that when you go into these teams and ask about the problems, there are people who can tell you what they are. But they either don’t think it’s their job or have been punished in the past for bringing those problems up. Rather than solve those problems, everyone focuses in on their own silo of stuff to do, hoping someone else will solve the fact that players don’t seem to like what’s being made.

Large organizations are more prone to this, because it’s easier to think all those issues are someone else’s job to solve. And there is no doubt that everyone - even if they are doing something that really doesn’t move the needle at all - is busy all the time.

You end up with a large organization of busy people not solving the most important problems while absolutely burning money. It’s a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Some people - some devs! - think that’s what AAA game dev is. 

Escaping The Trap

We have to refocus our orgs to share goals and be rewarded not based on individual expression of craft, but collective delivery of compelling player experiences. 

To do that, you need to create the vision of the game and then have everyone beat it up, improve it, and understand their part in it. You need to recognize where you want to invest time and how you’ll work through the biggest risks and unknowns related to the game, then focus on resolving those issues before hiring dozens or hundreds more people to go “make amazing stuff.” 

You need your organization to accept that production quality does not directly correlate to value for players. At best, it creates indirect value. At worst, it’s self-deception, tricking you with amazing art or smooth framerates or humorous dialogue.

Another big piece of this is the ability of everyone to work together and tackle the shared problems. If your disciplines don’t interact well together, even if they are all individually amazing, you are unlikely to create something stellar. When you see breakdowns in relationships between disciplines, that needs to be a high priority to solve for leadership. No single discipline can create a AAA product.

This is hard. It takes everyone and especially all your leaders into an abstract space that’s less controllable, less measurable, and less sure of being able to “show results.” Our comfort zone is what we’re best at. “Breaking ranks” to go and talk to other disciplines about how we can help them because the collective problem we’re all having is more important than the individual problem you are having is counter-intuitive and uncomfortable.

If you can create this culture within a studio, I believe you’ll dramatically lower costs. 

How so?

By staying tightly focused on the major pain points of the game as a holistic experience, you’ll hire fewer people, and you’ll hire them later in development. 

By having people in tune with the vision of the game, you’ll get more discussion and conflict about what really matters to achieving that vision, reducing the number of things built that don’t actually move the needle but do suck up lots of resources.

By collaborating effectively and understanding more than your own discipline space, novel solutions and ways to support each other will emerge that end up replacing the need to hire.

And, to top it all off, you’ll have a better understanding throughout development of the viability (or lack thereof) of your product.

The best part? If you build fewer things that matter more, you have less stuff to polish. Your game can still come out at high production quality. It just won’t have all the extra stuff that wasn’t adding much value. There may be a lot fewer high quality things that never see the light of day, replaced by rough tests that taught you what you needed to know and are much cheaper to discard.

I realize this is asking a lot. It’s a serious pivot for AAA game dev. But I do think a shift away from the “product quality” obsession and a return to creating compelling player experiences (experiences that are probably why you ended up becoming a AAA studio in the first place) is going to increase your chance of making great games while also lowering costs. And that means more ROI. 

Not an easy shift. But I don’t know that we have much choice. The underlying economics require a major change. So best get to it!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 5 minutes

Hey All!

I’m going to do something a little different today. 

With all the content being created, I’ve found myself on a bit of a content treadmill, just keeping my head above water with posts and podcasts and newsletters, but not having much spare creative capacity.

I aim to keep giving you something useful every two weeks, so my plan for the moment is to take every other newsletter and point to other content related to leadership in game dev.

It could be our own podcasts, posts from others, cool articles, whatever else.

I’ll give you my brief take/review on whatever it is plus a link to check it out yourself. And if you have some things in mind you want me to review and share to everyone, let me know!

The other podcasts (every 4 weeks) will continue to be written by me as I’ve been doing these last few months. Feel free to send me topics you’d like me to cover, as topic generation is one of the hardest parts of this whole process!

My goal is to keep giving you all useful tips to lead better in game dev, while perhaps also pointing you towards other great resources.

This is all experimental, so as the readers of my newsletter, I want to know what you think, and if you’ve got other ideas that could work, OR if you think I’m nuts and this is a bad idea. I’m open to any and all feedback and suggestions!

With that said, I’ll be kicking things off with a quick review of the last two episodes we released in the Building Better Games podcast:

How to Market Your Game w/ Ignition Facility

Link: How to Market Your Game with Chris and Joe from Ignition Facility | #76 - YouTube

One of my favorite parts of this episode was when (I think it was) Chris said something like, “You’re smaller than you think you are.”

Whenever we’re building games in whatever studio we are in, it’s easy to think our game is much more likely to succeed and bigger than it is. After all, we’re pretty smart, the people we work with are exceptional (I’ve never met a studio that didn’t tell me they had the best people working there), and our idea is amazing. Otherwise we wouldn’t be working on it, right?

It’s a trap. That whole line of thinking is flawed. We tend to place higher value on the things we feel ownership of and the things we’ve invested in. Both of those apply to the games we’re working on. We become biased in our thinking and it clouds our ability to be objective about the reality our game may launch into. 

A small startup occasionally breaks into the stratosphere. But more often, it struggles to sell anything at all. Even large, AAA products with massive budgets are hitting a wall in recent years. The IP, the reputation, the dollars, the talent, the confidence, none of it mattered.

I’m not saying to think of yourself as tiny and pathetic. I’m just saying be aware that you may not be as big a deal as you’re telling yourself. And if you realize that, you can adjust your marketing, you can take chances that only smaller studios get to take, you can play with fire and survive. And you can be grounded in reality while you do it.

There were a ton of good points in this episode, including aligning incentives between marketing and dev, and not taking the “build it all then market it right before ship” approach to launching your game. Check it out, Chris and Joe know what they’re doing, and if you need their help, reach out. They love helping studios think about marketing in a better, more modern way. 

The old ways are failing. Time to adapt!

Which Game Should You Make? w/ Omar Kendall

Link: How You Know Which Game To Make, with Omar Kendall | #E77

This just popped last week. I loved this conversation with Omar. He’s insanely thoughtful and measured while still being a bona fide expert in multiple spaces of game dev, and especially thinking about product and innovation in games. 

He said something that I heartily support: keeping an effective team together to continue to tackle problems they have become proficient at solving dramatically increases the chance you succeed, but is RARELY DONE in our industry.

I’ll go further: I think that if you have an amazing team, whether it’s one of many teams at the studio or it is the entire studio, keeping that group working together is one of the best ways to get insane outcomes, while breaking them up is one of the best ways to flush money down the drain.

I would take a team that has spent years learning how to interact, overcome challenges, and lead and follow each other as appropriate over any big studio or publisher’s hand-picked team of top talent that has never worked together before EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK.

The best teams are far better than the sum of their parts. You see this across esports, regular sports, musical groups… pretty much anywhere collaborative teams need to solve problems together.

Too often, I’ve seen organizations break up highly effective teams in order to “spread the love” around. The orgs don’t realize that while those devs may have figured out how to work together in a high performing way, they can’t just port that to any random group of people. In fact, you’re more likely to create frustration and sadness as the devs realize they are no longer in such an exceptional environment.

Building that team chemistry takes time. Some teams gel faster than others, and there are reasons we could explore as to why, but the bottom line is that if a group hasn’t worked together there are some bumps they need to work out before they will hit their stride.

Alright, that wraps it for this newsletter! Please send me your thoughts about the new direction, would love to hear from you!

Happy Holidays!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Welcome back to the Building Better Games Newsletter!

Today, I’m continuing to breakdown the past few years of our industry. 

To get you caught up, in 2020 there was a pandemic. It was bad for the world, but actually had quite a positive impact on game dev - temporarily. 

As the pandemic faded in day-to-day impact, things started looking pretty bleak. \

Startups, Mobile, and AAA

Many Game startups had launched after the pandemic hit between 2020 and 2022. As we got towards the end of 2023 and into 2024, those startups went back to investors looking for their next round and discovered that there wasn’t much available, and the standards for receiving funding had become much more stringent. 

Many ended up with less runway than they’d anticipated, as investors and optimism had pushed them to too high a headcount and too far down their production phases. Investors wanted higher valuations, which often meant bigger teams or focusing on the work that wasn’t the most critical for solving the problem the game was having. To be a bit reductionist, there was a lot of great art without much behind it. They (startups and investors) went out of sync with the reality of their game/investment, but once you’d made the mistake, attempting to acknowledge that and fix the burn rate issue probably meant you’d never get funding again.

Insolvent startups began shutting down. The relative number of devs laid off in those startups vs established games companies was small, but it was a blow to the model we’d used to create innovation in our industry, and it contributed to the number of people looking for work in games.

It wasn’t all bad. Some few startups, plus the rise of solo devs and small teams working on games on the side, were finding success. While absent the big brand recognition, less renowned devs created games like Valheim, Manor Lords, Lethal Company, Palworld, Battlebit Remastered, Helldivers 2, and many more. There were plenty of compelling experiences players had easy access to and that made back far more than they cost.

On the plus side, mobile was reworking itself and had somewhat recovered from the wound of IDFA changes. It was finding its feet again, though the machine had needed to be reinvented. A lot of simple games came out that were nonetheless compelling, often word games and the like, and mobile players were happy to have something else to do on their phones. Mobile gaming was dead, long live mobile gaming.

On the PC/console side of things, “AAA” (as a way to describe the best games humans make) took a huge reputation hit. Failures popped up and garnered more attention than ever before, all while the small studios and teams mentioned above released successes that returned many times their development cost.

In a continuation of the quality and release problems that had struck a chunk of games during the pandemic, it felt like new launches just couldn’t find footing. The world had changed, or quality wasn’t there, or the idea had never been validated and ended up being a dud.

And due to an ever-growing cost of game development at the AA and AAA levels (while it REDUCED at the indie, solo dev levels), these failures were not easily written off. 

A game touted as “AAA” no longer cost $30m as it had 10-15 years ago. That was a startup now. “AAA” games cost 9 figures. Hundreds of millions in development budgets were normal, while marketing would be stacked on top of that to try to ensure success.

But success was no longer easy to ensure. The cost and risk of dev had wildly outstripped the relative size and success rate of the market. 

Large Game Companies

Large studios could no longer afford to have failures in their portfolio, but games are an inherently uncertain space. In the old world, if you hit one strong product, even if a couple more didn’t quite recover their budget you’d be ok. But now, big publishers and game companies were struggling with even a big hit not giving them the cushion they needed. Critically successful games that had limited commercial success now caused studios to shut down instead of proving that they could make a good product.

Loaded into all of this, and related to the dev costs, was the reality that games didn’t just cost more because teams were bigger, they also took far longer to make. You were running much larger teams for much longer periods of time. 

The longer development time had some knock on effects. A simple one: the world changed a lot more than it used to from starting to finishing the game. If it took two years to make something, you might be able to guess about where players and the industry would be. But if it took eight years to make something, your future projections were far more likely to be wrong. Other impacts were higher likelihood of burnout on teams, losing key people during development, and falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy after years of efforts still weren’t creating anything good.

Baldur’s Gate 3 finally launched in 2023 after almost 3 years in early access, perhaps one of the most successful early access stories in existence. It was a counterpoint to the problems other large studios were having. BG3 was a resounding success from a studio (Larian) that had made some solid games but that few would have called “AAA” before BG3 came out. 

Players AND devs all viewed BG3 as an insane accomplishment. Game devs almost saw it as an impossibility. It was simultaneously proof that you could still make an amazing game, and also that most companies did not know how any more without outspending BG3’s dev cost several times over.

Large companies no longer had wiggle room. The stability that they had brought to game dev was suddenly shaky, and layoffs started in earnest in 2023 and have only accelerated into 2024. Here’s my take on the biggest factors for those layoffs:

1. Overhiring during COVID - this certainly played a role, but I think it’s overemphasized

2. Lower risk profile - companies losing money retreated into what they knew, dropping people who weren’t directly related to safe bets (happened in tech as well as games)

3. Being in the red financially - salary is usually the highest expense in game dev, so when things go south, reducing the number of employees is one way to try to get back to profitability

Initially these led to experienced devs being snapped up by other companies that hadn’t been hit yet, but as more and more studios and publishers realized they were in trouble and reacted with layoffs, suddenly you weren’t hiring even amazingly talented devs. Instead, the growing pool of available talent meant companies could get really selective. Many who were “the best in the business” would spend months or longer unemployed and getting more and more desperate. 

Just a year or so before during COVID, the established devs seemed to hold the power. Once the layoff cycle began, that pendulum swung back to the companies.

With the unprecedented amount of talent available, those companies started targeting specific profiles and requiring lots of experience across the board. Companies had lost some knowledge by now of how to train junior talent, and with an obscene quantity of senior talent available, they still didn’t need to solve that problem - especially since you could now pay a senior less with the changes in supply and demand across the industry.

Making matters worse, the last few years were the first years where significant numbers of students were graduating college with degrees in game development. Whether engineering, design, or art (the most common majors), an already massive talent pool was even larger. I don’t know what the future will be like. There is a subtle but increasing number of graduates focused on game dev while the industry is still relatively small and the audience isn’t growing fast enough to support us all.

Large companies were also wondering if the advent of LLMs meant they could get away with smaller workforces. As they looked at what seemed like unsustainable budgets - especially because some major titles that are perennial successes had fallen flat - they wondered if ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever could fill the gap, reducing the cost of development while speeding up parts of the process, potentially solving both problems.

In the midst of all of this developer pain, mistrust from failed releases plus the lowered reach and trust in games media was hurting the relationship between the games industry and players. Their suspicions had grown while their interests had continued to evolve. The increasing time to ship meant some titles felt outdated at launch, while others were just not working. The disconnect between development and players grew.

Players, Live Service, and Indie Dev

Even as new AAA titles and the community of game devs were struggling, players had tons of great options to spend their time on. The biggest draw for players? Those very few but still insanely successful live service products. A massive amount of player attention would end up going towards games that had launched years or even decades before across PC, console, and even mobile. 

The live service market was - if anything - overcrowded. Many of the newer startups had been funded based on the idea of becoming a successful live service game that would print money for years into the future. An amazing investment … assuming you could pull it off.

That turned out to be much harder than it had seemed. Well-funded startups who targeted this space started fizzling out, and much of the web3 stuff seemed to go along with it. 

Live service wasn’t easy to get started from any angle, especially not when the incumbents already had deep commitment and engagement from the players new live service games were trying to attract. Players might drift into the game, but they would likely drift away just as rapidly, and since a live service product was often free or cheap and based on long-term sustained engagement with a massive audience, these startups were not recovering even a portion of their expenses. It was all cost, no gain. The reality was they were often trying to lure players away from not just their favorite game, but also their friends.

Not all games are live service of course, and if players wanted something new, the lowered cost of entry to game dev meant you could find tons of engaging products of all lengths to sink your teeth into. Plenty of gems were popping up to satisfy every player’s desire for new great experiences, even as many contending (and probably quality) games were undoubtedly being buried in the tens of thousands of launches that were happening every year on Steam, Roblox, UEFN, app stores, and more. 

While the odds of success still favored large companies, the cost of making a game on the side in college or with a few friends meant that it wasn’t that big of a deal if your game didn’t take off. You didn’t have much to lose, while a failed AAA product would easily destroy tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in financial investment.

Still, the absence of investment wasn’t making life easy for anyone. Indie’s are not and never were the “safe” bet, instead being driven by a passion and love of games. Some hit it out of the park, sure, but many more slowly faded away amidst the glut of competitors.

Differences in Devs and Leadership - The Problem of Brand-based Hiring

Hiring was another problem area, and not just because of the changes to supply and demand in the games industry. 

Throughout this whole period I’ve been describing, leaders and devs were being brought into companies for poor reasons. The aura of success of wherever you used to work carried an outsized weight, as the logic of, “If they could pass an interview screen and get hired at Blizzard/Bungie/Riot/Supercell/Naughty Dog/Rock Star/Amazon/Meta/Netflix/etc. and then survive for a year or so, they MUST be good!” seemed to reign supreme.

While there is a nugget of truth in there, the grim reality was that many studios and investors took people away from their expertise, and asked them to work where they had no experience. 

Mobile product managers with incredibly developed talents creating ROI in the pre-”IDFA change” era were being snapped up by AAA studios because revenue was important, despite actually having low awareness of how that type of game development, player relationship, and monetization work. 

Live service leaders from the most reputable brands in gaming were handed boatloads of money to go … create a scrappy new studio and new game with a bunch of peers who were similarly unskilled at anything but the sustaining of an already successful product. 

Established AAA leaders good at shipping “boxed product” style games were pulled over to scaling live service efforts in an effort to “mature” their orgs and create stability, while having very little awareness of what it actually means to run an organization responsive to continual player feedback.

I want to be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with this if everyone has the humility to realize that what you were doing is not what you will be doing and accept that you’ll need to spend some time learning. BUT in many cases that humility and recognition of current inadequacy was not present. 

The industry ended up with startups acting as if you needed dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars to get a game off the ground because that is what it would have cost when they were at Amazon or wherever else, or monetization experts destroying player trust in established IPs by misunderstanding their audience.

The irony was that while we were being insanely specific about any dev or lower level leader role in games, at the senior leadership level where it mattered most we were overvaluing 1) past results and 2) companies operating in completely different domains as our predictors of how someone would perform.

All of this was, in my mind, a backfiring shortcut based on not really knowing what the company actually wanted or needed in the people it was hiring, and just hoping that someone smart enough to work at Google or Apple must surely be able to help us succeed here. We didn’t know how to hire, so we outsourced that to their last hiring manager and hoped it would work out.

Some new hires did adapt and learn, but many caused a lot of problems when they landed in their new roles. If they were discovered causing harm, they could be removed, but the damage had already been done … and many went undiscovered.

Summary

So that is where we’re at today. Hiring is a mess, talent is oversaturated, mobile is recovering nicely (way to go!), “AAA” game dev needs to change but is instead retreating into old (and now non-functional) patterns, and startups are experiencing reality checks at an alarming rate. The verdict is still out on AI, but Web3 and NFTs have mostly died, and I think for most game devs it’s not being missed because no one ever told us how it realistically made the experience better for the player anyway.

We’re continuing to experience dysfunctional relationships between publishers and devs, and publishers and players, but now we’ve added dysfunctional relationships between devs and players to complete the triangle.

I said last week not to bank on 2025 turning this around. There’s a lot left to improve before we’re out of the woods. It’s not that ways to improve don’t exist, they just are rarely amenable to the people who would need to be bought in. 

I want to zoom in now. In the midst of all of this, you have an opportunity to adjust your approach and do better as an individual and leader than you or others did in the past 5 years. I don’t know exactly what you should do - I’m not in your shoes - but here’s some advice.

What To Do

Here’s what I’d recommend.

1. Don’t oversimplify the industry. 

Recognize the complexity of everything that is happening. The number of variables involved are high, and to reduce everything down to one or two variables like “greed” or “macroeconomics” and then attempt solutions will more likely miss than hit

2. Contact reality as fast as you can. 

Whether you’re a startup or a AAA studio, you can’t afford to rely on hope for the assumptions you made. Focus on learning, recognize you probably got some things wrong, and then be willing to pivot if you realize you’re on the wrong track. A lot of current pain is far worse because people stubbornly pursued poor paths.

3. Establish (or re-establish) relationships with your players.
   If you go out and do a bunch of stuff players love because you took the time to understand them, we’re in a unique moment where that gives you a competitive edge over others that are frankly doing a terrible job of listening to their audience. Take advantage of that.
   

4. Don’t wait forever for a game dev job if you’re out of work.

I get it, we want to be in this industry. But there are some brutal underlying realities baked into games. There are only so many players out there. The number of games those players can sustain is going up slowly, but not enough to support dozens or hundreds of additional companies long term. Don’t put your life and career on hold. Go get experience elsewhere that you can bring back to games someday in the future. The industry will adjust, but I am not optimistic that it will be soon.

Alright, I’ve written enough and still have more that could be said on all of this, like what I think about the future.

Thanks to all the people who have shared their insight into the state of games with me over the past years. It’s been something crazy to watch and be a part of.

So, what did I miss? What are the big things you think are driving where the games industry is today? What did I get wrong? Let me know!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 5 Minutes

Game development is in a tumultuous state. 

There’s no shortage of articles and posts about layoffs, failed products, and studio shutdowns, as well as speculation about what the future holds for us all.

Today I want to look at why I think the industry is where it is, and also what we can learn from it going forward. Too many takes on the industry attempt to boil things down to one or two variables. 

Let me get the caveat out of the way first: I am going to miss stuff, and I’m probably wrong about either the size or impact of the issues I’ll bring up. I certainly don’t know all the variables. 

Nevertheless, here’s my take on the recent history of game dev as we head towards the end of 2024.

The Variables (...some of them)

Big, “Obvious” Stuff

• COVID had a huge impact on games

• AAA development is getting more expensive

• Layoffs mean that tons of talent is available for companies hiring

• Mobile Changes (IDFA, etc.)

• Web3, NFTs, Blockchain, P2E, etc.

• Gen “AI”, or really LLMs

Less Discussed Stuff

• AAA development is taking longer

• Game making and game supporting tools/platforms are easily accessible

• Way more games are being made

• Roblox and UEFN

• Interest rates and resulting changes in capital investment

• Investors with little understanding of game dev

• Changing player shape and need

• Narrowly targeted hiring reqs

• Decline in effectiveness of traditional marketing

• Incumbent products lasting for years or decades

• Macroeconomics

• Trend chasing

• Remote Work

• Conflict between players and developers

Rarely Discussed Stuff

• Different incentives between Publishers vs Investors vs Game Devs vs Players

• Growing numbers of college grads with gaming degrees

• Company brand and reputation-based decision-making in hiring

• Company-based hiring in funding

• Spike in startups in 2020 and 2021 now needing more rounds to continue

• Less “taste-making” through standard media like IGN, Gamespot, etc.

• Overly optimistic leadership

• Unhelpful focus on the process of making games over the purpose of making games

• Challenges to publishing in certain areas or countries of the world

• Discoverability of products in a perpetually red ocean

2019 - Where We Were

Towards the end of 2019, gaming had established itself as an “up and to the right” industry. 

While some studios were still shuttered after failures or because they didn’t align with the parent company or from just running out of capital, it was actually a relatively stable time to be a game dev. One might have even argued that we’d matured within our niche of tech/software dev, with large companies and stable jobs being more common than they’d been in earlier decades.

In the mobile landscape, some companies making games had almost become factories with known metrics. The game felt less important than the marketing apparatus you would hook up to it, and strong product managers from mobile companies were amazing at finding ways to plug their games into a machine where things like CPI, retention at intervals, DAU, ARPU, LTV, and etc. could be tinkered with to create a positive ROI - please don’t misunderstand me as saying this was EASY. But it was repeatable and reliable, and mobile was generating the biggest chunk of revenue by a long shot across game dev. (It still is.)

Tools were also more accessible than they’d ever been. Unreal, Unity, and GameMaker meant that you rarely needed to build your own engine any more, and also that people with little experience still had a chance at making compelling content.

Across every platform, entrenched live service games like Counterstrike, World of Warcraft, Fortnite, Call of Duty, World of tanks, Warframe, EA sports franchises, Clash of Clans, Candy Crush, The Sims, League of Legends, Apex Legends, and more seemed able to endure well beyond the traditional lifespan of a game. They didn’t just make some basic ROI soon after launch, they continued to return more than they cost well into the future. 

From an historical lens, it was a good time to be a game dev. Then COVID happened.

2020 - Early 2022

Over the next few years, the macroeconomic situation got … strange … with artificially low interest rates protecting nations during a time of low economic activity/growth. Meanwhile, people were spending more time alone and at home, both of which led to a spike in game playing. With less time spent outside or with other people, individuals who were in decent financial shape were more likely to spend their discretionary funds on gaming vs other things.

Scaled remote work became real. This changed the way work got done, but also enabled developers to relocate and easily move between jobs or form companies with whoever they wanted anywhere in the world. Many startups were born, and with the still insanely low interest rates PLUS the seeming spike in profitability of games you had investors who knew little about the industry willing to invest millions into it.

Into this fray entered Web3, the new way people would interact with each other. While the term was coined years before, it seemed like the “internet of things”/metaverse was almost here, and in game dev too! Many words were tossed around, but there was a huge amount of FOMO about this from investors across the board. A SHOCKING proportion of the total investment into game dev and startups went to studios that had (or claimed) some connection to Web3 despite little proof that it made games more appealing to players in any way - something that left the majority of experienced game devs skeptical.

Right on the heels of Web3 getting big, Generative “AI” or LLMs started to become popular and were able to do some surprising things. Whether viewed as a copyright infringement, a potentially helpful tool, or a change to humanity forever, people learned about it and started reacting to it at scale. And similar to game pitches containing “Web3,” now you could also probably snag some funding by having something related to “AI” as part of your deck.

In 2021, IDFA (and GAID) became “optional” and many people turned/left it off, hamstringing the machines mobile companies had built to create profit. This was a serious blow to overall revenue, but being in the midst of the gaming boom and the upcoming revolution of “web3” powered gaming meant it didn’t slow down enthusiasm much.

Everything was wild. The devs held the power because of how easy it was for them to switch studios, studios wanted to hire like crazy to take advantage of the boom in gaming plus the high availability of capital to fund it, and not just Web3 but AI were pitched as things that would transform our industry to its very bones.

It’s worth noting here that the devs who seemed to hold the power were not all devs equally. Senior devs did amazingly well, but mid and junior talent were often pushed aside as senior people willing to work remotely were everywhere and paying them wasn’t a problem. The relative cost-to-benefit ratios seemed tilted in favor of those already established in the industry, while others struggled or sought to join far less stable studios they could get into. Part of this was the sudden availability of talent, while some of it was companies having no idea how to train someone remotely and choosing to rely on “proven talent.” This would have many consequences down the road.

In the midst of the chaos, releases were volatile. Many more games were being made, but huge games had faltered in timeline, largely blamed on the pandemic disrupting how people worked and their emotional well-being. Players started being more suspicious, with launch failures like Battlefield 2042 generating real ire in the gamer community. There were a lot of delays and quality problems, though hits like Zelda and Elden Ring showed that good products could still be made.

Leaders during these months trended towards uncontrolled optimism, even as dev costs skyrocketed and historically reliable processes for shipping on time seemed to falter. 

In many ways, things were great, but in some areas, it felt like we were redlining. I’ll throw my own opinion in here: one of the bigger challenges that we are still facing is the breakdown in the relationship between developers of games and the players who play them. You don’t want an antagonistic relationship with your audience.

Late 2022 through 2024

In multiple ways, from late 2022 through 2024, our industry took body blows.

The pandemic cooled down and things started to return to whatever the new “normal” would be.

Interest rates rose, drying up capital by altering risk profiles against alternative investments.

Web3 was revealed to not be the revolution in games that people had thought it might be. In fact, it seemed that most of the web3 stuff had been gamified speculation for crypto schemes/launches (depending on your view). 

Gamers and everyone else started returning to other activities. A fairly predictable drop in game revenue resulted, but despite its predictability it still seemed to take many companies by surprise. Everyone always thinks they’ll manage to get off just before everything goes south, and - just like many other times in history - most companies had overplayed their hand.

Established companies with established processes started asking if remote was still a good idea, with some demanding a return-to-office for their employees. This led to a second set of “negotiations” between devs and studios, but this time the studios held far more power.

Big releases kept dropping the ball. Quality at launch seemed unpredictable and players reacted with ever more caution about new products. And most gamers had tried and true long-term live service games to fall back on and play. If new stuff wasn’t great, old proven stuff was everywhere.

One result of this? Player skepticism towards development and publishing, and a further breakdown of the relationship between studios and the audience they claimed to serve.

Alright, let me take a break here… 

Next newsletter I’m going to talk about where I see various parts of the industry in the last few years, but this one is more about a reflection of the pre and post pandemic situation.

It’s been tough. Simultaneously, the underlying numbers are still up and to the right for game dev. The economy is looking somewhat better at least in the west. There is hope out there. 

My honest take though? We’ve still got a lot to figure out before we break out into a more stable industry again. I don’t think 2025 is going to be the year of amazing recovery. I’m open to being wrong about that, and actually hoping I am too.

Some takeaways from everything above:

• Don’t bank on 2025 being the year everything gets better. Many thought that about 2024, and things got way worse. I don’t know where the bottom is, and I don’t know how long recovery will take, but take care of yourself and those you love by assuming 2025 may be a continuation of 2024. If it IS a year of recovery, great. Don’t put all your eggs in that basket.

• The power dynamics between employee and employer have shifted. Don’t behave as if they have not. Whether it’s fair or right or whatever, it is what it is. Adjust your approach, recognize the new sets of tradeoffs, and make good decisions based on reality, not the ideal you wish was true. 

• Be wary of gaming trends. Think through the world you’re in. Web3 was very appealing to lots of people who don’t know much about games. SOME people who knew stuff about games did jump in, but usually with very different types of bets than the people who knew nothing about games. The majority isn’t always right, but it is worth taking seriously.

• For the love of all that is holy, please CONNECT WITH YOUR PLAYERS and don’t treat them badly, speak down to them, or act as though they are idiots. If you don’t understand them and recognize how they relate to games, you have a much lower shot of making one that succeeds.

That’ll wrap it up, see you in a couple weeks with a deeper dive into the last year or so for specific parts of our industry.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Let me tell you a story about a potential you.

You’ve recently started working at a large, multi-game studio. Thousands of employees. You’re in a leadership role, and you know you want to have a positive impact on the people around you and the game you’re working on.

Fresh eyes give you an advantage over people who have been there a long time. You find it easy to spot areas to improve, but you haven’t yet gone about making changes.

The reason? You’re not quite sure how to drive change in your new environment, and you’re politically wise enough to use a little bit of caution. 

You don’t want to burn trust with others, so rather than going to #general chat on slack and declaring your 12 point plan to help everyone else stop sucking (a bad move), you spend some time watching how change happens. Through observation and time investment, you develop relationships with influential peers and leaders above you.

The longer you are there the more (and bigger) problems you see. You continue to accumulate credibility, starting to make small changes. The changes you target aren’t necessarily the most helpful, but they do build the most credibility and are certainly appreciated by those around you.

As time goes on, this cycle continues. Some well-chosen wins with the right visibility from leadership create a promotion for you, and that exposes you to even higher status problems you may be able to tackle. But, with the promotion comes a new layer of leadership to understand and navigate.That’ll take some time. Back to relationship building!

Of course, the problems you saw when you first arrived that impacted the people you used to lead… those are pretty small problems now, and they just weren’t visible enough then and still aren’t worth investing time in. You’ve gained sufficient influence to - with a bit more work - solve bigger problems. You leave the small ones, and the team that has them, behind for someone else to figure out.

Over the course of the next few years, you advance in the organization, building strategic relationships, solving the right high visibility problems, and developing other skills to both preserve your existing role and influence, and expand your reach in the org.

At one point, a dysfunctional leader you disagree with, and who is likely causing some of the problems you’re trying to solve for the good of everyone, makes a significant blunder. To help the company succeed, you very tactfully and without taking a serious risk make it obvious that said leader is a failure and misaligned with leadership. A few weeks later they’ve resigned, and due to some deft handling, you’ve taken over their space and influence.

You’re excited by your own progress, and are even more confident. Soon you’ll be able to get to the real issues that abound and that you are uniquely suited to fix. But you’re not quite there, you need to consolidate your position a little bit - change is likely to cause some blowback, and you need to be secure to bring about the transformation the company needs and that you will soon be perfectly positioned to tackle.

Fortunately, there are people who work with and for you who are incredibly supportive of what you do. They see the same issues you do, and are happy to have you leading them. You ensure their good judgment and quality is rewarded, and they rise with you. It’s good to know that such capable people agree - it reinforces that you’re on the right path.

One day, one of those peers who regards you highly and who you have a working friendship with asks some tough questions about what you are both doing, and is this the right thing? They bring up some of the problems that have been left behind, and some of the methods that you’re using to secure your position in the company's senior influence game. They’re concerned that you’ve both drifted into a bad space. When they started, this isn’t who they wanted to become.

Your peer’s points give you pause. Not because they’re good points, but because they’ve clearly lost the plot. The way to drive change is to create the influence to fix the problems at the highest level. That is the path. You know you’re here to make everything better for everyone. And now you realize you can’t trust them. 

Over the next few months you work to distance yourself from them and succeed before they make a career-limiting move challenging a C-level about some poor leadership practices. You still care about them, so you tried to warn them without exposing yourself, but they ignored you and drove on, and now they are basically useless to you. Just not worth sticking your neck out, even if they were right about what they were calling out.

Time moves on. Another one of your chosen leaders makes a move for more authority without checking with you, seeming to be interested in taking credit for work you did. Fortunately, your network of leaders gives you a heads up and you beat them to the punch. You quickly end any chances of their further advancement in the company. They quit a month later.

Eventually, you’re secure and ready; the ammunition you need has been gathered. You wait. 

The moment finally arrives. Your CxO slips up, and you take the risk and go after them with the support and information you’ve gathered. 

It works. The old CxO resigns. You are the obvious successor. You “humbly” jump into the most senior level of the company, negotiating a hefty raise. Those who supported you are rewarded. Many who were on the wrong side of history end up leaving. You’re a star. And now you’ve got access to the organization at the highest level.

Of course, the CEO and the board remain, but once you figure out how to gain leverage, you’ll be able to really do some good for the org. Time to consolidate power so no one can stop you… from all that positive change you’re almost ready to unleash.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------

The U.S. Army is a giant organization. It does many things well, and also has its share of issues. In my time in the service, I and many officers talked at length about the problems we saw and what it would take to fix them. Often, the answer was something like, “You gotta stick it out long enough to reach the rank where you have the power to make the change happen.”

Many of us (myself included) weren’t up for that. I left after four years. Massive respect for the Army and military, but it wasn’t a culture fit for me.

Some did stick it out. And they encountered a problem: as you advance inside of a large organization, you learn what it takes to advance, and you practice the behaviors that lead to advancement. Unfortunately, if you manage to survive and break through the system to the point where you have the power to make changes, odds are you don’t really remember what the issues were, and you’ve now been practicing what it means to succeed in the midst of DYSFUNCTION for so long that you have become a supportive part of the broken system.

Young officers now look at you as the obstacle and wonder if they’ll ever have the authority to bring about change inside the system.

—---------------------------------------------------------------------

Leaders are change agents. Your job is to bring about positive change. 

But change is hard. In the story I wrote above, the idea that you need to develop relationships and build organizational influence to have the maximum positive impact is real. 

Some stubborn leaders reject this idea entirely. They refuse to “play politics,” and hamstring their ability to bring about positive change. It’s not that they can’t make a difference - it just won’t be that meaningful, and will be frustrating. They’ll often quit, looking for a “place without politics” where they can do the right thing uninhibited. Such a place does not exist.

If that’s one end of the spectrum, the other is the story I wrote above. With the best of (starting) intentions, you could become the political animal, the self-serving narcissist convinced only they can fix things, who is willing to cut down anyone who threatens you. The whole way, you’ll believe you are doing what is best for the org by doing what is best for yourself. National and global politics comes to mind.

You’ve probably seen both of these. The problem with both ends is that they have a chunk of truth in them. They’re both true to an extent, with one extreme becoming the monster they wanted to destroy, and the other extreme dying on every hill of principle available but at least not compromising who they are.

If I had to choose between the two, I’d say pick the stubborn leader who avoids politics. At least you won’t transform into someone you’d not recognize.

But it’s not a binary choice. 

We have another option, and it is to acknowledge the reality of politics, recognize the importance of compromise, and seek to drive positive change for the entire org, but WITHOUT becoming the self-serving political animal.

To utilize this option, you have to be grounded in something outside of the work you’re doing. If you’re stuck in the work as your whole world, that increases your vulnerability to becoming the monster. 

What you need is a set of values or an ethical framework that you follow even when it hurts. And that framework cannot be, “The ends justify the means,” or “The greatest good for the greatest number,” two related moral ideas that are both deplorable when played out to their logical endpoints.

Without an ethical frame to guide you, diplomacy will rapidly become a zero sum game about winning. Wisdom will be replaced with craftiness. Self-preservation will rule the day.

So, with that in mind, here’s a few values to keep you leading well, interacting with the political environment endemic to human organizations, and not becoming the very problem you used to want to solve.

Three Values

Humility

Humility is a core part of a well-lived life. It is the opposite of pride and the check on arrogance. Humility is not self-denigration or low self-esteem. It is pointing your thoughts away from yourself towards the world around you. As C.S. Lewis eloquently said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.”

Why it matters: To lead well (morally and effectively) your focus must be on those you lead, not on yourself. You are helping others reach the goal, and the way you help is through leading. You develop the skills of leadership, you learn to negotiate, you understand the politics, but you take yourself as out of the equation as you can. You are here for the good of others, not your own glory. 

A huge advantage of this: leaders who are humble definitionally get to worry about themselves less. They can be curious about others and different points of view. They can listen and hear feedback about themselves without self-focus overcoming their situational awareness. 

The disadvantage: you may pass up opportunities for your own advancement, or sometimes be blamed for something that wasn’t your fault.

If you are only interested in climbing the career ladder, avoid humility. If you want to make a difference for those you lead and the players you serve, humility is a good place to start. You’ll have more time to think about how to add value in all the time you save not focusing on yourself.

Courage

Courage allows you to do the right thing when it is hard. If the right thing were always the easiest thing to do, courage would be unnecessary. But in the world we live in, the right thing is often hard. It’s why we admire people who choose the hard, right path. We know it’s difficult. I can certainly think of times I’ve failed at it and either passively or even actively done the wrong thing instead.

In your career you will face moments where courage is required. You will be asked to do something you should not, or your self-preservation will tell you to cover something up so no one knows you made a mistake. Courage to do the right thing matters here. Courage sometimes forces you to acknowledge your own faults. It might push you to confront a leader doing something wrong.

A huge advantage of courage: if you get good at practicing doing the hard thing, you’ll become someone who does it more naturally. You’ll still be afraid, and you’ll sometimes experience negative consequences for running against the grain, but you’ll also learn that that’s ok. 

Courage doesn’t guarantee you are right, so it must be matched with humility. Combined, these two allow you to focus on the big problems and take risks trying to do the right thing. 

The disadvantage: you will sometimes lose (in big and small ways), alone on a proverbial hill of principle. Remember, doing the right thing is hard sometimes, and that’s when it’s most important to do the right thing.

But a practice of courage will mature you as a human being, teach you to pick yourself back up when you fall down, and create a force for good that is simply unequaled by those without it.

Care

Care, compassion, love, kindness, whatever you want to call it, this is desiring what is best for others. It’s more than empathy, it’s not just politeness or being nice. It is the genuine hope followed by action that attempts to lift up those around you.

Why it matters: Leaders lead people. To succeed morally and effectively, you have to care for the people you lead. In our case, in game dev, we also need to care for the players we and those we lead serve. 

A leader who doesn’t care about the people they lead and/or the players they serve is dangerous, and not a lot of fun to work for. Care brings the human element to the equation; it keeps us from becoming machines. 

It’s hard to maintain, especially as you scale. But I would argue it is as or perhaps more essential than both humility and courage.

A huge advantage of care: if you are able to truly care for those you lead, you have an abundance of daily wins available to you. No longer will success be dictated by whether the product was the best or your career is advancing, but you will be working towards and seeing the positive impact you are having on others each and every day. 

I want to emphasize something here: to truly care is to put action behind feeling. We may say we care about many things, but if we aren’t doing anything about it, it really doesn’t matter much. When we lead, we need to care with action, not just words.

Like courage, this will be hard. Sometimes our care will cause us to miss something important to us because someone needs our attention and we choose to be present for them in that moment rather than taking care of ourselves. 

Care is also challenging to do well if you aren’t humble. A prideful, self-focused leader can’t afford to care too much. It gets in the way of their own advancement.

Simultaneously, a person who is trying to be caring but not courageous will struggle to follow through on their care. They will back down when it matters most, and abandon people around them from fear of negative consequences.

But as a leader, care provides immense benefit. It gives massive meaning to every day.

To care about those you lead, in action and word, provides a reason to keep going forward. Expanding that care to the players who will play the games we make only increases that purpose.

Care is a value I highly recommend.

Summary

When I think about the people who have led well and I wanted to follow, they often had these three values.

When I think of leaders who I was suspicious of, regardless of their effectiveness, they often lacked one or more of these values.

If you cultivate humility, courage, and care, I believe you will be a leader worthy of being followed.

I also believe that these values will go a long way to keeping you from becoming the self-absorbed leader only interested in their own growth, with a rationale for every awful action taken.

I’ve used the word “practice” a lot. We become what we practice. If this newsletter resonates, I encourage you to think about what values you are practicing today, and to add in the practice of humility, of courage, and of care.

You will be a better human being if you do. And better human beings make better leaders.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Where I’m At:

The last few weeks have been wild, and the next few will continue the trend! I’ll be giving a talk in Ohio at the Shawnee Game Conference, then headed to India for the India Game Developer’s Conference, and I just finished teaching a two day course on “Reframing Agility” to an amazing group of game devs.

Lots of exciting stuff! I have also had less time and creative energy with everything going on, so I’m doing something a bit different for this newsletter: I’ve grabbed a few of my more engaging LinkedIn posts from the last few months and I’ll be sharing them here, as well as some solid write-ups from a couple other newsletters you should check out!

Enjoy!

The Efficiency Lie

Game producers: Stop trying to make everything more efficient.

There are so many ways to become more efficient. You can become efficient in time, efficient in quality, efficient in people, efficient in scope.

And none of them may solve the underlying issues your team faces.

I get that we're incentivized to say, "We got 20% more art assets completed this quarter than last quarter thanks to the new pipeline I developed!" and everyone claps and you look good and all that.

Did you need 20% more art assets? Most places I've seen need about 60% LESS art assets.

Or perhaps a better way to say it, most studios need to figure out what art assets actually matter and stop treating artists like machines on a factory floor.

That's what you should be doing. Not just chasing, “More, Faster, Cheaper!” but stepping back, seeing the whole, and figuring out how to improve the game’s chance of success.

It's almost certainly not by shaving 10% meeting load out of the week.

Figure out what's going to stop your team and game from succeeding. THEN go and make the RIGHT THINGS more efficient.

Shipping A Good Game Is Hard - Be Excited If You Do

I remember a quote from Jeff Kaplan (paraphrased):

"In your career in video games, you might make a good game. If you're really lucky, you could make a great game. There's a very small chance you make a 'lightning in a bottle' game.

"If you make a good game, be proud. Making a good game is really hard."

It was years ago, but I've never forgotten that quote.

Evaluating A Leader’s Success By Their Absence

One way to know you're succeeding as a game producer:

You step away unexpectedly for more than a week, and the team continues to execute AND IMPROVE the way they work, stays focused on the vision of the game, and challenges themselves in healthy ways.

There is a never-ending journey producers are walking. There will always be ways to improve any team, and get more and more nuanced (and interesting).

If you can't get past the basics by remaining a crutch and dependency for the simplest things, you never get to go on the journey to high performance with your teams. You'll get to a "functional" level and stall.

Your job isn't "running a work system," it's making the team/org/studio you lead more effective. You may start at the lower levels, but be careful not to get trapped there.

A Valid Game Dev Assumption

In game dev, a good assumption is to assume most of your assumptions are wrong.

Great Reads

Finally, here are some game dev related articles I enjoyed from the last few weeks.

Pushtotalk.gg

Ryan Rigney does a dive into how the existing and mature live service products are shifting the game dev market.

My TL;DR: Live Service may not be the path to success it was once thought to be!

The Gamers Are Locked In

push to talk #39 // players are hooked on games that launched a decade ago // what does that mean for the industry?

EliteGameDevelopers.substack.com

Joakim Achren takes a look at some of the Web3/Crypto madness of the last few years through the lens of an investor, and also with the insight of a founder who built a Web3 game during the craze.

My TL;DR is probably a bit different from Joakim’s. He asks the question, “When will the next crypto boom be?” and for me, that question looks more like, “What makes you think a next boom WILL happen?”

Crypto Confidential: What I Learned

How ‘Crypto Confidential’ echoed my own web3 gaming ventures during the pandemic years.

Ryan and Joakim are both insightful writers who have a lot to contribute, so I hope you get a chance to check out their work.

That’ll wrap it up for this week!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>I’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with me, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

In The Trenches

You’re pushing hard to meet a milestone objective. There’s a sense of urgency permeating your studio, and everyone is doing their darndest to get through the work that you all knew was probably too ambitious.

Despite that, you press forward. You cut everything from your schedule you can. You stay up late a few times too many. You’re burning out, but at least you’re not alone. The milestone looms. Nowhere to go but forward.

With a few days to go, you admit you’re not going to make it. A bit of grief sets in, and with it a mix of despair and resolve about the next milestone. You don’t stop trying exactly - and neither does anyone else - but you know it’s going to fail. There’s a sad resolve as the clock runs down.

The milestone date arrives. 

Disappointed but not defeated, work is rolled forward. The resounding call is, “We’ll do better next time!” Yes, it was tough, but you and your team have more in the tank, more to give.

Leaders and managers go about focusing on getting people to work more efficiently. “Extraneous” interactions are reduced and scorned. If you’re going to catch up, you need to focus on delivery. You need to put your collective heads down and get “stuff” done.

The cycle continues.

Ignoring The Problems

Does this story seem familiar to you? I’m guessing a lot of people, in game dev and outside of it, can relate.

There’s a lie that somehow got embedded in our brains that working hard is the way out of every problem. We believe that if we and those around us can just get enough focused time we can overcome every obstacle. 

What often gets ignored as we rush from one phase focused on efficiency to the next focused on delivery to the next focused on execution is that the problem may not be any of those things.

Further, the actual problems are likely staring your studio in the face. If you were to go and ask your devs what would help them go faster, or what tends to get in their way, they might have great answers. 

But no one has time for that. The devs who spot the problems are overwhelmed to the point of not being able to take the time to fix them or even articulate what’s wrong. The leaders are doing everything they can to keep people from being “distracted” by negativity or meetings that might slow a key contributor down.

Someone knows what’s wrong, but the right people do not, and no one has the time to do anything about it anyway. 

We are unwilling to stop, or slow down, and figure out what’s happening.

Learning Takes Time

In game dev, there is a constant need to be learning. The world is always shifting around us, for better and for worse. The systems, organization, process, vision, and culture we’ve built need to adapt to that changing environment.

Without deliberate learning, those changes either don’t happen or happen randomly. I know we love to think we’re picking up and applying valuable lessons as we go, but the reality I see is that game devs may be individually learning about what works and doesn’t through experience, but none of those changes are being fed back into the system to make it better.

In other words, you don’t get the benefits of what you learn  in your current role. You only hope to bring them to your next role.

And why? Why do we ignore all the wisdom we’re accumulating?

Because it takes time.

If one person on a team realizes there’s a better way to do something, but never gets to talk to the team about it because there’s never a good time, it won’t get fixed. Perhaps everyone had the same thought, but in the absence of space to think and talk and take a step back together, you’ll rarely see a change implemented.

Leaders face the same struggle. There are always a million things to be doing, and the idea that I’m going to STOP for a moment and think about what’s actually going on, or spend some time asking people what the biggest risks are, isn’t something I’ll prioritize. This goes double for those organizations where every leader seems to be in back to back meetings eight hours a day, five days a week, already barely able to keep up with the barrage of tasks they’re responsible for.

Unfortunately, learning, continuous improvement, adaptation, whatever you want to call it, is not optional. If you fail to adjust to the ever-changing environment, you will fall out of step with it. That’s a path to failure.

Committing To Learning

The way out is the one no one wants to hear. I don’t believe in magic bullets. This will take time. But, as I’ve said before and will say again: 

If you don’t have time to solve the problem of not having enough time, you need to stop.

Not forever. Maybe not everyone.

But you need enough people to stop attempting to execute their way out of the situation you’re in to make some changes and see if it improves things.

This is another thing that makes stopping and learning hard. There is no guarantee that the solution you come up with will be better, now or later. Maybe everyone takes a couple hours to pause and try to make some improvements, only to have no effect. Maybe it even makes things worse. 

Hence the commitment to learning. Committing to learning is committing to giving up cycles from your devs and your leaders to be able to reflect on how they’ve been working so that they can apply what they’ve learned right away and to the benefit of your team, rather than at their next gig after the studio gets shut down.

The “lost” cycles are a short-term hit to “efficiency.” But if you allow learning to be applied consistently, your organization may be able to focus on the things that are stopping you from succeeding. You may actually make progress towards a cohesive game, rather than just more productivity.

Overcoming Anxiety

It is a travesty that the retrospective/AAR/post-mortem is one of the first rituals I see teams cut when times get tough. It’s like curing a hangnail by chopping your arm off.

Certainly, some continuous improvement practices aren’t effective and perhaps aren’t creating value right now. But when you remove them entirely rather than fixing them, it sends a cultural message about what’s important, and what’s not.

And when times are tough, it creates anxiety and stress. Both of those things shut down critical thinking in high doses. It puts people in a place where they want to TAKE ACTION, not THINK. Highly stressed people who are just trying to work their way out of the problem will be incredibly frustrated and annoyed at someone asking them to stop for a moment, take an hour or two, and think about what we could be doing better.

This is exactly why it must be done. Game development is inherently creative and uncertain. We NEED the abstract, thinking parts of our brain. We have to grapple with the complexity of what we are doing, not pretend it’s simple because it alleviates our anxiety. We have to think in order to learn.

Prioritizing Learning

The good news? You have the ability to change your approach, even if it’s just you.

The bad news? If the culture isn’t there, you may get some backlash for asking questions when everyone else is trying to execute their way to success.

For the individual contributor in that situation, here’s what I’d recommend:

1. Create space to think.

Block some time to step back and look at the big picture. Give your own brain a space to process everything that has been happening. What have you been doing over and over that hasn’t been working? What’s the thing that you keep putting off because there’s so much work to do? Who have you not talked to and stayed aligned with that you should’ve?

Just spending 30 minutes giving yourself time to breathe every week or two can get you out of bad habits. Take a long lunch, book some time at the beginning or end of the day, find a spot to pause and reflect on what’s been going on. This can also reap huge personal benefits as you also get to think about your own work and career. We neglect that too often.

2. Use 1:1s or other conversations with your leaders to go big picture

In rushed organizations, every 1:1 or conversation tends to be about tactics and execution. Break that trend. Use your 1:1 to ask some bigger questions and stay connected to the higher level goal. If the leaders you talk to don’t know what that is besides, “faster, sooner, quicker” that’s a great sign that the org has lost self-awareness. That can be valuable to know.

3. Suggest a change that would help the org

I wish I could tell you what to suggest (maybe some of these ideas about creating space for learning?) but in every part of every org that exists there are opportunities to be better. Use your space to think and 1:1s to think of and test ideas that could make things better. Then, take the risk of suggesting the change.

You could bring the suggestion to your team, or your discipline, or your manager. Maybe it’s something you can do on your own, and you just want to let others know you’re trying it and you’ll let them know how it goes. Whatever it is, throw it out there. Sometimes everyone knows something needs to change but no one has the time to suggest an improvement. Be the person who suggests something. Unless your workplace is insanely toxic, the worst you’ll hear is “no.”

For the leader in that situation:

1. You can do everything the individual contributor does, a couple of changes based on your distinct role:

• Create even more space to think. Shoot for an hour or more a week. You are there to align people, to do that you need to be grounded in what matters and not caught in the trap of urgent work. The higher up you go in an org, the more time you’ll need to process and think about how you’ll solve the problems facing you and your team.

• Rather than simply suggesting a change, you may have the power to implement one. When people are in a rush, they may not want to hear about your new idea, so I’d start small and frame it as a quick two week test of something new. Then see if you can improve things one bit at a time. Choose something that you’re pretty sure will work and make things better for the team, it will build trust for future improvements.

2. Create and/or hold onto whatever continuous improvement practice(s) makes sense.

Whether it’s a pull system where people can make suggestions via a slack channel, or recurring retros with the whole team, or post-mortems on every feature/asset that’s created, spend your own and the team’s cycles trying to make things better. Compound interest is an insane force, little 3% improvements stacked over time can lead to an amazing team.

Just remember, whoever you involve in these practices or meetings should feel like they are working. Nothing more frustrating then going to a retro that’s supposed to help, only to have it be something where only the leaders talk and the action items never get done. I recommend picking ONE thing and seeing if you can make it stick as a team, then move to the next. More is rarely better when it comes to simultaneous change initiatives.

3. Ask questions that encourage thought rather than immediate action

This one might seem dumb, but the way you talk will have a huge impact on the culture you create. If something didn’t go as expected and you always say something like, “Got it, what are you doing about it?” or “What’s the next step?” you are biasing people to KNOW WHAT TO DO in all situations. Instead, asking, “What did you learn?” or “How could we avoid this in the future?” gets people stepping back to look at the overall situation instead of diving into another desperate solution. 

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes there is a time to act quickly and you want to encourage that. But I would argue that most orgs bias so strongly towards doing the next thing people eventually start to believe thinking isn’t really something that’s expected of them. Train your team to think.

For the senior leader:

1. You can do everything the ICs and leaders are doing, with the following changes.

• EVEN MORE time to think. There should be multiple slots every week where you’re pausing and making sure you’re not caught in the weeds. What’s the goal of the company, how are you communicating it, what are the risks we’re ignoring, what is the deep truth you know that no one is talking about at the senior layer? Give yourself time with questions like these, and often.

• Suggesting changes shifts slightly for senior leaders. You have massive authority in the org. But you also don’t want to be a wrecking ball of chaos. Be specific about what you change, and don’t overdo it. An email that takes you 5 minutes to write can take the next layer of leaders multiple days to digest and take an org weeks to implement, and that’s in a highly effective org. Be self-aware and recognize that you will think at a rate much faster than the organization can change. Don’t whiplash everyone.

2. Ground yourself in reality

There are a plethora of games that were supposed to succeed but did not. The senior leaders were often unbelievably optimistic and able to rationalize why. They were also wrong. This happens over and over and over again, and one cause of that is how distant senior leaders can end up from the reality of what’s going on.

To avoid this, find ways to stay connected to what’s happening on the ground. Surveys might help with this, or even - if you can make it non-threatening - finding time to grab lunch or have a quick 1:1 with people who are doing the actual work. 

In game dev, stay close to playtest feedback and always be looking back at the vision and whether you’re getting closer or further away.

Above all, you need to be doing everything you can to disabuse yourself of the notion that you know what’s going on at the org. That’s not your job, and it’s not possible. If you’re in a studio of even moderate size, you are aware of a small fraction of what’s happening and where the problems are. The challenges ARE KNOWN, but by the layers below you in the hierarchy. 

Your job is to create space for them to tell you what’s actually happening and wrong, and also to create and maintain alignment to where the org is trying to go. 

Ego and confidence are your enemy. Cultivate curiosity and humility. You have immense power and can move worlds, but it’s much easier to mess things up than it is to make things better. Be cautious and open to learning from unexpected places.

3. Hire people who are good at learning and improving

Don’t chase every pedigreed expert the world has to offer when you need a role filled. Find people who demonstrate flexibility and applied learning. Turn down the person who has the perfect game dev background but can’t tell you a good story about how they improved themselves or the team they were on.

You (and your peers) define the culture. Who you hire is a big part of that. If you want an adaptive, learning org, hire people who are comfortable learning and adapting. 

Closing Up

Learning is not optional if you want a sustainable game dev studio. Everything around us is changing all the time. 

Don’t get trapped kicking all those reflective and improvement oriented practices to the side when the going gets tough. If the car engine is broken, it doesn’t matter how hard you press the gas pedal. 

Whether you’re an individual, a leader, or someone in the C-level, spend the time and accept the overhead of thinking and learning and improving. In a much shorter amount of time than you’d think, you’ll be outperforming the individuals, teams, and studios that try to outwork every obstacle.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 6 Minutes

We’ve got a guest author today! Jonathan Zabel recently wrote a great piece on milestones in game dev, and I wanted to share it with our distro. Jonathan gave us permission to publish this, so many thanks to him! Let’s get into it.

Story Time, Part 1

Back in 2018, I had just joined a 60 person team making a 4X game (you know, those intense strategy games with base building, combat and a huge world map).

When we talked to the execs funding us, we confidently told them we were in Production heading towards Soft Launch in a year.  But if you looked at our process, it was a mess.  We spent three hours every night trapped in a conference room reviewing everything in the build with the Game Director down to the smallest detail. (And of course there were many hours spent filing JIRA tickets the next day to make sure not a single piece of feedback was missed!)

As weeks turned into months, there was more stuff going into the game, but the game wasn’t getting better.  The more frustrated the Game Director got that we couldn’t understand his vision, the more low-level and tactical the direction became.  He stopped trusting the team.

We were losing the forest for the trees.  We were teaching the team to be helpless, to stay in their lane and do exactly what they were told.  Something had to be done or our launch would be a flop.

So I asked the Game Director one day, “What would happen if you took all the energy you’re currently spending telling the team what stuff to build, and instead spent it on describing the player experience you want to create in as much detail as possible?”  He was intensely skeptical, but what we were doing was not working and that was my opening.

And then everything started to get better.

Milestone Basics

What’s a milestone, anyway?

A milestone is a collection of goals that have more impact when delivered together.

Typically, milestones have three components:

• The player experience you’re looking to create

• Deadline

• Consequences (if either the experience or deadline is missed)

Why are milestones useful?

Milestones allow the team and stakeholders to agree on a desired player experience that will be delivered at a specific time.

How are milestones typically used?

Milestones get a bad rap with teams because they tend to be externally imposed (by your studio or publisher) and don’t help the team focus on a desired player experience.  I’ll briefly describe the two most common uses.

Typical Use #1: Game Phases

Most publishers, studios and teams use a development framework (game phases).  They are, very roughly:

Let’s expand on Pre-Production as an example:

Game phases might not be that inspiring to the team, but they do serve a useful purpose as a validation funnel.  Since your team’s monthly cost goes up the more people you have, frontloading risky ideas early in development allows the team to stay small and experiment for longer without as much ship pressure.

Typical Use #2: Rhythm of Business

If you haven't signed with a publisher or secured funding yet, “we need X features by Y date when we pitch our game to Microsoft” or “Apple said they’d give us free marketing if we deliver X feature by Y date” are common situations milestones are externally imposed on the team.

If you’ve signed a deal with a publisher, specific milestones and deliverables tend to be written into your contract.

Player-Centric Milestones

What are player-centric milestones?

Here are two hypothetical milestones for a fighting game prototype with equal scope:

1. Deliver two characters, three menus, five weapons and a small map in April

2. In April, players can pursue mastery in a 1v1 fantasy duel that challenges their wits as much as their reflexes.

The first milestone might seem impressive in terms of how much stuff your team is making, but it’s hard to know what all that stuff is for.  This type of milestone is why your Game Director might be saying the team “doesn’t get it” and the team might retort that “the vision keeps changing.”

The second milestone talks about:

• How you want the player to behave (play the game a lot)

• What motivates them to behave that way (they want a feeling of mastery)

• What experience you’re delivering to satisfy that motivation (a deeper strategic metagame than other fighting games)

How do I set player-centric milestones?

Step #1: Target Player

Before you can set player-centric milestones, you need to answer the question: “Who’s our target player for this game?”

The clearer a picture you have of your target player, what they enjoy and what their current frustrations are, the more effective your milestones will be.

Step #2: Player Behavior

The first question you’ll answer is: “After playing this milestone, how will players behave?”

There tend to be four major behaviors you’re looking to drive:

• Engagement (players play the game for the long time and/or play multiple times a day)

• Retention (players come back and play every day, for months or even years)

• Reach (players tell their friends about the game and convince them to start playing or come back to the game)

• Revenue (players spend money on the game)

If you’re setting a milestone that targets multiple behaviors, it’s a good time to stop and ask whether you’re taking on too much at once.

Step #3: Player Motivation

The next question is: “What will motivate players to behave this way?”

Think of motivations as a prioritization tool.  If you know how you want players to behave, motivations will help you understand where to focus your efforts in order to make them behave that way.

A simple example:

• If you want players to play the game a lot

• And you know your target player is motivated by mastery

• Then you’re going to spend most of your energy making core combat deeper (instead of on worldbuilding & narrative, social systems like guilds, etc.)

I’ve included a sample player motivation model from Quantic Foundry to get you started.

Step #4: Player Experience

The last question is: “What will players experience that serves that motivation?”

I recommend a technique called Player Journey Mapping because it allows you to draw a direct connection between what you’d like players to experience (“pursue mastery in a 1v1 fantasy duel”) and all the stuff you need to build (“two characters, three menus, five weapons and a small map”).

This is what you’ll show to stakeholders who ask you “OK, but what’s the strategy here?” and to team members who ask “yeah, but what do we actually need to make?”

Example

Let’s revisit my fighting game prototype and bring it all together.

Story Time, Part 2

After asking the Game Director to talk about the player experience he wanted instead of the stuff he wanted added to the build, he mentioned that in the next six months:

• First Time Player Experience.  He wanted new players to keep playing past the first few days because they felt like they were becoming more powerful, mastering the core game mechanics and were curious about the story.

• Mid-Game Progression.  He wanted players who had been playing a few weeks to keep playing and not get bored because they were getting constant upgrades to their base and fighting other players for the first time.

• End-Game Guild PvP.  He wanted hardcore end-game players to play a massive amount on the weekends because of the powerful upgrade resources they could obtain by battling other guilds in contested territory.

These milestones weren’t about adding a new combat unit, rebalancing the crafting economy or changing the progression unlock order of buildings in your base (though we did do all of that stuff).  They were about driving specific behavior for a certain type of player within our game.

Because we had this clarity, we were able to split the team into three pods, each with a separate backlog that would serve these six-month milestones.  Playtests and reviews became more focused.   It was easy to know what was important and what could wait.

It wasn’t perfect.  There were plenty of times we got caught in the weeds, or suddenly pivoted and blew up all our existing backlogs.  But at least we now knew why players would care about all the stuff we were making.

Next Steps

Take a look at the milestones on your current project.  How would you redefine them to focus more on the desired player experience?  How would your team and your stakeholders react?  I'd love to hear about your experiences and insights!

Reframing Agility

As a heads up, we’re running our Agile Fundamentals course called “Reframing Agility.” If you (or others you know) are looking for certified agile training, we have an open enrollment course on October 14th and 15th.

Agile is misunderstood in game dev. We want to create clarity and give you tools to improve the process you and your teams use every day.

Check out our ICAgile Certified training! Sign up before October 6th to get the discounted price of $799!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

If you managed to build the best game dev team in the world, here’s two principles they would follow in their work:

1. They would only work on the most important things they could find. If it wasn’t the most important work they could be doing, they would stop and go do that work instead.

2. They would only take each piece of work to a barely sufficient quality level. Once it was “good enough” they’d move on to the next most important work.

No matter how many people and how much money you had available, if you got your team to follow these two principles, whenever you ran out of money you would have gotten as much of the most important work done as you possibly could have, given your team and budget.

This is an ideal worth striving for! It’s hard to do, there’s a ton of nuance in both points, “easier said than done” as they say, but if you could pull it off, that team would give you the best shot at producing something amazing.

The first bullet (only working on the most important stuff) is intuitive to most people. The difficulty is in figuring out what the most important work is and then doing only that. 

But the second bullet, this idea that we’ll do barely sufficient quality work… that one’s a bit trickier. For many a game dev, it runs against our intuition. We don’t want “barely sufficient” work, we want amazing work!

So when I tell you that I think you should err on the side of doing work that doesn’t meet the bar, instead of exceeding it, I know I’m probably ruffling some feathers.

It’s true though.

All other things being equal (warning: they might not be), you are better off stopping before what you’re working on is good enough than going too far. 

Let’s explore why.

The Cruelty of Diminishing Returns

Every song, game, movie, character, book, and etc. humans have ever made could be improved. None of them are perfect. If you had a proficient expert, they could go through every game you’ve ever played and point out little flaws and mistakes made, errors in the art or story, ways the design could be subtly improved.

Even your favorite things are imperfect. It’s the nature of the creative endeavor. As we used to say at Riot, no champion is ever done, we just stop working on it.

And why? So we can ship it and move on to the next thing. Perfection, as they say, is the enemy of good. It is the unreachable and subjective and shifting target that we may aim for but will never achieve. 

And if everyone at Supercell, or CDPR, or Valve were completely obsessed with perfection and only moving on once it had been achieved, they’d all still be working on the first few assets and features of their first game, trying to hit that infinite quality bar. Realistically, they’d have gone out of business long ago.

League of Legends doesn’t need one perfect champion. It needs a ton of imperfect but pretty darned good champions.

The game you are working on doesn’t need perfect code or the best possible feature or an immaculate main character. It needs code and features and characters and story and etc. that create the compelling experience for players you are aiming for.

What this means: all work we put into a game is not equal in the value it returns. And the deeper you go on one asset, the less you get back for it. Conversely, as you get closer and closer to the unattainable “perfect,” the more effort you need to spend to make it even better.

Here’s a couple of charts to help:

On average, after a small bump at the start, the closer to perfect you want to be, the more effort you have to put in. Effort grows exponentially, and you never get to 100% perfect.

Now let’s look at value vs perfection:

On average, after a bit of a slow start, you get a pretty nice ramp where making things better adds a lot of value, which then tapers off dramatically as you get close to 100%. It’s shocking how much value a game can get out of an asset that’s just barely working and only took a day to throw together. But spending another two weeks polishing a part of the environment may net you almost nothing.

This is reflected in all kinds of truisms like, “The last 20% takes 80% of the time” or the 90/10 rule that 90% of the outcomes result from 10% of the efforts, and etc.

So if effort doesn’t create perfection at a linear rate, and perfection doesn’t lead to value at a linear rate, then effort expended is not the same as value gained.

In fact, it is EASY to spend massive amounts of effort and get very little value out of it. In my experience, this is COMMON in game development. Developers in all disciplines focus on creating more and more perfect things at a higher and higher cost. Even ignoring the subjectivity of “perfection” for a moment, this is a bad trade!

Way before we realize, we’re in diminishing returns on whatever it is we are doing. The tweaks become smaller and smaller. The improvement to the player experience becomes more and more negligible. The time lost though, that’s gone. You spent two days trying slightly different shades of blue for a cape. You don’t get that back. Time lost is linear. 

And in game dev time disappears faster than anyone expects. 

Choosing What To Improve

Imagine that all games could be broken down into a set of categories. Based on what your game was intending to become, the audience, and the impact you were trying to have on the world, you set a target “quality” for each category between 1 and 10. (By the way, if you’ve never done this, it’s an interesting alignment check on a leadership team)

You have high expectations for gameplay and performance, but you also want a pretty strong story and some good progression systems in there. You’re not as worried about the long-term viability or cohesion of the IP.

You can probably think of a game that looks something like this.

Your devs are constantly investing time to learn and build so you can create this amazing game you want. How do you go about building this thing?

I think a common approach people take is to use their craft expertise to always go above and beyond. You want to outperform expectations. So, whenever you are thinking about the quality bar, your objective isn’t to hit it, it’s to exceed it. Everyone everywhere is doing this all the time.

This shifts the target quality bar of the studio a bit. It takes the actual target higher.

Remember the value to perfection and effort to perfection charts I mentioned above? Well, to get these higher quality bars across the board, we have to invest more effort than we expected. But hey, we’re game devs, and our job is to exceed expectations! We’re not settling!

And everyone is thrilled with this. As each individual asset comes in, it’s even better than it needed to be. The team is psyched, you’re making an even better game, gosh does it look good. The publisher loves the high standard!

And then you hit the point of realization: you don’t have enough time. Your runway, well, it’s running out. Yes, the publisher is loving it, but it’s not quite a game yet, even though you’ve got a ton of high quality stuff everywhere, and your investors are getting concerned about spending more.

Suddenly your whole approach shifts. No longer are you able to exceed expectations. That seemingly endless three year runway you had is into the last 14 months, and things aren’t where they should be. You spent a lot of time in “diminishing-returns-land,” and now it’s time to pay the piper.

The quality bar drops across the board. We go from multiple iterations to make sure each walk cycle is just right, to just making sure it kinda works in game without breaking anything. That extensible feature we thought about building other things on top of? That’s the prototype, and it’s shipping like that, because we have zero time to spend improving it. 

When you first started this whole thing, someone made a plan, and they did their job of adding buffer and even added a two month window at the end of development before launch called, “Polish.” 

Now, the buffer is gone, and so is that polish window. Some people might think, “Well, stuff took longer than expected, and we’re just not going to have that time.” I think it’s more accurate to say, “You already polished. You just did it before you knew what was important to polish.”

The above story (or some variant of it) happens a lot.

In the end, you don’t make that many meaningful choices about what to improve. All your time is spent just trying to get something out the door. People blame estimation, they blame the publisher, they blame the red ocean you were going into, they blame leadership, they blame all the usual things.

But the reality is, you spent a lot of time way before you should have, trying to get higher and higher quality. The effort to quality line fought you the whole way, burning hours and days you didn’t have. 

You spent way too much of your time here…

…spending a lot of effort for not much real value.

In the end, the quality of your game is all over the place. Performance (both smoothness and bugginess) is not in a good spot. A game limps out the door, but it falls far below the goal you had. And for the last 6 months, it felt like you had no agency, no ability to change anything, you just had to keep trying to grind out stuff you weren’t proud of and hope it all worked out.

The Alternative

So imagine you went back in time to before the last 6 months. Let’s say you went back to the very beginning. How could you approach this differently?

Let’s keep the same targets, but you start by having serious conversations with all your individual contributors/discipline leads. 

You don’t want to be overshooting the quality bar, you want to be undershooting it. Yes, absolutely, we want to make a high quality game, but the quality of a game is much more about everything coming together and investing in the right key elements than it is about every category being high quality. 

So you tell people to undershoot, to do less than they might think they want or need to. This doesn’t mean everything starts as a “2” in the quality bar, mind you! Some things might still be very high! But you want the bias to be towards under-delivering rather than over-delivering. 

Not everyone is thrilled with this, but you walk them through the possible futures: do you want to burn all our effort on stuff that might not matter so that everything is high quality individually, but the game may not be great, or do we want to spend less time getting more done, and then having the choice of where to spend our resources?

They get onboard. You’ve basically convinced the team to spend more time here:

You are getting more value for less effort.

The outcome of this is a less flashy game with less polished assets, but that is actually coming together holistically. It’s not a bunch of great pieces, it’s a cohesive whole that starts to show you where more investment will win, and where it won’t. 

And now, when you get to the “buffer” and “polish” parts of your plan, one of two things probably happens. 

1. You don’t have time anyway, but at least the game is complete and man are you glad you didn’t overinvest in every asset for the first 18 months of development.

2. You do have time, and what you’ve learned means you get to really focus on leveling up the most important parts of the game, while leaving the stuff that really doesn’t matter as much as it is.

Either way, this is a better place to be.

Summary and Takeaways

There is so much more we could go into about this topic. The subjectivity of perfection, the way a large “AAA” studio thinks differently than a small indie dev, the way those categories are ridiculous and can also be subdivided almost endlessly, how the little graphs I made up don’t apply all the time to everything, the importance of establishing a clear quality bar, and on and on.

Let me know if you want me to dive more into some of those details in a future newsletter.

For now, here’s the concrete things you can do to improve your chance of making a better game:

1. Recognize that not all effort is created equal. Your job isn’t to be always working, it’s to be working on what returns the most value.

2. Encourage people to show their work early and often. Don’t let people go off and work on something till it is fantastic. Get people to show their work “before it’s ready”, and then see if it is actually good enough. It will be, more than you realize.

3. Set expectations that we’ll be looking and working and playing stuff that isn’t great, and that we EXPECT you to produce stuff at that level. 

4. Do the alignment check with your team or your fellow leaders. Break your game into its pieces. What needs to be a 9? What would be fine at a 2? Figure out what the target is, and then work with the appropriate disciplines to not overshoot early on. 

Remember, if we work only on the most important stuff to a “just barely good enough” quality bar, you will get the most important work done that you possibly can with whatever your team and resources are.

That’s why I’m telling you to not always do your best work. Good enough can be good enough.Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

I recently talked about three things that allow you to influence the organization around you: trust, credibility, and relationships. Now, I want to get a bit more practical about managing up.

Nearly everyone has someone over them in game dev. 

Whether it’s a team lead, a discipline lead, senior stakeholders, a director or VP, maybe someone at the C-level - heck even CEOs end up accountable to boards and VCs and Publishers to some degree or another - we’re all answering to someone in authority.

Now, in an ideal world, those above set clear expectations, engage when appropriate, use their greater influence and authority to support others, and seek to create an environment where the people they are in authority over can succeed.

We don’t live in an ideal world. 

Our relationship with the people above us in our organizations is not always the pretty picture we wish it was. Too often, expectations are unknown, interactions are infrequent and unhelpful, we don’t get the support we were told we would have and are still asked to “figure it out,” and on and on and on.

To make this an even tougher problem, failures in senior leadership are often not overt maliciousness or rampant ego (though those both exist). Most leaders above us are untrained, unsupported, and doing the best they know how while in over their head.

Now, you may be in one of the studios/teams out there with pretty strong leadership and a good culture. They do exist, often in smaller pockets of larger organizations, or in small and mid-size companies. If you are, that’s awesome. It will be a great opportunity to learn, so be bold and take advantage. But it is not the norm.

I have found many leaders out there who truly want to be great leaders and set their teams up for success. BUT, as with every level of an org, they are faced with perverse incentives that drive them down poor paths. Combine that with the aforementioned lack of any good leadership training, and you have someone creating a ton of pain without much awareness of it, as they seek to enhance their career and appease “even more senior” leaders.

When this happens, the leadership failure ladders all the way up to the top. Ever seen the organization where everyone is blaming the layer above for every single problem? Well, the problem isn’t only that blame has become a cultural norm, it’s also that the origin of that blame is frequently justified.

So… how do you “manage up” in a modern company? What does it look like to try to thread the needle between ineffective passivity and a “career limiting move”?

That’s what we’re going to explore a bit today.

BUT, before we do that, I want to be really clear here: results are not guaranteed. I recommend caution.

See, sometimes there IS extreme and self-focused ego in leadership. Sometimes people enjoy making other people suffer or playing power games. You may run into a truly incompetent person with a ton of authority who is insanely proficient at protecting themselves from accountability through skills that aren’t helping them do their real job at all. Sometimes that needle just won’t be threaded.

In my opinion, these toxic situations are NOT the majority case, but they do exist. So beware!

OK, first step: let’s make sure we’re not overthinking this whole “influencing senior leadership” thing.

Before you go about doing anything complicated to manage up, remember something that might work and is worth trying: just ask or say what you think should happen to your boss or stakeholders.

Yeah, it might not work, but if it does you’ve saved yourself a ton of time. So if you need something or see a problem you want their help solving, try asking first. If that doesn’t work for whatever reason, you then enter the more complex world of “managing up.”

Seriously, I’ve had it happen where I’ve gone to a leader above me with all kinds of data and a coalition and having done really well for the last quarter so I could ask for this super hard thing, only to discover it wasn’t super hard and the senior people above me would have helped me with it months before.

Bosses and stakeholders are rarely evil menaces looking to screw you over. Sometimes asking the question gets you what you need. Don’t overcomplicate things unless that fails or is for some other reason not viable.

With that covered, let’s continue on to the more meaty suggestions.

Solving Your Own Role

Everyone but the first founder in game dev is there because someone else decided they needed something done that they couldn’t or didn’t want to do themselves. 

Your boss had reasons for hiring you. Yes, sometimes it’s because the spreadsheet said we needed another producer, but more often it’s because a hole developed and you filled it. Your first and primary job then, is to perform that function when seeking to manage up.

It’s a good thing to spot all the problems in an org and want to drive change and get the senior leaders onboard with what’s wrong. But if that happens before you’ve fully taken on and understood your own role, you may be shooting yourself in the foot for two reasons:

1. You don’t really know how to operate within the system yet, so you may be seeing solutions to worse problems as the problems themselves.

2. You haven’t built up the trust and confidence you need from those senior leaders.

My first recommendation to managing up is to really lock down your own role. I’ve made the mistake of going into a new space and taking on all kinds of responsibilities, and then gotten destroyed because it didn’t seem like I was fulfilling the core reason I was brought on. 

You may think that the role you were brought on to fill is just not as important as the other things you see, but the problem is if you want to drive change through hierarchical layers above you, you have to figure out how to see the world through their eyes. They have a different perspective, and if you clash with that directly and without credibility, it won’t end well.

When the stuff you’re being asked to do really isn’t that important, I still encourage leaders to put the effort in to fulfill the expectations their boss or stakeholders are placing on them. It’s an organizational tax you have to pay to get to a place where you can solve the bigger problems.

So, first thing for “managing up”? Crush your own role. Knock it out of the park, do what you were hired or brought in to do. If you’re absolutely nailing it, it will make things. 

What Are THEY Facing?

The second thing I want to do: understand what my boss and stakeholders are trying to achieve, and what they see as the obstacles in their way. Honestly, the more you are solving your bosses problems and resolving stakeholder concerns, the more leeway you have to suggest change and “manage up.”

I have personally been guilty of spotting serious problems, getting self-righteous about my awareness and cleverness, talking about how we should solve it to others, complaining to anyone who will listen about how dumb everything is, and then talking to my boss about it at the end of that whole line. What I discovered: they are very aware of the problem, they are working on solving it, and here are the four reasons that the solution is much more complex than I had assumed.

Further, sometimes they’ve clued me into even bigger problems they are facing, and are struggling to solve. So one of the reasons that big problem I saw isn’t being fixed is because it’s relatively small compared to something else.

Now, this is all a matter of perspective. Sometimes what I think is a big problem, my boss thinks is a small problem, and vice versa. But regardless of whether we agree or not, the reality is that my boss and my stakeholders have an entirely different experience that they are parsing through as they do their job. They may know the problems, but have reasons - good or bad - for dealing with them. Just like all of us.

My intuitive assumption that I’m seeing everything important is not only wrong, it’s misguided and toxic. 

To manage up then, one of the things I encourage people to do is try to understand their boss. What are their problems, what are their incentives? Are they in a delicate position already where taking on additional “organizational politics” risk would doom the good they are trying to do? 

Yes, sometimes it is true that they are just sucking at their job, or have terrible selfish motivations, but far more often there is a lot going on.

Have the conversation with them. Frame it as a training opportunity, because that’s what it is. Ask them to walk you through their world, their priorities, the obstacles they are working through, the opportunities they see, and whatever else they choose to share. Some might tell you a lot, some might tell you a little, but in all cases you’ve gained a perspective and learned more about how your boss (or a key stakeholder) views their job. 

If there are ways you can help them achieve their goals, they might be super appreciative. Taking work from them and handling it, or sometimes even being a sounding board can be useful. 

You want their help getting where you want the team to go. Help them get where they want to go too. 

Steven Covey said that we should, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” This is the same principle. Do this well, and they are far more likely to have time to listen to you.

Alright, so second thing you can do to manage up: understand your boss or stakeholders working reality, and see if you can help them by lightening their load, or maybe even resolving some of their biggest challenges.

Create a Cohort

When only one person has an idea to get something done, someone who trusts them might listen, but it’s pretty easy to ignore/deprioritize. 

When most of the leaders in a space all agree something should get done, that’s much harder to gloss over.

This creates a “managing up” opportunity, albeit one that walks a knife’s edge.

If you can bring together a lot of people and agree on some specific approaches to solve some problems you collectively observe, you will likely have a much easier time getting support to take the next steps. Even if you can’t get support, often a group of leaders can make the changes happen on their own, and the quantity of people committed means that those above are less likely to interfere.

Here’s the knife’s edge part though: it is easy for a cohort of leaders hoping to make things better to look like insubordination or rebellion against the senior leaders in the org. While that is SOMETIMES something that needs to be done, it should be very rare. So unless your intention is actually mutiny, you need to be careful to keep the group problem focused and goal oriented.

You don’t want to bring together a group of people and have everyone complain about how the leaders above are all sucking and we need to solve the problems they should be solving. That’s undermining their role, probably unfairly.

Instead, bring a group of people together to talk about the problems you see and to discuss how you’d resolve them with and without help. 

This can start as 1:1s to see if other people are seeing the challenges you are seeing, and to expand your view of the overall space. It’s doubly valuable because you also get insight into their problems and perspective on your own from an outsider. Do this a few times, and you’ll probably have a much stronger thesis and also better potential solutions.

I usually start with people I know and trust and who know and trust me just in case I’ve lost my mind and need them to tell me that. Then I will solidify my “pitch” for what improvement looks like, take it to a set of peers, and eventually bring it to the most sympathetic senior person involved. That I’ve run the idea by many others and they are aligned creates a compelling narrative that this is worth doing.

Remember though, frame it as, “Here’s an idea to make things better,” not, “Here’s how you’re screwing up and how we all need to fix it.” 

I can’t emphasize enough how important framing is when taking ideas to senior levels. People want to know you support them, their goals, and the org, not that you’re just sniping at all the problems. I’ve made the mistake of being “right” at the expense of being “helpful” because I framed everything through the lens of senior leadership failures, rather than through opportunities to improve.

Alright, so third thing to do when managing up: Get buy-in from peers and surrounding leaders, and use that to create momentum around an idea before bringing it to senior leaders.

Some Other Tips

Here’s a few more things that might help you.

• Bring data (at least at first)

Data can help show people that something is wrong or that something could be more right. Take the time to collect, organize, and present data that helps your position. My caution here: to some leaders, data is threatening. See if you can figure that out and understand who cares and who doesn’t. If you bring data to the wrong person it can torpedo your whole effort. I wish the world wasn’t like that, but the world doesn’t care about my wishes. (Thanks to Kenn White!)

• Be clear about what you want

Many efforts at managing up fail because they are vague and difficult to understand. Sometimes someone is “struggling to manage up” when in fact the people they are trying to influence have no idea they want anything and are perfectly willing to help if that someone would tell them a clear need. Here, you need to understand how the OTHER person communicates, and adjust what you say to meet their style. Clarity is hard, and senior people tend to be busy for a lot of valid reasons. Being brief and concise will help them help you.

• Framing, framing, framing

What you want and how you say you want it are two different things. Framing is how you say what you want, and there is no neutral frame. Choose your frame carefully. An example of this is what I said earlier; don’t make your suggestion look like the senior person’s failure, make it look like an opportunity for more success. Both are probably true, but the latter definitely is AND is more likely to convince the people you need to convince. Framing does not imply dishonesty, it does imply awareness that framing matter. 

• Managing up is personally expensive

Managing up takes time and is not usually captured in the job description or expectations you’ve been given. You have to find time to do it, and you have to be careful because you are coming from a position of relative weakness. You may spend a long time pondering how to most effectively influence senior leaders, but they get to respond with whatever is top of mind without any consequence. It’s your job as the person attempting to “manage up” to expend those calories. But be aware it comes at cost, and don’t start failing at your core role because you’re spending all your time managing those above you.

• Choose your battles

Every organization has tons of challenges to overcome. Problems are not exceptions, they are the rule, and dysfunction is the norm. If you go after everything all the time you’ll exhaust yourself and fail to influence the leaders around you. The only time that works is if you are well connected to someone senior enough to provide air cover, and even then it’s dicey. 

Pick the things that matter most, then make sure you’re building trust by crushing your own job, understanding the senior leader’s world, and creating effective cohorts to drive change.

Summary

Managing up is hard.

I wish I could tell you some guaranteed technique to drive the change you want via the leaders above you. Perhaps you can find someone somewhere that has that wisdom for you. But the brutal reality is that managing up is a challenge. Even in relatively healthy environments, it can be exhausting.

My three suggestions…

• Crush your own job

• Understand the leaders above you, then help them

• Create a cohort

…are all time-consuming endeavors. It’s not something you can usually swing in two days. 

And that’s ok. The nice thing about managing up? It’s often NOT expected. This is all bonus credit to the org. It’s good practice for seeing how the studio or team work. It’s exposure to problems and getting reps building influence and driving change.

It’s worth doing, and most things that are worth doing are hard.

My recommendation: don’t wait to start building these muscles. I didn’t want to “play politics” early in my career, probably because I didn’t know how. I just skipped it, and the consequences of that were when it became necessary to “manage up” I didn’t know how. That hurt me, it hurt my team, it hurt the product. Don’t get stuck there.

Find ways to drive positive change. Put time aside to see the bigger picture and engage with your boss or stakeholders around it. Get used to thinking creatively about solving organizational problems that your peers all claim are, “over their head” or “above their paygrade.” 

Try anyway. You might be surprised at the positive impact you can have.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at info@valarinconsulting.com.