we don’t need more games
I found my closest friends through games. I made a career out of games. I still earn my bread through games. But this might just be my last games job.
we don’t need more games
We don’t need more games and we don’t need more game studios trying to make the next chart topper.
Some of this is bitterness at having failed to do it twice. It is hard to separate the lived experience from objectivity. While I have been making games all my life, both as a hobby and professionally, the last two major attempts were through starting new companies.
After quitting my job at EA, the first company that I started was with a bucket load of passion. A hunger to do it all myself, feeling as if I had forgotten to make games in all the years of managing mobile and social games. I wanted to build games from scratch, to experience the joys of creation from earlier years again. To self-publish, to prove that I could, and to take baby steps towards being a real business. I got all that I set out to do. Unfortunately, those goals weren’t enough to build a sustainable business, especially bootstrapped. We needed to generate much higher revenues from our game at a rate faster than we were making. I consulted and worked for hire to survive, and ended up making more money than my last job, but with a constant thorn in my mind of not building new games — this was the whole reason I had quit my job in the first place.
I started my second company after getting a term sheet from a local venture capital fund. While the terms scared the skeleton out of my body, it opened up my mind towards a new way of building companies. Along came all the romantic and inspiring YouTube videos of shipping fast, doing things that don’t scale and building billion dollar companies. Passion was suddenly enhanced by business and product thinking. We were going to build a games platform for emerging markets.
A single word best represents how that panned out – Ghanta (yeah right).
I was reminded of how I used to have a keen sense of detecting BS as a young adult. I was trigger-happy to dish out a well timed Ghanta every time I came across assumptions that were untrue or gross exaggerations. Somewhere along the way, that objectiveness got lost in the hubris of strongly and passionately believing in something without a solid grounding in deep work and first principles thinking. We ran out of the small amount of venture capital we had raised from another fund (bless their heart) and with a couple of failed acquisition conversations, lots of lessons learned, that journey had to come to a close.
Now, if I had to start a pure games studio again today, I wouldn’t. For the following few pragmatic reasons. The market is ridiculously crowded. Many of the top companies that have gone public in the games industry make money selling shovels, not games. The expectations of players are sky high, and they are spoilt for choice. It’s hard to innovate and come up with new mechanics, systems, progression, and economies that truly work well together. Sounds like a skill issue, till you start studying and comparing other industries.
When I look at my pile of shame (the games I own that I haven’t played or even installed once), I feel for all the good games that come out every year, but can’t all be played because we only have 24 hours in a day. You could make the same argument for many other creative fields that have saturated markets and a similar clear divide between indie and professional products. To these when you factor in a planet scale audience, where catering to small niche audiences is good enough for a profitable business. I would agree to your argument for the most part, but no.
Spending your most valuable resource — your time — on a hope that ‘it might work’, is not good enough. When you build something, it’s your responsibility to take the best shot at the goal, and if you are not good enough yet, it’s better to pause, get better, and then take the shot. If you are worried about time passing by instead of how you spend your time, then that goal is most likely not important enough for you to give it your best shot. Should you even bother with such side quests?
we don't need more games… or do we?
So then, how do you correlate the life altering impact of games on people and the realities of building a game business? The cultural landscape is ever changing and people need new stories to relate to. The technological landscape is changing at an even faster pace, spawning new opportunities to create innovative formats for people to immerse and engage themselves with, to find connection, to combat loneliness.
I am always reminded of the first game we took over from another team at EA, Pet Society. At first, I thought I would hate working on that game – it was just a glorified shopping cart. But that all changed when I saw a review from one of our most engaged players that went like this.
“I have been suffering from xx and my life had lost all its meaning. Taking care of Kiki and decorating rooms for her, taking care of her needs, taking her to her friends home for a visit everyday, has given me new purpose. It has helped me find connection and move away from a life of depression and towards active recovery. Thank you for making and continuing to build the game.”
How do you not feel proud of something you have created after reading a message like this?
Games can become full time hobbies. Yes, people might only have time for a few hobbies at a time, but when people do get hooked, they engage and retain deeply. This allows creating business models which are less about entertainment and more about lifestyles.
Games can give us:
Story
Power
Escape
Design
Delight
Fantasy
Wonder
Strategy
Discovery
Challenge
Dopamine
Simulation
Excitement
Completion
Community
Competition
As a craftsperson, how do you build things that can get your audience to experience this whole range of emotions? If you don’t start by building games, how do you master the craft? You have to start somewhere.
So. If you are making it a business, get good at the craft of business and where games fit into the business. Otherwise, don’t do it for the money, do it for the love of the craft and to grow towards mastery! Fulfillment will follow.
As I grow older, and as I solve problems closer to my heart with a stronger purpose; games remain a beautiful medium and an important part of who I am plus how I got here, and I can’t treat making games as just a job anymore.