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The World of Licensing in Games with Slitherine's Marco Minoli
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The World of Licensing in Games with Slitherine's Marco Minoli
Update: 2024-12-12
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This episode is supported by Xsolla
Trent Kusters chats with Marco Minoli, Director of Publishing at Slitherine. Together they discuss the world of licensing in video games; the benefits and opportunities that can be found; how deals are structured; how to collaborate with license holders; and then explore Slitherine's catalogue of games from consumer facing war games to war simulations used by defense departments in governments around the world.
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Transcript
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00:00:52
Hey everyone, I'm Trent Custer, co-founder and studio director at League of Geeks. And this is the Game Makers Notebook.
00:01:00
A few weeks ago at Dice Lake Como, I had the chance to chat with local Milanesi developer and publisher Marco Minoli from Slytherin Games, who's based in Milan.
00:01:12
You may be familiar with Slytherin, they have, I was just looking on Steam, they've got 117 titles or something like that on Steam. They're a developer based out of the UK.
00:01:22
They work in licensed strategy games and war games and they're some of the best in the business of what they do.
00:01:28
We're talking Warhammer 40K, Gladius, Battlesector, Starship Troopers, Terran Command, and of course, they're more war games and style stuff like Headquarters, World War II.
00:01:38
We talk about Slytherin and they're offering what they do as a publisher and a developer.
00:01:44
But there's a range of different things that they do, and it's quite interesting. Like digital war games, they have a subsidiary of their company called Matrix Pro Sims.
00:01:52
It actually is like a leading defense supplier. So making actual war games that the defense used to train and to run war games in and everything.
00:02:02
Marco was telling me that they used to do it in PowerPoint beforehand, so very happy to be doing it now in Slytherin Games.
00:02:10
But then of course we get into the real bulk of Slytherin's business, a lot of what they do, which is licensed games.
00:02:16
Which interestingly was a conversation that was happening a lot at Dice Lake Corvo this year, at Dice Europe.
00:02:24
Something on a lot of people's minds obviously with the success of BG3 and Space Marine, and people thinking about how to de-risk in everything in games.
00:02:34
Licensing has become a really great opportunity. Obviously we had Eric on the podcast from Marvel just recently.
00:02:40
And so that conversation continued at Dice Lake Corvo and Marco was the perfect person to talk to about it.
00:02:46
So we talk a lot about the state and the future of license games. We talk about the pros and cons, how a deal is usually structured, the growth of licensing within the industry.
00:02:56
And how Slytherin has positioned themselves very well in this segment. And then of course we talk about where Marco and Co have their eyes set for the future for Slytherin.
00:03:04
And we round up with some sage wisdom from Marco on how to instill trust in your developers and partners that you work with.
00:03:12
Marco is someone who as the publishing director over at Slytherin has overseen dozens and dozens of titles across some of the biggest names, licenses and work with some publishers from around the world and work with everyone from government and defense through to your local indie developer.
00:03:30
There is a raft of experience here and especially if you're interested in licensing in games, whether it be the, you know, the big boom that we're seeing at the moment or you're a developer or publisher or in licensing yourself, there's a lot here.
00:03:44
So without further ado, please enjoy.
00:03:46
Welcome to the Game Makers Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in depth one-on-one conversations between game makers providing a thoughtful intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.
00:04:04
The Game Makers Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member-driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.
00:04:15
Marco, thank you for joining us here at Dice Lake Coma.
00:04:25
Thanks for having me.
00:04:26
Yeah, my whole time almost.
00:04:28
Oh, he's just going to say yes.
00:04:30
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us at Dice Lake Coma.
00:04:34
Yeah, it's you're literally the guest that has traveled the least.
00:04:38
And I mean, I've come from Melbourne, Australia, so absolutely like this is your hometown, right?
00:04:43
Yeah.
00:04:44
Yeah, so based in Milan and we're only, how many were like 100 kilometers or something from Milan?
00:04:49
It's about 45.
00:04:51
Oh, right.
00:04:52
Very close.
00:04:53
Yeah, very close.
00:04:54
And this is our weekend spots.
00:04:56
Yeah.
00:04:57
Very comfortable family.
00:04:58
So it's nice.
00:05:00
It's actually nice to have such a big event in Italy.
00:05:03
It's, I think it's the first time that we have such a big crowd of people from the industry coming to Milan or around Milan.
00:05:11
So yeah, shows that we're doing some, some things right.
00:05:16
Yeah, we even had a little bit of chatter about the Italian industry today up on the one of the talks as well.
00:05:20
It was great.
00:05:21
Okay.
00:05:22
Well, you know, we've got to get to talk about today because I mean, Slytherin has literally published hundreds of games across like your different verticals and everything.
00:05:31
And you've had like, you know, an established and storied career yourself.
00:05:35
But we like to take it kind of way back when we start off.
00:05:38
So how did you first find yourself getting into games?
00:05:41
Oh, that's an interesting one.
00:05:44
I actually needed money for finishing university and I need to find a job.
00:05:49
And, and, you know, distribution company that we're doing distribution for video games back in the days.
00:05:57
It was mainly PC games.
00:06:02
They were looking for someone and I started as an assistant to the marketing director.
00:06:07
All right.
00:06:08
And yeah, as an intern.
00:06:10
And that's really how I started.
00:06:13
And I got, I didn't really, you know, I didn't have like a super fun passion for games.
00:06:19
Yeah.
00:06:20
But I was interested.
00:06:21
Yeah.
00:06:22
And that started me off in the marketing side of the of the business.
00:06:26
And, and, and then from then on, I never left the industry.
00:06:30
You know, it was like 97.
00:06:33
Yeah. And I mean, huge your director of publishing now, which obviously a massive part of that is marketing.
00:06:38
But before that, like, basically, your whole career is like marketing and BD, right?
00:06:42
Yeah.
00:06:43
Marketing business development.
00:06:44
And, you know, actually, the rain, which I joined in 2007 quite a long time ago.
00:06:51
You know, we, when I joined, it was five of us.
00:06:55
Yeah.
00:06:56
Wow.
00:06:57
So it's, it's almost like natural that I started doing a lot of things that really didn't have anything.
00:07:02
Really didn't have anything to do with marketing.
00:07:04
Yeah.
00:07:05
But I had to sort of the opportunity to see so much stuff around the video games industry.
00:07:11
So much so now that, you know, coming into the role of publishing, it's almost natural to me to, you know, discuss topics in the development of games.
00:07:21
Yes.
00:07:22
And QA and testing and all that kind of stuff that, you know, someone coming from marketing probably doesn't have a really, you know, a good grasp on.
00:07:30
Yeah, totally.
00:07:31
Like if someone found themselves as assistant to a marketing director at EA and then that was their sort of place that you could absolutely not interface with a lot of that.
00:07:39
You could be in a little bubble for it.
00:07:40
Exactly.
00:07:41
And finally, you spent a bit of time at EA, am I right?
00:07:44
I did.
00:07:45
I did back in 2003.
00:07:47
Again, EA was starting the subsidiary neatly.
00:07:53
Yeah.
00:07:54
And again, there was like three of us and it was almost like a startup back in the days.
00:08:01
I was brand manager, senior brand manager back in the days.
00:08:04
And the idea was, you know, help distribution in local territories.
00:08:09
And I didn't like it, you know, I didn't like it.
00:08:12
I didn't like not the fact that was the EA, but I didn't like the, you know, the big structure around it.
00:08:19
Being like a small piece within the big beast.
00:08:21
Exactly.
00:08:22
So that didn't last long about a year.
00:08:25
But I had the chance to learn a lot in this year.
00:08:28
Yeah.
00:08:29
It was interesting because then a lot of best practices are still used today.
00:08:33
You know, brand plans and all this structure for launching games and stuff like that.
00:08:38
Yeah.
00:08:39
And still use a lot of the learnings from that experience.
00:08:41
You know.
00:08:42
Yeah, it's easy to kind of, you know, when we come from, you know, as you know, I have a small boutique, you know, game development company in Melbourne.
00:08:48
But, and, you know, we do publishing and stuff and it's easy sometimes to like think that those big machines are just this big archaic thing of people tripping over themselves and everything.
00:08:58
And at times they can be, but there's so much like decades there of PR and marketing pipelines and processes and practices.
00:09:05
Like, I'm sure you can learn so much in even just a year there.
00:09:08
I think the cool thing about that is, is not the actual marketing of games.
00:09:17
It's what goes around it.
00:09:19
You know, research.
00:09:21
Yeah.
00:09:22
You know, as small publishers or developers, you don't really do a lot of research.
00:09:26
I don't have time for that.
00:09:27
And that means a lot of the luxury for it.
00:09:29
Yeah.
00:09:30
So you don't do that.
00:09:31
Well, these companies do a lot of research and sometimes, you know, you think it's really useful.
00:09:38
But, you know, most of the time it's actually eye-opening, you know, what they can achieve with that research.
00:09:43
Yeah.
00:09:44
Analysis, numbers, you know, evaluating KPIs, understanding what works, what doesn't.
00:09:50
You know, we are, you know, in smaller companies, we usually use our guts much more than, you know, than our brains.
00:09:59
Absolutely.
00:10:00
It's all in Jewish and all the time, right?
00:10:02
But that's something that, you know, I learned a lot from these bigger companies that, you know, if you apply some science to it, which we try to do these days.
00:10:11
You know, you can, you know, really, really have some big benefits there.
00:10:16
Yeah.
00:10:17
Oh, yeah.
00:10:18
So tell me, how did you, how did you end up at Slytherin?
00:10:21
How did that all sort of come together and you find yourself there amongst the five of you?
00:10:25
Well, yeah, that's, that's a, like, a tried short, but it's an interesting story there.
00:10:31
Yeah.
00:10:31
Basically, I was, I was working for a company called Backnave's Mystone.
00:10:38
Mystone is still, you know, the biggest development studio in Italy.
00:10:42
And they're doing driving games and so on.
00:10:45
They were opening their publishing arm.
00:10:48
And so they hired me out of EA and I stay with them for some time, three years or something.
00:10:56
And one of the deals I signed was with Slytherin that are one of their games.
00:11:00
I went to GDC and I met the guys there and I saw the game.
00:11:04
It was a game called Legion Arena.
00:11:06
I saw the game and I said, I like it.
00:11:09
I saw it on the Wednesday.
00:11:11
We signed it on the Friday.
00:11:13
You know, so became a publisher for Slytherin.
00:11:18
And that game was the start for, you know, we should use this game to attach a brand to it.
00:11:28
And make it a something different.
00:11:31
So Legion Arena became the history channel, great battles over all.
00:11:36
So we worked through it.
00:11:38
We deal with the history channel and so on.
00:11:40
And by the time we were ready to sign with the history channel, our MD back at the company at my stone said, I don't want to sign anymore.
00:11:48
I don't think it's going to sell anything.
00:11:50
So I phoned up the guys at Slytherin and said, they don't want to do it.
00:11:54
And they said, well, why don't we do it?
00:11:57
So I basically enough space of a week.
00:12:01
I, you know, I switched and we flew to New York signed a deal directly with the history channel.
00:12:08
And ended up selling a million units.
00:12:11
Okay, right.
00:12:12
So the deal to be on you made the right call by switching everything.
00:12:15
That's what made Slytherin turning to a publisher.
00:12:18
And also you hadn't published before then at all.
00:12:21
And that's how it started.
00:12:24
It was incredible.
00:12:25
And that was the beginning of like a sort of long relationship with the history channel, right?
00:12:29
Like you made other history games too.
00:12:30
I think we did four games of them.
00:12:33
One of them was the only game, the only non-strategy game we did, which was a driving game.
00:12:39
Oh, right.
00:12:40
Okay.
00:12:41
Ice road truckers.
00:12:42
Oh, right.
00:12:43
Ice road truckers.
00:12:44
I was like, what driving license would be history channel app?
00:12:46
Of course.
00:12:47
Ice road truckers.
00:12:48
There's some strategy and ice road trucking, right?
00:12:51
Yeah.
00:12:52
Yeah.
00:12:53
Yeah.
00:12:54
Sold masses and mobile and mobile did very, very well.
00:12:59
And again, help us grow from license games, which is still a big part of how we do business.
00:13:06
At least 50% of the games we do are license games.
00:13:10
Yeah, wow.
00:13:11
Well, because earlier today I sat in on a roundtable of yours, which was talking about the state
00:13:17
and the potential future of success and the challenges of license games, right?
00:13:22
So I had a couple of hour long conversations there with some folks from around the industry, some really great chats.
00:13:29
Yeah.
00:13:30
I mean, licensing is an interesting beast because it's all about understanding what kind of value a license can add to your games.
00:13:38
And when we talk about strategy games, we are targeting very narrow parts of the market that are very difficult to capture.
00:13:48
But license will always help you broaden that potential audience and maybe capture people might be not interested in testing, checking out a game that has like a law that's not known or stuff like that.
00:14:01
So finding the right license for the right game has been very successful for us in, you know, widening our audience.
00:14:07
And we've done, you know, with games workshop, with Sony Pictures, with Skydance.
00:14:12
It's got quite a lot of very good games that helped us and I have to say that wouldn't have sold that much without the actual property attached to it.
00:14:21
Yeah, without the help of that IP.
00:14:23
Yeah, it's more people.
00:14:24
Absolutely.
00:14:25
So maybe it might be a good point to stop here because I think I wouldn't blame folks who even regardless of how prolific you've been because of what you just said, the niche that, you know, and I know you don't see that as a dirty word.
00:14:36
Same for itself, right? You know, it's one of the strengths of Slytherin is like really servicing this incredibly lucrative and, you know, committed and passionate niche.
00:14:45
But there are folks out there who if strategies and their thing or they're not really paying close enough attention, they may not have heard of Slytherin before.
00:14:51
So maybe give our listeners a little bit of a spiel about what Slytherin is and what you do.
00:14:56
Yeah, well, Slytherin started off as a developer of strategy games back in 2000 and we started and we were published by paradox.
00:15:07
We were doing, you know, one game every 18 months, like every good developer.
00:15:14
And all of a sudden, you know, in 2007, we turned to being a publisher, also helping other people publishing their games.
00:15:22
And we stepped when we started being, you know, sort of solely focused on strategy games as publishing as publishers as well.
00:15:29
And, you know, we now have three like lines of products.
00:15:34
Slytherin does these strategy games that you're familiar with.
00:15:38
So starting troopers or hammer of a thousand bottom sector and, you know, the beer, you know, games we sell.
00:15:45
We then have a part of the company. It's called matrix games. It's brand and that focus solely on what we identify as war games.
00:15:55
Now war games are like the niche of the niche of the niche of the niche. It's like super small, but super lucrative and super, you know, community based.
00:16:06
It's almost like a hobby.
00:16:08
Totally. It's a passionate, engaged community.
00:16:10
And when you say war games, you mean digital war games?
00:16:12
Yes. Yeah.
00:16:13
War games and a lot of people miss, you know, misunderstand what a war game is.
00:16:18
War game is usually a 2D, but it can be 3D, but it's a digital strategy game.
00:16:26
It can be tactical or strategic, but it's very in depth is simulation level is super high.
00:16:33
So, you know, if you look at it, if you look at the vast majority of the points with games titles, they're super ugly as well.
00:16:41
Because that's not what people are looking for.
00:16:44
Yeah, absolutely.
00:16:45
They're hex based. They're turn based. They're super boring. If you don't know what you're doing.
00:16:49
Yeah.
00:16:50
Some of them you take maybe, you know, it's funny because some games these days last maybe three, four, five hours game play, right?
00:16:58
You know, three, five, three hours is a good average turn on one of these games.
00:17:03
Amazing. You're just planning, strategizing.
00:17:05
Yeah.
00:17:06
That decision space being so agonizing in a beautiful way.
00:17:09
Exactly.
00:17:10
Exactly.
00:17:11
So, and that's Matrix games and we still invest a lot in that.
00:17:15
And the third area of the business is Matrix Pro Sims, which is basically taking some of these super hardcore simulations.
00:17:24
And we are selling them as professional software to defense industry.
00:17:29
So, majority of our clients are, you know, of course NATO clients, we've got 24 different countries.
00:17:37
And we serve departments of defense, private industry at speed to be very different rules, very different type of product.
00:17:46
But it's effectively what was called serious gaming, now called applied gaming.
00:17:51
Yes, yeah.
00:17:53
And it's, it's a new way of what President Obama said back back when we started this, the use of cuts, which is commercial of the shelf software.
00:18:06
Right.
00:18:07
To solve professional problems.
00:18:10
Yeah.
00:18:11
And you can see that the video games industry has a lot of potential in doing that.
00:18:15
Yeah.
00:18:16
And it's across the board, medical planning of cities, just loads of things that video game starts very well.
00:18:23
Yeah.
00:18:24
And it's, you know, much more financially viable for, you know, professional companies to actually buy enough to shelf a version of a game.
00:18:34
Yeah.
00:18:34
Rather than start their own thing.
00:18:36
And I think us within the industry as well that come from your typical sort of entertainment style development.
00:18:41
We've heard of and we know of that there is obviously serious games and applied games and that there are no doubt great solutions.
00:18:47
I mean, obviously your games are, you know, training nations like armies and strategic and tactical warfare and stuff, right?
00:18:54
Like to incredible success.
00:18:56
Now, but some of the things that we don't think about is this notion of, well, we may actually have it already ready to go.
00:19:03
It might require a race game or some small retooling, but it's not like needing to design an entire product from scratch, just bespoke for that purpose, right?
00:19:12
Absolutely.
00:19:13
I mean, the one of the things we found out when we started working with the Pentagon was there was like six years ago now.
00:19:24
They run, they run war games. For them, war game is like a number of people in the room, like usually one, two, three stars, generals.
00:19:34
And they are like strategizing over, I don't know, board or something like that.
00:19:41
And there's a like a, like a mass role master.
00:19:45
Like a GM. And there's blues and the reds and they, and they, you know, fight each other and up until 10 years ago, they were doing everything in PowerPoint.
00:19:58
Well, they spend millions to put all these generals in a room and, you know, for two weeks and running these things, which they called war games.
00:20:10
And then booting up PowerPoint after all that money spent. Exactly. Wow. And then they find out that this stuff is available. And for them, it's like, wow, you know, I can't believe this is something that's real.
00:20:23
It was like a general watching his, like, some play battlespect or over his over his shoulder at home, one nine is like, what is this?
00:20:29
Exactly. And then we now run tournaments for USMC with some of the war games.
00:20:37
And they generally have like a giant leap forward with a fraction of the money spent.
00:20:44
Yeah, incredible. And because as you say, it's there. It's off the show. It's there. And you know, yeah, it's, it's now in the cloud. They can, you know, play it whenever they want.
00:20:53
We set up tournaments or they can set up their own tournaments. And, yeah, we just come up with your words and say, yeah, you want that.
00:21:01
So when did Matrix Pro Sims spin up? I think six, six years ago now. And it's an interesting business, of course, because this, the model is annual fees.
00:21:14
Sort of, it's almost like buying a license for Adobe. Yeah, it's a service, right? Yeah. And then you rates are very high.
00:21:22
So it's like for the business is very, you know, it's very good because, you know, that keeps us also secure from the ups and downs of the industry.
00:21:30
That, you know, goes crazy and very unpredictable. So that's absolutely an interesting way of what an incredible benefit to have like this more stable realm of your company whilst you're working in a hit driven business as well.
00:21:42
Absolutely. Yeah.
00:21:43
Okay. Great. So today we spoke a lot about licensing. And you've spoken about being a strategy publisher and developer. And you've got some incredible licenses.
00:21:56
And potentially seeing them, I mean, we took Warhammer. We took Terminator Starship Troopers recently.
00:22:01
Tell me a little bit about the process for you in finding partners and working with partners and matching up developers in their games with a license.
00:22:11
Or how does it come about for you? What's that process like?
00:22:15
It differs from time to time. I mean, the main line we have is that when we work very well with the developer, we try to then, you know, step to one step further in the relationship and say, okay, we want to work with something that's longer term.
00:22:33
And when you talk about longer term, license is always very good opportunity because, you know, working with developers for, you know, for maybe six, seven, eight years on the project allows you to on a license project allows you to release content that, you know, adds value all the time.
00:22:54
So how it usually works is that we have, we now have the relationship with basically every license folder out there. And we analyze the target audience and consider our target audience is male 30 plus maybe.
00:23:09
So you have said the number of names of licenses that are relevant to that audience. Starship troopers. Yeah, kind of still relevant, but not as expensive as a Star Wars or Marvel or whatever, right.
00:23:24
And when you say expensive, just so folks know you're talking about, say, for example, putting down the minimum guarantee that you would have to pay for the license of B and things like that.
00:23:32
Yes, as expensive and I mean also, you know, expensive from a financial perspective, but also from a engagement perspective with a licensed owner.
00:23:43
So making a Star Wars game, you know, involves larger studios because the approval processes and the way that the process is managed requires a lot of people that are not related to actual development themselves.
00:24:01
But, you know, but to, you know, to the process itself, of course, that makes so much sense because if you have a relevant, but smaller license where they're less concerned about approvals and things like that.
00:24:14
As opposed to these large things, then you're cutting down your, as you say, your engagement costs, not just like the.
00:24:21
Exactly. If you go, we got the Star Wars license and it was only a million dollars for the minimum guarantee, but then you spend 500k, making sure that you can deal with them.
00:24:31
Yeah, I think a good example of that is when we first signed Battlestar Galactica, which is a game developed by an Australian studio in Perth.
00:24:40
And, and, you know, back in when you signed it, the studio was like three guys.
00:24:45
Yeah. And, and they had an existing game called Starheimer, which we sold and was successful and said, you know, why don't we sort of take that as a starting point to make a Battlestar Galactica game.
00:24:59
If I had, you know, a relationship with Disney for Star Wars, I couldn't have done that because the first question would have been, how big is the studio?
00:25:08
Yeah. You know, how, you know, how do you, you know, how do you manage the process of creating assets and so on.
00:25:15
Yeah. Universal didn't ask any of that. You know, they were like, yeah, you know, interesting.
00:25:20
Let's discuss about it. And they had a GDD that had an existing game that didn't ask anything about the background or stuff like that.
00:25:28
They were only interested in the proposition and the stability of the publisher and funding the whole game. And that's it.
00:25:35
And that's, that started, you know, think what we, what we have today, like, you know, going for licenses that are licenses that are relevant to that audience, past the Galactica was the first one, then we had.
00:25:50
I think the following one was Starship Troopers, then we had Stargate Terminator and hopefully more in the future.
00:25:58
And Warhammer sits very well in that, yeah, in that frame, because Warhammer is, first of all, I think it's the only license that speaks to gamers.
00:26:12
So much more than any other license. Yeah, it has its roots in the gaming community. It is. And any strategy game as well.
00:26:20
That's true. Double win, yeah, of course. So Warhammer, we've done like four games with them. And, and it's an ongoing process of, you know, what can we do next?
00:26:33
Yeah. And, and it's a fascinating thing because it's not always easy to find what we're doing next.
00:26:39
Yes. Yeah. Of course. Well, speaking of that, it's a perfect segue into what the market's doing right now. And there are two things that I think are, and I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this.
00:26:49
The two things that I think are kind of leading to a future of a lot of great license titles, right?
00:26:56
One of them is the recent extreme successes that we've had with license titles, obviously with Warhammer Space Marine and Baldur's Gate 3 and even Spider-Man as well.
00:27:05
Huge like some of the biggest games released in the last decade, let alone in the last couple of years.
00:27:10
But then also publishers and license holders are looking to de-risk as well, right? And so licenses become a fantastic opportunity for talented development studios to like pair up with a publisher who's more risk-averse these days, who maybe isn't doing license stuff as, you know, as they're bread and butter like slither and is.
00:27:28
Do you think that we're, we're kind of entering what could be a kind of golden age of license games? Do you think we're going to see a bunch of shovelware license games come off the back of a chart?
00:27:37
What do you see for the next five years of licensing? I can definitely rule out that we're going to see a lot of shovelware because I think there's a lot of control on the quality of stuff.
00:27:48
I remember I think it was 10, 15 years ago Warner Brothers was enforcing this thing where basically your game had to guarantee at least 70 metacritic to be qualified as a license game or whatever.
00:28:02
I don't think that's going to be a problem anymore. First of all because metacritic is less relevant these days, but, you know, also because generally there's a quality control that goes like, you know, all through the process.
00:28:18
My, my view is that licenses, licensing has changed dramatically over the last 10 years, which means that, you know, back before that, you had like, I guess only two types of licenses like what we call a tie in, so movie tie in or like, you know, licensing a property to make a game about a movie or whatever.
00:28:42
And then you had licensing a brand for a game like car or I don't know whatever, but, you know, you know, now the spectrum is so big, you've got like a big training integrations.
00:28:55
So if you've got your terminator character in Mortal Kombat, you've got like that kind of use of license is pretty new, right?
00:29:03
And you've got like call of duty characters in power watch simulator stuff that goes like fortnight, obviously everything they're doing.
00:29:12
That's even even more different in a sense that most of the times and fortnight and roblox, it's actually the companies that own the brand that pay for, you know, I want to be in your game.
00:29:23
So license is such a huge spectrum of applications now that it is a golden era in a sense that you actually see license owners going at shows and pitching for, hey, I've got Ghostbusters, can I sell you Ghostbusters?
00:29:40
Or I got this, I got that. So it's, it's almost like a catalog now. Yeah, it's like need some licenses, man, yeah, exactly.
00:29:49
And so actively pursuing opportunities, which you wouldn't find more than like 70 years ago.
00:29:57
And it's it's like, yes, there is a big shift there, but the opportunities are huge. And I wish I could do more like stuff like we have a lot of World War 2 games.
00:30:09
I wish we could do more like, like a tactical World War 2 game, I say, so a band of brothers DLC, you know, stuff like that.
00:30:20
And yeah, I think what did by daylight has done is really, really impressive, right? Set up a platform almost for a whole horror licensing catalog.
00:30:28
Yeah, absolutely. And and one of the shifts, I think that will happen in the next few years is also that we're going to see much more license.
00:30:38
Which more licensing within the gaming industry. So again, you can publicly saying this, but the dream of my life is making a recent evil RTS.
00:30:51
Yeah. And I mean, trying, trying that, you know, putting it out into the other game. Yeah, but maybe someone listens.
00:30:58
But, but you know, having this thing where we really use existing IPs from the gaming industry to make other games.
00:31:07
Yeah. You know, it's a huge value because you end up having, first of all, you don't have to research your audience that much because their game is already there.
00:31:15
Yeah. Yeah. They all year. They're not moving a form of a form out of medium already.
00:31:20
They don't need to buy a PlayStation fight to play my game. They have it.
00:31:23
Because they played the original way the license is from on the PlayStation.
00:31:26
And and also the media is the same. And influencers, content creators call it. It's like it's weird that we don't do that a lot more now.
00:31:36
But I can see that happening a lot more. And I think what Mario Rabbids has done.
00:31:40
I was just thinking that it's like it's got to be the standout success here of giving that a shot.
00:31:44
Yeah. Especially on a super hard core genre like, you know, a strategy Xcom like game.
00:31:50
Yeah.
00:31:51
That's an interesting, you know, thing to explore for the future.
00:31:54
Yeah. It's interesting. I know that the, even in the indie world, it happens a little bit too.
00:31:59
Like you'll see in these like trading licenses, you know, we're trying to do anything that we can to get our games to like perform better.
00:32:04
And like this cross promotion, I remember when we did our Mellow, there was an indie game called anti hero.
00:32:09
And there's a bunch of our Mellow skins that you get as you play the game running around the city being a thief.
00:32:14
And even talking about Nintendo and, you know, the crypto, the neck root dancer.
00:32:19
Developers famously got, you know, there's older license and stuff to play around in that.
00:32:24
So it absolutely can happen. And it is, it is surprising that it doesn't happen more.
00:32:28
Yeah. We'll see a lot of that, I think in the future.
00:32:30
Hopefully. Yeah. That's it. All right. Now, something interesting that came up in the panel.
00:32:37
And I say interesting because I asked the question.
00:32:41
And I learned so much more than I expected was, you know, when we talk about license games and the value that they can bring to us as developers or publishers,
00:32:51
we often talk about eyeballs or impressions or people, you know, the audience that they can bring.
00:32:56
But everyone around the table just they listed so many more things.
00:33:00
What is it that you see in licensing games that are some of the lesser known sort of benefits of working within a license property?
00:33:10
I think that, you know, depending on the partner you work with a force.
00:33:14
But, you know, I give you some examples of games that are extra for instance or or or Sony pictures.
00:33:19
Starship troopers is that being part of a family of license games allows you to multiply your your visibility across a number of opportunities.
00:33:33
So it's not only about, hey, I've got a new Starship troopers games.
00:33:37
I've got media coverage because there's a Starship trooper brand on it.
00:33:40
If you didn't have it, I wouldn't have, you know, got that that front page on PC gamer. Yeah, it's more about every year.
00:33:48
Give you this example every year game structure runs a big celebration of video games called Skulls Festival.
00:33:55
And that's like every end of May.
00:33:58
All the games workshop license games will have front page on steam discounts announcements. They'll run a video of, you know, announcements and across all stores playstation.
00:34:13
And so they add as a as a brand owner they had a huge amount of value to, you know, you know, our commercial opportunities.
00:34:22
And the other thing is that especially now that this thing that, you know, licensing to multiple partners as, as you know, exploded, we now have the opportunity to share assets or share knowledge with other developers doing effectively the same thing with.
00:34:39
So, you know, with Starship troopers, we know that our forward is doing a specific type of content. So we won't be doing that.
00:34:50
We're doing something else so that we can, you know, give space to them and then they give space to us.
00:34:56
So there's a lot of coordination and it's got, it's adding a lot of benefit because we learn from them, they learn from us, we learn from Sony giving us all this ability to interact with each other.
00:35:06
So it's almost like creating its own like little industry within the industry and I really like that.
00:35:12
And, and also, you know, adding, adding a license also helps gameplay and saves us a lot of money.
00:35:24
So imagine that you're making a strategy game with games or for instance, and yes, we pay some money to them, but they give us the characters, the lore, you know, stories.
00:35:39
The weapons and when they say, yeah, yeah, move that slightly to the right side to life, it's, it's not a problem for us because, you know, making that thing from scratch would have, you know,
00:35:53
we've meant a long, even a lot of process. So even if there are some revisions, it doesn't matter if you're already saying a bunch of cash anyway.
00:36:00
And we don't have to come up with, you know, what a tank looks like and stuff like that.
00:36:04
So imagine even only the concept art process, it's like super fast. Now we've done this now four times. So we know how to come up with a space marine, but, you know, it's, it's definitely, you know, adding value for the developer or development process, not only for marketing and commercial aspects.
00:36:25
There's something that was also mentioned in the panel and discussed a little bit was the structure of these deals. And I think as speaking as a developer and publisher myself, I said in the roundtable that one of the things that I was most interested in is just understanding how the business of licensing works because it does seem to be quite different.
00:36:42
I come from the world where you talk to a publisher about a deal or you talk to PlayStation Xbox about a new platform deal and the platform deals are largely the same and the publishing deals are largely the same same term same sort of structure generally.
00:36:55
What are the sorts of things that you think developers and publishers should be looking up for with licensing deal? What's the things that you've seen work better with all of your experience and things that might tend to be gothers.
00:37:07
But I think the main difficulty in licensing is coming up with the right deal for the right product. So my, my assumption is always been that financially, you know, it hasn't, it doesn't have to be a burden for the development process.
00:37:27
A lot of the deals we try to do are, you know, deferring advances and minimum guarantees into late into the cycle.
00:37:37
You usually have a signing fee. That's always the case. But then, you know, other than that, you're going to try to push it as much as close as possible to go master or later.
00:37:48
So that's that's one thing that I would be very careful about. The other thing is Roger rates and how they are calculated always always think that, you know, that the IP owner will want from net net, you know,
00:38:09
of course, you know, we're working towards other numbers. But the, the relative rates are usually differing a lot. So they can run from 5% to 35%.
00:38:21
And it really depends on it. You have to really think about what they give you for that money for that percentage.
00:38:29
And, you know, take an example of a, a license can be very powerful, but it doesn't come with a law or it's just a brand, right?
00:38:39
Yeah, right. As you say, it might not be a game's license. You might be a huge brand, but you don't get all those characters and guns and all the stuff that you're talking about before.
00:38:47
Then I think that percentage wise, that's less valuable. You might want to, you know, there might be a big MG because, you know, it's really adding a lot of value commercially, but, you know, from a percentage perspective, they have to contribute less.
00:39:00
So that's also an important part. You know, for instance, you know, most of these companies have 3D assets. You know, will they deliver the 3D assets? Will they be a starting point where when I can, you know, get some characters already from them.
00:39:16
All the kind of stuff counts a lot into the, you know, creating a deal.
00:39:21
And the other thing is, we tend to, these come, the IP owners usually tend to make short deals, like three years, maybe our industry is now into like lifespans of me, 7, 8, 9, 10 years, right?
00:39:36
Always think about a very long term after release. So, and it's painful usually because that has to be to have to be convinced.
00:39:44
So it's either like auto renewal clauses are there, but think about a very long term. All the games we do have, you know, a very, very long tail because they have DLCs because they want to be selling for, you know, very, very long time after.
00:39:58
Yeah, and high engagement being strategy as well. Yeah, the retention there is always be a DLC in the deals because, you know, you don't want to be having that conversation when you try and make it.
00:40:09
Yeah, exactly. A lot of this is planning for success, right? And on that same note, what are some ways that you've found have worked best in regards to the approval processes or collaborating with license holders as you're actually developing the game, whether it be starting to get on the same page or in the depth of development.
00:40:27
Trying to close it out. Well, the approval processes vary a lot. Most of the companies now have IP owners now have internal producers with game experience.
00:40:40
Yeah, so back in the days, you know, long time ago, it was very hard to make them understand what was doable. You know, what can you do make this character fly and do this into that? No, I can't, you know, this game is done for something else.
00:40:55
Right. Now they have professional producers. They know what they're talking about. It's a huge step forward because, you know, the process is much simpler, you know, understanding UI, understanding gameplay and stuff.
00:41:08
You know, it's you don't have to explain that, which is great. Although, sometimes we have to explain the difference between a turn-based game in our RTS, but, you know, that's more specialist, maybe, yeah.
00:41:20
So that's really good. The main issue we have with the approvals is usually because we talk to business development people and you end up having to give ask approval to somebody who's in creative team or a brand owner within the company.
00:41:37
And so on. And these guys talk, maybe to each other, maybe once a month or once every two weeks or whatever. So they're not involved in the process. So approve this asset is fine, but approve this gameplay feature is much harder because they have to be explain or what it, what is them trying to do trying to ask approval for.
00:42:00
There's this and and also the fact that especially for some of these older licenses, there's no one who's really owning the brand within these companies sometimes.
00:42:13
So some of these are old, right? You know, good example is Stargate, right? Within MGM, subsequently bought by Amazon, there is no one who really knows, you know, yeah, there's not like a Stargate law or a call or a story.
00:42:31
There is nothing. Sometimes we are pointed to, you know, check the DVDs. And you know, the Stargate, all the glyphs around the Stargate, we asked the community of fans on the internet, what was the right order because no one knew about it.
00:42:51
So there is a 3D Stargate that we build for the game. They asked us to send it to them because that's now, you know, what they send it to everyone else for.
00:43:05
Right, you're sort of like rebuilding the library event because that last story wasn't built or what we work in games, we know how easy it is, you know, our our medium has such an impermanence to it.
00:43:19
So easy to, I remember talking to Warren Spector once about him having to like dumpster dive to like save design documents at some of the studios that his colleagues have thrown out or whatever.
00:43:28
Absolutely, absolutely. So we were in touch with the director of as you want episodes for a long time Martin Wood and he had to check his scripts for stuff.
00:43:38
And he was very kind, you know, he went to do it.
00:43:42
And, but yeah, so sometimes stuff is getting is harder, a good exam, a good example is Terminator where we basically have an RTS out, which is based on dark fate.
00:43:54
Yeah, dark fate is the last movie, the one, you know, the last last movie wasn't very successful, which was supposed to reboot the, you know, what Skynet was.
00:44:05
You don't have Skynet in dark fate, you have Legion because everything Skynet belongs to Studio Canal, which is another company. So it's like, you know, can we do stuff together?
00:44:16
Not really, because this is two different types of licenses and so on. So it has a lot of complications.
00:44:23
Well, that's another thing that you've just touched on too is that sometimes a license isn't just Terminator all neatly in a box. It can be carved up like kind of like song rights can be carved up to like this person wrote it, this person produced it and you got to get all of them on board.
00:44:36
I remember talking to Takumando, who, you know, the creator of Tenshu, president of a claim, and he was talking about the Tenshu license has this crazy like, you know, it's like the,
00:44:46
the infinity rings or whatever spread around the world is like from software has something, Activision has something and he has something and, you know, trying to get them all together to read a comeback is what.
00:44:58
We have done a lot of going back to, you know, war gaming, we have done a lot of digging out of who owns what because not so much for licenses, but for old IPs from the video games industry.
00:45:17
A lot of that is forgotten, no one knows who belongs who owns what right so I don't know if you remember SSI, which was this big strategy games publisher, which was bought by Ubisoft and sold to talents of some stuff and so on.
00:45:32
So there's this game, this brand called Age of Rifles and it was back in the days it was a big, huge strategy game and started the age of sale license and so on.
00:45:45
And we think we own it, but then, but then somebody else also so it's like impossible to track down so no contract anymore, you know, source code's gone so it's almost like anyone can use it and nobody would sue anyone.
00:46:01
It's like there's art investigations to try and figure out the provenance of something right yeah or when we bought master magic from Atari we bought master magic brand and the IP so we have it, but there's no source code anywhere.
00:46:14
So we were going to do what we call it a reboot or a remaster of the original game can't do that because there's no source code and the music belongs to somebody else so it's like it's a big mess.
00:46:26
Yeah, absolutely when we did solely an inferno my room are going to pick and like is he did a lot of it himself, but you know, his sister in law did the high art and some guy that there was actually someone on the team that we just could not find and we actually go to the point where we thought is this person deceased and then what do we do if that's the case and we've got to find there a state owner and talk to them and turned out they'll find they're okay and we but it was like that process of like just the rights to some of the actual art because we were doing like a not a straight.
00:46:55
One for one remasters you know about a reimagining and you you want to have those things all in the in the building before you step out and start developing the thing in earnest yeah.
00:47:07
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00:47:31
So let's go back to slither in a little bit because I'm really interested how you were five you've said you scared how how big are you now today by 100 and something just about 100 yeah people.
00:47:44
I mean growth has been very slow I've gone very slow we haven't had that type of growth that I like to say that we're very responsible and sustainable company.
00:47:58
And and especially in these days where there's a lot layoffs and a lot of people are you know have grown responsibly yeah companies we have really tried to build this company that has the real the foundations for the next step every time we do a next step we do really try to make that happen.
00:48:17
It's a little by little and and yeah the company has grown over time slowly the big moments of growth for us were when we bought matrix games in 2010 matrix games is you know the war games publisher we bought them because they were actually the first company doing e-commerce of digital games because I had to nobody one would list.
00:48:44
You know we put the war games on shelves right anymore yeah there's no space for this you know we are sort of like super super super nish game so they had to come up with the solution and I did digital digital delivery.
00:48:57
So we bought them out and then back then of course team would only list like very few games that was this process of brain line.
00:49:06
We have been before that yeah of course the publisher getting on board yeah so we bought them then and then we bought a development studio so we bought paradox friends then development studio in Poland then Greece and then.
00:49:23
So these were like the the moments where we try to internalize some of the development so we now have like three development studios are internal and they're part of the group.
00:49:32
But in general I mean we're about fifty fifty fifty percent of the people working on publishing and fifty percent working on development and that's like across the board counting also the matrix proceeds people and so on.
00:49:47
So it's it over the last I would say COVID after COVID or during COVID that has been a big you know big spike in revenue but the lucky thing is that we kept that spike going instead of like going back to pre COVID revenue numbers in the meantime so we now have you know a solid base for what's coming next which is you know hopefully next year is going to be a big breakout here for us.
00:50:16
Yeah yeah so you've obviously you have some some of this IP in house you've spoken about IP that you've bought and everything are you interested in all are you doing original IP as well or is it.
00:50:30
We do yeah I mean as I said fifty percent of the stuff we do is original okay yeah so we we own master magic we own close combat brand close combat for us we bought it from Microsoft like you know maybe ten years ago and it's yeah it's a key legacy brand for RTS.
00:50:45
We have Panzer core which is the you know of Panzer general distant worlds which is you know it's just so weird 4x very very very niche 4x game but sells a lot of copies developed by a single guy New Zealand you believe so I do believe so.
00:51:05
And then so we we have quite a lot of stuff that we develop internally and and try to grow our own IPs and we we tend to look at franchise brands or IPs or internal IPs as you know long long term growth opportunities.
00:51:26
So we started with fill glory which is feel glory is a interesting case because it started a tabletop war game we built the tabletop war game yeah interesting and then we turned into a digital version which was ugly and and you know only interested to actually to the war game.
00:51:48
And now we sort of have a series of feel great to which is a pretty you know niche war game but still but you know larger audience sold quite well across the board you know end up selling maybe half a million units across the board so you know quite a big substantial audience for a pretty war game.
00:52:11
Yeah and we branched out we have another 4x 4x version of of these games are you know two games one ancient one medieval and imagine like the paradox style types of games but more like historically accurate and focusing on history more than that.
00:52:32
So and this was over maybe 10 years yeah we tend to do that for every property right panza core now has 16 DLCs and it's got like a it's got a huge number of players every day like you know it's been it's been very successful for us and of course it's it's still games that are addressing a specific audience.
00:53:01
But they are very lucrative for us because you know they are it's almost like the company we go right so this is phase one then we go to face to and then you know grow it in every duration trying to grow it a bit more a bit more and it's working very well.
00:53:18
Yeah strategy seems to have this ability i mean we did it with our mellow and i think if we had the if we had the revenue and the opportunity to do it with jump load Odyssey and sold him in for my imagine it would pan out the same way but it's it's been the paradox model for years and slither and done it so well is strategy see it just seems to be really amenable to this process of just releasing iterations of a particular game i mean who said a king three is one of paradox is if not their biggest game ever right and it's.
00:53:45
And it's taken more than a decade to get a you know in the iterations of all that DLC and you're doing it as well yeah total war civilization yeah that it's like an age of empires yeah it's like very like specific to that that audience yes premium as well it's not like.
00:54:03
Yeah basically premium and then the DLCs on top of the premium so yeah it's a cool thing about it is like we're in the seventh year of Warhammer 4000 Gladius now seventh year and so far it's the best year we had on the license on the on the franchise so far.
00:54:21
Wow and we don't sell the base game anymore that game is selling for one dollar yeah yeah but that the DLCs are you know keeping up the revenue coming and it's.
00:54:31
They really do become a platform for DLC yeah I remember on the third year by the no I think it was late in the second year of.
00:54:40
Releasing our mellow we were making more on the DLC than we were on the base game and at that point we only had to DLC release me ended up releasing six or something so still to this day regularly like the daily or weekly revenue from our mellow is far more from the DLC than the base game.
00:54:55
So the only downside to that is that it's very hard to do sequels yes because that's why there's no I'm a little too yeah because people expect that sequels will have the content of.
00:55:06
Everything that's been released before yeah and I think we've seen a couple of high profile strategy games kind of stumble at launch for that exact reason right I mean we.
00:55:15
This you know it's not really it's not their launch but the frost on guys just recently came out and having trouble in early access because people expect.
00:55:23
Starcraft three from them you know when they think they're not even they're not even blizzard you know but that the right at the gate in early access you expect all the bells and whistles that the DLC provided in the last game and everything.
00:55:35
Yeah I mean a good example for that is still on games workshop you have a battle fleet gottica armada two released.
00:55:45
You know with all the factions and the point is that you release a game with all the faction cost you a lot of money but you don't have the exploitation opportunity to have you in the future right yeah so.
00:55:56
I know one is blocked you know I think version three out now and again you know you expect that people want all the factions I've seen a lot of two on the release of three but doesn't happen like that you know got to reveal the game from scratch it's not like yeah yeah.
00:56:15
Do you think this kind of model that we see from paradox and that you're doing quite well it's leather and do you think it's kind of evergreen or do you is there someone in the industry that's working in the strategy space that's you know commercializing their product in a way that's quite impressive that you've seen.
00:56:31
Listen I think that you know the audience is niche and you're not going to grow it by making the games three.
00:56:41
I see that Stormgate is good example of free to play game RTS trying to make some kind of a starcraft you know legacy and it's and it's free but I don't see it as a platform for.
00:57:00
A tracking more people and then growing from there I think that premium is still going to be the vast majority of revenues coming from strategy games all the time because these people are dedicated that really want.
00:57:14
You know they they want to spend their money they want to see that's you know and in that target demographic of 30 plus males you know they do have disposable income yeah to be able to do that.
00:57:27
Was to think that I see a lot more cool strategy games on mobile.
00:57:33
That are developing into more complex strategy games that are you know a good example of okay that's a different model like I'm interested to explore I'd be interested to explore different rules you know but you know so we won't be doing it because you need a completely friend company mindset but.
00:57:50
That's a platform where I can see you know new ways of attracting players coming out because.
00:58:00
The players are different yeah so you've got me more female players you got more you know casuals you know playing a strategy games for five minutes is that possible maybe it is right so I think these platforms are more.
00:58:14
You know valuable to this goal then you know the existing you know PC platform where you're always going to address your core audience anyway yes well funny talking about license game to just in the success of tactics right and mobile yeah yeah.
00:58:29
Again games workshop they're everywhere they're all over the charts at the moment so what is what is next for Slytheram what do you say you've spoken about these phases you know that you're going through you're in what what do you see is the sort of next five to 10 years that you all have an Europe.
00:58:47
I listen five to 10 years is a long time I probably focus on the next two or three yeah but especially because it is industry is just crazy crazy very hard to predict well we currently have the most wish list of game on on RTS game on steam so we have a lot of hopes for broken
00:59:07
error for next year yeah we we do think there's there's a huge opportunity there it's it's a game that could sell in the millions if done well it's a big challenge for us it's a first time we have something like we
00:59:23
have close to three hundred thousand people subscribe to the open beta wow it's like numbers we're not used to yeah so we're taking like it very very cautiously but again as I said you
00:59:35
know could be that platform to you know give us a big opportunity for the future and we're also now expanding slightly
00:59:43
outside of our scope with simulations so we have one submarine simulator coming out next year we have a tactical
00:59:53
flight simulator coming also this year in early access so talking about just on that talking
00:59:59
off the shelf are you developing them yourselves from scratch or have you found similar games that you're sort of feeling to
01:00:05
those into those they're both internally developed yeah and and and I think that branching out slightly will help us understand if
01:00:16
there's a value for us into other areas of the market and again and when I say slightly it means that we're not trying to do a
01:00:23
driving game you know something completely different we're trying to sort of expand a bit where we think that we could add value as a
01:00:31
publisher because most of the times I can see that selling to different audiences you always have to start from scratch
01:00:41
and a good example of this is you know doing this submarine simulator I sometimes feel like I don't know what I'm doing
01:00:49
you know and the team you know we need to have the right people to do it because different content creators different rules
01:00:57
for pricing different you know subgenre all the kind of stuff it's see it might seem easy because it's still a video game
01:01:06
but it's not it's like super hard to jump into something that you're not used to and when I see a lot of publishers doing a lot of
01:01:13
you know very casual stuff or jumping from one thing to another I really don't know how to do it it's it's like either you
01:01:21
do vanilla marketing or you know you you have to adapt to that game yes especially because we talk about community
01:01:30
community building and so importantly you've got to know the words the language you know how to interact with people
01:01:36
and if you come to me and say I'm going to do community building for your strategy games you've got to prove that you're able to speak the same
01:01:44
language as these guys yeah and I've got a guy you know said to me in the company said you know just thought steam as a testing
01:01:52
and you know these guys are asking for an AAR what's an AAR you know it's an action report what it's not it's not that hard
01:02:01
right but you know they they didn't know it yeah you don't know what you don't know yeah exactly so you know
01:02:09
having that's value as a publisher has helped us immensely grow the business yeah because people
01:02:15
trusted who know what we're doing yeah and you said you know the business is gone slowly but I think
01:02:20
another word for it is organically as well right what it when actually I'm going to I'm was going to ask
01:02:27
when do you grow or how do you go but I'm going to ask it in a different way because you were talking about broken
01:02:33
arrow what does the potential success of you know selling millions of copies or something in the you know
01:02:40
in a game like broken arrow wish listing the highest wish listed you know RTS game and it's clear that you're
01:02:46
treating the potential you know that you have in your hands there with great humility and awareness
01:02:51
what does that mean for the company if you have like a publisher of your size if you have a success
01:02:56
like that I'd like to tell you in a year's time but yeah we'll get don't worry we'll be back if it does it yes but
01:03:05
I think that for us it's it's not going to change much you know I think that what we are seeing with broken
01:03:14
arrow is that you can make potentially successful games yeah with resource with the resources we have
01:03:27
yeah so if we do that it does it does it does mean that we don't have to you know higher you know gazillion
01:03:34
more people we can we want to we want to try that and try that you know avenue of okay can we handle
01:03:42
this yeah can we handle this and this means that you know we've never done a live big live multiplayer game 5v5
01:03:50
hundreds of thousand people playing the same time yeah never done it how do we do it how do we
01:03:55
quality assure these types of you know numbers yeah now that is something that we add as a know how to
01:04:03
the company that we haven't got and so that's why we're taking it very cautiously because we don't want
01:04:10
to we've seen too many games out there failing because multiplayer wasn't working on the one what the hell you
01:04:17
know multiplayer game it has to work yeah yeah so that's where I think that it will add a lot of know how
01:04:23
and and how we'll use it I'll tell you you know when we get there sounds great and I love I love your
01:04:29
answer as well of like the success of broken arrow the potential success of it if it pans out to be big
01:04:35
success then it actually validates that you can with the budgets that you're currently working with the size
01:04:42
teams that you're currently working with have huge success it's not it's not a reason to then go okay great
01:04:47
we can finally make a twenty million dollar strategy game that would almost be the incorrect response that I could
01:04:52
success but also you know we leave it a market I think we've proven multiple times to you know everyone that
01:04:59
you cannot fabricate a success you know there's there's no way you can do that no one's done it you know
01:05:04
and and so you know we've got to leave with what we have and and and trying to our best to use when we
01:05:12
announced our youtubers day one we just announced it as we do any other game day one we had thirty
01:05:19
thousand wish list you know amazing and we're like what did we do we do differently yeah so it's it you
01:05:28
know it just happens doesn't sometimes yeah I remember we were you know we're developing two games in parallel
01:05:33
jump like Odyssey and solemn inferno and there is just nothing that we could do to get solemn inferno
01:05:38
to basically drive wish lists the way that jump like I see it there are different games one of it you look
01:05:43
at one and you're like that's probably the more commercially viable one but I've never market a game that was
01:05:48
so resistant to every type of marketing that we tried with it and in the end solemn inferno we just put
01:05:53
everything into word of mouth because that's the only thing and I mean it did yeah like the game didn't like go
01:05:58
crazy or whatever but like the word of mouth stuff had had traction and everything so yeah it was just
01:06:04
but it's sometimes like you say like what you do for one game just absolutely doesn't work for the
01:06:09
next game even though they're in the same genre it's same publishing team maybe even the same developer yeah
01:06:14
yeah hmm okay now something else that I I really want to ask you about because I've encountered this so
01:06:22
much myself being a strategy you know ahead of a strategy studio and publisher is developing strategy
01:06:29
games is entirely different to developing say a third person an action adventure game or where so
01:06:36
the way they explain it for folks or for our listeners who may not be familiar with strategy game
01:06:40
development is when you go about making a third person and I'm going to talk in very reductive terms you're
01:06:44
very generous you make something like a third person action adventure game or first person shooter it
01:06:49
has sort of might have low verticality meaning a fewer systems and then a huge amount of horizontal
01:06:54
horizontality a lot of content and so to get to a vertical slice you just get a few things in one
01:06:59
level and you move around and you can find your fun as they say and then you just expand vertically the
01:07:04
other little few little things and then you expand horizontally as well with strategy as you know it
01:07:11
basically the games all the time don't come together until beta or beyond right like because to have
01:07:16
the decision space where that fun exists in a strategy game you need all of the systems pretty much
01:07:23
and more than 50% of the content for them to interact in interesting ways and provide these
01:07:28
emergent situations in the simulation so how has it been working with developers and being a
01:07:36
publisher I mean you you kind of don't have to answer to anyone else where there's like outside
01:07:41
financing or anything but do you find sometimes license holders freaking out when a strategy
01:07:46
game isn't coming together until later in the process and big time yeah okay so how do you
01:07:52
handle that how do you work with stakeholders in the trust you know I think that the name on the
01:07:58
box means that we know what we're doing and people are usually trusting us to do to know what we're
01:08:04
we're doing with the games sometimes it's much harder but I guess that that's the main thing and
01:08:12
what I would add to that is that especially when working with developers that's where we find it harder
01:08:17
you know usually working with developers who know what they're doing it's and and have a clear vision
01:08:27
of what you're doing is almost like a must for us because you can add many producers and design it to
01:08:36
the team externally but you can't feed design into a team that doesn't understand what they're doing
01:08:44
and don't fully own what they're doing so it's almost like a freeways trust relationship where I trust
01:08:53
the developer to own the project and when we did bata sector with black lap games you know we knew
01:09:01
they knew what they were doing right to make the premium tactical warhammer game and it's super easy
01:09:10
to get wrong you know like it's you could be looking exactly the same but it doesn't work
01:09:18
getting play wise and games workshop was entirely trusting us because we've done three games with them already
01:09:26
but it was like transfer of trust that I'd say that you can't do without and especially in strategy
01:09:37
games where we're looking at the game on the on the pitching process we're following now is that especially
01:09:46
for 4x games as you say there's a multiple layers of systems on a 4x game if they don't interact with each other
01:09:56
you don't have a game right it's only very late in the process that you say right that works
01:10:02
yeah absolutely terrifying right it can be literally weeks before a game is due to ship
01:10:07
before it really starts to come together so in the process we have to trust the teams a lot more
01:10:14
than anyone else because our ability to control the process is going to be very very limited
01:10:20
is there anything you would say to excuse me and maybe that's the advice but is there anything
01:10:26
you would say to someone who's currently financing or producer from on a publishing side of a strategy game
01:10:32
who is going through this this period where it might seem like their team doesn't know what's going on
01:10:38
or what they're doing how to tell the difference between someone who's just wandering the woods
01:10:42
and completely lost and and you know it's like the submarine that's gone down underwater
01:10:47
and you know it'll come back up right where it needs to because it's led with this razor sharp vision
01:10:52
I guess if it's your first game and you have to come up with gameplay ideas
01:10:59
come up with one gameplay idea and do and copy all the rest from something else
01:11:05
because that means that you talk to someone and you say I want to do this like this game
01:11:11
this like this game and then on top of it I'll put this very cool new feature
01:11:15
because that's your first game you have to prove yourself
01:11:17
then after that you can you know you can fly with as many ideas as if that worked
01:11:22
then you've proven that if you want the design of something
01:11:26
you can you can make it work because you've built that trust that you're talking
01:11:29
exactly exactly it's very hard to come up with crazy ideas in our spectrum
01:11:35
unless you're in India and you want to publish yourself
01:11:38
it's going to be very very hard to you know very limit the number of strategy games
01:11:43
that manage to innovate with the publisher
01:11:46
the publisher will be less risk will be more risk adverse
01:11:50
think about faster than light or into the breach
01:11:53
they're all self-published because these guys had a vision and they knew what they were doing
01:11:58
and you know why would I you know risk on into the breach
01:12:04
it's a weird game you know and then when it releases everyone's freaking out because it's great
01:12:09
but you know it's yeah it's hard to communicate that when you're in the midst of it
01:12:14
and you're in that you know in the in the woods trying to get out yeah totally
01:12:18
okay well now I'm going to pivot to the marketing of strategy games
01:12:22
we've spoken about it being an issue within an issue
01:12:24
we've spoken about the importance of being able to talk to that community
01:12:28
what are some of the things you found successful or some of your
01:12:32
when you think about marketing strategy games
01:12:35
and maybe some things you see people do wrong or do right
01:12:37
what's some of the lessons you've learned marketing strategy games
01:12:40
what 20 years now or something yeah I guess you know
01:12:43
key learning is that you don't to market strategy games
01:12:46
you don't have to spend a lot of money you know
01:12:51
if you look at the top strategy game makers in the world
01:12:58
like creative assembly yeah paradox and so on
01:13:02
other than creating super cool CGI videos
01:13:07
I can't you know I can't judge the cost of that
01:13:09
but you know because maybe because you know players expected
01:13:13
you know it's not like a huge amount of marketing going
01:13:18
it's really about managing your community well
01:13:21
growing it nurturing it talking to them
01:13:24
and community is going to also guide your development
01:13:28
give you advice and so on
01:13:32
it's branching out to potentially attract players
01:13:37
that are into sort of similar games
01:13:42
and again that's done through you know
01:13:46
Reddit or Discord or where you know
01:13:51
you find other communities and you can attract them to your
01:13:54
or it's it's very time consuming and marketing
01:13:58
strategy games is not about creating a YouTube campaign
01:14:02
and you know spending a lot of money into it
01:14:06
it's very time consuming you need a lot of people
01:14:08
a lot of interaction with people you need to sort of
01:14:11
engage with them a lot thoughtful content
01:14:15
and then you need to be I think you need to be
01:14:17
creative in the assets because usually selling
01:14:21
a strategy games through trailers
01:14:25
it's it's been overwhelming right yeah
01:14:29
absolutely yeah we've been dealing with that problem for many years
01:14:33
you know how do I make a trailer of this game
01:14:35
you know how do I explain what it is
01:14:37
and and finding ways to engage with people
01:14:40
without having the cool shooting gameplay
01:14:43
a lot of stuff is is one of the biggest problems
01:14:47
we've got and you know coming up with ideas there
01:14:49
so there's a lot of creativity creativity going on
01:14:52
and positioning the games right correctly into their
01:14:55
audience and trying to find what is it that these guys are interested in
01:14:59
so for instance think about you know
01:15:01
a war war two tactical game
01:15:03
people are probably going to be interested in military history
01:15:06
or so going into this you know
01:15:09
where do people learn about their military history
01:15:11
is there any youtuber talking about military history
01:15:14
might be interested in this type of game and so on
01:15:16
trying to go to other you know similar audiences or interests
01:15:20
that are maybe catering to that to that audience
01:15:23
it's something that Age of Empires for did really well
01:15:25
absolutely you know the little historical
01:15:27
featureettes and everything that spoke directly to
01:15:29
I mean I remember at the original Age of Empires
01:15:32
the gold edition came with that I played as a kid
01:15:35
came with a a manual that had just like
01:15:39
historical information about all of the
01:15:41
all of the different civilizations
01:15:43
and I used it for a geography project and I got an "A"
01:15:46
to see so it's like speaking to those interests
01:15:50
people have commercial of the show
01:15:51
yeah I love it
01:15:54
okay so tell us about it now
01:15:58
someone's been listening to this podcast
01:16:00
so like on a second I love strategy games
01:16:02
I'm going to check out Slytherin what would be the projects
01:16:04
the Slytherin projects that you would recommend to people
01:16:06
to get a taste of the sort of stuff that you do
01:16:08
if they were going to go on to steam and open up their card
01:16:10
or you know go on your website and grab some games
01:16:12
recently I think there's two projects
01:16:14
some three projects I'm very proud of
01:16:17
Warhammer 1000 Buttersector
01:16:20
and praise to the developers there
01:16:23
Black Lab Games
01:16:25
an amazing team
01:16:28
I just think they've done a great job at making that game
01:16:32
Starship Troopers, steering command
01:16:34
it's an RTS, it's fast-paced, it's action-based
01:16:37
so it's very much like on the
01:16:40
very edge of our space I would say
01:16:43
being hardcore, it's not hardcore
01:16:45
but it's still
01:16:47
Warhammer midcore
01:16:49
a game that's been developed in Belgium
01:16:51
by a very talented team
01:16:54
again small team of five
01:16:57
it's amazing what you can do these days
01:16:59
with the tools and some experienced developers
01:17:01
and headquarters
01:17:04
Warhammer 2
01:17:05
a game developed by a company called
01:17:07
Starny Games in Ukraine
01:17:10
and they've been developing it
01:17:13
in very bad conditions
01:17:16
and they've done a great job at making a game
01:17:20
that's kind of similar in scope to what Buttersector is
01:17:23
but in Warhammer 2 and with amazing graphics
01:17:26
and using Unreal
01:17:28
which is weird for a strategy game
01:17:31
so these are like the three projects that I would say are
01:17:36
getting the best example of how much we're trying to
01:17:39
branch to attract the wider audience
01:17:42
of course if you're into
01:17:44
if you don't know us try to start with Panzercore
01:17:47
you're probably starting from a game
01:17:49
that's a bit too hard or too hardcore
01:17:51
although it's pretty and everything else
01:17:53
but it's probably too hardcore for you
01:17:56
maybe that's the second or third place
01:17:59
step into the Slytherin catalog
01:18:01
we have a game called Shadow Empire
01:18:03
which is a very, very, very, very complex 4x game
01:18:09
and again developed by one guy
01:18:13
that's all the friends
01:18:15
but usually are developed by some mad genius
01:18:17
it was like Sully Minfernum
01:18:19
the original is developed by one guy as well
01:18:21
Vick Davis
01:18:22
and you know Shadow Empire is developed by a guy called Vick
01:18:26
by the way
01:18:28
and that game is super complex
01:18:32
but you can go on RPS for on Rope of Shotgun
01:18:35
it's like best strategy game of the year
01:18:39
and whatever
01:18:40
but you don't want to touch it if you don't know what you're doing
01:18:43
it's not a gateway drug to the genre
01:18:46
it's a hard stuff
01:18:47
it's really cool
01:18:48
yeah, okay
01:18:49
all right and we've spoken about Broken Arrow
01:18:51
so go wish list, Broken Arrow
01:18:53
but anything else coming up on the Slytherin people
01:18:56
should know about keep an eye on it
01:18:57
gosh lot, we, oh, I can't really say much about anything else
01:19:06
next year we have a lot of modern novel warfare
01:19:10
which is the submarine simulator coming out
01:19:12
we have Broken Arrow
01:19:13
which has already been announced
01:19:15
and most of the stuff that really is next year has not been announced yet
01:19:19
we'll move
01:19:20
we'll have to chat to you about it when we do the loop back around
01:19:23
after Broken Arrow is released
01:19:24
and it's been a big success
01:19:25
I'm asking you all the questions
01:19:27
so I asked you before
01:19:28
I'll be giving talks about it
01:19:29
and saying we know what we're talking about now
01:19:32
exactly
01:19:33
well, thank you for joining us today
01:19:34
probably it's been a pleasure talking to you
01:19:36
thanks for having me
01:19:37
thank you for joining us for the Game Maker's Notebook
01:19:48
for more information on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences
01:19:51
our podcasts and our other initiatives please visit www.interactive.org
01:19:57
www.interactive.org
01:20:03
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