I have talked to aspiring engineers about professional skills they will need that not taught in school. Some of them are technically taught in school, although they are taught poorly. Version control systems are a great example of this.
While getting the basics for fetching code, creating branches, and committing code is nice, that is not the education you need with version control software. I will use git for our example today, although it could be many different flavors of version control. Perforce comes to mind as a version control system that videogame developers use because it manages large repos of game assets nicely.
The things you need to learn about version control are more related to merging code and how to deal with a repo that four or more people are actively working on, sometimes even editing the same file. This is not what you get to do in school unless you are working on some kind of capstone project. A week-long project with two or three developers does not get to the level of excruciating pain and suffering that results from four or more people actively working in tandem on a codebase. You seldom get projects with enough people, and you are not working on a project for long enough for the pain to really be felt.
It raises the question: “What is the reasonable expectation for source control proficiency for a new employee without any experience?”
The answer is: “Git proficiency is not a reasonable expectation.”
There is a moment of cognitive dissonance when a new employee asks for help with a git merge. “Hey,” You might be tempted to say, “Didn’t you submit your code sample from a git repo?” While that is a perfectly reasonable knee-jerk reaction, it is not really a good one. Merging code into a large project on a team is not the same as “one person writes a small piece of code and uploads it in a controlled environment with no one else touching it.” It is not in the same ballpark and probably not even in the same league.
You are left with two options.
The first is to buy them one of them goofy mugs with all of the git commands written on it and to have them hunker down and “git gud.” Maybe this works here and there. I do not know if it scales well. If you want to try that, you have the Amazon Affiliate Link to try it. I will thank you for them tasty Bezos nickels if you buy one.
The second option is to have them look at using nicely written GUI tools to do their git management.
I am a fan of the second option. I have used Sourcetree to great effect with new engineers, technical artists, and other team members to solve git issues. Sourcetree is reasonably good and it is free. It is also a Gateway product to Bitbucket and Atlassian products. Consider yourself warned.
Other people use Smartgit, a fine alternative. It just costs the monies.
Visual tools like this are a reasonably good and fast way to teach new hires to triage repo issues effectively.
In the long term, is this a skill you will need to be a successful senior software engineer or architect? Possibly. Some people get quite good at using visual tools to manage the repos for their whole organization. Some people need to go to the command line, possibly out of personal choice.
The point I want to make is that this is not an urgent skill to learn right out of the gate. If you do need it, maybe, in several years, you will have time to learn it. There are enough important things to learn as a freshly employeed software engineer that this one is worth punting down the field a little.
At least one finance person has made the jokes about GAAP and how it does not mean what a game developer thinks it means. GAAP in this conversation means Games As A Platform. Consider yourself disambiguated.
We are all watching the conflagration in the mobile app stores and eating our popcorn. The view from down here is magnificent and… big enough to see from space. What is selling today? Recent studies show many six-year-old franchises and [checks notes] Monopoly-plus-coin-master.
You might narrow your eyes and proclaim, “But whaddabout Balatro?” Or you could point at me and mumble, “Something something Palworld!” Yes, you are right. Four or five amazingly successful indie games exist out of at least ten thousand published annually.
I keep telling people every year, “Right now is both the best time and the worst time to be making video games.” Yes, that is right, I am very conflicted about this. Too bad I cannot channel that into a career making the Toktoks.
Let’s throw some more conflict on the fire. I am a gigantic fan of true player ownership of digital goods. I believe that web3 represents a possible means to this end. I am also a fan of distributing games on the open internet. That last point represents a conundrum because the best path to tackling the existing mobile dual monopoly is yet a third closed platform: The Epic Game Store. The enemy of my enemy is not my enemy. While he is still fighting the Apples and the Googles, Tim Sweeney is my favorite person in the games industry every year.
Let’s bring that back to GAAP. Roblox. Fortnite. Minecraft. Zepeto. These are a few of the names I have heard for GAAP. Roblox is presently the incumbent in this space, possessing full facilities for developers to sell virtual goods, mass adoption, and a thriving developer ecosystem. Fortnite is on its way there. You cannot directly sell your items yet, but we must believe this capability is coming. Minecraft is still unsure what it wants to be when it grows up. Zepeto is just this strange international platform that smart people keep yammering about. I am including Zepeto in this conversation out of respect for their pattern recognition skills.
So how do we know that GAAP will be so gosh-darned big?
The first thing to point out is that making games is expensive. Let’s pretend that game developers are construction workers for a moment. How much more expensive and time-consuming would it be to build a house if the construction workers were not allowed to reuse their hammers from job to job? Unreal Engine, Godot, and Unity are all engines that make it easier for people to make games; however, the production pipelines and intermediate tools made on top of them generally do not enjoy portability from game to game or company to company. This is one of the reasons that GAAP is attractive. There are already companies founded by Roblox players who have turned their passion into their livelihood. One of those games is so popular they had a toy included in Happy Meals from McDonald’s!
The creator programs for Fortnite are not far behind Roblox. They understand this is their future. It took years for Roblox to reach Seven Hundred Million Dollars in payouts to creators. In a year, Fortnite got halfway there. Fortnite is kind of cheating a little because it is paying creators out of the revenues generated by selling items and V-Bucks. I strongly believe that a real creator economy will be coming soon.
What makes this interesting is that you can make some comparisons to the dual monopolies in mobile app stores. For example, you can argue that Roblox is like Google and Fortnite is like Apple. There is some delicious irony in that last comparison.
Like in mobile app stores, a dual monopoly creates pressure to compete. Similar things are happening in ridesharing. Uber and Lyft essentially keep themselves honest with their customers. There are more disturbing comparisons to be made between ridesharing drivers and game developers, and we will choose to have that conversation later.
The last interesting point that makes me believe more firmly in the GAAP future is how hard it is to publish… anything. The Friction Is Too Damned High. This will eventually be a problem that comes to GAAP, but today is not that day. Going through all the submission processes for mobile and console games is hard. I cannot speak to the Steam submission process here because I have never done it. I see developers begging to have their game wishlisted on the socials all of the time, and it sounds like it has its very own rituals and observances.
If I started my career fresh today, I would make a game on Roblox or Epic’s UEFN. Heck, the desire to try making games for these platforms is even non-zero for me. I can feel the pull, and it is stronk.
I have declared that GAAP will be a “Next Big Thing” and might even be here in 2025. There are lots of people who believe that “something something AI” is going to be a “Next Big Thing” and are puzzled that I left it off my list. I feel like I should address this.
AI tools are coming to games, and I believe they will be here in the next few years. I also do not think they are a revolutionary change. LLM-based AI will be an evolutionary step that reduces studios’ costs. I do not think it is an automobile; I think it is a faster horse. I will let you all puzzle out what that means. If you need help, you can contact me on my socials.
On that perplexing note, I hope you all are here again next week!
I continue to earn about fifteen cents a month as an Amazon Affiliate. Whoever bought that book from my top ten last week, thank you. This week, I wanted to talk a little about “The Next Big Thing.”
The Next Big Thing is a consumer phenomenon. Once upon a time, the iPhone was a “Next Big Thing”. At one point, the internet was a “Next Big Thing”. CD Rom drives, The Nintendo Switch, and even the Commodore 64 all had their moment in the sun as The Next Big Thing.
Figuring out what will be “The Next Big Thing” is hard. I gave a talk in Seattle called “Out of Touch: The Next Big Thing After The Next Big Thing.” My thesis was that in 2014, gesture technologies were up and coming, and there were so many interesting technical problems that needed to be solved that it would not be the Next Big Thing, but it could possibly be the Next Big Thing after that. It was a fun talk, and the audience rated it highly. I do not have my slides anymore or I would share them. All I have is this great picture of me wishing I was Tom Cruise.
Now that we are in 2024, I was clearly wrong about gesture technology’s speed to market. I remember declaring that there will be a point when gesture technology will be the predominant driver for man-machine interfaces. There will be a new form of sign language that machines will use to interpret gestures, and old people like me will use an old keyboard to talk to machines. The keyboard will not be connected to anything… Some product manager somewhere will take pity on us old people and have a “fax machine compatibility layer” that will watch the gestures of someone typing on the disconnected keyboard and understand what letters are supposed to appear.
There are lots of people who think that voice is a killer app for communicating with computers. They do not have kids, and some… probably do not have a robust dating life. I do not mean to be mean about it. They just forget that sound is a lousy shared transportation medium for data. It will be hard for a room full of kids to scream commands into some online game and have them all easily understood. At the same time, you can always add more cameras if you have maxed out the ability of a machine to count wriggling fingers and elbows. An interactive application with gestures is possible at a football stadium in the same way that a voice-driven application in the same venue is not.
So now that we know that I was mostly wrong about gesture technology a decade ago, what do I think about The Next Big Thing today?
I see three things.
GAAP (Games As A Platform)
I think that this is The Next Big Thing. Roblox and Fortnite have gotten to a billion dollars in creator payouts. This is almost real money! I am also learning that other platforms exist, like Zepeto. Also, while they are currently at a disadvantage in their current market position, Minecraft can still make itself felt here. If I had to bet dollars on this, I would bet on GAAP being a significant driver for consumer game spending. I think this will double by next year in size and be the big theme for next year’s GDC (Game Developer Conference).
Augmented Reality
Right on its heels, I can see the Apple Vision Pro and similar AR devices being very real by 2026. I have some self-interest in this position. I wagered a fancy steak dinner in SF that there will be 4 million AR devices in the marketplace by 2026. I do not know what the killer app for AR will look like yet, either. No one is throwing dead presidents at me to parachute in and get feral with the device in search of its Genre Defining Hit. I do think there is a clear prosumer and urban city dweller killer app outside of games. People looking to meet in real life will use AR tools to find replacement meeting places for work or play when someone is stuck in traffic or if the place they want to meet is just too busy. There is a clear advertising model here for coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and other businesses to offer incentives via discounts or BOGO (buy-one-get-one) for consumers to adjust their plans in real-time. AR can advertise the arbitrage opportunity inside the display, and the platform can also give everyone updates on where to go and when.
Distributed Ledgers
While this is the one I am most interested in, I think this one is the furthest out. I did not call it web3 or Crypto on purpose. Grifters and bad actors have done a considerable amount of damage to the growth of this space. We are in a prolonged period of indigestion on distributed ledgers accordingly. There are many uses for tokens and distributed ledgers, and we cannot get to this future fast enough for me. Some great use cases for distributed ledgers include resource access, public spending, fund-raising, member-based governance, and voting.
There you have it.
– 2025 will be the year of GAAP.
– 2026 will be the year of AR.
– 2029 will be the year of distributed ledgers aka web3
I will do my very best to remember to check in at the end of each of these years to see how far off I am. I do have a history of being very early to most new technologies.
Happy Easter, everyone! I was trying to figure out how to write something very quickly for today and figured, “How hard can a top ten list be?”
The answer is: Very.
I am not going to finish this before the Easter egg hunt begins and the corresponding Easter wine bottle (or three) gets opened, but here we go.
I was an uneducated startup CEO in 2005 when I was trying to raise money. I was blessed with many advisors who gave me feedback on things I needed to learn to be a better CEO. I almost listened to them. Here we are, nearly 20 years later, and I have finally learned some valuable lessons about business management and fundraising.
I was a pretty cocky entrepreneur, and I thought I had it all figured out. Here is the idea. Just add money. A lot of that cockiness came from bootstrapping a few companies into existence. I was super cringey, as the kids say it, and I thought I had the rizz. The rizz is also something the kids say. A lot of VCs, and really good ones at that, took meetings with me, and I appreciate them doing so, even if I was essentially burning an hour or two of their time. I think some of them were trying to figure out how to pair me with an actual CEO and be their technical cofounder. I have some later thoughts on why that failed—largely related to my inflated sense of self-worth. We all have our own problems.
At the time I was bragging that anyone could start a company, and I was really harsh on people with MBAs. It was largely a defensive and childish reaction to people spouting, “One plus one equals three.” On at least one whiskey-fueled occasion, I came up with the idea of the Amazon.com MBA program.
It was my thesis that you could just figure out all of the crap you needed to run a startup and raise money by reading a bunch of books from Amazon. It was an absolute hit amongst my drunken engineering friends and I made a note to myself to put together a list and post it to the internet in all its glory.
Thousands of days later, here we are, and I still have not made this list. This changes as of right now. As an official Amazon Affiliate who has made Hard Cash Money for the first time, I will put together my top ten books that will help you dominate the world! At the very least, it will steal nickels from Jeff Bezos and put them in the pocket of yours truly. Every click matters! Insert the Starship Troopers “I’m doing my part!” memes. Do your part, dammit.
Without further ado, here are my top ten books, presented in no particular order:
This is a powerful book. I used this personally to stop checking my fingernails. I use it professionally to help shape the minds of the people I coach.
This is an oldie but a goodie. It is software development related, and it is in layman’s terms. It was recommended to me by a fantastic games producer I worked with at Digital Chocolate. It helps you think about big problems in software and how to solve them as people.
This is the first book that I read from this list. It is probably one of the two most creepy. The secret language of success is about body language and unspoken cues. It talks about the importance of how to structure your office and why I fucking hate having my back to a door at work.
This is probably the most important book to understand. If you cannot frame yourself as an abundant thinker, you will be forever trapped in scarce thinking and fighting zero-sum games. It is also important for you to understand scarce thinkers and how to avoid their traps.
This is also a very dark book. There are a lot of conversations about habit forming and how social media is like nicotine for the soul. If you want to understand the motivations and dark patterns to make applications addictive, this is a primer for what to do and what not to do. I do not recommend this book to everyone.
I love Malcolm Gladwell’s books, and Outliers is really important. It gives you some guidelines on how to think about practicing your craft and the importance of repetition. There are a lot of people who misunderstand the ten thousand hours he suggests, which makes me chuckle. Some people can reach their ten thousand hours in only one thousand hours. The importance is the unfair advantages of being exposed early and often to ideas.
This recent recommendation talks about the power of networking and connecting with highly influential people. It gives some interesting anecdotes about one of the unseen power brokers of Silicon Valley and speaks to the power of having a coach and a mentor. I strongly believe in the power of networking and the importance of mentorship.
Software development is war, and there are few leaders like Patton. I don’t know what else to say. This is a good book about the importance of audacity.
This is an awful book and a must-read. My corporate counsel recommended it to me when I was trying to learn about fundraising. You need to understand the contents of this book before anyone gives you a penny as an investor, especially if they are an institutional investor.
There are a few books missing from this list. Is this a separate list for the runner-up books in the future? Or do I violate good UIUX principles and give you too many choices?
I recommend this book so everyone can learn how to do principled negotiation. I mostly tell people to read it and throw it in the trash. Most negotiations you will do in your life are against monster hardball negotiators. Win-win situations are uncommon; you must be prepared to blow everything up and walk away. Always know your BATNA.
This last one is me nerding out. The DevOps Handbook is a primer for how to think about large-scale deployments. You might argue the contents of this book are now dated and serverless is the future of software. I might write about this later and what the 37 signals people are learning about getting off the cloud, oops, I mean migrating to the sovereign cloud. Everyone is on the cloud because that is the destination of the information superhighway—or something.
Left out from this list is a primer on calculating the Total Addressable Market. Maybe that is something they teach you when getting your MBA. I sucked at this, and I broke the standard script for making decks. According to recent advice, about 90% of my VC pitches were dead by the second slide.
So there you have it. I would love to get a list of your must-read books and maybe add them to the Amazon.com MBA.
After a half-week in San Francisco, I am back home. I just attended the Game Developers Conference (gdconf.com). I have a soft spot in my heart for GDC… I feel like I am at home when I am talking with other professional game developers. A part of me wants to sit my creaky bones down in a chair, point my cane at you all, and explain how it used to be better while shaking a fist. Once upon a time, it was in San Jose, more intimate and less Brought To You By Our Esteemed Sponsors. The Sponsors were always there, but in this day and age it feels like they take every opportunity to try and smash their logos and products into your face.
I attended half a dozen sessions this year or so. Admittedly, about half of them were at an offsite event focusing on Revenue Optimization that my company organized. These sessions felt like “The GDC of Old” to me.
I also attended two amazing sessions this week. Zac Litton put on the first of these. I had the pleasure of working with Zac indirectly during the early mobile era and from what I can read on LinkedIn, his career story looks amazing. His presentation was on engineering leadership. Some excellent ideas on how to think about your engineering leadership were presented here. I need to think about how this will benefit the engineers I work with now.
The second amazing presentation was by the ever-so-humble Raph Koster. He was celebrating 20 years of his book, A Theory of Fun. As an Amazon Paid Affiliate, I will link it to you from Amazon in my continuing attempt to wrench nickels from their profitability.
It is great to hear Raph speak for many reasons. First, my serious love affair with Ultima Online was why I pursued a game career. The second is that when I bought myself my first GDC badge, I walked up to a group of game developers talking about MMOs, and Raph was one of them. The first game developers I met were all MMO developers, and I stood there (more than a little awkward) listening to them share stories, thoughts, and anecdotes about their game launches and current live ops issues. It was quite educational. The final reason is that his presentation was a nice update to the state-of-the-art on his “Theory of Fun.” Do I link it twice? I must. You should buy this book.
One of my takeaways from the presentation was that the “two marshmallow” experiment has been debunked. I am a little sad about this one. I use this experiment all of the time because of its cleverness. Another takeaway I shared with the audience at the end of the presentation as a comment is that we need to ensure we are bringing industry and academia together. Someone in the audience asked, “Can you make fun without formal game design training?” Raph quickly said, “No.” The audience chuckled. The real answer is “not anymore, and not for a commercial production.” When the game industry started, I think many people made fun games without any formal game designer training simply because it did not yet exist. The budgets and teams for games these days are so big that I believe it is certainly a necessity.
I attended a few other talks. I was keen to attend a talk on successful remote studios. I was irritated that one of the panelists was very excited about remote work, provided the vast majority of the team was within driving distance. It is like saying you are a vegetarian because the beef you are eating does not itself eat meat. It distracted from the presentation and diminished the overall value of the session. I went there to see if there were any new tricks I could learn, and mostly, it reinforced stuff I already knew. This is okay. We cannot win them all. I was worried I would not learn anything from this presentation because it looked like the amount of time I have remotely led teams exceeded the sum of half, if not all, of the panelists.
The final thought I want to leave you all with is that, generally, there is “one thing” that everyone is talking about each year. Usually, it is “the next big thing”. MMOs. Microtransactions. Social Games. Casual Games. Mobile Games. Mobile Games 2.0.
I did not see any of that this year. The conversations, the sessions, and the exposition floor were a shotgun blast of topics. Layoffs. Consolidation. The continued suckiness of web3 games. The fear of AI games. The continued repercussions of Apple Privacy on marketing (and subsequently, escaping from the app store).
I should rephrase that. If you stared at everything hard enough, you would see a rising conversation about the power of Games As A Platform. You have to search for it. The reason is that it has some energy similar to the AI game conversations. Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox are a gateway product to a new generation of game developers. A hungry, excited, and amateur generation of game developers. And much like “the scary AI,” it is coming for “your jerbs.”
I predict we will see and hear more about this next year. Roblox is in a happy position of having several hundred million dollars of creator payouts that put them at the top of the GAAP leaderboard. However, UEFN paid out three hundred million dollars to creators and got there faster than Roblox got to three hundred million dollars. If you are good at arithmetic, this is now a billion-dollar marketplace. Sort of. Maybe I will talk more about that in a future week.
A long time ago, I interviewed at Amazon. I interviewed there a couple of times, come to think of it, including at their game studios and hardware subsidiary. If you are interviewing at Amazon, you must read this Clearly Affiliate Linked book: The Amazon Way. It is an interesting book to read, even if you do not interview at Amazon. One of my Amazon interviews was with a part of the company that prided itself on its independence, including independence from Amazon culture. I did not know this going in, and I did My Very Best to sound as Amazonian as possible. I channeled my inner Bezos and felt I nailed the interview. I later got feedback from some of my spies that I sounded too Amazonian to fit into their culture. Whoops.
There is a lot to like about The Amazon Way. There are also parts that are less likable. One of the fourteen principles of The Amazon Way is to disagree and commit. I found this to be the principle I loved the most from the book. I was not a “disagree and commit“ employee early in my career. I was a “disagree and burn the whole fucking company down around me” employee. I did get better. After becoming older and wiser, I apologized to several people too close to the flames I created in choice moments of disagreement.
Disagree and commit is an important principle. In many situations, I have been the lone voice of dissent and have argued heartily for what I believed were the best business strategies and outcomes. Sometimes, I have been voted down with good reason. Sometimes, I have been voted down, and the cost to the business was severe. In at least one case, it was fatal.
In the case where it was fatal, I was right to disagree, and I committed to our intended (and flawed) path. I have often wondered how I could have persuaded the rest of the leadership team to adjust our trajectory. Sometimes, you do not have the tools necessary for the situation, and the best you can do is to commit to the bit.
This is GDC week. I debated writing one or two of my pending game-related blog posts. My contrarian instincts kicked in, and I wrote about my favorite part of The Amazon Way instead. Everyone will learn enough about the game industry from others for the next seven or eight days. I am even participating in an exciting event near the show to talk about what I do for fun and excitement these days. I think the event is filling up, and if you want to learn more about revenue optimization or say hello, you know how to find me on the interwebs.
Let’s get back to disagreeing and committing. This is an incredibly valuable team skill, and it is also an incredible leadership skill. While you want to put forward the best ideas, sometimes they do not land successfully on the roadmap. The best you can do in that situation is to challenge each other to understand what truly happened after the dust settles. This can sometimes take months.
Some of my earliest career mistakes revolved around holding onto my ideas too long. I should have let some of them go even when I was right. There was some karmic blowback from that when I started my own game studio. I was the CEO and held the majority stake in the business. My cofounder was in the minority. Most of the time, however, his ideas were correct. We had long debates on strategy and tactics and often took his proposed path. I could disagree and commit, even though I could have just doggedly pushed my slightly worse ideas as the decision-maker.
Right now, I am in a nice spot of being able to agree and commit. That is super easy! I always stand ready to jump into the decision-making fray and argue my position if that changes.
Learn to disagree and commit. Especially if you think you do not need to do so.
I was a Vice President of Engineering for Hi5.com, which eventually became a startup working on a social games site called Magi. It was the first time I was an executive for a company with tens of millions of users and tens of millions of dollars in revenue. It was also a sinking ship. There are many reasons why the business utterly failed, and that conversation will cost you at least one or six beers. I am in SF next week for GDC if you wish to avail yourself of this storytelling.
I confess that I agitated my peers by my conduct. I was in the process of learning to teach people to lead. I had to read that back to myself, and I am satisfied with the sentence. Mistakes were made. There are old sayings about giving people fish and teaching them to fish. I cackle maniacally when people bring up these sayings and then change the conversation to explosives and scooping fish out of the water. There are as many ways to catch a fish as there are to skin a cat. I am admittedly not certain I would try to skin a cat with explosives.
This has nothing to do with engineering leadership and the teaching thereof. Today’s metaphor is the warp core.
I am guilty of conducting high-risk social experiments on engineers and engineering leaders. Some of these experiments were well-controlled. Some were detonations visible from space. I often encouraged people to lead meetings, which was a well-controlled experiment. I would randomly and, at the last minute, appoint someone to run a meeting who had yet to do so ever. At least one person in the room knew I was not there intentionally and was merely hiding out of sight. They were there to send me a signal flare if something was going badly and I needed to intervene.
My peers hated this with a passion. “You are meddling with the warp core!” They would proclaim indignantly.
Yes. Yes, I was. I was meddling with the warp core. I look at the people who were a part of these experiments a decade later, and I will say that many of them have been forged into terrific leaders.
If you lead people, give them learning opportunities and stretch their capabilities. Do not be afraid to do this! I had given people learning opportunities by accident early in my career and have deliberately done so much later.
I am quite pleased with the results.
You should take this as an encouragement to meddle with your warp core. Traveling around the universe at a comfortable Warp Six point Five will get you there consistently if you only care about the results. Occasionally, pushing your engines to a crazy Warp Ten will tell you how good the ship is under duress. It also gives you some opportunities to find issues that need tuning in case you need to go that fast. Eventually, you will.
That is it. That is the whole post. See you next week!
I spent a few years at Zynga. A few clicks and keypresses on LinkedIn will confirm this to be true. One element I loved about working at Zynga is that it was a great gateway career to working in games. Some companies have a self-absorbed AAA stink that makes it hard to get a job there. I used to joke with people, “You need five years of EA experience to work at Activision. You also need five years of Activision experience to work at EA.” Especially at the more senior levels. There are only five remaining top ten publishers and they may as well have an expressway between their HR departments for the amount of revolving doors for their employees.
This article is not about the stagnation of creativity inside the publicly held quote-unquote game industry marketplace leaders. It could be on some other day.
I plan to tunnel a little on Zynga. When people want to work in games, they generally envision some grand magnum opus game project they hold deep inside their hearts. I have a few such games. I have some MMO games, some hunting games, some casual games, and some mid-core games. Most of these games will not see the light of day because there is not enough time in the day, and I do not have the kind of “eff you” money I would need to hire teams to build them all. I have pitched a few of these games and a few game portfolios to publishers over the years. One regret is that while I would drop a couple hundred bucks on some crude prototype art, I never quite convinced myself it would be worth a couple thousand bucks to make the prototype prettier. While I have a pretty good inner eye for the bones of a game, the mechanics, and the opportunity, this is a rare skill. Most people’s inner eye cannot come to the phone right now. I did try to leave a message after the beep.
There was nothing more infuriating than hearing a portfolio manager at a publishing company say, “I would personally play the shit out of this game, but we could never publish that here.” If I had made these games more beautiful, at least one or two of those would have gone to the greenlight committee. I understand that now.
This article is not about pitching games, either.
Or is it?
Some game company applicants to Zynga look at the variety of games they ship and think, “Golly! These folks are all over the place, and their portfolio has no rhyme or reason!”
These applicants will have a “big-brain” moment and conclude that they can get a job, spend some time in the trenches on an existing title, and after some time-in-role and maybe a little heroics, Zynga will allow them to build their One True Game.
It is not the worst idea in the world.
It also does not work that way.
One of the most amazing things I have seen at Zynga is the amount of anxiety that the company culture effectively creates in its staff through its superpowers. Setting aside a few early spectacular failures, the one thing that Zynga is good at is buying existing games.
I see your Spock eyebrows raising. I shall elaborate a little for you.
A significant number of Zynga’s titles were acquisitions. Some of the games were also logical extensions of other brands. One of the most amazing social phenomena inside the company was the number of people who attached themselves to the success of Farmville and would attempt to use that street cred to bully people. I have heard a dozen variants about who was responsible for what, and the stories differed enough between people that I could not determine what was true. Some people, through coffee meetings, lunches, and drinks, would argue that zero long-term successes were wholly created inside Zynga.
It was not for a lack of trying. There were a lot of additional stories being told about game projects that never made it to the consumer marketplace, as well as games that were launched only to be shelved for not hitting their numbers. For the games that launched, there was always a question about whether or not there were realistic targets attached to the game to achieve the “Zynga scale” to keep investing in it.
It was an interesting question that people constantly asked themselves and each other. Zynga was excellent at acquiring studios and giving them space to operate and thrive. The price of that excellence appears to be a struggle to create new franchises and games.
I will not debate what number of original games were created at Zynga. I will give kudos to the business development teams who spotted great companies to acquire to maintain significant growth and market presence over the years.
This observation is not a thinly veiled attempt at criticism for Zynga. It is intended to point out Zynga’s superpower. Zynga is reasonably good at franchise management. It is likely why Take-Two acquired them.
There are two things that I would take away from this.
The first is that it is important to know what your superpower is. I think that Zynga did not take advantage of this. There were constant efforts to build new games and launch them inside the business. In hindsight, I think these efforts were ill-informed. A better approach would be to provide strategic funding for a handful of folks to spin out into their own business and attempt to launch the game independently. Put some strings on the investment to give Zynga reasonable options to bring that back to the mothership. Do not make them onerous, but make them fair to everyone involved.
Second, you should take advantage of that superpower as a game creator. If you want to create new mobile games, go and work at Zynga for two to five years and establish that you can effectively contribute or manage live operations games at scale. When you have this mastery, use that to check off some investor boxes for de-risking your own studio. I did not do this early enough in my career to benefit from that experience.
I will close by stating that I am a contrarian. I think financially challenging times are the best time to start a business. If you can succeed in a low-oxygen environment, you can succeed anywhere. Learning to manage a successful franchise will help convince investors that you have unfair competitive advantages.
Thank you, as always, for reading along. To check the box on “Does this post have a magnificent ‘Must Purchase’ Amazon Affiliate link?” I would ask you to check out Razer’s BlackShark V2 wireless gaming headset. My kids have beaten the heck out of their SteelSeries headsets with an unacceptable MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), and we are switching brands to see if these will be more durable.
Making software is hard. I am very tempted to stop here. You heard me, I almost said to myself, “That’s it, that’s the whole post.” and logged off for the day. If I could splice together funny video clips with some obnoxious dubstep, I could TokTok that. This is not that day.
One part of the hardness is figuring out if you are building the right thing. Some people are better than others at figuring out the right thing to build. It is okay if you are not good at figuring out what to build. I have good news for you. All is not lost. Some people are good at doing surveys and focus groups; others can build small mockups to validate whether or not something is right. Even if you do not have those people on your team, you are still not completely without hope.
If you do not really know what the right thing is, you can always make an educated guess. You can simply make something up! It is important to figure out how to make it as small of a project as possible to get it in front of people and learn how far off you are from the right thing. I call this the “ship and iterate” approach to software development. I know many people like Lean Startup lingo and would refer to this as the MVP (minimum viable product). I do not use this language very much. When talking to people who proudly say, “We are a lean company!” I nod sagely and reply, “Yes, your company sounds poorly managed!”
I guess I am not always trying to make new friends.
Now that I have chased a few people away with my hot take, let’s return to the subject at hand. Making sure you are building the right thing. Some percentage of companies making new products miss the mark. Sometimes the design is off, sometimes the functionality is off, and sometimes the marketplace is just not ready. I am looking at you, Apple Newton, I mean Apple iPad. Do you see what I did there?
Apple believed very strongly in the handheld device marketplace early on. If you look at the itch that the Newton and the iPad scratch, I would say they look very similar. With Apple releasing its first AR product, the AVP (Apple Vision Pro), we must figure out how far along we are on the Newton-iPad spectrum. The price, market timing, and overall usability suggest it is probably closer to the Newton than the iPad. At its current price, an AVP customer is born every minute. Apple deliberately only made a couple hundred thousand of them on purpose so they could gouge their fanboys and declare that it made more money than the fastest-growing competitors. Another word for “fastest-growing” is “smallest”, by the way.
I can speak to this with some degree of certainty. I worked on software for the “put a bucket on my head” crowd. It was five years too early five years ago. Five years later, it is still close to five years too early. I have spent considerable time making early experiences for nascent technology platforms. It is definitely the hardest problem to tackle in the world of “making software is hard.”
To bring this all home, I think that the iPad owes some of its success to the failure of the Newton. Shipping the Newton at the time they shipped was shipping the wrong thing.
A whole generation of VR hardware also fell into the “wrong thing” category. You can look at many platforms and products and find an early mover. Sometimes, they made execution mistakes. Sometimes, they made strategic mistakes. Sometimes, the mistakes were purely timing.
Before you ship a piece of software, it would be nice to know that it is not the right thing. Sometimes, you must do a little trust-fall with your customers and hope they will catch you. If they don’t, that is okay. Maybe they were not ready to catch you the first time around, and they will be there in a few years after you have picked yourself up and dusted yourself off.
You cannot put yourself into analysis paralysis on whether or not you are shipping the right thing. You should always be shipping something. If you wind up shipping the wrong thing, it is really important to understand why it is wrong. It is also really important to scope down your product so it is not betting the entire farm on one thing. Magic Leap is a good example if you want to know how that turns out. It is okay for Facebook and Apple to make a billion-dollar bet on the AR marketplace. It is less okay for Rony McStartup to make this kind of bet.
So, let’s draw some conclusions from this. You should not be afraid of shipping the wrong thing. You should always do your best to ship something. If you do not know if it is the right thing, you should try to ship something small and iterate on it. Shipping and iterating are better than iterating and then shipping. One of the best takeaways from John Szeder’s Favorite Book About Software Engineering (Warning: Clicking this link and buying this product steals nickels from Jeff Bezos) is that you should always “ship faster, with better stuff.” Yes, I know there is a new edition. No, I am not going to get rid of my fax machine.
It is important to ship things and to ship them quickly. After a few beers or lines of cocaine, you can see that “move fast and break things” kind of resembles ship and iterate. Maybe there is some survivorship bias here, but this is how marketplaces are born.
There are some subjects that I just cannot shut up about… MMOs, Engineering Leadership, Stealing Nickels from Jeff Bezos, and Epic Games’ War On The Thirty Percent App Store Tax.
I have an ancient note to write a blog post on battle passes. I fear writing this article because it is focused heavily on the early Fortnite Battle Pass. It also focuses on why a large slice of casual players stopped playing Fortnite. With this in mind, it made sense to log back into the King of Battle Royale and see what was happening.
There is good news, and there is bad news.
The good news is that the leadership of the Fortnite team has been listening, or at least thinking. One of my complaints about Fortnite is that they went all in on the paragon-style battle pass, clearly copied from Apex Legends. While Apex Legends is a better game, it was also less popular. I still wonder why they thought they would want to adopt features from a poorer-performing title. Apex Legends was more hardcore, and most of the Fortnite audience was casual. If you are not sure about that, Google Peely. That will tell you everything you need to know.
I am pleased to say that there are once again three daily matches you can play without having to think about killing five people with a shotgun, then killing ten people, then killing fifteen people, and so on. If you want to log in, get 40k experience points, and finish your murder party day, Fortnite has you covered.
You can also complete seasonal paragon-style quests. You have 20 ranks of quests for completing matches, doing damage, killing other players, and, the most important part of the match, thanking the bus driver.
Epic is also trying to Metaverse. It stands to reason that they should partner with LEGO and have a LEGO Fortnite game. Those of you who read the news know they took some money from Disney to do a “something something Disney” real soon.
This goes into the “good things” bucket because I am collecting experience points for my Battle Pass in LEGO Fortnite while we speak. I have Done The Research and figured out some of the optimal things you can do to progress through your Battle Pass levels to collect your stars. I will share some math with you later on.
It is smart for Epic to include tranches of quests from LEGO Fortnite, their racing game, and their brand partners. I do not know why a TMNT promotion is happening within Fortnite, but I accidentally earned two levels toward my Battle Pass because it exists.
So, let’s talk about the cartoon stink lines emanating from the game. I know this is what you really came here for.
I am going to apologize because I do not have screenshots for everything. I am certain some of this will be valuable as a historical record. Still, as much as you are not interested in clicking on links to steal from The Bezos, I am not interested in making a giant collection of screenshots. If you will indulge me in becoming suckers for my internet marketing scheme, I will do more work in the future. That is a fair and reasonable request.
Now, let’s jump in.
First off, I have my own version of “enshittification” as a word. I am going to call it crapflation. The user experience for Fortnite players has experienced a significant amount of crapflation. There are more buttons per square inch of screen on the first screen than there were before. Most of them are unclickable noise. This is bad. This is also how Roblox looks. You can put two and two together. Much like Fortnite thirsted after the UIUX from Apex Legends and chased that audience, they are doing the same thing with Roblox. UEFN is real, even if the revenues are not. That last point bears some explanation on another day. I am going to tunnel on Fortnite badness for a while.
There is also crapflation on the quest screen. You have a gigantic vertical scrollbar filled with banners indicating your different categories of quests. You have Ranked Quests. Match Quests. Weekly Quests, TMNT Quests, LEGO Quests, Fortnite Crummy Race Game Quests, and everybody’s least favorite, Fortnite Stupid Dance Party Quests.
Look at all these quests!
I will acknowledge the awesomeness of so many different ways to earn experience for your Battle Pass. Some of the categories will easily disappear once you have completed all of the quests. I should have put that into the “good things” category. The problem is that some of the categories of quests include massive time sinks. I am reasonably certain there is a metrics-driven PM somewhere inside the Fortnite Bidness Citadel with a graph suggesting that it is good for Fortnite Crummy Race Game to include a quest for players to earn Gold Driver status. I hope someday that person asks, “Am I pissing off the core Fortnite players who just want this stupid quest category to go away?” The answer for this player is “yes.” That goes double for Fortnite Stupid Dance Party. I am on the fence about the quests for LEGO Fortnite because the quests they offer are easy to complete, and they have not yet patched out AFK experience points farming as they did in Fortnite Stupid Dance Party.
Last week, I declared Disney’s investment into Fortnite for “something something Disney” as “meh.” A lot of people had questions. They assumed that I would be excited about this because I love the future in which the thirty percent platform tax goes down. That is a reasonable assumption to make. The problem is that most of the extra experiences in Fortnite have taken the Roblox path. They are poorly crafted experiences.
LEGO Fortnite is not fun. It is a pale Minecraft imitator with boggling UIUX problems. I tore through it to clean up my regular Fortnite quest UI.
I similarly tried to do this with Fortnite Crummy Race Game. The problem is that Fortnite Crummy Race Game requires you to get to Gold Driver status, and the time commitment for clearing out this category of quests is not reasonable. As a game, FCRG is not entirely terrible. The biggest problem I have with it is that the multiplayer racing technology is a fucking liar. It may look like you came in third on your screen, but the fraction-of-a-second split between you and the other bad players meant you actually came in seventh. This is unforgivable to me and incredibly consistent. If you love racing, you will buy an XBOX to play Forza because big-boy racing games do not have this horrible amateur-hour problem. Also, you need to understand the shortcuts to score bigly in the race. I accept that “I am not gud” is not really something I can complain about.
Reach Gold Rank in Rocket Racing? Hard Pass.
It is now time to talk about Fortnite Stupid Dance Party. I am nearly trembling with rage at this one. I get that I am not in the psychographic for this game. I am willing to accept that there are “The Kids These Days” who also like to play their four-button rhythm games with two hands, but what the actual everloving hell is Jam Stage all about? I am at least grateful that the Jam Stage quests are easy to clear, even if the Main Stage Stupid Dance Party quest has two phases that make removing the quest category from my Fortnite regular screen impossible. The second set of quests is “Play a bunch of matches with a friend.” Do you know why they are my friends? Because I do not invite them to Fortnite Stupid Dance Party. I am grateful that one of my sons volunteered to earn me some stars in the Main Stage event. He also gave me a pretty good and thoughtful explanation for why the game is bad and punishes really good players.
Play with others? In this game? Yeah, no.
Some of the quests also require Creative Mode play. I am grateful that someone inside the Fortnite Bidness Citadel did not add a category of Creative Mode quests at the top level. You can earn some bonus TMNT points if you are excited about turtle power garbage. I got some of the quest currency this weekend from having my face ripped off repeatedly in one of many different UEFN variations on murder party. I was so terrible at it that eventually, people got tired of killing me repeatedly, leaving me all alone in a battleground to earn experience points and think about what I did wrong.
“Earn 65,000 experience points in creative mode.” They said.
As I sit here, I struggle with categorizing everything in the “this is bad” category. While I appreciate a “No Build” version of the game and enjoy it, I almost invariably come in second place. I die to people who have gotten 100% chance loot drops from minibosses or are using the overpowered TMNT melee weapons. Why do this? Why remove that incredible sense of randomness in the battle royale match by making it a near-requirement to get specific overpowered weapons to win?
You gotta murder a whole lotta people to get that last trophy.
At the end of the day, I am sitting at level 100-ish with enough time in the season to grind out all the remaining “bonus rewards” if I want them. I will do about five more levels to get to another 100 V-Bucks. They did balance the season, so you generate 900 V-Bucks in exchange for buying a Battle Pass for 950 V-Bucks. Every 10 to 15 levels after 100, you can earn another 100 V-Bucks if you feel it is important to earn yourself a free Battle Pass. It is not important for me to grind out more than that because one of the biggest problems with Fortnite now is that they have jumped the shark.
At level 100-ish, I have bought enough V-Bucks in the bonus purchases section that my next season is FREE! FREE! FREE!
The whole reason my casual family and I loved to participate in Family Murder Party Night was the awesome cosmetics. And while the store refreshes algorithmically, they have not added enough new stuff. We used to love going to the game to see what new and exciting skins have been added to the game and are appearing in the shop rotation. It is no longer like going to the mall; it is instead like taking a bunch of near-expired coupons to the factory outlet mall.
Net Fortnite usage is up, and net Fortnite revenues are up. They are doing a good job merchandising music and automotive items for game modes I do not love. They also have a lot of random stuff happening in UEFN land as they try to nibble on Roblox’s incredible market share. None of these things enhance the Battle Royale game significantly to me.
I should amend that. I actually enjoy parking my character in LEGO Fortnite for a few hours for some free experience points that have not yet been patched. They did patch out the AFK points from Fortnite Stupid Dance Party because it was an embarrassing amount of free levels each day with both AFK grinds possible. Giving away that much free experience is mildly inconvenient for one game. If you inflate daily active users for a game, it might be one with a license partner so they can pretend to feel good about the volume of daily “active” users.
I have a few more weeks of avoiding super-sweaty blood baths in Fornite Unranked No Build mode. If I did accidentally earn Ranks in Ranked Fortnite, I would be forced into deeper levels of competition than I want as a filthy casual. It is also a good idea to avoid playing when the weekly quests refresh and when branded content like the TMNT quests drop. That TMNT quest drop happened this morning, and I had my face ripped off twice as a reward for not paying attention to what quests are new today.
Knowing I can earn supercharged experience points before completing a daily quest is nice. Knowing that I can earn half of a level’s worth of experience points by doing daily quests is nice, too.
You get 15k, 10k, and 5k experience points on doing basic dailies, just like the good old days!
Ultimately, I have earned or collected all of the items I was looking for from the Battle Pass this season. I may get a few more accidental Victory Royales if my panicked clicking with TMNT weapons or measured clicking from a well-covered location with an auto-lock pistol catches someone off guard. I won’t get into the long, slow turtle fights of two people with riot shields or talk about the cruelty of hirelings or turrets. Some of these things are net negatives to the experience.
This is a whole lotta 5k experience point quests.
So, what do we conclude from all of this?
Racing game technology is challenging. There are many questions to ask about the Fortnite Stupid Dance Game. Unranked No-Build Fortnite is awesome. Anyone who works at Epic ought to pray that decision-makers at Disney do not read what I have written about how crappy some of the game modes are. Many things were added to Fortnite Battle Royale that detract from the Battle Royale-ey-ness of the game.
I did not even get into the bullshit that is the car-refueling weekly quest where I have 0 / 75 progress. I have read the websites. I have watched the videos. It is a mystery how to do this quest successfully. I will close by telling you that I have discovered no less than ten different ways to die horribly in Fortnite while trying to refuel your car.
Do not stand next to a car while someone snipes a can of gas next to a fuel pump.
