Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

This week there was an article in the news about Kickstarter looking to put itself on a blockchain. Generally I see a lot of “something something blockchain” articles and think to myself “yeah, that is a hard no”. Kickstarter being on the blockchain actually makes a lot of sense.

I am not here to talk about that today.

Today I am here to talk about t-shirts and why I removed crowdfunding from my bucket list.

Crowdfunding looks exciting. You have an idea that you are too poor to execute, you tell the world about it, and everyone interested gives you some money to build it. People wrote a bunch of articles on how to succeed with crowdfunding. I read them all voraciously, hoping to leverage the Power of The Crowd to build one of my dream projects one day. While there is a definite investment by the crowd into “I wish to back the project of someone who made something in the eighties or nineties that I really loved”, there are also some additional people who will back new projects from creators who have no track record. Online experts published crowdfunding stats about all of this. They tracked the number of people you have as facebook friends and twitter followers and correlated those to successes and failures.

I personally backed about ten projects myself. The outcomes were split evenly between “I got what I paid for”, “I never got anything and I want revenge”, and “I forget what happened—I just wanted to support the creator”.

A half-dozen friends crowdfunded their own projects while all of this was happening. The most recent of these was a fun little tabletop game. In three cases I offered to eyeball their product offerings, and see if I could provide any feedback.

Universally I observed three things in each of the kickstarter proposals.

The first is well written about. Making physical goods is hard and expensive. Put enough profit margin into your physical goods offerings so you do not sink all of your crowdfunding earnings into making rewards. Remember to account for international shipping costs too.

The second is that pricing is really tricky. I had the benefit of working in publishing and platform businesses and I got to learn a considerable amount about pricing. I am by no means an expert at pricing, however, there are some very important prices to support in your Kickstarter. If you have gaps in your price offerings it will make it harder for you to get your project over the finish line. I generally looked to see if there was a 50 dollar offering that made sense, a 75 dollar offering that made sense, and a 150 dollar offering that made sense. These are the levels I would contribute to someone’s kickstarter. Generally speaking I found that one or more of these tiers was missing. If “John-as-potential-funder” does not have a price point that he will invest at, it is hard to move him up into 200 dollar land. If there is not enough interesting stuff lower then he will also not move down. This is a great way to get to zero million dollars quickly.

The last thing was really a personal one for me.

I am a sucker for physical goods. When I see a Kickstarter I want to back, I look at the aforementioned 50 dollar to 150 dollar window to see what has the nicest physical offering I can buy. As an Ultima fan from the eighties, I was stoked that I could get a big box for Shroud of the Avatar. It sits on the shelf next to my Collector’s Edition Ultima Online box.

I am grateful that I was able to talk to a few people early enough in their crowdfunding plans that I could give them some of this feedback. I also took advantage of that to do some help-me-to-help-you kung fu.

I told them to sell me a t-shirt.

I will repeat my earlier statement about not being a marketing guru. I will also repeat my earlier statement that crowdfunding is hard. You can be forgiven for not including an important price point and you can be forgiven for not thinking about selling a t-shirt.

I also think that it is one of the best things to put into your crowdfunding campaign.

For starters, t-shirts are not terribly expensive. There are some logistics on sizing to solve for, and certainly international shipping is a pain, but if you put a t-shirt into a 70 dollar or higher tier, you will be able to make money with it to support your wonderful project. If you price it in the 30 dollar or 50 dollar tiers, not so much.

It also turns your biggest fans into advertising machinery. Before you look horrified, people will also be happy to be your advertising machinery! I wear a Macallan scotch hat sometimes. I also have Justice League t-shirts. People have commented on my World of Warcraft hoodie in the grocery store, even though it is from the Alliance.

[Required Disclosure: The above links are shameless attempts to get you to buy something and generate an affiliate fee. I have less than thirty days left for one of you to buy anything I have linked before Amazon considers me a failure and revokes my as-of-yet-unused affiliate code.]

Coffee mugs are cute, as well as collectible box sets. The challenge with those is that you do not take your collectible box sets out into the world with you and I have questions if you are taking your crowdfunding mug to Starbucks for refills.

People who are better at this marketing stuff than I am will tell me this is some clear “one plus one equals three” marketing. You get your investment from the crowdfunder who is now a walking talking billboard and you might eventually get one or more socially validated customers.

I was glad that each campaign where I gave some feedback was successfully funded. I am also glad that I was able to get t-shirts out of them where it was possible.

If you are about to jump into crowdfunding, I would love to hear about it. I would be willing to stare hard at your crowdfunding plan for thirty minutes and talk about it with you afterwards as a courtesy.

If you do not want to listen to me ramble on about your plan directly, at least try to follow the three pieces of basic advice above. If you do not, you run the risk of losing your shirt.

As I am putting the final touches on my “Tedious Creativity” product for game masters, I want to talk about one of the dumbest things I have done in my career.

In 2007 or so, mobile 1.0 was starting to wrap up. It was pretty clear that the party was over, and people were either leaving on their own or being not-so-gently escorted to the exit.

My business partner and I decided to shutter our fledgling studio before this happened and each of us went our separate ways.

I sat down and tried to figure out my next steps. There were two marketplaces that were adjacent to mobile games. The shitty, casual, downloadable games market, and the shitty Flash games market. I spent about a month in analysis paralysis on which of these two markets made the most sense for me to spend time and energy on.

The mistake I made here was meme-worthy. I was the “why not both?” kid. And that was absolutely the dumbest thing to do.

I had two sets of contractors working on projects. One was a tribute to “The Oregon Trail”. A downloadable casual game where you travelled west across a pseudo-random map including a mountain range, some rivers, and eventually settled in the west. It generated a fun little narrative outcome based on how many wagons, resources, and people you arrived with. It had some interesting progression structures and the ability to choose multiple different wagon masters to help give different outcomes.

The other project was a limited Flash game that told the first leg of a three-part story. It was the story of a young farm boy on his way to learn how to become a wizard. The game was a simple puzzle game where you matched items on a board for simple offensive and defensive spells in battle. There was deliberately no progression added to the game.

The good news and the bad news is that both titles shipped and recouped their investment. This was good news because I did not lose my shirt. This was also bad news because they did not generate profit.

While I learned a great deal about each platform, it was not enough for me to make a decision to commit to one or the other, and in the intervening window of time it took to ship both of these products, each marketplace was maturing, and going the way of mobile 1.0. They were both collapsing and were soon to be gone.

The mistake I made was to split my focus between these two different marketplaces. There was almost nothing that could be leveraged from each project into the other. They each had different audiences—they each had different technology stacks. It was a fun design exercise and I learned a tremendous amount from each product.

I have done some analysis on game designers and game studios over the years. I always ask people if they can name ten different designers who have had “best sellers” in two or more categories.

It is a very small list. You can count David Jaffe, Jon Van Caneghem, and Will Wright among them for certain. The list breaks down at that point and you really have to squint at the other game designers and their products and nitpick. I do not know that I have ever seen that list get to ten designers.

It is probably tremendous hubris on my part to think that I could have gotten two “base hits” in two different categories concurrently. Even in early mobile two of the products I worked on were top five best sellers in the same category.

I am spending some time thinking about this right now because I am about to launch a product and thinking about what to do next. I have decided to reopen my back catalog and picked a game to iterate on. I chose one of the first two games I have ever made—a simple RPG I built for the Pocket PC—to be the basis for my next project.

There are a few reasons for this.

The first is that it is the product I want to make.

The second is that it is time to stack up my projects more effectively.

If you look at games like Diablo, Torchlight, Fate, and others, you will find out that there is a core of individuals who, working together, have honed their craft in this space. All of them went on to make a successful game in its category and in its genre after they initially worked together on one project or another. Sometimes it was at Blizzard—sometimes it was at WildTangent.

The core team that did Diablo went on to make a studio called Flagship and worked on a game called Hellgate London.

As a customer, I was super excited to hear that the Diablo team was making a new game. The instant I saw the trailers I felt like I was pushed off a cliff.

It was nothing like Diablo. I immediately became unexcited.

I think there is a decent-sized segment of gamers who felt the same way. The game launched and did not attract a massive audience.

It is my personal opinion that this product would have done much better if they stuck to their core expertise—they should have stacked up their projects.

You can look at Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, and many other game designers who have built their careers on a stack of games. It is a good model to follow.

Quite often, if you peer into the history of a particular game studio, you will find the same thing. Studios develop expertise around a particular genre or audience. They will find repeated successes with that genre or audience.

You will also find that many of them have early projects that did not do well or were cancelled. In some cases they used these projects to build a core audience or a core technology upon which they could grow.

Starting businesses is hard. Getting successful with consumer products is harder. Making a profitable game studio is probably one of the hardest intersections of those two statements.

I have had a few people over the years inquire about some elements of my back catalog that were successful. I always give them the same reply. 

“I will partner with you to do the game you want, but it will need to be the third game we do together”.

While this might be the best long term win-win outcome, generally it is not met with enthusiasm. There is a long and complicated discussion there about leverage, ownership, and strategy that will need to wait for another day.

I hope you all take away the importance of stacking up your projects and figuring out how to leverage them better using my counter-example. While I have learned an amazing amount from the various projects I have worked on, none of them gave me any of that famous “one plus one equals three” magic that you need to succeed in the business world.

Looking forward to lamenting about some other stupid crap I should have done differently next week!

Twas the night before christmas and the lights were down low
The energy all taken by an ethereum bro
The stars overhead were shiny and glinting
And pictures of monkeys were furiously minting

Their marketing felt like a kick to the groin
As the shillers would pimp their collections and Coin
Maybe people paid extra to buy their own token
Because the supply chain for real things is totally broken

The ships with their stuff are all stuck in the ocean
Somehow corporate stocks are still upwards in motion
We no longer hear about the planet and Greta
We all rolled our eyes as FB became meta

Tim Epic and Tim Apple are still fighting dirty
Epic takes twelve percent, Apple still takes thirty
We all managed somehow to get some work done
We all managed somehow to go have some fun

As flights are all filling and as we all go back indoors
We resume our dining, our playing and our chores
A few companies had the incredible cheek
To pay five days of pay for a four day work week

Will we see more responses to staff indignation
To attract back the talent from “The great resignation”?
We all watched Activision reach a new low
Which coincidentally rhymes with “new CEO”

Let’s take a deep breath, this year’s almost through
We stand on the precipice of 2022
So let down your hair and let out a great cheer
And have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I spend a day each week with my professional hobby. I promise I will actually talk about it soon. I do not want to share the details while it is still approaching “Da Real MVP”. The “DRMVP” is the “MVP” you launch after you build your first “MVP” and discover it is not “V”. If you do not know that MVP is Minimum Viable Product, by the way, we should talk more often.

I am paying someone full time to work on this product. I am hopeful that we will be able to make some money off of it somewhere. If you want to know more about what I am building, search my blog for the subject of Joe the Elf. Okay fine. It is located at Joe-The-Elf. Happy? I saved you some typing. Read that later if you haven’t already.

I am paying to build this product in its entirety because it constitutes enough risk that no one in their right mind should put a dollar towards it. I could probably convince someone that it is worthwhile to invest in this product; however, I absolutely guarantee that I would spend more time trying to convince someone of that than actually building it. Maybe it means I am a shitty salesman. I don’t know.

I do have one other project that I think would be fundable. Something something NFT. I also know that it will be an uphill project to get it funded because it is the second professional hobby I am starting. My theory is that my first project will launch and require a little bit of attention here and there, but it will effectively be operating with minimal adult supervision very soon.

The problem I am going to have with raising money for my second project has already manifested itself. I have been given extremely negative feedback about raising money for it twice by people I really appreciate, and once in video form, while listening to someone who is an investor in the something-something-NFT space.

“You are not serious about your project if you are not on it full time”.

I listened to them. Really I did. I bit back the urge to send them a fax with my feedback.

The truth is that it is a bunch of bullshit. I won’t go into the long conversation about family, children, life choices, and investors that will invariably ensue. As a parent of six kids, one in college, it is probably not a good idea to go all in 100% on my professional hobby even if it possesses outsized returns. You cannot buy baby clothes with options, nor pay for college with equity.

Somehow my life choices make me a bad entrepreneur.

Okay. Accentuate the positives. I want to talk about Elon Musk. Actually, I don’t. Not really. Enough people talk about Elon Musk. Let’s think about him for a minute, shall we?

If you asked an investor today if they would invest in Elon Musk’s company, they would probably say yes. They might also ask “which one”?

According to the collected wisdom of the easily-distracted investor, Elon Musk is also a bad entrepreneur.

From the boring company, to space trucks, to rocket ships, to electric cars and flame throwers, the dude has got some serious focus issues, right?

And yet, he totally would be worth putting your money to work.

That is because Elon Musk is an ultrapreneur.

What-the-what-what?

If you spend any time looking at investor stats, you will observe that a large number of investors throw money at young folks fresh out of college (whether they completed it or they dropped out of it; it does not matter). The burn rate of a single person who shares an apartment with two other people is remarkably low. It means you can write a lot of checks to a lot of people. A lot of very similar people.

You might see where I am going with this. There are studies out there about the best age to be an entrepreneur from a return-on-investment perspective. There is a bit of a disconnect between the pattern of behavior of investors and the pattern of returns.

If you expected me to say “something-something-cognitive-bias”, you are right. Everyone pattern-matches on the young tech bro who can build a whole product for what it costs me to keep my kids fed and clothed and in college for a year.

Let’s go back to my new word: The ultrapreneur.

What exactly is that?

An ultrapreneur is someone who is making a new business as a part time project.

There is a vast untapped ocean of people who have the vision and dream to build something amazing while blending it into their current work-life balance. Sometimes that work-life balance involves family, and sometimes it might involve additional part-time professional obligations. A good number of friends of mine are building really awesome projects on their own time and dime because they have done the math and concluded that in the amount of time it would take for them to write it all up and convince someone to take an investment journey with them, they could have just built the thing and shown off the investment hypothesis in a live trial. Given how little it costs to build products now, you will see more and more of this happening.

I think that, over time, the investment community has neglected and dismissed the bulk of the ultrapreneur crowd. The exception here is when it is someone who has already demonstrated a few significant exits, such as the aforementioned Elon Musk.

As the current venture model patterns crack and show signs of strain, I am expecting a tectonic shift into alternative funding patterns. Sequoia Capital has figured this out. They are focusing on optimizing their exit strategies. Eventually, venture capital firms are going to start examining the top of their funnel. Less “four twenty year old dudes sharing apartments while they work eighty hour weeks” and more of something else. I want to spend some more time unpacking this in the future with you all.

Unfortunately, I need to get back to work on my hobby project now that I have basically raised a giant middle finger to the entire institutional capital industry… I hope to inspire additional people to become ultrapreneurs when my project becomes successful!

PS: Yes there is more to come. Consider this to be one of them teasers that gets dropped on you by the Netflix.

There are so many different articles out there about hiring and “the great resignation” and emotional intelligence and blah blah blah. It seems everyone has something different to tell you about how to go about getting a great job. I want to apologize because I am going to add to the noise today. I am going to tell you what I think about your hobbies and how they can help or hurt your chances in finding a great job.

I used to list my hobbies on my resume as “fishing, whiskey drinking, and gaming”. I think it is a good idea to include some of your personal hobbies to help convey what kind of person you are and what you like to do. You might find a point of connection with someone through a shared activity. I just followed someone on Twitter who mentioned they are a metalhead in their bio. While I got my haircut along with my real job I still love me some metal. You will note that it also did not make the list. Why did I filter “listens to metal” out of my hobbies and yet included “whiskey drinking”? I would be lying if I claimed I could articulate the reasons fully.

Your hobbies identify who you are and what you like to do. They represent the kinds of things you would like to spend time doing and also spend time talking about. Having a few personal hobbies on your resume might help your resume stand out amidst a stack of identical candidates. It can also be a double-edged sword. In some places you might find there is a scotch club, and putting your enthusiasm for whiskey on your resume might indicate that you will fit in well with the team. On the other hand, there are some negative connotations for some hobbies that might flag you as a candidate that will not fit in well with the team. I think there is some deeper reflection now on what kinds of candidates exist and whether or not they are a diversity hire. I suspect self-identifying as a whiskey drinker could cost me an interview since I might come across as an outdated “tech bro”. Figuring out what is good and what is bad is certainly a challenge.

There is one other kind of hobby activity to consider. The professional hobby. This is yet another double edged sword, for a different reason.

I have two professional hobbies I actively maintain. I am building a small app at the moment, of which we will speak more in the future. I am also working as a mentor and advisor for up-and-coming engineering leaders. I have multiple reasons for doing both of these activities.

I am mentioning this here because I love to find people who have professional hobbies. I find that people who do some kind of professional hobby use these hobbies to learn new things. I embrace lifetime learners wholeheartedly. If you like to hire “best athlete” candidates as opposed to “best fit” candidates, it might be a good idea to look at people’s professional hobbies. Many of the best of the  “best athlete” candidates I have worked with have professional hobbies.

There are also times that it can be a net negative to have a professional hobby. Some companies have very onerous intellectual property practices and have a very strong “put all the wood behind one arrow” approach to work output. If the job you are applying for is like this, then it might be considered a distraction for the job you are applying to and you might lose out to a candidate who does not have a professional hobby.

So what should you do?

You should use this information to help find the job that you want.

If you want to focus all of your work energy into a single company, then listing a professional hobby is probably not a good idea. In fact, it is probably not a good idea to have that professional hobby at all.

If you want to find a place that gives you space to explore your professional hobbies, then listing them will help filter out opportunities that are not a great fit.

So to recap, there are good reasons to include your personal and professional hobbies on your resume. There are also good reasons not to include them.

It is important to understand what you should and should not put on your resume. You should make a conscious choice about each element in your resume and the story that it tells about you.

Thank you again for reading along! Today was a really short writing exercise. I look forward to giving you more of my thinky thoughts next week. I should warn you that we are coming into the end of the year and I also need to spend some time working on my 2021 holiday poem which might fill a week of writing in the near future.

As always, feel free to Socials this article. Any form of digital social reciprocity for the entypening of my thoughts is greatly appreciated!

I apologize for the delay in writing—it has been busy for the past few weeks. Hopefully I will get back to a regular weekly article because I really enjoy writing these and some of the ensuing conversations that happen with readers afterwards.

If you work professionally long enough, you will eventually get involved in some kind of external merger and acquisition activity and/or internal divisional roll up. As companies grow and contract, the ebb and flow of business units will involve some kind of “realignment of resources”. This could be as a result of external market forces or internal company forces—sometimes it is both.

When combining two business units together, the more keen among you will note that there will be some duplication of roles between those two units. The unfortunate truth is that when these things happen, there will be some Highlander-esque “There can be only one” activity that ensues, especially as you go higher and higher in the org chart.

The real challenge is trying to figure out if you are part of the problem or part of the solution. So what are your options When Two Teams Collide?

Resignation Two Ways

The easiest thing to do here is to remove yourself from the situation, either slowly or quickly, in some manner. You might see a formal resignation or an extended leave of absence from some of the team higher ups.

A formal resignation is a very clear signal that you are moving on to new opportunities, but also suggests that there is not a lot of confidence in the incoming management to take on the business unit.

A leave of absence is a subtler way that includes giving new management some grace to absorb the team without additional anxiety, as well as giving yourself some space to be approached for consultation, or perhaps re-integration, in the case of something going terribly wrong.

Schrödinger’s Box

In addition to an explicit, well-communicated resignation or leave of absence, you can also just disappear. People wonder what happened to you and there is mutual agreement by all parties not to talk about this. I have seen this happen. Where did they go? Why did they leave? Will they come back? No one knows, or at least no one says. This also comes with a certain amount of organizational anxiety, and usually suggests some level of disagreement between the two team leadership structures on what is the best plan going forward. Years later you might find someone took some kind of package or just cut communications entirely for various other reasons.

Transitional Leadership

Once the top tier of thunderdome has been finalized, there is generally a tier of captains and lieutenants that are still hanging around. They might be peacefully accepting of new generals and admirals or waiting to get some kind of sign whether they are getting to retain their roles or transition their responsibilities to others. This is a pretty common occurrence. You generally don’t see this at the very top of an organization, but certainly in the middle. You can expect that a graceful transition takes about a year to enact while everyone gets to know each other and sorts out what they want to do.

Over the course of integration you will start to get clearer signals about what the expectations are by new leadership. Do they want to retain you, trade you off to another team, or remove you? Let’s look at these individually.

Retainable Rose

A Retainable Rose will be given opportunities to do interesting projects over the course of a year. They will be called upon by new leadership to handle problems, as well as given reasonably good rewards. One of the clearest signals of being a Retainable Rose will come at EOY, at compensation time. A Retainable Rose will be awarded stock and/or options because they are seen as a worthwhile investment for the organization.

Fungible Fran

Fungible Fran is a different matter. It is not really clear if they want you to stay or if they want you to go. This is one of the worst places to be because there are usually a multitude of Fungible Frans when teams get rolled up, and most of the incoming leadership is insufficiently enlightened or self-aware to handle this situation gracefully. Most of the time they inadvertently pit the Fungible Frans against each other trying to decide which one they want to emerge victorious from thunderdome. I have been put in the Fungible Fran position a few times in my career and have often tried to apply Prisoner Dilemma rules to cooperate with my peers for a best outcome. On more than one occasion this resulted in someone throwing me under the bus. 

I will confess that one time I treated a team of direct reports as Fungible Frans and did not realize it. I am still regretful about that.

If you get to a compensation review during a merger and you are not getting some sort of retention bump, especially in the form of equity or shares, you should take this as a sign that you should consider exploring your BATNA.

You might have the good fortune here of getting a side-grade into a different team at the company. Your management should be supportive of this and take steps to make that easy for you. Be warned that your manager may subtly undermine your ability to do this, in which case you might be less a Fungible Fran and more of a Regrettable Ron. The end of year review is one of the weapons that they might use. If your organization relies on these to make staffing decisions, this could be the tipping point on the scale that sends you to greener pastures at a new opportunity. If your existing manager weaponizes your end of year review, it could come back to haunt you. Your new boss might be looking for excuses to funnel end of year review money into other people regardless of how good you do your job.

Regrettable Ron

Now we come to the last category. The Regrettable Ron. You might be lucky and have a mindful leader who will just give you a package and send you on your merry way. The odds are that you will be unlucky. I get disappointed when I see organizations try to gaslight unwanted employees out of the organization. It is very inexpensive to create a resignation, and it is easy to retcon the HR documentation to suggest that this was not a regrettable departure for the team. You will find this happens more often than not. A team gets absorbed into a new management structure, and some percentage of staff (usually managers) are redundant and undesirable. You probably know within a week of the new leadership arriving if you are observant and a Regrettable Ron. You even might not have done anything wrong to deserve it—just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are a few things you can do when you are a Regrettable Ron. The first is to just focus on your job and accept that you are on a shot clock. Be polite and graceful about it, especially if this happened outside of your control. You are probably going to be set up for failure and asked to do things that you do not agree with. You can always follow those instructions with grace and regret while you attempt to do your very best.

You can also jump ship to a new opportunity. This is a double edged sword. It has cut me a few times in the past. If you run away from an unexpected workplace situation people will raise eyebrows about it and you will be called to the carpet on the subject when trying to get a new job. Why yes, I am speaking from experience here.

You can also blow yourself up. You might do this by design or do it inadvertently. Please try to avoid doing this. If you are in a position of responsibility, you should do your best to give ample time to transition your responsibilities to other people. Two weeks of courtesy notice is nice to give when you are early in your career. I have found that a month or more starts to make sense the more responsibility you have earned. I heartily recommend asking your direct manager how much notice they would like to have. It generally nets out to a month from my most recent experience, and it gives you a chance to exit with grace.

Generally speaking, there is a substantive part of the organization that does not fall into these buckets. The general day-to-day workers often carry on with business as usual. Consider yourself fortunate if you are in this position now and understand that it will not always be true in your career.

Take this opportunity to understand what will happen when you are on two teams that are getting merged, because in the future you will be one side or the other of this transaction. If you are on the receiving end, you can use this parable to give you an understanding of where you sit with your new incoming leadership and figure out how it affects your career.

If you are on the delivering end, maybe you can read the anxiety and disappointment that people have experienced on the receiving end of this business transaction and figure out how to humanize it more effectively—assuming you care about that sort of thing.

Thank you for reading! I hope to see you next week, where I might experiment with Amazon Associate Referral codes again. Apparently I have not yet generated three referrals, and they will eventually deactivate my account because I am a poor marketing shill. I may give you a list of “Top Ten Business Books I Have Never Read” in a panicked attempt to retain my coveted Associate status. Okay fine, I do not covet it that much. I accept my marketing shortcomings.

I think I have mentioned that I still play World of Warcraft a couple of times here. I enjoy being a raid-healer and helping to coordinate team activities.

I also enjoy seeing what they change year-over-year in the game. Every expansion the design team at Blizzard tries to improve on the game’s core systems in interesting ways. They balance these improvements with attempts to fix previous failures. Sometimes you get more improvements, and other times you get more failures.

I think that I am feeling some of the failures for this expansion acutely. In previous expansions they removed the raid tier system. Many of us really liked the tiered armor sets. They attempted to fix this by introducing something called “Domination Sockets”. In my opinion, this is the closest thing I have seen to an actual war crime in game design. I am not going to go into detail about this here.

I am also not going to go into the failures of covenants, especially since they are about to take away the majority of the pain that they inflicted on the player base, the likes of which has not been seen since the Aldor/Scryer system back in The Burning Crusade.

Between that system, the randomness of earning Archivist Rep in Korthia, and the removal of the tiered sets in the first place I do have to wonder if sometime in the past decade “not playing the game” has become an important feature for live teams. It is hard for me to accept that someone could be a well versed player in this game and make the design decisions they are making.

Regardless, most of these things are superficial and will pass by the time another expansion comes around. Release expansion, release patch, offer an apology patch and a pretty mount for six months of subscription monies, repeat. The system works™.

You might get the impression I think the game is limping along. You are very astute. I do think that. I often ask myself “what would I do if I was steering the ship at Blizzard and trying to figure out how to get myself unstuck from this predicament?”

My answer, which is probably a surprise to most of you who know me well, is “something something mobile”.

I was once asked the question “what could you do to make a WoW subscriber from a mobile game player?” I think that Blizzard themselves tried to answer that question by creating Hearthstone. To be honest, I liked the mini-card-game-from-a-fantasy-franchise better when it was called Arcomage.

My own answer for this is that you really cannot make a new WoW customer from a mobile game player. I think the effort there would be akin to trying to make water flow uphill. It is probably not advisable.

There is an interesting twist on this answer. It is hard to create a new WoW subscription customer from a mobile game, but you can probably reacquire a former WoW player through the power of nOsTaLgIa. You only have to look as far as WoW Classic to understand that this is a real thing.

There are enough fancy mounts in the game that you could repurpose into any manner of endless runners, flying games, or tappable tycoon games. The WoW polygonal assemblage of identifiable geometries is massive.

They are already granting mounts inside of WoW for playing hearthstone, and probably granting hearthstone things for playing WoW. They might be running one of these promotions right now.

I do think they are barely scratching the surface of what they ought to be doing. You know. Because metaverse.

There is an unfounded fear that if you go deeper than a mount here, or a card there, you are going to hear the players scream that you are making them buy mobile devices in order to be successful at the game. Anyone who thinks that you are not going to make a WoW player purchase hardware has never tried to zone into a dungeon or raid on a 7200 RPM hard drive.

We are now at the point where omni-channel and cross-platform are common-enough words for game content that it is useless to resist. You will be assimilated.

I am going to put on my armchair-product-owner hat for a moment and tell you How I Would Run Things™.

Resource-ification

Farming for resources in WoW is a painful experience. I pick flowers between raids to fuel my alchemy habit. There are multitudes of auto-following multi-druids that stand between myself and my weekly alchemical raid needs.

There are probably easy ways to calculate a reasonable velocity for gathering resources. It should be easy to grant these as rewards as resources per minute in other products. Should it matter if you are spending an hour on your tablet playing Hearthstone, or an hour chasing druids on autopilot? This feels like the easiest win to me.

World of Ultra-casual-craft

Building on the previous point, you can already play “match three” and “flappy bird” in World of Warcraft. You already have all the publishing and authentication pieces for Hearthstone and the Battle Net App.

Why not release a slate of mini-games for your daily quests as bundled or standalone games?

There are nearly a dozen different games inside of Wow that are easy to put into a mobile experience and generate the same rewards. There are also at least one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand thirsty mobile-game developers out there who would do this as a work-for-hire project in order to stave off the financial demise of their indie company. In fact, a good one third to one half of them would probably be interested in joining the team full time upon successful completion. The cost of doing the project would probably be in the same ballpark as  the cost of recruiting that many engineers anyway. Given how many “This is my last day at Blizzard” posts I see regularly on LinkedIn, I am reasonably certain there is plenty of work for fresh new developers to do.

Create Virtuous Cycles

The last thing that is worth looking at is to create virtuous cycles between games. I will confess that this is one of those things that I really feel strongly about.

Going back to the aforementioned broken parts of the current raid expansion, there are a variety of hard-to-acquire currencies that players need in order to be successful.

I am going to use Soul Cinders as an example here. Soul Cinders are largely acquired from Torghast. You can also get reasonably good Soul Cinders from doing two “Weekly Assaults”, and meager drips of them from your Covenant adventure table.

So why is this interesting?

I think that it would be interesting if you had the ability to craft “limited use” hearthstone cards inside of WoW. Not only would it be a good way to add intermittent patterns for players to collect, and an interesting sink for resources, you should go full circle and grant the player WoW Soul Cinders when you use these cards inside of Hearthstone.

This is what I mean by a virtuous cycle. There would be extra points awarded if you increased the complexity to generate recipes in “game 1” to create items in “game 2” and earn resources in “game 3”.

I will confess I thought we would be much closer to this with the launch of Hearthstone, and the subsequent acquisition of King and their mobile game development expertise. I do respect that integrating these things is hard.

I also think that it is high time to see this done. I mean, you know, we all have phones.

I am going to stop myself now before talking about what could happen if you added features that were Social, or Community. I can see a world where people ask their friends and family to play casual mobile resource generating games. I can further see a world where you could even give them some incentive to check out the online game for a length of time comparable to the size of resources they generated as a gift to the WoW player who has been on the receiving end of their largesse.

I would go so far as to say one more thing about this world. It is probably the only world in which you could get water to flow uphill.

Thank you for reading along. This post has been intentionally devoid of referral links and “punch the monkey” flash banners. You might see me return soon to the world of totally-may-shock-you click-bait referral shopping links. With as many kids as I have, I could use your Amazon referral dollars to offset the December beating that my American Express card gets. 

Stay tuned for John-Szeder’s-Top-Five-List-Of-Books-He-Has-Not-Yet-Read.

I am sorry this article is late.

I am now the proud owner of an assembled Uplift V2 standing desk. The reason this article is late is that prior to yesterday I was the proud owner of an unassembled Uplift V2 standing desk. You might sense the fragrance of a fine California whine here, and you would not be terribly wrong.

The Uplift V2 standing desk is hundreds of dollars of product that promotes workplace comfort and healthiness. One would think that they would take the “C-Frame and T-Frame Models” combined instruction booklet and better annotate the instructions that only apply to one of these models, so the person assembling the other one does not get freaked out and lost trying to find and assemble parts that do not exist. Or better yet, for as many hundreds of dollars just put one of two completely separate books into the product. I would not expect to find a “Pickup Truck and Sports Coupe” owners manual in a vehicle purchased from the Ford Motor Company. And yet, these products are scarcely an order of magnitude apart in price.

Setting aside my mental disassembling over assembling this desk, it is a great product so far. Five stars. Better than Cats™. Would purchase again but hopefully do not have to.

Since I was somewhat preoccupied with getting this desk assembled I thought I would take a moment and ramble about work idiosyncrasies. I have recently come into possession of a full-sized room inside my house as my oldest son has moved out to pursue college education. I have transported all of my various computers, work surfaces, and electronicals into this room and made it my own.

I have three different stations set up in this room, each with their own purpose. I have a primary workstation, a hobby-project work station, and “snobby pc gamer” setup. If you do some kind of hobbyist development, I have found that having a separate physical space has helped me focus on the successful outcomes of those projects. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is trying to do some extracurricular projects. I also have tried to persuade my remote-learning children to adopt the same habit.

Earlier in my career I used to commute every second week between northern and southern California. I was also raiding in an MMO quite profusely at this time. I started ordering keyboards and mice of the same kind by the threes and fives—having identical computer peripherals in multiple locations helped me stay consistent in my pursuit of raid-boss enmurderment. To this day I still attempt to keep the same peripherals for all of my devices. I cannot say enough how great it is to use computing machinery with a consistent man-machine interface.

Since I was preoccupied with building my desk this week during my regularly scheduled writing time, I thought I would take a moment to share some of the peripherals I used consistently—they have evolved modestly over the years. Yes, I have extra sets of all of these if I ever wind up in a situation where I would need to return full time to an office.

Ancient Dell Keyboards. I know many people are hot and bothered by clicky mechanical keyboards. I really got used to the phat spacebar on these bad boys. I do buy these in groups of ten and I am down to my last few spaces over the course of a decade.

Razer Deathadder Mouse. I grew up on a steady diet of Microsoft Mouses. Mice? I don’t know. When the last of them started to fade, and the replacement OEMed Microsoft Mouses started to break more frequently, I decided it was time to upgrade. Fortunately the Deathadder is reasonably close to the form factor I know and love.

IMAK Ergo… uh… thingy. I keep these under my wrists because: Old Person. I also pick them up and toss them around like a bean bag in meetings. I don’t care if people hate it—they probably read comic books and listen to rock-and-roll, so we have plenty to argue about.

Steelseries mouse mat. This is a big mouse mat that covers a lot of my desk. Whether I am stretching bigly browser windows or trying to move my mouse frantically in an attempt to keep a raid alive as a healer, these are my favorite mouse mats.

Belkin gel wrist rest. The final piece of my consistent assemblage of peripherals and ergonomics is this goofy squooshy bar of gel. They make them, someone has to buy them.

I could go on about ASUS WQHD monitors here but I will not. I am likely to start phasing these out in Operation Experiment With Curved Monitors coming soon™. Similarly, I have a few nice Sennheiser headsets that are just really nice headsets minus a gamer mic.

I could also go on about Secret Lab chairs. I am on my second Secret Lab chair. The first one is presently a family heirloom passed down through at least one generation of lineage from father to son.

Okay. There you have it. I have given you digital words this week. 

If you are doing multiple things with computers, I find it helps to have some separation of space between them. I also find that it is good to have decent ergonomic support items, and a consistent interface for all of your computers. It has been a decade since I have found myself using a different brand of keyboard or mouse between home and work and making these things consistent has brought me some measure of value, even if it is just perceived value.

Looking forward to writing to you again next week, probably on an actually interesting topic.

Author’s note: Blah blah blah Transparency. Something something Authenticity. There are referral codes in the links above. If you are offended that I would like see if I can earn some beer and pizza money off of your staring and clicking I apologize. I am not trying to get-rich-quick. I am experimenting with it for my own education and amusement and will share anything I learn.

Today I am going to be the wrapper on one of those drying agents put inside packs of beef jerky. Please stop reading this article if you dislike being told “do not eat”.

A lot of people got tingly body parts on seeing Netflix’s acquisition of the company that made Oxenfree. I would love to see the week-over-week sales for Oxenfree. I bet it went up noticeably based on game developers running out and buying this game based on the press release. “We made one game and got boughted out by the Netflix” says the press release.

I could actually feel a momentary surge of tears upon reading this press release. I was able to prevent them from pouring down my face like hot rivulets of seawater at low tide. The pangs of grief hit me upon the realization that the percentage of people who make bad studio management decisions is about to go way the fuck up.

I say this from a good place. I mean well. The problem is that the story is more complicated than it appears on the surface, and most people are looking at it on the surface and making decisions to figure out what got Netflix to buy the creators of Oxenfree. Every tired work-for-hire IP creator who dreams of shipping their own game equates themselves, true or false, to this team. They probably feel that they could be next in line if they put on the same fancy attire and sing similar songs to get on the same stage and have the same fantastic outcome.

I say this because I was probably one of those kids once.

So let’s dig a little deeper and drop a stinky poop all over those excited dreams for a few minutes.

Let us start by taking a look at the release date of the game. Netflix made this announcement in Q3 of 2021. Oxenfree was released in Q1 of 2016. That is a long time to be paying people’s salaries on one royalty stream. If you do a little digging on the Googles, you will find a wacky wiki page that talks about work-for-hire deals and partnerships with other companies to pay the bills—one of which almost tanked the company. I am lazier than you in not providing links: dO tHe ReSeArCh!

Assuming you feel like you can keep your company afloat for five years, let’s look at what else makes this company special.

If you read about the creation of Oxenfree, it is a Very Different Game™. Disclaimer: I own a copy via Epic Game Store, but I have not played it so I cannot confirm or deny these claims. It looks like they had some sort of partnership with another company to do some kind of transmedia bullshit. I confess I do not understand it. You probably do not either. We will come back to this.

This game has some unique selling-points on narrative and storytelling. It also has paid voice actors, and a soundtrack from an audio person that has more links to fancy audio references than I have the time to click on. So while the art style matches a lot of random low budget indie games (like yours!!!), they clearly snuck in some high budget items that you might not be able to afford. This added to the game ambience I assume. So while it does not look like a fancy, high-production game, remember that half of the other games out there have their brothers and sisters doing the voice acting for the heroes, and Dad reading out the lines of the villain (too Freudian?). These details matter.

So we have some random media hype that came out of somewhere. We have some fancy sound effects and voice overs. Someone somewhere spent some money on this game. That also means they probably have a good PR person to help orchestrate this and put it together. They have a game that talks about different elements of storytelling but pretty much followed the industry script for talking about that story. I am smirking smugly over here at my own cleverness, and I hope you can look past it because most of us cannot make it past the second article on how to effectively do PR without getting tired and wanting to go sleepy times.

I promise to only make you sadder for a few more paragraphs. I am going to say something positive and nice to try to scrape your feelings off of the floor by the end. Stay with me. You will be okay.

So we have some money for PR. We have some money for paid voice actors. We have some company doing media stuff to bolster the project and we have a Unique Selling Point that earned some industry awards.

Some of you are probably doing work-for-hire and can solve the money problem with your split-focus studio. I have lived this life. Binge on licensed game projects for other companies. Purge on building your own IP. This is the cycle of indie life.

The Unique Selling Point comment appears more than once in this article. It is almost as if it is important. It really is. While many of you have “get my studio acquired” as step three in your plan to jillionairehood, step two should not be “make an Oxenfree clone”. Please cross that off of your 2022 list right now. This game has a Unique Selling Point. If you want to really stand out, please do not attempt to Xerox this product and wonder why the streaming companies trying to slide into the games publishing business are not frantically offering you briefcases of money.

There is one last nugget I am going to drop here. Some of the founders came out of careers at TellTale games. Some of the founders came out of Disney. This is a veteran team with track records that check a bunch of the M&A boxes much like you need to enter your PIN to get 20 dollars from the ATM.

So if you are doing some kind of analysis of this deal, and think you deserve a similar payout, ask yourself some questions:

• Do I have good PR?
• Do I have revenue streams to cover my original game development and five years of not getting acquired?
• Do I have a Unique Selling Point for my game?
• Do I have a track record that gets me into a slide deck by a fancy M&A person?
• Bonus points: Do I have relationships/games/random-whatever to do whatever the hell Skybound Interactive did to augment all the other things above?

This is where I apologize for the hot mess I just made of your dreams.

Now I am going to try to fix it because otherwise I will feel like a shitheel for the next week.

You should pick one or two of these things to work on. Be prepared for it to take years. The more time you can invest up front in solving those problems, the shorter your path to “step three: sell the company” will be, and it will already be a five-year journey if everything is in your favor.

So what is the important thing to fix?

For me, I will argue that pedigree is pretty important. The best way to be a successful indie is to spend three to five years in the salt mines on someone else’s IP. The bigger the better. If you can show the world that you have a track record of dealing with eight- and nine-figure projects, things will go better for you. When I say “the world” here, I do not mean Cathy Customer. I mean Patty PR, Veronica Venture Capitalist and Denise the Designer.

It is worth it to invest five years in career building to help bolster the width and depth of your portfolio opportunities as an indie. We sensationalize the folks like the Popcap founders and Notch, but those are extreme outliers. If you think you are that person, then best wishes to you. I will remind you again that I said “do not eat” at the start of this article. You do you.

The next thing to look at is the Unique Selling Point. When I was looking at career plans in 2016, I was playing a lot of Summoners War. I  did some napkin math and looked at their release notes dating back to launch and calculated how much it would be to build a mobile viable MVP to compete in that space. I am not going to depress you with the number. It was large. It would probably be hard to raise given that it is an also-ran opportunity. Some people like to write those checks—they are not in my twitter DMs.

And that is front and center the reason that we are here. Their unique take on dialog and story probably factored heavily in the acquisition. Netflix squeezed out Bandersnatch, and visual interactive stories that resemble 1980s young adult “choose your adventure” products with such similarity in simplicity that it actually merited a lawsuit. I cannot make this stuff up— if I told you to turn to page eighteen.

Netflix wants to have its own flavor of Unique Selling Point for content. As well they should. Their CEO correctly identified Fortnite, and all things like Fortnite, as competitors for his billion- dollar jet-setting lifestyle.

So he is coming to do 1v1 with all the publishers out there.

Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? It is hard to say. It is a nice paycheck if you can get it. 

Movies and books spawn their own games. Games spawn their own movies and books. Something something metaverse.

If you think about the problem intelligently, it is a pretty good time to be alive as a game developer. In order to think about the problem intelligently I recommend diving deep into each of these acquisitions and understanding what problems are being solved by them, and what that means they will need next.

If you make a second Oxenfree, Netflix already has one of those and it is very nice.

Try to figure out what someone will write a check for in five years, and be prepared to be a little hungry for some of that time.

If you are trying to figure out what you can sell tomorrow, understand that you are already five years too late.

And that is my story. I hope that last part helps give you some ideas. If you have a friend in the industry who spent the weekend playing Oxenfree, you might want to send them this article. Try to play dumb so they do not hate you forever. Rather, ask them “hey is this guy making any sense?” If you can downplay it successfully, then they can be mad at me for being the person who told them “do not eat”. If they take offense that you are telling them they are doing the wrong thing, then offer them an apology because you were just trying to help.

Will they accept that you are helping them with their Netflix acquisition dreams? I don’t know.

I have certainly seen Stranger Things.