Video Games: Optimized Learning Environments — David Edery

David Edery is a buddy of mine who I think you guys are really going to love. Dave is one of the co-founders he’s the CEO of Spry Fox, which is a unique game development studio here. They’re  based here in Seattle, but they have people spread out. They made Alphabear, Steambirds, Triple Town, and Realm of the Mad God.

These are games that all together have 50 to a hundred million people playing them worldwide. Dave is a very successful game developer making really delightful games. They’re trying to make the world a happier place. You should definitely play their games on your phone. Dave used to work at Microsoft and and he wrote a book about transforming business with what can be learned from video games. The book is called Changing the Game. I think even now a lot of those lessons can be super relevant.

I think of games as like the future of almost every industry. Video games are an industry where there’s a lot of competitive dynamics. Unlike almost everything else, no one’s paying you to play a game. If you get bored, you’ll quit. And nobody wants to read a manual to play a game or take a class to play a game.

So the games have to teach you how to interact with them. And there’s so many things that can be done with video games. I’ve seen so many other industries learn from games. We also talk about the capacity of games to be used for education and learning.

I’m really interested in that topic and have thought a lot about it over the years. Dave is a guy that you would want to talk to about that. He also has a really unique culture in his company that he’s tried to create. As well as a really unique view of developing culture in online communities. He has a lot of experience with this.

I think anybody in the game industry knows Dave by now because he’s also involved in creating a community out of game developers. There’s a lot to learn here and I’m hoping that you guys really enjoy this episode.

Pablos: I have a zillion questions for you. This is going to be fun for me. At this point, you had a super interesting and maybe not extremely long but long career in building video game companies. Video games are the glue or something that connects a whole bunch of people to computers, computation, coding and all this stuff. People don’t realize how responsible they are for scaling the interest in personal computers. That’s important because it attracted a lot of people, money, investment and even things we take for granted, especially like the obvious ones like GPU’s are almost entirely made possible by the demand from the video game industry.

To some extent, ramping up the scale, reducing costs on hardware, all the things that exist in the CAD industry, for example, for making 3D models and designing stuff on computers, that industry can pay $10,000 or $20,000 for a workstation that’s top of the line and super-fast to render models. They don’t have economies of scale. They’re never going to get the custom hardware they would want. They’re never going to get the price down to the point where a lot of people could use it, but video games did that for everybody. The industry itself is the first entertainment-related industry that got computers connected up to real people.

David: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when you look at systems that are being put in place to teach kids how to program, a lot of them have a big focus on, “You can make a game this way.”

Even when I was a kid, we didn’t quite have video games or the ability to make them, but we had things like logos, which was like, “You can make this thing move on screen like a video game.” It’s trying to make it accessible. Now that is how kids learn. The starter drug for coding is Minecraft mods or making a game from scratch. It’s an important part of the history of personal computers. You probably know better than me, but my understanding is that the scale of the video game industry is bigger than movies, TV, music and books combined.

They include hardware sales in that. I’m pretty sure that includes the sales of the console themselves and stuff, but still it’s a lot.

You wouldn’t count the cost of your television and the cost of the TV industry.

We’re not including that either. We’re all sharing the TV. They’re including the stats for the Xbox and the PS4. Even if you take that stuff out at this point, I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re beating movie revenue even with the hardware taken out.

That seems pretty easy to substantiate. It’s a massive industry and super influential, and has gotten past high school nerds.

Something like 99% of kids under the age of eighteen play games.

A lot of middle American housewives.

They don’t count themselves as gamers, but then you ask them, “Have you ever played Candy Crush?” They’d be like, “I play it all the time.” There you go.

Apparently, that’s a significant market too, casual games, all the PopCap stuff.

Unfortunately, PopCap is not a big player anymore, but there are various Saga S games. It’s a huge market.

Maybe another way of thinking about is like who’s least likely to be interested in any video games?

The least likely will be someone like the elderly. The older you are, the less likely you are, to some extent. There are plenty of older people who are playing solitaire or whatever, it’s how they pass the time. Even for them, it’s an unfair generalization. First of all, people who didn’t grow up with games tend to be less interested. It’s not a thing. They’re like, “This game thing, what’s that?” That’s a stereotype, but that applies to a bunch of people.

Additionally, even if you did grow up with games, and this is funny, it’s even happening to me. I loved the damn things. As people get busy with work, children and stuff like that, they start to be like, “I don’t have time for this.” They’ll push most games aside. What’s interesting is they don’t push them all aside. They’ll still have that one game on their phone that they pull out of their pocket when they’re stuck in a line.

It’s different contexts. The point I was trying to get my head around the industry because there’s a lot of other industries related to computers that are not nearly as fun, accessible, compelling or something to people in general, but video games are the biggest that go everywhere. It’d be interesting to know how you found your way into this industry.

I grew up playing games. I loved them.

Your parents didn’t suggest, “You should be a doctor, a lawyer or a video game developer.”

I got into medical school and then decided not to go and break my dad’s heart.

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People who didn't grow up with games tend to be less interested.
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You have parents that want you to be a doctor. Why is that? My parents aren’t doctors and they didn’t specifically try to get me to be a doctor. I have no interest in it whatsoever. The doctors I know are some of the most abused people on earth. I don’t know why anybody would want that job, but people who have it seemed all want their kids to be doctors. What’s going on there?

I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience. For mine, it was very simple. My dad has this very strong belief that is based in part from growing up without very much. He used to say it all the time. He’d say, “They can’t take away your degree.” Doctors will always make money. They will always be in demand. He would hammer that into me over and over again.

You grew up at a time where employment options were slammed and you had to dedicate yourself to being employable.

Bear in mind, he didn’t grow up in the United States. He grew up in Colombia, South America so even more so.

It’s a higher reliability career.

Shortly after graduating from medical school, there was a requirement at the time that you would have to travel around the country doing national service. He has stories of like, “I was riding a donkey to this isolated town or whatever.” He would tell me. He’d be like, “Everyone is happy to see the doctor.” You’d have instant respect anywhere you go. For him, it’s like a thing. It’s like guaranteed respect, guaranteed money. Why wouldn’t you do it? It’s the right career path. It makes sense for someone who grew up without the resources he was hoping for. The thing that all good immigrants do like, “I grew up with nothing and now look at everything I’m going to give you. You’re going to give your kids even more, but you’ll have to be a surgeon to do that” or whatever.

I’m not trying to get my kid anything. She takes more than she deserves. You ended up getting into medical school. Why?

I’d only ever been doing it because I hadn’t ever thought it through. This medical school program was very interesting. I got in early without having to do all the requirements at Mount Sinai. One of the requirements that you do instead of taking whatever course I was able to skip is, “You have to spend eight weeks with us over the summer and shadow people in the hospital.” It sounds awesome. I went and did that.

The first time I saw a substantial amount of blood, I fainted. They were like, “Don’t worry. That happens a lot. It’s normal.” A few days later, I saw a substantial more amount of blood, I fainted again. They’re like, “It’s not that normal for fainting twice.” I wasn’t particularly enjoying any of this either, it wasn’t just the fainting. I thought, “That’s okay.” I was always interested in psychiatry. I thought, “That’s going to be the thing that will save me. There’s no blood in psychiatry. It’s a doctor who still needs an MD. I’m not going to be seeing a lot of blood as a psychiatrist. It’s going to be fine.”

I spent a week in the psych ward and it was the most depressing week of my entire life. It was horrible. I had a lot of pity for them. That was part of the problem. I had this tremendous empathy for the people who I was seeing there. All the people who were treating them were horrifically jaded. I understand now, as a mature adult, you have to be on some level because the people you’re treating many of them will almost certainly never get substantially better in that context.

At the time, I didn’t know that. All I knew is that this one thing that was the saving grace for me for medical school seemed horrible. I was like, “This is not for me.” I always wanted to be an entrepreneur on some level. The dot-com boom was happening then. All my friends were talking about the startups they were going to make. It seems so exciting. I love computers. The heck with this medical school stuff. I’m going to go teach myself programming and do that. That’s what I did.

This is a total aside. One of the things you said about the jaded people working in a psych ward, the patients, lots of them will not likely to get substantially better, empathy not being a functional cure for whatever else then. I wonder if that’s true in other contexts too. Maybe they’re not in a psych ward, but people in general, in daily life, a lot of the time feels like they’re not going to substantially improve. You have to temper how much effort you put into them. Do you ever feel that way as a professional nice guy?

It’s hard. My personality is such that I’m willing to bang my head against a problem for longer than I probably should. I’m generally not willing to give up, but if you’re running a company for long enough, sometimes you learn that you have to. Whether it’s on a project or an employee who’s not working out or whatever. Sometimes it’s like, “I’ve spent two years trying to make this work. It’s not working, I got to cut and run.” I do think about it a lot. This is one of the reasons why I like games. When you think about what a game has the capacity to do. A game has the capacity to chip away at someone for thousands of hours if they’re willing to give it that much time. This is perfect.

It is trying to teach you and it’s ultimately patient.

Think about what you can accomplish. That one of the reasons I got excited about games in the first place was the realization that imagine there’s a person who’s bad at X but they like your game. That’s cool. They might be willing to spend 1,000 hours getting better at X, whatever X is.

That’s one of the things I think about a lot. We often are fixated on a lot of things with robots right now. Robots are amazing because you teach one robot something and they all learn for free. With humans, you got to start over from scratch with every single one of them. You teach them something, you’ve accomplished nothing that scales. You have to start from scratch and teach the next one. It is work every time.

The problem with education is nothing about it scale. The video games to me are these extraordinary optimized learning environments. A video game has got to assess where you’re at, put a challenge right in front of you. If it’s too hard, you get bored and quit. If it’s too easy, I get bored and quit. Nobody’s paying me to play video games. Nobody’s paying my kid to play video games, but yet they do it all the time and people do it all the time. That’s what a good teacher would do. If you could afford to have a one-to-one student-teacher ratio, your teacher would understand your level where you’re at, what your interests are, and know how to put a challenge right in front of you. It’s not too easy, not too hard.

The games are doing that. People disparage video games all the time, but they don’t realize that these are optimized learning environments. They’re outperforming schools, all of them. My kid would go to school for six hours, come home bored having learned nothing. She plays video games on her iPad for 45 minutes and learn a ton. It’s mostly stuff we don’t care about for learning, but it’s a learning environment that is compelling.

It’s funny when you were talking about how teachers aren’t scalable. Another thing that’s typically considered highly not scalable is therapy. Therapy is a one-on-one like you and a $200 an hour therapist or whatever it costs, going back and forth for years until you are a slightly happier and better person. Talk about something that’s super not scalable. I was watching a webinar. I have a guy I know in Boston. He’s created a company called Mightier. They’re creating games that will help children with emotional self-regulation. I was particularly interested because my daughter has mild anxiety issues, nothing like crazy, but enough so that we take her to therapy because we want to help her with this.

When I found out that this guy I know had created a suite of games that are designed to help kids with anxiety, I was like, “I have to check this out.” We haven’t gotten it. I’ve only watched the webinar. I should be receiving my package soon, but they had one thing that was clearly a knockoff of Fruit Ninja. The way it was working is there was fruit falling down from the sky and the kid had to cut it. As they’re playing, the kid is wearing a watch or something that’s measuring their heart rate.

If their heart rate goes up because they’re getting excited about the game and the game is getting more intense, the game purposely starts to obscure the screen so that it’s even harder than it already would have been to play. This is a feedback thing and your heart is getting up even faster. The obscuring of the screen is linked to your heart rate. At some point, you can’t even see the screen. You have to tap the thing and say, “Stop.” It prompts you to use deep breathing exercises to lower your heart rate. Once you do, the screen obscurity stops and you can go back to playing it. I thought that was such a cool idea.

I’m excited to try it with Arian, which we haven’t had a chance to try it yet. It’s a perfect example. I don’t know if this will work. It’s based on research that came out of Harvard. It’s got sound research backing, but assuming that it works, imagine with a piece of relatively inexpensive hardware and a set of digital games that can be distributed for free to any iPad, all of a sudden you have a way to help millions upon millions of kids with emotional self-regulation. What’s that worth? It’s pretty cool.

I’m thrilled about that. It is interesting to see the way because we all have mobile smartphones and these kinds of things, and apps are relatively inexpensive to make and distribute. Lots of things like that that people are doing to try and better themselves. There’s work to do to take the best in class, understanding of game mechanics, gamification, and then cross-pollinate that with the problems like anxiety or things that you’re trying to solve for. A lot of times you end up with a mediocre game and a mediocre solution to your problem, which I think of is educational games in the ‘80s.

There were awesome games and then you had mediocre games that would teach you stuff. The second kids figure out you’re trying to teach them something, they’re out of there. For an adult or someone who knows like, “I’m trying to reduce my anxiety. I’m going to do this thing and sign up for Headspace or whatever.” That will work, bur with kids, I always thought what we ought to be doing is burying the things we want kids to learn into awesome video games.

A friend of mine years ago had made the first Medal of Honor or Call of Duty, which I don’t remember which one came first. He would go visit battlefields. He would interview veterans of these wars. The whole game was historically accurate, all the guns, all the characters, all the locations. People thought they were just running around shooting stuff, but they were actually learning war history. We have this entire generation of people who grew up playing those games. They don’t even know that they know a lot about these wars. You could debate the merits of learning war history. Those games were no compromise.

Civilization is the one that people most often bring up. You’ve played that.

No, I’m a big fan but I don’t play any games.

You’re going to have to play Civilization because it’s one of the greatest strategy games of all time. It’s a storied franchise. It existed since I was a kid. People oftentimes will bring that one up in the context of a discussion about exactly what you were describing. These games that are awesome and happen to teach you something. Civilization was all about advancing your civilization from pre-wheel technology all the way to traveling to space. Unlike SimCity, this is a competition. There are other civilizations and you’re either going to have diplomacy and succeed that way, or war and succeed that way. You can have to try it one way or the other, or you can succeed by being the first people to reach the stars since one of the conditions in the game.

There are multiple different ways. One of the ways is researching new technology, whether it’s the wheel, tanks or whatever. Civilization does this wonderful thing where first of all, it’s highly fictionalized. Yes, the wheel came before this thing, which came before this or whatever. It’s presenting to the scientific developments in an accurate order. Second of all, it has all this information about those developments, but it doesn’t force you to read them.

When you develop the wheel, it’s like, “Here’s all this information about the wheel and why it was such an amazing thing. You can read it if you want to. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s there. Tons of kids goes into reading that stuff and end up developing an interest in history as a result. It’s in science and a bunch of other things. This comes up over and over again. It’s considered one of the primary case studies for how you could do an educational game correctly.

To me, it seems there’s another aspect of it. Aside from the educational aspect of it, in the lab where I was working, we did a bunch of computational modeling and the primary thing we were doing or one of the biggest projects was trying to model the spread of disease. You have the same thing as SimCity or I don’t know about Civilization, it’s probably the same thing. You have a model of a city and you can try different things. You could figure out which things make the city work better and which things cause it to spiral down into endless doom. We’re doing the same thing, but for the real world and trying to figure out which things can we do to end the spread of a disease. Fundamentally, they are not much different from each other.

What’s happened over the course of our lives, our computers got faster and more powerful with more memory and more capable, and now we can run ever more complicated models. The point being is you have a model where you get to run experiments in a way that’s safe because if they fail, nobody dies. In the real world, we’re always running one big experiment where people die because we got it wrong. One of the amazing things is we’re at this point now where we’re not nearly so computationally constrained. For our whole lives, the models were always super limited because of how expensive computation was and the availability of it.

Now we’ve got more computation than we know what to do with it. It’s allowing us to make these ever more complex models of the real world and run all those experiments in them. You could easily imagine, for example, the future of a real city would be a computational model. It’s like SimCity. We’re in Seattle. You should have a SimCity of the actual Seattle. You should be able to run a bunch of experiments. They were like, “What would improve traffic? What would improve reducing homeless populations? What would improve shortening the line of Starbucks? What would improve parking?” All those kinds of things could be tested in a computational model before you make a choice about what to do in the real world. That’s not happening right now because you can see the kinds of problems that we have or a lot of them would be easy to fix that way.

It’s inevitable and in some sense, imminent that we’ll get those tools. All of it goes back to video games. We’ve been doing all that in video games forever. Video games are impressions about the future of almost every industry. They’ve been at the forefront of adopting these technologies, putting them to use. You look at the progression of 3D rendering, trying to make photo-realistic imagery. The whole world got to watch this play out through Pixar movies. Toy Story was specifically a story designed to keep from ever having to show a person because rendering skin and the luminosity of skin was so hard. Rendering hair was hard.

As the years progressed, they started doing things like Monsters Inc., where they’re showing off how good they could do at rendering hair. It’s like, “Our main character is Fuzzy,” because pics are showing off like, “See, we do hair now.” It was a hair movie. There’s the Asian hair movie based on a video game. I’m not sure which one that was, Shrek and those things. We’ve long since solved hair. We’ve long since solved this luminosity of the skin. We can do all of those things. It’s the exact same thing we’ve been doing in video games. It just had to advance to the point where we could do it all.

There are a lot of things that games do that have been doing for a lot longer than anyone else realized like, for example, there’s all this conversation nowadays about toxicity and online communities, and how do you solve for that? Games have had to be worried about this and solving for it for decades. They’re way ahead of the curve, which nobody knows or at least decision-makers don’t know. That’s changing as decision-makers become more people from our generation.

People ask me about those things. I think of it as a maturation process. I got an email in 1982. I’ve been chatting online since the ‘80s. At first, it takes over your life, but you build an immunity. You learn to figure out like any other addiction, how much of it is making my life better, and how much it was making my life worse?” You learn to balance that. Some people fail to learn to balance and that’s where you end up with real problems. Most people do learn to balance. I got in Instagram. I lost two weeks of my life to that. I got it under control. Now it’s not an addiction or something that eats up my life anymore. Some people overdo it. Some people don’t engage because they know they’re addictive, things like that.

There’s this real societal mechanism that kicks in where everybody wants to blame somebody else. We want to blame Instagram for taking over our lives. You don’t have to use Instagram. You want to blame Facebook for electing the wrong people. You don’t have to use Facebook or at least not so much. The more you’ve been through those cycles of getting a new whizzbang thing that takes over developing the immunity, the more you have confidence, that’s normal and can be done. A lot of video games are a cesspool for bad behavior. There do seem to be interesting cases where the community in the game develops their own set of values and their own enforcement mechanisms. They’re little societies.

In some cases, they’re gigantic societies, millions and millions of people participating in them. It’s like anything else. It turns out that culture is a powerful and sticky thing. People tend to underestimate how hard it is to change a culture once it has calcified into a given form. Good game developers understand that if they want their game community to have a good culture, a culture that will be welcoming to new entrance and generally non-toxic that you have to be vigilant from the very beginning. For example, we have an MMO that we’re working on. Because it’s still in development, it hasn’t been released publicly yet. It’s got a relatively small community of about 1,500 people in Discord, which is one of the big gaming online communities nowadays.

We’ve been super clear with them from the very beginning that we have zero tolerance for any particularly toxic behaviors, anything like racist or sexist speech, but even being rude to someone we don’t tolerate. We’ll just warn you, “You’re being rude, keep it up and you’re going to get banned.” The fact that we’re doing that from the very beginning means that we don’t have the problem that many other game communities have, where nobody bothered to try to enforce that until the community had been behaving that way for months, if not years. At that point, they were like, “Screw you. This is who we are. This is how we function. This is how we talk to each other. Who are you to tell us that we can’t?”

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Some people fail to learn to balance, and that's where you end up with real problems.
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We get in from the very beginning and we tell them that. Not just that, where it gets more interesting particularly in the game space is we try to build games that will also function that way. In other words, in our MMO, we have tried to remove all the mechanics that encourage toxic behavior. We’ve been very thoughtful about this. I’ll give you a few examples. In other games, you might have this concept of kill stealing, which is a thing where like, we’re both fighting the same monster. I get the final shot that kills it. I get all the experience points and you get none, even though you did 80% of the work killing it. You did a kill steal. That sucks. That’s ridiculous. That’s a terrible mechanic. All that does is cause two people who should have been happy that they were helping each other, now they hate each other. It’s terrible. In our game, it doesn’t matter. If you do 99% of the damage and I do 1% of the damage, we both get exactly the same amount of experience and it’s the maximum amount possible.

I’m never angry that you were there. Even if you did nothing, you didn’t hurt me. It would have been nice if you had helped, but you didn’t hurt me. There’s no kill stealing. There’s no like, “I did 99% of the work and then you screwed me at the very end.” That seems like an obvious thing when you talk about it. Every game should be that way. In a lot of games, kill stealing is a real thing. We don’t let it be a thing in our game and I could go on and on, but I don’t want to bore you.

I’m interested in this. I don’t know about these problems. I haven’t thought this through the way you have. Is that like a participation award? I show up while you do all the work and kill the thing. I’m like, “I got all the points too,” because I’m not contributing.

The answer is yes and no. Yes, it could be but it turns out, no one joins a game to sit there and do nothing.

They seemed to do it in real life. That’s why I’m asking.

That’s the thing. In the games, they don’t. The games are there to have fun and participate. You don’t have to worry about someone sitting around and doing nothing, unless they’re there doing it on purpose because they’re assholes. You do get that. You get trolls in games just like you get them everywhere else. The question is, can you rob them of their tools to be trolls? The answer is, yes, you totally can. You can do all kinds of things like you can make it. The shared XP is probably one of the best examples. This is less common to be fair, but you’ll see it in other games. You’ll see someone have a power that’s useful to them.

In theory, it’s supposed to be highly useful to the people around them as well. It should be a cooperative power. It’s a heal. As long as I do it near enough to somebody, I’ll get healed but they’ll also get healed. Isn’t that nice? In many games, it’ll be pretty easy. You have to have some skill to execute the heal correctly. If you’re not relatively close to the person relatively skillful, you’ll fail to heal them. You might heal it only yourself. That’s disappointing for them. In our game, we don’t allow that to be a thing.

The heal is this massive bubble that explodes across the screen and it hits anyone even remotely near you. If you’re incompetent, you’ll probably still heal at least a few people. If you’re a troll, you’re going to have to be off the screen to be your troll-ish self and not helping anyone. At which point, who cares, you are off-screen. It’s a matter of looking at the mechanics and saying, “How can I make these mechanics something that someone who is actively trying to be a jerk can’t be a jerk?”

Ostensibly, this work would pay off by making the game more fun because you don’t have to be in a game with a bunch of assholes and practice, is that true?

The nice thing here is that while a lot of the stuff that I’m talking about is fairly unique. We employed many of these tactics in a game that we co-developed a few years ago, and we saw it work well there. I know it works. The thing about that game, which was called Realm of the Mad God, which shared a lot of these mechanics that I’m mentioning now. We developed it with another couple of guys at a company called Wild Shadow in 2011, 2012, something like that.

The problem with that game was that while it had a lot of these great ideas that I’m talking about because we didn’t control it at the time, it was this other company, Wild Shadow, that I did. The community was managing it in a very hands-off fashion. It was allowed to turn it into this highly toxic thing where people regularly were rude to each other and used offensive language. It had half the picture. It had some of the cool cooperative mechanics that were to grieve with, but it lacked the active community management. You still ended up seeing toxicity develop because it will. Anonymous people online, some of them want to be toxic. That’s how it is.

Do you think that you care about this stuff because you’re in Seattle?

I came from Boston so maybe that’s the same thing. I don’t know. I’ve always cared about this stuff.

You got a whole company of people who care about doing this stuff.

They’re all over the world.

Your people are?

Yeah, I got someone in Germany.

This isn’t a uniquely Seattle phenomenon to try and solve these problems in games?

No. I wouldn’t call it common. There’s a lot of people who are concerned about it, particularly toxicity in games, this whole designer communities now forming to tackle this. I wouldn’t say it’s the majority of the game industry that’s fixated on making the world a happier place through games. It’s still a minority, but there’s a fair number of us all over the world.

Maybe starting several years ago, video games essentially killed off most of the toy industry. All the money used to spend on toys got spent on Xbox and PlayStation. That industry is now a little niche. Do you have a sense that the video game industry attracted and a lot more people become more accessible to companies, developers and designers? There’s a multitude of games. I would assume the noise floor is pretty high to get over.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whose perspective you’re taking, it’s hyper-competitive. I like to compare it to some extent to TV and movies, although perhaps even more competitive than those in the sense that pretty much anyone who grew up loving games, there’s a decent chance that at some point they might decide to take a crack at making them. Nowadays with open platforms like iOS, iTunes and Google Play, Steam and all those, pretty much anyone can get together a few of their friends grabbing an engine like Unity, crank out a game and put it out there. You’ve got thousands of games flooding the market every month. Most of them are junk, but enough of them are not junk that it’s hard to stand out. The vast majority of games lose money. That’s true in any open market. Particularly in digital spaces like this one and in entertainment. How many kids do you know that say when they’re young and don’t know better, like, “I want to be LeBron James when I grow up, I want to be Tiger Woods when I grow up?” You have to sit down and explain to them how 0.001% of people will pull that off. Games are the same way.

Your odd of making it are super low.

I feel very lucky to be one of the few who’s making it.

What do you think happened? Was it luck?

A big part of it is always luck. If you’re a humble and honest person, you have to admit that. Some of it’s also timing, which is in many ways a function of luck but not entirely. I was very observant. I like to think I’m very observant. I noticed moments were there’s a blue ocean because the game industry is not like this homogeneous thing. You’ll have moments because a new platform is being born where for example, “There’s an opportunity here. It’s not a red ocean yet.” An example I like to give, it’s a funny one. It was also around 2011. Do you remember when Amazon announced that there were going to be games on the Kindle devices before the Kindle Fire existed? Your black and white Kindles.

The screen refreshes like 300 milliseconds or something.

It was something disastrous. It was terrible. They announced that they were going to allow games on there. I asked every one of my friends where they’re thinking about making a game for it. The answer from every single one of them was either, “I didn’t know that was a thing” or “Are you crazy? The answer is no.” Those were the two answers I got. No one said yes. I said, “Here’s a platform that has millions of people, all of them have their credit card in the system. No one’s going to make games for them. I’m going to be the only one. Let’s give it a try.

Amazon back then was a disaster to work with. They were awful in so many ways. I can’t say it was a good experience, but we made a game called Triple Town for that platform. It cost us $20,000, $30,000 to make. It made over $200,000. It was like an opportunity to learn that this game was a pretty good game. It had a perfect five-star rating for the longest time. We made a mobile version of it years later that reached 13 million, 14 million people or something. I can’t remember how many.

The point is $200,000 is not like that’s a ton of money or anything. It was a 10X profit or 5X profit, whatever it was. It was a safe profit. I was virtually guaranteed to make that money because no one else was going into that market. I’ll pat myself on the back for saying, “That was me being clever.” I spotted an opportunity that everyone else was ignoring. I’ve done that multiple times in my game industry career. Sometimes I pick wrong. I’ve picked platforms that went nowhere.

On the whole, if you do that enough, you can have some advantages that other people don’t have. We also have done it with business models. Dan is my cofounder of Spry Fox. Dan and I got excited about the free-to-play business model way before the vast majority of game developers in the US, before 98% of them or whatever. Most people back then were like, “Free-to-play, that’s terrible. It’s horrible. It’s junk. It corrupts the game.” They went on and on about how it was a terrible business model. It’s also harder to do so why would you bother. We were making free-to-play games back in 2011 before anyone was thinking about that stuff. That was part of the reason we were able to reach an audience of fourteen million people with Triple Town because there weren’t that many people making great puzzle games, free-to-play games back then.

What platform was it on?

Triple Town was in Kindle. It wasn’t free-to-play then. It was free-to-play first on Facebook, back when Facebook games were a big thing. We moved into mobile and it did well there. That was because we had embraced free-to-play in a way that the vast majority of independent developers had not. There are opportunities.

You call it free-to-play instead of freemium or it’s different? It’s free-to-play, but you can spend money in the game to get to watch ads or both.

That was me saying, “This is a business model that’s going to be a success.” There’s no question in my mind, free always beats paid with very rare exceptions, except in the luxury goods space. It was becoming already a big thing in Korea and in China at that time. It’s a matter of time before it becomes a big thing here as well. Observations like that have given me opportunities to succeed where other people didn’t have them. I’ve also made plenty of mistakes. It’s impossible not to. Some of my success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time and having luck. It’s a combination.

If you were trying to get into the business of making video games now, and you’re going into the red ocean because it’s all red oceans everywhere right now. Your odds are low. You’re not setting yourself up to get lucky. You’ve got to look for what opportunities there are to do something different than what everybody else is doing. Doing what everybody else is doing is probably the advice you would give somebody if you wanted to doom them.

If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you have to realize that you’re competing. There are other companies that exist that specialize in that. They’re good at that. If you decide to make a game like Fortnite now, you’re not only are you competing against Fortnite, but you’re competing against dozens of very well-resourced game companies that are all trying to chase that same wave. You have no chance. You might pull it off, but your odds are incredibly low.

We say this in another business context like, what are your differentiators? What are the things that you’re doing that give you a unique position in the market or a unique offering? These days your companies are like 10 or 12 years old, and you’ve got mostly iPhone games now?

We’re best known for mobile. That’s where we have by far and away the most users, but Realm of the Mad God was a pretty big hit on PC. The game that we’re working on now, Steambirds Alliance, which is the spiritual successor to that. It’s also targeted at PC and consoles. We try to be everywhere in part because speaking of surviving in this red ocean. You never know when a market’s going to go south. It can be hard to tell. Being in many places insulates you from that. I’ll give you a perfect example.

We used a very large chunk of our revenue every year for many years. It has come from Google Play until now. In 2019, that has stopped. There’s a bunch of different reasons. The main reasons are that Google has changed their attitude towards how they manage the marketplace. It’s all AI driven now. I wouldn’t say that the AI is doing a particularly good job. I’ll give you one very simple concrete example. We made a word game called Alphabear 2. It’s a sequel. This is very unusual. I don’t know if anyone else has done anything like this. We partnered with the US Department of Education. We got an SBR grant from them. We worked with professors to build English learning stuff into the game, but in a good way. The way like we were talking earlier where you don’t feel like you’re being forced to learn, but you are learning without realizing it.

We’re pretty proud of this. We put it out there and they did an initial feature of it but it hasn’t gotten as many users as we were expecting. A few months after it launched, I noticed that they have a collection in their store called Word Helpers, Build Your Vocabulary. I look and my game’s not in it. I contact Google and I say, “What’s going on here? I’ve made, as far as I know, the only legitimate free-to-play word-building game in history. I partnered with the Department of Education. There’s a bunch of stuff in this category that’s garbage. It’s not educational.” Their answer was, “Sorry, the algorithm picks what shows up in there.” I said, “You have no way to override that?” They’re like, “Yes, we don’t.” That’s Google there. That’s one