Randy Tau wanted to talk about ownership, and we were happy to oblige. Randy's career runs from startups to the military to being a director at Amazon. We cover ownership from a ton of angles, and also talk about leading at scale and what it means to level yourself up.

"BigBoss" is the creator of the Flavor Universalis mod, one of the most successful Europa Universalis IV mods out there. He is about to live every modder's dream by going and working for Paradox on the game he used to mod for free. In this podcast, he talks a bit about his process, how he relates to his community, and what it has been like to lead a successful modding project.

Grace Liu is an experienced Art Director and Lead Artist working at Netflix with past experience at Riot Games and Blizzard. She shares her journey into leadership, focusing on what the shift from individual contributor to leader looked like, as well as how her less directive style leads to great results for her people. We talk about art, crunch, and more. Check it out!

In this episode, we bring in Erin Hardman to talk about recruiting in games. Erin has been hiring leaders and developers in the games industry for years and provides a look at some myths in the games industry when it comes to hiring, as well as exploring how finding talent for game dev has changed due to COVID and remote work.

Understanding how people join your team and who they should be is a sacred process. Companies live and die on their ability to hire effectively. Join us as we go through the key (and core) principles of how we approach hiring, what companies get wrong, and discuss practical tools that you can use to set your team and yourself up for success (and finding great people).

Arcane released in 2021 and quickly became the highest rated series on Netflix, recently winning 9 Annie awards. We've seen our share of video game flops in film and TV, so we wanted to get a better understanding of why Arcane succeeded. In this episode, we talk to Alex Yee, one of the show's original creators responsible for writing and producing Arcane. We talk about how the show came to be, leadership, and his creative work in video games and television.

Nearly every adult has had a boss. Many people have been a boss. Yet so few people have thought about what it means to be a good boss beyond the superficial. What makes a good boss? What role do they play in the work lives (and lives!) of the people they manage? Ben and Aaron start off the podcast with a debate about what should make bosses tick, then explore two of their people management pillars: Growth and Integrity. If you're looking for some controversial statements, take a listen!

Content pipelines! There's little info about them outside of the game industry, and even within it we tend to view them as some reductionist and step by step repeatable process, a machine you shove artists and writers and designers into to get 'game art stuff' out the other end. In this podcast we talk to @David Klaus, an Agile Coach and former producer who led one of the most profitable teams in the history of game development, to talk about how you lead, serve, and support developers as they make fantastic and useful art.

It's our first episode of Season 2! We've renamed ourselves Building Better Games, and we're going to start by talking about the importance of maintaining a connection between game devs, the game they're making, and the audience. Get ready to talk about playtests, product thinking, and player empathy. Enjoy!