Byteside: tech + digital culture

Usually I spend my time on the Byteside podcast chatting to creatives or engineers about things they've been hard at work building for the future. So on the surface it seems strange to say we're here to talk to two people from the Wizards of the Coast marketing team - but, for me, Greg Tito and Shelley Mazzanoble come to the show with the same sense of creative energy.

As the co-hosts of Dragontalk, the official Dungeons & Dragons podcast, they do a lot more than just talk about the latest news and new release updates about the game. They have spent 7 years and 350+ episodes becoming part of the heartbeat of D&D, interviewing the team behind the scenes and introducing us to guests from across the worldwide to deepen our shared love of the game and its community.

The podcast has been so wonderful they are just about to release a book about the Dragontalk podcast and the lessons they've learned about the game but also life, the universe and everything else. 

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This episode was sponsored by IBM

The nature of trust and security online has been a big challenge throughout the pandemic, but the events of 2022 have tested these issues like never before. We had been planning this sponsored episode for many months, but when it fell into place this turned out to be an excellent time to talk to Chris Hockings, APAC CTO at IBM Security about the state of security and trust in Australia today.

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Rosie Barnes is a mechanical engineer working in wind farm and clean energy technology and during the pandemic she started sharing her knowledge via YouTube. From explaining the basics to going deep with other experts, she's working hard to build that clean energy future – and help the rest of us understand it better while she's at it.

We talk about her career, her YouTube channel (Engineering with Rosie), the value in working to communicate niche knowledge to online audiences, and the journey for women in engineering, and more.

You can also catch this episode as a video on the Byteside YouTube channel here.

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Slack proved its value during the past few years and its addition of Huddles in 2021 helped to find a great new middle ground between formal video meetings and text chat for general updates. Huddles is now being extended with new features to make it even more useful for quick creative brainstorms and catch ups that help end the game of hunting people's calendars for 30 minute timeslots.

We're chatting to Rob Seaman, Vice President of Product at Slack, to learn more about what's new in Huddles and how Slack has learned about its value to customers during the pandemic.

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It's our 73rd episode of the Byteside podcast but it was also our first time recording as a video podcast! Will it be the last? Nic Healey and Seamus Byrne catch up on recent news - Seamus digs Meta's VR Visual Turing Test and isn't so down on Diablo Immortal as a very casual bit of mobile fun. Nic found a Metaverse pop up shop in Melbourne? Plus what the guys have been watching lately. Including the amazing Exandria Unlimited: Calamity.

Go see the full video version at the Byteside YouTube channel.

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For a long, long time, Australian federal governments have left game developers out in the cold when it comes to simple support mechanisms like tax offsets. In 2021, the government announced the Digital Games Tax Offset – a big step forward for supporting investment in game development in Australia.

But how good is the detail in the DGTO? Yes, broadly, it's great that it exists, but Ben Thompson from Techlever, an expert in R&D tax support structures, has noticed there's a lot of exclusions that make it very difficult for small and mid sized developers to feel like they can rely on this new mechanism. We chat to Ben on this episode!

Submissions for feedback on the DGTO draft close April 18! Details here.

Read Ben's summary of his concerns at Techlever here.

And follow the industry body's insights on all things Australian game development here.

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Games publishers usually have a notorious reputation for being money grubbing beasts who want to wring every last drop of creativity from talented game makers as quickly as possible until the talent loses faith in the games industry and quits, making room for new talent. Rinse and repeat.

And then there's Devolver Digital.

Devolver is a games publisher that has specialised in publishing quirky indie games - like Disc Room, Carrion, Fall Guys and Inscryption - and helping everyone have a pretty great experience through the process. And building its own weird, wonderful persona along the way.

I wanted to understand how Devolver has pulled it off, so late last year I caught up with Robbie Paterson, Marketing Manager of Devolver Digital. I've been particularly fasciated by Devolver's infamous, bizarre - and utterly compelling - series of E3 video press conferences that really seemed to take Devolver to a new level of anti-marketing craziness that has also had some Black Mirror style moments where...

Honestly, I adore how Devolver has managed to stay super weird while it seems to have grown in stature in the industry. If anything it's only gotten weirder. If you don't know them, it's hard to describe it all just by talking about it. You need to hear some of this insanity for yourself to even scratch the surface.

I caught up with Robbie well ahead of the company's IPO in November, when the company listed on the AIM in London at a valuation of over a billion Aussie dollars. So, with that billion dollars in mind, let's dive into my chat with Devolver Digital Marketing Manager, Robbie Paterson.

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