As game companies become desperate for growth, what are the different strategies they will pursue?

Zynga, Applovin, Skillz, and Jam City represent 4 different growth paradigms in F2P gaming. This week I discuss their different approaches to growth and the potential risks these companies face.

LINKS:

   - Joseph Kim, CEO LILA Games

   - LILA Games: We're Hiring! Especially Systems & Economy Designer, Product Manager, and Level Designer!

   - GameMakers YouTube Channel

Epic Games recently announced MetaHuman Creator, a cloud streamed application that enables the creation, live captured animation, and potentially, in the future, fully AI capable life-like NPCs.  What are the implications of this new technology to games? In terms of cost, capabilities, and production value?  

SPEAKER: 

   - Arvind Neelakantan, Tech Evangelist at Epic Games: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvind-ne... 

HOSTS:  

  - Joseph Kim, CEO at LILA Games: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jokim/ 

  - Avinash Pandey, CTO at LILA Games: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avinash-p...

LINKS:

#1. Sign up for the GameMakers Newsletter

#2. Check out the GameMakers YouTube Channel

Key advancements in data infrastructure tech are driving big new changes in game development studios' approach to liveops data.

CHECK OUT:

#1. This episode on YOUTUBE

#2. GameMakers Substack NEWSLETTER

Sign up for the newsletter everybody: https://gamemakers.substack.com/

JK talks about 5 big changes that will potentially cause huge structural shifts in the games industry all coming to a head in 2021:

#1. Post-COVID Renormalization

#2. Lack of M&A Targets for Growth

#3. Impact of IDFA Deprecation

#4. Game Studio + Ad-Tech Vertical Integration

#5. The Rise of China

RELATED LINKS:

- Game Biz #1: Chris Petrovic, Eric Kress, and I talk M&A in 2021

- Mobile Ad Revenue in 2021+: With Josh Chandley (Wild Card Games), Sofia Gilyazova (Social Point), and Offer Yehudai (Fyber)

- Modifying Payment Behavior in Games: Clash of Clans: Bigger, Better, Battle Pass by Eino Joas

We talk about game development methodologies and best practices with how to structure and execute game development.   

SPEAKERS:  

   - Chris Cobb, co-founder and CTO of Pragma Platform, who also formerly worked as an engineering lead at Riot Games, and held software development roles at both Popcap and Microsoft.  

   - Noemi Rouleau, Associate Producer at Square Enix Montreal. Noemi also worked in production at Ubisoft on games like RainbowSix Siege , For honor, and Assassin’s Creed Origins  

   - Xiang Shen, CTO at Century Games. Century is a multi-billion revenue Beijing-based games developer and publisher. Xiang also formerly founded mobile games studio Outact, and was formerly a technical director at Roblox, and worked in software engineering at Tencent, EA, and Ubisoft.    

TOPICS: 

0:00 Intro 

1:18 Team Structure 

9:00 Dev Team Roles 

20:40 Game Dev Phases 

36:18 Engineering Practices (CI, Code Review, Coding Standards) 

50:27 Dev Methodology 

1:03:18 Sprint Estimates  

1:14:10 Final Message

Today we speak to Shahar Sorek to answer a core and fundamental question behind video games. We will discuss the question: Why do people play video games?

JK discusses how Shahar's concepts are very similar to the Japanese game design concepts around "user needs": basically that players will play games to fulfill some latent psychological need or desire manifested through playing games.

Tom Kalinske has had a career as the King of Brands.

Tom first became well known for marketing Flintstone vitamins and then reviving Barbie and Hot Wheels at Mattel and then Launching Masters of the Universe.

In the games industry and perhaps most famously Tom’s efforts to turn around SEGA of America were chronicled in the book and recent CBS documentary Console Wars.

Tom famously turned around the SEGA console business growing SEGA of America from $72M to more than $1.5B in revenue.

Learn the lessons of how Tom revitalized the old, and created new massive hit brands. 

Riz Virk is Executive Director of Play Labs @MIT.

Prior to that Riz has had a very successful entrepreneurial career as part of the founding team of TapJoy and CEO and co-founder of GameView Studios (makers of TapFish) that was sold to DeNA.

More recently in addition to his work at MIT Riz has written three books:

#1. Treasure Hunt: Follow Your Inner Clues to Find True Success

#2. Startup Myths and Models: What you Won’t Learn in Business school

#3. An MIT computer scientist shows why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics all agree we are in a video game

In addition to his books, Riz writes articles including most recently a piece for NBC News titled “Trump uses TikTok and WeChat to challenge China. Welcome to a new conflict: The app wars.”

In this far ranging discussion we talk about App Wars, why Riz believes we live in a simulation/video game, and critical start-up lessons and how they can apply to game start-ups today.

In today’s episode, Randy Nelson from Sensor Tower interviews me (Joseph Kim) about gaming trends in 2020 and potential impacts for the future including 2021 specifically.

In this discussion we talk about not only the defining trends of 2020 and what will be the longer term impacts from 2020 into 2021 and beyond but in addition:

So a SUPER wide ranging conversation... don't miss it!

In this episode Joseph Kim, Paul Leydon, and Avinash Pandey the three co-founders of LILA Games talk about each of their personal reasons for wanting to create the new company.