Richard Browne has spent 38 years in the video game business. He ran production at Universal Interactive, ran external development at THQ for the best part of a decade, and spun up the publishing operation for Digital Extremes alongside Warframe. Now he advises studios on funding and survival, he thinks most of the industry is getting it wrong, and he calls Game Pass "cancer" for the business even as it props parts of it up.
This is a straight conversation about why the AAA model has stopped working and why Microsoft has talked itself into a corner with Xbox. We get into the challenges nobody wants to say out loud: you cannot spend $300 million and five years on a brand new IP and expect to survive. Richard makes the case for beachheading an IP at $10 to $20 million, proving the audience, then committing to a ten year, three game plan. The path Naughty Dog, CD Projekt and Larian all actually walked.
We also cover the generation gap quietly reshaping everything: why his kids treat a game as one tab in an ecosystem of Discord and YouTube, why Roblox is the modern playground, why photorealism stopped growing the market, and why a 15 hour game you actually finish beats another 400 hour epic. Plus the Championship Manager origin story, killing games (he's shut down 35), the Concord post-mortem, and what's worth your time once GTA 6 clears the runway.
CHAPTERS
0:00 — Cold open: "It's in dire straits"
0:30 — 38 years in: from the BBC Micro to consulting the industry
1:33 — Why the market is in dire straits, and the COVID live-service hangover
2:53 — "Dad's IP": why kids won't touch Star Wars, Doom or Gears
5:32 — The broken maths of AAA, and the $10–20M beachhead
5:58 — The ten-year, three-game plan every IP needs
8:23 — Why a 15-hour game is enough, and the GameStop trap
9:39 — What he plays, and how his kids play completely differently
11:50 — Coding at home again: AI, Steam and where Minecraft came from
13:11 — Roblox as the modern playground, and the Payday conversion problem
16:11 — Why photorealism stopped growing the market
18:24 — The Microsoft mess and the Gears exclusivity mistake
26:04 — Nintendo is Disney: the power of generational IP
27:47 — Do we even need a PS6? The end of the visual arms race
29:08 — What investors want now, and why it doesn't build games that last
30:50 — The Championship Manager origin story
33:16 — Low risk, high reward: Crash, Among Us, and community first
37:01 — Killing games: Concord, ego, and the 35 he shut down
38:24 — Character vs world: The Last of Us and the God of War pivot
43:11 — "I think it's cancer": the case against Game Pass
51:54 — Netflix games, streaming latency, and what actually works
56:28 — Why Xbox can't build a studio system you can't live without
59:30 — How US studios survive now: small core, global outsourcing
1:03:38 — GTA 6's blast radius, what he's hyped for, and the takeaway
Guest: Richard Browne
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brownerichard/
Purpose Made Podcast, hosted by Pete Bell
https://purposemadepodcast.co.uk/
https://purposemade.uk/
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