product management

Slay the Spire 2

by
Slay the Spire 2 ascension progression

I never got into the original Slay the Spire. I’ve spent 160 hours in the sequel so far, and I’ve improved from terrible to bad as a player. (In the chart above, you can see I’ve steadily advanced to Ascension level 9 on all 5 characters.) By now, I’ve internalized a few things about why this roguelike series is so replayable – engaging for thousands of hours for its most devout fans, rivaling the best live-service games. (Years ago I heard from a fan of the original: “1,000 hours is just the beginning for Slay the Spire.” Now I’m starting to get it.)

Let’s discuss the sources of this replayability.

To start with an (obvious) negative, it’s not sustained by live-service content keeping the gameplay “fresh”. There is a live-service feel during Early Access, as the devs iterate on content (anywhere from balance tweaks to replacing bosses) and add features, but the intent – at least judging from the original game’s development – is not a live-service strategy.

Instead, I think the big pieces are the following:

  • “Easy to learn, impossible to master” core gameplay depth. This was already validated in STS1, and refined in STS2
  • Extending the core gameplay to social play with native multiplayer (STS1 only had modded multiplayer)
  • Embracing the modding scene and thus facilitating UGC

Below, I want to spend some time dissecting the core game design; I won’t go in detail on multiplayer or modding in this post.

Core gameplay depth

Easy to learn

(If you are already familiar with how roguelike deckbuilders play, skip ahead. Below is partly a writing exercise for me to concisely explain what the game is.)

The game structure of Slay the Spire 2 is quite straightforward:

  • Combat is an intuitive card-based system:
    • You have a deck of cards
      • Every turn, You draw a number of cards, and have an energy resource to play few cards
      • When all cards are drawn from the deck, they are shuffled and form a new draw pile
    • Objective is to kill enemies before they kill you
      • 3 core attributes: HP, attack damage, block (temporary health that mitigates damage, expires each turn)
      • Every turn, you act first; the enemies’ actions are telegraphed
    • Lots of modifiers that add variety / depth on top of this foundation, e.g. debuffs that reduce the enemies’ damage or make them take more damage
  • A single session (run) consists of progressing through a classic roguelike branching-nodes map:
    • Players choose the next immediate node (combat, mystery node, shop, rest, treasure etc.), but just as importantly, visualize and plan out the longer term path
    • The combat difficulty scales up as the map progresses, with several boss fights as key checkpoints
    • Deckbuilding is the primary way for the player to become stronger to meet the increasing challenge
      • Through the nodes, players are often presented with opportunities to add (or in rarer cases, remove) cards to their deck
    • Relics (abilities that trigger based on specified conditions) and potions (consumable spells) are the other important sources of in-run progression
  • Beyond a single session, the game offers a difficulty system (Ascension, ranging from 0 to 10 currently) that bumps up the challenge overall (e.g. all enemies do more damage or have more health), and provides a longer-term mastery goal for the player

I think the game is intuitive to pick up, arguably even for someone who’s never played video games. “Playing a deck of cards” is a helpful reference that reduces onboarding cognitive load, while the damage formula and character stats are also simple enough to quickly grasp (this is inherited from a broad lineage of board and card games, but still worth stating).

Impossible to master (Is Slay the Spire 2 a difficult game?)

What’s not easy, is actually winning a run. Even at the starting A0 difficulty, the game demands a certain amount of fluency with the “language” of card games and deck-building theory,1 game knowledge (cards, the playable classes, the enemies, etc.), and good decision-making.

At the same time, high level players are already able to beat the highest difficulty at very high consistency – for example, conservatively speaking a 60+% win-rate at A10, regardless of character. To hear them discuss the game (there’s a decent Youtube scene, in particular I was quite inspired by some content from Jorbs in this post), the game’s difficulty is quite manage-able, or even “easy”. (You’ve also got the speed-runners, winning a game at the highest difficulty in 10 minutes.)

One underlying theme of these high achievers is that they have played the original, a lot. “A thousand hours” was often literally cited, and they share the opinion that the experience gained transfers quite directly to the sequel (understandably, given the core of the game is largely intact). So we could say that the game is not literally “impossible to master” – depending on how strict you are with the definition of “master” – but it requires a surprising amount of time investment to do so.

A sensible follow-up question then: how did a single-player PVE game create such depth?

From a systems perspective, there’s nothing that’s “obviously” groundbreaking here. I’d say the fun and depth of the game comes from a combination of (a) the craftsmanship and taste in the design execution, most centrally the card pool; and (b) the volatile effects of imperfect information, randomness and a convoluted feedback loop on decision-making, both within a single combat encounter and across an entire run.

I’m not going to attempt a discussion of how to design a good card game. There’s probably been several books written about the topic; otherwise design discussions about Magic or Hearthstone would be natural entry points to go down this rabbit hole. Instead, let’s talk about point (b) a bit more.

Imperfect information is constant in every combat. Almost every turn, the player is asked to make an ambiguous decision of “what are the best cards to play this turn?” A extremely common scenario looks like this:

  • The enemy will attack you for 12 damage
  • You don’t have enough damage to kill the enemy outright this turn
  • Close candidates for optimal play is often between:
    • play 3 Defend cards (each giving you 5 block, so you create 15 block, fully mitigating the incoming attack but also “wasting” 3 block)
    • or, play 2 Defend + 1 attack (so you block for 10, taking 2 damage, but also dealing some damage to the enemy)

There’s no universal “optimal” approach here, because it depends not only on the enemy’s remaining health and action pattern (this is knowable/deterministic as enemy behavior is scripted and fixed), but also what cards you draw in future turns (not fully knowable/deterministic, as you can only see the remaining draw pile). So it’s also plausible, with hindsight of what cards you actually drew in the following turns, that the optimal play in the above turn was actually to not block at all, but just rush down the enemy’s health (because you avoid a much bigger attack later).

Imperfect information also comes into play over time across a run:

  • Future card rewards are hidden info, so deckbuilding always features opportunity for speculation (”this card is great if I get this other card later, but otherwise it’s risky/bad”)
  • You don’t know what enemy you will face in each combat node, and of course you don’t know what will happen when you select mystery “?” nodes on the map

A convoluted feedback loop primarily refers to deckbuilding and other player decisions outside the scope of a single combat. Deckbuilding itself is a deep topic:

  • The general principles of a good deck are teachable:
    • Enough “upfront” and “scaling” block and damage
    • Ways to accelerate or improve the quality of your deck during combat (draw more cards; remove “bad” cards; generate more energy, etc.)
    • Suitable ratio (”density”) of different kinds of cards
    • Cards with specific functionality that solves specific enemy mechanics you may face (e.g. AOE damage; removing debuff cards that the enemy inserted into your deck; ability to deflect some damage back to the enemy, especially when the enemy does lots of “multi-hit” attacks)
  • But, the application of these principles is hard in practice:
    • At the beginning of a run, when you only have the bad starter deck cards, what do you focus on improving first? And how do you adjust your plan based on the actual first few card rewards you are given?
    • How do you keep a good grasp of what your deck needs, as the game progresses? For example, how do you know if you have enough damage or block? Are you over-compensating? This requires good contextual evaluation of upcoming challenges, and what you already have (and really, what’s working in your deck)
    • Static evaluations of card quality (tier lists) are seen as mental shortcuts, but they are often not useful in practice, because the “S Tier” card you see may be irrelevant or detrimental to your deck’s immediate needs

The convoluted feedback loop occurs when the implications of a “mistake” is only evident much later in the game – you got too greedy with a card pick (you picked the higher value card which doesn’t immediately improve your deck), which resulted in you taking more damage per combat, which led to you having to rest for HP healing instead of upgrading a card at a campfire, which made your deck comparatively weaker in subsequent combats… It’s a gradual negative snowball, which makes the lesson hard to pinpoint and learn.

(An interesting and specific way to visualize this is to simulate the expected HP loss of a fight with the addition of removal of 1 card. A delta of +/- 1 HP a fight might not sound like much – but such incremental differences are exactly how the outcome of the game is shifted.)

Looking at it from the opposite end – acquiring mastery in this game requires the accumulation of many little optimizations. This might sound like a bland truism that could be said of many games, but it feels more pronounced and sharp here.

Impressions from my play experience

I have played quite a lot of runs, though my play pattern (spreading them across all characters) is definitely trading off depth for breadth. Below are some takeaways:

  • The UX choice to auto-increment the difficulty after you’ve won a run strongly anchors players to view the difficulty levels as a form of progression, as opposed to an opt-in challenge. This may be a source of many players’ frustrations with the game
  • The difficulty bumps themselves reveal how “small” changes have big impact (the convoluted feedback loop). For example, one difficulty level added a curse card to your starter deck: the card does nothing and is also “ethereal” (it disappears from your deck this combat, if not played when drawn). In effect, this is just a dead card that negatively impacts your first draw pile. But there are memorable moments when you can really feel it
  • I’m often surprised by how my deck performs, which reflects that I still don’t have a good grasp of mechanics and their strengths / weaknesses. There’s been a few games where the “killer” card in the final boss fight was not core to my game-plan at all
  • My win-rates across characters are divergent enough to tell a story. The characters that I do better on (the Regent and the Defect) probably (accidentally) suit my mental model of the game better; meanwhile, I’ve struggled for example on the Silent, who is often seen as both “simple” and “brokenly strong” by elite players
  • In my last losing streak (16 games on the Necrobinder at A8), it often felt like nothing was clicking, and I was just being whittled down one battle after another. I’m sure there were lots of micro-adjustments I could have made, but mostly I just felt directionless. That’s an interesting sensation after I’ve already spent 150 hours in the game

Market reception

Now let’s talk briefly about the business side. While the original was a indie darling that amassed a cult following over time, Slay the Spire 2 entered Early Access as a juggernaut, immediately hitting a peak of 574k CCU on Steam (the original peaked at 33k in its first 5 years). This fits a familiar trend in recent years, where established IPs have better odds to command gamers’ increasingly scarce time and attention.

Review bombing

Part of the scale-up is due to Steam’s playerbase growth, especially in China. This is where things got interesting though, as after a brief honeymoon, the game landed in hot water with the Chinese player community and got review bombed en masse. As far as I can tell, Chinese players were very unhappy about the game’s content and balance changes (”nerfs”). To me this is a fundamental (and tragic) misunderstanding between the developer and this playerbase. Chinese players live and breathe live-service games, and are used to channeling their anger to push developers to appease them (meanwhile, Chinese developers are adept at monetizing their playerbase – it’s a fraught relationship, to put it mildly). The developers of Slay the Spire 2, Mega Crit, likely see Early Access as exactly that – iterating the game with a live audience, to get it to a final release state. So they are probably at least a bit surprised at the flood of negativity to content iterations. I don’t think they necessarily want to treat the game as a live-service, but now they are forced to at least partially adapt to a live-service mindset.

Modding

I mentioned earlier that native multiplayer and modding were 2 smart bets the developers made. For multiplayer, apparently the signals were already there in the original (players modded the game to add multiplayer support), so it was a high ROI feature. For modding, there’s going to be an explosion of content (some players have already ported the entirety of the original game into the sequel as a mod), as AI coding has drastically reduced the barrier to entry and also the development time. If the developers have any “platform” aspirations (which they may not, if they are just passionate about the game itself), they certainly have the foundation to take a shot.

  1. For example, why would you pay hard-earned resources to remove a starter card from your deck? The value is not intuitive for someone who has not played other card games before. ↩

Common price-discrimination tactics and warped consumer psychology in China

by
chalkboard cafe menu display for bakery items

This is not a post about gaming. I wanted to jot down some observations about daily life in China, starting from the topic of pricing related to restaurants.

Let me describe a typical flow at a casual restaurant:

  • You seat yourself;
  • You scan the menu QR code (often in Wechat, but could also be other mega apps), and you can start browsing and ordering;
  • Confusingly, there’s often also a QR code for Meituan/Dianping, advertising special discount offers (e.g. a special set menu for 2, or a work-day only lunch-set). If you purchase one of these offers, you will need to call over a waiter to manually redeem the offer (How? They scan a QR code on your phone, of course.)1
  • Depending on the restaurant, when you submit the order, sometimes you will need to pay immediately via Wechat or Alipay. This is often a point of buyer’s remorse, because after you’ve already spent your hard-earned cash, you then realize there’s “90 for 100” (pay 90 RMB to get a 100 RMB voucher) deal for this venue on Meituan.2

The savvy Chinese consumer is thus taught to not make any impulse decisions, and instead browse the restaurant menu, check the Meituan deals, and after exhausting the research, then decide on a plan of attack. It’s orders of magnitude more complex than going to a restaurant in most other countries.

This is not limited to Chinese-style restaurants – KFC in China also seems to take delight in overwhelming consumers with choices and lots of pricing complexity. Take the below app screenshot I just took: there’s currently a 13-piece party-combo, that requires you to choose 8 food options (it mixes burgers and side options, and limits you to no more than 6 burgers out of the 8 choices) and 5 drinks, and starts at 89 RMB (~$12, if you picked the cheapest options). At the same time, there’s a 10-piece (starts-at) 79 RMB combo, a 7-piece (starts-at) 69 RMB combo; and those are just the options in the first tab of the app…

KFC app screenshot, with a 13-piece combo

Why do retailers do this? I speculate that it’s at least partly driven by pricing discrimination needs. Consumers insensitive to price (or just in a hurry, or lack the patience for research) will pay full price; bargain-hunting shoppers may get lured into buying more than they need.

More generally, there are myriad data-driven price discrimination tactics in China – Chinese people call this 大数据杀熟 (big-data price discrimination, but more literally, big-data killing old customers). For example, people talk about the sudden price hikes on an item (e.g. flight tickets on a trip you’re planning) that you’ve browsed several times – giving new meaning to “special price, only for you my friend”. What I’ve personally encountered recently is Luckin Coffee’s weekly 9.9 RMB voucher excluding the item I’ve always ordered (a plain ice latte, if you are curious – for that, I can now get it for 12.9 RMB thanks to a different type of discount). This is similar, but more sophisticated, than the introductory offers (e.g. first month subscription at a discounted price) in the west.

The cost of these tactics is warped consumer psychology, that I think may have a net decrease in total spending. Chinese consumers are trained to bargain hunt, to look out for gotchas, to become experts at complex pricing schemes. They become skeptical when it’s just a simple price tag, with no fine print. I do think this extends to online virtual goods.

There are counter trends to this, but so far their share of voice seems low. Take hairdressers, for example, for years the dominant pricing strategy has been volume discounts on membership cards3, but consumers have become increasingly frustrated with this model (risk of losses due to fraud or bankruptcy of the retailer), so now some hairdressers advertise their “no membership cards” pricing. Similarly, I’ve come across one restaurant where, next to the menu QR code, was a simple sign that said “we don’t do deals on any other platforms, just order away”.

  1. Nowadays, there are some social integrations that allow these offers to directly show up in the restaurant ordering mini-app, which makes redemption easier. ↩
  2. This type of offer is common enough now that it has also been streamlined – instead of manually deciding how many vouchers to buy, redeeming them, and paying the remainder, now you can just input the total amount on the bill and the app will make sure you get the right amount of discounts. ↩
  3. e.g. top-up 3000 RMB, and you enjoy 50%-off list price while you have a balance; smaller discounts if you top-up less. ↩

Valorant Mobile, and Evolving Player Expectations

by

Valorant Mobile has been out for about a month now in China. It’s still too early to know if it has legs, but it’s a decent start. Per Sensor Tower iOS estimates, on a launch-aligned basis, it’s ahead of last year’s Delta Force in downloads and revenue; but it’s a far cry from the pre-pandemic launch of PUBG Mobile in China. I’ve heard vaguely that it has met Tencent internal expectations for the launch. So far so good.

I’ve yet to really play it, just like I barely dabbled in the PC version 5 years ago. (That didn’t stop me from writing a long-ish post.) I did read a bunch of player reviews, and I’ve come away with a few anecdotal opinions.

The core idea is simple, and it’s a formula that the Tencent Quantum Studios teams know well (from their successes with PUBG and League of Legends): execute an authentic (faithful), high-fidelity mobile version of a beloved PC game. Authentic (faithful) doesn’t mean blindly replicating every design decision down to the raw spreadsheet values – but it is a driving design principle in making players feel that they are playing the same game, even at the expense of something that might “fit” mobile better.

In Valorant’s case, this means that the number of rounds per match have shrunk down to “first to 8 wins” (PC was first to 13), which sacrifices a bit of the game economy flow for a shorter session length; and there are small mobile quality-of-life features such as aim-assist and visual foot-steps indicators (PUBG Mobile had the same – acknowledging that many players play without sound). But otherwise, the short time-to-kill, the general gunplay (Counterstrike-like crouch-fire mechanics) are meant to feel the same as PC, even though this type of tactical shooter is a lot more clumsy to play on mobile.

Reading the comments, it seems the game does a decent job at the above. It still feels a bit like the lower-end, fast-food version of a meal you already love, but that was arguably the same case with PUBG and LoL. “Go play the PC version if you can” is a common sentiment – that’s not a bad thing, because the mobile version is the always accessible version, for all of us who can’t play the PC version.

Unfortunately, another thing that seems to have faithfully carried over is the toxicity of the player community in a highly competitive PVP game. The “matchmaking system” remains a universal villain for Chinese players (see the frustrated Honor of Kings  player who sued Tencent to publicly disclose the matchmaking algorithm). Even worse, voice chat facilitates widely prevalent harassment of female players (there’s a Valorant meme where male players call female players “mom”).

I also noticed one player sentiment that does seem to be shifting. I saw a number of players complaining about the price of the cosmetics (same as PC version), and also some asking “why are we asked to buy the same thing twice?” This is an understandable sentiment, and there’s plenty of good product/business reasons (including player-focused ones) why sharing PC-mobile inventory is not the right product call.

Indeed, we went through this whole argument in the Riot team for League of Legends and the mobile Wild Rift around 2018. I wasn’t the ultimate “decider” but I was firmly against any sort of shared inventory:

  • While the PC game was popular in many markets globally, there were vastly more future players on mobile. If I were a mobile-only player, I would be greatly discouraged by the PC veterans and their accelerated content progression
  • For PC veterans, it could set false expectations that the content of PC and mobile will eventually reach parity – same champions and skins, for example. I felt the games should have the space to make unique content (and of course, collaborate on joint events where it makes sense)
  • Linking the two games’ inventories and thus their economies is hugely risky
  • The mobile version is co-developed with Tencent Quantum, which makes the economy-linking even more risky from a business rev-sharing perspective
  • Additional technical integration needed
  • And all the headaches around grey market of reselling PC accounts

Ultimately, you can abstract the argument as whether PC and mobile were 2 games or 1 game. And for Wild Rift, I firmly believed it was a different game.

Back to Valorant, I could argue that most of the above still applies as rationale to keep PC/mobile decoupled. But, it’s clear now in 2025 that this is no longer the best-in-class player experience. Natively cross-platform games, including Tencent’s own Delta Force, is educating players to demand a more seamless experience. And in turn, this is going to further reduce the attractiveness of these “western PC/console game + Chinese mobile version” co-dev deals, for both parties involved.

Shooters: Tencent Hits, Lilith Misses

by

Tencent announced its 2025 Q2 results this week, and one game it has consecutively mentioned is Delta Force: monthly average DAU exceeded 20 million in July, versus 12 million in April (both China domestic figures).

Elsewhere on Steam, Delta Force has slowly but steadily gained on Marvel Rivals since both games launched last December, and is now neck and neck with Apex Legends.

It’s safe to say that Tencent, and specifically TiMi’s J3 Studio (also marketed as Team Jade?), has found the recipe for success in the HD shooter space globally. This capability was not built up overnight. J3 has been making shooters for a long time – Nizhan (PC, UE3) back in 2012; Crossfire Mobile (Unity) in 2015; one of Tencent’s 2 competing PUBG Mobile games in 2018 (the losing one which was shut-down, UE4); Call of Duty Mobile (Unity) in 2019; and finally Delta Force (cross-platform, Unreal).

One thing I heard recently is that J3 got some code access to Call of Duty during the development of CODM. This was cited as a factor that helped them improve their ability in making the gunplay feel good. Whether this anecdote is truth or fiction, J3 devs definitely would have had some amount of discussion and interaction with veteran Call of Duty devs, and it would have likely enhanced their domain expertise.

In contrast, Lilith Games’ Farlight 84 finally launched in China (also cross-platform, Unreal). Local media widely talked about its 6-year dev cycle and “1 billion RMB” budget (~$150M). Unfortunately the game is quickly dropping in the charts. I’ve been surprised that Lilith stuck with this game for so long, given its lack of market resonance from its previous launch outside of China.

A long-running theme of this blog is Chinese devs’ steady expansion in the global games market. They started with mobile leapfrogging, back in the early-mid 2010s, and first in China and then globally. But they were never going to be confined to the mobile platform. They are now knocking on the doors of the core HD genres – often referred to as “cars, guns and balls” (“车枪球”) locally. The contrasting outlooks of Delta Force and Farlight 84 show that the technical barrier to entry remains high, but some teams are getting through.

AI gives you wings

by
AI gives you wings

PC, internet and mobile are 3 tech platform shifts I’ve lived through in my lifetime. It’s clearer than ever that AI is now the 4th.

A few years back during the initial mass market craze over chatGPT, my sentiment was “this is novel and seems promising (and inexplicable), but how will it actually matter?” But even then it was clear that this was something entirely different from VR, metaverse or crypto, 3 recent hypes that reflected a lot of wishful thinking from builders and investors – the winners and losers in mobile were largely set, and so the motivated parties collectively willed these new gold rushes into reality.

AI is different. A couple of months ago I started vibe coding at work in earnest, and my personal journey was illuminating. It has also been echoed many times by others (of varying levels of programming expertise) who’ve gone through a similar experience.

As background, I’ve never been a professional programmer, though I guess I had been well-positioned at several points in my life. My father was an early adopter of PCs in the early 90s, so I had the childhood memory of copying simple games code written in Basic from magazines (borrowed from the local library). In the late 90s, I learnt some rudimentary HTML to create a static webpage as part of the submission material to apply to an event for middle schoolers. And in college in the early 2000s I formally learnt C. I think I enjoyed learning programming – but I never ventured far in building things personally. (It’s one of the things I’ve puzzled over the most about myself – what were the missing ingredient(s) that stopped me from being more of a creator than a consumer? Complacency, broad yet shallow interests and the lack of persistence to stick through the “boring” bits are perhaps some of the culprits.)

All that’s to say – my perspective is clearly that of a novice coder. And this is one demographic that is primed to be bullish on where things are headed, because the ability to create working software (without relying on others) is immensely liberating. Anyone that collaborates with (and rely on) coders and are technically literate enough (or simply brave enough) to start vibe coding will quickly be drunk on this sensation – say, designers, project managers and product managers.

The biggest contributor to this sensation is the dramatically shortened feedback loop. If you have an idea, it’s now possible to experience the first approximation of that idea in a few hours, as opposed to days or weeks. And the next iteration might be mere minutes away. Paraphrasing a manager/mentor I had, “the best predictor of quality is the number of iterations the software has gone through” – and vibe coding changes the scale on this.

But what about code quality? Or tech debt? Or security risks? I’m not qualified to hand-wave these concerns away – but I will predict that these are stumbling blocks that will be worked out. We are still very early in this cycle – it’s not clear which IDE or LLM will be the consensus “best” a month from now, patterns are emerging but paradigms are not settled.

It’s also clear that the nature of coding work will change – as Ben Evans likes to say, “new tools start out being made to fit the existing workflows, but over time the workflows change to fit the tools.” If the economics make sense, we will adapt to the shortcomings of AI code while maximizing their strengths. This means what good code looks like – and what good coders look like – will shift too.

A version of this shift is happening in other parts of game dev – most notably, art, where it is coinciding with a brewing consumer backlash against genAI art. (For the purposes of this post, I can’t help but look past that debate and think about the possibilities for creators who are now granted the wings for art.) And zooming out to when the dust settles – it’s hard to imagine that the day-to-day of game-making will not change with AI-native workflows as core components. I’m fascinated by the thought of building a game team for that future, but I also have anxiety over the challenge of navigating current teams through a to-be-defined transition.

(Featured image: created via chatGPT.)

Book review: Play Nice (2024)

by
pages on an opened book

Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment – I finally got around to finishing Jason Schreier’s account that spans the 3+ decades of the storied company. I was left with a variety of feelings, loosely captured below.

A trip down memory lane

I have to start with my relationship with Blizzard as a player. As someone born in the 80s and who spent my teens in the mid-to-late 90s in Beijing, I first fell in love with Blizzard through shareware versions of their games that floated around on pirated CDs (or even floppy disks). I still remember playing the shareware versions of The Lost Vikings, Blackthorneand the original Warcraft. (I was particularly charmed by The Lost Vikings – even the shareware version’s few levels I played several times over.)

Later on, I first saw Diablo (the shareware version) at a friend’s house. His PC had a sound card and a couple of speakers. As we descended Tristram against the drums of the deeply atmospheric soundtrack, I still remember the visceral feedback of every mouse click against a zombie. That was the magical moment that cemented Blizzard as a QUALITY brand for me.

Starcraft took that fandom even higher. It remains my favorite Blizzard franchise, and contains the most childhood memories. I played StarCraft and Brood War a lot with my friends, even though we never really got past beginner levels of mastery. (I partially rectified this 10 years later, as business school overlapped with Starcraft II – I mained Protoss and 4-gated my way to Diamond.) I played Warcraft III but didn’t like its smaller scale and much more tactical combat; I did get hooked on that DotA map and that almost impacted my college diploma.

The ambitious scope of the book means that any particular episode of Blizzard’s journey could not be covered in sufficient depth. I felt the book flew through the 90s and Blizzard’s first 10 years – my favorite decade of the company. I was a bit disappointed by this, but it’s an understandable trade-off. As a side note – I would heartily recommend Stay Awhile and Listen books 1 & 2 by David Craddock, which covers the making of Diablo and its sequel. (I briefly wrote about book 1 back in 2013 – with an anecdote about my legal copy of Diablo.) These 2 books focuses more on Condor / Blizzard North, but there’s still an excellent picture of those early days of Blizzard.

Scaling under different owners: Davidson, Vivendi, Activision and Microsoft

One of the remarkable things about Blizzard is how its identity (and core talent) stayed intact despite the number of times it was sold. The owners list above actually skips over a few transactions in the late 90s: Davidson & Associates was acquired by CUC, which through a merger became Cendant; a subsequent major accounting scandal led to the division that included Blizzard being sold to a French company called Havas (which had just been acquired by Vivendi).

The studio’s track record since founding through the first few expansions of World of Warcraft obviously helped – don’t kill the goose that laid golden eggs, after all. Blizzard veterans, with Morhaime at the helm, eventually lost the fight to remain operationally autonomous in the Activision era, but they had a long run.

I never got into WoW.1 So in the mid 2000s, I was oblivious to how much WoW transformed Blizzard as a company, for better and worse. Play Nice does a solid job capturing this chaotic and lucrative transformation. From an archived New York Times article back in 2006:

Since the game’s introduction in November 2004 the company has expanded to more than 1,800 employees from around 400. Almost all of the additions have been customer-service representatives to handle World of Warcraft players, helping them with both technical advice and billing concerns.

This rapid scaling of full-time player support staff stands in contrast to another tidbit from the book – Kotick questioning why Blizzard wouldn’t scale up the WoW team to achieve an annual cadence (or even create multiple teams to work on future expansions in parallel – such a strategy had great success on Call of Duty). However even to the end of Kotick’s own tenure, he wasn’t able to realize this vision. The book doesn’t provide a comprehensive discussion of why Blizzard did not buy into this vision – it seemed to be a mix of feasibility challenges (”this is not possible”) and misalignment in goals (”why do we need to grow even bigger”). Unsurprisingly, such a rift between the stakeholder and the team will eventually result in a shakeup.

“Suits” vs creatives

This might be a central theme of the book: the fraught relationship between the business “suits” and the creatives. This is not unique to Blizzard or the games industry, and it’s not just Activision vs Blizzard or Kotick vs Morhaime. (The book features a few examples where a project was canceled by Blizzard execs to the shock and surprise of the team.)

The stakeholder – team relationship is never easy to navigate, because at the core it’s about flawed humans, their predictably irrational decisions, and that finicky thing called trust which holds the relationship together. There are no principles that work in every situation. The stakeholder could argue for one thing in one context, and the complete opposite in another. For example, a common conflict is in the team wanting more time or money, and the stakeholder questioning that – in more recent years, Blizzard’s project delays were certainly causing such ire with Activision; at the same time, the fun examples in Play Nice were the opposite, where a team (WoW team above, and later the Overwatchteam) pushed back against the stakeholder’s push for headcount growth.

The book leans towards the creatives and implicitly casts Kotick and his army of consumer-packaged-goods lieutenants as the villains who eventually took the knife to the golden goose. In an alternative book centered on Activision, perhaps they’d be the *Moneyball-*like heroes who figured out the hack to sustainable growth in a hits-driven business. If my stance here sounds wishy-washy, it’s because while my heart is with the creatives, I feel it’s imperative to be on the same page with the stakeholder on strategy. If you as the creative cannot convince them of a better path, you’d better full-heartedly commit to their path. “Misalignment” is one ominous word that you don’t want to hear your stakeholder utter.

Titan and the pitfall of abundance

One last ramble – the story of Titan is a familiar cautionary tale about the necessity of constraints. It sounded like a perfect storm of a team awash with the abundance provided by WoW coupled with boundless ambition. In such a combination, years can go by with little to show for it. There is sort of a redemption with Overwatch, but it seems the team later committed a similar sin of over-scoped ambitions with Overwatch 2. This is a familiar tale, and it happened (repeatedly?) too at Riot’s campus, only a 2-hour drive north from Blizzard.

Hearthstone provides the counter-example of how modest beginnings can grow into billion-dollar games. (Ben Brode has often told the story of how the best thing to happen to the project was when most of the team was pulled off to fight fires elsewhere. The skeleton crew left made remarkable progress through various scrappy means.) Linking back to the stakeholder thread above, a tightly-scoped project has a lot going for it – smaller initial budget, shorter timeline, and earlier results to make follow-on decisions on. It has one major detriment – it can be perceived as “not ambitious”, and not worth the company’s time (even though the team is not asking a lot!). And so it requires belief from the stakeholder that such small bets can create outlier successes, and skillful upwards management from the team to keep that belief firm.

  1. Until much, much later out of professional interest (I played Warlords of Draenor with coworkers at Riot). ↩

Some thoughts about Netease’s Seattle layoffs

by
misty forest landscape in autumn season

I don’t write frequently enough to effectively cover recent events, but I thought the Netease layoffs story deserved a quick write-up.

If you are out of the loop – eyebrows were raised in the player community (as well as the game-dev community) this week when Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser announced on linkedin that he and his Seattle team had been laid off. Netease later issued a statement to reassure players that they are not cutting back from investment in the title, but rather, this was a “difficult decision” “to optimize development efficiency”. Also as important context (read this analysis by Niko Partners), this is part of a broader cut in overseas studios at Netease since 2024.

My sympathies to these fellow game-devs who suffered this misfortune. I did also want to add a few thoughts, from the lens of “the realities of working for a multi-national company” and “the realities of working in co-dev projects”.

First, at the macro level, this is another example of the inherent risks when you work in a remote office far from the headquarters and home market of the company. This is not specific to the games industry, nor Netease as a Chinese company. You are far from the power center, and there’s a fog of war that affects your assessment of the company’s state. For example – there were some dramatic events happening at Netease last year, such as this corruption scandal(link in Chinese) that involved top gaming executives and 27 vendors (which have since been blacklisted). How has that impacted the overall vibe of Netease management and their decision-making? I’m not arguing that you should never work in the remote office of any company – actually over half of my game-dev career I’ve been in this mode – but you need to be clear-eyed about the structural risks.

Second, it’s worth considering the stage Chinese companies are at in the journey to becoming truly multi-national corporations – as a baseline I would expect them to be less mature still in managing their talent outside of China. Part of this are the multi-cultural challenges and how to effectively empower local workforces. Japanese game companies have been practicing this since the 80s; Korean firms since perhaps the late 90s; for the Chinese, since the late 2000s. (And really the inflection point is the mobile platform leapfrogging in the 2010s, from which Chinese devs rapidly accumulated immense wealth and capital.) In the Marvel Rivals layoffs, it feels like Netease was a bit surprised at the public reaction, and part of their messaging sounded like a rebrand – Seattle was a “support studio”, the “core team” and leadership are in Guangzhou. Previously they probably had little reason to go into such org details with players; indeed, the Wikipedia page was only updated on Feb 19 to reflect this insight.

Third, zooming in on the realities of remote co-development, and especially US-China game co-devs. I’ve a few years of personal experience in this regard. When the Chinese team is in practical terms the “lead studio” (putting in the bulk of the production capacity / most of the headcount, even if on paper they don’t have full decision-making authority e.g. the IP-holders’ approval rights), they typically have little patience for a remote team (whether its another team in the same company as is the case of Netease Seattle, or the IP owner’s co-dev team) to get into the “core” production pipeline. They probably have heavy-handed rules around version-control access and code/asset check-ins; the default mindset is to not give any to the remote teams, if politically possible. This “hostility” is simply because project management is usually chaotic enough already inside the “lead studio”, and they really do not want (nor have lots of proven experience) working across time-zones/languages/cultures with remote teams. So for the remote teams, it’s an uphill battle to really exert influence on the project. Indeed, I think the above linkedin post from the Seattle director alludes to this, when he mentions that the Seattle team is “sort of an ‘R & D’ branch, coming up with new level design mechanics, gameplay mechanics, and so on”. Speculating here – these mechanics possibly needed to be “sold” to the designers in the core Marvel Rivals team in Guangzhou, and then “properly implemented” by the engineering team there.

Another factor is where the remote team is on the org chart in relation to the “lead studio” – if it’s not reporting into the “lead studio”, but part of another function and embedded into the project, that creates more room for “arms-length” interactions. In my own past experience I’ve often been frustrated for having to consider such organizational intricacies, but alas, we are predictable creatures, and these are predictable structural issues.

Black Myth: Wukong (2024)

by

After spending 55 hours in Black Myth: Wukong (BMW below) for a first playthrough, I’ve finally gotten around to this write-up. At this time – 4 weeks since the game’s launch – a lot has been said already about the game from many different angles. So I won’t elaborate too much on areas where a lot of good analyses already exist.

What’s Black Myth: Wukong?

BMW is the first premium game title from Chinese developer Game Science, and the 3rd game the studio has shipped (the prior 2 being mobile free-to-play titles). The project took over 6 years, and the team eventually grew to about 140 people. Built with Unreal Engine 5, the action-RPG game boasts impressive visuals, and is deservedly hailed as the landmark first Chinese “AAA” game.1

It has sold over 18 million copies in 2 weeks and set the current record of 2.4M for highest concurrency in a single-player game on Steam (and 2nd highest ever of any game, only behind PUBG’s 3.2M back in 2018).

While the vast majority of sales are from China (estimated 80%), it’s still an impressive feat for a debut title to claim a few million copies sold from overseas at launch – as a simple comp, 2019’s acclaimed Sekiro (one of my favorite games ever) sold 2 million copies globally in its first 10 days. And BMW’s western community is steadily growing, with its subreddit crossing 300k subs (up from ~160k when I first started visiting in early September).

Game critique

I found the game’s 81 rating on Metacritic to be quite fair. I enjoyed my playthrough, and am certainly tempted to play more to chase all achievements; but I’m also well aware that my cultural affinity to the subject matter is playing a big part.

Visuals

“Uncompromising high-quality graphics” is reported to be one of the 5 key product principles of Game Science2 – and BMW faithfully realized this vision. Never before has Chinese fantasy been presented in such vivid and high-fidelity fashion in a video game (or arguably, any visual media), right from the flashy (and a tad over-exerted) opening scene with Wukong facing off Erlang and the 4 Heavenly Kings. Along the journey, there’s plenty of breathtaking and varied scenery,3 often painstakingly captured from real-life locations via 3d scanning tech. And there’s lots, and lots, and lots of unique enemies you’ll encounter, each intricately made.

The overall visual fidelity has not only captured the hearts of many gamers in China, but drawn great interest from the broader population. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the game has by itself shifted Chinese public perception towards games. (More on this later.)

Combat

If I score the graphics a 9/10 (the 1 point deducted for technical performance issues, even on beefy hardware), then combat gameplay would be a 7/10. The gameplay is fundamentally enjoyable, as the base structure of overcoming a difficult (but generally fair) boss-fight has been well-tested by Soulslikes and other action games. Players are offered plenty of complexity and choice in creating their builds, and there is execution depth with mechanics such as perfect dodge and attack combos (with some advanced parry combos). However, one common critique (link in Chinese) is the combat can get repetitive: enemies often have very lengthy (and very performative) move-sets, during which players have limited responses aside from spamming roll to dodge4; on the other hand, players’ offense is either the basic cycle of “spam light attacks to charge up heavy attack, then unleash fully-charged heavy attack”5, or, casting most of your spells in a short time window to burst the enemy down.

BMW tries to break this repetitiveness with the occasional hard-scripted behavior – certain enemies will always side-step a fully-charged heavy-attack, they are immune to certain spells, or one of their powerful abilities can be fully negated by one of the utility items you can equip. In the extreme cases of the final boss and the secret boss, this hard-scripting ventures into easter-egg territory, with lots of unique interactions – these two fights are thus highly theatrical and memorable, and the developers’ blood, sweat and tears are on full display in these moments.

One other grievance I have with the combat: at times, the game is clearly choosing to prioritize the performative (how the fight looks) over the actual experience (how it feels to play). Encounters with large enemies, or enemies in the sky, will often contain frustrating amounts of missed attacks and janky camera-work. These are known hard problems, and I’m unsure whether to praise the team’s courage or fault their stubbornness.

Level design

Level design is the sole area where BMW earns a fail grade (4/10) outright. The biggest problem is a lack of respect for any type of design consistency, leading to constant player confusion, and taking away enjoyment from exploration. For example: the game teaches players early on that they cannot fall off cliffs (and the player character will even play a specific balancing animation to show they’ve hit the edge); then in the 3rd chapter, fall damage is introduced, but it only exists in very specific areas. And then there are the infamous invisible walls – liberally used to block off inaccessible areas, but often contradicting the art visuals (open space or pathway that invites exploring).

Another issue is the lack of cohesion, or rather, the willingness to throw in one-off sequences that might be novel but don’t tie in well to the game’s overall flow. Early in Chapter 1, the player is transformed into a flying cicada, and is taught to scout ahead with this ability; this is never repeated in the rest of the game. In Chapter 5, there is a short platforming sequence where you have to dodge a roaming death-ball – mechanically highly similar to chariots from Elden Ring. And the entirety of Chapter 6 feels highly experimental, where player movement is completely upended. These are not bad ideas individually – though some clearly lack polish – but they feel out of place, and possibly are the vestiges of deeply-cut features.

General level design know-how is available in China – at least grasp of the theory, as evidenced from this lengthy level design critique from a local game developer (link in Chinese). I suspect in BMW’s case, the team suffered from both a lack of experience and an unwillingness to change the art to fit the gameplay. They liked how it looked, and with no time to find more elegant solutions, they spammed invisible walls.

Narrative design

I won’t dwell too much here, as I don’t have many insights to offer (and this is of the biggest areas of debate in the Chinese internet), but I think the game made a number of clever decisions to elevate the feel of the narrative (without actually delivering a very cohesive story). Using beloved characters from Journey to the West, the game skipped over laborious character-building while also tapping into affinity and nostalgia (especially for the 80s TV series). Also, by segmenting into 6 standalone chapters, the game makes players accept that there is little narrative continuity across chapters. At the end of each chapter, players are rewarded with a beautiful animation (each done in a different animation style, by talented studios the developers had partnered with) that provocatively echoes the theme and also serves as an intermission.

Greater than the sum of its parts

While I’ve called out above some deficiencies in the developers’ craftsmanship, an entertainment product is not measured by a simple sum of its parts. BMW has clearly captured the imagination of an entire country (and beyond), thanks to its overall quality. On this point I’m reminded of The Witcher 3, a game that I personally found pedestrian in many aspects – save for its relentless dedication to storytelling at an open-world scale, and through that relentless drive it became one of the most beloved (and best-selling) RPGs of all-time.

Implications of BMW’s success

Moving on, let’s discuss the implications of the game’s success.

From a production standpoint, BMW is proof that Chinese developers has accumulated enough know-how to now effectively compete in the AAA space, long seen as the most prestigious (but not the most profitable) part of the industry. The sheer scale of the game is a feat, and a demonstration of Chinese developers’ openness to embrace production volume. “If the game’s not fun, just add more content” is wasteful and often not the answer, but here it is befitting the developers’ ambitions. Also, we should not overlook the role Unreal Engine played here, as the great leveler and enabler.6 Prestige studios such as Rockstar and Naughty Dog will still be at the bleeding edge with their proprietary tech, but scrappy upstarts can now punch above their weight thanks to Unreal raising the floor.

From a market perspective, the impressive sales figures are a validation of the PC premium games model in China (everything old is new again). Intuitively we always knew the audience was there – the yearly Steam MAU growth and Chinese language share data are in plain view – but until BMW definitely proved it, there was always room for doubt. One common analogy that’s been made: BMW to Chinese AAA is like Wolf Warrior / The Wandering Earth to the Chinese box office (and their respective genres) – it’s a validation of the China domestic market size and a validation of local production to win that market.

Having said this, I would be cautious to forecast an overnight change in the funding landscape for AAA games in China. For one thing, if we only talk about market size and ROI, mobile still dwarfs PC; for another, the size of the investment and the long development cycles mean there are few teams readily available, and likely fewer capable backers who can stomach the whole ride. Indeed, even with BMW and Game Science, their early investors Hero Games (invested in 2016, 60M RMB for 20% ownership) divested their stake in 2022 for 480M RMB.7

Last but not least, I also did want to mention that BMW is also a great illustration of the ambiguity of the regulatory landscape in China. By all accounts, the great majority of the game’s sales happened on Steam, which operates offshore in a grey-zone with spotty service availability in China. Case in point – the “game accelerator” (VPN services legally sold here, specifically to access games) I use to access Steam was promoting a BMW cloud-save feature to mitigate Steam Cloud sync failures (which I frequently encountered). Meanwhile, Tencent’s Wegame service was distributing the officially approved onshore version of the game, and as such has a number of censored content.8 And for playstation players in China – since the government had only approved the PC version of the game, by definition all of these players are purchasing and playing offshore versions. (Suffice to say, if I were an investor, I don’t know what discount I would apply to a business case to account for the uncertainty of Steam in China. Fortune favors the bold, I guess?)

It’s time to wrap this up – I want to congratulate Game Science for what is clearly a labor of love. They stuck to their guns, and with the right mix of talent, a lot of hard work, and luck, they’ve achieved a milestone that will be referenced for a long time. (Maybe it’s time for me to go back to the game and finish those remaining achievements…)

Easter egg: if you’ve been somewhat annoyed by my (very intentional) choice to shorten Black Myth: Wukong to BMWthroughout this post, here’s a little reward for you (and this is if you really want to go down the rabbit hole).

  1. Matthew Ball in his recent post disagreed with this notion that BMW is China’s first “AAA” hit, using Genshin Impact as the counter-example. While “AAA” has never had a strict definition, I think most people associate it more with premium-purchase products and not free-to-play. ↩
  2. From this 2020 IGN China article (link in Chinese), another being “immersive progression-driven gameplay”, the others unknown. ↩
  3. Thanks in part to some key pieces of new tech in Unreal Engine 5 – Lumen and Nanite – that greatly aided the team’s production. ↩
  4. You can use spells to disengage, and I do, but since mana is such a scarce resource, this is usually saved for the hardest enemy combos. ↩
  5. Some of the stance combos provide flashy parries, but the risk to reward is not worthwhile for most players. ↩
  6. At the recent Unreal Fest in Shanghai, Game Science didn’t send representatives as they were all-hands on deck for their game release. But they did make the effort to record a short video – prominently shown during the first morning – extolling UE5 features Lumen and Nanite. ↩
  7. Of the 480M RMB, 280M was transferred in 2022, the remaining 200M are yet to be paid and perhaps has some additional conditions. As disclosed in their annual report, and also reported here. Both links in Chinese. ↩
  8. Link in Chinese; some of the changes are disputed, per the user comments on the page. ↩

The futility of predictions (and a path for seizing success)

by

I’ve now worked in the games industry for well over a decade. And with the accumulation of experience (and hopefully some wisdom), I’ve formed a few convictions. One thing I feel strongly about is that “hits” (massive successes) are fundamentally unpredictable.

What do I mean by this? The industry’s biggest hits (in terms of engagement or revenue, and regardless of platform) are often surprises out of left field. Helldivers 2 and Palworld are two examples just in the past two months; from the past 5 years, Monopoly Go!, TFT China (Fight for the Golden Spatula), Among Us and Fall Guys come to mind; and if we go back to when I was a newbie to the industry, Minecraft and League of Legends both seemed to come from nowhere. After the fact, people can come up with plenty of rationale to backwards justify each of these cases, either trying to look smart (”it wasn’t a surprise to me!”) or being driven by an innate desire for attributing causality. But before the fact, if one were to analyze any of these games and try to assess a business case – I’d argue that the more you thoroughly analyzed the less you’d be able to confidently present a bullish case. Each of these cases was a low probability event.

Let’s take Helldivers 2 as a concrete example (I’m lovin’ it, and just want to talk about it). Its sales performance has blown by internal expectations. But pre-launch, there seemed to be little to be bullish about this title:

  • It’s competing in a crowded 3rd-person shooter market, and this is the first game from developer Arrowhead in this space (lots of execution risk on “table stakes” features);
  • To make matters worse, it’s made on a discontinued engine, Autodesk Stingray, further raising concerns of execution risk;
  • As a sequel title, the brand has little recognition; the sci-fi setting feels generic, and again, the competition is fierce (Halo, Destiny);
  • The co-op gameplay is punishing (mandatory friendly-fire), which suggests a niche audience and presents a challenge for onboarding and retention.

Post-launch, it’s clear that not only did Arrowhead nail the execution, but the gameplay also managed to capture the zeitgeist as a bit of counter-programming to modern shooter design conventions. And if you trace back to the original Helldivers, it’s “obvious” in hindsight that the team had already “found the fun” of the core game mode (albeit in a top-down camera-angle; and thus the design risk is not as big as it first seems). Furthermore, when faced with the unexpected success, Arrowhead managed to quickly overcome the server capacity issues, and thus sustain the momentum – this is an important feat that I’ll come back to later.

It’s not just that the “unknown” hits are unpredictable. Even for “sure-bets”, sensible analysts would likely be laughed out of the room if they made forecasts that actually lined up with the outlier results. Success is nonlinear, while the burden of proof in justifying a nonlinear forecast is insurmountable. One recent example is Elden Ring – FromSoftware had built up an impeccable record and a loyal fanbase prior to its release, so there was plenty of ammo to be bullish, yet the actual sales performance still shattered expectations (at least 2-3x internal forecasts). Going further back, it’s fun to look at Wall Street analysts’ forecasts for *GTAV* (probably the biggest “sure-bet” ever), and compare to the results.1

This is not a rant against analytics, or business forecasting. “All models are wrong, some are useful.” We need to remember that these are just tools to assist decision-making – “what needs to be true, to justify this amount of marketing spend?” The danger is to blindly follow the outputs of the models.

What I’ve found more interesting – and to make this post a bit more constructive – is to think about whether there is a better way to develop games, given that we know we have very little ability to make good predictions about outcomes. For starters, given the above discussion, it seems that we must allow the game to see the full light of day – no amount of confined player research is a substitute for a real launch and the potential surprises. I’d go as far as to argue, even in the cases where there is little organizational faith in a product, it should be allowed to launch – TFT China is one such example where Tencent launched it with minimal commitment and have been completely floored by its performance.2 This also means that the team needs to be able to cut their losses early, if needed; and that there needs to be a delicate balance between controlling the marketing budget and not starving the game of the minimal spend needed for a viable launch.

The next part is tricky. One thing that separates the outlier successes versus their peers is the developers’ readiness to solve the myriad emerging challenges associated with unexpected success. For example – Arrowhead’s performance so-far in tackling Helldivers 2 capacity scaling has been impressive, given this is the first time they’ve ever encountered such scale.3 And I’ve always felt that a big reason Epic Games leapfrogged PUBG with Fortnite was because they were perfectly positioned with the engineering know-how to quickly iterate and deliver a more polished and stable service. So ideally, the dev team has either the previous experience and/or has done some scenario planning in advance, so that they can better react to situations in real-time and not lose the momentum. But too much pre-planning can derail the development momentum as well, and the team could get paralyzed pre-solving problems that may never arrive. In hindsight everything is obvious – before then the team just has to make their bets and live with them.

In summary, I think I’m advocating for:

  • Don’t let forecasts dictate launch decisions;
  • Take real shots by launching games;
  • Build teams such that they have the problem-solving experience / skills to be responsive to the challenges of unexpected success.

This is by no means rocket science, nor is it the only way. But even when this seems to be the desired approach by an org, it’s very hard to actually practice it. There are a lot of needle-threading and judgment calls, which in hindsight looks either foolish or ingenious – “history is written by the victors.” But I find this ambiguity to also be the appeal of the craft.

  1. Even though many of the game examples I’ve used are premium games / AAA, I’ve seen the same phenomena in free-to-play. ↩
  2. One typical push-back against this approach is the potential damage to the brand (in the case of a poor product). This is a real concern – Google now has an uphill battle with any new consumer product/service launch because they’ve launched and killed off so many (rather haphazardly). But this surely can be mitigated, by carefully managing the player expectations and the launch spend. ↩
  3. I still remember that when I first joined Riot Games in 2011, the all-hands-on-deck situation was that the server tech at the time couldn’t keep up with the game’s growth, and this got to the point where the company had no choice but to make the painful decision to split the EU server into 2 servers to buy some time. (This migration itself took many months, and was painful and controversial in the community.) ↩

GDC 2023 impressions

by
road beside buildings

I was in San Francisco for GDC 2023. The last time I was at GDC was 2011, as a poor student, so I won’t pretend to be intimately familiar with the conference. I didn’t do much networking, though I did catch up with a few friends I haven’t seen in a while.

Good talks

I attended over a dozen GDC talks Wednesday to Friday, since I got the Core Pass. (Monday and Tuesday’s agenda was mostly for the Summit Pass.) I tried to sample different types of content, though my natural interests gravitated me towards 3 themes – game design, product management, and leadership soft skills.

“The Science of Managing Transitions During Crisis” and “Tell Me What to Say: Active Feedback Techniques for Teams” were my 2 favorite talks out of those that I attended. I was quite surprised by this, as I’m usually a bit on the jaded and cynical side when it comes to “business self-help” types of content. But those speakers totally won me over with their timely content which was well tailored to the quirks of the games industry. And their sharp public speaking skills left an impression – at a particularly soul-searching moment in “Tell Me What to Say”, Drew Kugler (a veteran executive coach) stared down the audience and pronounced: “YOU are here (at this talk) for a reason”.

I also greatly enjoyed a number of the design talks. “Designing ‘Marvel Snap’” was predictably enjoyable, despite Ben Brode on the verge of losing his voice. “Cards, Dice, and RNGs: Using Randomness Intentionally” paired well with “‘Good Numbers’ in Game Design“, and both were educational and practical. I also quite liked “Layered Battles: Generating Multiple Qualitative Tactical Battles for ‘Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope’“, as it directly related to something we’re tackling at work.

I’d be amiss to not also mention “Prioritizing Roadmaps for Growth: Simplified Framework for Small and Growing Teams“, which was a short, sweet and uber-practical talk for product managers. In small teams I’ve been on, it’s common to eschew the more rigid dev processes (anyone love playing planning poker?), but far too often teams just end up suffering from a lack of process. The framework shared in this talk felt light enough to be adopted.

Expo floor

I squeezed in a couple of hours to walk the expo floor. It’s always a good reminder of how mature the modern video-games industry is: just look at the vast amount of suppliers providing various tools and middleware, and how specialized some of the solutions were – there was a vendor dedicated to motion capture of fingers. I’m guessing that maybe AI will take over the expo floor properly next year; for 2023, VR/AR and web3 booths are still around, and paying good sponsorship fees.

It may be a bit of a cliché, but I do believe you can get a sense of the players’ standings in an industry just by measuring the size and production value of their expo booths. In that regard Epic / Unreal Engine certainly seemed to have one of the biggest spaces, and they had a good crowd.

I also had a funny “duh!” moment on the floor: I was checking out one of the weird peripherals on display, and I commented to the exhibitor that it seemed like an interesting alternative to controllers. Then I realized I was in the alt.ctrl.GDC section, and alt.ctrl is literally “alternative controllers”.

Vibes / trends

Attendance at 28k was high, and more than doubled the 12k of last year. But this wasn’t an outlandish number per se – it only matched 2018’s record, despite a post-Covid rebound. I’m curious about the geographical distribution of attendees – it seemed like I was running into fellow Chinese speakers everywhere.

I didn’t go to any of the Unreal talks – my colleagues covered that – but it did feel that Epic made the biggest announcements. Much has been said already about UEFN, the new Verse language, and the new Fab marketplace. It’s clear that Epic is investing heavily across many fronts, and I’m almost tempted to make analogies to classic Microsoft which was immensely powerful / profitable due to owning both the platform (Windows) and the biggest app on the platform (Office). Epic is not at that level of dominance in our industry, but they certainly have a lot of the right stuff.

I don’t know if this is new – it might be – but there was a real effort by Tencent (and to a lesser degree, Netease) to spread awareness of their capabilities. Not only did Tencent sponsor a developer summit (which enabled them to deliver a host of talks on various aspects of their dev muscles), one of their in-house studios Lightspeed sponsored a summit as well. Unfortunately they may be swimming against the tide here, in light of the current US/China geopolitics.

Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels