Steve Meretzky is an American video game developer best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the hit interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the comically titled Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment. His keen wit, prose, and coding skill made him one of the first interactive fiction writers admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America. He has been involved in almost every aspect of casual game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design.
Steve Meretzky is an American video game developer best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the hit interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the comically titled Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment. His keen wit, prose, and coding skill made him one of the first interactive fiction writers admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America. He has been involved in almost every aspect of casual game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design.
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's getting2alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Game designers, Steve Meretzky has seen it all. From his early days at Infocom, writing interactive fiction like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with author Douglas Adams, to designing titles like Spacebar through his own company, Bofo Games, Steve has been part of every chapter of casual gaming history.
Nowadays, free-to-play games on mobile are the norm, but back in 2010, when Steve worked at Playdom, Facebook games were hot, and still pretty new.
Steve: The platum attitude was just look at everything that Zynga does and then just do the same thing because they have five times as many people and resources as we have.
Why should we waste time venting the wheel? [00:01:00] Just look at what they're doing and copy it. Later when I would talk to people at Zynga, they were like, Oh no, we didn't know what we were doing. You know, we were as much clueless as you were.
Amy: Join us on a rollercoaster ride through the history of casual games, the ups, the downs, the ever changing business models, and all the fun with Steve Meretzky.
Welcome, Steve, to the Game Thinking Academy.
Steve: Thank you. This is such a great honor. I have been dreaming my entire life of appearing on the Game Thinking Academy.
Amy: Oh, your sincerity really moves my heart, Steve.
So, um, You have a long and storied career in game design, and Today, we're going to talk about that, but really pull the red thread of monetization because you've experienced a lot of different monetization models. It's something,
Steve: That might be a green thread
Amy: Oh, good point. I think it is a green thread. [00:02:00] Yeah.
Steve: Or gold thread. Gold thread could be.
Amy: Yeah, it could be a gold thread. So before we wind it way, way back and talk about where things got started. Let's just take a slice of life right now with your current job. You are VP of design at PeopleFun, correct? So what's a typical day like? What was yesterday, like, or today. I know there's no typical day in game dev, but tell us a little about what you do.
Steve: Well, I am living in San Francisco and the company is headquartered in Richardson, right outside Dallas. And like many game companies these days, they're almost completely remote. They still have an office and they have about a hundred employees and roughly two thirds of those live in the Dallas area.
But even people who live near the office mostly are remote these days. And so a good chunk of my day. is just remote meetings [00:03:00] on Zoom or on Google Meet. And the rest of my day are all those typical designery things like playing prototypes of our games, writing design docs, answering emails, playing competitive games.
That's pretty much how my typical day goes. So it's really just like my days used to be back when I was in an office. Only the meetings are remote and I'm in my home office instead of a real office.
Amy: So I'm curious, have you learned any tips or hacks or anything about working effectively remotely?
Because you're running a team, you're working with a lot of people, game development's very challenging and very creative activity. What are some of the things that you do to just like stay in touch with your team and work effectively?
Steve: I'd say you really have to over communicate. There's just lots of communication that happens without you thinking about it.
When you're [00:04:00] all co-located in an office, there's all sorts of creativity that happens without you planning it or thinking about it. The famous discussions around the water cooler when you're in an office, you can just be at someone's desk having a discussion and someone overhears it and joins in. And before you know it, you've dragged up a whiteboard and you've got an impromptu brainstorm going on.
And those sorts of things don't happen when you're working remotely. So you kind of have to force them to happen and you need to schedule more meetings and brainstorms. And then there's really no, no way to get around. The fact that you should be co-located at least some of the time and so just carving out time to get whatever team or people together for a few days every few months, just to get some in person time and kind of deepen the relationship.
And also, I find, particularly on creative matters, that those in person times are just so much more [00:05:00] effective than anything remote. Um, just got my team together in Texas the week before last for three days, and I feel like we got more done in those three days than we had in the previous month. So, those are all my various pieces of advice.
Amy: What tools do you folks use to stay in touch and communicate?
Steve: A lot of Slack. Yeah, definitely more Slack than email and all sorts of video conferences, whether just one-on-one or groups, company meetings are pretty much all held over Zoom or Google meet these days.
Amy: So you've been in gaming a long time and sort of worked your way up to this very senior kind of role, and they're lucky to have you.
But let's wind it all the way back when you first got into gaming and were getting involved with early text RPGs, text adventure games. How did you get into gaming? How did you first get those gigs?
Steve: Well, Infocom was my first job in gaming. The [00:06:00] first dollar I earned in gaming was as a tester for Infocom in November of 1981.
So coming up probably next week on the 41st anniversary of the first dollar I earned in the industry, the way it happened was somewhat serendipitous. At the time I was a couple of years out of MIT and I was rooming with a friend of mine from MIT, Mike Dornbrook, and he was Infocom's one and only game tester.
Infocom didn't yet have an office, and so basically he was doing testing, this was of Zork 1 and then later of Zork 2, on an Apple II, on our dining room table. And so that Apple to sit there around the clock and often when he wasn't using it, I would sit down and I'd play these early pretty buggy versions of Zork 1 and later Zork 2.
And when I found bugs, which was quite common, given what an early version of the game this was, I [00:07:00] would write them down. And so he was finding bugs and getting paid for it. And I was writing bugs and not getting paid for it. But it worked out well in the end because after Zork 2 was launched, he went off to business school in Chicago and Mark Blank was working on a game called Deadline and needed someone to test it.
And because I had found so many good bugs in Zork 2, he said to me, do you want to become Mike's replacement as Infocom's game tester? And at the time, so my major at MIT was in construction management. And I was at the time in my third company, construction company after graduating, each one more boring than the one before it.
And I was very happy to quit that job and to become a game tester for Infocom. And I did that for a year. And then Mark said, so how would you like to try designing your own games? And I said, sure. And forty years later, that's still what I'm [00:08:00] doing.
Amy: That's such a cool story. So you really came up through testing and as you became your own game designer, how did testing inform that?
Steve: Well, certainly as a tester and at Infocom, it wasn't merely looking for bugs where the game didn't operate as intended, but it was also making comments about the difficulty of puzzles, making comments about the fairness of puzzles, making suggestions where the game would be more fun, more interesting, uh, you know, times when the game just gave a very vanilla response to something when a more handcrafted or amusing response might have been better in that place.
So from being a tester. I had a lot of experience kind of thinking about games in those sorts of ways, so that when I started writing my own games, I feel like I did a lot of those things proactively instead of kind of waiting for someone to suggest them.
Amy: So one of the things that's [00:09:00] fascinating about those early text adventure games is they really set the stage for so much else, right, which we're going to talk about.
But one of the things we were talking about the other day in our Masterclass is the use of the second person, because any of you who are familiar with Zork or old text adventures, it says you are X, Y, Z. You are in a room with three doors, all those second person. And I'm really curious if you tried other things and how that now archetypal style of computer interface dialogue, how you actually developed it and chose to use the second person.
Steve: I think, you know, if you think about the alternatives, if the game were written in first person, if you said to the game, Open the door and the game said, I walked to the door and open it. It sounds like, you know, who has walked over to the door [00:10:00] and opened it, the computer, the game designer. And if it's third person, then all of a sudden you have to have some way to refer to that third person.
And typically in the early days, the person who you were playing in the game was supposed to kind of be in every man or in every woman. In fact, in the Zork trilogy, it was just referred to as the adventurer, and that's how it was referred to in code. And so, who would you even say was doing something if you were writing it in the third person?
Open the door, the adventurer walks over and opens the door. And so, really, second person, I think, is the right, the right way to go, just from default. And then I think another thing to think about is the fact that Adventure and Zork really grew out of Dungeons and Dragons. And that's the way a Dungeon Keeper speaks when he's running a D& D game.
He doesn't say, Cleric take seven damage. He says, you take seven damage. [00:11:00] And so I think it was kind of already a really established thing before, before Adventure and before Zork even came along.
Amy: So much of gaming came out of D& D tropes. It's amazing. So, you have this core initial experience rising up through the ranks and designing games, text adventure games initially, which are their own kind of genre.
Now I want to go on and talk about some of the key genres you've tackled since then, which are many. But before we do, let's touch on monetization. So how are those games monetized back then?
Steve: Well, from kind of the dawn of the industry until the internet came along, there was really one way to monetize games, which was you put it in a box and it sold in a store for 40 or $50.
And the publisher of the game generally got maybe 60 percent of that and [00:12:00] the distribution chain took the rest of it. And I guess the one other way to monetize games in those days was arcade, a quarter at a time. And so really it wasn't until the internet came along and ad supported games and subscription supported games became a thing, and then of course later free-to-play.
Amy: So let's talk about those. So after working with Infocom, what were some of the next big, impactful games that you worked on designing and what genres did you get involved in?
Steve: Well, as you mentioned, the early games at Infocom, they were text only. And it was really only the last game that I did at Infocom Zork Zero that had any graphics at all. And they were pretty rudimentary.
And then after that, I designed several adventure games. for Legend Entertainment, and they were more significantly graphical. They had a still graphic illustrating each location in the game. Also, that was the first time I had any experience with audio [00:13:00] in games. Merely MIDI music tracks, but still that was the first time I had to work with audio.
But probably the first big kind of change was the fourth game that I made at Legend, which was Superhero League of Hoboken, which I had envisioned as a role-playing game. But Legend, being entirely an adventure game company, was a little reluctant to take the jump all the way into role-playing games, and so they convinced me instead to design the game as an RPG adventure game hybrid.
So there were sections of the game that would play like a role-playing game as you were kind of moving around a geography and having encounters with monsters. And then you would get to certain key areas within that geography and go into more of a adventure game interface. But really that was the first time that I ever worked on any game where there was any sort of systems design.
Because adventure games, pretty much every moment of gameplay is handcrafted [00:14:00] and there's nothing really procedural. So that was kind of a big change for me and a big learning experience.
Amy: For everyone listening, can you explain kind of at a high level the difference between an adventure game and a role-playing game to set that up?
Steve: Okay, well, in an adventure game, it's almost like everything is scripted. And so pretty much you are negotiating some kind of a world, and in a text adventure game, you're doing that by typing sentences. You're saying, walk west, open the door, pick up this item or that item, throw this item, use this key to open this door.
In a graphic adventure game, you might be, if it's a first person game, you might be moving from location to location. For example, mist, and then. Seeing a first person point of view of your current location and then interacting with that environment by. Pushing buttons or picking up a book and opening it, things like that.
In a third [00:15:00] person adventure game, you might be controlling an avatar moving around the screen and doing all of those same actions, only you're actually seeing your character performing those actions. So pretty much everything in those games is scripted. An author has decided what is going to happen moment by moment as you do all those things.
Amy: So all of those are single player. So we're talking single player adventure games, correct?
Steve: Yes.
Amy: Okay, good. Just wanted to clarify.
Steve: And so there are many cases, obviously an author can't cover every single thing that a player might try to do. And so there are often default responses. There's nothing interesting here.
You can't do that, et cetera. And merely you want to have interesting responses, hopefully for as many of the things as the players are going to try and only rely on those sort of default or generic responses when you have to. So that's pretty much how adventure games work and role-playing games. Tend to be more procedural.
So you again, have a lot of different [00:16:00] types. You have single character adventure games, party adventure games. Those could be displayed first person, third person, et cetera. But typically they're much more sort of statistically based and procedurally based. And so you're traveling around an environment and perhaps, you know, there are certain chances of encounters as you move around that environment.
And when an encounter happens. There are all sorts of numbers that come into play in terms of the stats of the characters who are fighting, their weapons, their armor, and so on. And the results are typically figured out procedurally rather than being anything that's handcrafted by an author. The responses, of course, may be handcrafted in terms of describing what happens when a certain character takes damage, or a certain character avoids damage, and so forth, but the underlying simulation is much more data based and much more procedurally based.
Amy: Right, and since it's called [00:17:00] role-playing, I know there's a wide spectrum, like we're getting into like, game genres, and there's a wide spectrum, but most role-playing games, they involve some sort of party where people play different roles.
Steve: Probably the majority do, although certainly there are some role-playing games where you just play a single character, right?
And typically there's a concept of character advancement in an adventure game. Your character may develop an inventory of items and kind of become more powerful in that sense. But essentially the character in an adventure game doesn't tend to change, whereas the character in a role-playing game is constantly getting faster and stronger, etc.
And they tend to be games that reward sort of persistence over skill. So if you think of, for example, genres like first person shooters, those are games where you tend to get better because you as a player are getting more skilled. Typically in a role-playing game, you get better just because you've played the game longer [00:18:00] and your character is getting more powerful rather than you as a player are getting more skillful.
Amy: Right. So adventure games are more like branching storylines. Uh, yes. Which involve worlds.
Steve: Certainly the most basic of them can just be essentially branching stories. Like, like, which way do I go now books? And the best of them are essentially very interesting simulations of a world or some small piece of the world.
Amy: Right. So you developed these more graphical games. It got involved with sound. Still selling games for X dollars a pop, correct?
Steve: Yep. We're still so...
Amy: At that point.
Steve: Super Hero League of Hoboken came out in 1994 or maybe 1990, yeah, 1994.
Amy: Right before the web.
Steve: Yeah. So that's still well in the heart of the retail era and really it would be six years before the first time I was developing games for the [00:19:00] web.
Amy: So let's fast forward. You. had many other experiences, one of which was WorldWinner.
Steve: That was, yeah, what I was just referring to, my first time developing games that would be distributed over the internet.
Amy: Which really brings up different monetization models.
Steve: Yeah, totally different monetization model. I mean, really, we didn't use the term at the time, but in almost every way it was free-to-play.
Amy: Right. Which is really interesting. What it wasn't was microtransactions, right?
Steve: Well, in a sense it was, basically.
Amy: Well, let's back up for a sec, because I want everyone to know what WorldWinner is, and then we can get into the how it's got early microtransactions and free-to-play, which is kind of mind blowing.
So, what year is it you're working on WorldWinner? What is WorldWinner?
Steve: It's 2000 and WorldWinner was a startup. I joined the company when it was [00:20:00] just a few months old, and the goal was to create games that would be played in a tournament model. So basically you would play a game and other people would play the same game and you would get a score and there would be a leaderboard and you could optionally enter a tournament.
with an entry fee, a cash entry fee, and such tournaments would have a cash prize. And so if you played for free, then you were just sort of playing for the glory of finishing at the top of the leaderboard. But if you entered a tournament with a cash entry fee, you were playing for the hope that you would finish top At the top of the leaderboard or toward the top of the leaderboard and actually win a cash prize.
So this differed from gambling because the games were games of skill, not games of luck. They were still only legal in roughly 40 outta the 50 states. The law that governs whether such games are legal is entirely a state by state law, not a federal law. So even the other companies like WorldWinner that did [00:21:00] it.
Every company had a slightly different definition of which states were legal. So some companies might allow it in 42 states and some in 38 states. So when I started at WorldWinner, I was thinking that given the sort of fierce competitive nature of it, the types of players that we would be attracting would probably be sort of young male, more hardcore players.
And therefore the types of games that we'd want to make would be relatively hardcore games. And what it turned out was. The players that we were attracting were mostly the casual market, older, more female players, and the sorts of games that were very successful were games like Solitaire and Match 3, the kind of core casual games that were successful in other areas outside of tournament gaming.
Amy: You're talking 2000?
Steve: Yes.
Amy: Wow. So that must have been a surprise to the team.
Steve: There were a lot of surprises. I mean, I also thought that typically [00:22:00] maybe a player would play one or two tournaments a day and therefore we'd probably want an entry fee of like 10 or $20. But in fact, the really sweet spot was having a tournament entry fee of about 1 and people playing dozens of tournaments a day.
So, both the length of gaming, the size of tournaments, the entry fee of tournaments, kind of the initial guesses that I made in almost every case turned out to be wrong.
Amy: You guys stumbled into casual gaming before casual gaming existed.
Steve: Well, not really true. Casual gaming, certainly, you could point to a number of things as kind of the birth of casual gaming.
I could point to Shanghai, an Activision game from around 1986. I could point to Tetris around that same time. Windows 3.1, introducing Windows Solitaire for the first time. And even by 2000, certainly sites like Pogo and Yahoo! Games, We're [00:23:00] offering casual games on the web to millions of people per day.
Amy: That's true. So you were right in there. I guess it was before mobile and it really exploded with mobile, but so you were part of that early wave of casual games, but you stumbled into it by discovering who your audience was.
Steve: Yes, and actually a game that I had made a few years earlier, in 1995, actually the next game that I made after Superhero League of Hoboken, was a game called Hodge and Podge, which in many ways was my own first foray into casual gaming.
It was the first game that I made that chipped on a CD ROM instead of on floppy disks. So I had, I mean, a floppy disk hole, one little over one Meg, a CD holds 600 Meg. So a huge amount of space available to me for the first time developing that game. So it was really the first game [00:24:00] where I had any significant amount of voice acting and a much huger amount of graphics and animation than any game I'd made before.
But the design of the game was basically a two person board game, a tabletop board game. And each player played a prince searching the kingdom for two kidnapped princesses. And as you moved around the kingdom, this sort of fairy tale, but very humorous kingdom. There were 19 locations that you could enter and play mini games and they were all kind of grouped into areas like there was an area with casino games and an area with word games and an area with sort of arcade games and and those games playing those games depending on how you did would give you information about the location of the princesses or an item that you might need to rescue them.
Or some coins. And so all of those 19 minigames kind of turned the game [00:25:00] into kind of a casual game pack. And in fact, a very common use of CD ROMs in those very early days was to just sort of throw a whole bunch of casual games onto a CD ROM and call it a solitaire game pack or a word game pack or whatever.
So in many ways, that was my first foray into casual gaming, and it was kind of a game before its time, because the casual gaming market didn't really quite exist yet.
Amy: It's funny when that happens. But the thing that's interesting to me is that you really stuck with casual gaming. You've done so many different things and different angles on casual gaming, which you're going to get into.
So there's something you must really love about casual gaming.
Steve: Well, certainly as I've gotten older, I've become much more of a casual gamer myself and much less of a hardcore gamer as my time has gotten more scarce and my reflexes have gotten more crappy. And so certainly as the years [00:26:00] have gone by, just for my own gaming entertainment, I'm more and more turning to casual gaming, and I'd certainly rather be creating games that I like to play.
So I think that's only natural.
Amy: Some people stick with their love of console or battle games, but I do think that's a pretty natural evolution. So, what were some of the really big lessons you got out of World Winter, particularly anything you learned about running a site with a cash-out mechanism.
Steve: Well as I said, we didn't use the term free-to-play, but in virtually every single way, it was free-to-play.
I mean, we had a cost of acquiring users and we had a funnel. Some percent of users would stay and register. Some percentage of users would come back on a second day. Some percentage of those users would eventually spend some money. And it was all very metrics driven, just like free-to-play gaming is today.
And so, so really from I was there from 2000 to [00:27:00] 2005 and there wasn't really any kind of free-to-play gaming industry of any sort in the U.S. I'd say until Facebook came along in 2007 2008 kind of time frame. So essentially WorldWinner was sort of training me to be right at the forefront of what was eventually going to be the, the primary way of monetizing games, through today.
Amy: Yeah, it's such a great way to grow the audience.
Steve: And then I'd say it also taught me a lot about live game development. It was really my first time up until that point, I had just created games, put them in a box. And unless we did like a second edition of the game or something had kind of no further involvement with the game from that point forward.
At WorldWinter, the games were all live, and we could constantly change them and improve them and tweak them and make them easier, harder, and not just the games, but the tournaments that [00:28:00] they were embedded in. And so I was in charge of essentially everything about planning tournaments. How many would there be?
How long would they run? How many players would they have? What would the entry fee? What would the prize be? And basically every day I'd make changes and kind of see what the impact of those changes were on the metrics and make more changes. And so basically that was my first introduction to games as a service, my first introduction to live ops.
And it was really interesting because after 2005, when I left WorldWinner and kind of went back to non WorldWinner. Live games for a few years. It was amazing. I had not anticipated how much I would miss that. And it was almost like kind of with a withdrawal from not having that kind of daily dose of metrics to pour over.
Amy: How did you see those metrics? Were you just like in spreadsheets all day? Did you, did they spin up like a little dashboard?
Steve: Yeah, we had a dashboard and we could look at it all [00:29:00] online and there were daily reports, weekly reports, monthly reports, and divided any way you wanted to by tournament, by game type.
And, and yeah, like most sort of data driven game development, there was just so much data to pour over and it was easy to get lost in it. And also easy to kind of see. Noise and think it was a pattern. I remember a really good story from that time was we. It was sort of third week of June and all of our numbers suddenly dropped by like 15 percent and everyone was panicked.
What's going on? Something must be broken. We spent like a whole lot of time trying to understand what had happened and couldn't find anything. And then suddenly right around labor day, everything 15%. And our theory was That basically a lot of our audience were moms, and all of a [00:30:00] sudden kids were out of school and they had a lot less time during the day.
And sure enough, the next year came around and it got toward the end of June and the numbers dropped again. And at that point we had like a new set of management who was like panicked all over again. And I said, no, no, we saw this last year. It's just a summer drop and it's going to be like a 15 percent drop for the next three months and then it'll go back up again.
And it did. So, so that was kind of a case where there really was meaning to the metrics, but there were many other times when there'd be some kind of a fluctuation and management would say there must be something wrong, but no, it was just noise. It was just random fluctuation.
Amy: Yeah, I think one of the hardest things is once you get in a data loop, really knowing what to pay attention to finding the signal and the noise, not overreacting to the wrong things and...
Steve: Liken it to, like, when you're dieting and getting on the scale every other hour.
Amy: Yeah, so then [00:31:00] you joined Playdom. Now, how did that happen?
Steve: So at the time I was working at Blue Fang, the company that's best known for Zoo Tycoon. So I'm still in the Boston area at this point. And I was contacted by my friend, Eric Goldberg, who was advising Playdom. So Playdom at this point, was perhaps a year old, they were actually focused on making MySpace games and were just starting to think about getting into Facebook games.
They were already very successful, well into the black, and they had about a dozen people on staff, but no one with any game industry experience at all. And Eric basically had said to them, you really ought to have a game designer. And so he asked me if I'd be interested. And my first thought was my space and Facebook games, they can't be very interesting and I hadn't really paid any attention to the space.
And I started looking at the space and said, Hey, there are actually some pretty deep [00:32:00] and interesting games here. I was thinking that it was basically just things like own your friends and silly games like that. And so I went out and talked to them and was quite impressed. Pretty impressed, and they made a good offer, and at the time we had just become empty nesters, and so it seemed like a good time to move across the country.
Except in the sense of the economy, because that was 2008, so the peak of the Great Recession, and um, took almost a year to sell our house in Massachusetts.
Amy: Wow. So what did you learn about Facebook games and about the free-to-play market? Cause obviously you had this previous experience at least adjacent to free-to-play.
So you got knee deep in that. What was that like?
Steve: Yeah. Well, I mean, it was just a market that was exploding. I mean, the Facebook audience was growing so fast and you could kind of put out almost anything and have it [00:33:00] succeed. And nowadays we kind of talk about the golden cohort. You know that when you put out a game at the very beginning of when that game is released, you're going to attract the customers who are most attuned to whatever that game is.
And if you put out a crappy game, planning to fix it later, you're going to immediately turn off the people who you most or who you least want to turn off. But back in those days, the market was growing so quickly that the kind of golden cohort didn't matter. Because sure, if you kind of put out a game that was still like super rough and A million people played it and got turned off by it.
It didn't matter because another million people were joining Facebook next week and the week after. So, so it really lent itself to just getting stuff out as quickly as possible and kind of polishing it and adding features later. Also, there was such an interesting dynamic between Playdom and Zynga, which were the top two companies in the market.
[00:34:00] And pretty much the platum attitude was just look at everything that Zynga does and then just do the same thing because they have like five times as many people and resources as we have. And so they're presumably A B testing and kind of making all the right decisions about everything.
And therefore, why should we waste time kind of reinventing the wheel? Just look at what they're doing and copy it. And later when I would talk to.
Amy: How'd that work out?
Steve: Well, later when I would talk to people at Zynga, they were like, Oh no, we didn't know what we were doing. We were just like, basically...right.
And so anyone copying us was, it was ridiculous because you know, we were as much clueless as you were.
Amy: There's a lesson for you. It's so common. You really don't know just by looking at your competitors moves. They could be doing a bunch of really stupid stuff fueled with VC money, for instance.
Steve: Yup, yup. And similar story actually at my next stop, which was GSN where I was primarily working on social [00:35:00] casino and management at GSN were not games people.
I mean, we were owned by the TV company. Game show network and they were TV people, not games people. And pretty much their attitude was very similar to Playdom's. And in, in this case, the market leader was Playtika and they would say, just look at Slotomania and do whatever they're doing. And the problem with that is pretty much they had 10 times as many people as we had.
And so looking at anything that they launched and then trying to do the same thing would mean we'd be doing it a year later with a fraction, as many people on a fraction, as much money behind it. And so therefore it wouldn't be as good. And it would be like way behind the curve in terms of players in the market being exposed to it.
So it was just such a losing strategy. And I was constantly saying, look at things like the big successes of the time, like Candy Crush. They didn't get to be a big success by like [00:36:00] imitating someone else. They got to be a big success by carving out an entire new genre, in the case of Candy Crush, the sort of saga formula of having level after level and a progression to make you feel like you were sort of on a journey when you were really just advancing from level to level.
Amy: And beautifully tuned game design.
Steve: That helps.
Amy: Wow, so, so many lessons there. And you also ended up working at King.
Steve: Yes. Then that was my next stop after GSN. So basically the main product at GSN was GSN Casino, which at one point was a top 10 mobile game on both Android and on iOS. And instead of adding more features, basically management just wanted us to add more slots.
And, and yeah, really just more slots. I mean, we had other games in it like bingo, like video poker. I'd say ironically, the death knell was when we launched our most successful slot game within [00:37:00] GSN casino, which was based on the most successful slot in land based casinos, which is called Buffalo. So I forget what our game was called.
I think American Buffalo, something like that, but it was basically an imitation of that game and it did terrifically like it was making, I don't know, $300,000 a day. No, wasn't quite that much because the whole app was making maybe 5 million a day. Yeah, it might've been making $300,000 a day. So it represented kind of a big bump in revenue.
And, and that wasn't surprising because it was an imitation of the most successful slot in the real world. But management said, Oh, that was great. Okay. Keep doing that like every month. Well, there's only one. Best performing slot in the world to imitate, right? There's, there's one of those things you just can't repeat a second time.
And we could obviously go down the list and imitate the second most successful slot and the third most successful slot, but obviously with diminishing results. Anyway, so they got increasingly Impatient. And they, again, were [00:38:00] constantly bringing up the example of Playtika and saying, Oh, Playtika does most of their development in Ukraine, where they can get it done much cheaper than us doing it in Boston or in San Francisco.
So let's buy a development studio in Ukraine and do all our development there. And one difference is that Platyka had been doing that for a while, so they had a lot of expertise at doing that. And secondly, they're based in Israel, and so they're in the same time zone as Ukraine, as opposed to being eight hours away or nine hours away from it.
Anyway, so, basically, they just started dismantling the teams in Boston and San Francisco and moving more and more development to places like India and Ukraine. And not surprisingly, GSN Casino has disappeared off the charts.
Amy: So that didn't work out so well for them.
Steve: Which was all a preamble to you asking, so you went to work at King.
So that, that was a pretty interesting stop. Basically, King brought me on to spin up a new [00:39:00] studio in San Francisco to work on games for messaging platforms, which at that point were brand new. iMessage on Apple had just introduced games within the messaging platform for the first time, and Facebook was just about to introduce.
Games that they called instant games to their messaging platform. And so King kind of felt, Oh, this could be like the next big thing. And so let's create a new studio to, to explore that space. So I spent a year putting together a small studio of about a dozen people. And we looked at both of those platforms at Apple and at Facebook, and at the time, both platforms were absolutely horrible in terms of the user experience and the user interface and kind of how buried they were and how hard it was to get into games.
But the difference was, it seemed like Apple was Not investing any more into the platform and Facebook was investing a lot into the platform. So that was where we kind of [00:40:00] concentrated our efforts and we made a few games. And at 1st, all of our efforts were on making games that we thought would be highly social because we thought.
Isn't that kind of the whole raison d'etre of the platform? And in fact, as we launched our first few games on Successfully and looked at what was being successful, they were games without any socialness to speak of. And they were just all the usual suspects. Match three and solitaire and words with friends and chess.
And the only socialness to speak of tended to be just like a leaderboard of daily scores or lifetime scores. So for our third game. We actually made a video poker game, just a totally vanilla video poker game. And that was like so much more successful than the first two games that we had done. And about the only thing that was interesting about it was tuned, unlike real video poker machines, it was tuned so that it would return greater than 100 percent of your bet.
It would return [00:41:00] 125 percent of your bet or so. So instead of your Bankroll shrinking over time, the more and more you played, the more your bankroll would grow. So essentially your bankroll became your spot on the leaderboard.
Amy: But no cash out?
Steve: No cash out. No, no, you weren't putting money in or getting money out.
Amy: Yeah. It's all play money.
Steve: And our plan was that eventually you would be able to invest that money in buying more machines with even higher return rates, et cetera. But then basically what happened was the market wasn't really developing into anything with any appreciable revenue. And then really the death knell was you couldn't have IAP.
On either iOS or on Google. So basically, Facebook was an app on both of those platforms. And basically, by the rules of both platforms, you couldn't have. A store within a store. So Facebook was negotiating with both Apple and with Google to allow them to have [00:42:00] IAPs within instant games. And they were basically, basically they said, we're not getting anywhere with Apple.
So that's probably not going to happen, but it's probably going to happen on Google. And they're going to take a cut just like they do with IAPs. in regular apps on Google, but we're not going to take anything because we're just interested in creating a good platform and a good experience for the users.
So they negotiated a deal with Google and then they announced the deal is done and Google is going to take 30%. And then we're going to take 30 percent of the remainder. So whatever like little possibility there was of this being a financially interesting space was completely torpedoed by that. And so King just shut down the effort.
And laid off my team. And in fact, just a couple of months after that, they ended all North American game development completely.
Amy: Interesting. Boy, there's a lot of learning in that. So for those who [00:43:00] don't know, IAP.
Steve: In-app purchases.
Amy: Yeah. So, Steve's story really make points out, but the dynamics around mobile app stores, Google and Apple mobile app stores really determine business models.
Right. Then back to the gold thread of modernization. I think we ended with a gold thread, right? At Playdom, you really dug into free-to-play modernization models, right?
Steve: Well, I mean, pretty much the whole history of free-to-play is sort of perfecting those modernization models. And there was always a. Kind of an ideal of the idea of free-to-play with retail.
If you're selling something for $40, the idea is if someone doesn't value your game at $40, then you're going to get 0 from them. And if someone values your game at way more than $40. You still only get $40 from them. And so the idea [00:44:00] with free-to-play is if someone values your game at $2, that's how much you'll get from them.
And if they value it at $40, that's how much you'll get from them. And if they value it at a thousand dollars, that's how much you'll get from them. And so if you kind of think of that as area under a curve in normal retail, you're just getting that. One box in the corner, whereas in free-to-play, theoretically, you're getting everything under the curve.
But the way it turned out as the years went by is things quickly developed into a model where all you really cared about were as, as they're termed in the free-to-play industry, the whales, the people who spending huge amounts of money, the 100th of 1 percent of players who give you the lion's share of all your revenue.
And so games are tuned for that tiny percentage of players and otherwise the only tuning for the rest of players is just to kind of keep them around hoping that maybe they'll turn into one of those whales.
Amy: So what's next? I [00:45:00] mean, what models of monetization do you think we're moving into?
Steve: Oh, I don't see it changing.
I mean, free-to-play is just so successful. I mean, free-to-play games make, you know, far more money than pay to play games. And we've seen that in the app store where once they started allowing free-to-play games, and that goes back 10 years ago or so, within a few years. free-to-play games have just completely crowded pay to play games off the App Store almost entirely.
Amy: Yeah, it's interesting. I know a lot of people really don't like the feeling that friction's always being created so that there can be money, and they want a different experience. But, yeah, it's hard to break out of something that's so successful.
Steve: Yeah, and, I have always hoped that there would be games which would monetize more democratically, that would get a much smaller amount of money from a much wider player base, and in fact, I made that the challenge for [00:46:00] the Game Design Challenge at the free-to-play Summit this past March, try to design a game which would, the lion's share of its revenue from people giving you 5 or less, but I didn't really feel like any of the Proposals really met my goal of coming up with a new, I don't even know what to call it, a new psychology for free-to-play companies, a new paradigm that would really kind of turn that, that whale hunting on its head.
Amy: Tells you what a hard problem it is.
Steve: It is.
Amy: I mean, the thing is, there's another industry that uses the term whale.
Steve: Casino.
Amy: That's right.
Steve: Yeah, that's where it comes from.
Amy: A lot of the incentives make it devolve into a casino dynamic, right? And so you want to break out of that. You first have to realize that's the dynamic you're in, right? But I think it's an interesting question to pose. Like, what could that be? I'll tell [00:47:00] you, what did a pretty good job of monetizing a much broader player base is League of Legends, which isn't casual, but I was astonished when I saw like 40 percent of the player base monetized.
So that's really interesting. It's different. It's a more, you know, mid core I'd say game hardcore for some, but you know, it's a really interesting thread, but there's a couple of things I want to make sure I asked you about. Really looking at patterns across the teams you've worked with, because you've evolved from a tester to a designer to really a leader, right?
And what are some of the common mistakes that you see game teams, particularly first time game teams, making in the early stages? When their bring their ideas to life.
Steve: No I think the biggest one is just not killing ideas, just going with an idea after it has shown that it's not working and just pouring more time in and pouring more money into it and, and [00:48:00] it ends up dying.
A year later instead of a month, you know, in when it became obvious that it was not an idea that was working. And so, yeah, I think it's a matter of teams kind of falling in love with their baby and it's, it is very hard to do to say this isn't working, let's kill it. But that is the number one mistake.
Amy: That is such good advice. And so if you're talking to a first time game designer or junior game designer who's really eager to build a compelling product and not really sure of the best approach, what's one piece of advice you could give them? I know it's not everything, but they're sitting in front of you.
What's one piece of advice?
Steve: Well, particularly for kind of today's mobile market, which is where my head has been now for many years, is I kind of think about the right amount of innovation and making games that are just a clone of something that's already out there is not a recipe for success. [00:49:00] And.
Making a game that's sort of wildly innovative may be a recipe for success, but with a super, super low hit rate. And I feel like unless, you know, you're planning on having lots and lots of shots on goals, you, you really want to maximize your chance of having a success with a very few number of shots on goals.
And the way to do that is sort of finding the real sweet spot. Of having a little bit of innovation, still a lot of familiarity, a good example might be homescapes or gardenscapes really, which came before homescapes of taking a very well known and very well loved genre and in terms of match three, and then combining that with a decorative metagame that felt very new.
And so that was, I think, a good example of having enough familiarity that people could pick up the game and. and not feel like they kind of had to learn too much to know how to play it, but enough knew that it did feel like something new [00:50:00] and not just a clone of Candy Crush or other successful match three games of its time.
Amy: Just enough innovation.
Steve: Right, the Goldilocks effect.
Amy: The Goldilocks and what was it you said? The golden cohort.
Steve: The golden cohort, meaning the players who are destined to be your best players tend to be the players who find the game first. They don't have to see the ad 20 times. The first time they see the ad, they're like, I'm in.
Amy: Yeah. That's such a great lesson. This was such a great hangout and chat. Thank you for joining us.
Steve: You're so welcome.
Outro: Thanks for listening to getting2alpha with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast [00:51:00] episodes.