Seth: [00:00:00] Some of, I think the biggest failures we've seen in the last 12 to 18 months, they're games that just had no audience, no one cared. And they waited way, way, way long to announce it. And it's like, oh my God, you've waited so long. Do people even, you know, want this? It's not that like they came out and they got super low scores and, and therefore it's like, no, they come out and they like do okay.

They get a seven outta 10, but no one buys it. 'cause there's no audience for it. No one's excited.

Alex: That was Seth Sivak, the founder of Developer Proletariat. They got bought by Blizzard a few years ago. Good for him. Talking about how, hey, don't wait too long to release your game. You might find out people don't want it better to find that out at the beginning than at the end. You 

Aaron: know what I mean? Yeah.

That was interesting. You know what he means? Yeah. That was a very interesting comment, and we had another comment like that from another guest that we haven't released yet, and the [00:01:00] conversations are kind of blurring, you know. Oh, oh, come on. No, hold on. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna mug the waters here. I'm just saying that like, I'm not gonna mention what the other, the other guest said.

It makes 

Alex: it sound like you can't keep stuff straight, Aaron. 

Aaron: No, I'm saying that there is a pattern, there's a lot of data coming in and there's patterns and, okay. Yeah, and that's really interesting too, this like 12 to eight months, 12 to 18 months, no audience and no one cared. I mean, you kind of feel it in the air, right?

Isn't that weird? It's a weird time, man. What you get me like this? There is steam in this conversation. Where is it? Where is it? I'll explain it to you. It's a very touchy situation 'cause we have friends that are making games right now. We have friends that are getting laid off. We have friends that are losing funding.

We have friends that are releasing games and no one's playing them. You know, like 

Alex: mm-hmm, mm-hmm. 

Aaron: I have felt this [00:02:00] three times, four times in my career. And maybe that's just 'cause I've been in the industry for a long enough time and I think it's normal. But I think this next stage of the industry is gonna be so crazy.

It's not the same of as going from PS two to PS three, which is what happened, right? Like at every, every console generation it, there is this like dead zone and then the doldrums go away, the wind picks up. And everyone just forgets, you know what 

Alex: I'm saying? No, I know what you mean. I mean, there's cycles.

There's cycles everywhere. Yeah. Sometimes those cycles are in sync. Sometimes they're out a phase. Things go up, things go down. People's tastes change. Uh, you know, the new guard, the young folks generous, thank goodness they come up and yeah, new ideas and do new things. But I don't know if this is what you're kind of getting at, that the moment that we're in right now is a little different from previous cycles because it's almost like a perfect storm of things that are just making it really challenging for [00:03:00] the industry in general, especially here in North America where there are a lot of game developers.

They're all expensive, 

Aaron: but it's not just games, right? Like it's everything. Like I think it, I think games is just like one element. It's almost like, yeah, we're seeing it in other parts 

Alex: of entertainment as well. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, like sports. Okay, so we're, so we're recording this right after our summer break.

Hey, welcome back from summer break. Aaron. Nice to see you segue. How nice is it that we, that we, uh, picked a downer quote, no offense to Seth. He's a, I don't, it's quote, it's such a huge smile on his face through the whole conversation we had with him. But in any case, Colbert show just got canceled last night.

Yeah. See like that. And that's related, I think. Yeah. It's, I think it's related to the, to just the explosion in channels and choice and content. I was thinking about this. They were, I was listening Toper this morning and they were talking about Colbert being canceled. They were talking about the history.

He's not the first, [00:04:00] right? Yeah. Well, they were, and they were talking about Carson and then the, the transitions from the Carson era to the Letterman era and how. Those shows pre-internet were sort of like the way us as a community would experience the day together. And if it's not like that anymore, I mean, it was like that then because you didn't have information hitting you constantly all the time.

But now you do. 

Aaron: Well you have targeted information now too, like with Purpose Target. 

Alex: Yes. And these platforms, like they don't pay for any of this con, I mean, maybe some of them Netflix plays for pays for content. Yeah. But TikTok Instagram, it's, we're all giving that content up for free and they're, you know, how much money, fucking money Meta is making.

You know, selling the ads. But it's s 

Aaron: too like, it's like the, 

Alex: it's not, I mean that's the whole reason it works. It's the whole reason it works is because it's all algorithmic. Yeah, you're right. There's definitely some steam in this topic, Aaron. 

Aaron: Yeah, [00:05:00] there is. It's a good conversation and I don't think it's a downer.

I think it's more of like the bush is shaking and there's something in the bush. You're right, 

Alex: I should get off my rant horse. It's change, it's evolution. It's definitely 

Aaron: change. And I think that, but I think this, this next change is going to be so complex that we are not gonna handle it well, I don't think no one's gonna handle it well.

I think it's gonna be very, very, very good. Well, you 

Alex: may, you might be right. You might, you know, usually I think you're in sort of conspiracy land, but, all right, well thank you for sticking with us through our first intro back after vacation. No. Stretching those legs out. Getting the muscle memory going against.

Nice to be back. Good to see Aaron. 

Aaron: Yeah, likewise. 

Alex: Hope you enjoy our conversation with Seth cvac. I've known Seth for many years. Totally cool. She'll do hope you enjoy the conversation. Welcome to the fourth Curtain Friends. Today we are joined by someone I've known for many years [00:06:00] from his days as founder and CEO of Proletariat.

Seth Vac. Seth, how are you? I'm doing great. Excited to be here. You look great. You know, I appreciate that. Yeah. You got a big smile and you Its color. Looks good. I You got a nice webcam and standing stand up desk here. 

Seth: That's good. Gotta have energy for the podcast. Yeah. So I just figured I'd stand out.

Alex: It's good energy. Um, proletariat started in 2012, and I remember this because it was around the same time we were launching Industrial Choice and you guys got your start on mobile as well, but like smart people shifted focus to the PC eventually releasing spell break in 2020 and then getting bought by Blizzard where Seth went on to become the VP of a tiny little game called World of Warcraft.

Nice run. And I know you did a few sizable funding rounds in there. Did you get to like a C round? Yeah, we ended at one point, ended 

Seth: up raising five rounds of funding technically. Yeah. So we raised [00:07:00] high round funding. We raised, uh, the, the biggest one was, um, take two lead in 2019. That was a $20 million round at a hundred million free.

Alex: Wow. Wow. Okay. Good for you. Good for you. Um. Yes. Uh, I also recently discovered your Blog Boss Battles. I don't, and I found a substack. There's a blog, but I think you have your own site. I, I don't know exactly how, what is the website? Is that a thing? You, you, you, you're pretty prolific. You're like, do you write on that every week or what?

Seth: I, I wouldn't say prolific, but I, so I've been doing it for almost a year now. Um, and, and yeah, writing every week. And I had all these notes that I had taken over time of, from starting Proletariat. And I always told myself I should like, write these as blog posts, just so I had them for myself to look back on, um, if I wanted to do this again or if I like, wanted to learn some of these lessons.

And it's actually been incredibly helpful to, to, to write it out. So yeah, I've been doing it every week for almost a year. And what's the URL? It's just uck.com. But also there's a Substack and I post it to LinkedIn as well these days. [00:08:00] Oh, cool. 

Alex: Yeah, right on. Lots of interesting stuff about team culture, leadership, things that we chat about quite a bit on this podcast.

So thank you for being with us. Great to see you. What have you been up to? 

Seth: Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, since I left Blizzard, I had been working on doing some advising and, and some consulting work, and that's been really fun. It's interesting, and you've probably experienced this, Alex, I think you've, you've gone through the entrepreneurial journey a few more times than me, I think.

Um, but there's, you know, I don't know how long industrial toys was, but the proletariat experience was almost 10 years. It was nine and a half till we sold, and then I ended up staying almost two 11 years. Um, when you count all my time at Blizzard as well, and. It has been really interesting to, to come out of that experience and the idea of like, jumping in to start a company is terrifying to me 'cause it took 10 years to sell, to build and finish like, you know, the proletariat era.

And, and so I've been enjoying actually doing a variety of different projects and actually being an individual contributor a bit again. I mean, when I was at Blizzard I was working with, [00:09:00] and even at Proletariat, like really large teams, you know, hundreds of people and it's been fun to kind of get my hands dirty on some stuff, work with some teams very closely, work with some startups very closely and, and so that's been incredibly rewarding.

Alex: Awesome. What, what is your background like when you start proletariat? Like, were you like entrepreneur, engineer, designer, all the above. 

Seth: My undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering and I went to grad school for computer science and so I started as a like gameplay and graphics programmer predominantly doing design and, and programming at a really small startup that was called Conduit Labs.

And that was a. Uh, we were doing social music games on the open web. It was like, you know what if you did a music version of Puzzle Pirates was kind of some of the idea. Huh? And this is before Facebook. That's a good games. I know this is before Facebook games were really, were really big. And, and so then we pivoted to Facebook games and we made a game called Music Pets, which was kind of what you would expect.

It was like Pandora, but you'd feed your pet music and it would bring [00:10:00] you back more music that you liked. And that got enough traction early on in Facebook for Zynga to acquire the company. And so we became Zynga Boston. And so at that point, I moved. They didn't really know what to do with me. They were like, you're an engineer and a designer.

You can be one or the other. And I was that, that kind of broke my brain. And our CEO at the time was like, Seth, you should become a product manager. And I was like, I don't know what that is. But that was the black magic voodoo that, you know, that Zynga was bringing to the game space. And, and I thought that that would be a good thing to learn.

And so I got my product management education on Mafia Wars and Cafe World during the kind of like heyday of those games. Cafe World was 8 million DAU or something at the time. And that was the, the amount I learned in six weeks as a, as you know, on on as a product manager. Writing daily reports on Cafe World was just a tremendously valuable education on product management.

Alex: Wow, that's super fascinating. Can we pause there for a second because I would love to get your opinion, point of view, perspective, whatever, on what is a product manager? I know that's kind of like [00:11:00] maybe the most simplistic question, like it's a new-ish role. 

Aaron: Yeah, that's kind of where they started. Like the Facebook Zynga, 

Alex: right.

Yeah. And I think, yeah, ZY probably one of the originators of that role. Maybe Scopely one of the perfectors of that role, but it seems to mean something different. And for those of you who aren't like hands-on making games as a job, like how would you simply describe it and then how would you sort of like describe that education that you got, like how to change the way you think, et cetera?

Seth: In a lot of ways, product managers, I think are very similar to designers, but they're often a bit more of a combination of. Designer meets project manager and at Zynga, they were responsible for the success and failure of a of a given feature. The idea was like the product managers are the CEOs of features, so they would like own entire features end-to-end.

So you were shipping typically every week or every other week at Zynga. And so you often were working on three features at a given time. So you were [00:12:00] analyzing the last feature, developing the current feature, and planning the next feature at a given time. And so it was sort of a crazy, like the pace that product managers needed to work, it was like really crazy 

Aaron: pipeline.

Yeah. And when you say feature, you mean like mechanics to bring the player back? Mechanics to hold the player for like a certain amount of time. Like these kinds of features. 

Alex: Yeah. You, you remember anywhere that's like, oh, this is the greatest feature I did. Yeah. 

Seth: You would see all sorts of crazy, I mean, like, there, there were so many lessons that I learned while I was at Zynga, just like kind of wild behavior and, and kind of how, how people would play games the way, the way it would work.

And one of my other favorite examples is the poker team added the ability, so, so the way original Zynga Poker worked on Facebook is like you would put money in, but you could never take your chips back out. There was no real money component. So you'd buy chips and you'd use them to whatever to accrue them, but you could never, there was no way to, to get the money back out.

They added this mechanic where you could tip the dealer because that's just something you would like do in real life. [00:13:00] People would just tip a dealer if they had a good hand. You're just giving your money away to Zynga and people would do it. And, and it was like an astoundingly good w check. And it was, it was because it just modeled real life behavior.

And we saw this as well with like CSR racing where people would spend money on things that would, they attributed value to in real life, even though it was in the game. I'm not a big car person, but they were really into some of the car pieces and I was amazed that some would do way better than others.

And it turned out that those were just the more expensive parts. In real life. People would just be like, oh, of course this should be more expensive. And so it was really interesting to see how mapping to real life behavior would impact the behavior of what players would do 

Aaron: it Really exciting. Yeah. I bet you they thought they were getting better cards.

Like if you tip the dealer, I swear I always get pairs, you know? You know, like little things like that. I mean, there's all sorts of 

Seth: superstition, but 

Alex: that's how Vegas really works. Yeah, yeah. All right, so you kind of started the startup that gets bought by Zynga, but before that, were you at Carnegie [00:14:00] Mellon?

Were you in that, that entertainment technology Jesse Shell program? 

Seth: Yep, exactly. Yeah, so I, I was part of that program. Um, from 2007 to 2009, I pitched a project there. That we were working on. It was actually a a a a we game. We were building a game. We hacked, we moats, so we didn't have weev kits. We hacked, we moats and a dance pad, and we were making an active adventure, what we called an active adventure, which the, the whole purpose was to make a, to make an exercise game that didn't suck was our goal.

And so we built this over a couple of semesters and we actually submitted it to IGF in 2009 and we were in the student showcase. And that was one of my first experiences going to GPCI think. Then in between my first and second year, that summer, I, I worked in Imagineering, so I was in the creative technology group in Imagineering doing a lot of like 3D graphics work and pre-visualization and things like that.

It was, it was so cool. We got to work on a wide variety of projects for, you know, I worked on Radio Springs Racers, toy Story, midway Mania, a bunch of projects [00:15:00] Oh, nice. For the, um, for the cruise ships, things like that. 

Alex: Midway Mania was that, was that Jesse's game, was that Jesse's show? Mm-hmm. Yeah. He he did that.

Yeah. Yep. Exactly. So cool. We we're a big fan of Jesse's, uh, that program. We've had folks come, you know, work in our studio, obviously did use good service and you sort of get this PM education, project manager education at Zynga. But then after, I guess the shutdown, is that when Proletariat started, like how, what was sort of the genesis of starting your own studio there?

Seth: Yeah, so we did the acquisition into Zynga. We flew out and we all lived in San Francisco. There's only 12 of us as part of the acquisition. The company was really small. We, we did that, you know, kind of immersive onboarding. And then we all went back to Boston and we started to work on a game there. And I moved, actually, I, I stayed on as a product manager for about nine months, but then I became the lead designer of the project we were doing at Zinga Boston.

Which was what? What 

Alex: project was that? Yeah, 

Seth: so that was Indiana Jones Adventure World. 

Alex: Oh, that's cool. 

Seth: So after that I moved on to a different project [00:16:00] and so I moved into an executive producer role. With 20 person team that was on a mobile title. And I remember we had this little prototype that everyone in the office was playing this mobile prototype.

And I really wanted to move it through Greenlight faster because I was, I, I felt like we could launch it in three months, but though Greenlight process at Zynga was, took at least six months to get any of this stuff done. And I remember there was this huge spreadsheet and I just took it upon myself to go through every single line and just see how much faster I could move it.

It's like, oh, legal needs 12 weeks to approve. I would go find the person legal and be like, Hey, could you do this in six? And and so it was just this, this kind of constantly trying to move through to get it to actually ship. So we were, we were caught by surprise during the layoffs. So we, I'd started to have a couple of conversations with some of the proletariat founders because right around this time, heyday and Clash had shipped.

Uh, you know, when you saw these mobile games, you saw the growth of tablet gaming. We thought you could make these games with a really small team. We were building [00:17:00] this game internally at Zynga with a pretty small team compared to what the investment Express games. You know, at the time, Citigo was a hundred, 150 people.

We were doing this with a really small team. We'd started prototyping this original game with two people. Um, and so, so we felt, hey, maybe this is good, but then I got promoted and I didn't wanna leave right away. And so we would kind of put it on ice and then the layoffs happened, and so that, that gave us all three months of severance incentive that we could stretch to six.

And, and so we felt like if we couldn't, we didn't have healthcare by six months in, we would go find jobs. So that was, that was the way we approached it. 

Alex: Right on. Sounds familiar. Yeah, that's what we did, right? Alex? I don't feel so good. I gotta go to the 

Seth: doctor. Hang in there. It's funny because I think, um, you know, in some ways we, when we shipped our first mobile game, um, Zynga actually hit us up, uh, on the corp dev side and wanted to meet with us, but at the time, everyone had turned over so they didn't know the genesis of the proletariat team, [00:18:00] so they didn't know who we were.

And it was just funny because I kind of wanted to go to the meeting and be, Hey, you guys seed funded this, our, you know, with the severance, we, you seed funded the, um, you know, our, our first project. So, um, but yeah. 

Alex: So did you basically bootstrap your first game? Or when did you, like, did you raise money right out of the, the game?

Were you thinking, Hey, this is like a, a scalable VC backable enterprise here? Or were you just like, I, let's just make a game? Which it was, it was. I mean, I, uh, 

Seth: do 

Alex: you remember? 

Seth: Yeah, no. Which game wasn't you? I do remember. So this was World Domination was our first moment, world, world Domination. Um, and I think we, Alex we met just after that because I think you guys were working on your first mm-hmm.

Um, title at Industrial Toys and we got introduced from some mutual friends or something at some point, I think. But yeah, so in, we got laid off in October of 2012. We started the company in November and I didn't know what, I didn't know. I just started to talk to folks that I knew from the gaming side.

There was a cohort of other. Ex [00:19:00] Zynga founders starting studios. You know, Mike Verdu had started a studio, which I don't know, Alex, if you know Mike. 

Alex: Oh yeah. Mike was one of my, like six bosses at EA that I had over the course of like nine months. 

Seth: Yeah. 'cause he, 'cause he led, he led mobile at a while there, right?

Twice, two different times. Um, two different tours. That's great. Yeah. Um, but, but Mike was a, was a, was you know, was one of those. And I've reached out to a few folks just to ask how should we go about this? And, and at the time there were no game investors that didn't exist from a venture capital side.

Mobile was the wild west. We started talking to whoever we could, but at the same time we wanted to ship a couple of small projects by ourselves just to build our muscle again with the five of us. 'cause we had all the components we needed. Four of the five founders were engineers, and the fifth one was our art director.

And so the five of us, we started to make this thing called hug the sloth. Which was, this is a Jesse Shell thing, but one of the things they teach you at Carnegie Mellon is they have this concept of a gold spike, which is the gold spike is what you they use to [00:20:00] connect the Intercontinental Railroad. And the idea was that you wanted to get every piece of the pipeline in place.

So for us, we wanted to build and ship a mobile game that had one in-app purchase, one push notification, one Facebook login, one timer. Every single, single thing we thought would be part of the game that we wanted, uh, the bigger game we wanted to make. And so this game was exactly what it sounds like. You would log in and you would.

You, if the sloth needed a hug, you would hug it and then it would be a random amount of time until you could hug it again. There were in-app purchases where you could purchase hats for your sloth, and we had to go through all the process of getting a done in Bradstreet number and an Apple, you know, account to be able to ship and actually launch this thing on iOS.

And, and that was super valuable just to, for us to build all the muscle to do, to do. Oh, yeah. Then we started to work on a slightly bigger game. Right on. Okay. 

Alex: Can we pause there for a second? Because this idea, the golden spike and your approach to laddering up your capabilities is super fascinating. Yeah, it's 

Aaron: fantastic.

Alex: Yeah. The golden [00:21:00] spike, that's a thing, huh? I've never heard that phrase before. Yeah, I never heard it that way. 

Seth: So I, I mean, I, I love it as a concept. It's something that we used, we, we, we tried to do a lot of new things at proletariat. We never really felt constrained, so we would move to different. Even with spell break, we, we treated this the same way, and a lot of it I think comes to building muscle.

We started to ship regularly on spell break incredibly early. We ran a beta that was cross platform between the PlayStation and the PC before we went fully wide with full cross platform cross play. I'm a big believer in the best form of planning is to just do it and build the muscle. And so that was the way we approached it, was to continue to, to try and build our capabilities by, by action.

Um, and I think with, with a, something like a gold spike. Picking something that is small, that is, that is digestible, that is something you can get through quickly. Proves out so much of what you want to do, and allows you to have this near term horizon to know like, okay, we want to, we wanna [00:22:00] try this, we wanna build to the next thing.

And, and at the time we had a bit of this space and, and it's not like we, you know, our first game then we built on top of to go to the next game. Actually, we, we moved from Unity to Unreal in between game one and game two. But I think a lot of the processes, because why not? Because why not? It just made sense.

At the time we were moving from, you know, a, a, a more iso isometric strategy game focused on mobile to, uh, like PC focused third person action game. And so that just made sense to move to Unreal. But, so 

Alex: let, let, let me ask you a couple questions like, 'cause I, I, I do love that we've, we've tried to do similar things.

With the studio that we're in now, I largely because at industrial toys, I think we took two big, uh, we, we took big swings, you know, and taking the small, you learn so much more quickly if you're shipping, you know, were you ever sort of, kind of debating with yourself, like either, is this good enough? Like can we actually release this?

Is this good enough? Does this meaningful enough? Did you ever, were you ever sort of sloth hug [00:23:00] in the debate between that and, Hey, can we make this smaller? You know what I mean? Like this, this thing that we're planning to release, could it have like half the features it has and still be a thing we should release?

Did, were you ever having those debates too big, too small? 

Seth: The sort? Yeah, I think so a bit. But it didn't really come out as this is too big or too small. It was more how quickly can we get feedback on this thing that is either us playing it or other people playing it, or actual. You know, feedback from, you know, data, any of those things.

And I think the interesting thing of going through the cycle with, as a PM at Zynga, where it was so metrics driven, it meant that you ended up with this situation where I think some games came out that that didn't have the right balance. When I think about the, the right way to manage making creative [00:24:00] decisions, creative direction decisions, there's, there's three key components.

There's basically what the team, what the designers want to do, that's like the actual creative direction, what's in their soul, the type of experience they wanna build. Then there's the, the, the qualitative feedback, which is like, what do, what do players tell you they want? Then there's the third piece, which is like, what do they actually do?

Which is the data, right? The quantitative side reality. And I think the right way is balance those, the reality, right? But the question is how quickly can you start to get one of those three pieces? So, so can you start to get feedback from, Hey, we're just trying this ourselves, subject matter experts, that's in like the first bucket.

Can you start to get some small number of play testers in there? They'll tell you what you want. You maybe don't have full tracking and analytics in there. You can't know what that's gonna be. But each one of those things, the closer and closer you get to what you think the final experience needs to be.

The more and more valuable I think you get from the variety of different pieces of feedback that come back to you. But for us it was always a push of how quickly [00:25:00] can we get something out? How quickly can we get something out and then iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it was just all about velocity to iteration.

And that was the way we approached it with spell break. Like when I look back now when we did the pre-alpha for spell break. I'm amazed because there's so much placeholder art, like gray textures, things that weren't in there, but we had tens of thousands of people playing it, and I think that's. That's something that whenever I talk with teams now when I'm advising 'em or whatever, they're like, it's just not ready.

It's not ready for people to see it at, you know? And, and, and I think there's often a tendency to wait way too long. And, and I think it's, you know, especially when you're in a low risk environment, no one knew who we were. No one knew who proletariat was. We released something early. No one's waiting with bated breath for our next thing.

We have to go the opposite direction. We have to make people give a shit. Um, and so in that way, we really need to get it out early, build excitement, do what we can do. And if, if we can't, if we have something that we think is like minimum viable, you know, like, like. [00:26:00] Emotional feedback. Can we get anything?

Can we get a rise outta people? Can we get some excitement? Can we get any interest? The sooner you can start to get to that, the better you can start to build on it, because you don't know how long you're just going in a direction where it's just never gonna work. Like I see some of these games, some of 'em, I think the biggest failures we've seen in the last 12 to 18 months, they're games that just had no audience, no one cared.

And they waited way, way, way long to announce it. And it's like, oh my God, you've waited so long. Do people even, you know, want this? It's not that like they came out and they got super low scores and, and therefore it's like, no, they come out and they like do okay. They get a seven outta 10. But no one buys it.

'cause there's no audience for it. No one's excited. 

Alex: They could have figured that out, you know, in the first couple months, way, way earlier, hopefully $40 million sooner or, or, or in 

Seth: some cases way more than that. Right. Um, so yes, 

Alex: I really like those philosophies right there. I tried to live them. I, I do often ask the question of how much [00:27:00] is, is enough for it to be meaningful?

And I, I mean it sounds like your sort of point of view is as quick as possible, doesn't really matter how small. As quick as you could get something, that's the start of the iteration cycle and that's when things actually start. That's when you're able to act, deliberately move things into a quality direction, is when you can start that iteration cycle.

Yeah. 

Seth: This is one of those things that I think is, is. Maybe a bit more in the, you need a nose for it or some amount of taste for it, which is, it's so hard to break through with games. It's so hard. It's so hard to find a thing that gets people excited. And so if you have some idea on how to do it, how quickly can you test if that key idea, that key innovation, whatever it's gonna be, is exciting enough.

And so we're jumping ahead a little bit in the timeline, but when we were prototyping spell break, one of the things we did is we actually built a battle royale mode into as a mod for do to two before the official Battle Royale mod was [00:28:00] built by valve. It's because we had a bunch of ideas on things we wanted to test with fantasy battle royals, and we got 40,000, 50,000 players.

Val wouldn't give us dedicated servers, and I think it was because they're working on their own version, um, uh, for it as ah, mod, but it was, Hey, we can get a bunch of ideas in here On the core idea we had with Spellbreak was this idea that battle royals are roguelike, multiplayer rogue likes for people who don't play rogue likes.

So how can we build these RPG Roguelike elements into, into some games, like, like Doda? And so we, we built it as a mod because it was way faster to build as a mod, release it, see if we can get an audience engaged, start a discord, start talking with people, get feedback, release a couple of updates, and see it as they're, they're there.

And I think we ended up moving away from it. One, because I think we, we were worried that. Valve could just release their own battle Royal Mod. And if we had to go make our own version of Dota and then, and then go from there, it was gonna be really hard. But a bunch of those ideas we explored [00:29:00] ended up making their way into Spellbreak, like a bunch of the ways we did skill blending and, and a lot of that stuff.

And, 

Alex: and that was intentional. That was like, Hey, we have a thesis around a game idea, and this would be the fastest way for us to kind of test if there's something interesting. 

Seth: We built two prototypes at the same time, so we built the Dota one. So we, we were, we're, we're skipping ahead, but that's fine. We, we, uh, uh, and to go really far with that, like, what is 

Aaron: Baby Tim, I want to go Aaron, Aaron 

Alex: wants to go back to the beginning.

He wants to know like, what you were like in high school. I don't know. I think it's 

Aaron: interesting, like you have all this energy, like we're doing this and we're doing that. It's like, that's awesome. Where, where did Baby Seth get like to that? You know, 

Seth: some people in the game industry, they're like, I came outta the womb holding a controller.

I knew I wanted to make games. Like, that was, that was not me. 

Alex: Okay. 

Seth: I grew up in an age where like, you know, we didn't have consoles in the house until I was in middle school. I think I was in like eighth grade and we got an N 64. It was our first console, but my parents would let us play PC games. So we were [00:30:00] allowed to play all the Lucas Arts games, all the adventure games.

Yeah. 'cause that was the type of stuff my dad was playing. And people, my mom and dad saw that as a little bit more educational than like, doom. We weren't allowed to play shooters, we weren't allowed to do any of that. We could play civilization. I remember spending hours and hours playing civilization.

And I remember But your dad 

Alex: was a gamer. 

Seth: He, he did. He was playing mist. He was playing King's Quest. I remember playing King's Quest with him and things like that. Nice. I remember him bringing home, it was some F1 racing game where we had a racing wheel with like a thumb. You know, you put the mouse on it with the ball and you would like, you know, drive with the wheel.

And this was the, this is the time where. You know, in order to, you can just pass the discs around. And so the way they would do copy protection is you'd have this like paper wheel that you would need to like rotate the, like cipher to figure out the codes or whatever. And he, he brought home one that had clearly been like, photocopied and cut up to like, fit.

And so he obviously did by that piece of software. All right. 

Alex: Dad's the gamer and a pirate. Good to know. So light up, right? Like even smile. So it's, 

Seth: uh, [00:31:00] so good memories. So we, and we, because I grew up with two brothers, we, we would often play almost every game, even if it wasn't multiplayer, multiplayer because we would just like swap the, we'd pass the controller, we'd swap seats, we would do all those things.

You would, you would imagine. Um, and then, you know, the reason why we bought an N 64 instead of like a PlayStation is because there were four of us. So we want, we wanted things with, or three of us. So we wanted things with, with three controllers or more for, for multiplayer. Mm-hmm. 

Alex: Um, 

Seth: gold. Gold eye. Do you guys 

Alex: play Golden eye?

Seth: Tons of good golden eye. Lots and lots of golden eye. Um, you know, Aino time was my first Zelda. Um, and, and, you know, still one of my favorite games of all time without question. Um, I remember spending just hours and hours and hours playing Aino time and trying to find all the golden sculpts. But I, I was, I was interested in games.

I always enjoyed. Playing games and got really into games. You know, as I, as I continued through high school, really into Diablo, Diablo two, StarCraft, all the Blizzard games was very hardcore in World of Warcraft when it came out. I was like a main tank in a [00:32:00] rating guild all throughout my undergraduate time spending, you know, 30, 40, 50 hours a week playing World of Warcraft.

Do you 

Alex: know what an awesome full circle 

Aaron: story story here. What is, so what does that feel like when you're, now you're working on that and you're, you know, like 

Seth: it was fun. It was, it was pretty interesting to sort of see on the inside and get a chance to meet amongst, 'cause there's a lot of people that are currently on the wow team that were, have been on the WOW team, you know?

Yeah. You meet some of the people that are the namesakes of some of the folks that, some of the things that are actually in the game itself. And, and so it was really cool. But I, there were no game degrees didn't exist when I was going to school. My parents were very much like, you know, career focused and so I.

Went into mechanical engineering really with a focus on being an aerospace engineer. And so my undergraduate at Northeastern, Northeastern University is amazing because it allows a co-op program, which I think every university should require, so it makes it a five year program, but you do three six month co-ops, which are basically working full-time.

So you get a chance to one, get a bunch of experience, you're much more likely to come out with a job at the end, but two, you get [00:33:00] to see if you actually like the job. 

Alex: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. And so 

Seth: I spent the first two of them working on Hanscom Air Force Base here out in Massachusetts, in Lexington, mass, um, at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as an optical systems engineer doing defense work.

So I worked on satellites, missile defense, that kind of thing. And I realized I hated it and I wanted to do something more creative. And so that's why I went to Carnegie Mellon for grad school. Okay. 

Alex: Okay. All right. So did, did you end up in Boston because of Northeastern, or did you grow, grow up in, I grew about an hour outside 

Seth: of Boston, um, uh, in, in northern Massachusetts.

But I went to Carnegie Mell with the express goal of becoming an Imagineer. So I got a chance to do the internship at Imagineering, and I think, one, I didn't love living in LA again, it was like a tough time 'cause I was so poor that I, you know, couldn't have really experienced, I think a lot of what LA had to, and I, and I really rented, like, the world's tiniest room.

And also just the timing was really tough. When I, when I was coming outta grad school, I, I had a full-time offer to go to Imagineering, but all my friends at Imagineering were like, don't come here right now [00:34:00] because one, all of the cool projects have been cut because the Great recession Disney World is a once in a lifetime vacation for most people.

So when there's a big recession, it, it would get really heavily hit. So 2008 project 2009. 

Alex: Nine. I graduated 

Seth: in 2009, so I did my internship in 2008 and then graduated in 2009. And so I had a full-time offer, but I didn't take it. And 'cause the advice I was getting from folks was like, go somewhere else for two or three years, then reapply to Disney.

So you can come in at like, not an associate level. That's why, that's why I took my job 

Alex: at Disney was 2009. 

Seth: So you were working in the park stuff though, like, um, so maybe, maybe digital was a bit bit different. Yeah, yeah. Um, although I think it was maybe all under the same umbrella, but, but that, you know, from there I had been doing, you know, been building games at Carnegie Mellon.

I was like, Hey, I could probably do video games, um, even though I really wanted to do location-based entertainment and took an internship at the company at Conduit Labs, which then converted to full-time and that's how I got here. 

Aaron: Okay. Right. Okay. [00:35:00] We'll be right back if you like what you're hearing, like, and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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Joining 

Alex: the IGDA is a great move for your career and as a nonprofit supporting everyone making games. It's a great move for the whole community. Join today and now a. Back to the show. All right, so let's get back to Proletariat and world Domination and, and there were some other games besides World Domination and Spellbreak, right?

There's some in between. There's one in 

Seth: between. Streamline one in between. Yeah. So, 

Alex: yeah, that's right. I remember Streamline, it was like built for like players and, and streaming, right? 

Seth: Yeah. I'll try to pick up where we left off. So in 2013 we, we raised the funding early to May, 2014. We do a geo locked beta for world domination and we're building it out and we're continuing to go and, and I'm learning a bunch of really valuable lessons on.

How the hell you actually network, um, to try and [00:38:00] try and get someone on the Apple editorial team to care about what we're doing. 

Alex: This is a great topic. Like what did you learn? Yeah, because I, a lot of people, Aaron included, are always asking me like, how do you network? Like what, what does it like, make friends and change minds.

What does that, what is that Bush? 

Seth: Yes. Um, uh, to get to like you or something like that. Win friends and influence people. Yeah. Thousand. That's it. That's it. It, it's, it's worth reading like every couple of years. There's some good stuff in there. The advice I would give on networking is, is to try and make yourself valuable.

Like do a favor for someone else first if you possibly can. Like pay it forward as much as possible. And also the, the best advice I can give you is to just show up. It's super awkward. I've been doing this, I've been in the game industry. I was a CEO for 10, 11 years. I still cannot walk up to a group of people that are having a conversation at like a, you know, happy hour and just introduce myself.

I can't do it. Like, it's just so awkward Every time I'm terrible at it. I'm that person who's just gonna like, sit by themselves in the corner and wait for other people to come up to him [00:39:00] so it doesn't get easier. But I, you know, I think the best advice for networking is try to pay it forward as much as possible and just show up.

So if there are events, go to those events and, and, and do the work to actually go get business cards. When we used to give out business cards, I used to come back from GDC with like bags full of business cards from all the meetings I would try to do and all the people I would try to meet. But my, my goal was to try and get some connections at Apple because we wanted to try and get the others' choice.

Um, yeah. And so we showed them what we were building and they ended up coming by. They actually ended up seeing the game earlier that day before we were supposed to go to this dinner. They came by the Amy Mega booth and they were like, this looks so cool. Like, are you coming to our thing tonight? I was like, Hey, I actually got an invite.

That'd be really great. And so I got some of the connection there and then from there, ended up. Talking with them and we, we showed them what we were building and they were like, Hey, we're doing this thing, you know, this new graphics thing called metal, which allows you to do graphics work like directly on the hardware.

And what we were doing with World Domination was these huge flocks of zombies. So it actually was like pretty [00:40:00] intensive. And, and they, they were, they were like, Hey, if you can push this really good, maybe we will, we'll do, you know, we'll do something interesting with you. So they actually ended up putting us, our little proletariat logo was in the Apple keynote that year because we were like one of the game, one of the games working on metal.

And so fast forward a bit to February of 2015 and we, we end up going to ship, uh, world Domination completely. It was a little scary towards the end because Apple had just changed their policies to actually make us pull all the guns out of any of the marketing material, which like, this wasn't a shooter game, but like it was a game where you shot zombies.

But then they ended up letting us through after like 10 days and we got an Apple editor's choice, and then we were the best. Best iPad app of February and that that really accelerated what we were doing with world Domination. But we were really happy. We were like, it was, it was amazing to get that recognition.

I think it helped put us on the map. The problem was, is about that summer, so few five, six months later, we were just watching [00:41:00] CPIs like double, triple, quadruple, like every month. And we knew CPIs we could probably 

Alex: cost per install. Right? So like how much money cost you are paying market Yeah. To get players to.

So 

Seth: we've been able to like really increase LTV, like our lifetime value of our customer. We had done a ton in the nine months. We were in our kind of like, oh, geo locked beta to full release. But we knew we could only really market at super small scales and it would be barely enough to really break even the studio.

And so we thought we should, we should do something else. So we ended up supporting world domination for six, 10 more months, something like that. And moving on to something new. And one of the things we did in early 2015 that was, that was really interesting is we were partnering with these YouTube influencers who were creating content.

They weren't even called influencers at the time. This is like pre the influencer era, I feel like. And we would have them put an affiliate link for the game below the videos they were making, and we would pay them a quarter per [00:42:00] install for those installs that came through that link. And these would be.

Customers that we'd make 15, 20, $30 on. And that was super small scale. 'cause you have to do individual contracts with individual YouTubers. And I remember explaining to our lawyer what a YouTuber was in 2015, which was actually harder than you would think. Um, and, but we saw this opportunity with this shared influencer ecosystem and really how can games distribute themselves?

How can you build games that are also these content creation tools? And so we ended up, and also at the time Twitch plays Pokemon exploded. And we, we were looking at this and we thought this, this could be something really cool. What if you did a shared experience where you had a live streamer? An audience and a bunch of players all in one shared entertainment experience.

And so we started to build Streamline. Um, and so Streamline was a 16 player sort of arena sports game. You would, you would kind of do this parkour running around as a big game of tag. So the influencer was the [00:43:00] person who was it, their job would be to go and like Cat, like hit the other players. The other players would be dodging and, and jumping and trying to collect all these different points as they were running around.

And then the audience would do things like vote for modifiers. They would like put in slow motion or like, you know, other changes. And so they'd be voting, they would like make bets. The thing that people actually love the most is the, the influencer would get badges, like if they got like a double hit on two different players, like a double kill, they would get this badge and they would play bingo with the badges.

Alex: Yeah. And 

Seth: this was all integrated into a website we built as a viewing website for it. 

Alex: Super cool. That's cool. 

Seth: And so that ended up getting enough attention from Amazon. We ended up being the first game to, to be part of Twitch Prime. So you would get spell break for free via Twitch Prime. We were also the first game stream, available stream for Streamline was Right.

We, we would also be the first game that was available, um, to buy on Twitch. So people don't really remember this 'cause it was [00:44:00] a, a short period of time, but Amazon was trying to compete with Valve and they built this whole store on top of Twitch with this idea that like you'd give the influencers some small cut of the money.

They would be able to like feature the games as a buy button underneath and you would like buy it. They, they'd acquired Curse and they built their own launcher. That's right. 

Alex: I remember that. 

Seth: And so all of this happened in October of 2016 and it was a disaster. Like the launcher didn't really work when it launched.

They had like lost the major deal they wanted and they ended up going with just this smaller Hearthstone deal, which didn't drive anywhere near enough people. They told us their low bar estimate of the number of people that were gonna, that were installing, that were gonna install and to streamline. The first month was gonna be 500,000.

We were like, okay, cool. We'll cut that in half and have that be our target so we'll, we'll, we'll estimate 250,000. It ended up being like 16,000, so it was less than 5% of their target. And so we were, we were, we were like, we're done. We're gonna run outta money. Like we, you know, 'cause we, we, we did this as a small [00:45:00] minimum guarantee and then like, pushed more for royalty ownership and we couldn't launch on steam.

'cause you needed, we ended up launching on Steam eventually, but like, you needed a Twitch account. And so we were getting these terrible reviews on Steam. 'cause people were like, why do I have to do this with Twitch? Um, uh, and so anyway, so that, that led us to, to kind of like the very first true near death experience with Proletariat.

We ended up experiencing several others along the way, but that was the first one where we ended up, um, you know, we, we had about si five, six months of runway and, and we had to figure out what to do to try and, you know, to try and, uh, uh, company. How'd you navigate that? 

Alex: That's, I mean, that's not uncommon.

Many startups run into those situations where they get to a funding crunch. How, how, how, what, what'd you do? 

Seth: Uh. Uh, it was, it was a, it was a very difficult, like, you know, in all seriousness, it was a, it was a very difficult time. Like, I'm, I'm not gonna lie, I think have, 

Alex: have you ever gotten down to one month?

Seth: We have been that close. We have been close enough where it's been, Hey, [00:46:00] you know, our investors came in to give us a bridge where we had a signed term sheet and it was gonna be, you know, we, we were gonna be tight on the next, the next paycheck. Um, uh, and so we, we have been there, um, basically every year from 27, 20 18 through 2022.

When we sold, we, we had some point where we were like, less than two months of runway. Which is just very scary, 

Alex: stressful. It's giving me anxiety right now. It's amazing. Your hair's not gray. Oh, it's the headset. The headset hides it. You still have it though, so, um, yeah, so, so, okay. So you have this first, this near, you know, you have these expectations with this big deal with Amazon.

It's like, Hey, we're riding high, and then things don't quite go the way you want. And, and now you're, you're looking down the barrel and you're like, okay, we are gonna have to figure something out. Like what was your, how did you navigate through that? 

Seth: It was literally just shake every treat possible was, was my approach.

And so I remember [00:47:00] I was sort of, this happened in, in October, early October. I flew out to Amazon in late October, and I was like, Hey guys, you need to help us. And they're like, Nope, we're not helping you. We're actually moving away from this. We're shutting this whole thing down in 60 days. And I was like, okay.

Um, so then, so then I was like, all right, I don't know what to do. And I was, we did a board meeting and the board was like, I don't know, maybe see if you could get acqui hired somewhere. We, we don't really know. Um, and I was like, all right, well, let's, let's try to figure this out. And so I remember it was Thanksgiving and my wife and I decided to like go away for a couple of days before Thanksgiving.

And we, we ended up going on a trip up to Montreal and I spent two of the days that we were there. Like she went out and just kind of hung around and, and went through the city. And I spent two of those days just nonstop phone calls to everyone I could imagine asking if there were deals, pitching everyone we could imagine.

We did pitches for, for Warner Brothers, for NBC Universal. We pitched projects for any, anyone and everyone that had an RFP. And we also, you know, I was talking to strategics. I go and talk to Unity. I went to talk to, to whoever we could. [00:48:00] Um, and we ended up getting a little bit of traction. With Tencent, and Tencent at the time hadn't really done any smaller deals or any early deals.

They'd only done really big ones. They had done the big epic deal. They had done the big deal with Supercell. They had done a bigger deal with High Res, so they, they had done these later stage ones, but they, they had brought on some new partners and they, they thought it was really interesting that we were willing to do what we did with Streamline.

That we had learned some lessons around how to, how to build for influencers, how to build content that would go really viral. And so they. I remember this was February, early, late January, early February, and I remember we, the, the partner at Tencent at the time, John LA who's now at, um, who's, who's now at a 16 Z, he, um, he called me on a Thursday night, 'cause he was in China, I think.

And he, and I thought it was just the like, Hey, thanks, you know, thanks for talking with us, but you know, we're done. And he came back and he was actually like, we wanna lead your B round. And he's like, and I was like, oh my God, that's so awesome. He's [00:49:00] like, the downside is tomorrow's Chinese New Year, so we can't get you a term sheet for two weeks.

And we were basically on this Thursday, we, we had decided that the following Monday we would tell the team that we're gonna shut down the studio. So it was literally like 72 hours before we were gonna close the 

Alex: state. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. And so our investors 

Seth: moved really quickly. They got us a bridge round of a couple hundred thousand dollars, which gave us like a month or two of runway.

And so we could negotiate that deal and Tencent led that round. And that was what led us into basically the next phase, which was spell break. 

Alex: Wow. Okay. So, uh, can you say how much that round, like how big was that round? The B round? Can you say 

Seth: That was, it was meant to be 8 million, but we ended up only getting about six, six and a half, something like that.

6.25. 

Alex: Okay. 

Seth: Um, and so it was, it was Tencent leading and then our existing pro rata. Um, and that was, that was basically a flat round on the previous one. You know, at the time people think now it's, it's like bad for, for gaming BC like I totally agree, but also that era. Which you lived through this Alex, so you probably remember, but 2016, going to 2017 was [00:50:00] also a like frozen tundra of game investments.

Yeah, yeah, it was. We were in this like back half of the console cycle. All the VCs had gotten done big bets into like eSports and vr and none of that was panning out. It was going way longer than people thought. That's right. So there was just this retreat from anything and, and like no one was really flush and so there just wasn't much happening.

And so it was very difficult. And like publishing deals weren't that common. There was no, there wasn't much going on. 'cause this is like pre. The switch really blowing up and getting big, like, you know what I mean? There just wasn't like the, the industry was just in a, in a rough 

Alex: Yeah. And a lot, a lot of investors had, yeah, they had done their run on mobile.

They, they weren't looking at mobile as, as fertile investments anymore. I remember that, that period of time definitely 

Aaron: we were trying the VR games and you Yeah, we were doing all, 

Alex: we weren't doing similar kind of like, kind of soul searching of like what the next act was gonna, uh, look like for us. But so, so super impressive that you were able to [00:51:00] kind of go from, you know, your experience with streamlined to landing one of the most sought after investors in games, Tencent, to lead a B round.

That's pretty cool. Like what, what do you attribute that to luck, like luck, time, timing, or, or like a, a, a match in strategy? Like you had something that they were like actually searching for. 

Seth: I mean, I think it was the latter. I think, you know, I mean, certainly luck. I mean, whenever someone asks me, you know, what.

What was the secret to success with proletariat? I mean, part of it is like, have a great team, but the other part is like, stay alive long enough to get lucky. Um, the, the, but with, with Tencent stay, stay 

Alex: alive job one 

Seth: with Tencent, they, um, they, like I said, they had not done smaller deals at all. We were, we were literally the first one in the strategy.

So, so we were the very first deal, and we fit this, this idea where they were, they thought, Hey, what if we do equity investments in some of these like North [00:52:00] American companies or some of these companies outside of China? And kind of part of it was to build relationships. Part of it was maybe they could be the publisher for our games in China, because that was, that was really the bread and butter that worked for them with League, right?

Like is is they brought league to China. And that's where it made, you know, I mean it made good money in outside of China, but like China's really was really the major market. And so I think the Tencent, it was a match in strategy. They, they wanted to start doing more investments. They wanted to start building more of a strategy outside of China.

And we just happened to be right in the bullseye at the right time. And like I said, I just shook every tree I possibly could. Sometimes multiple times 

Aaron: persistent 

Seth: and just was like, Hey, is there any, is there any, any deals, anything you wanna work with us on? Any pitches? And we had pitched Tencent a couple of ideas on how we would build off of what we had learned for Streamline.

It wasn't spellbreak yet, but it was, it was early ideas. And so we, we started to kind of move in that direction. 

Aaron: Right on. Right on. We've said it before, right. Alex, what are the three? It's persistence. Luck. [00:53:00] 

Alex: Yeah. Talent. You know, talent you need, you need two out of the three. Persistence, luck or talent, you know?

And if you have all three, you're like, you're set. Slam dog. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just looking at the clock. We gotta talk about Blizzard. Like how did that whole. Thing happen? 

Seth: Uh, yeah, we can um, uh, we can accelerate to basically the, the, the sort of spell break era. So, you know, just to really quickly go from here, so we, we ended up moving off of streamline and messing around with a bunch of stuff on the live streaming space.

We, we'd actually built a bunch of projects in collaboration with Twitch 'cause we never learned our lesson that, that it wasn't gonna work out well. We were like, okay, what are we gonna build next? We, we got this money. I remember having this moment with the other founders where I was like, we just raised $6 million and we were so devastated.

Like I, my confidence was so shook. That I was like, I don't know what to do with this money in games to possibly get a return on this investment. So we ended up just kicking around a ton of ideas. And we knew that we wanted to do a new ip, we wanted to self-publish, but Proletariat's not a big name. [00:54:00] We're not well known.

How do we, how do we possibly do this? And so we build a game that can really distribute itself. What's the distribution advantage we can bring? And so we were looking at this game called H one Z one, and this was one of the first battle royals. It was super popular on Twitch and on YouTube, but we felt like it could be so much better.

And so we were like, what if you did a fantasy version of this? This is the whole, this is a roguelike for people that don't play rogue likes. It tells a great story. It's a content creation engine. People can just make endless content with it. And so that's when we started to experiment with different ideas.

So one was called Ragnarok, which was like a Viking themed souls like battle royale. It was all melee, very slow, methodical, combat. I could go on and on at length on. All the different ways that melee battle royals are incredibly hard to make, um, and have all sorts of issues. And then we were working on that dood.

Fast forward six months, we decided to kill the Dota two mod and really lean in to doing an evolution of Ragnarok. And so we tried combat five or six different ways we couldn't make it work. And then we end up just one of our, one of the [00:55:00] founders. We started to do more range stuff. It started to get more interesting with range.

We added magic arrows. And then he came back after, you know, a week and he was, he was prototyping a bunch of stuff all the time. And he was, he was like, Hey, like what if it's all magic arrows? And it was really all magic spells. And at that moment he did this thing where two of the spells combined together and we're like, oh my God, we have something.

And that was the very first thing was this idea that you could throw down a poison cloud and then light it on fire. And it was just like we saw it and everybody was just like, jaw dropped. We were like, this is gonna be so cool. Like, we, we wanna make a, we wanna make an action combat game that's fantasy, that doesn't feel like re-skinned gums.

How can we make like fantasy, magic combat feel cool and interesting? And so now we're in early 2018, we, we had an art style that no one liked, but our art director was on, was on paternity. And we're like, Hey, when he comes back, we're gonna like talk to him about this. And we got back and we thought it was gonna be a really difficult conversation.

He's like, oh yeah, I hate this too. Let's do something else. So it was great. Um, and that team, no [00:56:00] lie, put together this, this, this diorama for this style that was like a more. You know, mature version of Breath of the Wild's, painterly style into like six weeks before, before GDC and I brought it to GDC and people played our like gray box playable.

That was a five, E five team death match with these really cool spells and everything. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of cool. We get how this can eventually become a battle royale, but this art style is incredible. And so we ended up just doubling down on that. Um, and you know, we, we built out more stuff in the battle around.

We pitched everyone you could possibly imagine at GDC and then E three we ended up getting two different term sheets that both got pulled back and I was like, we need to just get traction. 'cause we were gonna run outta money in October, November timeframe. And so we ended up. Going into and like pre-alpha, we started to put content up.

People went nuts for the animated gifts for the game. 'cause the art style was just so resonant with people. And so we went from 5,000 people in our discord to 10,000 to 30,000 to 60,000. And it just started to build momentum. [00:57:00] Wow. And then we did this, we, we put out this like trailer on YouTube that was just a 92nd gameplay clips of the pre-alpha.

And that went mega viral. And so overnight we went from like 60,000 people in our discord to like 120 or 150 or something. And all of a sudden we had zero. We went from zero term sheets, which we had had a term sheet pulled from us, like during the middle of this from a Chinese company that basically was like, actually we shut down all of our US operations and laid everybody off to then all of a sudden having like 12 or 13 term sheets.

And so that's when we ended up partnering with Epic. And you know, there's a bunch of stuff I'm glossing over here of how close we came to running outta money in that point as well. But, but we did a deal with Epic to do, um, to do distribution for the game. So we were the first non Fortnite multiplayer game on the Epic game store.

Huh. We ship on the Epic game store in February of 2019, and 

Alex: I think our lives Yeah. Semi exclusive window came with a little bit of advance or something, right? Yes, 

Seth: exactly. So that, that's, that helped us smart. I mean, that was amazing. Yeah, right. [00:58:00] We basically got the, we got an advance which allowed us to continue to fund the project and so we, we raised money four times to get spell break out the door.

So we were like every year. Um, but we, you know, the, the one thing, my one, like if I could look at a different timeline of Proletariat's experience, we were gonna launch on a Tuesday, like on the Epic game store and we were gonna lift the NDA and we're gonna let everybody share all their stuff. We started to hear these rumblings about five or six days before we were gonna ship about another battle Royal coming.

And literally the Monday before we ship Apex Legends launches and it just takes all of the air outta the room for like a month and a half. 

Alex: Yeah. 'cause E AI spent I think a million dollars hiring all the big streamers. Right. 

Seth: It was like $90 million. It was not like 1 million. It was a lot. But anyway, we still did pretty well.

We still got a good amount of traction. We were still growing pretty well, continued development through all of that. But when COVID hit, that really shifted everything because our development partner for the, for the Switch and mobile versions was in Japan, and they basically [00:59:00] just couldn't work. Mm. And so we had to end that contract.

We shelved the mobile version, we brought the switch version in-house, which is another one of my things that I wish I could take back. Like I think we should have maybe just shelved the switch version as well. But because we ended up having to take the gameplay team off of like doing iteration to the combat and gameplay work and everything to get the switch version done in time.

And so we ended up launching without a battle pass. So the battle class came in like 6, 8, 8 weeks later. Um, just because we couldn't fit it all to try and get it launched in time. So Spellbreak launches in September of 2020. We get great growth. Early on, we launched like, you know, if there was one other thing I would've done, I would've raised a bunch of money to actually get marketing.

'cause we only had about a $4 million marketing budget. We probably needed like a $24 million marketing budget. We, we just felt like we couldn't sustain and keep up with Apex and Fortnite and Call of Duty and PG. Right. And like, you know, because they were, you know, PUG wasn't free yet, but these other ones were, and they were spending.

Tens of millions of dollars a month on [01:00:00] marketing. Like we just, it was just too hard to keep up. And so, you know, come around to 2021, we knew we had to do something else. And that's when we started to work on other projects. We started to pitch other projects. We started to figure out what we could potentially do differently.

And we ended up starting to have conversations with Blizzard in October, November of 2021. And it was all around this idea of like, maybe we come in and co-develop, uh, an expansion for Wow. 'cause they just like wanted to do more content for Wow. Which is what they've been doing since the acquisition. And, and you know, they've, they've been able to get a lot more content out and the players love it.

Like, like there's sort of no, there's no lack of appetite for new wow. Content. Right. And so, so yeah. So then, you know, we, we, we ended up having, starting to have a series of meetings right around April that got really serious really quickly, and we ended up selling the company in late June of 2022. Wow.

Alex: Wait April to June? 

Seth: Yeah, we, we, it was a 90 day window, basically. I mean, we started the conversation a little bit early, [01:01:00] but they weren't about acquisition. It was just about like, 

Alex: yeah. 

Seth: And they, they, blizzard saw us as an opportunity because like we had a stylized art stylist spell break. We showed what we could do there.

We had experience with running live service and they really wanted to try and, you know, increase the cadence of the amount of content they were getting out and, and. Proletariat or me, like me, I didn't really have much to do with with some of this stuff. 'cause they were already on a path to like ship every eight weeks.

Um, for, for for World to Warcraft, which before that they were shipping every like three to four months. So this was like a big, a big step up in the amount of content they were shipping. Um, but they, you know, they saw that as valuable. They liked the Boston location because they wanted to try and get away from the cost of talent in Southern California.

And the fact that basically like mm-hmm, mm-hmm. They, they felt like they were just, it was so competitive. Um, we had great access to schools and other things like that in Boston. So there were a lot of great things that really fit with what they wanted to do with the future of both like World of Warcrafts and the broader Warcraft franchise.

Um, and so it ended up being, for me, I, I mean, I saw the opportunity as like, you know, I, I loved. [01:02:00] World of Warcraft, you know, had thousands and thousands of hours, was a hardcore raider for a long time. Saw the opportunity for what, you know, future of MMOs could look like. What World of Warcraft could become and, and even now seeing, seeing how big World of Warcraft Classic has become is like so crazy to me to show the opportunity.

I think, you know, it's really difficult to build new MMOs, but man, like that's basically a new MMO. 

Alex: Yeah. A couple things. One, an incredible journey and it's just a great lesson maybe of how you can find opportunities it from lots of different contexts, like through those conversations you have with Blizzard, you guys found a partner who was trying to do the thing that you were doing, not necessarily, you know, ship a game and it's got a 60% margin and it's throwing off a hundred million dollars a year in free cash flow.

That's not the only outcome that leads to. Success or to great partnerships. Um, often it's really, it's [01:03:00] about alignment. You know, it's like trying to do the same things, help each other out. I think that's pretty cool. 

Seth: It's, it's interesting. The one thing I would say on that is like, I think there's so much value in building these relationships over time.

Like the person who connected originally on the World of Warcraft opportunity was a guy who was running. Basically all of third party development for Activision. And we had talked to him way back in 2016. I had taken a meeting with him about potentially doing a, a mobile game with the Call of Duty ip.

And we had built that relationship. I remember we had this ritual where for whatever reason, like three or four GDCs in a row, we were always each other's last meeting on the Friday. And so it was like, so we go a little bit over, we'd have a drink. Like we, you know, and, and um, and I think those things are really valuable.

And I was on a panel recently, this is not that recent, I guess like six, eight months ago, with a bunch of startup folks. And like I was the geriatric startup founder there. 'cause a bunch of these other folks are more recent. And one of them was like, what do you do if like an investor reaches out right after you, you know, right after you've raised, like, should you engage, [01:04:00] should you not engage?

And the general consensus on the panel was like, no, man. Heads down. Like, don't worry about it. Like, you know, like just, just it's, it's a distraction. And I, I take the other side of that, like, I think a lesson that I learned going through the first near death experience at Proletariat with the Tencent deal was just always be pitching.

Every three months. Yeah. There are so few partners that that, you know, that can make it work that you should always be talking to them about, like what are they looking for? What incentives are aligned? Like how does this work? Because the timing is so important. And so if you just only pick your head up when you're running outta money, I think you're gonna be in a way worse place that like, you know, talk, like talk is cheap.

Doing a 30 minute call to build a relationship with someone to meet them for the first time, to invest in a little bit of that. Like there's no way you are so focused on what you're doing that you can't spare that time. Like I don't believe you. 

Alex: That's great advice. It's easy to talk. Well, maybe not for everyone.

Aaron, what do you think? Is it easy to talk to people? 

Seth: Yeah, 

Alex: I mean, 

Aaron: if you need money from them. [01:05:00] 

Seth: Well, this is more the inbound, right? Like if someone wants to talk to you, would you turn them down and be like, nah, not right now. No, I'm too busy. And I was like, don't, like, for me, I would always just like, I, you know, maybe I, maybe I'm, you know, a bit old school on some of this, but I, I, I think, like, you know, if Corp dev team reaches out to you, if you're a startup person, even if you have zero interest in selling, zero interest in raising money right now, like, take that call.

Yeah, talk to 'em for 30 minutes. Now, if they're gonna give you a runaround of like a bunch of due diligence, like say no. Right? But the idea that you wouldn't start to invest. In, in this. And, and, and I think especially in games, because there are so few partners and they, they, and often these partners change strategy every 90 days.

That's right. So like what wasn't a good idea at GDC is all of a sudden a good idea at E three and now E three doesn't exist anymore. But like that kind of window, like that happened numerous times for us. And it would, you'd be amazed like what six months of time can do to a strategy. And so the idea that you would like only check like, you know, I just, it was just always be pitching.

It was just constantly, constantly talking [01:06:00] to people. This is what we're doing. Yeah. You know? 

Alex: Yeah. You said something earlier, which I thought was pretty interesting, which is like, you kind of characterize yourself as a little bit of a wallflower. You know, you go to the party again and like, you're not the one who's gonna walk up to anybody to a, I don't believe that.

Um, but BI just, it made me think just how opposite that is from anybody. Like there's probably, some of you listeners are probably gamers. Maybe all of you, but if you get into an adventure game or an MMO and there's an NPC around, you're gonna go fricking talk to that character, right? You're not gonna talk to that character like, how are you gonna win this game without talking to that character?

It's like, okay, yeah. Life's a game. So life's a game. Um, last question for me. What was it like for you to make that transition from startup guy figuring out how to like, shit, we got 60 days of payroll left. I gotta hustle, get out the Rolodex. To go from that to now you're like an exec at Blizzard. 

Aaron: Yeah.

And then what [01:07:00] was it like to install the first thing you worked on and like, play it, you know? 

Seth: Yeah. I mean, uh, well the, the wow thing is even funnier because my parents, they're retired. They're in their early seventies and they play Wow. Every single day. And they have since like 2000, like, you know, they have since like 2010 or something.

So No way. Did you like 

Alex: totally juice their accounts for them? I did not. I did 

Seth: give them a lot of, a lot of, uh, blizzard swag, though. They, they have, they have benefited from that. So I did have like, you know, and I had some fun kind of going, going back to some of the people that I used to raid with, um, or still playing well and like never stopped.

I mean, I, I stopped in grad school. I just became too busy and too focused on other stuff. And so I stopped around wrath of Lich King, but some of them still played play to this day. And so I jumped back into the Discord, found them, and like played a bunch with them while I was, while I was still a blizzard.

Um, and so that was really fun to kind of reconnect with these people. It's like, you know, some of these people were, were people that I'd spent thousands of hours with, right? And so the transition question I think is like a, a really difficult one. I mean, I think. There's a lot of lessons, there's a lot of differences.

It's just a different [01:08:00] job to be building and managing an organization. You know, it's a different job to surf the wave rather than create the wave. So the the real answer is like, I think I'm happier in the, let's build some stuff, let's make some waves. And I think I'm happy of the work that I did. I think I came in and was help, helped to really, you know, I was tasked with building out a, a live service team for a while 'cause it didn't really have one that was really focused on ongoing events.

And so some of the work I did, I'm tremendously proud of. I got to sit down on a lot of the creative meetings, which, you know, getting a chance to work with someone like Chris Metson, who's a total force of nature and was like, I definitely had to pinch myself a couple of times. Uh, you know, uh, like I would blush a little bit if Chris thought I had a good idea.

Um, but the transition is, it's just a totally different job. It's a totally different focus. And, and I think for me, I wanted to get back to closer to the, to the games. Like I was getting pulled further and further away into the operation side. And that was something that I felt like I was. Capable of doing it, but it was really what gets me excited every day, [01:09:00] what gets me closer.

You know, I had I multiple levels of people between me and like the people that were building stuff and that, that, um, that was something that I really struggled with. And, you know, I wanted to own something. I wanted to like really drive a project and, and be able to like, be more with it. And that wasn't what was really needed for, for me at the time.

So 

Alex: I can, I can relate. Um, yeah. You've got the entrepreneur blood coursing in your veins. 

Seth: Yeah. I mean, you know, I, uh, yeah, I, I love the idea of building stuff and, and you know, so it was fun to, to build some of the teams and, and things like that, but it's just, you know, it's a different job. And, and it was a, it was a grueling time, um, at Blizzard because there was like a lot of changes happening.

There were a lot of shifts. There's a lot of work to, you know, the, the Wow machine is incredible. Like that game. I think I had a, I got a whole new appreciation for that game as a game for that game as a business for all the moving parts. Like that thing is 20 years old. Yeah. And still such a juggernaut.

And [01:10:00] it's incredible. 

Aaron: It's insane, huh? Yeah. It's, 

Seth: it's just like, you know, the, the people that work on it, the, the, the amount of passion, the amount of effort, like, like the people bring every single day. And some of these people have only worked on this one game for their 15, 20, 21 year career, and it's incredible.

Yeah. That, that, that they still can like, get excited about it. Like, it's amazing to me on the level of focus required to continue to push themselves, to make better encounters to, you know, to try and one up themselves on what the, what's gonna be the better quest. Like they've been sitting at the top for so long that, you know.

Yeah. So, 

Alex: yeah. It is, it's really interesting the way this industry has evolved and games like, wow. And maybe even you, you can put games like Roblox and Fortnite into that category as well as games that have. Attracted such a large, loyal audience. It's had, I think, a big impact on sort of the shape of entertainment, like interactive.

It's like what people play, how they consume it, and, and just like how the industry works. [01:11:00] It's pretty fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, Seth, we've kept you way long. You're such a good sport. Yeah. And such an incredible, just that whole, like you've had so many chapters in, in that proletariat story.

Lots of really interesting lessons popped out. Thank you for sharing. Super cool. Yeah, it's, 

Seth: uh, it's my, it's my favorite Indiana Jones quote. It's, uh, it's not the years, it's the mileage. Um, you know, I feel like I, I had a, I had a 10 year run at Proletariat, but it was really like a full 40 year career.

There you go. Um, when I, when I'm looking at all the stuff we did. So 

Alex: thanks again and best of luck on the stuff that you're working on now. Not that I know anything about it, other than it sounds super cool. Mm-hmm. So I can't wait to see you next time. Nice to meet you, man. All right, well thanks again and uh, we'll see you around.

Cheers, Seth. It's interesting to hear Seth's take on being at Blizzard. I had no idea that he was such a core wow player. 

Aaron: Dude, 

Alex: that conversation ended up getting [01:12:00] acquired by Blizzard to be a VP on. Wow. That's, that's like having your dreams 

Aaron: come true or something, isn't it? Yeah. It's weird. It's kind of like, I don't know, man, like that's like one of those, how much did he get to really.

I don't know, like, is it good to do that? 

Alex: To bring in all his notes from 20 years ago? Say, yeah. Okay guys. So I think really at, for this character, I think we gotta change the, uh, sounds like he was a little conservative with, uh, his, uh, his commentary. I don't, he was talking about his, I mean, what 

Aaron: do you think though?

Right? Like, I don't know, because I wanna work on Star Wars stuff at some point, and it's like, man, it's so cool. It's so nice. It's like an established universe and I don't, you know, I work with brands and then there's kind of, there's, it's kind of nice not knowing how the sausage is made sometimes. Mm-hmm.

Just enjoying that bite of the hotdog. Mm-hmm. You know? What is it like going to work for the game? You, you sunk thousands of hours into? Yeah. I don't know how to answer that. It's awesome. Like, what does that feel like? But [01:13:00] it's like, is it, you know, I don't know what to say. Good for him. Good for him. Right.

You know? 

Alex: Yeah. Actually, you know this, that is actually a good point. I, 'cause I remember back at Wide Load, we had our short team that was making the mm-hmm. Short form stuff, cyclone. And we were, yes, I cyclone. Exactly. We were talking to Apple about putting that on the iPod before the iPhone game stuff.

They shipped a couple of games on iPods and we made this game for a click wheel and we got pretty deep in there. And I got very excited because, you know, I'm an Apple fan boy. Like a life. I mean, look, I got a, whatever, 28 I know behind me, I can't believe you got it there, dude. It's so weird. Stop.

Okay. But then when that project didn't, you know, it, it went some amount of distance and then it didn't, we, we, we shipped it somewhere else and we didn't actually end up shipping it with Apple. Mm-hmm. I, that wasn't great. I got over it, but. [01:14:00] Yeah. You're like, I, I didn't wanna have the conflicted feelings, you know?

And I, you have conflict. You always have conflicted feelings when you're working on something professionally, you know, there's always, yeah. Trade-offs, you know? So maybe, yeah. Maybe it's not the best. 

Aaron: I don't know. Yeah. 'cause I think it is cool. 'cause I think if we were in an office and I woke up every day and I walked into the games workshop.

Headquarters, and then there's like a giant Space Marine in the hallway, and then there's like a, a scathing wrap in the restroom. You know, like, it's like, you know what I'm saying? Like that's where it would be. That's where it would be, yep. Yeah, in the snack room. Like a cool sculpture and like, yeah, there's something about that that's very motivating.

Alex: I'm gonna get you a Space Marine to put in the foyer of your house, you know? So every time you come home, you come in. 

Aaron: I'm trying to get a Pacman machine in the house. Miss Pacman my favorite one. 

Alex: All right, well, welcome back everybody. I missed you all terribly. She wouldn't stop talking about it. [01:15:00] Thanks for hanging out with us.

Hope you enjoyed our conversation with Seth and we shall see you next week.

Aaron: See you later everybody. Thank you for listening to the Fourth Curtain Podcast. Visit us@thefourthcurtain.com to find our monthly newsletter and support the show via Patreon. The Fourth Curtain Podcast is a production of Fourth Curtain Media, lovingly edited by Brian Hensley of Noise Floor Sound Solutions. Production support by May Li, with Community Management by Doug Artman and Art Production by Paul Russell.

Thanks again for listening.