Ben Jones (@Bagelbeard) is a creative director at Zenimax Online Studios where he’s working to build an ambitious IP from scratch. Ben has been a key contributor in AAA game development for 20 years, working on several high-impact titles in a variety of roles including MAG and Battlefield. His passion for games got him started in the business, but his love of people and problem solving has kept him in it.
Ben will discuss design and creative direction for online games and how as a designer his relationship with data has changed over the years. He also stresses the importance of live events, holiday events and calendarization of your games and using multiple data points to inform your design decisions. He'll also touch on UGC, NFTs, mods and the metaverse.
Ben Jones (@Bagelbeard) is a creative director at Zenimax Online Studios where he’s working to build an ambitious IP from scratch. Ben has been a key contributor in AAA game development for 20 years, working on several high-impact titles in a variety of roles including MAG and Battlefield. His passion for games got him started in the business, but his love of people and problem solving has kept him in it.
Ben will discuss design and creative direction for online games and how as a designer his relationship with data has changed over the years. He also stresses the importance of live events, holiday events and calendarization of your games and using multiple data points to inform your design decisions. He'll also touch on UGC, NFTs, mods and the metaverse.
00;00;05;00 - 00;00;06;14
James Gwertzman
Hello. I'm James Gwertzman.
00;00;06;14 - 00;00;09;23
Crystin Cox
I'm Crystin Cox. Welcome to The Art of LiveOps podcast.
00;00;14;08 - 00;00;15;03
James Gwertzman
Hey, Crystin.
00;00;15;03 - 00;00;15;22
Crystin Cox
Hey, James.
00;00;15;23 - 00;00;16;28
James Gwertzman
I see we're talking to Ben today.
00;00;16;29 - 00;00;39;19
Ben Jones
My name is Ben Jones. I'm a creative director at Zenimax Online Studios here in Baltimore, Maryland. I've been in the industry all of 20 years. I've worked on a ton of live games. A mod way back in the day called "Day of Defeat" to huge games like "Mag" and "Battlefield". So I've seen it all. Right now, I'm working on a new triple-A online game that will debut sometime in the future
00;00;39;20 - 00;00;41;12
Ben Jones
that we're all really, really excited about.
00;00;41;17 - 00;00;51;08
Crystin Cox
He's got a long history in online games, going all the way back to a modding career in the early 2000. So I think it's going to be a really interesting point of view.
00;00;51;16 - 00;00;55;16
James Gwertzman
It's a good reminder that live games have been around for a long time. It's not just a recent phenomenon.
00;00;55;20 - 00;01;07;24
Crystin Cox
Absolutely. He's done a little bit of everything at every scale, so I think it's gonna be really interesting to chat with him and specifically about design and creative direction for online games and where that's going in the future.
00;01;07;24 - 00;01;08;29
James Gwertzman
Cool. All right. Let's jump into it.
00;01;14;00 - 00;01;47;06
Crystin Cox
One of the reasons we wanted to chat with you is I think you have a really interesting perspective on liveops because you did come from a modding community early on and have sort of seen every single size of liveops, I think there is to be had in the industry. And I'm curious as to hear a little bit more from you about your perspective on how liveops has changed from the time when you were very first making, you know, live mods all the way to working on a, you know, giant AAA new IP.
00;01;47;07 - 00;02;10;22
Ben Jones
That's a great question. The change has been enormous. The first thing that comes to mind for me is in terms of package deployment, right. So actually getting your content out to end users. And I think back to when we were just doing data feed on our own before we were acquired by Valve, it was just a matter of us packaging up those updates together.
00;02;10;22 - 00;02;32;28
Ben Jones
And then me hand-delivering them to dozens upon dozens upon dozens of websites with patch notes and trying to get mirroring up there for updates and trying to get anybody and anybody to host those files so our users could see them and download them to where we are today, where almost all of that is driven at the platform level.
00;02;33;18 - 00;03;08;15
Ben Jones
There's a significant amount of consolidation there. I'm not reaching out to PC Gamer begging them to host my update So that's a huge one right there. Moreover, thinking about the dedicated departments and the staffing now associated for live operations at online companies, almost every major publisher has massive departments that are supporting these things now, combined with the platform holders themselves, So really, Steam on the PC side, but and Epic Games store and others, but obviously Microsoft and Sony too.
00;03;09;02 - 00;03;38;14
Ben Jones
And the coordination of that staff in terms of deployment and long horn calendarization for first party is obviously a massive change. And then on top of that, the availability of data I think is a really big one as well. So our ability to harvest that data, the processing and the visualization of all that and then the change management that occurs afterwards, right where we're looking at all of this data and determining what to do to best serve our communities and our players.
00;03;38;17 - 00;03;59;10
James Gwertzman
Well, one thing we've been talking about on other episodes is sort of the culture shift that goes on over the course of time in a studio as they get more and more used to running games as services, because you've been doing this for your whole career, but many studios haven't. For many studios, this is still a relatively new shift. This idea that you're now sort of monetizing engagement and that games need to be, you know, run as communities, as services.
00;03;59;19 - 00;04;17;09
James Gwertzman
What would you say, I guess, has been? When the studios you're working at now, you talk a lot about these bigger teams, bigger investments. What do the modern tools and modern sort of, you know, teams look like compared to when you first started out and you were first kind of figuring it out from first principles?
00;04;17;28 - 00;04;54;13
Ben Jones
Well, they're very different You know, I spoke to the scale change a minute ago, but I think it is it's a combination of a lot of factors. And I think it also ties into the misconceptions that a lot of folks have about live operations in general. Maybe we can get into that. But I think a significant growth in personnel in terms of product management, business intelligence, analytics, monetization, dedicated platform folks and services, all of those folks are working together underneath this liveops umbrella with other groups, the community as well.
00;04;54;14 - 00;05;17;04
Ben Jones
Right. To really service this on a day to day basis. And it's it's really integral to what we do. Right. I think it's there's a lot of data out there and we've always been able to get at least a piece of the pie. Right. And I think now more than ever, we have almost a holistic representation of what our players are doing and can infer what they want through those various channels.
00;05;17;17 - 00;05;48;29
Ben Jones
So it's really about bringing that all together. And, you know, I think on going all the way back right to the "Day of Defeat," that was that was just a couple of us who were ingesting data and looking at and looking at forums and trying to infer what they really community was like resonating with and where we messed up and how we could do better And there are teams upon teams of people that are doing that now, you know, not just through the hard data that we're getting every day and processing, but also folks in community to I mean, this is this is these are professions.
00;05;48;29 - 00;05;59;01
Ben Jones
I think that is the biggest thing. And we've really matured as an industry to a point where all of these are really viable, but they're also very very necessary in terms of successful live operations.
00;05;59;14 - 00;06;30;28
Crystin Cox
Yeah. I mean, I think that the you're hitting on something there. That's a theme that we hear a lot from people like you who've been doing it for quite a while. Right. Who sort of came up online in online game development and game design. And I'm curious to hear, like you said, there's some misconceptions, which I've definitely experienced myself, like working with teams that are coming from a more sort of box product or a single player history and culture.
00;06;31;07 - 00;06;45;21
Crystin Cox
And I'm cure...you're saying, yes, there's all this investment, which absolutely there is, which is great. But there is still some misconceptions. And I'm curious what you what you see that the biggest misconceptions are and like how you sort of tackle that, especially with such big teams and big investments.
00;06;46;10 - 00;07;01;27
Ben Jones
Yeah, great question. I think, you know, there's a bunch I think the first is probably the definition of live operations as a whole. Right You could probably have on this podcast series talk to a number of different people who will define it in a very different way.
00;07;01;28 - 00;07;02;15
Crystin Cox
Absolutely.
00;07;02;19 - 00;07;21;24
Ben Jones
Part of that is good, right? Because it should be custom tailored to the needs of your studio and your audience. But part of that is also confusing when we're trying to collaborate and coordinate with one another. Right. And, you know, all of this is maturing in real time. But there are a lot of people that look at live operations and they're like, oh, you mean monetization?
00;07;21;26 - 00;07;46;06
Ben Jones
It's like, well, yes, but not purely, most certainly. Or, oh, maybe you meet analytics, right? It's like, well, yeah, that's a piece of the pie, too. But it's really, as I was mentioning, where we're really all comes together. And I think that's that is part of the maturity that I think where we're still lacking is kind of uniformity of terms and getting an understanding of what each of these things really means.
00;07;46;16 - 00;08;04;24
Ben Jones
It's certainly a big misconception. Also, you know, I spoke about monetization. A lot of people just look at liveops, especially those who have traditionally been in, you know, off line games or single player focused games and just look at us like, oh, that's just the means of making money. And most certainly that's a part of it. But it is that is not the focus, right?
00;08;04;24 - 00;08;27;20
Ben Jones
The focus is really alignment with the customer and our player base more than anything else and learning from them right. And having an ongoing conversation with them so that we can improve the product. That to me is the real opportunity of live operations. Whereas, you know, on a standard package product, maybe you get a couple of updates or patches to improve things.
00;08;27;20 - 00;08;41;26
Ben Jones
But mostly the team is moving on after a period of time to focus on the next thing that's not what we do. Our focus. The next thing for us is what's the next update for as long as we can make it viable. And all of these components really feed into that.
00;08;43;04 - 00;09;02;23
James Gwertzman
Well, let's follow that through into the rest of your studio. So you talked about the sheer size of a liveops team now and the investment that represents. But let's talk about how the rest of the game production team also changes how our game production teams now, you know, the rest of the studio are they're set up differently or operate differently in order to accommodate the continuous updates you just described.
00;09;03;29 - 00;09;28;19
Ben Jones
That's a great question. Yeah. Part of it again sits back into the scale that we talked about before. Right in I look at the examples that we've had over the last couple of years, like even my time of the EA and at Sony, how the scale of the community departments has grown significantly. Right. Just because of the needs of that paradigm, it's shifted completely.
00;09;28;22 - 00;09;49;24
Ben Jones
And what we're seeing now, especially on social and primary channels, is that community managers are front and center. Right. Whereas before they were a little bit in the background or maybe they had a moniker that people would interact with online a little bit. But I mean, you know, for people like myself who live on Twitter, the community managers are the face of the product a lot of times.
00;09;50;04 - 00;10;09;20
Ben Jones
So their importance there has really grown. But I think it's overall, it's just the sheer scale of things is what really blows me away. So, you know, for ZaaS right, especially now where my team is, it's been built up from scratch and we have two teams working in parallel. And now granted only one of those is working on a live game, which is, "Elder Scrolls Online".
00;10;09;27 - 00;10;33;13
Ben Jones
But we'll be there someday, right? And we need to prepare in kind. And that means a scaling of staff across all those groups that I managed earlier, which is a huge hurdle because they're also the most in-demand groups in game development, especially when you're talking about DevOps engineers and really good analysts and PMs. I mean, they're just super, super hard to come by.
00;10;33;16 - 00;11;00;19
Ben Jones
I know, because I've been trying to staff them for the last couple of years and we found good success there. But boy, it's tough out there. So I think it's really all about finding what the fit of the product is. But the needs, especially at scale, when you're thinking about how how much more we do in terms of overall content and the cadence at which we're seeking to deploy that content, it's really night and day from where we were 20 years ago.
00;11;01;23 - 00;11;30;07
Crystin Cox
Yeah. I mean, I definitely agree with that. Like when we think about live games, I think one of the surprising things for me, I think when I started interacting with a lot of teams that were not traditionally liveops teams was how much smaller their design departments were because the focus on content was quite different and how much less emphasis there was on content pipelining. You know, in live games
00;11;30;07 - 00;11;56;02
Crystin Cox
there's so much that needs to happen to make sure you can efficiently create a lot of content that it ends up looking pretty different. It's been fascinating watching those teams scale because yeah, like in the early 2000s even, you know, big online games had much smaller...all games had much smaller teams back then, but online games as well just had much smaller teams. So I'm curious to talk...
00;11;56;06 - 00;12;00;03
Ben Jones
Sorry, I was like, is there a question there? Yeah, yeah. It's been crazy.
00;12;02;02 - 00;12;26;15
Crystin Cox
I am curious to talk with you as a designer, especially a designer who, you know, has worked your whole career in online games, how your relationship with data has changed over the years. It's something we hear come up on this podcast a lot this sort of, some amount of tension sometimes between design and data, especially for people who are sort of using it for the first time.
00;12;26;15 - 00;12;37;05
Crystin Cox
But I'm really curious your perspective and how your relationship with data has changed how you've seen overall, like across the industry, the relationship between designers and data has changed.
00;12;37;26 - 00;13;05;15
Ben Jones
Yeah, another excellent question. I feel like this is still something that we are struggling with to a degree, but I think at this point the stigma has largely dissipated. There's certainly some holdouts, but I think it's I think it's largely driven by an influx of people coming into live operations for the first time. Right. As opposed to significant resistance to the usage of data to inform the job, right. As designers we're
00;13;06;07 - 00;13;16;04
Ben Jones
inherently, we want to trust our gut. And that's why it's important for us to get in the rooms with other people who are experts in their particular areas to tell us where we're wrong and how can we can be better. Right.
00;13;16;25 - 00;13;17;04
Crystin Cox
Yeah.
00;13;17;07 - 00;13;46;10
Ben Jones
But part of that for me is, is getting the data and most of the designers I trust kind of live by the mantra of like data informs, not data driven. And I think that comes from liveops working hand-in-hand with dev to derive conclusions and suggest action items. Right. And then once acted upon development and specifically designers seeing the success that can be found when you're building not just off instinct but also with data.
00;13;46;19 - 00;14;06;05
Ben Jones
And it brings me back to the first time I was able to really get my hands on some of these tools was when we were developing "MAG" and we were looking at one of the most common usages of data back in the day was heatmaps, right? We'd look at where players went. What they did, where kills occurred, where objectives were reached, all that stuff.
00;14;06;18 - 00;14;29;04
Ben Jones
And it really helped inform and shape play and how we look to change things, especially before launch, you know, when we were in betas or soft launch periods, but very much so afterwards. Right. When we would get a swell of players helping to drive those conclusions. It's come a long, long way since then and what's available to us is very different now.
00;14;29;09 - 00;14;52;01
Ben Jones
But I think it's also grown hand-in-hand with the expectations and the desires of designers for that data so that they can use it to validate assumptions or, you know, or, or something else. Right. It basically is a tool for you to use in a lot of different ways. And I personally am very excited to have all those at our disposal today.
00;14;52;10 - 00;15;12;27
James Gwertzman
Also to ask you mentioned heatmaps, but I'm also curious, I think sometimes you talk about data informing game design and it seems very abstract to folks who haven't necessarily done it. Can you maybe give some other examples of maybe recent other questions you've asked that you've used data to help answer or just how you do use data on an ongoing basis as you plan your updates or changes?
00;15;13;17 - 00;15;16;01
James Gwertzman
Like what are some examples of actual, you know, queries you run?
00;15;16;08 - 00;15;38;19
Ben Jones
Yeah, I would love to get into some of the recent questions we asked, though. I can't cause we've been doing some recent playtesting internally that that is proved out very useful. But I think, you know, anecdotally you can look at timing I think is a big thing. Right and feel is something that is very difficult to gather data on right.
00;15;38;20 - 00;16;03;06
Ben Jones
That's something that you know intrinsically we know as players and developers when something feels good. So how do we correlate that with data is a big thing that we barely been pushing on. And a lot of that is derived through questions associated with play, where we really dig into components and usage and then back that up with video footage of players playing. A like simple example is
00;16;03;07 - 00;16;24;04
Ben Jones
Boy, I can go back to you on "Medal of Honor" we were really pushing the envelope in a lot of ways. With user experience and UI and doing some things that we thought were fresh would like help us to push things forward. And what we found in user testing based a lot of not just by the feedback but the data of time spent on screen or time to click.
00;16;24;04 - 00;16;42;10
Ben Jones
Right. Where we were determining are players looking for the things to do or like how long is it taking them to find the thing that they want? And we found that those times were significant, and therefore we use that data to optimize flows. Right, and page layouts and everything else. You know, it's not just those kind of things.
00;16;42;10 - 00;17;08;27
Ben Jones
It's also eye tracking and other stuff all kind of fit into the picture. So that's, you know, that's what I talk about, like data informs. There's a lot of different types of data that are accessible to us, and it's up to us to kind of pull those in and gather perspective from them, but not rely too heavily on one data point, because that can obviously lead to failure in the same way that relying too heavily on your gut can [ad break music]
00;17;10;03 - 00;17;38;01
Crystin Cox
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00;17;38;15 - 00;18;00;27
Crystin Cox
That's Azure.com/gaming. A-Z-U-R-E dot com slash gaming to learn more and get started for free. [ad break music ] Welcome back. You're listening to The Art of LiveOps, where we are chatting today with Ben Jones, who's a creative director at Zenimax Online.
00;18;01;04 - 00;18;08;02
James Gwertzman
A game designer who has been at the forefront of live games for his entire career, all the way from mods up through some of the biggest MMOs of recent years.
00;18;08;02 - 00;18;29;19
Crystin Cox
So let's jump back in and continue that conversation. You've had the opportunity to be very close to some games that have been successful for a long period of time and have gone through a lot of changes I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about what that looks like right when something's out in the wild. You have a lot of player feedback.
00;18;29;19 - 00;18;50;25
Crystin Cox
You're gathering telemetry. You're also gathering qualitative feedback from community. How does that for you as a creative director and designer, help you sort of drive forward the future of a game? What kinds of places you're taking that game? Because, you know, games that have been live for five years, ten years plus, they really go on a long journey.
00;18;50;25 - 00;19;04;16
Crystin Cox
And a lot of times we look back at them and go, Wow, can you believe we started from here? And now we're all the way over here because of all this iteration? So I'm curious how how data and player feedback helps you You know, sort of direct a game forward.
00;19;05;09 - 00;19;24;23
Ben Jones
I love that. I think about it a lot. And I think one thing that's really misunderstood about most games is that almost every, almost every developer, regardless of is a single player, a game or a live product, would love to continue to work on that game for as long as they can. Right. A game is never finished. It's never perfect.
00;19;25;15 - 00;19;53;05
Ben Jones
And we always have a significant backlog of ideas and features and components and stories that we want to tell whenever a game launches or goes live. And I look at live operations as an opportunity to, as you're seeking to build those things over time, to look at your player data and determine when is the right time and how best to manifest right because you've got a long roadmap, right?
00;19;53;05 - 00;20;11;13
Ben Jones
And you may have the best idea ever for a feature, but players could be in the first three months clamoring for a bunch of fixes that you didn't anticipate. Or maybe they love an environment that you barely spent time on and you want to iterate on that and then decide to spin up a bunch of similar things so that you can really hit upon what's been successful.
00;20;11;20 - 00;20;24;13
Ben Jones
That happens all the time. And so it's really up to us to continue to gather this, gather this data constantly and then align that against the roadmap and all those things that we have in the backlog that we want to do.
00;20;24;19 - 00;20;31;27
Crystin Cox
Yeah, absolutely. I often say two teams, nothing gets cut in liveops games. It just gets moved somewhere else on the roadmap.
00;20;32;05 - 00;20;40;18
Ben Jones
Right, right. Well, yeah. And sometimes you can do that to soften the blow too with something. It's like we probably shouldn't ever do this, but let's, you know, we'll keep it on the backlog. Just in case you never know.
00;20;40;28 - 00;20;52;14
James Gwertzman
Well, and that's where I think a lot of events are often very effective thing. A lot of events often act as ways to try new ideas out and try things that are you know, I don't know if this is a design change we want to make permanently, but we can change it for this weekend and see what effect that has.
00;20;52;19 - 00;21;00;02
James Gwertzman
Do you have any examples maybe of events where you've you know, or how do you think of events as fitting into your own kind of plan for a game?
00;21;01;16 - 00;21;26;24
Ben Jones
Well, I'll address the latter question first, and I would say 100% events play a huge role in live games, and they should if you're considering building one, not only is it an opportunity to test out mechanics in a truncated time period like you just described, but it's also a way to calendarize your product, right? And ensure that regardless of what's happening out in the real world, that you have an in-game index for it, right?
00;21;26;24 - 00;22;01;01
Ben Jones
Like you almost everybody has a holiday event these days. Right? It's really important that you bring that into the fold. So I look it as an opportunity to do a couple of things. One 100% test out new ideas. That's a great, great component for it. Two, right, it connects your game to, you know, the outdoors, the real world and ensures that regardless of what culture or background you come, that there if you can, there's a there's an in-game celebration to correspond with that.
00;22;01;01 - 00;22;25;10
Ben Jones
I think that's really important if you know, if you're seeking to have a wide audience that's engaged with your game and three, it's really a great opportunity to reengage your player base. Right. If there are three rather I don't even know what numbers I'm using anymore. It's been a long day, but it's a great opportunity to reengage and invigorate your community at certain key points.
00;22;25;10 - 00;22;40;15
Ben Jones
Right? So you can look at your calendar and say, well, hey, you know, we didn't, we're not going to be able to ship the update this month like we thought we were. There are a couple of things that we need to fix instead. Why don't we pull forward this event that we have in the can for next month or next quarter or whatever it is?
00;22;40;15 - 00;23;05;02
Ben Jones
And we'll use that as an opportunity to engage with our players and make sure that they have something new and fresh and fun to play. So I think they play a very, very strong role, not just now, but I think looking forward to the future. They're going to become more and more important as we as we become even more calendarized with our products, as we really understand the cost that it takes to get live.
00;23;05;02 - 00;23;08;05
Ben Jones
And we're working well in advance with various components.
00;23;08;05 - 00;23;36;06
Crystin Cox
Yeah, I love that. I think it's just fantastic advice. As you said, the live events are so important to games and for all the reasons you just mentioned. And I also I think they're just so important to community development, like having shared history in a community. It's so important for a community to be able to tell a story about itself and have those touchpoints in, you know, on a timeline to say, Oh yeah, I remember when this event happened and then this happened, and that was something that was important to the game.
00;23;36;10 - 00;24;00;09
Crystin Cox
Yeah. And I do think that, you know, teams that are looking to launch live games, this is an area where a lot of teams that I work with, I'm always saying, you put more effort into this, build out those tools for live events, be ready to run them. Like you just mentioned, something like having one in the can like it is really challenging for teams to get to that place and it really takes a lot of effort.
00;24;00;18 - 00;24;18;14
Ben Jones
Yeah. And I mean, I wasn't here for a lot of it, but, you know, having worked with so many now who we spend every day on "Elder Scrolls Online", it took them a long time to get there too right there in an amazing place right now in terms of their flexibility and their standardization. But that was certainly not the case out that out the gate.
00;24;18;29 - 00;24;39;11
Ben Jones
So we're all learning as a development community. But I think that learning will continue on a product to product level. You can only be so ready at launch. Right. And I think it's about being open to learning and continuing to do so and evolving your processes so that you could, you know, you could advance a product and continue to serve your communities in the best way possible.
00;24;39;17 - 00;25;00;08
Ben Jones
I love what you just mentioned about having like giving players something to look forward to. That's a huge evolution over the course of the last ten years is the publishing of public roadmaps. Right. And what that takes in terms of guts from a developer and confidence that you have in your group to get something like that out there.
00;25;00;09 - 00;25;22;23
Ben Jones
Yeah, right. And then when you know you have to change it, right? Being open to that conversation with your community, it's really important. But the benefit of that, of course, is that your players have something really clear to look forward to and hopefully a ton of things right over a period of time. And that gives them an opportunity to think about reengaging with your products, which I think is becoming more and more important.
00;25;22;23 - 00;25;46;23
Ben Jones
Right. As playtime is sucked up. And, you know, there's just so many amazing games out there today. I'm sure everybody on this chat today has a pretty substantial backlog. It's really important that you gain mindshare with your players about, hey, when's a really great time to come back? I know this game that you love just came out and you're probably going to sink 200 hours into that.
00;25;46;29 - 00;26;02;28
Ben Jones
But don't forget, like three weeks from now, we're having this event, which you really loved last year, right? That kind of conversation is really important in terms of terms of gaming, mindshare, and just reminding your folks why your game is great, right? Even if they step away for a period of time.
00;26;03;07 - 00;26;12;20
James Gwertzman
So talking about keeping the game fresh. What about user generated content? Have you spent much time or have you done much design work yourself with games that encourage players to create their own content and share it with others?
00;26;13;10 - 00;26;45;17
Ben Jones
Well, I mean, I got my start in this business doing one of those. I mean, the people at Valve were generous enough to open things up on Half-Life and enable a mod community that is still thriving today. So that was obviously very, very important for my career. But yeah, I mean, I think my time at, you know, at EA and Sony and everything else was relatively limited in terms of UGC just because we had kind of a walled garden approach on some of those products.
00;26;45;23 - 00;27;24;09
Ben Jones
But, you know, I'm in Zenimax now. It's that's an important thing for us, even if it doesn't manifest on all of our games. Like, you know, it's, obviously very important to Todd Howard, right? And the games that he builds and I think it's important part of the game community as well that there are products that have those opportunities because I think that just as we've seen boy, I just think about back to H1Z1 just a couple of years ago, the opportunities to create something substantial using mod tools or using user generated content still exists and that's where some of the best ideas in the industry are coming out of.
00;27;24;10 - 00;27;46;14
Ben Jones
Right, like just industry defining ideas because it's an easy way for new creators or creators that don't have significant means or entire teams at their disposal to try something out and see if it gains traction. So, you know, I think it's really, really important and I'm glad to see that there are still developers out there who are looking to support user generated content.
00;27;47;03 - 00;28;17;27
Crystin Cox
Yeah, I'm really I am sort of curious to dig in just a little bit into this because of your background. I feel like there's been this community around modding for a very, very long time in games that has been so fantastic for the industry, as you said, for many reasons. But I think we're just now starting to emerge into a place where having much more formal conversations about compensation around that work and like how, you know, marketplaces or platforms should operate for people that are engaging in that space.
00;28;17;27 - 00;28;32;12
Crystin Cox
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. I mean, you know, not necessarily trying to pin you down on anything, but I'm just curious for your general thoughts around where we are with platforms, discoverability and sort of creator compensation.
00;28;32;14 - 00;28;55;22
Ben Jones
Boy, well, discoverability is a tough one, right? It's very difficult to stand out in almost any medium at this point. And generally that involves getting in early with a new platform and making your mark right away. It's really, really difficult to rise through the ranks. It takes a lot of time and dedication I mean, I think about a game like "Among Us", right, that have been out for years before it gained in popularity and really took off.
00;28;56;02 - 00;29;22;12
Ben Jones
That's the kind of environment that we are in today. It's very, very congested. In terms of compensation, my hope is that the development community can find ways to compensate people properly for their hard efforts. And, you know, I think Epic has done a pretty good job of this of late on both ends, really, by sponsoring the creation of unique content and giving a lot of individuals and teams opportunities that might not have it likewise.
00;29;22;12 - 00;29;46;00
Ben Jones
But also ensuring that they get their fair share of things once that that game reaches the market. I think it's an evolving conversation. There's going to be more and more of that. And I love I love the thought of independent creators generating content that makes its way into the game. Right. That is then finds its way into a marketplace that they're getting a good stake in.
00;29;46;00 - 00;30;05;25
Ben Jones
Right. Right. And making it as equitable as possible. I would love to see that future, you know, eyes wide open on this stuff and really interested to see what happens. But my hope is that there are platforms and games that are creating opportunities for individual creators to be paid for their work and not merely celebrated.
00;30;06;25 - 00;30;27;17
James Gwertzman
Dare I ask about NFTS and whether you've been following any of the recent activity with actual explicit payment mechanisms in open marketplaces on online gaming. This can be very divisive right now. Some people think this is the next big thing. Others are very dismissive of where and NFTs are in gaming today. I think a lot of what we see today is speculation and pay to, you know, so-called pay to earn.
00;30;27;24 - 00;30;40;08
James Gwertzman
But, er, play-to-earn. But I do think that that's just where we are now. And it's going to evolve over time as we get more familiar with these tools and start to figure out and that about the design space because I do think it's a very wide and rich design space that we're creating. We were the early days of it.
00;30;40;23 - 00;31;01;19
Ben Jones
I would 100% agree that we're in the early days of it and also that it is quite divisive But I'm watching the space very closely. I think it's fascinating. And I think I think that there are opportunities for players to hold on to things that they pay for, they earn, and for that to have meaning long term.
00;31;02;03 - 00;31;20;13
Ben Jones
You know, I don't know that I'm entirely sold on the concept of the metaverse or who might create it. But I think there are elements in between that might take shape over the course of the next couple of years that have a lot of merit and could see individuals benefiting not just from their creations, but perhaps from their purchases.
00;31;20;21 - 00;31;27;14
Ben Jones
And I know that NFTS, you know, you throw that around there, right, wow you're going to get a lot of like scouls in the development community.
00;31;27;14 - 00;31;28;08
James Gwertzman
Yeah.
00;31;28;08 - 00;31;43;08
Ben Jones
But I think it's so nascent and I think people's understanding of the potential is relatively limited and very focused on their current frame of mind. So I'm fascinated to see where things evolve, and I hope that they do in the right way.
00;31;43;09 - 00;32;00;12
Ben Jones
Right. Some of some of the use cases right now, I'm just even I kind of look at it with my eyes glaze over with some of the numbers involved and everything else. But I think there's a balance point to be found there. So I'm very interested to see what happens over the course of the next couple of years.
00;32;00;16 - 00;32;19;23
Crystin Cox
Oh, listen, I mean, given the opportunity, I could probably talk for hours with other people who are sort of in the early virtual worlds phase about what metaverse means. But maybe for a maybe for another time we're starting to get to the end of our time here, and we want to make sure we ask you our favorite questions.
00;32;19;23 - 00;32;40;09
Crystin Cox
We ask this to everybody who's on the show. Can you share a live ops disaster with us? Either one you've personally been involved in or the peripheral of? We really love to hear them. They're always interesting and I think they also keep us humble. And remember, remind everyone that even people who have been doing it for a long time and doing it really well.
00;32;40;21 - 00;32;42;15
Crystin Cox
Everyone, everyone's got a story.
00;32;43;22 - 00;33;12;29
Ben Jones
I have a bunch. All the ones that are creeping into my head right now are all ESO related, and I feel like those are others. Those are others' stories, so I'll let them tell them I'll go all the way back. I'll go all the way back. And, you know, with live ops in quotes and think about our time on "Day of Defeat" and I put an interesting, interesting deal together with PC Gamer to roll out our 2.0 patch for "Day of Defeat", which was a big deal.
00;33;12;29 - 00;33;33;23
Ben Jones
Lots of new functionality, lots of new maps. It was, the biggest release that we were going to have up to that point, obviously. And we did a deal where we were going to be on the cover and have the entire back sleeve taken up. And they were going to ship their CD that came with the magazine with us all over it.
00;33;33;27 - 00;33;58;10
Ben Jones
Right. And featuring this update. And so we got the deal done. And then just a few weeks later, realized that holy crap, the build that we sent to them had some critical errors that would basically boot people from the servers or allow them to not play the game as soon as they updated instead of the intention, which was to obviously get them the latest and greatest and then they're playing with their friends.
00;33;58;22 - 00;34;12;24
Ben Jones
So we had to work out something with PC Gamers, to ship a an incremental on their next CD, which basically they had never done before.
00;34;12;24 - 00;34;13;03
Crystin Cox
Oh man.
00;34;13;03 - 00;34;25;02
Ben Jones
And obviously now is a much, much easier prospect. But yeah, that that did not ring well with the team. And I don't think we did that again afterwards. But a great, great lesson to be learned there for us.
00;34;25;20 - 00;34;38;18
Ben Jones
And boy, that was that was a rough one for anybody who picked up picked up the game from PC Gamer. But, you know, thankfully, there were a few other places at that time where you were able to download the game itself.
00;34;38;19 - 00;34;41;13
Crystin Cox
I bet PC Gamer was thrilled too.
00;34;41;13 - 00;34;44;16
Ben Jones
Oh they were over the moon.
00;34;44;16 - 00;35;07;01
Crystin Cox
Oh, it's so interesting, though, to think about that. You know, you're just talking about all these distribution sort of challenges that we used to have that are in a lot of ways gone now. Although I will say that having worked significantly in China, still exist in some parts of the world, lots of fractured, fractured deployment platforms and things like that.
00;35;07;01 - 00;35;19;00
Crystin Cox
And I'm I'm actually quite curious what will happen in in the mobile and cloud space going forward as far as that's concerned, because it can sometimes feel like we got all that worked out. But I think there's actually still a lot of change coming.
00;35;19;17 - 00;35;38;14
Ben Jones
Yeah, I think there's a ton of change coming. I mean, in the coming years, I think what we'll see in terms of trends, you know, more frequent updates across more products, right? Like we're getting more versed in this and have a better understanding of what it takes. We'll be able to get more content out there to players and also players seeing content that more closely suits their needs and wants.
00;35;38;14 - 00;36;07;18
Ben Jones
Right. So that's finding ways to surface individual components to players. I think it's going to be really important significant learnings from today's market leaders right there who are driving trends right now are going to be seen, I think, in bits and pieces across the majority of online games. It takes a lot to replicate in "Apex Legends" or "Fortnite", but there are there are things that you can learn from that process and apply to your game right away and also reduce downtime and better preparation for scale on demand.
00;36;07;21 - 00;36;30;29
Ben Jones
Right. Which were two of the biggest things that any online game looking to come to the marketplace. So I think we'll see all of those evolve over the course of the next couple of years. And I'm really excited for that future because as a player that means stability, right? That means really clear expectations. The most frustrating thing can be, you know, going to going to play a game with your friends.
00;36;30;29 - 00;36;51;06
Ben Jones
And for whatever reason the patch didn't push despite your auto downloading settings. And I'm sitting there for hours trying to get the latest, you know, 500 gig update and I end up not even be able to play with my friends that night. Right. So finding ways to change that and improve that experience, I think will be key in the coming years.
00;36;51;12 - 00;36;55;14
James Gwertzman
Well, thank you so much, Ben. It's been a fantastic a fantastic interview.
00;36;55;27 - 00;36;57;12
Crystin Cox
Yeah. Thank you for coming on.
00;36;57;13 - 00;37;02;21
Ben Jones
Perfect. Well, hey, thank you all for reaching out. This is great. Happy to chat any time. And yeah, we'll talk to you soon.
00;37;06;03 - 00;37;08;11
Crystin Cox
Thanks for listening to The Art of LiveOps podcast.
00;37;08;18 - 00;37;13;17
James Gwertzman
If you liked what you heard, remember to rate, review, and subscribe so others can find us.
00;37;13;24 - 00;37;18;13
Crystin Cox
And visit PlayFab.com. For more information on solutions for all your liveops needs.
00;37;18;23 - 00;37;19;18
James Gwertzman
Thanks for tuning in.