Birth of a Game

Thanksgiving

In the spirit of Thanksgiving I'd like to share some things I'm thankful for. I give thanks to my wife for believing in me and supporting my decision nearly two years ago to leave my job to start Uber despite having just given birth to our second child. I’m thankful for the support of friends and family during the startup process. I give thanks I now live in this beautiful part of the country and how easy my wife and I have found it to make great friends and to feel we have family locally, even though our actual families are thousands of miles away. I'm thankful Uber has me surrounded by incredibly talented and passionate people, and I'm thankful we live in a country that provides the opportunity to transform that talent and passion into success through honest and hard work. I give thanks for our men and women in uniform, without whom we would have no such opportunity. I’m thankful for our firefighters, police officers, volunteers, and all servicemen and women who keep us safe. Uber Entertainment wishes you all a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Listen To Your Partners

The partners we work with are very large corporations that have a wealth of experience, knowledge, and insight into aspects of our industry that we sometimes do not. It's therefore important we listen to them when they offer to share such knowledge. I've seen other businesses treat their business partners as the enemy and I wonder how any business gets done at all under such adversarial tension. Typically these relationships are one-off and disintegrate at the conclusion of the project. Our philosophy from the start has been quite the opposite. Our strategy is to be the best partner we can possibly be in all relationships so that repeat business is not just possible, but desirable from both ends.

We showed our game recently to one of our partners and got some feedback that, if acted upon, would probably set us back a month or two in production, add risk/scope to the project, and possibly just not work at all. The changes did not mesh exactly with the vision, but we saw that with some effort it could be made to work. We had a choice; we could dig in our heels and preach the vision in hopes to convert, or we could put on the Captain hat, listen to our partner, and course correct the vision. Their feedback was coming from a source of experience and data that we did not have access to. Our intuition told us their numbers were off, but by how much was an unknown. We decided to trust our partner, take the calculated risk, and course correct. In the end, I believe we have a better game because of it. It would have been easy for us to dig in and possibly even get offended by the suggestion to alter the vision, but I'm proud of our flexibility and our willingness to do what it takes to take a game from good to great.

Dreamers and Captains

A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission. - Neil Peart

I've been thinking about the balance between vision and practicality, and how a dream with a mission can blind and deafen even the most intelligent and well intentioned. To achieve any mission you need both a Dreamer to provide vision and a Captain to provide leadership. As a Dreamer it's your responsibility to embody the vision and preach it as gospel in order to embolden your team and convert the nonbeliever. As Captain you ensure there exists a realistic possibility to execute the mission, chart the course, and keep the ship from running aground.

In some organizations these responsibilities are divided among individuals, however in many others a single person is burdened with these often diametrical roles. The Captain overcomes criticism with facts and reasoning; the Dreamer overcomes criticism with powerful conviction. Success is multiplied when the roles reinforce each other. When the Dreamer can trust the Captain has the compass, map, a clear destination, and the ability to navigate he doesn't need to pull up charts and graphs to make his case. If he can communicate his vision with clarity and passion he can persuade. Likewise when the Captain can rely upon the Dreamer to communicate the vision effectively, he can focus on the plan, charts, and graphs to provide the foundation required to even get a deal. Think of it from an investor's perspective; they're not going to invest in a dispassionate business owner no matter how good the numbers look, and they're not going to put their money with the charismatic visionary who has no demonstrative means of executing.

Great entrepreneurs are both Dreamer and Captain. Every day I strive to improve in each area, but it's easy to get so wrapped up in one that you lose sight of the other. I look to the greats for inspiration. Watch a Steve Jobs presentation during a major product launch. He seamlessly blends conviction and reasoning to communicate a vision in a way few are able. For execution, he relies on Jonathan Ive, Apple's design guru. Mr. Ive plays a major part of the Captain role by realizing the physical manifestation of Jobs' vision flawlessly. With my strengths and weaknesses in mind, I've done my best to surround myself with brilliant people who, replace my limited skill in some domains with expertise, fill in completely missing gaps (you should see me try to draw or animate), compliment each others skills, and act as productivity multipliers on the business. My goal is to make everyone at Uber believe in the mission and have confidence we'll get there as a team, which is not hard because this place is full of Dreamers and Captains.

We Make Games

While a business rarely goes as defined in a business plan it's still a useful exercise to write one. It forces you to ask some fundamental questions to which the answers should be clear and concise. One such question I had to ask myself is, "what is the business?" Well, we make games. Simple enough, right? Not really. Apart from additional product details such as genre and platform, you'll find that you need to answer the question of what it means to make games from a business perspective. Your business is a legal entity with a purpose to make money. The managers have a fiduciary obligation to maximize profits, yet in a creatively driven business that's usually not the first thing on their minds. We want to make great games, games we're proud of and sure, games that sell well. Fortunately it just so happens this intersects perfectly with the primary mission of the company. We'll be proud if our game is great and great games generally sell well (provided they're positioned correctly in the marketplace, but that's the subject of another post). So if we focus on making a great game our fiduciary responsibilities should be met.

Focus. Al Ries wrote a great book on corporate focus and how the lack of it can be a killer (Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It). He gives numerous examples of successful and failed companies framing them in terms of focus. It's a compelling notion. So what does it mean for us as a small startup game company to focus? For starters it means picking our battles and not overreaching on our first product. The three most resource intensive aspects of game development are game design, art production, and technology development.

Design

Game design may not sound like a large task, and certainly for some games it can be quite small, but late changes in design can have huge ramifications on art and tech and end up costing millions, missing your launch target, and/or even having your project canceled. The preproduction phase is critical for the game design to get nailed. I've got another post on deck that will cover some of my core philosophy for this period.

Art

Art production for modern games is a huge cost simply due to the massive content requirements. For example, staffing a 30 person art team for 24 months will cost you nearly $9 million (using a 12k man-month). Ideally the art staff size for a project should ramp up and down fairly sharply over the project. You start with a core team, ramp up the production line quickly when you have your ducks in a row, and ramp down quickly back to the core team when the production phase completes. One of the most common problems seen in game development is ramping up the art team too early and ramping down too late (or not at all!). Outsourcing doesn't really change this. If your technical and design groundwork are not properly laid and the preproduction phase has not identified what it's really going to take to finish the game you're looking at a chaotic and inefficient production period. In other words, it's going to cost a lot more than it should.

Technology

Technology costs can grow beyond limit if you don't have the right people in place. One software development adage states that a new feature that takes 2 weeks for a skilled veteran programmer can take infinite time if put in the hands of the wrong programmer. This means they simply can not solve the problem no matter how much time you give them. Your game will either ship without the feature, or with the feature in an unpolished or possibly an unusable state, and will certainly cost way more than it should have. Creating a new engine from scratch is a huge risk for a small game company, no matter how great your programmers are. As neutrino pointed out in his first technology post, there are simply so many "fingers and toes" in the modern game engine that it requires a ton of resources to be competitive.

Reducing Risk

So how do we pick our battles and reduce the risk? By knowing what we are, and what we are not. Although we have brilliant engineers, we are not a technology company. Although we have fantastically talented artists, we are not an art production house. If licensing technology and outsourcing a large portion of the art production help us focus on actual game development then that is what we'll do. We will focus all of our energy and talent toward a single endeavor. We make games.

Whatever It Takes

A few months ago while in the very early stages of startup mode I was talking to the CEO of a large, publicly traded medical devices company. I showed him the business plan and asked for some advice. "Do whatever it takes," he said. You knock on every door and you turn over every rock. You do whatever it takes to make your business go. You can spend months writing the perfect business plan, but nothing ever goes as planned. Being flexible enough to capitalize on opportunities when they arise is crucial.

Knock on every door. Investors can appear from the most unlikely places as I realized simply getting to know my neighbors. Putting some time in the relationships you'd classify as "acquaintances" can go a long way. I run a local industry event every month that brings out developers looking to socialize. It takes effort, is time consuming, and I'm often exhausted before the event even begins, but I feel it's something I need to maintain. The majority of attendees aren't business guys, they are in the trenches developers. It's important to stay grounded even as I transition away from development. You never know when one of them is going to turn up having a rich uncle looking to invest!

Turn over every rock. This has led me to rekindling old relationships from half a world a way. Putting together our Japanese investor package has really helped me distill the true essence of our business proposition and realize how bloated the English package was.

Be flexible. According to our business plan we shouldn't need to talk to publishers for another year. When they approach you, however, there's no harm in listening. I'm surprised how quickly we've been approached by 3 of the top publishers in the world so early in development.

This is going to be a very exciting year. Our core gameplay prototype is really coming together. In fact, I'm off to hop in a playtest now!