Five things I wish I knew when starting in the games industry

30 years after starting in gaming, industry veteran David Amor shares the key lessons he’s learnt building studios from console to mobile F2P

This summer saw my thirty-year anniversary in the games industry, originally hired at a publisher to make tea, test games and help people who were stuck in Ultima VI. Since then I’ve spent a good amount of time making games at Electronic Arts before building games studios of my own for the last eighteen years. Many games across home computers, console and mobile. Aside from some summer jobs making games is all I’ve ever done, so I have nothing to compare it to. Nonetheless, it feels like a good time to pause and consider some things that I’ve learned that would have been great to have known as a fresh-faced teenager back in the summer of 1990.

#1. The only consistent thing in this industry is change.

In 2009 I was running a studio making PlayStation games. We’d had a series of hit games aimed at the casual market, the company was doing great and we had the golden touch. Against this backdrop of success, I attended a talk from Kristian Segerstrale where he described how his company, Playfish, had given away a game for free on Facebook, attracted 55 million players per month and ultimately sold to Electronic Arts for $300M. It was an inspirational talk but it was also unsettling. My business, which was in the habit of building games retailing for $60 and attracting significantly smaller audiences, suddenly seemed dated. Fatally dated, as it turned out.

It was my clearest example that nothing stays the same for any length of time. Carts to CDs to downloads to cloud; 2D to 3D; mobile games; networked games; self-publishing; free-to-play. Technologies and business models are forever changing, which punishes complacency and creates opportunities. It means that the incumbent has as much opportunity as the newcomer because what worked five years ago is unlikely to work today. The changes that will occur in the next ten years are hard to predict but they will certainly come, and those people with energy, talent and innovation are those that will succeed.

#2. The least predictable things are the humans.

Despite the forever-changing nature of the industry, the technological challenges and managing cashflow in a hit-driven business, the least predictable things are the humans involved. It’s truly the most complicated part of the machine and the part that will usually make or break a business. Happy, motivated, talented people can make the impossible seem easy but it’s difficult to keep everyone in that utopian state for any length of time. What motivates one person can be a turn off for another, whether that’s company strategy, product strategy, remuneration structures, management structures or a hundred other things, some of which are invisible and outside your control.

What I’ve come to realise, both as employee and employer, is that it’s okay. Listen, do what you feel is the right thing, then get ready for unexpected — humans are never going to be predictable and that keeps things interesting. The same set of inputs can result in very different outputs; it would be boring any other way.

#3. Ideas are cheap.

For twenty years the way I got games started was by pitching to publishers and telling them about our amazing idea. A good pitch would get a green light and funding, whereupon that same amazing idea reminded everyone why they came to work to build it for the next two years. It reinforced the concept that the idea was of huge value.

Moving from console game production to mobile showed me how wrong that was. Best-practice mobile game development has you testing ideas as early as possible and letting the data inform your decisions. It turned out that amazing ideas were quite easy to come up with and when tested, ‘amazing’ turned out to be fairly subjective. In retrospect, I realised the games that got green-lit were the games that seemed amazing to the people with the loudest voice and the seniority to make decisions, but those people aren’t necessarily the best judge. Today, I reserve the greatest amount of respect for those that can propose great ideas but are ready to test them and move on to new ideas if necessary. Besides, the execution is more difficult and time-consuming than the idea.

#4. A ‘maybe’ is probably a ‘no’.

I’ve found the most difficult part of making mobile games is knowing what to prioritise, whether that’s on the game production or publishing side. You have a hundred things that are worth trying but only capacity to do ten of them. As such, you need some mechanism to decide and the mechanism that worked for me is to only to do the things which are obviously a good idea.

Shall we keep working on this game? A maybe is a no.
Shall we try this new UA network? A maybe is a no.
Do we think this feature will increase D7 retention? A maybe is a no.
Will we see an ARPDAU increase with this new ad provider? A maybe is a no.

It’s rare that small, incremental decisions move the needle and there’s opportunity cost all around, so figuring out what’s really going to make a difference and what’s just busywork is worth waiting for a Yes.

#5. The audience for games is bigger than you’d expect.

Back in 1994 the PlayStation 1 was released and people started referring to games as a mass-market industry. We were on the cover of trendy magazines; celebrities gushed about how much they loved playing games; consoles were in everyone’s living room. Around that time I was working at the esteemed developer Bullfrog, responsible for games such as Theme Park, Syndicate and Dungeon Keeper. Our mantra was ‘we make games that we’d want to play’.

Today the market is around five times the size — it turns out we were nowhere near mass market in 1994. I believe what held the industry back was our mantra that seemed so important to us at the time. We were too busy making games for ourselves, men in their 20s and 30s, that we didn’t pay much attention to the other 90% of the world’s population. Mobile games, with their accommodating business model, their ability to be played on the hardware in your handbag and approachable game design, changed that and now 2.5 billion people play games whether they define themselves as gamers or not. I’ve been amazed that year-on-year, more and more non-gamers find themselves playing games. Those that remain are unknowingly waiting for the right game experience in the right medium in the right business model to come along; it’s fun to try and figure out what that might be.

So much has changed in thirty years that it’s hard to imagine where we’ll be in another thirty years time. Wherever we get to it’s going to be a fun journey full of opportunity.