In this episode, host Kalie Moore sits down with Terry Lee, CEO of Fusebox Games, to unpack one of the most overlooked but powerful business models in mobile gaming: interactive fiction built on licensed IP. While much of the industry chases scale through mechanics or ads, Fusebox has quietly built a $30M+ business by turning hit TV shows like Love Island into living, evolving games with some of the highest payer conversion rates in mobile. Terry shares how the studio transformed from a one-season-per-year content cycle into a high-frequency content machine, why writing (not tech), is their true competitive moat, and how they’ve engineered a system where narrative, data, and monetization continuously inform each other in real time.
They also explore what makes fandoms move seamlessly between TV and games, how Fusebox approaches community (including its complicated relationship with Reddit), and why the team is expanding beyond romance-driven gameplay into broader storytelling formats with IP like Big Brother and The Traitors. Along the way, Terry offers candid insights on leadership, scaling under pressure, and navigating the role of AI in creative industries - arguing that the real advantage won’t come from replacing talent, but from amplifying it.
We’d also like to thank modl.ai for making this episode possible! Using a combination of computer vision, reasoning models, and feedback loops, modl:QA+ autonomously explores builds, detects bugs, and generates actionable reports that sync directly with your existing workflows. To learn more, simply visit https://www.modl.ai/.
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Kalie: Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Kalie Moore. Some of the most interesting businesses in mobile right now are the ones that most traditional gamers wouldn't pick up.
They're the ones that are built around IP that live on our TV screens with a hyper-engaged audiences in monetization models that are rewriting what engagement looks like on mobile. Today's guest is Terry Lee, who's the CEO of Fusebox Games, a studio that made a name for itself by taking the shows that everyone's obsessed with and building games around them that are even more addictive than the originals.
Terry joins Fusebox Games at a moment when the studio is struggling with only one season of content a year, losing money for most of it, and has since helped turn it around in more than a $30 million business with some of the most engaged players in mobile. We're talking a 12% payer conversion rate in a genre where 5% is considered exceptional.
Today we're gonna explore what actually takes to build a content machine around licensed IP. Why Fusebox Games treats its writing team as its biggest competitive advantage even in this world of AI. We're also gonna explore what the Love Island community tells us about how fandoms move between TV and games, and what Terry has learned about building a career worth following, including lessons from his recent book.Terry, welcome to the podcast.
Terry: Thank you. It's great to be here.
Kalie: So, let's dive in. I wanna start simple. For anyone who hasn't come across Fusebox Games before, can you give us your elevator pitch, what you like, who plays it, and what makes you different?
Terry: Sure. Yeah. So Fusebox Games, we, our focus is on interactive fiction free to play games. So, the way that I can explain this to people that don’t know interactive fiction, it's like those choose your own adventure books we used to have when we were little, where you kind of read through and then you make a choice and it says go to page X. And you go through, and then you kind of read through and you're kind of choosing your own adventure.
You are, you know, you're writing your own story. And that obviously happens in traditional games, but, but, but there's also kind of play action in those games, so there's normal gameplay. Whereas interactive fiction definitely skews more towards kind of reading, and, and less gameplay. So, the gameplay is the, is the kinda, the reading.
So that's our, our core focus and we make those games for IP specifically. So, for Love Island or Big Brother or Traitors. And the free to play aspect is the really interesting one as well, because, again, like you, you know, when, when you comes, when it comes to monetization and you're talking about what makes players convert through storylines, it means that, you know, like a traditional TV show, you would have a hook at the end of every episode to kind of bring people back.
We have hooks every, you know, every few minutes, and those hooks are kind of monetized. Thus the kind of the 12% conversion rate that we were talking about what makes us unique. I think it's probably just the quality of our, of our writing and of our narrative. We have other competitors in the space, but they definitely skew more towards the more hyper casual, and, and kind of large amount of quantity of content and user generated content versus very kind of bespoke writing, which is, which is what we do.
So, every piece of our, our content is scripted and kind of like meticulously, like edited to make sure that, you know, the, the quality is there.
Kalie: And we're gonna dive a lot deeper into both how you guys approach writing and the interactive fiction angle, and also monetization. But I wanna hear a little bit more about your role.
So, I believe that Fusebox Games started over a decade ago in 2014. Right? But you joined a couple years back at a really pivotal moment for the company. I know when we did our prep call, you mentioned that you joined when the studio was struggling around financially. I wanna hear about what you walked into and what were the first things you focused on to turn things around.
Terry: Sure. Yeah. So Fusebox has gone through quite a few iterations over, well, as you would expect over such a long period of time. An interactive fiction is only actually a fairly recent, you know, adoption in, in the, in the, in the grand timeline. So, so when I joined, we had Love Island, the game. And even then, Love Island in the game, in itself, was successful in terms of coming off of the back of COVID and, Fusebox had been subject to the same over hiring and over kind of success during the COVID period that a lot of other games studios had gone through and subsequently have, have, have struggled in. So, when I joined, we were on the back of, I suppose that struggle where the, the audience had, had disappeared to a certain extent.
And, and we were left with a fairly inflated team. And, and the, you know, the monetization had, had kind of come off a cliff a little bit. And so, when I joined, we had one season, a year of content. I suppose to backtrack, like I joined as, as kind of head of studio. But, but from a product background, so I came into, into Fusebox with this idea of I play the games and I'd, and, and I'd understand there's lots of improvements bringing my kind of free to play knowledge.
There's, there's, there's a fantastic amount of free to play improvements for Love Island that, that, that weren't there. And, and, and actually there was, you know, I still have the pitch deck that I, that I did for my interview where it's just like, there's so many free to play mechanics and things. And I was like, there's, there's 20% growth on this game, right?
Just, just with free to just with free to play, mechanics that, that, that didn't exist in the game. I quickly realized that our biggest problem was not actually the, the monetization. It was, you know, so like, you know, the average revenue per user, average revenue per user was actually pretty good.
But the, the amount of content that we, that we had and the amount of content that we were releasing was, was way too small for, for the headcount that we had. So, as you mentioned, we were releasing one game a year, one season a year. And whilst we were releasing that content really kind of hardcore fans were playing that content and paying and it was fantastic.
But there was, was only one season, and then all of the other months of the year that we didn't have content, we were essentially losing money and paying for a, a, an expensive team. At that moment we also had a studio in LA, so, so we were, we were paying kind of quite expensive, you know, salaries and, and kind of set up costs to, to maintain a, a studio in LA.
So, the first thing was to focus on streamlining some of those things. So, we removed, I basically removed the studio in LA. Unfortunately, we had to wind that down. But actually when it come, when it comes to things like, like efficiency of working across those kind of time zones, it wasn't just the salaries, it was also the kind of the, you know, the, the logistics of managing a studio where both teams were required to work on the game together.
And so just handover times and the logistics of that was really, didn't work and, and really were impacting team morale. So, the big thing was cut to start off with, and then, and then start to focus on essentially building, building a pipeline to, to deliver more content.
Kalie: And you saw a lot of success. So, I know that you went very quickly from going to one season of Love Island content a year to three, and then I believe you said from 10 million to 30 million in roughly two years with fewer people, which isn't a normal trajectory. Can you walk us through, I mean, you just shared, you know, a little bit about what had to change when you first took over the role of CEO, but it sounds like you saw results quite quickly.
Terry: Yeah, so I suppose to, to put it into, into context. So, at that point I was still a Head of Studio. So, so really my main, my main focus there was, was firstly the optimization. And we still had a, we still had the old CEO at that point. But the biggest change was actually just challenging the team to do more.
Like, I don't like, I, I know this, it, it might seem like a bit of a cop out answer, but, but I think in this day and age, sometimes just asking very difficult for people to do very difficult things is, is not done the way that it used to be. And you know, we, we sometimes try and beat around the bush or trying to kind of like go nicely, softly, softly.
But ultimately the business was losing money. And so, you know, I kind of, I, I, I ran an all hands and I read the right acts to everyone, and I said, look, you know, the, the business is losing money. I can guarantee you because this is what the data said. I can guarantee you if we deliver three seasons a year, this will be an incredibly successful business. And obviously it's very easy to say that.
Kalie: Yeah.
Terry: And you know, a lot more difficult to do. But I actually find that a lot of times people don't just say it, right. Like you just, you know, they think about the challenge, and they try and overthink the, you know, like how to get there and work it all out before just saying we need to get there.
And it was very binary. It's either we get there or the studio, the studio closes. And so, you know, and, and people having jobs is generally a, you know, a, a good motivation and continuing to have jobs is a good motivation for people. So, in that sense, it, we were quite lucky because the data was just very obvious.
We just needed to deliver more content. How we got, there was a lot of hard work from, from, from everyone else. And not that much hard work from me, funnily enough. Like, you know, actually then, you know, the, the. The, the onus of, of like delivering that plan went onto the senior team, the heads of departments to, to kind of push forward.
And really, my, my job at that point was to work with the, the then like board members before we, we were acquired. So, to work with the board members to generate confidence that this was a business that, that, you know, that they could invest in. And we were, we were basically outta money at that point, so we needed more investment from the existing board.
So, my job was to inspire confidence kind of up and down, right? So, to the board members that we, we could do this, we knew what we needed to solve and to the team that, you know, if we do this, we can, we can deliver. And practicality, like practically, how did we actually get there? We, we spent probably six months.
We invested pretty much six months of solid time on pipelines and tooling and, and revisiting like how we made the content. At that point we were using external, an external kind of development team. And just, there was just so many inefficiencies in, in the process and in, and how we, you know, and how we delivered content.
And so, we stripped away the external team, we brought, we brought some functions internally, and, and we, yeah, we invested in tooling. We built our own, we built a lot of our own tools to speed up implementation of, of like, of content. And yeah, like you said, we actually ended up delivering three seasons a year with less people because, because of that. Because of that focus.
Kalie: And you also ended up getting acquired after this too as well, correct? And you, and you share that experience.
Terry: Yeah, so, so at that point I was, I was still Head of Studio, and the, the old CEO had left. So, the, about a year after I joined, the CEO left, and I was pretty much the only the, the, the highest person in the business as a head of studio.
So, I was working with the board to kind of run the studio. And the board, obviously, the, the board members had very, very, um, experienced people. And, and so they, they kind of helped me run the studio. And we, we picked up a CEO, very experienced CEO, good at like, found a CEO who, whose remit was essentially to sell the business.
Like once, once we'd got the business to generating profit, we had a very tired board at that point. The business has been around a long time. The cap table is. I think 200 plus people. So, there's a lot of minor investors, not a lot of major investors. Everyone's fairly tired of Fusebox at this point, like, and, and they're looking for an out, which is absolutely, you know, which is absolutely spot on.
So, and I'd never sold a business. I had no experience, at all or any contacts, contacts in that area. So I may, I moved to COO and continue to manage the, you know, the, the operations in the studio and to continue to push things forward and, and increase our revenue. And then, Shakib, who's the CEO that came in to sell the business, did a fantastic job of, of, going out there and, and, and kind of drumming up interest in Fusebox.
And we eventually, yeah, we sold to Nazar who are our parent company and we're very happy. Then Shakib moved, moved on because he, you know, that was, you know, he's got his own things to do. He really just came in to, to focus on the sale. And then I moved into the CEO position after the sale.
Kalie: Amazing. So now I wanna focus a little bit more on the monetization success. So how I found out about you guys is, I, I told you this on our, our prep call, but, when I start my, my team calls every Monday we'd share about the games that we played over the weekend or new games. And I had a team member who said that she's continues to play the Love Island game and that she spent thousands of dollars on it.
Yeah. And I wasn't really familiar with you guys, and it came out that she's not the only one on our team who's obsessed with the Love Island game and who's also spending lots of money. You mentioned that you have a 12% com paid conversion rate, and I believe you said the industry standard is 5%. That is a wild number.
Can you speak a little bit of how, how the interactive narrative component is you attribute to that 12% metric?
Terry: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, I, I suppose, and also a bigger component to that is the way that we do user acquisition to start off with. So, we target only payers. So, so we focus, so instead of going for mass as in like, you know, just targeting installs we specifically target payers.
So, so that in, that, in just in general improves our conversion rate. But, but what you get there is you get, it's more expensive to acquire those players. But then you, but then obviously you are getting high quality players, like from the, from the start. So, so essentially we have, our volumes of acquisition are lower, but we're getting quality people that we know are in there and we don't really try and reach for speculative like installs.
So, so that attributes to higher conversion rate in general. And that's, and that is already different to, to some casual games, you know, or hyper casuals games where they generally go for mass. Yeah. So, they will just hire, they will just buy players rather than payers. So, it's not all, it's not all just Fusebox magic.
There is a, there is method to the madness, but, but, but to a, but to acquire payers, you then have to have a lot of confidence that you can actually make them pay.
Kalie: Yeah.
Terry: Because if you acquire payers and they don't pay, you end up losing money very quickly. And that is a knife edge that we, we work on every, every week.
So, we have a fantastic director of growth that, that is, is looking at like our UA dashboard all the time, making sure that we never go over that line. So, we're looking every day at cohorts that we acquire, are they making money? And so it, it's a very, it's very time intensive, but it means that we're acquiring great players to start off with.
So already we've got two big things going for us. We've got, we've acquired people that we know already pay in other, in other aspects of their entertainment. So, whether it's other apps or it's, yeah, it's other games or they've paid on something to do with Facebook or TikTok or Instagram. So, we, so we already have that in our back pocket that we know that these are, that the intention is high.
And we always, and we already have the IP. So, we already have trust signals, which again, when you are building a free to play game, one of your biggest, one of your biggest kind of hurdles to start off with is trust, right? Because people will part with their money if they trust that the quality, the what they're gonna get back is, is right.
The way that I kind of put this is, it's like. It's very difficult. Let's say for example, you wanna, we wanna get our garden redone, right? And we're willing to spend the money, but we're not willing to spend the money on someone that we don't, that just some like random builder or some random person off the street, right?
You, you hunt for people that you've got that you know that someone else has used them and you know, they've got references or whatever, right? So, you, you're willing to part with money, but only for people that you trust, because you don't wanna get scammed, you don't wanna waste your time and your effort and your money is, is exactly the same for games, right?
So, so we already have that element of, of trust because we, we have an IP attached to our product. So, we have two fantastic things start going for us before players even. You know, even read one, one line of dialogue. But then comes the dialogue, right? So then comes the actual, like what, what makes Fusebox tick and, and how do we get to that conversion rate?
And essentially the, the, the, it boils down to just the, the absolute quality of the writing team and, and the art team to, to, to look at data and to understand what people like, what people, you know, what, how people convert. And I think that's the, I suppose it's the magic, you know, the magic source of Fusebox is we don't just have writers and we don't just have artists.
We have people that are incredibly interested in business and data. And to work in free to play, you need a special type of person. You don't, you don't just need generic artists and generic writers. You need people that are interested in business, that are interested in the psychology behind what makes people excited to come back and to do things, you know, you're, you're, and to pay.
And so, we train people pretty much from the ground up in terms of use of data, in terms of, you know, like running ab tests. So, every time that a player will read a line of dialogue and, and, or, or go through and do a premium choice, that premium choice is being tested. It's being reviewed. Every player that goes through, every player after the first cohort of players that go through will maybe see a slightly different version of that, that, that's more efficient in either retention or conversion.
So, it's, it is a perfect blend almost between creativity and unit economics.
Kalie: Can you gimme an example of a premium choice that's become a runaway hit from a monetization standpoint?
Terry: So, I, off the top of my head, I probably wouldn't necessarily know a specific premium choice, but what I could tell you is an ex, a really good example of how we, how we do this.
So, in season seven, we had a love interest called Alex, who, has became, become like this, this, this scenario has kind of become our kind of poster child for, for how Fusebox do what we do and why we do what we do. For context for the audience. Like we, we don't just release a whole season of content and then players play through that season.
We release seasons over a set period of weeks, like a TV show, right? So you can't just in and play season the newest season of Love Island. You have to play what we call a volume, which is three episodes, and then you have to wait until next week. Now there is a bit of method to the man. It's apart from the fact it makes it easier to create a season because we're still kind of writing the end of the season as players start the beginning of the season.
But the interesting thing here is we are looking at the player performance and the player data weekly. So, every time we release, every time we release a, a volume of content, at the end of that week, the data team will sit down and they will present to the entire company how that volume has performed.
The, the love interest where our players are going in terms of all of the different routes. But then we will start to build suggestions based on, on player behavior. So, Alex is a fantastic example where he was one of the many love interests that you, that, that a player could choose during, the start of that season.
And actually, we found overwhelmingly that players tended to try and couple up with Alex, and he was just a runaway. And, and sometimes you can predict this stuff. But a lot of the times you, you know, you, I think it would be hubris to think that you could just predict it every time. So, this is why we look at the data.
So what happened in that situation is we then rewrote later parts of the season to have more of Alex, but also to monetize more of Alex. So, there's this constant evolving of the storyline as players are playing through, which you wouldn't get if you felt like you were just playing the game.
You wouldn't kind of have that idea. You would think that it's all just rewritten already.
Terry: But it's actually being constantly rewritten based on the data, which is something that most games can't do. Right? Most games, what you would do is you would redesign a level based on a cohort of people that have already played that level.
So, right. So, everyone, let's say it's like a, I, I've just used Candy Crush as an example, but like, let's say you have a level of Candy Crush that. For some reason converts people really well because of like, it's the right balance of gameplay and time and, and skill. But you, and you get some learnings from that.
What you, what the team would do there is they would update that level to, you know, to make it more efficient, blah, blah, blah. But then the cohort that that data came from would move on. They'd be going on to the next level and the next level and the next level. And it's a very linear progression. And so, the benefits would only then be for the people that haven't reached that level yet.
So, the new players coming through. But for us, we can, we can change the data so that later on, that same cohort that had that interest and showed that data is now being, we are now basically rewriting content for that cohort. Which is the, which is a, an absolutely fantastic way of releasing these games.
Kalie: I love how active the love island games some subreddit is, especially alongside the fandom around the TV show, and it feels like those communities really blend into each other. How closely do you and the team pay attention to the game subreddit and wider community conversations? Does that feature into your data?
Terry: We have a bit of a, a love hate relationship with the, the subreddit community, I think. So they're, they're obviously incredibly dedicated community and they are, and they are, I would say, you know, the, the, the, they're, they're a vocal minority, but they're a strong, there are still a strong, you know, you know, like qualitative data point for us.
The reason why I say it's kind of a love hate relationship, it is. Previously we did have a community presence where we, we kind of interacted with the community. And I don't think that it was managed particularly very well from our side. And, and, and in general when if you want to interact with a community, you have to be consistent and you have to follow through with the things that you say.
And this was kind of before my time, but there was certainly, you know, we, we did have a community manager and I don't think the studio was really in the right place to. Not just to engage. Engagement is easy, but like follow through is difficult, and you get, it becomes very disingenuous very quickly if you don't follow through and explain why you haven't followed through or, you know, you don't kind of, yeah, you don't keep the back and forth communication.
And people get very fed up if you know you're engaging and it feels like you're engaging and, and that they do have some kind of input and then actually they just don't, 'cause there's no capacity that the studio's struggling. And the reason why, like we also keep the community slightly arms length from, from our side, is it is quite, it's a quite an opinionated community.
And there has been a couple of times, whilst I've been here, where we've, we've had some junior staff that that. Have been really affected by their work going out in the community and being absolutely decimated. And so my direction to people in the business is like senior people look at the community.
We want to keep our finger on the pulse of what's going on, but generally I don't like junior people going out and, and, and, and scrolling through the subreddit because I think it is difficult for, for more, more junior people to, to kind of, to work in that environment. Like the internet environments and subreddits, et cetera, are all wild west places to be.
But, but they are valuable data points and they are our fans. And so, this is a very timely, because actually we just hired a community manager yesterday, or she, well she started yesterday, in fact. So we, so it is been part of on, it's been like on my to-do list to, to reengage with the community, but.
We needed to build the capacity at Fusebox to actually follow through with, with, with the, you know, our interactions with the community rather than just, you know, engaging with them, and, and, and nothing else. And now we have built much more like of a structure at the business. We've hired more developers.
We've, you know, we, we've just hired a product director. So, so there's more capacity now we're not on firefighting mode. Yeah. As a studio, there's more capacity to engage and follow through with, with community interaction rather than just engage. And so we will be moving back out into the, the, into the, you know, the, the community and doing a lot more there, which I think is incredibly important for such an active community to be to, for us to actually engage with them and hopefully.
We'll land that ripe. I think it'll, it is still a difficult thing to do and to do well. And I think you need some people with kind of quite thick skin to, to, to do that. So, but yeah, I mean, the community is, is, you know, is very strong. We have just traditionally managed it very poorly.
Kalie: That's fair. And I know we're talking mostly about Love Island, but you do have other beloved games too. So, you know, Love Island I know is a long-term beloved IP. You've also done Big Brother, which you've described as a bridge in a more group dynamic storytelling and traders, which everyone is very excited about, is your next big bet.
How do you think about moving community across these different types of IP? Or are you focused on building new ones from scratch as you launch new games?
Terry: So, we, we are actually more focused on building a fuse box community. Rather than individual game, like individual IP communities. Because whilst there is crossover between, between like, like people that watch the show and people that play the game we also see from, from some minor engagement we do with community around like, you know, sometimes we do like surveys, et cetera.
Not that many people do still watch the show. I, you know, I, I think there is a moment where we've, we've taken some people into kind of more of a Fusebox community and more of a, like, they, they like what Fusebox does and actually the show might have moved, they might have moved on from the show.
I think everyone dips back into Love Island every now and then. But, but, but certainly our focus is, is to build a fuse box community, people that love what we do rather than build like different pots and then try and link them together. So like, you know, a, a Traitors pot and a, a Love Island pot and a, and a and a Big Brother Pot is, we've got a level of confidence now that people love what we do.
And so that's our kind of community focus. Obviously the, you, you still get people coming in from traders that may never want to play Love Island because they are, we, you know, we have, they are fairly, you know, very different IPs. So I don't think there's necessarily a, a, we wouldn't try and cross promote someone in terms of you should, you, you're a traders fan, you should come and try and play Love Island necessarily because of the Love Island IP, but more because of the, the, that it's a Fusebox game.
Kalie: Yeah. Interactive storytelling component. That can cross all genres if you like that type of gameplay.
Terry: Yeah, exactly.
Kalie: So, I wanna talk a little bit about the other IPs too. In your mind, what did Big Brother let you explore that Love Island? Couldn't either creatively or commercially?
Terry: Yeah, so, so, so we were actually really excited and, and we asked very excited about the Big Brother IP. The biggest thing for us is in the world of interactive fiction, specifically on mobile, most games out there are love related, right?
The, the core focus is relationships. But more, more than just relationships. Relationships more on the romantic side. So, so. That's obviously Love Island, you know, in a, in a nutshell. And even our competitors, it's pretty much always erring on the side of, you know, like relation, like love, relationships, et cetera.
But interactive fiction, you know, and relationships like a, a, a very broad, right? Like you, you, you can create drama and, and relationship like situations in, in almost any IP. And that's the great thing about interactive fiction is, is it's just storytelling, right? It's, it's just relationships and, and drama.
And you can have relationships and drama anywhere, but what we were unsure about with, with, you know, with Big Brother or with moving away from, you know, from just purely romantic games. Was whether or not the audience was actually there. Right. So, so, you know, we picked up the, the, the Big Brother IP. And that was really a stepping stone because there, there is still a bit of, you kind of have, still have a bit of romantic relationships in, in Big Brother, and there is in the game, and there has been in the TV show.
But really it, it, it enabled us to start to move much more and test the waters, I suppose, in terms of just like romantic relationships not being the cornerstone of why someone would play the game. And so we launched, you know, a short season of Big Brother to start off with, which were only 16 episodes.
Normally our seasons are around 42. So, we released a, you know, a shorter season just to test the water, just to see how, how, how things went. And Big, big Brother pretty much has the same KPIs as Love Island. So not in terms of LTV, because there's not as much content out yet. But in terms of, in terms of conversion, in terms of retention, in terms of average revenue per user episode on episode retention, it's, it's pretty much as strong as Love Island. Which proves to us the con, it proved to us at the time that, you know, that these games can, you know, interactive fiction can exist in a world that isn't just romance.
Kalie: That's really exciting. And you have Traitors coming actually. Do you wanna, do you wanna share what Traitors is in the Naavik Gaming podcast?
Audience knows, sure, knows about the, the show and therefore the game, but I'd love to hear you introduce Traitors and then also talk about why, why you were the obvious partner to create that game.
Terry: Sure. Yeah. So Trators is, is a fantastic IP and, and I'm gonna butcher this 'cause I think it probably came from somewhere, some kind of format, even older than the one I remember, but I remember it mainly from, there's a card game called Werewolf, which is a fantastic game where you kind of have a deck of cards and two people play werewolves and, and then it, it is about group dynamics.
It's about lying, it's about like, you know, like how to, stitch other people up, how to make friends. So, it purely is. Like the that group dynamics. Right. So, so, and a lot of intrigue and a lot of, yeah, like backstabbing. I'm sure werewolf comes from somewhere else, but like that's as, that's as far back as I kind of remember.
The, the, the kind of the, the approach. But traits itself is and idea exactly that idea where you have, basically like Traitors and Faithfuls. So, you have a group of people that go off, I think in the, well, in the UK it's a castle. I think in the US it's also a castle. It's a castle in most places, but I think it could be big man houses, et cetera.
And they go off onto a location and you have traitors and, and Faithfuls and the, and the, and the general concept is that, the traitors, everyone has to last to the end. And, Traitors can essentially kill people off over, over the, the period of the TV show, and the Faithful will have to try and root out the Traitors.
And they do that by voting at the end of each day on a big, like round table. And everyone will hold up their votes and whoever gets the most votes gets voted off. And, you know, and so it's, it, I mean, that is the, the, the general premise of it. There's so much more that goes into the, you know, the, the, the actual kind of like the, the fundamentals of the, of the, of the show.
But it, it just creates the most fantastical moments because, you know, the way that the ca you know, the, the way that the camera work is done in the show, like, like I think the show really takes, takes it to another level in terms of just the, just the, just like seeing the group dynamics and seeing the camera work.
And the, the traders know who each other are, so they're trying to strategize. But the idea being that at the end of the tea, at the end of the show, if there's a, if there's a, a trader left in the final kind of few people, then they get a prize pot of money. So, they've managed to lie and steer you and cheat their way to, to the end.
But if there's no trader, then the faithful essentially get money as a very high level.
Kalie: So, I know that Love Island and Big Brother, they skew very heavily female, but with Traitors, how are you thinking about the audience mix from a gender standpoint and will this shift any of your designer writing choices?
Terry: So, it, I mean, so, so yeah, so in general, the Traitor's IP, you know, just, just on the surface is a lot more mixed, right? So, it is a lot female, a lot less female-dominated than Love Island, but Big Brother was also a shift in the direction of less female, you know, orientated IP. So we have been moving kind of in that direction already.
And our writers kinda understand how to, how to write, you know, write Big Brother and to, and to write these scenes because the romance side of things and the love side of things, you know, the, they are a critical part of, of, of, you know, of the IP and of the writing when it comes to Love Island. But there, it's still just a tool in a writer's toolbox.
And actually, if you, if you strip away. Love related aspects. And you think about just the fundamentals of what the writers are doing. They're essentially, they're essentially just creating drama, right? But whether or not that drama is love related drama or, or essentially it's relationship related drama and relationship related drama can be in a love format or it can be in a, you know, like in a different format in terms of a different type of relationship.
So, in, in, in your question about the writing, generally we've, we, we, the same team that can write Love Island, can write Traitors, because it is, is, is the fundamentals that, that are, are the strength of the team. In terms of our target audience in general, the interactive fiction, mobile target audience skews heavily towards women anyway.
Now whether that's a chicken or egg, because most of the games out there are, are romance related. And, and women generally play like the romance related games over, over men. So, whether, yeah, whether it's just because the games that exist in that, in that genre are already skewed towards, like, you know, a female audience.
So, I don't, I, but I, I don't think, I don't generally see that our audience will change that much. I think it will still be predominantly women. I mean, in Love Island we're 95%, I think Big Brother. I think it's about 88%. So, I think Traitors maybe come down, maybe could come down to 75%. But the interesting aspect is you, you always play a woman in our games.
So, there is no option to play a male main character.
Kalie: That's interesting.
Terry: Yeah, it's something we've explored. The problem is because we write all of our content and as much as the, the people on Reddit might, might say that, it's all AI generated. Like, you know, it, it's not. And, and so we writing every line of content and the problem with bringing in a male main character is you ha, you essentially have to rewrite the entire season.
You, you know, you'd, we'd have to go through and rewrite everything, or we'd have to create a very specific season of content where you know it, where you played as a male character. And we are not beyond doing that. It's just, and people will hate this. It's just the data doesn't support doing it.
The return on investment for us to spend an entire writing team doing that is not worth the amount of players of our player base with that would actually play a male main character. That may change as we see our audience shift. And, and some, like some of our female players want to play as male characters, right?
So, I'm not saying that it's just as simple as a binary, you know, if you're a male, you wanna play a male character, female, you wanna play a female character. Like, there, there, there is a, there is a growing audience that wants to do it. It's just, it's not enough for us.
Kalie: I wanna dive into something you mentioned in the answer to this question of people on Reddit accusing your games of being written by AI 'cause one of the things I found most interesting is that you grown your writing teams significantly in a period where a lot of studios are cutting back on writers. And you've described your writing team really as your moat. I would love to hear a little bit more about your thinking and how much you've grown the writing team and how important it is to Fusebox Games to have those writers.
Terry: Hmm. Yeah, so I think, so our writing team now is a third of the business, um, more than a third of the business. So we have 21 writers. And I think, so when I joined we've maybe had. Maybe nine. So, so yeah, it's, it's, it is grown significantly. So like, like you said, so writing really is our moat.
And actually any content, like any of our content is our moat, right? So even, even art in terms of, we do, we do use AI for some of our artwork, but the quality is, is still defined by the people that we have. So, so for both art and narrative, we look at AI as a, as a tool to optimize and to get more out of the people that we have, rather than a cost cutting exercise for removing the people that we have.
Because, and, and this is where every studio has to come up with its own. Its own kind of path through, through the, you know, the, the kind of times we're living in. But like for us, we purposefully focus on optimization and using it to, to, to, you know, to make people more efficient and, and get more out the people we have rather than the other way round.
Because if we use, if we use AI as a race to the bottom right, so like how, how quickly can we re, you know, re reduce our bottom line? , It opens us up to being disrupted by two people in a basement that can make interactive friction games, right? Because there's not a lot complicated. About what we would do if we were just using AI because, because we would get the same output as, as anyone else could get.
Right? The the reason that, that we, we can do what we can do, and we can get 12% conversion. And is that the artwork and the, and the narrative work that our team create, is, you know, is taking like a lot of detail. There's a lot of care, there's a lot of like, you know, like things that go into that. And if we just race to the bottom and use ai, then we'll be using the same tools as anyone else can use.
So that's kind of the, kind of the, the, the, the biggest focus there. I mean, we are still, we are still, you know, investigating AI and understanding how it's gonna affect our business and we still have the same. Pressures as every other business of how do you, you know, optimize your costs in a world, you know, where, you know, where AI is a thing.
And we're, you know, we're taking kind of baby steps to, to try and, and get there. We're using AI heavily in, in data and, and things like that. So, in some places we're using AI very heavily. But in terms of content creation, we are very much light touch at, at the moment. And that's not to say that we won't, we won't increase that over time. But it certainly, it's a very small amount of, of what we currently do.
Kalie: All right. I wanna continue the AI conversation, but through a different lens. You recently published a book, CEO in 16 lessons to take your career to the next level, which walked through a lot of your learnings for people at any point on their career path.
But you also mentor, younger people getting into the games industry, and I think you have some really interesting insights into how young people are approaching ai, which could harm their ability to get a job. You shared with me an example of a junior artist talking about how she doesn't use AI on her resume. I was hoping that you could walk the audience through that.
Terry: Absolutely. Yeah, so I mean, it, it was actually more, even more explicit than that. It was specifically anti AI on, on her cv. Right. So, so it wasn't even leaving it as a generic, as in not, not actively mentioning it, it was actually actively mentioning against using ai.
So yeah, this came about in kinda one, one of my mentoring sessions, where I was re reviewing her CV. And, yeah. So, she had, she had, you know, on her cv that, that she doesn't use AI and won't use ai. And so, I, I questioned, I questioned that and I said, look, what, what, how have, how have you come to this?
Everyone's got their, you know, everyone can have their own opinion, right? But like, how have you come to this opinion and how have you come to this kind of stance? And she'd said that on LinkedIn, one of the art directors that she follows, like she really loves his, his, his kind of artwork. And he is, he's quite kind of prominent in the industry.
I, I, I won't say who it is, but, but h is, is vocally anti AI. And so, you know, from her point of view, this is someone that she looks up to, that, that has, has made it in the industry and, and is saying like that, that he won't use AI and he won't hire anyone to use AI. And I think the shocking thing for me at that point, I is just, I suppose the, the, you know, the, the issue with a, a very junior person that is just starting out in the industry, taking a very hard stance and advice from someone that has basically made it already and has career capital to be able to take that stance. Right. And I, and I think there's a, there's such a, there's such a like chasm between, between those two, those two example, those two, you know, those two people.
You know, this is someone that's probably gonna retire in five years, six years and can just ride the wave of that particular opinion. Right. And, and has so much career capital that it, that's fine. And you know, I actually, I actually count a lot of us that are in the industry right now to be quite.
Lucky that we've, we've, we've, I think we've just picked in at the right time in terms of ai, where we've got to senior positions enough that it's gonna be a lot less disruptive to us than newer people coming in, to any industry. Right. Um, and so if you're in a job right now and, and, and you're worried about ai, I mean, we, we should all be worried about ai.
But, but like, I would carry yourself quite lucky because the, the generation after this is gonna have a much more difficult time. They haven't managed to get in job experience. They haven't managed to crack that from junior to mid-level to mid-level to senior. And that's gonna be the most disruptive, like generation of, of people coming into the industry.
And so, it really annoyed me. Like I kind of got a bit wound up because, because it's, it's, it's the irresponsibility of someone that knows they have a platform, to, to kind of, to, to have such binary po, such a binary position without any caveat to it whatsoever. Right. Like a pure call out of, of like, you know, of like being in a binary position and no, and no wiggle room.
No, not taking into account the platform that they have and the people that, that, that reads, you know, and follow them. And I, and I think that's a big problem in, in, in, in LinkedIn, on LinkedIn, in, in, in general. But it's also just, I suppose, a bigger problem. We won't go in, in too far, but like into society itself, right?
We've somehow lost the ability to like, to be able to have. Multiple positions on something or to, or to be open to something. It feels like now we just instantly jump to binary positions for or against, like we've lost the ability to be able to have a discourse where you can recognize someone else's opinion or someone else's situation is different to yours.
And that may require a slightly different approach or a different opinion to yours.
Kalie: I mean, especially on socials where people are competing with attention. Right?
Terry: Exactly.
Kalie: You have contrarian view. And I completely agree with you. The people who are starting out their games careers now have a, a very different battle ahead of them then we did.
If you could hand one chapter of your book to someone who's entering the game studio space, who, who wants to work in games and stay and say, start here, which chapter would you choose?
Terry: So, I think, yeah, so I think if it's someone starting out then, , there's a chapter in the book called Work-Life Balance will Keep You Average.
And really it's the same problem that I see in terms of the AI and, and social media is this championing of, you know, not just work-life balance. 'cause work-life balance, you know, a balance can be many different things for many different people. But there's a big push on, you know, leaving at five o'clock and, and demonizing overtime, to the point where, you know, you are, you know, people that are working overtime are questioned, like, you know, oh, like, why are you working overtime?
Are you okay? You shouldn't be working after hours. You should. And, and I think there is a, there is again a big problem where we, we have heavily indexed on wellbeing, which is absolutely fine. Like we, we should, people should be taking into account their wellbeing and their mental health. But in general, I think we've also lost the, lost that kind of idea of, you know, people there, there are limited resources, there are limited jobs, there are limiting, there are li there's limitations everywhere around you.
And, and if you are trying to balance your work life in your t in your twenties, your early twenties, if you're trying to color code your calendar for wellbeing, you are going to lose out to someone who's not right. You are gonna lose out to someone who is pushing harder, who is, you know, who is still managing their time and managing their mental health, but like managing themselves in terms of seasons, right?
And are going into seasons a little bit. And I think it's becoming quite a thing actually, like seasons of, of, of, you know, of, of, of life. But like you will have seasons where you need to push, you need to sprint, you need to put a lot of work in and, and be seen doing it. It's a sad, it's a sad thing that you, you shouldn't expect a need to be seen doing more things or, or training yourself or getting further getting ahead.
But that is, that is the reality of, of what in the workplace is, is people that people that work harder that, that, that grow themselves instead of waiting to be grown, get further in, in business. And, and again, on this idea of, of the, of LinkedIn is there's a, there is a lot of now of more senior people saying, yeah, you know, you should be putting down tools at, at five o'clock and, and going and doing social things and stuff like that.
It's just like, but those people weren't actually doing that in their twenties. Those senior people were still in the office working weekends, like growing themselves. Even if, even if you're not working at your job,
Kalie: Should, yeah, you're a side hustle.
Terry: You should then be side hustling, or you should be just growing yourself doing courses like, like learning more.
Doing whatever. But just to think at night five o'clock, that's it. I'm done. I'm not gonna do anything to do with my career. Anything to do with business. I'm just gonna, you know, go and do something else or relax. It's like people have earned the right to do that because they're now in senior positions.
And if they go on LinkedIn and they say, you should be doing this, like, color code your calendar and, and make sure that you're doing all these different things. It doesn't work for everyone. It works for people that have made it. And so my big, my big push in the, in the, in the book is, is to, is to help people understand that.
And, and, but also to understand that that doesn't also mean just burn yourself out. Like, like you, you, but you have to take personal responsibility for your time and, and, and how to push and when to push and understand when you are in a season of push and when you're not. Because I think one of the biggest misconceptions about if we were to say people, you know, should work overtime is that.
You shouldn't always do it. You should have a goal and an ending, right? If you're just doing it for the sake of doing it, if you're just working three hours more every day to get more of, of what you've got done, you are gonna burn out because you, you haven't got an end goal, you haven't got a, there isn't, like, you haven't structured it. Like, okay, I'm doing this
Kalie: To be strategic. I think,
Terry: Yeah, I'm doing this because of this and, and when I've done this, when I've achieved this, I'm then gonna have a bit of a relax. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tear my foot off the gas a little bit, and, and, and kind of and regain my energy.
Kalie: I think this is very wise advice and we're gonna make sure to link your book in the show notes below, like your leaders wanna check it out more. Okay. I have two final questions for you. Are there any types of shows or IP that you'd personally love to adapt into games that might surprise people?
Terry: So, the surprise people is probably the tough question because I'm a pre, I'm pretty basic at heart. And I'm not particularly creative as a, as a person. I kind of go where the money is. So, there's…
Kalie: So, you can scratch the surprise part of that question. What's on your IP wishes then? Sure. Even if it's obvious answer.
Terry: So, I've got an aspirational IP, which I, I don't know if there's any ever any possibility we would be able to get, and even I get raised eyebrows in the studio, but is Friends.
Kalie: I love it.
Terry: I, I grew up with Friends and, and my wife is obsessed with Friends. Like, she pretty much goes to sleep watching, watching it. And the interesting thing about Friends as a, as an IP is it was never, there was never, it was never, there was never any kind. It was never gamified. Like there is, there's, there's a board game. Which I think is a trivial pursuit version of Friends.
Kalie: Interesting.
Terry: And then there was, yeah, there's t-shirts and there's, and there and there's the, the, the normal accepted kind of, you know, like merchandise. But for such a huge, huge, like genre defining ip, there was never anything else. You know, there it is a very odd, kind of odd thing.
And so I think there is, there is a massive opportunity for us to be able to not, to, not to use the, you know, the, the original cast or anything like that, but like the concept would be something like you, you are, you are a new housemate in those two apartments, right? So, you're a new housemate that comes in and there's completely different, you know, it's a completely different cast, but you are just.
Retracing the dynamics of, so you're going, you know, you are, you, you're, you're in one of the apartments and there's, there is the same little, there's the same dynamic 'cause those, the way that friends is, is still the same as anyone that has a shared apartment. Right. I lived in a shared apartment in London. Those fantastic dynamics are timeless.
Kalie: Yeah.
Terry: Absolutely timeless. And the stupid things you get up to like in shared apartments when you are, yeah. When you're in your kind of like your twenties and your thirties. So those dynamics still exist and I think, you know, being able to tap into some of the iconic places like Central Perk and, and stuff like that.
And just for players to almost like relive the locations without reliving the characters.
Kalie: It's also probably the perfect time with nostalgia coming back too. And I think Joe probably ended 20, is it 25 years go?
Terry: It's crazy, right?
Kalie: It’s absolute crazy. That makes me feel very old. Well, okay, I hope this works out.
I look forward to playing the Friends game. And then to close, what is your favorite Love Island game moment or storyline?
Terry: So, I think, Double Trouble is probably my favorite. Because there was, obviously there were, there, there were twins in, in the Love Island show, right? So, they, they, they kind of managed to, to find twins that would, would go, go on the show.
But I think double trouble for us was, was really interesting. Mainly because I'd, I'd only been at the studio for a, for, for a bit, and so, you know, and so it was, it was one that I probably played first, like fully played. Which was, which was, which was good. But so, I think just that idea of being the first season that you play of, of, of something, you get that kind of nostalgia aspect to it, or that just, yeah, looking back on it.
Um, but I think what it did for me, rather than being particularly like, like a standout episode or standout like seasonal concept was it opened my eyes to the possibility of what we can do that. The shows can't do even though they actually annoyingly they actually did do this. So, it's not the perfect example.
But, but when we speak to the casting director at ITV for Love Island, who the, the fantastic, and it's incredible amount of detail. They go into cast all these people on the show, on these shows. But you can see the limitations they have. They actually have to find these people, right? So, if you want twins on the show, you've actually got to go and try and find two twins that are willing to go on a show, right?
And, and as a, and I opened my eyes to the point of like, as a studio, we don't have to do that. Like we have this, we, we can just come up with cast because, because we have that power. And we've really taken that through. Not just Love Island, but in terms of, in in terms of Big Brother and traitors is like, we have this superpower in that any casting director would kill for, which is that we can come up with any character that we want, any background.
We don't have to try and source them, right? Like, like we can just go, right, this would be an absolutely hilarious person to put in the Big Brother house. Let's do it. Um, and, and that kind of o that that moment of having twins in the game, like open up my eyes to, to that, like I say, even though actually they did have twins in Love Island, so it's not the best example, but
Kalie: I wonder how long it took them to find it though, I'm sure.
Terry: I think it was, I think, I think it was like season six of Low Island, season six, five. I dunno. It was, yeah, it was, it was a while before they, they, they managed it and they've, and, and so, but there's a lot more you can do, right? There's a lot more, using that example you can go on and find. All kinds of crazy things you can do with a storyline.
Kalie: Amazing. Well, Terry, thank you so much for joining us on the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm very much looking forward to playing Traitors later this year, and as I mentioned, your book will be linked in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time.
Terry: Perfect. Thank you very much.
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