Finding Success with AI Agents and Content Creators

Today, we’re diving deep into the world of gaming innovation with a guest who’s been at the forefront of some of the industry’s most exciting trends from enabling user generated content to launching the first commercially successful game leveraging AI agents.

In this conversation, our host, David Taylor sat down with Ran Mo, the Founder and CEO of Proxima to unpack the lessons learned from Proxima’s success with the viral sensation Suck Up!, a game developed where you act as a vampire convincing AI citizens to let you in their home so you can suck their blood. 

Ran is also the former Head of Central Product Management at Electronic Arts and oversaw the development of UGC systems for iconic franchises like The Sims and Skate. We’ll also hear his thoughts on the future of gaming, from the role of AI and UGC to the innovations that could define the next generation of experiences.

We’d also like to thank TikTok for making this episode possible. In a dynamic gaming market where a majority of games fail within three years, TikTok has become a critical partner in helping games achieve long-term player retention and substantial revenue growth. Learn more: https://bit.ly/LiveOpsProgramNAVPodcast 

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

David: Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, David Taylor, and today we're diving deep into the world of gaming innovation with a guest who's been at the forefront of some of the industry's most exciting trends.

From enabling user generated content for iconic franchises like The Sims and Skate, to launching the first commercially successful game leveraging AI agents. In this conversation, we'll explore his journey from head of central product management at Electronic Arts to founder and CEO of Proxima, unpack the lessons learned from building UGC systems, and dive into the challenges and opportunities of designing games with AI agents at their core.

We'll also hear his thoughts on the future of gaming from the role of AI and UGC to the innovations that could define the next generation of experiences. So without further ado, Ran Mo, welcome to the podcast.

Ran Mo: Thanks so much for having me, David. Excited to be on here.

David: Yeah. So just to kick us off, could we do a little quick dive into your background, how you arrived to being the founder and CEO of Proxima today?

Ran Mo: So, thanks again for giving me this platform. A little bit of background. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Proxima. We're a games company that uses AI to build new interactive experiences. The first experience that we launched last year was a game called Suck Up. It is a game that uses AI agents to create comedic gameplay for players.

And we were fortunate that it really took off amongst the player community and across the content creator community. And so today the game has over a few hundred million streams across YouTube and other viewing platforms. Before building Proxima, I ran the central product organization at EA, where we worked with multiple different studios to build systems and improvements within their games, most notably working with Maxis across the Sims and some of the, some of the mobile gaming studios as well. I come from a traditional business background. I have an MBA at Wharton. I worked in the strategy team at YouTube at one point in time and, and so on.

But this is a space I find always fascinating. So, love to have that conversation with you.

David: Awesome. So we'll pop over to the Proxima story a little bit later in the conversation. I'd love to start maybe towards the beginning of your career and talk about UGC, which is obviously part of the industry that, that I spent a lot of time looking at and, and love.

So maybe we can start just by, by asking, you know, when you were working on The Sims back in 2018, what were you seeing on the UGC side and how has the space evolved since you were there for Maxis?

Ran Mo: Yeah, I think my experience with UGC actually precedes even 2018 with the Sims, the first exposure of it was when I worked at YouTube, which of course is all UGC.

It's not video games, of course, but it's arguably the biggest platform of UGC content anywhere in the world. When I joined EA in 2018 and started working with Maxis, there were two things that I noticed. One is that Maxis has this enormous corpus and the Sims has this enormous corpus of user created content that people are using.

Because if you think about what the Sims is, is really, it's a role playing simulator. It's a, it's a, it's a way for players to live their dream lives and that dream life can encompass a lot of different things. And so, sometimes it's where, it's with content that the game has already, and the game has an incredible amount of content but sometimes it takes out of the content corpus of what EA has, and that's where UGC really comes in. So it really brings to life the sense of play and the sense of infinite play that we're still seeing with The Sims today. The second thing that we were seeing in 2018 was the early rise of Roblox, and this was something that was everyone was paying attention to many people were paying attention to in the industry, and I was advocating for EA to look in that direction, and when I first saw Roblox, it was awesome.

Maybe 1:50 at the time of the scale that it is today, but as I looked into the tooling and the systems and the monetization of how Roblox works, it's really very similar to YouTube in the sense that you have creator payout, you have creator. Purely created, a creator created system. So it's, you know, robots, not a game.

It's a, it's, it's a platform people to build on. And for me, that was the obvious thing to say that this could happen within, or it was already happening within the video worlds. Very well may happen and is happening and continues to happen within the video gaming world. So that was a very interesting trend and I continue to push EA on that front.

David: Got it. And so when you were at EA, what were sort of I want to sort of better understand how the UGC system on Sims works a little bit. And maybe you can use Roblox as a compare and contrast of what, what The Sims tool set looks like versus what you were seeing at Roblox at the time.

Ran Mo: Yeah, I mean, Sims is a game that monetizes like a game, it plays like a game, there's a core loop of a game, and the UGC system is essentially bolted on to the core game itself. So the Sims has a gallery of user created contents and it has a way of curating that content for people to download and install the game. Um, there is a set of tools that creators can use to, to, to build and upload, but the difference is it's, it's not a platform.

And so the gallery and other user created contents were used in conjunction, with, what the existing assets of the game are. The second thing is that it's not monetized. So like most games, I'd say 99 percent of games, UGC content is not monetized, which means creators are building these assets purely for the satisfaction of themselves and of other people, which is a very noble cause, but it is a different incentive system. And the third, I think is there's, there's one piece around having a bunch of assets. There is another very deep capability around how do you orchestrate and curate and surface these assets. And game plays to the players themselves, which is as the amount of content gets bigger, it becomes bigger and bigger challenge. Do you surface that couch? Do you surface this particular gameplay mode? And that's really about a recommendation engine. And that wasn't really thought through very thoroughly by. Yeah, most other game developer, I would say.

David: Got it. And so, yeah, on that note, like, I guess, what were the benefits and drawbacks of implementing the UGC systems? I imagine when you looked at Roblox, you saw a lot of opportunity for what you could bring to the Sims. But obviously, feasibility is always, you know, the gating factor here. And so I was I'm curious, like when you were when you were leading the UGC side.

Like, what were some of the opportunities that you thought might have been low hanging fruits versus things that, you know, were just going to be too much work to, to execute?

Ran Mo: Yeah, I think it's a really good question. And the starting point is, I think it's a business question, which is, what do you want the business to be?

Do you want it to be a game that has UGC component to it? Or do you want it to be something more than a game? And that has different implications on how you monetize. What features and tools you build and how much you commit against that road map. And I think that's the big question out. You know, we were asking at the time even as a game, UGZ has enormous benefits.

I think one of the biggest, two of the biggest games that have ever been mod one is Minecraft and one is Outer Scrolls Skyrim. And what the mod has done is that it created new play experience for players that were different than the original and in which the developer didn't have to invest content, against which means the game lasted longer, which means you truly have more players, which means there's more variety of play and you can sell through that game for a much longer period of time. And so that's the game model for UGCs, the platform model for UGCs. Is something very different, which is can you incentivize creators with monetary incentives to create content for you, whether these are individual creators or small teams of creators, and by sharing that you're basically offloading some of the development costs.

And some of the creativity onto the community, you're saying, Hey, look, here's a scaffolding the Sims in which you can build a whole bunch of great content. We'll share some of the problem with you now. That's a different model. And it's as far as I know, I haven't been with EA for some time. That isn't the model that it's being currently pursuits more about the game itself. But I think both are very interesting models.

David: Yeah. When you look at those two models, I guess I want to ask, like if you were talking to. You know, another franchise that was considering UGC. What would you, what would you guide them to? Would you guide them to the platform model where you're creating, you know, an economy around UGC creation, or do you guide them to sort of the giving, giving players, you know, the tools or the ability to modify their game and create new experiences.

Ran Mo: Yeah, it's a really good question. And during the 2020 2021 cycle, when we saw this mass explosion in the metaverse and UGC, I think most people had the thought of, hey, let's go build a platform like Roblox, especially seeing the success robots had the challenge. I think it is very, very, very difficult to start a platform from scratch and even more so at this stage where there are already existing platforms like Roblox that you're competing against, you know, after all those years, there's still YouTube is still a dominant long form video content platform, despite a number of people trying to compete against it. And I think that's true for any.

So if you're going against the platform model, what you have to bet is that we're going to be a technology business, we're going to spend it. Billions of dollars competing in this arena, and we may not make a send a profit for a decade. And, you know, Roblox still has not made a sense of profit for as far as I realize.

I've tracked it more recently, but I think it's still unprofitable and, and so for that model, I think both the technical expertise required the roadmap to get there and also the payback period doesn't make sense for the vast, vast majority of. Keen for his companies, which is mostly our universe. And so what I would actually advise people to say is probably for the companies that we're thinking about the EA's Activision, blizzards to take twos with GTA, it's starting with the contents and layer in UGC over time, and we see that be very successful with the Minecraft to some extent with Fortnite and, and, and others.

So I think there's a way to get there as well.

David: Got it. In my current, in my current role, I oversee the business side of development of a few new franchises. And, and so I'm sort of, you know, I want to ask like, if the question is UGC or no UGC. What, like, if I'm making the argument internally that we should, will be leveraging UGC, what would be the, you know, the argument that I would make from both an opportunity, but then a cost perspective?

Ran Mo: Yeah, I mean, the opportunity is, if it's just for UGC for a game, it extends the shelf life of the game, it expands the playability, it opens up a whole bunch of arenas, but The, the, the cost is there is a real cost in creating the tools to, to create UGC, to creating the services that if you're hosting the UGC yourself.

David: Percentage wise of a total project, like, or gross dollar terms. Like what would you say?

Ran Mo: I think it really does. Pence, you know, it depends on the play pattern of the project. If a project I think is generally more about free play and exploration, and then it lends itself very well to UGC. The Sims does it very well because it's essentially, it's a dollhouse. That's Will Wright, the creator of The Sims.

That's how he pitched it, which is it's a dollhouse play in, which means it lends itself to imagination. Minecraft is another example where you can do anything you want. And so you want to bring in all these gizmos and gadgets. The opposite of the spectrum is a game like, like League of Legends, right, which is a very rigorous rule set.

It's possible for League of Legends itself came from from UGC. But I think investing in UGC for League of Legends may be less fruitful. Versus investing in UGC versus Minecraft. So there is this balance of, well, what is the game? Who is the core audience, both from a creative perspective and from a play pattern perspective?

I think there's certain genres that lend self way better for each.

David: Yeah, it sounds like open world one with obviously Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft and then whatever, whatever role play game. Some role play games are open world. I wouldn't necessarily describe the Sims as open world because it's fairly restrictive in, in terms of.

The explore exploration side of things. Yeah, but yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess I, I'm still, I still want to know just from a general cost perspective, like, do you think that, , you know, if you're, if you're launching a game, you should be thinking about UGC from the beginning, or is it more of like, let's wait to see if this is big enough to warrant building new GC tools into it.

Ran Mo: I think I'm a little bit more pragmatic and I may see it's, let's use example for night, which is they didn't have a lot of UGCs or any UGC tools at the beginning, but they found massive success by building upon one of the most popular play patterns at the time. And then they. bolted on UGC afterwards and to extend it, it works.

So I don't know if there's one formula to it and there's games which UGC came out at 12. Well, the one thing I will say is that UGC is not a panacea for, for, for a new game, which is if your game doesn't have an audience, you're not going to have people who are building. Tools and user creations for that game because a there's no audience in which that creation is served to and two people are just interesting in playing it.

So, I think the mistake I think people make is to say that, Hey, look, I'm going to build a second rate game, but we're going to build all these great. UGC features, and it's kind of a cold star problem similar to building a platform, which is if your game itself can draw players in, in of itself, then they can funnel into the UGC part of the game.

And so I still think that if you're, you know, unless you're putting this kind of tech platform, it's game first, you have to build a game that can stand alone by itself that can draw mass amounts of audience despite having UGC and the UGC is a. Is a funnel where people go into to, to, to create more content and variety and accelerate and accentuate the game.

But, but it doesn't start there.

David: Yeah. And when I think about like the time timelines and the way in which scope creep occurs over the course of a, of a development, project, like I, I find it, I find myself. Like sort of holding my tongue when as much as excited as I am about the potential of UGC, but, but when you've got to build, make the fun happen first, it's hard to say like, Oh, like, let's put, you know, a couple of people on, on building the UGC tools right out of the gate, I think.

You know, bolting it on after launch, after you show that there is an audience, might make a little bit more sense.

Ran Mo: For sure.

David: This is great. Well, I want to move on to our next topic, which is that, , we both write a lot about the video game industry. And so I wanted to spend just a quick, quick, brief moment talking about it, because I think that, from my perspective, it's like one of the biggest like career hacks you can do is like to be.

You know, publishing your thoughts and, and having, you know, the world, whoever, whoever your audience may be, take it in. So I just wanted to ask, like, you know, I've read your, your work on a lot of folks on the novice side of respect to you as a, as a thought leader and, uh, really enjoy your article.

So, you know, I just wanted to start off by asking, like, why do you write in the first place? What was the reason you started writing? And we can go from there.

Ran Mo: Yeah, thanks for asking the question. I love writing and I totally agree with you David that this is a totally a career hack for gaming before any industry.

I started writing during the pandemic and frankly I was, or there was not a lot to do. And I was just writing to organize my own thoughts and think about where the world is heading for the world of interactive media, which is an area that I've very passionate about. And I didn't think it would lead anywhere.

I was fortunate that a couple of articles in one of the articles actually about Roblox was picked up by The Economist and it was a nice moment where they included one of my charts and cited me as an, an author, which is kind of cool, but the other thing that, you know, I bought a couple of copies of The Economist for years to keep it.

David: Why isn't it framed behind you right now?

Ran Mo: But the other thing that it lets you was opened a lot of doors in terms of, even venture funding. So when I met with when mentor partners, who was the lead investor for my first round and investment for Proxima, the connection was because they read some of the work that I have written about the space.

And so there was some understanding of course, it wasn't enough to, to fit investment, but it was enough to open a conversation and the door to a conversation. So I think it's hugely influential to my career and, but I didn't really know about that when I started and I actually haven't written for a while.

So thanks for reminding me for that. I do it more often.

David: That's part of why I had you on the podcast is just to give you a little poke of like, we're ready for the next article. Awesome. Well, I want to talk a little bit about process because I think I'm, I'm personally fascinated about the creative process and how many different ways there are to be creative.

What sort of your process, how do you decide when you're going to write about something?

Ran Mo: I think for me, and again, I haven't written too, too much is that I don't try to keep to a calendar. I think that really stifles a lot of thought process. There's one way I did it where I said, okay, well, I'm gonna release an article every month or every two months or something like that.

But sometimes there's nothing to say and sometimes there's a lot to say and it takes a lot of time for those thoughts to percolate. One of the, the razors I have for myself on writing is, if I sit at my computer and start jamming the notes of what I wanted to write and I get really excited and the words just come out and before I know it is two, three pages of bullet points, I know that I have something because there's something I wanted to say.

And if it's something that just I know I want to write about it because it's current or if it's on trend or popular, but they're just the words won't come out, I think it's a reflection that maybe there isn't as much insight on my end. I thought there may be, even though maybe that's where the world is interested in right now.

So I tend to just let what interests me and what fascinates me lead. And if there's a reader on that, then great. If not, then it's better than, you know, catering to an audience when I have nothing to say. That's my past. At least I'm not sure if that's the best of all worlds.

David: Yeah, no, it's super interesting. I, I think we have similar processes in the sense of, yeah, I don't have a process other than like there's something going on in my head and then I'm just sort of responding to this need to write it down.

I don't actually feel like I'm necessarily like in control of the process. It just sort of happens to me. Um, but I know that there's other people who take a process of like very meticulously, like what are the things that I want to say? And like, and lining it up and then pretty and outline and everything.

Whereas, it sounds like maybe what we do is just like regurgitate this thing that's happening in our subconscious. That is that we're excited about.

Ran Mo: Yeah, for sure.

David: Cool. Well, let's move on to Proxima. You mentioned, you know, that you, that this was a, writing was a key part of, or not a key part, but definitely benefited in the fundraising process.

Well, maybe we just kick it off by, you know, when you're, when you were going through that fundraising process, like what were you telling investors was Proxima's mission and, and how is your approach different than other studios?

Ran Mo: Yeah, I think it, the fundraising process changed a lot over the last three years.

And that, and I was in that first, the first thing to know, I think we, we, we started in 2021. And this was it incredible in hindsight, probably, you know, the most incredible period in history of funding for interactive entertainment and games, because of all the growth the industry saw during the pandemic, plus low interest rate, plus narratives around the Metaverse and all that.

And so to raise the first round of capital to say, okay, we're going to go build these games that are going to do this and that. It was, was really not hard at the time, you know, I had somewhat of a reputation within the industry a little bit and, and some investors say, okay, we're going to build upon what have already came before at the time AI wasn't even out.

So we didn't really have AI or AI was out, but the, the, the iteration of the, the modern LMS as, as it stands today, it wasn't really readily accessible. And so that wasn't really part of the picture. What it became really difficult and that was a small round. So that was a precede to kind of get an initial team going.

What was really challenging was the rounds that came after.

David: But wait, before we get there, like, so this was, this was at the end of the crypto bubble, right? In 2021. That's right. So were you pitching a crypto game? At that time, or what were, what were you sort of pitching?

Ran Mo: I think it's a question that everybody.

And frankly, I would say 80 percent of all companies, gaming companies that were funded at the time, whether they end up using crypto or not probably pitch some version of, Hey, we're going to use crypto to do something because it was the way in which, you know, people got funded. We took a look at the space quite deeply.

We build some stuff. So we, before Suck Up, we build a, another game called Mari, which is a pet collections game, not so dissimilar to Palworld, actually. But it was a project that was too big for us to complete, given the size of our, you know, our team and funding. We thought about, Hey, is there an opportunity to tokenize some of these Realtor assets as games have done and move in that space.

And the answer, I think we, the conclusion that we came to is that it wasn't appropriate for the game that we were building just because the audience, the time and still is, I think the crypto world is that the thing that the people really care about is how do you generate returns? Yeah, right. And how do you gamify the generation of returns?

And, and that's not on a knock on the industry. It's just that's the, that's the, the real world. And I think, you know, and there's tons of people who are building gamifications of it. We're games on crypto's road. If we build the legends on crypto would have built halo on crypto and, and so on. But I think the, the, the real, the real draw for crypto is it's about the strollers.

I think there's a, there's an application I think recently called pumped off fund, which you're just, You just create meme coins from nothing and people are betting on it, but it's, it's not a, it's not a game, the traditional sense, but it creates gamified dopamine rushes. And it's probably the best crypto game, but it wasn't an audience that we felt like we understood to serve.

And so we didn't. End up watching anything related to crypto, but it was very difficult as a game company to stay entirely away from the area in 2021, 2022 when most of it was that

David: Got it. And so, so that was sort of your first funding round. Did you need to raise the second round in order to get to what you ultimately became your debut game of suck up?

Ran Mo: Yeah, we didn't raise a second round, but we had to raise some British capital. And that was. 2020, end of 2022, beginning 2023. And then also a little bit more in 2023 itself. Um, and it was, it was night and day. I remember in 2021, we were just building heads down. There was nothing about the company, who we are.

And I would get LinkedIn messages, you know, every couple of days about people wanting to put money into the business. And there was a moment in time where it just, just all stopped, you know? And no matter what happened, it was just, it was not possible. And in hindsight, I think it's actually a good reflection of the exuberance that we came in.

I think we saw a lot of overfunding of companies during this period of time and, and some really amazingly talented founders as well. But the business model of, of, of funding these massive rounds. Games, you know, pre launch has not been overall successful. So I think it is a moment of reflection, but it wasn't really tough time, but it, it took that.

And I think there's the second thing we took was that we initially went down the route of let's go build a game that on the scale of power or something. They, so, so, you know, 20. 15, 20 people, but not, not massive, but also required a couple of million dollars to build. And at some point we were, we released the pre alpha that tested quite well, but it was just impossible to.

Get the capital for to require to get to the next milestones without massive dilution. And at some point we looked at ourselves and said, we can keep going down this road, but I don't think we'll get there or we'll get there with a lot of pain that probably isn't necessary. And so we, at some point made the hard decision to say, okay, we're going to park all that, and we're going to build a game that can be contained to a small size team, which we were only five people at the time, , that we can ship in a quick amount of time that we have high confidence in actually making revenue for ourselves.

And that's the only way to survive during that period of time.

David: So at that moment, did you have an idea of what you wanted to build, or were you just sort of like, this isn't going to work, we got to find something.

Ran Mo: It's, it's the first, I think, or sorry, it's the second. I think there, we, we, there was a few criteria that we had.

One of it was we have to build this. fairly quickly, something within less than six months, which is incredibly fast for the world of video games. So launch and ship and test and, and deploy in six months. The second is that we didn't have a marketing budget. So we had to rely on the game being natively able to drive around in itself.

It's the only way in which we can build. And so the two criteria is that we had. Was we have to build in less than six months, and we have a zero marking dollars against this. And so the, but that constraint really forced us to think about what are the type experiences that have the potential to go viral?

What does virality actually look like? And how do you build fast against it? And, and, and we literally had a. I think a Figma board of a hundred plus different ideas against those constraints. And it was some of the most creative time, I think, I mean, as a team.

David: Amazing. So, uh, so how many Figma sessions are we talking till we got to the, the winner?

Ran Mo: I didn't remember, but it was a lot of long, long Figma conversations. But it was fun. You know, it was, it was a time when Jackie BG had launched, I think maybe seven months ago or nine months ago, we got built something actually quite remarkable in our previous scheme with AI, which is actually more advanced than what we did with suck up, which is we used.

And there's videos of it on our website. You can still see we had these pets and you can actually use voice commands to talk to your pets and play with your pets. So if you say, Hey, let's go play hide and seek. We'll just go hide under a bush because it recognizes the environment. And we gained the LMS control for the game commands itself. So it can be iterate, so we can do, you know, intend to actions. So you can try it. So it was very agentic the way that was, you know, that was in 2022. So, or 2023, so much, much earlier than the agent conversations has been happening in the AI today. That game that that experience was the prototype say, Hey, look, we can actually build with a I as a team.

We have the capabilities internally, but that to me in particular was just really long and hard to build. So, when set up when we thought about Suck up, it was something that even within AI, we can grapple and wrestle with it within six months.

David: What I love about Suck Up is it seems to, it leverages the imprecision of AI as a feature, which I thought was really well done of like, it's like the player experiences.

Let's see what I can say to convince. This, this NPC to let me into their house so I can suck their blood. And by the way, we should probably do like just a quick intro of what Suck Up is, just so that people have that context in case they haven't seen it. Also, I highly recommend just like going online and looking at some of the like creator content because it's hilarious.

But, yeah. So, I mean, we'll get to the, we'll, we'll get into more detail, but let me just finish the question, which is like, it seems so perfectly balanced to leverage the capabilities of AI. And I'm just wondering, like, did that take, did that take user testing in order to get to a place where you're like, okay, we're using the sort of what many people call like a bug in AI, but we're actually leveraging that as a feature.

Or did you have that for through the Figma boarding that you were doing? Do you sort of know of like, okay, we know that there's this sort of limitation with LLMs today. Let's actually turn that into, a fun experience.

Ran Mo: Yeah, I, we mean, again, we were, we were really short on time and, and, and, and runaway and all that.

So we didn't have a lot of room. We did. It runs a family testing, of course, but it wasn't the thing that drove this kind of long duration. We just kind of build it. The, I think the kernel of it is, you don't, you know, Suck Up is a, is a town and you had different houses, you have police, you kind of like GTA style, you have all these things.

But the kernel of it is really the experience of talking to one person, right? Whether you can address that one person, and we can build that very quickly. Actually, we built that in less than a week. And we, and we could test to see if there is a nugget of, of fun in there, right? And, and, and usually I think for games, it's actually, that nugget is actually quite small.

And so you can build that nugget within probably one hackathon session or. A week or two, and you can see if it's, if it's funded, of course, you ought to build a lot more to make it a game, but we got an insight that it could work fairly early now. We didn't know if it was going to take off or anything like that, but it was playable with a swine and we had a good time doing it.

And then it was about, okay, well, how do we invent a character to the characters that people can understand? So people like, you know, characters like a Karen or emo teenager or something that I, people can probably resonate with. And the third, I think when we go back to virality, the way that we thought about suck up was that, at the time that we were building, it was really about all, everybody was talking about AI companion.

So it was, how do you build a AI companion that can be your best friend or something like that. And And we kind of flipped the switch on that set because for Succub, the star is not the AI, the star is the content creators. You know, Succub, if you take it, is at it's most holistic level, it's an impromptu comedy game.

It allows players to express their genius in comedic bullshitting, if you will. And their AI is basically kind of a foil against that, right? It can respond. It can respond to you. It can do these things. It can acknowledge your joke and it can react to you. But the true genius is really in the content creator, the player and the content creator.

And that's the insight that made it really popular. People are watching stuff, videos on YouTube for the AI. They're watching it for what the creator has to say because the creator is funny. The AI just, you know, simply reacts to it. And, and that was kind of the, the, the, the script. I think that we charted at the time to make this game to be what it is.

David: Was that, was that an intentional thing or was that sort of emergent in the, in the game development process?

Ran Mo: It's intentional. It was intentional because we had the constraint that we had to go viral. And we looked at the, so we. We, we build a deck of what are the factors of reality and how do you thrive against that?

And how do you think about expectation or subordinating expectations or building? And giving kind of the content creators the ability to express that comedy was very, very, and there's reasons why games like. Build Simulator or, these random game or amalas became really popular because it allowed the content creators to express their genius, their comedic genius, their dramatic genius in some way, or GTA role playing or something like that.

And so how do we kind of continue? And that could be with AI. It doesn't have to be, but that has to be the central nugget for us because we wanted the content creators to play this game.

David: When you think about the success of those games that you mentioned, how much of it do you, would you attribute to the streamability of it versus, you know, some game mechanic or fun or, or player fantasy that they were able to capture?

Ran Mo: I think, I think it's two levels. I think there are games in which are fun to stream because it gives an avenue for the content creators to express themselves. And there's games that are fun to play as a common player, if you can have both of those things, Minecraft is a really good example, right? It, it, it's such a broad canvas that it allows the content creators to build whatever it wants to and create whatever story arc.

And, but it also is fun for the players to build. GTA is another example with the role playing. It allows content creators to really create that sense of immersion, but it's also really fun for average person. If you have both those things. Your game is going to be an absolute hit, no question about it, but it is very difficult to get both content creators to like something and the players to like something because those two things are sometimes not the same.

One is about how do you have a canvas of creating content or a stage to create content. One it's about feeling some kind of internal satisfaction and enjoyment. That's why there's so few games that can do both.

David: Do you think that this is just going to be sort of part of the game developers playbook going forward is everyone's going to be designing for both streamer and player in mind,

Ran Mo: I think, I think, um, the more that I spent time building in this industry in this moment in time, the more I realized how difficult it is to get attention. It is the most difficult thing because. Building the game itself is getting easier and easier with Unity, with Unreal, with Blueprints, with now with AI, with Roblox.

You have 16-year-old kids who can make games. What is really difficult is getting attention because there's tens of thousands of games that are coming out every year, and how do you, and the attention shifts really fast in today's world. You can manufacture attention in the way you could in the past.

In the past, what you do is you just do brand marketing, right? You, you, you blast every billboard with Spider Man or, you know, Hogwarts. But, but today you have to drive for attention through short form videos through, through, through the call of conscious. And that moves really fast. It could be your game for three weeks.

And then it's going to move on to something else. But if you can capture that attention for three weeks, like things like lethal company, things like Powell, you can make half a billion dollars. In those weeks, but it's not predictable, it's not predictable in the sense that you can, you can do with brand marketing or traditional forms of distribution and, and that you can, you can engineer it so that you have a broader or greater probability of success, but you can never guarantee it.

And that's what I think games today, especially making game continuity is more and more of, of a bet. It's a gamble, right? You can, you can, you can, you can move the hand slightly in your favor, right? If you're playing blackjack, you can decide when to hit and when to stay, but you'll never get to a hundred percent probability as where the world is.

David: Yeah. And it sounds like you got to throw out the old marketing playbook and, and start to adopt, you know, the, the marketing playbook of today, which is to leverage, you know, fairly grassroots. Streamer base, give them content that they want to engage with and, and make sure that it's organic. You can't necessarily pay streamers to do it.

Cause you know, then they have to say, this is a sponsored post and I'm just going to say whatever they told me to say.

Ran Mo: Yeah, it's very expensive to buy, you know, we, we had some, KSO and some of the largest streamers who were playing streamers who had tens of millions of, of, of subscribers playing our game for free.

Those subscribers playing a sponsor post would be tens or sometimes even thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to play a single game. And the payback is just not there for indie games. So the, unless you're. Apex legends or something like that. You wouldn't, you wouldn't, the economics would not make sense.

And after setup, we had a lot of, I had a lot of founders reach out to me to say, how, how did you guys do it? What was your formula? Like, did you do share, um, you know, revenue share with content creators? Do you have some kind of a special program to, and I was kind of naive the time. No, we just, we'll just email them and DM them and say, Hey, come play.

But the reason why someone who played suck up was there's one person who played suck up. His name is Mad Morph. He had something like 150, 000 subscribers that time. Very, very comedically, funny, just amazing, naturally gifted voice actor. He played suck up within a day. I think usually his videos gets around 20, 000 views within a day.

The first video that he came out with Suck Up, he got a million views, you know, within a day, which was, and people were like, what is this thing? And within three days, we have many, because YouTubers are very smart. They catch, they catch on trends like that. And within two weeks, we had some of the biggest.

Streamers play a game without ever reaching out to them. And that's just how it works, right? If you can, if your game can drive views for people, people will organically click. That's the thing that people want. They don't care about rev share. They don't care about anything else. They care about getting views.

And it's not easy. It's not easy to build a game in which you get streamer views.

David: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So I want to, I want to talk about just sort of the AI component of what you guys were building. Was it hard to, to introduce AI agents? It sounds like if you guys built this in six months, you mentioned you had the capabilities, but is this something that, you know, would be pretty easy for anyone else to replicate?

Ran Mo: I think we were very talented from an engineering perspective as a team. I think, when we launched it, there was so much uncertainty. So for example, Steam didn't allow anything with anything AI, in it. So we basically had to distribute the game arts. I think they changed the policy since then.

But we, at the time, we had to basically Figure out how to distribute the game ourselves, which is like, then we have to build a whole, we have to use, figure out all payment rails and which is not super hard, but, and sell it ourselves, which usually has never done the benefit of this course, you keep a hundred percent of the revenue that comes in, uh, but with AI it was.

And the harder thing, actually, what we did was actually not set up, but the, the, the prototype that we built before the Asian, the, the pad, that a lot could move, understand environmental awareness, can do a bunch of things and play games with you and only do all these things. And that was really, really difficult.

And I think we were probably one of the first teams to do it. And people didn't take us super seriously at the time because we were, you know, You know, not the AI company, we're a games company that wasn't founded on AI games, but we did it. I think today, deploying AI is easier. The trick is to figure out what, how does it benefit the game that you're building and how does it benefit , the, the, the loops and the motivations in which you try to satisfy, because it doesn't apply to all situations at all times.

And the world is also for AI is still continues to evolve very quickly. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a Chinese model that beat Open AI, mostly every single metric and it was 95 percent cheaper. When we launch, we were really scared that a token cost was going to make this game unproper for.

We didn't, the token cost was really, really high at the time, and so when we, when we launched the other thing, what's it, what's the token cost just for, just for us. So when you use, you, when you interact with any sort of AI that compute is use, is generated in a data center, right?

So E. W. S. We're, Azure or wherever else the data center is being hosted, and it's computational expensive into to make that work. The companies who are offering that are charged a fee based on tokens. So a token is an abstract concept of computation, but usually if it's something more complicated, so let's say if you have a massive chunk of text, if you feed it images or if you make it actionable, so there's a loop involved in it, then it costs more tokens than if it's a short message, like, hello, how are you?

And so tokens are not fixed, but whenever you interact with AI that costs tokens. And so as a player, the more you play this game, the more it costs us, which is a very different model than any other video game, right? So if you download StarCraft and you play StarCraft, Blizzard isn't getting charged unless, of course, you're playing online on their servers, then there's a little bit of server cost.

But by and large, or if you, you know, let's say you buy Minecraft, a single player game, you play Mojang and or Microsoft is not getting charged anything. For us, it's different, right? We were selling this game for 1299 and we thought, Hey, look, people play for five hours or 10 hours. And they go crazy, then we might incur.

And actually, that did happen. We had, strangely, we had some speed runners that I don't know why people wanted to speed run suck up, we had some speed runners who were just basically inputting console commands, they were like, dude, this just did it. And they were trying to gotcha the AI. And they were putting an enormous amount of tokens playing our game, you know, in an hour they would spend like five, ten dollars worth of compute costs.

We're, we're in a couple hours, they would spend that much, but by and large, it was manageable. We, that, that was the thing. The business model was not to find the time to, so we, we were really inventing a lot of things. But compute costs, even between where we launch, which is the end of 2023, beginning 2024, so just a year from now to now has dropped dramatically.

The same model is probably 75%, 80 percent plus cheaper and better models are getting those same price if not cheaper as well. And so that's the interesting thing about building in this industry is that the costs are continuously coming down from what you thought was impossible six months ago or a year ago.

David: Yeah, it makes sense. So do you think that we'll see more game companies, developers incorporating AI agents into their games? Why would they and why wouldn't they?

Ran Mo: I think it's a, it's a tough question. I think after we launched, we had a bunch of people who are both Small indie studios and some of the largest gaming companies in the world reach out to us.

And people are really interested in the space. But the fact is, after Suck Up came out there has been zero commercially successful games with AI agents. , commercially successful being it is profitable by itself. I, unless you've seen it, I have not seen one and, and I think that's not because people are, and we can take that as a sign.

Hey, look, we can pat ourselves on the back. Congratulations. You know, we're the best in the world, but it's also a sign that something's missing here. You know, when I remember I, you know, I wasn't in the space at the time, but, you know, even following as an outsider, when mobile gaming first came out, there were dozens and dozens of companies were generating tens of millions of dollars of.

Revenue and profit every year in the early stages of the mobile boom, right? Is the early 2010s. We have not seen that for a, and I think any, I has actually two impacts that it has one is on. Hey, can we create different set of game play with agents, which is what we're doing or what other kind of features that AI offers in real time, which I think is a real innovation on design.

There is another real impact of AI, which is it drives down development costs and capabilities. Now you can make 3d assets easier. You can code easier. You can deploy easier. And this is, you know, we'll not talk about agents, but you know, coding assistants with 3d art generations with whatever else is integrated.

And so more and more people are able to make games. And what that allows for is allows for the supply of games to increase over time. And I think that is. Net of the two impacts of AI, I think that's the bigger impact, which is, I think we're going to see exponentially more games being built over time and more games built by very small teams and solo developers with the assistance of AI, which makes the whole argument of how do you have a game that stands out more challenging, if not less, because we're going to see increasing number of content.

In the world, it's already massive, right? And it continues to grow more massive every day. It is going to, that rate of growth is only going to accelerate with AI. That's, I think is the bigger impact. Like, so if mobile on the whole is, it impacts demand because it increases demand. It doubles demand. AI, I think, by and large, impacts supply, it increases supply, and that's not a good, it's a good thing if you're a consumer, it's not a good thing if you're a game developer.

David: Yeah, like, indie game development is, is going to become a lot more akin to Roblox game development, where you're competing with 5 million Developers instead of I think like 50, 000.

Ran Mo: And it's not just in the I think it's double a triple a rate because if the market as a whole is scoring 3 percent 5 percent per year and you know, and sometimes you have games like lethal company or power world that's making a half a billion to a billion dollars made by Couple people, then these people really strike golds when maybe an obviously they didn't use AI, but imagine the future part of the game is bill with AI assistance, whether it's in the co generation or in the asset generation, That’s the money that's being diverted from traditional larger games to deals. Right. So I think. I think the world if I were have a prediction is that it's going to become more chaotic. You know, there's going to be massive winners like the guy who make lethal company or malas, and that you're going to see that more frequently, but the stability of the industry in which you say, Hey, look, I'm going to go build Assassin's Creed.

I'm going to go build and I'm going to guarantee to get a salary as an employee or get a amount of profit or revenue as a big gaming studio. I think that's going to become more challenging over time.

David: Super interesting. I've had a similar thought that like the, the middle is getting carved out a bit more and people are going to the fringes of like either massive mega franchises or, very indie games and both, you know, can be successful, but also it's extremely competitive because now you've got more entities that are producing content and yeah, it's super fascinating. Think about that as a, as a future, if it's not already here as you think about that future. And as you think about Proxima and what you've learned from suck up, like, are you guys going to continue to invest in suck up? Is suck up done? And you're moving on to the next project?

What's next? What's next for you guys?

Ran Mo: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think on startup, we build quite a few features since its launch. So we, you know, going back to the UGC conversation, we actually build an UGC Component where anyone can build their own characters. So people build like Harry Potter characters and so on.

Obviously you have to watch for IP infringements and all that. But, and so that's been an interesting piece. We've also built other experiences with the Sakhafi number. So we put a Valentine's experience in which you can break up people. And it's kind of funny. We build a rap battle mode in which you're battling the rap.

You're creating rap versus in your battling other AI in a wrapper, you know, so there's all these game modes, I think, that continue to drive engagement. And we'll continue to invest. Against it, but at a fairly small level because I think there is a there's a run rate to the game, right? No time. It's good.

David: Is this DLC? Like people have to pay for each of these modes? Or how are you monetized?

Ran Mo: It’s free. It's free right now. It's just, it's, you know, we just drive if we can drive engagement and we get we get waves of new sales. That, that's, yeah, so we're not doing DLCs at the moment, or paid DLCs, so everything's free.

And we will continue to invest against it. But I think at a, at a reasonable scale, that makes sense from a business perspective. I think from that, in terms of next projects and going forward, I think, I think there is. The world is very different. I think when I signed up for Proxima, where I signed up the team and the ambassadors into Proxima, there was a very different world order that we were seeing as a part of the pandemic and pre pandemic.

And I would argue that world order is being disrupted in a pretty dramatic way today. There is a reason why I think we're seeing a massive amounts of layoffs within industry over the last couple of years, probably. One of the most unprecedented times ever, and, and part of that is cyclical because of overinvestment, but part of that is structural because of the way I think gaming content is evolving into similar to YouTube, right?

Similar to Roblox, in which it becomes more indie, it becomes more, you know, everybody can create games, but that has dramatic impacts on what the industry does. And how does that Impact the business that I'm building for, you know, do we build content, do we build more content? Do we do something else? I think that's an open question for us to figure out.

You know, I signed up for this journey to heal it. We're going to build a great game. We're going to ship it and we're going to do that. We build, I think, a Fairly good game and fairly innovative game. We started what we set out to do initially, but then what do we do next? You know, how does, how do we respond to a world that's very different today than what we've seen and we can't have in the same, the playbook, the pitch deck, I mean, the message and no longer apply.

And so I think TBD, to be honest, it's something that I think maybe I'll write another rock post at some point about, but it is a, it is a brave new world out there for sure.

David: Yeah, it sounds like it's still marinating, waiting to come out and an inspiration, in terms of blog post or in terms of the next Proxima game.

That's awesome. Well, Ran, it's been awesome to have you on the podcast. Thanks for, thanks for coming on. It was great to chat about UGC, AI, AI agents. You, you really gave us a great understanding of, of some of gaming's top, top trends at the moment. Thanks for stopping by.

Ran Mo: Yeah, thanks so much, David. Thanks for, for having me on.

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