In this episode, host Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, sits down with Mac Reynolds, co-founder and CEO of Night Street Games and Night Street Records, and Matthew Berger, Game Director at Night Street Games. Together, they unpack the journey of building Last Flag — a zany 5v5 hero shooter with capture-the-flag at its heart and music embedded deep in its DNA. From a scrappy prototype built with an outsourced team to a 50+ person studio, they share lessons on pivoting engines, refining the core loop, and innovating within the oversaturated PC shooter market. They discuss how music shapes gameplay moments, creates immersion, and differentiates Last Flag from typical shooters — and in a first-ever moment at Naavik, we share exclusive music tracks straight from the game itself. The conversation also explores parallels between the business of music and gaming industries, what game devs can learn from music artists, and the realities of cutting through noise on Steam for a new IP. After listening, watch the trailer and sign up to playtest here.  

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

Alexandra: What's up everyone, and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the Interview and Insights segment. Earlier this month at Summer Games Fest, the studio I have on air today dropped their launch trailer for their shooter Last Flag, a zany 5v5 true capture the flag hero shooter that takes place in a stylized arena.

If you have not seen it, the trailer is linked in the show notes and the studio is Night Street, founded by Dan and Mack Reynolds of Night Street Records Fame, a venture back gaming studio with investors like B Craft and Mantis. As many of you'll recognize the Chain smokers VC firm, I am particularly excited about today's conversation as we're gonna go deep on the intersection of two industries, music and games, and a novel approach to building a game studio.

I'll keep this intro short as I want my guests today to tell us about the game. But overall, in addition to talking about Last Flag and building Night Street, we're gonna discuss cross media learnings, making music matter in a competitive shooter, you know, music in the DNA right from the start, and the general crisis of building and marketing new games on Steam and other PC storefronts, particularly ones with new IP, and generally double a distribution to today's videos video game market.

With that, I'll get to introducing my guest. My first guest is Mac Reynolds, CEO, and founder of Night Street Games prior to finding the studio. He has a long-standing career in the music industry at Reynolds Management as a co-owner of Night Street Records, the label under which the Imagine Dragons publishes.

And everyone has probably heard of the Imagine Dragons, so I don't need to explain who they are. Welcome to the pod, Mac.

Mac: Thank you. Thank you. Small, small correction, if I can. So Imagine Dragons are actually Interscope records, but Dan and I started our own kind of side record label, Night Street Records, and our artists include, Benson, Boone and Kle.

So a small, a smaller little subset.

Alexandra: No, that's a large correction. Thank you for telling me that. The music industry is so convoluted to me. I'm like, who owns what? Who owns the song? Taylor buys back all of her tracks and now she owns them. Didn't know she didn't own them before. So thank you for that.

Mac: No worries.

Alexandra: My second guest and I share background at Blizzard. And I'm pleased to welcome Matthew Berger, Game Director at Night Street Games. Matthew spent the majority of his time at Blizzard on Diablo 3, Diablo 4, Diablo ROS, Diablo Immortal. Can I name more Diablo titles? But it's always good to have another Blizz alum on air. Welcome to the show, Matthew.

Matthew: Thank you very much. I actually think I may be the only person who's worked on Diablo on all platforms, console, PC and phone. So you go.

Alexandra: That's pretty impressive. Very nice. It's on a lot of platforms. What? Oh, what about Switch?

Matthew: So that one's cheating a little bit because I was there, but saw the switch port was done by a different studio.

So I can't, I can't, you know, say that I actively worked on Switch, but I did work on PS4 and, and through, through osmosis.

Alexandra: You, you had it. Alright, so it's really good to both have you here and, what a journey it's been since, and at least Mac our initial meeting for the Series A investment at Bit Craft. I will call out on air today that Night Street was one of the deals that I covered at Bit Craft, so it's been extra special seeing this project evolve from the first Unity playable to where it is today. And we'll talk a little bit about that migration. Mac, before we kick off our show and our standard order of operations, I want my audience to get to know you both.

And so, Mac, maybe you can start us off. Tell me a little bit about your background, but specifically I wanna know why you started a game studio. I know Dragons, DNA runs deep.

Mac: Sure. You know. So my, you know, my background was originally in law actually. I went to UCLA for law school, stayed out there for a little bit, did like a little stint of corporate law at Sol Cromwell, moved over to Proskauer and did mostly entertainment litigation.

But, and it ended up kind of sideways finding my way into music. You know, I started managing a, a couple artists, including Imagine Dragons while I was in law school, and, decided to jump ship and gonna management full-time. And, and so started managing them about 15 years ago, uh, and have been doing that ever since.

But, um, you know, gaming was very much in the DNA for Dan and I. So Dan, the lead singer's, my brother, we, we grew up, you know, on studios like Lucas Arts and Sierra Online and Delphine and like these studios. It just played a huge, uh. Huge role in our childhood. You know, I remember sneaking out to like call the hotline for Sierra Online, you know, like while, you know, when my parents were looking, you know, I'm dating myself here, but , you know, I did 3D modeling and animating when I was a kid as well.

And Dan is a pretty decent coder. He's actually pretty great. He does a lot of work in C Sharp, mostly does stuff in unity, builds little games, and often shares them, uh, shares 'em online anonymously actually. And we talked for years about getting into games and about three years ago, you know, after doing every kind of collaboration we could get our hands on with the gaming and music for a decade, decided, you know what?

We gotta stop talking about it and, and, and step up and make games. And so we started our prototype. The rest is history.

Alexandra: Alright, well, that, that's an amazing story. And it's so cool to see so much artistry overlap between kind of two mediums, you know, on the music side as a singer and a songwriter, as well as on the game side.

Okay? So Matthew, I'm gonna turn to you. These guys start a video game studio. What makes you join them? What, what, what do you see as the opportunity? And pack up your bags from Blizzard and, and join this brand new video game studio with the, with Dan and Mac.

Matthew: Actually it, it, it really boils down to Mac more, more than anything else. First of all, he and I really hit it off very quickly and had a really good rapport when we were chatting and they had already built a prototype for what would become last flag. And so Max showed me his prototype, we played it. I got to play, you know, a play test with it. He and I chatted about it.

And between Mac himself and the fun I was having chatting with him and his vision that just really, really convinced me. One thing is people sometimes hear Mac, you know, manager of Imagine Dragons and they think he's the studio head. He created the studio. Those things are true on the creative and on the game design side.

And you could see the promise of, of the stu of the game initially right out in the prototype. And he and I really, you know, started kind of vibing about what potential updates we could make, what changes, what adjustments. Usually what that happens to me when I dive right in, it means that I like the core idea.

I'm, I'm excited. And so really it's that like I, I really love talking with Mac. I like what they had put down and we had a good rapport. And games are a creative endeavor. And so who you work with is not only critical to the success, but also to your day to day because you're gonna run into tricky spots and whatnot, and you are gonna put in some long hours, often.

And so if you can work with people that you connect with and that seem to have your back and that, you know, you have a, a good relationship with, it makes all the difference.

Alexandra: Wow, that's incredible. And as someone who's played that early demo, um, I agree it was loads of fun and had, was, was spiced, with a ton of really great creativity.

So I wanna start with, you know, last Flag's journey and kind of building Night Street and the journey that you've undergone so far. I'm familiar with where you started, but Mac, you know, tell me a little bit about growing and scaling the studio, you know, where you began when you and Dan were like, we're gonna start a game studio and, and where you are today.

Mac: Yeah, so it's, you know, it started out with us kind of just dinking around with our own game design documents and kind of talking about the game. We drawing diagrams. Dan actually made a whole series of animations and, and hand-drawn sketches and music and, and voiceover and all kinds of stuff to start building out the world.

And the thought. But really the core for us was we knew we wanted to make, capture the flag. We knew we wanted to kind of recreate that childhood experience of actual hiding and finding that we didn't. I didn't really get in the CTF game modes that we loved. You know, especially the nineties, two thousands, you know, unreal, tournament war, song Gulch, whatever.

Great, great, great, great games, but never scratched that. It, so we started from this place of, okay, how do we recreate that? And logistically, you know, we knew we couldn't do this on our own and. Credit to Dan. He kind of started the ball rolling. He, I, I think he literally, it was like googling how to meet other game developers and like, ended up going to like various outsource kind of websites and started, you know, looking at things that other companies had made around the world and had narrowed it down to about four, four outsource companies he liked.

And, and, and that's when I kind of dove in with him a little heavier at that point in time we started doing these like, web conference, you know, interviews. And it was really funny 'cause of course he didn't say anything about Imagine Dragons. That was not part of the pitch. And we got pretty far with the company that felt right to us, which is this company, Argen X out of Ukraine.

We just really like the guys they see the most realistic, I think, you know, which is nice. You, a lot of people tell you what you want to hear when you're bidding out stuff like this. And we just really vibe with them on a creative level. And so at some point in time in those conversations, I think, you know, they were like, you kind of look like that guy from Imagine Dragon.

So that was like a whole kind of funny conversation. But we started with them, we started building our prototype and it was, you know, that was a, a long labor of love and it took a lot of twists and turns. The game, like at one point was like isometric fog of war, right? And now it's like a third person shooter.

It's like really taking some turns. But we got the prototype to a place where we felt like, okay, like the fun is here. It's not super consistent. Like there was a lot of work to be done there, but the fun is there. And, and we took that and went out and started just like many other. Studios, you know, talking to different firms and trying to raise money, and that's where we met you, of course, Alex.

We were, we were doing our seed round and raised some money and from that began kind of the next leg of our journey, which was, okay, we've got a prototype. How do we elevate this to a game? And, and we need a team of people who have shipped great games and, and understand the, the lay of the land. You know, we've been really lucky to have awesome advisors in our corner.

You know, people who we'd worked with in the game industry in other ways who were kind of helping us and guiding us in some ways. But, building a team was the most important thing that we have done. I think as a company and, and fast forward, you know, to today, we're now, you know, we've got about 50 folks on the team, a little more than that, but to be able to work alongside people like Matthew who worked on.

Like our, one of our favorite game franchises of all time is just one of the most remarkable things. And we built that team kind of just person by person, you know, over the years and with a very, very high index on culture fit. That was really important for us. But also, you know, we were fortunate enough to be able to get a lot of people who worked on not just the right games for what we were doing, but did the exact things that we wanted in those games, which you can't always do when you're hiring up.

And, yeah, we, we ended up building up the team and then taking the game, porting it from Unity, where we started into Unreal, which is a whole nother journey, raising some more money and like a seed extension. And now we're kind of. Finally post announce as of, was it last weekend, the weekend before?

I don't know, time's flying and off to the races, looking at a launch next year. So it's a, it's been a crazy journey.

Alexandra: I'm curious, given that you guys started actually as an outsourcing studio before bringing on maybe like I guess who you'd consider to be in-house, what challenges have presented them along the way with maybe beginning as an outsourcing team and then hiring a staff of in-house?

And it sounds like you're about 50/50 now.

Mac: Yeah, so there are a lot of challenges, but also some real opportunity there. And we've taken a little bit of a different approach. For us, that original team, they might've been an outsource team, but for us, they were our team and there wasn't really a difference, right?

These are the people making our game that we were in the trenches with every day. And so even though we saw a need to kind of supplement with kind of these full-time employees in-house, we've soon found kinda like halfway along the time of development that there was those challenges of having two teams, right?

Like some people sometimes you feel like you're throwing things over the fence, back and forth between people and, and we were like, how do we eliminate those visibility and accountability gaps that can happen between. Team A and team B. And, and so we made it a determination actually to fully integrate the outsource team into our company.

We didn't wanna lose the magic of these are the people who started with us. They have shared this vision with us and helped shape that vision. Instead of kind of pushing them further as we built the team, we were like, no, how do we pull them closer? And so today, even though some folks are kind of contract through this outsource company, it's an exclusive relationship.

And, and their team members just like anybody else. So we report up through the same lines. All of our team meetings are together and we're already remote studio around the world, so we can kind of get away with that kind of one team, one dream mentality. And it's worked really well for us even though there were difficulties, I would say in figuring out like, how do you take a, a separate company with its own structure and hiring practices and culture and we have this little like shell of a company. We started here with like these core people. How do we mesh those together? It took us some growing pains, but it was well worth.

Alexandra: Yeah, it's a little bit like a m and a to be honest. You just kind of bought, brought in a team and it's actually become really popular because you know, before the feeling of working with an external development partner felt external, given that you were in person and these people were not in person with you, except that now I think actually a lot of people have been more open to outsourcing and co-development relationships given that it's kind of now the default that everyone is external, physically, which I think is, is really, really interesting. Matthew, any thoughts to add to that?

Matthew: Yeah, actually that last point that you made, that, that was my experience. It's, it would almost be harder to think of them as an external partner because all our, all our meetings, all our conversations, everything being remote, since we're all fully remote, we're all split all over the world.

My interactions with people whose contract nominally says Argen X isn't any different than my interactions with, you know, someone whose contract might say Night Street and also Mac was, it was very important for Mac to just bring them into the fold as one studio for us to feel like we were one team making one game.

And so I, it's almost, there was, at no point I felt them like an outsourcing partner personally. I just felt like they were always part of the team.

Alexandra: I see. Yeah. And so my next question is actually maybe gonna be in that vein. You know, this is to me maybe from this outside looking in, this is a, maybe a traditional way of starting a studio, but, Matthew, there's been a lot of challenges in game making space today, especially across AA and, you know, this idea that traditional development is broken, and I'm sure that you either both have heard or read the summaries of Owen Mahoney's latest pieces, specifically his talk on, or his blog on sympathy for the devil. And many issues centering around an inability to make decisions fast and iterate and get the product in the customer's hands and sort of building in the dark.

From your perspective on the game director side, you know, how have you tackled that at Night Street, given the team dynamic of where this, where the studio started and, and where you are today?

Matthew: Well, I think, you know, you do have some, there, there's essentially some drawbacks and benefits to being large and some drawbacks and benefits to being small, and they kind of dovetail one another. At a smaller studio you have less resources, you know, that's, that's a drawback, right? You have less money, literally. But with that, you also have more freedom in terms of decision making, right? You don't have somebody over your shoulder going, Hey, how are we gonna make this a billion dollar game because I've just invested 200 million into this? So the drawback becomes a strength, right? Yes, you have less money, but you get to make decisions that you feel are the right decisions for the game, not necessarily the decisions that match the financial outlay. This also means that the team being smaller is more responsive.

You get their feedback faster. Everybody has a stronger voice in terms of the, the quality of the product. If somebody has something that they see, it's very easy for them to send me directly a message, you know? And for us to have a quick conversation. There's really no layer of hierarchy that is preventing people who see a problem from giving it to the people who may be the ultimate decision makers.

So you can move very quickly. Because of that, you can also pivot really hard, really fast, and we've had that experience a few times where we've had an upcoming deliverable, an internal milestone that we had decided for ourselves. And when looking at where we were standing, we had decided that there were some key things that we really needed to hit before getting to that.

And we made some very hard adjustments really quickly in a few conversations. And while that can still be painful in terms of the overall project, it's the right decision and everybody understands why you're making those decisions. And I think that, again, like that can be more difficult in a big organization where you have $200 million plus writing on your project.

It takes longer to make a pivot like that. And that that costs more money, it costs more time, and it compounds the problem.

Alexandra: Hmm, interesting. Yeah, I mean there's definitely, I think one of the interesting things was about also just like an asymmetry of the ability to know the information that you would need to know to green light or not green light a project. And those, basically, those knowledge bases being housed in two different people and two different, sorry, almost two different functions. So like the executive team doesn't know whether or not the project can be delivered and the project people obviously want their project to be delivered.

And so there's no one's really telling each other always the truth. And so I think that that level of candor on a small team is, is probably part of the ability to pivot and the ability to shift gears.

Matthew: Yeah. And in, and in this particular case, Mac is the executive layer, but Mac is also the vision holder at the highest level, right?

Mac was very clear about this is a capture the game first. It's a shooter second. And so having that clear vision be inhabited by the executive layer is really important. And also there being nothing between me fundamentally. The Mac means that if there's any moment where I need to question that decision, we can have those conversations, we can have those conversations quickly and we can make a decision, reinforce or pivot.

Alexandra: Hmm.

Matthew: Got it.

Alexandra: Interesting. Two more quick questions before we move on to, you know, the, the relationship between music and game making for you guys, but do you think that there's any kind of interesting AI use cases for your studio today? And I mentioned the shift from Unity to Unreal. Give me like the, the two highest pain points that you guys experienced and, and how you got over them.

Mac: I'll take a second question. Let Matthew answer the first question. Is that so nice of you, Matthew? So Unity, Unreal. The biggest pain point was team. We had a, we had a team of folks that were, you know, making a game in Unity. And so we had to be strategic and, and pivot a little bit in our hiring.

We had to work to level up folks on our team who didn't have experience in Unreal, this, I think, was mitigated by the fact that we knew exactly what we were making at that point, which made a huge difference in terms of tech debt. It really helped us when we went into Unreal to, to kind of know exactly, you know, we weren't building the airplane while we were flying it, which is sometimes how you're doing when you're coding, right?

So that's, I think was, was one hurdle. The second hurdle was just kind of the inherent. You know, hurdles you face in terms of Unreal is constantly updating and knowing where, where are you jumping in? You know, like what resources are you going to use? Like, are you using Lumen? Are you using Danni?

What are the imp implications? Like we had to make those decisions pretty quickly. And, and that required kind of a lot of testing, baking, lighting versus lumen versus, you know, whatever else. And you know, we're still, you know, we're still trying to make some of those decisions, right? We're in five five right now, but, but that was something we had to kind of jump into pretty quickly.

Alexandra: I feel five five. It's fun over here in five five,

Mac: Oh, we can have a whole five, five conversation. I'm sure we could fill up a whole hour.

Alexandra: We're also in five five. It's, so stay the line. Okay, Matthew?

Matthew: So I got the AI question. So the first thing you got question, the first thing I, I think I will say is when you get something, a new technology like AI, that can be potentially very disruptive.

You also always have to be a little bit careful how, how you approach it and what you, you do with it. Internally, there's sort of essentially two cases where AI has been used very early on. We, we have a, a, a voice announcer, you know, comments during a match and very early on being able to record some of the voice lines using an AI voice, which is essentially the more modern version of the old text chat, allowed us to get a, a feel for whether this was landing, whether the voice lines were connecting and all that prior to us then having it actually recorded with, you know, a voice actor who did an incredible job and, and, and is amazing. So that, that was a good way for us, and this is especially good for a small studio to kind of proof, prove out this, this, this system and prove out the, the writing on the lines.

Without having to record them, listen to them, rerecord them, which is expensive. I also sometimes personally will use chat GPT as like a super search engine. You have to be very careful because it can throw false positives out the wazo. But it is, when I'm trying to like look up lar reams of information, I'm trying to kind of get some information that I'm, I'm using to kind of brainstorm things or information about different places.

It's a good start in the same way that going to Wikipedia is a good start. You can't rely on that to be the truth, but it's again, like, it's sort of a supercharged version of Google and Wikipedia together. So that's, that's mostly how I've used it, and that's really the extent of how we've used it on, on our, you know, on our project.

Mac: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's, it's a really interesting frontier, Alex, and, you know, we're seeing a lot of studios use it some exciting ways, whether it's building out, you know, worlds in real time. We're having characters that take on their own life. It's just for our project, you know, having generative uses hasn't really. Has it really been a thing?

Alexandra: Yeah. But it's interesting to see the different ways that each team uses it to brainstorm. You know, sometimes I've heard actually designers using it to help do like level bands. And so it's, even though that's something that is known, it's just a lot of work to write them all and do the math.

And so it's interesting to hear what you guys have to, what you guys have thought about. I wanna start talking about our second topic, which is music, right? Music gets its impacting Last Flag, but also the music industry and what can be learned and applied to games. And we're actually gonna do something in this episode that we've never done before at Vic, which is at some point in time during this podcast, we'll actually play some riffs from the actual game itself, I think will be really cool.

Before we talk about it from the business side though, from the artistic side. Mac, you know, what are the three ways that you guys are innovating with music and how does that actually connect to the games design?

Mac: Three ways that we're using music in the game.

Alexandra: You're saying? Yes. And like, why is it important to the games design?

Mac: It, it's funny because, you know, Dan and I, I think we almost deliberately were like, well, we're not making a music game. Like, you know, like, this is, we're making a game, everything's gotta serve the game first. But that said, it's kind of inescapable when it's a part of your DNA and you think about music so passionately when you're thinking about player experience.

So for us it was like, how do you, how do you have the music, make the game more fun? That's really kind of our, our focal point. And so at, at, at a base level, it means an unusual experience for a shooter shooters, typically you're not really thinking about music. It's like if you, I don't know, I don't remember the music in any of the shooters that I play.

Lemme just put it that way. Right. And I'm sure there's exceptions with some games, but in, in the ones I play we have some unique opportunities because we're captured the flag first. So, for example, you start the game, the first minute of the game is you're literally hiding the flag anywhere on the map as a team.

And if you're not hiding the flag, you're like hunting down these like golden cash bots and like trying to find them and kill them to get some pre-game money. But you don't have to have great spatial awareness of every bullet flying by you in that part of the game. So we have this spy thriller seventies song that plays, that makes you feel kind of a certain way while you're playing.

It's a little bit different than you usually have in a shooter. Like you, like it like puts you in that like mind frame in a way that you can't usually have that experience, I think in, in a shooter with music. So, so we use it for, you know, uh, immersion purposes, I guess you could say it's also important for us in terms of, you know, we really care a lot about IP. Like we want to have like a, a world, a story that that feels kind of meaningful. And even though your options are limited somewhat again by the genre, there are some opportunities there. And being able to have that music underlined, that, you know, people talk a lot about the identifiable nature of your art, that you should, you should be able to see a screenshot and know, oh yeah, that's last flag.

Or, oh man, like I recognize that that's fire watch or whatever the game is, right? Like, it should be unique. You don't often get that opportunity with music. And for us, we wanted to take that as a challenge where you hear something and you're like, oh, like that. Not only does that feel seventies, like that's like real instruments and that's like, this has gotta be, that's gotta be a song from last flag.

So it's another kind of opportunity I think to. Center the player inside the IP, in the universe. And for us, it's a tonal thing as well because, you know, we take a lot of inspiration from, I, I mentioned Lucas Arts, for example, is a studio, but maybe like a more modern example is portal, right? Like we love the portal series, that tongue in cheek humor where you feel like you're in on the joke and it doesn't take itself too seriously.

We're a little bit of like an anti. Shooter or anti, you know, hero, hero story in a way. And, uh, and the music does that. So for example, there's this song that plays when you lose, that's maybe the best song of the game currently, right? And it's like the consolation prize when you lose. And unfortunately I could hear a lot, but the, the, the lyrics if you listen as you move along, are pretty hilarious.

They, like, they, and, and so it gives a chance to kind of show that like, side of our game. So in the future there might be some other interesting case studies in terms of music as expression in the game. And, you know, I don't wanna get too far ahead of myself here though, because right now we're just working on making that core experience pretty awesome.

But those are some of the ways that we integrate it right now.

Alexandra: Yeah. And we're gonna play that track right now.

Mac: We're not giving. You want me, we not giving you.

Alexandra: Okay. Yeah. And so, hopefully everybody heard, heard the track. And I think it's super cool because, you know, I think a lot of defeat songs normally try to make you feel bad about losing. I've definitely played enough final fantasy to know that the defeat sound is not pleasant and the victory song is very pleasant.

So I think it's really cool that you've done that kind of innovation around, you know, making it kind of. Cool or vibey that you've died. And I think that's, that's pretty exciting. And I think you're, you're calling out to a good point that music has never really mattered too much in competitive shooters.

It stands out, it's less front and center, but your game has this kind of spacing for you to allow to create this immersion. Which is obviously, you know, by design and by the nature of being a capture the flag game versus, you know, immediately drop in three people and then you could be in a firefight almost instantly.

But I've gotta ask you this question because, you know, everybody will have me asked that on air, but, you know, you guys are composing a ton of music in-house. But how involved are the Imagine Dragons group themselves in this project beyond Dan's participation?

Mac: Sure. Yeah, no, that's a fair question.

So, you know, Dan and I, this is kind of like a brother labor of love together, right? This is like something that, that, you know, started with a project with just us two. Now it's really a team. It's a ninth Street studio. It's not really about us. It's about this like group of 50 incredible developers. And pretty soon, hopefully it won't even be about us, right?

It's gonna be about the community who's gonna adopt the game and make it their own. And, and we're gonna be trying to serve the game together. In terms of the rest of the band members, you know, they're incredibly supportive and awesome. They're gamers too. And so, you know, they're, even though this isn't their project, you know, they,

they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll support play and, and be a part of the journey. It's in their own way, I think.

Alexandra: Nice. All right. And from the business side, you know, you, you mentioned actually on some of our kickoff calls that you've done, you know, many collaborations during your career so far in music and games, you know, for, you know, with the Imagine Dragons doing stuff for like Riot or, you know, a bunch of other things.

But, you know, I think I'd be curious to know what about working in gaming? And what about working in music are super different, and what should gaming take from music and what music just like makes absolutely no sense. You're like, thank God games does it this way, you know, like what kind of has, what, what have you kind of had to rewire in terms of like, the business of the actual industries? And how have you thought about that while you're at Night Street?

Mac: Well, let me start with maybe. Maybe we'll start with the similarities and, and then tell you about the differences in what they taught me. I try not to make any kind of like lazy comparisons. It's so easy because I'm like, well, this is where I come from.

So I look through this lens. But I do think there's a lot of interesting overlap and, and a lot of lost opportunity in terms of the way the two mediums work together. In terms of same, EE, everything is a pro process of creation, right? And it's a magical thing. Like anytime you're starting with nothing, creating something and trying to connect people together, that's magical.

And I think it's also, you know, on a similar note, gaming and music are very similar. That at the end of the day it's about community, it's about people. You're, you're making something and trying to pull people together through that, that medium and connect that through that medium. And it's kind of starts there and it ends there.

Everything you're doing is kind of serving that, right? One thing. I think that's been a learning for me over the last little bit where, and it was a positive learning where we kind of started this and, you know, we were lucky enough to start it as kind of a passion labor of love. We never, yeah. Even if that had been in retention, we, we wouldn't have had the, the skillset or the experience to be able to kind work backwards from some kind of case study of here's how you make a hit game.

You know, like, like, oh, we gotta, this is where the biggest audience is. Let's go chase it. We never started from that place. We really started from a place of like, what was inspiring to us and, and, and, and, you know, how did we feel about, you know, the creative and, and, and where this would take us following our MI guess.

And I think there is something to that though, that's also kinda like music. If you're trying to write a, you try to write a radio hit, this happens. People get into like, we're gonna write a hit or whatever. You're almost never gonna succeed. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, it's just, that's not how you make something great and special.

It's not how creativity works. You kind of have to, you know, if you're trying to fit a niche or like, you know, sell to an audience. It's an uphill battle. And I think it's the same way in games. It's like, if, if you're like, well, there's this huge demand, or this is very, you know, I, I think that you struggle in that process, and this is something I'm still learning, but it's been reinforcing for me as we've, as we've moved along.

It's, scary sometimes when you're creating something without, with almost having those blinders on of like, Hey, like this might not make sense because A, B, and C for a business reason. But I think this sounds fun. I think we've seen some early reinforcement of that, of people playing the game saying, oh yeah, this is fun.

And, and, so that's, I think I'm only talking about similarities here and you didn't even ask that. I'm so sorry. Difference. So yeah, I, one of the differences for me, that was awesome. Is a lot of times in music it feels like it's a lot about the artist. Hmm. And so it could be a little egocentric sometimes.

Oh, really? Could insecure between artists. I just think artists in general like was a joke. I was like, I was like, yeah, hundred percent. But we've all seen Kanye. It's like everybody's looking. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Everybody's looking at each other and it's, it's feels very like a zero sum game sometimes.

And it's tough. And I think for Dan and I both like I. It was so cool to get into games and see how selfless the, the game Deb community is. And I think it's because it's really about the art and everybody kind of acknowledges it typically takes a village, right? And you know, there's small deb teams, don't get me wrong.

Some people build things on their own, but I do think the mentality people have is much more sharing forward. It's like very, very selfless. People are willing to kind of, yeah, let me tell you everything I learned and every good resource I have for fundraising or whatever else it might be. It was pretty, pretty awesome to see that.

That was maybe my favorite difference. I could tell say more, but I've already blabbed on it for a while, so maybe let's just be quiet.

Alexandra: Yeah, that's really interesting because I think a lot of times in games we say like, it's about the player, right? It's not about the dev team, it's about the experience that they're having.

And, also I think they, we were calling it, I think the game industry, I think more so than others. Especially, like, software, like, it just general tech is extremely collaborative. People are really willing to help one another and share. And whereas I think a lot of times in other, you know, other industries, people are pretty closed off.

But I love the comparison. I love the kind of thing that I don't write. You don't write songs for radio, you know, you're probably not a fan of those like AI things that just tell you to make the notes where they go, And then so therefore you can manufacture a hit. But, you know, you've talked a little bit about how music is a big differentiator for last flag, especially on like a competitive five E five game.

But, you know, Matthew, I wanna talk a little bit about, you know, carving out a niche in the actual shooter market. And this is gonna be some context also to anchor some of the distribution questions we'll talk about later on. But I wanna talk, start with the core of the, the game design, right? We've, we've, I've played last flag, but, you know, tell the audience about, you know, what last flag is and why it's different than any kind of five e five other last flag shooter in a more specific way than perhaps we've been talking about so far.

Matthew: Yeah, yeah, of course. So at highest level it's, it's a, a five v five hero shooter. And at its core it's capture the flag first and everything else second. And so that means that we try to capture the totality of the experience of capturing of playing capture the flag, which of course means hiding the flag.

So you do have this, this phase where you and your team are hiding the flag on your side of the map. You have 60 seconds as Mac, mentioned earlier. And then when the match begins. You are actively looking for the opposing flag while trying to sort of prevent them from finding your flag. And that created some interesting design challenges for us because you need to have a map that's large enough for you to have a lot of space to hide the flags so that it's not found immediately.

But you don't want to have matches last too long because you're struggling to find the opposing flag. And while we were in our development phase earlier, the, we had wild swings, right? The, the some matches. You just found the flag right away. So five minutes or whatever. And the match was, you know, the flag was out and then other matches 20, 30, 45 minute matches.

And that started to feel too long, especially if you were gonna lose, right? If you're gonna lose and you've put so much energy into it doesn't matter how much fun you had it, it's hard. And so we put in a few mechanics to help you get to capturing the flag within a 15 to 20 minute time period, because we felt that 15 to 20 minutes was the sweet spot for us.

And so what we did is we introduced these radar towers that you can control. You capture them, and they provide several benefits. One, when you die, you can respond there, which is great. So it cuts your travel time. That became very strategic. But the other thing is every 30 seconds almost like you're playing battleship, a radar tower that you control says, Hey, the enemy flag is not here.

It's not here. It's not here. So it's not telling you exactly where it is, but it's narrowing the search area for you. And so by doing this, we really started to make it easier for people to have to find the flag, but still not take too long about it. And then after 15 minutes, we were like, you know what?

We're gonna kick in into overtime. And so at 15 minutes we reveal both flags. You know where it is now, but you still gotta get it, bring it back to your home base, and then mm-hmm. Hold for 60 seconds to win the game. So those are some of the, the decisions we made that, you know, really leaned into this capture the flag idea that has been core, to, to the game from the very beginning.

Alexandra: I will tell you one funny anecdote about my last flag experiences, very, there was no radar and there were no towers. , And I think, , at one time we were playing and someone had this, I think maybe it was the scout, maybe someone else, but someone could basically like rappel with like a, like a, with using a rope was the—

Matthew: Old sniper.

Alexandra: Yeah. A grapple hook. Okay. Well that person, And then we planted the flag in an unreachable spot that only the sniper could get to, but nobody else had the sniper on the other team, so nobody, we found the flag. Nobody could access it. Yeah. So, which is pretty sick. I had a good time during that though.

It was obviously, you could not complete the game. So, but it was a great player story.

Matthew: So what's interesting about that is, you know, that grapple ability, that's a fun grapple ability. It was actually in our game until very recently. We had to pull it for reasons. But having big movement abilities, having fun movement, that joy of movement is really important though.

So one of the decisions we made at some point was during the flag hiding phase, you do not have access to your abilities. So it doesn't matter which contestants you're gonna play, the flag will be in a place that you will reach. We also give you infinite stamina because you need to be able to cover the map, you know, as quickly as you can to find the right spot for the flag.

So again, like we, we try and not, we lean into the things that make the game special, that make the game unique, that make the game exciting. And, and I think that's one of the, the big lessons for me on this project. There's two big lessons, that, that came to me is, and they're kind of connected, you shouldn't fight others where they're strong. Like don't, don't, don't try and out muscle, you know, Overwatch on what make Overwatch great. Like we're never going to beat them that at that. And lean into what makes your game unique. And when you start to do this, it, it can be scary because you know. If people ask you the question, Hey, which audience is this for?

It's hard to say, well, 15% people who do this and 20% people who do that, and that, that's never me anyway. I feel always feel a fraud when somebody asks me that question. But you do have a good chance of making something that's unique and that speaks to a core segment of the, of the player base that they, they, they, they would love to play this and nobody else is doing it.

Alexandra: Hmm.

Mac: How have you. Alex, don't worry, don't worry. By the way, though, even without abilities, people are still hopping around trying to find the easiest swag box. Oh yeah. It was super funny. I remember being, you still get, you still get that chance, Don, don't worry.

Alexandra: Remember being so funny. I was like, I don't care that we have one. We just all, all 10 of us know exactly where this thing is and we're all standing around it.

Matthew: Like the cheesiest spot I've seen recently was, it was out in the open, so you could see it real easy, but it was essentially up a, basically up a telephone pole, so you had to jump onto it. So it was hard to do the jump and you were very exposed trying to pick up the flag while people were defending it to get gun down though.

Makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alexandra: Okay, so you've talked a little bit about some of the big design changes that you made. I'm curious, like how often, you know, did you, did you, did you discern those changes because you were play testing with the community? You know, we talked about how, you know, Mac, you know, maybe music is a little bit more egocentric, but games are for the players, right?

How did you hold yourself accountable to players as you've been building and iterating on Last flag?

Mac: This is definitely a Matthew question, but I just wanna tee it up for him because, uh, I have to say this is one of like the greatest things that happened in terms of bringing in a team and being able to have so many more, so many more different perspectives at the table in our company.

And Matthew, I think rightly helped us kind of figure out early on that inconsistency issue. And we have a play test culture. We've been play testing, we're a thousand plus play tests and easily on the game. And, and that's an important part of things. But we had found kind of early on in the play test some challenges and we really paused things almost for a minute and said, we're gonna spend like six months and we're just gonna work on that game loop and figure out like, how do we make this fun every time we play?

And that was maybe the most important part of our dev cycle. I'd say, we learned so much about the game, just play testing and talking about it over and over again. And that's where the radar towers emerged. We moved it, so like the flags come back to the home base. You know, we, we cut out things that were very almost precious to me, but needed to be cut out.

The when together. Oh, not the wind together, all the other things. I know, I know, I know. I'm still working on getting the golden shovel to come back. You know, that's, that one's still a fight. But, but, but really it was great because the more people played the game, the more we saw this is where the fun is.

And Matthew just did such an awesome job of helping guide us in terms of not being precious and being willing to cut out things that, that even if they were fun, they weren't, they weren't serving that core experience. Sorry, Matthew. This is really a, a you question, but I had to give you a little credit there where it was doing.

Matthew: I'll try and find anything left to answer. I think Mack touched on something very important is we have a strong internal play test. Culture. So there's two full team play tests per week on Wednesday and Friday. And then on the design team, we have two smaller play tests on the off days, on Tuesdays and on Thursdays.

So we're, we're constantly kind of checking on the features that are going in where we're at and when, especially when we're doing those, those larger team play tests, we're getting a lot of feedback. You have the play test and then right after it's okay, what's everybody's feedback and you just write down all the feedback.

And it's rarely about bugs. It's more, this didn't feel good, I didn't like this, I didn't understand this. I wish we could do this. Right. And so it really is a player first feedback. Now we have. Started having a wider play test audience. And so that's great because you get different views. You get players who don't understand necessarily the game development and so they're, they don't have any kind of filter visually that is kind of going, that is blocking and they're just experiencing this should be a game that where I'm having fun.

This thing is preventing me from having fun. Having fun. Let me tell you why the challenge there is actually absorbing the amount of information, right? There's two challenges. There's absorbing the amount of information, it's a lot of of data, points of feedback, and then sorting through those data points and going.

Is this something that we actually think we should fix? Is this something that is actually not really a problem? We just think that this is how our game works or it is something that we should fix, but is this actually what this person thinks the problem is? Or is it a symptom of something else?

Mm-hmm. Right. Because when somebody tells you that they didn't enjoy the game for reason X, Y, or Z, they're correct. They didn't enjoy the game. Like there's nothing that you can challenge there, trying to figure out exactly what was tripping them. That might be very nuanced and it may not be immediately clear to them what that is.

And, and, and one final point is, one of the reasons why it's so tricky is you may have heard this when you were back at Blizzard. You know, there's, there was a philosophy that I took with me that was, I've always found very important, which is you have to be careful about not erasing all the rough edges.

Because if you remove all the rough edges in a game, you're, you're removing the texture of the game. And so you sort of have to identify, is this a rough edge that's actually good for the game, or is this a thing that's actually an impediment to the fun? Hmm. And when you have a lot of data points, a lot of information, a lot of feedback coming in, it can be hard at time to, to filter through all that.

Alexandra: Really. Interesting. Did your players, and this will be our last question before we go to the final topic, , and I mean, don't mean your, I mean your external players, not your internal players,, tell you anything that was special about your game that surprised you, you know, something that you were like, I didn't know that we were onto this, but like, this is, we're onto this. But we had no idea.

Matthew: That's a really good question. I can't think of anything specific in that vein. What I will say is, when you're working on a game, at least this is the case for me. I don't like my own work in the sense of I see the Matrix in everything I do. Right. I'm constantly seeing the, the, the issues, the things that, that, that I need to, to kind of improve.

And on a theoretical level, I understand when something is fun, but, but it can be sometimes hard to really see the truth of it. Mm. And when you have external players play it, when you have people who are just players and they tell you they have a good time or you see them smile or they're excited by something that is really invigorating because it does help you understand.

The things you believe in, you're on the right path because ultimately it is the players having fun. So to me it's, it's actually that more than anything else.

Mac: And two tiny things that were kind of fun for us. This isn't like part of our core external play test group, but we had a, we were going to play in person with, I think it was with an investment group or something, and all their kids were home from school.

They'd come from some school project or something. There was like, I don't know, a handful plus of kids that were like ages, like six to 12, right? And they jumped on and played the game. This was an early state for us and it was so interesting to watch how quickly they just totally understood things that were more difficult for us.

The onboarding, some of our external play testers. That was fascinating to me. And more recently. We had, you know, we've started bringing in like some college eSports teams and things like that to come try. And I found that the way people play the game is so different and, and you learn a lot by seeing how those groups relate to it.

Particularly the eSports teams, like the communication was like immediate. And it's not just that they're shooting well, whatever, the way that they would shift strategy in real time and, and kind of really quickly see what's happening over a radar tower over here. So we're gonna pivot this way, or you're gonna hide the flag, you know, don't run the flag across the line yet, like, hold the line over here.

They think about things in ways that, that just. It gave me a glimpse of how fun it's gonna be to watch the metas that observe that that emerge over the next, you know, six months. And, and I'm sure some of  'em will be game breaking and we'll have to figure things out. But yeah, you learn something every time you watch somebody play.

Alexandra: Yeah. That's awesome. It is. It is truly amazing. What players, the inventiveness of players, what they will do once you put this toy into their hands? I've definitely had similar experiences where you're like, I didn't think about you doing that. Interesting. Okay. Now, if everyone did that, what would happen?

Okay. Uh oh, let's go back and figure this out. But okay. So, you know, you've talked about some of the cha the, you know, some of the design changes, that you guys have made to, to last flag over its evolution. We've talked about the history of the studio. And now I kind of wanna talk, you know, you got this pivotal point right where your trailer dropped at Games Fest, and you guys are, you know, in the process of going to market.

And I would be curious, and maybe Mac this, I'll start with you. If you could break down your kind of strategic approach to, you know, to finding and reaching players, you know, what pillars are you deploying against and, and who's leading that at the studio? Or are you working with a partner?

Mac: It's a really collaborative effort, let me say that first.

And we are totally independent right now. We don't have a publisher partner. And so, you know, for us, Matthew could have touched on this a little bit, but we. Try to lean in on the strengths of being independent. And one of those is we could take creative risks. So all of our strategies are, are we, that's try, we try to keep that top of mind.

And that's, for example, our social strategy, right? We're just now starting to, you know, get our messaging out. We're creating content, we're thinking about the ways that we express ourselves to the world. But we're able to be super nimble and that's awesome. You know, we come up with an idea one day and it's out the next day.

We don't have to run through like four levels of approval and then have a publisher tell us it's a stupid idea, which by the way, it might be a stupid idea. But, you know, when we look at our prongs in terms of, you know, how we, how we try to cut through, because that's, that's the difficulty, right? Is cutting through the noise.

Same thing in music right now, right? It's like you just have access to so much every single day you're competing, what is it? 19,000 games? A what? I don't Is it day on Steve? A year? A can't remember. Yeah. A year. Okay. Sorry. It feels like a day. The, you're competing against an incredible, incredible amount of content.

And so, and so everything we're trying to do is say what makes us different and how do we let people understand that difference as quickly and cleanly as possible so that they can find, this is my tribe, this is where I belong, this is, this community's me and attach to it. And so that's the mentality we take from the way we handle press from our, you know, influencer, creator, streamer folks.

But particularly on social, where we can actually control the messaging and decide, you know, what is the personality that we're showing, what are the aspects of the game that we're showing? And, it's a, you know, for us, I'd love to be able to outline like a 15 point plan. You know, I mean, it's not that we don't have plans, but we do try very hard to be nimble.

And, you know, we, we had meetings today where we're sitting down and we're thinking about. What is it that's resonating right now? And for us, we find that to be gameplay. We find, you know, we're competing in a very difficult market in terms of shooters. And even though we're capturing the flag first, not everybody understands that.

You see people running around in the third person view with a shooter, and you get a lot of comparisons super, super quick, and that's, you know, that's totally fair. But, you know, we try to think about how do we get this game into the hands of people as quickly as possible so that they can understand those differences.

And so pretty much everything that we're doing right now is how do we scale up internally to support that, and how do we funnel people into those play tests as quick as we can in hopes that that word of mouth is really the difference maker. You know, a lot of games live and die by social right now.

And people when they, when they don't know where to, you know, they don't look as much to, you know, press to understand what TV show to watch. In the same way people, when you hear from your friend that this game is fun, that means 10 times more than any kind of ad that you might be able to put in front of them. So getting that network effect is our goal.

Alexandra: So you mentioned, you mentioned Steam and you also mentioned socials, um, and you know, how games are basically living and dying on their socials. So I've got two questions for you guys, but the first is, you know, will you actually, and again, I have to ask this question, but will you lean on maybe the Imagine Dragons brand to create a distribution edge for those socials?

And then after you answer that, we'll talk a little bit about Steam.

Mac: Well, that's an easy one. I mean, the Dragons have been super supportive in letting us kind of share on the socials, and we probably do that a couple of times. But, you know, we always are really kind of cognizant too to not do a disservice to the game in the studio, which is, you know, this is a game created by incredibly.

Awesome developers working together for years. And it, it would really be accurate or fair to kind of call it like, it's not Imagine Dragons side project or something, you know what I mean? That's not what this is. This is Night Street Studios, Night Street Games. And so, you know, I, I think we try to ride that balance of, you know, it's, I think a lot of members of the Dragons community are super excited to see Dan working on a game and, you know, communicating that to them is awesome.

But, you know, we don't try to lean too heavily on it. I will say like that it's, we've been lucky enough to work in entertainment for so long that we've met a lot of partners along the way in games, in other areas of entertainment. You know, one of our investors is Live Nation and, you know, you know, they bring kind of their own perspective and, and marketing experience.

And so there are definitely some, like, some helpful, you know, connections and friends we made along the way that have made a big difference for us. But. Honestly, for the most part. We're doing it like any other studio, it's like hand to hand combat. Yeah. Every, every person that you're putting in front of, like trying to help them understand the game and get 'em on the wishlist, you know, that's what we're doing. There's, there's no real shortcuts to that.

Alexandra: Honestly, the way that I've heard someone say it is that you almost need to, like divorce players from, like, you need to have players divorce their other game and like, break up with Apex to try something else, which is obviously a, a very, very hard goal. And so I guess that, you know, I wanna talk about Seam.

You know, you mentioned, you know, there's a, it is a really, really deep well of competitive games, and it's not across even just a, it's like schedule one can compete with Call of Duty. I think that's like, the other insane thing about today's gaming market is that it's not just everybody's consolidated in their own orbit is that you can pull from even like the, the like, you know, very, you know, typically graphically low fidelity games and also reach all the way up until like the Sky Room territory.

And so there's this general perspective that, you know, driving wishlist is like that, that winning Steam is just all about driving wishlists. And I would be curious, like what's your guys' approach to, to wishlist today, given that you guys dropped the Summer Games Fest trailer, how are you guys thinking about kind of going in that hand in hand combat with the, with the STEAM algorithm?

Mac: Yeah. Well, let me first say I think it's healthy and awesome that. You can have, you know, schedule one competing with Call of Duty. Like, you know, as much as it's really, really competitive right now, the fact that the barrier of entry is so low is amazing. And honestly, steam gets a lot of credit for that because this is a platform for discoverability where anybody could compete.

And that's, that's pretty awesome if you're an indie studio, knowing that you have access to that. Wishlists, you know, there is a lot of focus and attention on it. People are always like, well, what's, you know, what's the latest on the algorithm? Is it like bursts? Should I snowball? Should I, like, everybody's trying to think about those things.

We're trying to just think first community and then wishlist second. And so, you know, our call to action for people first and foremost is like, Hey, sign up to play test. Come to last flag.com/sign up. Get get in here, give us your email address. Be part of our community. If you wanna jump into the Discord, great.

You wanna go? Wishlist is on steam. Awesome. We love it. But first and foremost, we're trying to get people to connect to what we're making and to opt into being part of the community. And so wishlist is an port halo of that. But it's not, you know, it's not that everything we're doing is really based around, you know, just that number.

Matthew, you probably have some thoughts on this. I'm talking quite a bit.

Matthew: I mean, I'm, I'm actually very lucky in this that I don't, I don't care because I have to care about something else, which is, and, and this isn't to demean this, like, it's very hard, you know, all the social stuff, all the wishlist stuff.

It's very hard. And, and I'd be completely outta my depth trying to do this. My job is to make sure that the game is good and fundamentally. If the game is good and, and players have a good time, there's a greater chance that it finds its audience. We can have all the wishlists we want. If the game doesn't end up being any good, it does, it's not gonna help us at all.

And, and, and that's not to mean that the incredible amount of work that Mac and others, you know, on that side of the fence are deploying to give us the best chance to meet our audience. Isn't hard. Like it's, it's, it's incredibly hard and it's incredibly valuable. It's more that I'm actually lucky that I don't need to do that.

And that I have the freedom to, you know, the luxury really to just focus on trying to make the game as good as possible, which is already pretty hard. But it's, it's, it's nice that I don't have to do that. And it's great to have a partner like Mac, who, while I wish he was focusing on helping me on the game right now, 'cause his insights and, and, and creativity's invaluable to us, having him deployed temporarily against this other problem means that I don't need to.

Mac: Well, you know, Matthew touched on how related the two are though, which is so true. One of the reasons Steam Next Fest is so powerful is because nothing is better than getting people in to play your game. You know, that is, that's really where the social effect comes in. But we don't have to wait for those moments to start that.

Right. We can, you know, we took a very non precious approach where having feedback early and often to us, rather than being precious about what we gate is, is what we put a premium on. And so that gives us a chance not only to. Get that effect of people playing and hopefully sharing how much they're enjoying the game, but also to help us make the game better.

And also to help us on the dev side with that, building those muscles of like, feedback, iterate, Polish feedback, iterate polish. And we're like deploying builds. We're learning things every time we're building muscles as a company that are super important, um, that are gonna, you know, I, I'm super, super, super proud of our game.

Like, I love it. I, I am so proud of the team for putting it together, but I think that the most beautiful thing that we've been able to create is this team, to be honest. And, you know, our focus on everything is we want to keep making games together as a team. And so, yeah, that means we have to. We gotta deliver on game one.

But, uh, you know, it is also helps you kind of, I don't know, it puts things in perspective in all the decisions we're making. We're very kinda longterm focused.

Alexandra: Okay. Final question before we move on to our conclusion, 'cause we're coming up on time. But, you know, you mentioned that games today is similar to music, right?

Where there's potentially an oversaturation as similar, what's happening in games right now has probably happened to music, you know, five years, a decade ago with streaming and, you know, cost of distribution and cost of basically content creation going to zero. You know, I can whip up my, you know, Serato or whatever it is, and I'm, I'm a DJ tomorrow.

What is potentially working in music in terms of distribution and, and finding consumers and audiences that you think are thinking about trying in games?

Mac: Well, I think you rightly pointed out, it does feel in some ways, like music's like a little bit ahead of, of games in terms of like the dynamic shift happening in terms of barrier entry and, and you know, cost of distribution and cost of production.

It's a real challenge in music right now. You know, you could go back five years ago, 10 years ago and pretty reliably say, you know, radio's gonna drive sales, and then it didn't anymore. And then it was like, well, it's playlisting, playlisting will drive sales. And then it didn't anymore. And then it was TikTok’s gonna drive sales and, and it, it's, it's like whack-a-mole in some ways.

And I think today a lot of people are really unsure of where and what to do. And you could look at that as a terrible challenge or you could look at it as an opportunity and where you're seeing. Artists succeed is when they innovate and they, and they see the opportunity. You know, we've got Benson Boone on our label who's having a really great experience right now.

And it's interesting because he's really succeeded on socials and I think socials are extremely important in gains right now. But also he, you know, I think very wisely, didn't, didn't underappreciate the importance of the in-person kind of person to person community building, like make, going to different countries and doing the groundwork, you know, in those countries and, and, and putting in the time to kind of build from the ground up and taking time to connect to your community.

And so, these are like kind of loosely some things that I see as like positive glimmers of hope for when I look at, like, the other games around us. You know, my buddy. You know, give a shout out, you know, to Brain Jar games in his game Dead as Disco. He just was this last next fest really successful.

He's done a wonderful job very early on of community building and social was a big part of that for him. I mean, he has got a game that is a lot of fun on TikTok, but really focused first and foremost on, again, like where are the people and how am I finding them and how am I connecting them? And those tools are gonna change every single day.

But I think if you keep your focus there, there's opportunities to outplay people who are outspending you. And you know, that's kind of a vague. Vague answer because I don't, if I had the answers, you know, we'd be number one on, on Steam Wishlist.

Alexandra: Yeah, yeah. Well I think you're pointing into something important is that, you know, some people have said to some extent actually some of the stuff that has happened in games has actually leveled the playing field even more than it ever has been.

You know, public dollars end is not equal dollars out and although it's potentially, it's awesome, like you said, that Schedule one can compete with Call of Duty and it's because that is different now. But okay, let's move on to a conclusion. I think Matthew, I have, I both have one question for both of you.

I think, Matthew, you might have already addressed this question, but for me it was, what is success to you for Last Flag?

Matthew: I think there's two parts. One, like Mac said, we do wanna make more games, right? So we hope that it, the game finds its audience and that it's successful enough for us to continue making games at Night Street that continue to make game games with one another.

The other, more personal, and part to that answer is, I've worked on, on a lot of games and, um, it, it's a, it's a very big world out there and every so often you're very fortunate. You run into somebody who's played a game that you've worked on. And if you're extremely lucky, they tell you how much they enjoyed it.

Right. And I'll be honest, like it hasn't happened often it's a big world, but every time somebody says, oh, you worked on this, I really liked that game. Oh, you worked on Space Ring. I really enjoyed Space Ring. You know, it really makes me feel very good inside. You made a thing that brought joy to someone, even for a brief amount of time, it made them happy.

And I know that when I listen to music, read a book, watch a, a movie, you know, play a video game, it makes me happy. Like, I love being able to kind of meet people who might've worked on those and say, oh, this was great. I love this. And so my hope is that, you know, we deliver last flag to our players and that it brings them joy.

And actually that trying to find joy in the game has been a driving force for us on this game as well.

Alexandra: That's amazing. Okay. And for Mac, my question is, what has been your biggest leadership perspective shift, switching from being a leader in music to being a leader in games? What have you had to change about yourself, and what has remained staunchly the same?

Mac: That's a, that's a tough question to answer. You know, I come from a, a background where it's definitely servant leadership, right? Like management, that's the whole name of the game is you are very behind the scenes all the time. You're very, you know, you don't wanna show your face. You're very deferential in a lot of ways.

And so taking a different role here has been interesting for me. It's been both a positive and a negative, I think like a pro and a con in that, you know, I think the best idea, winning in the game studio is really important and having very, you know, a kind of flat leadership style can be important.

But I've also had to learn like, hey, you know, a, like you need to make decisions, you need to be decisive at times, and b, you need to understand the weight of your words. And Matthew's been really good at kind of keeping me honest on that. I'll have times where, you know, I, I also come from a legal background, so I like to see things, I like to see ideas fight themselves and kind of see where they go.

And I, I never take 'em personally, but sometimes I might throw an opinion out there. 'cause I'm like, well, let me test this opinion and see how this is. And I have to be really careful that someone doesn't take that and go, okay, well the CEO thinks, blah, blah, blah. So let's go and do it. And, you know, I might not even perceive that that's happening and be like, wanna wind it back and be like, no, no, no, no.

Fight me on it. I'm probably wrong. In fact, I think I'm wrong. I just wanted to say that. And so I've, I've had to kind of mitigate that side of me and, and, and really think about the, the weight of the words that I say. But I, I, I would just say in general, I've been really, really lucky because the people I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with, like Matthew, and all the other great directors and people on our team have brought a lot of like passion and honesty and heart into, into the company.

You know, when we were hiring people, I think, you know, we were like, well, we, we know we wanna have, make this kind of culture as a game studio. But really at the end of the day, I think hiring people who already embody that culture is the best thing you could do. And being able to, you know. Not inherent all of your partners in the way that often happens in music, but actually choose the people you work alongside and take ownership of those decisions has been super awesome for me.

Alexandra: All right, and finally, how can people become fans of Last Flag?

Mac: Oh, that's an easy one. Come to come to last flag.com/signup and join our, join our play tests. So we are widening that funnel as quickly as we can. We're bringing people in as fast as we can, and we'd love to have people come play the game and tell us if they love or hate it.

Alexandra: Awesome. All right. Well guys, it was such a pleasure, It's been so cool to see the, the growth of the studio and the growth of Last Flag. And thank you guys for sharing your journeys and a little bit about what you're building. As always, friends, if you've got feedback or ideas, hit me [email protected]. I'm always open. And with that, that's our episode. We're out. Thank you, Mac and Matthew.

Mac: Thank you. Thanks Alex.

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