In this episode, host David Taylor sits down with The Gang. Originally a team of five entrepreneurs, The Gang was one of the first venture-backed studios to go all-in on Roblox back in 2020. They quickly made their mark with Strongman Simulator, which shot to the top of the Roblox charts and has racked up over 1.5 billion plays.
While they started with hit original titles, The Gang soon shifted to building branded experiences for some of the world’s biggest entertainment and lifestyle brands — Netflix, Vans, Shrek, Spotify, the NHL, and more. Most recently, they’ve been expanding beyond Roblox by licensing one of the platform’s top IPs, Blade Ball, for a Steam release. The team is also developing an original cross-platform game, Out of Sight.
In this conversation, we dive into the team’s entrepreneurial journey, what it was like being early builders on Roblox, how the platform has evolved, and what’s next as they explore new platforms and formats.
We’d like to thank Heroic Labs for making this episode possible! Thousands of studios have trusted Heroic Labs to help them focus on their games and not worry about gametech or scaling for success.
We’d also like to thank Lysto — the AI-native playtesting platform helping game studios capture unbiased player feedback and convert it into structured, actionable insights.
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 joined by The Gang. And by that I mean the whole gang. Originally, a team of five entrepreneurs, The Gang was one of the first venture-backed studios to go all in on Roblox back in 2020. They quickly made their mark with Strongman simulator, an original game that shot to the top of the Roblox charts and has since racked up over 1.5 billion plays. While they started with hit original titles, The Gang soon shifted focus to building branded experiences for some of the world's biggest entertainment and lifestyle brands, including Netflix, bands, Shrek, Spotify, and the NHL, just to name a few.
Most recently though, they've been expanding beyond Roblox licensing one of the platforms, top ips Blade Ball for a Steam release, as well as developing the original cross platform game out of sight. In this conversation, we will dive into the team's entrepreneurial journey and what it was like being early builders on Roblox, how the platform has evolved and what's next as they explore new platforms and formats. Welcome to the the podcast guys.
Hakan: Thank you. Thank you, thank you.
David: Just to kick us off, I'd love to get a quick introduction from each of you to sort of give us a sense of who each of you are and, and what you've contributed to, to The Gang over the years. Why don't we start with Gustav?
Gustav: Okay. So, I'm Gustav. I, my background and what I started doing at Gang is programming. I started out back in the nineties in the moder community and built mods for Quake, Quake two, Quake three, and then started working as a professional in the gaming industry. And I worked with everything from Returned Coast of Wolfenstein to Candy Crush, and have had a couple of gaming companies before.
And yeah, it feels great to be back on Roblox because it feels like the game moder community. So it feels like I've gone full circle, and I love it.
David: Amazing. How about you, Olle?
Olle: Hi. Yeah, I am similar to Gustav. I think we all come from a moder background in one way or another, almost I was aspiring artist to begin with, but now I'm a man with many hats. So I went from art to character art in mobile gaming to begin with, and then did some stints in AA slash AAA. Also done er in capacity as a technical artist. But right now in The Gang, I'm acting as a producer on our original titles.
David: Very cool. And Marcus, how about you?
Marcus: Yeah, nice. Nice to be here and thank you for having us first of all. No. So I'm, my background is not from gaming. Originally. I started up companies in the digital marketing sector, so I created my first company late nineties, and then I sold a few companies and I met Gustav by investing in his previous company. So I was part of the board of directors. And then, I was sitting there until that company got sold.
And that's kind of how we got to know each other. And then most of the other guys are from his previous company as well. And my role now I'm the group, CEO, so I oversee businesses.
David: Awesome. So we're starting to get into how this all came together. Robin, how about you?
Robin: Yeah, so I'm CTO at The Gang. I lead the technical side of our original IP games, like everything from architecture to performance and making sure our developers have the tools they need to build our games. And my background is a mix of game development and more like traditional software engineering. So I spent like eight years in ed tech industry and yeah, so that's short about me.
David: Very cool. And Hakan?
Hakan: Yeah. Nice to see you again, David. My background is within game design and, and production. I quite are like late figured out that you can actually work with game development. So I have had all of these, you know, normal jobs, working within like industrial production and repairing robots and stuff like that.
But, yeah, slowly like, figured out you can actually work with game development. So, educated myself within game design and jumped into the industry like 10 years, 12, 13 years ago, something like that.
Robin: Yeah. Very cool.
David: So I was hoping one of you would sort of tackle this, but like, how did the, how did the whole team come together?
Like what was the, what's the origin story for The Gang?
Marcus: Well, first of all, we, we had a different idea. So we were, we were actually thinking to build a more traditional game on Steam in the beginning. And our first plan was to build a company. We wanted to build a, a game and we wanted to work with people we liked to work with and have fun, more or less. And then, vacuuming the Roblox by coincidence. But I would say go stuff is more the glue for everyone. So, I hand over to him.
Gustav: Yeah, I, I think we were in 2019, I, we were in a position where I had sold off my previous company. I was getting a bit restless. And we were in a position where we were looking to maybe not take a normal job, but instead work together as Marcus said, with people that we like and do something where we thought it was more of like for pleasure instead of business. And it just happens, to be that from all of the people that I had worked with before the, the top four people that I wanted to work with again were in kind of similar positions where they were looking for something new and something else. So, it was a perfect time to come together and say like, let's make a game together. And it doesn't really matter that much what game it is. We said that we'll, we'll take a year without any pay. And we'll see where it goes from there. So we bootstrapped it entirely. We also said that we were never gonna be more than 10 people, so we failed on that one, but, but which is surprising because your name is The Gang.
David: But which is surprising because your name is the gang, so.
Gustav: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, we still all work full time in the company now, like almost six years later, so, so in that sense it was a success and we keep true to only working with people that we truly enjoy working with.
David: That's amazing. How big is the company now in terms of employees?
Marcus: We have approximately 220 people.
David: Oh my God. Do you know if you're the biggest, Roblox studio, or, I know that you guys are not technically a Roblox studio specifically anymore, but.
Marcus: You know, we, we, yeah. We are the biggest, as far as I know, in terms of employees. We are also the biggest in terms of working with brands. We are not the biggest, we are looking to number of CCUs on Roblox game, for example.
David: Got it. But in terms of brands, it would be like number of brand activations per year. Then we are number one.
Gustav: Okay, cool. Yeah. And employees, we, we do not like a lot of the big studios use a lot of contractors. We have full-time employees with proper salary and pension and all like that. And, and with that, I think we're definitely the biggest.
David: Yeah. Yeah. I know Roblox is mostly contractors. Even people, I mean, which isn't to say that they're underpaid. I mean, there are certainly contractors who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But yeah, it seems to be sort of like a, you know, it's a creator economy. People move around to different projects, very, very fluidly Woodley.
The, uh, the thing I, I, I would love to get into is sort of the early days of The Gang. There's sort of two questions that I wanna ask. We'll start with one, which is sort of the element of like, you started off and you, and you said we didn't imagine ourselves growing more than 10. So what were sort of the key milestones that allowed you guys to scale to where you are today of over 200 employees?
And then the, the next question is gonna be around like, what are some of the, what are some of the funny stories of being on the Roblox platform? I know, you know, it can be ridiculous at times. You know, working on, on a platform that encourages creativity, encourages, you know, fast failing, and also as entrepreneurs, I imagine you also have some pretty funny stories, you know, trying to raise money and whatnot. So would love to just give you guys the opportunity to share sort of that, that path of starting with just the five of you and, and growing and what are some, some things that happened along the way.
Marcus: I, I, I can kick off and then I hand over to the fun things to the guys who can talk about that. Talk about the corporate things. No. So I think from being entrepreneurs and looking into it from an opportunistic point of view, very early on when we came into it, we saw that it's kind of blue ocean.
There were no devs focusing on brand partnerships and building games with the focus that we came in with and with that also experience because there are, and there are tremendous devs on the platform. There are, I'm, I'm amazed every single day when I see what they're building, but we are coming more from a more traditional, I would say, gaming perspective. And when we came in, there were no, none of those. So when we started the first game, then we saw that there is a huge opportunity here and we believe this platform will actually grow. So when we said there were not gonna be more than 10 people, but then when we started to get requests from clients, we started to get traction on our own games.
It was absolutely no possibility not to scale. So, we just did it in order and we also scaled with profitability. And that's what Chrisa said before we're profitable year one. And it didn't, it, it would've been a stupid mistake to not scale and grow. And then if it came into what we're doing, I'm gonna hand over to the guys to talk about our success, for example, and that.
Gustav: Yeah, I think that kinda leads also into some of the funny stories like, one very early story that I find funny in hindsight, and that was very humbling, is that like I worked professionally in the games industry since the nineties. I've done everything from like Facebook games to mobile games to console PDC, and I thought I knew gaming and all of us did.
We were like, yeah, this platform, it's just a bunch of kids making games on it. So we thought it was gonna be easy, and our first game was horrible. Like it performed super, super bad. It was such a bad fit for a platform, and the players absolutely hated it. And so, so we pulled it down and we made it entirely from, from the, from the start.
And then it performed much better. And that's how we started to, to learn the platform. Like we were making mistakes and instead of trying to blame. The platform or something else. We were like, yeah, we don't know what we're doing. Like we have no idea. And we started to play a lot of the games and we started to get more involved with the community and started to learn from it.
And it took us about six months until we had our first hit, which was called Tapping Simulator, and I think we picked a 30 KCCU on that. And, and this is back in 2020 when the platform was right, much, much smaller. So that was actually one of the top performing games on the platform. And that was like, I'm probably more proud of that moment than, than Strongman because it was was the first time we felt like we had a hit and we were making money.
We could start to take on the employees and pay a salary for the first time.
David: So, and just a quick question on this, like, how, in that six month period, how many games did you try? How many games did you launch? And then how long did it take you to, to build tap simulator?
Gustav: Do you remember Robin, do you remember Olle?
Robin: So Tapping must have been our fourth game, right? Or fifth.
Hakan: We had some, some tag at the same window, right?
Olle: Yeah. Yeah. Then it's our fifth. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the development was around like the prototype of the game. I think we did like in a weekend. Or something that, that was the guess of it. And then the full release was in, was it, it was two, two weeks or something that it was a pretty fast, really fast production.
David: That's amazing. I feel like it takes a lot of studios I've seen, especially the, the venture backed ones, a long time to sort of come to that conclusion of we need to make a lot of different games in a short amount of time. I still see some companies investing millions of dollars into a single game, and I'm just like, Oh, that's gonna be hard to make back.
Gustav: Yeah. We have made some expensive games that have taken way too long as well, but all of our successes have been like probably the fastest games that we make where we find. Like a core mechanic. We build the first version of the game very quick, like Strongman was about four hours for the prototype.
And, and when we feel like this is actually really fun, like this is a good game, then we can start to build on it. Often when we have tried starting the other way around where we start with paper and we build this grand idea like you typically do in the traditional gaming industry, then those games don't perform well.
David: Yeah. And you guys also, I had a recent game launch that had some success called Prison Pump. I'm curious, like, which one of you is the, the weightlifter of the group?
Hakan: It's everyone can, can't you tell? We are all, we're all strong men here. But before we jump to that, David, I think it's one more project that is important to mention that kicked off like The Gang on Roblox.
And this is, that's Vans that was also like a monumental game for us. Yeah. Because that has been our window towards all other brands and, and Roblox themselves. So that's an important project to mention as well. And again, that we are super proud of, so.
David: Yeah. Yeah. I, I remember when I was at Super Social, Vans was one of like the few branded experiences that actually had like a sustained audience without the use of free UGC. Which I think speaks to sort of, you know, your, your guys' ability to make, you know, an advertisement fun to engage with.
Marcus: Yeah, but we also, that game to be, to be honest, we built it also from the perspective of building a game and not, yes, not as an ad or similar. We, we wanted to have something that is actually fitting for the platform that is fun and, and also they, they are obviously super happy as we continue to work for them after all this time.
So, there were one of our absolute first clients who are still. Work with them. So it's.
Olle: Yeah, and it was a really process as well, working together with them. They're great to work with them. They really embrace this right away when we wanted to push them in the direction of, we actually have to make a proper game.
I know we threw out Tony Hawk a lot of times, for example. That was a strong reference, yeah, for this product. So, no, they were, they were great to work with. And that's important as well, that you have this great connection and relationship together with the brand.
David: Amazing. So before we get into sort of the, the branded side of things, I also wanted to just understand you guys have been on the platform for, for, you know, five years.
The lot has changed. I mean, I've, I've been on the platform for three and a half years and it's like night and day from when I began, when I began to, to now. What are some of the things that you've seen changing and what are the ways in which you've had to a adapt both on the branded side as well as the original game side?
Olle: I think like the biggest change, we have touched on this already, but how, how many more. Professionals are coming into the space, how much more competitive it's looking right now. So from that perspective, there has been a huge change. But then also, touching on the development side of things, like it was always a pretty good environment to work in.
But what happened during these years is like it's leaps and bounds from. What it was before. It's a completely different engine with way more features like the analytics tools, everything is just better. And that's also adaptations that you have to make now as well. And you have to utilize all these tools in a different way.
David: When you say that it's, they, what, what sort of has, what have these tools enabled? Has it enabled you to make games faster? Has it allowed them to be more high fidelity? What's sort of the, the unlock for. The end product that we, that me as a player might, might see.
Olle: Not so much in terms of speed, like Roblox is always gonna be fast to develop the words, but definitely when it comes to fidelity, like making, making stuff that can compete with products on Steam as well, with unlock of modern technology that didn't really exist.
In the same sense. I mean, it's, it's not on the same level, but it's getting there and you see it every year. It's, it's too much to keep up with essentially. But yeah, we're trying to keep up with everything and especially the analytical tools are really important. And you can work way more data-driven now than what you could before.
Like in the beginning, I think we used Google Analytics for everything, which wasn't really. Feasible in the end, but now we have this out of the box and you really need to utilize it to be able to perform.
David: On the, on the game engine side, do you feel like Roblox is headed towards being at the same level of Fidelity performance as, as other game engines like Unreal Engine or, or Unity, or? Do, is it, is it never gonna be there? It's really more focused on, you know, being easy to use. Like is there a, is there a, is there a moment where Roblox might catch up and still be easy to use, but be just as powerful as those engines?
Olle: I don't think it would be beneficial for them to be on direct competitor, because that's also the beauty of about Roblox, that it's, it's more about the games and to me, it should always be more about the games than the actual fidelity, and you can see that on certain titles that come out. Now, I know Grow A Garden is generating a lot of buzz. It's, yeah, the fidelity is not really needed in that sense. Yeah. So it could catch up. Should they? I'm not sure.
Gustav: Yeah. I would probably turn it around, like I'm saying that the other engines need to catch up to Roblox because, but maybe that's because I'm a coder, so I don't care about like render fidelity or things like that.
But the, the Roblox engine is absolutely amazing, especially for smaller teams, like the collaboration tools where, where you can actually see what's happening in real time while, while adding it, it, and , like the ability you have built in multiplayer and the social features and everything, like the other engines have a lot of catching up to do.
And I worked with probably 12 different engines and I, I worked as an engine developer as well on them. And like the APIs from a tech standpoint, like this is the most beautiful engine. I have ever seen. I absolutely love it. And you need to remember also that a majority of the players are on mobile devices.
You don't want to push all, even if you have the capability. And there are some games that look amazing. We, we have a horror game with like PBR really exciting, called Grad Camp, that when we show videos of it, people don't believe it's Roblox, but it's not a good product for the platform because it's not available to the minority of the payers.
David: Yeah, we definitely saw that at Super Social, just the more memory usage. The short, the lower recession length would be because you'd have, you know, 50% of the player base on low end devices. And, you know, they can't, they're not gonna wait 30 seconds for a game to load. You know, they'll wait three to five seconds and if it doesn't, then they leave and then that just hurts, hurts your session link.
Gustav: Yeah. And also I, I think we're seeing the, and maybe we're straying away a bit from the topic, but I, I think we're seeing a trend on the non Roblox platforms where the successful games are starting to look more like Roblox and less like Fortnite. So I think that's very interesting. Like, as I said, I think the other engines need to catch up. It's not the other way around.
David: Makes sense. Anyone else wanna chime in here on sort of what makes Roblox tools particularly enjoyable compared to other.
Hakan: I mean, you can summarize it, that you, if you have an idea to build that idea to cross publish that game to multiple platforms, have it live, and then also have user acquisition to that game, there is no other game engine or platform that can do what Roblox does, like that process itself. It's just, you know, so good.
David: Awesome. I, and this is sort of a another philosophical question, but, you know, given how easy it is to build games on Roblox, I'm curious how a company such as yourselves with, you know, 200 plus employees, how you guys are able to retain talent when, you know, the best Roblox developers on the platform are able to, you know, build these games without the support of a larger institution.
Marcus: I, I can start here. So the way we did it, because we work with a lot of brands, and also these guys have been in the gaming industry for a long period of time, most our connections from the beginning were not from Roblox because we didn't come from Roblox, but not robots native. Mm-hmm. So, our first employees were more from the traditional gaming industry.
So we hired them from working from other studios, gaming studios as artists, designers, coders. And then, we educated Roblox to them and then we, and that worked quite well for us. So that's what we have been continuing to do, more or less. And I think. That also makes us partly unique because most of the studios to work mainly with, as we spoke about before, contractors or native Roblox.
We are doing that from time to time as well, but the majority of our employees are, more traditional from traditional gaming, industry.
Robin: Got it. Okay. Something we actually found that a lot of traditional game developers find it liberating to have like development cycles measured in months rather than years. Like that's something a lot of papers in anyway.
David: Yeah. In my current role, the, the development cycle is around four to six years. So, I feel for those who have been working on a project for six years, and then that's when they find out if it's successful or not. And then most of the time it's not successful just because of, you know, the hit rate in the video games industry.
So, yeah, it can be, I imagine, very heartbreaking to go through that long cycle and, you know, most likely being. Facing failure at the end and potential layoffs as well. So yeah, I, I can understand why people would take shelter at the gain and in turn. And so, so a key part of that is, is the branded experiences, right?
Because you are sort of guaranteed some amount of, of revenue upfront through the contract. I'm curious sort of how has that evolved over time? Like, you guys were obviously early movers in 2020. How has the market for building branded experiences evolved? And I'm really curious about now because, you know, you've seen fewer branded experiences being built.
Overall, more brands are leaning into Activations, which I, in terms of reach are, are probably the most efficient way to, to market a product. And then you have Roblox as advertising push, which is where they're trying to make this more programmatic advertising. So how are you guys sort of responding to that?
How have you responded over the years to the evolution of, of marketing on the platform?
Marcus: Let's begin with why we started with branded work versus original games. I think that's good to know. So we, when we created a company, we, we didn't know if we were gonna get the hit or when, so then we, we thought it's good to work also with branded work because then we have, as you said, some kind of platforms and kinda stability in terms of revenues.
But not only, we also knew that having brands like Vans, for example, or Hasbro, or those that we worked with very early on, those unlock possibilities for us, especially in beginning new technologies and everything. So Roblox wanted to test on the, on the more well-known brands, so then we got opportunity to kind of unlock new technologies, and then we also built our own experiences.
Outside because we wanted to get the hit, obviously. But also the second thing, which was really, really good for brands, was that we tested on our own things so we could test different genres, different tools and everything. So when we spoke with the brand, we also know what worked or didn't work.
And so we didn't have to test on the brands. So that was kind of a really, really good thing in the beginning what we see now. Yeah, it's, it's been shifting and, and moving quite a lot. Of course, what I think is the main difference now compared to before is that now brands have more knowledge on why they are actually.
Doing something Roblox. It's not a clear stunt. It's not that they create something else because they want to get headlines on a lot of newspapers. And in the beginning, I would say there were so many companies contacting us that zero clue what Roblox actually were. Yeah. And, they could have just made something on Roblox or on any other platform at the time, and didn't, man, didn't matter if it was like a platform that was for crypto or if it was Roblox.
They, they just wanted to be there somewhere. So I think the level of knowledge has increased quite a lot. And also the, the ROI, the possibility to get something back that you, the reason why you spend the money, that has also increased. And robots have been pushing quite a lot on this. They have been pushing technologies when it comes to ads, as you mentioned, and, and also integrations possibilities. So it's easier now than it was before.
David: How are you guys adapting to that, right? If, if brands are having a higher ROI expectation and Roblox is sort of pushing towards, you know, more scalable advertising solutions, what does that, what are you guys doing to adapt?
Marcus: Well, well, that has always been the case, to be honest, that the brand should always have a high ROI possibility. So, the way we do it is that we work alongside Roblox and not against. And we utilize their possibilities, technologies. So we work a lot with ads, for example, together with Roblox. We also bring them into the rooms if you speak for the client, we have them alongside from the beginning to talk about what are the objectives, how can we do it, what kind of possibilities do I have here in order to not work against each other or having someone else coming in from the sideline and doing something else in the end. Yeah, and I think that's quite natural. It's like with every single platform, not only Roblox, that you have to, they, they're obviously gonna try to push in new technologies. So they increase their margins and possibilities, but in the end of the day, that should also benefit the clients, and it'll benefit the clients, and that's why they do it.
David: What would you say are, are the benefits of building an original experience today? Like I, I still see a lot of brands doing original experiences. I, you know, I think Universal did both an original experience as well as sort of a, a slew of integrations across multiple experiences. So how, what is the role of the original experience versus the activation? How do those things differ?
Marcus: I, I think, I think it's pros and cons for both, first of all.
So it's not that one is better. When you have your own experience, you have full control. First of all, you can do anything. Within as you want, you can also activate or integrate other partners. We work with a lot of sports brands, for example. So if you take Wimbledon that is ongoing right now, the tennis tournament there will have multiple of their partners in their actual competition that they have brought into the space.
That's possible to do if you have your own space or a place, so you can offset some of the costs to, together with your partners already. And, but mainly full control and also build community over time so you don't just take something in, put it in someone else's experience for a short period of time.
But then you can actually build a community, a foster community, and speak with the community and use it as a similar as any other channel website or social media integrations. They are really, really good. If you want to reach a certain audience, you know, predefined which audience you want to reach, you want to know.
You also know how many they have. So you can calculate forehand exactly how many are you gonna reach, who are you gonna reach for which period of time. So, so I would say it's depends what your, what your objectives are and timeframe. If you, for example, want to launch a product and you really need to reach a lot of people, you might be better off doing an integration.
But if you're gonna do this long term, you might be better off building your own space in the long term.
David: And you say better long term because why you might grow an audience over that time period. Are there examples of games that have grown, you know, significant audiences over time? That branded games?
Marcus: I would say Vans is one of them that is a reason why we continue to work for them over time. We, we have, I, I would say Wimbledon as well. We're on the third year right now, so, and in the beginning I was only Wimbledon. Now we also work with the US Open, Australian Open, and we have quite good traffic when it's, when the event is, and then it goes down when it's not, obviously.
So they, they do see reasons for being there. And also, I would also say reach, reaching an audience that you cannot or is difficult to reach elsewhere. Of course, you might be able to reach them on YouTube or TikTok, but it's different platforms. Yeah. And here you have a focused audiences.
David: Cool. I wanna talk about the future a little bit. Where, so, you know, you guys have launched a cross platform game. You have sort of, you're sort of dabbling on, on these adjacent platforms. You know, Blade Ball being ported over, it's not technically a port, it's a, it's a, a license of Blade Ball and, and bringing a version of that experience to Steam.
What sort of is driving that exploration? And, and what is sort of, what's sort of your views on, on the gaming industry today that are leading you to take these, these exploratory paths?
Olle: I can talk a bit on that. I've been producing Blade Ball, so in case of, in case of that, I think.
David: Sorry. And while, sorry, just to, well, since with, with that information, would also just love to understand sort of what it's been like doing that. Because I think it's a really interesting, strategy and I'm sure if you guys are successful, everyone's gonna probably be piling in trying to do the same thing.
So I'm sure people's ears have perked up to just sort of understand how that all came together, if you're able to share, and, and what are some of the hypotheses behind it.
Olle: I mean they, I don't remember exactly the number now, how much they peaked in CCU and that's what peaked our interest. I think it was up to half a half a million or a million even.
David: Yeah, and they've stabilized around 20,000, 10 to 20,000. I mean, and they're always in the top 10 earning games. Yeah. They're around number 10 or 11.
Olle: No. So then that's a big part of it. Like it's a very strong community. It's a very creative concept and I think that's what it comes down to, these creative ideas that you can find on Roblox, in another sense.
And that's what we wanted to tap into. So, doing this, uh, as a collaboration with Blade Ball, then we get to utilize their community to actually help shape the product into what it's gonna be eventually. I'm actually gonna play this in 10 minutes. I accidentally double booked a stream that we're gonna do, so I'm gonna have to play a little bit on the side here while we do this.
David: It's all right. We can try to wrap up by then too.
Olle: No, but it's fine. I, I, I'm, I know it by the back of my hand, so I don't really have to focus when I play it anymore.
David: I’m sure you wouldn't be the first person on the podcast to play video games while he was being interviewed.
Olle: Yeah, no, I can imagine. No, but that's, so that's how we're working with it right now, like playing together with the community.
Now we're collaborate, collaborating together with two streamers are gonna play it. So essentially just building it up until we feel that it's ready for release and that we get a thumbs up from the community essentially that now it's good to go.
David: Do you think that there will be new audiences that come, or are you really sort of anchoring towards being able to get people who are typically on Roblox to come over and play on Steam?
Olle: Both, in a sense. But what we have been trying to do, we realized that the games don't take the exact same shape as they do on Steam, for example, versus Roblox. There, there will be differences. So we have tried to shape this game in being, in this case, it's a, it's a bit more complex than what you would see, on Roblox.
Like, we don't have to really have a mobile in mind as much, so we can rack up the complexity a bit. And by that we want to try to scenario players from that, like games, like Rocket League for example, or similar multiplayer brawler games. So that's our hypothesis, like take a really good creative concept in this case, the, this collaboration together with Blade Ball and try to shape it into a new product. I see them working side by side essentially. They, they are not competitors in a sense. They are the same in many ways, but they are different games.
David: Yeah, I mean, Blade Ball was heavily influenced or inspired by Genji Ball, which is an Overwatch creative mode, and I think that was inspired by another game mode from Team Fortress Two.
Olle: So yeah, Pyro. Pyro ball. Yeah.
David: Yeah. So Pyro Dodge
Olle: Ball. Yeah.
David: Presumably there is an audience off of Roblox that's interested in playing this game as well.
Gustav: Yeah, but I think that's where we're coming from as well. Like we, we have not only worked with games for a long time, we have all been playing games since we were kids as well.
And we have seen this before, like Dota started out as a mod and, and a lot of good game ideas go through different platforms and they evolve and change. And we felt with Blade Ball, especially, we felt like. This is a brilliant game mechanic. Like this has been, been on so many platforms and it has evolved into something that is a very, very good core gameplay.
And we also see again, as I mentioned earlier, like we, we see a trend on, on Steam and consoles were a lot of the hit games like Company was a hit game last year on Steam and it was made by a Roblox developer and we're seeing like the top games when we play them and we see them, we are thinking like, Hey, this is a Roblox game and it's doing really well.
So we think that the creativity is so high on the platform, and, and there are so many good games, and we think they should be available to a broader market.
David: I mean, that's why, why I love the platform is just getting exposure to all of that creativity. It's, you know, it's delightful to just look at the, the charts every day and to see what's popped up lately and, and hop into it and see what it's about.
So, so we talked about Blade Ball. How about the, out of, Out of Sight? How, how did that come about? How did you guys decide to, to explore just an entirely original game that's cross-platform.
Gustav: That that is actually, that's a fun story. So, I was, I was doing a talk at an event here in Stockholm and after me, student team went up on stage and they had won like all of the awards, all the student awards in Sweden that year, and one of the guys were working at The Gang.
So I was like, Hey, that's Simon and he's part of this team that like won all of the awards this year. So, so after their presentation, I just grabbed them and said like, Hey, let's make this into more than a student project. Let's make it into full game, and do it with us.
David: So Simon didn't tell you he was doing this. You just have him to.
Gustav: No, he, he had, he had done this during his education. So he joined us when, when after his education, straight from school. So, so they were presenting like their, their final exam, which was this game. And, and that game had also gone viral through, itch.io and, and had a lot of YouTube views.
So, and it's a brilliant game. Like it's, it is very different from what we typically do, like single player horror game, but, uh, it was just such a good game and we thought like, if you see a good game, why, why pass on it? That, that, let's see, this game realized as, as they would have wanted to see it and not on a student budget.
David: So I, I imagine you guys are sort of new to launching cross platform games. How have you sort of taken the approach of marketing this and, and getting it, getting people aware where that the game exists?
Gustav: We did a boring thing and went with a publisher. Really like we have, we have had a lot of releases before The Gang on like traditional platforms, but we have always worked as developers and not publishers. We started out thinking like, Hey, we self-publish on Roblox. That's self-publish outside, but that is a different beast all together. So we are signed with the publisher.
David: Awesome. Well, I hope that the publisher knows what they're doing when it comes to marketing.
Not all publishers do. Yeah. So, okay. So cool. So, I guess like, just, you know, just to sort of wrap up the conversation, would love to sort of reflect on the, the five years that you guys have been on this journey. Given what you know now, I'm sure you've learned a lot over, over your time on the Roblox platform at least. But what would you do differently if you were starting the game today?
Marcus: I, I can start, first of all. I don't regret a second that we jumped on Roblox because it's super, super fun and we, and also testament to that we still work together, all of us full time and we haven't gotten tired of each other yet, which is quite amazing. But I think what we would probably have done differently, we have been doing a few larger investments early on in games, like you said before as well, that the, the hits that we have had are way shorter time spend on building, uh, the prototypes for, so we would probably, we should have probably had done focus more on that and not been doing the more grandiose game times, I think, and the second thing from a company perspective, I think we should have kept the original games versus brand business a bit more separate from day one, which was very entangled and for a reason. It, it worked for us. But I think we have been working for quite some time now to separate it.
David: Yeah. You guys have, I, I remember seeing sort of new CEOs popping up of different, different parts of the gang. Like how did that all come together, just outta curiosity?
Marcus: No, so what what we did was that we, we noticed it was actually counterproductive to have everything on there or entangled too much, so we separated the brand work that we do, the work, work for hire versus the regional games into two separate entities. And then we put two people to lead each part. It's Max and your role.
David: Yep.
Marcus: And the reason for it is that we will have way better focus on each part instead of stealing resources to one or another. And mainly from a retail games to, to brands.
So when we got the big new. Client coming in, it was all hands on deck. And then we stole resources from a regional game development. And that's why we needed to do this because we wanted to have a hundred percent dedication, very full focus forward, and then we can grow much better. And also the platform has involved quite a lot.
So it's different way of working with brands today. They were five years ago. Yeah. And so, I think this makes a lot of sense and that's probably something we would've done earlier.
David: How about the rest of The Gang? Any other things that you would've done differently?
Gustav: No, I think, I think the most important thing is kind of what Marcus said, like more focus.
We consider ourself task platform agnostics. And we have built like games on UF and, and we have built on like a lot of the other platforms that are not as big. And we have been trying to stay on top of like the trends across so many different verticals that somehow we ended up being like spread thin on our original Roblox games.
I think, and we kind of lost focus, and yeah, I would have, if I were to redo it, that's the thing I would change, like more focus saying like, this is where we're gonna be, the best. Mm-hmm. And, and execute on that instead of saying that we're gonna be good at everything, but, but really don't, maybe excel at our own games. Like I don't think we currently have a game in top 10. And I think we would have had that if we would've kept a super focus on, on that goal alone.
David: Amazing.
Hakan: I can only echo what the guy says here. Like, focusing more on our own productions, I mean, the platform proves it year on year.
Like we think we've seen the biggest game ever. But then next year, you know, you have the new hit game or you think that, oh, this is a vertical where it's like there's no room to go in and compete within this vertical. And then a game like, I don't know, just to impress comes or then a game like fish comes or you know.
The, the platform just keep on proving us, right? In that sense that we should focus on building our own games and our own IPs.
David: Yeah. Couldn't agree more. Awesome. Well, I know Olle has to get to a, to a Blade Ball stream, so I think we can wrap it up here. It's been amazing to have you guys on the podcast.
Appreciate you all finding time to be in the same virtual space at the same time. This has definitely been the largest group of, of podcast guests that we've ever had on the podcast. I'm glad we all fit on the same screen. But yeah, this has been super enlightening. Really appreciate you guys coming on and, and best of luck in, in the, in the coming year.
Marcus: Thank you so much for having us. Thank you, David.
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