In this conversation, David Taylor sat down with Crystin Cox, Head of Publishing at Arena Net and a 20-yr veteran of the video game industry, to discuss her experiences leading live-ops on Maple Story, monetization on Guild Wars 2, and publishing at Xbox Game Studios Publishing and now Arena Net.

They explore how the landscape has evolved over time and what the future holds during this tumultuous time in the video game industry.

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

We’d also 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. To learn more and reach out, visit https://heroiclabs.com/?utm_source=Naavik&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Podcast 

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 going to take a dive into the evolution of the games industry through the lens of publishing and live ops. My guest today has led teams overseeing some of the biggest commercial successes from MMORPG genre and has leveraged those experiences to support dozens more through publishing roles for Xbox Game Studios Publishing and Arena Net.

I'm delighted to welcome a 20-year veteran of the video game industry and a close mentor of mine, Crystin Cox. Crystin, welcome to the podcast.

Crystin: Oh, thank you very much.

David: To kick us off, could you just give us sort of a quick intro on your background and how you got to where you are today as head of publishing at Arena Net?

Crystin: Yeah, absolutely. So I think like a lot of people in my generation, my first gig in the VM industry was as a tester. I was actually, I went to school for theatrical scenic and lighting design with the idea that I would work in film and television. I got out into the industry. I did start working in film and television, but as anyone who's worked in that space knows the beginning of your career is a bit of a grind.

So I was doing really like low end work, like indie movies and like bad cable TV shows, and I wasn't loving it. And I needed a job between two seasons of a bad cable TV show. And I had a lot of friends who I'd gone to school with who were like, you are the person in our group who loves video games more than anyone else.

Why don't you go make video games? And the industry in, in Los Angeles at the time, the video industry was really booming. But I had come from that generation that was under the impression that Programmer was the only role in video games. And so it hadn't really occurred to me. And I, I did, I found that there was sort of a big call for testers at THQ, which is where I had my first, my first job.

And this was in the day where it would be just like hundreds and hundreds of testers in a building, just sort of throwing, you know, hours at testing games, black box style. But I loved it. I had been very frustrated in film and television. It felt a little stagnant. There was a lot of hierarchy. It didn't feel very like flexible or creative at the time.

Reality TV was just starting to take over. And the video industry, even from the position of, you know, like a contract QA person felt really. New and fresh. Like there was a lot of innovation, there were a lot of possibilities and I loved the people. And so I didn't go back to doing film and television.

I. I stayed in games, you know, did some, did some testing, and then was really lucky to get a job. , as a production coordinator, because I had this deep arts background, I went to work for sort of an insourcing studio for NCSoft at the time that was doing art insourcing for, everything that NCSoft was doing.

And the head of that studio had also come from film the television and had an arts background and thought that I would do well coming in to help with production coordination. So that's where I got my, my first like, um, the in-studio position. From there I had this, you know, design training. That's what my degree was in.

And so I made a transition over the next couple of years into doing a sort of like hybrid of production and design. I pretty much immediately, as I said, like my first real gig at a studio was for Ncsoft, which made MMOs. And I ended up staying in the MMO space for a really long time, you know, from Ncsoft.

I went to Disney and worked with the team at Disney, Walt Disney Internet Group, that did like Tune Town online in the Pirates of the Caribbean online. And then from there, um, I transitioned to work at Nexon, and I had really wanted to work at Exxon. Like I was very excited about what Exxon was doing.

When I was at Disney, I was doing a lot of competitive analysis, looking at other MMOs that were aimed at a younger audience, and there's very little of that that gets made in the west, like western game developers even today don't really get super excited about making games for younger audiences.

You see, mostly wanna focus on teens and then adults. So there was a lot more content aimed at a younger audience coming out of Asia. And so I had been playing a lot of Exxon's games and was really excited about a lot of the stuff that they were doing. And their sort of approach to MMOs or like, we called them virtual worlds a lot more back then in the early two thousands.

So I made the jump over to Nexon and there I learned just a ton. I was working at the like sort of Nexon North American office in Los Angeles and we were handling, publishing and development and sort of managing live services and live game direction for all of these Nexon games. Many of which had originally been developed out of Korea, but we're now being operated for the rest of the world.

And while I was at Nexon, I ended up eventually leading the Global Maple Story team which operated Maple Story for basically everywhere in the world that didn't have another, another version of Maple Story running. So we did everything except for Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia. So our, our focus was largely North America, but we did service the rest of the world.

I did that for a number of years. It was in incredibly educational. I got exposure to just like a lot of live ops games that NEX time was operating. I got to do a lot of free to play work, a lot of work on monetization and a lot of work with deep data and data analysis. But I was mostly working with a team in Korea.

I was spending a lot of time in Seoul. I was spending a lot of time. Not operating in my native language, which was very expansive. And I, I don't regret it at all, is I think a wonderful experience. But eventually I kind of wanted to return to working with a North American team and get a little bit closer back to development.

So I left Nexon and went to Arena Net. And I was at Arena Net for almost seven years. I came in to help them launch Guild Wars 2 and there at Arena Net, I, I got a lot deeper into working in design. I was a lead designer and a game director there. I focused on in game economy monetization rewards systems. Eventually did a lot of design, leadership and game direction. Um, and then after my time there had come to an end, I went, I was, I kind of wanted to go back to publishing because I missed having the larger purview and getting to see lots of different games and lots of different experiences.

I loved Guild Wars so much, and loved working on Guild Wars 2. But I, I did spend, you know, almost seven years working on one game and so I went over to Xbox Game Studios to work on the publishing side there with like the goal to see a little bit broader set of games in development. And, and I got that.

It was really wonderful. I get to work on, you know, over a dozen titles while I was there with a whole bunch of different developers and there I focused a lot on strategy and also on trying to help development teams understand how to move from making sort of consumed boxed products into making live ops games because so many of the teams we were working with at Xbox were very traditional AAA developers who were now sort of grappling with the reality of the industry where players expect you to take care of the game after it launches almost no matter what kind of game you're making. And so I spent a lot of time with teams there helping them understand like what makes live ops work and like how to approach making games in a way to players to engage with for many years or like over a long period of time.

And I was there up until pretty recently, I, I left Xbox Games Studios in October of last year, to rejoin Arena Net. So I actually am back at Arena Net now. I talked a little bit before about how much I love Guild Wars. It's still so important to me, like creatively and such an important part of my career, and I love that community so much with the opportunity came up to go back to Arena Net and head up their publishing division.

 I took it and I, I rejoined Arena Net at the beginning of this year.

David: Awesome. And, and for the folks listening, I was on Crystin's team at Xbox, and yes, we miss her dearly. We talk about it every week that we miss Crystin. So, but happy that you found something that is bringing you equal, if not more joy today.

So, yeah, I would love to sort of like, look in, look at the live ops bit of your career, and then we can talk about publishing later. But I'd love to sort of just track the evolution of live of live Ops in the gaming industry over the last, you know, 10 plus years. Right. You've been sort of playing an important role.

How has that evolved? Maybe through the lens of Mabel's story, which was obviously a massive success. I, on w according to Wikipedia, it, it has generated $1.8 billion. So, you know, that's a, that is a, a whopping success. Would love to hear sort of what were the, what was it like back then? What was, what was new?

What was sort of the, the innovation that allowed for Maple Story to be successful?

Crystin: So much of it really comes down to, and this is I think the story of live ops is the, uh, rising ubiquity of like always connected to the internet home setups. There had been a little bit more of it in Korea a little earlier, both in the home, but also because culturally there was so much more. There was so much more of a tradition of playing online games in a communal space in a, in a PC café that like access to that like really like high speed broadband internet connection was pretty accessible to people, even if they didn't have it in their home a little bit earlier, like in the late nineties and like really early two thousands in Korea.

And so some of this innovation did come a little bit faster out of, out of like Korea and Japan. But we follow a similar trajectory in the West where as people got more and more access to high speed internet and were connected more and more, they were just getting interested and starting to explore all of these opportunities that are created by that in the gaming space.

And this idea of having always connected. Virtual worlds or MMOs that are, you know, they're continuing to progress and have things happen in them, whether you're connected to them or not. They're sort of a separate space that's always on and always running. And as a player you just, you know, join into that world whenever you have time.

But it continues to live and grow and change even when you're not there with something that had been really interesting to game players. Basically for, since the sort of modern era of role-playing games with like tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons and Dragons or like war game or miniature games, was this idea that there's a big world and you are stepping into it to play, but it might like have a life of its own even when you're not there.

Some of the first computer games are muds, right? Like multi-user dungeons that are text-based MMOs that were getting developed as soon as the internet was up and running. So people have been really interested in this for a long time. There, I think that there's a sort of natural human, gameplay and desire for this kind of experience.

As I said, the world to kind of persist when you're not there and you step into it and play a role and, you know, it continues to go when you're not there and you can meet friends there, like make friends there. But in the early two thousands, we started to see graphics also come up, and that created another layer for players to interact in a much more social way.

Text is great. There's still muds that are running today that do really well, people are very passionate about, but when we added in the layer of visualizations starting in the late nineties and into the early two thousands, then we really started to have people engage with MMOs and virtual worlds in a way that was like very social.

It was like about having a presence there, like a virtual presence that maybe represents you. Maybe it doesn't. It's a virtual presence that you can embody and then go out and like engage in games. And that is something that has been a strong motivator for players from the beginning. And I think what we've really seen over the last 20 years is the rest of video games, in the rest of the video game space has sort of caught up technologically to be able to deliver some of that in almost every gaming experience that you have and has just adopted those things because they're so motivating to players and they're so engaging for players that now what we see is almost every AAA game that you would play has some level of that, that they're trying to put inside of their game. Not literally everyone. There are other genres that aren't interested in this kind of thing, but for people who are aiming for mainstream success or like really broad appeal, they are thinking about this kind of desire.

And this level of motivation that exists when players can engage with something where they're like, wow, I am like really embodying this character and I'm really experiencing a world that feels more real. It feels more persistent. It feels like something where what I do matters a little bit more. And so, so much of the video industry has just been this trajectory over the last 20 years of more and more of the sort of broad appeal AA space, adopting more and more of those capabilities as technology has just allowed it to happen.

You know, with just ubiquitous broadband accessibility in the west now, and also like cloud and streaming and all of these things that allow for more and more of that to happen. You know, if you're making a video game, you can do this at this point, and if you can do it, you probably are at least considering doing it.

David: Yeah, it makes sense. So what, what I'm curious about is because, you know, technology was sort of unlocking this new capability, this new style of, of engagement in play. I'm curious if, you know, when you were there doing the live ops and the monetization, were there sort of things that you guys were testing out that we're sort of testing, setting the stage for what live ops and monetization would be for the next 10 to 15 years?

Crystin: I would say yes and no. One of the interesting things about working so early in virtual worlds and MMOs on the PC side and working with a team in South Korea, which had been sort of pioneering a lot of this, a lot of this stuff, there were things happening in the west, but especially free to play and that kind of monetization was really being pioneered out of the east.

Was that we were looking at a lot of player history and data back in the early two thousands and we were experimenting and trying a lot of things with like, how does engagement work? What are we trying to drive, how do we do monetization? And I think I was a bit lucky in a lot of ways to work with a team at Nexon that was very long tail focused, like extremely long tail focus.

There was this idea that if you wanted to do microtransactions, the trade off that you were making was that instead of getting a lot of money up front and then, you know, hopefully you satisfy and live up to the expectations for the player. , we're gonna invite the player in for free and they're gonna try it, and then they're gonna decide if they want to pay us, but they functionally can only pay us little bits at a time.

So if you don't have repeat purchasing, you don't have a business. Like if players, you know, pay you once and then they don't ever pay you again, you're not doing well as opposed to traditional, you know, boxed product where actually if they pay you once, even if they're incredibly unhappy with the game, it doesn't really matter to you from a business perspective.

Obviously from a creative perspective it does, but from a business perspective, you're like, well, I got the money. Like, you know, who cares? What happens next? But next one was very focused on the long tail. Like there was a lot of thinking and a lot of the data and research that we did was always based on like, how do we keep players happy for a really long time?

And we very quickly learned that you really had to watch out and try to avoid, like binge spending. Like this was not a good thing for long tail relationships and we were also dealing with a younger population, so we were always a little nervous about any kind of like massive spending because probably their parents were gonna be like, wait, what are you doing now?

They would call us and be like, no, no, no, no, I don't want, you gotta reach, you gotta refund all of this. And so we were playing around really early with a lot of like, okay, how do we make this feel like there's worthwhile things to buy, but we don't want you to buy a lot of stuff all at once and we don't want you to get into kind of a re like a binge spending cycle.

Because we had all the data. We're like, if people start spending like massive amounts of money really quickly, they'll be gone really quick, quickly. They almost never stick around. Um, so we were very Is the insight

David: That it is, is the, is the insight there that it's like if they spend a lot, it's probably means that their parents are gonna like shut them down and not up them play the game anymore?

Or is there some other, like what's the like insight around why someone would binge spend and that would cause them to churn?

Crystin: Oh, usually binge spending is a behavior that leads to regret. Like you, you might be in a mode where you're spending a lot, but then when you finish and you look back at it and do like a value like calculation, a lot of times you'd be like, Ooh, I shouldn't have done that.

And it creates like a negative association with the game. And then you're like, maybe I should stop doing this altogether. Like, this isn't really like, something I wanna continue doing. Or if you were someone un you know, who was a minor, yes. Your parents might step in and be like, you can't be doing this.

You can't spend all this money. We're gonna, you know, get this re refunded or whatever. But we also saw this with adults a lot. Like , and I, and it still, I see it quite a bit now. Even, like, you gotta be really careful if you start to see like binge spending because it usually means that they're about to flare out of the game.

Like there's, they're unlikely to stick around for a really, really long time. So we were just thinking a lot about Long Tail. We were thinking a lot about like how to keep players engaged for a long time. We were thinking a lot too about, you know, um, operating for a younger audience that they would age out of the game and, you know, I thought of really interesting resources being done around then.

Really interesting stuff. I was also getting a lot of insight into different motivations in different regions, because culturally, you know, Korea is not the same as the United States. And we had like different things that people cared about or people felt was fair, um, in the way that monetization was done.

So that was really helpful 'cause I had a really global purview 'cause we had players all over the world. I think that was really helpful. So we were doing a lot of this thinking and I feel like we were. Really starting to figure out how to create long tail relationships with players in the West, which was different than the way that we operated the same games in like Korea.

And we were really starting to think about like how to put a lot of our own internal sort of policies in place to keep things all running smoothly over the long, long term. We also grappled with the stuff that most, you know, game studios do. Like, we, like, you know, we would get pressured to like, hit your quarterly goals and, you know, you maybe wanna make bad trade-offs to do that, but I think we were really grappling with that in a pretty healthy way.

And then, right when—

David: Do you, do you have an example of like, like a design choice that would lead to a more healthy type of spend with the long tail versus the binge spending?

Crystin: Yeah. One of the things that was a big goal, a big rule for us that I carried through even after I left Nexon was like, never ask an angry player for money.

Like you never wanna associate anger with spending money, because you can get really short term like heightened. Emotions can lead to short term spending, but you're creating a negative long-term association with the player and you're upsetting them. Like there's a lot to be said too about like, just because a player paid you doesn't mean they were happy to pay you.

And you'd really to be thinking about that in the long term. So yeah, never ask an angry player for money. So like, if something really frustrating just happened to the player they just lost or like they just had a bad experience, don't then be like, oh, do you wanna solve this with money? It's an easy out in the moment, but it's a lot.

It's a, it's a recipe for long-term churn, from that player 'cause you, you've maybe like activated also some like sense of unfairness, right? Like something mm-hmm. Bad just happened. Like, you see this in research all the time where like when people lose a game, a competitive game, if you tell them that they were playing against a machine instead of a human, even if they were playing against a human, they will assume the machine cheated.

And even sometimes that the human cheated. People are just, we're just wired that way. Like we don't like to believe that we lost because of our, you know, failings, like we wanna, you know, find some external reason for it. And so you activate this sense of unfairness. A lot of times if you, if you are very much in danger of activating that if you ask players for money when they're mad, um, which just isn't great.

The other thing, thing that can be really rough. And we, we were very cautious about this when I was at Nexon. We were like, never ever, ever should we let you like open a random box and then like immediately push you right back into another one. Like do not create slot machine. Like experiences was like a huge thing for us.

We're like, do not do that. Like, do not create a situation where if you're rolling a random chance, we're like, oh, roll another one, roll another one, roll another one. Because you're really in danger of creating a spiral like you, you are generating. And we looked a lot at the gaming space and we're like, okay, don't do stuff that they do.

Like don't look at stuff in the gambling space because you are literally gonna start activating all of these sort of hardwired human tendencies to like go down these spirals. And that could be really bad and we just also didn't want the perception, especially 'cause we were making games named at younger audiences that we were like.

Trying to get them into gambling or something. Right. So we, a lot of these hard rules that I think were really helpful.

David: Everything you're describing sound kind of sounds like mobile games today. So I'm, I'm curious, like, are there, is there, are those mobile games just being short term minded or is it just a different audience, different play style, that demand, that has like different demands on, on the player?

Crystin: So, I mean, this is, this is my opinion, right? Looking at this stuff as a designer and, and a live operations, um. You know, like someone who's done a lot of live operations in production, like I'm not an expert in mobile monetization, but yes, my perception is that largely most mobile games are very shortsighted.

Like, and they don't think about having a, a, a three, four year long relationship with their players. I would also say they're mostly optimized around appealing only to people who wanna spend really massive amounts of money and not appealing to people who wanna spend small amounts of money. This has been a, the trend and something that the mobile industry has had to grapple with in the last 10 years is they were so anxious to optimize and like, you know, AB test their way into like really going after the high spenders.

That's inherently a really small percentage of your potential player base, no matter what you do, right? There's only so many people that are gonna be happy or willing or able to spend massive amounts of money on your game, but so many mobile games. We're kind of coming outta this a little bit. We're in a different era now.

A lot of things have changed in mobile in the last three or four years, but there was this era where they were just really, really focused on short-term gate. I mean, you would like launch a mobile game, optimize your way into identifying only your highest spenders, churn everyone else out, who cares about them, you know, just milk it really hard and move on after, after a year, right?

Like, this is like very much the attitude for not everyone. There's like some great mobile games that think about the long tail. There's some great mobile games that appeal to high spenders. But there was a, a sort of conventional wisdom that built up, and this is actually why I say like, oh, the work we were doing back when I was working on like Maple Story or like, you know, there were, there was stuff happening with like Guy online or Haba Hotel Club, penguin even Ultima Online and stuff like that.

I was like, oh, was that setting the standard? Sort of in, in many ways no, like, was very fascinating. Like we were doing all of these things. We were having a lot of success, um, in the West as well. Like people were constantly surprised by this. The industry just wasn't really ready to accept it. We would be like, oh, we're, we're killing it.

Like, we're making tons of money off Western players. We have a, we had tons of Western players. But then the, so sort of social games happened, like social, like Facebook games happened and mobile games happened, and that sort of part of the industry in the west came up almost entirely removed from traditional MMOs, even traditional free to play MMOs.

And honestly, for me felt really bizarre. Like it was like watching a group of people operate in a similar space and make just wildly different decisions than. We had been making and that we felt were best practices, that we were like, these are really like, sort of counter to a lot of the things that we think are best practices based on years of experience.

And we had had a lot of success, but like they really diverged those two lines of design and ways of thinking about live operations. Really, really diverged Western mobile and Facebook gaming, which didn't last for very long, but those, but this very connected to what like Western LiveOps mobile games are all about, really went their own way.

Like, and, and sort of forged their own path very much sort of through first principles of trying to figure out like how they wanted to approach doing these things. I think it's understandable when mobile and social gaming first started, they were really mostly like very short session games and they didn't, they think they legitimately were not thinking about keeping people engaged for, you know, three years, four years.

You know, um, to up to 10 years. I don't think that was on their mind at all. So they had very different incentives and very different things that they were trying to accomplish with their games. And so we really diverged. And it's only, I think, fairly recently that a lot of it is coming back together and people who are working primarily in like mobile are starting to go like, oh, like maybe there's some stuff that has been going on in like PC or like longer session, traditionally longer session game games like PC or console games in live ops, like could have some bearing on what we're doing in mobile as more and more of these experiences like become just device agnostic.

David: Got it. I feel like there's a million more questions I could ask about this, but we, we're two questions in, so we gotta keep on.

Crystin: I know. Oh my gosh. Keep on.

David: I, I wanted to actually ask about, you know, how live ops has changed over the last 10 years, like mm-hmm. How. How is what you were doing at Maple Story and then at Guild Wars two, like could you take us through that quick, that evolution of like, what is live ops today and what has changed versus, you know, the first 10 years that you were?

Crystin: There's a million things.

I'm gonna just focus on two that I think are like big themes and one is pretty quick, it is obvious. Technology-wise, it's totally different. I mean, like, you know, when I started we thought a lot about buying our own proprietary server hardware and how we were gonna install it and how we were gonna maintain it in like physical locations.

So we had to rent and we had to have people like go out and like maintain it and look at it. And it was very different from a technology perspective. And that is just all totally different now. Like, you know, basically like cloud computing has changed live ops so dramatically in many ways just for the better.

But it, it really has just changed so significantly. Like I was talking with one of my colleagues recently, like remembering us having to like deploy this army of people to go out and set up all the server, The server farms all over the world to support Guild Wars two's launch. Right. And obviously we would never do that now.

We would, we're on AWS like, it's just like, you know, you just push some buttons and set some settings. So that's one big one. The other one that I'll say is something that I think about quite a lot. When I was first starting in MMOs, there was a lot of emphasis on creating sort of, small scale, but like deeply engaging in emergent content with players.

We had all of these tools in like Mabel story and also like tune 10 online and, and private security online. Where a person could go into the game and like execute a command and like just kick off an event or you know, talk with the players who happen to be there and be like, let's do this thing right now.

Let's like, let's have an event right now, and like doing that kind of dynamic content was really, really popular and just considered table stakes. Like of course if you have an MMO you've got to be able to do those things with players. And then we went through this period where more like AAA developers started playing in the live ops space and we lost a lot of that.

We got sort of obsessed with this idea of everything being sort of automated or everything being baked in. We lost a lot of flexibility I think for a long time in the live ops space. And I am always like surprised even today when people go to make live ops.

David: What do you mean by automated?

Crystin: Like everything is done like in pre-baked code.

Like, so if I want an event to happen, someone had to decide months ago that an event was gonna happen at this time to this time, and a designer like designed it, a programmer, programmed it to happen and then it gets like baked into a client update versus Maple Store. We just had a, a web tool that we logged into and like punched some numbers into and it's like, bam, an event is happening right now inside of the game.

And I think in this pursuit for things being more complicated, but also for things to feel more, um, like, we sort of lost a lot of that flexibility. And I think we're just starting to rediscover it. But it is something I think about a lot. Like every time I talk to a team that's making a live ops game, I'm like, what is your plan to support like dynamic content?

Because mm-hmm. Content is the thing. The players are gonna want. I think we went through this period where there was this idea, I used to hear people say, our game's not a content treadmill. And I think this was a sort of chasing the end of the rainbow a little bit. As developers, it's like, yes, it is like from your players' perspective, content is king and like players want content.

You can try to come up with a lot of like really clever systems and things to avoid delivering content, but generally players want content. You kind of have to grapple with that. And it's, it's hard, like it's legitimately hard, but I think we lost some of the earlier tools that we had back at the beginning of the sort of, you know, online virtual world period.

Because we don't think about, that almost seems like too simple or it seems like it won't really be that interesting, so why do it? But I actually think we, we are starting to rediscover a little bit. I see something like, like Cal Divers Two does a lot of this, and I'm like, wow. Yeah, that's really great.

Like we, they're, they're kind of getting back to those roots things that did work. We kind of lost a little bit as we got more sophisticated and, and complicated and more AAA.

David: Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. I, I remember playing Fallout 76 and I thought that what they sort of have these programmatic events that happen and people will just sort of gravitate towards them.

Mm-hmm. It's a way of bringing people together in like a, you know, an open world style game where you might not see as many people because of the environment..

Crystin: Yeah. So large. So big. Yeah. It's so spread out in that game.

David: Yeah, cool. So, the other thing I wanted to ask was, and this could be a good transition to the publishing side, but when you were at Xbox Game Studios publishing, you got to see a lot of different games.

I'm curious about any of the sort of common live ops pitfalls that, you know, people should just watch out for or, you know, generally things that they should avoid or they should make sure that they do when launching a live ops game?

Crystin: I think this one's really hard for traditionally AAA teams that fundamentally like, and I don't think, I don't know if people in tech really understand this that well, but, um, most AAA teams are pretty like.

Hardcore waterfall in their production methodology. Like they, they really do go, like, first you plan, then you build, then you're done. Like it's, it is very waterfall. It's because there's a ton of dependencies. They're very complicated, large teams that have a lot of dependencies going on and people working at different rates, and so they still do a lot of waterfall.

That's, that's pretty rigid. And because of that, if you're coming from that background, it's so difficult. And one of the biggest LiveOps pitfalls is you have to be able to ship really frequently and easily. You have to, you just have to, you have to be able to get a game client out and update out like very quickly and very dynamically.

And you have to accept that sometimes, A lot of times it won't be perfect, and then you're gonna roll forward and it's okay. I mean, if you're looking for perfection, you can't go fast. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about delivering high quality players. We absolutely should really care about that.

But when it comes to really doing a good live ops game, you've gotta be able to just throw stuff out and iterate, and you've gotta be able to do it really quickly. And it's very hard. It's very, very hard for teams that are used to working in a pretty rigid waterfall way to accept that what you really need to do is be able to ship really frequently, which flows onto another thing, a big pitfall.

You can't be frightened of your players, like you've got to be willing to go out and make mistakes. Own up to them, apologize, be real. But you've, you can't just be so scared to do anything 'cause you're so worried. The players might have, some players might have some negative reaction. You've, you've gotta roll with that.

Once you're making a live ops game, you're in conversation with your players all the time there. It isn't like we built this perfect, beautiful gem and then we send it out to the world and people review it and there it is. That's what it is. This is the opinion about the game. It's a constantly evolving dialogue and you can't be a frightened to have that dialogue with your players or you just won't be able to do the things that you need to do in order to find your voice, find your audience, and then go grow and build that audience with your community, with you.

Unless you're like, you've got enough of a sort of thick skin to accept that you're gonna be wrong sometimes and it's gonna be okay.

David: That's really interesting. I've, so I've spoken to some game designers who are like. I mean, all game designers listen to their, their fans Yes. Their players, but some don't do what their, what their players say.

Sure. And others, you know, do, and I'm curious, in your experience, what do you think is sort of the right approach? Like, is it to have a vision and stick with it independent of what the players are saying or asking for? Or is there some, or is it really like being in tune with your players, listening to what they want and then delivering on those features?

Crystin: So, I, I think both are valid. Like, I, I, I think that there's lots of experiences, entertainment experiences that we, we want, and I want them too. Where, what I really want is I, I wanna see the creator's point of view. Like I'm here to see their vision. Like I, I want to experience that. And there are other entertainment experiences where I wanna be catered to.

I want the things that I want to happen. I think they're both valid. If you're making a live ops game fundamentally as a designer, I think your job is to know better what your players want than they do. Like you do need, you should listen to them. I think mostly live ops games are about satisfying your players and delivering them and catering to them more than they are about, you know, you know, sort of my vision, like the, my point of view.

And you, you came to hear it, and, and that tracks a lot of live ops games are made, are not very auteur like they're, they have a lot of voices and a lot of creators in them. But as a designer, it's your job to know, I mean, fundamentally this is the job. Otherwise we would just survey players and say, what do you want?

And then we'd just build whatever it is they said they wanted, but that's not the, you could try it, it's not great because people are terrible at doing what they want, and your job is to, to actually know what they want. So you listen to a lot of feedback. You, you do a ton of feedback. You look at data, you listen to people talking.

You, you hear, you get survey results, and then your job is to take that emotional response the players have and actually know this is the thing that, that is really gonna satisfy them, not the thing they asked for, which probably won't because unsurprisingly gave design as a skill and like, you know, like anyone is, I mean, you could take me to, I.

You know, design a car and they'd be like, what do you want? And I could tell you I'm probably wrong. Like, I don't know anything about designing cars, right? I haven't spent years learning how to design cars. What would be better is to be like, well, wait, what do you want out of a car? Like, what, you know, what frustrates you about your current car?

And then a, an actual car designer would be like, oh, these are the things that will, that will give her what she's looking for. And that's the same with game design. Like, you've gotta listen to your players, but you need to know better than them what they want. That's what they want from you too. They wanna get taken care of, they wanna be catered to, but that also means they don't wanna do the work.

Like, they don't wanna be the ones that have to design the game for the most part. So, again, I think like games and entertainment experiences are abound that like, I want the creator's point of view. Like that's what I'm coming for, right? I, I'm not gonna go play like a kajima game because I'm like, I want kajima to do what I want.

I wanna know what Kajima wants to do. Like, I'm curious, like, what is he thinking? Like what, what is his, what does he come up with? But if I go to play an MMO, I want you to create a, like a, a world that's gonna cater to me and like, you know, leave me satisfied and, and gimme the things that I want. I think both are valid, but if you wanna make a successful live ops game, you probably wanna get a little bit closer to the side of wanting to cater to your players.

David: Awesome. Well, this is a good time to switch over to the publishing side of things. Um, I was hoping you could give us just a quick, perspective on the state of publishing today and how it has evolved from, you know, when you were at Nexon to mm-hmm. To today. I know a lot has changed from physical to digital.

What are some of the, what are some of the things that have, you know, changed the role of the publisher? And then what does a publisher do today? How can they really add value? 

Crystin: I think for the last 10 years there's been an ongoing sort of existential crisis in publishing. Really, like trying to look at it and say like, what is it that you do as a publisher?

Like what is it that you provide as a publisher? Because a lot of game teams can self-publish like the tools exist to go do that yourself. Like distribution can be totally digital. That's a totally valid way to go. You don't have to do any physical if you don't want to. I don't think physical is dead, but you don't have to do that you could do totally digital. You can engage vendors to help you with marketing. You can engage experts to help you with community. You can engage all kinds of, of people to help you with those things if you don't have the staff for it, so you can do it yourself. And so publishing has, I think for the last 10 years been really as we've moved away from being primarily a distribution.

Partner to ask like, well, what is it that we do? Right? Like, what, what do we do, in publishing? And I think it has changed a lot. I, I think there was a lot of value 15 years ago, even 10 years ago in getting a publisher that would like help you do distribution because it's hard. Um, and it was much harder.

The further back we go, who would handle, you know, cert and they would handle, you know, any kind of like platform set up, they would maybe even handle services like, like quality control or localization because it wasn't feasible for a developer to have those services in-house and there weren't a lot of options to go out and buy that, those services piecemeal.

But over time, that's become less and less, right? Because more people have come up to offer those services piecemeal and there it is easier and easier to do your own distribution. And so today, when I look at publishing, I think that there's a couple of things that it does functionally, if we're being honest with ourselves.

A lot of what publishing is funding. It's fun because most game developers can't afford to self-fund their games, and they have to find someone to be a financier for their games. And so a lot of publishers end up having to spend a lot of their time and energy being a financier and being looking at things like investments because they're ultimately mostly a funding partner.

And they're asking like strategic questions like, where should we put our money in order to make good strategic funding investments? And the developers are like, well, we're dependent on you to get our funding. There are other funding options, but it's, it's one of the funding paths that developers can go down.

And that's a big part of it. I honestly think some publishers are really clear headed about this. I think we run into a little bit of trouble when publishers are mostly a funding. Apparatus and an investment financier apparatus. But they, they, for whatever reason, would like to believe that they're, that that's not their primary function.

And so they wanna like split end up splitting a lot of their effort between doing strategy and helping their develop their development partners who they have funded, do good strategy and then all this other stuff that maybe that they're, but they're like, their focus is really split. So they're not really a services publisher, but they kind of are a services publisher because that's the other big thing that a publisher could do is provide services.

You can go piecemeal all those services together, but a really good publisher can provide those services very seamlessly. They have, you know, they have more people, they have more expertise. They're doing it all the time. They can be really great at that. If you find a good partner there that's gonna do that for you, that could be a great opportunity for a developer to be like, this is a, a team that's really good at all this stuff.

We don't have to worry about it at all. They're gonna coordinate it all together and do it. They're gonna be a services based publisher. But I think sometimes it's very hard to do both really well. I would say it's not impossible, but it's very hard. And I sense sometimes publishers even get to a point where they're like, I'm not really sure which one I'm trying to do best.

And that can be really challenging and you'll be extra challenging as a developer if you went to a publisher looking for a strategic investor, but then they wanna spend a lot of time doing services. Or you went to a publisher looking for services, but then they wanna spend all their time like doing strategic investment work with you.

And it can be hard to even know when you are talking to prospective publisher what they're actually gonna end up wanting to do with you.

David: Yeah. Do you think that, so are, is, is the takeaway here then that a publisher should sort of just focus on one, and, and just go all in on being either funding or services or.

Crystin: I think like most things that's not bad advice if, if you're, if you're like a publisher and you're like, I'm not sure what we're doing, I would say get clarity. Like, what is your purpose? Mm-hmm. Like why, like why are you doing these? And then go do that really well before you start trying to do a bunch of other stuff.

You know, sometimes you don't have that luxury, right? As a publisher, you, you kind of have to be a one-stop shop and do it all. And then I would say there's still benefit though, to stopping and, and like really asking yourself like, are we delivering on both of these fronts? How are we, how are we staffed and how are we, what's our focus percentage to make sure, like if we are gonna do strategy, are we actually doing it well?

If we're gonna do services, are we doing that really well? And get like, realistic with yourself about that 'cause there are two big jobs. Like there are actually two pretty big jobs that might require wildly different expertise to do well regardless of whether you wanna just focus on one or the other, or you need to split your time, but you need to just get a good, good clarity on it. Just get more, I mean, my biggest advice be just get really honest with your development partners about what you are and are gonna provide and like where, how you see your focus when you talk with them. Like what you think your, your benefit that you're gonna provide to the developer is so that you can enter into a relationship in a positive way.

David: Got it. I wanna flip it on, from the developer's perspective, like if you're a developer and you're thinking about the different ways in which you can fundraise today, is there sort of a type of funding that makes the most sense? Or is it just get whatever funding you can? What's your, what's your perspective on this?

Crystin: Well, I, I mean, in the current climate, some, I, I'm not, I don't wanna sugarcoat it for people. Like, a lot of times it will be, get the funding that you can, because we're in a, we're in a rough funding environment, but if you have the luxury of choosing. It really depends on what your goal goals are. Like one of the things I always talked with prospective developers about, you know, when I was looking at opportunities and like who we might partner with was to really ask them like, what are your goals for your company, right?

Is it, is it just make this current game you're making successful, that's fine. Like, you don't have to have more goals than that. But really think about it like, what are you trying to do with your company? If your goal is way beyond the, just this one game, right? And you have like specific aspirations for like your company's growth and what you're trying to do, you, you might have more success with VC funding because VCs are looking to invest for an exit.

Generally it's not every VC, whatever, right? I'm talking generalizations, but I. And they, they mostly invest in people, like they're a little less interested in investing in specific content. And honestly, if you look at the, the history of the last 10 years, when they have invested in specific content, maybe they haven't had an amazing track record.

So I understand where they're coming from, where they often are investing in people or companies because they're looking at eventually making an exit. And that usually means a sale or an IPO or something like that. And that's much more company focused than it is individual game focused. Maybe your company is like, oh, we're gonna be, our game is gonna be so huge that it's worth an entire company's worth of, you know, of evaluation.

Maybe that's really hard to produce. But, but think about what you want as an organization where you're thinking about where to go get your funding and recognize like the different funding avenues are, they're gonna have their own goals, and like, like VC is gonna be looking for an exit. And so you have to be thinking like, are we actually gonna do something that's gonna align us with them?

Like, are we gonna be all be wanting the same things together? Like if you were, you know, building a small indie studio and you wanna make, you know, a lot of small games, but you don't want the studio to grow and you never wanna have an IPO like, and you, you are absolutely dedicated to retaining like sole ownership.

Like VC would be hard as an extreme example, but VC would be tough. So actually sitting down and asking yourself like, what do I want for my studio? Whereas like a publishing relationship is, a funded publishing relationship is usually about a single game and that has its flip sides too. Your publisher probably isn't going to be super invested in your company, right?

And like, they're, they're, they're not really tied to you in that way. Like they're really just focused on the game you're making together and the content that you're producing together for this. Project that you've signed on for. So that creates a whole different situation and a different set of incentives for you to navigate and different things for you to care about versus what the publisher or your funding partner either way might care about bootstrapping is also an option. I, I think because VC money was so much more available in the recent past we've lost like, the realization for a lot of developers that like bootstrapping is an option and hard to do, but angel investment, you could get an angel, you could try to get an angel to come in and do a private investment in your company to get you going.

Those are, those are real options though. Like you, we, we got a little bit, I think, um, distracted by VC money for a while where there's this attitude like, studios get started by. Getting a giant, you know, influx of cash and then you immediately grow to like a large number of people and start like, you know, doing all these things.

But actually for most of the industry's history, and for a lot of developers today, still, that's not the way it happens. It actually happens through bootstrapping. You're really small, you do a little bit of work, you build a demo, you do some work for hire as a, as a team. There's a lot of ways that that happens that, that is very different from what we saw during the era where it was like, oh, everything is coming through VC.

David: And you know, as someone who's spoken to a lot of game teams, I'm curious what, and, and this is probably a good time to share that also the opinions shared on this podcast are, yeah, mine and Crystin's not absolutely representative of our respective employers Xbox and Arena Net, but I'm curious, you know, what are you looking at when you're assessing whether a game is a good fit for publishing?

Crystin: Yeah, and it's not a big part of my role anymore because Arena Net's publishing org isn't, we are an internal publisher, entirely focused on our own work, which is a, a whole different part type of publishing. But evaluating games for publishing, From a strategic point of view, I would say for me, it really comes down to, like, this is gonna sound very simplistic, but do I really think that this team can make the game is a huge one.

Like do they have the ability, do they have the knowledge and are they able to work together? In a way that seems like they will likely actually create this game that they say that they wanna make.

David: And then, so, so when you're, sorry, sorry to interrupt, but when you're assessing that mm-hmm. What are the things that you're looking at?

Crystin: I'm usually asking teams like, have they worked together before? Have they had shipping experience before? That's a clear one. Like if you've had shipping experience before, that's a good indicator, obviously. But beyond that, if you're just trying to suss it out from a team that's forming up the beginning, I really like to talk to people about what their decision making processes are like, like how do they actually come to decisions as a team?

You know, who makes calls? Do they all agree on that? Like, does every do, would I talk to them? Do they actually have an agreement on who makes those calls? And is there some alignment with them on like what they're trying to accomplish? If I can talk to. Key members of the team even ask like, what are you trying to do here?

Like, what's the goal? And I get like, at least like semi similar answers to each other that there's some alignment there that can really be a good indicator that like this team can actually do it. And then I also like to talk to them a lot about like, what is their understanding of the space that they wanna get into, right?

If they're like looking to be in a specific genre, if they're looking to be on a specific platform, like if the pitch is about these things cool, like how well do they know that space? How well do they know the players in that space? Do they understand what the competition looks like? Do they really know how things work in that space?

 And then have any of them worked in that space before? And like what has their experience been like? Working in that space is also really, really helpful. , and then, you know, just talking generally too about like what their expectations are. For the entire development process. Like what do they, how do they think it'll go?

Where do they think they'll have crop? I love asking me like, what do you think the biggest pitfall you're gonna run into too? You know, what is the thing that's gonna make you delay the game a lot? Like, what is, what do you think it is that's gonna happen there? Just give you a sense too, for like how realistic the team is and how clearheaded they are about the kind of things that they might run into and where problems really come from in game development.

David: Are, and are most of these examples folks coming to you before they've actually built any of the game, or are they coming to you to, and showing you sort of what some demo of what they've built? 

Crystin: They really, either way for me, building a demo can be indicative of, of some of these things. So you might be able to get some answers for this by looking at what they've accomplished and talking to them about like, okay, well how has it been so far?

But building a demo and building a whole game is really different. And so, you know, it only helps so much. A lot of times demos are really about. Better communicating your concept and not so much proving what you can actually do. In fact, like I think we, the publishing world puts too much stock in demos.

It gets really like really like starry-eyed about teams. They're like, we built this demo in a month, and they're like, oh, they're gonna move so fast 'cause they built this demo in a month. And it's like, yeah, nah. Even I, I, I'm a little more cautious about that, just knowing what it is to pull, to put demos like that together and like how well that actually relates to full development.

David: Got it. Awesome. For, for the last bit, I would love to zoom way out and just sort of mm-hmm. Take a look at the, the game market today. Mm-hmm. You know, you've been here for, you've been in the, in the industry for almost 20 years, so I would love to just hear your perspective about where we are. You know, there was, you know, significant layoffs.

I think 25,000 jobs were lost in the last two years.

Crystin: Yeah.

David: Ninety percent, over 90% of playtime is spent in, you know, six, I think it's like, you know, older games. I can't remember the specific years.

Crystin: So almost like six years old. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was the, I think that's the stat people were throwing around.

David: Yeah. So these black hole games that are sucking up all the playtime, you know, there's the growth of, of roadblocks in all this as one of those black hole games. I'm curious, like, how do you see the state of the market? Where are we in the, in the grand scheme of things?

Crystin: That's a big question. We, we just went through this period where there money was free and the money was suddenly not free.

And that's really put shaken things up quite a bit. And we've had a lot of loss, like a lot of job losses and a lot of studio closures. We're in an uncomfortable place as far as that's concerned because like, um, you know, demand for games is not lowernbut we are actually gonna struggle to, for least, especially in the AAA space for the next several years as we lost a lot of content.

Just, you know, there are people who've been working on games probably four or five years. Those games will never come out now that there's a thing that happens all the time, but it happened in a really concentrated way over the last two or three years. That's gonna be tough for us to deal with. You know, the, if I wanted to put an optimistic face on it, I'd be like, Hey, indie games, we'll have an opportunity to step into that empty space.

But I wanna spend more time talking about this sort of. This idea about black hole games? I hate phrasing it like that. I, I think the thing that always strikes me about this conversation is all of those games that people are like, they're black hole games. Like, you know, you have to deal with the fact that people are already, you know, engaged in and invested in them is like almost none of them launched as humongous hits.

They all had a road, oftentimes a very long road to become the game they are today. Like Roblox included. Even things like Fortnite were like out of nowhere. Yeah. But the game had been out actually for a while, and struggling and almost failing before it became Fortnite. And to me, this is the thing I often like, push people on, especially if they want to make.

Live ops games and they go like, how can we make a live ops game when the market is so saturated? Those games all had a long road to get to be really huge. And the truth about like the live ops market is that players are more inclined to go play something that's established, consistent, great value.

Mm-hmm. You, but you can't get to be established consistent and have great value until you spend the years working on it. Yeah. So I think the big mistake that we've made, and it's not surprising we did it as an, there was a period where we did the same thing in the early two thousands when it was like, you know, I, I hate, like, this isn't like any shady, it's amazing.

I don't blame them for this, but Wow. Was so successful that it created this boom where people spent massive amounts of money trying to make, wow. Like games. And then most of them didn't make it. And I feel like we're similarly going through a thing with live ops games where people look at something.

It's very successful. That's six or seven years old, and they're like, I want that, but I don't wanna wait six or seven years. I wanna pump mm-hmm. Hundreds of millions of dollars into it and have the success immediately. That I think is incredibly unrealistic. Those games took a long time to get where they are.

You should expect your live ops game will also take similar amounts of time to get where it needs to be. And also those games are great and I love long tails. I mean, I've, like, literally earlier this week, Guild War's Silver in his 20th anniversary, we did a big update. We still run. Guild Wars is still up and running.

You could play it right now. It's really fun. There's a bunch of players in it right now. We did a big update to it. I'm, I'm not saying like, oh, games can't have really, really long tails. They can, but eventually players will wanna cycle into something new. So like you might be looking at everything right now that's six, six to seven years old.

They're at their height. They're like the best they're ever gonna be right now because they put the work in and they've built up this amazing value and this really solid experience. But there has to be another generation that comes up behind them because they won't be there forever. Even a game I worked on Maple Story, you know, it was so good for so long and there's so much to be proud of there, but like it couldn't last forever.

It couldn't stay on top forever. The other thing to know is that when we look at actual, like player like play pattern research, um. Yes, a ton of playtime goes into these top games, but players are always looking for the next thing. You, you, you do have opportunities like play players absolutely are constantly trying other things.

And you're right, it's hard to get them to jump ship, but my advice would be don't try to get them to jump ship in the way that they go. Like, I'm never gonna play Warframe again because your game has blown my mind. And like, I can never go back. That's not the way it's probably gonna happen for you, and it's similar for, for stuff like Roblox and like a lot of people wanna come out and make other UGC platforms.

You just gotta remember the journey Roblox had to go on to get where it is today. You don't, it's very difficult. Maybe impossible. Maybe someone way smarter than me will figure it out to just go in. Create a dominant competitor to an established game like that, you have to go through your own journey to build up your own community and your own audience and find your way to that success.

David: Do you think that these, I don't know if it's AAA or whatever, but do you think that these games that want to be the next black hole game, do you think that when they don't do it out of the gate, that they're pulling the plug too early, because it's a longer journey? Or are they just super rare and then it also on top of that takes six years to, to get to that, that sort of scale?

Crystin: Like yes and no, but I think the, the, the strategic mistake happened earlier. , like, yeah, they probably are pulling the plug too early, but the reason they're doing that is from a business perspective, they've sunk so much money in that if they, that they, it feels like an insurmountable hill to overcome.

And so I think the strategic mistake is like a little bit earlier in that. Again, like get outta the waterfall mentality. Just get in there with players and start iterating. Don't do it perfect. Do it interesting. And in a way that's gonna get you that engagement to start and then start building forward.

So I, I mean, I don't actually think, like, in some ways they're very rare. And if your measure of success is, I'm only happy. If the game is the one of the top three games in the whole world, then mathematically it will always be very, very difficult for you to get there. But I have seen a lot, a lot of live ops games that are well made, take a, a disciplined approach to iteration and development and, and cost management on the development side that make a good business.

David: I, so I know that you've, you know, you, you've advised a lot of indie developers over the years. I'm curious what your perspective is on UGC platforms and their ability to sort of enable there to be more indie game developers in the world. Are you, are you bullish on the games industry and, and just all of the creative energy that's enabled by those platforms?

Is this a new thing? Is this. Is, has it always been the case that you've always had these small amateur developers, they just, just have used different platforms? Or are we in a new sort of a new, you know, decade of, of tons of, of game developers, you know, being in the world?

Crystin: I think all, a lot of more what's changed, I mean every generation is a little different and technology has moved forward, but more of what's changed is distribution is really easy.

You know, my generation of gay developers, the previous generation of gay developers, many of them started in flash. Many of them started in modding communities. Many of them started in muds just doing text-based stuff. 'cause it was really easy. Distribution has gotten a lot easier. So there's a greater opportunity if you make things for more people to see them.

But that is I think the bigger change. I think, I. I'm excited by stuff, by Rob. Like, like Roblox, because like, like there is, there is another generation of game developers coming up and this is where they're learning, like this is where they're figuring it out, and I think it's a really cool tool to figure that stuff out.

And Roblox Al also in, in and of itself offers a sort of kind of neat YouTube esque experience of like, trying a lot of like little things out. And they're really fast and they're experimental and they're interested and like, there's like a social component to it that I think is really neat and super fun.

And I think you're, I think a lot of game developers, especially AAA developers, really ignore like what younger people are doing. Like sort of consistently, right? Like we saw this with Fri to play MMOs when I was coming up. A lot of AAA was like, ah, that doesn't matter. Who cares what's going on over there?

And it's like, well this is what, like ruin scape and Maple Story and like Haba Hotel. This is what like the next generation of gamers is growing up with. Like this is shaping them. I think Roblox is that now. And so I think it's important and people should care about it. And, and I think it is allowing people to mess around with game development.

I will say that I'm a little less, like, I think when you look at stuff like YouTube, or just the, the internet in general. I think it's wonderful that more people make games. I think they're, I, I would like everyone to make games, like we shouldn't have some sort of weird monopoly on creativity. Like people should make games.

It's fun, it's cool. We all made games when we were, we were little and on the playground and making up rules and imaginary worlds, and it's, it's awesome that people get to do it. Getting to do it professionally is different. Like doing stuff for fun and doing stuff for a profession is wildly different.

I think games that, that you just create out of joy and, and love and, and pure creativity, like could be, are often more like art, and doing it for a living is entertainment, which is very different, right? In entertainment, we don't just get to do things because we like them. We have to entertain people.

That's a skill. It's a skill that you have to work at, and you have to build. The industry's always changing. Will the skills specifically coming from Roblox translate from like a development and implementation standpoint into like the more, the more professional or more polished games of tomorrow.

In ways they will, in ways I think we don't even understand now. They probably will. But I think there will always be demand in games, at least in our lifetime, that are at a variety of sort of visual quality and like fidelity, quality level. And so if people making games on Roblox today are like, I really want to someday make a really like great feeling like action game, I, they're, they're gonna have to go get those skills in other places.

Like I don't think Roblox can deliver that, right? Roblox, that's not what Roblox does. It doesn't make amazing controller feel games. And that's a skill they'd have to go pick up somewhere else. But I think Roblox is also helping us understand that the. Appetite for seeing people just make weird, experimental little things that aren't about the way a controller feels in your hand, but are about, you know, different kinds of design is high.

Like people wanna see that stuff and it's really cool. We still see the same kind of rule on Roblox that you see in, in most like, amateur creative spaces, which is that a huge percentage of it is not that great. You know, like a huge percent of it isn't very good. Again, I don't, I think people should still make it, even if it's not great, but, but a huge percentage of it isn't that great.

There are millions of YouTube videos that have three views out there, right? But that doesn't mean we, we spend a lot of time going like, maybe YouTube shouldn't exist. And I feel the same way about Roblox. Like, yeah, people should make games that only four people play, and maybe the next one they make will 15 will, people will play.

Or, or maybe they'll be like, I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't care. And they, I think both are fine.

David: Yeah. And I also think there's a question around what is a great game? You know, it could be subjective. There's plenty of yes. Roblox games that, that are great have, you know, a hundred thousand CCU in them.

And I, I go into them and I'm like, I do not understand why this has a hundred thousand CCU in it.

Crystin: Right. Yeah. There's Right. Also there's taste and there's generational. Yeah. Like preferences, that's a good point. Right. That is important as a developer. Anytime when you play lots of other games to, like, part of your job as a developer is sort of remove your personal taste a little bit and try to see things a little more objectively so that you don't end up in an echo chamber.

David: Yeah. It will also be really interesting to see how players who grew up on Roblox and, you know, playing these sort of, you know, contained versions of, of many of the play patterns we see out in the world or entirely new play patterns, how their tastes shape, you know what? AAA and AA, yes, AAA game development.

Crystin: And it will change.

David: Though in the future.

Crystin: The same way. Like I, you know, people back in the early two thousands were like, eh, you can just ignore all this, you know, Facebook gaming, you could just ignore all of this free to play stuff. And it's like, well, but no, it, it has like massively shaped the way that we think about games, and all and all tears in all areas.

David: Amazing. Mm-hmm. Well thanks so much Crystin, for coming on the podcast. Absolutely. I enjoy every hour I get to spend with you. Oh, thank you, I always learn so much. So really appreciate you coming on, and I hope everybody else enjoyed it as well.

Crystin: Thanks everyone.

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