Afleveringen
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Mark explores the challenges of leading and recruiting for distributed teams in the gaming industry.
He discusses the difficulty of assessing cultural fit through remote interviews, the need for self-driven team members, and the impact of remote work on leadership.
Mark also addresses broader industry issues like rising development costs, market saturation, and the evolving role of AI in game development. He emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement and adaptability in achieving success.
Guest: Mark Peterson has worked in games and IT since 2007. During his 15+ years, he has worked on projects for companies like T-Mobile, HP, Rovio, Porsche, and Lufthansa and co-founded three studios. From creating Top 10 games for the iOS and Android app stores to working on VR & AR titles as early as the first Occolus DevKit, he has been involved in all aspects of the industry. He has co-founded SPECTARIUM as a fully remote studio working with 35+ team members, with successful VC rounds led by Bitkraft. They are currently working on their co-op cross-platform Action RPG 'MYTHS'.
Host: Patric Palm – Favro ceo and founder. Serial entrepreneur and tech investor. Mostly games, film, SaaS, AI, deep tech, and functional foods. Passionate about hyper-performing teams and business agility.
Learn from Leaders podcast 🎙️ series focus on SaaS & Game industry leaders. Challenges from real-world experiences and how some of the best studios and companies have overcome them.
Visit 👉 https://favro.com and learn the best collaborative planning, business agility, working-from-anywhere, project management, culture & leadership, and practices.
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John unpacks the intricacies of managing and collaborating in a remote-first work environment.
He shares tips on fostering trust, establishing clear expectations, and maintaining open communication as crucial elements for success.
John also explores collaborating with external partners in game development, highlighting how to achieve upfront alignment and establish clear communication channels.
Guest: John is a Senior Team Lead and Producer who has been in games since 2007 after joining Harmonix Music Systems. His career spans 17 years spent at Harmonix, Runic Games, teaching at Rochester Institute of Technology, and now at Unknown Worlds. He has worked on the Rock Band, Dance Central and Subnautica series of games, with experience on PC, console, mobile and VR. He aims to grow and empower individuals and teams, and leads with an attitude of tolerance and humor. He is a passionate supporter of growing the industry's next wave of diverse talent.
Host: Patric Palm – Favro ceo and founder. Serial entrepreneur and tech investor. Mostly games, film, SaaS, AI, deep tech, and functional foods. Passionate about hyper-performing teams and business agility.
Learn from Leaders podcast 🎙️ series focus on SaaS & Game industry leaders. Challenges from real-world experiences and how some of the best studios and companies have overcome them.
Visit 👉 https://favro.com and learn the best collaborative planning, business agility, working-from-anywhere, project management, culture & leadership, and practices.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Could Carl's approach to game design, emphasizing responsive AI and emergent technologies, be key to replicating the success of Helldivers 2?
Carl delves into the success factors behind Helldivers 2, dissecting its core appeal. He emphasizes the game's satisfying co-op gameplay and its tongue-in-cheek, satirical world that fosters a strong sense of community.
Carl highlights how the game's design encourages role-playing and a shared language among players, fueling a sense of belonging.
He also observes how this approach aligns with his work, which uses AI and emergent technologies to create dynamic in-game experiences that react to players.
Guest: Carl Kwoh is the Co-founder and CEO of Jam & Tea Studios, a new multiplayer game startup focused on building player connections. He’s experienced in tabletop, web, mobile, PC, and console games. Before Jam & Tea, Carl developed the product management discipline at Phoenix Lab as the VP of Products. In 2017, he founded Ghostly Bear Games after spending six years as Riot Games’ Head of Talent Operations and Systems. Carl is deeply passionate about social design in games, fostering team dynamics, and elevating disenfranchised voices within the gaming industry.
Host: Patric Palm – Favro ceo and founder. Serial entrepreneur and tech investor. Mostly games, SaaS, AI, and deep tech. Passionate about hyper-performing teams and business agility.
Learn from Leaders podcast 🎙️ series focus on SaaS & Game industry leaders. Challenges from real-world experiences and how some of the best studios and companies have overcome them.
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What are the insights regarding the game industry's talent cycles, remote work challenges, and the impact of layoffs on studios?
Jenny discusses historical trends in talent acquisition, the challenges larger studios face in embracing external talent, and the impact of COVID-19 on remote work acceptance.
During the talk, our guest covered how Game Boost faces remote contractors and the increasing trend of individuals wanting remote work flexibility. The discussion delves deeper into industry layoffs, attributing them to various factors, including studio closures, canceled projects, and potential cost-cutting strategies by larger companies.
Jenny provides excellent insights into the evolving dynamics of talent management and remote work in the game development industry.
Guest: Jenny’s career has been a journey of diverse experiences, from entrepreneurship in web development and home renovation to her pivotal role at Paradox Interactive, where she spent over six years as a Studio Manager, contributing significantly to the gaming industry. Her current venture at Game Boost Sweden as a Game Contractor Supplier reflects her dedication to fostering talent and matching the right expertise with projects that shine through in her work, reflecting her passion for driving success within the gaming ecosystem. Simultaneously, she fosters leadership qualities in her leadership role at GREAT LEADERS.
Host: Patric Palm – Favro ceo and founder. Serial entrepreneur and tech investor. Mostly games, SaaS, AI, and deep tech. Passionate about hyper-performing teams and business agility. Learn from Leaders podcast 🎙️ series focus on SaaS & Game industry leaders. Challenges from real-world experiences and how some of the best studios and companies have overcome them.
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Past, present, and future: what are the significant changes in marketing strategies in the gaming industry?
Matthew talks about the transformative journey of games marketing, a decade's shift from skepticism toward influencer culture to fostering authentic collaborations. The conversation delves into the widening divide between indie and AAA games due to faster marketing cycles, balancing creativity with the potential of AI to augment creative workflows rather than replace human input.
Listen and learn more about the crucial role of marketing in embodying a game's fundamental essence amidst the dynamic evolution of game development approaches.
Guest:As the founder and CEO of NoodleHaus, Matthew Stainner is responsible for the small army of writers, art directors, animators, editors, and artists required to light up screens around the world. Over the past 30 years, Matthew has consistently created entertaining visual content. His credits and awards span a vast array of games, marketing, and events. The brands that have benefitted from his contributions include some of the most successful video games and franchises in the world, like Call of Duty, World of Tanks, Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater, Assassin’s Creed, Rocket League, and Fortnite to name a few. His work has been an integral part of countless events and shows, from Comicon, to GamesCom, from LA Live to Liverpool he’s literally traveled the globe to produce the content our audiences love.
Host: Patric Palm – Favro ceo and founder. Serial entrepreneur and tech investor. Mostly games, SaaS, AI, and deep tech. Passionate about hyper-performing teams and business agility. Learn from Leaders podcast 🎙️ series focus on SaaS & Game industry leaders. Challenges from real-world experiences and how some of the best studios and companies have overcome them.
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Why does the games industry still have big issues in production management and what can be done about it?
Ben and Aaron discuss typical issues related to how game companies are managed today, specifically leadership in production.
They advocate for how a paradigm shift in leadership can help studios bring better games faster to the market at a lower cost.
Listen to learn more about how to embrace uncertainty, encourage a more adaptive, collaborative approach, and how producers can go from being stuck with task management to being facilitators of alignment.
The discussion also addresses why studios get stuck in old practices at a time when increased live services make the evolution of management more needed than ever.
This episode is truly great for both new and senior game industry leaders who want to take their production practices, team leadership, and studio management to the next level.
Guests:
Benjamin Carcich has spent the last few years helping leaders at studios of all sizes, and recently led the creation of training for game producers called "Succeeding in Game Production: What You Aren't Taught". Before that, he spent almost a decade at Riot Games shipping champions, tools, maps, and various platform and backend systems, and ended up leading discipline efforts around hiring and the role of production while teaching agile fundamentals around the world. His first job after college was as a Combat Arms officer in the U.S. Army.
Aaron Smith got his film degree in southern California and started doing production work, only to realize this wasn't his tribe. He joined a tiny company called "Riot Games" and worked his way from intern to director over a decade- shipping dozens of products small and large. Now, he's a Co-Founder of Building Better Games - a company focused on helping studios scale and ship unique products by instilling leadership and quality production practices. BBG also serves game leaders looking to build their game production skill set.
Building Better Games Newsletter: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/newsletter
Building Better Games Podcast: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/podcast
"Succeeding in Game Production: What You Aren't Taught" course link: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/succeeding-in-game-production
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Guests:
Josiah Kiehl, with a background in software engineering, started his career at Oracle, focusing on business software, before transitioning to Riot Games. There, he played a crucial role in scaling the delivery of the viral game League of Legends to a global audience, working extensively on automation and infrastructure software. After a successful stint at Riot, Josiah briefly worked at Google on large-scale distributed systems before realizing his passion for game development once again, leading him to co-found Sprocket Games.
Andrew Woo, Head of Production at Sprocket Games, began as a software engineer in financial services at companies like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Seeking a more fulfilling path, he transitioned to game development at Obsidian Entertainment, working on titles like Neverwinter Nights 2. After continuing at Riot Games, Andrew's experience as a C++ gameplay engineer and game producer brought him valuable insights into the industry. His decision to join Sprocket Games after 15 years at Riot was motivated by the exciting opportunity and innovative project presented by the studio.
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Guest: Carl is a Leadership/Agile Development Expert, having decades of hands-on experience as an entrepreneur, manager & leaders across a diverse range of industries. He is also as one of the global SAFe Fellows an official contributor to the SAFe Framework and one of the key people behind the Release Train Engineer (RTE) certification course.litator. The founder of leadership & agile advisory firm We Are Movement and one of the people behind the sustainability firm Naturgruppen and the biodiversity foundation Rädda En Art.
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Guest: Jon Lawrence has been in the games industry since 1998 after joining Bullfrog Productions. A career in games for 25 years spent at Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Natural Motion, Digit Games studios, and now at Tencent games. Have managed a mixture of internal and external projects on PC, Console, and mobile and worked on many successful titles, including Harry Potter, Formula 1, Need For Speed, and Crysis. Now part of the Nexus team based out of Liverpool and working with 5 second party studios, Inflexion, Sumo, Splash Damage, Sharkmob, and Tequila Works.
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Guest: Alan McDairmant is Head of Studio Operations at Fuse Games, a former member of the Criterion studio leadership team, worked for EA for over 17 years as a leader on the Need For Speed games. He moved into leadership project management roles quickly and has always embraced a collaborative, servant leadership approach to working with teams to help enable people and projects achieve their goals.
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Guest: Carl is a battle-scarred entrepreneur and investor who has seen many sides of the tech ecosystem. He runs Creandum’s San Francisco office and invests across consumer internet, and b2b software. Carl started his career in management consulting and went on to co-found the digital ad network AdProfit, bootstrapping the business into one of the leading digital channels for b2b advertising in the Nordics. Following this, he co-founded Wrapp, a consumer gifting app that became a portfolio company of Creandum, Greylock and Atomico, where Carl was responsible for scaling the company internationally across 18 markets.
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Guest: Teis Mikkelsen is the CEO and Co-founder of Multiscription. He has a passion for the mobile games industry, and it shines through his 15 years of experience managing games and digital product development. Teis and his co-founder Martin got the idea for Multiscription from experiencing both sides of the subscription model: the problem and the solution side. They started the company in December of 2018, and it has seen tremendous growth ever since.
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What will the future of management in the games industry look like? What is changing, and how it affects culture and management? Tune in to hear the thoughts of two inspiring industry leaders.Guest: For the past 18 years, Zoë Curnoe has held production positions at a range of companies that include working with artists in the Canadian Rocky Mountains at the Banff Centre, as well as working with smaller independent companies and large powerhouses, such as Riot Games and Electronic Arts. In 2021, she left her role as Production Director of the Story Campaign for the massively popular Gears of War franchise at The Coalition to found Timbre Games, where she took on the role of Studio Director.Guest: Kevin Johnson is a Game Producer with over 14 years of management experience and 3 years of design experience working on high-profile AAA console and PC titles as well as premium mobile titles.
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What will the future of management in the games industry look like? What is changing, and how it affects culture and management? Tune in to hear the thoughts of two inspiring industry leaders.
Guest: For the past 18 years, Zoë Curnoe has held production positions at a range of companies that include working with artists in the Canadian Rocky Mountains at the Banff Centre, as well as working with smaller independent companies and large powerhouses, such as Riot Games and Electronic Arts. In 2021, she left her role as Production Director of the Story Campaign for the massively popular Gears of War franchise at The Coalition to found Timbre Games, where she took on the role of Studio Director.
Guest: Kevin Johnson is a Game Producer with over 14 years of management experience and 3 years of design experience working on high-profile AAA console and PC titles as well as premium mobile titles.
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For Antti Sartanen, CEO of Return Entertainment, part of the charm is solving problems nobody has touched before. With that mindset, he’s stepping out to the gaming frontier and aims to make cloud-native gaming accessible. In this episode, Patric and Antti discussed the differences between cloud gaming and cloud-native gaming, the prospects of the latter, as well as democratizing gaming and handling uncertainty. Tune in to also hear their thoughts on Stadia's flop and Nordic companies’ key to success.
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Game Production Leader Frank Fay stayed with us for another podcast episode, where we discussed the benefits of async work and building a remote team culture. Being forced to be “always online” and respond immediately to your distributed teams leads to undesired multitasking, decreased productivity, and increased stress, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Tune in to hear Frank’s take on meetings, daily standups, retrospectives, and involving executives. It’s all about being more effective at work without becoming inhumane and cutting off all connections.
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In this episode, we look beyond game development and explore the ever-present issue of burnout with Frank Fay. Having worked in the video game industry for three decades, Frank understands the challenges of stress, crunch, and maintaining a work-life balance. “When someone has burnout, it’s already too late,” he says and shares his checklist of what employees and managers can do to avoid it.
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In this episode, gaming industry executive and entrepreneur Brian Graham joined us to discuss best practices around game production. Having brought over 40 Game SKUs to market, he certainly knows the drill. He shares his tips on getting more productive, overcoming common frustrations, embracing failures, as well as managing investor expectations. "Make sure you're scheduling unscheduled time" and be ready for pivoting, says Brian referring to the fact that the gaming market is constantly changing. His industry insights will be inspiring for battle-tested and junior producers alike.
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In this episode, Viktor Nyblom, CTO at Baby Journey and angel investor, talks about the current investment climate and the challenges startups face at each growth stage. He also shares his thoughts on what he looks for when choosing to invest in startups, especially in the B2B space. “I need to see that founders are enough of a 'hustler' to get something out in the world,” says Viktor.
If you're an entrepreneur or a startup founder, tune in to this episode to learn more about how to get investors' attention and what to watch out for when scaling your startup.
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In this episode, we invited Hannah Meiton, Co-Founder & Partner at Ampli Ventures, to join us and share her insights both from an investor's and a team member's point of view. This time we talk about the trends in SaaS and what growing pains companies should be ready to face. Hannah also shares some good indicative metrics that she has found useful in her career and how to align objectives between the team and board members.
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