Gaming’s veterans tell how to break into the business

Above: Jens Begemann, the CEO of Wooga, at the company’s colorful Berlin headquarters.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Begemann: I think there’s a number of differences, actually. Obviously, in terms of technical capabilities, that’s happening. If realtime 3D is an advantage for my game, if that makes it better, then now it will happen. Devices are capable of 3D now.

The key difference with free-to-play is that if you do a $70 game, people mostly buy it before they’ve played it. They pre-order it. They buy it based on reviews or videos or screenshots. Those things are key. Because of that, production values are important. It’s easier for me to shell out $70 for high production values. In a free-to-play game, it has to be good-looking, but people are more willing to just download it and try it out. Then you have to keep them. The key to success there is retention, keeping them in the game for a year or longer.

Schofield: Yet the market is just growing. AR and VR all have their place within video games eventually. We’ll get to that point where it’s $100 billion a year and we can all work. It’s great. I look at the mobile stuff right now and think, “Man, there’s a billion cell phones out there that still don’t play games yet.” That’s a lot of growth.

GamesBeat: What about e-sports? Is that exciting to you guys?

Fries: I think it’s incredible to see what’s happening. I just helped some friends of friends get tickets to the International, the DOTA 2 tournament in Seattle. I tell stories about that event last year. It takes place at the Key Arena, where our basketball team used to play. It sold out last year and again this year. Even if you were there clicking right when they went on sale, you wouldn’t get tickets. Last year they raised the prize pool to more than $12 million, and all raised by crowdfunding within the game. The winning team took home $5 million, more than the PGA major tournament that happened that same weekend. I don’t know the exact numbers, but there might be more people watching the International that weekend than watching the golf majors. You can tell non-game people that and they don’t believe you, but when you show them all the broadcasters in all the different languages on all the streams, it’s incredible. It’s something we’ve talked about for years and it’s finally really happening.

Schofield: People say, “You can’t judge a game by looking at it.” But nowadays, with Twitch, people are just watching games. We just had a Call of Duty tournament where we gave away $1 million. We work with them a little more now. We want them to give us feedback and play the game. It’s pretty amazing.

Falstein: There are a lot of game people at Google who are over on YouTube just because there’s so much going on there. It’s one thing to be a professional game player. But it’s amazing to me that you can do so well just being a game player who goes out and comments and becomes incredibly successful at that. That shows every sign of continuing to grow. People are concerned about discovery. That’s one of those things where both the people that become these commentators and popular YouTube channels—It’s good for them. It’s good for players. It’s a whole new entertainment form.

Fries: At the keynote today the Amazon guy showed the top YouTubers. Three of the top five or four of the top six were all game-related. They were all above any star that you might now, any musician or whatever.

Above: Glen Schofield of Sledgehammer Games tosses Call of Duty T-shirts into the Quo Vadis audience.

Image Credit: Brian Miggels/VentureBeat

GamesBeat: They’re making game journalists and game reviewers feel a bit obsolete now. I’ll be opening up my Twitch channel pretty soon. [Joking] We were supposed to answer this question about “Quo vadis game industry?” Where is the game industry going? Does anybody actually have a great prediction? What are you going to be doing on the Star Trek Holodeck in the distant future?

Falstein: A lot of times we hear this question and people want the one thing. I’ve already addressed that. There are many things, and I’m grateful for that. I do believe that the sort of holodeck feel—Having tried a lot of these new VR systems recently—I was a skeptic. Jaron Lanier did a demo for a group of us at Lucasfilm Games in 1984. He was the guy who coined the term “virtual reality.” The fact that it’s taken so long has made a lot of people skeptical. “We’ve heard this before.” In the talk I’m going to give tomorrow, I show a cartoon a game developer did in 1983 about the future of arcades. It looks very much like the Oculus Rift, frankly.

I do think we’re at that point, though. I was talking at the beginning about creating science fiction. Even before Star Trek and Holodecks I’d read books that had this idea of people being able to go into virtual reality systems. There was a great one from the early ‘60s, Way Station by Clifford Simak, that had it as a minor plot point. It’s exciting to me that we’re getting to that point now, being able to blend the real world and the virtual world increasingly seamlessly, much as the movie visual effects people have been able to do. We’ll be able to do that in real time in everybody’s home.

GamesBeat: You just told everyone to go into virtual reality. That’s exactly what you said you weren’t going to do. [Laughs]

Fries: I just finished watching a Japanese animated series with my kids called Sword Art Online. It’s about 50 episodes, taking place in a VR world. But what that got me thinking about more as far as the future is this idea of value and what matters. My kids would much rather get a stored value card for their birthday than a toy. To them it’s just as real. When they can take that and go into a game and buy some digital asset, to them it’s just as real. That’s something we’re going to see blur over the next decade, this idea of what we think is real.

What I’d ask you to think about is, why do you think the real world is so real? The things we care about in the real world—Take diamonds. The only reason we value diamonds is because De Beers wants us to. Or pearls. Or money. What’s money? Bitcoin? It makes us wonder what money really is. All the other things we care about. Brands? Mostly things that someone told us are important, told us are worth something. It’s all just as virtual as these virtual items. That blurring of what is real and why “real” things matter more than virtual things is going to change. Maybe our generation has to die before that can take over with the next one.

Above: Samsung Gear VR with Oculus tech

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi