Hothead Games details its 10-year transition from console to mobile and Kill Shot Bravo

GamesBeat: Now you guys have this whole roster of games. You are, at this point, keeping up with a nice cadence of updates. What’s it like maintaining this whole list of games?

Ceraldi: Games as a service, running what we call live operations or live ops. We have significant resources dedicated to existing services that are running, updating them, tweaking them, fixing them. Running events, promotions, sales. Responding to feedback. User issues on new devices that come out that the game was never designed for. It’s a lot to learn.

It’s a key differentiator for a company like ours. Not every company is very good at it. There’s lots of room for improvement with us, but it’s definitely a competitive advantage if a company can be excellent at doing live operations. That’s one of the learning things we laugh about. The idea that we didn’t do it before — didn’t understand what it meant — it’s laughable. But there are lots of companies that don’t do it or don’t really know what it entails. It’s been a long journey of learning best practices in that regard.

The personality to run it, the skill sets. The lead designer for a live ops team is far different from the lead designer on a game you’re building to eventually launch. Being data-driven and understanding user behavior and understanding what’s working and what’s not. How to tune it to make a better gameplay experience or how to monetize better. That’s a daily thing. It’s going on all the time.

Monitoring the KPIs, seeing how the game’s health is. It’s pretty daunting to understand. Like I said, when we look back on what we’ve learned it’s one lesson after another after another. We really could write a book about it. If you told me at the start that we’d have to do all this, it would have been pretty daunting.

GamesBeat: Go ahead and tell us about the makeup of your teams today. 

Ceraldi: We used to have little teams, five-six-seven-eight people in some cases, building very small concepts into products that would go live and never be updated.

Now we have teams that can exceed 50 people. We have a lot of fluidity with regard to team makeup and sizes. Live ops teams can be more than 30 people. We have our core game teams. We have our live ops teams. People shift around to different projects all the time, helping with different tasks and taking on different opportunities. Things are more fluid than they’ve ever been in that regard.

We’re seeing a lot of the genre we’ve chosen to become best in the world at, the shooter market. It’s paid lots of dividends, the learning and acceleration of our skill set in that genre. Both on gameplay, controls, technology, visuals, monetization, server, events, multiplayer. That’s been a key difference as well. Back in the day we were making a diverse set of games that had no relation to one another. Now all the teams are going in the same direction.

GamesBeat: What would you credit with giving Hothead its longevity?

Wilkinson: One of our core values is “make mistakes, always learn.” We appreciate that we have to take risks. We have to do things differently to achieve better results. There’s a quote on the website about adapting and mutating and doing whatever’s necessary to move forward as a company. We really embrace that. We think we’re smart and we’re very hard-working. We like to think we learn from our mistakes very quickly and don’t repeat them.

Both with Radical and with this company, I don’t think we’ve ever been at risk of going out of business or any dire consequences that I can recall. That’s partly just through running the business well. We have multiple teams. We have a portfolio approach where we have games with higher expectations, a higher risk profile. Other games have a lower risk profile so we can balance it out. We make sure that we’ll be here next year and the year after that.

Birch: Just to clarify, our core value is “take risks and always be learning.”

[Laughs]

GamesBeat: Taking risks and always learning, I guess that means you’re willing to look at what’s next. It seems like you guys have a formula that’s working right now, but I’m sure you believe that maybe one day that formula won’t work, and that’s why you take risks. Is that the reasoning behind that?

Wilkinson: Yes. If someone’s going to eat our lunch. We want to be the ones eating our own lunch.

Ceraldi: We want to make that next iteration, that next evolution. At the same time we’re making that evolution, we want to invest in something that’s a step beyond that evolution in the genre we focus on.

Ian mentioned that portfolio approach. Each game does have a significantly different risk profile as far as innovation or a variety of different factors. We have a number of exciting new projects in the pipeline, in production, on top of the road map of new ideas we have for existing game services. We’re not afraid to make some pretty big changes to our live products. We’re adding a lot of depth and new experiences for gamers.

Kill Shot: Bravo , for example, we decided that PvP was strategic for us while it was in development. We added PvP to the game before it went worldwide. But it wasn’t part of the original vision for that product. It came out of a lot of analysis of the market, understanding where it was heading, looking to China and other regions that showed us how the market would be shifting in the future. And then taking our designs and modifying our products and delivering on that in a relatively quick time frame.

But no, we’re excited about our road map across live ops and new products. There’s always innovation, always new ideas being brought to bear, but some games are going to be far more innovative and take more risks than others.

GamesBeat: What are the next 10 years going to be like?

Ceraldi: We’ll start with the next three: World domination.

With regard to the genre we want to become best in the world at. We want to become the best shooter publisher on mobile in the world. There’s lots of strong brands in the shooter market on other platforms. We want to be creating that brand on mobile, one that we bring to a worldwide audience that has the same power and resonance as those major brands do on other platforms. That’s our three-year horizon.

Birch: It’s safe to say that’s a company-wide initiative.

Ceraldi: Yeah, company-wide. Our strategy is that everything is supporting that vision.

Wilkinson: I write an email to the employees every week to tell them how we’re doing on our priorities. We have quarterly priorities, annual priorities, and a three-year plan they’re intimately familiar with. Then, once a month, I do an all-hands meeting and we talk through our strategy and execution and where we are with respect to our goals.

Anyone in our company should know exactly what we’re trying to achieve. We have a three-year plan, a forecast. We spent a tremendous amount of time on it. We believe in it. The different teams have contributed to it in terms of their revenue goals. And then we publish it, essentially.

Ceraldi: The other part of your question is the next seven years. We really want to use our dominance in the genre that we’ll achieve in the three-year time frame as a stepping-stone to other genres thereafter. We want to leap ahead into another genre in the future.

But what we’ve learned in mobile is that things change rapidly, far faster than any other product cycle or platform cycle in the history of gaming. There are lots of new things coming down, technology, be it VR or other new things in the gaming space. We don’t have a 10-year plan saying, here’s what we’re doing in mobile. We have a three-year plan saying, here’s how we’re going to dominate this genre and we know we want to grow from there.

GamesBeat: Any final thoughts about the state of Hothead?

Wilkinson: Interestingly enough, I just did orientation — we have 10 or 12 new employees that started in the last few months. I asked them for their observations. Some of them have been here a matter of days, others weeks, others months. I said, what do you like about the company? One thing they said that, in retrospect, doesn’t surprise me, but that I wasn’t fully anticipating — they said we can’t believe the level of transparency. You sort of tell us everything.

We have a revenue report that goes out every day. It shows exactly how much we make on every single game. It shows downloads. It shows DAUs and so on. We’ve done that for six years, I believe. All the information we have, we try to make it available to the employees, just so they can make better choices. We’re quite willing to make mistakes. We make mistakes all the time. And then we try to recover from those and learn from them. But consistently that was some of the feedback I got from new employees – we can’t believe how transparent you are and how willing you are to share information.

Ceraldi: The way they actually expressed this — the word they used is powerful. It’s different from transparency. It’s “trust.” I think it ties in — not necessarily to our core values directly, but it comes out of who we’ve become as a company.