Neale 00:09
Welcome to another episode of another BrightSpark podcast. Our BrightSpark today is Henrique Olifiers and we are at Albert House, central of London, near Old Street?
Henrique 00:20
That’s it.
Neale 00:21
The home of Bossa games where Henrique is co-founder and Gamer In Chief which is a really cool job title. Okay so we’ve talked before about you know you’ve worked with Ignis and we’ll touch upon Spectrum Next and that kind of thing in a little bit. You’re a huge gamer yourself as well as been in the industry. Where does that passion come from?
Henrique 00:44
Childhood, really. I think around 7,8, 7,9, I got given my first console. It was a Pong. It was made by Fuco Ford. Like Ford who made his cars, right? And they made a video game console. After that was Atari 2600 and, well, all my peers were playing football because that’s what Brazilians do. I was locked in a room playing video games and I had my square joystick. Next thing you know, I learned about computers and I got a ZX Spectrum clone. Thus, the link with ZX Spectrum X. That was my first computer, the first one I owned. Very few people know the ZX Spectrum was famous in Eastern Europe and in Latin America, Brazil in particular, but it wasn’t made by Sinclair. It was just…
Neale 01:26
Did they have a spec or was it just companies had taken the console and done their own version of it or?
Henrique 01:31
Yeah, it was pretty much copyright infringement right down to it. They just cloned it and made versions of it were somewhat compatible. Some of them were very compatible, but they were not quite the same thing. But doesn’t matter. I got the bug of it and I got connected to British magazines back then and that’s probably why I ended up in Britain.
Neale 01:52
many years later come back that’s where the games come from what you loved yeah well the games is readily available then so the Sinclair games were released obviously in the UK if they weren’t were they distributed to Brazil then no no no
Henrique 02:03
It was, of course, a lot of piracy and so on. But there weren’t that many games. And exactly because there weren’t that many games, I ran out of things to play and got into making my own games. And because there was this whole set up of schoolyard trading games, oh, I give you one if you give me one kind of thing, I had to make games that nobody else had. So I had trading stock to get the games that I wanted to play. And that’s how my first game came about. James Lemonade’s stand.
Neale 02:33
What was the game? What did you have to do with James?
Henrique 02:37
It was a tycoon kind of game. to buy lemonade and sugar and ice cubes and depending on the weather, you’re going to sell more or less of them and you end up with overstock and will not have enough. To be frank, it’s a trope game, it’s an established genre, right? I didn’t come up with it.
Neale 02:51
But still it’s a development, its necessity. I suppose you just said it in you didn’t have many games. So you had to learn to make games to do the thing that you love It’s very like an engineering based way around isn’t it if you like driving cars there aren’t many cars available you would have to learn to sort of build and make you make your own
Henrique 03:07
Yeah, exactly and the curiosity about how are these things made right? How can I make them better? How oh my god How is this possible and kind of tweaking and learning and you didn’t have the internet He didn’t have a lot of information available Best-case scenario could find a book somewhere right that you extract some
Neale 03:27
I had the same thing with the Amstrad, it came with a code book and you could make a basic version of like Pong and that kind of stuff.
Henrique 03:32
Exactly, but what I really never liked about it was amazing times where you get the full Schematics of the hardware you abide right every computer came in with all the parts on a layout and scale You could trace things up and if something went wrong But they never had a lot of machine code, which is what you needed to make proper games, right? They will teach you basic they will teach you the hardware machine code will be an appendix Oh, yeah, there is a thing if you want to learn more buy this book is it where I will find this book How can I get my head? Yeah, I can read there’s an error. Good luck with that
Neale 04:07
Do you remember that moment? So for me, I’m in a band, I’ve played guitar for years, the moment I got into that’s my main sort of passion. I’ve mentioned it on this podcast before, I do apologise for your views. I was at my uncle’s 40th and I was obsessed with Oasis. It was 1995, I just wanted to be Noel Gallagher, I didn’t know anything about music, I just loved the record. And one of my cousins friend came round with a guitar and started playing Oasis songs. I was like, what, you can play Oasis songs on a guitar. I’d seen them but it never occurred to me and that’s when I fell in love with the instrument. I wanted to follow that passion. It sounds like you were the coding, was there a distinct moment that you remember?
Henrique 04:51
Yeah, there was actually a very specific one. It was with a British game called Elite by David Brabant and Ian Bell. It was the first game I ever touched or experienced, which was open-ended, a sandbox situation. Up to that point, it was essentially text-based adventures, which kind of exploration and trying new words and things like that, right? Open door, walks out. Or arcade games. Those were the two genres that I was used to. And then all of a sudden, I got hit in the face with something which is, here’s a spaceship. Here’s a universe. You go out and explore. You can be a pirate. You can be a trader. You can be law enforcement. Whatever you want. And not only that, the scope of the thing was magical. It was so big because it was procedurally generated. Again, black magic by those two guys. How could they fit that in such a small space and create something that felt like it was a universe alive and inhabited and dynamic? That what propelled me, OK, I need to stop with this basic thing and go into machine code to understand what the hell is going on here. Absolutely.
Neale 06:00
The rest is history, I guess. I think, when you think about it, it’s like, I mean, you and I are the earliest generation of who can sit in our bedrooms and explore whole worlds. We were the first ones to do it. Absolutely fascinating. I was reading the statistic that 24% of people have some sort of retro console for people in their 30s and 40s. It’s a SNES or an N64. People’s in the 50s and 60s. It’s the old Sinclair and the old Commodores. There’s been a rise of people getting back into more simpler gaming. Why do you think that is?
Henrique 06:35
That’s a very good question. There is, of course, rosy tinted glasses, right? You remember a version of yourself which was free of responsibilities and everything was possible. There were no joint pains anywhere. The world was surely better than it is today, right? The food tasted better, the stomachs were longer and hotter. Everything was better, music was better. There is something to the human condition. But if you look at technology particularly, there is this harking back to simpler times. And you see that from music, for instance, right? We now have streaming, we had CDs, etc. Biggest seller today is vinyl. I won’t go into the details of vinyl being better or not. It’s irrelevant. The fact that we want that physical object and we still go through the process of putting it in, needle on the thing and scratchy sound, but we still get to enjoy that. There is something fundamentally tactile and valuable about you understanding everything that’s going on there. For me to understand everything that’s going on or say you’re on a streaming platform like Spotify, God help you, right? Yeah. Am I being played by algorithms? Is this the best music that I could be played? There’s all the music in the world. What should I listen to next? It’s too much choice. It’s too much noise. It’s like I’m not enjoying it anymore. I think that is that, is this ability to fully understand what it is.
Neale 07:59
ownership business, a physical ownership business. Yeah.
Henrique 08:01
and feel like you are in control.
Neale 08:02
Yeah, do you think this is why as well sort of subscription-based like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation aren’t as popular people want the physicalness of a game
Henrique 08:13
The people who have contact with the physical, they certainly do. The Spectrum ZX, for instance, when people make games for it, the physical copies oversell the digital ones, and you can see that repeated in the likes of Atari, Recreations, and things like that. There are whole businesses that do premium boxes of modern games. That tactile thing or opening, there is a map, right? I remember when I played Ultimo online that there was a cloth map inside, right?
Neale 08:43
Yeah, same with the Zelda, when we get Hyrule, I don’t know where I’d go next.
Henrique 08:50
Yeah, and you treasure those things, right? That there is love and effort gone into the design of making those things. And if you know how difficult these things are to make, you appreciate them. Digital is very disposable, right? Oh yeah, here’s the right. Or if the company goes down, that right is gone as well. We might change the end user license agreement and take it away from you. So there is something there that tells in the back of your brain that this is not really yours kind of thing. That might be it. But I think that it still is. The fact that you understand that I have something is mine. I appreciate every aspect that’s gone into it. I can see it, I can touch it, and I can use it in any shape or form I want. I think that is…
Neale 09:31
probably where it is. I think that’s why a lot of pre-order games are popular as well. I’ve just pre-ordered Assassin’s Creed Shadows and I went for the collector’s edition with the statue and the box and that kind of thing because I know previously when I played, I think it was Origins on that was set in Egypt, I was obsessed but it was such a good story. I was so engaged with it. I wanted some ownership of it, you know, and it’s because the stories stay with you and that’s that’s the really powerful thing.
Henrique 09:56
And you are also defined as an individual by what you surround yourself with, right? You’ll be identified by what kind of music do you like, right? What kind of… Guitars and CDs. Guitars, and food, and everything that, right? It’s very hard for you to identify yourself with, identify yourself with something that is intangible. Yeah. Absolutely. Online, yes. They can see you playing. They can see your achievements and all that, but I cannot put that…
Neale 10:21
No, you can’t have your little t-shirt, you don’t walk around with the logo. Yeah, absolutely. Are you a Trekkie or…
Henrique 10:25
or Star Wars guy, that means a lot to a lot of people.
Neale 10:29
Star Wars. Yeah, absolutely. Mark and I were talking in the car before and you’ve just touched upon it, sort of the connection, the sort of human element in gaming at the minute with, I’m talking about AI basically, so if you look at AI you’ve got, you can write a book, you can write a script, you can do a piece of code, you can write an entire novel now. I don’t know where we’re at the stage out with coding in terms, but I was thinking is it possible to actually create an actual map, buildings, can you program that into AI and if not yet do you think it will happen and would it be possible to create entire games based on an artificial intelligence model?
Henrique 11:09
There is one thing about AI which is undeniable. You can’t get around this fact. It will only get better. People who look at AI today and pick them on its flaws and say, yeah, but it cannot do this or it cannot do that, well, just wait and see. It’s not going to go backwards from where it is today. So a lot of the stuff it produces is sub-power. It will not be for very long. I’m already surprised at where it stands. If you’re not surprised by what AI can do right now, you are missing something. It is impressive, not perfect by any stretch of imagination, but it is impressive. Five years ago, nobody would come up to you and say, that will happen. It sounded like science fiction. It is here. Now, right now, you cannot create a game with AI. There are aspects of games development that are being improved by decisions of AI. For instance, if I have a game idea, I am a game designer, and I try to convey that idea to my team. In the past, we would use a concept artist to kind of sketch things very quickly and it will not be quite what you need and it will take a few hours for them to do that. If I want to visually impact something, now I can use AI to illustrate what I’m talking about. I can do pitches very quickly. You don’t have to hand sketch it. You can create imagery. So, none of that will go into production, but accelerates the communication process of a concept, of an idea within a team, from a developer to a publisher, etc. If you are pitching games, you are not using AI art to show what you intend to do with the game, you are probably spending more money than you should. Now, game balancing, the first pass or items generation and things like that, for you to put things in the game very quickly, early prototyping stage, it can do that, it can help you with that. There are pipelines that can turn 2D images into 3D models. As long as you are not your main character in the game, you can do that. Placeholder music, you want a kind of music in the game right now. You can pick and choose commercial music, sure, but you can also ask AI to conduct some stuff and compose some stuff, and down the line, you remove all of that and put proper composition that you will commission. So there are these aspects, but just ask the AI to make a game, it can’t make anything. Encoding is the one, you can use AI, and a lot of people do, for coding for websites and JavaScript and things like that. The problem is that gaming is at the very cutting edge of coding. The problem that game developers solve day in and day out is absolutely top of the shelf kind of problems that involve a lot of considerations and performance especially a consideration. So AI is not yet at the stage that it can help senior developers to do that. It can help junior developers, but I don’t know if that’s actually a help.
Neale 14:06
No, you are the junior developer, you want them to use their imagination. I want them to make it wrong. Yeah, they can make it right. Yeah, exactly to learn.
Henrique 14:14
Right? So when they are kind of assisted in that way, there are now studies and considerations that they’re actually not graduating or learning as fast as they would otherwise.
Neale 14:26
Handheld through the not make mistakes
Henrique 14:28
Yeah, they don’t understand the solution because the solution was given to them. Of course. So, yes, we need to adjust our expectations how we deal with this piece of technology. In my head, it’s a piece of technology like any other. A tool. A tool, if you wish, right? When you remove a red eye from a photo that you took on Photoshop, is that AI? I would say, probably it is, right? It’s a very advanced algorithm. They go train into eye removal and you don’t think twice about doing that.
Neale 14:56
Get rid of the whole backgrounds and people then.
Henrique 14:58
Yeah, we take that for granted. That’s a machine learning AI of the background.
Neale 15:04
Again, the coding element and the images and the graphics, if we did get to a point where it could create a game, I’m not sure if it would create the complexity. If you take something like The Last of Us, which is an incredible story, I don’t think it’d be possible. That’s a human element, isn’t it? You’ve got another human condition. I remember we played Last of Us, part two, my wife and I. We got to the end of it and we were heartbroken. You know, we absolutely, it touched us in a way like a movie would. Games are a lot more in-depth now, but it was just incredible. I don’t think a machine of that is going to understand the depth of human emotion.
Henrique 15:42
there is well human emotion and content that you want to watch is a moving target by default right the games that I used to enjoy 20-30 years ago I still have fond memories of them majority of them if I launch they and try to play you’ll be a disappointment yeah of course right my memories are much better than the actual game
Neale 16:00
Rose-tinted memories. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right
Henrique 16:03
It’s the same with films and books, etc. You go back too far and you ask yourself, why did I ever enjoy this thing? So we as creatures, we are always evolving, music, film, literature, all of that. There are the classics that remain with us, but even the classics are usually reinterpreted to remain current and have appeal. And Shakespeare, the play is reinvented, of course.
Neale 16:30
It has to be yeah, right
Henrique 16:32
the same with this. Exactly the same with this. So yeah the Last of Us is a great game right now and at some point maybe AI will be able to do that but by the time they do that you don’t want to play The Last of Us anymore. Now the question is will AI be able to anticipate what is that you want. We are not there yet. Right now AI is remixing what we already built ourselves right and it can make some extrapolations and sometimes can come with something which is funny and creative and whatnot but bottom line is it cannot touch your heart just now.
Neale 17:06
So there’s a great story I’d love you to tell about the time you were trying to get the rights for Spectrum Next, the actual name, because you wanted it to be just like a Christmas present with the original logos. You wanted the original case in that same excitement. Exactly. It had to be the same memory, didn’t it? It had to.
Henrique 17:24
The whole thing came about a friend of mine who lives in Brazil, which is a hardware genie. A lot of the stuff you find today on the web, like Atari 2600 adapters for cartridges and things like that, or FPGA machines, et cetera, it came from him. He’s the guy who come up with the first idea, then people remix and it becomes big. He’s the guy. He has a pick and mix and a whole assembly line on his shed. That’s the kind of guy we are talking about. He came up with what the Spectrum could be in the future, but as a board, he was basically picking up every expansion that the Spectrum had, like SD cards and RGB video output, et cetera, but on a single board that you could take the old one and replace with that.
Neale 18:14
But you need the old technology wouldn’t you so old televisions of CTRs and stuff
Henrique 18:19
Exactly. And now you have HDMI and whatnot. So that board kind of fixed all of this. Instead of you trying to attach a lot of expansions to the poor, small spectrum, you just replaced the board with something that came with all the facilities. And he wanted that to come to the UK, which is the birthplace and where half of the spectrum users in the world live. But what I told him at the time was that this is not the experience we had. When we bought the spectrum or in our case, the TK-90X. The copy. The copy, right? It was nonetheless a full box. And we opened that box, there was a manual and there was a smell. And that box- Did it have the same rubber keys as well? Exactly, it was exactly the rubber keys. So you had the rubber keys and then plugged into a TV and off you go, right? You didn’t have to tinker and build things. That came later. So I told him, let’s try to make that. Let’s try to recreate that. In order to do that, I needed the brands, which now have been sold to Amstrad, which in turn have been bought by Sky because Amstrad made a set of boxes, a satellite set- That’s right.
Neale 19:24
So, Amstrad bought Sinclair because of the computer side, so they wanted the right to that, and then Amstrad also had satellite dishes, Alan Sugar, obviously Skye, cheaper to have our own satellite dishes, let’s just buy Amstrad straight out. So, you had to follow all the way to Skye, that was right, yeah.
Henrique 19:39
I had a friend in Sky, high up, very handy, always handy, and she helped me navigate that, and I secured the brands. The next step was to secure the team, like the original designers of the machine, right? Like the guys in Cambridge, Phil Candy and Rick Dickinson, who originally designed the machine, I bought them in, and they recreated what the spectrum would look like, what they would feel like, if it was a modern day. So we had this machine that was, in hardware terms, evolved. It had more colors, more sound, it was completely retro compatible. It could even attach a cassette tape to it, and load your original tapes.
Neale 20:20
Which is important, you were saying before about the Spectrum games, they want a physical copy, so you put the cassette in, make your own cassette, the tape you have on your shelf.
Henrique 20:29
There you go. Or you could use SD cards like they do. They sell SD cards with a nice box. You open up, you sell SD cards and you play. All the comforts of modern facilities, HDMI and whatnot is there, right? But, at its heart, it is a Sinclair machine designed by the same table.
Neale 20:45
with this right brand. The right feeling at Christmas, you open it up, and then you dispatch the last ones just in time. For Christmas, was it the last batch that went down?
Henrique 20:53
Exactly. Most of the world, right? There’s 80 countries, so some of them aren’t like that. Because there was also that problem of we got caught out by that pandemic that wiped out electronics from the face of the earth and we had to redesign the board because the parts that we used were not available anymore and Ignis came in and helped us through a very rough path.
Neale 21:14
That’s right. I’m trying not to do a plug on this podcast, but the FPGA was either no longer available or did they hike the price? What was the…? Both. Both. Okay. So tell us about the price. I think it’s really interesting. I was trying to convey the story to Mark on the car on the way down. But yeah, what was the original spec, the original price? We originally…
Henrique 21:34
we use Xilinx Spartan FPGA. And as we were ready to go into manufacture, we got a notice from Xilinx saying that they will not produce it for the foreseeable future. And if you wanted to use FPGA, here are the other ones you could pick and choose from. Completely different dye, IDE, everything is new. So we say, OK, there are probably some of the market. And we started to look in the market. And just after that announcement, they went from, I don’t know, $9, $10 each to $200, $300 each. From $9.
Neale 22:09
$110 to $200. Yeah, on the black market. I mean that’s just not You’ve got the crown you’ve got the crown for did already. Yeah, the money’s in price. Yeah Yeah, I can’t change the price can’t go back and say just to let you know it’s gonna be extra 200 pound for comfort Yeah
Henrique 22:23
There were a couple of sleepless nights there, so we kind of we had to redesign the entire firmware around a new version of FPGA and we ended up working with with your team I didn’t seem to make that happen and in the end with we shipped But it was fairly late far more expensive than I expected
Neale 22:43
And with the with the you with the different shape of the was it was the more More you could do with it more. Yeah
Henrique 22:50
Yeah, because the new chip had a lot more space on it. So we decided, OK, now what do we do? So every time there was a new idea from the engineering team, oh, we can add this new circuit to it that does this new other thing, right? And the best. I bet Oregonians loved that. Yeah, they did love that. Every week there was a new change to it. Poor Nico said, what the?
Neale 23:14
I think he started going grey around about that time, Niko. Yes, I did not have a single one.
Henrique 23:20
But look, it was a work of passion, so you have to indulge. None of these guys, they had been paid for it. We didn’t take a salary on this project. It was a project made… Passion. Passion. Yeah. And because of that, we’ve got to get some leeway. If someone has an idea, they have to be able to see it through. Sometimes that idea has to be shut down, but that’s very rare. We try to put in as much as we could to make use of the bigger FPGA that we ended up with.
Neale 23:45
Yeah, fantastic. So you crowdfunded the project. I know there was two iterations and the second one sort of blew you away. I’m quite interested to know how did you go about the crowd funding? Because we work with a lot of clients who do a similar thing or have a great idea, don’t know how to go about funding and stuff. What was your process to do that Kickstarter?
Henrique 24:06
It’s a very long one. By the time a Kickstarter goes live like that, that we have been working for at least a year, if not two. And when I mean working, it includes prototyping the thing, knowing that the thing can be done, but also creating a community. You want to have everybody lined up before you hit the crowdfunding. So you have a measure of success. And then it can snowball. You cannot go into crowdfunding with no one, thinking that the crowdfunding campaign itself would generate enough momentum for it to be satisfied. You have to surround an activity to understand. Exactly. So that, of course, includes PR, going to conferences and talking to people about the project, telling people what is it that we want to do and listening to them about what is it that we should do instead. And what they would like. Exactly. And that starts to build confidence on what you are about to do. And the second you flip the switch, they are there. Case in point, the second kick-started got funded in less than five minutes. Wow. What was the original target? 250,000. And we ended up with 1.8 million.
Neale 25:14
Quite a big jump. It’s a great story. You’ve been with Bossa for, I said, 14 and a half years now. Looking down you see the previously you worked with EA which is obviously a much bigger organisation. What was it like for you at EA and what was the difference between like an independent studio where you are now and a big behemoth like EA?
Henrique 25:36
Oh, that’s a good question. Well, one of the reasons I shifted out of EA after shipping a FIFA game was because it felt to me that it is big and it’s slow moving. And in the world that we were back then, things were changing very fast. We were going from physical to digital. There is a lot of momentum in the indie space. And ideas, new gameplay ideas, were not coming from the big players. They were coming from these guys in bedrooms and small studios pushing games that you put your hand up and say, how the hell did you come up with that? And that is so funny how no one thought of that before. And that was the exciting bit, right? It’s great to make a FIFA game and work on that, but it’s very constant. It’s very similar in every iteration, right? And in our studio, no two games are back. You use graphics and better, music, more players. Because football is football. That’s what you want.
Neale 26:34
Yeah, the players know something, it’s superpowers, where they can.
Henrique 26:38
You don’t want them running around with machine guns or jumping five meters.
Neale 26:41
Because that’s a great idea for a game. Yeah, maybe. Machine Gun Football. But you know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s a tribe and tester formula. People buy it because they love it. Like Assassin’s Creed, like all those huge franchises, you want to be doing the same thing. You can tweak it and develop it. Yeah, and expand.
Henrique 27:00
but you want familiarity there.
Neale 27:02
You don’t pick up GTA expecting to kick a ball around a pitch. You want to steal a car, kill a prostitute, rob a bank, all that kind of stuff.
Henrique 27:09
that’s the experience. So if you wanted to make something different in a different way, you end up in a studio like Basse. I could not imagine any studio that would green-lit I.M. bread, where you are a slice of bread who wants to be
Neale 27:23
become toast. And there’s not always a toaster available, so sometimes I’d just use a… That’s the whole point! Yeah.
Henrique 27:29
So the first level there’s a toaster.
Neale 27:31
And then, yeah, I won’t win the game if anyone wants to play it. No, it’s fun. Yeah, it’s really fun. I think it’s…
Henrique 27:37
extreme you have to break into a car, the car turn it on, then go on the bonnet that’s warming up. And toast yourself.
Neale 27:44
dryer thing as well. Yeah. See you soon.
Henrique 27:46
break a TV and when it’s on flames you touch yourself using a bowling ball or whatever. So that kind of thing, right? And it went on to be a very successful game, shipping millions of copies across multiple platforms and we were happy that we created that. We could do that at a large company like E.A. Everything is expensive, everything is very big, so you have to limit the risk that you’re taking.
Neale 28:07
You can’t go on a limb as much as you can here, yeah, there’s a lot there’s a lot of quirkiness in your games I mean like the surgeon simulator is that is there a creative team here that sort of come up with snowball ideas How how do you come up with them?
Henrique 28:23
The ideas in game jams, we stopped for a couple of days, give a theme to the entire team, that that team would break up into smaller teams, usually five or six, right? And they would work for 48 hours in a new game concept that is aligned with that theme. On the case of Surgeon Simulator, the theme was Heartbeat. It was part of the Global Game Jam 2013. And a lot of people make rhythm games and et cetera, and my team decided, all right, let’s make a game about heart transplant. And they ended up with the weirdest, the most difficult game.
Neale 28:56
living memory I’ve only I’ve not played it but I’m seeing the trailer it looks absolutely bonkers yeah it is
Henrique 29:01
Yeah, you’re doing heart transplant in the back of a moving ambulance at 90 miles per hour. That’s not something that happens in real life, but it’s fun.
Neale 29:09
Yeah. You talked earlier about this before, Mac Warrior 2, it’s a huge game, obviously you obviously loved it. If you could pick any game where you could erase your memory, erase your playing experience and get to play it all over again, what would you choose?
Henrique 29:25
I would choose Elite, yeah, back to the roots. The original one. Yeah, the original one. Frontier was a better game in every shape or form. It was the follow-up for it. Many years later, I played that on the Aviga. It was a great experience. But that sense of, I can do anything, I can go everywhere. There’s a lot of stuff hidden around me that if I look, I will find it. I don’t think I ever had an experience as impactful as that.
Neale 29:51
That’s the sense of exploring, isn’t it, and sort of using your imagination, which is really great. What’s the health industry like at the minute?
Henrique 30:00
Ah, it’s in transformation, right, there is, you have seen a lot of layoffs and pseudo-shredding down across the world.
Neale 30:07
but Ubisoft have laid off quite a lot of people haven’t they? Yeah, I did the time.
Henrique 30:10
yesterday just in the UK in the past month and a half there were around 20 studios so it is rough and this has happened probably two or three times throughout the games industry lifetime right the games industry is still growing in general and aggregate but there are several pain points mostly to do with the nature of how games are made and how they are found and bought that will require fundamental transformation of the industry as it happened before of course as always the wishful thinking that okay this is just a phase in a couple of years things will go back to where they were
Neale 30:45
technology changes and society’s like a look at streamer for example you know not people upstream whereas these the biogrides industries move and change and evolve don’t they so this time
Henrique 30:54
I think is more cultural than anything else. Okay, that’s interesting. It’s the first time in history where we are time starved. If you look back in the 80s, I would be looking for things to do with my time, right? We had a lot of free time in our hands. Now we are bombarded and the time slice is getting smaller and smaller, attention is going through the window, and you have too much of disposable, low effort content available to you, like small videos and small experiences and everything is on a click of a button you have it. That is transforming how people relate to games, how they use games in many fundamental ways, particularly because you are so tired of so much inbound information, you are inclined to stick with what you know. This is why you have these games that are always here, like the Fortnite or the Call of Duties and the FIFA.
Neale 31:53
stick with their what they’re familiar with so they can engage with it quickly they know the controls yeah they know yeah okay I’m with you
Henrique 31:59
They are tired because there’s a lot of information going. We’re working more than ever. So the prospect of you learning something new, going through a tutorial, et cetera, is not as welcoming as it was, as it was. As a result of that, it’s now very hard for publishers who fund games, essentially, and take them to market. To ensure that the game that they put into market is going to be successful because catching the eyeballs is harder than ever. And some of the levers that could pull in the past, like, oh, I will buy ads, or I will buy influencers, or I will buy, I don’t know, a space on a magazine or whatever, that would yield results don’t anymore. All the power of discoverability are in the platform hands. If I have a PC game, the kingmaker of success is Steam’s name, and it’s algorithms. And Steam is a very pro player. He will not allow someone to create an artificial success by spending money. Steam doesn’t take money. He can’t throw money at the problem anymore. Yeah, exactly that. You cannot buy exposure inside of Steam, for instance. And if you buy exposure elsewhere, once you get inside of Steam is a black box. You don’t know if that person actually bought the game or not. That lever, the publisher don’t have anymore. And it’s the same in the app stores, et cetera. So at some point, the publishers are losing the ability to be kingmakers. And with that comes the risk of, is this game going to be successful in his own merit or not? And how do I predict that? How can I tell if a game that doesn’t yet exist is going to become exist?
Neale 33:34
Yeah, because it’s such a huge investment on going out on such a lift. Yeah.
Henrique 33:38
massive, right? There’s no such thing as a cheap game, unless the two guys leaving you on the basement, not taking a salary, making a game, that’s a cheap game.
Neale 33:47
So the spectrum, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Henrique 33:49
But if you put a team of 10, 15, 20 people together, that’s… Salaries that I was talking to you. Exactly, four years, right? That’s a big, big shot. So you have that dynamic going on. So publishers are being far more cautious and not signing as much. Development became more expensive because expectation from the players has always gone up and you have this perfect storm. Now things will change. They will settle. Games are still a big thing. Everybody’s gonna continue to play them. But how they’re made is gonna be fundamentally transformed in the next few years and it’s gonna be… every change is gonna be painful.
Neale 34:28
There’s more opportunity then for smaller independence like like yourself to flourish and make a name for yourself. Yeah
Henrique 34:33
The way I see it, I think that teams will be four or five people tops, being able to do a lot with that. Very agile. Very agile. And if you look at big games on PC recently, which is where most of the creativity comes from, games that are innovating on paradigms of gameplay design, etc., they’re mostly on PC first, then they migrate to other platforms, they start on PC. If you look at things like Valheim was like four or five people team, Vampire Survivor was a single guy, Factorio was a single guy, and Little Company is a small student in Sweden, and I think they’re like six, seven guys. It’s small teams doing a lot, right? And these are multi-million selling games. Yeah, of course. Very successful. At the same time, you have games that cost like 10 times that, but 10 times a lot of people not achieving the same level of success now. So if you are funding this, we…
Neale 35:29
Which one are you going to find? The opportunity for smaller independence, because the marketplace is so vast, I mean most people, not everyone’s a gamer, but most people have a console or a computer, so when the marketplace is that vast, you only need a tiny slice of that pie to be very, very profitable. If you’re a small team. If you’re a small team. Exactly. But if you’re a big organization, you need a big chunk of that.
Henrique 35:50
Yeah, exactly. On a game that cost you, say, 15 million to make, which is not a AAA game. It’s not a big game, right? It’s what we would call a AA. Probably 20 people, two or three years development. You need to sell a million copies to be able to break even. And sending a million copies today is a hard ask. There is a lot of games there competing for your attention, and all of them very good.
Neale 36:15
And there’s only there’s only a couple of like superstar franchises like GTA six which come out late this year Yeah, they’re already built on that as the event of the year
Henrique 36:22
Yeah, if if they don’t break it up, it’s gonna be a huge success. Yeah is theirs for the taking for the sake. Yeah, right Making a ganglage at EA from scratch Good luck with that
Neale 36:35
No chance. All the complexities and the stories and the amount of people that you need. Everything. The side missions alone. Never mind those storylines.
Henrique 36:45
And if you look at GTA 6, or even 5, the last one, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a process that evolved from a 2D top-down game that was the original GTA into what it become. A lot of lessons were learned throughout those decades and built on top of each other until you finally end up with what we call GTA 6. For someone to come and challenge that from scratch, it’s very, very hard. I wouldn’t say it’s possible, but I wouldn’t go that way.
Neale 37:17
It’s not a fight that you want to take. I’ve got one last question for you. If you could recommend a really underrated game, what would you recommend? Something that deserves a bit of spotlighting, that people should go out and buy and play, and I’ll put a link to it in the bottom of the video.
Henrique 37:37
There’s so much stuff. So much stuff. You can write a few of your own. Okay, so it depends on what you want. If you like building things, it’s like a simulation, not simulation, optimizing things, et cetera, I would definitely play the latest version of Factorio Space Age, okay? It’s about building big factories and automating things and going mental in kind of industrial scale, okay? If you want a cozy experience of just you or maybe you and a kid, et cetera, take something like Stardew Valley. It’s not new, but it keeps being updated all the time and it’s such a lovely kind of warm feeling wrapping around. If you want a survival game, I’m launching one in a couple of months. You can plug it. Yeah, the Go Check Lost guys is a co-op, PvE survival game that we are launching. Fantastic. And if you like a lot of adventure with your friends, I would suggest Go PvE with a little company. It’s a very fun game.
Neale 38:35
Okay, fantastic. Henry, thank you so much for your time.