um but a little bit more senior to go and help work on a couple of games there the first one being dawn of Titans and

then secondly they were also developing CSR Racing too within the studio as well so that’s that’s how I ended up kind of

moving moving across I also realized that I was kind of tired of the old

development model of building a game for two three years not knowing if it’s going to be successful and then kind of

crossing your fingers and then you know you’re either wildly successful or you shut down the studio um and I and I felt

like there was more of a room for data for analytics uh to be able to help guide decisions and so that helped

because at that time I I hadn’t worked in Mobile and uh that opportunity with natural motion was all mobile and and so

I thought right okay this is an opportunity to learn a brand new um area within the industry um you know it’s

also the biggest part of the gaming industry as well and so that’s how that’s how it led there um and then to

come back to your kind of question what what led me from Zinger back to EA

well I I basically got head hunted again um there there were some close colleagues that I had the opportunity to

work with while I was at um EA the first time I actually went to a conference in San Francisco and met a few people that

worked on the on what was then the the sort of FIFA franchise and is now the EA Sports FC franchise and um out of the

blue I just I I just got a a reach out through through Linkedin through a person I knew there John Shepard and we

just got talking and uh there was a unique role that they had which was you know um I don’t want to go too long on

into this but there was certainly a sort of motivation there to join FIFA first of all it was my favorite game as I used

to play it all the time and the opportunity arose to work on it in a very unique role which was a mix between

production and product side of things and um I instantly knew within I think

the first conversation that we had that I was going to make the move across to Canada so yeah that’s that’s how that’s

how that worked out seeing a theme of these are former

colleagues kind of head hunting you so I can imagine you’ve made quite an impression so I want to wanted to ask

like when you move to mobile games you mentioned there you had a lot of lessons

from the initial Ro at EA I’m curious what did you take you what did you take

from EA with you to zingo what lessons did you take with you a lot of uh lessons I think you

certainly learn about um what not to do which is always a sort

of key thing um you also learn that well certainly for me I learned that games

development is really not much more than research and development there’s no right path to

success there’s no right way to make a game if there was every game developer would be a billionaire by now and it’s it’s sort of very much an

industry that is based on intuition mixed with a bit of experience but a hell of a lot of luck as well and sort

timing timing luck you can say they’re the same thing or not and what I realized was was I wanted to

I wanted to try and find a way where we could create processes and systems that would help us lead towards success or or

or give us a greater chance of that rather than be completely led by somebody’s creative whims you know so

someone wakes up and then sort of says right the best color is red and then next week the best color is blue and you

know sometimes I kind of mark them as sort of geniuses and sort of creative Geniuses and all that sort of stuff for me that was all kind of

nonsense I I can certainly see that you need those sorts of people you need this is a creative industry you absolutely

need that but you also need some kind of structure some kind of process to get stuff done so at that time I just kind

of realized that that I needed to be in maybe an environment that was a little bit more analytical because I wanted to

try and balance that with the strong creative element that was at the studio previously and I wanted to sort of

combine that to be able to understand if there was some further lessons I could learn to help guarantee um success as

well uh and then the other thing was just the power of people this is this is you know um completely based around

people I mean 90% of the costs in development are all people based um whenever you’re making a game so it also

taught me the importance of having a very well-developed team rather than maybe one or two strong individuals um

because you ultimately become extremely reliant on those individuals and um as I said you know depending on their whims

and sort of decision- making um confidence you can be shift Direction left and right every other week which

which isn’t necessarily the best thing for a sort of Studio’s Health long term uh so there’s a lot of things like that

that I learned um that that certainly helped with the with s of working working at natural motion which which

then obviously was a was was a prim singer let’s dig into that so you

mentioned having one or two superstars is not ideal versus having a kind of

very good team so I wanted to touch on when it comes to sansoft your VP head of

Studio Your Role is very much about building up that team so what philosophy

do you have around building teams so I’ll first of all start off by

saying that everybody that I worked with throughout my career um I have learned

from and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with them good or bad um you know ultimately it sort of your job to be a

sponge and to and to learn from others uh and to add your value to those conversations as well um so so I

certainly never look back at any of my careers in the negative way at all ultimately they they are just

experiences and I’m very grateful for that and for the people there as well uh coming back to kind of what you were

saying around um you know taking a a sort of very creative lead approach versus a product lead approach so

creative lead approach is is essentially you have like your Superstar designer um you know your will WR of the world that

sort of thing and you kind of build something around them and so they either come up with an idea or or a company

decides that that they want to invest in that one individual and whatever idea they come up with based off their track record cache whatever they want to then

invest it and that’s a very hit and miss driven um way of working very hit and

miss uh you can shoot for the stars and and sort of you know reach the moon whatever or you come crashing down and

again as I said shut down the Studio 6 months later and there are plenty of instances within the industry where

you’ve seen both so for me it’s a very high-risk strategy extremely highrisk because you know God forbid anything

happens to those one or two individuals then where does that leave the rest of the studio so um for me it’s not a

sustainable way of building a games Studio at all um the other opportunity

that you have is is more product Le which is to say we will find market opportunities that are out there we’ll

combine them with Team interest team ability and build a more cohesive team

which maybe may not have the same um creative strength in kind of concentrated in in kind of a few

individuals but as a team we believe they are much stronger than an individual and you want to invest in

that and what you say is that you’re not investing in the game you’re investing in the team um and and I think that’s

that’s the other approach which for me is much more of a guarantee of more sustainable success and so that’s the

kind of philosophy that we’ve taken um at sansoft as well is is to approach that team first mentality you know um

there was a great um uh article by Ila pakingan from the the supercell CEO

where uh you know a recent post where where he mentioned that that they don’t green light games they green light teams

and that’s exactly the philosophy that we have at sansoft is that um ultimately

we are no different to say um say like the pharmaceutical industry for example

you might have a group of scientists who are very excellent and sort of what they do they sit around a table and say guys we’re going to come up with a C for

cancer the likelihood of that cure coming about is very low but it doesn’t stop them from trying to achieve it and

along the way they may discover a new drug that is completely revolutionary for for something else or they may start

to make one 2% progress towards that kind of cure games development is exactly the same I mean we sit there and

we say how are we going to make the next big successful game in an industry where nine out of 10 games commercially fail

so you have to invest in that and you have to have that mindset to say if that’s the IND that we’re in we have to

invest in teams and we have to support them as much as we can and we want to see the sort of progress that they make

so that’s the philosophy and the kind of direction that we chose to take rather than concentrating on one or two

Superstar individuals um I think what would be

worth um touching on is sof is a very unique business I feel so could you

potentially paint a picture of what sof is doing as a whole because you have

from my understanding different units some are trying to make their own games you have the localization so how do you

how does sof kind of fit in the games industry so so I I’ll I’ll sort of start from the top so soft games is a Saudi

Arabian headquartered games company which is a phrase that not many people in their life ever thought they’d be

hearing let alone me saying um so we completely sort of you know acknowledge that but the world is sort of always

always changing they are owned by another Saudi Arabian company wholly owned which is called aelan and brothers

which is one of the most successful private run family businesses in the Middle East they have in excess of about

two to three billion a year in revenu 16,000 employees 70 different companies they’re essentially a sort of

conglomerate and they decided to get into gaming four years ago as Saudi Arabia began to open up culturally

economically um started offering tourist visas and now of course Saudi Arabia is

is isort pretty much on sort of everyone’s lips especially within the the sort of gaming industry as being the one of the few places in the world where

you’re see seeing a lot of very intense and rapid growth and so at the time the

sort of family decided they wanted to get into gaming because there was a huge opportunity there the the Mina region

has always been underserved by Gaming companies it’s never been one that’s been paid a lot of attention um but it’s

a very very lucrative um Market uh you have different types of audiences in

different countries um and certainly within the mobile industry it is used as a sort of test bed in sort of a lot of

different ways to try and identify user Behavior so it’s a market that’s ripe

with a lot of potential and there is no real Studio or certainly there back 3

four years ago that could help build that and since then you have a couple of big studios that have emerged sof being

being being one of them and sansoft really kind of operates some sort of three pillars um we we focus on

publishing uh we focus on investments and we focus on Studios so if I start with publishing um publishing is is sort

of one of our arms where we essentially work with third parties to to publish games we recently worked with Jam City

and DC on a game called DC heroes and villains um that recently won the Pocket

Gamer Mina game of the year um award as well um so so we do a lot of activity

there um we’re looking for a lot of really really great sort of titles from all over the world we have a couple of

development Studios that we’re co-developing with uh in Eastern Europe to make Gaines for our publishing arm uh

using using different sort of framework so that’s one pillar the second one is Investments we look at game teams we

look at uh game ideas um that have shown potential and promise through sort of

early results and we invest um in those game studios and game companies one of the Investments we made was in a racing

game studio in the south of France uh in in in Leon called tiny digital Factory

um they they ended up making the first kind of blockchain based racing game for animoca called rev racing they’ve worked

on another game called GT manager which is a fairly successful uh racing Mobile

manager game um as well and they’ve got a ton of other projects that they work on as well so we’re always looking for

those sorts of opportunities and then thirdly this is more of our long-term strategies to build our Studios to build

our own games that’s where you have the highest margins that’s where you know essentially I I would also argue uh

people really want to focus on which is making their own ideas making things that they built from from sort of scratch so with that we have a studio in

Riad which we opened at the beginning of last year and then we uh opened up another Studio at the beginning of this

year in Barcelona so those are our two Studios there but ultimately our kind of mission statement is to be um you know

one of the world’s leading games companies um we’ve done a lot of other things as well we just recently signed

an exclusive joint venture with nettis uh one of the top five gaming companies in the world um to be their exclusive

partner to publish with in the Middle East and you know interestingly enough I think it’s a great vote of confidence on

the company because netes themselves they’ve only ever done one joint mention deal in their past and that was with

blizzard um and the second ever deal that they chose to do was with us um so

um again I think it’s Testament to the people that we have involved to our Holding Group the kind of reputation that they have and also everybody

knowing that we’re here for the long run we’re not a company that’s just popped up to try and make a sort of quick Buck

no for us we are seriously interested in the gaming industry and we’re more than interested we are very very active as

well so yeah that that should hopefully give a bit of a summary um around around what what s sansoft

does no I think perfectly said and I don’t want to understate how big that nettis deal was like nettis when I

looked into him earlier this year didn’t realize they literally just humongous tens of thousands employees and that

point you said about I just want to double click on this you help publish games that are kind of already out into

the Middle East so this is specifically challenging because I think from my understanding the language is backwards

and that on its own Super difficult for my understanding to Port game so sof is

like the go-to when it comes to this thing so I’m just thinking if anyone’s listening to this they have a game I’m

guessing they just like hey sansoft can you help me kind of publish it in the Middle East is that how it works yeah

yeah I I mean it’s it it’s obviously the sort of deal with netes is is focused on the Middle East but but for us our

aspirations are more Global um we aren’t we aren’t a middle eastern game

localization provider that is actually probably less than 1% of our entire focus our our actual focus is to be a

world leading games company um and this is just one great way of establishing

relationships um with with different games companies to help them understand

what it takes to make a game game successful within the Mina region because as I said there are very few Studios with our size scale support that

can uh and our people and sort of background that can provide that ready-made experience for for what it

takes to be successful within that region um and so rather than a company themselves taking a huge risk and

setting up an office and doing various other things they have a potential company they can work with that can help

open those doors uh and it can be mutually beneficial as well my question is what do you do when

you’re building a team from scratch do you do the hire one at a time do you

look at it as a group of hires how do you approach it uh fantastic question um

something I spent a long time thinking about so previous to this role I had never built up a studio before which can

be both a blessing and a curse because obviously you don’t have the experience of having done it before but also it’s a

blessing because can avoid a lot of the mistakes that um or you can learn from a lot of the ways in which things have

been done before as well and for us there were I think first step is you

have to understand what are your unique factors um at play around what you’re doing you know to to use the sports

analogy if Chelsea are using um or deciding to to build their team from the

ground up after being acquired they’re going to operate slightly differently than say a sort of you know League 10 um

division Club which which which doesn’t have the resources and and and just kind of is happy to find whatever they can um

so ultimately you have to understand what’s what’s unique about sansoft so what’s unique about sansoft um was that

we don’t have a an existing Studio within our Holding Group or within our

company where we look to and say aha they they achieve success let’s let’s copy paste uh and that’s what a lot of

studios in in established companies tend to do is is there’s a lot of pressure to say hey that studio has been really

successful need to come up with this new idea let’s just let’s just do that but let’s just do it somewhere else and and so you end

up following a culture which really isn’t yours or the people’s um you know

all the sort of Staff within the studio so that can cause um a lot of problems but um so first thing was unique thing

we didn’t have somebody telling us what to do uh because of somebody else’s success within the company that was

great the the S second thing is that we looked at our resources and we looked at our ambition and we said we are a

startup but we’re also not really a startup I mean how many startups do you know that are you know investing in s of other companies that are that are

publishing games as well as making their own games that have the kind of resources and sort of capital deployment

that we have and so we and so we thought to ourselves okay so then we have room we have we have time this isn’t

something where someone’s got a gun to our head and says you’ve got to achieve success within six months or we’re g to have to shut everything down so that was

the S second unique Factor so we have time um and we have resources and we also have uh you know a sort of blank

sheet and then it’s the fourth thing is is you know uniquely um I kind of skip

through three there but but the fourth thing is um where are we in the world you know we’re not in La we’re not in

London we’re not in Talent hotpots where if you throw a stick you’ll hit 10 game developers right uh we’re in we’re sort

of setting up s in Saudi Arabia which has a lot of um Unique Kind of

perception issues um because of the lack of Education awareness around the country and and its development and so

we know that Talent is going to be hard to recruit um while they might believe in the philosophy and everything else

they might find it initially a challenge culturally to say hey I’m going to move from London to to like Riad what does

you know that’s something I never thought I would do um so so we looked at those unique factors and then that’s

what kind of led us to uh deciding how we wanted to sort of approach building the studio so it’s like once we once we

estabish the unique factors um for sort of how we wanted to approach building the studio we then kind of said to

ourselves what’s the philosophy we could go down a lot of different routes and we already discussed this earlier but um we

decided that we weren’t interested in the creative Le uh approach of having one or two super stars instead we wanted

a team um that could Gel really well and could perform at a high level so that was number one the thing that we wanted

to do and then there were two you know um kind of I guess insights that I

generated as I was looking through and researching things I’m I’m a very analytical kind of person and I realized

that n9ine out of 10 games commercially fail so that’s the first thing so we decided that we were never going to be Project based I was never going to show

up to the door and say guys we got a license to this IP they want us to make a racing game two years here we go let’s

build a team around that that was not the way that we wanted to work because that’s the Sure Fire way of you know

hiring a lot of people and firing a lot of people why because you got a 90% chance that the game’s not going to be

successful which is the industry average so we decided that we were going to be team based we were going to invest in

the team never in a specific idea or a sort of project um itself and then the

second one was that again nobody in this industry has more than a 10% success rate individually in terms of the games

they’ve released so for us again it didn’t make sense to have a bottleneck

from a creative point of view with like a chief product officer or a chief creative director

um a lot of people in those Industries uh have made their reputation in sort of one or two genres or maybe one or two

titles but outside of that there’s limited value that that that they can really add to something else you know

say if you worked in in in sort of um U match three games and and and that’s where you’ve made your reputation and

you’ve built a lot of good match three games your ability to add a ton of value to say sort of realtime strategy game

it’s probably not going to be that High um so for us it was it was it was kind of removing that creative bottleneck and

sort of saying we want much more of a flat structure where we have people in the teams that are um discussing things

with each other that are trying to build consensus uh there is some leadership and and direction should there be needed

but ultimately we believe in the power of the collective versus the sort of one individual so those are the kind of

philosophies and principles behind how we started to set up the studio and that’s how we’ve been forming um you

know we are taking our time to find people that that work really well together that are less on the um

egotistical side and and think they know the answer to everything and rather realize that everything that’s great

that’s made within the gamees industry is made because of a of a team not because of one individual and so um

that’s that’s the kind of path that we’re on now how do you do that how do you measure ego in an interview process you

use your own experience and intuition um because that has to be of some value first of all and I think secondly you

know you’re relying a lot on how people communicate you know there’s that saying that I think 70 75% of all communication

is non-verbal so you get a very interesting idea of people just by watching them and seeing seeing their

mannerisms and thirdly you use um personality tests uh you know Myers Briggs um as sort another example of

sort of one of those that’s something that we take a sort of Keen Keen sort of look at um it’s something that we’ve

used um not not necessarily as a part of our explicit recruitment process say and

we don’t get candidates to to sort of do it but it’s something that we internally refer to once we’re talking to

candidates and and and we know what the makeup of our existing team is who have like gone through these sorts of tests

as well so you know we don’t want to put a whole bunch of people that are exactly the same personality type into the same team because that’s a recipe for

disaster we want to make sure that there’s a good balance between leaders between people who are more pragmatic uh

between people who are more say creative empathetic as well so those are the sorts of things that we use in order to

try and understand and say it is much more of an art than it is a science there is no perfect way to make a team

um because even even if you think you have the right things on paper and things should gel well uh sometimes they

don’t um and that’s just a part and parcel sort of team building as well I’m curious your flat hierarchy is

your studio set up remotely is it hybrid no no no um we took an approach away

from I think where the trend was going and has been going since and

uh for for for a number of reasons I think number one for me um when you’re building a new team that hasn’t worked

together and you want them to be invested in the success of the studio I

think they have to have skin in the game uh number one and they have to be um you know people who don’t just say

yeah yeah sure it’s something I’ll do but I’ll do it from 6,000 miles away with like a 6-h hour time difference but

actually are invested in in in the success by sort of saying hey I’m physically going to move myself or my

family to the region and I’m committed to like making this work for as long as I can but also when you’ve got a new

team that hasn’t worked together like I said before it’s 75% of communication is

is non-verbal how are you going to get that through a screen how are you going to get people in a creative industry

getting the best out of each other when they’re not surrounded by each other when somebody here overhears another conversation and all of a sudden and

they kind of jump in and start thinking of an idea rather than having to schedule a meeting for every single thing which which which for me doesn’t

really inspire a lot of creativity I think it can work if you have an established team that has worked

together for a long while and knows each other well knows when somebody says something’s rubbish they actually mean

this right um so so they know how to read people they’ve worked with the team

beforehand and they’ve delivered things before as well I think there there’s a higher chance of that sort of a system

working but certainly for when you’re creating something from scratch and you’re investing a lot of resources time

uh Etc into it for us it makes a lot more sense to have people invested in the success by having some skin in the

game but also it gives us a much higher chance of success to have people that are around each other dayto day that can

that can that can really build that team chemistry so how big is the team

now uh as I’ll start off on sof side so sof I think we’re about 60 62 people so

far we’re spread across Barcelona Riad Helsinki and Shanghai um right now in

the Riad Studio we have roughly about 12 people our ambition is to get to about 24 by the end of the year um we’re

starting off with kind of a sort of you know I’m sure we will get into it but a sort of tribe structure uh so we have

very small kind of experienced teams that are working together rather than just recruiting a lot of people so yeah

right now we’re we’re about the sort of 10 to 12 Mark um and we’re growing to about 24 by the end of the year

yeah that was the follow-up question so with 12 people I feel like the flat hierarchy is a lot more not automatic

but it’s a lot more manageable but when you double that to 24 yeah things start to change so yeah please tell me more

about the tribe format yeah um economies of scale and sort of whatnot I think um

it it’s sort of interesting because you can have a very large team

and let’s define um you know a s large team working on one single game or say anything above 20 people all working on

on sort of one game um I think once you have that you have benefits but you also have downsides and

the clear downsides are that it takes longer to get things done which is odd

because you would think with more people you should have more resources right but actually realizing what we’re doing is

research and development and nothing more it means that you’re going to be pivoting you know every other day or like every other week you’re going to be

exploring something else now if you get 20 people in a room and you try trying to explain okay guys we’re going to shift to this direction then next week

this direction you’ll get a lot of people who are like what the hell’s going on uh and and you’ll have to slow

everything down because you’ll have to explain everything you’ll have to go through it so for us what we found was that the optimum number for a team size

especially in the prototyping ideation even the kind of production phase is around about that sort of 10 to to sort

12 marker kind of sports team size um and that for us is the optimum size that

we want to build our teams around so each game team and we’re planning to have two game teams by the end of the year will have about that number of

people in each and they will operate themselves like they won’t be you know working on each other’s games they’ll be

supporting each other when they need if you need to borrow resource Etc you will but ultimately they are developing their

own ideas um and they’re going to be working and they’re responsible for their own ideas as well so that way even

with a slightly larger number of people you’re still able to manage things in a way where you can maintain a sort of

flat flat hierarchy and um the other thing as well is is that and and and let me Define what a

flat hierarchy actually means for us flat hierarchy for us means that um uh anybody that’s working within the actual

game team doesn’t report to anybody else in the game team that’s to make sure that nobody feels like they have to side

with somebody because that’s their boss and if they go against them with a certain idea they’ll be reprimanded or

sort of whatever so within the the game teams it is absolutely flat um outside of that um we have a role for an art

director and for and for a technical director and we need to provide discipline guidance so for that reason

we have somebody there that can lead on the art side somebody there that can lead on the technical side um but

outside of that we have no creative director we have no Chief product officer within the company and all the

studio that is not something that that as I said earlier that we that we believe in so instead what we have are what we call councils so all of the

designers that we have they will essentially be meeting up with each other every other week and they form a

round tape and same thing on the product side and that’s a place where you go to to work with your peers on different challenges

different ideas different ways of thinking uh and you don’t since you’re not reporting to anybody else it’s a

very flat space to be able to discuss these ideas with your peers rather than with your manager which can be a very

very different kind of conversation so we have those sorts of councils for those roles which are more on the

creative side and then we have discipline leads for the ones that are focused more on more on the sort of technical side and since we’re really

just hiring experienced people for those roles we’re not in a huge in-depth need

to have a creative director that can train a bunch of Junior people uh you know we’re looking for people that have

at least seven eight nine plus years experience within those discipline areas um so yeah that’s that’s how we work and

and that’s how we maintain that kind of a structure uh without kind of falling into the sort of trap of of sort of

having you know sort of Fairly well-built pyramid I haven’t heard that format

before for um the tech director and the art director are they per game team or

would it be one for both teams all of the artists that we have within our studio would report to the art director

all of the um programmers that we would have would report to the technical director regardless of whatever game

tribe they are in with you so the I guess measures of

success is down to I would assume you and the two directors like keeping

people accountable yes yes yeah yeah but but but here’s the thing um because we spend

so much time on recruiting the right type of people for us um the people that we recruit are incredibly motivated um

they’ve taken a risk in in sort of moving to Saudi uh to kind of work on this sort of stuff they they are not the

sort of people that are looking for others to push them they are already pushing themselves and so that again

comes back to the whole recruitment philosophy of you know for us we want to build slower we don’t want to hire a

whole bunch of people overnight and then you know just assume that 30% we’re either going to let go or sort of won’t

be performing for us we want to reverse that and say forget the industry average for how many people you know you usually

get to sort of turn over let’s spend more time at the beginning uh focusing on on on sort of getting people that are

the best fit for the team and then from there building building um uh around them uh so

yeah like solving that massive Domino which will solve all these other potential issues like you mentioned

before you don’t need a creative director to train the Juniors because you’re hiring self motivated experienced

people which I feel like solves a lot of issues which are quite difficult for other Studios um that I speak to you

know this isn’t this isn’t the way that um I think every every Studio should be run I think it really depends on where

you are at in your life cycle what types of games you have if you have a very established game that is making you know

hundreds of millions billions um a year it is very difficult to operate in this structure and and you need more of a

hierarchy because it becomes almost like a sort of um content production line and

so there it is much more important to have process than it is to be able to allow the sort of creativity that’s

needed when you’re first starting to make a game um so I you know that’s that’s a that’s a kind of clear

difference like we don’t believe this is the way to do everything but certainly for where we are now and where we where

will be for the foreseeable future this is the kind of philosophy that we want to maintain when it comes to making new

games live games is a separate proposition um and and something that that that yeah we can we can discuss

later if you want to but but certainly believe it requires a slightly different structure for it yeah for sure like when it comes to

making new games prototyping I really like this format I’m curious like if someone’s listening and they’re also

prototyping games the setup that you have

having all the experienced people start at the same time I’m just curious what happens

when they’re working on a game like when do you actually say oh wait guys we got

to kill this kind of like I feel like that is different for everyone yeah another fantastic question so um again

something that I’ve thought about a lot uh it comes back to those two foundational principles that I was sorry

insights that I was talking about um nobody in this industry has more than a 10% success rate with the games they’ve

released nobody um you know don’t care who you are um the only thing people

tend to hear about are your successes but never about the games that never made it and there are way more games

that never made it than the games that that’s sort of did so when you start on that premise you realize nobody has the right answer and when you start thinking

about that you you think about the whole green light process and you think well why do we have a green light process you know because usually you’ve got people

in there who are turning around saying yep kill that game kill that game but if you’re on the assumption that most people don’t know what makes a super

successful game versus what doesn’t then that’s a very flawed process and so we kind of revamped it and we said well we

don’t have a green light process we don’t uh instead what we do is we rely on doing a lot of external validation um

fairly early on throughout the game development process so it is up to our game teams to be able to go out there

and test their ideas cu the best people that will greenl the game will be people who are the players of the game not me

not the CEO not anybody else I might like a game and love it and really want to support it but the the rest of the

world hates it you know so it doesn’t really add much kind of value to the to the to the game team then and so we

leave it up to the game team ultimately to make the the decision about how much conviction they have based off of the

results they receive to be able to continue working on the game or whether they want to scrap it and move on to

something else and there are you know different ways that we kind of um implement this so there’s this there’s

this sunken cost fallacy which is something that that nearly everybody in the games industry has to deal with and

that’s the idea of saying that you know I spent six months on this game I spent $100 million on this game and even if

all the metrics are showing you hey this isn’t going anywhere I’m still going to continue because this is my baby right

and that’s what I think a lot of people fall into the sort of trap of and so for us what we’ve done and done is built

some mechanisms around that to help our game teams avoid that ultimately a lot of their compensation isort of tied to

the performance of the games number one so they have that same yeah I I mean

it’s it’s the same in a lot of other companies but you know because you your sort of bonus structure is usually tied

to your individual performance than the company performance so it’s the same thing for us but it’s boiled down much

more to the sort of Team level um if they have targets and and things that they want to achieve like say getting a

game into production by the end of the year then they know that that they’re being held accountable to that that

standard and if what they’re working on is not likely to help them achieve that objective then they’re able to make more

of a rational decision alongside the sort creative one so it’s no you know it’s no longer not just my baby but it’s

also something else I need to think about so all of those same decision-making points that you would often find a green light committee

thinking of like the financial considerations sort of creative ones the market ones they’re ones that we

essentially boil down to the team and say you guys can think of this stuff you don’t need us to sit there and kind of talk about it and ultimately if the game

team themselves truly believe in either killing an idea or in continuing with an

idea then we would support the team right because their conviction is more

important to us than our own individual beliefs um uh around that again we’re we’re investing in the teams we’re not

investing in the game there are so many examples of games that you know when you read about their history would have been

killed if they were part of a green light and I mean we could talk about Boom Beach for example from supercell um

you know there are stories there where where nearly everybody in the company hated the the sort of game and and

didn’t believe that the metrics were going to be strong enough and the metrics weren’t but there were one or two people in the company on the game

team that believed and continued persisting and then you end up with a billion dollar plus franchise every year

and that would have been killed by by other ones as well conversely there are loads of games that should have been killed much earlier so for me there’s no

right answer for how to and there’s no right person in the world who can say yep that’s a successful game that’s not

ultimately it comes down to does the team themselves continue to want to believe in this um in this in this idea

that they’re working on and is there enough progress that we’re seeing with the metrics with uh qualitative feedback

that would give us encouragement that it is worth supporting the team in that and

the team themselves get to make that decision and then the final thing uh as well to kind of Bear in mind is that a

lot of teams get very disenfranchised and lose a lot of their passion when

they ideas keep getting killed by Green Light committees that are outside of their control right and so at a certain

point that frustration just boils over and they want to leave and they want to go and do something else but if you’re the ones that are killing the game ideas

you you yourself as a team you you own that decision it’s not somebody else making that and that you can you know

and complain about it no it’s it’s hey you guys decided that even though you worked on this for a while it wasn’t

working and you decided to move on so it gives the team a lot more ownership um as well and and for me that’s a really

important thing to make them feel valued but also make them real real kind of participants in the sort of success of

sort of what you’re making as well so many things I like about this

the alignment of incentives I found to be massive problem in the games industry

some of the most common reasons when I was speaking to like a senior looking to leave when I was recruiting for like

senior developers was simply because the incentives of the student Studio which

was potentially more of the content production or just doing the same old same old they no longer had an incentive

to really push themselves it was kind of like if I do my job too well then there’s actually a risk of potentially

losing my job kind of thing and I feel like your solution is so good because

you’ve got the full ownership of the decision and then you have the alignment

of the incentives of if the game does well I do well so I do not have an incentive to keep working on a game that

I will eventually kill just to keep my job cuz like no like that’s the whole reason we’re here and when you add the

fact that people brought their families over some of the time the skin in the game I think that commitment is a big

big factor which isn’t really spoken about that much if you could leave at a moment’s notice it potentially makes

this decision um I guess easier like it’s like oh the game’s going to leave I

will leave when that’s the case like there’s a bit more commitment people are trying a bit harder so I love so aspects

of this one question for you in terms of the tell me is no no no I was just going

to say I mean this isn’t this isn’t something that I sort of came up with um by myself in sort of isolation um you

know this this really was s triggered by initially when

I again I said I’m like a very very analytical person for anyone listening here my kind of my Briggs is more inj so

if they understand that they’ll like completely get it but um I kind of just looked at everything and I said to myself what why are some

studios successful why do some studios fail to repeat the success that they’ve had and why are why do other Studios

fail and out of that came like a very very clear winner for me in terms of the

approach and I kind of referred to it earlier but um you know certainly the way in which supercell work has been a

huge inspiration for us um because they they they operate in a similar flat

structure um hierarchy um you know the CEO is the least important person in the

company that’s the same philosophy that we have you know I’m the least important person in the studio I’m not adding any

Direct Value to programming or to coding um my job is to help support the team and to kind of remove blockers um and

whenever things are getting tested in terms of our principles philosophies to make sure that we adhere to them as best

as we can um but really it’s it’s it’s a sort of developers that are the superstars and and and and the ones that

are the one you know far more far more valuable to us and the sort of company as well um so yeah there are examples

out there but the thing is is that from the very beginning when we’re all raised as as sort of children we always have

somebody telling us what to do always whether it’s your parents whether it’s your teachers whether it’s your boss

whatever there’s always somebody that you kind of look to and go you know can I have permission to do this what should

I do and so we’re all trained psychologically from a very early age to want that structure and that’s a very

corporate structure as well that is exactly how that’s built and it works for companies where things are very

predictable for you know oil and gas or for Real Estate or for construction where you have defined processes um

defined margins and soort everything else but in a creative industry it is the worst way to run something absolute

worst way to to run something it’s why so many companies fail to uh repeat their success it’s why you have a lot of

companies that have got one massive game but outside that couldn’t develop anything else because truth told they

got lucky with that game and whatever they learned from it and it’s almost

become too big a too big an entity that it kind of kills any new ideas because you know the cost of me putting one

engineer on this new Pro prototyping team might lose me $2 million a year but if I put them on say something like

Candy Crush or or or something like Angry Birds I might generate $200,000 profit from them a year so you end up

with with these situations where it’s very very difficult for established companies because they’ve now put in a

lot of these corporate processes uh because they’re either publicly listed or they’re just way too big uh for them

to repeat that success and and it’s why again there are very few shoers in the world that have repeated success and for

us learning from them learning what worked what didn’t was super essential

um and then having the conviction to believe it was the hard part and and and honestly is the hard part for even

anybody listening to this who kind of thinks yeah this all sounds great in theory um it the hard part is when it’s

tested and when you aren’t as successful as early as you thought you might be and then you think should I just default

back to the way I used to work um and that’s when this stuff really really comes alive um and and you’ve got to

have that sense of conviction in it as well having that longterm outlook as

well when we are being creative it might look like nothing’s working three six

months in but then you would never know what it would be like 12 months 18 months in that Candy Crush example you

gave me really resonates cuz um yeah back in recruitment we worked with Candy Crush and I felt that there you know it

was always an opportunity cost where one developer on a new game team

is going to be weighed up against how much could we get on the cash cow and

you want to avoid that and I like the ways of working that you just described when it comes to having gain teams so

they aren’t kind of competing right they’re not competing with resources

they separate unit and I think that just empowers them so much more so you’re not always like that little kid in the

corner who’s not getting all the attention it’s like no you’re just you’re your own team and you’re going to go and make games I really like that

model it’s more of a friendly competition that we try to create rather

than something that’s super competitive and and people are just looking out for themselves because ultimately if like

one game team is successful then the whole studio becomes successful and that success spreads um it nobody is sitting

there thinking I a company within this or you know I am a studio within the studio it is just we are focusing on

this you guys are focusing on that because of the work we’re doing we’re likely going to help you guys find better better direction there’s a lot of

learnings we’ll get blah blah blah so so you end up with a lot of learnings and then all of a sudden if one team

achieves success it’s never in isolation never like no success is in isolation so

you find that the teams themselves will begin to really appreciate that and um ultimately they’re just kind of working

towards finding that as well but but for me it was about sustainable success like I’m I’m I’m really not interested in in

kind of like a one hit wonder where you where you have one major game and that’s all you ever do like for me it was how

do you build something where you stand a greater chance of achieving sustainable success and that comes from um more of

your philosophies and your approach rather than saying I have six months of Runway and let’s just throw everything

against the wall in and see what sticks and if it works great if it doesn’t I’ll start up another company and do the same

thing um again and again for me that’s just that’s just purely luck based you learn nothing from that um and if you

really just want to make money there are way better Industries where you can guarantee yourself to make a lot more

money um so yeah gaming is not for people who want to make a sort of quick Buck you really have to have the

resilience and the and I would say the sort of maturity to be able to understand what it what it

takes you’re also an adviser I see on your LinkedIn so I wanted to ask you

what is the role of a good adviser what’s the role of a good

advisor very good question again um I think it’s it sort of boils down to

providing people with perspective that they may not have because they’re so in

the weeds with what they’re working on um or it’s providing them with insight

into an area which they don’t have much knowledge on I think those are the kind of two areas where an advisor can

provide value um what you should never ever do as an advisor and the clue is in

the actual title is you advise you don’t tell you don’t because because you don’t

know all the ins and outs sort of what’s going on right you might only get a fraction of it um ultimately your kind

of responsibility is more as a said to question the team and their assumptions

and their philosophies and their motivations to see if they still have the conviction in their beliefs to be able to provide them with more insight

maybe around a certain area which they may not be aware of um and that and that might affect might affect their

decision- making but uh yeah I would say that’s that’s what ultimately for me makes a sort of good advisor rather than

someone coming in and saying oh I know what your problems are X Y and Z you need to fix this this and this because as I said like every company every

situation is unique um so what may work for us in Saudi Arabia might not work in

the middle of LA right it’s it’s uh really understanding that more than anything rather than believing there’s

one blueprint for success and and like that’s the way that you’ve got to do it because that’s the way it worked for me

in the past yeah that context is so crucial

speaking of context I’m assuming which maybe I shouldn’t be assuming but some of the advisement is on the minor region

as a whole yes yeah so I’m curious for people for

people listening like could you potentially just talk about mea the Mina region I guess the future of like what

is the future of the Mina region when it comes to games oh um I would say it is

the place to be um that would be my headline um why is it the the sort of

place to be well you see the amount of layoffs the amount of restructurings that that have been happening over the

past year and a half where in the world is the gaming industry growing there’s really only one place and that’s in

Saudi Arabia primarily but in the Middle East more s of widely um the resources

the ambition that the country has are unrivaled there is nowhere else in the world that has that level of resource

that level of ambition and has the systems in place to deliver against it you know when you talk about how quickly

things happen in Saudi Arabia when they want to build something it’s just it’s just done and

you know when you think back to maybe other places around the world um it takes years and years and years and then

something might be canceled right whereas here you’ve got an immense amount that is that is being built um

and so for me the whole culture the environment within you know places like

the UAE places in within Saudi Arabia is very entrepreneurial um you know one of the

one of the interesting facts that I learned when I first moved across which which again you know sort of breaks breaks a lot of stereotypes is um 60% of

all the entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia are women um that’s where they start from um 25 what is it I believe it’s

over 60% also of the population is under the age of 25 within Saudi Arabia so

you’ve got this massive youthful population you’ve got um very very ambitious leadership in terms of what

they want to achieve you’ve got um a lot lot of I would say um untapped

potential within the region as well and it is really for me a sort of place

where you can also get an immense amount of capital investment um that is not as

readily available any anywhere else anymore at least for the foreseeable future so all these sorts of things

really add a lot to the region which most people when they think of the Middle East think of conflict think of

Wars think of you know um various other kind of cultural stereotypes and sort of

whatever but once you just start scratching the surface you begin to see something in entirely differently and

it’s not just within gaming I mean you’ve seen you’ve seen it everybody’s seen it it is very hard to avoid all of

the sports events all of the teams all of the football transfers all of the massive projects and everything else

that is that is going on so um hopefully that will continue to help change the perception of people for the region

especially Saudi Arabia and kind of Mark it out as a place where people see it as a much more viable um place for them to

build game studios for them to come and work within the games industry and I’ve already seen that over over the past

three years um or so that I’ve been within this kind of a role and sort of

um advising and so on um I’ve seen a huge change I’ve seen a huge change from

people initially saying Saudi Arabia what the hell are you talking about to now oh Saudi Arabia I heard they they’re

doing this there’s that there’s that so it is just a sort of process of time now

I don’t think that anything else will will sort of stop it or sort of get in the way it’s just more continued

awareness education and you and you’ll start to see um people seeing Saudi Arabia as um an extremely viable place

for them to build a very very solid games company i’ second all of that I last

week I was in Dubai for the UAE um in the UAE for the Dubai game Summit I was

at games matters and at Esports festival and I can second that passion the amount of Entrepreneurship that is

there and it’s right for growth like there’s so much more to go and there’s

so much need for talent I feel which I you don’t feel that in the UK or the US

like when you see the layoffs like I feel like it’s going to take a lot of time to kind of rebuild that kind of

demand for talent again but in the minor region I just don’t see that it’s the opposite it’s like there there’s a need

so a th% second like the time is now for

the minia region in the sense of like if you were trying to make a bet like if you got in early just as a game Studio

to be established or if you’re a service provider or anything just there’s so much growth coming and I just I saw that

firsthand yeah yeah yeah it is it is a really really really fascinating place

um and something that you know I as I said over the past three years I’ve seen

so many Trends which which shows so much promise um and yeah I it’s it’s it’s

really where the excitement the energy is uh that kind of enthusiasm and and

you will have felt it when you were in sort of Dubai when you were as well just the environment you’re in makes a

massive difference to your energy level to your enthusiasm to your desire to kind of get stuff done um and there are

many many many factors that enable that as well that the respect Ive governments

are kind of promoting and pushing and especially within Saudi Arabia you know Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that I certainly know of and and

please fact check me on this but um they’re the only games company sorry they’re the only country in the world

that that actually has a national gaming strategy right they’ve like put aside $40 billion to invest just in gaming and

most countries don’t even have that much to invest in infrastructure so that for me just shows the immense level of

resource ambition that they have and um I think it would be a real Miss for

games companies and for games developers to not think about the region and especially Saudi Arabia as one of the

key gaming environments in the next 5 to 10 years I know there are countries that

have national game strategies but I guess it’s a relativity thing here like I know the UK has one but the sheer size

of that number you told me it it changes everything right yeah yeah yeah I mean I

mean you’ve seen it with the acquisition of scopely for example example uh you’ve seen it with loads of other Acquisitions

that have happened within the region you have a lot of VCS that are now in the gaming space that are setting up offices

uh or or sort of putting putting people here on the ground within the Middle East so I mean that alone kind of shows

you you know where the kind of direction is sort of headed as well perfect I’d like to close the

podcast so I live and breathe LinkedIn so I’m curious what is your relationship

with LinkedIn ah interesting I think just LinkedIn is like any other social platform um you

make of it whatever you want uh if you want to utilize it in in a sort of constructive positive way to help build

your network great uh it is a fantastic tool um if you want to use it for you

know I don’t know validation or for promoting your own achievements that’s that’s another way you can use it as well uh for me LinkedIn has always

served to be a really good place to be um it’s it’s a very concentrated Network

that you end up building up but I would say that that that you know if if there’s anything I’ve learned You’ got to manage your network um on there and

not necessarily accept every single you know um equivalent of a Facebook friend request but you’ve actually got to

really kind of build build a sort of solid Network there and I think in this day and age um when people are so spread

out the old Network way of just sort of physically seeing everybody and and and kind of meeting is really difficult to

do uh and this is a great way of being able to maintain networks in lots of different geographies lots of different

areas that you can utilize uh to your advantage and that you can also provide benefits to uh for them as well so for

me it has only ever been of positive um positive place to

be the connections you make in person LinkedIn I guess is the glue that allows you to keep those connections I found

that to be super powerful uh especially after doing the conference is the amount

of you can basically build a whole second tribe second family on LinkedIn I found just by staying in touch because

like you said it’s super concentrated yeah yeah we didn’t touch on this and I want to ask you as a final

question what advice do you have for young people especially in the games industry based on your career now you

have a difficult time what advice would you give to youngest people I would say that the games

industry is one of the few Industries in the world where you have just as much a

chance of success as somebody who’s been in the industry for 20 30 40 years

um you again coming back to those principle

or coming back to those insights nine out of 10 games fail um no one is more

than has more than a success rate of like 10% uh it is a very Level Playing

Field you could be an Indi game studio and come up with a huge hit like Among Us um or you could be a very

wellestablished studio and um come up with your own hits but they might take longer it’s it’s a it is much more of a

meritocratic um it is much more of a meritocracy than any other industry that I can think of

and the barriers to entry are extremely low um you can pick up Unity licenses

and real licenses for free if you’re like a just a solo operator or in a small team you can develop games you can

learn pretty much everything that you need to off of YouTube online courses um it is an it is an industry where you can

experiment very quickly and you can prototype very quickly you can understand what could work what what

sort of doesn’t and if you have something that shows promise there are people out there who are immediately looking to work with you regardless of

your size uh to be able to help you with that as well so I would say to anybody young that’s either thinking about

getting into the into the industry or is already getting in or or is already in it um you really have no excuse to not

be able to um um learn to be able to innovate to be

able to um invest in yourself um you don’t need

a ton of mentors you don’t need a ton of advisors the the best things um or

certainly the the things that you learn the most are the ones that you experience not the ones that you’re told

right like me telling you something is not going to be as helpful as you experienc it yourself so where you can learn and you can fail quickly that is a

fantastic environment for you to really um broaden your skill set and and and and become um somebody that that that

like gains gains a real foothold with foothold within it so yeah I I would say I would say that um you’ve got no

excuses to not um succeed within this industry and um you can’t say that for a

lot of other ones where you need established networks where you need 10 15 years of experience where you need

various other kind of things here this is this is open to anybody the barriers of Entry are very very low and um yeah

yeah so yeah I I would say that and i’ I’d second that like

competition is higher now as it’s ever been but to your point you want to show

Merit so it’s one thing to have five 10 years of experience but if you can’t

show it through the project you’ve worked on or something like a portfolio

I think that is everything so especially if you’re young think to your point having something to show so you can talk

about it is one of the biggest Parts yeah I mean experience in the games industry is just potential that’s all it

is um because it can’t guarantee you success all it is is simply saying that you have the potential to achieve more

because you’ve maybe achieved success in your past but there’s no guarantee of success so um you know when I first came

into the industry I didn’t necessarily have access to all the resources that maybe others do now um but I can’t say

that for for a lot of Industries I mean going back to the law somebody who’s who’s been practicing law for 10 15

years is at a significant Advantage compared to somebody who’s just coming in but in the gaming industry that kind

of difference in the Gap level is way less so um yeah it’s it’s it’s and and

the final piece I would say is trust your instinct um trust your instinct it’s it’s something that tends to

develop over time generally speaking but you can accelerate it by developing it

through experiences so the more that you do the more that you try the more that you fail the more you’ll begin to trust your instinct a lot more and you can

accelerate that within the games industry as well perfect we’ll leave it there yeser

thank you so much where can people find you what should people do should they apply to sand soft where what should

people do yeah um so so obviously LinkedIn since we’ve been talking about

that um definitely that would be one option if sort anybody’s interested in in kind of working with sansoft or or

maybe interested in sort of continuing this sort of a discussion with their own thoughts um and I love contrary thoughts

as well so so so please if you have them be I’d be more than happy to kind of discuss uh obviously sansoft um soft.com

so we are actively recruiting uh um a bunch of across a whole bunch of disciplines across a whole bunch of

different different kind of areas so uh soft.com careers would be sort of great place for you to have a look if you want

to look to see what other opportunities we have across publishing Investments and also our studio since we’re

Barcelona and in Riad as well um those would be the sort of two main areas that I would suggest people kind of move

forward with if they’re interested in sort of either getting in touch or also learning more about soft as

well amazing thank you so much for this conversation I really enjoyed it yeah likewise take care byebye