network is your net worth. Especially in game, eventually if you build out your network and you start having these

connections with people, you find yourself at that that crack in the door gets a little bit wider. Today, I’m

joined by a former Unity and Qualy exec who’s now leading Turilla as CEO, the mobile studio behind the Mad Skills

franchise, which has been downloaded over 200 million times. You don’t get better playing worse competition. You

only get better playing better people. Why is it that we should be happy with 36% day one retention in this region?

Why can’t we get to 40%. We talk about why most devs misunderstand publishing, what separates a good mobile game from a scalable one

and how to fix your live ops strategy before scaling and also how to kind of get ahead in the games industry. The

major difference between gaming and finances. Finance is cutthroat. It’s all about you and the eye. Whereas gaming is

all about the Wii, that we’re in this together. Business as well as life is about trusting people. You need to build

out those relationships and those trusts because if you want someone to follow you, you need to lead by example. You

need to show that you will do what you say you would do. From someone who’s advised studios, invested in top crushing games, and now

leads one of mobile’s most iconic racing franchises, this episode’s guest and friend, CEO of Torilla, John Wright.

Hi, John. Hey, Harry. How’s things? Things are very well. Very sad I didn’t actually get to see you at develop. Why

didn’t you go develop this year? Uh I actually was meant to come for one day but it was my wife’s birthday on the

10th. So family firsted I uh I decided to Yeah. I was going to come on the

Wednesday but then I had another engagement but then it was my wife’s birthday and I just decided to Yeah. Family first on this this time.

There’s always another develop and your wife is definitely never going to forget that if you went to develop 100% agree.

Okay. Sweet. So yeah, thank you for joining. I’m really tired for today’s chat. I want to quickly start some context for

people. I’ve known John very long time. Um kind of like on and off and if I

remember like the way we met was a long time ago. I think we did a very tiny conversation podcast back when I was a

recruiter and then we’ve kind of just stayed in touch over the time and like more recently I think I we did an

introduction and you’ve invested in one of the companies I did an introduction with. Then you’ve helped me as well, introduced me to a lot of people over

the years and it’s been kind of like we’re helping each other, but it’s always like from the sidelines and then

we follow each other on LinkedIn. It’s like a very weird relationship, but I like it. It’s very unique. No, bro. We’re just connected. This is

like we’re just like, you know, like we’re connected, you know, I look at you as industry friend. We hang out. We we

talk life. we talk, you know, other stuff, but ultimately we’ve, you know, we’re both in the same industry and

we’re all about, you know, helping people, connecting people, growing the space, and uh you do that, I do that,

and then sometimes together we do that. So, that’s the way I look at it. Yeah. Lovely. All righty. So, for

everyone at home, we’re going to get into three parts today. So, we’re going to start on leadership and team building

and then move on to more of the nitty-gritty of like mobile publishing and then game economics and scaling. So

I want to start with a little story John. So you and my dad actually share a

crazy similar origin story. So my dad because his grandfather wanted him to do

well paid him to become an accountant. So he trained him became a university and he did something slightly different

to you but you probably resonate. On his last month of his university degree he was getting top grades but he dropped

out cuz he was like if I get this degree I’ll be cursed to do accounting. and he’s just like, I can’t do that. And

then what he ended up doing is he started like fish and chip shops and became more of a carpenter, which is a lot more what he wanted to do, but like

there’s a definitely a different timeline for him. So I’d love to hear like you wrote in an article once that

you had an identity crash at 25. Like love to hear like now you’re the CEO of a gaming studio, but at 25 that was

probably not on the card. So yeah, could you tell me about what happened then? Yeah, dude. like uh I mean starting off

very simply you know I come from a very sort of modest background. I grew up on a council estate in East London. And I

think from a society perspective, um the culture what I come from is all about the future generations progressing

and becoming something more. And and my parents, you know, very instilled in me in a very young age that they didn’t

want me to be a builder like my dad or they my mom was a nurse and they were

like, “Okay, you need to to think about education.” Like my my dad dropped out of school at 14. My mom dropped out of

school at 15. Both for the most honorable reasons, which was my dad had three sisters and you know that we

needed money on the table post World War II. So he went to work and put money on the table to support his family. My mom,

her father had cancer, so she dropped out of school to become a living carer. Right? So they did the most honorable

thing I know, but that did not set them up for for to be to have money, right?

And and look we had an amaz like you know my parents were very loving and you know were married for a long time till

my dad passed away but ultimately they were always in like instilling into me and my brother like you need to to do

something right you need to have a profession you need to become like or have a trade or do something with your

life and so I remember being like 14 you know speaking to high school guidance

counselor and not having a clue what I wanted to do right and you at that age

you’re going into like preparing for your GCES. And at the time when I went to school in the UK, you left school at

16 and you had to make a conscious choice to go to college. It wasn’t like now where you you work up to 18 uh study

up to 18. So my high school guidance came and looked at my grades and said, “You’re really good at maths and

statistics. Like you should be an accountant.” And then that was the start of an 11-year journey of me like

spending 11 years of my life studying, working, dedicating myself to something

that I had no passion in or did not enjoy in the slightest just because I

was trying to to do the social cues of I want to progress, you know, I want my

family to have an easier life than I did growing up. You know, I didn’t go abroad until I was 14. like all of the holidays

we had, we didn’t have a car. We didn’t have disposable income to go to restaurants. And my family were like,

we, you know, we want you to do better. You want you want to give you opportunities, experiences, and so that

was where it all came from, dude. Um, and and look, they did, that’s the again, they wanted the best for me and I love them for it, but it was the wrong

thing. I was kind of like like funneled and pressured into something that I had no interest in. Um, and like you said,

at 24, 25, I I was already married. I got married at 23 to my wife. So, we’ve been married 15 years this year. And my

wife uh my wife sat me down and I said, “John, like every Sunday you’re filled with dread, but I was getting anxious,

Harry. I’ve never been an anxious person, you know, and but I would I was working at WPP. I was working in in one

of the biggest companies in Europe, right? Uh conglomerate of 150 companies, 150,000 people. And I was the youngest

sort of management accountant in the entirety of the finance division. There was like 40 50 other people. None of

them came from my background. None of them spoke like me, you know, had the same experiences as me. And I just felt

out of sorts every time I go there. And then what I started to do, and this is so bad thinking about it, but I started

to change the way I spoke, my mannerisms, the way I acted. It was like I was living um living a lie. I was

pretending to be something I wasn’t because I wanted to fit in. And and then

I realized again I had this moment with my wife when my wife was like, “You need to think about this. You need to change.” And that was the best decision

of my life. I decided, you know what? Like I looked at the things I I was passionate about. I’ve I’ve always loved

sports and I played rugby at a good standard and that was always my like personal thing, my weekends of playing

and training during the week and stuff. And then I had my professional thing which was the accountancy stuff. But

then the other sort of constant in my life is I’ve been a hardcore gamer since I was five years of age. So which is

nearly 35 years now. And so I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to go for it. I’m going

to I’m going to will it.” And literally it took me probably over a year, probably nearly two years. And equally,

I had to do a side step from finance into performance marketing in e-commerce. And I was working with Ralph Lauren and Harrods before I got my

opportunity to go to Greenmat. And uh but all of that work and all of that effort paid off because I every day love

what I do now. I feel like this is my purpose and it’s my passion. Um so yeah,

dude, that’s that’s that’s the story really. It’s super cool and it’s one where at least in the games industry, it

moves so fast, but like if you were looking back at your career now, I feel like you’re the CEO of Turillo, right?

You’ve got hundreds of millions of downloads. You’re big team. I can just imagine like that as a snapshot. You

just show it to the 23 year old accountant. It’s like they’ll be like what interdimensional channel is this on

like how this happened. But then when you look back and it’s like oh this is it makes sense retrospectively but I can

definitely see like when you started I’m going to will into gaming like how can you predict like that’s possible?

For sure man. and and and look the the the best advice I can give people who want to do the same thing and and a lot

of people reach out to me about this and say about joining the games industry.

Yeah. Like how do I break into games and and actually I just I met someone at a

conference a couple of months ago and they were in cyber security and and they were like John look I don’t I’m 25. I’ve

been in cyber I got out of university two years ago. I got into cyber security because I was very good at engineering

and data, all this other stuff. But he’s like, I have no interest, no passion. It’s just I want to get into games. And

you know, we had a 30 minute exchange at a conference. I gave him some advice and I talked about transferable skills and

and you know, how do you build out your network? How do you actually establish connections? Because you’re more much

more likely to get an in through someone you know and who someone who can vouch for you than if you’re going in cold,

right? And so I gave him some advice and then two weeks ago he pinged me. Hey John, like do you remember we had this

conversation four months ago? I’ve just I’ve just closed my first job in gaming and it was from a connection that I

established. So I I introduced him to a company and he connected with one of my

friends who used to work me in a previous business. I I basically gave my friend some context and now yeah he’s

he’s starting his uh his new venture in games on Saturday. And it was all because he he listened. He was like,

“Okay, transferable skills, help build that network.” Like, network is your net worth, especially in gaming. And uh, you

know, working on those things. Like I said, if you’re not in gaming right now, there’s nothing stopping you going to

game jams. There’s nothing stopping you going to events like your one, Terry. There’s nothing stopping you going to

bigger ones like Gamescom. There’s nothing stopping you, you know, being part of communities and Discords and and

gamer groups, right? And eventually if you build out your network and you start having these, you know, connections with

people, eventually you find yourself that that that crack in the door gets a little bit wider, you know,

100%. My role as a recruiter was very much just like you’re already good.

You’re just not telling your story very well. And what you just said there is like you probably gave the context that

context is like he’s a go at all of these things in cyber security which is why I think he will be able to solve these problems but if you’re trying to

break into an industry you might not know what problems they’re willing to pay for right now. So like you need like I my biggest advice is very similar to

yours is like find someone cuz they do exist who’s willing to give you 15 20 minutes and then ask them like hey what

are you right now needing or your friends needing and then you position yourself as the person that solves that

problem. And one more asterisk here and I’ll be curious to hear your opinion on this. I feel like like when I started my

agency last year so I have a marketing agency and right now we’re go for CEOs and that is the main work. When I first

started, like the first month, I pretty much just coached people and the first two clients I said I’ll do it in

exchange for testimonial and feedback. So, I didn’t ask for money. But then I took that work I did, which is now I’ve

coached someone big in games and they got a real result. And then when I started the conversation, it’s like when

you’re pitching for money at a VC and you’ve said, “Oh, by the way, we’ve already got this person already committed.” Even if it’s a tiny amount,

it’s just like I can imagine the decision-m process becomes a lot easier because it’s like, oh, they someone else vetted it. So, in your case, John Wright

gave his unofficial stamp of approval. And I feel like you can get that. It might take a bit of quote unquote free

work in the first couple months, but once you have that compared to someone who doesn’t have it, it’s like it’s like night and day.

Yeah, man. Look, I think building out that credibility, you know, and and industry credibility is really

important. And uh and like you said, people in general in gaming like the the

major difference between gaming and finance is finance is cut throat. People are throwing each other under the bus,

you know, like it’s all about you and the eye. Whereas gaming is all about the Wii, you know, it’s about we’re in this

together, you know, there was a time, you know, 20, 30 years ago where gaming was like we’re outcasts, you know, like

we’re the we’re not the norm, you know, and that was that I think that built a culture of collectiveness, right?

because you wanted to be with people who shared similar things to you which maybe again weren’t cool at the time. Now,

gaming is cool the same way that anime is cool, but you know, these things weren’t at some point. And it took some

time for people to understand that and break through that. But, um, but yeah, I think your advice is right. I’ve had a

couple of people over the years who have just reached out to me randomly and asked for advice. And as long as, you know, I’ve got the time and and stuff

like that, I’ll always give it, right? And some of the the best relationships

I’ve developed over the last couple of years are from people that randomly messaged me on LinkedIn, asked for a

call. I said, “You know what? Why not?” Had a chat with them. I I helped, you

know, mentor them in their career a little bit, give them some advice, and then, you know, a year later, two years

later, they’re saying to me, “Hey, John, um, I’ve started a company. Would you be

an adviser? Would you invest? Would you do this? Would you do that?” and and all of that pay and my whole attitude is

always pay forward, right? Like if I help you, just help someone else. I don’t care about financial gain, you

know? I I’m sorted in that area. But if you can do this sort of stuff, dude, I think collectively it helps the industry

grow, which inadvertently helps me because I’ve dedicated my life to this space. What I want more than anything

is, you know, positive growth in the industry, solid kagar, you know, like revenue going up year after year, more

people gaming because this is what I want to, this is my passion, what I’ve dedicated myself to. But but again, yeah, what don’t be afraid to contact

people and be open and even vent or something like that, just go over and say hi. Like, what’s the worst that can

happen? You know, too many people put too much pressure on themselves and try and do this stuff alone, which is what I

did. That’s why it took me two years to get into gaming because I had to literally build out a you know my my

experience in e-commerce to eventually qualify for a job. Whereas if I would

have built out my network and done all this stuff that we’ve just discussed, I would have been able to leaprog into

gaming much sooner. I learned the hard way and I didn’t have a mentor or someone who could direct me and help. If

you can just ask for help and and LinkedIn’s a great place for that and you get in a connection with someone, it

will honestly expedite your process into doing this. Right. It took two years for

me. It took 4 months for the guy I mentioned who I met at an event. Right.

Yeah. 100%. I think also that point you made like what’s the worst that could happen that is the case on LinkedIn and

at conferences like conferences it’s kind of I have a weird take on conferences like

I feel like some people because they’ve been in the industry so long it’s almost like a conference for them is like a vacation and they treat it like one and

it feels like high school everyone’s there we’re here for the same reason and it’s a weird vibe where everyone can be

a friend with anyone because there’s already a default connection that you have and like saying hello to someone

like I’ve seen people go up to titans of the industry and say hey do you have any

advice on me getting a job and they sit there and give them like 20 30 minutes of advice not everyone’s going to do that but definitely you can probably get

that and like you said anyone can go to gamescom like for example develop Brighton I think it cost 100 quid to go

but if you actually ask them and you’re a job seeker pretty much get a free ticket and I think a lot of conferences are able to do something like that so

yeah just having that conversation with someone in the industry rather than be someone who’s on the outside trying to join

massive game changer. And the some LinkedIn math for people, if you send 100 connections to someone, if your

connection’s horrible, you probably still get five or 10 accepts and maybe one person is willing to give you 15 minutes. Or if they don’t have time,

like, hey, do you mind replying with a voice note, what do you think I should focus on? You you you take what you can

get and then it can grow. You might get a John right and hit the jackpot. They’re willing to give you some time, but you also might get something that

will basically change your two-year road map to like two months cuz oh, actually

you don’t need to do any of that that you were planning to do. Exactly. Like don’t ask, don’t get, Harry. Here we are. Yeah. Sweet. All righty.

So, John, CEO, big business. I would like to get into like what does the day-to-day feel like? Because this is

kind of unique at least for me on the pod where you’ve come in as a CEO of a

business which has already been running. It’s got a bit of a legacy. You have a team to run. You’re new to everyone there. You haven’t kind of been promoted

to CEO. So, I’d love to just for people at home, like what does your day-to-day actually look like right now?

Yeah. So, so like you said, Harry, Turborilla is a very long-standing business. You know, Tobias, who’s the

founder, started it, you know, out of university 17 years ago. It it predates,

you know, the traditional mobile, which is what where it’s famous for. And uh

ultimately you know I was brought in because uh you know there was some change in the business and and the

previous CEO wanted to move on. And so we decided that you know through through

connections and stuff like that Tobias and and one of the investors you know connected me and we decided to have a

conversation about like what would it look like? what would turbul look like under the leadership of John Wright? And

you know to begin with it’s it’s very different to a lot of the other positions I’ve had where you know at

Luna I built out the entirety of the team right like I was the founding team

member you know VP operations I hired everyone individually I picked people

that I wanted for those positions and it’s very different different between starting your own company and team

versus inheriting someone else. So you have to be much more empathetic and

understanding of the company when you are not creating it yourself right like

you are inheriting it and there is a massive psychological difference in how you manage the team how you establish

yourself but the the main point is you need to come on pretty quickly and prove

you are someone that can be trusted. You say what you mean and your word is your

bond basically like uh you come on and you have to you know reinvigorate reval

validate motivate and it’s about again coming on and establishing yourself very

quickly as someone who can be trusted and stuff like that because this is the thing like business

uh as well as life is about trusting people right like you need to build out those relationships and those trusts

because if you want someone to follow you. You need to lead by example. You

need to show that you will do what you say you will do, right? And uh and that

was really the first couple of weeks for for me was about, you know, addressing the troops, you know, like in inheriting

a company of 25 people and and look, I’ve managed much more people in the past. I was managing 200 people at

Quali. I was managing, you know, 40 at Luna. So it wasn’t a case of um

establishing uh uh seniority because I already had that with with previous roles and I knew what I had to call but

CEO also is a very different fish compared to VPs or or C’s like which are

not CEO like you are the top of the pyramid. Everything you say has more weight and and onus behind it, right?

The team really read into it. And sometimes this can be very good and sometimes this can be bad because you

might say the wrong thing or you might be interpreted in the wrong way and because you are the CEO it it does get

more behind it. Um but yeah, I would say first and foremost it was about

establishing connection and and trust. It was about imp you know ensuring that the team were motivated but also giving

direction and understanding that you know this is the outcome we are desiring right we want to not only make this the

best company in the action sports arena and the massfields franchise has been downloaded over 200 million times you

know our monthly active users is is know nearly 10 million and you know for the genre it’s it’s done a lot right it is

one of the most established franchises there But how do you then take something that has kind of hit this kind of

ceiling? How do you take it to the next stage? And that is really what my focus is going to be for the next 12 months

with the team is okay, we’ve done a great job up to now, but how do we, you know, dial it up to the next level? You

know, how do we maximize what we have, you know, and then the current catalog, how do we approach new games? like are

we going to add an additional like we’ve already got Mad Skills 123 the logical thing would be to add another you know

another issue to the to the franchise which at some point we definitely will sneak peek um and uh and yeah dude it’s

it’s about that right it’s about making sure that everyone’s on the same page that you are leading by example you are

doing what you say people can get behind you they believe in you because once you’ve got all of that trust and

motivation then you know you can um you know you can set the standards you can

set the expectations and the outcomes that you want as a CEO and you can trust in the people to deliver them and

collectively when you’re doing that across every every vertical of the company finance legal HR um UA

monetization production development like you need all of those individual pieces

working to the top level because if one of them is slightly lower it could drag down the other so you need to make sure

that every part of that machine all of those different cogs in the machine are working to the top level and and being a

CEO is about ensuring that happening. I’m CEO of NY little agency now and I

wanted to touch on the thing you said like they got to a certain point but

by definition you have now changed the business and they now need to change

their actions right and change is hard which is what I’m realizing so I wanted to use my current analogy and then ask

you a question on change here so I am hiring writers now and it’s been one

very very hard because I either have the option of telling a writer to change the

way they do things and also change what the definition of good or bad is and it

feels personal or train someone from scratch and I’ve realized

unless I’ve had someone do exactly what the way we do it which is very few I found like this middle thing is just so

hard to get someone to change it just so much energy and I’m feeling like well if

the kind of north star of your business has changed, but these people, they probably been there. Some maybe probably

been there for like 5, 10, maybe more years. They now need to Yeah. So now they need to change what they’re doing.

So maybe it’s a very big question with very few words. Like how do you manage change as the CEO in your business? Like

how do you navigate getting people to kind of change their behaviors while keeping kind of I guess satisfaction

high and ownership high? Like I found that very hard. Yeah, look, I I think it’s a great question and I feel like

instilling a culture of accountability isn’t extremely important. So, how do you do that?

Well, I think you just have to be very honest with people. I think you have to set expectations and again, it’s about

really aligning on what the short-term, mid-term, long-term goals are, right? So, one of the first things I did after

coming on board was, you know, I put together like a 35 slide presentation about like the history of the company,

where we’ve got to, and what like the expectations of where we’re going to go to next. Because like I said, the

business has done well. It’s it’s pretty much number one in its category, but you know, it’s a niche category. It doesn’t

mean that you should be happy with hitting a glass ceiling in something where you can transcend, right? So why

is it that we are happy with being the best in the action sports area? Like why

are we not uh happy or why don’t wouldn’t we be happier to be the best in casual bets right which is a much bigger

term and stuff like that. So it’s about refraraming what like you said good what

good is you know Harry and and what the expectations are and making people

believe truly believe that if they follow you know this plan and we do all

of this stuff together that eventually we can transcend where we were into something bigger and better. And I want

our brand to be again not just the number one in its own vertical but I want it to be much bigger than that. I

want it to be household name like king, right? Like yeah, look, a couple hundred million installs is fantastic, right?

That’s that’s amazing. Like, yeah, nearly 10 million 10 million people every month play our games. That’s

crazy. If you would think about putting 10 million people, you know, in a place and lining them up, it would be more

than the eye could see, right? That’s incredible. But you know what’s better than 10 million? 20 million, 50 million,

100 million, you know, like it’s like, okay, now what? Yeah, exactly. But you should I said I I

think it was it was really about like I said and again the other thing I did once coming aboard I sat down with every

single person in the company and I said what’s the company do well? What does the company not do too well? What are

the things that you would um want to change if you could? And I started to like literally pinpoint the same themes

from certain teams and certain people. Can I ask you what did what was surprising there cuz I’m curious. I bet

you came in with some expectations, but then someone probably said something you didn’t expect. Do you know what, man? It was very interesting because I think um the

culture of the business previously was not um goal driven. It was very much

like, okay, we’re going to build the most incredible game we can and you know, we’re going to launch that and

we’ll see what happens and we hope it’s going to be bigger than the Is it more input driven then? Like, let’s build the best game rather than

let’s get X result from said game. Exactly. It was like I said the whole

it’s a it’s a very creative culture but the the culture of the business lacks

some of the structure that you would have from maybe more a corporate business or a bigger business or a

public business. Right? So everyone that I spoke to the underlying theme was they

felt like directionally they didn’t know where the business was going long term. They didn’t feel like a huge amount of

accountability on their on their their day-to-day actions. like they knew they were doing stuff and why, but what was

the impact of that over a month or two months or 3 months? And so we we reestablished those frameworks. We gave

people more clarity over what their ownership was, what their accountability was. We gave everyone new goals and we

made them very again very sort of um quantifiable goals. So people knew okay

am I doing well or not? And then we we started to iterate and I feel like we that coupled with the increase in

motivation talking about the big picture and you know transcending where we were and not just being happy you know being

not mediocre but you know being in in a place of comfortability right like you

only grow through through you know doing things. Yeah. Discomfort. Exactly.

Right. There’s a what is it? David Gogggins quote, you know, be be uncommon amongst uncommon people, but also like

be comfortable in the in in uncomfortable environments, right?

Yeah. It’s like how muscles grow. And I think just to put this point cuz I I found it really cool like I think Andrew

Hume did an interview with David Gogggins and he found that when the brain is doing something, it knows it’s

uncomfortable but then does it and gets through it. like a part of the brain actually grows bigger and stays bigger

and like becomes objectively now you have more ability as a human. I can imagine that’s the same in a business. If you just never do something that’s

uncomfortable, then you would by definition plateau and then because everyone else is probably doing

uncomfortable things, you won’t be progressing as fast as everyone else. So like you need to have discomfort.

Yeah. And and look, dude, you know, my my father used to tell me uh the saying, right? And it was always to do with like

when I was playing rugby as a as a kid and a team and then as an adult, but you don’t get better playing worse

competition, right? You only get better playing, you know, better people. And I

think for me that’s it’s the simple case is we were comparing ourselves to other people in our very small niche and not

comparing oursel and our metrics and and the levels that we were compared to other games that were much more

successful in in the casual area. When you reframe that and zoom out and and change the scope a little bit, you

start to to show people actually there is more, right? Why why is it that we

should be happy with 36% day one retention in this region? Why can’t we get to 40%. These other games are doing

that. So, it’s it’s doable, right? We’re not saying we’re going to get to 80% day one, which is completely undoable.

There’s lots of games at that that next stage. And what can we learn from those other games? How can we evolve and adapt

as a business, become smarter, more efficient, and so now I’m challenging the guys to progress and push forward.

And we’re doing that by quantifying the structure, the goals, all of that stuff. And and like I said, I think um it was

really positively received, you know, like that people felt like, okay, I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m doing it.

I know what the expectations are. I know what the outcomes are. And it just gives people, you know, that bit more

accountability and understanding as to what they’re doing. Yeah. Sweet. Um one more point on this

if that’s all right. The question I have is I used to I had this experience when I

was at a recruitment agency where they did monthly business reviews. That’s what they called them. But at the start

when you joined the company you did something called life mapping. all right what do you actually want in a year’s

time five years time and then we put that down as a personal whether it’s like number of money making type of

lifestyle whatever house and then we look at okay what needs to happen at

this company for you to reach these goals and also personally and then we try to align these two and I found that

objectively speaking in gaming alignment is just so out of whack after a company gets big it gets so weird I speak to

people over the year of last couple is and they joined this big company and now their incentive is well I need to get a

better job title so I need to manage more people. I’m like wait a minute what does the business actually want? Well

probably more profit and more revenue but then not doing that because that doesn’t align with what their goals are.

Well a lot of people say well I need to have this on the CV to be able to level up my position and it’s just like this

alignment is like all over the place and I’m trying to do that quote unquote right from the start. So, I’m trying to

hire a rider, but like if I hire a rider and they become exceptional, there’s nothing stopping them becoming another

job. So, I’m like, “Okay, they need to have a next level.” And in my head, I’m all right. So, I need to make a role that they could go into, oh, this person

likes to go conferences. All right. So, that could be another thing that they level up eventually. And I’m wondering

how do you see how do you approach the problem of like aligning the person with

the business? Is that part of the monthly oneto ones? Is that the CEO’s job? Is that someone else’s job? because I find that one of the hardest things to

do. Yeah. I think I think ultimately this is how you address the long-term strategy and direction of the business and

ensuring that everyone is buying into like that big outcome that we want to do. And again, that could be XY Z

things, you know, it could be transcending your current station. It could be, you know, again becoming a

bigger name in in this other other genres. It could be a certain amount of revenue. It could be launching a new

game. All of these things. You need to have one big thing that everyone can get

behind, right? So setting that goal is is important. But do you have that goal or is that is that

I mean we we have that goal. We have like in general, you know, we’ve reset the expectations on what does good look

like in the current catalog of games and we have like a five-point plan. It’s like re reorganized the economics and

the balancing of the games. So that in turn will allow us to improve the monetization which increasing the LTV is

very important that will allow us to do higher volumes of user acquisition because it will right because the LTV

versus CAC calculation unit economics of games is improved and once we’ve scaled

UA that improves our DAO and our DAO means that you know more people are playing our games more people are

enjoying it but ultimately also means that DAO times LTV equals total profit

so or total revenue and then subsequent profit after user acquisition costs. So that that’s the the basic firepoint plan

for our back catalog. But equally what that will allow us to do is if we can like maximize what we already have, then

we can put some of that money to one side and then start talking about new projects. And that’s what everyone

really wants to do in games, right? Like everyone in our company and team wants to work on mad skills for. But before we

get to that point, we need to maximize what we’ve got to squeeze the lemon. And then once we’ve done that, we know we

can wholeheartedly move on knowing that the back catalog is very stable and it’s generating a good amount of money. And

that stability gives us the ability to be more creative and and build new things without worrying if we’re going

to overspend and, you know, go from being profitable to being unprofitable and from financial health and all of

that stuff. So the short-term goal doing that fivepoint plan is extremely important because it will unlock the

ability to do bigger more creative things which is what everyone wants to do. Nice. So I like that you’ve tied

everyone’s goal which is work on MadMax. Sorry Mad Mad Skills Motocross 4. So Mad

Skills motocross 4 is the big goal, but you linked making the one, two, three,

make more money because that will give us resources to do the everything that is said. But so you’ve not said, hey, to

make more money in the business, let’s do this first. You’ve actually connected it to well to actually do this, we need

the resources. So I like that the you you made it so the thing that might be

less desirable is actually desirable because it gets us to the desirable state later. Yeah, exactly. And so

everyone knows now like yeah look if we work hard on maximizing what we have then we could be more adventurous later

with more confidence that the businesses are in a good position and equally that will allow us to grow and hiring more

people and that gives opportunity to individuals to step up. Yeah. Yeah. Because without that it’s

not possible. So like it’s almost like do you want what you say you want? Yes.

Then this needs to happen and then here’s the evidence. It’s not like a, hey, we’re doing this now, otherwise see

you later. We’ll find someone else that does. It’s much more like you’re saying it without saying it. It’s like, well,

if you want what you want, like we need to do this. Exactly, dude. Look, if if again, if we want to grow and so people But look,

some some people um don’t see fulfillment through going to a to a

manager role, Harry. Right. Not everyone wants to be, you know, a manager. like one of my good friends, you know, who’s

ex Luna. I remember when we got um after we got acquired, you know, he was a director in in Iron Source, sorry,

director in Unity. And and Unity were like, hey, like for you to step up to the next level, you need to manage 20

people. And he was like, but I don’t want to manage 20 people. I just want to do what I’m doing. Like I want to focus

on product. Like why is it that you know industry and society says that for me to

progress in my career it means that I have to manage people rather than doing a really good job and a really smart job

very well. And there is something in that right like it shouldn’t be that way in to to many respects because a lot of

the time what you’re then doing is taking maybe the smartest person in the room and then getting them to spend all

of their time supporting other people, right? rather than actually tackling the problem that only they can deal with.

It’s very silly to me like I am very lucky like most of my jobs were effectively sales jobs and the numbers

are public so I can it’s almost like a leaderboard like oh that person’s bringing that much business he’s also

bringing in the business and delivering for it and he’s like I’ve got a clear profit and loss we know how much they’re bringing the company happy days and I’m

trying to bring that to every single row in my company even the person who’s doing my podcast I’ve told him like look

if the podcast hits 3,000 subscribers and we get a th000 views per podcast we

can then sponsor the podcast for effectively 10 grand a month which gives me a lot more money to pay you and then

you can get a rev shirt. So this is historically a role where I could say oh

you need to manage the editors and then you get a promotion. I was like how boring is that? So I’m trying to make and it’s hard because I need to do math

basically and it’s like okay how do we make every role aligned with if you do better for the business you get more

compensation. So, I’m going the very crude way maybe of just doing like a rev share and bonus structure for every

single role. Maybe this will bite me in the ass, but I feel like what you said is I saw that a lot where it’s like the

only way to get a promotion objectively speaking, you just get a higher salary and more bonuses if you manage more

people and it’s just title based. I’m like, well, just like you said, you just weird alignment issues. Like, why don’t we just pay someone if they’re doing 10x

the work, maybe don’t pay them 10 times more, but definitely pay them a little more, call it principal or what have you. I don’t know.

Yeah, but look at the end of the day if you want someone doing the best job possible, you know, there’s uh I have

this uh thing which called the happiness index. It’s like a triangle, right? And it’s essentially, you know, what are the

things that make people happy in in their life and one of them is like or in

their job. One of them is the amount of money they earn, right? That’s one corner of the triangle. The second one

is the work they do. Do they like it or not? And the third part is the people they work with, right? And if like this

happiness index triangle, if you need to make sure, right, that at least two of

those things are good or positive because if two of them are bad, the

triangle flips over and that’s when you get attrition, right? Yeah. They’re already thinking of the next steps and all that jazz.

Exactly. But if you can do this three-point triangle and you can make sure that people are well compensated

that they’ve got they’re passionate about what they do and the work is interesting and fun and they work with a

good team of people and and look sometimes you have to be ruthless and you have to rip you know the the bad

route out right but that’s the nature of leadership so so like I said if you can

do that if you can balance that those three things normally most people are generally happy to to work for a company

continue to work hard uh and and like I said, you need people motivated and happy if you want to get the best out of

them, right? And overall, that’s the best thing for the business. Yeah. And for them as well. Perfect. I

want to move more tactically now into like the mobile publishing story. So, you name dropped Luma and Iron Source

and I was doing some checking and like please correct me if I’m wrong, but you

managed nearly $2 billion in use acquisition at those companies. Yep. That’s a big number.

Yeah. I think a year. A a year. Okay. So that’s probably more than a lot of people will see in life.

Are you from my understanding from a UA perspective you’re deciding where they put their money? Is that also I also

read that you did a one of the first playable ad creatives that like did well. Is that right? Yeah. Very true. Yeah. all of this. This

is how I got my opportunity at Luna because I was uh like Iron Source probably in what year would it have been

like 2017 2018. You know, the playable ad wasn’t uh an an idea yet. It wasn’t

an ad unit. Like the everything was either static banners or it was videos.

There wasn’t any way to interact with the playable. And then you know someone had a really good idea about you know uh

back in the day you would always get like a demo disc right for like PlayStation magazine new and and it was

that it was that concept reapplied Harry to a north to a new environment. And it was okay. If I give someone a demo of

the game and give them the ability to play it for a certain small window of time, will they have a li higher

likelihood of downloading that game and whatever else? And the hypothesis ended up being proven true. And whilst Iron

were not the first company to come up with this idea, there was one or two people before that. They were one of the

first companies that doubled down on it and found success. And I remember look there was a case

with uh you know machine zone which now was is no longer you know part of us. It was acquired by apploving and stuff like

that but you know I think the year was probably like 2018 2019 and we spent

hundreds of thousands of dollars and did hundreds of variations of playable ads um and and they failed. Like it took

like probably like 200 variations but once we got to 200 variations that ad was making like hundreds of thousands a

day, right? So the investment was well worth it up to that point. But um but yeah, so I was part of that initial team

doing that sort of stuff. And then that that opened the door for Luna Labs, which was the first sort of big

successful playable uh ad development company or technology. Right before that, everyone was coding in HTML 5 um

or you know and and what we did is we built a technology that allowed you to take what you already had in Unity,

convert the code into, you know, a different code base that allows you to run these these as ads. And uh yeah,

look, we ended up selling that for for a huge amount of money to Iron Source and then Iron Source was acquired by Unity

and the rest is history. But all of it started from that one little playable ad

that we did in 2017 2018. Man, so what’s happened over the last eight years? Uh um tell me how much I

can dig here. But like if someone’s listening to this podcast, like I need to know the secrets of playable ads, like how do they work, how do they work?

Like you mentioned in one of your articles, I think it was more dictim article that you wouldn’t call yourself

a veteran or an expert, but you’re always learning. I’m wondering like right now like what’s the scene like

when it comes to user acquisition? Is there a big mistake you seeing people make? I think look like that comment I think

is true. I think anyone who calls themsself a guru or you know expert or

something like that. I’m I’m not too sure I I believe that. I think that with our industry is ever evolving, ever

changing. Like if you take your finger off the pulse for a year or two years,

things move along so quickly and quickly you can become know you were an expert but now you’re not because you didn’t

keep up with it. And for me I read and research every day, right? Every day.

Every day. Every day. Every day. You’re not you’re not tapping. That’s true. So how how does it actually look like? Is that um articles? Is that

Yeah. Yeah. So, so it’s it’s pretty much it’s like, you know, there’s a few

I can’t I’ve got some industry books by the side of me, but I don’t want to bother like getting them all out, but like I read industry books. I spend a

lot of time reading very well put together LinkedIn posts from smart people that I follow. There’s obviously

blogs that I do. And then there’s websites, you know, like Games Forum, Pocket Gamer, all of these things. and

and every day I’m just trying to learn a little bit more, right? Like if you learn something new every day,

you you’re on to something good in life, right? And I think you should always remain diligent and remained a student.

I’ve always said that. Um but yeah, like I said, obviously from a UA perspective, we’ve we’ve gone through an interesting

time, Harry, over the last couple of years. It’s you know 2021 we saw the

highest sort of levels of user acquisition because the hyper casual movement right and it was we people were

acquiring tens or hundreds of millions of users very very cheaply you know a CPI could be 30 cents 40 cents um and

the idea very simply was to acquire someone very cheaply and then very

quickly make that money back make a make a profit um but look you know a profit

on 30 cents is only 40 cents, right? And that’s 10 cents per user. But when you’re talking about 10 cents per user

over hundreds of millions, it starts to mount up, right? And the industry was

very focused on acquiring as many people as possible cheaply as possible. Um

there’s a metric called IPM installs per thousand impressions and it’s like you know maximizing IPM

was was the was the goal of um many people. It was like okay on average you

know before this sort of um sort of step happened in the indry like getting a 10

IPM was outstanding and by the end so that’s $10 per thousand ad impressions. No. So 10 people downloaded

the game from a thousand impressions, right? Okay. So that’s like a 10. What is that?

10%. No, that’s a 1% conversion rate, right? Yeah. So what you wanted is 1% conversion from your impressions and

then it was like people were getting 20, 30, and 40, and some people got to like 50, right? And if you’re talking, just

to confirm, isn’t that a bit crazy? So 50% of people who saw an ad in five, sorry. Yeah, but still it’s like five

times more than usual. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and and dude, if you think about it, like if we look at some of the

basic calculations, so you’ve got CPI, which is cost per install, times IPM,

which is again installs per thousand impressions, equals eCPM, right? Which is the amount of money you are paying

for a,000 impressions. So what that means is if your IPM goes up, right,

that means that your CPI comes down as long as your eCPM stays flat. So, what

that meant is everyone was trying to maximize IPM because that means they didn’t need to spend any more money, but

they were getting many more users for the same amount of money. Right? So, like I said, if if I said if you said or

I said to you, right, um, give me $1,000 and I’ll give you 10 users or 50 users,

what would you want? I’ll probably take the 50 users, please. Exactly. Exactly. Right. It’s it’s a

no-brainer. And the whole industry was was sucked up into this and it was all about creating like highly marketable

viral ads, you know. But then there was there was I mean there was some some really sort of uh some bad ads came out

of this like the whole fake ads thing you know where game play did not mimic the uh the game itself and and what you

then found was people were optimizing so much towards IPM that they weren’t looking at the LTV and the rorowass

because it was like if I can get say my game normally had a CPI of $5 but I got

the CPI down to a dollar everyone was like wow this is amazing but what they a lot of people weren’t then checking was

like was the the users were they converting and staying around and were

they driving the quality in the LTV? Because look, if I could if again question for you, would you prefer to

pay for a user like pay $5 for a user and earn 10 or would you rather pay a dollar for a user and and make no money?

Well, that would depend. If I’m planning to sell my business based on how pretty my balance sheet looks like, I might do

the thing that makes it look like it’s a growing business. Yeah, exactly. So, you you would pick the option of buying someone for five

and earning 10, right? Because that’s the logical thing. Well, that’s the thing, John. I want to point I feel like some people wouldn’t

because it would look like it’s a faster growing business because number go up in users with fixed monetization later then

they try to get acquired. I’ve heard a couple of conversations like that and that’s where I feel like we’ve got all these weird situations like mobile

gaming aren’t making money like okay wait the revenue is stupid isn’t it just because you’re trying to make the

balance sheet look pretty to then get acquired because then that’s you’re playing a different game. Yeah. Look, look man, it depends on like the also

the the investment landscape has changed dramatically over the last couple years. Look, a few years ago you would get

multiples of revenue. Now you’re getting multiples of the beat which essentially is like you know net profit, you know,

with a few other things, you know, taken in. Yeah. So there we go. So now that but so what I’m trying to say is like

objectively a few years ago if you’re trying to get multiples of revenue then you might as well do the thing that will give you more revenue despite it being

less gross profit. But now if it’s being measured gross profit, hopefully we’re going to get some realignment and a bit

more sensible decision- making. Yeah. Look, I mean, I remember when Zingga acquired Rolik, they acquired

Raleigh because Rolik had hundreds of millions of users. And it was before sort of at came and the data landscape

changed and Zinga were like, we want to get as many people. We didn’t care about the money. We wanted as many people in

our ecosystem as possible because then we can cross-promote, right? we can move

a user from a Roletic game which had like a dollar CPI uh sorry a dollar LTV to, you know, a Zinga game that maybe

had a $5 LTV, right? And we could like funnel people around and it looked much

healthier based on their goals at that point. Did that work? I mean, yeah. I think if you look at if

you look at Rolic as part of the Zingga portfolio now and it was just part of the Take 2 portfolio, I mean a couple of

Rolick’s G new games, the hybrid casual games are doing like 100 million a year. So I think and also their their high

volume. So that from a Dow perspective I I can’t remember the actual stats but I

think it was like a year or two ago where Rolic made up something like 70% of the DAO of Zingga. So like that

acquisition powered their user base dramatically and now the quality of the Rollic Games is starting to bring in the

revenue side of stuff. So yeah it took a long time. That’s what I’m thinking is like they had users,

they probably had revenue, but like the gross profit, the IBITA, it took a few years if not more. I’m not sure. Um, to

actually get like a decent investment return is one what I’ve understood. For sure. I I would say that only now

that acquisition has probably been recouped because of the new games and the strategic uh shift into hybrid

casual, which is much more sort of like revenue generating and profitable than than hyper. But all in all, dude, it’s

you you’ve got a point in terms of like you have to look at the market. You have to look what the market wants. You need

to look at, you know, again, where the liquidity is. You need to look at what what people like the acquirers want. If

the acquirers want huge amounts of people or they want profit, then you have to tailor your strategy depending.

Um, and that depends on if you are planning an exit or you’re just happy,

you know, ticking along. Cash flow business. Yeah. Cash flow business, right? what you know like too many people these days

do what they do is very simply is they they raise money they dilute they end up giving away huge percentage of the

ownership um and eventually because the business doesn’t grow and the valuation

dips because they haven’t achieved what they expected they end up making like hardly no money right and there’s

there’s a few examples of companies out there that have sold for hundreds of millions and the founders have got basically nothing

I I spoke with a fractional CFO and he works with mobile gaming companies and

he said like the playbook a few years ago let’s say like 10 to 5 to 10 years

ago was hopefully I won’t butcher it was like basically get a crazy good team together raise a bit of money acquire a

bunch of users use those users to make a bit more money acquire a lot more users and then try to get acquired and then

get more users and then the acquisition was like the payday but like none of these steps we were thinking about

profit And I was like, how does like that means the ones that like die is like zero where right now it’s more like

how’s the cash flow? Are we returning on ad spend like exactly the it’s like laser focused on on everything that

builds up to a beta and a beta is again is just basically profit the company has. Um whereas before you’re right it

was all revenue and all of that stuff has kind of changed which but it’s it’s much healthier having an eye on this

rather than just growing as big as possible. It’s like a bubble, right? It’s just it’s literally a b I think

Yeah, I don’t want to derail the conversation, but like a lot of this AI stuff from my understanding they’re

putting all that money or we’re talking Microsoft, Twitter, cuz eventually the

first person who cracks it will make stupid amount of money. But like objectively right now, they’re burning money, but they know if they get it

right, it’s crazy good. So, I think it’s like one of those things where before it was like, well, let’s just get a bunch of users because eventually we’ll

probably figure out how to monetize them and we’ll be making crazy amount of money, but a lot of it’s just like just raise money and then later later later.

Yeah. And and look, people should be happy with building uh you know, a sustainable business where they can take

dividends every year. Like if someone if someone said to you, hey, like you know, you can have this business for 10 years

and every year you’re going to get a good salary and you also you can take out like a million a year, right? And

that just you just live a good life, man. But like too many people get sort of blindsided or you know it’s like

moths to a flame but with an exit. Like it’s and the industry especially with

VCs and raising like it’s such a big thing. If you have an exit next to your name, the likelihood of you getting more

funding goes up tremendously. Yeah. It’s it’s Yeah. It’s like having X. You have a stamp of approval of some

sort, right? So people were, you’re saying, chasing the exit despite the fact that that might not just be

beneficial to their actual personal goals or what have you. Yeah, exactly. I think you need to be just be a realist to what you want to do

and why. And uh don’t just just, you know, go for the exit if it doesn’t

align with what you want, right? if you if you want to work, you know, like again, the founder of of Torilla has

been working at the company for 17 years like and he’s happy, you know, he’s happy with the business he’s built, you

know, he’s made good money over the years and and stuff like that. Um, and that’s what he wanted. But again, I

think especially with younger people, like the industry kind of says the way that you will get acknowledgement and

and the big accolade is to build something and sell something and then that’s that’s it, you know, whereas

that’s not the right thing for everyone, you know? Some people just want to have purpose, work in a company that they

love. And again, like you you that’s what you can do. And not every company needs to be a unicorn, right? You could

be a company that makes 10 million, 20 million, 100 million a year. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Isn’t it crazy to say that there’s

nothing wrong with making 100 million a year? Like, someone needs to hear that, right?

So, what do you want, John? Oh, dude, look, from from my perspective, I’m just I’m just happy

being me. Like, I I’m in an industry I love. My goal in life over the last 15

years was to become CEO of a game studio. It’s it’s literally what I’ve dreamed of. I every day love what I do.

And you know I’m also fortunate that I’ve had some success and I have had an exit and I have got money behind me. Um

and that has changed you know my options in life and it has helped me upgrade my

lifestyle and give my kids a better life which you know my purpose for living is my family right like family first in

every in every description. You know I want to be the best dad I can be. I want the best husband I can be. I want to give my family the best life they can

have. Um but equally this this has allowed me to widen my experience by

investing in other companies right and I’ve also off the back of that got a number of advisory gigs and I you know I

get to work with not only being the leader of my own company in Torilla but I get to support help mentor some of the

smartest founders in the industry um and and ultimately if those companies are then successful uccessful. I also have

other, you know, ways to to make to make money and uh and so I feel like I’m the

luckiest person in the space, Harry. You know, I get to do I’m literally doing every day what I love, you know, I’ve

I’ve been successful to a degree and and yeah, I get to work with really cool

people. My whole thing right now and and the next x amount of years in my life, I want to work with cool people on cool

That’s all I want to do. Yeah. And you can do that because you’ve put in the work because

like I like what you said like you kind of you’re not beholden now to one thing.

You’re beholden to what John Wright one wants because you’ve got let’s say you

know some cash behind you. Also if something doesn’t work out it’s okay.

It’s not going to give you anxiety necessarily because you’ve got multiple things going on which I think in turn

because you’re less stressed will probably make decision- making a lot better. You can probably sleep at night. You’re not thinking, “Oh my god, worries

me. I can’t fix this thing cuz you’ve got all these things going.” So, no. Um, love it.

I want to ask you in terms of the

mobile gaming. So, what separates like a good game with a

game that’s like worth scaling? So, like a mobile game that is quote unquote good, enjoyable, good users, but then

what’s one that is actually scalable? We should put money in it. Yeah. I mean look with with games the

the first thing and foremost is and and believe it or not people forget this right because gaming has been so mobile

gaming has has been so sort of focused on on like metrics and stuff over the

last couple of years and and maximizing stuff. People forget that the first and most basic thing about games is they

need to be fun. Okay. And so like developing a fun game

what does that mean? So initially it means developing a core loop which

engages with people and how do you measure engagement or like the amount

that or people that find it fun that comes from retention right so the the basic way of looking at it is if you

build something and people come back time and time again that they obviously enjoy it right and they want to play it

and they want to engage in it and it’s fun. So again you can you can look at

very different games and different genres over the market but you know there is different levels like if you

look at you know some of the let’s say like match free right we’ll use like

king as the gold standard example but you know king for a long time you know

we’re making match free games and they were doing it very successfully and candy crush soda and saga and all these

other games they’ve made billions of dollars right billions like multiple games in the franchise. Idiots. And then

you had, you know, Dream Games come along from Turkey and then create Royal Match. And that kind of started

competing against against King. And in my opinion, what Royal Match did really

well is they they innovated on the initial concept of what, you know, King built and they made it more fun. They

developed the game a bit further. It wasn’t just about the core loop, but it was the meta progression, it was the

events, it was the live ops. They built out community. They started

doing really crazy marketing campaigns with people like LeBron James. Like they really elevated the standard. Like they

took something that was great or good already and then they made it great. And the same thing could be said with things

like Monopoly Go Harry. Like Monopoly Go essentially is coin master which has been reskinned and put on a board with

an IP that is recognizable but they’ve taken good and made it great by giving it more depth, more relatability and

just overall more content which is also very important. This is where like events and live ops and integrations all

of this stuff comes to be. So, so yeah, I think you know to sum up basically you

you you have to make sure that is fun and the fun will allow you to build retention. Strong retention allows

strong monetization right because if more people are coming back more often then you’ve got more opportunities to

you know sell them stuff which is inapp purchases or you’ve got you know more time in front of them to show ads. But

all of it comes back down to is it fun and do people like playing it?

Is that step one when you’re making a game? Retention. So a lot of the time if we look at the the standard sort of like publishing

road map, shall we say? So you normally have a couple of milestones. You have MVP, minimal viable product. You know,

this essentially is a game that has probably one to two hours of content.

It’s again very probably core loop focused x number of levels or x number

of gameplay but probably doesn’t have like the meta and the progression and the live ops because you know you have

to start off small at the beginning. You might as well validate that before starting doing a whole bunch of metagame

stuff because that’s expensive. Exactly dude. Exactly. And that’s the thing. So what you know a lot of the time what you’re doing is you’re

building these MVPs which are effectively prototypes. You’re then integrating the Facebook SDK. you’re

then running some uh marketing through through Neta and what you’re trying to

establish very simply is like what is the level of engagement with this because the other thing is if it’s uh a

great game uh and the metrics are good but the amount of people that want to

play it is very small like you know having 50% day one retention but only 100 people want to play it doesn’t

matter right it needs to be scalable and and so like again What the meta testing

stage allows you to test a few things. It allows you to have a cohort of users come through so you can monitor things

like day one retention. And again, most uh most companies if you’re not making at least day one 30 to 35% the game

would be instantly killed, right? Because is that a good thing? Well, the the idea is that you need to have

winning concepts because I’ve never seen like it’s this

traditional like turd polishing analogy, right? It’s like it’s really hard really

really hard to take something from 30% to 45%. Right? That could take years of

work and years of work equals so like again simple math if we can take

something and it takes 6 months right and it’s say 100k a month that means that the production cost of the business

of of the game is 600k but if that takes 12 months that’s 1.2 2 million and some

businesses don’t have that dude. Right? So you what you need to do is find a an in great foundation and starting layer.

So if you’re not getting say 35% day one, in my opinion, it’s probably best

to continue to iterate and find new prototypes and find something that will

break that barrier because anything beneath it will take a lot of time and time equals money and money you might

not have, right? make uh it’s all game especially mobile games everything is is

about you know cash flow and and profitability and revenue and you know if you don’t have cash flow you don’t have profitability then you have to

raise money raising money right now is very difficult and very expensive so you don’t really want to do that so you know

you got to be much more realistic with the shots you take because you won’t otherwise you’ll run out of money

yeah you only have a certain amount of shots right exactly that and and again you the amount of shots you’ve got is depending

on the cash you have and uh so yeah look for me making sure that day one uh you

know day one retention is above 35% is very important. Making sure that the session length is good like 20 to 30

minutes. What that means is either someone’s played it for 30 minutes in one sitting or they’ve played it 5

minutes in six sittings you know but either way we want to make sure that people are playing the game unless it’s

sticky. And then the final point is around the CPI like how much is this going to cost? Because again, if you

have, you know, day one 40% retention, but the CPI is $20,

it it’s not going to be feasible, right? What do you think about people who say they should do that before? Right. I’ve

been seeing more and more people saying, “Let’s find out what the CPI is and then build the game for that ad.”

Yeah. Look, some some people do it like some people um before they have like an established MVP, some people will make

much smaller prototypes. So, what I mean by this is they’ll have just a scene in Unity with a very simple

like a playable ad. Yeah, you could. I mean, you a lot of some people used to use playable ads for for prototyping and getting some

engagement and understand like that, but a lot of the time people just would run videos of of initial gameplay and core

loop on Facebook and instead of having a game to test retention, all they’re doing is seeing how low the CPC is. So,

instead of firing them to an app, you’re firing them to a to a web page saying like coming soon, wait list. Yeah.

Yeah. And you’re just monitoring. Isn’t it objectively a better thing to do? Because if you’re saying we’re going

to build a gameplay loop, check if it’s good, and then build the ad. But then what if the ad you never find a way to

do it? So why not just do the ad first? So the the thing is like just because it’s marketable doesn’t mean it’s going to have it be good quality. And the

retention is just basically so vital. Like the the C CPI CPI could be

optimized down, right? Like you you people spend, you know, uh millions a

year trying to beat the hero creatives. Why? And hero creative very simply is

the number one creative for your game in that chosen network, country, and OS, right?

That’s all findable, right? I found that really crazy. Like you can just go and see, okay, what’s the best ad right now that is making money?

Go Tower, go to Facebook, Meta Adi, go to App Magic, any of these companies. Like you can go and you will find the

best performing ads. But it doesn’t mean you can’t just like rip it and be like I’m gonna make this exact ad because it might not match your audience.

I’ve seen that though in that second and and don’t get me wrong it’s a viable strategy for a lot of people and uh you

know this is how innovation happens is like someone does something different and then someone looks at it uh either

copies it or does a plus one where they make an uh alteration etc. But but

ultimately, yeah, you’re still going back to the retention is the the the most uh the biggest validator of if the

game is going to be successful. And the thing that’s changed over the last couple of years is the day one retention was like king originally, but now

because CPIs have gone up and the cost of acquiring users has gone up, it’s like now it’s like day seven and day 30

is much more impactful than just day one. So what’s what’s happening is a lot of publishers are saying to to

developers, “Oh, look, your day one’s great, but it means nothing.” Like now you have to show me day seven. And the

issue with that is that’s a lot of content. That’s a lot of content. Exactly. The developer has to go back and spend

months building out enough content to get to day seven. Um, and some of the publishers won’t back that. They won’t

cover the burn, right? They will just say, “You go away, spend six months.” And again, that could be 50K a month.

That could be 300 grand, right? which the studio doesn’t have and they’re they’re unable to raise that money because VCs are not investing in these

sort of earlier stage projects now. So if they haven’t had previous success and have money from angels or something like

that, it becomes even more uh difficult to to got to boot scrap, right? You just

pretty much got to boot scrap make a little bit of money then I don’t know if you know about maybe this is a tangent but like there’s companies out that can

lend you money if you’re already making money and you don’t have to kind of raise it. Yeah, there there’s some great

companies out there like PVX that do like UA lending, but the problem is that means that means you have to have a

previous success. If you’re a new studio and this is your first game, you can’t you can’t rely on that, right? Got it. So, what can a new Let’s talk to

those new studios if you don’t mind. Like you’re a new studio, you like mobile gaming, you want to make a mobile game, and like you said, they now need

day seven retention. Should they just give up? Is it a matter of try a

different strategy? Cuz from what you’re I’m hearing if the standard is a 50k a month team and you have to do that for 6

months to get something that could do well or people don’t have 300k but like if you’re a new studio what can you do?

Yeah look a lot of people now are focusing more uh more teens in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia where the

production cost of studios are cheaper. This is you know one of the big reasons Turkey exploded in the last 5 to 10

years was because of that the quality versus cost. Afric games was was like

you know was amazing like you had great people for a low price. Um so that’s why it’s become much harder like if you look

at like Finland and the UK and America it’s much more difficult for for new

studios to exist and launch in these in these countries because of the expense. Do you think it’s only about the

expense? It’s maybe it’s not like totally about the expense. There’s also things like, you know, government grants and uh

trying to get the the countries themselves to invest into gaming and help bootstrap companies and and you

know, there’s a few things going on at the moment. The UK just launched a 30 million

30 million pound gaming fund. And and you think that’s going to work? Do you think that’s I don’t I haven’t looked into it enough to see, but like what’s

your first impression of that? Yeah, look, I you know, I’m very fortunate to know Nick Button Brown, who’s probably the number one angel

investor in games in the UK pretty well. We’re part of the same same angel group and invest in businesses together and

Nick’s been spearheading this and uh I think it’s an amazing thing for us because other countries have similar

things and we haven’t had that and and equally the UK um had this for music and

and and film but they didn’t have it for games right so so now you know what this basically means Harry is there’s going

to be more accessible cash at earlier stages to get people to that prototype oh wow so they could invest in a situ

situation where I get a day one prototype. I have numbers and there will be someone somewhere where I should pitch to to get the money for a day

seven. Yeah. Yeah. I mean depends on the cost and stuff like that like you know the the amount of money that these uh the

people are going to invest I think is is more like 100 to 200k or something like that but that could be enough like to

get you from one like depending on the size of your team and all of that stuff. But you need to be inventive. Like I

wrote an article for games forum a while back about like how to get investment in today’s market when VCs are less likely.

And you know government standards angels um even like research grants from uni

universities like one of my companies raised 450k from a Norwegian uh you know

education institute to to do some psy psychology stuff to do with the games. And um it’s like you have to be

inventive dude like to find that money. if you haven’t got it right, if you if if you’ve had a previous success and you

can invest 250k of your own money because you believe in it, then you’re golden. Um, but equally, the people that

have been successful before are more likely to get VC money, right? Which is where the problem comes like

Yeah. So, from what I’m hearing is to be the Yeah. People with money tend to make more money. But to get that first step,

if you’re inventive like we were in um kind of our careers, like I think we touched it earlier in the podcast, like

there is a way and it doesn’t involve usually millions of pounds or it’s more about the network or bootstrapping it to

a certain point to get recognition whether it’s a grant or what have you. Yes, exactly did. Exactly. I say I think

you just got to be you’ve got to have you know some tenacity. You need to understand that, you know, there’s more

than one way to skin a cat when it comes to money and investment. Don’t just put all of your time and this is the other

thing I speak to a lot of founders about like again the industry standard or what people think is the industry standard is

you know I build a a prototype get to an MVP get some money any metrics and I go to a VC and the VC will give me money

and then they spend six months instead of doubling down on the product they get all encompassed by raising money and

then they don’t end up building the best product they could have right and that in turn means that the likelihood of

them getting money from the VCs is also less because Again, raising is very very difficult. So, you’ve just got to be a

bit of a realist, understand what you want you want to try and achieve. If you can, again, if you if you needed 50k or

100k to finish something, then maybe again going to some angels and and getting, you know, going to some family

members and getting them to back you is much more realistic and quicker than

spending six months to, you know, pitching to 10 VCs and then getting no money in the end, right? It’s because

the game isn’t in the state to be for them to be able to tick their boxes. For sure. And I think I had um one of

the earlier podcasts a a few weeks ago that came out which was with Bobby Bobby from Kando Factory and

yeah that podcast did really well and it touched on this point like some of these VCs won’t have the time or the logistics

to give you proper feedback and you just kind of fishing in the dark and you’re

not getting any traction when you could have a conversation with John, Bobby, Harry and I could maybe point you in the

right direction and then find out like ah this is their investment thesis right now. That means I need to change everything rather than just go knocking

on doors, finally get your nose, you’re like, I’ve not done anything. You you’ve you’ve touched on a very very

important point there, Harry, which many people don’t speak about. And I actually spoke I mentioned this to you when we

were on stage in in Manchester a couple months ago, but like understanding the VC or the publisher thesis is highly

important because the nature of VCs and publishers is to never turn away an opportunity like or or they try and you

know try and keep things as open as possible even if it’s not the right time for them. So what that means is you

might think as as the developer that you’re much more likely to get some money from either the publisher or the

VC, but actually the game that you have does not match their thesis. So, you

know, these companies are looking to invest in games with AI or they’re looking to invest in puzzle games. And

you’ve got a, you know, you’ve got an FPS and they don’t know anything about FPS’s, right? And that means that their

their user acquisition team, their monetization team, their product team, their development team, their production

team don’t know the style of games that you have. So, they can’t add like the same level of value if it was something

that did match their thesis. So, like it’s so important for developers to ask that question and get an early answer

and and understand if your game matches what they’re looking for. Um, because there’s always from a VC perspective,

you have you have LPs, right? And LPs are essentially the people that put in big chunks of money.

And the LPs are the ones that kind of sign off on what that thesis is, right? So, the the VC will come to them and

say, “Okay, our thesis is that we want to invest in AI.” And then these LP votes, great. Okay, that matches what we

want. here’s a couple of million and then the VC can’t deploy that cash to anything but what that fees

yeah it’s a check box even if objectively it was a good opportunity it’s like well sorry the money wants

what it wants and I think the world is smaller than people think like there might be one VC that fits your thesis

and if they say no then you can’t just hope for the best it’s just logistically nothing’s going to change

and look you also have something called investment committee an IC with a VC right so every deal before it gets

finalized has to go to the investment committee. And the investment committee, their job is to make sure that this

stuff matches what the LPs want. So even if the guy you’re dealing with is saying all of the best stuff that you can ever

hear, doesn’t mean that it’s going to go the distance. So understanding the thesis is highly highly important. Can’t

stress it enough. Just want to close off here. Like you do, well, at least you did before joining Torilla. Like we said

before the podcast, like this is your first podcast in a while, but like you post a lot on LinkedIn, you share a lot, you go to a lot of conferences, you

speak a lot. Like what’s that motivation there? Especially now, like you probably don’t have the time to be doing this objectively speaking, but like why do

you still invest time in posting on LinkedIn and doing podcasts? Yeah, honestly, man, I just want to give back. Like gaming’s been good for me.

You know, gaming changed my life. You know, I’ve I’ve been more successful, made more money doing this than anything

I could have ever done. And you know, I’m at that point in my career and my

life where I want to try and help people and I look back on my journey and again

if I think to myself if someone if I would have asked for help and if uh if if there was someone else out there who

could help me in that early stage to help direct me and give me you know some some direction and stuff then maybe I

would have been in games earlier. So for me it’s like again it’s just you know paying forward everything that all the

good that has happened for me in this industry equally I have had mentors I have had good people you know good

managers good leadership that have helped me out over the last 15 years so I get a lot out of you know you know

that helping the industry in that way but equally on a maybe a selfish thing you know what’s good for gaming is

what’s good for me right a higher tide rises all ships and so if I can help, you know, educate people, help studios

become more successful, more games launch, that increases again, you know, the uh, you know, the the revenue in the

games industry overall and the Kagar, you know, year on year, then that that

again, it just fulfills me. It makes me happy and and overall it helps me directionally in some way.

Yeah. No, I really resonate with that. I learned that lesson by accident very early that it is selfish to be selfless.

So, um I don’t know how much I’ve told you about this, but like I used to make my money professionally gambling. That’s

how I made money. Probably before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I used to rinse the UK bookies. And the reason I made loads of money was

part of the group I was in was like a Facebook group. I made a Discord and I was like all the people who are good is

like, “Hey, I’m making a group with everyone and I’m I’m going to be sharing everything that I’m learning and then some people will share back.” But it was

quite funny where it was actually a zero sum game at some point because if a lot of people knew of a hack, the bookie

would patch it and would make less money. But in my head, I’m like, I’m just going to tell everything in the

hope that people will tell me stuff which will make me more money. And I definitely lost some of the kind of

edges over after a few months, but I literally 10 20xed from the little tip that someone told me about this or how

to scale this thing or by the way this whole way of making money exists. And

yeah, I feel the same with like with this podcast, I’ll just just give everything because you never know who’s

listening or you never know who’s going to help. And I yeah, just every single time I do anything, I think I’m very

similar to you. like I will give the time to help. And it it was funny. Um I

did an exercise recently. I have a business coach and he says right from touch point to sign cash collected how I

signed all my clients. Half of them were some very weird roundabout way from me

just giving a good conversation to someone who then recommended to someone in a taxi who then got into here. And I

was like if I never did all these exercises which objectively didn’t make money or took a lot of time like half of my business wouldn’t exist. And I was

like, “Ah, until you do the exercise, sometimes it’s hard to realize like how much comes back.” And it feels good. Yeah, for sure, dude. Like, I think we

as as people, we’re we’re socialable creatures, you know, we’re tribal, you know, we we like being around people. We

like help people. But, you know, from a basic standpoint, not everyone. Some people are but most people, you

know, want to go through life and be happy and help people. And I think that’s yeah, that’s the way I want to just, you know, spend spend my life, you

know. Like I said, I want to I want to work on cool stuff with cool people, you know. So, I’m I’m really happy, you

know, with where Turboriller is. You know, we have got a new season coming out in in a week, which will be great.

So, that’s that new content drop. And, you know, my family life is amazing. I just adopted my two sons last

week, so I’m very And yeah, all my all my other stuff and all the other time I spend with founders

and stuff like that, I love doing it. So I think yeah if you if you do what you’re passionate about if you do what

you love and you you generally have a good intent then this is the way to go through life basically.

I love it. Lovely. Closing now. Um I want to ask you based on this conversation we had is there something

that we haven’t said? Is there maybe something like underhyped in mobile games right now? Is there anything you would add? No, I would say like maybe

not underhyped, but I think you know I did a post about this on LinkedIn I think yesterday and it got a lot of traction but you know there’s there’s a

world of people out there who are trying to pitch investment to me at the moment personally that are looking for um

basically vibe coding games and you know there is some amazing tools out there

you know clawed and stuff like this which will allow you to build um an early stage prototype or a product but I

don’t you know me personally right now I think and there’s a lot of people again ra trying to raise money trying to get

investment saying right we don’t need engineers we can just you know use this this this AI to build a game and the

games are much more complicated than that Harry and maybe in 3 to 5 years you know these these you know technologies

and AIs will be able to build a game you know but games are tough man economics

monetization user acquisition content you know behavioral economics you know

uh motivations persona segmentation Like these things are really really tough. And like I said, there’s just a lot of a

lot of people again think that just making the best game possible um is going to yield a massively successful

business and it doesn’t work like that. You know, like economics and design and all this other stuff has to be baked

into that from the beginning. Um and yeah, AI isn’t there yet. Maybe in three years, maybe in 5 years. But

John, I don’t think he’s ever going to be there because of like first principles because games and I have this

in my agency, right? Like GBT came out halfway through. I started my LinkedIn go agency and then there’s loads of

people writing content and so you would think and there’s whole companies that are built for this now. My job is gone.

Well, actually no, it’s actually gotten a lot better because it’s all relative. If a game where is built by AI is good,

then if you take the same resources and add humans into it, then the probably the game that this one’s going to make

objectively will be better. So therefore, vibe coding will always be

below someone else. Unless unless the core idea and the game loop is so good,

then sure. But like if you just add people to the mix, you’ll objectively be better. And because people choose where

to put their time, it doesn’t matter. It’s like with for me like the NFT things like it’s not the fact that you

could make art which is the reason people are spending money. It’s just because it was worth something maybe in

the later it’s like it wasn’t the art that it nothing it wasn’t the art. It was all the story behind the art. So like yeah I just think first principles

it’s never going to happen. Yeah. Look dude my my whole thing is I think it will help people create really

fun prototypes very quickly. It will help the ability to test things like what we were talking about earlier

trying to early metrics. But as soon as you’ve got something that you think, oh wow, like these metrics looking good,

you then have to get people involved and rebuild it in a scalable way, right?

Because otherwise you’re just going to have really bad code. And you know, if you ask any any techy person, they’ll talk about spaghetti code. And spaghetti

code is just, you know, it something that could take you normally an hour takes you a day because you have to

unpick everything. You have to rewrite. you have to do this and and that makes it unscalable. So So yeah, like that’s

why I think it’s not going to succeed right now. And there’s probably people out there who who disagree with me, but I don’t care.

Honestly, even if it’s scalable, it will be uncompetitive because there’s a company doing it the right way and

they’re going to last longer than you. Like it’s it’s so weird to me. But yeah, really cool. Lovely. Everyone who’s

stuck around to the end, anything, how can people get in touch? Is there anything happening right now you would

like them to do? Is Turbo hiring at some point? How can people get in touch? Yeah. Do you know what, dude? Obviously, I’ve still only been at the company for

a little while. So, we’re still sort of, you know, finding our feet a little bit with with me as leadership. We’re on a

great trajectory, but the big things obviously, you know, you can look for me on LinkedIn. You can check out

turbarilla.com if you want to look at the games. Please go to the app store and download them. Madskills motocross

free is our big game. There’s a new season dropping next week, which means new materials, new creatives, new

events, and all that stuff. So, it would be a really fun time to download the game knowing that this drops next week.

And uh and and that’s it really. You know, hopefully some people have, you know, uh learned something and it’s

helped a few people today with the the stuff that we’ve gone over. I’ve had a lot of fun. I love spending time with

you, Harry, as always. So, yeah, I’m happy, mate. John, likewise. Really enjoyed this conversation. And yeah, by the time this

podcast is out, the new season’s out. So definitely, you know, download the game and check it out. And of course, if

you’ve listened to this part and you send a connection request to John Wright and you mention, hey, I just listen to this podcast in the game playbook. I’m

pretty sure he will say yes. So take that, take advantage, okay? Because most people won’t do it.

So the few that do, they can get in touch. Sweet. John, thank you so much. And yeah, um, everyone at home,

subscribe and have a see you later. Thanks guys.