so how crucial is it to know your audience before you start development nowadays more than ever it is

fundamental if you’re going to spend many many years many many millions of dollars only to find out that perhaps you made some choices at the very start

of that process that you could have avoided by understanding better what your players wanted wouldn’t you look back on that in two years time and kick

yourself for not doing it of course you would Callum is the head of third party publishing at end dreams being the

industry a very long time I can’t tell you honestly Harry how many times I’ve had conversations with developers and

they come to a publisher with a pitch deck that’s like hey here’s my shiny awesome game idea here’s the amount of money I need give me money please they

come into it completely naive I I’ll start I guess with the fundamental dos and don’ts of pitching to a publisher

first one of the Dos is for everyone at home Callum is the

head of third party publishing at end dreams been in the industry a very long time I will get let Callum kind of give

us a quick recap because you’ve been around the block yeah I sure have I’ve I’ve kind of been there done that got

the T-shirt I think is the the cloak coel way of saying it but I’ve been in the industry since 1999 uh working for big AAA PC console

companies Activision ea uh started my career Cod Masters actually doing great third party publishing work there um

took a bit of a sabbatical for 12 years to go and do freet to-play in Mobile at companies like King wargaming 10 square

games uh and the last few years in my career I’ve really been trying to get back to my roots and trying to be more

Hands-On with game teams trying be more involved in the game development side rather than being leadership side focused um and have recently found

myself heading up third party publishing at end dreams working in the VR space which is fantastic because I love VR

games I love Innovation and VR is very Innovation heavy as a space compared to other parts of the games industry uh and

it’s that wonderful sort of new emerging Tech space despite having existed for 10 years uh it’s still an emerging Tech or

it’s a new opportunity space that a lot of people haven’t explored yet so it’s really fun to be in their early doors for once yeah no it’s very exciting

actually when I was looking at your LinkedIn today I saw you left a comment and it was talking about how there’s a

game that is like nothing that anyone’s ever seen and I feel like VR is one of those Industries where that can actually

happen where you might just get a complete let’s say logarithmic change from the game from before then what it

is now 100% like just just browsing through the stores you can see so many cool Innovative different products where

the way that they’re still exploring and engaging with the VR medium how you use the controllers how you do uh proper

immersion through the headsets like there’s so many new things people are trying each each week like new releases come out where I play them and I play

probably far too many VR games for my own good but um I play you know seven or eight new new titles per week and I’m

just blown away by how much Innovation you can see in so many of them it’s a wonderful place to be if you’re a a true to Your Heart game creator that wants to

put Innovation at the Forefront amazing lovely so for everyone

at home we’ll get into a few things today so we’ll get into a little bit about kind of live Ops and potentially

what people maybe get wrong about live Ops and pitching to Publishers how to do that correctly and a bit more

efficiently a little bit about VR also in general just about being efficient in game development so balancing that

creativity with the business side of things so we actually stay alive for another year and actually make games

that’s the dream right we need we need to do both exactly lovely so I would

love to start with a big question to be fair so it’s how crucial is it to know your audience before you start

development so nowadays more than ever it is fundamental that you really have a

good understanding of who you’re making the game for before you start making the game um I guess going back 15 20 years

in my career it was very much autter driven you could have a person who had a great idea for a game they build a team

behind it they’d build the sort of the momentum the ground swell of initiative behind it and just go ahead and make it

and put it out there and often because the industry was quite small or relatively small at that point with fewer Studios out there you’d have a

decent chance of pretty much any game that you thought was cool having success now that we’ve gotten to a place where

Gaming’s become a lot more mainstream we’re appealing to mass Market audiences rather than Niche audiences you have to start understanding with that mass

Market who actually are my target user base inside that massive massive potential opportunity audience space

that I could be playing with um and one of the things I’m seeing increasingly um from my time back in Mobile is mobile is

light years ahead of this than than PC console um PC console still tends to operate in a very sort of brand and um

franchise driven mentality and not really knowing as much as it should do about who it’s player bases whereas in

Mobile they’ve been very very um proactive in doing things like Consumer Testing understanding Their audience uh

creating personas and creating um behavioral psychological maps of why people like certain games or certain

features inside games and getting really really smart at making sure that when they decide to Greenlight a game or

decide to move forwards with a game they really know what things they want to put in that to maximize their appeal to a

customer lower their marketing costs because ultimately if your game looks and plays a certain way and has features inside it that make it more appealing to

a user you spend less on marketing uh and just really turning it into a much more efficient um commercial opportunity

by using smart data which isn’t to say that that means you just copy whatever’s successful and go for it um you can find

ways inside that audience space Also to find the little not blue oceans blue puddles perhaps those little opportunity

spaces that exist in inside that audience um to do things that put your own spin on things have your own unique selling points but without knowing who

your players are you’re essentially taking the oldfashioned approach of making a game spending millions of dollars and many years on it and just

crossing your fingers and hoping that somebody thinks it’s a good game afterwards yeah which doesn’t sound like

it’s sustainable it’s not a recipe for Success mate let’s put it that way yeah yeah because the uh on a previous

podcast I had yeser who head of a studio at sansoft and he was giving me the stat like nine out of 10 games will fail so

yeah if a game takes like by fail I mean like not make a profit potentially or

maybe like a substantial profit to be relevant so when that’s the case if a game takes a couple years and you have a

whole team which are amazing that might still take a community of 30 years to actually get a winner and we probably

want survive that amount of time so with this in mind how important it is to get the audience probably Paramount now yeah

100% And just to sort of just to sort of build on that Harry like if you’re going to spend many many years many many millions of dollars or however much time

and effort it takes to get a game across the line only to find out late in the day that perhaps you made some choices

at the very start of that process that you could have avoided by understanding better what your players wanted or figuring out better the commercial

opportunity space and competitors you’re you’re you’re battling for market share against wouldn’t you look back on that

in two years time and kick yourself for not doing it of course you would so why why why people insist on not doing it at

the start of projects is kind of Beyond me I can really only draw a couple of conclusions number one it’s an illusion

that it takes away a bit of creative control from the people who have the vision for the project um I’ve seen that happen a couple of times where people

don’t believe in doing Consumer Testing and audience uh identification because they feel they’ve got a strong vision

for the game as it is and they can push that Vision on people sometimes that works which is kind of the danger with it it works often enough that it’s just

about still viable um and you kind of hear about these Studios where they have big creative leads and big personalities

who lead projects forwards and they kind of naturally float to the top of the news headlines in the games industry so I guess it’s a self-perpetuating niche

but it’s a niche we all aspire to be in a strange way uh and then the the second piece as well is the cost it doesn’t

come cheap to go and do the data digging to do the market research to understand your players um but it’s cheaper than

spending two years and many many many hours of De development effort and lots and lots of money to have a game that

has a lower chance of success so I always look at it as the AL you got to speculate to accumulate you do in this case you’ve got to go and understand who

your Market is in other Industries they wouldn’t open up a a new business and think of a game as a business in this

context they wouldn’t open up a new business without doing research if you’re opening a new McDonald’s restaurant that they’d go and send

people to walk the streets and count footfall and check for what other things people are walking past a meeting right

they they do their market research if through opening a car dealership you’d look at who else is in the area you’d look at like is it actually a thing that

you’d have to drive to in the first place like there’s lots of physical factors um that you you take into account when you’re opening other

businesses and the games industry shouldn’t be any different we should look at the uh the the factors that give us reasons to believe that a game could

and should be successful first and foremost um and it’s a little bit odd in that it’s a combination of consumer

research and market research um which are two very different skill sets and often people look at market research and

go oh well game X is in this genre and has this art style in these features therefore if we make game X plus one the

same thing but slightly bigger or slightly better we must be in a successful space but if they do that without understanding why game X

appealed to its audience or why it was successful or even why it didn’t hit the success it could have done they’re really just leaving money on the table

and potentially leaving enough money on the table they don’t make a profit

themselves based on what you just said if I’m a studio and let’s say I have 10 people I think typically in that

founding Studio there won’t be someone who’s got a lot of experience doing Consumer Testing like I feel like that’s

someone that you bring in right and I know you’ve done it before like I’ve worked with you before where you did Consumer Testing so if we go into some

practicalities here let’s say I have a budget I have great developers and I want to do my Consumer Testing but like

you said it’s expensive like what is step one like should I just talk to someone or is there is like do I get

someone professional to do it for me like what are the steps I take yeah if it was me in that situation i’ I’d look

at it as a risk versus reward thing if I was making a game with 10 people but it was a really small I don’t know hyper

casual mobile game where the the ROI is super super below and it’s got a relatively High chance of success anyway

maybe user testing isn’t the right thing for those games right maybe maybe you don’t need to go understand your audience um because your throughput the

speed at which you develop games is is actually probably more important than everyone having to be a hit you’re developing so fast and so frequently you

don’t need every game to be successful and each game is at low cost so therefore your your uh impact of being

incorrect is is is less less important but if I would making a a bigger bet game you know 6 12 18 24 plus months

like a a decent sized team like the 10 people you mentioned first thing i’ do is do a little bit of uh asking around

people inside the industry see who they’ve used for market research and for Consumer research before and there are some big companies there some people who

make a very very compelling case for doing this uh companies like solsten uh

companies like brighter um there’s you know you could Google video games consumer research and get probably 50

hits Each of which would be capable and competent um they are quite expensive like I said but you know chop around see

which ones offer you the best value for money um not every one of these agencies is is fully set up to do the wide

spectrum of the games industry in the same way some are slightly more PC console focused some are much more um

mobile focused some even focus on particular genres inside the industry or have a history of doing that um so do

your homework and do your research but also don’t be afraid if you have to as a small Indie developer to kind of Skunk

Works it a little bit um I’ve seen evidence of uh and even talked to some developers who’ve basically just run

Instagram ads and like tried to get people to answer some survey questions give them some insight into into different games that they’ve played it’s

not as scientific or as rigorous as using a professional team to do it but if it’s a if it’s a way for you to

cheaply and efficiently validate a hypothesis if not expand upon it at the start of a game I’d absolutely advocate

for doing that uh and if you find some data in there that’s Furious maybe then that’s the point where you look at that data and go this is inconclusive it or

it works against our hypothesis maybe we need to actually go and find the money to do some proper consumer and Market

Research Now to help us understand if we’re going to waste the next six 12 however many months of our time yeah I

hearing you say that I actually I’ve spoke to two people who have two ways of getting user feedback which might be

interesting so one of them is Johan Shadow is at rank one I believe so they

have a tool where they connect the data from like games that are streamed on

Twitch I think and people put the games they watch but they link their Twitch account so they can see the data but

then they also list games they like to play and then if you get enough of that data then hopefully people who play this

game would play these typical games so that might be another way to get data then a second one just came which just

came to mind was um someone I’m coaching on the LinkedIn

he’s he basically builds the game’s Tik Tok to grow your wish list and he had a

crazy stat so he buil an account to 100K followers got millions of views but that converted to then 5,000 Discord members

before the game was launched and then those 5,000 Discord members then became

people who actually bought the game but now that I think about it even if you’re just ignoring the buying the game part

if you just do good videos on you’re building a community then you can literally build

your own QA team in a funny way to if it’s one way to put it where you just constantly test that seems like a

cheaper way to do it maybe that’s actually really smart I’m going to mentally make a note of that and look into that because community-driven game

development is increasingly a thing across every platform Under the Sun people want to get into Early Access they want feedback from their players

like once you know who your player is testing it with your player your target audience is the best way to validate you’ve done what you set out to do um so

yeah that’s that’s a really handy tip for me thank you Harry yeah my pleasure no because it literally came up like last week I was helping him come up with

content ideas I was like tell me one problem you solved and he was like I don’t know and then he said I I got a I

build someone’s Discord to 5,000 before the game was I was like what that’s really cool yeah yeah cuz then you just

pay a couple Grand to get the Tik Tok videos if you have a good demo of the game but yeah that’s to do awesome so in

the psychology section now so you me we understand we have to do market research

but like what factors should we be looking at like how do we know once we get the data I don’t know what a report

looks like but I’m just wondering what should people keep in mind is there some psychology we should be looking at like how do we kind of dissect the data when

we get it yeah so depending on who you used to do the research they’ll do some of the dissection for you but if you

haven’t been able to do that the general things I look for are uh I guess three key areas game genre like one of the

things inside the game genre that mus haves nice to have should have and could haves that gamers are looking for so if

you’re making a firstperson shooter right must haves must have really good feeling guns it must feel really satisfying to shoot right there’s a a

list of things you have to do to even be relevant as a competitor in that genre so you can take those for granted a

little bit and put them to one side but then layer on top the the should haves could haves would haves Etc um and where

where you start getting into some really fun shap of gray with those is some of those will actually start to compete against each other so you have to make

some choices around what your Game feature set within the genre uh really wants to be what becomes its unique

feature identity um that helps I guess Define the material properties of the

game like it’s going to do these things for these reasons to the player and the reasons part is as important as the thing you’re putting in the the reasons

that you’re doing this should gradually start to build up a portfolio of similar likes dislikes attractions and

psychological satisfaction points that it’s addressing for the player um and then you can very carefully map

future features as part of a live op strategy or a Content rollout map and ask yourselves well is this is this new

thing we want to add this new piece of content this new feature this new mode is it supportive of all the things we’ve built up until this point or did it go

against that and sometimes it could be worth doing the the sort of going off at a tangent just as an experimentation

piece but often if you’ve got a successful product you kind of want to double down on success and keeping the audience more of what they like so

knowing who that audience is and their psychological behaviors and their patterns uh and their pre conceived expectations from other games of what

they want is is Paramount so that’s pillar one is the genre expectations and the feature Set uh pillar two is what I

call the the theme so trying to figure out what uh what thematic setting your game takes place in um so it could be is

it a western themed game is it a Sci-Fi game is it a modern military shooter is it a World War II historical strategy

game um your theme is really the the the backdrop against which all the game’s context sits um so the theme is super

super important large from a marketing and attraction point of view um in fact before I get onto the third pillar I’ll

share a little anecdote with you when I was working at wargaming we spent a lot of time uh with a fantastic us of research guy called Michelle kulong uh

he he basically came in and did this thing that he called discret Choice modeling uh where we asked thousands and thousands and thousands of players

hundreds of questions to get this really detailed map of what was uh what was important to them when they were looking to either go and buy a game or install a

new free-to-play game from the App Stores and ultimately it came down to these three pillars number one their first primary choice Choice was genre

people identify as a shooter player or they like shooters or they like strategy games and about 50 to 55% of their

decision-making choice to buy or install a game was based purely on the genre uh then the next one was the theme so 20 to

25 sorry 25 to 30% of their decision-making process was based around the uh the theme of the game and then

the last piece the third pillar is the art style so what do you apply upon the genre mechanics and the the Thematic

setting of The Game to give it its visual identity to give it its flare to have its own unique look and that makes that game Uniquely Yours and

identifiable um that accounted for the final few percentage points in decision making process for players and as you

kind of go down those three with the the genre being the most important and the the art style or the the look and feel

of the game being the least important they have decreasing value in terms of how much they sway the players into want

to getting into the game so if you had somebody who doesn’t like Shooters uh didn’t particularly like your setting

but you had a killer art style you’d have a much harder time convinc them to buy the game or to install that game than you would if they ticked all three

of those boxes I actually saw this in action I think I saw someone did a post where a

lot of big gaming Studios now for mobile like I think let’s say it’s a bingo game

they change the title of the game to have bingo games on the end and then they have shooter games on the end and they even use the word games even though

it’s one game which I found really funny because it’s literally just like the person is searching bingo games and like

ah there you go boom happens to be one but they don’t care but let goes to show how important it is right yeah

absolutely anything you can do to get that game more prevalent in your searches when you’re on the stores is fantastic I I do also wonder if there’s

some psychological satisfaction from that like you type in bingo games you get exactly bingo games back maybe it

scratches that itch on a deep subconscious level um I’d like to dive into that with some of my user research

friends and see if there is a a connection or correlation there of you getting exactly what you asked for I’m

sure yeah I’m sure there is I mean I would be sweet it’s like shooter games and I’m like ah there’s one Fair one of

the games I use on airports sorry in Planes I’m that guy who talks to people next to people on planes sorry but I

will bring out my two-player games so it’s an app called two-player games and

when I searched for two-player games I searched two player games and it was literally called two player game and it’s amazing but I just like a very real

example like yeah you really need to have something if it’s a mobile game I think potentially um supplies more yeah

I I mean that’s a better solution to being on a plane than my friend NAD and I where we both took our switches and played Mario Kart so loud and so angrily

uh that we got threatened by the stewardess with being thrown off the plane I think she was jealous she just wanted to play that’s yeah she could

have done we have a third switch she could have kind have joined in here you go she Leed with that I like no problem here you go yeah next time on the flight

to Gamescom perhaps Harry you and me we can get Mario cut on yeah I don’t know if you’re flying from Cyprus but if we Magic on the same good point I’ll reoo

to fly fl over with you good man lovely let’s move on to live op so we kind of dived into a

little bit of the mobile side there but in general about demographics so from a live perspective we’ve seen a lot in the

media oh my God like whenever I’m on my phone I must have clicked a hell div article at the start of the year and

then I just now get bombarded with updates about the game without asking for it and I just feel like I’m vicariously looking how the game is

doing same with um Suicide Squad like I feel like half my mobile feed is like oh

this game is dying and now it’s okay and now they release this I’m like I’m I’m just watching so yeah liveops how do we

ensure liveops isn’t an afterthought well the obvious answer is don’t treat it like an afterthought as

the very starting point I have seen over the course of my career so many times where game studios game developers some

very big game companies as well have gone hey we’ve made this game now let’s make it a liveops game and try to find

ways to retrofit liveops on at the end it doesn’t work well in very few cases

can you can you quickly bolt live Ops on and be like well cool it’s now product and we can treat it like that to design

a live Ops game properly you’ve got to again go back to the user research understand what your players want and find ways to build systems that allow

you to evolve that game in a direction that suits your players uh and and satisfies more and more of the ever

increasing needs they’re going to have over time as their personal lives change as the gaming economy changes um and at

its fundamental core I think there’s a really big misunderstanding or at least I perceive it as a misunderstanding around what liveops is inside the games

industry I’ve heard people who’ve got 20 25 30 years experience talking about live Ops as things as simple as going oh

we’ve got a DLC strategy for the game post launch therefore we’re a liveops game and kind you can kind of see why

they make that Mis that misconception in that a good live op strategy may include paid content drops and DLC drops as part

of that live Ops strategy but that one thing alone doesn’t make it a liveops game uh similarly I’ve seen people talk

about you know oh we’ve got multiplayer therefore we’re a live Ops game well no that means you’re a live game it doesn’t

mean you’re like you’re running live operations in my mind the sort of simplest most elegant definition I can

have of a game that would be deemable live Ops would be a game that’s built upon a framework where you can adapt and

change things inside the game to react to your audience needs based on data without having to upload a new binary

for players to download that’s my sort of not very elegant now I’ve said it out loud encapsulation of what it means to

be a live Ops game um but to do those things you’ve got to build um backend servers and services that allow you to

uh capture data to be able to change gameplay parameters be able to change gameplay settings change game assets on

the fly without having to uh to deploy new binaries and you don’t perhaps have to go as far as my extreme example of it

being a thing that you can just deliver over the air or over the internet to people without them having to do an new update you can run a successful liveops

game by having regular you know two weekly buildup dates monthly buildup dates kind of like the games you mentioned before you know the hell

divers and and Suicide Squad approaches they do very successfully release new updates you have to download to your console um but it’s really about having

the systems in place and the tools in place to be able to analyze the data understand that data and really be able

to make uh decisions informed by it and give the players more of the things that they want that make them happy take away

the things that are causing friction and frustration and and I think probably the most the second most common mistake I’ve

seen from people thinking they’re doing liveops is not actually using data to inform their decisions um I mean the the

the industry has been shifting ever increasingly since the the rise of mobile free to-play to being data driven

or data informed uh and I constantly see in in non-mobile gaming people who don’t

really understand why they would want analytics why they would want to gather data what they would do with that how they would interpret it um and I do hope

that in the next 5 10 or hopefully even shorter years than that the reticence or

reluctance or even in some ways the snobbery of the old school games who look down on freet toop playay mobile

goes away a little bit and Embraces a lot of what they do because if you look at the success of it commercially mobile

games account for more Revenue globally annually than than than flat screen products do or sorry uh PC console

products do and I think there’s a lot of learnings you can take from that because the the reason they’re making so much

money is they build products where you don’t have to release a new sequel every 12 months you don’t have to build the next game in a franchise which comes at

a time and money cost investment of many many millions of dollars and many many hours invested from teams building this

you could just take the game that’s already been successful and keep building on it and building on it and building on it and that’s what’s games

like fortnite becoming such a global phenomenon it’s constantly evolving it’s doing things that its users want it’s

adding content into the game that’s relevant to those users the reason they choose the skins and stuff that they put into fortnite isn’t pure coincidence and

chance they understand their players they’ve done their research they talk to their players uh they’ve got data that

tells them hey when we did the Mr Beast pack it sold like hot cakes when we did the Dragon Ball Z pack it didn’t sell so

much you know I don’t know that that’s true that’s just two examples um but they can use historical data they’ve gathered to tell them oh our players

want more content like this and less content like this and make really smart more efficient decisions about what they

do with their resources in the future so I feel like the games that I

think of when I think liveops just seem very expensive like to make like more expensive than the

average game and even if you are that big Studio like I think if they’re

having it as an afterthought for me that means they had someone potentially missing at the start of the game

development process so if like Callum I hear you I’m going to follow your advice who do I need in

place to build a good liveops game I wouldn’t otherwise need if I wasn’t building a liveops game yeah so It’s

tricky to sort of answer that across the entire industry because I think there’s a role there’s a role you’ve probably come across Harry called Product

managers which are more prolific in mobile games than they are in PC console games and in VR games as well product

managers are really the ones who set the vision for the product and if that Vision includes a liveop strategy then that’s very much the way that you go um

console and PC games tend to be more creative driven first rather than product driven so they’re not trying to

hit a certain genre or a certain niche in the market which is what a product manager is there to do it’s trying to optimize towards a business end result

of a successful commercially viable product the console PC space tends to not think that way it tends to lead with

I’ve got a great idea I’ve got a great feature I’ve got a great vision or art style for a game it kind of goes a

little bit against where the mobile sensibilities have started moving um so I would absolutely advocate for any game

team in PC console space that wants to make a really solid live operations game is to bring somebody in with product management experience um even if it’s

just as a short-term consultancy thing at the start to keep your cost down just to really understand the overheads the

the barriers and actually on the flip side the benefits you’ll get from building a liveops game so you mentioned

about the cost for a second there Harry yes it’s more expensive to build a liveops game however there are some great off-the-shelf solutions that give

you a lot of the things that you can get from a a full stack liveops team relatively cost effectively like play

faab for example is a great set of services that you can use which gives you things like you know in-game message of the day uh content management it can

host design configurations so you can change design parameters and rebalance things on the flight let you do AB testing so you can try different

variations and see what works and what doesn’t work um and I think the the real benefit you have of using that is

obviously you don’t have to build it yourselves if you decide it’s the wrong approach or your customers don’t like it you haven’t got that sunk cost you can

just cancel the subscription or or or or the the ongoing payments you pay to that provider um but it also lets you try

things out very very quickly and cheaply relatively early on in the game’s development see if it fits your development team’s methodology and shows

you other skills you might need to hire into the team if you think that’s the direction you do want to go the last thing I’ll say as well is the sort of

there’s a bit of a fallacy that building liveops slows you down in that it will slow you down

initially but imagine a world where once you’ve got a basic liveop system in and running and you can start getting data

and tweaking things and analyzing things and optimizing them you move faster towards a fixed result you want to

achieve because you’re not guessing each iteration cycle you’re making on the game you’re using data and you’ll be able to tweak things much quicker inside

the game because the data could be hosted on on your live op system that allows you to change your design configuration change the I don’t know

the economy rates that you’re getting coins or the XP rate you get from killing enemies or whatever things it is

that might sort of be um uh things you’ve put on the server you can actually move faster so your time to get

up and running is slower but your iteration time to getting the game to a place where consumers really like it

should be much much faster once you’ve got these systems in place so it’s more pain initially but once you’re up and

running it’s it’s much much easier to work in that environment for sure I feel like this

needs to be a commitment from the start that people understand that will take some resources because I feel like if you start and then halfway change your

mind either way like if you start live of like oh we can’t do this anymore it’s like this is a big thing so it is it is

and and I get it right change is scary and for companies that have been very successful making the more traditional

non-live Ops focused games it’s difficult to switch mentality and move to that model um because it’s not what

you know and you always trust what you know your own earned experience is the most valuable experience in every person’s eyes um I would just encourage

them to look at the wider industry and see where success has come from and embrace the fact that in you know 20

years time perhaps you know every game will be a live Ops game to some degree because that’s really where the success

comes from as we get pushed by increasing costs and uh and U um other

Market forces to make games much much quicker or much more efficiently the most efficient way to make a game that is is going to generate long-term

revenue is for it to be a base that you can build adapt and move on from each time um without having to every 12

months release a SQL and do the marketing campaigns to get that SQL done you have so many advantages and

synergies to building a liveops game over building the you know annual cycle box product model I reflect on like Call

of Duty and Battlefield now where Call of Duty has had that you know here’s a game it’s going to have a single player

game and I found it very funny that stat where most people buy it for the single player but you only see people play multiplayer fun but now we have war zone

and I think Battlefield the next one is going to be an incredible live Ops or whatever the CEO it like indeed yeah so

like when you have both of those it makes me think okay they’re doing that and these are some of the biggest selling titles ever so that is a good

sign hopefully and I think what’s really encouraging as well is that seeing those big companies shift that way they I

guess mobile has set a trend which other companies now from a business standpoint are trying to look at how do we replicate this

but as those big companies in the PC console space start to do this it’s going to mean that the other smaller companies that are trying to compete

with that either need to it’s really pushed to catch up and offer a live Ops model or find Innovative new ways to

move away from that but still engage Their audience in a way that’s meaningful to those guys um so again

that comes back to that first point about knowing what your audience is if you don’t think the liveop strategy is one you can afford to do or you don’t

want to take the risk on it try and find games where you don’t have to be live Ops dependent try and find games where it is a bit more Boutique or a bit more

a niche experience or things that don’t rely upon there being live services or live systems in place for you to

maximize your opportunity to engage and entain entertain an audience yeah for sure like the Indie Games studios are

really interesting because some of them you see these great stories where they just sell so many copies like oh my God

it was like a three person team and what have you but we obviously don’t hear about the ones that never made it

because of survivorship bias but like that to me means I feel like we’re going to have a bit of a split this is just me

theorizing now as someone outside where you got the Indie Studios who probably under $30 ticket but then everything

else is either freeto playay big live Ops I don’t know where AAA is going because I feel like ubisoft’s just

hemorrhaging money with those big 60 triaa games or quadruple a games I’m like I don’t know how sustainable this

is because like as me as a player I love going back to Hearthstone because I’ve put in 13 years and a St amount of money

and if I’m going to go back to a new AAA game as an adult now why I got fortnite

if I want to like I just 100% mate and you look at the you look at the costs of having to put on some of these big

quadruple games as we’ve seen them branded recently to justify those uh justify their development costs which

are spiraling into the many hundreds of millions of dollars for these big games and I saw a game on the on the PlayStation store recently where its

suggested price was $129.99 like I could go and I could go and buy like so many other more useful

things to my day-to-day life than a video game for1 130 um you know that’s three times the

price of the the last three games I bought on my PS5 you know that’s one game for the cost of three um and it’s

it’s kind of crazy and I get the economy of it I get the economics of it sorry like your game is more expensive

therefore you have to sell each unit at a higher price to claw back your investment but at some point you’re

getting to a point of ridiculousness where you’re going to be hurting your sales potential um so yeah they’ve got to they’ve got to really think about

whether those big boom and bus type single launch games every five years is really a model that’s sustainable for

them I don’t know if you’re ready for drama Callum but always Harry always cuz

previous guest they started in the industry from

99 um this was CEO of Arcane presid of Arcane who made Dishonored one and two

it’s a completely different world similar to how you said You released the game get actually getting something published was the hard part now it’s

kind of reversed and you need to be discovered this is the way it is fair enough and then we have Game Pass so if

we have Game Pass and all these live games and then you’re thinking oh I want to make a AAA title like I just I just

want to have a little bit of like 5 minute R um ramble here like do you think this is actually like do you see a

world in 10 years where AAA is still a thing as it is now I do but I don’t think I don’t think

it’ll be a world where every games Company claims AAA as this big badge of honor that the companies do right now um

I’ll be honest I don’t think consumers really give too much of a hoot about whether a game’s got a AAA label on it

they just want things that appeal to them and feel fun and feel interesting at a price where they feel they’ve got good value for money for it um so triaa

I think triaa will still exist in the sense that there will be games that you could label it or that the Press will label as AAA or even quadruple a um

games where you know it comes along once in a generation it’s such a big thing it’s a cultural Milestone right GTA 6 uh

and one would assume eight years time well yeah they’re starting to embrace the liveops model as well um but you

could look at GTA 6 or you know the next Red Dead Redemption or the next um the next Dark Souls game although Elden ring

starting to become more like a liveops game which is perhaps indication that they’re moving in that direction as well um there are some games where I think

that they are big enough cultural touch points that they can operate in the traditional AAA um uh mentality of you

know big boom release every five or six years and cool off they go the ones I struggle with a little bit more perhaps on a personal level mate is more the

annual franchise update ones so FIFA right or or now EA EA football um I

don’t really get why that couldn’t just be an annual update where you get new play stats new player skins yeah I mean

I get it from their commercial sense though they’ve got a captive audience right they make the best football game in the world and it is even though I’m

terrible at it I do love a good game of FIFA or sorry EA football um but yeah it just doesn’t feel like from a consumer

Value Point of View they’re getting they’re getting uh they’re getting change essentially every year they’re getting a very small minor update to a

game that existed for many many years it’s an iteration process but getting asked to pay full price for it every year because they want to play as their

cool favorite player at their favorite football clubs right they’re paying they’re paying for the privilege of being able to do the things they want to

do rather than for the technical Delta from last year’s version of being able to do what they want to do which feels a little bit disingenuous at least in my

mind yeah like for me I wish I had this stat um if I had a producer in the future maybe this would be useful but I

wonder how much the money they get from the ticket rather than like the live Ops features of like buying FC coins or

whatever they call them because if it’s like 80% on the FC coins then pull a war

zone like come on let’s go yeah 100% I mean I think I might be misquoting so if anybody’s listening to this and they

they have the actual data and I’m wrong I apologize but I believe there was a time where FIFA Ultimate Team was generating more Revenue annually than

FIFA boxed product um so I think there’s a precedent if that fact is true there’s

a precedent that’s actually 100% correct then Harry yeah no it’ll be interesting to see because I I it might be just like a

where diagrams will meet So eventually when it makes more sense to be live Ops they would just do it but at the moment

the cash that comes in a lump Sun maybe is worth it what have you and Y yeah

fair and borders Gate 3 I feel like is just in its League of its own now because I think they openly stated just

like we’re not going to do um much liveops right and they’re just working on a different game now um I want to say

that was said but that is but if you if you can sell hundreds of millions of copies globally and that works for you

every how many years were they developing BG for like 10 years 12 years I don’t know how long they started it

how long ago they started it if you can sell money that’s profitable yeah yeah and honestly as much as I’m a pro live

Ops person I would feel completely heartbroken if those big cultural touch Point moments in the industry went away

entirely because I do think we need those moments where somebody just comes in and goes boom here’s the best game in

this genre you’ve seen ever it is what it is you guys are all going to go and play it you’re all going to love it and it’s going to be the best game review

for the next 24 months like um um the Harry Potter game um Legacy brilliant

example like again the IP is really really strong so that doesn’t hurt but it’s a freaking awesome game as well

it’s so fun you to go and explore a world it allows you to go and do cool interesting things do things in games

you probably wouldn’t have done in other franchises um if that game had tried to come out and be a liveops game I think

that would have probably been doing it a disservice because it’s it’s you kind of want that thing to be self-contained a

little bit that kind of when it’s inside an IP particular you almost want to keep it episodic in a strange way and keep it

contained to that thing so then you can do a big build release um in four five six years time that’s the next episode

in that franchise it’s the ones where it’s much much smaller iterations like as I say the Call of Duties the uh the

the sports based games where it would more naturally suit a liveops model um but perhaps there’s there’s reasons why

companies don’t do that because they clearly sell a lot of copies of football games every year yeah exactly and yeah I

like that focus on the episodic side like I’m thinking borders skate threes or you say yeah it’s Dungeons and

Dragons like it’s very much like oh I finished cool yeah it’s it’ll be interesting to see how that you could spin the live platform DLC where that

seems to me Mak sense I mean if if I was if I was running Boulders Gate 3 and I was allowed to be more altruistic than

some companies allow people who own products to be I would 100% turn Boulders Gate 3 into a a ugc platform

and just let people go make their own little stories and campaigns in it and share it and that would just be so fun like it’ be Roblox for the RPG nerd

generation yeah that is an idea wow 100% right so I want to move into the

publishing part so if I’m looking to publish my game and I want to use a

publisher for it how do I nail the essential elements of a pitch to a publisher yeah it’s a really good

question and I I guess having seen a lot of pitches since I joined end dreams in the third party publishing role but also

previously in my career at Activision and cod Masters where I work worked in third party publishing as well um

there’s some classic mistakes even though there was a 12E period in the Middle where I was doing freet to-play the mistakes from 12 Years prior are the

same ones I’m seeing now uh and I think the fundamental first one like the one that sort of makes me a little bit sad

in my heart is that developers don’t often understand what it is a publisher does and they come to a publisher with a

pitch deck that’s like hey here’s my shiny awesome game idea here’s the amount of money I need give me money

please is kind of the way it feels sometimes without really understanding what else it is they could be asking for from a publisher Beyond just funding I

get it they’ve got a business to run they want to keep their Runway going so they can keep paying the bills and keep making the game but they they’d be

better suited uh understanding what it is a publisher can do for them rather than just funding their game and yes

Publishers will fund games and pay for things but on top of that there’s so much more value of publisher ads uh they

can help with placement with first parties so understanding how to work with Sony work with Microsoft work with

meta if you’re in VR to help you get the maximum possible impact for your game have it be in a place where it’s

featured more heavily have it be in a place where it gets more visibility more discoverability from players which is

all just great for your organic in stores or purchases they can also help with delivering a great marketing

campaign a publisher has access to uh internal staff or agencies that they use that can create really high quality

screenshots copy trailers um social campaigns influencer campaigns they can

do things that a small Indie developer on their own couldn’t really do and they’re they’re fully set up for this

right it’s part of their bread and butter their day-to-day business and it’s so impactful for creating not just a a a boom launch where suddenly people

get get to go and buy the game on day of release but for creating that buzz that Zeitgeist that noise around it where you

get organic Word of Mouth um traffic where people have talked about this game they’ve seen or talked about this community they’ve joined so so so

important they can also help with the the more mundane things but necessary things um so a lot of developers aren’t

set up to do really strong in-depth functional QA or compatibility QA making sure that their game works on every

possible configuration of PC and graphics card making sure their game aderes to all the guidelines that you have to hit for Sony or PC or for or for

Microsoft or for for VR those things are really specialist skills that take away your team’s time actually delivering the

product and working with the publisher gives you access to a specialist bench of people who do that stuff day in day out um and really just making sure that

you understand that while money is a big part of what you want from a publisher just going to them and asking for money

sets this weird tone where you haven’t really thought about what else you want the publisher to help you with and makes it feel a bit like you might as well

approach a VC or a bank or somebody else and you treat the bits that a publisher actually set up to do as kind of like a

Bolton uh over and above the funding or in some cases even like a necessary eil um we’d love we’d love developers in

fact I do love developers and I’ve seen pictures recently where they come to us and go cool we need this much money to finish the game but also we’d love you

guys to help with this help with this to understand this and we can have those active conversations much earlier in the

in the negotiation process around how we would work together and you’re much more likely to get a positive response from a

publisher in my experience at least if you understand what it is you want from that relationship rather than just

cash amazing so coming into that conversation with I guess your homework done like hey publisher I know you do

XYZ we’re looking for Y and Z and we know you’re quite good at it and we need this amount of money like coming in with

that kind of start to the conversation is there anything else you should add to kind of that intro I guess yeah well

just to sort of add an extra point on that first one as well when we go and do our forecast to see if a game actually makes sense for us to be a publishing

partner with a developer on we’re going to factor those things into our assumptions anyway we’re going to build in what it would take for us to do a

marketing uh campaign we’re going to build in what it would take for us to QA localize submit the game manage the

first party relationships so you might as well come in and having done your homework as you put it Harry and

understand that those costs are going to get baked into a p&l and figure out if that actually even works for you guys um

I’d be very remiss if I told anybody yeah we can just we can Wing this one and just not do those things that’s just how most Publishers work we have a

reputation of our own to uphold for releasing great quality games so understanding that it’s not just your Dev funds that you’re that we’re going

to be wanting to split revenues at the end to to recoup is a really important part and a lot of developers that I’ve

spoken to recently haven’t even really understood that we have to recoup our money they think it’s just like a a VC

investment or it’s like a long-term play where they’re like oh well here’s just some cash you guys go make your game if it does really well maybe we’ll ask for

some back like that’s that’s not how the publisher developer model works so know what a publisher is and does is definitely Point number one

number two as a as a sort of General tip as well would be coming back to our earlier points understand your audience

a lot of public a lot of Publishers are fully set up to go and do market research and consumer research and

that’s great we’ll do that as a due diligence piece on any game we want to publish but showing that the developers thoughts about that in a pitch deck is

infinitely more valuable than us going and doing it and sharing that with them later so worst case I see Pitch decks

where I don’t have any context for who their competitors are what kind of gameplay uh audience type they’re

targeting um that’s probably the most common case actually sometimes you’ll get a developer who’s gone out there and

looked at the market a bit and gone okay so we’re a bit like game a we’re a bit like game B we sort of sit somewhere

between those two um and they’ll do a little bit of like finger in the air back of a napkin forecasting I game a

sold this many copies game B sold this many copies therefore we probably sit somewhere between those two um it’s nice

that they’ve done that little bit of uh little bit of effort like it it does help at least understand that they know that they’re up against competitors and

this is not a a blue ocean opportunity um but the thing that we’d really love and the thing I have seen rarely but

love it so much when I do see it is really understanding who the game is for like tell me why this feature in this

game is appealing to this player tell me who you think your target consumer is what games they’re playing is a secondary function of that um actually

knowing why people go and play I don’t know a Sci-Fi space shooter great awesome tell me about the Sci-Fi space

shooter player what motivates them what excites them uh what research you done into why why they like these games how

do your features then come back to that like how do they reinforce this is a game for that audience um or even

sometimes and this has happened I think twice in my career they go Okay so we’ve done our research around this kind of player base but we think actually based

on the research there’s a gap right here a huge audience opportunity that’s not

being served we think that actually by doing the things from this type of game over here this kind of space shooter game or uh and this RPG game combine

those two things together and suddenly you’ve got a whole new proposition that appeals to two different audiences so so understanding your player base and

explaining that to the publisher can really help them understand the journey you’ve been through to to think that

your game is awesome and it’s got massive commercial potential and makes us more likely to feel like we can take a risk on investing in a game because

you’ve done the homework for us we don’t have to go and do it for you you’ve kind of given us the starting point or if we do have to build on it we’re not

starting from scratch so the two previous points we’ve talked about about you know understand your audience understand your player base absolutely

apply when pitching to a publisher and then I guess to sort of again go slightly back to where we were talking previously if your game is going to be a

uh a boom a boom release and then you’re kind of done U model great call that out but also if you want to do a live op

strategy you want to do future content releases DLC plans inapp purchases make

sure the business model is really really clear to the publisher when you’re pitching um because it’s often the case

that developers haven’t really thought about that they get kind of tunnel vision especially when they’re small developers with limited runways

financially they get very focused on just the thing they think they have to deliver not what happens to the game

beyond that because the Publishers work doesn’t really finish at the point where the game goes on sale we then have to

try and keep it selling keep it fresh keep players engaged with it and the more thought they put into how they would pitch that to a publisher the

easier it is for us to get on board with that Journey as well I’m reflecting on my time at Nordic

and a few conferences because I was actually hanging out with a previous guest on the podcast and seeing him do

his pitch he covered a lot of what you said but the competitive part I don’t think was in the slide deck so to speak

so I’m wondering like this just a curious me question like if I have let’s say a PowerPoint slide 10 slides how

much time do I dedicate to like here’s what the landscape looks like so I I’d almost treat it as the

rule of rule of thirds right so a third of your pitch should really be around the the game itself like what is the

game what are the features why is it cool what’s the art Star right the things to make you excited about it a third of it would be around the market

opportunity so we think it it’s this gamer base we’re up against these kinds of players uh we look at the market and

be like Oh nobody’s done a game in this space for the last four years you know that those players haven’t gone away they’re still playing games they just

haven’t had that market served do your research about a third of the deck should be around the commercial opportunity and then a third of it will

be the cost to get there uh or the partnership that it takes to get there so what development ARS do you need cool

Publishers can fund games but also how do you maximize that opportunity what kind of marketing campaign would you

like to work on um what kind of community do you want to to build for this game how does a publisher bring

itself into the mix with you guys and work as a partnership rather than just as an investor so rule of thirds I’d

kind of split it crudely that way um depending on how feature or complex your game is the sort of the game side of

that might be a lot more a lot more space in the end but if you start with the rule of thirds you won’t go far wrong and if you need to make one of

those bigger do it after you’ve done the other other two sections so then at least you’ve got the bases covered for the two-thirds that are what does the

publisher do and and what’s the commercial space look like I love that point you I believe you said

like the last part is like how we would work together as a publisher like actually writing that out like I don’t think I’ve ever seen that so imagine

someone coming in if I’m a publisher it feel like they’re kind of like seducing me in the L like oh you’ve just done so

much work before this like thank you so much it’s yeah it’s it’s like you know it’s like any relationship the more

effort you put into it early on you pay the benefits of that later on and and I I can’t I can’t tell you honestly Harry

how many times I’ve had conversations with developers where when they’re talking about what they want from the

publisher they they come into it completely naive and completely unaware that they can even ask for these things

there’s almost a a I guess a lack of information or maybe a reluctance to go and ask for support on things um because

they’ll perceive it as maybe they’re they’re being too greedy or being too bold or don’t know the industry well enough I’d love for a developer to come

to me and be completely transparent honest and go this is the stuff we don’t know anything you can do on this list

that we can’t do brilliant it makes our lives easier yeah and I can see how

amazing that would be from a publisher because like you can go in and see oh this would increase the value of this by XYZ and precisely then everyone can make

money and enjoy good game that actually gets released yeah amazing so before we before we uh close off here I would love

to end with a survival tip uh for those laid off so what would you suggest to

those who have been laid off recently or just looking for their next job a bit of a survival tip yeah it’s it’s a really

good topic and one that’s actually close to my heart I I have twice in my career career once being made redundant and

also once being in a situation where I had to give the news to my entire Studio that I was the studio head for that we were shutting the studio down um so I

can kind of offer perspectives on both sides so when I when I was made redundant it was very early in my career

uh I’d literally been working at COD Masters for I think nine months at that point um it was the first job I’d ever

had um I my world was completely just thrown to pieces I had no idea what I was going to do next um I made a

conscious choice at that point that I didn’t have to just stay in games so I basically found a job that was working

in a call center for a central heating company telling 80-year-old ladies in the middle of winter that we couldn’t

get an engineer out to them for the two weeks right really heartbreaking Soul crushing work but it paid the bills but

it was a nine-to-five job and then from 501 onwards I was hustling I was out there um working on my personal skills

working on my professional skills teaching myself how to use packages like this going to show my age now but like

shop Pro cuz Photoshop was too expensive um like I was learning how to do graphic design learning how to create 3D models

learning how to code learning how to program uh learning how to animate I was teaching myself things from 501 till I

could not bear it anymore and had to go to sleep to go and do my depressing call center job the next day um so don’t

admittedly I was in a lucky position and I was an entry-level job when I first started I was 17 18 year old kid so I wasn’t expecting the highest salary but

if you’re in a position where you are wondering what to do next find something that pays the bills while you focus on

getting back on track there’s Contracting work and I know you know a lot about that world Harry right um there’s there’s stop Gap jobs you can do

there’s temporary jobs if gaming is the thing you want to do and I knew after nine months gaming was what I wanted to do for the rest of my career find a way

to deal with the mundane stuff the day-to-day you have to do in your life um and don’t get too heartbroken if

suddenly the next job you take isn’t that isn’t a gaming job we’ve got responsibilities adults we’ve got bills to pay do what you need to do to allow

you to follow your dreams go sounds very cheesy I feel like I should be on Diaries of a CEO with a line like that

um and then from the flip side sometimes you’re in a position where you’re the person who has to deliver the bad news

um and I’m sure over the last few months we’ve all seen what looked like AI chat GPT generated messages from company

leaders which all sound very insincere I’ve even heard stories over the last few months the horror stories

you know oh we didn’t find out we were getting uh made redundant until we saw the post on LinkedIn or we saw the post

on X right um sadly not sadly not make believe that it does happen and has

happened recently when I had to let my colleagues in the Helsinki Studio I was running know that we were closing the

studio down the first thing I did was basically sat them all down together in a room talked about the reasons why the rationale uh and then opened my door and

was like guys if you want to come and chat about this oneto one or go to the pub and talk about it like let’s just do it let’s just be there for each other

and try and treat it like you’re all humans rather than rather than their employees I get that some of the people

doing these decisions are heads of big thousand person multi AAL companies and they can’t go and have a beer with every

employee affected but they can empower the people who do directly have to let those people go to spend time and treat

them like human beings because if nothing else in the games industry now when I’m recruiting when I’m talking to

people who are looking for jobs their biggest fear is they’re going to join a company and go through this again or

they’re going to get treated like a number in a system rather than like a human being if you’re leaving thought when you get uh laid off or made

redundant from a company that may hire again in a year’s time two years time is oh wow they treated me so badly you’re

going to tell your friends about that you’re going to tell your future colleagues about that and it’s just such good practice if nothing else it’s just

good human nature to let the people know that you actually took it personally that you actually feel sorry and and

just make sure that when they’re talking to other people about your company in the future they remember that really fondly that you weren’t just treated

like a disposable employee there was a human consequence and a human relationship built around the fact they had to let you go um so those would be

those would be my two sort of nuggets of advice for people on on both both sides of that situation no I think perfectly said and

I just add some evidence to the second Point there’s some studios I know who went through layoffs it didn’t go that

good and now they’re actually struggling to hire people because of that bad reputation that then compounded and you

have a reputation if it’s good amazing then people tell they’re friends and then the good spreads but if it’s bad

it’s so bad because then when the bad spreads it’s very hard to undo bad like it it’s a lot harder so what you it’s

just yeah super clear and on the point of being laid off and going to contract work I’ve helped a few people with their

CVS and one thing about contract work it’s a networking game so getting your

foot in the door is everything and by foot in the door I mean like being even in the loop of a hiring manager that you

could be useful so when I was doing contract recruitment I would have checkins with the hiring managers the

reason I do that is because when they think oh I have problem they’re like ah let me ask well you want to be the Harry in that

equation so the way to do that proactively is connect with people on LinkedIn generally just kind of you know

just put your Fe out you have 100 connection request a week even if they’re all blank because you’re not using premium around 10 to 20% would

accept even if your profile is any good and then just start those DM conversations try to get a few on a

video call and then just treat it like a recruiter really just try to have a quarterly chat and then honestly gaming

conferences the last two I’ve gone to a lot of hiring like I’ve had some students ask me the only reason I’m here

is for unreal code development I was like what like they’re looking for a bunch of unreal developers like have not

this doesn’t reflect what LinkedIn is saying so what I’m just trying to say is jobs exist but they’re not necessarily

screaming about it they might be thinking they might be doing this all before the job becomes public is what

I’m trying to say so you just want to be in the know um before they actually go and hire agencies and

stuff great advice man great advice and conferences are just a great way to get out there and meet people and and create

opportunities at this point in time when there’ve been so many layoffs in the industry I’m fully expecting in a year’s

time people who’ve been laid off who’ve gone to conferences have formed awesome new startups and are doing great new creative things so even if it’s not a

job you find you might find colleagues that you didn’t know you were looking for yet who can go and do things together that become the next great

amazing step in your career yeah and the hack on conferences it’s cheap if you plan it like if you just get a few

friends Airbnb get the cheapest ticket available for that conference that might be all in a couple hundred bucks if you get a cheap

flight like the return on investment that is crazy find find a spreadsheet for all the parties and suddenly you’ve

got networking for free and free drinks actually true yeah and this is a hack a lot of the parties if you just register

even if they don’t say yes if you just show up if they just see you actually registered and you’re pending I have yet

to be rejected so that is a hack for everyone who stayed to the end of this podcast literally invite only parties

don’t really exist just try to register show up and smile and you can probably get it good advice good advice words to

live by amazing Callum thank you so much I’ve really enjoyed this conversation me too Harry me too it’s been a pleasure

and uh thank you for the opportunity to share some hopefully useful knowledge with people uh and look forward to

having this chat with you again in a few months yeah 100% uh question where should people find you where should people go and reach out uh so best place

to find me is going to be on LinkedIn you can search for Callum Godfrey I’m probably the only bold man a man who

looks like a potato wearing glasses on LinkedIn um so yeah go find me on LinkedIn that’s the best place to find me and drop me a DM um then if things go

well after that we’ll figure out the best ways to communicate but that’s that’s that’s the easiest and most convenient place I’m not gonna give up

my personal phone number on this podcast yeah you have to seduce Callum with an amazing pitch deck which involves

homework and then you sure do yeah maybe you get the what I don’t think you I even have a WhatsApp yet so I need to do

some work all right do you not okay well well I’ll give you my number offline

goodbye everyone thank you thank you