Why Dark Souls Is The 'Ikea' Of Games

[Music] your GDC hangover is treating you I've been there housekeeping please silence mute airplane mode your phones closed laptop screens if you don't mind you will get an email about how you can rate me how I did I hope to earn a good review but you'll begin that and you are free to describe me as you see fit I also like to say it's a huge honor to be presenting here at GDC and I take it as a personal honor that you all came to see my presentation all there's a lot of cool stuff going on though there's a lot of important meetings so I am very flattered that you came here and this talk I'm just gonna looks at with my buttons there we go so this talk is about choice the choices we make as game developers and the trade-offs we have to make to get games made with restraints were all under and my favorite quote about this comes from Cliff Bleszinski it's about the trade-offs you decide on as a designer it's like playing an RPG riah of 20 points allocate to strength dexterity and intelligence and you can't have it all and I love this because you're describing the art of game design in terms of game design it's meta so often we make these kind of decisions based on instinct which is fine but a lot of times we make them because we get backed into them because of those those restrictions we make these choices reactively what I want to propose today is that there's a framework that we can make these decisions proactively based on who our target end-user is what the competitive set looks like and what our best practices are so to open up I want to start with the tale of two games that are very near and dear to my heart Dark Souls and Resident Evil 6 both came out in October the respective years both had about two years of development time the Resident Evil six outsold Dark Souls by about 70% in terms of physical units and yet history tends to remember Dark Souls is a critical and commercial success and Resident Evil six is a critical and commercial failure so the relevant question then is why is the game that sold 70% more units considered the failure of the two and that's what I want to talk about today in this presentation I'm calling strategic design or why Dark Souls is the idea of games so Who am I I start in the industry about ten years ago as a helmet production intern at webelo Games in Chicago Illinois work my way up to his studio lead senior producer position on games like guilty party Avengers initiative and with our sisters studio Avalanche working on Disney infinity over that time I really developed a firm belief that the human cost of making games in terms of layoffs and crunch and health issues the studio closures and uncertainty was a little more than I could stomach and I decided the best way for me to be able to positively impact that would be to learn as much about business and management as I could so in addition to working full time and raising kids I went to night school and earned an MBA at Northwestern University I'm currently working as a consultant not only with my friends at ragtags they work to finish raise the dead I'm also trying to get my own company agency principal up and running and off the ground and I write regularly my blog breaking the wheel where I apply these sort of business theoretical concepts to game development so if you enjoy this talk there's a lot more material there shameless plug alright so if you go to business school you will run into this guy a lot this guy's name is Michael Porter from the Harvard Business School he's a PhD in economics and a luminary in the field of business strategy he has two major claims to fame one is something called a five forces analysis and the other is codifying what he calls a true competitive advantage to understand a competitive advantage you have to understand another of his constructs which is called the productivity frontier this graph compares the value I product has for the end user versus the cost to make it that arc represents the line of best practice it's the equilibrium point in a market you can't do better than that line you can't get something that's more valuable for customers that are costing more and you can't cut cost without reducing value this is like the pinnacle of best practices in an industry eventually a company's going to figure out how to get past that through some new process or best practice or patent or intellectual property or access to know some new resource and for a while they're gonna have a market advantage they're gonna be able to make things faster for cheaper but eventually the market will catch up and we all as a society benefit because products overall are better and cheaper but everybody benefits except for that one company and Porter calls this shifting the productivity frontier the moral of this story is that faster cheaper better is only a temporary advantage you cannot derive a sustained market advantage from operational efficiency alone so what do you do in his landmark article what is strategy Harvard Business Review 1996 I highly recommend you Porter offers what he calls a true competitive advantage based on three things making trade-offs I'm sorry being different making trade-offs and achieving fit so what these things mean first off being different means creating something that is unique and valuable you can do this in one of three ways according to Porter you can be a few things to many people and his example is Jiffy Lube they will work on any car but they will only do car lubricant so they don't do bodywork they don't do engine work just car lubricants you could be many things to few people his example is Bessemer Trust which is a full-featured financial services company that will handle all your banking needs but only if you have at least $250,000 of liquid assets or it can be many things to many people in a narrow market Porter's example is is car lake cinemas which is a theater chain full-featured but only operates in cities of 150,000 people or less now to understand why being you can unique and different is so important I direct you to the Kawasaki matrix this is something that Guy Kawasaki if Apple Fame brings up in every talk I've ever seen him give on YouTube it's a very simple two by two matrix that compared his uniqueness to value so if you are valuable but not unique you have to compete on your margin you have to give consumers more for their dollar and get less in return which means you have to sell more units to compensate extreme example would be toilet paper very valuable not unique so toilet paper companies have to offer more cheats poor roll more rolls per dollar than the competition and that's why toilet paper companies make about a penny per package or a penny per roll in terms of profit if you're not valuable and not unique you're essentially the dot-com boom you're creating a bunch of stuff that's not useful for customers but it makes a lot of money for hedge fund managers and stock speculators if you're in unique but not valuable in Kawasakis words you're just kind of stupid you make it something nobody's gonna buy and you spend a lot of time now if you're doing that for your own artistic means totally cool but if you're having a tent to sell it and nobody want to buy it you're kind of wasting a lot of time so you want to be here unique and valuable where we can sell things to people that they want to buy you can charge them the price that they think is fair but you still but still allows you to maintain a healthy margin Kawasaki's mnemonics remember this is you want to be like george w bush high and to the right I don't know exactly means by that but I remember it so clearly it works next up trade offs it's important remember recognize that doing everything is not strategy it is indecision strategy means often choosing what not to do example here the production triangle good cheap fast you don't get all three it's hard to have a service that is both luxurious and fast it's hard to have a product that has lots of options and is easy to use and you've got to recognize that some activities are incompatible like I just mentioned next up is fit this is a really key concept for a competitive strategy your activities need to fit each other they need to reinstate interact and reinforce one another so for example if you're using multiplayer code it behooves you to have mechanics that don't require a high degree of computational precision this is why it's really hard to do net code for Street Fighter now why is this so important being different allows you to uniquely serve a target audience trade-offs allow you to serve that target audience at a lower cost than anybody else and fit makes it harder for other companies to compete with you they cannot just replicate one part of your value chain they have to replicate all of it to replicate your success Porter's example it was Southwest Airlines and on the 20 years since what a strategy came out they've since changed their MO a little bit but back in 1996 Southwest was many things to few people it was a full service airline catering to price sensitive customers who didn't care about perks and we're going between regional airports sure Southwest made a lot of trade-offs there was they only stuck the Regional Airport so you wouldn't find them in O'Hare LAX they had no frequent flyer program they had no first-class seating they didn't deal with baggage transfers and they only use 737 jets which meant they couldn't do long-haul flights this would seem to put them at a disadvantage until you consider the element of fit the fact that they're in regional airports means meant they had to pay less for gate rights they didn't have to negotiate is hard the fact they had no frequent flyer program in that aid streamlined ticketing the fact there's no first-class seeing a no baggage transfer I mean they could turn around planes in about half the time and the fact that they only use 737 jets means I only had to train their crews to service 737 jets and only had to carry these parts for 737 jets which reduced their overhead net effect is that Southwest was faster cheaper and better but for the target consumer they made a choice we're going to target these people over here at the expense of these people over here which is totally fine and there's no secret sauce here there's no trade secret they just had very good operational harmony now how effective is this 1993 Continental launches continental light with the intent of going directly head-to-head with Southwest Airlines but they didn't make the same trade-offs they kept her frequent flyer program they kept first-class seating they kept baggage transfers they use different kinds of jetties total failure such a bad failure they killed it two years later Board of Directors five that fired the CEO over it Porter's other example is IKEA much like Southwest IKEA is all thanks to few people they are targeting young price sensitive customers who are price sensitive but not time sensitive and have rigid schedules because their earlier in their careers they can't dictate their own hours yet IKEA makes a lot of trade-offs they're often located way the hell out and bfv so you got a drive we have to get to them there is no show people there's no customization you got to build it yourself they offer food court and childcare and they are open late much like Southwest this would seem to put IKEA at a disadvantage until you consider the element of fit so the fact there in the suburbs means they can have a really large property for really cheap which means they can have bigger parking lots which makes it easier to park bigger showrooms to show more furniture and bigger bigger warehouses so they can have more on hand inventory customers don't mind making the trip they're not time-sensitive they just want to deal the fact that there's no show people means you have less staff you have less operational overhead and customers are fine showing themselves around because what you see is what you get you know need salespeople because you can see the the the Ghidorah bed right next to the nürnberg lamp on top of the tournament all the names these things but you know what I'm saying like you can just see the furniture right there you don't need a salesperson describe it to you and the fact that there's no customization means they have streamlined manufacturing it's very it's really easy to have a streamlined process if you just have to make one kind of a thing over and over again it's easy to store and deliver boxes because they stack really well in trucks and in cars and in warehouse shelves and time insensitive customers or times time sensitive customers don't my building because they have time they just don't have money so those amenities the food court the day care the fact that open late would seem like extravagances but it means that customers can go straight from work because there'll be food there they don't have to get a sitter because I we'll take care of their kids and they don't have to rush and stress themselves out about finding traffic because IKEA is gonna be openly the net effect is once again IKEA is better for the target customer while still being profitable but it has reduced appeal to time-sensitive price insensitive customers who want customization in high quality again IKEA made a choice we're gonna target these people over here at the expense of these people over here that is the essence of strategy so to the meat of the presentation why is Dark Souls the IKEA of games if it's not obvious by now I mean that as a compliment so let's think of the target audience for Dark Souls hardcore gamer enjoys discovery likes pushing the boulder up the hill like Sisyphus wants depth and wants thrilling main and menacing experiences these are gamers who want games that are like badges of honor if they win now does Dark Souls meet the criteria for a competitive advantage was it different sorry it's good my head it was a different didn't make trade-offs did it have fit Dark Souls is definitely different it was a hardcore unforgiving no throw frills game in an industry of cinematic mass-market titles I'm pretty sure that pictures from one of the later Dark Souls games but a 200 million dollar person body count really kind of emphasizes my point here Dark Souls makes a lot of trade-offs few cinematics almost new tutorial one difficulty level sparse music limited multiplayer and it wasn't exactly using a cutting-edge engine much like a key in Southwest this would seem to put Dark Souls at a disadvantage until you think about fit so the fact that there's few cinematics and very little tutorial means you had to figure it out for yourself this tutorials in retinas of edge cases Cinemax can be expensive produce you don't happen to lead something by the hand that means you got to figure it out you for yourself that means it is the difficult game that the target audience really wants you got to figure out Dark Souls works or you buy the strategy got if you're a punk I want the stream to be good it was one difficulty level means you have focused balancing you know what to bounce for easy medium hard extra hard there's just the Dark Souls level of difficulty and that means it's take it'll even if you beat Dark Souls you have to beat Dark Souls which means you're one of the elite which means it has that badge of honour that the game that target sect was looking for sparse music cuts cost but it also makes the world of Dark Souls feel farm or sparse and desolate and menacing so it's a cut that made it better this is the essence of a competitive advantage limited multiplayer is focus multiplayer and the fact that you're using the tech from Dark Souls reduces some of their unknowns known tech or you know experience tech is known tech it's predictable tech you know relatively speaking this trade offs combine to create a harsh uncomfortable sink-or-swim experience which is exactly what the target audience was looking for and from software genre experts they've been making this kind of game since Kingsfield on the ps1 this really helps them hone their own what they're doing and hone their activities the night of fact is it felt tailor-made for an audience that often feels ignored or overlooked by the Triple A games industry in these trade offs allowed Dark Star from software to focus effort without sacrificing quality again for the target audience and that mends at Dark Souls could be more profitable with a smaller market and a difference in mr. Porter I call this notion in strategic design now if we contrast this with the other game for my introduction resonable 6 and I says for as somebody for whom resin he was my favorite game series ever resi vulture at 6 try to do the opposite I try to take a niche brand to the mass-market producer at the time said we're making games and we need to have mass-market appeal to survive and that mass-market design approach trying to target as many people as possible meant that resonable 6 couldn't cut costs and had a hurdle rate of 7 million units in the intro I said res evil 6 outsold Dark Souls by 70% it would have to have sold an additional 40% to make its own target the net effect is best expressed by residence Evans producer Massa she could quwata by trying to please everyone you please no one and if the direction of Resident Evil 7 is in the indication this was a lesson painfully learned now some of you might be asking how intentional was this I'm from software's part how intention really designs where they think did they read Michel Porter's article where they think it in terms of cuts and targeting a target market the answer honest no answer is I don't know I tried to find out I wrote to Bandai Namco they couldn't help me I reached through a press contract to go through some PR contacts and Bend nm code they couldn't help me if you got a from software's website they toe to go to Bandai Namco so I ran into a dead end but really that's not my point my point is not that from software read michael Porter's what a strategy and to emulate it my point is that Dark Souls provides a prototype by which you can make these decisions intentionally I I believe that Dark Souls verifies that this framework can apply to games effectively so to that end recommendations in seven timeless quotes first of all hue defense everything defends nothing Friedrich the great King of Prussia I'm gonna reiterate this because a bear's reordering strategy means making choices deciding what to do and deciding what not to do and always recognize that trade-offs yield benefits they reduce costs and they make it harder for other companies to compete and I see let's let's cameras going off and that's cool but I'm gonna give you a link to download these slides so don't don't stress about getting every frame good example here is X comma X comma was X calm if you weren't there to get slapped around by really hard turn-based strategy game it did not make any compromises for you and that is exactly what it shows on and that's why it's so successful on why it's fans are so ravenous about it because it served them very well and it didn't make compromises to dilute the experience for that target segment next up know thy enemy know thyself and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril son soon so get to know your target audience and figure out what it really wants this is basic marketing research stuff you can do persona exercises where you hypothesize emember the audience try to try to think ahead what they might be about what they're interested in what their day looks like what kind of media they consume go ahead actually find some of them do one-on-one interviews talk to them see what they're actually about you can use more advanced survey techniques like factor and cluster analysis and conjoint analysis and you don't know what the hell that means it's in the appendix of these slides which you can download but I can also talk about during Q&A if you're interested but you might need a professional survey company to help you with that but you want to use this information to pick your trade-offs and prioritize features good example here's supercell supercell knows how to dial in an audience really well they kill off anything that's not going to be huge hit with their audience and they know how to test and test and retest until they have games that are gonna be a huge hit that's why heyday and clash of clans are still on the top of the charts multiple years later if I'd ask people what they want they would have said faster horses Henry Ford so those last few slides notwithstanding I am not advocating design by focus group or design by survey that is a road to mediocrity and the reason is because people don't know what they want it's your job to show them this is one case where I think that is absolutely correct now this sounds pretentious but I what jobs met is that most people those consumers are not professional product developers and most gamers are not professional game designers it is not reasonable to ask them to construct things and conceive game designs in their head that's not what their training is they don't know what they want yet but they do know what they like and then is a very important distinction to draw don't know what they want but they do know what they like so figure out what they're passionate about figure out what needs other games aren't aren't answering tailor your feature set accordingly great example here is Resident Evil 4 which is my favorite game of all time and kind of my apology for shooting on Resident 6 a little bit if Shinji Mikami had gone to guys like me who were huge Resident Evil fans and said what do you want in the next game we probably would've said more zombies bigger guns bigger mansions more puzzles instead he scrapped that design and rebirth both genre and a game series with one of most successful games in the last decade I think he knew exactly what he wanted to do I think he knew what the audience was interested in and he was ok with trusting his instinct to give them something that met their needs but wasn't exactly what they asked for Retreat hell we are just attacking in a different direction lieutenant-general chesty puller so I'm not when this concept of strategic design I'm not advocating that you resign yourself to subsistence revenue or hiding from the competition I'm not saying you should get used to scratching a living off bare rocks it's not and it's also not about compromising quality to save money the goal here is to find underserved niches make ins those nations will love and then use trade-offs to make that and use profitable and make it harder for other companies to compete with you a good example here has gone home Gama home knew exactly the kind of his game was gonna make if you read the design it would seem very humble but there their dedication to that idea and just serving the people want to play that kind of game earn them a level of notability and a cord that bolide how simple that design was and they deserve every bit of that accord in my opinion music is the space between notes claude debussy so you're considering what cuts to make don't just take a hatchet to your design don't just hack things off willy-nilly without thinking through what you're trying to do you want to try to cut things that run contrary to your target feature set to enable it to be to leave yourself to focus on those targets example here uncharted uncharted for lack of a better term was trying to make the Indiana Jones of videogames to that end they have these very beautiful refined well shot well active well Oshin captured cinematic scenes that's what we all love about that series it's easy to forget and I forgot that I replayed it a couple months ago that game is about four hours long they cut quantity to support quality it certainly did not hurt the franchise's long-term prospects as we all know the enemy of art is the absence of limitations Orson Welles according to his friend Henry Allen we don't actually know if he said this but still good quote the idea here is not to constrain creativity don't be a glass half empty person yeah idea is to focus attention efforts and resources where they will provide the most value both your gamers and your company good example here the doom reboot now doom eschewed a lot of features that prevailing logic would tell you that modern shooters need there was no romance there was no ill advice stealth section weren't a ton of cinematics it was a very focused design that was all about kill things dead real good and that focus did not hurt the game that focus made it an exceptional shooter that stands out drastically in the current field finally the opposite of love is not hate its indifference le vessel now a lot of thing a bunch of professional entrepreneurs and marketers and product developers get wrong is they get way too hung up about if people are gonna hate their product or in this case hate their game but in order for one niche to love your game you have to accept that another niche is probably gonna hate it and that shouldn't bother you because if the people who hate your game are diametrically opposed to your target audience the fact that those people hate it is perversely supporting evidence it means you're probably on target which would freak you out a lot more than hate is indifference because indifference means that people can't even be bothered to hate your game they don't even care so always remember that passionate fans are what create valuable brands this is why engagement is far more important than traffic at a website a million people showed up to your site who cares did they read anything did they buy anything did they sign up for a mailing list do they post about it on Facebook but they tell their friends about it having a thousand people who are highly engaged is way more valuable than having a million people show up ago now another thing of professional entrepreneurs marketers product in dollars get way too hung up on is the size of the target audience whether it's too small but it's important recognize that your target audience is not the same thing as your addressable market your target audience builds your decimal market how do good old-fashioned word-of-mouth your fans will evangelize for your game it's important to remember that word of mouth is the most valuable form of marketing there is and it's the most valuable because it's the only form of marketing you cannot buy you have to earn it and you can try doing stealth and astroturf things but you will get caught so that you can only get word-of-mouth the old-fashioned way and the way but your fans are only going to evangelize for you if they are passionately engaged because you made something that they love so examples here abound Kerbal space program Counter Strike League of Legends Halo minecraft alone demonstrates this point for me so if you want to be the next IKEA or Dark Souls or Star Wars or Apple or Harry Potter or Nine Inch Nails don't spend so much time working worrying about making something everybody's gonna buy focus instead I'm making something that a segment of people will really love and with that I will turn it over for questions but first here's my contact info if you scan that QR code you'll get my contact details two underscores don't forget on the Twitter you don't get the one underscore Justin Fisher he hasn't tweeted in like seven years and that bitly link will give you annotated slides if you're sidin and they're sharing I'm sharing them under a Creative Commons 4.0 license so distribute them at your studio so most your friends just don't sell them or you gotta give me a cut and also if you enjoy my peculiar way of looking at the world I'm doing another session on Friday about applying operation science to game development so if you got production nerdy friends who are into production nerdy stuff I welcome them with open arms so any any questions at the mics oh thank you see one person walking up hi hello I'm just wondering if you think cuz Dark Souls is a console game do you think that console exclusivity plays into what you're talking about as far as like a limitation that could be beneficial it can be yeah I mean it should be where and who you target should be interrelated with your console your platform choices like Halo is a great example of you know you have one console that would seem to put you in disadvantage but also allows you to focus your design on what you're trying to make and and focus your technical efforts on what the specific hardware requirements are so yeah I definitely that if you're doing that in an intelligent way you can really limit you can limit the ability potential for analysis paralysis the answer you question yep thank you what are your thoughts on like identifying these niches based on sort of your own personal experience and anecdotal evidence versus like market research because you know I'm not off to five that producers in that they want that market research yeah it's hard to do I mean if you have lots of marking muscle and dedicated marketing departments it's a lot easier to kind of defer that work but honestly I think it's games to me are not not like consumer products they're all micro startups so to me it's the same thing as how base-level startups in the early phases try to find customers you go out and check actually who are you talking to who are you who and whose hands are you putting build so were you testing with like don't undervalue the ability of shoe-leather to start answering these questions for you and if you're if you're targeting the right people if you're looking at those people who are really interested in being at the ground floor who like to be at the cutting edge of game development don't underestimate the ability of you to flatter them by bringing them in early and that's how you can start building that base level of word-of-mouth if somebody's like hey these guys brought me in they asked my opinion they let me see things that can be a great way to start building that following does that make sense I just have one question about like if you're building a game and you launch it and it's sort of like a good Minimum Viable Product it's the Dark Souls of whatever you're doing if it's has success and you continue updating it you slowly add more and more features and craft and it suddenly becomes not that yeah what do you think about that and how would you manage that type of game design and development and I think that sort of iteration I'm there's plenty examples of it there's nothing wrong with evolving and and bringing in more people over time I mean I think that especially for like businesses that's kind of what you want to do so to me there's nothing bad about it as long as you're being intentional about it like okay we think this has a broader appeal to these people and they lose this feature set but if you don't wanna do it as like a panic routine like we aren't selling enough so let's just rope in more people without a really strategy let's just make it as mass-market as possible that's where you're running trouble or if you're really diluting what the core of what your game is that core value proposition and kind of messing it up with putting too much extraneous crap around it that's we can start run into problems so to me it's it's a it's an analysis driven decision like okay bring in more people talk to them have them play it see what they think are seals getting better or worse you still like you feel are honoring the core values of the product and that's how I would approach it Thanks just someone relate to that maybe a little bit theoretical but do you think it's possible to take what Dark Souls did in terms of trade-offs and refocus that on a different audience maybe even a larger audience if you start selling groceries in that keya format you get Trader Joe's like will that work yeah I think so I mean again as long as you understand what your target audience is looking for and what trade-offs are either acceptable or in some ways preferable in like the Dark Souls difficulty thing then yeah I I don't think the lesson from Dark Souls is that people want really hard games that are in a medieval setting with monsters I think the lesson is that people want games that are made for them and that make them feel like somebody's paying attention to them and wants to service them specifically so if you can figure what makes people feel like they're being serviced specifically and that there needs to be answered then it can work for any genre any game you just have to balance you know the more people you get the less the more people you're trying to target the less specific you can get to their needs and that's that's where the balance point is and that's where you need to focus on your trade-offs and you know where your specific value point is I agree make sense thanks yeah sure so if you think about Dark Souls in terms of strategically delivering a project or product to a niche audience that we're kind of forgotten by the industry do you think that strategical advantage might get lost now that we as an industry are maturing and not forgetting about audiences and trying to bounce out the products and therefore strategical advantage will only come from creating new genres and new products for audiences that have negated to at all yet no I I don't think it's it only needs to be new products because if Dark Souls was a constantly evolving constantly new content coming out kind of thing like like an uber like a just constant purses persists then yeah I think you would need to constantly find new things to go to but Dark Souls can coexist in a world with nioh and those two things you don't say like oh I'm gonna buy a fewer copies of Dark Souls because nyle is not here it it is scratching the same image it's serving the same audience it's got a different bend to it at that point you got to figure out your competitive set it's not just everything that's out there but what's coming out proximate to your release and what's gonna get buzz around the same time as used so that's got were that we're that strategic plan has to come into like whom whose needs my servicing and not just to their other games what are their other games that will be high-profile at the same time does annex your question a little bit I guess you know this industry is quite known for fast follow so yeah as well then everyone wants to play games anymore so then yeah we should make a cinematic triple-a game that goes to my point runs making the other guy of the lesser Dark Souls not like make Dark Souls it's make games for people and you know the lesson of Halo was not people want guys in green suits blowing up aliens it's that console shooter console gamers also like to shoot things so it's it's figuring out what needs they're addressing and not not focus in like the the topical sort of cosmetic trends of what made ourselves but really dig it into like the strategic nature of it so the fast fall itself is you know it's it's a it's a investment strategy like this less riskier but it's also less upside because you're now you're competing on margin again so you have to be yet to be aware of that where you making these decisions and one of the best lessons I learned business school is that there's not really good or bad decisions usually it's they're all trade offs and you got to figure out which trade off is most suitable to you most honors your core values most honors your strategic goals so let's right up there between known and unknown and convene on margin versus unique and valuable and you got to decide what the right balance point is for you and what's right for your your customer base and your game and your project and your finances is that does that better answer it yes like you think please hey great talk Thanks thank you um how how important do you think it is all right I guess I'd like to know your thoughts on changing these design principles from game to game versus companies that make their whole kind of image in you know one style of game over and over yeah that tricky so again it's another trade off if you keep making the same game like from software you get to you can establish a lot of best practices you true a lot of you know intelligence about it you true a lot of what's written before core competency about what that thing is the trick there though is for instance destiny Bungie it's gonna be hard it's gonna take a long time before destiny ever gets mentioned without halo coming up it's gonna be very hard for like Shinji Mikami he made the evil within which is very similar as you go forward he's gonna have a hard time making any game like that without them somebody bringing oh this is the guy who made resin you before so the more you stay within your comfort zone the more you're gonna live in your own shadow and that's not me again that's either good nor bad but that's a trade-off you've got to consider you know with how much do you want to be beholden to your legacy versus how much do you want to stay within your core competency where you can maximize your efficiencies but like IKEA you know we all know IKEA is principles and they're not like they're not starting new businesses or new stores that have totally different principles I'm wondering like do they really succeed because it's so consistent and we always know or like can you make games that are I mean obviously you can make games that keep changing it up but I just wonder how important it is to basically know your stick and own it and like put your stake in the ground so people stay away from your space I mean yeah the more the more formidable you are the more of an expert you are the like it's gonna be hard to go head-to-head with Cliff Bleszinski on a third-person shooter kind of things so yeah it does become easier to claim to stake out your claim and make it known that I own this and the more you show up here the more you reinforce my position as the industry leader like the Morris me that when resin evil was at its heyday in the PlayStation era the more games that showed up there were survival horror the more they reinforced a the the name survival horror and be reinforced Resident Evil as the premiere game in that genre like the own we own it and we define these terms and when that market started getting crowded they reinvented and redefined which survival horror is but still you know dead space comes out rosy before snow comes up Gears of War came out Resident Evil 4 came up so that's again that's part of the trade-off like you you secure that position and people everybody shows up to your party reinforces you here the head of the party which is a good thing but you also if you want to go start a new party that's kind of on the same type playing the same dance list or music list you're also going to be in your own shadow does anything requestion yep thank you can you think of any games that did anybody with a screen in front of their face whether whatever they're doing they're gonna play this game they're gonna yeah it definitely works I mean rock band we bowling Super Mario Brothers like there are definitely examples and again trade offs you shouldn't not target a broad spectrum just because some dork at GDC said so it's just be aware of the trade after taking that you know the more you make a game for everybody the less you make a game for anybody and there's a balance point but what your game is design is how broadly acceptable it is how big that market is the likeliness of that market to buy with a game being as not specific as it is like these are all numbers that need a factor in your calculus so it can totally work I mean we've seen it work so the goal is not to say like you have to do this but what I want to reinforce is that you should be intentional about these decision and really think about the consequences of your trade-offs is that does that make sense yeah sure all right thank you very much everybody I really appreciate

Channel: GDC

Views: 380,131

Rating: 4.8183584 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, dark souls, ikea, game marketing

Id: vid5yZRKzs0

Length: 34min 38sec (2078 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 19 2019