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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🤔 Why is it important to know and understand how to build a successful studio, versus, say how to make successful game mechanics?

🎮 The seven elements that make for a great studio.

✅ Why ‘right sized’ teams are important to a great studio.

👨🏻‍💻 Why Mishka values software and art over presentations.

🎨 Why Mishka considers an art director a key early hire.

❌ The one common characteristic of unsuccessful games.

📐 How engineers, designers and business people on teams look at problems from very different perspectives.

💭 Why a PM or businessperson-driven culture can find it hard to release anything genre-defining.

✌️ How to change the composition and leadership of studio teams as a game matures.

💯 How to think about being design driven vs. metrics driven.

KEY QUOTES

Art over presentations

The number two for me is always software and art over presentations. So in a lot of studios that I worked with, it was very important to show different types of presentations and calculations on how much money this game makes. They’re almost valued in a way that if you come in you say like, listen, this is a billion dollar opportunity, we’re going after this, suddenly your game becomes more important, even though you might not have anything, rather than a game that is having 10s of millions of revenue coming in and soon. 

So I first was adamant in the sense of software over presentations, but I’ve actually changed my opinion a bit and when I’m kicking off new games, or new studios, I always start with the art director, I think it’s really important to kick off visual development, because not only is it able to portray your vision, but it’s also able to encourage and inspire your your engineers because they all want to.

Keeping it humble with competitor research

And there was this thing that I read about a Call of Duty studio, I think it was Sledgehammer or Treyarch. And when they originally started, every Friday, they would devote a full day of playing the games of their competitors every Friday, full day. 

And that kind of, I thought about I was like, That’s crazy. 20% of your time playing games. Yeah. And I was like, wait a minute, we make games. Like as I’ve gotten older, and I have family, I don’t have time to play games at home. So it makes total sense to have everybody playing those games. And for them, it wasn’t like, we’re gonna have fun. We’re gonna eat Cheetos and drink Coca Cola and play games in our underwear. No, no, they were taking notes that we’re discussing. They’re playing their own game. They were playing competitors’ game and it’s being humble. It’s being humble and seeing what the other ones are doing.

Telltale sign of disinterest

And one common characteristic with the unsuccessful games was that the team did not play their own game. And you can kind of see it from that. Like if you’re not interested in what you’re doing, why would your player be?

Different strokes in a game dev team

So where the artists or designers in that case they were industrial designers, where they approached the problem was that they looked at details, and they started bringing the big picture up from a small detail to a larger scale. With engineers, it was always what is the most efficient way to do this? Not the best way but the most efficient way. Right? And, and with business people like myself, we approach everything based on benchmarks. Well, this game does this, this game does that. This is the market. You combine this and this together, you get this and this and by numbers, we’re able to communicate very clearly to the upper management and usually through that we’re able to kind of get the foothold even though the foothold might be wrong.

New elements can bring a fresh perspective

And genre defining doesn’t mean that you create something that absolutely hasn’t been seen before. If you think games like let’s say, Hay Day, or Clash of Clans, for sure you’ve seen farming games before. Yeah, Hay Day, was different. Yeah, it had different elements. But what really made it genre defining is it was first of its kind on the touchscreen device and it was really designed for it. 

And there were some cool elements that made it quite quite unique and that’s how it blew up.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Miskha Katkoff to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Mishka, welcome to the show.

Michail: Thank you so much happy to be on the show during this interesting time.

Shamanth: Indeed. Very much. So excited to have you because I’ve read your writings for a long, long time. So you’re certainly somebody I’ve wanted to have on the show for a while now. And perhaps a good place to begin would be to ask you why you chose the  topic we’re going to talk about – how to build a successful game studio, Why is that interesting to you? Because that surprised me a little bit when we talked last and I asked you, hey, Mishka, what would you like for this podcast to be about? And I’d really expected for you to say something about how to build successful game mechanics, how to, you know, deconstruct an amazing game. So why is it important to you to speak about – how to build a successful game studio?

Michail: Well, that’s a good question. First of all, it’s important to me because that’s my job. I’ve been head of studio for the past almost five years in 2 different companies. And because I haven’t built a successful game studio that topic continues to bug my mind. I started writing Deconstructor of Fun because I was working in product management. And I wanted it to deconstruct successful games in order to understand what makes them better, what makes them monetize, what makes them retain, what makes them viral, in order to use those same mechanics in the games that I was working on. And while I love talking about deconstructions, and I love doing them still, eight years later, is what the pressing topic for me is just building studios. Because after all, let’s put it this way. Successful games, successful game mechanics, successful user acquisition, all of those come from successful studios. And it takes all those things to bring together. And I’m just fascinated about that.

Shamanth: Yeah. When you say how to build a successful studio, are there component elements to that overarching topic that you think about. What would be the sub themes under that? 

Michail: Yeah. So when I think about a studio, I think about an autonomous unit that can concept, build, launch, scale and operate a game – so that’s basically the description of a studio for me. And the way I’ve approached studio building, I’ve built one studio from the ground up and I’ve joined another one which I scaled, kind of combined two different studios and then took the leadership of that. So two different experiences and I approach studio building and kind of what makes studios great the same way as I approach deconstructions. I kind of try to take different notes and write about it. And think about what are the elements. And if you would ask me and I actually have, like seven points that I’ve been kind of adamant on what a successful studio looks like. 

For me, it starts with the right size teams, I’ve worked in different companies and, sometimes when you’re working in a corporation, sometimes the size of the team is important because that gives you the weight inside of the company. I’ve also worked and started even in studios, where we had a very small team. It creates a lot of limits which puts you in a very creative problem solving position, but it also creates a lot of bottlenecks and bottlenecks creates risk and risk when they come together, that puts your schedules, your budgets and everything on hold. 

In terms of bottlenecks, an important person leaves or you’re unable to hire an important person because you only have one in those pipelines. So for me, like it starts off with having right size teams, that means starting small, but also it means, you know, starting small, starting with experience and starting with people that have worked together. But also it means in my opinion, having, you know, the boldness to scale the team, as you move forward, adding more and more elements. And I know the world changes quite significantly – going from nimble, agile friends working together on a game to a bigger live game where you have user acquisition, community marketing, all of that working together, and there’s a lot of coordination the work is quite different. But I think having the right size teams is step one. 

The number two for me is always software and art over presentations. So in a lot of studios that I worked with, it was very important to show different types of presentations and calculations on how much money this game makes. They’re almost valued in a way that if you come in you say like, listen, this is a billion dollar opportunity, we’re going after this, suddenly your game becomes more important, even though you might not have anything, rather than a game that is having 10s of millions of revenue coming in and soon.

So I first was adamant in the sense of software over presentations, but I’ve actually changed my opinion a bit and when I’m kicking off new games, or new studios, I always start with the art director, I think it’s really important to kick off visual development, because not only is it able to portray your vision, but it’s also able to encourage and inspire your your engineers because they all want to. 

They kind of see what the game will be and when you make a prototype, it’s kind of hard to, you know, sometimes you understand it’s fun or not, but sometimes it’s just a prototype. So that’s number two. 

Number three, for me. benchmarks. A lot of the studios that are not successful are not playing their own game and not playing benchmark games.

And there was this thing that I read about a Call of Duty studio, I think it was Sledgehammer or Treyarch. And when they originally started, every Friday, they would devote a full day of playing the games of their competitors every Friday, full day.

And that kind of, I thought about I was like, That’s crazy. 20% of your time playing games. Yeah. And I was like, wait a minute, we make games. Like as I’ve gotten older, and I have family, I don’t have time to play games at home. So it makes total sense to have everybody playing those games. And for them, it wasn’t like, we’re gonna have fun. We’re gonna eat Cheetos and drink Coca Cola and play games in our underwear. No, no, they were taking notes that we’re discussing. They’re playing their own game. They were playing competitors’ game and it’s being humble. It’s being humble and seeing what the other ones are doing.

Like in case of color. They’re probably looking at Dice and saying what a marvelous game Battlefield was. And just taking notes, taking notes. Taking notes and, and always thinking that we are an underdog. So I think the benchmark approach and devoting time to playing other games is crucial. 

And kind of that leads to the fourth element for me is playing your own game till exhaustion. So, you know, a lot of time there’s cases where people are making a game and they put it in test, play test cloud or usertesting.com, or whatever your testing platform is. And they kind of look at player who is continuing playing despite the testing time being over, which kind of indicates that the core game is very good and then it’s hooking them. That’s one thing, but also, I’ve worked on unsuccessful games.

And one common characteristic with the unsuccessful games was that the team did not play their own game. And you can kind of see it from that. Like if you’re not interested in what you’re doing, why would your player be?

Yeah, the fifth one for me is the respect towards players. So this goes more towards live operations and by respecting and understanding your players and listening to your community and doing the right things and not the short sighted things, whether it’s sales, whether it’s different kind of elements you’re adding your game to kind of monetize in order to hit quarterly targets, that’s short sighted. So if you have that utmost respect towards your players, and you’re able to create that content, that also retains them. 

And sixth one, for me is empowering teams to make the decisions. And this is something that has changed over time. Empowering, it’s a good word, it’s a fine word, a lot of studios save, they empower their teams.So there’s the thing where you empower but empowerment also means that that the team will take the ownership of the result as well. If the game sucks, that’s the team’s fault. That’s nobody else’s, so that will be a kind of empowerment as well, like there’s two sides of the coin. If you really want to take decision making power, you have to take the consequences of the decisions that you take. In a lot of studios that talk about empowerment, it sometimes leads to a situation where the decision making is kind of moved down, but that the resources are still held centrally. And it creates this weird tug of war in the sense where the team can decide what they do, but they don’t have the resources decided to do and they kind of had the ownership but they kind of don’t have the ownership. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Michail: This is not empowerment, you can’t empower somebody not give them the tools to actually build what they want. And empowerment also comes with time boxing, and if you want to create an organization with high level of empowerment, you have to also create organization where feedback and confrontation are normal. It is totally normal to confront the teams and have a critical discussion about what they’re doing. Because that allows them to improve where they’re heading. 

The seventh one for me is like always ship. I think it’s really, really important that you release games and see what the results are, instead of, kind of ending in this never, never ending loop of feedback and improvements and looking at what everybody else is doing and kind of being afraid of what to ship. So yeah, those are the seven points and that’s the deconstruction of what a successful studio, in my opinion looks like, after five years. But I think things change and I learn.

Shamanth: Certainly. I’d love to dig into some of these parts, also because some of these were in my original list of questions. Yeah. So one thing that I’m particularly curious about, having worked in very different studio cultures myself, is what you spoke about software and art versus presentations, right. I’ve been in cultures that are very PM driven, and they bring in investment bankers. I’ve nothing against them. I know some great investment banker said PMs who are very quantitative and I’ve noticed a very strong friction between the very quantitative PMs versus the game designers, versus the game artist, right. So there’s like a 3-way friction. And I know you said, look, you would want to prioritize software and art versus presentations. What would your advice be to a culture that, you know, let’s say you if you find yourself in a studio, that’s very PM driven Excel driven? How would you work with that? How would you deal with that?

Michail: Yeah, so that’s a good question. Because I am a PM, I started my career as a PM, and I’m that business school type of person. What was really helpful when I was studying what really opened up my eyes, like during the final years, we had this cross disciplinary program that you were able to join and it brought engineers, artists and business people together. And before that, I was young, I was hundred percent doing all the coursework everything with other business folk and we all thought the same. 

And what I learned from that was our way of solving problems and approaching problems was categorically different between these disciplines.

So where the artists or designers in that case they were industrial designers, where they approached the problem was that they looked at details, and they started bringing the big picture up from a small detail to a larger scale. With engineers, it was always what is the most efficient way to do this? Not the best way but the most efficient way. Right? And, and with business people like myself, we approach everything based on benchmarks. Well, this game does this, this game does that. This is the market. You combine this and this together, you get this and this and by numbers, we’re able to communicate very clearly to the upper management and usually through that we’re able to kind of get the foothold even though the foothold might be wrong.

So in these type of cultures, like there’s different solutions that some companies have taken, or some cultures have turned, for example, there are companies where a PM, which are very PM driven. And what happened is that the designer started becoming more and more PM-ey, they started to use more data. And I think that’s a little bit wrong. 

I think it’s good that they use data but if they go full on and become kind of like junior PM, they will still lose investment bankers and the folks that devote 100% of their time. So in that type of culture, I think you make a big decision if you are moving into a culture which is very PM driven, I doubt that your company will ever release anything genre defining. You will be in a culture of incremental innovation. It’s not bad, it can be very good. It can be very effective business. But I think you cap yourself. 

And then again, it doesn’t mean that if you go to a full on designer driven culture that you will land on that massive billion dollar hit – most likely most of your efforts will go to waste. But you will have that chance to succeed. So if I’d be doing a recommendation, I would – what I do like is I like having a different composition to the teams that are starting. So in the beginning, they’re very design heavy. 

And as as the project goes on, the leadership of the team might even change where after the phase where they enter the data gathering phase, whether that is a soft launch or global launch, the PM that has been kind of taking the backseat and helping out designers actually rises up and starts taking control of the whole project because after that, it becomes a numbers game. It becomes a game of optimization, it becomes a game of insights, it becomes the game of benchmarks and all the majority of the creative work has already been completed. And then instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s important to keep on pushing and going forward.

Shamanth: Interesting. So what I’m also taking away is: this is also dependent on the stage at which the game is. If it’s in the initial ideation stage. Really, that’s when the designers, the art directors need to have more of a driving force. Whereas when you’re scaling, that’s when optimization does become more important. That’s when a PM does need to take more of the reins so to speak.

Michail: Yeah, exactly. So when you think about a project, it goes from design driven to vision and metrics driven.

Shamanth: Right. 

Michail: And, you like if you start your design being metrics driven, I don’t know where you’re going to end up but I have been on those it’s a clusterfuck. So I would move from design driven as you go through the stages of early concept and pre production production, soft launch, hard launch, the design drivenness keeps on decreasing and decreasing. And at the same time, the role of a vision that still has to be there as well as metrics keep on increasing. And, ‘ve usually kind of divided all the elements between production, design and product. 

Shamanth: Right. 

Michail: And when it comes to usability, the core loop, the testament iteration, the core gameplay features, of course, those are design elements. When it comes to milestones, scheduling, backlog, scrum stand ups – that’s production. When it comes to reporting, forecasting, stakeholder management, monetization, optimization, analysis – that’s product. But there are still elements that are in between – and there are elements are in between such as economy balancing something that the product and design does together. Feature prioritization is something that production and product does together. And when it comes to quality, people management, knowledge sharing and team leadership, I believe that design, production and product handled all of those elements together.

Shamanth: Right. Something else I want to drill down on that you said was, look, the more optimization driven you are, the harder it is to build something that is genre defining. Right. And by definition, something genre defining is really hard to pull off. I’m curious, though, what other elements other than having the designers drive a lot of the early decisioning, would you see are central to having something be genre defining which is, you know, which could be like a Pokemon or Angry Birds in a different time? How might you think about a studio that has an explicit mandate about something genre defining. I don’t even know if it’s a good idea to give them a mandate to make something that?

Michail: Yeah, no. That’s a good mandate. When I think about studios and want to kind of evaluate studios, there’s three elements that really dictate what you should be doing. 

The first element is – what does the team want to do? What is their drive? What is their passion? Sometimes that’s overwhelming. And then you end up with indie games or you most often end up with games that are impossible to complete. They start something super aspirational. Oh, World of Warcraft on mobile, with a team of five. Yeah. Okay. Good, good story and that’s a problem. 

The second thing that I look at is, what is it that they can build. So they have a passion towards something, let’s say it’s one of the Warcraft and what they can build. And this is really the analysis of how many people you have, how much you can scale, what are their skills, what are their competencies were they good at, where are they weak at, and you kind of start finding the elements there. 

And the third one and something that I did not understand during my first video was, what does the market look like? Like what do the players want? Where can we find our spot in the market? And when you think about the market, your capabilities and what the people want to do, you start finding that spot in the middle, where the ideas are something that you can actually complete. And they’re actually market viable and, they’re actually, something that the team wants to do. 

So that’s usually the driver there. Even when it comes to genre defining. Most of us are quite creative. We always want to make genre-defining games. It’s not like we want to make safe games, there’s no such thing as a safe game. Unless it’s, you know, hyper casual or whatever, it takes two weeks. And yeah, I’d say if you can just release and forget. 

Yeah, but I would say, yes, the mandate would be there, but also understanding the market kind of opens up your view on what is there and what isn’t.

And genre defining doesn’t mean that you create something that absolutely hasn’t been seen before. If you think games like let’s say, Hay Day, or Clash of Clans, for sure you’ve seen farming games before. Yeah, Hay Day, was different. Yeah, it had different elements. But what really made it genre defining is it was first of its kind on the touchscreen device and it was really designed for it.

And there were some cool elements that made it quite quite unique and that’s how it blew up.

Same thing with Clash of Clans. I mean, if you think about it, the difference between that game and some other build and battle games like Backyard Monsters on Facebook was negligible. I think the art style and the quality, the UX were far better. But most importantly, it was first of its kind on mobile. And that makes genre defining – so those are the type of elements that also make a genre defining game. When you understand what is the market, what it does it have compared to other gaming markets. 

Shamanth: Right, that sounds like you want to be identifying what’s similar to what’s already there and what needs to be different and some clarity in that regard needs to be there. 

Michail: Yeah. But again, you’re talking to a product person. So again, I started with the big picture and I look at the market sizes, I look at the elements here and there. And I think about, you know, this is kind of underserved. This is over served, let’s not go out here. This is very concentrated, very less concentrated, what is in between here? Or, you know, I’d be playing Steam games, which I rarely do these days. Now I would figure out like, hey, interesting. This type of thing does not exist on mobile. This is a paid game that has a very interesting core mechanic, but what if we would match it with RPG mechanics or RPG progression from this type of game? Would it make something new? 

Well, yes, it would. And you can also start off from the design process where you just understand how the categories are evolving or the genres are evolving. Yeah, like in RPG games people are just not playing them actively. It’s kind of running on the side. And lo and behold, few months and a few years later, idle RPGs appear where they’re designed already in a way that you don’t have to press auto battle because we know that you’re going to auto battle them. And we’re going to design a full game around your new type of user behavior.

Shamanth: Right. That makes sense. And speaking of, something that could be genre defining or something that could be truly innovative, one dimension on which that is possible as by releasing a game on a completely new platform, which can be fraught with its own risks, right? There are very many Messenger games, and we don’t yet know if they’re gonna be breakout billion dollar games and so on so forth. Same thing with Apple iMessage games it’s something that a lot of many, very many games have some presence on. I’m curious as somebody who’s building a successful studio team, how would you think about exploring a platform that’s emerging and new, and assessing whether this is something to go all in on or not?

Michail: Well, there you just have to take the risk. It’s for the risk takers when a new platform emerges – sometimes it works, like let’s say in case of Supercell, where they jumped on iPads. Yeah. And that was an emerging platform and they made iPad first games, and then you know, a huge risk. But at the same time, the market grew significantly, and they were able to to truly conquer the market. And actually, it’s good for them because their games are almost optimized for bigger screens.

Shamanth: Right. 

Michail: And then, on other occasions, like VR or Messenger games, you know, message games, I think it’s safe to say those have all tanked.

Shamanth: Yeah.

Michail: It’s not even a doubt. You know, maybe VR. Facebook is putting billions in it. So maybe they will get something out of it. AR seems to be kind of dead in the water as well with Magic Loop being sold, if somebody wants to buy it, so you just have to make a call. And  I think that’s for smaller startups, I think they are the ones that need to be taking risk. I don’t think big companies are there to take a risk. And I think if they’re kind of jumping on a new platform that that kind of means that it’s already oversaturated.

Shamanth: Right. Interesting. So just so I understand correctly, if you see a big public company getting onto a new platform, iMessage or Snap or what have you or VR. Is your assessment that oh, typically, if the platform is somewhat proven, and they see that, oh, this is a somewhat safe platform.

Michail: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of like an emerging platform. So that’s one of those things like it’s not proven because there’s no developers in it. I mean, there are a few. It means that they’re just a platform emerging. And then it’s up to the game developers to decide whether they want to invest

Shamanth: Right. 

Michail :….into accessing being the first adopters of this new platform, and possibly gaining gaining, market share quite significant market share as a first mover or not and the risk that they take is that the work that they’ve done is going to be useless. So yeah, it doesn’t make a platform if Snap releases it or Facebook releases it Apple releases it. But of course there’s way more chance that it becomes a platform. Rather than your nobody startup releasing a platform for games.

Shamanth: Indeed. Mishka. This is perhaps a good time for us to start to wrap. This has been very instructive, very insightful. Much like so much of your writing has been. So this is a practical time to start to wrap. Before we do that, can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you,  about the Deconstructor of Fun and what you’re up to?

Michail: Okay. So you don’t need to find more about me personally. But Deconstructor of Fun is more interesting stuff, deconstructoroffun.com, that’s our blog. You can find www.deconstructoroffun.com/podcasts we do two different types of series. We do that this week in games so I really suggest you subscribe to that – that breaks down gaming news every week, not just free to play also a lot of AAA, a lot of cross platform, a lot of different stuff and it’s quite entertaining, if I may say. 

Then we do also like these type of interviews with folks around the industry. The blog is pretty big. Yeah, it’s grown quite a lot. And there’s just super detailed super in depth knowledge. You can’t read through anything without a coffee cup and a couple of sittings. But it’s what our readers like and I’m happy that people are adamant for consuming in depth analysis versus five liners of this is how you monetize your game five tricks. Yeah, that’s useless.

Shamanth: Yeah. It’s the in depth analysis – that’s what has really helped us learn and use and implement a lot of things in the games that we work on. So certainly, that’s why it’s impactful. Mishka, this has been incredible how. Thank you. Thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show. 

Michail: Thank you.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

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