Region Specific: Berlin – roundtable

The most striking aspect of the offices of Berlin Partner For Business And Technology, the location for today’s roundtable discussion, are the elevators that move between the floors in the building’s large glass atrium. Constructed of brushed steel and wood, with a hint of simplified Art Deco to their shape and design, they suggest that we’re about to descend to Rapture. With no plasmids to hand, however, we rely on coffee to fuel the discussion. Gathered with us are Kenneth Go, head of Kabam Berlin; Yager’s co-founder and director of development, Philipp Schellbach; head of Berlin’s newly opened King studio, Gabriel Hacker; Bigpoint’s Jonathan Lyndsey and Dan Olthen, Drakensang and Game Of Thrones producers respectively; Wooga’s head of studio, Alexander Mamontov; Media.net CEO Andrea Peters; and Berlin Partner project manager Birgit Reuter.

One common thread that ties together all of the studios here is your willingness to take risks

and embrace failure. What’s behind that?

Alexander Mamontov It comes mostly from the startup scene. It’s what you do – you start with an idea, you invest all of your efforts into it, and if it doesn’t work, all right, I’ve got my knowledge, I’ve got my experience, I’ll start something new. And here in Berlin, the startup culture is really awesome. There are many companies from Berlin, from the UK and US, from Europe; they create their startups here, and I think this also influences the local game industry. That’s why we all want to fail as long as we take in all the lessons.

Philipp Schellbach We can’t do that in triple-A development, of course, but we have kind of the same system within a game’s development. We prototype very early, very often. ‘Fail early, fail often’ is something that’s known to the game industry. It’s your first achievement in learning; you have to fail to see what works and what doesn’t and to learn the tools and so on. So actually we have kind of the same culture. It’s about efficiency – if you fail early, then you’re much more efficient, because you know something doesn’t work, so you can do other stuff instead and not try to do something that at the end doesn’t work out and has had a lot of resources wasted on it.

Kenneth Go So, at Wooga, do you have the people working on the projects making that decision, or is an unbiased party trying to support them in that decision?

AM All the decisions concerning the game are made only by the team.

KG What I found at Kabam, and maybe this is true in other companies as well, is that it’s very hard. The hardest thing to do is shut down a project that you’ve spent countless hours working on. And to make that ultimate decision that it’s not going to work out is something that you have to be very disciplined to do. Not many people are.

AM Yeah, it’s a big challenge with many parts to think about because, as you say, you work on a project for several months and if you stop it you wonder what’s going to happen to you. First of all, the team should be really transparent, and they should have a clear role, they should know they’re working on a potential hit game, they should question themselves always. Secondly, they should not be afraid of losing their job after a project has stopped. And the more projects you start, the more common it becomes. It’s a difficult system, and we’ve been working on it for a very long time to establish this culture, and we still are. We introduced Lab Time so that people who weren’t on a project could learn new skills, and feel like their job is safe.

Dan Olthen One of our philosophies is fail fast, too. It’s like, OK, there’s a feature, let’s prototype it on paper, with Lego or whatever. And we test it out, and if we’re happy, it gets to the next stage until it eventually gets into the game – or not. Everything gets a postmortem. If it worked, why did it work? If it didn’t, why not? What can we do better? We also look into what we’re doing with people – we want to retain talent; we want to offer them a chance to grow within the company. It helps with loyalty, and I really truly believe that we have to invest in those great people.

Gabriel Hacker Absolutely. And we have to fail fast because we have to innovate. The time to market is crucial, so we have to be fast. It’s one of King’s core values – to be fast, to be problem solvers, and to get things done. And in order to innovate you need to fail because otherwise you won’t find the gold nugget you’re looking for. You need to find that fun core gameplay loop that hooks people for hours, months or years, and you can’t find that by simply writing a design spec and then working according to that. This is something that I guess every game company needs to learn, and I agree with Ken when he says that it can be tough on the team. But then I guess management comes into play as well – trying to find good solutions like Lab Time that you mentioned. And also within King, we grew quite a lot in the past two years, and we now have studios all across Europe and we acquired Nonstop Games. There are opportunities for people to work on something else, even when a project has been stopped or cancelled. But innovation is key to that, and started this whole ‘let’s fail fast’ culture.

Jonathan Lyndsey I think we learned a lot from the web industries, right? For years, they’ve tried stuff, tested it, and if it doesn’t work out they stop it and go and try something else. And games haven’t worked like that for very long, right? Only in the past couple of years have we seriously been doing that. A lot of the most interesting blogs you can read about how to optimise and how to fail fast aren’t from the game industry. We’re still miles behind, actually!

DO I think we’re learning from different types of industries. For instance, game entry tutorial. The other day I was at a restaurant, sitting there on the terrace, but they had this concierge kind of guy and he was welcoming every single customer. Each customer was made to feel special. I was watching how he was working, how he was treating the customers and making them feel good the moment they stepped onto the terrace. This is how game entry should be. It’s how we have to create our games for every single user in order to create this special experience. I start Candy Crush and it says, ‘Hey, Dan, it’s good to see you back. We prepared this and this for you today. Do you just want to invest a little bit of your money to create a better experience?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, that game knows me – of course!’ That is nice, that’s a great experience. And this is where we can learn from our surroundings. We’re making games for people, and playing games is one of the most basic human instincts. As long as we look at our human nature, that’s where we can make all of our customers happy and treat them like people and not just paying users.

Elmar Giglinger I love the game industry’s embrace of failure, because so far there is no culture of failure in Germany. Most often in Germany, if you fail, you’re out. We need a culture of failure here.

DO It’s about learning. Like Supercell – they open a bottle of champagne when they fail because they learned something. But just as important is doing a postmortem of what you did. Spoken word may not stay in everyone’s minds, so document it and make it available to everyone – kind of like a wiki. Put it there, make it visible for the entire company and spread the knowledge, because other projects might face the same difficulties. We all want to make better games and create better experiences, and if we keep the common-sense knowledge super secret, then nobody with profit from that.

Does the internationalism of Berlin help grow that knowledge pool?

DO When other companies started coming to Berlin, I heard the panic of, “Oh my god, King’s coming!” or, “Kabam’s coming – oh, no, let’s run!” Well, OK, the first reaction is, ‘Oh my god, what’s happening?’ but then you realise that it’s getting interesting for international talent to come here. And this is where we’ll all profit as we get people from everywhere. Maybe you’ll spend a year with King, and then go to Bigpoint and then Wooga. As we grow talent, everyone benefits.

JL If you go back to a year ago on Drakensang, I think there was one person who wasn’t from Germany on the team, and now there are more than ten – so I guess about 20 per cent of the team. Previously it was quite difficult to get people from the UK, Italy, France or the US to move to Berlin. Berlin has been a cool place to go for hipsters and arty people for quite a long time, but now it appeals to everyone. You can see that from the amount of stag nights in Berlin now! [Laughter.] But we have a much bigger pot of people to choose from now, and the more companies you have, the more we all benefit.

Andrea Peters How about your relationships with local universities? Do you work closely with them?

JL Some of our people teach there part time, and we offer internships to the students that we think are really good.

PS Same for us, and we have a couple of really good guys who were from Game Academy.

AM We also work with students, and we have people from Finland and all over Europe. The only way to get more talented people is to teach and share the knowledge.

Despite the success here, there’s a good deal of modesty. Why do you think that is?

KG I think that’s more of a European thing, at least from my perspective. I can compare and contrast a little bit from the Valley versus coming to Berlin. And it’s definitely refreshing to come to this area. When we first moved here, all the people here were very kind to us and showed us around, helped us set up, showed us their offices and shared knowledge. I don’t think I would get the same kind of welcome in San Francisco.

PS I think it’s also about the culture. Because in the US they often in the past tried to push more in the direction of Hollywood – there’s a star designer or game programmer – and that’s not common here. We’re more focused on the team because we know that it’s the team that does the work, not just one person who does everything right.

GH Of course, we do compete to some extent, because what we’re fighting for is players’ time. But it’s also communicated by the management team as well – since I joined King, I’ve never heard Riccardo [Zacconi, CEO] talking about the competition in senior management meetings. We’re completely focused on what we’re doing, and completely focused on the teams, as Philipp mentioned, rather than looking at what other people are doing. For us, that’s not important.

Berlin appears to be in a state of flux. Do you think this sort of constant change fits particularly well with game development?

DO Definitely, yeah. It fits with the industry: it’s fast evolving, creative, and there’s a ‘make something out of nothing’ attitude, which actually comes from a historical point of view. Back living in Eastern Berlin, you had to make something out of nothing, and this is what you can feel from Berlin’s culture – it just spills over into the industry, and goes hand in hand.

KG I think all the things that we talked about are creating this perfect storm that allows companies to be successful. So you have the really easy ability to recruit high-quality talent from all over Europe with support from the government. You have a lot of creative, highly qualified individuals all coming together in the city at the same time. You have a culture that’s about change. And you have a lot of great companies that are coming here from elsewhere and bringing their expertise. That’s going to spread across the companies already here, and it’s just a matter of time before you have even more success built on top of that. That’s one of the unique things that I’ve seen in Berlin compared to San Francisco: I feel like a lot of the things that happened in San Francisco about 20 years ago are starting to happen in Berlin because of all of these different effects of the environment. San Francisco’s already past that; it’s too competitive, too high cost, it’s a little bit played out. But Berlin is building, and that’s why people are coming here now and it’s only a matter of time until you have a huge major success just like in the Valley.

What about the cost of living here?

EG In Berlin, some people have been complaining about rising prices as the euro is not worth what it was a year ago. But when I looked at the prices here and compared them to Munich and Hamburg, and also internationally with cities like London, Paris and New York, we’re still not bad.

AM There is definitely a trend of rising prices, but when you compare the cost of living today with the places you just mentioned, it’s still low.

JL A friend of mine got a job in Shepherds Bush, and he was struggling to find a flat. It would cost £1,600 for a flat big enough for him and his wife – about 80 square metres or something. You can find the same in Berlin for half of that. It’s maybe not going to be in the centre, but it doesn’t have to be because the transport system here is awesome. Berlin is the capital of Germany and pretty much the economic capital of Europe, and yet it’s half the price of almost all the other major cities.

KG I wonder if that has something to do with the culture of embracing failure, because in a high-cost city if you fail you don’t have enough money to fail again! [Laughter.] Some people tell me they have friends who are paying €80 a month for a flat, and if you’re paying next to nothing for a place you don’t have to worry whether your project is going to be successful. You have the luxury of not worrying about paying for your basic costs!

What about governmental support here for existing and new companies?

KG For us, it was great. I think it’s a different question for someone who’s from Germany versus someone from outside. As a foreigner coming in, not speaking the language, there’s probably no way that we could’ve done what we did without the help of Berlin Partner, Birgit and everyone. And I think the main thing was creating this community in Berlin as well – I don’t know if it would exist if we didn’t have these organisations. So when we came, Birgit did a great job of introducing us to other gaming companies in the industry, and they were also very welcoming to us. It was a nice feeling coming into Berlin. It wasn’t like, “Oh, the Americans are coming!” It was, “We’ll help you in any way possible. If you have any problems you only need to ask. Here are the people you can talk to who’ve done something similar”. So it was a really nice, warm welcome, and we felt very supported, and I think that’s very important for an international company.

Birgit Reuter Mainly we’ve dealt with international companies so far in the games sector – I think 80 per cent of the companies we support are from abroad.

GH You were also very supportive for us. You we’re in contact with King before I even joined! Andrea and Games.net immediately invited me to their breakfast where I met other game companies, but then you also, for example, help ex-pats so that they could apply for a visa very fast. So there was a lot of help involved in setting up the studio – the decision to set up the studio in Berlin was made by the end of last year, and two days ago we had our opening party. It was a very short time, and without Medianboard, Games.net and Berlin Partner we couldn’t have done it.

EG When you look purely at the numbers, there’s no other region in Germany that’s putting as much effort and money into the videogame industry as Berlin. From our side, for the last year, around €1.5bn was invested in new content and projects, events and games awards, Gamesweek, Games.net, etc.

A lot of developers with experience at more traditional studios are moving here to work on browser and mobile games, which is something we’ve seen happening a lot elsewhere, too. What’s your take on that shift?

PS I think it’s also to do with the time frame, because most of the bigger triple-A studios were established in the ’90s, so we were the only one in Berlin back then. Now we see more and more browser and mobile companies coming and they’re bringing a lot of money, of course, and that’s why I guess, especially in Berlin, it’s now more attractive for these kind of companies to move here. I wouldn’t expect any triple-A company to open up a studio in Berlin today. Also, the triple-A market is separated, so there’s not much growth any more. If you really want to grow, you have to go to that mobile space.

JL In terms of hiring people from other regions, like the US for example, the work culture here’s really different. You don’t see anything like the tons of crunch that you’d see in the US, and you don’t have this pattern of expanding a project, then letting people go, and then rehiring a bunch of them for the next one. That’s the business plan for a lot of studios in the States – and the world, actually – and you just can’t get away with that stuff in Germany. I think Bigpoint is the only games company in Europe that has this Betriebsrat, or workers’ council. It’s basically a workers’ union, but more like a council. They have co-determination on management-level decisions. At the start it was super difficult, but now it works very well. It gives a certain amount of security to employees: they feel like they have a bigger say in management decisions, and it’s actually something that new people that we interview are really interested in. They’re like, “Oh, wow, the council says we must only do 40 hours and mustn’t do any crunch? That’s not like my previous job”.

GH I think there was the old gaming industry, and the new gaming industry, and I remember the time when Bigpoint and Innogames came up and were pretty vocal in the game industry and talking about revenue growth of 2,000 per cent. And the old industry was like, “It’s just a bubble”. And I think they were scared for their jobs and for other things. Because there was a shift in the market and the boxed market became more and more difficult. A lot of traditional developers also faced insolvency, like Ascaron, for example – a very traditional game company in Germany that I worked for. Phenomic went down as well. A lot of studios in Germany went down, or had very difficult times, but now they’ve simply adapted and adjusted, and that is the reason that the two sides are now growing together, because in the end we all want to do the same thing, right? We want to work on great products that are challenging, motivating, fun and entertaining. We now have the business model thanks to Korea, Japan and other countries where it was invented, and some clever German entrepreneurs picked them up and made them big in Germany, and reinvigorated the PC market. So we needed those entrepreneurs, in Germany in particular. They are the people that are driving the two sides getting together again.

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