The Path to Rebellion's Independence with founders Chris and Jason Kingsley - Develop:Brighton

great thank you uh good morning everybody thanks for being here i hope you've all had a hearty breakfast kind of cushioned last night soiree a little bit my name's seth barton i'm the editor of mcv i'm just like thank develop for having me here this morning to host this and this morning's topic is rebellion the path to independence so independence is um an attractive idea i think we'd agree um evokes freedom creative expression and keeping the lion's share of what you earn so it's strange that in the games industry it remains relatively fleeting the game studios often don't last they become acquired they they have to join others to become maintain their viability or they simply close down so um the if if being acquired is the best possible outcome for a game is that the best possible outcome for a game studio should more game studios retain their independence especially at this kind of time where we see microsoft and others buying up more and more content so this morning hopefully we'll get a little bit of insight about that and a bit of insight about from our speakers about their background so to that end we have two of the uk's most successful independent game makers two brothers who've worked together for over 25 years creating titles such as sniper elite alien vs predator strange brigade and battle zone so please put your hands together for chris and jason kingsley of rebellion good morning everyone do we sit down yeah oh yeah so low this feet wakes you up doesn't it come around actually there are more people here than they were when we first got here so yes thank you for turning up can everybody here at the back yeah if you can't if you come on here just keep quiet okay yeah um thanks for being here to get today um so first things first so rebellion 26 years now yeah yeah it's 92 it's coming up for 27 27 yes the trouble with that is it gets so it's like asking how old you are when you get older you kind of have to count back and what yeah yeah and and it's still completely independent you guys run make all the major decisions and you own the whole business yes yeah 50 50 chris and me shareholders we have no external shareholders uh no vcs behind us no strange shadowy puppet masters pulling the strings uh no illuminati right audience it's not a single the um and that was uh and has that been how long has that been a conscious decision for i mean did was it a conscious decision from the very beginning to uh it's always been a thing we've aspired to and wanted to do actually i mean the very first game we ever did as rebellion either storm was self-published so but then we got into i guess a very comfortable world of work for hire but then it takes a while to realize that it's not quite as comfortable as you think it is um in fact you know we we were we did work for higher well before rebellion so we have quite a few years of just working as freelancers there's a whole story there of how we got in how we went from just being individuals and we're working with a sort of a disparate group of people to then say look we need to do something about it and uh something about the situation and become rebellion um well we'll talk about that later yeah so um in terms of your divide as he is you're 50 50 who who does what generally just we both pretty much cover every aspect of it chris is much better coder than me i gave up coding on the commodore pets so that was some time ago uh i wouldn't really say you started it that much okay cool i could peek and poke things and you remember i had a yeah anyway yeah so i it was very clear from an early age that i would have to adopt a different position right as opposed to technology focus i mean design communications writing stories that kind of stuff and it was quite complimentary because we both you do the same kind of stuff but you also have a technological background yes yeah so technology and art it seemed actually you know a really good sort of thing that fitted together for computer games obviously and jason was very much into sort of the dungeons and dragons tunnels and trolls those sorts of things adventure books he actually wrote one of the kind of the first adventure books right quite a lot of choose your own adventure books when you were 18 you had a number one best seller over a million books yep sterling the lost magic for anybody that's interested in it by lady bird i've got the rights back but not the rights to the artwork so the path to independence is just writer best seller at 18. would you know what i was saying i wasn't paid that much for it actually you know what the path to independence is actually wanting to do cool things and make cool games and try to continue to keep the money flowing in and try to continue to you know choose your own path if you like to use the same kind of game game book method it's also about recognizing what are the risks and as a as a work for hire developer yes there's a comfort level there's a glass ceiling though which is generally down to the you know your man-month rate um but then there's also there's the publisher risk which people don't really think about which is the publisher can cancel your project pretty much for any reason so in a contract you'll have a you'll have there'll be various cancellation clauses one of them will probably be a cancellation for whatever reason the publisher wants because quite frankly in the past you'll have found that publishers if they don't have that clause they'll make up some kind of thing yeah are we this texture they'll cancel on you anyway regardless they'll fabricate some breach that you've done yeah and that leaves you with a big staff and no project yeah exactly and you know and they'll probably you might have like they'll pay you for a month so well that's no good you've got you've got fifty hundred people working on this project take you six months to nine months to get the next project and actually if you look at the history of uh game developers without the uk a lot of the problems they've had is when they've had projects counseled by a publisher you know we've seen friends of ours go go bust because well they just had a project canceled and they just there's nothing they could do to get another project in time to to solve the problems and they've never had enough kind of spare working capital to keep them going through a sizable gap like that i mean theoretically you do get if your game sells incredibly well and you earn back against your royalties and stuff you can theoretically get more money from the success of the project but as people will know that doesn't happen very often because of the way the numbers are calculated there's incredible echo in here is that we just haven't put up with it i think yeah okay all right um so we had i mean we had fantastic success actually about half of our games when we did work for hire went into extra money we got extra money for it possibly yeah um but we've had all sorts of excuses from people that should have been paying us money as to why they haven't paid us money right and one of those was well we don't pay money very often so we don't really have we're not we're not used to paying royalties out it's like uh okay that's not a particularly good excuse um so so from as a work work for hire is actually relatively safe but you are hidden from the risks because you assume your publisher has got tons of money now the problem with that is that the publisher might not have tons of money and there's plenty of publishers gone bust as well and so it's a bit like hoping somebody else fixes something for you yeah and not worrying about it it can be coming into your eyes and yeah holding your fingers and praying so they're okay yeah not keen on that model particularly well actually it was all right it was it was okay but it has it's fraught with its own problems which once you leave it behind you realize those problems are bigger than you thought uh and of course people are it's very hard to bootstrap yourself it's very hard to get enough money together to afford to make a game from start to finish and get it to the marketplace um games are iterative they take time whatever you planned at the beginning will probably not be what you end up with if you're doing it right quite frankly let alone if you're doing it wrong so so then how did you bootstrap that first game how did you or when at what point did you decide that you didn't want to do the work for hire kind of treadmill and you did want to start creating your own games we well shall they yeah we sort of tried to have a portfolio approach so we we had some big projects for third parties we did simpsons game and it's very star wars games for lucasarts and that kind of stuff and they paid quite well um but we also tried to in parallel develop our own titles so it's a sort of um a portfolio approach to risk management if you like so you don't we were not in a position to suddenly become fully independent we sort of had to have this transitional period we have to we had to have this sort of uh adolescence of independence which took quite a few years to kind of get to the point where we're now 100 funding our own titles but there was a time for example was it sniper elite three yes yeah it was a code development it was a co-development so and that came out of a an interesting business conundrum so our partners 505 uh they wanted to pay there's a certain amount of money they wanted to pay and it was less than the budget needed to be we negotiated with them and said actually then we'll keep the pc version they didn't want a pc version oh right and we've developed it on pc so we said okay well we'll keep the pc version and we'll keep uh digital rights because you the budget you're paying isn't enough to cover it and they were fine with it because they were largely physical you know in industry was largely physical there so it made sense for them good business choice it meant that we could scrimp and save and sort of put our bit of the budget into the game and then and then we kind of split the proceeds going forwards right and we anticipated the rise of digital if you like so we felt that keeping the digital rights would actually be disproportionately valuable to us going forwards because we continued to own the intellectual property and we continued we felt that long tail was important and that has been the case the long tail of sales has been really important kind of at core we always look at you know whenever there's some adversity we always say well how can we turn that to our advantage and that was the situation like the budget wasn't what it needed to be okay or how can we how can we make that work for them and for us and that has worked out very well for us yes so you mentioned intellectual property there which i think is probably going to be one of the kind of core thing core parts of independence you can't be independent unless you own your own intellectual properties really you can't just work on other people's stuff so what point did you start to develop those properties that i mean because i mean is your big property yeah but right from the very beginning i mean either storm and various other blade warrior we we right for very beginning wants to keep ownership of our own property even even if we sold the rights to a game we kept the underlying ownership of the property so that we could do a sequel we were in this for the long term so i was thinking well in 10 years the platforms would have changed things would have changed there'd be a new generation of games players and if this game is really good maybe i can make a new version of that game for another generation and to say with the technology as well so it's our own engine and again part of what we did when we were negotiating with the publisher was saying look we own our engine i mean the number of contracts that we've seen other people you know when in those days they say well the publisher owns the engine it's like well you can't reuse that then how can you do another game so we did that and another area that we negotiated on was to make sure that we end all the generic assets right and i can't just say that it's like concrete trees walls bricks and those sorts of things though yeah trash cans that because they're generic we could use them across multiple projects that allowed our publishers at the time to you know to save money because they wouldn't have to kind of wouldn't have to keep recreating those assets and uh maybe we could use them on other things yeah and you've continued to use your own technology like lots of people have moved off using unreal or unity but you've always maintained your own and what kind of advantages has that given you there are many many advantages yeah uh principally we are in total control of what our engine technology does so we don't you know we're we're at the top of the list for getting bugs fixed we get access to the source code without having to pay extra money uh we get you know we get bugs fixed when we want them uh but also most of most of the people that we speak to they they they use these external engines and they they're not always very complimentary about them because you know they they'll for example have to oh there's another another build of the engine that's coming out another version we've got to then spend two weeks reintegrating and everything we fixed it has broken this is how there's a lot of effort so actually if you've got your own engine it's probably just as much effort to maintain and develop it as it is to be using an external engine and it kind of also lets you differentiate your titles yes and and lets you move into areas like vr because you were quite early yes title battle there was a launch title on psvr and i mean other things that we can do it allows us for example a strange brigade is with a very early vulcan title and in fact it is still the world's only multi-gpu vulcan title in fact i think it's one of the few um directx multi gpu titles as well so and then yeah and it still is being used to this day by chronos and various other guys to amd and nvidia to uh to work up all their drivers for falcon the great thing about that is it gives us direct access to the technology vendors because they obviously the the engine suppliers have their own access and and those engines are great they get you going very quickly if you don't have the infrastructure to have technology i think i've worked out the every time you turn over there you get that echo i think it's picking up that second mic maybe yeah yeah or if we spread out a little bit it might help okay how is the echo for you guys is it is it just it's okay it's just just us yeah i'll we'll separate a bit um so i think third party engines are are great to get going to get you up and started um and especially if you don't have technology people in your company to begin with who can do an engine um we kind of started out that way as most people did back in the day there weren't third party engines to hire so you had to roll your own and we never stopped doing that and other people have for all sorts of different reasons um so i don't think we're necessarily down on third-party engines as you know they're not evil or anything but i think again they slightly they i visualize a snow plow clearing snow in front of you and and somebody else's engine is you know helps you clear the snow but there's still a ton of snow you've got to get over um and at some stage there's a big pile and this notepad won't go through it maybe i've stretched the metaphor too far um but um they at the end of a project you've always got that perfecting phase that polish phase you know your frame rate maybe there's a few places where your frame rate is dumped on and if it's your own tech your own team can focus laser focus on those problems if it's in the engine what are you going to do is sorry the engine does it that way and there's not a lot i can do but i do think they're also the engines help people get get up and running very quickly they do have a certain look as well everybody's engine has a certain look i'm sure our azure engine has a certain look as far as games players are concerned okay so um coming back to this idea of developing ip i mean you you own a lot of ip we own a ton of shitstorm yeah well we own basically our ip goes back to 1888. right okay three dates computer games industry which is nice uh yeah this is our comic library in case of those of you don't know so we only we bought 2018 in the year 2000 which is very convenient for remembering it um we also we we then bought a whole bunch of comics from 1970 onwards from egmont uh who we bought 2018 roy the rovers yeah there were lots of girls comics actually we know we know when girls comics stopped being comics right it was a couple of months of history it's really interesting donnie osmond is to blame by the way we won't go there um and then we time inc we're having some financial restructuring and we said but you've got this whole back catalogue from pre-1970s all the way back to 1888 and comic cuts for boys which was a one of the first boys funny papers which is where the word comic we think comes from yeah because they used to be called funny papers they were called funny papers for boys and funny papers for girls and so we own all of that now a lot of that's out of copyright of course but where we've got this this archive so we go all the way back there things like billy bunter and sexton blake and the spider and all sorts of interesting characters which predate superheroes for example but we've always liked telling stories it's always nice to revisit the place you've created and going back to the earliest days in school when i used to be a dungeon master for my role-playing game buddies i'd create landscapes them to explore and chris did the same and so really what we're doing in computer games is creating landscapes if you've got a landscape there's lots of different ways of exploring it and therefore intellectual property and owning controlling that landscape and how you explore it is a wonderful thing you know people like visiting the same place again but in a different way yeah i mean the our ip catalog was described actually fairly recently is the biggest iop catalog in the world that you've never heard of it's a massive catalog so i think we will count it i mean it's literally miles of shelving we've got one and three quarter miles of comics shelving yeah comic shelving yeah that's not on its side that's that's pages yeah i think we started calculating i think it got to 55 000 characters and gave up counting yeah it's a lot of ip um i mean even although i mean even like the the more known about like 2080 stuff i mean it's not i mean it hasn't turned necessarily into games well we wouldn't have been able to buy it if if it was disney scale or marvel or dc yeah um so no so we've got quite a hill to climb to kind of re bring things out but we don't have some 2000 oh yeah yeah but we don't what we didn't want to be known as the guys who do 2008 games right so that was quite important to us we're independent create we're creative people we want to do our own independent games so where it makes sense to use an existing intellectual property great we'll do that it's a fantastic place to start um and where it doesn't make sense we'll create originals like sniper elite or strange brigade it just that's how it works and to be fair we've got quite a lot to choose from so it's like why don't you use one of your own ips okay which of the 55 000 do you mean we keep getting asked have you got a list no no we really don't have a list of them not yet um so i guess that we've talked about this before but um one of the kind of core things about this about rebellion becoming independent is the rise of of self-publishing um like what what point did you start publishing your own titles and and and how and and at this point how much how much of that function is internal and how much of it are you still using partners and other people well my first first game we ever produced out of the storm was self-published gun lock so we've always been trying along the way and you know i guess it's taking us a few years to get to something that's successful um yeah so yeah we do do it all in-house so we've got 350-ish 50-ish people the worst oxford is the headquarters uh we've got warwick and we've got runcorn and then wakefield which we call north um um because we already had an rw because we're here yeah it shouldn't be lemmington but hey so we yeah we have all of that function now we have to we have to as we as you expand the number of games you make and the amount of content you create you need all those support stuff all of those ancillary skills so you need more people in accounting because somebody's got to do the spreadsheets and work out who owes what to whom and that kind of stuff you need more management you need more qa qa is hugely important qa is a is an underappreciated aspect i think of games development good qa can really make a game very good audio is hugely important audio can make graphics look better there's all sorts of components that go into making a game and yes you need pr marketing you need community support customer service there's a whole bunch of things that you add as you go along but very much digital was that was our focus because when we wanted when we sort of did our most successful period you know recently with self publishing um we very we looked very hard at do we want to build up a physical publishing and distribution group and we we felt that look the rise of digital it's probably gonna take us five years to get a successful uh sort of physical publishing group do we want to be spending those five years or do you want to find someone who's great at doing that and get them to do it whilst we build up and focus on our digital side of things and that's what that's the route that we chose so sold out have been very very good partners to us yeah for the physical they know they've got a lot of experience know the physical world very well and we've been really focusing on the digital yeah i mean so independence doesn't have to me doing it all yourself no you can't do everything yourself you have to have partners i think one of the biggest learning learnings that we we have is how much you then have to start spending on pr and marketing and how much on advertising and marketing yes you sometimes get your budgets uh presented to you for your next game and you go how much are we spending on advertising good god but you have to yeah you've really got to communicate out there the biggest challenge i think these days uh apart from making a good game that people want to play is discovery apart from the small part of making yeah but assuming assuming we're all competent games developers in this room you know we know we have the confidence we can make games hopefully uh so let's assume that's a given but you've actually got to get it out to people and there are some superb games out there that nobody's ever heard of so the challenge i think for us is no longer distribution there was a time when as an independent developer you literally couldn't publish your own games you were not allowed to there were physical barriers put in in the way you know you had to have a have various publishing slots and all that kind of stuff and tons and tons of money you had to have a cartridge manufactured and you had to fight for us it was effectively a closed shop so it was literally impossible you could sort of self-publish on pc but that market wasn't very big you could publish back in the day on cassettes and that kind of stuff but then the market shifted to some physical infrastructure and that kind of the number of times you've heard but you're a developer yeah and and and that's that's the reason why you can't do something but you're a developer yeah i i literally there's some publishers no longer with us and i won't mention names because it's embarrassing for them but they had failed to pay us for something that they owed us there's no argument whether they owed us or not they just hadn't paid us so i walked into there after long convoluted conversations for various people i walked in with a winding up order and i said uh this winding up order is copy the winding up order which for those who don't know is a thing you you go to court to get them to pay the money they admitted they didn't have any money which is a thing you can wind somebody up for because they don't have the money so fine i'll go in and grab what you've got uh it went in there and the first thing the chief executive said to me is you can't do that you're a developer and i said well i'm a business person you know you owe me money you said you can't pay it yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna grab your assets first tomorrow unless you pay they paid me next week they the week after they went bust literally taking everybody else's money so sometimes development sometimes you just have to say no we're not in we're not the minority partner here we make games this is the important underpinning of the industry if we didn't have games makers there'd be no games industry there'd be nothing for anybody else to sell so we should be we should be the sort of ascendant ones if you like where the where the th should be the people on top of the pile that everybody else wants to work with yeah and it's scrabbling to work with but that wasn't the case back in the day it's shifted and changed now and of course with this digital distribution it is easier to get your game out there it's not easier to get discovered though no yeah it's funny we're still more comfortable using the d word than the p word to describe ourselves yes it's slightly embarrassing at the moment because we are a publisher and i don't like being a publisher really the principle is i don't want to be a publisher but um we do we do publish for other people we do do that i think that the you know that we're all just they're all just games companies now that may be that division is yes but yeah very hard there are still people in the industry who were in the industry back there you know yes um so in terms of those extra functions that you have in-house having the kind of marketing and all the pr presumably is a minimum number of titles that you need to be putting out a year in order to keep those people busy we don't really think about it that way no it's not it's not quite like that anymore i mean yes a few years ago you just put out a game and then six months later a year later you put out another game it's not that now it's much more about okay your game's coming out why you've got dlc when's that coming out you're keeping supporting that we've got a sale here we've got that here we've got this we've got a conference here we've got a show here um so it's very much about you know it's a long game yeah yeah if you just you think i'll just put my game out and that's it yeah you'll do okay but then you'll have a big gap to the next one the the the trick is how can you keep your game interested it's the long tail so you've got a whole teams of people who are managing your long tail yeah i mean and for those of you who are interested every game we've ever released follows a power law curve of sales that and and it never gets to zero anybody that understands math it never gets does it well eventually at infinity it will get to zero but it's a long time away um and so if you can build up that long tail of all your different titles you've got this um sedimentary rock piling up slowly and you're not doing anything and there's a little bit of money coming in and then you look back and you go actually that little bit of money is turned into you know modest amounts of games that we're selling from over 20 years ago still bringing in money yeah so for us as long as you can on things that's one reason why we don't tend to use uh licensed music on games because they're all fine you know we've few music licensing is a bit of a minefield so if you if you embed really cool trendy music a it dates your game very quickly because that won't be cool trendy music in five years time or 10 years time or 20 years time and b you'll have to take it out of the game if you want to keep releasing your game and there's some big titles out there skateboarding titles and that kind of stuff which had fantastic soundtracks of the era and they can't be published in that way anymore so something to consider it's very tempting to license classic you know to license great tracks but it comes with its own problems not least the cost of them and they're surprisingly expensive yeah the um i guess if we're going to talk about self-publishing we have to talk about platforms and just how many there are now um i mean it used to be that yeah but you say that there are lots of them but actually they're all the same underneath they're all amd or nvidia graphics oh i've seen yeah storefronts as well as there is that but that's that's a layer on top really back in the back in the day when it was hardcore when all of this was fields uh stone engines being built um you know there were proper differences between the various different pieces of hardware you know proper custom chips and anybody that's been in it for a long time will will know when a new piece of custom chip turns up and we worked on the original atari jaguar yes uh and that was interesting yeah 64 bit first first one wasn't it how did you work on the cd expansion that never really we did have them yes yeah we had those uh the jaguar toilet bowl yeah yeah and we worked on the vr version of our stuff as well it was a vr game yeah yeah really yeah never came out anyway so yes but technology is here to develop things are much more ejacular well you have tools now you have debugging tools that we're actually in a arguably a much easier time to make games than ever before but it's just as hard to sell them right so you know i think it's a wonderful opportunity out there right now i mean i mean in terms of coming talking about storefronts a bit more i mean you've had stuff on xbox game pass obviously you're you know on all the main store steamed um so i do have a little bit of a bone to pick with you because on the cover of mcv's may issue uh jason was quoted as saying i would need a bloody good reason to do an epic exclusive um and then in july he announced an epic exclusive so that's because so it had a bloody good reason yes exactly so what i wanted to do people can guess what that bloody good reason was it's not exactly effing rocket science you know no anyway we're not politicians so you can say what we like yeah genuinely i think you know i would prefer not to do exclusives but i understand epic's positioning in it and quite frankly they're paying through the nose to build their store all credit to them is fantastic and we'll take some of that money thank you very much in the long run though do you think there's a benefit to you of having more stores i think competition in any marketplace is is is benefiting everybody including those people who are being competed against right so we're good friends with steve we know steam really well and they're they're great colleagues and personal friends of ours uh and so it's a little bit difficult to tell your friend you're going out with somebody else um but they they they took it very well they're great people they engaged properly with us and uh they understood the reasons behind it because it's a pure business case and um i think partly it's also a bit of a kick up the backside for anybody when a new incumbent comes into a marketplace it makes you reflect you know new developers turn up with a brilliant game and you go bloody oh that's brilliant we better have a good look at that and how have they done it and it makes you focus on your game as well it's exactly the same for multinationals exactly the same for an enormous company look at sony look at microsoft they're going head to head and pushing it we've got the best technology nintendo are there there's massive competition and yeah the times when when it gets too far out of whack you know when playstation uh sort of two was so successful compared to xbox you know i think you could argue sony sat on their laurels a bit yeah in that generation uh that's for his great competition and it's great to see that it helps everyone but i have to say it was a little bit of an embarrassing interview to give and then one month later to then have the opposite ironically we had been talking with them in the background but it kind of kicked things off a bit faster they went oh i was awake i was actually i was i was aware that epic were doing exclusives obviously because that was the question but we hadn't actually been offered anything at the time yeah uh it would have been and i didn't really think they would because typically they were going for the sort of super big big big title which is great because they obviously count our new title zombie army four as a as a big title which is which is great it's a really nice bonus for us um uh and i was yeah i was quite impressed by the numbers that they offered i don't know i have to say working with them really you know like the steam guy is a really nice bunch of guys what's great about both steam uh guys and epic is their ex developers it actually really makes quite a big difference to how they perceive you how they work with you that it's really we see eye to eye rather than like hey we're up here and you're down there they're never going to turn around okay but you're a developer exactly exactly and also epic we're very keen to support help support the game uh you know give it a lot more marketing than we might have expected so that's to everybody's benefit really i mean it was fantastic the store isn't inundated yet so presumably you'll get a lot of space on the front of the on the front a lot of yeah and we get support from steam as well it was just that epic offered a a very attractive package uh and as an independent again you sometimes as an independent developer you've got to take your chances you know when something like that is offered when you have the opportunity like we did with sniper elite 3 to sort of share in the risk and share in the reward that was part way towards full independence and deals like epic epic offered don't come along that often and therefore you have to sort of search your bank account and work out whether you want to do it or not no did i say no seoul i meant seoul not mexican no we actually genuinely did agonize about it we did yeah we genuinely did absolutely you know should we do this should we not do this you know we've got a great relationship with steam we really like the steam guys um i mean obviously there's a player base for the game on on steam so that i mean that's the main agonising that has to be no no it wasn't that wasn't the main thing it was an element of it generally was you know the steam guys we really like them they're great guys we like working with them we like working with them will this upset them or not that was the biggest the biggest issue was how how much impact negative impact is going to have on our friends at steam is this is the joy of independence this is freedom isn't it this is the freedom this is where you have the response yeah where the responsibility is but there are big developers out there that have had this done to them by their publisher without even knowing and that's even worse because they can't sit here and go well they could sit here and go it wasn't my fault uh we have to take the blame for that decision or if they're allowed to talk about that boy if you probably wouldn't even be allowed to yeah true yeah we've been told to don't talk to the press many times in the past on games so i mean i guess that that that independence on a daily basis means that you can make decisions quickly that you know that you're not that you you don't have to double think about what something that someone else might think and that must extend to creativity and business decisions and all all kinds of things i don't know what's the word a kind of uh an overall outlook of just kind of like we're independent so we can we can make decision and get something done and push on no not really it's an absence of uh there's a certain lack of formality within the company people that have joined the company from big corporate entities are sometimes surprised by their informality um somebody's sitting in there when he's in his first the first few weeks put together a 42-page uh presentation about something like a powerpoint that he wanted to do and apparently we rather disrupted him by saying can you just flick to the last couple of slides please and what's the summary yes that'll do anyway oh you learned didn't you um because at the end of the day we've only got that one of our biggest limited resources is time and as you get bigger you do have that formality you know you've got formal accounts to put in every year you've got tax to pay r d tax credits and games tax credits to claim and all that kind of structure that goes with it you've got hr issues and an hr department so naturally there's more formality as you get bigger but that formality should be there to underpin the company and and help support the proper functioning of it but i don't have to go in dress in a suit and tie and present to a glassy-eyed board members who don't give a stuff what we're actually what the games are they care about the bottom line we care about the bottom line but it's not the only thing we care about in fact it's probably not the most important thing there's always got enough money coming in to do the next game that's what's most important and so there's a whole bunch of corporate admin that's missing that we don't have to spend money on and time on because we don't have anybody else to blame yeah but it's also about empowering the team members and we'll you know we're not there looking at our games every single hour every single day but we'll come in we'll do reviews and we'll have suggestions and improvements and things will get improved but it is very much so this is this is what the game is you know here's a one or two page let's get on and do it the teams work on those features decide on them we all agree where we're going and occasionally this would be a nice thing to have we sort of nudged don't we we have this sort of role i always think of our role as nudging the games in the in the right direction we initiate them and then we nudge the team and and kind of challenge and you know ask the aux slightly awkward questions is this bit fun i know it's in the design but is it actually fun to play and those kind of things and and ask the teams to rise to the challenge and that's really what our role as company directors is is empowering our staff and our teams to to make the best games they can sometimes challenging time frames sometimes you know restrict you know we don't have the biggest budgets in the world our games are not uh don't cost 100 million to make not even close um but there's still substantial number of millions quite often there's a lot of money goes into it but not as much as some so yeah yeah so and and what's the head count now three just 50-ish 350. yeah and then it's consistently you've managed to keep a kind of consistent growth well that's not really the objective the objective is to take on the exactly the right number of people with the right skills you need to do any one any projects you've got going at the time which of course says anybody that manages a company will know is next to impossible so then you've got to manage the start the head count what we don't do is hire and fire as we need that's what i was trying to yeah we we just just don't do that that's just wrong um we will high we do hire and fire yeah we sometimes fire people not fire people sometimes people leave the organization um because you know they haven't fitted in or they haven't done the work properly but it's very rare or the next opportunity or they want to go and live in america or canada or something that's fine yeah and an all company is like a living organism as inputs and outputs but the whole the company marches on um but we don't hire a bunch of people make the game and then get into that awkward situation of needing to make this quarter's financials work for the shareholders and have to fire a bunch of people and then by the way hire them back next quarter yeah which the public the public doesn't know the shareholders don't notice and you know that creates instability so we don't really we don't we don't do that do you i mean how do you maintain that stability though it's just a matter of planning ahead and making sure all the projects are lining up because do you use outsourcing to and that helps it really helps with kind of the you know when you need a lot of bulk art but we very much focus on like these this is the key art so we're our our teams are concentrating on the the best pieces the most exciting pieces the hero the hero bits and stuff and then you know the the filler stuff that tends to go out to us yeah if we need if we need 50 different street lights for example right yeah we might design five of them in-house and then concept the in-house concept will design the rest of them and then that one might go to outsource to do the bulk work yeah it means that guys can concentrate on say the cool stuff yeah the most fun stuff but it is it's an it's a never-ending sliding block puzzle working on projects simultaneously and uh i think possibly one of the best policies we have and it's an unofficial policy is sort of n minus one there's always there's never quite enough people to do it which means that everybody's working you know everybody's not not stressed but everybody's got things they've got to do because not having anything to do is actually really bad for morale having too much to do is bad for morale as well but not having much to do until next week is actually quite draining if ever if there's a little bit more than the amount you need it also makes everyone's job slightly more secure doesn't it because they're not like exactly right and you'll know as a journalist here having a deadline does focus the mind oh yes it does indeed i still make magazines so we have real deadlines not those kind of hey maybe we could put it up online tomorrow yeah exactly yeah so do we weekly yeah yeah we have a week 2000 days weekly yeah 1977. yeah so we share that yeah yeah how's that for pressure description running yeah well you can do it digitally if you want to yeah 2008 online save the trees the um so i mean although you've remained independent recently you've acquired a number of other studios and brought them brought them into to to yours yes absolutely but we don't don't ask them questions yeah yeah we we don't have a we haven't gone out to look for people to acquire right we've never done that uh opportunities have come up in conversations and situations have been such that there's an opportunity to acquire somebody and if they're a good fit if we work them before if they're friends if it makes sense for us financially then you know then why not you know so there's an emergent component if you hiring individual people they've got to take time to get up to speed they might not gel with individuals or gel quickly with individuals but when you if you acquire a team of people that work together there's sort of an emergent property there that's sort of quite valuable you know they've worked together assuming they're good at what they do which they must be um there's there's an added value it's really hard to put it into actually you know pounds shillings and pens i've got them showing my age kind of a culture yeah and if that works in rebellion's culture then you can bring them on board much easier you can bring on board 13 individuals and hope that they will stick yeah well hopefully those 13 people are greater than hiring 13 random people who are good at their job okay so i mean like in a way we're talking about independence and retaining independence but on the other hand obviously for some people being acquired is actually the best step forward but to maintain their stability and the viability of the studio yeah i think so we're probably not the people to ask about they should ask some of the people we've acquired and whether they think it's a good thing or not uh hopefully they'll all say yes it's a good thing um it's kept their jobs stable yeah yeah so that's the thing you know jobs are jobs and stability i think is really important for people and they can get on with the rest of their lives without having to worry about are they going to make their mortgage payment or be able to yeah i mean the other factor for people who own companies is there's a lot of stress on people they're going where are we going to get the next project you know they've got their finances everything where you know i've got to pay these people this when's the next milestone coming in there's a lot of pressure and it's quite attractive for some people to say look can i hand those problems over to someone else so can i just make games because most people like us who founded companies went into making games set up their companies to make games and there's all this other crap they have to deal with just to make games and we've accepted that you know we can't make games in the same way that we used to so yeah our roles have metamorphosized so much from the old days yeah jason doesn't do art anymore i didn't do programming anymore anymore so probably people are quite great i think i used to i was quite good at d-paint at back you're very good at d-painting yeah you did some really good 3d stuff on graph paper before the running uh i remember typing before there were tools to make things anyway shouldn't reminisce too much but i do remember typing in uh matrices yeah yeah you did some some really interesting characters in law 3d you know like using 20-odd polygons and animating them to make it look really interesting so yeah he's a very talented artist actually thank you very much maybe maybe one day you'll return to it well yeah there are much better people that work for me the um so i guess my main worry today is is that i'm going to say to you so you wouldn't sell your company and don't ask him to have a bloody good reason exactly you're not going to tell me a good reason and we'll be sitting here you know in two months time you'll be owned by microsoft and and you won't be able to say and i won't be able to interview you exactly which would be a huge loss for me we've been approached many times by people to be acquired and it's never worked out for us i've never felt it was a good thing for staff or for the company or for what we wanted to do the one of the reasons i always i never say never in interviews is because you never know but and i don't really like lying if somebody says would you ever sell it's like well i suppose yes i can imagine absurd scenarios where where we might but those scenarios are so absurd and i'm creative so i can come up with really absurd ideas um then you know i don't like it basically no we're not we're not unlike some companies we're not going out to be acquired we don't have investors vcs whose job is to build up a company and then sell it for a profit so that's that's that's the difference is we don't have someone behind us who says look get big get sold and you haven't floated the company either i think it'd be very unlikely we'd want to float i think that's just a lot of hassle we've got colleagues who have floated and uh they tell me that my job as ceo would change entirely from making running the company and making games to managing investors right and going to board meetings in with glassy-eyed investors and i i don't like the idea of doing that i wouldn't want to do that necessarily but never say never yeah and on the never say never if someone came to you a couple of years ago and said you were going to open a tv studio and put a future film into production then was that was that in your mind yes and part of what we do is our job is to think many years in advance i think multi-steps so and i think that's again that's what the sign of of good good management good owners of the company good good developers is how far ahead can you think you know for those that don't know they'd have now a tv studio we wanted to we we played around we've we've worked with we co-produced we co-produced the dread movie that dna did but we didn't have that much we had quite a lot to do with it but not as much as i would have liked and the whilst it was a great movie they did things that that i wasn't i would have done slightly differently it's a good movie oh it's a fantastic movie absolutely brilliant we worked hard to make the script right yeah there's a few lines in there it's like i wrote that that's cool um but that the point is what's the if you've got a box of toys to play with what's the point handing the box of toys over to somebody else to play with because you want to play with your own toys so uh that's that's really what we always wanted to do and then so we started to commission scripts and develop things by developer the industry is different the the film and tele industry talks about development being the thing you do before production you always have to swap heads really when you talk about different industries um so we're developing scripts and things for film and tv uh and we're actually investing so we've got our first fully funded feature film schools out forever based on one of our abaddon books uh going into production is it three weeks from now two weeks two weeks two weeks ish actually physical goes into production at your own studio space yes partly the studios partly on location in london and partly on location of lip switch it's about uh the apocalypse and a boys public school right so which are not too actually broadly the same quite frankly um uh so that's exciting uh one of the challenges was though there's a lot of development sorry a lot of uh filming going on in in the uk at the moment and there just isn't enough space i think the government said there's there's a shortage of two million square feet of studio space and we were looking around and one of the things we want to be materially involved we're going to have to bring in professionals to help us with production and stuff but we wanted to be able to be there all the time when they're being made because that's fun and that's really what we do it for and it wanted wanted to be close and there wasn't anywhere available pinewood's booked up shepparton is now booked up fully for 10 years oh is that the netflix deal yeah netflix basically bought sheffield for 10 for 10 years pinewood's basically pinewood are full when they're at 87 85 to 87 capacity so their paperwork says they're at 96 capacity now so they basically have no wiggle room for anything we just couldn't find any space to do anything at any reasonable price there's a few places of some place in cardiff but cardiff's a beautiful place but it's a damn long drive from oxford so i didn't want to do that so we looked in we found a place so we decided to do the rebellious thing and actually find a place that we could convert into studios we've got a 12 acre site 250 000 square foot of studios uh one of which is a massive soundproof envelope that was built around a newspaper print works and the printworks itself has got come out entirely and there's an enormous set of chambers there which are all soundproofed which is exactly what you need for a studio so we've got a ready-made studio there so we acquired that that's um we've merged that's our second set of studios along with audio motions weekly studios and uh after many years i've been to your offices of kind of saying well there's a bit of space out the back but really we're we're at capacity in this office we have we have built and there's a lot of people in there's 2000 a.d at the back and there's development teams and qa and marketing and there's your guys offices and you know and and it's all in this one big space really and now you'd like oh well we've got four football fields worth of extra space over there correct more than four yeah we've just there's a big warehouse at the back of our oxford studio which we have just converted to offices we haven't seen yet we haven't it's not open yet but it's yeah we've expanded into that studio into that website for the sign off from building control yeah i remember when we first moved into the oxford studios it was uh quite a big space and i remember putting my arm out and thinking all right people are so small that i can cover them with my thumb so that's yeah we're joking about having binoculars or telescopes to look out of our offices of people um let's be open we never did but there's a big place you could do drones just check people and fly back but the idea was to have a big open space which could be flexible if we need a small team we can have people work together if it's a big team we can have a big team working together and we move people around it's communication yeah yeah yeah you could just walk past and see what someone's doing you know there's little huddles yeah and you're not getting this gopher popping up having a look around and popping down yeah i think it's really important for coders artists designers q8 all work together because they're all in the same team they're all making they all should be pulling in the same direction trying to make the best game possible and silos prevent that kind of communication so an open plan office works really well has worked you get those communications so you get the the idea is to kind of have the leads in the middle so code and artists and then just filtering out so everyone's you've got multiple connections to concentric rings around the key coordinating people of the project but the studios are interesting because we've got so we've got rogue trooper he's very likely to start filming there in the new year that's with duncan jones so i've got the script for that which is looking great uh very exciting that and there's a couple of other projects as well which hopefully should go in then next year now isn't it yeah next year 2020. yeah thinking ahead looking at several years how does that then fit in with the games i mean is what i mean apart from the ips is their synergy with the with the current game you know what there's quite a lot of vfx synergy there's a lot of a lot of parallel you know uh kind of components and artwork and everything is very similar 80 percent of vfx is done broadly the same way we do computer games it's just they're not real time and they could spend longer per frame and they could have more fidelity per frame it's broadly the same tools you know brush those sorts of things so there's definitely that um production skills are transferable as well uh there's a possibility i mean again we're not going to just we're not going to make movies and telly of our games more of our books we'll be doing originals as well right so the idea is to tell good stories and entertain people and content is the only thing that really matters in the creative industries you know it doesn't matter i i like it sometimes it's making a phone call you know if i make a phone call to somebody i just want to speak to them i don't actually care who's carried the data or who's earned what fraction of a penny or whether it's been rooted via the maldives or anything as long as the signal is good i don't actually give it stuff those are enormous multinational companies there but they're all taking fractures of a penny off me and i pay monthly so i don't even know how much it's cost i don't i've stopped looking at how much my phone calls because these days there are two fixed points there are people who make the games the movies the tv and there are people who watch them and we don't really mind how or care how people get get them we want them just to get cool stuff that we make i can see a situation for example when i've got my mobile screen it might even not be a might be a phone it's a communication device or some description i say i haven't watched the original star wars movie in ages so can i watch it please and my personal assistant go sure and it starts showing the original star wars for me i've got a clue who who i've paid you've paid nor do i give a quite frankly i want to watch star wars yeah i may have paid ten quid five quid 7p whatever i don't know yeah and somebody will have searched netflix and yeah disney yeah hulu yeah and so arguably things like netflix netflix a big important company of course at the moment but they've got to build up a back catalog they've got to build up a value which is in their content and that's why they're commissioning so much fantastic stuff because what matters people watch netflix because of the content yeah you know yeah bit different for people like amazon you know amazon can sell you toilet rolls and content so they've got something else to sell you eventually they've got to do those silos and all those delivery platforms and brands become less important and it just becomes you think yeah it's the content because it's hugely important yeah really okay um have you had any questions well i've got to the end it says it says conclude here so um we we are also running short of time um someone else might have some questions exactly um any questions oh there we go straight you know he used to work for us is there someone who didn't work first we could actually ask a question quickly so new companies um doing games as a service uh which means they're basically on that same product for a very very long time but a lot of the value about yourselves is the portfolio just you've got this huge range of different things that you do do you think that new companies coming out now will it ever be rebellious in 25 years in the same place that you are now with that portfolio that's a tricky one isn't it the the the long duration games games as a service is a it's fraught with some difficulties at the moment there's all the controversy around loot boxes there's controversy around free to play i think these are conversations that we have to have as an industry and quite frankly the general public has to work out what they're okay with and what they're not okay with um it all comes down to spiraling budgets for the biggest projects you know if you're it's costing you 150 million dollars to make a project and you know the traditional market is only going to bring you 60 million in well you've got to find a way of squeezing more money out because you've got shareholders who want to see endless growth it comes back to this whole thing of not having shareholders not having to do endless growth so i think there's some challenges there the other issue for me is how much do those projects cannibalize each other so if you're somebody like ea and you've got you need to make lots of projects but you want those projects to last for four or five years you're putting lots of money into project one now project two is launched and you want that to last for four or five years is that are you marketing that to the same people that you actually want to stay in project one and project two i think there's a lot of complexity there for them to get their heads around i mean for us we we typically we want to extend the lifetime of our projects and this long tail but we would uh we're looking at doing that with luke not not with loot boxes but with things like dlc and you know elements that that makes sense you know by this additional adventure this additional level for whatever number of quids it is so it's a sort of clear and obvious transaction for somebody um yeah we we dabbled in the free to play space a little bit didn't we had a couple of free to play titles and learned quite a lot about it well the trouble with the free to play at the moment is it's down to the guys with the biggest acquisition budget yeah so yeah i mean you look as companies oh they've done two billion turnover yeah but they spent 1.8 billion on user acquisition or as we used to call it advertising so their their margins are very thin so those sometimes you could imagine those are quite brittle business models it doesn't take much as anybody that works in leverage derivatives knows you can make a lot of money but you can lose a lot of money very quickly and if your business model is quite brittle like if you're a developer and you've got one project for one publisher and that publisher finishes the project that's a brittle business model if you've got two projects for two different publishers there's less brittle that's there so if one fails you've still got the other to fall back on and some business models in free to play are quite brittle you can imagine it doesn't take much for the delta to change before yeah making 200 million becomes losing 200 million a year any more questions i think some hands up people at the back yeah oh yeah run microphone man yeah stick your hand up there is between video games and the movie industry so things like snatch it seems like you guys are now ideally suited to experiment in that area do you think he will in the future experimenting with interactive movies has been done for decades and failed every single time personally i don't know i think something might happen there i think vr is an interesting area for movie entertainment sort of more movie-like experiences to overlap into games i think it's a bit like saying can you merge books and games yes you can they call game books and choose your own adventure all that kind of stuff not a big part of the industry but a functional part of it i think that games and movies do something different games and television do different things they entertain in a different way one is much more active and one is much more passive and if anybody people near here know about venn diagrams you know the idea of smooshing the two together is you get every audience but you might actually only get the overlap which is which is not good and there's certainly been times in the past where we've had the film industry come in and say hey we're going to show you games guys how we make the games oh yeah we've had that do you remember the cyber cyber awards what was it in hollywood romania or was it awards the first attempt by hollywood to capture the video games industry it was black tie events they had proper seat fillers and somebody leaves to go to the loo somebody sits in there and the culmination was best actor in the video game best actor and actress in a video game they had a presentation on how video games are made and it's a fight that's a five-step process step one write the script step two i can't remember half of them but the last step was at the interaction at the game the step five in making a computer game was make the game i think it was write the script cast the actors film the actor's performance edit the actor's performance and then add the computer game at the end it was absolutely awesome we were sitting there in our rented tuxedos as probably the only people actually in the games industry in the whole of the uh place it was genius just absolutely dreadful it was astonishing proper hollywood nonsense brilliant and it was caesar's world of boxing on philips cdi that won the one best game it was great it was like that just like what nobody played that so no he'd need a bloody good reason to make a crossover video game yeah i don't think i i really don't think those two areas cross over very well i have to say i think they're intriguing and i think they could do but i i just yeah i think it's very very difficult and very expensive to do well let's face it it's really expensive to make a linear television program really expensive to make a linear film that's with one ending you make one with six endings where you obviously going to be increasing your production quality or spreading your production money more thinly over those six endings the trouble with having six endings is are most people going to watch all six or are most people going to watch one and go kind of that was curious okay fine i'm done now i'll go on to the next thing so you're wasting all of that production value so i think there are lots of tensions and difficulties in that area yes we are ideally placed for it though and virtual production for example is an area that audio motion are building up one of our divisions doing a lot of work in the virtual production space so that's sort of using games technology to do previews and post vis for movies and production in general so i the the overlap might not be where you think it is in terms of the end product it might be more in the production process cool anyone else oh just about there oh are we out of time oh car we're out of time sorry sorry all right ask us afterwards okay if you can find us we're off that was rather abrupt yeah i don't like this there are other sessions yeah at least it wasn't gonna ask you to clap but yeah they're brilliant thank you very much cheers