{audio:0:00:57} When you entered the StarCraft team, what exactly was your role?

{audio:0:01:03} My position was as a staff level programmer on the editor team. Anyone who has played StarCraft, may have seen the custom games and the editor that goes out with StarCraft; Blizzard has a long history of modding. I was working on the editor team, as a programmer and I started, initially, doing art tools. I was doing things such as the previewer, which was the tool that the artists used to look at their models and animations and things like that. Then I worked on some lighting tools. Eventually, I transitioned to this cut-scene editor, which was a large project that I spent three or four years on, in total.

{audio:0:01:47} In Heart of the Swarm, we wanted to really up the level of quality for the cinematics. In particularly, the cut scenes that happened between missions. Not the fully rendered ones that are the start and the end of the game, but all the ones in between, where the characters are talking to each other; briefing and debriefing after missions, and stuff like that. I worked with some of the other artists and tech designers and we built this brand-new cut-scene system, which was really cool and really exciting to work on. It was the tool set and the engine port and so on. That was my initial period of time at Blizzard, that tools period. Then I transitioned to UI after that.

{audio:0:02:27} Can we talk about how you thought about recreating the story and using the StarCraft characters to develop Heroes of the Storm?

{audio:0:02:40} Heroes of the Storm, of course, is a game that is all about the Blizzard IP. In many ways, it was a game that was for the fans and, for us, as fans ourselves, it was a matter of finding a way to make some sense of all these IPs smashing together. I do need to say that I wasn’t part of the story development, myself, for the role that I played; but I was adjacent to it. Really, I think it came down to the artists wanting to explore some new ideas, some new worlds, some ways that these characters could come together. The whole idea of the Nexus being this world between worlds and the idea that Sanctuary is a planet somewhere and Korhal, in StarCraft, and all these worlds are just out there, floating in this universe, that they can possibly come together.

{audio:0:03:34} I think, officially, it’s all considered non-cannon, but it was still a fun exploration. For the part of the team that I was on, on the UI side, a lot of the inspiration we were drawing from was things like eighties cartoons and eighties metal and hyper, over-exaggerated lightning bolts and craziness and bright pinks and blues. Bringing all these things together, in a really fun and irreverent way. Trying not to take itself too seriously and just really being a fun and colorful and wild game.

{audio:0:04:13} Do you think it’s easier when you have characters and a narrative, like StarCraft, and what that made of Heroes of the Storm, to create more of an engaging gameplay, versus the likes of Fortnite, which is more of a user-generated game, in a way?

{audio:0:04:32} It’s interesting; I think they can be really different. The three games that you just mentioned are all on very different wavelengths, for how they approach stories. StarCraft is a narrative game, in terms of a single player, as obviously, there is the multi-player, as well. The single-player game isn’t narrative; a story was told, starring Raynor and Kerrigan and all that. The Heroes of the Storm was bringing together known characters, known IPs and messing with them a bit, but they were still known characters. You were playing as Kerrigan and when she kills Raynor, she has something to say about it; if she kills Diablo, there’s some interesting things there. That’s the Marvel mashup kind of thing. Fortnite is very much a blank slate, that the players can put their own stories, in a similar way that Minecraft or Roblox might, as well. It’s really all about the UGC and all the events that happen all the time. There is a rough narrative that’s happening, with Fortnite, season over season. A lot of it is really about the players and what they bring to the table and what they’re doing with their friends; they’re hanging out and they’re doing fun things. The story, for them, is really just a backdrop.

{audio:0:05:49} I don’t know that I could say that any of them are more or more less engaging; they are just very different styles of story.

{audio:0:05:56} How did you look at the defining features of the gameplay of Heroes?

{audio:0:06:04} We were entering an established genre of MOBA. One of the things that we looked at, quite a bit on Heroes, was how can we improve the genre. That’s something that I think Blizzard is excellent at and it has always been. They will take a genre, like MMOs or RTS play and say, how can we add charm, make it more approachable, make it more accessible, make it more mainstream? Of course, the MOBA genre, at the time that Heroes was being developed, was very established; League of Legends was out there; Dota 2 was out there. So a lot of it was really about looking at what those games did, what they did well and what they didn’t do well. And trying to figure out how we could make it more approachable, more accessible.

{audio:0:06:52} As an example, the shared XP was something that we explored and that was something that was intended to make the game easier for players who, maybe, aren’t as familiar with the genre or where they are trying to be really fiddly with getting last hits and things like that. It also helped the game break out of its restrictions, in that you could have more interesting or unique characters that are doing different roles. For example, Lost Vikings can be in multiple lanes or Murky doesn’t really need to be in a lane much or Abathur can just hang out back in the base. It was the idea that XP had a different set of rules and it was, basically, more forgiving in a lot of ways. It allowed for more wild characters to be developed, where you’re not worried about the economy of the game – how much XP you’re getting and how much gold you’re getting – being dependent on your presence in the lane.

{audio:0:08:00} I think there were quite a number of features like that that we looked at. The other thing was, there was a lot of emphasis on multiple maps and having unique game mechanics on each map. That was something that was intended to really shake up the genre, as well. You could go and have a map where, yes, of course, you are trying to destroy towers and get to the core and do the main objective. But there’s also some interesting gameplay around the idea of collecting coins, to turn into a pirate or cursing the enemy team or things like that, which I thought was really interesting. Some of the maps were more successful than others but I really liked the idea of being able to experiment and go wild and fun and crazy with the genre.

{audio:0:08:40} How important are the maps in the free-to-play games?

{audio:0:08:46} There was a really big debate, around the time that Heroes was being developed, about is the MOBA map something that needs to be standardized, across all games in the genre, and should never change, or should the game have lots of different kinds of maps? The argument was akin to basketball or football, where people would say, you don’t change your basketball court every single time you play a different game; the rules of basketball don’t change. As a sport, it’s very fixed and there’s very specific rules on the size of the ball and the heights of the baskets. Whereas, Heroes is taking it and trying to mix it up and say, actually, no, every time you play, you could be playing with a bouncy ball, you could be playing with a medicine ball, you could be playing with five baskets; you could just wildly change the game, every time. The objective of that was to increase the fun of the game, to shake up the meta, so that the game doesn’t get too stale, which is something that happens a lot in this genre; the games are very calcified.

{audio:0:09:54} I think what was learned, after the fact, was that there is a certain comfort that players have, in keeping the map static. It’s not another thing that they have to worry about. These games are very complicated; there’s a lot to worry about. You’re worrying about your character and all of your abilities and what equipment you’re buying, what talents you are choosing, in Heroes. You’re worried about what your enemies are doing; you’re worried about your team composition. There are a lot of variables. Then you throw in another vector of variable, which is the map itself and it can be really overwhelming for players. That’s something that was an interesting lesson that I had learned, watching how players reacted to the space.

{audio:0:10:36} While I don’t think it was wrong; I think we did the right thing to experiment and try different maps and wild gameplay. But I think the unintended side effect of players becoming even more overwhelmed, was unfortunate.

{audio:0:10:56} How did you approach building the in-game services, for Heroes?

{audio:0:11:03} This wasn’t the first free-to-play game that Blizzard had done. Obviously, Blizzard had a really long and excellent history in live-service games, going all the way back to Battle.net in the nineties. We had a lot of built-in, institutional experience, in the idea of, what are the kinds of services and things that we’ll need. Things like matchmaking and parties and friends; all that stuff that Battle.net really provided. There is a lot on that side of things that we didn’t really have to worry about. They were known solutions and things were already built.

{audio:0:11:46} Then on the other side, there was a new set of challenges, around the free-to-play aspects that are unique to MOBAs, such as Hero rotations, collecting gold, levelling up your character, purchasing skins, unlocking characters and all that kind of stuff. We looked at other games in the space and we wanted to make sure that, no matter what, the game was always true to the Blizzard values of being player-centric, being really good for the players and not worrying at all about nickel and diming players or things like that. We always took the approach of, what’s best for the game. There was this series of events that occurred that was very public – it was during the beta of the game, I believe – where we had built this artefact system that was very briefly released. The artefact system looked a lot like a free-to-play mechanic you’d find in mobile games. Actually, it had a lot in common with some of the other games in the space, as well, in terms of having these items that actually have power, that you unlock over time, that you can possibly purchase, to speed how quickly you can unlock them. Not very different from things that you find in League of Legends or some of these other games.

{audio:0:13:23} Ultimately, we released a feature and the players really didn’t like it. It was seen, very much, as a pay to win feature. While we believed we were being respectful of the concern around pay to win, because all of us we fans of the game and we didn’t want to soil the game or soil the Blizzard name or anything like that, it was clear from the player reaction that they weren’t happy with it. This is something that went all the way up the chain, at Blizzard. Lots of discussions were had and, ultimately, we decided, don’t worry about the money; if this isn’t right for the players, let’s get rid of it. I was really impressed with that decision that was made. It was the right call to make and I’m glad we didn’t go down a dark monetization path. Even though I don’t think this was that dark, I’m glad that we stayed, very clearly, away from the line.

{audio:0:14:19} Did you see any difference in the type of in-game services you can roll out, in a game like Heroes, where you have defined characters, versus Fortnite, where they have and build their own characters?

{audio:0:14:36} Certainly. One of the biggest challenges that MOBAs have is that their core monetization, for most of these games, is around skins and progressions around skins and things like that, which is a very hero-centric idea that, if you’re playing Heroes of the Storm and you love Kerrigan, the skins that you are likely to purchase are going to be Kerrigan skins. You’re unlikely to purchase skins for other characters. Essentially, this means that if you’ve got 50 characters in your game – which isn’t even that many, for a MOBA – every time you make and release a new skin, the adjustable market for that product is only 2% of your entire audience. That really hurts the ROI on developing skins.

{audio:0:15:22} Whereas games that don’t have hero-based mechanics and hero-based cosmetics, are just much more open and free. In Fortnite, for example, their skins are open for everyone. Any time a skin comes out, it’s really just a matter of whether you like the skin or not. There’s no gameplay limiting factor to whether or not you can choose that skin. Going back to a MOBA, if a new skin comes out for Kerrigan, it’s both a combination of, do you play the character, do you like the skin? For a game like Fortnite, it’s simply, do you like the skin? This just means that it’s easier, in many ways, to monetize that. At least, your addressable market is much wider, for every item that you produce.

{audio:0:16:08} Does that extend to different virtual items that you can buy, whether it’s from the Loot Boxes, or whatever it may be, in Fortnite, versus specific items that that character would carry, for example?

{audio:0:16:21} Fortnite has limited customization, but there is some customization. You’ve got things like your Back Bling and your Contrails and your Gliders and things like that. They are able to mix and match things, as well. Whereas most MOBAs, it’s an all or nothing approach to a skin. Here’s your skin; this is what it looks like. Some games mix things like hats or whatever. You also have the challenge with MOBAs and the MOBA space that your camera is so high up, in general, that you start to lose a lot of detail of the character, as well. Things like your Back Bling or different weapons can also be a real challenge to show the value. Players don’t value things that they can’t see very well. That also makes it a lot harder to product meaningful items.

{audio:0:17:18} Fortnite also, very famously, has all of its dances as well and I think that there’s an interesting difference between third person view and your connection to the character, versus a top-down, mobile control of the character. When you’re playing a game like Fortnite, you are that character. World of Warcraft has the same idea too. You are that character; that is your avatar. You very much identify with that character and you will say words such as I or me, when you are describing what the character is doing. Whereas, with a top down game, you don’t identify as easily, with the character. You see Kerrigan or you see Stitches; you don’t, necessarily, see yourself as that character. That also harms some of the cosmetic potential. That’s not to say that these games can’t be modernized. Obviously, League of Legends has done amazingly well, with Dota and other things in the space. They’ve figured out really good formulas for this. But I do think that there is an inherent advantage to games like Fortnite and how they approach the gameplay and how the cosmetics really enhance the gameplay.

{audio:0:18:30} Given your experience working on Heroes and then Fortnite, can we take a step back and just look, fundamentally, at how exactly you would define the difference in the gameplay of Fortnite, versus previous free-to-play games?

{audio:0:18:47} Fortnite is in the Battle Royale genre and that genre was really interesting. One of the things that I think was a unique innovation that Battle Royale brought to the game space and was something that I don’t even think was done on purpose – it was stumbled upon, as these genres often can do – which was this feeling, when you are playing a Battle Royale game, that you are always winning, until you’re out. That’s something that all the Battle Royale games have where, basically, you start a game, you start completely scratch and everyone starts on the exact same, even footing. Everyone has the same items and the same vulnerability and that kind of stuff. You think this could be it; this could be my game. There is a pretty heavy luck factor in Battle Royale games, as well. Who else is landing near you? Did you find the right items? Things like that also play into it.

{audio:0:19:55} But the idea is, as you are playing, as you are running around and as the circle is closing and more people are dropping out, you’re thinking, ooh, this could be it; this could be my game. Then when you actually have combat, it’s very fast. I think the time to kill, in a game like Fortnite is probably something like one to five seconds. You’re dead. You’re out and you have that moment of sadness because you’re out then, replay, and you start all over again. Whereas in a lot of other games, League of Legends, for example, if a League of Legends game takes 35 to 40 minutes, there could be a very long amount of time where you know you are losing; you are coming from behind. Yes, there can be some really sweet moments of those, come-from-behind victories. But there’s also plenty of those slogfests of, we’re just losing and losing and losing. It’s a very different kind of feeling. That’s true for a lot of games. It’s true for most sports games and anything that has a score. You know exactly where you stand; you know if you’re behind and it doesn’t feel great.

{audio:0:20:59} With Battle Royale games, it’s more surprising. You don’t really know the state of the game. You don’t know how far ahead or behind you are. In many ways, it doesn’t really matter how far ahead or behind you are, at least for normal play. The esports level is very different; they play a very different game from the one I play. You don’t know where you stand and it doesn’t really matter if you are ahead or not, in a lot of ways because skill and other random factors can really make a difference to the outcome of the battle.

{audio:0:21:29} It almost optimizes dopamine release, for gamers.

{audio:0:21:35} Yes; I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s why we saw such an explosive growth of the genre. People realized that it was super fun. It feels great and being able to quickly get into the next game. I’m really curious to see how we, as an industry, can take that concept and start applying it to other genres. I don’t mean things like the 100-player Tetris or other people taking the very obvious formula of Battle Royale. I really mean that bit about, you’re always winning until you’re not. How can that be applied to other competitive games?

{audio:0:22:12} What else was unique about Fortnite, in terms of the maps, the graphics? Was there anything specific about the game or the UI that really defined the success of it?

{audio:0:22:24} I think the cross-play is, absolutely, one of the big things. It’s a very well-known phenomenon that a group of players, a group of people, in general, will do the activity that the least flexible friend is capable of doing. If the five of us are going out to eat somewhere and we know that someone can’t afford to go for a five-star steak dinner, the five people then tend to go to what that person can afford. Or if one of you is a vegetarian, you go somewhere that has vegetarian options. That same concept applies to playing games. The important thing for a social group is that people are together. You want to be doing things with your friends and with the other people that you want to be hanging out with. That’s the main goal. It’s not so much to play the game.

{audio:0:23:12} By removing barriers, so that more of your friend group can play, you’re more likely to bring your entire friend group in. Once you have a friend group, you have the social stickiness that, if you know your four other friends want to play Fortnite, then you’re more likely to just join them, playing Fortnite, instead of doing your own things. It causes a gravity well, into the game.

{audio:0:23:33} We discovered this, as an industry, years ago, that free-to-play allowed for this. Once you got rid of the barrier of entry cost, it allowed for a lot more people to come in. You could say, hey, I’ve got this cool new game, League of Legends, that I want to play; why don’t you come and play with me. You don’t have to worry about shelling out $60. You can just give it a shot and if you like it, you stay and if you don’t, you don’t. But the point is, without that barrier, you are more likely to come and join us. You don’t have that cost barrier as a reason why one person of your friend group may not join.

{audio:0:24:04} But you did have a hardware barrier. League of Legends is PC only, so if you didn’t have a gaming PC, you couldn’t play with your friends. Cross-play knocks down, completely, the hardware barrier, as well. It didn’t matter if you had an Xbox or a PlayStation or a mobile phone or a Switch or whatever it is. If you had a machine that was capable of playing a game, Fortnite could play on it, which meant that more people could play with their friends. This is something that I experienced myself, as a player. I have a 14-year-old sister and she was 12 when Fortnite was really starting to take off and she was playing with her friends and I wanted to play with her. I thought it was really cool to play a game that I had worked on, with my little sister; I had never really done that before. But they had an Xbox and I had a PlayStation. Traditionally, we were on the opposite sides of the fence, but once we had cross-play, I was able to call her up and say, all right, let’s play. It was no longer a barrier; no longer a thing we had to worry about or think about, at all. I think that all games must be cross-play, in the future. I think this is a critically important thing for gamers. It’s what gamers want. Gamers want to be able to play with their friends. They don’t care about console wars; they don’t care about what devices they’re on. You can go into any store and look at all the different ones, but most players don’t care. They just don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars for something, if they’ve got something already. They’ve got their phone; they’ve got the gaming console that they bought or their parents bought and they just want to play games with their friends. They don’t want to have barriers to that.

{audio:0:25:49} What level of scale do you think defines a successful free-to-play game today? How many MAUs do you need, to really have a game that can be sustainable, in that sense?

{audio:0:26:06} It really depends on what your goals are, what your costs are and things like that. A game with a million MAU and maybe, let’s say, $2 ARPMAU, is making $2 million a month. So they’re making $20 million a year; that’s fine for a very small company. There’s nothing wrong with that. It depends on what your costs are, what your needs are and, as an organization, what you’re aiming for. That $2 ARPMAU is also a guess at an industry average.

{audio:0:26:50} But in terms of how much these games cost, like Fortnite, like Apex, to actually produce and maintain, there’s surely a 10 million, 20 million MAU that’s required to have a decent ROI, over a lifetime?

{audio:0:27:05} Again, it just really depends on your size. A company the size of Epic or the size EA, obviously, they make big plays, they big bets and they put a lot of money into things and then they want their returns. But indie developers and smaller developers, they have to make smaller bets, but if they’ve only got 20 employees, they can survive on a lot less, as well. It’s really hard to put a number on that, to be perfectly honest. The ranges are so wild. Roblox have just said, I think, that they had 120 million MAU. Minecraft is up there, as well. But you’ve got plenty of successful businesses operating at one million, half a million, five million. It really just depends on what your needs are, as an organization.

{audio:0:27:54} I do think that the ARPMAU and retention are probably the two more important numbers. In retention, you need that day one, 45%, day seven, 30% and day 30, 10%ish, to really be successful, with a free-to-play game, because you need to be able to have that viral coefficient, ultimately, go positive. You need growth. It doesn’t matter how many people you pump into the ecosystem with acquisition. Acquisition costs far outweigh your average values and ROIs. You’re hoping to be able to pay once for a player and have them keep returning, month after month, year after year. It’s the retention that matters, more than anything else.

{audio:0:28:49} How did you think about driving retention, at Fortnite?

{audio:0:28:53} There’s a lot of well-known retention thoughts out there, in terms of progression systems and social stickiness and things like that. What Epic did was, very much, what you would expect other companies to be looking at. How often are players coming back and are they playing with their friends? What are some of the indicators that might predict if someone is going to come back or not come back?

{audio:0:29:22} I’m just curious as to how Fortnite can keep the retention and engagement going. Is it about making the gameplay more and more engaging, to keep people retained?

{audio:0:29:41} I think one of the common playbooks out there, for engagement, is constantly keeping the game updated. When you’re looking at mobile games, for example, they know 100% that the more often you update the game, the fresher you keep it, the more changes you make, the more likely players are to come back. There are some caveats to that like, not having a patch is bad for retention but having an event is good for retention. If you look at Fortnite’s patch cadence, for example, they’re constantly updating the game. They’re updating it week after week and sometimes multiple times per week; adding new items, adding new game modes, adding new things. They’re eventizing everything too. This week, there’s this cool, new shotgun that’s different. Then you’ve got the Avengers game happening over here. There’s constantly something to talk about, constantly something new to check out. That’s one of the key drivers that Fortnite had, for its retention, as opposed to other things I worked on or some of the others in the space.

{audio:0:30:46} I think that eventizing of everything is a really interesting thing that a lot of companies should be looking at. A lot of them are, of course. As I said, this is something that mobile has known for years, that when you have these events like, hey, for these three days, something is different about the game. It’s interesting, it’s fun, it brings people back.

{audio:0:31:09} Are there any specific variables that you, as a developer, would focus on, in terms of retention?

{audio:0:31:18} Retention is very important and, for the game I’m working on now, at the company I’m at now, one of the things that we’re going to be wanting to look at is around the day one, seven, 14 and 30 retention. This means the percentage of players who return on a given day, based on their lifetime. Once an account is created, day one is, do they come back the next day? Day seven is, do they come back the next week. Those are some of the biggest numbers. If you can start to see where you have holes and gaps, you can start to predict, maybe, where you have problems.

{audio:0:32:03} If you see that you’re healthy through day seven and then you drop off a cliff between seven and 14, what’s going on there? Is something happening in your progression system? Is the game getting too difficult? Is the game getting boring? You can then start to dig in and get a better understanding of where your problems might be. That’s going to be one of the big indicators. ARPU and all the different revenue numbers, of course, are important. Are players spending money? Are they interested in the products that you’re putting out there? The game that I’m working on now is a very social game, intended to play with friends and things like that. One of the big drivers will be things like, how many friends do people have? How often are they playing with friends? How do people who play with friends compare, in terms of retention and spend, to players who don’t have friends? Those are some pretty important numbers to look at, as well.

{audio:0:33:01} If you can start to cohort your player base and understand where the healthy players are and where the unhealthy players are, based on different metrics, such as do they play with friends, how often do they play, when do they play, at what time of day? Do they play with lots of different characters? Do they focus on one particular part of the game? You can start to cohort that out and start to see, actually, we’ve got a lot of healthy players over here and the unhealthy players over there. What you do with that really depends on what your problem space is, ultimately. Are you trying to convert these players into players like these players? Are you trying to improve these players, but they can still stay in this cohort?

{audio:0:33:39} It also depends, a lot, on your specific game space, as well. Average play time per day can be wildly different, depending on the genre of game. The same applies to number of sessions. If you have a typical mobile game, the metrics for a lot of those games are things like, they want you to play the game five times per day, in three-minute sessions. That doesn’t make sense for things like Fortnite or Heroes of the Storm. They are more likely to look at how many times per week they come back and what’s an average session, when they do come back.

{audio:0:34:16} What was unique about the in-game services that Fortnite offered, versus previous free-to-play games?

{audio:0:34:28} I talked a lot about cross-play; I think that is probably one of the biggest, unique things that the service has offered. The other thing is the technical excellence that was required to operate at that scale. The amount of players that came into Fortnite compared to other games and the speed at which they came in, required a level of technical excellence that was really quite impressive. That online team, they were heroes and they did an amazing job keeping the servers running, making optimizations. From a service level, a lot of that stuff was invisible to players, except for when there were problems. But there was a lot of work and a lot of thought and a lot of genius that had gone into how to operate at a scale that was never before seen.

{audio:0:35:20} When you look at the numbers that Epic released for things like the Marshmello event and, most recently, there was another concert that they had, these are massive numbers; 10 million CCU and things like that. Games don’t operate at that level; that’s absolutely insane, especially in the west and especially for games that are very real time in nature. Not only that, but Epic really loved having these large events, like the concert, where they basically focused all players in, at an exact moment, causing a massive spike in server usage. This is something that, typically, a lot of companies actively try to avoid; they try to smooth out the curve, as much as possible, so that you’re not dealing with these massive spikes that the servers can’t handle. If you go back to the Ahn’Qiraj event that World of Warcraft had, at least 15 years ago, the designers had built this event that caused all players to focus in on one server, in one location, because this one server happened to be the one that did the war effort the fastest. They were going to open the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj and there was this new dungeon that was waiting behind; it was a really cool event and players were really excited about it.

{audio:0:36:35} But by the nature of how it was designed, they basically encouraged all players to be focused in on this exact one location, at one time and the servers were just melting; the architecture was not built for that. There was a lot of effort done to make sure that, for World of Warcraft events, the design of various systems was more about spreading people away. Whereas Epic, with Fortnite, they looked to bring people close together, which is really cool. They take the technical requirements and they say, you know what, don’t design around the technical requirements; make something awesome and then the tech has to be fixed, to make it work.

{audio:0:37:14} Was there anything different about the Battle Pass or challenges or loot boxes or any of the add-ons that were offered in Fortnite, that were materially different from previous games, that gave it a much higher MAU, for example?

{audio:0:37:31} The Battle Pass is really interesting because there was some Battle Pass like things that had existed prior to Fortnite, but that ended up being a really interesting mix of gameplay and cosmetics, that you could purchase. When you purchase the Battle Pass, you purchase the ability to unlock items, if you play more. You get both the stickiness of making the purchase because one of the biggest indicators if someone is going to stick or not is if they spend money, but also the stickiness of the progression system. In hindsight, I guess it’s a little bit surprising that players were willing to spend money on something that they didn’t really get everything out of; they had to then work. They purchased the ability to work, to get the rest of what they wanted. You wouldn’t have predicted that that would have worked well. But I think the truth was, the value of the Battle Pass is just so incredibly high, when you look at the amount of items you get inside it, including just the V-Bucks. The V-Bucks inside the Battle Pass pays for itself.

{audio:0:38:46} In many ways, what you are doing is, you are purchasing a subscription-like system. It’s not in the wrapper of a subscription, but every three months, the Battle Pass comes out and you spend your $10 and then you get to unlock things, over time. I think that was a really interesting approach. As I said, other games had done things like this before. Dota has their Battle Pass, but it’s got some differences. That was a surprise, seeing how that played out and how well players really reacted to that. That’s something that now, almost every free-to-play game coming out now, has some kind of Battle Pass, for a good reason.

{audio:0:39:35} What surprised you about player behavior and monetization; what they were purchasing and how they were engaging with the game, specifically?

{audio:0:39:45} The biggest surprise, for me, looking at how players played Fortnite, was how they treated it like the third space. That concept where many players were playing Fortnite, but not actually playing Fortnite. They weren’t playing the Battle Royale game; they were just hanging out with their friends. That’s really all they wanted. That concept of the third space being that place that you go to that isn’t your home or school/work; it’s the community area; it’s the mall of the eighties and nineties. It’s the place that you’re just going to, not to do the activity that is intended at that location, but you’re just hanging out with your friends. In the eighties and nineties, when the mall was that third place, you weren’t going there to shop; you were just hanging out with your friends. Fortnite, in many ways, became that first true, virtual third place. I think World of Warcraft and some of the other MMOs had that, to a degree. But Fortnite really took it to the next level.

{audio:0:40:43} What do you think defines a winning third space?

{audio:0:40:53} Having lots of interesting things to do, but not being forced to do them, is probably one of the big things. That’s probably something that World of Warcraft and Fortnite both have in common. They’ve got this interesting, rich world and all these toys that you can play with, but you don’t have to actually use them. You can hang out in Stormwind and chat in Trade Chat or you can drop in whatever location, in Fortnite, and just run around. You don’t really have to engage in combat. You don’t really have to pick up and do things. You can do all sorts of other activities. You need an interesting world where there is stuff to do. Possibly you need some danger and excitement and random things that happen in the world. But you don’t have to engage with it; it’s not as if you are constantly playing.

{audio:0:41:46} If you take a game like League of Legends, you are constantly playing. You can’t just hang out in League of Legends. If you stop and decide you just want to take a walk through the jungle, you just fall behind. That’s a different kind of game. Even though both Fortnite and League of Legends are competitive games, in Fortnite there’s not the same kind of pressure to win. You’re not letting your team mates down; you’re able to just hang out and do whatever you want. That freedom, I think, is a really important aspect to it.

{audio:0:42:14} Also, things such as charming world, interesting and fun characters, irreverent. While you can probably make a third place in a post-apocalyptic zombie survival game, I think it will have a very different feeling from a game where you are running around on colorful hoverboards and zipping around and having fun. It’s a different kind of thing.

{audio:0:42:35} Did you see monetization per player change, through the lifetime? You played the Battle Royale games, engaged in combat, when you start playing and then, after a while, if you’re hanging out with friends, does that mean there’s lower monetization? How do you look at the lifetime of the player?

{audio:0:42:57} I think that gets a little too deep into things I probably can’t talk about.

{audio:0:43:01} I guess my question is more just around how difficult is it to keep engaging people and players? How sustainable is this world that Fortnite has created?

{audio:0:43:17} I think the most engaging thing, by far, is the other humans. And of the other humans, your friends are, by far, the most engaging thing. That’s what it is all about. As long as your friends and you have a reason to go back, in some capacity, it’s your friends that are going to keep you engaged; it’s your friends that are going to keep the game interesting and sticky. The other humans that you are running into and possibly making new friends, or they’re doing something interesting or silly, or you’re watching them stream. That’s where all the engagement is. As long as a game can keep putting out enough content that gets players to want to check it out, I think that’s the important thing. The core game doesn’t have to be the most engaging thing possible.

{audio:0:44:06} If you look at a game like multi-player StarCraft, I find most parts of StarCraft hyper engaging. There’s a ton of stuff to do and keep track of. When I’m focused on a game of StarCraft, it’s all I can do; I’ve got blinders on, to the rest of world around me. It’s very engaging and I find it a lot of fun, but it’s not nearly as social. What separates StarCraft and a game like Fortnite is that, for Fortnite, it’s about the people first, then the game is the backdrop, in many ways.

{audio:0:44:43} Therefore, do you think that there’s some kind of winner-takes-all market in this virtual world? If Fortnite has all the people and engagement is people, then it’s going to be hard to dislodge a Fortnite?

{audio:0:45:00} That’s right and you see that in all of the different genres that have this winner-takes-all model. In MMOs, basically, it’s World of Warcraft. Shooters, at this point, it’s basically Call of Duty. A lot of these genres – I guess I’d put Minecraft and Roblox in a similar camp as well – have that really deep social stickiness. It’s going to be really hard to unseat Minecraft, as you’ve seen over the last 10 years. It was impossible for any company to unseat WoW. There’s no MMO that can outdo WoW. Here we are, 16 years later, and it’s still making news and doing really well. It’s probably going to be some other activity that will cause some of these top games, such as Fortnite or WoW – any of these top games that become lifestyle games – to start to decline. I don’t know that they ever truly have a crash or a massive fall. It’s really hard to beat these games. You can make better versions of these games. I would argue that Heroes of the Storm was a better version of League of Legends, but it was never able to unseat it, I think; primarily because of the social aspect and the stickiness of the players that were already there.

{audio:0:46:31} What’s your view on how Apex come into the market?

{audio:0:46:54} I think Apex targeted a different demographic, ultimately. They were going for players who were dissatisfied with the irreverence or silliness that Fortnite has. I think, maybe, winner-takes-all is a little extreme; it’s not quite as binary as that. It’s probably, winner takes 80% and then a dozen other companies fight over the other 20%. I think that Apex found a really good niche in that super AAA, more traditional shooter style. I think they’ve done a good job. I haven’t paid a ton of attention to Apex. I’ve played it for maybe 10 or 15 hours, when it first came out and I see it in the news, periodically. I think they’ve done a really good job of finding space in that other 20%. I’ve no idea what Apex’s numbers are and whether they are actually competing with Fortnite or not.

{audio:0:48:09} What do you think is the biggest risk to the sustainability of Fortnite and engagement and retention in the game?

{audio:0:48:19} The entire genre is a hit-driven, fashion-like genre. When something comes out and is the new hotness, it probably comes from nowhere. No one saw Fortnite coming. People didn’t even see WoW or League of Legends coming. I remember when League of Legends was exploding; I was a developer, in the industry and suddenly, I’m hearing rumors of this game. I think that’s probably what happens. There is going to be some kind of surprise and it’s probably going to be something that is completely different. I don’t think that there is going to be a game that can out-Fortnite Fortnite and beat it on that. It’s going to be something that is completely different; some other way to play that we haven’t seen before.

{audio:0:49:07} I think that’s what keeps happening with these lifestyle games. When a new one comes out and, suddenly, it’s the biggest thing out there, typically, it’s a new way to play; something that we haven’t experienced before. It is often a game that exists in some capacity, in a smaller way, that has a really interesting kernel or seed. Someone else then takes that and makes a massive AAA-like, or AAA social experience around it. For example, you’ve got EverQuest to WoW, you’ve got Dota to League of Legends, you’ve got PUBG to Fortnite; you’ve got these predecessors. There might be a game out there, right now, that is that next thing, that is niche and small and someone makes the AAA more social, approachable, accessible, charming version of it, that most gamers haven’t seen before. Once they see it, they experience this form of playing and say, this is cool; I have to tell my friends about it. MMOs was the first time you could explore this world, with all of your friends. League of Legends was the first time of really being able to experience really good, fun, competitive, top-down play that was for the masses. In Minecraft, this idea that you could go and destroy the world and recreate whatever you want; it can be anything. In Roblox, people can just make any kind of scripted gameplay experience; how cool is that. It’s usually something that players haven’t experienced in some way before. That’s probably what it’s going to be.

{audio:0:50:55} That said, I don’t think Fortnite is going anywhere. World of Warcraft is still here, 16 years later. League of Legends is still near its peak, as far as I’m aware, if not breaking new records. Minecraft and Roblox are still around. Roblox is about 13 years old. These games are all breaking records still. I expect Fortnite to be here for a very, very long time.

{audio:0:51:21} Do you think Epic has an advantage in producing these new, big hit, FTP games, because they own Unreal?

{audio:0:51:29} I think Epic has an advantage because they have amazing developers. They have a good engine and a good engine team. It’s family there, to me, and I very deeply respect the programmers, designers and others who are there. But I also think that’s true of a lot of the other places.

{audio:0:51:53} How do you look at Unreal versus Unity engine?

{audio:0:51:58} I don’t have a ton of experience with Unity. I did do a multi-month side project with Unity, a few years ago. I can’t speak to it with lots of experience, but I’ve certainly got my bias with Unreal. I understand Unreal people. The game that I’m working on now, it’s in Unreal and we’re able to make the changes that we need to make in the engine. It’s a great ecosystem of developers. Unreal is, obviously, very powerful. As a developer like me, who has spent 20 plus years programming C++, I love Unreal because I can go into the core engine and makes changes however I want. I’m not put off by the fact that it’s all in C++ and not scared by the idea that there is lot of native code involved in building a game like this. I think it’s just different markets. I am a different kind of developer from the ones that Unity is probably targeting. I think Unreal is amazing, to be perfectly honest, and I intend to use it for the foreseeable future, as long as I am making games, probably.

{audio:0:53:21} Another question the community is asking is around who is going to capture and own this kind of metaverse and the third world? Whether it’s one company or publisher or owner or whether there will be many different chances to create 10 successful free-to-play games? How do you see that evolving over the next 10 years?

{audio:0:53:53} It’s going to be impossible to predict, in a lot of ways. If you look at some past examples of things like social networks and things like that. I think that each of the different social networks that are massive now, they offer something different from each other. Twitter has its style of short-burst news items. Facebook has its style of baby boomers arguing over politics. TikTok has got silly videos. Basically, they all specialize in some aspect of social networks. I would guess that a metaverse, when we get there – and I do believe that we will get there – I think it will probably take a similar shape. There’s probably different angles to it that different companies are specializing in. In each of those angles, there is probably just one winner. I can’t actually name another social network that is like Facebook, but isn’t Facebook, or like Twitter, but isn’t Twitter. There’s probably going to some specialization and they will probably be specialized on different kinds of lifestyles or different kinds of player or user desire. Maybe there is one that specializes, primarily, in gaming. Maybe there is one that specializes, primarily, in hanging out with your family, or whatever it is.

{audio:0:55:32} I think that overcoming the video game stigma, for the older generations, is probably a bit of a challenge. My grandmother is on Facebook and I can see why she uses Facebook. I have a harder time imagining her picking up a controller and walking around in a virtual world. Maybe there are ways for her to engage that are different from walking around with an avatar, or maybe she is just not going to be a part of it and it is something that is for some of the younger generations. I think that the Oasis style or the Ready Player One style metaverse is super interesting. I do think that the idea of having this kind of web-like, 3D space is interesting. That’s probably where one of the winners will emerge from, in this idea that everyone can connect, everyone can make stuff.

{audio:0:56:44} If you look at the World Wide Web of the mid-nineties, it took off because everyone could make stuff and it was self-organizing. That’s probably something that the metaverse will need. It’s probably not something that is going to be curated by a company.

{audio:0:57:02} That’s pretty interesting though, because it’s almost like Fortnite could win because they haven’t got the deep storyline and characters?

{audio:0:57:13} Yes, I think that helps. I don’t know that it’s a requirement, though. I was about to argue that maybe you could do a World of Warcraft IP metaverse, but I think, being stuck in fantasy, is a bit much. Maybe it’s not a story that matters; maybe it’s the idea that you’ve got this kind of blank canvas IP, where you can a wizard standing next to Batman, standing next to a knight, standing next to a military shooter guy, and it doesn’t look weird.

{audio:0:57:45} But don’t you need third-party IP?

{audio:0:57:48} Yes, but the IP of Fortnite, I think is a very blank-canvas IP, where lots of things can be impressed upon it. But you can’t take World of Warcraft and put a military shooter guy, carrying a rifle, running around; it just doesn’t work in that game. But in Fortnite, anything fits and they’ve done a really good job of making that IP very, I don’t what to say vanilla, because there’s clearly an element of Fortnite, where you can say, that’s definitely Fortnite but, at the same time, anything can fit in Fortnite. They did a good job of that.

{audio:0:58:26} Looking forward five to seven years, for Fortnite, do you see lots of opportunities to change the maps or change the gameplay, specifically? Or are we just go to see more and Travis Scott concerts and more and more third-party IP in the game, to drive engagement?

{audio:0:58:43} I don’t know what they’re planning on doing, in the future. I would imagine that, as I said before about how Fortnite is not about the gameplay and running around and shooting things; it’s about hanging out with your friends. That was the big surprise that I had, paying attention to Fortnite, as it was growing. I think, more likely, it’s going to be about the other things and less about the Battle Royale and less about the map and things like that. There’s such a rich potential, to go much wider than just the running and gunning.

{audio:0:59:25} You can see that already, I think. They just released the Party Royale mode, where the whole point is just to hang out. They’ve disabled all weapons and you just run around. They’ve got these fun, carnival-like activities that you can do. On Friday, they just played Inception, and you could watch Inception, if you wanted, inside of Fortnite. That was a cool thing that they players could just hang out and watch a Hollywood movie. I imagine it’s a lot more of that kind of stuff and less of a focus on the running and gunning and the Battle Royale gameplay.

{audio:1:00:02} How do you, as a developer today, think about, firstly, carving out a niche in the new games you are going to create, versus what we are seeing with Apex and Fortnite?

{audio:1:00:16} I think the formula that I’ve seen work well, in my career and that I’ve been attracted to, as a gamer, as well, is what I alluded to before. You take this thing that is known and enjoyed by a niche audience, that clearly has some kind of cool seed there and then you make it mainstream. You make it mainstream through accessibility, approachability and charm and things like that. I think EverQuest to WoW is an example of that; I think Magic: The Gathering to Hearthstone is an example of that. I think Marvel comic books to the MCU is an example of that. People knew comics existed, but they were nerdy and for specific types of people, and I think that they had some problems, in terms of their approachability to a wider audience, both because of the format of comics, but also because of some of the content inside, being overly nerdy or niche. And I say that, as a fan of them.

{audio:1:01:19} But then you take the Marvel Cinematic Universe and they made it so much more approachable and they made it for a wide audience. Yes, they changed some things and simplified some things and they probably angered some Marvel fans. But ultimately, they made something that was so cool and special and loved by a massive audience, to see where are some of the emerging trends, where is some of the cool stuff that maybe some of the bigger companies aren’t going after, because it seems too niche and it seems too nerdy. It doesn’t seem as if it is something that could be a big enough audience and it’s too risky for them. They say, how can we make a AAA version of that? How can we make a mainstream version of that?

{audio:1:02:05} As a developer and creating a game, how do you think about cross-play and the impact of cross-play and distribution, more broadly?

{audio:1:02:19} Cross-play is strictly required, in my head. Every game needs to have cross-play. There are different forms of cross-play. You’ve got something like Google Stadia, or you’ve got your video streaming and that satisfies cross-play just as well as releasing a game on eight platforms. Either way, I think it’s fine. The important thing is that, from the gamer’s perspective, they’re not concerned about what device they’re playing on. That’s how I define cross-play and I view it as strictly required. There is no reason, anymore, to not make every game cross-play.

{audio:1:02:52} For the kinds of games I gravitate towards and play and like, I’m less concerned about the crazy top-end graphics that maybe your mid-level Android phones can’t play. I think it’s more about the gameplay and the people you are hanging out with and less about the super-fancy graphics. I love games like Horizon Zero Dawn or these narrative, beautiful gorgeous games, that would never really translate well to a phone. But for the kinds of games that I, as developer make, and the types of games I tend to play, cross-play is very much required, as is multi-player, live services, free-to-play. Basically, all the barriers need to go away and just get down to that core fun that players have.

Fortnite Gameplay Design & Monetization

Core differences in Heroes of the Storm and Fornite gameplay design and mechanics

Fortnite Gameplay Design & Monetization

Former Head of UI, Epic Games

inpractise.com/articles/fortnite-gameplay-ui

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Executive Bio

Matt Schembari

Former Head of UI, Epic Games

Interview Transcript

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Fortnite Gameplay Design & Monetization(June 30, 2020)

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