Hello everybody and welcome Wednesday! It is time for another press play. What's you by polka stutter dot gg? Hosted by the fabulous self me George and co hosted by gaspode gaspode
Hello! Fantastic! So today we are going to be looking at double checks how this word is pronounced, "irritive building" and we are joined by a game I have put some time into and I know gasboard has put a lot of time into as
Well today we are joined by Fableborn. We are joined by two guests from Fableborn today. We are joined by Cam and Maria. So what we'll do first off is let's get some introductions going. So Cam can you tell us who you are and a little bit about yourself please? Sure.
Thanks for having me firstly. So hi everyone, my name is Kam, I'm the CEO and founder of Pixion Games, the studio behind Fableborne and fortunately I've been in industry my entire professional career. Firstly starting as a game designer
working on a few triple A games such as the Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill franchise this for Konami before then taking on the role to lead the Yu-Gi-O trading card game brand for five years.
Awesome! Sounds like you've got a wealth of experience behind you then, Cam. And Maria, if you could also go ahead and introduce yourself for the listeners as well, please. Hey, it's really nice to be here. I'm Maria, I'm Product Director.
Pixion and I come from a diverse background of industries including fisheries to FinTech until I finally landed in games and I am a massive GND player.
Fantastic that sounds great. I can see gasboard throwing up the hearts for the D&D player line at the end there. I'm pretty certain he is a self-proclaimed awesome dungeon master. I've not had anyone else say
say this only him, so we've got his word to believe on this. So, Cam, we'll start with you, and can you tell us a little bit about the game, Fableborn, for anyone that may have never heard of it somehow?
Sure, so favourable is a mobile multiplayer game. We're blending two genres together really, so action RPG and base building. Or another way I like to describe it is Fink Clash of Clans meets Diablo, but with two really key differences.
The first being in Diablo, you know, the worlds that you raid are created by us or the studio in that sense for game designers, whereas in Fableborn, those worlds that are created are completely created by players and so can also be played owned. That means
user-generated content is, you know, natively part of our core loop. And then the second main difference, from my perspective, is unlike in other traditional base-building games, like Clash of Clans, for example, in FableBorn, when you're raiding, you aren't dropping units. And then idly watching,
instead you control that hero when you raid. So what that actually means for players is you decide what to attack, how to attack, when to attack. So for us, raiding becomes much more engaging and that's because you're in complete control. So every time we speak to players that's really
the wow moment that they're building the base and then they go to raid and wow I get to actually control the outcome because I'm controlling the hero so that's favour-borne in a nutshell really. And I can agree with the wow moment of doing the
attacking. I am just immense to be honest, I'm going to be humble about it and I was just clearing decks with the attacking and the fact that you could do slight differences rather than just dropping down units, made it feel so much more interactive when you're clearing out people's bases and stealing their gold.
I've also pinned to the top. I was doing some research for the space and I found a YouTube video of the latest built. I pinned that to the top for anyone interested. Throwing this question out to either of you, don't mind who answers, but why did you choose to go on mobile?
So maybe I'll take a little bit, because I actually wrote a Fred on this yesterday, you know, why obviously we believe Web3 is for future, Web3 gaming is a future, but why mobile is going to be the on-ramp for hundreds of millions of players into this space?
Firstly, everyone has a mobile device, right? So that means you've got this gaming machine in your pocket that you can play all you need is five minutes and an internet connection for most games. Not only that, what's really exciting for us
because when we think about reaching the largest audience, of course mobile made sense of the platform, but equally markets or emerging markets like Brazil, Philippines, India, Vietnam, those countries generally players don't have access to
consoles or high end gaming machines and we can all clearly see that Web3 and blockchain natively has greater adoption in those countries compared to the US and Europe for example and so if we did want to be at the forefront
of this industry and create this new playbook that others will follow, we had to be a mobile. So those are just some of the reasons there's many more and I'm sure Maria probably has a few too. Yeah, I can jump in. So also another aspect of mobile
is from a studio perspective building games, if you're trying to hire the team to build the first game. Generalists for one platform will still be more experts on that platform than generalists on our multi-platform, so it's also from an organizational
perspective of who you're going to hire to the studio to develop the game. And then additionally, you know, marketing is just a massive aspect of the game's business. You can build the most fun game in the world, but unless you can, you know, get players interested in having to join the game,
It doesn't really matter if you have the most fun game out there. And on mobile, the way that we do marketing is easier to measure and evaluate than, for example, on PC and console. And that also gives an advantage to a startup in the gaming space to first target mobile.
I love the comments around the marketing side. I always say that, I say it always, I said it twice and I've liked it so I'm saying the same thing. But a good game with no marketing is just a bad game. So I think it's really key and I do agree that mobile, it's just a bit more
I don't know, formal A, it sounds bad, but there's no ways of marketing within mobile. And we don't see PC projects having the same kind of step up to start with. I have pinned your, your threat to the top cam as well as I found George selling us bats, but a
follow up question on the Y-Mobile and you kind of touch me slightly is as you've been designing the game have you been considering how long a play session would be each time someone jumps in or is it something that came secondary? Whereabouts did that come in the design process?
Yeah, I think even before we started to write even a single line of code, you know, part of our vision for the studio is how do we build these games that have high barrier to not high barrier entry, high skill cap but really accessible controls. So making
it as easy as possible for more players to play. So, natively that means of course we choose a platform like mobile, but the secondary it's really important for us when we're thinking about players' behaviour and particularly on mobile where there's a million notifications
coming at you every single day, players are distracted and generally we're all time-porn now and so building our sessions and building favourable and where like I said earlier all you need is five minutes or less and an internet connection and you can jump in, check out your base, collect your goal
old, raid a few players, jump back out if you needed to. And so that accessibility, you know, is part of not only fabled-born but all the previous prototypes that we've killed, that was always a key pillar for us when we were designing and building our games.
As amazingly as this is now going to sound that you've managed to segue me straight into my next question with your end line of the previous products that you have killed prior to the game we are now sitting on. It's something that is quite common in Web 2 that people start to make a game and they kill it off because it's not going to
be what they want or it's not going to deliver the way they want. And I know we've recently been speaking, or you've mentioned that you killed, I think you said four before settling on Fable Born itself. What kind of ideas came before this that led you towards what we have now?
Shall I take that Maria or you want to jump in? Sure. So we again always had some key pillars so short snackable sessions, a core loophouse really accessible but had a skill cap server as mastery. Those are always fundamentals that we always stop to.
The second was always multiplayer as well. And we actually first started with real-time multiplayer games and quickly realized that was a mistake and a mistake that was very expensive for us for a few reasons. One on just the technical side, you need a huge amount of
back-end dev support to be able to not only build that deterministic system that has low latency and can supply and provide this really succinct player experience, but secondly when it comes to marketing side scaling you have to have this huge amount of
current users, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week because if a player jumps into the game and they're wanting to play, they're in a queue, right? Unless they play bots and no one wants to play bots if you're in a real-time multiplayer game. And so you're waiting in a queue and if you don't have players in that
Q ready to play the game, verimben like I say 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You're going to struggle, the play experience, going to really suck and players are going to churn and so just testing that game we were spending tens of thousands of dollars just to create
or just to ensure that the data wasn't providing us with false negatives, you know, just to create an accurate test that we had enough players in the game that they weren't churning because they had to wait 10 minutes just to start. And that was really costly, particularly when you've yet to find products
market fit when you're still validating feature systems, mechanics and you're having to spend that much just to actually test the game itself. It was like a very expensive mistake both on the resource side and on the amount of funding we needed.
for marketing and so we click who realized real-time multiplayer isn't the way forward but we always had those key pillars like is a multiplayer first, re-neccessful call loop but with a high skill cap so there's mastery for players.
And guess, I can see you are unmuted, so I'm assuming you've changed Bluetooth devices, but we can't hear you.
We can hear you now fantastic. Am I better? Will OG stop hitting me?
Okay, hopefully we'll. Just to pick up on the idea of either no playerbase or against bots, I think no playerbase is something that we see a lot of projects struggling with right now. You need that critical mass for people actually even to be able to play. Playing bots can help, like you mentioned, but no one
going to go around bragging to their friends that they manage to smash loads of bots in again. So they're kind of asynchronous style that you've got going on now. I can kind of get excited about the fact that I stole George's gold or I ruined Hub's base. So and they don't even need to
be online. So I think that is definitely a great way going through it. That's the best thing right. Like I stole George's goal while he was asleep. You know, so he comes back and goes, what the hell? I stole and Holy is gold. And he tries to take revenge. So I think that was really satisfying. And when we do the tests, you know, we
see a lot of our players wanting to share the success or failure or generally the success of their raid particularly with their friends and those that we know. I did share someone at Takami because I felt really hurt that they would do it to me, the betrayal, but other than that it was mainly just
flexing on me stealing people's gold. And that links into the kind of the community aspect of that. Maria, how important is building with the community, do you think? It's really important and that's why I love working in mobile to be honest. It's a lot harder to do this with PC and console.
is still possible, but just harder. And we're trying to make something that's fun and when we're designing the game we always design a feature, a gameplay, thinking, "Hey, it's gonna be really fun." But then that doesn't always translate when you actually have people playing it. And so,
The community is so important because it allows us to build a new game before it's released with the compass. We can know where are we going, are we going in the right direction? And if you're just hidden in this box for one year or two years, polishing this experience, and only then you release it and you get
actual feedback from who's going to be playing your game. That's too late. When you could just have that feedback throughout the development. And then additionally, not only does it give us, you know, qualitative feedback, like putting something out there, even if it's low content and in and
Yeah, we're going in the right direction. We should continue pursuing this. But then also we get some quantitative data, which allows us to balance and allows us to understand if any of our content is missing its mark and its expectation. So yeah, extremely important. Do you have anything to add, Ken?
I think you've really nailed it. It's really important that not only building with the community but I'd probably say a little to also build without the community, is equally important as it is to build with the community.
community and like Maria said get both her quality of and quantitative feedback and understand their behaviour and just see if that social loop is working in the way and that feedback loop is working in the way that it's intended. Equally the community, you know, they're really engaged
with us, they're brand champions of fable born and so they're always going to retain more, engage more, spend more. They're also going to be a lot more forgiving when it comes to UX challenges where players at scale, players that don't know anything about
with you and have been with you for years and those that have only seen and come across your game 10 minutes ago. Yeah, I think that's firstly the point I wanted to note from Maria was the idea of getting this feedback as you'll make
making the game rather than releasing a final product and everyone pointing loads of things out about it because you've taken no one else's feedback for the whole time. I think we've experienced that. I think the most recent one was the game that had read in its name. I forgot the name of it. They got absolutely trashed if they had done a little bit of work with their community.
was building the game, they may have realised that this game was not going to end up the way they thought it was. But I do like the idea of your point on then at the end of the idea of you've got two communities basically, one that is with you and is basically Maxi Fableborn and then the average
person that might download it, take a look. And if they're facing challenges, the ones that have been with you for time no longer notice, because they're just used to this is the way it is, then I think that's definitely something else that needs to be working on. And it kind of goes towards the next idea of how do you curate like
what is quality feedback compared to just negative nellies in the space, just been negative about anything compared to constructive criticism and someone maybe giving you feedback that isn't all sunshine and rainbows. How do you deal with this sort of stuff?
We'll go with Maria who has her hand up. So I actually wanted to address how we gather the data in terms of the feedback, you know, with players who are with the community or in stealth that installed the game without any context. And another really
important reason why we need to be doing these processes alongside each other is that when we do release the game and we go to scale it, we won't be able to customize and speak to each person that we're trying to attract in the game. Part of our marketing strategy, you know, it will be through Twitter and we'll
We'll know the community will be able to reach them directly, but then we also need to use strategies like paid ads to reach indirectly who could be new players and get them into the game. And so this is why they're equally important to test because the community feedback that we're getting qualitatively and that are
invested into the game already could shape us in a direction that then wouldn't work if we were to do user acquisition where someone's just seeing an ad and we have to capture their interest to install the game. And then in terms of how we process the feedback, well one of the ways that we
mitigate this again is having several data inputs. So we wouldn't make a product decision that is critical with a single data input. So we would be looking at qualitative data, essentially what the community is saying, or written fee-back form.
We do competitive analysis, understanding the market, internal play testing, and then we would make a decision. And so actually having someone in your play tests that can provide little detail or even deconstructed feedback
I mean, that's okay. That's expected. There's always going to be a certain percentage of feedback that we can't use, but that's mitigated by utilizing many sources. And then as my last point, you can also have mechanisms in the feedback forms and who you invite to the play tests so that you have
quality over quantity because if you know who's in your community and who's in this tight-knit initial group play testing your game, you can somewhat assure that you are going to be collaborating with community members who will be giving high quality details feedback that you can use. Do you have anything at Ken?
Nothing I think you did really well. Yeah, that was a extremely thorough answer about how feedback is collected and used in their most useful way that it can be. I like that. It's quite an opening.
And with the idea of the feedback you're collecting, you're getting all this different data, all these different ways that you're going to be putting it into use as well. I'll send this one over to you, Cam. Why do you open and close the build, opposed to having the builds run back to back to each other?
Yeah, really good question and we've actually gone back and forth on this quite a few times over the last 18 months or so but we landed with these fast feedback cycles that we have now where every 5 to 6 weeks we'll put a new build out, generally for
5-10 days are somewhere in between. The focus area is to support the players and ensure that as a team we're active that we are there to troubleshoot any bugs but also potentially quickly deploy a hot fix if it's a
critical bugs are players can continue to play. But that adds a lot of time, right? And so in a space where no one has really scaled yet, including us, no one has found product market fit. Everyone's trying to build that playbook. It's really important that you're able to consistently validate and like Maria
said, taking all of that data, creating new hypotheses, build out the next feature, the next system, and put it out again and validate and repeat. But each time we put a build out, our mentality switches from development to
operating live game and so that requires a lot of time, a lot of effort but also Distracts you from your your other goal which is building you know that new hero or building that new unit or building that new progression system and so just to give the team the velocity
that we can ship fast and we can iterate and validate the game as fast as possible. That's why we have these short windows, like I say, these fast feedback loops where we put the build out, we focus on working with the community and operating it as a live game.
learning as much as we can and then we go back into into the darkness let's say and try and decipher all the the feedback that we've got and put that into the the next feature or the next build.
I think that's, I like the way of doing it. I think it can avoid having the grind of an alpha that's kind of always open. You've mentioned some of your previous history. How is building in Web 3 any different to building in Web 2?
I want to hear your answer, Cam, before I go.
I was about to say this is perfect for Maria but let me let me go first so there's obviously key differences firstly community is at the center of building in web3 you know it's it's really important to find those first 5,000
players that really love your game that are there to give you, like Maria said, some incredible high quality feedback that allow you to shape and have them shape some of the game and the vision for the game.
The second part I'd say is just a sheer amount of unknowns. So in Web2, Marie and I are fortunate and the rest of the team at Pixion, we've built games that have had tens of millions of downloads and hundreds of millions in lifetime revenue.
Maybe Maria has a different answer, but I certainly felt a lot more comfortable. You know, everything we were doing, there are a lot more knowns. We'd done it before, and although building a hit game is never easy, we had a lot of experience as to what
we should be doing. Whereas in Web 3, I feel our experience is still important, but it doesn't tell us what to do. It tells us what not to do, right? And so there's still a lot of areas that we're discovering, that we're learning, like we're building a game for the very first time, and that's
is equally why we have this development methodology of shipping fast and gathering as much feedback in these quick feedback loops. It's because there's so much unknown there and building that new playbook, you only really know what sticks once you
it out and so I'd say that's a big change for us that the feedback loops are much shorter there's a lot more emphasis on the community and equally you have to be really comfortable and embrace working in the unknown.
Yeah, I want to lean into the community element. So in general, is it different in Web 2 and Web 3? I'd say it's widely the same in terms of the roadmap, but it changes in terms of the research requirements when you're developing your marketing strategy because it is a different
audience and also new ways to design the game economy. It also affects the analytics pipeline. So it has all of these changes, but if you were to draw a tree of what you need to build, launch, support a live game, it's still essentially the same. So in Web2 mode,
There's this concept in user acquisition that's called the Golden cohort. It's a really cool name. And basically this Golden cohort are the first people that once you release your game that you acquire, they join the game, and those people are the easiest to acquire and retain. Because over the course of the game,
game being live, the people that the pool of the exact match of players to your game gets smaller and smaller every single day that you are acquiring them to enter your game. So let's say, you know, five years later, that's that pool of people to join your game is a lot smaller than you had on day one. And so
So actually, if you look at a lot of existing mobile games, that Golden cohort still sustains the grand majority of revenue, an engagement and retention, even after a three or four years of the gaming life. All this to say that in Web2Mobile, you don't
really want these key players to have access to an unfinished experience because you've now missed an opportunity that if you had got them in your game when it was more feature rich, you had live ups, they would then stick around and be there for a really, really long time. And so when you're doing, you
validation with these stealth tests or if you're soft-launching the game, you're really you're not going to use your key markets to do that first. And so building with the community only really happens once the game has been soft-launched. And this is why I love
working in Web 3. I'm so happy that I joined Pixion and now building in Web 3 because the community is there from the start. And I'm not going to say that this has changed because of blockchain or financial incentives. Like I really see that the mindset of people interested in being
you know, part of building the game is just different. They want to be there. They don't really care that it's super unpolished or unfinished. The motivations are different and so yeah, this is the biggest difference. The community is there with you from the start and you don't have to wait until you have like this perfect game to get them in.
I think waiting for perfect can kill good and you'll never get there and you'll never start. So I'm glad that you mentioned that and the other bits I think it's something that other projects that maybe a newer to development could learn from because
They try to make everything brand new or reinvent the wheel rather than just sprinkling some glitter on it. But anyway, looking to the future, what are both of you excited for in the future, both for the game, but also the space in general?
Maria, now I definitely want to hear you. I just gave a really long drink of water.
I'm just gonna go in the meantime of this I'm drinking a sip of water my Portuguese verbs here so while my excited about what's coming next so we have
Another closed playtest is as we've been doing and we addressed a lot of the community feedback on it There's something pretty major that we're trying to implement in this closed playtest to address the gold reserves being depleted and also testing in our
what the economy and the progression system could be in the future. So really really excited to hear feedback from what will be in the next closed playtest. We're also building our first competitive features because you know, FableBorn is a competitive game. It's really good to have that underway.
We're formalizing the pipeline for new content for heroes and defense units. And so as we're going through those motions, we're becoming more stable with how much content we can create and balance it. So yeah, I'm really excited.
for the rest of the year, to be honest, I feel like we know. We've got to a point where we really know what we need to do right now. And so it's like a train track now, you know, and then we're like taking feedback and optimizing it. But it's really good, it's like, okay, yeah, we know where we're going. Let's get there.
Yeah, and I think after lots of experimentation and like I said killing five games in the past we're at that point now where we've got this really fun core game. We've got some really great feedback from that core loop and the process internally as well.
well, although we are always looking to optimize. Like Maria said, we've got a clear pipeline of content that we're building towards and consistently trying to get feedback for those features. Equally, what I'm excited about is we've got to that
stage now where we're very confident in the game that we're building, the core loop that we have. And so we're going to start sharing a lot more about what's our on-chain strategy and again we think about this in a very meticulous
far away and so excited to just share that with everyone here in the WebFree community but also get feedback as we always do on what we're building and how we can improve it.
Awesome, yeah, it sounds like a lot of the site stuff is coming for us in the the fabled born universe I shall call it Obviously we love the trope of not web 3 games and web 2 games they're all just games so one of my last questions that I like
to ask at the end of these is what our guests are excited for in the gaming space as a whole as a general like not specific to web 3 can be anything that is happening in gaming at the moment and we'll start with cam first. What are you excited within the gaming world?
What am I excited about? That's a really good question actually. I'm not going to jump on the AR VR bandwagon which although I'm excited about there's a few other things that I'm more excited about. Generally I'm more excited about this paradigm shift that we're in
now and we're part of building that and trying to build out that playbook but we've seen these paradigm shifts every 10, 15 plus years. We've reached play prior to that, premium and prior to that arcade and not only does the business model change away design
as in game designers, build the content changes, how players play the game changes, and I'm just really excited to figure out and find that playbook, but also find and play other teams versions of that playbook. Everyone's going to have a slightly different skill or
what they think on chain assets and how this technology can improve gaming. So I'm really excited to just be in the space, work in this space and collaborate and try and build this really exciting experience that hasn't been done before.
Yeah, venturing into the unknown is always something to be excited for. I'm not jumping on the what was the latest one for AR and I was at the Apple the Google no the Apple vision or whatever it was called that one. Yeah, I'm Maria. What are you excited about?
for in gaming in general.
all of these incumbents. And so I'm so much more excited this year to be a player. You know, you look at the games that some of the games fest announced. You have all of these new studios popping up and you know it also with AI, new technologies, new
ways of working, you're just seeing all the new creative games coming about and so that makes me really excited about being able to play new experiences that feel fresh and it's a new video game and not just the same game, reskinned over and over again. It feels good.
I would definitely agree that we have had a slew of grinding survival crafters in different forms, skins, and iterations recently. Although it is my most favourite genre and I love cutting down trees and building houses
the point my girlfriend thinks the favorite thing I like to do in games is cup down trees and I just don't know I happen to just be cutting down a tree again. So for the people that are listening that want to stay up to date with what is happening with
able born, where should they be looking to make sure they're up to date with everything and are able to offer their assistance to participate in these play tests if they so wish? That can go to either who would like to answer.
Like quick draw who's going to unmute Marie, do you want to close out? No, please I was I've got the fear of waiting out and then I So obviously of course
follow myself Maria we're going to be dropping a lot of new news and exciting news over the next couple of months but if you want to get involved you are discord is the best place to be that's where not only myself and Maria are but the rest of the team
We've got a really great community where they've been with us for the last 18 months. We've really focused on being game first and that shows I think in the community that we built and what they're excited about.
it about. So if you want to get involved in play tests, be part of a community, definitely head over to our Discord, otherwise check on FableBorn Twitter that's also where we're going to be really active too.
And was Marie going to add anything to the end of this or is it my turn to speak? You're doing please.
Okay, fantastic. Okay, everybody, as always, thank you again for coming along on this fine Wednesday for another press play. Thank you to the team from Payable Born, Cam and Maria. Make sure you are going out there and following all their all their socials and jumping into the discord. If you want to keep up to date with what they're doing.
and maybe have the opportunities to take part as well because I know I would definitely love more people to steal gold from to make sure I had lots of gold in mind. So I've been joined as always by Gasburg, so Gasburg, do you want to say some words? I've been lovely chatting, I'll be around on Twitter as always.
Fantastic words, Gaspard. Thank you for those words. Thank you everybody that has come along and thank you to everyone up on stage with me that has done some fantastically speaking again. If you are listening to this back on Twitter, congratulations. If you want to listen to it on your favourite podcast audio listening sites, we are available on most at Request and we are
there. We're still working hard to ensure that sandbox is not a liar and are trying to get onto iTunes but we're not quite there yet. Make sure you come back next Wednesday for more press play. If you need any news, reviews, guides or anything before then get a Polk Started.GG and I will see everyone next week. Have a fantastic week and goodbye.