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Full Transcript of Dean Takahashi's Q&A with Walter Driver and Javier Ferreira
Dean Takahashi: I’m Dean Takahashi. I’m the editorial director at GamesBeat. I am here at the GDC, and we’re doing another GB Live recording here and very happy to be with Walter Driver, co-CEO of Scopely, and Javier Ferreira as well, also co-CEO. We’ve known each other for quite a long time here, and you guys just celebrated your 15th anniversary. So how’s that feel?
Walter Driver: It’s surreal. I think it’s hitting 15 years right now, and I remember the first time I came to GDC and was staying at a hostel with a bathroom down the hall that was, I think, $58 a night and a lot has transpired in the interim. So we’re really grateful to celebrate 15 amazing years of Scopely this year.
Javier Ferreira: I think for me the thing that’s kind of exciting about this milestone is that in some ways I feel like the company feels the youngest that it’s ever been, and I mean by that just most amount of energy and ambition and drive. It really does feel as if the future is going to be more exciting than the past, and I think it’s very fortunate to be in that moment after 15 years.
Takahashi: Your people, in a pretty nice press release, counted up all the sort of milestone numbers you’ve hit too. I guess 15 billion is one of those, 3,000 employees now. What are some things that come to mind about hitting these kinds of numbers?
Driver: We recently hit 15 billion in lifetime revenue and 150 billion hours played. It’s a testament to the incredible effort of everybody across Scopely for a very long time to try and create experiences that are deeply meaningful to our players. Because we compete against millions of other products that people could spend their time on, and to create worlds that matter enough for people to choose to invest their time and their money over and over again, sometimes for many years, in one of those experiences — I think it’s great validation that we’re making things that matter to people and continuing to evolve them in ways that get better over time. We’ve been able to do that at really significant scale. They’re exciting milestones to hit, but I think they’re really just output of all the effort that has been upstream of that.
Takahashi: You mentioned worlds to create, but 15 years ago, mobile games were not considered to be such big deals, that you could create a world in a mobile game. That seems to be one of the things that’s changed; they’re not thought of as simple throwaway things anymore. Did you guys have some kind of vision that this kind of world-building would come to pass?
Ferreira: I think to your point, 15 years ago some people perhaps were not taking mobile seriously. Certainly we were. I think for us it was clear that mobile was going to provide the most exciting kind of opportunity, in my opinion, in the history of play because for the first time everybody was going to have access to a device 24/7 that allowed us to create experiences for them to play with. That was an unprecedented kind of opportunity.
Then certainly from Day One, we always thought about building not just games but services, and I would even go further and say we were always trying to build people’s favorite thing. To do that, suddenly you had to bring this kind of mindset of creating a special and unique kind of world and not just world but context and social relationships. Certainly we were always thinking about games that could last for years and decades, and I think that was there from Day One in how we thought about the company and the type of experience that we wanted to bring to market.
Driver: In the early days of mobile, maybe people were thinking about digital worlds as things that were more about how immersive and what the graphics were like and maybe underestimated that when you create this place that people can go to play with their friends, you can create an identity that’s a different version of yourself. You can feel different than you did on your way in and tap into a different part of your personality. So you are going to this different place that’s been created for you and by you and with other players, and that can have really rich significance for people. So I think people have evolved their perspective — it is not necessarily about how visually different this world is and more about how different you feel when you’re visiting there.
Takahashi: Take us back to some of the earlier days too. You guys were not one of the first mobile game companies jumping on something like the iPhone, and yet you found a way to start this journey, jump on these opportunities and get through some early failures too. Were there some early failures that you distinctly remember?
Driver: My experience was more of a fire hose of continuous failure for the last 15 years in a lot of ways. We started in 2011, so the iPhone had been out for a while, but it was still relatively early days of mobile. We knew the ecosystem was going to evolve a lot, and so I think our core orientation was not about building a specific product for one moment in time for one set of users. It wasn’t about solving a specific problem and then going and executing. It was really about — if we believe that play is one of the most fundamental things that people need to do, as important as work and rest, and that play helps people form these really important relationships to them, and that this ecosystem is going to evolve a lot over time — how do we build a company that can make experiences that matter to lots of people for long periods of time repeatedly and different kinds of products?
So the early days was very much an exploration of what kinds of capabilities do we need to build? What kinds of elements do these products need to be successful? What kinds of people do we need to have at Scopely to be successful? There was a lot of experimentation and yeah, I would say a lot of failure. We still are in a stage of experimentation on a lot of fronts and feel like we’re failing most of the time.
Ferreira: I think when you’re building a company, success feels like something that happens in some ways outside looking in. I think when you are building a company, the experience is much more about overcoming resistance, overcoming challenges, overcoming failures. And the other thing that I think we’ve learned is that failure and success depend very much on the moment in time that you ask yourself that question or you try to assess that.
We’ve had products, for example, that have failed, but we know that without those moments and without those experiences we would have never been able to make some of our most successful products. When you look at it from that longer kind of perspective, actually they were part of the journey to massive success. So it’s not something that we are super focused on. We are much more focused on growth, on becoming better, becoming more agile, more powerful, better game makers, and we know that if we do that continuously, we’re going to do well.
Takahashi: Do you guys feel like lottery winners or do you feel like there was more control over your destiny than that — that some things helped guarantee more of the future for you?
Ferreira: Luck inevitably always plays a role, but I would say that our outcome, whichever way you want to assess it, is the outcome of an Operating System of a specific culture. I think you see that in the trajectory of the company where, to your point, we started small and humble and were not the smartest people in the industry, but we have been very focused on growing and learning. If you see the trajectory of the company and of the games that we have shipped, I think we have been very consistent in bringing games to market and we have also been consistent in making bigger and bigger games over time with our biggest one being the last one that we have launched.
Also I think we have been pretty systematic in expanding our capabilities with our own studios, partner studios, M&A, and we have been also systematic about not being pigeon-holed into a particular type of game. We have done casual games, midcore RPGs, 4X, pretty much everything. So certainly grateful to all the luck that we’ve had, but I think the outcome of the company has been driven by a lot of intentionality by a significant group of people.
Takahashi: You mentioned that word or phrase "Operating System" and I think I always perceive Scopely as more systematic about a lot of things. You found good developers, found interesting ways to get them started — sometimes you would take these ownership stakes, relatively small at first, and then over time as they proved themselves then you brought them inside. There was this kind of test-and-see-what-happens approach, and then test some more and then proceed. Did you feel that that part was very key to having an Operating System?
Driver: I think we’ve always felt like maybe our most important product that we’re working on is the Operating System of the company. In some ways, the way a company works is a technology that you have to iterate and update as if it’s a piece of software and the continuous improvement of how you’re going about those things I think is really critical.
But it is also not something that can be too mechanical either because if people think that there’s a mechanical path to success in a creative industry, you’re going to be sadly disappointed. I think it’s less about a system that’s rigid and more about creating a system that’s adaptive. One of the design principles of the company was to try and build something that is the most adaptive organism possible because we think the faster you can change and grow in this industry, the more likely you are to thrive over the long term.
One of the catalysts that we’ve had for adaptation has been to bring new people in through partnerships, through acquisitions, through hiring and really use the integration of new people and new ways of thinking and new capabilities as an opportunity to push the Operating System forward and add new capabilities and change who we are and what we might be able to do moving forward.
Takahashi: Does the Operating System seem like something very specific to you as opposed to, say, Microsoft?
Ferreira: It’s not something kind of specific and written, but to Walter’s point, it’s the set of values, culture, rigor, ways of working that we hope drive the 3,000 people that we have across 30 countries these days. You cannot and you should not try to drive a company like that by telling people what to do.
We want to really decentralize decision-making to what decisions should be made as close as possible to the players and as close as possible to where it matters. But at the same time we want decisions to be governed and driven by a certain kind of way of looking at the world and a certain way of looking at the industry and a certain way of looking at each other and at players.
So that’s what we call our Operating System, and it’s continuously evolving as new people come in, as we grow, as we learn, as we encounter some of these failures. It’s not explicitly written, but it is something that I think people at Scopely can describe to you with some level of accuracy — some of the key ingredients of what that is.
Takahashi: How do you describe your culture to say your new employees or what is the culture that’s developed that’s unique to Scopely?
Driver: One of the very first goals that we had at Scopely was not a product or financial KPI. It was that we wanted for as many people as possible who came to Scopely to have this be the best experience of their professional life. The reason why we thought that that was really important was because we thought in a creative industry where the most talented people are often exponentially more talented than the average person at what they’re doing, if they’re in an environment where they’re also feeling like they can do their best work and they’re inspired and challenged by the people around them — that basically if we could make sure the best people in the industry were having the best experience here — then they would tell their friends, they would stay for a long time and they would be inspired to push themselves to do the best work of their career.
So a lot of the cultural decisions that we’ve made are: What does it mean to have the best experience in your professional life? Does that mean the most comfortable, the easiest, or the most meaningful? We tried to invite people when they come here to choose to try to have the best experience. That usually means to try and push themselves to learn and grow faster than they have at any point in their career, to try and make an impact on the people around them so that those people also feel like the most powerful, capable version of themselves because of who they’re working with. If you’re going to go on an adventure together and try and do things you’ve never done before at the frontiers of your current capabilities, you need to be comfortable with it being uncomfortable and messy and encountering a lot of unknowns.
So I think one of the most important aspects of our culture is we try to celebrate that struggle that’s involved inherently when you’re exploring, so that you don’t need to have neat and tidy answers and act like everything is going exactly according to plan. I think when company cultures start insisting on things being predictable and buttoned-up they stop exploring and they stop pushing themselves to develop new capabilities. So we really try to celebrate people who are engaged in things that require courage and a willingness to be open and transparent about what they’re struggling with.
Takahashi: How do you think about how this industry is not easy as well? I did go to a talk this week from Don Daglow who was looking back on 55 years in the game industry, and he said that this is like being on the ocean, and you’re on a ship and there’s storms and there’s calm, and while you have a lot of setbacks and unpredictability, you still know how to sail and then you never stop being a sailor as well. Does that make you feel like how unpredictable this industry is and how you deal with it?
Ferreira: First of all, there’s a lot of talk about the industry, but we think we should always contextualize that there’s never been more gamers in the history of play worldwide. You could say that everybody is a gamer now. And there’s never been more revenue being generated either. So you put those two things together, and it’s a really exciting place. It is fast moving and the conditions of success are continuously evolving. To me that’s exciting because it’s the blend of the creative — and there’s no limit to the creative ambition that we can bring to this industry — but also coupled with technology and all the opportunities and advances that creates.
So I think the sailors that are going to enjoy the oceans are the ones that can really navigate between those two dimensions, and I think make sure that they are driving the boat in a way that is favorable to the current winds, to extend your metaphor. I think perhaps what has been happening somewhat in the industry recently is that people are trying to sail against the winds. And that’s very challenging. So that’s something that also we talk a lot about at the company, just making sure that we are always becoming self-aware of what is happening in the industry and what is happening in that big ocean. We remain super excited about the ocean, but at the same time always aware that ongoing success depends on our ability to adapt, to grow and to be very, very aware of what’s going on around us.
Takahashi: It turns out that MONOPOLY GO! and Pokémon GO have really punched through and reached the right audiences and overcome challenges. How do you think some of this happened?
Driver: Well, I think MONOPOLY GO! and Pokémon GO are two of the largest mobile games of all time. I think at the heart of it, they’re both just hyper-engaged communities. Both of them have really innovated on bringing people together around the game in different ways. MONOPOLY GO! is an extremely social live ops experience and maybe one of the most engaged communities in a casual game. There’s over a million players in the MONOPOLY GO! Discord server, which is pretty incredible for a game of that genre. It’s an experience that is true to Monopoly — it’s a shared experience. You have memories of playing with your friends, but we really had to reinvent what does that mean in a mobile gaming context. But a lot of that happens in the digital world.
And then in Pokémon GO, I think they’re convening community in some of the most innovative and inspiring ways in gaming in the physical world. Hundreds of thousands of people showing up in person to events like GO Fest, GO Tour, and GO Wild. So there are these tentpole events where you see massive crowds coming together to play together. Then a huge number of community ambassadors around the world using Campfire, the companion app, to organize groups of people in their communities to explore their world together and explore their neighborhoods, and those people are forming really deep connections. So it’s two different approaches that I think are very innovative but both amongst the most social versions of those products in the world.
Ferreira: The one thing that I see that maybe brings them a little bit together and that I think is very unique about them, going back to the industry a little bit, is today to be successful it’s not enough to make a good game. It’s not enough to make a great game either because all these gamers are already playing their favorite game. There is a favorite game that they’re playing and they have incredible levels of engagement. When I think about these two teams, they are incredibly focused on building the favorite experience for their particular audiences.
When you hear them talk about what they’re trying to do, you rarely hear them talk about a feature or about development language. They really talk about the experience. In the case of Pokemon, they’re incredibly focused on exploring the world through play — not just focused, but disciplined around that mission. In the case of Monopoly, they continually talk about the idea that they want people to feel like they are on a roller-coaster and to have that kind of experience and feeling. I think it is that focus on delivering player emotions and building people’s favorite thing that has allowed them to — both of those games have KPIs and retention that are just off the charts.
So I think that’s something that I certainly would encourage everybody to really focus on.
Takahashi: I think what’s unique about them too is that they seem to be steady. They’re always holding people’s attention. So many games really just pop, get really popular and then all of a sudden people move on to the next thing. So that long-term success is very rare. I wonder if there’s advice you have about how to get toward that long-term success?
Driver: Well, it’s not easy, but I think you have to come in with that orientation where you’re trying to make things that are not just good but people’s favorite thing to do for a very long period of time. That informs how you think about the size of team you need, what kinds of features and experiences you want to build and how you want to live-operate the game with that orientation. Pokémon GO is about to have its 10th anniversary and in its ninth year, it hit all-time highs in revenue.
I think it’s an output of thinking very long term and trying to be a long-term steward of the community and to give them experiences that are continuously evolving so it stays really interesting for players. But you have to do all of those things well. It’s been one of our core elements of trying to build things that can last for decades instead of years. I think that probably 15 years ago people didn’t realize how long these things could last if they were live-operated really well.
That gives you a foundation where you continue to explore from when you have live services that can last a really long time.
Ferreira: I think people need to really move away from focusing on launching. Of course launch is part of the journey, but you’ve got to have a multi-year vision of what you’re trying to do and be ready for that in terms of the team and your strategy and your product thinking. At the heart of this to me, the big secret and the big gift of live services is that your players are speaking to you.
When you look at the KPIs of the product and you look at the numbers and the analytics, it’s just another way of trying to interpret what the players love about the game, what maybe they don’t like. It gives you all the kind of insights that you really need to make the game better. Because I think underpinning the success of these games is that they get better over time and that’s why they last so long. Engagement gets better. It doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the teams are really listening to the players.
So that would be the secret sauce of live services. If a team is able to interpret what the players are telling them through how they use the product, then I think they have a great shot at building a multi-year, multi-decade business.
Takahashi: I think maybe it is possible that a lot of companies make the mistake of thinking about their players as a resource to be mined, like "let's go extract as much as we can from this resource." Maybe they’re not thinking so much about community. To you, what is the difference between focusing on your players as a community as opposed to something that you can extract from?
Driver: I mean, I think the players are our boss. We work for them and they can fire all of us if we’re not doing a good job. In free-to-play live services you have to earn players' loyalty every single day. You have to be the thing that is most worthy of their time. When you have that orientation, I think it puts a lot of pressure on you to make sure that you’re improving the game in meaningful ways.
And it’s not just looking at the data, but when you go to GO Fest and you walk in a park with 100,000 people playing this game and you get to meet people and see and hear what they’re feeling and why they flew here to meet one of their old friends who lives somewhere else or how they’ve been playing the game with their grandfather, you start to understand where the significance comes from. When you feel that significance, it transfers a lot of responsibility to you to make sure that you’re continuing to give people this thing that’s really important to them.
But I would say also that it’s not all on us. The reality is people do come for the gameplay and they come back for the gameplay, but they also stay for the relationships they form through their shared love of this game with other players. If 100% of it was on us and the game teams to put on a show for people every day, I think it would be very hard for these things to last for decades. But because the relationships with people in the game are always evolving and the context is always shifting — you’re playing with different people and different scenarios — it stays really interesting over time because of that social context. I think that’s a really important component of why these things last a long time.
Takahashi: When you talk about it in that way too, you’re also sometimes faced with the challenge of starting a brand new game and launching a brand new game into a market where people have those sort of attachments to their older games. I wonder how you think about how we can succeed when everybody may be wed to their favorite game already?
Ferreira: I think that kind of conversation and that focus is top of mind for every kind of product that we’re developing—and we are working on quite a few. So we have that objective and that ambition and that drive and desire to bring new and exciting products to market. But I think that’s exactly it. The way that you’re framing it, we are always asking ourselves: how is this game going to be a more exciting and more interesting proposition than other games that might be in the market for us to be able to build a 10, 20-year business at scale? That’s a journey.
Certainly we don’t start with the answer but we know that we have to get to that answer if we want to be successful, otherwise we are just not going to be able to attract enough audience and enough players.
So it is central to every single game that we are making but we think it can be done. Not only do we think it can be done, it’s objectively true that it can be done. We have done it with MONOPOLY GO!, we’re talking about Pokémon, there’s dozens of games that have been launched over the last few years, including of course Pixel Flow! as an example, that have been able to really resonate with players and build really large audiences over the last two or three years. So that’s the bar. If you’re not committed to going over that bar, do not attempt it. But if you are committed, there’s a path for sure.
Driver: Well, the bar is getting higher every year, but that’s a creative challenge for everybody. We were having these conversations with a lot of people who said: is it still possible to launch breakthrough games in 2023? The IDFA, the market’s more mature... and we launched MONOPOLY GO! just about three years ago now and it’s been played by almost 100 million Americans alone. That’s like one in three adults in America. More than that have played the game. And so it is possible. It’s not easy, but also at this state of the industry, if you can do something like that, it can be even more exciting.
The biggest games that were launched in 2014 or 2015 were still much smaller than these kinds of outcomes. When you launch a game like that... we were talking about the scale of these things from a cultural perspective — Taylor Swift’s Eras tour is the biggest musical touring act of all time and MONOPOLY GO! is grossing more revenue every year for three straight years than the Eras tour in one year. That wouldn’t have been possible in 2014. These games were much smaller.
Takahashi: You guys have arrived at that world-class level. You’ve been acquired, you’re acquiring big companies too and still growing. There’s nobody as much at the top of the game as you guys are now. How do you level up?
Ferreira: I think the first thing I would say in all honesty is I certainly do not feel we have arrived at that kind of mastery. When you go inside the company we are learning every single day and being forced to learn across the portfolio across the games that we are making. So I really feel that there’s no sense at the company that we have arrived anywhere, nor is there a sense that we have achieved any sense of stable mastery. I think instead what we encounter every day is difficult things that the teams are going after.
So I think what drives us is just ambition — ambition not from a financial perspective, but ambition in terms of the experience, which is another way of saying the company that we want to build. For me that’s multi-dimensional. We remain super excited about, as Walter was saying, you go to these Pokémon events and it’s really inspiring to see how your products are touching people’s lives. So we want to keep building and deepening our relationship with players. We want to continue to make better games, games that we can feel more proud of and that we can really admire and feel like we’re growing creatively.
Internally, we want to work with people that challenge us more and help us grow and learn faster than we have in the past. Experientially we want to have a lot of fun building something that is deeply meaningful to all of us. We always say we are a journey company. We certainly don’t feel that we’ve ever arrived at any point of that journey and mastery is very, very far away. I can tell you that.
Takahashi: That last point here is interesting, you were pointing to Walter about how much gaming has grown in culture and it is bigger than things like music culture for sure. And yet it does seem like gaming’s dominance is not necessarily guaranteed either. There are other kinds of entertainment out there. Some of it can be more addictive — there’s gambling, sports betting, OnlyFans, AI companions, prediction markets, YouTube and TikTok as well. All these other things are competing for everybody’s time now and some of those are growing really fast. How can gaming, which is more about fun than addiction and truly generates a lot of happiness, actually be the good guy that wins?
Driver: I think we try and do things that we think matter to people in a way that we’re proud to be involved in. We think play is something that is a great unifier. There’s a lot of other technologies and things people do now that might highlight people’s divisions and differences and make people feel maybe more isolated.
I think one of the things that we see is that when people play with other folks, first of all, they feel better and they feel more connected. We see that these communities transcend geography, borders, politics, genders — people really put aside all the differences they might have in the regular world and go be a version of themselves that they want to feel like more often, which is the playful version of themselves.
And one that’s connected with people from sometimes all over the world that they would never know otherwise. I think that’s really powerful. I think more people are thinking that that’s something that’s really actually good for them. Many of those other things that you mentioned that people might say is taking share of people’s time or spending on gaming, I don’t know if they make people feel as good afterwards as playing games with their friends. That’s what I’m interested in doing and we’re going to try and do it as well as we can.
Ferreira: I agree. I’ve never heard anybody wake up in the morning and say social media is my favorite thing, or "I love social media." But there’s billions of people that say gaming is my favorite thing, or "this product or this game is my favorite thing." I think as an industry, that’s what’s unique about us. If we continue to use all the talent that is out there and the technology that is available and is coming towards us to continue to deepen on that path, I think the industry is going to thrive for many, many decades.
Takahashi: My last point here is: What are you hoping for in the next 15 years?
Driver: I’m hoping that the rate of personal growth and development that everybody’s experiencing accelerates. I think that’s maybe the most important metric: How much are we learning? Sometimes as companies get bigger and have been around longer, there’s inertia that allows people to start learning at a slower rate. I think that’s probably the most critical thing from a business perspective, but it’s also the thing I care about the most because that’s why I love doing what we’re doing; we keep throwing ourselves into the next challenge and the next thing that we don’t really know how to do.
That feeling of exploration is for me a source of constant renewal of my energy. So I hope that we keep pushing ourselves to do things that we don’t know how to do and hopefully some of them we figure out. But it’s the process of discovery for me that is my favorite part.
Ferreira: I think on my side, you could say that we have achieved some level of success, and I think that’s been good. But I think as I think about the next 15 years, my hope is that we can continue to build something really meaningful. What "meaningful" means is something that is continuously evolving and we are continuously exploring and trying to define.
But it’s something that hopefully makes the people that work at the company feel something special, unique. As Walter was saying, something that hopefully they’ve never felt before. And hopefully we can also bring products and experiences to players that also make them feel something that is not just a distraction, that is not just passing time, but instead takes them to places internally, with friends, with the communities that they find inspiring and meaningful. So I think we are on this journey of finding meaning and hopefully in the next 15 years we can find a lot of it.