Teacher: Hello

Gabe Newell: Hi, this is Gabe Newell.

T: Hey Mr. Newell, Ben Rogers. How are ya?
G: Good
T: Can you see us and hear us okay?
G: Yeah
T: Alright. Everybody wave. This is my sports and entertainment marketing class.
So most people in here are juniors and seniors in here. Are there any sophomore
s in here? Oh a couple lucky ones. Couple lucky sophomores. And some freshmen? *
laughing*
We really appreciate the time, can you hear us okay?
G: Yeah I can hear you great, can you hear me fine?
T: Yup. We appreciate the time that you re taking out of your busy schedule to tal
k with us. This is a new thing that our school is kinda piloting and you are kin
da the first business that we ve talked to. So, we ve tried to get with the pro foot
ball hall of fame and do some other things but quite honestly most of these guys
here wanted to talk with someone in the video game industry, so that s why we re ta
lking to you. So we appreciate it.
G: Hey, go Seahawks.
T: *laughs* I m a Bears fan so I ll just pretend that uhh Although the Bears *Gabe boo
s followed by laughing by the class*
Alright, if you could, the way that we kinda thought this would be great to do i
s if you could just, if you don t mind, give us some background on Valve and some
general knowledge stuff and if don t mind we can open it up to these guys for some
questions. Does that sound good?
G: Sure, yeah that s okay. How many of you guys play video games? *pause* Okay. Ho
w many of you played any of Valve s video games? *pause* Yeah that s pretty useful.
So um, say again? So we started the company in 1996. It was founded by Mike Harr
ington and myself. We were good friends who were working in Microsoft. We ve known
each other since the early 1980s. For us it was a new venture. We really had no
idea whether we were going to be any good at it or not. I mean if you ve spent yo
ur career creating operating systems and spreadsheets, the idea that you can bui
ld an entertainment product is You re reasonable to be skeptical. So the most likel
y outcome was that we were going to fail and then have to go back to our old bos
ses and plead for our jobs. We ended up being way more successful than we had an
y right to be with our first product, which was Half-Life. The success we had wi
th Half-Life which is a single-player game, and it behaves a lot like a feature
film does in terms of how you market it, how you do audience development, what i
ts shelf-life is like, gave us the opportunity to get into online gaming. And on
line multiplayer gaming behaves a lot more like a sport. So if you look at how H
alf Life and those kinds of products are marketed it looks not that different th
an how, say Super 8, the new movie from J.J. Abrams gets marketed. But if you lo
ok at how something like Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2 behaves in a marketpl
ace, it looks a lot more like how the NFL markets and manages its properties. Fr
om there, we really saw that there was this opportunity to have a direct connect
ion with our customers and to build systems that took advantage of that connecti
on, that it was a two-way connection, and that it also needed to recognize that
the value of the experience was generated as much by the customers as it was by
us. This isn t that different than the issues the NFL itself is going through righ
t now. Trying to figure out, you know it has its traditional distribution partne
rs, but it knows that there s a future where it s providing more of its products and
services directly to consumers. Not just in terms of people showing up at stadi
ums, but in terms of people watching videos or Have any of you guys used NFL.com?
So do any of you look at the audio or video products the NFL has tried putting
out? So one of the key things on the football rebroadcasts is they have all of t
he comments that people have created and that those drive what they call a heat
map, and the heat map essentially tells other fans what the most interesting par
ts of the games are. So here s an example where they re recognizing the value of wha
t the fans are actually creating and you can just go and click through on the hi
ghest levels on the heat map and get a really good idea of what the most interes
ting parts of the game were. And that s being done without any sort of editorial d
ecision making by someone at the NFL.com. So in a lot of ways the issues that ar
e facing people in the league management are similar to the kinds of issues we re
facing in the game space. So we saw that opportunity to build those kinds of sys
tems, just like the NFL is trying to build those today. Nowadays, we re trying to
look at things like how do we transition from entertainment as a product to ente
rtainment as a service. That actually means a bunch of various specific things i
n terms of how we build our products and connect to our customers. And we re also
interested in how we can assist other developers using those services. So that s a
quick background about the company. We re about 275 people now. We just finished
Portal 2, that s pretty much put to bed and we re just waiting for final approvals a
nd get the discs manufactured. Our next product is gonna be a game called DotA 2
which will be out later this year. So hopefully that gives you some background
on questions that you guys have. I also have the list of questions that you guys
sent, so I can also address some of those.
T: Yeah that d be great. What are you more comfortable doing? You wanna go through
the ones you have or They basically have a lot of the same questions that you ha
ve. There s a couple additions I think. We have a couple of stu
G: I d rather listen to their questions now.
T: *laughs* Alright. Why don t we start with I ll go through, you guys just say your
name and then fire off one question at a time and we ll move on.
(student): My name is Michael. How far can a company go to avoid losing profits
due to free game updates, community services, or vice versa to milk out to custo
mers to the point that they stop paying for customer products? For example, like
Team Fortress 2, they introduced a weapon buying system. How did this affect th
e outcome of the game and the profits from it?
G: So what you want to do is Part of the problem is that there aren t any good exam
ples for how to do this stuff. So we have these legacies of what we learned abou
t in the brick-and-mortar era and almost everything we learned from selling prod
ucts through retail stores ends up leading you in the wrong direction when it co
mes to how you want to do things when you re directly connected to customers.
So here s a simple example. When we work on sales we try to encourage people, our
partners and ourselves, to knock as much off the price as we can. So traditional
ly if you did that in the retail channel, all you d be doing is cannibalizing your
self, right? You d be encouraging people to buy the product now rather than buying
it in the future. And you d also see a lot of elasticity. So if you dropped the p
rice by half, you d double your sales. And so, it wasn t really clear that you were
doing anybody any good by fiddling with the price. When you re selling a product d
irectly online though, and you drop the price by 75%, you ll actually increase you
r total gross revenue by a factor of 40. So it s not that you re selling 40 more uni
ts, you re actually, 40 times as many units, you re actually generating 40 times as
much gross revenue. That s a completely unpredicted occurrence. And then after the
fact, you find out that sales, rather than going down after you return to sort
of the baseline price, sales would actually be higher after you return to the ba
seline price. So you re not simply going out into the future and capturing a bunch
of sales from the future earlier. You re actually somehow increasing the demand f
or your product by running the sale, the total absolute demand for your product.
That s a very unusual phenomenon that you wouldn t learn about by selling boxes thr
ough traditional retail distribution.
So, TF2 is our product that we use for a lot of experiments. And what we re trying
to do is we re trying to change enough variables so that our customers can show u
s what matters to them and what doesn t matter to them. Right? So we don t know what
the right thing to do is so we accept the fact that we have to go with our cust
omers and discover what the right thing to do is. So everything that we re doing,
really, with TF2 is designed to teach us more about what they like and what they
don t like. And part of the problem is, you guys will find, is that if you ask pe
ople what they would do versus what they actually do they aren t necessarily the s
ame. So you can t just simply say what would you do if we did this? You actually hav
e to go and do it and find out. The really concrete example that I know of is wh
en, back when I was back at Microsoft and we were trying to figure out what soft
ware was actually installed on people s machines. If you asked people what they ha
d, they basically lied. If you ask people what kind of software that they have i
nstalled, it s always things that sound good like educational software for our chil
dren and productivity software so I can do my work when I get home and the reality
is they have a bunch video games and pron on their own systems and nobody will e
ver tell you that. So the difference, you just have to recognize that in reporti
ng behaviors or in predicting future behaviors that s usually not nearly as useful
as actually just running the experiment and finding out.
So with TF2 we try a bunch of stuff. We say okay, we re gonna put out a bunch of di
fferent options for people to purchase and then they come back and they do this w
eird thing where the number 1 most purchased item in TF2 was the most expensive
item in the store. The second highest unit volume item in the store, and actuall
y the second highest gross revenue, was the cheapest item in the store. So what
does that tell you? Well, you know, it tells you you need to run a bunch more ex
periements to try to figure out what customers like and what customers don t like
and one of the things that leads us to believe is to think of pricing as being a
service. Okay? That sounds kind of weird, pricing as a service. Well, brick-and-m
ortar teaches you that pricing is sort of a broadcast mentality. One price for ev
erybody. Right? And it turns out that what people want is an optimal for them set o
f tradeoffs between what they get and how they create value for it.
So here s a concrete example. Most of you guys have played multiplayer games on th
e Internet right? Yes? How many of you have played Counter Strike or Call of Dut
y or Team Fortress 2? So here s the weird thing about those games. Right now... wh
o s ever played with someone who was a total jerk on one of those games? And how m
any people know that their friends, who when they go online, they wanna play wit
h those people because they re a lot of fun? Those two people are creating differe
nt sets of value for everybody else and they should be charged accordingly. The
person, who when he or she starts playing, a bunch of other people join their te
am, that person, you might even think about getting the product to them for free
. The person who is hated and everybody else leaves, you might want to make that
person watch a bunch of ads to help compensate for the negative externalities t
hey create. Does that make sense? Yes or no?
(class): Yes.
G: So you want to value people and essentially create different ways for differe
nt people to create value. For example, the jerk guy or girl might put up a serv
er that other people can play on and that s the way for them to create value for t
he overall community. The person who everybody likes should receive some affinit
y or status, right? They should be a friend of the developer or friend of the game o
r they should have some other benefit. So what we re trying to figure out right no
w is how you can create sort of a custom package for each person. Some people wa
nt to pay the least amount of money and are willing to value their time at a ver
y low rate. Other people value of their time really highly and so are perfectly
happy to give money in order to end up in the same place. So rather than thinkin
g about the ways that people inject value into this overall gaming community as
being one-size-fits-all and the way that monetization occurs, you want to create
something that s completely custom to each person. That much we know and we re just
only now starting to find some of the different ways that make that possible. W
hen we look around for good role models for this, they don t really exist. This re
ally is something that we re sort of having to discover and so we force ourselves
to be as quantitative as possible, simply because any time we measure something
we end up being smart about it, and we also try to be as predictive as possible
because it forces us to expose our ignorance. One of the problems we had is that
everybody here at Valve is a supergenius after the fact. Everybody here can exp
lain why something occurred, the problem is very few people can predict what s goi
ng to happen before it happens, and we found that it was a really useful exercis
e in exposing our own ignorance when we tried to create situations in which we w
ould predict what would happen.
T: It s like the stock market. We just were talking about the rapper 50 Cent, a lo
t of these guys listen to him and he has this company H & H Imports and it opene
d up at like 4 cents and you know, he started tweeting about how awesome it is.
Well today, it s at like $1.69. I mean it s ridiculous and it s all about that. I mean
if I would have known that, I would have, we all would have who are money in at
4 cents and been well off right now, so
G: One of the things you ll notice about stock market analysis is everybody can ex
plain something after the fact, and they always sound incredibly confident, in t
erms of well the market s reacting to news on the unemployment front, but none of th
ose guys who are now explaining after the fact made the bet prospectively, so th
ey really are just making it up. When you look at 99% of what passes for comment
ary on the stock market, it s all retrospective and it does and tell you what s goin
g to happen next. Unless something s going to tell you what happens next, it s just
a story that people tell each other, probably for entertainment value, and unles
s you re predicting the future, it s pretty useless. That was a very long answer to
a very simple question.
T: Alright Michael, you do another one and we ll pass it on to someone else.
(student): Are you happy with the changes in Valve in last year as a business?
G: So, that really sort of goes to what I think about when I m managing the compan
y and I think our customers are really pretty happy right now. I think the peopl
e who work here are having a good time in terms of enjoying their work, not bein
g too stressed out, feeling connected to their customers. One thing I m worried ab
out is the amount of stress that we put on some of the families. When you re runni
ng a business for the long run, sooner or later that s gonna bite you. You can t rui
n people s home lives in order to benefit your business or it blows up in the long
run. Right now we seem to be a little out of balance in some people s lives in te
rms of we re not telling them to work on weekends but people are working on the wee
kends and we need to figure out how to sort of mitigate that. So one of the thin
gs we do that helps buffer that is we take all of the families on a trip each ye
ar and it sort of gives everybody a chance to connect with other people at the c
ompany, and to feel a part of it, and to yell at me *students laugh*. It seems t
o and that s coming pretty soon. I m sure I ll have lots of opportunities to talk to pe
ople with their families to sort of get a better handle on how that s working. And
those really are the things that we worry about. We re not a publicly traded comp
any, so I don t care what analysts say. I don t have to view them as a constituency.
We fund our own projects so I don t have to worry about how the bank or whatever
feels about our business decisions. It actually makes our business a lot simpler
to be run, to be structured that way.
The financials of our business are great. They re sort of a ridiculous. I really k
now how to think about them because all of the ways in which you worry about com
pany financials, they were great a year ago and they ve gotten a lot better since
so I mainly worry about other things rather than worrying about the financial re
sults of the company.
T: Cool. Do you have one Williams or you wanna go down to Evan? Go ahead Evan.
(student): Hi, my name is Evan. Did you imagine Steam would have the userbase it
currently has from its inception?
G: So, that we got into steam was really by listening to customers. So, it seems
like in the late nineties, in early plots, that our customers had a clearer ide
a of the impact the Internet was going to have that most of the executives at ga
me developers and game publishers. You d have these weird conversations were you w
ould just be chatting to some fourteen year old game player at a trade show and
they had a much better idea of the impact of the Internet, that the Internet was
going to have then the Senior Vice President of channel marketing at a game pub
lisher. And they seemed to understand that it was going to impact the design, su
pport, marketing, distribution, sales of everything about the games business way
before the rest way before the people on the production side understood that. So
listening to them, it was pretty clear that there was an opportunity to do some
thing that was really large. So if you were listening to your, to them, yeah, yo
u would expect that it was going to be a big shot in the arm to the games indust
ry and that all of us were going to benefit by having this much better way of co
nnecting and providing value to our customers, that it was gonna grow the market
. It wasn t just gonna move bits off of optical media into bits of wires, that it
was actually going to give us all opportunities to build better experiences for
our customers.
T: Cool, get another one there.
(other student): Do you think the current state of the economy discourages compa
nies from releasing innovative games such as Portal, Heavy Rain, or Bioshock, fo
r example.
G: Not really, I mean, uhm. You know, actually at this time I would say it s easie
r for small projects to develop an audience than ever has before, so if you look
at the independent game scene, I think there s a lot of super interesting stuff t
hat s happening there, and it s now possible for them to reach a worldwide audience
without having to convince a bunch of intermediaries that they should publish th
eir game or carry their game. So, I d say that sort of these large economic fundam
entals are dwarfed by the efficiency that the Internet has enabled for guys like
Jonathan Blow or Super Meat Boy or all of the indie guys are able to develop an
d deliver products that never would have been possible role years ago, so I thin
k innovation is less the deck is stacked less against novelty that it was a few y
ears ago.
T: Who s next? Anybody? Who s got one. Man, can I get you guys to be this quiet in c
lass? And shy? *class laughs* Oh there s, okay, go ahead.
(student): Hi, my name is Brad, and I was just wondering what s your favorite game
that you have made.
G: That we ve made?
T: Yeah, or
G: Portal 2. I think Portal 2 is our most confident design that we ve done so far.
I think it s a great game. I m really proud of what, the work that everybody did on
it.
T: How about the, your favorite game you ve ever played?
G: Um It s still Mario 64 actually. I still think that that was just an astonishing
-
T: Now hold on, has anyone ever heard of that game in here? So then show our age
then Cool.
G: How many of you have played Mario 64?
T: Wow!
G: How many of you were really disappointed at Mario Galaxy? *raises hand* Not a
s bad as Mario Sunshine, but In the back with the blue and black check-shirt, why
don t you ask a question.
(student) *laughing* My name is Jared. How many years of college did it take to
get into this? I don t know if you answered this already but
G: So, I was at Harvard. I was 3 years in and I went to visit my brother and he
was working at what at the time what was the third largest software developer on
the East side of Lake Washington. And, so, he had to work a bunch because it wa
s a brand new job for him so I was just hanging out at work, and a guy named Ste
ve Ballmer got mad because I was bugging Dan, so he told me to go do something u
seful, and a couple days later they gave me a job offer. So I never went back to
school. So that s, that was my history, it s not exactly a normal work history. Tha
t s how a lot of us ended up at Microsoft in the early 80s, though. Ballmer never
finished business school, Bill never finished his undergraduate degree, Richard
Brodie never finished his undergraduate degree, Charles Simonyi was a male prost
itute who escaped from Eastern Europe, who happened to be the guy who wrote the
first compiler behind the Iron Curtain. You know, we all had sort of weird life
histories getting to Microsoft.
T: How about your employees now, I mean is there, like a couple guys in here are
going to Full Sail next year
G: Yep.
T: What kind of education do you require for some of your employees?
G: So the main characteristic we look for is the ability to create something, de
velop an audience around it, measure their reactions to something you ve created,
and then change what you ve built to reflect that and measure again how much of a
difference you made. That iteration cycle live customer feedback is the most imp
ortant characteristic for someone to be successful right now and the ability to
demonstrate that through a portfolio, through a web site, through a mod, that s wh
at we really look for, and I also think it s what a lot of other companies are loo
king for when they re thinking about who s gonna work well for them. You have to act
ually act almost like a CEO yourself, in terms of understanding an audience, und
erstanding a market, building a product, taking feedback about the product, evol
ving the product, communicating about the product. More and more we see that eac
h person that we hire has to be able to do that, even if they re just going to be
narrowly contributing, you know, in marketing or product development, or support
, or Q. A.. That people who have demonstrated that ability previously are going
to be the people who are most likely to be successful, and that, more than wheth
er you go to an ivy league school, whether or not you take computer science clas
ses or drawing classes, that s the thing that for us that s the key indicator of fut
ure success
T: So essentially then you were saying that, and I m sorry guys if I m just going on
here, you talk with a lot of like, you mentioned a 14 year old gamer, I mean if
he-
*intercom interrupts*
T: Sorry, where was I going a fourteen year old gamer, I mean if he knows his stu
ff, essentially, the age really doesn t matter? I mean, could that be true, if he
was good?
G: Well we see something that sort of odd where, you now age sort of in some cas
es negatively correlates with success. I mean, the students in your class are fa
r more connected with a bunch of technological, you know, like you re much more li
kely to use social networking than your parents are. Right, you re much more likel
y to understand the dynamics of community building than the previous generation.
You know, it s not that they couldn t, it s just that, you know, technology seems to
be stretching people faster and it s actually kind of weird to look at, you know,
kids in junior high school and in some ways they re more sophisticated in some iss
ues that people who are currently in high school, so sorry to tell you guys but
you are already being eaten by the younger, smarter generation. So, what it mean
s is that ability and focus and an awareness of what s actually going on right now
tends to trump a lot of previous experiences, and I don t really see that changin
g. I think it s gonna be harder and harder for people to stay current as the pace
of things accelerates. Something to think about when you guys are looking at you
r own careers is to make sure you get in front of rather than get behind whateve
r structural changes are occurring in an industry that you re going into. For exam
ple, manufacturing. In manufacturing I think there are people who are figuring o
ut right now how to connect their manufacturing capability all the way through t
o the consumer and there are other people who are still thinking of themselves a
s jobs shops or production shops for some other third party who s building somethi
ng that s used to make some other thing for some other market someplace, and I thi
nk it s a really bad idea to be on the wrong side of that transition that the peop
le who understand how to Us the fact that you can now connect to customers all o
ver the world for the price of what used to be running an ad in a trade magazine
for you now, one region of the united states, that one of those businesses is g
oing to help its employees be a lot more successful than the other business. So
when you re thinking about where you wanna go, try to put itself in a position to
write those kinds of transitions on the front and rather than the back end.
In my own life, like I said, when I went to Microsoft, you know we were at the t
ime this rinky-dink little company but it just happened to be in front of this h
uge tsunami of the personal computer revolution, so I was just really lucky to h
ave, you know I could have gone and visited my sister rather than my brother, and
I d probably be an M.D. nowadays, or I don t know whatever it ended up being, and t
hat would have had a huge impact on where I ended up professionally. I think you
guys, I think it s a lot more obvious now that it s important to think strategicall
y about where you go with your profession to make sure that the company is gonna
sort of well-position you to be on the front of those kinds of structural chang
es.
T: Very cool. In about 1 minute they re gonna do the announcements so when that ha
ppens I m gonna mute it real quick so you don t hear it. Unless you want to hear wha
t s for lunch tomorrow and hear about what s going on after school. Uh, I ll mute it.
G: (muffled) basically nostalgia
T: While we re doing it, anybody else? Oh here they come, hold on one second. You
guys wanna ask him a question before the announcements go on and then you can
G: How about the guy in the Letterman jacket who s stretching? *class laughs*
T: What s your name?
(student) My name is Kim (?) and, how long does it normally take after you come
up with an idea of a game until it, you release it?
G: So, uh, it varies a lot. Like, how do you decide that a game is done? It s a lo
t harder to figure out when you know what the game needs to be and each game ***
is considered to have a bunch of different risks associated with it.
*** At this point the school intercom is playing over the voice conference and c
ontinues for about 2.5 minutes
Just wave if you can still hear me. Okay. So figuring out how, what the scope an
d scale of a game is, is one of the challenges and we tend to, you know, you guy
s understand that you can either constrain the number of people who work on a pr
oject, how long it takes in term of a calendar, and how good the project is. You
can constrain two, but you can t constrain all 3. If you say only five people can
work on this, provided it has to be a triple-A game, both in terms of scale and
quality, then it s probably gonna take you 10 years to build, and we tend to alwa
ys focus on quality at the expense of calendar time which is both a blessing and
a curse about our company. We ve gotten better about that in recent years. I thin
k the most disruption ever was around how long it took us to ship Half Life 2 an
d all of the drama that was associated with that. So what I m saying is how long d
oes it take it really depends upon how long you want it to take and how long you
can afford to spend on a specific project. I think that nowadays it s important t
o try to constrain your projects as much as possible. Not because you re trying to
reduce financial risk, but because you re trying to get your customers to tell yo
u how to make a product better as quickly as possible so you can iterate, and th
at that s one of the important characteristics, is to get feedback from your custo
mers on what you re doing right and what you re doing wrong.
[completely unrelated to the conference, Intercom: The fun fact of the day is the
profession most often portrayed by an Oscar-nominated actress is a prostitute.]
*** End of intercom playing announcements ***
I ll take another question.
T: Since Steam doesn t have a physical presence like retailers like EB Games, how
does it compete to grab people s attention?
G: So it turns out that the best way to get people to try out steam is to use th
e people who are already using the, a game or are using the service itself, so t
hings like free weekends, or guest passes are some of the best ways to get new p
eople to try out steam. It used to be that you would go out and buy a Super Bowl
ad or you d spend a bunch of money in other kinds of traditional media to promote
yourself and those things seem to be less effective with today s gamers than they
used to be. New media is sort of scary so we try to run experiments like with F
acebook or Google adwords and they actually lose us money rather than make us mo
ney and that s kind of stressful. What we find is the best partner we have to get
new customers are our existing customers so figuring out ways that we can help t
hem help us get more customers is the best. That s part of the reason that we do u
pdates, is when somebody gets a free update to something they get all excited an
d they start playing it again and they tell their friends a story about it and t
hat turns into new sales for the product.
T: Who s next? Go ahead Evan.
(student): I noticed many of the jobs at Valve require three or more years of ex
perience in the business. How would you recommend one acquire that experience?
G: Those are just made up requirements. You know, if somebody walked in and said
I have no formal experience but here s this website I ve been running and this serie
s of flash games that I ve been developing and here s the process by which they get
better then we d say awesome. The best way to start getting experience is don t wait fo
r somebody to give you the opportunity. You know, put up a web site. Try to figu
re out how many people are coming to your web site. Try to figure out how to get
more people to come to you web site. Try some stuff. Make sure that you fail oc
casionally because if you re not failing then you probably aren t fully exploring yo
ur different options. You know, that s how Facebook got started, you know, it real
ly was some projects that Zuckerberg started in his dorm room. Michael Dell star
ted Dell in his dorm room, at university. So there s no reason that you guys can t s
tart, can t do the same thing right now and showing that you know how to do that,
to build an audience for a property, and evolve that property over time is one o
f the best ways to get experience that will open doors for you. I think you have
a better chance of being successful in our industry that way than by some of th
e classic methods which are to come in through QA or try to come in through supp
ort. The reason for that is that most companies, they put in all of these barrie
rs to try to keep those people from moving out of QA and support. Like 90% of th
e people who go and get those kinds of entry level jobs have the goal of not hav
ing those jobs and so at some companies you can actually get fired for trying to
get out of support positions into the development organization, as strange as t
hat sounds. Build a flash game, ship it, make it better, and you ll get everybody s
attention if you ve got talent. And also make sure that the people who are working
with you on it are the best people that you know how to find because that will
have the biggest impact on your own success than just about any other decision y
ou make.
T: Alright, we have time for one more question, and then these guys gotta go to
their next class, which I know they don t want to but Who wants to finish it up? I
know you got a bunch. Go ahead.
(student): What is, can you explain the process you have to go through to take a
n idea and create it into a working project.
G: It really depends on the project, I mean we ve all been doing this for a long t
ime, so you get pretty good at thinking through what the issues are, but it real
ly is something where you have to do it a couple of times and then you know Each
project has, you adapt processes to each project. Sometimes you storyboard it, s
ometimes you prototype some aspect of the artificial intelligence, sometimes you
do concept art, it really depends upon what the project is and part of what you
learn as you get more experience is which tool to use. Do you pick up a hammer
or a hacksaw? Well, you know, it really depends upon what you re trying to do, and
, each project it varies. There s no one size fits all approach to this and each t
ime we have a new project, it represents a new set of technical, design, artisti
c, marketing challenges that are different and unique. We really enjoy that, oth
erwise we d get bored and kill ourselves, so. It s part of the fun of working in the
games industry that it s evolving quickly. So I wanna thank you guys for taking t
he time to talk to me today. It really is useful for me to get out of my office
and connect with people who are at your stage in your careers. I was exactly whe
re you were, sitting. You know, we didn t have video conferencing then, so it was
harder to connect, but I was in your seats at one point. And it was really helpf
ul to me to look into the future when talking to somebody like me and it really
helps me to connect back with where I came from in order to remind myself of whe
re I need to be going in the future. This is as valuable to me as hopefully it w
as valuable to you so I thank you guys.
T: We thank you too, we understand you re extremely busy and for somebody to take,
I mean, almost an hour, out of their time is just great so you guys say thank y
ou. *class says thank you* What s the he weather doing out there?
G: We have less snow, I think than you do. We have more rain.
T: Okay, I think you do too. Alright, good talking to you. See ya.
G: Bye