Jon Radoff is the co-founder and CEO of Beamable, an extensible server platform that enables developers to create online games and virtual worlds in minutes. His journey began at NovaLink, where he developed Legends of Future Past, one of the first MMORPGs. Jon went on to found Eprise Corporation, GamerDNA, and Disruptor Beam, reaching over 20 million players with games like Game of Thrones Ascent and Star Trek Timelines.

Join us as Jon shares his insights on the future of gaming, exploring the transformative potential of generative AI and immersive technologies, and how they intersect with social networking, content creation, and online communities to shape the next generation of the game industry.

🎧 Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• The Internet's Shift to Real-Time Connection and Creativity
• How to Build Online Games and Virtual Worlds in Minutes with Beamable
• Unlocking Potential with Generative AI in Gaming
• Modern Development Practices for Game Studios in 2024
• Securing the Game of Thrones IP through Authenticity
• Jon's Journey of Vulnerability and Success in Entrepreneurship

Resources Mentioned in this episode:

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Jon Radoff on LinkedIn
• Beamable
• Building the Metaverse Podcast
• Metavert LLC

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome. The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not. We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Today we have Jon Radoff with us.

Jon is co-founder and CEO of Beamable, a development platform for online games and virtual worlds. Previously, he shipped games to 20 million players for titles like Game of Thrones Ascent and Star Trek Timelines. He writes about AI, immersive technology, and games at metavert.io. Let's get started. Thanks for coming on the show, Jon. 

Jon Radoff: Hey, Lizzie. Thanks for having me.

Lizzie Mintus: I want to start and talk a bit about one of your areas of research. You have so many. Can you talk to me about how the internet is evolving towards real time connection and creativity? 

Jon Radoff: Well, I think if I look at everything I've done in my career, it's always been about uniting the realm of creativity with however you execute that from a technology and production standpoint. So how do you tighten up that loop? So the Internet is basically just a big network that connects us all together. And when I started my career, it was when the internet wasn't super new, but getting commercial products on the internet was still relatively new. And I created a game called Legends of Future Past. It was the first thing that I ever did. And the challenge with Legends of Future Past is we wanted to have an online game, but we wanted it to get updated regularly. So we had to figure out processes and techniques, both technology, script languages, things that could work for the team so that authoring was a continuous process that they could update it all the time.

So I feel like I started doing that back in the 90s, but everything I've done since then has been about accelerating game creation, not just the initial creation of the game, really about how you turn each game into a living world where you can keep updating it, adding things, keep features evolving, keep content evolving, have participation from teams where they are, even in some cases, live actual parts of the universes that are being created. That's really what real time connection on the Internet is about.

How do you create those worlds? How do you allow that interface between the creators and the community that are interfacing with it? And of course, also within those worlds. How do you allow the people who populated the players to have their own piece of it? How do they interact with each other? How do they build on top of it? How do they extend those worlds and in any number of ways, whether it's through an economy through a social graph or through even content that they contribute to it.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk about Beamable a little bit? 

Jon Radoff: Sure. Let me just start with a little bit of what led to the creation of Beamable. For most of the last decade, I was a game maker. So I've spent pretty much most of my life making games. And the first game that we made at a studio that I founded called the Disruptor Beam was Game of Thrones Ascent. It was the first online game based on George R. Martin's World of Westeros. We started building it at about the same time that HBO was about to roll out the first season of the show. So we were able to release the game just as people were starting to engage with Game of Thrones, and of course it blew up and people loved it. I feel like We were part of that.

So just as I was describing Legends of Future Past a little while ago, it was similar in this particular game. We wanted it to be a living world in which we were regularly updating content and all of the players were populating this world and interacting with each other to make it a world where we were updating it all the time.

That meant getting really good at the authoring pipelines. We would literally have an episode come out of Game of Thrones. It was brand new that the world has never seen. And that day or within 24 hours or so there was new content rolling out in the game- that was characters items storylines that you had just seen in the episode so that while it was fresh, you were actually entering that world and participating in the story to some extent.

That required us to think about speed of execution, speed of authoring content and really connecting with that audience and we continued that tradition through the other games we made. So Star Trek Timelines, we continued that and Star Trek Timelines is a game that you can still play today. 

So to fast forward, we don't make games at Beamable. We make the technology that makes games possible. It's like we're building the machine to help you create games. And if you look at the environment for making games today, one part of the game development process has gotten a lot easier, and that's the front end of the experience.

The 3D graphics and the way one authors that through technologies like Unity and Unreal have just made it way easier to deliver a really great looking experience and immersive experience and interactive experience without needing to know things like the math of 3D graphics shader graph programming and things like that.

You can just sit down in those environments and start building amazing stuff. The way they've done that is by making it a easy to use workflow system coupled with script language, essentially C# in the case of Unity, for example, and then the ability to compose in lots of other components. They have marketplaces where you can download lots of assets, add it to your game, and you can start assembling a game together.

What we spotted at Beamable, and it began back at Disruptor Beam is that there's nothing like that for cloud based infrastructure for the back end. We're really talking about the servers, the social graph, the economy of games, the multiplayer functionality. Everything that happens online was extremely fragmented.

You had to build lots yourself. You have to create a lot of middleware. If you're a game developer building an online game, you're basically in the middleware business because you're constantly linking all these pieces together and then linking it to the 3D engine. And that's really not the way game developers want to work because game development is fundamentally top down.

You have an idea and then you want to start implementing it. You want playable content and a lot of what happens in game development when it's successful is speeding up the process so that you can get from the ideas in your head, the artistic creativity, the features, storylines and getting that on to the screen quickly. Anything that slows you down in that process really is harmful because you're not only slowing down the entire time that it's going to take you to ship a game, you're experimenting less, you're iterating less, you may not actually build something that's really fun. And of course, that's why we're all building games. 

So at Disruptor Beam, we had to build a lot of the stuff. We spent millions of dollars building the infrastructure, just like everybody else was doing in the last decade to build all those online components. But we really wanted something that was more like the Unity of the back end, meaning again, it has to be highly composable. You have to have a script language that automates it. You have to standardize a lot of the data interfaces and the way things plug into each other. And ultimately, one would want to create a marketplace of components so that if you want more back end functionality, whether that's all these new trends like generative AI or blockchain or stuff that might be more familiar, like analytics and player matchmaking, there could be a marketplace of those components that you could just download and install into your game. And it adopts a set of standard interfaces that make it easy to use those capabilities. 

So we saw the lack of that, but also the opportunity to build something like that. And prior to building games, I was also building enterprise technology for website creation and data analytics for games and some kind of more enterprising B2B type things and really felt that me and my team had some unique skills to bring to the table in terms of the scalability in the productization of a real platform, which came from part of the experience, but really the also the visceral experience of building games, knowing what happens in the trenches of building a game product. So that's what I've been working on now for over 3 years where we decided to take Disruptor Beam, take the games that we had been working on that were launched like Star Trek. We sold those off. We decided we weren't going to keep building games ourselves because we wanted to really commit to the vision of creating a tech platform that would enable every game developer in the world, millions of people to build their dreams and to do it with smaller teams that could be more capital efficient and build more games because you could iterate faster and your velocity would go up.

So that's Beamable. 

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. And that's so top of mind as games get more expensive and teams get bigger and cycles get longer. Tell me about, if you can say, who's using your product? What is new with your product? Where do you hope for it to go?

Jon Radoff: I mean, it's really all kinds of game developers. If you just imagine the universe of people who are building with Unity or building on Unreal I would say that's our market today. We can be using other engines as well. There's various interfaces that allow you to do that, but the core of our customer base is people using 3d engines and namely the top engines that are out there on wheel. So that covers virtually all platforms that you can conceive of and all genres of games.

I think there was a time in the game industry when people believed that like in the realm of triple A games. They all need their own special bespoke technologies that are just for triple A and everybody else can build on off the shelf technologies. But time has proven that is not the way game development actually works. What people actually need is a tool set that is familiar that they can train on and they can take that skill set with them from studio to studio and publisher to publisher. And Unity and Unreal have both been pretty effective at spanning the entire range of game development that takes place.

Now granted Unreal tends to be used in more AAA games proportionately and Unity, probably more mobile games, if you look at the composition of where they are. But you can find AAA games that Unity uses and you can find any kind of game that's been built with Unreal, it really comes down to which engine you prefer for your particular project and which platforms you're targeting. And things like that factor into the choice of which engine you want to go with, but those are products that cover the whole market. 

At the same time, we've seen other 3D engines that were a little bit niche here, or in house at a publisher. Those have really diminished in importance. And you could look at cases like, CD Project Red, for example, had their own engine and is now building the next witcher installment on Unreal. So this is just sort of a general trend of the marketplace, which is developers of all sizes are eventually going to go with standardized technologies.

And there's a lot of reasons for that. One is the skill set circulation problem that I referred to, but it's just way more efficient for software companies to invest in the R&D across the entire industry and share those developments with an entire industry versus try to have a hundred different competing engine projects by publisher.

So at Beamable, we have that same vision. All this stuff needed for online games, virtual worlds, social systems, game economies, all the stuff that exists in the cloud needs to be just as accessible and standardized across the industry. Basically, our goal is to make it as easy to build online games and virtual worlds using Unity or Unreal as say, sitting down in front of Roblox to build it within their ecosystem.

Lizzie Mintus: That makes sense. Do you have any stats on money saved, time saved that you can share? Any like particular success stories of someone that used Beamable and had success? 

Jon Radoff: Yeah, totally. Well, in general, if you look at the budgets of games that are building online games, just on average, they're sinking about 20 percent of their budgets just into trying to reinvent the wheel and build online infrastructure. And frankly, that makes me sad when I see them spending that much money because that's money that would be better spent on the content of the game and iterating faster and getting at the fun of the experience, as I think all the capital that you spend on anything other than then that important stuff decreases your chance of success. It'll cut down on your runway and it's a distraction. And actually, even if you're successful, you inherit massive amounts of tech debt that slow you down once you're in live ops. So we see about 20%, obviously for some developers, it can be more than that. Maybe for a few, it's a little bit less than that if your use is very lightweight for online components. 

But we've seen developers, frankly, that were struggling for as long as a couple of years and people have come to us two years in to trying to build this stuff themselves. And they've realized that it was essentially a write off after two years. And they just needed this stuff to work so that they could optimize their spend. And we've had people go through that and then within a matter of weeks, they've been up and running with infrastructure that just worked with them. And invariably, they tell us that they wish that they had just started that way.

Sometimes we see experienced developers come to us who have already been through that experience of creating an MMO. And they'd tell us never again will I build that. And when they discover that we can help them out. But the important thing to note is we're not just accelerating the process. We're changing the way they build games to a process, which is actually much more aligned to the way game developers usually work, which is this top down creative driven process, as opposed to building layer upon layer, as you build up backend systems to support a game that you're building.

But, if you think about that 20 percent savings for any given game. It can be hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that one's going to save. But it's not just the cost savings. It's the de risking of the project. Like you might save that money, but the real value is getting your game out faster and shipping it in a way where live ops is built in and you can actually entertain your audience on an ongoing basis after shipping.

Lizzie Mintus: You said you're building generative AI into your platform. Can you talk more about that? 

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Well, so to be clear, we're not building generative AI into the platform. We are making it very easy to utilize generative AI with Beamable. So our whole approach to the market in general is to open up interfaces that make content creation, the production pipelines, and the DevOps that goes along with game development very standardized so that you can just hook pieces into it at will. 

So, for example, we published some open source code that demonstrates how you can use generative AI in a live game to produce art for like, we called it gentleman. You can imagine what kind of game we're riffing off of there, but the various mons in the experience are generated on the fly. That's just something that easily is invoked from servers that are managed by Beamable where we handle the scalability and the interfacing and taking that content that's been generated and linking it to a content database and inserting the records and propagating it over the wire out to players as they're continuing to play.

So there's all that plumbing and technical work that is a set of framework interfaces that we deliver as part of beamable and then publishing plugins to that generative AI is just another example of that. Blockchain is the same thing. For the developers out there that are experimenting with blockchain or building blockchain games, we don't tell people how to monetize their game. We just want to give them the ability to do whatever they want easily, so that's not the thing that is the stumbling block in the development process. So again, the content catalogs, the ability to deposit an item on the chain of your choice, to be able to inherit that data and bring it into the real time play experience, those are just automatic interfaces that you can implement in Beamable. We have several open source projects that implemented on different chains.

But that's the Beamable ethos. We're really solving a workflow problem that starts with this top down development process where you're sitting in front of a 3D engine. If you're a developer, you're sitting in front of a web browser. If you're a live ops person that needs to schedule content. address customer service, look at a player record, all of that stuff. So we've really geared it towards the way people work. And generative AI is an example of that. And generative AI, I think, has really interesting use cases in terms of the accelerating certain aspects of the production process.

And then there are also really interesting new kinds of games that people are experimenting with. During the live experience of gameplay where the generative art isn't just made like in advance, and then you ship it to the players. It's actually in response to play session, kind of experiential stuff. So incorporating that into your game needs to be easy. Or again, it's just another type of middleware. That's kind of what I go back to, which is like, if anytime you find your team is having to build a bunch of middleware, that's a lot of work. That's a distraction. It's expensive. It may not scale and you're inheriting tech debt.

And I totally get it when you're like way out at the bleeding edge and you're trying things that have never been done before. That's cool. Go for it. But in general, most things in game development aren't like that. Most things in game development are about the story, the experience, the features, how you're delivering that unique fun to the player.

And there, we want to make sure that these less differentiated parts of the game development experience, whether it's linking to gen AI, whether it's linking to any number of payment models, business models, whether it's subscription, blockchain, free to play or none of the above, just premium games, all of these things just have to be choices that you could make very easily where the technology is not the barrier to building.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you tell me more about generative AI and how people can integrate that into their games in a defensible way? What are the use cases right now? And then what are the issues that are hurdles that people are still seeing? And if you have any solves to those hurdles, I'd be really interested to hear that.

Jon Radoff: Well, the market is still developing. The state of generative AI is that 2D art is quite good at this point, and there are a number of companies out there that are figuring out how to deal with things like aesthetic consistency within the arts scenario. 

For example there is a company that is in our plug in marketplace for Beamable. They're doing a lot of work with generative AI, really focused on the needs of game developers, but pushing out content where all the content looks like it came from the same art director. And as I understand it, they address it by working with you to figure out, what is your art director's vision? Draw upon those art designs that you bring to the system and then kind of refining your own model that reflects some of those choices that you can start adding content back in. So I think those approaches are pretty good. 

With 2D, I'd say we're reaching a stage where many of these examples could be used in production at this point because 2D is quite good where there's still a lot of work to be done is on the 3D side. 3D, of course, is what most big games are now using. 

3D is much more complicated than 2D art because you've got all these elements of the workflow, the rendering pipeline, and whatnot to deal with, right? So you've got, first of all, just making the model. You've got to animate it. You've got to read it. You've got to do all you've got to then light it. You've got to place it in environment. Very complicated set of things and getting those to all work really well in games that are actually worthy of going to production is far from a solve the problem right now. But I have seen some interesting work in that area where there's people working on foundation models for AI to do 3d generation from text prompts.

But I'd say it's still relatively early, even though there are in fact examples that work, but it's feeling like 2d art was, a year to 18 months ago when people were still laughing about the extra fingers. To be fair, I'd say 3d isn't even quite at that level yet. So 3d has a lot more work to do to get production worthy, but it's really clear though, if you look at the trajectory of these things, how quickly it's evolving. You can look at things like video, for example, like compare generative video now versus one year ago.

One year ago, things looked totally so realistic, dreamy kind of experience. And now they can still look like that, but also you can create a few seconds of pretty high quality stuff. Where you wouldn't necessarily even know that a section of it was generative. So it's coming along quite fast. And I think it speaks to the power of these systems. 

So our goal at Beamable is really just to make all the options accessible to people, whether you want to put it in the production process or put it in the live game environment and just make all these things drop in plugins where you don't have to create new middleware every time you want to swap out what particular model you use for art generation that it plugs into content catalogs and inventory systems and live game servers and all the other stuff that's necessary to deliver a game. 

So our investment in this area is at that framework level. Creating the framework for items and inventory and economies and linking it to player accounts and production processes and over the wire game updates. All of that stuff is super complicated and really before us hasn't come out of any kind of platform that unifies all of that capability together. So that's where we're focusing. And then we're delighted to work with people doing the generative AI components, whether it's at the foundation model level or whether it's at the application level to bring those capabilities to everybody. 

Lizzie Mintus: I think you have an interesting perspective, though, because you're interfacing with all of the plugin providers. So you are on the forefront of what is possible and what plugins are working. 

Jon Radoff: Yeah, we get to see a lot and we are super lucky in that I get to see all kinds of like generative AI startups, all kinds of startups who are trying to solve different pieces of the whole, call it, metaverse, spatial computing, virtual worlds, MMORPGs. All those words I just used mean slightly different things, but they're part of a continuum, which is about real time interactivity, online and social systems, and things being live, essentially on the Internet with some kind of graphical front end that sits on your device that you then interact with that world.

So people are attacking all kinds of different parts of this and we get a front row seat at Beamable to a lot of people who are trying to solve those problems. And our goal at Beamable is to be an ecosystem that allows all that stuff to play together really well so that it's far less fragmented. It's more of a marketplace approach to how you can import capabilities and let these things communicate with each other through standardized interfaces, wrap it within a workflow that is fun to use within the 3D engine of your choice. And then deploys to a live environment to scale up for your end users to whatever scale your game gets to, hopefully tens of millions, hundreds of millions of players, whatever it is, we really want to help people do the moon mission and succeed at whatever scale they can get to. 

Lizzie Mintus: Some of our listeners who want to start a game studio or are pretty early in a game studio. I would love to hear your two cents on what modern development practices you could implement today in your company. If obviously you're not 2k, EA, someone that's so advanced. Obviously work with the existing engine, work with Beamable, but outside of that, how can people think about creating a game studio in 2024?

Jon Radoff: Well, you definitely shouldn't be looking to AAA studios with a thousand people working on a game as the model of how you're going to develop your own game. So by the way, those companies make amazing products. Like GTA six is the most anticipated game, I think in history right now. And I'm sure it's going to be amazing. And I just played Baldur's Gate three, which is an amazing game. So at scale, like these game companies build truly amazing products, but there's plenty of room in the market as a solo dev or a small team, create products that are super. Successful as well. 

Look at games like Valheim. Look at games like Stardew Valley that came before that. So one person to four people is a great team size to build amazing products. And the scope that these games can now cover is so much greater than what you could have done just a few years ago. And that's largely because of 3d engine technologies have made it a lot more accessible to people. Distribution technologies are available to get it in the hands of players. And I certainly think we at Beamable are playing a big role in making it accessible to build virtual worlds and online game products and get people back to the core fun of their game. 

So the real thing with anybody starting a studio today is let's take a step back from that. It's really what I've said several times, which is, game development is about shots on goal, meaning you've got to try a lot of things. And almost every idea sounds amazing when it's just sitting in people's heads. When it's in the realm of pure imagination, lots of things sound amazing. You've got to be able to go from the realm of pure imagination to actually delighting players on a screen. That's what game development is about. So your single goal as a brand new studio, whether that means you as a indie developer, single practitioner through small teams of three or four or 10 people, whatever it is that you're pulling together, you've got to get things onto the screen and playable and then you need to iterate that as quickly as you can because that's the only time you're going to get real feedback because that's when you're going to discover that many of the things in the brilliant idea, where it was pure imagination and it seemed amazing, breaks down in practice. And it's totally normal for that because games are super complicated. We human beings have limited minds with which to conceive of all of the complexity that takes place in a game. So the only way to actually engage with that complexity in an efficient way is get it on a screen, get pieces of it playable. And that's where anytime you can choose technologies or systems that speed that up, that's going to be something that hugely helps .

But whatever it is, whether it's a technology or a process or the particular talents or skills you bring onto your team, I really urge any team to focus on get it onto the screen because that's what's going to really allow you to find the fun and then polish the heck out of it so that when you ship your game, hopefully you'll ship it so many games start get started and don't ship. But look there were 14,000 games on steam last year, more than 14 000 games. Unfortunately, we probably won't know about a lot of those games. You've got to build a great game. You've got to polish the heck out of it and make it super fun. And discovering that means not just iteration, but getting feedback from your target audience on how well it's coming together and then shipping it only when it's ready. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you shouldn't spend a hundred million dollars and develop your game in the dark.

Jon Radoff: Well, there's an exception. Every rule is in there. There are games that exist that was built that way. But yeah, listen, as a new developer, you can fantasize about a hundred million, but you'll be lucky if you can get 1 million, right? You got to make good use of whatever capital you can secure to build your game. And it may be 0 million, right? Like Stardew Valley, it was 0 million. I think that my understanding is, he was living with his girlfriend or something for like five years and she sort of supported him through the whole process of him building the game. 

So whatever capital is that's available to you, you've got to make good on that and maximize your runway, try a lot of things and build stuff. Get it onto the screen, and build an amazing game. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thanks. Yeah. Tell me about your first company, Eprise. What was it? 

Jon Radoff: Oh, I had a company before that, which was Building Legends of Future Past.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. We can start there. Yeah.

Jon Radoff: Sure. That was early days of the internet building commercial, online games. We built an online game, which was kind of like an online renaissance fair, we had actors, our game masters would play roles inside the world and they'd write scripts for adventures and experiences and they would implement them in real time and engage with the players. So it was an early MMO, is I guess the easiest way to think of it.

 That's where I got my start taught me a lot about just getting again, content on the screen quickly. We had a discipline of regularly pumping out content and experiences for people to experience. Every time we do that, we would learn from it and try to improve what we're building as a team.

But Eprise it's interesting. Eprise is completely different. I saw an opportunity to help people get a different kind of content on the screen, which was web content. So it's interesting because websites suffer a lot of the same problems as game development does today, which is at that point in time, it was just technically complicated.

You basically have these I.T. Departments typing html manually. They were like the world's most expensive typing pool where it and software engineers are basically taking a press release from the marketing department and hand coding html for them. So we created automated processes for everything from the content creation to the workflow approval, versioning, access controls and all that stuff that it takes to build a website.

Interestingly enough, many of those problems remain the problems in building online games and MMOs, virtual worlds, metaverse, all that stuff today. So there's sort of a common thread there. 

But E Prize, I mean, that was an amazing experience. Started it, grew to over 300 people, all went public. So learned a lot through that experience. But nevertheless, but the crazy idea of going back to games. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay I have so many questions for you. So you started the company was this the company you started with your wife or that was the renaissance fair company? 

Jon Radoff: So that was called Inner Circle Software which became Nova link. I've started most companies with her actually. Started that company together, Eprise together, Disruptor Beam. So yeah, we've worked together. She is not working at Beamable. Her more than full time job now is we homeschool our kids. So she spends all her time on that. And believe me, that's a crazy hard job.

Lizzie Mintus: It's the hardest job. I have kids too. I look at my nanny, I'm like, I actually don't think I could do what you do. I love my kids, but it's just a different challenge. It's a challenge. 

Jon Radoff: Yeah, I can't. I can't do it. Yeah. She likes doing it, which helps. And it seems to be working for at least one of our kids. The other kid is actually transitioning back to public school. So we're doing both. So I know, we're sort of live experimenting different approaches. 

Lizzie Mintus: I was just going to say that. 

Jon Radoff: Yeah, we're experimenting with different approaches to education and figuring out what works for who and remains to be seen whether public school work for our child that would like to try doing that again. My son doesn't want to do that again. It also proves like different people need different approaches to education. Anyway, that's what she does. 

But Beamable, I started with my 2 co-founders, Ali, who was my first engineer that I hired into Disruptor Beam, and he and I built Game of Thrones Ascent together, we coded it together. He went on to manage and create the platform that we used at Disruptor Beam to launch all of our online games, so that became core technology that we then productized in Beamable.

And my other co-founder Trapper, he's our CEO. He works directly kind of hands on with game studios, helping them get Beamable implemented. He I worked with at another startup called Gamer DNA that I started. In short, we looked at data from Xbox and we could see all the achievements people were earning. If you get a data feed for that, you can build player profiles, which can be used for several use cases. You can help inform game companies how to build their games better. You can build behavioral ad targeting networks. You can build recommendation engines for games. So we were building that. And after that company was sold to Live Gamer through a series of a couple of transactions, Trapper went off and did his own thing for a while. But now I'm working with him again here. 

The great thing at Beamable is working with a couple of people that I spent a lot of time. With Ali, I've now worked with him for 10 years. With Trapper, if I add it all up, I guess I've worked with him for about 5 years now. So it's nice. It's a rare gift to be able to start a company and work with a team that you've got that level of experience, hands on working with. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's the best. Congrats. You found your people. You curated them, and you kept them. That makes sense. 

Okay. So I want to talk about your Game of Thrones game. How did you come about getting this massive deal to make the Game of Thrones game? 

Jon Radoff: So, two things, authenticity and persistence. Yeah. 

It wasn't easy to get in front of George, George R. Martin. He was kind of the one that I had to convince or that I did convince. I kind of had to pursue that for a couple of years before I even got in front of him. Maybe his agent just got tired of talking to me from time to time. He was just like, okay, we're going to see if this thing can fly or not. And then if George hates it, we'll tell Jon and he can just go away forever. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I was going to say that too. Then Jon will stop calling me. 

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Well, so it did take persistence. It took a couple of years to get in front of him. That was just pure entrepreneurial hustle, frankly. Like get in front of him, not don't give up and bring the story. But once I was in front of George, I think it was just the authenticity. I had read his books. I felt that I understood what he was trying to accomplish with his world building, with the kind of storytelling that he was doing. And I had a vision for a game which would reflect that world that would incorporate this idea of consequences into the world. Some of which is not always a positive cut, just because you're a good guy doesn't mean there's a positive consequence, but there's a consequence to your actions in Game of Thrones, among many other things that I saw in the source material that George had worked on. 

He was being approached by everybody at the time because it was known that he had sold the rights to HBO and they were working on a series. So of course lots and lots of people were starting to pitch him. And my understanding is that many of those didn't really understand even what Game of Thrones is, they just heard it was a full IP, a lot of people cared about, and they could kind of slap that name on something. 

And that's a general problem in IP based games in the game industry. The IP is attractive to people because of the name recognition value, and it just gets slapped onto a game like a coat of paint, instead of actually building the game up from the essence of the IP, the story, the lore, but also really the underlying themes that drove it. And listen, it's game. Sometimes it works anyway and things get to scale. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Jon Radoff: But more often than not, these games just are not successful and don't engage the audience that loved the IP to begin with because they can see that it's so superficial.

So persistence and authenticity won the IP. And then it was just hard work. It was me and Ali and a handful of other people grinding away at that thing. And we shipped a game in under a year, getting 10 million plus players. 

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. It's a funny story. Good story. I feel like authenticity is so undervalued and that's really just the key to being successful in your business because people know when you're not and people know when you don't really give a shit about what you're doing and it shines through.

I mean, maybe you have some IP and you're going to do well because it's IP, but probably not. 

Jon Radoff: It's something that we've made an effort to bring it to make part of our culture. It's certainly anybody who is a Disrupter Beam would say that we talked about it a lot and it's continued into Beamable as well. Hopefully we succeeded most of the time. Sometimes listen, business is hard, so you don't always succeed, but we made authenticity or to the way we try to run our business, which means not only bringing that authentic nature of the IP and surfacing it within the game, but kind of everything we did, the way we communicated with each other within teams, the way we thought about business.

So it remains an important project at Beamable where we have the slogan, this mantra really, which is, we fight for the game maker. We see the game industry as a place where there's just a lot of predatory players and people who are there with their hand out to extract some value out of the game developer, but without really returning a huge multiple on that value and exchange. We hope to help and do our part of that. Anybody who seeks to build a game with online components, live components, which is increasingly, practically all of the game. Yes. If that's going to be important to you, then we want to make it not only capital efficient for you, but we want to speed you up. We want your game to be successful. 

We're not looking for a percentage of your revenue. We're looking for our ability to supply technology at whatever scale you want, and you pay for it primarily when you're successful. And when you're successful, you kind of scale up on a usage base like any other kind of compute architecture out there. That's what we do. 

Lizzie Mintus: We talked about business being hard and I always like to ask people for a vulnerable story if you can share one because you've had so much success and people really idolize that and they're like, oh wow, this person's so successful. Everybody has imposter syndrome. Everyone has, maybe not a time where you have a month of payroll left, but you always are navigating near disaster situations as an entrepreneur.

Do you have any that you could share? 

Jon Radoff: Well, I mean, at Disruptor Beam, we were lucky that most our games were successful, but not all the games were successful. So of the three that we got to ship, two were really successful, which was Game of Thrones and Star Trek, and we also did a Walking Dead game that just wasn't successful.

I guess the story there is, the Walking Dead game that we built was my favorite game that we built. Don't get me wrong. I loved all the games. They are like my children to me, but I had really thought we were onto something with our Walking Dead game. I thought it had a great core mechanic and certainly in playing it with people, I saw that players loved it as well. But it really hit at a time when two challenging things were happening in the market. One, there were a lot of other Walking Dead games that were suddenly coming out. That made it very challenged to rise above the noise of other products that were in the market.

And the other is just that cost of acquiring customers generally was increasing a lot. So it was very hard at that point in time to acquire customers profitably. And it led to a lot of problems for us as a company that we frankly barely survived to get through that. So that's sort of the nature of games, which is you're only as good as kind of the last game that you shipped.

Yeah. Maybe there's a few exceptions to that out there, but in general, it's hard to recover from that. Fortunately, we did. We recovered because we had all this great technology that we built, and we had this vision of helping game developers avoid a lot of the problems that we did, because if we had saved, say a few million dollars on our production by just being able to pull that tech off the shelf, that would have been a few million more that we could have put into like more features and more longevity of the game, maybe a little bit more into the marketing of the game, that could have optimized the results there. 

But that was a tough lesson. I mean, listen, you work on games for years and then when something like that happens, it's a tragedy for everybody involved in the team. But like I said, we were also super lucky at Disruptor Beam in that most of the games we shipped, if it was a batting average, we would have been like the best baseball player of all time. And Star Trek timelines continues to hold on to a really great audience to this day. I mean, that games, geez, it's a decade ago that we started with that game and now it's been up for years and it continues to go. 

Although we don't run the game anymore, Tilting Point is a publisher that owns it. They operate the game on our platform. So continues to be something that we have a, an important connection to it at Beamable. 

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. Yeah. You've delighted so many game players. And I think what's cool about Beamable is you can influence really even more throughout all the games that are made on it. That's exciting. 

Jon Radoff: I hope so. I hope we save people a lot of problems and we just, we allow more games to get their shot at being successful.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I like your mission, and I like that there's a common thread through everything you've done. I have one last question before I ask it, I want to point people to your company website, beamable. com. The last question is, I know you have an article about the 75 things that you learned while shipping games to 20 million live service game players.

What are some takeaways that people find most surprising? 

Jon Radoff: Most surprising. That's an interesting view on it. 

Lizzie Mintus: What you might not think when you went into it, right? Something that you didn't anticipate while making the game that you should have thought of or most valuable. 

Jon Radoff: At the end of the day, when you have a team that's been working on a game really hard for years, and some of those same team members come back and they look at that list of 75 things and they say, Jon, I wish you had realized a couple of those things while we were working on the game, first of all, they're right. Of course they're right. But that's maybe the surprising reaction to that, but I hope that I can pass on the wisdom because wisdom is only learned largely through painful experiences. If any of that information in there can spare some other game developers, any amount of pain, even including the pain, by the way, I'm making it sound like it was all negative. Like I said, we've shipped a cup, we shipped a couple of games that were super successful. One that's probably a legitimate hit on mobile. But that said, there was a lot of near death experiences even in shipping that game too. So we were lucky. Games take a lot of luck. And I guess if I had to add a 76 thing, it would be like, get a lot of luck, because game development could use it.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, a lot of people on the podcast have told me every game that ships is a miracle. We've been talking to Jon Radoff, who is CEO of Beamable. Jon, where can people go to contact you, read your blog, work for Beamable? 

Jon Radoff: I'm all over the place, so go to Beamable.com for my company. You can go to metavert.io if you want to find all the other places that I hang out. I've got a substack blog that I post. I post video interviews with people, AI, and game development and stuff like that on YouTube. I'm on LinkedIn. Find me anywhere. Not hard to find. Love to connect with all of you. 

Lizzie Mintus: And you have a podcast and some great episodes on there. I want to give that a plug too. 

Jon Radoff: Sure. I have Building the Metaverse and started out pre Zuckerberg version of the metaverse, talking about building these big, awesome, vast virtual worlds and what that would mean in the future. And over the last year continued that, but a lot more about generative AI, since that's driving so much of the creative pipeline.

Those are conversations that I've had, primarily with other founders of companies. So founders of game studios, generative AI companies, people like that. I love having those conversations, and I've heard from some people that they're really useful for other people to hear as well. So check those out. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.