Daryl Ogden is the co-founder of Valued Cultures, a startup dedicated to building healthy, sustainable, and innovative cultures in the gaming industry. With over a decade of experience advising leaders from top Fortune 500 companies and iconic game studios, Daryl is an expert in aligning leadership, investing in talent, and navigating critical transitions—all while safeguarding a studio’s unique identity.

In this episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast, Daryl shares actionable insights and real-world examples on the role of intentional culture-building in driving creative and operational success. Topics include challenges faced by game studios, adapting to remote work dynamics, fostering cohesive teams, and the tangible impact of culture transformation on game development outcomes.

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

• How to preserve studio identity during scaling, leadership changes, or restructuring.
• Stories of culture transformations that enhance game quality and team success.
• The importance of aligning leadership for cohesive decisions and a unified vision.
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Daryl Odgen on Linkedin
• Valued Cultures
• 2024 Report: Winning Game Studio Culture in the Post-Pandemic Era

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. We are a boutique, game, and tech recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about their journey. You can expect to hear valuable lessons and to get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is kindly brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We work in games and tech and value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. 

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a thank you to Valued Cultures co-founder, Mike Merrill, for introducing me to Daryl and to Shannon Loftus, who is one of your advisors for the overarching connection.

Today we have Daryl Ogden with us. Daryl is the co-founder of Valued Cultures, which works at the nexus of leadership, strategy, and culture to help build successful, sustainable game organizations. For the past decade, he has worked with the leadership of some of the world's most iconic game studios and franchises.

Today, we're going to learn from Daryl's years of coaching leaders of top studios and talk about how to build a solid leadership team, company culture, what's going on in 2023, 2024 and to come, and how to build a successful product from your team. Let's get started. Thanks Daryl for being here. 

Daryl Ogden: It's great to be with you today, Lizzie.

And I'm looking forward to the conversation. 

Lizzie Mintus: Good. It's fun. I was just on your podcast. So now we're swapping. 

Daryl Ogden: Yes, we're trading places here, aren't we? Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's perfect. So I would love to start for anybody that's not familiar with Valued Cultures, if you could dive a bit more into all that you offer.

Daryl Ogden: Yeah. Well, as you said in your very generous introduction, I've been working with game studios for the better part of a decade now, and that has really become my primary focus in my work with organization leaders. And so a couple of years ago, one of my longtime colleagues who you just mentioned, Mike Merrill, Mike and I go way back. We were faculty together at Georgia tech and Atlanta, and have crossed paths over the years in various ways. But we never had worked together, per se. We had done some projects together, we had done some thinking together, we'd had a lot of fun together, but we had never created something together.

So, a couple of years ago, we put our heads together and said, hey, based on the 10 years or so of experience that you have of working with games, what would it look like if we started a company that was exclusively focused on serving the games industry? So that's what we did. We did that at the beginning of 2023, we spent the better part of 2023 consolidating a lot of learning that I and my colleagues and other constellations had assembled over the last decade. 

And we also pursued a really significant, substantial games industry report. When we focused a lot on leaders, there were these wonderful game industry reports out there that 'd get thousands of inputs from game developers, and those are incredibly valuable. But we decided, Hey, let's focus on leaders and what leaders have done to build successful studios over time, successful organizations over time, and successful leadership teams over time. And so that was very much the focus of the report. 

And I think it informs the kind of work that we do, which, as you mentioned, really does focus on working with studio heads with leadership teams and cascading the insights and the development of those teams, cascading the learnings down across the organization across the studio in a variety of ways.

And so what we're really about, it is about building sustainable organizations, but it's also helping those organizations, with the focus on human factors. Big focus on human factors is because you're not going to come to us for technical support, but focus on making games that are better, making games faster and making games more sustainably. And I think that we're very excited about that value proposition because I think that what we've learned over the last couple of years is that the industry really needs to do just that. And particularly to figure out how to deliver games at quality, in a shorter period of time, in a more sustainable way- and in a variety of ways that you can define sustainability.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I would say that is the topic that I talk about with many people on my podcast. 

Daryl Ogden: I'm sure it comes up. Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: It is a common theme. Yeah. So what are some of the main problems that leaders in the game industry come to you to solve? 

Daryl Ogden: Yeah, it's not a small list. Game studios are complex organisms and lots can go right, but lots can go wrong. You know, I think what I might focus on, Lizzie, is to think about it, in terms of upside, is that we are really interested in working with game studios, game organizations that are at inflection points in their life cycles.

And so there are a number of what you would think of as predictable inflection points. I think that they have an outsized impact on studios because, generally speaking, game studios are pretty small organizations. If you compare them with big enterprise software companies like Google or Microsoft or something like Meta, they have tens of thousands of employees. Game organizations are significantly smaller than that. So there are these outsized impacts across the organization when you have these inflection points. 

Some of the inflection points have to do with leadership changes. Sometimes a founder starts a studio up, has a vision for it sticks around for 10, 15, 20 years. Puts their fingerprints all over it. Their DNA is all over it. It's a very founder driven studio. And then they say, Hey, it's time for a new adventure, time to go do something else. And they hand the studio leadership off to a successor. That successor has a big challenge in terms of holding on to what made the studio special, probably in the 1st place, but also putting their own stamp on it. So, leadership changes, scale changes really have a lot to do with what we're up to. 

So if studios become very successful over time... just as an example, in 2015, I had the good fortune of getting pulled in at Xbox to help with the integration of Mojang with the maker of Minecraft. And as I recall, I think when I met the team in Redmond, and then subsequently the team in Stockholm, I think we were talking about 50 - 60 people total that were responsible for creating this world changing IP. And that studio is a lot bigger today. And it's really a global studio, hundreds and hundreds of studio members. And so there are these changes that happen culturally as a studio grows in that way. And when they hit particular scale points, as an example.

And so how do we grow, how do we scale our operations? But how do we do that by holding onto what made us special? And so those are some of the kinds of things that we end up working on. Of course, when you have growth, you have things like communication, coordination, and collaboration challenges that are very typical. 

Hey, before all of us were doing everything, we were all in the same room. We knew each other. We could finish each other's sentences. We were the founding group of devs that made this game. Suddenly we have 500 people. We don't see each other anymore. We're working remotely. We're working maybe in multiple locations. We're feeling fragmented. How do we get the sense of cohesion and togetherness that we had when we started up? 

So things like that happen all the time. And then, games that are behind schedule, teams that are struggling to make games in the time frame they've agreed to it, the quality that they want, and in a way that makes the studio feel good and positive. I mean, that's a very common problem as well. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: But I feel like a lot of people would probably diagnose the problem, not from a, it's a culture problem, but maybe we need to hire an outsource team to fix X, Y, Z. So I like your approach to fixing what's already common. 

Daryl Ogden: Yeah. I mean, this is a common distinction in my line of work between technical challenges where there's a kind of a playbook that you can go and execute. And a lot of those kinds of technical changes are things that devs can do that an executive producer can do and so on. And then there are adaptive challenges where there is no playbook and where the complexity is really significantly higher and you're creating a solution rather than following somebody else's solution. And that's where we can come in and really make a difference. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. And the example that you gave, which I think is a pretty common one, you were this founding team. You made this product. It blew up. Now your team is gigantic. What are some steps that you could take to feel more cohesive?

Obviously, this is a made up situation, so you can't really diagnose. But in general, how can people even think about approaching the problem? Where do they start? 

Daryl Ogden: Yeah, I think it really starts with intentionality. And it starts with the intentionality of saying what kind of studio, what kind of team, what kind of org do we want to have. And often, studio leadership will often anchor around a set of values or a set of principles that really inform all of their decision making, inform their behaviors, and inform the skills and the habits that they want to have. But I think that it starts with intentionality, really. Who do we want to be? What do we want to be? How are we going to get there? 

 And then, it often has to do with the way that the leadership team works together and then how they turn key, how they work together down to the next layers of leadership. Those are often leads or principals, et cetera, that then are working very, very closely with the devs.

So we're talking about a studio or an org that might have multiple layers of management or multiple layers of hierarchy in some ways. And so ensuring that what's happening in the C suite or with the leadership team, that that's coherent down and through across the organization- that's really, absolutely critical. 

You know, often Lizzie, what you'll discover when you come into a situation is that the leadership team might be working really well together, but they haven't figured out how to translate that working well together down. Or the leadership team may be dysfunctional in some ways and not working very well together and the good work that's happening is happening down at the studio level. So we just try to figure out how do you link that up? How do you create that coherence? How do you create that alignment? If you don't have it, you're typically going to have problems. 

Lizzie Mintus: That makes a lot of sense. Okay. And what if you are a founding team? I work with a lot of earliest stage companies and it's five people. And I really like your word, intentionality. And we've had this conversation, but I feel like being intentional in your recruitment process, having your values, doing all of this work ahead of time saves you a lot of work down the road because you're following an intentional path. You're not just going where the universe takes you.

So if you are working with a really early stage company that's trying to set up all of their best practices, what do you recommend that they think about when building a culture, a leadership team, a studio?

Daryl Ogden: Yeah. Well, I think what's important here for me is that game studios are different from other kinds of organizations. Creative tech in general is different from enterprise software, as an example. It's different from a bank. It's different from healthcare companies. So one, I think it's to try to not think of your studio like a regular organization in a way. You have to recognize that making games is kind of a consumer art form. And a player oriented art form, it's not just your regular application on a phone or a desktop. 

So that's the number 1, it just recognizes what is the industry that we are in and out, he needs to feel that. And what I'm really interested in is whenever I come into work with teams, whether they be startup teams or teams that have been working together for a long time, there's a question that I always ask, which is essentially tell me how you make games. What's your way of making games? And then what's your way of being together as a group? 

If you can get somebody to describe the way that they make games, to themselves sometimes, because sometimes they haven't even taken a step back to ask themselves that question. It's just been much more intuitive or instinctive. But if you can get someone to describe how they make games, you can say, is that the way you want to make games? Is that the way that you want your team to work together? So a lot of what we're trying to do when we're doing early, call it diagnostic work, is we're trying to defamiliarize what people experience in their day to day world, where they just take it for granted. We want to actually make it feel a little bit strange. So like, describe it to me. Can you tell me about it? Can you tell me what it's like? Can you turn this thing that is essentially who you are. Can you turn that into an object of inquiry that we can see that we can understand? And then by holding it outside of yourself, and you can do this with an individual or with the team, hold it outside of yourself and say, is that who we want to be?

So, so much of what I and my colleagues do is, we try to put up a mirror to the team, to the leader and say, is this the team, the leadership that you want to be? Is this the culture that you want to have? Are these the dynamics that you want to have? As a leadership team, do you want to cascade that down across the org? And if the answer is no, then it's to give them a lamp and say, okay, well, where are we going to go instead? 

So this idea of a mirror and a lamp, I think, is very constitutive for me. 1st, we hold up a mirror. Is this who you want to be? Usually people are not satisfied. I mean, I tend to think the people that we work with generally are very ambitious. They don't want to stand pat. They wouldn't have brought us in the 1st place to work with them if they were satisfied. There's something that they want to do more of. Their ambitions aren't fully realized. 

And so generally, when we hold up the mirror, we're picking up a lamp shortly after that and saying, okay, where do you want to go? And, you know, just asking the common question that I've been asking for 25 years with leadership teams of various kinds and 10 plus years is, where are you? Where do you want to be? And how are you going to get there, right? And who do you want to be when you get there? So it's not just strategic, because those are strategic questions. But who do you want to be as an individual? Who do you want to be as a team? Who do you want to be as a culture, and kind of working at all of those levels of granularity at the individual team and the organization level, which we're trying to make that really coherent.

Lizzie Mintus: And with your question, how do you make games? What are you trying to, what are you getting from that? What are the common answers that people share with you? 

Daryl Ogden: Well, it's quite variable. One of the things you're trying to get at when you're asking that question of a game leader is, essentially you're asking, is this a tech led studio? Is this a production led studio? Is this a creative studio? What kind of studio is this? Generally speaking, although game teams will typically have all of those disciplines represented along with art and sound, et cetera, they generally are leading, as a production led studio where the studio is meant to operate almost like a machine. Everything is just so well coordinated and everything together. 

If they're doing really innovative things with technology and they're really pushing the edges of technology, they're often a dev led studio, right? And the producers are enabling the depth as opposed to leading the process. And if they're a creative led studio, they're generally making new IP of some kind, or they're again, kind of pushing the boundaries. And it's very different to be making a new IP than it is to be working in a franchise model, for instance, where you say, Oh, this is the sixth version of Call of Duty that we've developed, or here's Fortnite, right? 

So when you're working with someone working with new IP, they're generally a creatively led studio. So that's really almost like the 1st cut of understanding that. And then, I just like to get people to just describe your process. And so what I'm curious about is, can they describe their process to me in a way where they can show me that they've been really intentional about all the steps along the way? And they know what the iteration loops are and they understand the process and the sequences and so on. And what the challenges are, what the choke points are, et cetera. I just want them to be able to describe that to me. 

And if they're really explicit about it and they're really clear about it, then there may be improvement areas within that process, but that's probably not the choke point. We may be dealing more with interpersonal issues as an example, interpersonal challenges or philosophical challenges on the team. That leads to a different kind of diagnostic at that point. 

Lizzie Mintus: Interesting. I love talking to coaches and I like the questions that you ask them to understand what you're trying to get at. And the question seems so simple, right? Tell me about your process, but they're so hard to answer.

Daryl Ogden: Yeah, well hopefully I think like anything, when you feel a certain amount of mastery and, I'm still learning every day, I'm still learning new things, of course. But when you get to a certain point of mastery, your difficult questions become simple, right? And so that's actually a sign that the simplicity of the question and getting at the core of the matter, to me, is that the elegance that you're looking for in a coaching relationship. And then what comes with it, once you've gotten a certain amount of repetitions, is that you just develop pattern recognition and you say, Oh, I've seen this problem before I see this pattern emerging and then you have to situate that pattern within the specific culture, of the specific situation that you find yourself in.

All patterns are not created equally and they are differently inflected according to leadership and the kind of game someone's making, which is also quite important. Yeah, and so all those things kind of fit together. And you get better and better at processing it more quickly. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, but I think you're so valuable because you and your team, they work with so many studio leaders. So you also have a vantage point of, Hey, I am aware of what these, I don't know, how many times you have many studios are doing. Of course, there are common problems. And for me, if I'm a studio leader, I have seen my experience and maybe my team's, but you have this total advantage. So that's pretty amazing. 

Daryl Ogden: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think what's so fun about the partnership. And you probably experience this in your recruiting work and your placement work, and we're similar in this way in that you have this broad perspective on recruiting and placement and finding the right leaders, whereas our clients at Value Cultures, we have people who've dedicated their lives to these studios. You know, I mean, the passion and the commitment they have to their studios, I'm always just blown away by it and it's inspiring, frankly. 

It's very energizing to have conversations like this with game leaders, because it's not just a job for them. It's more than that. But they're so embedded in their work. And they've often worked in one studio their whole career, because that's what they committed to do. And so the value that I and my colleagues can bring, just to your point, to have this broader perspective and say, Hey, this is where you're situated in this ecosystem, and we can help you think about that and give you a lot of different possible solutions based on what we've done with the variety of studios that have done something like yours. And we can often invent new solutions that maybe are hybrids of solutions that we've discovered elsewhere.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, our businesses are very parallel. I guess we do the same thing. Like I hired for studios 20 years. Here's how other companies approach the problem. Here's where I see a breaking point. Super similar. So you work with many game leaders. How do you define the ideal profile of a successful game studio leader today?

Daryl Ogden: Wow, that's a great question. You know, to me, I think the number one thing that you would just say about games is that the industry is just so dynamic. It's constantly changing. It's constantly evolving. If you just think about the kind of the head snapping changes that have taken place over the last five years or the last six months or the last week, it's just constantly evolving.

And so certain technology, solutions, certain creative solutions, they will become obsolete over time, you know? And so you can kind of put that money in the bank. That's going to happen. And so I think the most successful leaders are leaders who know who they are. They are informed by a set of principles, a set of values that are essentially permanent. They might, they may evolve over time, but they are enduring. But their methods and their behaviors and their skills are constantly evolving. And they're constantly learning and they infuse that curiosity and that learning into their organizations. Because if you say, hey, here's the most successful game studio of the year 2000, if that studio was operating as it did in the year 2000, it was probably out of business in the year 2005. And I think that's just the case. 

To quote a philosophy professor from college, it's Heraclitus, the great Greek philosopher, you'd ever step in the same river twice. And as a studio head, you better not be stepping in the same river twice. The river's constantly flowing and you've got to run without flow. But you don't just get on the river and whitewater rafting down the river and let it take you where you want to go. You also are directing it and you're guiding it and you're giving intentionality to it in a significant way. So it's that marriage of learning and recognizing that you're part of a larger system that is bigger than you in a way and you have to go with that flow, but redirect that flow for yourself. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So what I heard is you want people who are able to take charge and lead who are curious and adaptable and are solid in their own values. Maybe certain about who they are and what they want. Obviously it's more my end, but you're advising on recruiting in a way. Here's your current studio team. And here are the people that are the holes that I think that you need. So if you're in part of a leadership team and you're evaluating a leader in general, are there any other attributes that you feel that are common?

Daryl Ogden: Yeah. Leadership requires followership, right? So you could be the most curious, intelligent, dynamic, values driven person in the world if you don't have the ability to generate followership. It's pretty tough to be a leader. Now, you can be a thought leader, but you're probably not a leader of a team.

And so can you also bring a certain amount of charisma, a certain amount of magnetism that generates followership. But also, can you invest in people? And are you generous towards your team members about growing them, about advancing their careers, about being invested in their success in a way that inspires belief and loyalty and confidence, that you can be trusted as a leader with someone's career. I mean, that's a precious commodity, right? 

And so, what we were talking about earlier was a lot of what you would think of as intrinsic things that a leader would have that are about that person. But you also have to be outwardly oriented towards your team and the ability to build an org and a team that is in your image, but is bigger then just you bigger than the sum of the parts of the team members. It's something that's a representation of your values, a representation of your principles, but it's actually bigger than that as well. 

Lizzie Mintus: And in terms of 2023, I know you have a wonderful report and you did a lot of research, which you teased on. And it's downloadable on the website. It's called Winning Game Studio Culture in the Post Pandemic Era. We talked a little bit before the show, but can you share some main points? Obviously I encourage everybody to read it, but if you're just listening right now, I would love to hear some insights. 

Daryl Ogden: One of the things that I think is so fascinating about our report is, we ask leaders, how important people were to you, how important talent was to you, how important your studio culture was. And overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, they described it as among the most important aspects of their success, right? Could not be successful without this, essentially, and it's critically important to us. But when we ask them what investments they were making, you know, actual investments of time and energy. And of course, with time and energy is also an actual budget. But what kind of investment are you making? 

And what was extraordinary was this gap. It was almost like inversely correlated where they were under investments really substantially in all those areas that they said were important. So this drives right to the heart of our intention. The intentionality point is that, okay. Well, you say that this is important, but your behaviors and your habits and your investments don't match up to what you say is important. So how important is it really right? So we're trying to shine a light on that. If you think about that mirror in the lamp metaphor, we try to show that to the group.

And then what I think is also really interesting is where I become fascinated, because I've had the, again, really good fortune of working with some gaming teams and orgs over a long period of time, in some cases for a decade. And I've been there at the beginning of new studio births. And I've also been there when studios were going through real hard times and trying to reimagine themselves and help them get out of dips and so on. What you'll see, if you look at our distribution of the studios and studio leaders that we pulled, is that they start off very, very enthusiastic about culture and about the team and about being very intentional. And when they hit their middle years, and I'm going to call middle years, 5 to 10 years into their studio's life, you see a real dip in terms of that commitment. 

And maybe that is because of the business cycle. Maybe it's sort of the day to day grind of making games. It's really hard work making games. You see this dip, but the studios that then had a long lasting life, that were multi decades old, that they had kind of won the sustainability battle over, many iterations- you saw the difference for them is that they were above the studios that were just starting out in terms of how intentional they were. So there's just no question in our minds that if you want to build sustainability over time, that intentionality, and that ongoing investment and that commitment to that, that it pays off. 

And it's very easy for studios to get into short cycle thinking. It's normal. We all do it. You have to pay the bills. You have to hit your publishing dates. You have to do a variety of things in the short term cycles. But if you're not keeping an eye on the longer term vision and the longer term investments, you'll be calling us up for help, is what you'll be doing.

Lizzie Mintus: That happens all the time in recruiting. I talked to a CEO and they're like, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn recruiter, or I think I'm just going to hire my friend, or five people applied. And I'm interviewing them and I ask, Hey, what's your interview process? What are you looking for? And they reply, Ah, well, they're going to talk to a few people and you know, we like good people.

Daryl Ogden: Yeah. Tell me more, right? Can we get a little bit more specific? Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's like going to tour an open house. It's like hearing, Yep. I found my dream house. You don't even know what other houses are out there. I mean, you haven't even been assessed. This house might be on a landslide. 

Yeah, I know we like to work with the same people, but it's interesting because I see that too. How intentional are you? And then I work with companies and they're like, here is our employee handbook. I just had a company send me their art bible. Here's our art bible, with everything that we like art wise, what we aspire to be, what we've done. Here's this. 

Okay, clearly you're going places because you're so thoughtful. And I bet there are correlations on my end as well. 

Daryl Ogden: No questions. You know, it's funny. I've worked with a few, and just to this point, Lizzie, and to me, this is a great example. I've worked with more than one studio that was a startup that was essentially like a super band studio. Like They basically create an all star team of their leadership team. They had a lot of capital. They were able to go out and recruit like kind of best in class people who all came from these different organizations. Well, guess what? All those different organizations had different ways of making games, different principles, different values, right? And so what looks to me, and they are like an all star team, if you ever follow an all star team, all star teams typically don't play very well together. They don't have chemistry. They didn't grow up together. They have egos. They have different philosophies. 

And so, if there's one piece of advice that I would offer any studio is don't, don't ever build an all star team, not to say that those individuals aren't great, but you need to find a group of people that can work together and that are organized in the same way, right? You know, maybe complimenting each other. Maybe there are differences, but it's not like all differences, right?

Lizzie Mintus: I think people often look for people like themselves, and then you have a bunch of people that are just like the founder, and then you don't have diversity. They hire their friends. I mean, it's great to work with people you've worked with, but sometimes it's so, so homogenous, that it's an issue. Or you have a bunch of people that are ex Bungie, ex Riot, ex Blizzard, and those people are wonderful at Blizzard, at Riot. But you are 10 people, and your teams at a startup are very different from however many people Riot has. And this person's going to be working on so much for you at a startup. They're going to be T shaped. And before they were just working on this feature because the team was huge. So yeah, there are many differences. I have this conversation all the time. 

Daryl Ogden: Well, I'm glad we're aligned. Anyway, we're great. Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So I'm sure you're going to put out a 2024 report, but other than everyone having a financial meltdown, what are some of the big challenges people are really thinking about? 

Daryl Ogden: What I think is really interesting, and it's not surprising. This isn't going to be a surprise. I hope that our report will have insights that will be really useful for people. But the number 1 thing from our original report, if you were going to say, what's the number 1 thing on a studio heads mind, it was, how do I do everything that I need to do, build the games that I need to build, build the culture that I want to have for long term success- how do I do that in a post COVID world where people are not working together in an office, five days a week. And so what is my return to office policy? What does a hybrid look like? What does it look like to be a remote studio? Because there are remote studios out there that do have what we would call vibrant cultures and can be successful.

But everybody's trying to figure that out. And. that is a persistent problem. It hasn't gone away. You've seen these kinds of brute force approaches, which is Okay, we're just changing the policy. Everybody comes back five days a week into the office or three days a week. And if you don't want to come back, goodbye. We don't want to work with you anymore. That's fine. And you've also seen these other commitments to say, Nope. We said that we were going to be a remote studio. We're going to continue to be a remote studio, but maybe they're not having the velocity that they need to have to get where they need to get. And so those problems are just still persistent.

And I think that we have some hypotheses about what can be done about those problems. I will leave you with a cliffhanger about that to create buzz for the report. But I think that's the question that we're going to really burrow into for 2025 because it has been persistent, and it's still there. And of course, it ties to everyone's financial success. It ties to how quickly you can make games. It ties to what the quality of the games are. We are in an environment right now that is very, very, obviously, very cost conscious about how expensive games are. And so when that gets correlated to what return to office policies are or hybrid or remote policies, it matters to people. So that's where we're going. 

Lizzie Mintus: I think it's very interesting. The shift from 2022 where employees had all the power and they could say, I want to afford a work week. I want to work remotely. I need this item bonus. I need all of this stuff, to massive layoffs of very talented people, and companies having all the power. And I think on both ends, I've watched people ask for too much, almost get greedy and then companies are getting greedy right now.

But I'm very interested, and I'm not sure what you think will happen next year, but at some point in the future, the tables will start to turn again. And it will become more of an employee's market. So I always talk to companies about what are you doing to incentivize people when the tables do turn to stay with you or to make your process appealing or your company appealing because you can say, Hey, I have all the power. Tomorrow, you need to be back in the office five days a week, even though I told you, you would be remote or you're fired. 

And people are going to stay with you now because they don't have options, but when they have options again, it will be very interesting to see what happens and what companies retain their talent. No one really could have seen the pandemic coming, but it's a lot about how intentional you are, how intentional you were maybe with your processes now in your policies and how you approach remote work. But it's such a challenge from a talent standpoint, because I think you've been able to see, Hey, I can hire the best person in the world for my role. And now I'm returning to the office and I need to hire the best person in Santa Monica. And that's very different, and that's a trade off. 

Daryl Ogden: Yes. Yeah. It may be easier to get someone to come to Santa Monica than other places, but, yes, you're absolutely right.

I always come back to Lizzie, that is what people are looking for in their careers in general, and this is maybe even more true in games than in other careers. I'm just setting aside compensation for a moment, because everyone's going to figure out what their compensation needs to be and what their financial goals are. And that's going to be very specific for different individuals and different people will have different needs. So setting that apart, what people are looking for, I think and this is a high level of abstraction, but they're looking for meaning and agency. They're looking for a sense of meaning. Am I making a difference on this team for this studio in the industry and games as an example. And do I have the power, the control, the ability to go and do those things? And if those lines cross, if meaning and agency cross in a significant way, then you can hold onto your talent. If you don't give people meaning, they don't feel a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of there's something that I'm going for here that's bigger than me, you're not going to be able to hold on to them. And if they don't have a sense of ownership over their work at some level, the sense of that they have control or power over their work, they built you to do it, you're also not going to hold on to them. So those lines have to cross. And so organizations, you know, game studios that figure out how to make those lines cross for their top talent. They'll hold on to them. And those that don't, won't. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's very true. I have one last question. Before I ask it, I want to point people to your website to download your culture report, valuedcultures.com. 

The last question, you can anonymous, but can you share an example of where fostering a better culture within a game company led to significant results? And I'm sure you have so many of them. 

Daryl Ogden: Yeah, there are a lot, I would say. There's a studio that we worked with where, let's just say, it could have been this week, but it could have been the last three months they launched a game. And we engaged with them about a year ago. And their top team worked together for a long time, knew each other very well, but hadn't reorganized themselves after the pandemic. We're working a lot remotely. Actually, we're really missing each other. They thought that they understood each other, but they didn't. They had lots of assumptions that they had because they had known each other for a long time. 

And there was a lot of implicit trust, but maybe the explicit trust wasn't where it needed to be. So we did a diagnostic process for them- interviews, survey, workshop, and kind of showed them what the gap was between where they thought they were and where they actually were as a team and correlated that to where they were in terms of the game development. And that was really startling to them. And let's just say it got their attention and we tracked that change over time. Then for the subsequent months, we kept running the survey, kept working with their leadership- getting them more aligned. 

We saw the velocity of the game improve. We saw the quality of the game improve. And today you've got a big success out in the marketplace. But yeah, we won't name names, but it's something that internally we're very, very proud of and really delighted with the partnership.

Lizzie Mintus: That's the best. And see, that's your meaning. I have the meaning too, right? I bring people that make that game, you fix the process and helps so many people. 

Daryl Ogden: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So hopefully this holiday season, people will be enjoying this game. 

Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: We've been talking to Darrell Ogden, the co-founder at Valued Cultures. Darrell, where can people go to contact you, learn more about you, have you coached their leadership team? 

Daryl Ogden: Well, you can go to valuecultures.com and you can get to me there, but you can also get to me at daryl.ogden@valuedcultures.com, a way to email me directly. But there are all sorts of ways you can get to me. You can also find me on LinkedIn and you can message me on LinkedIn. We're there a lot. 

You and I spend time on LinkedIn together sometimes. So we can do that. So, any of those things are just great. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. 

Daryl Ogden: Thanks, Lizzie. It was really fun having this conversation. Look forward to seeing it come live and look forward to our podcast being published as well. So maybe they'll come out back to back. 

Lizzie Mintus: Check them both out. Thank you. 

Daryl Ogden: Yes, exactly. Okay.

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.