Rich Vogel is an award-winning executive producer with over 25 years of experience in the gaming industry. Today, he is the founder and studio head of T-Minus Zero. Before this, Rich built and led three major studios—Sony Online Entertainment Austin, Bioware Austin, and Bethesda Game Studio Battle Cry—together generating an impressive $3 billion in revenue. He’s also been a key player in running live operations for critically acclaimed MMORPGs like Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

In this episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast, Rich takes us through the journey of founding T-Minus Zero and the experience of running a remote-first studio. He talks about the importance of building a strong company culture, shares his insights from live game operations, and explores how AI is transforming the future of game development. From overcoming the challenges of creating efficient content pipelines to understanding the vital role of community management in a game's success, Rich offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it truly takes to thrive in the world of online games.

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

• The importance of fostering trust, communication, and independence in remote teams for high performance.
• Strategies for maintaining long-term player engagement through regular updates and evolving game content.
• The potential of AI tools to shape the future of game design and player experiences.
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Rich Vogel on Linkedin
• t-minuszero.com
• Raph Koster on the Here's Waldo Podcast
  

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. I am the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, 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 get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We're a boutique recruiting firm for the game and tech industries that values quality over quantity and data driven recruiting. Today, we have Rich Vogel with us. He is an award winning executive producer with over 25 years industry experience building online games.

He is the founder and studio head of T-Minus Zero. Prior to T-Minus Zero, he built out three studios, including Sony Online Entertainment- Austin, Bioware- Austin, and Bethesda Game Studio- Battle Cry, which generated 3 billion in revenue. Additionally, he was instrumental in running and overseeing live ops for four critically acclaimed MMO RPGs, including Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Star Wars The Old Republic. Let's get started. 

Thank you for being on. I'm happy that I finally got to talk to you. I want to start by talking about your newer studio, T-Minus Zero. 

Rich Vogel: Yeah, we formed about a year and a half ago. We kind of formed right at the moment when funding was drying up. So it was right under the edge there, so to speak. If it was going to be three months later, we probably wouldn't have been able to get funding. So I was glad I did it when I did. 

It's very hard out there right now. So we had a couple of offers, a couple of first party and equity financing. And I decided, you know, I've done equity financing before, and it's, you always are under chasing your burn rate. Like you always have to make decisions on survival. And that doesn't easily end well when you're making a game, because you're making decisions not based on the gameplay at all, or the user experience, you're basing it on survival. 

So I didn't want to go through that again- also extremely stressful. And so I decided to go to first party, and I've known NetEase for about, I'd say, 12 years, since 2008 I've known them and they've always a company that I respected.

Yes, they're in China. They've built a great gaming, sector in China and they were wanting to expand to the West. And I said, this is a great opportunity. So I talked with them, with the people I know there for a while, and I felt like they were the best match for us, and that's why we went with them as a first party studio.

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. And tell me more about your studio. What led you to start in a studio? Without getting into all of your past, but what made you decide, right now is the time I'm going to make a game. Did you have the idea? Did you have the team? Was it just, I have to do this now? 

Rich Vogel: I talked to a friend of mine who I worked with at Bethesda on Fallout 76, another title I actually worked on. And I worked with Mark Tucker and we had some ideas running around of the type of game we wanted to build. We talked about it for a while before we did anything about it. And we said, I think it's a great opportunity with all the investment going on to do it right now. And it's also a good transition for me out of a certain affinity. So we decided to put the pitch together and make our ways through the process of pitching to publishers and equity people. Then we came about the studio.

But yeah, it's interesting. You know, we had these ideas. We did pick one that we liked a lot. We're still working on that one right now. We're excited about it. We think it's something very different, which the irony about everything is when I was pitching this, I was pitching a co-op shooter. And everyone was saying, Oh, PVP is a game of service. PVP is the one that lasts longer. We don't know about co-op, right? Name one co-op game that lasts. 

And of course, Left 4 Dead was the first thing that came to my mind. And there are ones that have done well, but not nothing breakout to talk about. And I said, I think there's a huge demand for co-op games. I think that they're just, you have to figure out a good hook to get people involved. I think the community is better in a co-op game than PVP. PVP games have a community that doesn't tolerate very well. You know, when you go play and they expect you to be at their level, if you're not, you're out.

And so the community is better. And of course, we had some other plans that we're going to do, and then suddenly Helldivers came. And it just validated everything we pitched to all the publishers who were kind of against it. And it was funny that they just kind of proved that point that there is a demand for co-op games in this world. So it made me feel better. 

Lizzie Mintus: I was having this conversation yesterday. It seems like for a while, every studio was pretty much working on a very similar game, all of which have come out and no one's really hit it out of the park. So yeah, it turns out doing something a little bit different at the time was the right thing to do.

Rich Vogel: Yeah, we want to do something different. We wanted to build a player experience that people are familiar with. We picked an IP and the public domain as a foundational thing to build our game around. We're not using everything about that but it's enough to make it our own but when the people see it, they'll know exactly what it is and they know exactly what to do. And that to me is you know a little less riskier than doing the brand new IP. 

That's something that, to be honest with you, one of the biggest things and you see this out in the community out there- a lot of new IP has really had a hard problem building awareness. There are very few that actually have done a pretty good job. And I think that has a lot to do with, publishers today don't understand how to build morality in a marketplace today. It has changed so versus three, five, six years ago. It's so changed. Everything right now is, you're curated. Your information is curated to you by AI. 

And that's the way it works on every social platform that you on. It looks at how you're selecting things and will curate information to you. You have to learn how to break through that, and a lot of publishers do not understand that methodology anymore. You just can't buy TV ads. You can't go to the award show and buy and make a big splash there. And a PC magazine- who reads PC magazines anymore, right? 

People go out, look at some of the people who are well known players out there, and they look at what they're playing. Look at how they're playing, right? In fact, there was an article recently about games that are watched more than they are played. And that totally makes sense because when I pick up a game, I like watching people play the game so I can learn how to optimize my player experience when I go play the game. I want to figure out the best build out. I want to figure out the best selection when I'm building my character. I want to figure out the best strategy to defeat that boss or make that quest or mission and conquer it, right? And so I watch the experts play and that's how I absorb it, right? And that's the way, in my opinion, this generation has been brought up. 

It's about synchronous versus asynchronous communications. This generation is asynchronous. Our generation was synchronous, right? And so it's interesting when you communicate. When we communicate more today, I very rarely use email. I use Slack. I use other things, like Teams, to communicate with people. I very rarely ever use email anymore, right? It's the same philosophy, right? And I think, if you don't know how to build awareness, it's tough for brand new IPs out there. It really is, because you need to build it. And learning how to do that is hard.

Lizzie Mintus: So if you were to make a new game that is a new IP, what would you suggest that you do to build awareness, a true community, if you're not Valve? 

Rich Vogel: You know, building awareness has to be, in my opinion, where you would go. I wouldn't spend it on videos. I wouldn't spend it on magazine reviews. I would spend it on TikTok. I would spend it on places that people are at, right? And Discord and learning how to capture people by getting some influencers out there and getting some influences into your game and playing your game, right? 

Now, I don't like paying them a lot of times because I want them to come in and talk about our game. 

Lizzie Mintus: But sometimes, you 

Rich Vogel: have to fuel it, right? You have to fuel it. You have to pay them. That's just a fact of life, but something to help generate that buzz in your game. And it's a different approach, right? Totally different approach then what has happened in the past, even three years ago. And then looking at companies and understand how those algorithms are made to push that curated content to you and figure out best ways to do that and join forces with them. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So you're building a co-op semi mysterious new game. NetEase is backing you. How have you thought about building a studio? What kinds of things? I know you're very clear about your culture. Could you speak a little bit more to that and what fundamentals you put in place when you started?

Rich Vogel: Yeah, when we start a studio, one of the biggest things I always do, is figure out a mission statement and then our core values, right? And try to put our core values into our daily decision making process, because if you don't use them enough, they're just they're figureheads, right? And our mission statement is the kind of direction we want to head as a studio in the long term. So I always think about not where I'm at today and where I'm heading. And so I want to make sure we have the right match.

We're a remote first studio. So being a remote for a studio is interesting. Basically, it's a whole new way of communicating. It's a whole new way, because you're not in the office. You don't have the ability to walk by someone's desk and see what they're doing. You don't have that sense of community when you're there. So you have to build that. 

And to me, my first goals of our first year was, of course, getting to our concept phase and our prototype phase. But the biggest one was learning how to work together and becoming a high performance team. Now the high performance team usually takes a little longer to develop, but learning how to work together is key. And that's my top one goal is learning how everyone works. 

Everyone has a different vocabulary when they join a company. There's things you say, can mean differently to different people, right? And based on their experience, you have to form this vocabulary. This is a lot of learning how to work together and understanding how people work- what the best environment is, how they work, and figuring out best ways and processes to help people achieve their goals. 

And in the pre-production phases, which is where we're at right now, it's kind of loose a little bit. It's very chaotic, right? Because you're trying to figure out what your game is all about. And so you're trying different things, but we don't have a turn to do our game. So I want to be able to work out processes that kind of timebox things in a way that we can see how long things are taking. And putting pressure on people is important because you have to have a responsibility, because you don't have forever to make a game.

And in this market, the thing I've seen with a lot of companies, I've seen these huge teams take five years or more with ungodly 600 people to make. I think with the salaries of today, I think that's not sustainable anymore personally. And so when we started out the studio, we were going to be a smaller car team and we're going to do a lot of codev and outsource it to make up for it and keep the core team kind of tight. And I'd say some of the heavy lifting tasks, we'll work together with co developers on doing, right? 

It reduces risk, and it helps us financially. One of the biggest things I look at even when I hire people with salaries and things like that is I don't look at where we are today. I always have a thing on my spreadsheet that shows me what my burn rate is at launch. And I know and understand that I have to make that much revenue a year to break even, right? And that's just headcount. Headcount Is only 80% of the cost. There's a lot more cost involved, especially when you launch a game. It also involves marketing, go to market, all the live ops costs are all there that adds to just the development costs. 

So there's a figure there that you have to make. I want them to beat me, is, do I think we'll have a successful game? I certainly hope so. My goal is to make sure we have enough runway, that we can grow the game over time. That means we have to break even. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you're a planner. I like that. 

Rich Vogel: Right. Exactly. I always have this fear, right? One of my biggest fears is when you put your heart and soul on something and no one shows up. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, we won't say names, but we always see this happen lately. 

Rich Vogel: That's devastating. That is so devastating to a team. It is my biggest fear. It's what keeps me awake at night. I want to make sure we make a player experience that people will come to and have a vibrant- when I say vibrant community, that means a good community around it. The only way you have a good community around is to have a good game. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's true. That's the magical question. 

So you talk about getting to know people's working style. How do you actually go about doing that? You have certain questions, best practices, really intense onboarding. How do you figure that out remotely? 

Rich Vogel: We're learning, right? This is my first, remote first studio. I've always formed studios where we're on site. So this has been our huge learning experience for me in the past year and a half to learn what works, what doesn't work. 

To me, we had to kind of change the type of people who are hiring, right? We want to hire low maintenance people. What I want to do is hire people who understand the passion or passion about what we're building, who you don't have to tell. They'll look for things to do. You give them assignments. They'll get it done, because they said they will get it done. They'll know if they need help, they'll tell you. And if they see gaps, they'll jump in and help. That's a low maintenance person. 

Lizzie Mintus: And 

Rich Vogel: someone asked me on our website, because I actually posted a job description. I mentioned low maintenance and people picked up on it, right? And this kid asked me what low maintenance was. I said, awesome question. Let me explain to you what low maintenance was, because I think that's a great question to ask. And so many people said, I'd much rather have a low maintenance person that's good than a rock star. 

Lizzie Mintus: Especially remote, where there's Slack messages that can be misconstrued and people don't always know how to work together. A lot easier in person. 

Rich Vogel: Exactly. And again, people who know how to work together well, right? And of course, when you're hiring remotely, it's always difficult. Sometimes you miss on the hire, right? And it happens. I think that we understand, we learn from it. And because when we're such a small studio as we are right now, every hire matters. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. Especially, it's more make or break for you, for sure. 

Rich Vogel: It's more a break when we're smaller, but yes, every hire does matter to us. That's why we're very picky. I totally agree with that. We've had positions open longer than people expected us to, but we want to make sure that we have the right person that fits what we're doing. They're excited about it, and that they have the experience and the passion that we need to drive us to where we need to go. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. They're low maintenance. 

Rich Vogel: And low maintenance, right? Yeah, that's the term I use. I think it's helped us in the past. Our older hires have been pretty good, but the recent ones have actually been really, I think, a lot more blending into this remoteness.

When you ask, are you okay with being remote? I even ask that question. We do, right? Because some people need to think about that. Are you okay with what it means to be remote? Think about that, cause it's somewhat hard. You're in your house, you're working, you could easily get isolated or turtle, I call it, right? And with programmers and others, some people are introverted, right? So you have to help push that out of them. Speak up. It's okay. 

So one of the biggest things I think about building a culture is making sure we have an open culture. Anybody could say anything. I'm not going to sit there as long as they're considerate when they say it and not being a jerk. When they say it, I'm fine with it. And know the timing of when to say things too. I'm fine with that right and I try to open that up to everyone. So they don't feel like they have to hide anything from us because that to me is the worst environment to be in 

Lizzie Mintus: That's true. Yeah. So anything else you look for when you're building out a high performing team 

Rich Vogel: I would say, besides low maintenance, people who like to push themselves? When I say that, they feel uncomfortable. I tell people all the time. I'm very uncomfortable. And I've always will be until we launch this project to see where we are, right? And I tell people it's okay to be uncomfortable. We're in pre-production. Things are a little chaotic, right? It's okay. We're trying to find things. 

When we start getting into the vertical slice and we understand what we're building Then I start saying, it's time to get stuff done. No more noodling, let's move right?

And so it's really interesting. When you hire people, there are doers and then there are noodlers, right? And that's the thing about it. I want to hire the people who want to feel uncomfortable. They will push boundaries, which is what we want. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, one of my core values is GSDR, which is, get shit done right. So you're going to get shit done, but you're also going to get it done right. You're not going to compromise on quality. I think that's really important. And I love people. You have to get your job done. And if you can't get your job done, you can just say, Hey, I need some help here. That's fine too. 

Rich Vogel: That's exactly my opinion. That's the type of person that we're looking for. And again, you have to learn how to ask those questions. You ask them differently, because it's interesting how you talk to a person in the beginning and then talk to them in the end. They're totally different because they're absorbing what's going on in the pattern, and they try to match what they're doing. So you try to dig deeper, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you do have to ask the trickier questions to discern that or do references.

I want to hear a bit about your Ultima Online time. I had Raph on my podcast. He talked about sleeping under his desk and typing in the cold in his fingerless gloves, which is such a good story. But you were a senior producer there for three years. What stories do you have from your time there? 

Rich Vogel: Yeah, we were a very small team. We were about eight or nine people when we started. A very core team. Most of us, all of us in fact, were Mudders. So multi-user dungeons are what we played, right? All of us were. We all came from that. But there was this core RPG single player group within Origin that wasn't brought up in that realm, right? So we had to kind of teach them that building an online game is not like a single player game. There are a lot of considerations that you have to make in these games.

And so the game got really a lot of attention through the investors because it was online, and online at that time was huge, right? This is before the online bubble burst, right? It was huge. And so suddenly there's a lot of attention. And so I was hired to come in by EA actually to come down and help launch the game.

I've had experience with Meridian 59, a very successful game at 3DO. We were also working on Mike Magic online. I got interviewed to go down there to Origin from San Francisco. I moved down there because I thought it was a great opportunity, 'cause what I saw there was a lot of potential.

There wasn't any game at that time I had and so I had to build a lot of, not only game infrastructure working with Raph and his team, but also the infrastructure for LiveOps, which wasn't there at all. So, in a very short period of time, because I knew our leash was a year and a half or so and that's it. So I had a very short period of time to build a lot of systems that we built from early 59, that took a lot longer to do into Ultima Online launch. 

And it was interesting. I believe Raf said this about us. We were in a part of the building being renovated. And so there wasn't much heat going on. There were open areas of the building, actually, where we were. You walk up to the suite and it's basically, you can look out and see the trees and everything over here. And then there's one space that had the doors and everything else- that was the Ultima Online team on the third floor. 

And the thing I learned from that, we had a community manager we hired from Meridian 59. Well, I think it was the first time ever where, I think my perception of, a community manager was ever used. And we hired someone with a theater background. I like people with theater because they understand how the audience works and they understand how to talk to the audience in ways, and improv. And so we hired a community person. Raph is awesome at community and we used him for a long time and we hired a community on top of that.

Managing this game was very interesting. We were put on a very bad deadline that was very unrealistic for our launch. We just weren't ready, from a backend technical point of view. And so we had to launch earlier than expected, which caused a lot of issues at launch that could have been avoided. And the unfortunate thing is we were watching the statistics around our website. We had nine million unique people entering that website 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Rich Vogel: That was huge, huge. The potentialist game was huge. And I kind of tried to communicate that up, but they were a very quarter driven company at that time. They didn't understand online 

I said this is not a fire and forget. They thought it was firing. That's the way they treat it, right? This is not fire and forget. Let's really launch it great. We can build it over time. And I told him, you know, we could get to a million players. I really do see it looking at our uniques that are hitting the website.

And by launching early, we weren't prepared. We had lots of back end server issues that we had to deal with in real time, which we did. We got the service really better, but there were so many edge cases because what we built was so out there. We built a seamless world, which means you can walk graphically from one section of the map to another.

You're actually going from one CPU to another CPU, right? And everything's being handed off in real time. And those borders are where people were manipulating things and causing things to happen, like duplication was going on, and all sorts of exploits were happening. 

And then we built housing. So we had the first game where you can actually build a house in an area, go in there and furnish it any way you want to craft a brilliant crafting system. And the problem was the house was never secure because the way it was put onto the terrain and everything wasn't all fixed. There's tons of edge cases that we do not think about, right?

People would put in teleporters outside the bank, for again, even bank buildings had this where we had someone put in a teleporter right inside the bank where you couldn't see it. You'd transition inside and they got transported to an island where a whole bunch of P cares are there. They stripped their clothes and everything out of them and left them on the island because they couldn't get off. There were so many stories where we said, well, that's kind of unique. At towers, they actually started stacking things on towers to break into someone's tower. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, yeah. 

Rich Vogel: And again, these are things that we had in the game that acted that way, but they were used by players as exploits. So we were constantly trace checking back down. I think the biggest thing that we kind of gave the foreshadowing of things to come on UO was the night we closed beta down. And I was sitting there right next to Rich Garrett, we were playing, we had this special event where everyone, Rich Garrett was at this castle, everyone went and met with him because we were celebrating closing the beta down. 

And we asked Rich, are you invulnerable? He said, yeah. And he wasn't. He didn't understand how to do that. We should have shown him. But a PKer came out, shot him with a fire wall. He died, and a whole bunch of GMs went around him, and that made the news. We couldn't believe it. The next day, it was in USA Today. It was everywhere, about the assassination of Lord British, on opening night. It was the best PR move that we could have ever done, actually. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I was going to say that was a good move, too. 

Rich Vogel: The irony about that is it foreshadowed all the PKing problems that we're going to have on our game. And we had a lot. We had game masters who we gave a lot of power to. We had a very powerful client that we built with a God mode. And that God mode gave a lot of power to the game masters. And game masters show up and become policemen. So we had 24/7 game masters in the game until we were able to stabilize it for a while. 

And we had people who were exploiting us. We had people who were harassing other people. We had a woman call us up one evening and I got called on, about her daughter playing UO. A PKer came up to her daughter, took her cat, killed it, and then skinned it, and gave her the hide. She was devastated. She couldn't believe this game. 

The GMs were telling me, well, this is an M rated game. And I said, No, no, no, let's not do that. Let's give her another pet. But she was devastated by it, right? Here's a great example of all the stuff. And there were some good things about it because I was walking around everyone, myself, Starlong, which is called Blackborn, and Rich Garrett had custom outfits.

So everyone kind of knew who we were. I was to pray, Lord British and Lord Blackburn. And so when I walked the world, people knew who I was. And this woman asked me to come in for dinner. And I sat at her table at dinner. She was actually talking to her husband in Germany who was in the military. That to me was a great experience, right? That's something I never knew could be done in this game. 

And people were doing this, and again, this is before Discord. This is before any of that. This basically, what Ultima Online became, is a 3D chat for people, right? A 3D experience that people and their friends could come together and play. And it had a very powerful system all around it. So we had an event system. This is way before Fortnite. We had Hulk Hogan in to wrestle. Everyone came and watched the wrestling match with Lord Blackthorn. All this kind of stuff. We already did these events in UO. 

Some of the technology was such amazing technology. We actually had some shards that we didn't use right away. And we use them as recreational shards. Think of Disneyland. So we did things in that shard where people can take their character to that shard without any consequence, or you could play a creature, for example. You can play a dragon. You can play all sorts of things.

You can change it in the next three months. We change it to, okay, if you die, that's permanent in that server, right? All sorts of things we did and people loved it, right? So there's, it was such a great era to experiment online. And of course, a lot of people have stories about the PKing and all the things that were going on. It truly was fearful to walk out of the city, when your cities were known as their safe areas. And there are people who set up businesses. We had vendors that we set up in the game where people could craft and make great things and they would actually go and sell their stuff. And the vendors were automatic dispensers basically. So they didn't have to be there online. And that was amazing. 

The first two Christmases though were rough on us. The first Christmas, we had Christmas trees. Everyone opened up the Christmas trees. The problem is all the lights were callbacks to the server. And so when everyone lit their Christmas trees up, it crashed the server, right?

So we were called in to go fix that immediately because people were crashing the servers. Then the next one, people were stealing the Santa Claus outfits, and there were naked Santa Clauses running around saying ho ho ho. And the PK guilds were actually using those Santa outfits to go get players, and it was just one catastrophe after another on the Christmas celebrations that we had to deal with.

And we knew when Christmas time came, it's funny. The first Christmas, I gave everyone off and I was actually monitoring the service. So at home I was actually monitoring the service and I, and of course I saw that in real time and I was just, oh, great. And of course 'cause we had to go ask our developers to come in and help fix the game. It was a lot of fun though. I'll have to say, some of the stories. Yeah, that's one of 'em. 

We had one guy that was crashing the server through some text that he was able to put into the causes of some characters in the text and the server to crash. And so we had to get him to do that, so I actually had GMs go out and harass him. And get him to be mad, to go PK him. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh. 

Rich Vogel: And he flips over there. We had a reputation system he flipped over. And he could reset. And so, when the server came back on, when the server crashed, that's why he did it. We got him to do that. And that was kind of a fun thing to watch in real time.

 And then I called up the person, and we found out who it was. I called him up, and his parents answered the phone. I said, this is Rich Vogel, I run Ultima Online, your son is causing issues on our servers, harassing people. We are banning him. And then you could hear her yelling at her kid when we got off the phone.

 But yeah, like I said, tons of stories on UO. It's probably one of the favorite games I ever worked on. It was an amazing time, a game that had so much power. It changed the way people think about online, for sure. And it was the first true, in my opinion, massively multiplayer game.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, and you learned so much from Ultima Online. As you said earlier, things have really changed in the last few years for how you make a game, how your game gets found, how you keep people happy. Can you talk a bit about LiveOps in 2024, 2025 and on? And how do you make a successful LiveOps game?

Rich Vogel: Well, so the biggest thing I've learned is pipelines. You got to have your pipelines in place to build content at a good clip. If you don't, players will leave. This has happened to so many projects, so many online games that are launched, it takes months and months and months, six months to even build a patch that's decent, right? That's crazy. 

One of the best people has done is Fortnite. You have to build a cadence. When you have a couple of small ones, a couple big ones every month, and a really big quarterly update, and then a big one at the end of the year, maybe twice a year. That kind of stuff is critical to be successful. So you're constantly evolving the game, constantly changing the game for feedback. Players see it. They love it. They take community feedback. You figure out what's the biggest thing that you get. You involve the community in decisions and help and get the community part of the process of building in the game actually once it's launched. And you embrace that. 

I think the best, and I'll have to say this, the best launch, in my opinion, was Helldivers so far in today's launch. It had the best community management I've seen in a long time. The problem they had was they weren't able to update as fast as they needed to, right? They just released a major update. For a long time, that was their first real, I'd say, major update. You gotta do it faster than that. If you don't, you're just not going to have your audience with you in the long term, right? Because you want to keep them happy. Now it's okay if your audience comes and goes, that's fine. 

That's, by the way, normal. So I don't have any problem with audiences coming back when something new comes in and they play it for a while, right? You'll have a core base with you, but that core base is mobile So that's the big thing today. It's mobile people go where their friends go and whatever is a new hotness, they'll probably go over there. 

The key is, always have something here that they understand. Oh, i'm familiar with this and I actually enjoyed my time here. I'm going to come back with this new update and play it, right? And you get this big spike, which is awesome. And you grow the service over time with those spikes as well. Cause you get new players coming in from that. People's friends are expanded and they invite them to come, Hey, this is a great game. Come on and join me. 

So to me, the other way is how we build awareness. Definitely, I would say we work with companies that understand the new abilities with the algorithms, having to reach, also posting on TikTok and other Discord and other places like that. And having good community management, right? Listening to players, talking to players, have a single voice sometimes is also great. 

This is what Helldivers did, had a single voice talking to a community that everyone knew and respected. That's what I love, right? And how dev gets involved. I always kind of get dev involved in that too. So LiveOps, again, what I call heartbeat or cadence is really, really important. 

I think down the road, I think UGC is important. I think today's generation has played with Roblox, they've played with Minecraft, they understand it. I can remember, one of the biggest things that I could not compete well in Fortnite because I could not build a tower fast enough to snipe somebody like this generation can, right? 

And what is interesting is, when they took the building out, they expanded their audience by 30% because now people like me can come in and play. 'Cause again, I don't have that DNA. I mean, I can build stuff. I've been a level designer, but not at that speed that players can do it today.

And the thing about it is with AI coming about, AI generative tools, I think what happens is with a lot of UGC, you only have maybe 2% that I call up to dev quality or decent, right? Everything else is kind of eh, but I think with AI generated tools, I think that gap can close. I think you'll see probably about 60, maybe 50 to 40, I'd say 40% maybe in five years, you'll start seeing it going up to 60% of actually some good stuff coming out by people who are modders 

Lizzie Mintus: By modders, okay. And then talk to me about integrating AI. If you're starting a new game studio, for instance, how might you think about using AI in your game? 

Rich Vogel: By the way, gamers have used AI and games for a very long time. I hate to tell everyone this. We've been using it for many, many years. And this is nothing new to us. Our creatures are all AI generated. We have NPCs that are AI generated. 

What is new is the AI generation tools that allow us to, one of the things I'll say is, when we did our pitch, we didn't have much of an art team at all. In fact, we used Midjourney to do our concepting, right? And they did a very good job. Midjourney and did an awesome job at our concepting. It's great for concepting. It's great to try things out that are new and try them. There's still a lot of hesitation with the asset side of things because we don't know the copyright issues that are going to come and get us eventually. And so there's hesitation there.

And some people say, well I can always train it on just my IP stuff. And I said, but the reality is that's not true because the stuff they're using that is training on their AI was built around everything else, right? So it wasn't raw. It's not. They were built over all the browsing and everything else going on that they were using to get the tool to where it is. For example, they recognize what a hand is, or eye, or face, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Sometimes they think it's a foot. 

Rich Vogel: Exactly. I'm just saying, AI, right now it doesn't do a great job, but it will, trust me. It will get there. And for me, the asset side of things was, we could use AI to do some of what we call LODs, which are the low poly models that we use so that we can fit more things on the screen, right? And so things at a distance that are low poly, things that are in front of you are high poly.

We can use AI generated tools to help us generate those for us, right? That's a mundane task. Some of the mundane tasks like quality check our maps, so there are no holes that you don't fall through, right? Or quality check our creatures. We can iterate things, explore things faster with AI generated tools, so that we can say, well, what if we did this? And AI can generate very quickly and we can go see it, right? 

If there are copyright issues, we'll probably do it ourselves, right? Versus using AI to generate it. There are things like, one of the best things I heard that I went to a game summit last year, that I thought was very interesting is companies are taking actors and training them using AI. So they basically train them to say a whole bunch of things and AI will take it and put it together into a dialogue. Now, they still pay the actors the fees and everything as if they were there. The great thing is they don't have to schedule them, right? They can let them sample it. They can let them listen to it and improve it and they can use it in the game. And when you have high profile actors, that's really nice. You pay them anyway, you don't have to, but use their time, which is the key. And so this saves the developer time, saves the actor, they still get paid the great opportunity as long as they approve it. 

Lizzie Mintus: As long as they approve it.

Rich Vogel: As long as they approve it, right? That's the best way to attempt. There's lots of hesitation, especially in the Screen Actors Guild and all the other stuff about AI taking over. And I think you have to embrace AI. And the best way to embrace AI is to say, okay, yeah, you can do that as long as I get to approve it. And you pay me. And I'm fine with that. And that's exactly what we need to embrace AI for, right? 

I mean, I'm a photographer and I know if I had my stuff stolen and used somewhere else, I feel like, well, that was great. I definitely think there are lots of ways AI can be used and one of them is the audio one I gave you. There's so many different ways. For example, we use Copilot in meetings to take notes, right? And it summarizes our meetings. And so if someone missed the meeting, they can go back to Copilot and look at what was discussed. And it actually is pretty good. There's some things that don't quite get, but it gets about, I'd say 85, 90% of it.

Lizzie Mintus: It's awesome. It says, Hey, Lizzie, here are your follow up items. Here are your action items. Would you like to send this out to everybody? It's great. Yeah. And obviously everything's still improving. It's new tech, but it's super helpful. 

Rich Vogel: It's super helpful. So those are what I call efficiency tools. So I think AI generated stuff will help with our efficiency of building content. That's where I think AI will do for us in the future. And I'm a big fan of it, always been. When I saw what was going on, I just thought it was amazing. And I knew. Right now it's very much in its infancy. Give it five years. And I think you're gonna see some really good results of smaller teams to do these big, big games now.

Again, it's about efficiency. That is where AI, I think, will have a huge impact in our industry. But today, I think that there's some subtle impact. I think in five years, I think you'll start seeing a lot bigger impact. You know, a lot of people think it's the silver bullet. You see a lot of execs talk about it all the time. It's not a silver bullet right now, but it will eventually be there. I think there's still some technology that needs to be developed, and some of these tools that help us, again, become more efficient and build our content. 

It will never take the ability for a designer to go in and build and craft a player experience, because to me I don't think AI is just not there. And it won't be there for quite some time. That's a craft That's an art.

Lizzie Mintus: I think about that with recruiting too. I mean, AI has some uses in theory, but do you want to talk to AI about your job? Maybe, like maybe it's going to help you with your resume and some stuff, but you really want a person that knows you and thinks of you. And I feel like more and more we crave that personal relationship. So I think about that. 

Rich Vogel: You know, it's interesting. I've seen rejections from people and friends of mine, and I know that's AI. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, yes. AI has its own issues for screening and biases. And people have this too. But yes, I think perhaps it could help you. But it's not the answer. Yes.

Rich Vogel: I always tell people AI is based on us, what we do. That's what it's looking at. We are all biased in our different ways, right? And so that bias is transferred. in that tool. Trust me, it's there. 

Lizzie Mintus: It is absolutely there. I have one last question. I want to point people to your website T-minuszero.com.

One of the things I love about podcasting is asking people for their lessons. What do you wish you knew five years ago, 10 years ago when you started your career? Because there's so many lessons and trials and tribulations you've gone through and you could save someone else some time by sharing your learnings with them. So if you could give one piece of advice to help listeners in the game industry, what would that be?

Rich Vogel: Listen to people. And what I say to that is always look at their lens that they look through, not just yours. And if you ever get angry, go walk away. Don't ever respond in anger, ever, ever, ever. Calm down, look at their perspective, see why they're doing, why they're saying it, and then interact with that person or group. 

I've always found that everyone has a different perspective. Everyone has a different lens they look through things. And so there are times when, you know, as I was younger, I was very impatient because I wanted to get stuff done. And I had to learn how everyone does things at their different paces. 

Everyone's not the same as you and you have to learn how to build a relationship with that person and basically make them become the person you want them to become when you're building a game, right? And help them lead them to that. Don't expect it right away. And so that patience and listening to me are very, very important from a communications point of view. And I'm still learning that, right? 

And my biggest one at my level now that I have to learn, cause I've been such a doer for such a long, long time. Sometimes I want to jump in and just do it. And I have to realize, Oh, I have people that do that. I don't want to walk over them. I want to make sure that I trust them. I say implicit trust is really important, you have to trust people that you hired to do their jobs. And sometimes they may not be aware of things that you're aware of because you have more experience. You need to help communicate that to them and not jump in and do it, right. 

And that to me is a very hard lesson. Even today, I have to know I can't do that. I have to talk about this and figure out different ways of attacking it than just jumping in and doing it. Because my voice as the position I am as a head of the studio has more leverage or power than what I have. That person's voice does. And so people will listen to me over that. And I had to learn how to control that. 

Lizzie Mintus: I have a friend who said he mutes himself on his computer during meetings, and he also mutes his microphone. So if he tries to talk, he's double muted. Which I think is funny advice. 

Rich Vogel: Yes. I remember sending an email to all responding, when I should have just responded to that person. And you do the recall and that recall never works by the way. 

Lizzie Mintus: Listen, listen, life hack, put a delay of a minute on your email. I, at the early start of my career, replied all to a thing I should not have replied all to. Yes. And you just have that like a, Oh shit moment. So I always delay. And it's so handy because, and I mean, sometimes you even send an email halfway through sending it, right?

Rich Vogel: Right. I have that delay built in now for that one reason. I actually learned that lesson too. I said, man, that was the best thing someone taught me. I'll tell you that right now. 

Lizzie Mintus: And what you said about not responding when you're angry reminded me, I have a friend who works in HR at a large company and uses AI to help them work through scenarios and have appropriate wording to talk to somebody and get to what they want.

So basically HR is AI now. And not that it replaces HR by any means, but you could get some good consulting from AI on how to deal with it. 

Rich Vogel: I was saying in development, we use it to try things very quickly and learn whether it's going to work or not. That's exactly what- well, let me go through scenarios so I can figure out the best approach to saying a tough message, right? That's awesome. I love that. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's a good use case. We've been talking to Rich Vogel, the CEO at T-Minus Zero Entertainment. Rich, where can people go to work for you or contact you or learn more about you? 

Rich Vogel: Yeah, absolutely. Go to t-minuszero.com. That's our website. And I'm on LinkedIn, you'll find me there under Rich Vogel, so please LinkedIn to me, if you need to contact me. I'm pretty good about it. I do have a lot of people on my LinkedIn, but I'm very careful about making sure I respond 'cause I hate people who don't respond to something, and ghost you so I try to respond as best I can. 

Lizzie Mintus: Amazing. Thank you so much. 

Rich Vogel: Thank you. I really appreciate it. You take care.

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.