The Influence of Writers on the Gaming Industry With Dean Takahashi

March 15, 2024

The Influence of Writers on the Gaming Industry With Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is the Lead Writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat, a technology news website that provides news, analysis, features, interviews, and videos. He boasts over 28 years of experience as a tech journalist, with a dedicated focus on gaming. Joining VentureBeat in 2008, Dean previously contributed to esteemed publications such as The Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. A prolific author, Dean has penned two acclaimed books, Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Additionally, he spearheads the organization of the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences, cementing his role as a prominent figure in the gaming industry.

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

Dean Takahashi gives an overview of VentureBeat and GamesBeat
A day in the life of a gaming industry writer
Dean reflects on some of his most memorable stories
How has the gaming industry progressed during Dean’s career tenure?
Dean’s advice for pitching stories to games journalists
Emerging trends in the gaming industry
Dean explores the evolution of journalism and its intersection with generative AI
The games Dean considers the most impactful in the industry

In this episode…

Gaming writers play a vital role in driving discourse, fostering innovation, and shaping the cultural landscape of the gaming industry. Through their passion, expertise, and dedication, they continue to inspire and influence the trajectory of gaming for years to come.

Dean Takahashi is a pioneering gaming journalist who covers gaming industry developments, provides industry insights, and conducts investigative reporting. Beyond providing critical analysis, which helps consumers make informed purchasing decisions, he uncovers stories and reports on industry trends. Additionally, developers, studios, and publishers look to writers to unveil emerging trends in the gaming industry.

Tune in to the latest episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast as Lizzie Mintus sits down with Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat, to delve into the diverse impact of gaming writers. Dean provides insights into VentureBeat and GamesBeat, offers a glimpse into the daily routine of a gaming industry writer, and explores the evolution of journalism alongside its convergence with generative AI.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

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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: 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. Before introducing today's guest I want to give a big thank you to Perrin Kaplan for introducing us and to Ed Fries for introducing me to Perrin. It all connects.

Today we have Dean Takahashi with us. He is the lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has covered game news for 27 years and has been at VentureBeat for 15 years. He also leads GamesBeat's events. Let's get started. Thanks for being on the show, Dean.

Dean Takahashi: Yeah, thank you, Lizzie. I appreciate it.

Lizzie Mintus: Hopefully everybody is familiar with GamesBeat and VentureBeat. If they're not, can you give a bit of background?

Dean Takahashi: Yeah, I've been a journalist my whole career for about 35 years now. Most of that time I spent as a tech writer, and then about 27 years of that now as a game writer as well. I used to be 80 percent focused on tech and 20 percent on games. So games is almost like the side hustle part of the beat, but around the 27 year mark when I was at the Wall Street Journal, I started covering games as a full time beat. And so I've been doing that ever since. 15 years at the VentureBeat, I helped start the GamesBeat site and also the GamesBeat events. I've been curating speakers for those events the whole time.

Lizzie Mintus: What a curation you have. Can you share a GamesBeat events? What's coming up? What we can look forward to?

Dean Takahashi: Yeah we did finish back in December our first GamesBeat at the Game Awards event, which was more like a celebration of gaming. It was like a shorter half day event. Now we have about three events a year including that one coming up in December of 2024. But our next event is GamesBeat Summit coming May 20th and 21st in Los Angeles. And then we will have a GamesBeat next event sometime in the fall as well.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, everybody wants to know. My first question, Dean, how many articles can you write per day?

Dean Takahashi: I can publish a lot more than I can actually write because I often get the information in advance. An example for the most recent Consumer Electronics Show I had I think on the Main News Day published 24 articles on that day and that was a lot of work. Some of those are definitely live based on going to press conferences and just listening to what they said and publishing as soon as I can.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. Yeah. You have the most efficient system. Everyone I talked to comments on how much you get done. Pretty impressive.

Dean Takahashi: I try to also pay attention to the quality level and sometimes I have to dial back how many stories I do in order to just concentrate on some that I can do better. I think it's constant struggle to balance that between just, there's so much, many things that happen in the game industry that you want to write about that you feel like should be chronicled or recorded, in the first draft of history, right? But you can't get through them all and at some point you cut it off and say, okay, here's the ones I can do well, here's the stories I can tell well, and that's what I'd rather do.

Lizzie Mintus: So how do you decide if you can do it well or not? Just based on the amount of information, passion?

Dean Takahashi: I think maybe if he can bring something unique to that story that maybe nobody else has insights into. So that often means, interviewing them in advance or they're looking at their release well in advance and then trying to come up with something that is my own sort of unique spin on it or talking to the right people. And, making sure that the stories that you're initiating are ones that you feel like these are the people everybody wants to hear from.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What's the most popular story that you've ever written?

Dean Takahashi: Oh, wow. This gets to some of the downside of game journalism and dealing with social media was when I was writing about Cuphead. It was a particularly difficult game that came from Microsoft and another fledgling studio. And it was something that I tried out. I went to a games comm event in Germany and I had about 25 minutes to play the game, walking into it cold. I recorded the video and I thought, wow, I did really bad playing this game, right? It was just something I had no clue I was walking into.

And then I went back home and said to these guys. You know what? I think this video is so bad that maybe I shouldn't publish it. It's just embarrassing. And then somebody said no. Why don't you just publish it as a joke? It's oh, look how bad Damien is. And so I did that, and that turned out to be ill advised because about a million people watched the video.

I'm not kidding, a million people watched the video. There was a narrative some of the, people who don't like game journalists or don't like journalists latched onto, which was, Oh, see, look, these game journalists are unqualified to do what they do. They're the gatekeepers around games. And yet, they're so unskillful at playing these games, they don't even know what they're doing. So that was the narrative that took off. It became a Dean Takahashi meme that I was not so good at playing games. So that was probably, unfortunately, the most popular story and hopefully not something that I will be remembered for as my primary achievement in life.

Lizzie Mintus: I think you've done many other things. Do you have any other really memorable stories from your journalism days?

Dean Takahashi: I have tried to do some investigative work for stories that, are not always fun to tell, but almost seem more necessary or to shed light on something that's happening that you should know more about.

One of them was on Microsoft's handling of the flaws in their game console, the Xbox 360 back when it launched. And I did a lot of work after that launch, had written like a couple of books on the Microsoft Games business. One on the Xbox and one also on the Xbox 360.

And so I learned, a lot from insiders about things that transpired. And, there were a lot of things, a lot of points along the way where Microsoft could have been more forthcoming about the problems that they had with their game console. They didn't disclose these things, in the timeliest manner, and it wound up, leading to their biggest write off in history. $1.1 billion, and they had a lot of angry gamers on their hands and testifiably, I think.

So that I wrote about a lot of what happened on the inside. In that story. It ran way back in 2009. But I also had a story that ran more recently about the tough working conditions at a company that made some beloved games like Ori and the Will of the Wisps Moon Studios, and how the founders were pretty abusive when they talked to the entire staff, which was all remote working staff. A very interesting sort of landmine in running companies that you don't normally think about. It was a story about a company with toxic founders that most people didn't really know about.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. But maybe people can read it, listen to it, consume it and gain knowledge and become better. I guess that's probably the hope.

Dean Takahashi: And anybody thinking about taking jobs at a place like that, they have to walk in with their eyes open.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot more information. I was just chatting on my last podcast about that. You can do a lot of research on how the company really is.

What kind of story do you feel most personally fulfilled to write?

Dean Takahashi: I enjoy writing stories about people that I have talked to again and again, mark their progress. It feels like what we have with GamesBeat over time that we've developed is more like a community. We see a lot of the same people come back to our conferences or a lot of people come back to us to tell us the latest twist in their stories. Jenny Xu is one of these who I wrote about back when she had won a contest for a running game that she did as part of a n accelerator program that Niantic had done, the makers of Pokemon Go. Just this week I wrote a story about how she raised $6.3 million for the game, Run Legends, and how it's published now and her Telopha Games studio is expanding. It's fun to, come back to people at different points in the career, sometimes they're not always successful but it is meaningful to track people and how you can explain how important they are and what progress they're making in a very difficult industry of making games.

Lizzie Mintus: Jenny is a superhuman. She was on my podcast.

Dean Takahashi: Nice.

Lizzie Mintus: Doing it all. It's fun. It's really fun to watch people and see their careers blossom and see them succeed. And like you said, even if their story is not the happiest of any and because it's games and making games are miraculous, at least there are some good lessons that they can teach other people.

How has the industry evolved since you've been reporting in games?

Dean Takahashi: The one thing that I noted when Jenny raised her money was that another woman named Sandra Marshall was the chief.

She was named the chief operating officer at Alchemy Labs virtual reality games company. And I was thinking about it and I was like, when was the last time? I wrote two such stories in a day of successful women making big moves in the game industry, and it happens all too rarely, things like this. So it was at least worth noting to me that Yeah, it is nice that the game industry has progressed and evolved in a way so that it's possible for women to do this. But it's also in some ways disappointing that there isn't more progress and that this kind of thing still knocks you forward. It should be so common, right?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, progress is exciting. And thank you for having the Women GamesBeat breakfast too. That was the highlight for me. It's really special to be with a bunch of other women in the industry and share notes and see what they're doing and just feel the support. Thanks for doing.

Dean Takahashi: No, thank you. And you're welcome. Yeah, it's always fun.

Lizzie Mintus: That is. What criteria do prioritize if you're reviewing a game, how do you think about analyzing it?

Dean Takahashi: One thing to note is that much of my job is not reviewing games now. I do play games and I do review them because of things like that Cuphead episode, I focus more on the games that I really like or, say, specialize in. That's a lot of military shooter games or strategy games. And I'd leave a fair amount of the reviewing to some of our other writers Rachel Kaiser and Mike Manotti. They do a very good job and they have more diverse interests than I do.

So when I look at some of these games, Call of Duty is a good example of my kind of game and I can look back on all of the other Call of Duty games that I've played and whether or not this one that's up, this year meets with my satisfaction or if, there's just enough things wrong with it that I feel like, Oh, this might not be the right way to go for this franchise. Sometimes that is a signal as to whether or not, that call of duty is going to be successful that year. And if it's not successful it could be off by a couple of billion dollars on the revenues, right? It would be a disappointing year. That's the case in the past year where people were disappointed with the single player campaign in Call of Duty because it was so short compared to 20 years worth of Call of Duty campaigns.

When that kind of thing happens, we have to assess how big a deal that is when it comes to whether somebody should decide to purchase a game or not. If it's a big deal, then you call them out on it.

So honest and authentic and very focused reviews are a great idea. Most of my time I spend writing business stories. So yeah, it's informed by playing games, right? And I can't do this job if I don't play games. But there's different kinds of skills involved in writing about a business as opposed to reviewing games.

Lizzie Mintus: Thanks for differentiating. I'm sure you get pitched a lot of stories. And I think a lot of listeners would like to know your advice. How do you recommend someone pitch you or another journalist of story?

Dean Takahashi: First you do want to find some journalists you can trust and who are well known in some way, because you have to take some risk in saying, hey, look, I've got a story that's coming up. I can't tell you everything right now unless you promise me that you're going to write about it at the right time. Write about it when the story is ready to go out. If you approach a journalist and they say, no, I don't want to do that. I only write about things that I find out or once you tell me, I'm just going to turn around and write it. You don't want to have people who are really short term focused on what they want to achieve, when they're writing a story or something.

You do want to establish a long term relationship with people, even with game journalists, right? To do that, you can pitch a stories ahead of time, well before everything is cooked or done. And then we'll weigh in and try to judge how much time to devote to it. It's better to get a pitch that way than it is to say, here's the press release. It's published now. Do you want to write about it? Quite often I'm like, Hey, like I've got six hours of meetings coming up. I can't write about it today. If I can't run about it today, then it's old news. That is a part of the process. A lot of people maybe don't understand.

The other part is that often there could be days, especially like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, where we've got 10 stories that are going to run, and if your pitch comes in as the 11th and it's not as important, then sorry, I don't have time for it. So we can work out some details. The other things is, it should have news. It shouldn't be something that's important to not just your company, but to a lot of others in the industry and to the degree that you can give context and point things out about the bigger picture about surrounding your company and the trends that you're trying to attack or address.

Then I think that's good. Stories of disruption are always interesting, whether you're reacting to some kind of disruption that's happening or you're causing something to happen. I've written more than 20, 000 stories over the last 15 years, right? And when I get a pitch in, it's pretty clear to me very quickly whether I want to do this story or not. It is a bit hard to pigeonhole things as here's the kind of story that we will always do. Sometimes it's just dependent on oh my God, I have no story for tomorrow. Pitch me something.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So if I wanted to pitch you, I would pitch it on a Monday or a Friday and have something interesting and tie it to some bigger current event theme, if possible, or have it be really disruptive.

Dean Takahashi: Yeah. And I think some of the thinking that goes into it is that more people are on the ball at work, reading things on a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Yeah. Monday and Friday, they're reading less. And Saturday, Sunday, they're taking it easy. Yeah. But it doesn't always happen that way.

Sometimes if you are competing with less news then your story stands out more, right? And so sometimes on a Friday, your story can become very popular if it's the right kind of news. Or if it's a long story, like a interview Q and A, or just some other feature story that people have more time to read those on a weekend. Different calculations can go into it.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. Did you cover what people shouldn't do in a pitch? Anything else that people should avoid?

Dean Takahashi: Let's see, one guy made a sexist joke in a pitch and he probably thought it was funny, but I didn't think it was so funny.

Lizzie Mintus: That's a good life rule maybe, just avoid the sexist joke.

Dean Takahashi: Yeah but you'd be surprised at the kind of pitches that come in sometimes. There is some that are insulting in some ways. It's oh, we gave this story to the Wall Street Journal and they're gonna publish it first, but you get to publish it second. It's a privilege we're giving to you. You're the one that gets to be up next.

And we're like, okay. I get enough good pitches in coming as exclusives that are probably pass on something like that. If it's old news and somebody else already has written about it, then, there's not much reason for us to do it, too. But no, I'm happy to say that a lot of the pitches that do come in from professionals, right? They're coming in from professional PR people who are either working at their own agencies or they're working for the big companies themselves. A lot of those come in just the exactly the kind of format that we like to have them in. They provide all the answers. They provide the images. If there's videos involved. They include those too so we can see what a game looks like. I appreciate it when, the professions are really on the ball.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So if you can find a great PR firm, do it, because they're going to make it really turn the key for you..

Dean Takahashi: They know how to send in pitches like that's their strategy, right? Sometimes, definitely you will have to pay money or pay more money that way, but it can pay off. By no means is it necessary. You don't have to be a huge company. You don't have to have a huge PR budget in order to reach us. But you do want to pay attention to the kind of pitch that you send in and make it good.

We like small indie success stories as much as anyone. At the moment there happens to be one called Pow World that's exploding. In three days they've gotten 5 million users for their game, which is basically Pokemon with guns.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So you know exactly what's going on all the time. I want to hear it from you, Dean. What's the future of games in the next year?

Dean Takahashi: There are some awesome things coming. Say, Grand Theft Auto 6 is gonna be coming by likely 2025. And there are a lot of big AAA games that are coming after years of effort. Say, Hellblade 2, Senua's Saga coming in May.

But the good thing about the game industry is that there are these unpredictable things like Pow World say, Pokemon go back in the day. Flappy Bird. All of these strange, weird indie hits that capture everybody's imagination and and they take off. And so we chase after those when they happen. That's a case where this entrepreneur is going to have a thousand pitches coming in from journalists around the world saying, I want to tell your story, give me an interview. And so it's the opposite of what happens when the PR people chase us down.

But I do worry that, we have seen five times as many layoffs happen in the past year as happens in a normal year. And, it shouldn't be happening in this way. There has been a slowdown, like the industry grew barely at 1% in 2023 when it was growing, 30 percent in 2020. And so something is going wrong where, we have some very big games, some very big hits, and yet the industry itself is weakening to the point where there's lots of layoffs that are happening.

Now, I think it's hard to explain everything that happened, like Embracer group was particularly, overly active in, in amassing 120 game studios when it didn't realize that it would soon run out of capital and would have to start cutting back a lot. There were a lot of people who became less productive when they moved into remote work and then the studios hired lots of people to compensate for that and they were expecting that the sort of good times of the pandemic with the increase in the number of users, which is, relatively speaking, it was a good thing, But we had games that came out, people went, back out into the world. They spent fewer hours playing the games that were coming out. So there was a slowdown there just at a time when everybody had ramped up. And perhaps they hired too many people during the boom time. And right now we're shedding a lot of those jobs.

Lizzie Mintus: So you said something about remote work that people are less productive. You think that is a fact always?

Dean Takahashi: Oh, no. That's what I do. I work as a remote worker, we don't have an office anymore. And I think I've been fairly productive as a writer. But I think that my kind of work is really individual effort work. And a lot of game development is so much focused on teams functioning well together. I think that a combination of working together in person in some unscripted kind of way leads to more creativity, I think. And yet, I think flexibility in allowing your workers to work the way they want to is also very important. There's maybe a hybrid solution somewhere in there that can make people both productive and happy.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I did a poll on my LinkedIn of 700 people. It's mostly senior people in games. 3 percent said they wanted to be in the office full time. Just a small data city, but that was shocked, right? I would think it would be more than that. Most people said remote. And, in the middle, way more than 3 percent said hybrid. But what does hybrid mean, right? Do you fly in every X time? Do you mandate Tuesday, Thursday?

Dean Takahashi: Yeah. The thing that I appreciate more is not going into an office to see my own co workers, but to go to events, like our own events where I can see a lot of people from across the industry and hear different perspectives, meet people I don't know already, and get ideas from places that are different from the ones that have always come to me. That to me is very important in having a more diverse rolodex or more diverse set of people coming into contact with me, to, to pitch stories outta me.

Diversity is extremely important and there's always a point of view to the news. And if you talk to the same people over and over again, you just get stuck in your own echo chamber, right? And the perfect example of that sort of proves that point in journalism, was the coverage of the Vietnam War, right? In Vietnam, there were correspondence that the news organizations were sending in to the country to see what is it like. Are we winning this war against the guerrillas? Or is the population turning against us? And they would gather all this on the ground reporting in the field, talking to real people, and they would write their dispatches in their point of view, and they'd send it back to the editor.

Some of the editors all happened to be in places like Washington, D. C. or New York. And then those editors would cross check it and go oh, I'm going to call my friends at the Pentagon and see, how are we doing with this war? Are we winning the war? My guys out there say we're losing the war. And then, the guys at the Pentagon say, oh, no, we're winning it. So they edit the stories. They publish it and they get this sort of lion's share of the say of what's the perspective in this story. They basically wound up, misleading the American public about how this war was going.

So I think, diversity of viewpoint and seeing something from another reality so you can get at the truth, is very important in journalism. It applies to game journalism in the same way.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and I guess if you're at home, it probably just exacerbates the problem. You're in your echo chamber. You're in your echo social media. You're talking to the same people at your company, which are probably a lot like you, and you're not getting out in the real world and seeing more people.

Dean Takahashi: Absolutely. Yeah, I think, definitely true. Where, say, if you find you're talking to a lot more CEOs and PR people than you are talking to game developers or workers then, you're going to get a slanted perspective.

And that's something that as a business journalist, I have to always be reminded of and be more careful about.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I guess that's who I interact with a lot as well. And then, you go outside of games and you're like, wow, this is a very different world, right? Yeah, a little bubble.

How do you feel like journalism has evolved? Would you say there's less trust in journalism today than before? Or do you think people trust certain sources more?

Dean Takahashi: Yeah I definitely feel like politicians like Donald Trump have made journalism a fair game for criticism. A fair amount of that is, is particularly true, I would say, in political journalism and. Things like game journalism, we've had the same kind of experience with the attacks on journalists, made by different folks with their own agenda, the gamer gate experiences, where nobody had a great time during that time, especially journalists.

Professional media has weakened a lot. The newspapers have weakened. The print publications have weakened in general. Some of the larger organizations have all had to retreat. It's interesting that GamesBeat has a crew of four writers. We're not huge, right? We have four writers focused on games.

But the Washington Post laid off everybody except one game writer. They had a whole team. The New York Times wrote a story about how they had increased their investment in game writing, and they have three writers focused on games, writers and editors too.

And you look at what they publish. The Sunday New York Times arts and leisure section, will be mostly about Broadway plays. And yet, video games and their influence on culture, society, in general their popularity, you would think that by many times over you should have more people working on those stories than you do on something like Broadway plays, as wonderful as they are, right?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, definitely. Tell me about trends in the industry. Talk to me about generative AI.

Dean Takahashi: Yeah, generative AI just came upon the world in a very big way with open AI about a year ago in Chat GPT. And it created this awareness that AI had reached the point where it's capable of creating things that didn't really exist before. Generative art generative programming. All kinds of things. And so it is sweeping through all industries now.

I could see that at CES. That's one reason I go to CES, where, which has 130, 000 people that go to Las Vegas. Almost every company was talking, like Samsung, LG, Google. Everybody was talking about the impact of generative AI on their companies and their product lines.

I moderated the panel there on AI and its impact on democratizing game design as well. Because you can theoretically argue that AI is going to be the tool that helps ordinary people become more creative. And so when you have user generated games that are done by people who are not the most professional, there are people who are amateurs creating games, those that UGC often lacks in execution, right? The the professional work part of that is lacking. But if you have AI come along and fill that gap, then some of those great ideas that are coming from ordinary folks can actually be executed in a much better way.

So UGC ought to come out in much better quality. I think that is going to be a sea change for the game industry and, really help platforms like Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft showcase emerging talent in ways that didn't happen before. It should also, though, theoretically help a lot of those big companies, right?

A lot of the game developers conference did a survey this week that talked about all of the concerns that game developers have about AI eliminating jobs. And I think there's, as we mentioned, earlier, there's a lot of other reasons why there might be job losses right now. Owen Mahoney CEO of Nexon, he's the outgoing CEO of Nexon he gave a talk at one of our events and he said, he emphasized that it can be a good thing to have this sort of shock to the system because nobody ever dreamed of working in a content factory, right? You wind up being one of 2000 workers working on a game like Grand Theft Auto 6, right?

And that means you're in charge of how the trees look or something like that, right? Which is not the reason you got into this business. You wanted to exercise your creativity a lot more than that. And I think Owen was arguing for smaller teams getting back to the core creative reasons why they got into this business in the first place and focusing on doing something really unique and different that's not a sequel, that's not based on a well known franchise, but something original that you can make with a relatively smaller team, like a hundred people. They've got a couple of examples that Nexon has done like Dave the Diver and the Finals games. The finals was made with a team of less than a hundred, even though it looks like a triple A game that was made by many more people.

Lizzie Mintus: Maybe over a thousand. And there's such a trend of very small teams making these really successful games for Roblox or Fortnite. Talk about that a little more?

Dean Takahashi: Yeah. One of the things that you always hear as things journalists should do is follow the money. That's one thing we do. Oh yeah, everybody's funding blockchain game companies now. I guess blockchain's gonna be a big deal coming up or everybody's funding the metaverse. Now that's been replaced by everybody's funding AI companies.

Lizzie Mintus: No, it's ai. Yeah.

Dean Takahashi: The other thing that's interesting is follow the people, right? There's one fellow, Alex Seropian who I covered over many years, right? And Alex recently started up a new company and started making more user generated content games, made by professional game developers focused on Fortnite, islands, just creating new kinds of games in the Space Jam. When you see interesting people like that moving into a new space, you follow the people and you find something interesting there. I've seen a lot of that happen and expect more of it to happen.

So I think this area, the user generated content companies could be the place where many of those young, eager job entrants can focus their attention to try to find jobs at a time when everybody else seems to be laying off people.

Lizzie Mintus: Riot Games today. Definitely been a bloodbath. Where else are interesting people going? What other areas do you think they're in?

Dean Takahashi: We covered AI, covered user generated content. I do think that there are still people who are going back into the fray. The founders of a company called Playdemic, sold their company to Warner Brothers on the strength of a game called Golf Clash. They were a mobile game company and then EA bought the Golf Clash company for $1.4 billion. The founders like Paul Gouge and his buddy relaxed for a bit and then came back this week with the new game company that had raised 10 million from Griffin Gaming Partners. They're just going to focus on making more mobile games again. They feel like it is hard to succeed in mobile games. Now, there's a lot of things that are going against it.

The apple push for privacy over targeted advertising is one big barrier. There are other kinds of, barriers and getting your game notice. They feel like because we have this experience and we know the right people, we have access to a good team that like, hey, let's just go do it again. Because it is still the biggest part of the market. It's not necessarily them jumping on a trend. It's just basically having the confidence to , . We know how to do this. We're going to go do it again.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I think that's such a fun studio to work for and to recruit people for, because if you see somebody and they have sold their last two, five, 10 companies they're really an interesting person. I like to talk to them. How are you doing this? What's your new vision?

Interesting. What about the Apple vision pro?

Dean Takahashi: I think we have to wait and see the, like it's imminently out on the market now and it's, there are some people who are blown away by it but there isn't much to do with gaming on it yet. I don't think they're pushing for games until somewhat later on in the cycle for this kind of new product. I think the best thing you can say about it now is that it's version one and that you can see that they're going to work on this for a long time. And eventually it's going to be really good and more importantly, a bit affordable in the long run as well. Right now at $3,500 for the base product with not enough memory in it, it's something that's going to sell in the hundreds of thousands. I don't know how successful they're going to be in reaching the millions or tens of millions as other Apple products reach.

Lizzie Mintus: I saw that it's sold out today and I was curious if it's like a luxury goods sellout thing, which is so hot right now. And I saw Magic Leap brace a lot too.

Dean Takahashi: Yeah, competition is a good thing. And some people want to make sure that there isn't just one show in town. And I think that is very important in the technology industry that the tech sector should never be dominated by a single vertical company that is doing everything. And Magic Leap represents some kind of competition to Apple. They have a focus in the enterprise and I think their hope is that they can create experiences that are a lot more precise. Something that like a surgeon would use to very closely and accurately put something in the real world into the right place based on what they see in the virtual world. So that kind of precision is probably not necessarily what Apple's thinking about their first product.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's very interesting to see the general world meets games tech. Like with Jenny, fitness games with learning. There are so many interesting real life examples. I like the mentality.

Dean Takahashi: What is interesting to you about the game business?

Lizzie Mintus: I think what is interesting is people love games and I used to recruit for just tech. And the first question always is what's the TC or total comp? Like you don't even give a shit about what you do.

For me, it's just not very fun to interact with people who are all about money. And if you are all about money to some degree, because you have a real life circumstance that requires it, that's different, but people love what they do and they pour their heart into it and games are really a creative expression that takes so many people coming together with the same vision.

So I think it's really magical to me to be a part of that. I am not a game creator myself, but I really like to talk to people, find out what they like, and the best hire is I connect you to a company and they don't even have a job posted. Or maybe they weren't even looking for that, but somehow we can make that connection that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

So I like the passion. I like people. And then it's really rewarding to see, Oh, this game came out or this tool came out. And I know that I hired XYZ people that made this feature so cool or you know the reason why the game is such a hit I hired this gameplay engineer who, made this gameplay system.

It's fun. It's also a community and I like to go to the events and you get to know everybody. I think everybody is very open and kind. Anybody to me that loves what they do has some infectious energy that you pick up and there's a lot of that.

Dean Takahashi: Yeah. I think that's some of the attraction of coming into the game industry. We would always want to remind people to get fair value for what you're worth as well and don't settle for awesome opportunity, to work at a game company. No matter what kind of conditions, you want to find a good place. And I think the game industry still has a long way to go to make itself into a desirable destination that you would expect it to be. There's other industries that have things like job stability and, higher wages and less cyclicality to to employment, I think then the game industry. People should come into this industry and follow their dreams, but, stay attuned to the notion that, you have to be fairly compensated for what you do.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, absolutely. But you can see reviews on Glassdoor. You can look at the Blind. You could read articles from Dean. You can do a lot of due diligence. I think these days and salaries are public information if you have over 15 employees in many states. All the states are different. But for the most part, I think you're able to at least assess the market. But I'm always surprised by how many people don't really don't really know what to ask for. I personally think that's your own responsibility for you to figure out what is fair for you and what is your value based on information that is readily available.

Why do you stay at games?

Dean Takahashi: There is a point where you cross lines and say, I'm not that useful to anybody else except for what I'm doing right now. And I enjoy it as well. I still think that one of the things I do when I retire is like, Oh, I'm going to attack that big pile of shame of games that I never got to play. And for my fun and free time I can't think of better things to do than play a lot of games.

Lizzie Mintus: And play games with your kids. Some, right?

Dean Takahashi: Yeah. One of my kids is way better than me already.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I watched a great video. The worst part about being a parent, it shows a kid playing Mario Kart. Watching your kid be so terrible at some game at first.

Dean Takahashi: Yeah yeah, and then you're really pissed off when they just start beating you all the time, right? Yeah. That's no fun. You're crushing me. Take it easy on dad.

Lizzie Mintus: It's fun to play together, though. I haven't been normalized across so many different kinds of families.

I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to VentureBeat and gamesbeat. com. The last question is what games have you found to be the most impactful or transformative in the industry since you've been in it?

Dean Takahashi: Two different series. One is The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II. Last of Us was my favorite game when it came out. And then when The Last of Us Part II came out, it was, I thought it was better. I can understand why it was turned into like an HBO series. The story itself is so compelling. There's like this bookends element of the beginning echoes, and the ending echoes back to the beginning of The Last of Us. And it makes you think about, what did I just see? It's a comparison that they're making from the beginning to the end. That's just really good writing and the kind of storytelling that, you want in any great work of art.

But the other thing that I wrote recently was my favorite games of the last 13 years. And on the beginning of it in 2010 was Alan Wake. It was a great story about a writer who writes things and they start becoming true in a horror kind of way. It's just a really, again, well done story that they started back in 2010. And they tried to make the sequel to this very successful game many times and they failed until 2023. And so my favorite game of 2023 was Alan Wake 2 and they had, done such a good job of. Figuring out exactly what kind of, story to tell in the sequel and how to mix it up so that it felt like a brand new game, focused on different characters, more diversity of characters. It's wonderful to be able to say, being a big fan of Alan Wake when it first came out and then to see it come out 13 years later. I just hope it's not another 13 years I have to wait for the next one.

Lizzie Mintus: We can forward this along to him. We've been talking to Dean Takahashi, who is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. Dean, where can people go to contact you or learn more about you or read what you write?

Dean Takahashi: They can read what I write on gamesbeat. com and venturebeat. com and then I'm on LinkedIn a lot of other folks if they want to directly contact me. I also post things on Twitter as well or Facebook.

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.

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