Episode #467 from 29:54
Indie game development
Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, pirates do lead the way for innovation, the same as the story of Spotify. Basically, I think, most people when they derive value from things like video games, want to pay for those video games, they just want it to be easy. And so the same thing with music, with Spotify. But maybe just staying on the 90s, there are going to be a lot of indie game developers who will listen to us talking today. Can you go back to that mindset and try to derive some wisdom and advice to those folks when you were just a solo developer or maybe just a small group of people creating your early games that eventually became this huge gaming company. But in the early days, what were you going through? What were the ups and downs? What did it take to stay strong and persevere? Well, one of the critical things that Epic always worked hard to do was to make something different that nobody else was doing, and to try to satisfy a small audience rather than competing globally with the game juggernauts. Back in the 1990s, Epic was new, but Electronic Arts and Activision and the other big publishers had been around for a decade, and they were huge companies. It had giant retail distribution networks. If I tried to make a game and then convinced them to publish it, I doubt I could have had a chance. And I doubt that even if I had made a successful game, that I would've made much money from it, though they might have. And so the really unique angle to Epic then was shareware. And that was just the idea that if we distribute our game differently, then we can reach a much larger audience than these bigger competitors by virtue of this first episode of the game being free.
Why this moment matters
Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, pirates do lead the way for innovation, the same as the story of Spotify. Basically, I think, most people when they derive value from things like video games, want to pay for those video games, they just want it to be easy. And so the same thing with music, with Spotify. But maybe just staying on the 90s, there are going to be a lot of indie game developers who will listen to us talking today. Can you go back to that mindset and try to derive some wisdom and advice to those folks when you were just a solo developer or maybe just a small group of people creating your early games that eventually became this huge gaming company. But in the early days, what were you going through? What were the ups and downs? What did it take to stay strong and persevere? Well, one of the critical things that Epic always worked hard to do was to make something different that nobody else was doing, and to try to satisfy a small audience rather than competing globally with the game juggernauts. Back in the 1990s, Epic was new, but Electronic Arts and Activision and the other big publishers had been around for a decade, and they were huge companies. It had giant retail distribution networks. If I tried to make a game and then convinced them to publish it, I doubt I could have had a chance. And I doubt that even if I had made a successful game, that I would've made much money from it, though they might have. And so the really unique angle to Epic then was shareware. And that was just the idea that if we distribute our game differently, then we can reach a much larger audience than these bigger competitors by virtue of this first episode of the game being free.