80 Level Podcast

80 Level Round Table: David Ventura on the Peculiarities of Japanese Gamedev

May 31, 2022 Kirill Tokarev / David Ventura Season 2 Episode 3
80 Level Podcast
80 Level Round Table: David Ventura on the Peculiarities of Japanese Gamedev
Show Notes Transcript

The CEO of Ichigoichie Games David Ventura has joined 80 Level Round Table to tell us about the peculiarities of Japanese game development and compare them to European and American gamedev, explain why he moved to Sweden, and speak about Ichigoichie’s games and hiring practices.

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David Ventura is the CEO of Ichigoichie Games
LinkedIn: https://se.linkedin.com/in/dgventura

Ichigoichie Games Website: https://ichigoichie.org/
Ichigoichie Games Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ichigoichieGames/
Ichigoichie Games Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ichigoichie_Inc 
Ichigoichie Games Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ichigoichieGames/

Check out the demo for the Backbeat game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1585730/Backbeat/?utm_source=80lvpodcast

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0:00

hello guys uh today we have a very interesting guest it's one of the


0:05

co-founders of ichigoichi david ventura and uh he's gonna talk about his career


0:12

in games uh which spans uh a number of years and a lot of continents so he worked on uh


0:20

games in japan uh he studied in united states and uh now he builds music based titles


0:28

in sweden so here's what he has to say greetings and welcome to the 80 level


0:35

round table podcast in each episode host karel tokorev invites video game


0:40

industry leaders to talk about the world of game development no topic is off limits as long as it


0:47

relates to video game development new episodes are in the works so remember to follow us or subscribe and


0:53

share with someone you know will also enjoy the podcast david before we kind of go into like the


1:01

nitty-gritty and the question and so on can you do like a little intro tell us a little


1:06

bit about yourself like what you do uh where do you come from about your company my name is david ventura i'm the


1:13

creative director of ichigo ega which is a swedish indie game studio


1:18

and what i do is i work on running the studio and i direct our games


1:23

hexagroove and backbeat are the two titles that were we've worked on previously


1:28

so we have a lot of questions but be before um i want to kind of stop and


1:34

talk a little bit about the like the japanese part of your career so how did you get to


1:41

work in japan how did this journey start so when i was in graduate school uh


1:47

i was studying entertainment technology which is like theme parks and video games and movies


1:53

and things like that and we have a summer internship that everybody does most people went to


1:59

california to work for ea or disney or something like that but i wanted to try something different so i actually did a research internship


2:06

in kyoto at a research lab and i worked on a project where we were designing


2:12

using robots to teach children about music that was the first time i'd been outside


2:17

of north america and it was an eye-opener for me i loved it a lot so


2:23

when i finished my graduate school i went and worked really hard to get hired


2:28

and i was fortunate to get a job right out of college for an indie studio called innis in tokyo


2:34

can you tell us a little bit about kind of how does this market work because


2:40

i think the japanese games are kind of so penetrated so well like the american


2:45

culture and the world culture and they're everywhere but we know only about those big


2:50

companies we know about like capcom we know about nintendo sony


2:56

but there's this whole market out there like different studios and like


3:01

there i heard like there even like different styles of approach in game development in different regions of the


3:09

country can you tell us a little bit about how does it work inside like how big is it


3:16

what are those indie studios in japan like are they similar to like american


3:21

companies or how do they work yeah uh i have most experience with the company


3:27

i worked at innis which was a very small studio when we started out when i joined the company


3:32

there were only five people and i was the second programmer and when i left the company nine years later we


3:38

were up at 70. so i saw the growth happen from a small like just you know


3:44

we had an office on top of a beauty parlor um when we started out and then we ended up


3:49

in the center of the city in a big office building i think that small indie studios there exist and like


3:57

a lot of indie studios in the west you get by doing like contracting and weird gigs i guess to get started


4:03

when i started the company i designed i worked on like a flight simulator for all nippon airlines so we were making


4:10

something to help pilots train themselves for flying airplanes uh we did ports of uh famous ips to


4:17

mobile phones um before smartphones feature phones so like putting like pingu on like a ntt docomo phone or


4:25

uh working on a port of castlevania for for feature phones and things like that and these little projects here and there


4:31

our company was made um of musicians uh people that had studied music in college so we did a lot of contracting for music


4:37

software building sample libraries and things like that um and that the funny thing is that's very similar to the kind of work that i


4:43

do with ichiko ga and how we we are operating right now until you know until you have that big hit and what it takes


4:50

to like fund your own titles so you got to split your attention between selling yourself as a software developer


4:57

as much as someone who makes uh products and games so um


5:03

that was really interesting to me to to see that start and to see it grow and we had our heyday where all we did was


5:10

make games and we did them for ourselves and we did them also for for other publishers but uh


5:16

the way that the japanese do game development i think does differ a little bit um


5:21

what are like the what are like the main differences like from the united states and uh europe


5:27

i think that in japan you have a lot of top down um management and top-down


5:33

production so usually for most of the successful ones or all the studios you have like one guy at the


5:38

top um or that's that's very driven and very passionate very


5:44

confident in their abilities and they have this thing and it goes down and it's a pyramid and there's middle management all the way and there's a a


5:51

system of checks all the way down i'd say there's more infrastructure probably it's nowhere near as flat as the


5:57

companies that i've seen and worked with in the west um and everything is very methodical like


6:03

all the specifications for the games are written in excel and like even though it's like a spreadsheet you write tons


6:08

of text like it's a book written in excel with graphs next to it it's very analytical um


6:14

the planning is very uh meticulous and i think you it's it's not when i worked


6:22

at it it wasn't quite as agile i guess as we try to do now with game development where with that it was very waterfall and you just if it didn't work


6:28

you threw it all away and you started all over again you did that over and over and over again um until until it clicks


6:35

how do those studios um how do they find people so you mentioned


6:40

that you had this opportunity to go from united states work there even when you were still in


6:46

school but overall like where do they find the people to work with do they just go


6:52

to colleges or is it like internal networks and they're just asking for


6:57

references are there job boards like how does one get into this side of the


7:03

game development yeah i think it depends where you're coming from i know that i did recruiting


7:09

in japan for about six years and we got our applicants from two large pools one was


7:15

the the trade schools so their schools are especially in 3d animation or game development or


7:20

things like that and the second is intermediate hires for people to try to change jobs so you have


7:26

like the equivalent of like a monster.com or a in indeed and things like that where


7:32

people are posting and looking for jobs and they're getting hired over but one thing it's that's diff i think is how uniform it is every station like was in


7:39

the exact same template or like name here you know age what school did you go to there's a photo of the person at the


7:46

right hand corner and like it's it's it's very cookie cutter there's no individualism in the documents that you


7:51

get uh from there another thing is that they expect a lot that the company is


7:56

going to train the employees so the amount of skills that the students know coming out of school is not quite as


8:03

advanced i think as in the west so we expect that they're not going to know almost anything at all even though


8:09

they've gone to a specialty school for game developer animation and then it's kind of like an apprenticeship where


8:14

like the the senior animator or programmer whoever is going to take this person under their wing and they're going to train them


8:20

and this person's going to learn on the job and it'll probably take years before they can actually contribute to a level


8:25

where they're considered a standard employee that that is you know pulling their own uh weight inside of the


8:31

company and that's something that extends not just in game development and i t it's it's in the way that japanese


8:37

develop people that are younger for all kinds of different professions does this also mean


8:43

that they also stay with the company longer uh do they jump from one place to


8:49

another like they do in u.s and europe um it used to be that people stayed with the company for a much longer time i


8:55

think in the last generation that's starting to change um people are starting to feel


9:02

like they're this uh enchanted with the idea of like working for life and things like that a


9:07

lot of the people that we hired intermediately or the people that i worked with that were my peers had been


9:12

there for like 15 20 years um but i know the people that we were


9:18

recruiting right towards the end of when i lived in japan uh they would quit within one or two


9:24

years and they would go to their company or maybe they would quit games altogether and then go to work in something


9:29

completely different like hotel management or beauty or something do you feel like there is still this


9:35

passion for a video game industry in in japan where people really want to kind of you know they play dragon quest


9:42

their whole childhood and now they want to contribute and continue working there


9:47

i think so um but i i don't hear i didn't hear that story to be honest as much as i do in sweden now in sweden i


9:54

do a lot of recruiting from from trade schools and from places like that and usually people do say yeah i played with


10:00

my parents i played ever since i was very young i've always wanted to make games or it's been in the back of my mind but in japan it was


10:08

it was becoming not entirely socially acceptable to be into those kind of things i mean okay so


10:14

you didn't hear that kind of narrative quite as often but of course there still are people that are very passionate about making


10:20

games in japan so how did this shift happen with you when you decided to move


10:27

from japan to europe when did that happen and why did you


10:33

decide to make this move so when i had been working for about nine years um


10:40

i had i really loved the company i loved the people that i worked with but the products that we were making started to


10:46

make less sense to me and i kind of felt like i needed a change in my life i was a little burnt


10:51

out to be honest i was burnt out in game development in total so at that time


10:57

my wife and i talked to we thought we'd like to see what it's like to live in europe neither of us had ever lived here before


11:03

so we decided to get a clean a clean break especially for me in terms of my career so i came to sweden to


11:10

work with music software directly as opposed to games and i took a little pause for about four years or so to recharge


11:17

before i got pulled back in and just couldn't stay away from making games


11:22

so why sweden why did you like it because sweden is like one of my favorite countries in europe i like the like the


11:29

northern you know places uh more than like the the central europe


11:34

so to speak uh why did you decide this um place and um


11:40

tell us about like what i don't want to say culture shock like but what were the


11:45

things that seemed different especially with your you know coming from us and then asia and then suddenly


11:51

sweden like maybe fika or something else where kind of the things that you were really surprised with yeah


11:58

um so i wanted to work in music software and i wanted to do i mean for me i'm a very


12:04

passionate person i want to believe in the products that i'm making and sweden and germany both have very good music software industries i think


12:11

there's lots of a lot of the big names that make uh software in sweden and germany i went to both of those countries i interviewed


12:18

for jobs in both of them but in the end there was a company here in stockholm called propellerhead that was making a


12:23

product that resonated with me very strongly and i felt uh i wanted to be a part of that so for


12:28

me it was purely um about the job and the product that i was going to be working on


12:35

when i got here yes it's very different from japan in some ways and very similar


12:40

in others um the swedish people have a sense of i guess distance and between people they


12:46

don't know and they don't want to cause trouble or or inconvenience their neighbors like in


12:53

their around where they live or you know if you're at a bus stop you kind of spread out and things like that in that sense it's very japanese


12:59

um but other things are that uh what i saw working in my company was that people took work in a completely


13:06

different kind of uh way when i was in japan we started at nato nine nine o'clock 9 30 in the


13:12

morning and for the first i guess half of my career there i usually went home around 10 30 at night


13:18

later when i was in japan i started dialing it back and started going home i think like at 7 30 or 8. but in sweden


13:25

people get in at 9 30 but they're gone by like four o'clock or 4 30 or something like that so there's there's flex time


13:32

everybody who has children is in very early and then they're gone before like i guess daycare pickup starts or whatever but even the


13:39

people didn't have kids they didn't work very late and they didn't socialize so much with other people in the company so


13:45

it felt to me like that they weren't as engaged maybe or with the work or not with the company


13:51

like the company was a job and it was just something you did but like in japan even if we left late we would go out


13:58

drinking afterwards and we'd do that several times a week and it was it was not so much about just drinking because we wanted to to


14:04

have beer but it was you want to commiserate and like the people in my office were my friends and we wanted to


14:10

talk about how things went well or we wanted to you know to about you know bosses or how something was going


14:15

and that bond was a very big part so the the the work life was part of my


14:20

personal life and it was a huge part of my identity so coming to sweden and then being in a company where


14:26

everybody else was just like pulling a switch at like 4 35 o'clock i was like what am i gonna do with myself for the


14:32

rest of the day like i felt kind of kind of like lost


14:37

how did you fix that like the more time was family or did you finally start to get some connections with the


14:43

swedish guys or is it like the same right now i think it's


14:49

uh it's a balance for me right now personally so i spent more time with family i guess


14:54

after being here about two or three years then i had children um and then we started to have you know


15:00

more things to do like like obligations and then activities and being with the kids and whatnot


15:05

but also um i i mean i really like i have a couple


15:10

people that i'm very very close with and i try to spend as much time with them as possible like my co-founder magnus is one of them um so we still have


15:17

uh after works where we have beers and hang out and talk and things like that and that's very important to me i don't


15:23

think i'll ever give that up no matter what country i'm living in david so you mentioned that you're doing


15:28

a lot of hiring in sweden and uh we know that there are a lot of great


15:34

schools in europe in general there is like a wonderful school in belgium there's


15:40

france germany like there are great institutions that create um


15:45

the build up like very great uh specialists and unlike i guess


15:50

guys from japan when they go out of this school they're usually well prepared can


15:56

you tell us a little bit how do you work with those schools where do you look for people how do you find


16:02

them because a lot of our audience are actually guys who are either looking for work or


16:08

they're just kind of like on this threshold where about to graduate and they really want to pop up and see


16:16

and maybe travel the world and how do you find people then right so we have two


16:23

i guess main sources of where we find uh new talent in our company one is that we work with schools in the stockholm area


16:30

so some of those are trade schools that are just specialized in game development and some of them universities that have game


16:36

development courses or degrees but all of these programs have an internship


16:42

usually where the students can work with us for somewhere between three and uh seven


16:48

months doing something like programming or 3d art and learning how to contribute so


16:53

um i'm in contact with the the headmasters and the directors in these schools and i meet with them several


16:58

times a year because that's when the the period is for finding the internships in their their program


17:05

the other is that we have um some outliers so there's like uh


17:12

a company that's called the swedish american chamber of commerce and what they do is kind of like help


17:17

american students that are looking for jobs in sweden and then we can post our job listings with them and internships


17:22

and we can find them that way too so it's a lot of young people


17:28

we don't do a lot of hiring of veterans just yet uh but it's mostly through


17:33

schools right now is there's is there interest like do you feel like uh because that's the the


17:39

question that we keep having because uh at least like in my circles people are like 100 percent sure that


17:47

games right now maybe are even more important for maybe people of our age when we were


17:53

growing up right that they are more important than let's say netflix or stuff like that um do you


18:00

still see this passion like with people you're recruiting who are really interested in building games or


18:07

is it just like a work for them like it's a it's a work thing and


18:13

they can choose games or work in a bank or or do something else


18:18

i think it seems to be half and half to me even some of the people that come from specialty schools


18:24

they're there and they're doing it because they like games but it's not they're not like uh ravenous about it and they have other


18:30

options and i've seen some of them go on to other industries uh as well some of people are very very dedicated


18:37

and passionate but one thing i've noticed is the people that sometimes are the most passionate


18:42

it's very hard to find a balance of people that are very passionate but also can work very well with other people and


18:48

like be able to collaborate because games is a creative process that we do in teams so it's very important


18:54

that we listen to each other and talk and are very good about communicating our our issues and our problems before they get


19:00

out of hand so i think that's an interesting uh compliment and you and and you're looking for students that can kind of


19:07

check both of those boxes so it is an interesting question right


19:13

because your game's a little bit different and they are kind of a lot there is a lot of connection with music


19:19

and sound and kind of rhythm um how did you come up with this


19:26

new approach right i mean we we all know that there were games kind of concentrated on music and you think


19:32

about like guitar hero and all the other series they're huge right but


19:37

what how is your approach different like where do you see kind of this niche


19:42

for music-based games for us uh what we're trying to build is


19:49

games where music is not something where you're i guess


19:54

emulating a famous person or emulating a famous song we want to use music as a


19:59

way for the game player to be creative and to express themselves uh and we're familiar that this is a


20:05

very challenging thing to pull off so we hide music inside of other kinds of game


20:10

designs so um our specialty is that we take other genres like puzzler strategy genres and


20:16

we define rules in the space in terms of what you can modify and how you can modify


20:22

the environment and all those rules are underpinned by what makes great music and as a byproduct music is produced by


20:29

the actions that you do in our game so that's something that we we excel at and


20:34

we want to to pitch to people that if you're looking for new kinds of gameplay interactions


20:40

and new kinds of design uh spins on existing genres and ones that allow you to be creative that's what we


20:46

want to build and i think that's there's a potential for future there not just music you could think about lots of things like analogs for other concepts


20:52

that we're familiar with but have not yet been worked into the rules of what it is to succeed in a video game


21:00

do you feel like it's important in um game design especially to kind of break uh the established rules that you have


21:06

there because we we've seen like especially on the indie scene a lot of studios come


21:12

trying to do that when they're they're taking one concept and then they're


21:17

completely changing it up mixing it up and then there is a different game out there like how do you approach it do you


21:24

you know do you do prototypes at first or do you just play a bunch of games and then you have an idea like what's the


21:30

creative process behind this rule changes what we do is we usually start with an


21:36

experience that we want to create something that's very esoteric and


21:42

emotional based and something we want to achieve and then we think about how we can manifest that that's the way i approach it like i want to build the


21:48

feeling of what it's like to be in a club and to hear the thumping of the bass and the tinkling of the air and the smell of the


21:55

people around you while we're all dancing and having a fantastic time and then um


22:00

we try to work that into a game play uh concept and the concept has to feel fun


22:06

and pleasant and pleasing from just pushing a button or doing some kind of thing so we want to add that simple


22:11

pleasure into the basic foundation we do do lots of prototypes like you said so the game that working on now backbeat


22:18

we had four or five ideas all at once that were kind of in competition and we built prototypes with them


22:24

just in a web browser using like emoji uh because the the presentation is not


22:30

has nothing to do with if it feels fun or not to us so we


22:35

mock this up really fast in chrome we hook up a game pad to it we move the emoji around and see if the these rules


22:40

of this environment are inspiring or fun to mess around with and in this case the one that became backbeats uh won out


22:47

over some other web browser emoji games and uh then we refined the concept until


22:52

it's in the 3d world with a story and characters so i i know backbit is not uh


22:58

it's not released yet but there is a demo on steam so people can try it out yes there is a demo on steam that you


23:05

can you can try right away cool okay i will leave a link in the in the description


23:11

um tell us a little bit about um kind of the tools that you're using are you relying mostly on


23:18

just coding and just doing it like with html5 or do you work more with unity or


23:23

some other tools like what are like the important tools that are currently available that


23:29

are part of your like def development toolkit yeah so we work with a number of things


23:36

we try to be as reusable as possible for the for the stuff that is special to us our


23:41

specialty so we build our middleware and our game logic and our music software


23:47

uh our audio engine all in rust which is a programming language is becoming more popular with game development recently


23:54

and then we can cross compile that to c plus and have it run on a web browser or a switch or a pc or a


24:00

mac or a playstation or whatever it needs to be that's our foundation and uh


24:07

we start out with typescript and we're prototypings that's i was talking telling you about those games and web


24:12

browser with emoji now we use unity when we're working towards the the real game


24:18

after we've nailed down the concept and then we're building the how it operates with all the bells and whistles and


24:23

things like that we use unity and c-sharp for the higher level logic on top of that custom


24:29

plug-in which is made with rust and from a graphics perspective we use maya and


24:35

photoshop for the two tools that we have do you feel like these tools um did they


24:42

become more kind of accessible and affordable over the last let's say 10 years if you compare them


24:49

when you were just beginning and you're studying or do you feel like there is still a lot of


24:54

barriers to kind of entry i think it has gotten more accessible like if you look at


25:00

like maya used to cost thousands of dollars for a license um we are on the maya indy i think it's called where you


25:07

you buy a year's subscription and you pay by month but you know it comes out to be i think like two or three hundred


25:13

dollars a month or something like that or excuse me a year um so that's a cost that we that we can


25:18

take um that our artists can use for all of our projects photoshop too if you're just doing photoshop you can get i think


25:25

it's only like 10 a month for just photoshop on the creative cloud and that's like a hundred dollars a year or 120 a year and they keep updating it


25:31

so that that works um with game engines too if you're an indie and your your earnings are


25:37

underneath a certain threshold you don't have to pay royalties to to or have a


25:42

license that costs money to unity or unreal


25:47

so uh i have a little bit of a question on the on the business side so


25:53

we ran a survey not that long ago and we presented it at gdc and we one of the


25:59

questions we asked is basically two questions that were how much money do you need to build a


26:05

game and the other one was how much money are you willing to give away to a publisher


26:12

and the results were quite interesting so the results were


26:17

um basically like 50 of people said and there was like 800 people surveyed


26:22

so it was like a large number so fifty percent of them said that they don't need any money to start uh


26:28

building the project and then the second biggest answer was


26:33

did they need a hundred thousand dollars so when you when we looked at that when we figured


26:39

then a lot of people don't really know you know the you know the budgeting and all the other stuff they don't know how much


26:45

money it actually is required to build anything not even like a full project and when we asked


26:53

about kind of publishers and then it was like a trick question because we asked like even if it's like a consultation even if


27:00

it's like just some help like how much money are you willing to give and people were willing to give up to


27:07

like 50 percent they were saying like 25 30 and then 50 and like at 50 i was


27:14

shocked literally because i didn't i don't know how the mess adds up at


27:19

this level so my question for you is like um


27:25

how difficult i guess from a business standpoint is it to run a video game company especially an indie company


27:32

right now in europe like um are there problems with funding because


27:38

um right now i see a lot of kind of companies who are you know vcs who are


27:43

entering uh game working and they're basically throwing money at you um


27:49

do you work with these kind of like new money machines or do you want uh to


27:55

work with publishers or how do you self-publish like how does it work on your end


28:01

up until now we have always done self-publishing um and we don't have any


28:07

real difficulty with anything technical that's involved with game development so like porting or hardware and stuff or


28:12

art we can handle all of that we don't have a lot of experience in marketing and we're not very we don't


28:18

have a big reach so if i had to say that we needed some kind of outside assistance it would be in marketing and


28:23

getting access to get above the noise floor you know in terms of visibility so i would i would prefer to work with a


28:30

publisher i guess if the terms are right um our company is entirely privately owned and we have not taken any kind of


28:36

vc money or loans so we just funded it with our own personal savings and then contracting


28:42

money afterwards and that does slow down the development of the game obviously if you're working


28:47

40 60 doing contracting for someone else then that's only 20 of the time your game is


28:52

actually taking a step forward do you feel like it's still important to


28:57

kind of build the product because this is one of the things that i always had like there are a lot of wonderful


29:02

companies out there but they're basically working as outsourcers like contractors


29:08

they're they're building products or parts of products for someone else but they never release anything


29:13

do you do you feel like it's still important to have kind of something off your own and put it on the market and then see


29:20

how it goes i think definitely i mean that's why i got into it i mean i founded my own company because i believe


29:26

that i had a vision of something i wanted to create and i wanted to to make something unique um if if i if we did


29:33

contracting all the time then i'd be like why don't we just work at another company and let someone else


29:39

handle the risk of making sure our paychecks are paid every month because otherwise my job becomes chasing after


29:44

contracts 24 7 and that's not what i want to do um with my life i want to i want i want to make games so for me it's


29:51

a means to an end um but it's it is exciting working with with the partners that we have


29:56

david kind of like the the last question we asked this a lot to all of our guests


30:02

um how do you feel video game development is gonna change in like the next five or ten years do


30:09

you feel like there's going to be like more you know procedural generation there or


30:15

you know ai based systems that kind of build everything for you uh or is it or


30:20

is it still to be like as it is today i think that in terms of the


30:26

the high-end games the aaa stuff you'll find more procedural or more algorithmic


30:31

type tools to help assist people but i don't think that you're gonna


30:37

you're not gonna find uh that that that will supplant a


30:42

workforce of professionals anytime soon in the next five or ten years um


30:47

i think for an indie developer hopefully you know we we continue to find more channels to


30:54

broadcast ourselves and to gain visibility and to build communities you know things like discord uh showing up


31:00

and other social platforms if you can get involved with things like tick tock and then and pull people into the funnel


31:07

i think that we need to be aware of the the constant commoditization of games


31:13

unfortunately and we need to think of a ways as as indie developers to how to how to battle that


31:18

um because as as as it becomes easier and easier to make games and easier and there's more and more indie developers


31:24

out there adding more and more stuff to steam and whatnot you know you have like a spotify type thing where if you have


31:29

everything you can eat for like one price when you see more game passes and i know ps pluses and things like that


31:35

it'll be harder to sell a single copy of a game for 20 25 30 and things like that so


31:42

that narrative and that value proposition to find to reach consumers that still want to pay for an individual


31:48

license of one game um is very important and that's something we have to stay on top of to be able to to survive i think and to


31:55

keep selling making the games that we want to make do you feel like there's still going to be a market for that because if you look


32:01

at the like dvd sales for example they're basically gone right


32:07

um do you feel like people are still gonna be buying like individuals like dark souls


32:13

for 70 bucks and you know that kind of stuff or is it just going to be like the the spotify


32:19

netflix model i want to believe that it's going to become kind of boutique-ish


32:25

and there will be there will be competition there but hopefully those of us that


32:30

you know we have the pedigree and we have the unique content that we can provide a really high quality unique experience we can survive if you look


32:37

was it vinyl sales like outsold cds and like vinyl sales are now like growing very big


32:43

um this this kind of physical media and having something and buying it i don't think humans will ever


32:49

stop feeling that basic desire to have those things and they appreciate the work that goes into


32:55

something that you can put on your shelf you might find that like physical games like have a resurgence and if the


33:01

distribution models can improve such that um they can be produced more cheaply and consumers don't have to go


33:06

to the big box stores and the developers can get more money on each cartridge that they produce or something like that


33:12

and i think we can survive um we just need to keep developing uh those channels of industry and


33:19

things like band camp or you know or physical record stores find ways to help support those indies


33:27

all right david i think this is kind of like an optimistic note to end the the podcast tonight um thank you so much for


33:34

your time i know you're busy so i really appreciate it and we'll leave the link to the description


33:40

for backbeat and your studio so everyone who wants to maybe communicate with you


33:46

or work with you they can you know reach out and figure out what's going on right


33:51

thank you so much for your time thank you great being here


33:56

thanks for enjoying another episode of the 80 level round table podcast check out upcoming episodes on the 80


34:03

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