YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Beck

lines on the record: 59
first: 2020-12-14
most recent: 2020-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You know, I think we definitely got lucky. We were in the right place at the right time. And if one of many, many, many different variables just went slightly differently, there would have been a totally different outcome. Like if the board pulled the plug in 2008 after we failed on the platform, that wouldn't happen at all. And we're the exact same people who love games and are driven by the same things. And obviously we've learned a lot and had a lot of experiences It's a team effort. There are so many things that need to go right, and there's so many great people that need to collaborate or have it come together to achieve these types of things. It's just really, really hard to do. And so the probability is incredibly low. And so I think we feel tremendously fortunate in order to have the result that we've had.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never in a million years. Our first financial model that we built assumed that we would hit 20,000, like our base case scenario was 20,000 simultaneous players. And if we did that, we hoped we could break even and have a business. And still magical when we actually get back to be able to go back to the office because of COVID, to walk into campus and to see art and to see community faces on the walls and see how lively the community is and see esports matches. It's super exciting.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Donate money to help frontline workers and get masks allocated. And I think we've donated several million dollars just around COVID relief and support in different parts of the world. And so I think from a lot of perspectives, we're just proud of how rioters have responded because we know that this is just a really tough time.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, so we are a fortunate relative to, I think, many industries in that when people aren't able to go outside or do a lot of things that they would normally do, a lot of people choose to spend some more of that time playing games. And so we do benefit. That being said, it is also very difficult to shift to a remote work model because we're such a collaborative organization where teams work so iteratively and so close together. And so we've really had to evolve this whole work from home model where about 99% of our staff around the world are working from home. And it's been incredibly exciting to see rioters find ways to continue to support our games or add content or even launch new games all around the world while doing it all remotely. That's incredibly cool. And then because the business is up, also, you know, we've been trying to figure out, well, what else can we do to help? And so the company's been trying to donate.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that's definitely not intended. And so we've done everything we possibly could to bring everybody together. And we brought in our first chief diversity officer. And I think the company did a lot of soul searching. And I also think we've learned that perfect inclusion is sort of something that we're never going to achieve. But that's okay, that it's actually the like elevating it as a priority is what's super important and involving everybody in the conversation about what can we do better. But yeah, it really, it still hurts”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guys, this is an amazing There's supposed to be one of the best places to work in gaming. Ah, what is going on? And where are you? Because Brandon and I. didn't even get up in front of the company when this media happened until about a week later because we also weren't running the company. At the time, and once we got up and actually on stage and started to speak to all the riders, right? We broke down and started crying and apologized for anybody that felt that this incredible riot experience and mission we were trying to be on It was devastating because we always tried to be an incredible place to work and to think that some people perceive that that wasn't the case. It did really.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when the article first came out, I mean, to be honest, it was sort of devastating because decent chunk of the company were like, ah.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, part of the reason Brandon and I stepped down was because we needed to also make it sustainable. We were exhausted from running this place with so many crises every step of the way. And when we're, as the company really grew and continued to scale over and over and over and the surface area got larger, it sort of shifted into governance mode where we're sort of an inch deep and a mile wide. And the balance of energy draining activities versus energizing activities really got out of whack for a long period of time. We feel tremendously fortunate to be able to elevate a team of great leaders to now manage the data operations. And I don't know when we're going to not want to do that anymore, but I know that it's hard to sit on the sidelines when they're struggling and trying and to figure these things out that are just really, really hard. And so that's why we like to be able to be helpful.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so then I think we got more aggressive around continuing to reinvest in the business. Reinvest in starting more games, reinvest in adding features, reinvest in expanding all the world and building offices, double down on really investing in esports to try to grow it. But in 100% of our growth since that 2011 transaction is organic, right? Like riot's never taken on or capitalized the business at all. So like it's been a sort of since that period of time a very profitable business, but we've now scaled to over about 3,000 employees around the world.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I didn't control the company at the time because we had to raise so much capital. Prior to launch, that we gave up a majority of the equity. And our perspective was it's better to have a smaller piece of something that works than a big piece of something that doesn't. And 10 cents perspective was like, why are you guys selling? Like we actually think that this company is just getting started. And so part of their pitch was we don't want to run it for you guys. We want to empower you to keep running it. And so we were lucky in some ways that the deal was able to come together in that way.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was and all this. In a lot of ways, we then started creating headlines where we pat ourselves on the back for reducing toxicity. And then so the headlines or the stories really became bad toxic community gets incrementally better. And when you get really large and there's just a lot of lot more people in the ecosystem, it's just really hard to. Solve for everything that every individual cohort is looking for simultaneously.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that so while there are some players who get aggressive and are toxic and don't behave, it's really diverse community. So while there are some notable, say, streamers or situations that have been controversial from a toxicity standpoint, there's also huge amounts of beauty and cosplay and fan art and friendships and marriages. And I think that we made a mistake when we were investing in building out our player behavior team to try to nurture a really positive community and promote sportsmanship and train people how to be better online where we moved from sort of a crowdsourced self-policing model where the community would agree to sort of a code of conduct to one where riot was sort of identifying what good or bad”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, and a lot of it was about trying to nurture an ecosystem where the team really came together to try to focus on how do we make it easier to be a fan. That would then create the viewership, which could then create the advertising model or the interest responsors, which could then create the incentive for team owners to then take the risk of raising capital or going and buying good players, which would then create the incentive for players to be able to tell mom it's worth me dropping out of college or not taking this job to go be a full-time professional gamer because it's real now. I mean, there are all these different barriers to overcome. And so it had to happen incrementally.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we didn't look at it as a revenue stream, especially early on. We looked at it as sort of a feature that would help drive engagement and just be a value-added experience for the community, for just something cool to watch and pros and teams to aspire for and like this kind of fun path to pro where it's like, hey, if you're really good at the game, come sign up, see if you can win some money and get some fame and just have a blast.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely not in 2010 because we were still, our platform was often unstable. We had to add features. StarCraft 2 was coming out. This is going to be the sequel to the best PC game of all time, which was going to have a new map editor that birthed the genre that inspired League of Legends. And they were going to have a mechanism to enable for the creators of these mods to actually make money and sell them directly. We were terrified of StarCraft 2. And so we actually timed our season one competitive update two weeks before they launched. And then subsequently both Valve Entertainment and Blizzard announced MOBAS, you know, direct competitors to come directly after us. And so we did not have a moment's rest. And anyway, it was just, there was just one thing after another where it wasn't until...”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So one of the focuses of the development effort was to first of all make our characters, which is the thing that the players would play at any given session, they had to be really cool, really great theme, really fun to play. Another key success factor was matchmaking. The ability to align players of relative skill because sharks playing against sharks is really fun. Minnows playing against minnows is also really fun. Sharks and minnows, not so fun because the sharks just eat the minnows, it's not great for anybody. But then another was the ability to update the game rapidly. We would have this feedback loop with the community on message boards about here's all the changes they're making to the game, here's why, and players felt that they were being heard, that, hey, this thing's unbalanced or we don't like this or we want to see more of this. And they would see rapid progress, which helped build trust that the game is getting better.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did do PR because we tried to get as many interviews and game reviews as possible because as sort of free awareness. But what we really focused on was credibility from a positioning standpoint to our audience and then trying to create incentives for them to help bring in other people. So we created a friend referral program as an example. And whereas people with their accounts would bring in other people and have a code that would give credit to the person who referred them, they could unlock additional content or get sort of a scaling amount of rewards or things like that. And then YouTube was starting to grow at the time. This was 2010. And so we created a YouTube channel and we created a show called Summoner Showcase because players of League of Legends were called Summoners. And then we started getting millions of views of this show because people wanted to get their stuff highlighted. And it just felt like this organic positive community that people wanted to come be part of.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as the word got out, more and more people started to join because it was multiplayer, people wanted to go bring their friends to play it with them. And then their friends would help people get over that learning curve. And so once we turned on the store and we started making some transactions, we were like, wow, like, okay, our burn rate, which was the highest burn rate of any company in any of our VC's portfolio, started to trend down a little bit just month over month.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one thing that was worth mentioning during this period of time, too, is my wedding was scheduled on the first week of November. That's because originally when we had set the date like a year and a half previously, we're like, there's no way we're going to slip the game this far. And so it was this, just so many things kind of going wrong all at the moment. And we did this brief destination wedding. And obviously the whole time we're sort of freaking out based on where things were. I remember The game was now live. Then we had to go to the wedding and we didn't get the store on until for another three weeks post-launch.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it wasn't just awareness, it was also credibility. And that's because there was a lot of stigma where any free game that existed in the West at the time was generally like a really low production value sort of like mini game. And so we really thought it was critical to have the main gaming review sites like PC Gamer play the game and say, this is a real game in order for players to take us sufficiently seriously to even be willing to try it.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think when we were able to run a successful beta test, we had less than a month of cash left. And we were doing it at like one in the morning and everybody was in the office and we were logging on all the PCs we had in the office also and we have a video of it. But it was this incredibly exciting moment once we, you know, the numbers ticked just above 1,000 and we all cheered. Then the VCs were aligned with us where they were hoping that we would achieve that because they wanted to see if this thing would be able to go. And so that then gave us the next tranche of financing, which led us to continue to move forward.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Like the whole team, you know, we were very transparent with the team in terms of how what the situation was, how many resources we had. And one of the solutions that the team came up with was we ended up hiring 1,100 people in the Philippines to go play the game because we knew that if Western audiences participated in a beta with a game of this quality at this point in time, it could, you know, even if there was an NDA, it could really risk the brand positioning. People are like, wow, this game sucks, because it just, it wasn't good enough. The content, it wasn't mature. There was really buggy. We didn't have enough of the systems to sort of make it feel sufficiently fun. Right.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's because our ventures, our first series A financing was actually tranched. So we got three and a half of the $7 million. And in order to unlock the second $3.5 million, we needed to successfully run a beta test with a thousand concurrent players because that in the negotiation with the VCs, that was the mutually agreed milestone that like, okay, we're on track if we do that. So then we actually had six months of cash left in order to build a platform capable of running a beta test with a thousand simultaneous players. And the game was behind schedule too. Things were hectic.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we do think necessity is a mother of all invention and constraints drive a lot of creativity. And because everybody knew we had this fixed amount of runway, it was sort of a do or die moment for the company.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we were working with a company that seemed very credible from our perspective where they came recommended by VC. And to make a long story short, once we were able to bring in Scott Gelb, who became our VP of technology, who had deep expertise around platform, his very first assignment was to go validate where we were with this third-party technology provider and came back after a couple days and is like, this is not going to be at all what we need in order to achieve what we want to achieve. And so that was a really scary moment for the company because this is June 2008. And we then had to call our board and tell them, hey guys, you know that back-end technology we were building and that million dollars we spent on this, we're literally going to have to throw it all away and start from scratch. And that was a horrible moment. Brandon and I were quite terrified that the board would want us to shut down the company.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also, there's a game server, right? And the operational infrastructure, meaning we had to write software to put onto hardware which goes into data centers that we had to administer ourselves, because this is also, we're building this before the cloud existed. So we had to go put physical hardware in data centers, hire operations people, which we, and we totally underestimated the complexity around this too, which, of course, became a big challenge over time.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A ton of work, so not only do you have to build an incredibly fun game, which is really hard, by the way. So if you think about like, how do you go design chess or soccer or something where people can essentially play it infinitely? There's a lot of really difficult problems to solve there. And then you have to do it from a technology perspective where it has to work and the system has to scale and it has to be able to update and the balance of the game from a math perspective needs to be incredibly precise. You need the content to be compelling where people fall in love with the characters from a creative standpoint and the way that somebody would for Batman or any of their favorite superheroes. And so there's so many things that you have to get right. Again, it's like Brandon and I sort of joke that knowing what you know now, you know, like we wouldn't have invested in ourselves back then.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think our perspective was really shaped by the experiences in all these different communities and playing games so deeply where we just believed that people would try it because it's free, but they'd stay if it's great. And so it was incumbent upon us to develop such a compelling experience that once people got into it, unless they fell in love with it, unless they loved the content, the characters and whatnot, then they wouldn't spend money. You know, we really needed to establish trust in our player base that we understand what's important to them, that we care about them, and that we're going to invest and also make the experience better.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I mean, there were many moments when I think Brandon and I felt like, oh my God, how are we possibly going to get through this set of challenges, which there were so many that felt overwhelming? And there were times when we also, Brandon and I would sit there and be like, are we pursuing the right model? Should we try to pivot to sell a box? Maybe we could convert to free-to-play later. In the fog of war around the ambiguity around what the perfect path was when nobody had done this successfully in the West at the time, especially as our first entrepreneurial venture, there was a lot of doubt. And again, and this is us also now managing a team of experienced developers that were oftentimes older than us that had shipped big games and whatnot. And we had to be confident but realistic and explain why this is going to work.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the sort of worst meetings were obviously when we'd be ignored or VCs would essentially just essentially say like they really don't believe in what we're doing. And I think there was the most poignant memory I have around that was when I think of VC was trying to understand like, okay, so you're going to have a multiplayer online battle arena game where a bunch of college kids are going to be killing each other online and you're going to make money by selling virtual skins, which kind of translate to them playing dress-up doll. And we're like, well, kind of, but not really. And they're like,”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I would characterize the dysfunction as being that we were being bullied essentially because of our own insecurity around our own lack of experience by people who essentially wanted to do something else. And we're telling us we're the experts and this is how we need to go do it and trust us. But it always just felt wrong and it felt off Once I think we started to really realize that that was the case, we then realized that we were absolutely going to fail unless we change the dynamic in the office. And every key inflection point from the organization really was around when we managed to bring in an experienced quality developer who was culturally aligned who believed in the vision.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was a really contentious moment in the office where it turned out that we heard that this individual was having meetings with Sony and Microsoft to try to go build games for the PlayStation network or the burgeoning Xbox marketplace. And again, because the company was focused, we had raised money from investors, we had an obligation to go do what we were, that we sold them, that we were going to go do. And so it became a situation where this was untenable and we had to We had to move in a different direction.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the tension really was around a lack of shared vision. So we really believed in the ability to build sort of this online experience that would grow and evolve with players. And I think given this individual's tenure in the industry, Once we sort of ultimately had this come to Jesus moment where it essentially confided that had no interest in building the thing we wanted to build, we then had to part ways, which then meant Brandon and I were alone essentially to go figure out, gosh, how do we actually do all this?”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all this feedback, though, also definitely caused us to reflect and reconsider. And we're like, wow, maybe we're wrong. I mean, these guys are experts who are doing this all the time. And so we would, you know, our confidence was shaken. And so then we'd have to go back and validate. But then we'd think about it again from a player perspective. And we're like, no, but we think this is what makes sense to us. And so it was always a confusing time because we were just intimidated to a certain extent by our lack of experience.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was sort of mixed. So we would very enthusiastically show a video of our demo, sort of flew around the map and it showed some characters and it showed them fighting and things like this. And it had this fast music track playing. And so we tried to hype it up. And part of what we were saying is there are other key messages is like we did all this in four months and we have proprietary technology talking about the broader opportunity. And so a bunch of publishers were also just really not interested in particular because of the business model, how he didn't want to have single player because every game at the time, like publishers would tell us most people don't play the online component of games at all. They typically only play single player. And the business model is really you get the vast majority of revenue in the first month when the game launches. So how could you possibly make a game free and expect to make money on it over time?”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that we believe this would work for a variety of reasons. So one, the free-to-play business model was already having success in Korea in particular and then starting to have some success in China. And then the type of content or games that could benefit the most from this type of model, we thought we're going to be competitive multiplayer games. And so an onslaught was sort of premised upon being this highly engaging competitive multiplayer game and where the depth of engagement was not from adding lots and lots of content, but more from how the game would be dynamic because you're always playing against other players.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's interesting is we tended to not focus much on the actual details of the game, but much more on the business opportunity and sort of the transition that we saw where the game industry would evolve from a sort of packaged goods model to a direct-to-consumer model. And that onslot was going to be the proof point to this broader company thesis around being able to develop a direct to player relationship and grow a community and evolve initially this game onslaught, but then subsequently other games with them. But ironically, it is actually a lot of the content details that Brandon and I were most focused on and interested in and that I think especially over time really became a lot of the differentiator of the company.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we really wanted to essentially get gameplay up and running as soon as possible so we could start iterating on how do we make the game fun, how do we build out the tools pipeline, and Brandon and I had to learn all these steps too, because again, this was our first time developing a game. So we had to were going to conferences, we were reading books, we were trying to consume everything we possibly could about learning how to develop a game.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much, yeah. And we ended up talking to his parents also because they were also like, is this real and whole thing? And yeah, we flew Steve out. And we ended up having sort of these young, inexperienced, very passionate people that were sort of interns or whatnot that would hire on Craigslist, but that really understood the content and the vision we were trying to create. When we first opened up the office, we essentially there were four of us. And over the next several months, we probably grew to about 12 and maybe three of them were interns with essentially no experience.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, so Steve Feake, you know, his online handle was Ginsu. And it was very hard to actually track down the real Ginsu online because there were a variety of people who went under the Ginsu handle. And so, you know, I ended up talking to a guy in Brazil and was trying to pretend he was Steve and things like that. But ultimately, it took us many months. But he was working at Best Buy in Wisconsin and was in college studying computer science. And he was just this incredibly passionate, smart, thoughtful game designer, but with really sort of self-taught.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Brandon and I cruised over to Greg's house in Malibu, and we give him a pitch and run him through the deck. And he's got some good thoughts and he brings his 17-year-old son over. And he's like, hey, have you heard of Doda? What do you think about this whole game? And what do you think about Games as a service and all that? And he's like, yeah, that sounds really cool. And so then Greg would be like, cool, yeah, if you get other people that are going to come in, yeah, I'll invest, right? So then he'd actually introduced us to other people. And that's really how we ended up putting together an angel round of a lot of angels.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when we put together the business plan, it essentially was like a 15 slide deck. And then we ended up having almost 200 slides of backup in this really detailed appendix. And we would essentially just tap the network and ask people, like, you know, give an example that my then girlfriend's father, who's a dentist, he was friends because one of his patients was a guy named Greg Dollarheid, who was the former CEO of Baja Fresh. And so he's like, hey, you guys should go talk to Greg. He's a great businessman.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Financing the game, we quickly realized that that wasn't going to work because part of the experience that we were thinking about delivering was going to be premised upon having the game be free and needing to go direct to consumer and not having single player potentially exploring alternative business models like digital goods and things like that. And once we started talking to publishers whose entire incumbency and massive multi-dollar billion dollar businesses were built around selling shiny disks at retail, they told us that this was a horrible idea and it would never work, which of course shook our confidence. And we talked to a lot of talented developers too. A lot of people were busy. We're no names. We didn't have a lot of money. So people didn't want to come join us either. So we had all these different challenges to try to figure out how to move forward. And the scope quickly expanded and it was huge.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is right. Yeah, Brandon and I were 24 and 25 at the time with no professional software development experience. And so, you know, we, part of the diligence process in terms of building the business plan was really focused on answering three questions. And it was one, if we build this game and this experience that we think would be great, would it work? Would people actually want to play this? Two, could we attract capital necessary to fund the development to be able to launch this game? And then three, sort of on a related note, is could we attract developers and the right type of talent to be able to work together with us to build this thing? And when all signs kind of pointed to yes, we ended up jumping ship from our respective careers and opening the office in September of 2006. But again, given the lack of experience, we really underestimated the scope and complexity, not only of building the game itself, but then subsequently when we were talking to publishers about”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was interesting because I started dating my girlfriend at the time. He was my now wife. And then many of my friends or family, they'd be like, hey, what do you do this weekend? I'm like, well, I'm going to go over this guy's house and we're going to work on a business plan all day. It became this thing where people were kind of like, oh, interesting. And what's your company you're working on? I'm like, oh, a video game company. People be like, huh? Like I just remember how people, it just felt abnormal. So it was fascinating to just experience the surprise and I don't know if it was because of me or because of not many other people who wanted to go dedicate so much time to something at the time. But I just remember being really shocked by that kind of reaction.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought, well, maybe the Dodo step game, it actually proves this whole game as a service thing. Maybe we should go explore games as a service. And it was that questioning, which then led us to start working on the business plan, which then had us reach out to the creators of Doda to start being like, hey, why don't we go explore building a company to commercialize this game and demonstrate that we could make it so much more than if it's just remains a mod as part of this Warcraft 3 ecosystem. And so it was really that which led to the genesis of riot.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yes, in particular around Dota, or Defense of the Ancients. And so this became, this is a game. There were multiple iterations of Dota. There was sort of the original Dota. And then there was Dota All Stars. And Dota All Stars in particular was a really, really fun game that started to grow virally because it took the heroes, these characters within Warcraft 3 and just made it incredibly fun to team up with a team of five players and fight against an enemy team of five players and all these characters had different abilities. And there was this community site called DotaAllSearch.com. And as we got deeper into this community, we're like, oh my God, this type of thing where the developer is connecting directly with the audience and growing it in concert with them over time, this is what the future of the industry is going to look like. And then we thought, well, maybe we could make a dot of hepgame.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it enabled an explosion of game concepts and design because it made it much more widely accessible for people to come up with their own ideas and then ship them to a marketplace for free and then see what would stick and what people wanted to play.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Warcraft 3, which was a commercial product from Blizzard Entertainment, shipped with what's called a map editor, which is an ability for players of the game to utilize the in-game assets, meaning like the art and... Design abilities, things like that to change the rules. And then you could upload these maps that'll have these custom rule sets to anybody else in the world that could then go play them. Everybody that was playing had to purchase a commercial copy of Warcraft 3 in order to play. And so this is one of the reasons it was a good business model for Blizzard.”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an incredibly complex thing. And so the company needed to continually raise money, and they could never quite get the game design or pitch or the problems that they were trying to solve. Ended up just not resonating when they ended up shipping the game. It was kind of a watered down version of the original idea. And so the company ended up going out of business”
2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT