0:00:01 – (Matt Widdoes): Welcome to another episode of Growth at Scale. I’m your host, Matt Widdows and today we are joined by Travis Boatman, who is the CEO and founder of Carbonated, Inc. An independent mobile PC gaming studio based in Southern California. And he’s got a career spanning major industry leaders like ea, Zynga and many others. He’s also shaped the evolution of mobile games through his expertise in game design, monetization, mobile advertising and digital strategy.

0:00:27 – (Matt Widdoes): Prior to launching carbonated in 2015, he served as SVP of mobile at Zynga, overseeing the company’s mobile game operations and SVP of Worldwide studios at EA Mobile, driving innovation in mobile gaming. Beyond Carbonated, Travis remains an active voice in the gaming industry, serving on advisory boards such as O3DE foundation and USC Viderby School of Engineering. His leadership in digital distribution, strategic partnerships and open source game development continues to push the boundaries of next generation gaming experiences.

0:00:59 – (Matt Widdoes): Travis, thank you so much for joining us today.

0:01:02 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s always weird to hear your sort of your entire career read back to you, but yeah, but it’s cool.

0:01:08 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah, this is, yeah, this is your life review today. I’m curious, by the way, did I pronounce the. Is vitter be the right pronunciation for us?

0:01:17 – (Travis Boatman): Viterbi. It’s close.

0:01:18 – (Matt Widdoes): Viterbi. Okay. My sense, as I was reading that, I’m like, that doesn’t sound right, but I’ll check. I’m glad I did. So cool. Well, you’ve been, you’ve been in the gaming industry for some time and you’ve worked with some really great teams and great people, many of whom I’ve also worked with or alongside or know very well. And so I guess for our audience who may not know you or maybe or they’re outside of gaming, could you just tell us a little bit like who are you? Where have you been? Walk us through kind of your experience, particularly in gaming, but just generally from, from your, your career.

0:01:53 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, totally. So, you know, I, I was fortunate enough to grow up in kind of the Silicon Valley Bay area. So I was sort of born in redded city, grew up in Mountain View, Los Altos. And I think both from where I was lucky to grow up and also the timing, I sort of grew up at the beginning of the games industry. A close friend of mine in high school actually started at a games company in high school and he was like, hey, you got to. This place actually pays you to like test games and stuff. I think there’s a commercial that does that. It was really kind of true. He’s like, we could go, they pay us to play games. And I’m like, no way.

0:02:21 – (Travis Boatman): So yeah, yeah, it’s impossible. But this is, you got to remember this is like 1988. I’m old. So even more impossible.

0:02:27 – (Matt Widdoes): It’s like they’re going to pay us in pizza. Is like, is it. Do they do. Is this the Ninja Turtles arcade scene that we’re walking into? So yeah, it sounds amazing.

0:02:35 – (Travis Boatman): Pretty close. And the games back then, I think we were playing, we used to play a lot of Bomberman, if you remember Bomberman. Like it’s kind of that era. And so, yeah, so I started doing QA work at this games company on the summers and then I went to school down in Los Angeles where I am now at usc. It’s partly why I’m an advisor for the school because I love the school and they’ve been good to me and so I want to be good to them.

0:02:59 – (Travis Boatman): But I was a pre med student so I didn’t go in for computer science. I didn’t go into any business. So so sort of pre med student and continued to on the summers go back and work for that video game company. And that games company was called PF Magic. So if you go look that up, it’s like a clown in a disc. It was sort of CD ROM era. But I worked at PF Magic and that’s how I kind of got my start to the games industry. And PF Magic was a studio that made games for kind of the early publishers back in the day and so got into the games industry, you know, through kind of QA and sort of working my way up.

0:03:33 – (Travis Boatman): Then you know, later I, you know, sort of went to Mattel, Mattel Interactive division back in la. I kind of wanted to get back to Los Angeles. I just loved the beach and the life down there. My friends were all, were all down there. So I moved back to Los Angeles to do interactive work at Mattel. Of course at this time I’m a late, mid, late 20s guy, you know, single, didn’t have any kids. It’s kind of weird doing kids games and you don’t have any experience in that.

0:03:59 – (Travis Boatman): So I had a desire to do something else. And that was sort of the very early rise of mobile. And so I did some mobile games when I was at Mattel and then through that work got connected with this company called Jamdat Mobile, which was a pure play publisher funded by a lot of really amazing executives. Sort of Mitch Lasky, Zack Norman, Scott Layman, Austin Murray, and a few others, and was fortunate to sort of be a place where I could really learn from them in all different ways. Game production, executive leadership.

0:04:30 – (Travis Boatman): First time I’d ever worked in a company that was venture funded. You know, we did very well. We went public. So first ipo, seeing that whole experience from the inside, and then we were public for two years and we sold to Electronic Arts, was the first public company I think EA ever purchased, was jammed up. Oh, wow. And yeah, and so then I got to go through the acquisition experience and what that was like going into Electronic Arts as a kind of a. A little bit of a redhead stepchild. Like, you know, mobile at that time, you’re sort of talking 2006 before the iPhone launched, so you’re still pre iPhone era, so you’re still talking flip phones.

0:05:06 – (Travis Boatman): And so E at that time is doing amazing console, beautiful graphic stuff. And we had like flip phones or doing Tetris. So, you know, it was an interesting cultural experience to be kind of the redheaded stepchild of a big company like that. But to give EA credit, they believed in the space, they believed in us, they gave us tons of support. And my time at EA was simply amazing. So I did that job for the next seven years post acquisition, six years.

0:05:33 – (Matt Widdoes): I think those were also, by the way, like amazing years to be at ea. Right. Like this was like heyday ea, right, if I’m not mistaken.

0:05:41 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, not only that, that was also the era. Well, EA stock actually didn’t do super well. I think we were acquired at around $62 a share. And when I left to go to Zynga, it was like $12 a share. So the stock didn’t do very well. But the launches of products and frankly the mobile business was booming, booming. That’s when the iPhone came out, that’s when the App Store came out. That’s when Android appeared.

0:06:04 – (Travis Boatman): That’s when Free to Play showed up. Like all of those big beats on the mobile side happened during my time at ea and it was a wild ride. And some of the best times of my life was during that time at ea. So I have nothing but wonderful things to say about EA, my time there. But after 11 years between Jamdat and EA, sort of one long run, you know, there was the rise of Free to Play and microtransactions and Zynga was this new thing on the rise and, you know, Free to play gaming with live operations driven by data.

0:06:36 – (Travis Boatman): And that was something that was super alien to me and I really wanted to understand that. And so I Had a lot of friends who were at Zynga and, you know, the lure was strong and, you know, I just sort of said to myself, well, it’s been really good to me and I love ea, but I wanted to try something new. And I’d done 11 years of that same business and I thought, well, I want to go learn and stay on the bleeding edge of technology, which I can talk a little bit about kind of some of the methodology that I think I use, and we use it carbonated, but comes from this idea of technology in the games business moves really fast and you have to force yourself into where the new is or you become a dinosaur, you become antiquated quickly.

0:07:15 – (Travis Boatman): And so going to Zynga was part of that. It was like, I want to learn the new, I want to see, I don’t understand totally what they’re doing and I want to go learn it. And so they entrusted me because I knew a lot about mobile to help them grow and build mobile as a, as a pillar of Zynga. And I knew nothing about kind of really free to play live ops and I wanted to learn that from them. So I think it was a good kind of exchange there.

0:07:38 – (Travis Boatman): And then I went to Zynga.

0:07:40 – (Matt Widdoes): I’m curious, how did they find you? Was it like you got recruited? Did you have a buddy there? Did you see like a job posting? You reached out, like, how did that. Do you remember how that came to be?

0:07:48 – (Travis Boatman): I. I basically got recruited. You know, there was a lot of overlap at that time. I knew a bunch of people that were there. I mean, probably there’s a guy, this guy, Ben Jones, who, you know, was, was. He was in the kind of the recruiting business early on. Then he was a really early guy at Jamdad and then he went to Zynga. It was, Sorry, he was at Jammed it. Then he was through like fall, was with me, you know, the whole time. Like he was jammed at then ea, then he left and went to Zynga. Got it. And Ben has always been somebody who has been, whether deliberately great to me or accidentally great to me, but he’d always, when he sort of felt like, hey, I know somebody who can help here, he’d reach out to me. And so part of the reason I ended up at Jamdat from Mattel was because he introduced me there.

0:08:33 – (Travis Boatman): Part of the reason I ended up at Zynga was because he introduced me there. So he was really instrumental in that jump. And then ultimately when I was interviewing, I was interviewing with two senior execs there One this guy named David Kohler. Um, and then of course, Mark was, was a. Was a heavy, heavy person in that. Um, and I would say what’s interesting about that interview going from. From ultimately EA to Zynga was they were very much like, we believe the future is social.

0:09:00 – (Travis Boatman): And I was very much, I believe the future is mobile. And so the first time they sort of tried to recruit me, I basically said no. And I said, look, because there’s a disagreement here. Like, you guys think the future is social, I think the future is mobile. And. And we didn’t really see eye to eye and we sort of went our separate ways for, I don’t know, maybe six to nine months. And they kind of came back again much more aggressively. And then I remember meeting with Mark Pincus at the time and he said, you know, okay, I’m essentially paraphrasing, but he basically said, okay, fine, you know, we believe the future.

0:09:30 – (Travis Boatman): Future is social. And you believe the future is mobile. Do you believe the future is social on mobile? And I was like, yes. And he’s like, there you go, they get over here. And I was like, all right. So they sort of won me that way. And yeah, and went over there and I learned a lot. You know, obviously that was. I joined right. Right before the IPO and right before sort of Facebook sort of essentially turned out the install flow and the Facebook business sort of sort of crashed.

0:09:55 – (Travis Boatman): But the work we did on the mobile side was pretty good. You know, we were, you know, we had one of the top games in the world at the time. Zynga Poker Mobile was like number one top grossing for quite some time and we were sort of finding our way. But I think the pressure of what happened on the Facebook canvas side made it extremely challenging to really, you know, give mobile the space it needed to grow the way you would hope it would. But ultimately, you know, Mark strategy and those guys who said we believe in mobile were ultimately right. I mean, Zynga exited to take two as basically a pure mobile company. It started way back then when they believed that they were starting to bring in talent like myself and others, you know, who were mobile zealots or experts, I guess you could say.

0:10:36 – (Matt Widdoes): Well, I’m curious too, to go back. You had mentioned it in, as part of your. The early days, you. You started off school, pre med. I’m curious, what did you hope to do with that? Like, what was the dream back then with the pre med approach?

0:10:49 – (Travis Boatman): It’s funny you say that. There was no dream. I did it because it seemed Like, I don’t want to say the cool thing to do, but you know, you’re young and you think, you know, you get it. Yeah. Be a doctor. Right? It’s like, oh, I want to be a doctor. And I had always had a good mind for what I call like logical sciences. I tend to be good at like problem solving and understanding structures. I tend to like drift into physics and, and math and things that are sort of structural thinking.

0:11:16 – (Travis Boatman): I really struggle with memorization. My wife will tell you I’m terrible with names and, and memorization is not my, not my thing. And so what I found in, in pre med was half of it’s those kind of structural sciences and half of it’s just pure memorization.

0:11:30 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And I, for a million things, you.

0:11:33 – (Travis Boatman): Know, the lunate surface on the bone, it’s, you’re just like, I had to memorize some of that stuff. But I, I hated memorization because I felt like I was wasting my life. I was like, I want to know how things work. I don’t want to have to just memorize this. Because some scientists back in the 1800s happened to name it that, like that, that bothered me. And video games spoke to me in that again, structural, logical way. Right. Everything makes sense. Everything ultimately boils down to a zero or a one.

0:11:59 – (Travis Boatman): And I thought, ah, this is a business that I can really, it sort of spoke to me in that way more than the entertainment side of the business did much more. The engineering and how it worked really spoke to me. And I also have to give USC really good credit. They at one point have a. I don’t know if they do it anymore, but they had a class where they basically say to you, if you go to medical school, here’s what your life looks like going forward.

0:12:22 – (Travis Boatman): Here’s how much debt you’re going to be in, here’s how long you’re going to be in school for know, here’s when you’re going to start to practice and here’s when you’ll start to make money. And it was, you know, 10 years out kind of thing. And as a 19 year old, you’re like 10 years. I’m going to be like 29. Like that’s crazy. You know, So I was like, I don’t want to like lock myself into this for my whole life.

0:12:43 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, well, for sure. And by the way, was that class, which I think is a great class to have, is that a, that’s not a semester or is that like a two hour course or is it.

0:12:52 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, it was like it was like a seminar thing where they curious, we’re going to explain to you what you’re about to sign up.

0:12:58 – (Matt Widdoes): Well, it’s so funny and part of the reason I asked that is I, when I went to school I started off as essentially biology undergrad with the plant with pre dental. But I go back to that time and same question, it’s like why? I’m like, I don’t know, I’m like, I basically I. And I feel like it’s still this way. This is a bit of an aside but I’m like I, I feel like 18 year olds heading into college have essentially the same grasp of what options exist as a, as a seven year old where you’re like, I can be a policeman, I can be a dentist, I can be a doctor, I can be a lawyer, I can be a plumber, I can be a bus driver, I can be a trash man, I can, you know, it’s just kind of like. But nobody’s like I want to be a project manager or like I want to be a, you know, yeah, I want to be a commodities analyst. It’s like okay, so there’s no.

0:13:52 – (Matt Widdoes): And I think it’s one of the biggest disservices we, we have to our, our youth is that I feel like your junior year in high school it should be a number of, of required classwork on personal finance on like what, what, what is the life of a doctor at the end of it, right? Or, or, or a lawyer and, and get people better prepared to kind of try and find their way because you’re just so unprepared and like nobody really knows what they want to do. So you end up with all these people who are like I’m studying psychology freshman year or I’m so. Because I want to be a psychologist. And it’s like none of them go on to do that.

0:14:29 – (Matt Widdoes): And yeah, I wish I had just known more back then because I might have got, I might have like done economics or I might have done something else that like has, has some more like real world applications. So anyways, I’ll come off the soapbox, but it sounds like you were in a similar spot also super beneficial. And I think you mentioned like very fortunate to be so close to the technology that was driving gaming because your other option back then would have been like Tokyo or something like that. There wasn’t like a lot or like maybe in Maryland or something like that. There’s some stuff on the east coast, but yeah, if you grew up in like Kansas City, there’s no, you don’t even know where games come from. They just like magically show up somewhere. It’s like a complete, a complete unknown. Especially in the, in the mid-80s, late-80s.

0:15:14 – (Matt Widdoes): Okay, so you, you’ve, you’ve gone through that acquisition, you’ve lived in this kind of heyday. I think of ea, particularly on the mobile side. You come into Zynga during what is a kind of boom period for them and then Facebook pulls the rug out and says like actually we can kind of wildly impact your ability to earn. And now Zynga’s. That probably was a fire drill that you like walked into where you’re like, oh, okay, this is going to be a little bit more wild. But you have the ability to kind of look, lead that change and, and, and be, you know, at this pivotal moment for Zynga that then, you know, has done very well.

0:15:53 – (Matt Widdoes): And I, I think I came to Zynga probably after you had left or, or shortly thereafter. And then did you immediately from Zynga start carbonated? Is that about right?

0:16:04 – (Travis Boatman): No, it’s sort of. Good, Good question. You know, I had at that time been on kind of like. Exactly. You mentioned like a, like a great run, like heyday of a lot of the business. I’d never really taken any time to like live life. And that sounds silly to say, but I, you know, I was sort of living life in the moment, you know. So I was traveling a lot for EA and Zynga all over the world, you know, with studios everywhere. So I’d live kind of like the, the. You remember that scene from Fight Club when he’s on the plane and he’s like, you had these like five minute friends or whatever. Yeah, that was kind of my life. I was traveling seven, eight months out of the year at EA and probably six months out of the year in my Zynga days.

0:16:41 – (Travis Boatman): And, but, but EA was traveling almost the entire time and um, I, I was having a great life, but I also didn’t really, like, I couldn’t really build relationships to be totally transparent. So I was a single guy, you know. And so after my time at Zynga I took some real time off. I was pretty cooked because I’d been working. Yeah, you know, whatever since the start of my career. Straight, very little time off and, and I just thought I’d take a break for a while and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I sort of like stared at the sun. You know, I live down in Los Angeles kind of near the beach. I’d go to the beach and just sort of think about life.

0:17:12 – (Travis Boatman): My girlfriend at the time we started to build our relationship, we ended up getting married. So that was during that window where I could actually spend time building a relationship and thinking about my life and what I really want to do next, if anything. And I think during that window of time, I just sort of continued to drift back to games. I love the technology of games. I love mobile games particularly.

0:17:35 – (Travis Boatman): And I just kept saying to myself, no, I don’t want to do anything else, I want to stay in games. And then I sort of thought about my career and all the things I’d done. And there were sort of two things I’ve never really done purely from scratch. I’ve never started my own company, I’d never done the entrepreneurial journey, had no idea how to do it. And two, I never made a game for myself from scratch, like literally from scratch, you know, just like pen and paper in a room by yourself, with nothing. And just what do I want to make? Start from scratch.

0:18:03 – (Travis Boatman): And I thought, well, maybe I’ll fail miserably at these things, but I want to try it. I want to at least take a shot. And so that was sort of the starting of Carbonated. I started by myself in the room that I’m in right now and sat down and started to think about what kind of company I wanted to build, what kind of products I wanted to build, how, how would this company compete, you know, what would be the advantages this company needs to have to. To succeed?

0:18:26 – (Travis Boatman): And I came with kind of a plan and then I started to execute on that plan. And that’s sort of how how Carbonated was born. Carbonated started in the early days because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had some offers, some early venture offers and some early sort of financial offers, but I didn’t want to take money from people yet. I just felt like I don’t know what I’m doing from a company perspective. I sort of felt like I knew how to make product. I’ve been doing product my whole life that I’d never started a company before. So it was very much imposter syndrome. Very sort of like, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t want to take money from people and lose their money.

0:18:59 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, I’ve never done this before. And so instead we did a work for hire deal with Glue Mobile and I knew the executives there and they were doing it transactional, which very much made me happy. It’s like, we’ll pay you for this work.

0:19:11 – (Matt Widdoes): Great.

0:19:11 – (Travis Boatman): You know, and that was a great way to get started that we did, you know, sort of two products in that work for hire kind of deal that lasted for about three to four years. And then my co founders and I, we all sort of said, I’ll talk about them in a second. But, but we sort of said we started this company to make this game, which of course I pitch them to join the company. Like, we ultimately want to make this game, but we’re do some work for hire to get bootstrapped.

0:19:35 – (Travis Boatman): And after a couple of years, we all sort of looked at each other and said, like, what are we doing? Like, we started this to go make that game. We’re, we’re getting trapped in the work for hire because it’s, it’s, it’s addicting to money because they just keep paying you. So you’re like, why go out and do this other thing?

0:19:49 – (Matt Widdoes): Totally.

0:19:50 – (Travis Boatman): And so we ultimately said, okay, we’re going to go all in on this. So we, and the glue guys were great. They, you know, at the time we started negotiating with Nicola Damasi and then later Nick Earl. And Nick was great with us. You know, he basically said at one point like, do you guys want to keep doing this or do you want to. We know you want to take your shot eventually. Yeah, you know, let us know when you want to do that. We’ll be, we’ll be good partners. And they were excellent, excellent partners to us. And so we eventually sat down with him one day and we said, yeah, we think, we think now’s the time. And he said, great. You know, we kind of knew this was coming at some point and we then started full in on our game, concepting it, you know, leveraging the thesis that we had.

0:20:24 – (Travis Boatman): We ended up raising capital basically kind of late 2019, early 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and then, you know, raised at a round in 2023. And then now we’re sort of here. So that’s sort of like the, the whole, the whole journey to, to today.

0:20:38 – (Matt Widdoes): And where, like, what are you, what can you tell us about what you’re building? I know that it’s, you’ve got, it’s. We’re almost to a point where you’re going to have some, some beta stuff ready. But it’s. I know, I mean, I’ve been you and I’ve been talking about it for a handful of years and it’s like, I know, at least from my perspective, I know it’s very important to you to get it right where it’s like, I don’t want to rush it. It’s like I want to get, I want to get everything right. And there’s like lots of, lots of tweaking and iteration. But can you. And I can see some, we can all see some characters in the background if you’ve got the video up. But I see they have guns and it looks like a very dangerous place to be. But can you tell us a little bit about it and kind of what you’re working on?

0:21:20 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, so I’ll tell you about. I sort of think about games in these kind of four buckets, which is actually something that I learned and worked with Zynga at the time to kind of come up with this framework. So Mark Pincus was great. He said, I want to understand mobile games and I want you and this other guy named Bill Allred to go and come up with a framework. So he and I went and kind of a hole for a couple months and came up with this framework which I still use today. Okay, so the framework’s in kind of four pieces.

0:21:41 – (Travis Boatman): It’s appeal or thematic. Like what’s the appeal of the game? It’s your game mechanic. Like what do you actually do? What do you play? Retention. What brings you back to the game? Because you only play the game once, it’s not going to do very well. Come back to the game and ultimately how you monetize games is a business. You got to make money somehow. And so I was thinking about that framework when I came up with this game. And thematically I came with this kind of idea about a dystopian present.

0:22:05 – (Travis Boatman): And where the idea came from was twofold. One, I was at USC during the LA riots. And what I realized during the LA riots and I was not to say that I’m not super, super liberal, but I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. Very liberal kid growing up. My dad was ex military, but still very anti guns. Police will take care of you, all that stuff. And after going through the LA riots, I had that, you know, direct exposure to, you know, sometimes the police just pull out. And in that time they did. They, they pulled out and they let you kind of fend for yourself. And there’s some dark stories I won’t share here.

0:22:36 – (Matt Widdoes): And by the way, quick, quick aside because that’s so interesting. My, my sister was also in LA during the rides. But I’m curious, like how close were you to kind of the danger of it? Pretty close. It sounds like.

0:22:45 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, USC was in the heart of it.

0:22:47 – (Matt Widdoes): Okay.

0:22:47 – (Travis Boatman): So we had people trying to climb up our balconies. You know, we had a guy who was nearly mortally injured, pizza delivery guy who was brought into the students who live below us in the apartment. So it was.

0:22:58 – (Matt Widdoes): Had been just beaten physically kind of thing.

0:23:00 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, okay. Physically. While delivering pizza.

0:23:02 – (Matt Widdoes): And the. Right. He had nothing to do with. And then the cops. You saw cops kind of nearby. And then at some point they were just like, we’re getting out of here. And you’re like, what, the cops just drove away kind of thing.

0:23:10 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. The LAPD sort of pulled out because they. I think the story was they didn’t want to make it worse, so they sort of pulled out of the area. And, you know, USC has USC security, but we were off. We were about it. Block or two off campus.

0:23:20 – (Matt Widdoes): Right.

0:23:20 – (Travis Boatman): And so, you know, you’re got Ryan.

0:23:21 – (Matt Widdoes): What are they going to do anyways? They would be mob. Yeah, okay, got it. So you go through this experience and you’re like, okay, hold on. Maybe. Maybe the police won’t always take care of us. And so I interrupted. But I think that’s important.

0:23:33 – (Travis Boatman): No, that’s right. And it would. It sort of showed me is that very quickly things can fall apart and people can kind of turn on each other and violence appears quickly. And so that sort of stuck with me. And again, I’m a very. We were talking before this podcast about how I tend to be a hyper optimist. I’m a very optimistic person. Right. So I’m not like doom and gloom. This isn’t about doom and gloom. It’s. But it’s a. Interesting idea to play with that things can go bad really quickly and people.

0:23:54 – (Travis Boatman): It is. You can suspend disbelief in a theme that this could happen because I obviously live through. Now, granted, that doesn’t happen very often. It’s extremely rare. And for the most part, the world’s a pretty safe place and things are generally pretty good. But it does happen. At least it happens enough to suspend the disbelief of. This could happen.

0:24:10 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. It’s not totally science fiction. It’s.

0:24:12 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, exactly.

0:24:13 – (Matt Widdoes): I mean, it’s happened, you know, in the last hundred years, many places across the globe where.

0:24:17 – (Travis Boatman): That’s right.

0:24:17 – (Matt Widdoes): Civil unrest pops off and, you know, shit hits the fan base.

0:24:22 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. So that’s one side of the theme is sort of the. The world can fall apart quickly. And then the other side of the theme is that I also was living in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay area, before I went to college during the big Loma Prieta earthquake. And when that earthquake happened. It. There was a, I think a sinkhole or I don’t know what it did, but it cut 280 kind of in half at one point. And we lived very close to the 280 freeway, which is a big eight lane freeway up in the San Francisco Bay area.

0:24:46 – (Travis Boatman): And this, the Loma Prater earthquake, I think was in like June or July. I remember it was hot, it was like summer. And, and I remember the earthquake happened. It leveled houses around us, is pretty gnarly. It was a 7.2, I think, as I recall, 7.2. And we live down in, in Mountain View, Sunnyvale area. So we are much closer to the epicenter than San Francisco. We were like, I don’t know, 10 miles from the epicenter. So it was a massive earthquake where we were.

0:25:10 – (Travis Boatman): And after the earthquake finished, I walked up to 2:80 just because I was curious because, you know, power was out, lights were out, water was out, gas was out, you know, so I was just bored. I was like, I’m wandering around, have a walk, right? And I walked up to the 280 freeway. And I’m not making this up. The freeway was absolutely empty, no cars on it because it had been cut off. And there were deer walking across the freeway just middle of the day.

0:25:31 – (Matt Widdoes): And how many minutes or hours had passed since the freeway had been cut off?

0:25:36 – (Travis Boatman): I think it was the next day. I think it was the next day.

0:25:38 – (Matt Widdoes): So it’s been. Okay, so it wasn’t an hour, but yeah, but by the next day there’s deer that are like, this is fine.

0:25:43 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, just walking, you know. And that part of the Bay Area is kind of, you know, it’s, it’s kind of closer to the mountains. If you look at Mountain View. Mountain View, kind of close to the mountains.

0:25:51 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:25:51 – (Travis Boatman): But it was wild to sit. And I sat on the freeway kind of Indian style, and I looked down the freeway in the blazing sun at like noon and there were deer just wandering down an eight lane freeway. And that stuck with me. And I was like, oh man, that, that. And so when I was thinking about kind of, you know, concepting this game, I was like the juxtaposition of those two things, like the violence, the madness of people and the beauty of the world. So Mad World is sort of the mw. The M’s red and orange for the madness. And the W is the world, which is beautiful and blue.

0:26:21 – (Travis Boatman): So the color contrast uses orange and blue and it’s related to that.

0:26:24 – (Matt Widdoes): Okay.

0:26:25 – (Travis Boatman): So that was the theme. This sort of like, it’d Be interesting to play with. This idea of the world goes sideways today, current day, so it’s not in the future. It’s like if the world went sideways like tomorrow you play the game six months after. We call it the Collapse, but six months after the collapse, so enough people have sort of died off that the world’s quiet. And then we keep some beauty of the world. We try to anyway. It’s hard to do on a little mobile game, but you know, some of the beauty of the world, the quietness of the world that you’d imagine if many people were gone. So no credit cards, no airplanes in the sky, no street noise, no Facebook, no Instagram, like so that’s part of the story that you’re sort of have these two worlds opposed to each other. The violence of survival of humans fighting each other and the beauty of a quiet world.

0:27:07 – (Matt Widdoes): Also I would imagine TVs, radios, cell phones, all gone.

0:27:10 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, all gone.

0:27:11 – (Matt Widdoes): Right.

0:27:12 – (Travis Boatman): So you play as a bunch of survivors fighting for territory in this mad world. So the game is called Bad World. And then we. So that’s on the thematic part of things, then on the game mechanic part of things. We actually really struggled here for a while. We tried to do something really innovative with using kind of AI technology. So you swipe and the squads will just do what we think they do with a swipe.

0:27:35 – (Travis Boatman): And that’s ultimately what got our investors most excited in the early days was a new way of playing play using intuitive.

0:27:41 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, intuitive GUI kind of thing.

0:27:42 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, yeah. And it worked pretty well. We got it kind of mostly solved for early and mid. Meaning if you’re a new gamer, it was a little weird, but you pick it up pretty quick. And as you sort of progress in the game and you get a little bit better at understanding the game, you’re sort of not hardcore yet, but you’re sort of starting to figure out the game. It was really elegant and played really, really well. But we pretty quickly realized that more of the hardcore players who really wanted to min max the game and control the squad and I want this sniper to just sit onto the edge and I don’t want that guy to shoot until he’s right out of the ammo. And they to get frustrated with the AI, it’s not doing what they wanted it to do.

0:28:14 – (Matt Widdoes): It was assisting too much kind of thing.

0:28:16 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, well, you. Yeah, you. You basically let the AI play the game. So you’d swipe and depending on where you swiped, the AI would interpret the swipe and. And do things.

0:28:23 – (Matt Widdoes): Got it.

0:28:24 – (Travis Boatman): And that we man, we spun on that for, God, I don’t know, you know, it took us two and a half years to develop that. And then we spun on it for another full year and we just couldn’t crack it. And we were getting closer and closer, but we were just going to run out of money. And so we said, okay. In our thesis, we had a pivot point built in. We said, if we can’t crack this, here’s how we’ll pivot. And that pivot was to more of a traditional third person shooter.

0:28:47 – (Travis Boatman): And so we did that pivot and the board, who we have was great. They understood. And it was always part of the plan. If we can’t crack this, we’re going to pivot to a little bit more of a traditional core mechanic. So we did that pivot. So now the game is a third person shooter for the core and then the retention. Why you come back to the game, the metagame is, is about progression to leveling up your characters, but it’s about territory control. And so, you know, if you’re, you know, in la, you’re going to fight for trying to control la and maybe you’ll fight against San Diego or if you’re in Germany, you know.

0:29:19 – (Matt Widdoes): You mean if you’re in LA in real life, you might choose to go there, Is that what you mean?

0:29:23 – (Travis Boatman): No. So, yeah, well, we look at your IP address and we lock you. There’s a world map in the entire game and you play from where you’re from.

0:29:31 – (Matt Widdoes): Okay, got it. You pay where you play, where you’re physically at in the real world.

0:29:33 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, right.

0:29:34 – (Matt Widdoes): Okay, that’s.

0:29:35 – (Travis Boatman): So if you’re. So if you’re playing from. I’ll use it extreme. Let’s say you’re playing from Korea, you’re playing from Seoul or Busan, you know, you’d show up on the map in Korea and you’d be playing and you’d be fighting for control of Korea. And you might be fighting against Japanese players who are playing from Japan and are attacking, or you might be playing against Chinese players who are moving through North Korea and trying to take Korea.

0:29:57 – (Travis Boatman): If you’re playing in Germany, you might be playing against, you know, Polish players who are trying to fight, you know, fight you for control over.

0:30:02 – (Matt Widdoes): Well, and it’s cool that you’re, you know, that you’re playing amongst it also. Yeah, there’s an element which is like, how many of, how many are there of us here? And you’re like in la and it might be a ton and then you’re like, okay, I’m in the middle of, I don’t know, some random city in Oklahoma and you’re like, I’m the only one. Am I the only one in the state right now? And then like you eventually run into somebody else and you’re like, oh my God. So it kind of actually replicates that a little bit, I would imagine from like a discovery standpoint of other people. I don’t know.

0:30:32 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, well. And it also kind in a, kind of a weird way sort of self balances, although we’re not sure and this all sounds great and everything. We haven’t shipped it yet, so we don’t know. But like, yeah, your example is right. If you’re in Oklahoma, you know you’re gonna be able to take a lot of land quickly. Right. Because there’s not a lot of people fighting for it. And that land might be a little less valuable.

0:30:48 – (Matt Widdoes): It’s more to defend though, when people show up.

0:30:50 – (Travis Boatman): That’s right. But if you’re in la, you’re gonna have a lot of people scrapping for la. Lots of people there, because that’s where people have mobile phones and the like. So in the game we think we’ll have a lot of players battling for and then we can do some stuff to make where there’s more density of players at land and economically more valuable.

0:31:05 – (Matt Widdoes): And 100% mobile. Not. Or is it also PC?

0:31:09 – (Travis Boatman): Correct. 100% mobile. You know, the tech and the platform we’re using allows us to go to other platforms, but we are trying to stay focused. Mobile first.

0:31:16 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, got it. And then I think you had started to talk about the monetization, but what do I buy? How do I level up? Is it all. Yeah. Could you walk me through that? I’m just curious.

0:31:23 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, totally. So then on the monetization side of things, you know, it’s. We’re sort of traditional free to play mobile on the top. Right. So you can, you know, download the game for free. You know, you have IAP and you have battle pass ads. Yeah, all the, all the traditional stuff that mobile free to play gamers would understand. And then one of the things that we’re doing that we think is innovative, although, you know, these days we’ll see is we have an ownership component like an NFT crypto component on the back, which is not in the core part of the economy. So there’s no SO for free to play. Gamers who want to play this, they’re not going to run into, you know, an economy that’s sort of poisoned by Financial incentives.

0:32:01 – (Travis Boatman): But there’s, you know, we believe, and we’ll see if we’re right, that people might want to own, you know, Los Angeles or Monaco or Dubai or Hollywood or. Or maybe their hometown in northern Oklahoma. And that owning, and not only controlling it from a gameplay perspective, but being able to own it and trade it and do interesting stuff with that land collectible in a sense, we think is valuable. We’ll. We’ll find out so that it has a component there as well, which we’re doing some innovation on.

0:32:29 – (Travis Boatman): And that probably links us to a little bit of like how we think about starting a company in game development, which is you have to take some risk to do something truly different. You can’t just paint by numbers.

0:32:41 – (Matt Widdoes): Well, and, and that’s the nuance of gaming is like, it’s super, super competitive. It’s relatively zero sum game. There’s only so many hours in the day. I’m not playing like 12 games deeply all day, every day. And there is this kind of homogenization where everything kind of feels very similar. Or you’re like, yep, that’s just a reskin of. That’s essentially Mario Brothers with a different character. And I’m used to a side scroll and this is this. And, and that’s on top of the fact that outside of the fact that consumers have a ton of choice and outside of the fact that it’s relatively expensive to make a good game, consumers are also incredibly fickle and relatively demanding from like an outsider’s perspective. Like, I don’t build games, but I’m like, I’ve seen the gaming players. I’m like, you guys are kind of can, you know. No, no gaming company could say this, but I can say it as an outside observer. It’s like you guys are a little spoiled. A little. Like, give us a break. Like, you know, you see it all the time with aaa. You see where they’re like, this game sucks is I’m like, do you have any idea how, how hard it is to get, you know, these things right? And to keep these games live with a million players, like where the accuracy of the shot is, you know, it’s, it’s just not a simple thing. So. Yeah. So I think, I think especially nowadays you actually have to have something fairly novel or amazing IP or something to stick out, because otherwise you just kind of blend in the sea of same.

0:34:05 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. And I have this, this, I talk about this one a lot, but I always say, like, game games, games have to shake players out of apathy. Right? Otherwise Nobody wants to play the same old game. Otherwise, if you want to play the same old game, it’s been made already. So if you want to play the same old game, you play Call of Duty. If you want to play the same old game, you play whatever. You play these IPs that are very old and have been around forever.

0:34:25 – (Travis Boatman): So the only way you can really get players to do, to play something new and to give you grace, right? Like, I think one of the problems is if you copy another game, your expectation of quality is going to be really high, right? So imagine you’re copying Call of Duty, right? You’re going to have to be at least as good as Call of Duty if you’re copying them or better, right? And that’s impossibly hard.

0:34:43 – (Travis Boatman): But if you do something truly different, the customers give you a lot of grace. They’re like, this is different. Your quality can be. Arguably, I’m okay with that.

0:34:52 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah, I’m okay with that. Because you’re like, breaking new ground. You’re doing something else well.

0:34:55 – (Travis Boatman): And they don’t have something to compare them to, right? There’s no comps, right? So if you’re doing something new, there’s nothing to compare to. They don’t even know what quality is yet because they’ve never seen it before. And so, you know, you, in that framework that I talk about, you have appeal or theme, you have mechanic, you have retention, and you have monetization. You have to sort of decide in those buckets how much risk you’re going to take. Where are you going to innovate? Can’t innovate on all of them, but you got to innovate somewhere and you got to take real innovation, risk and not to, like, throw stones at a lot of the teams and the folks that I talk to, but a lot of times you’ll talk to a team, they’re young teams, and like, oh, I have this cool idea. We’re going to do a unity game that’s this mechanic, that’s all the same stuff. They paint by numbers, everything else is the same.

0:35:34 – (Travis Boatman): And then their idea is what’s different, Some minor tweak.

0:35:36 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah.

0:35:37 – (Travis Boatman): You’re like, do you know, like, 50,000 games go live every month? Like, the sheer volume, your idea is not going to stand out. And so that’s why, you know, shake them out of apathy that the players, you need to do something truly unique. And I think I learned this from John Carmack way back in the day. But like, much of game innovation comes from technology innovation Right. Because if the technology is always the same and you have 50,000 games going live every month, you’re not going to beat them on ideas.

0:36:03 – (Travis Boatman): So if you have a new technology that enables a new idea, you will truly stand out because nobody else can do it. You’re the only one, if you have new technology, the only one who could do that idea. If it’s linked to the new technology.

0:36:15 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. Or be first. Right.

0:36:16 – (Travis Boatman): And then re.

0:36:17 – (Matt Widdoes): First take that soon after.

0:36:19 – (Travis Boatman): Then they chase you. Yeah. Particularly, you know, you got a lot of developers in Asia who chase. But. Yeah. So for us, we were thinking, where can we take real risk? And it has to be technically driven risk in our mind. And so we did a couple places, as I mentioned before, we tried to do a core game mechanic driven by new technology, AI technology. Couldn’t get that to work. But that was a technical risk that drove a new way of play. Right. And we got it close, but couldn’t quite crack that nut.

0:36:47 – (Travis Boatman): And the lesson I learned there is that game mechanics are a bit like the periodic table. They’re almost immutable. Like there’s a certain number of them. Not to say that they. You can’t make new ones, but boy, that’s a, that’s a tough one. And we, we certainly put the best money and people and minds against it. It’s hard to crack that. So. So I think mechanics are more immutable. They’re more like these things on the periodic table. There’s, you know, match threes, there’s shooters, there’s board games, there’s.

0:37:11 – (Matt Widdoes): Well, and, and then within a shooter or within a Match three, then there’s not a lot of room for nuance on mechanic on a mobile phone because you’re like, I got two thumbs and I got like this much space and like, what are we doing? Right. It’s kind of, there’s, it’s not. And, and if it’s unique, it’s not like in and of itself. Probably enough to like. It’s not something that consumers are like, I love that little thing. But it might, it might be some, some like. Yeah.

0:37:38 – (Travis Boatman): Anyways, well, and you have this other problem is you’re swimming upstream against being trained on a mechanic. So let’s say, for example, your point about like a third person shooter on mobile or something. Right. We definitely run into this. Like, even if you do have a cool mechanic, you have whatever half a billion people that are playing Pubg and Fortnite and Call of Duty Mobile, like, they don’t want to learn a new. They Just want to get in and play.

0:38:01 – (Matt Widdoes): They don’t want to walk with their right hand and shoot with their left hand. They’re like, yeah.

0:38:04 – (Travis Boatman): Or there’s like some new way of aiming. They’re like, no, I’ve put a thousand hours in Pubg. Or Call of Duty. Don’t make me learn something new. It’s kind of like. Yeah, it’s like Tesla when they, when they wanted to get rid of the signal stock. Right. And they wanted to put on the screen, everyone melted down. And it’s like, people are just so used to that.

0:38:21 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:38:21 – (Travis Boatman): So train. And so I think there’s. That’s also a problem in games. It’s not even. Even if you’re right, you still have now to train hundreds of millions of people and in free to play, you don’t get that time. You can’t train them because they bounce off your game in seconds. So you’re, you’re cooked. So that’s why I think we learned that lesson and we kind of knew it, but we, we thought we’re gonna again, bold and brave and trying to do new things. I, I think we, we learned that lesson the hard way again, that, that core mechanics are these sort of like, imagine almost like a periodic table. They’re sort of. They exist and you, you don’t really want to mess with them too much.

0:38:53 – (Travis Boatman): Oh, one thing I’ll comment on that, though, is they do change, but they typically change with interface. So if a new piece of hardware comes out with new information, then new mechanics are born out of interface.

0:39:02 – (Matt Widdoes): Absolutely. Yeah. You go to a Switch and you’re like, okay, I’ve got new things I can do here. Or. Yeah, or like the, the, the kind of like motion stuff with a Wii or whatever. It’s like, yep, all that can be really amazing stuff that you can do then because it’s there. You’re retraining everything. Right. There’s not, it’s not the same paradigm. Well, and you mentioned, you know, technology being so important.

0:39:21 – (Matt Widdoes): We’ve been talking with a lot of people in, in games for many years, and particularly recently, I’ve seen this kind of like, rise maybe about a year ago, of people being like, what’s AI going to mean to all this? And then like some kind of like, valley of disappointment or something where people are like, I don’t know, it’s not going to be a real thing. People. Everyone says it will, but it won’t. And now we’re starting to kind of actually, like, nope, there’s some actual real things happening Here we actually invested in something that’s a smaller company but great executive behind it and it’s totally different. It’s AI first kind of thing.

0:39:56 – (Matt Widdoes): I’m curious, what’s your opinion on that? And it is like a red Queen’s race where kind of everybody’s moving at the same speed and everyone’s got kind of equal access but you have the ability to be first. And yes, if for the most part, if you’re going to use AI to do something, somebody could fast follow on that like, you know, because it’s all fairly, you know, even playing field. But what are your personal thoughts on AI as it relates to gaming and the future of gaming and is it now or is it five years from now or is it kind of some blend of in between?

0:40:26 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, so. So we’re like hyper bullish on AI, so we use it in a lot of interesting ways. It’s like any new technology, it, you know, it impacts all parts of the business. The most obvious one, which I think we all know, which has the dark downside is it’s a super cost reduction. Yeah, Technology. Right. Allows you to create art quicker, more efficiently, allows you to write code quicker, more efficiently which has twofold, like either you can do things with less people or a smaller team can go after bigger games. Depending on whether you’re sort of, you’re looking at glass half full, glass half empty. We tend to sort of be a glass half or glass half empty, a glass half full type of team. Optimistic.

0:41:04 – (Travis Boatman): And so we want to use AI coding, for example, to punch above our weight class, build a bigger game with more features, go up the chain rather than a lot of teams are saying I can use AI to reduce my headcount to do things cheaper.

0:41:17 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, sure.

0:41:18 – (Travis Boatman): And you could do both. And there’s some mix of that. But like I think building bigger games, going after the bigger guys, punching above your weight class is a good use of AI. It’s essentially a margin play for the most part across, across your, your entire team again. Art, sound, music, video coding, product management, analysis, creative, hr, finance, like everything marketing impacts everything. Marketing. Yeah, you’re right, everything.

0:41:42 – (Travis Boatman): So that’s one part of it now. So that’s on that business operations side. But if you go to the creative side, how does it enable new forms of play? Whether it’s a thematic thing, whether it’s game mechanic, whether it’s retention bringing you back or whether it’s monetization. Those four buckets again, because that’s a framework I personally use. So for us, what we’re doing is we’re using AI in a way that basically auto localizes the game and creates content for the game for players all over the world.

0:42:14 – (Travis Boatman): And why do we think. And that you may say, well, that’s not really a different way of play. You’re just talking localization. But what it does is it allows players to experience a game in a way that outside of the United States, that most people don’t get to do. So you think most players, let’s say you talk about players and I’ll say Brazil, for example, like Brazilian players. Every new game that comes out is almost always in English. Right. And the art is almost always in New York. You know, New York falling down or the Golden Gate Bridge explodes. Or maybe it’s Paris or London. Right, right. But very rarely is it going to be Sao Paulo.

0:42:45 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, yeah, it’s never going to be that. Right. Or if you’re. You’re playing game from Indonesia, you know, it’s not going to be Jakarta. It’s not going to be. It’s always going to be the kind of where the teams typically are because they, they build what they know. And so what we realized is that these AI tools will allow us to create content for players for where they are.

0:43:04 – (Matt Widdoes): So. And I would, and I would imagine. And this probably, maybe I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m excited by the premise of it where it’s like, okay, I’m in the uae, I’m going to be seeing way more desert than what I would see in a Woodlands, you know, Western, you know, pack Northwest. Because I’m like, I don’t relate to that.

0:43:22 – (Travis Boatman): Right.

0:43:22 – (Matt Widdoes): And you don’t have to deal with the amount of art required to produce all that stuff, but.

0:43:30 – (Travis Boatman): Right.

0:43:30 – (Matt Widdoes): I mean, that’s like one element of it outside of not like to your point, not just localization and like the words on the screen, but it could go way, way more enriched than that.

0:43:39 – (Travis Boatman): That’s right. And so for us, because we’re relatively small team, you jumped like I think to the end state, which we’re not going to quite get to.

0:43:45 – (Matt Widdoes): But you’re right, the premise.

0:43:46 – (Travis Boatman): Right, you’re exactly right. And so we’re sort of like 2/3 of the way there. So we do content mostly text based. We do auto localization, mostly text based. We do some audio, so 11 labs audio. And of course I can do it in any language. We do some content related to what you did in the game. So if you did something in the game, the language that the character speaks to you is in your language. It’s in your. You’re on the maps. You’re playing in your home towns, your home locations.

0:44:11 – (Travis Boatman): All the content for that land is written by LLMs in your language with knowledge about where you’re from. So if you’re from, you know, again, Tokyo or Korea’s on my brain. It’s one of our partners is Korea is come to us. And so we do a lot of testing there. Like, if you install the game from Busan, the background of that hex and Busan will talk about Busan. It’ll be in Korean, and the narrator will speak to you in fluent Korean because it’s 11 labs Korean model.

0:44:36 – (Travis Boatman): And for Korean players, that’s amazing. Like, they don’t get to play games where they come in and it speaks them in their home language with their home content. And it. We think that’s a fun new way of playing. Because you want to fight for your home, then it’s your home.

0:44:49 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:44:49 – (Travis Boatman): It’s more personal. Yeah. It’s in your language.

0:44:52 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah. You’re not fighting for somewhere you’ve never been.

0:44:54 – (Travis Boatman): That’s right. Yeah. You’re a Korean player. Instead of fighting for Paris or New York City, you’re fighting for Seoul.

0:45:00 – (Matt Widdoes): With no emotional attachment. No, no. Yeah. No familiarity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re kind of having to fill those gaps in yourself to be like, all right, I’m going to pretend like I lived in this place versus, like.

0:45:10 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah.

0:45:11 – (Matt Widdoes): And if you go to the extreme version of it, from a map standpoint, some small town in the middle of nowhere in Korea where you pulled from Google Earth, and they’re like, whoa, that’s the actual gas station in my town. Like, I know that place. I’ve shopped at that place. And here it is rendered like, it’s almost creepy to think about where you’re like, why did they do my local gas station? You know what I mean? Like, it’s cool.

0:45:37 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. Yeah. We in one of our play tests that we did last year when we were first had the first kind of alpha version of this technology we were trying trialing. One of the players that came in was from Detroit. He lives outside of Detroit, and he’s an industrial painter. And he was raving about how cool this was. And so he’s like, you want to jump on the call with us? We’d love to talk to you. He’s like, yeah, sure. So we did a zoom call with him, and we chatted with him, and he was just random industrial painter.

0:46:01 – (Travis Boatman): He lived with his girlfriend all he had was a cell phone. He didn’t own a computer. He had one tv, but they had to share it. And he was blown away because when he read about the part, the town that he was fighting for, the models had found the local. I don’t know if it was an eatery or it was like a local warehouse or something, and it added it to the story. And when he read that, it blew his mind because he’s like, oh, my God, I’m in some small town outside of Detroit. Detroit.

0:46:27 – (Travis Boatman): This game knows the eatery that I go to and commented that it had been destroyed in the pie and there was guys holding it. He’s like, that’s down the street from me, right?

0:46:36 – (Matt Widdoes): That’s my place.

0:46:37 – (Travis Boatman): That’s my place. Yeah. And so we had real customers kind of give us that feedback. And so that’s what got us bullish on that. Now we haven’t sort of, again, we haven’t launched it yet, so we don’t know if that works at scale, but it’s. But the point I’m getting at is, you know, we believe that you want to use technology that’s totally new, that hasn’t existed before. Right. That separates you because given that technology has never existed before, this feature could never exist before. Therefore, it’s totally new to players.

0:47:03 – (Travis Boatman): And then it’s incumbent upon the studio. Can you make something quality and fun with it? And that’s the hard part. That’s the magic. But I think, you know, when I talk to other studios and, and I’m always trying to push in the direction of, like, hey, if you really want to stand out, you got to do something truly new. And it can’t just be some cool IP idea. It’s got to be driven from technology or new business model, which is generally driven by technology too. Whether it’s free to play or other forms of payment, you know, blockchain or whatever, those are technologies that enable new ways of play or new ways of monetizing new ways of distribution or whatever.

0:47:36 – (Travis Boatman): Anyway, kind of side rant, but. But I think we really think about it that way.

0:47:40 – (Matt Widdoes): Well, and, you know, I’m curious from your, you know, you’d mentioned you, you know, after you had this kind of break in la, staring at the sun and, and kind of realizing, you know, I kind of want to stay in games, I want to take a shot and do this for the first time. I think there’s many people that listen to this podcast, many people I know who are, you know, who are maybe super comfortable, cushy, Jobs making lots of money. They have an idea. They.

0:48:07 – (Matt Widdoes): It’s like that addiction to the, to the paycheck is like it’s always like another month or no. Yeah, maybe like after the end of the year when I get bonus. And then it’s like, oh, but there’s this big project. I can’t leave. And like, I just hear that so many times from people who would probably make very great entrepreneurs, but so many people are scared of taking that step, and very few people ever do.

0:48:27 – (Matt Widdoes): So. And I think it’s a really. I can speak from my own experience. It’s very rewarding and challenging and not, I guess, again, in my experience, not as tough, is not tougher than anything else. Like, you know what I mean? It’s hard to go to a new job anywhere. It’s like, you know, and it’s. But it’s. But you get this different experience. And so speaking of that, like, and. But there’s this huge unknown. So it’s very scary still. It’s like you’re almost like something might be wrong with you if you don’t. If you’re not afraid to start your own thing. You know what I mean? Like, you know, so I’m curious, like from your experience, because you decided, okay, I’m going to make that jump.

0:49:06 – (Matt Widdoes): Was there anything that surprised you? Was there any learning early that were you or like anything that was just different than you thought it would be? You know, as we just think of like other people who might not be in gaming, but who might have an idea that they’re really passionate about that they want to bring to the world. Yeah. Any thoughts of those early days or lessons or just things that were different than you had expected prior to kind of making the plunge?

0:49:29 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. There’s two things jumped to mind. So one was the thing that made me do the jump was I sort of thought to myself, when I’m old and gray and I’m retired and I look back on my life.

0:49:42 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:49:42 – (Travis Boatman): Well, I regret that I didn’t at least try.

0:49:45 – (Matt Widdoes): Yep.

0:49:46 – (Travis Boatman): So that’s what pushed me to do it. It really was. I thought if I’m old and I look back on my life and I go, man, I really wish I would have at least done it now. Not to say that there’s a lot of things that you could say like, oh, I wish I would have, you know, been a race car driver.

0:49:58 – (Matt Widdoes): Older.

0:49:58 – (Travis Boatman): I don’t care.

0:49:59 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah.

0:50:00 – (Travis Boatman): I don’t. I don’t have to be a race car driver, you know, or I don’t have to be, you know, whatever.

0:50:04 – (Matt Widdoes): But, but it was on your bucket list, essentially.

0:50:06 – (Travis Boatman): It was. Yeah, it was on my bucket list. And I, and I was like, would I regret this that you know, my whole life in video games and never made my game or never took my.

0:50:13 – (Matt Widdoes): Never attempt? Yeah, yeah.

0:50:14 – (Travis Boatman): Never even tried.

0:50:15 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:50:15 – (Travis Boatman): And even if you fail, you’re like.

0:50:17 – (Matt Widdoes): I tried it and I failed and it sucked and it was painful and I lost everything. But I know what happened, like that’s your worst case scenario essentially, versus I don’t know what could or couldn’t have happened. So. Yeah, I can relate to that for sure.

0:50:28 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, it’s that, you know, better to live in love and lost and never to love it at all.

0:50:32 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, that’s right.

0:50:33 – (Travis Boatman): Sort of that, you know. So I was like, I’m gonna try, you know. And then there was another entrepreneur who was an ex Zynga guy, kind of blank on his name. I hate blanking on people’s names in the middle of a podcast. But anyway, he started a company, you might remember him, he started a company like a parking company. It was like an uber parking company, super familiar.

0:50:49 – (Matt Widdoes): Where you can basically pre pay for your parking. Right?

0:50:52 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, you can be like, I’m going.

0:50:53 – (Matt Widdoes): To reserve a spot. I do that. I know him well.

0:50:57 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, yeah, he was ex Zynga guy. What was that company called? Anyway, he, he did a, either a podcast like this or a post or something. And it was before I had started and I read it and it really resonated with me and he said something like, I had no idea what I was doing. You know, I, he sort of, he sort of was very self deprecating and he said, but what I found was you just have to put one foot in front of the other.

0:51:20 – (Matt Widdoes): Yep.

0:51:21 – (Travis Boatman): You know, and there’s an old military. I think it’s a Navy SEAL phrase where they say something similar, where they say you can quit, just not today. And, and I always like that. Right. Because it gives you an out. It gives you the out to like the pain’s not going to last forever. I can quit tomorrow, but I’m not going to quit today. And then you just every day, one foot in front of the other. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I think one of the reasons why we’ve been able to survive and we’ve had some rough times at Carbonate, like it’s not been easy.

0:51:54 – (Travis Boatman): You know, we raised in some of the hardest environments. We’ve had deals go sideways, we’ve had all kinds of, you know, Tough employee things that have happened. But every day we just, we just sort of say, you know, we’re not going to quit today. We’re going to put one foot in front of the other. And then you’d be surprised how many teams just kind of quit. They just give up. And not to say that’s why they fail, but it’s definitely a component.

0:52:14 – (Travis Boatman): You know, you hear a lot of the teams that survive are like down to the last day. You know, they have one or, you know, you hear all these stories. You know, Elon with FedEx. Yeah, they’re always down. It’s like they just didn’t give up. And, and sometimes those companies go under no fault of their own. They. But the ones that survived are always the ones who continue to fight to the end. And I think that served us well in a lot of ways. And again, it’s. Some of it’s luck. You know, sometimes you, you’re at the right place at the right time sometimes, you know, you know, but, but, but staying alive long enough gives you more shots at being at the right place at the right time.

0:52:47 – (Matt Widdoes): That’s right. Yeah. There’s. There’s a few things that come to mind. There’s the. Actually on your. Well, one, the, the point about resilience and like how important that is in every seat within the org as well. Right. Because you need, you need everybody to be hyper resilient. And then this premise of like the longer used. Which is kind of silly when you hear it, but it’s like the longer you stay in.

0:53:11 – (Matt Widdoes): The longer you stay in business, the higher likelihood you have of it working out, which is like. Well, yeah, obviously, but it’s like. No, it’s, it’s like the surv. The value of survival is exponential. And, and there’s this like spirit value of survival that’s not just in the clear, obviously, like you’re still in business. That’s good. Which is interesting. And then I think. Or I’ve always thought was interesting. And then your point on the Navy SEAL stuff. I’ve also heard that the, the recommendation they give new recruits for Bud’s classes and all these other things. Their, their point is you just. And it’s kind of similar to your point that you made that you, you can quit, you just can’t quit today is like you just have to make it to the next meal.

0:53:56 – (Matt Widdoes): That’s it. So like, whatever you have to do to get from here to breakfast, do it. And then you’ll have a meal and then whatever you have to do to get to lunch and whatever you have to do to get to dinner, whatever you have to do, get to the next breakfast, you have to break your focus and days. And just like that left foot, right foot stuff, which is like, okay, we just got to get this done. Granted, there are exterior constraints. You can burn through cash, you can do all sorts of other stuff.

0:54:21 – (Matt Widdoes): But yeah, that super resonates. And honestly, in, in so many ways, at least in my experience, it’s not that much different than working at a big company in that respect because ultimately we have huge goals. We have to scale this to 500 million in, in revenue. We have to. It’s not happening. What are we going to do this quarter? And then you do it. Right. And so it’s no different except you have way more ownership and probably some more of the risk. Right. Depending on where you’re at.

0:54:48 – (Travis Boatman): Well, and also I think, you know, this is one that comes down to how much cash you have and all that stuff, you know, to, to put that step forward, you know, say, take that next step. A lot of times you’re doing terrible things. You know, whether you have to lay off somebody or you have to cancel a contract, you have to work super long or yeah, whatever, whatever. Those things are uncomfortable things. And those uncomfortable things are always constraints, Right? They’re always like, well, we don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough money, and, and the like. And I think that’s one of the reasons why, you know, obviously startups and entrepreneurs tend to, you know, have a different perspective than big companies because big companies tend to have the money, right? If they really want to, they could extend the schedule if they really want to, they could give you the money if they really want to. You know, but startups, they really can’t. So they have to take those hard decisions. They’re out of money. You know, they have to sadly let those people go. They have to raise money in a way that they maybe don’t want to. They have to give up more equity than maybe they want to. They maybe have to survive because it’s.

0:55:42 – (Matt Widdoes): Like, because it’s either worth zero or more than zero. It’s like binary on. And it can go to zero way faster than any large company can because they have just way more cushion. Right?

0:55:56 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. And so that’s a forcing function to keep, keep stepping, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Big companies, you kind of don’t have to necessarily. I mean, there are structures that try to do that. That’s why you have managers and all that stuff, which we all know. But, but yeah, the, the startup life is. It really forces you to take those hard decisions. And I think, I know lots of startups that have struggled or have failed, not always because of this reason, but sometimes they won’t do the hard thing.

0:56:18 – (Travis Boatman): They just won’t do it. They’ll be like, I believe it was funny. I remember maybe it was Mark who said this, maybe somebody else, but he was sort of saying like, you have to kill hope, which I always sort of smiled at because it was sort of a little bit of a dark thing. But a lot of times, you know, startups or small teams will get into this position where they hope something’s going to happen. Well, I hope the game’s a hit, or I hope we are raising our next round, or I, I hope customers like this, or I hope the economy changes or whatever.

0:56:44 – (Travis Boatman): And if you’re hoping for something you’re not operating against, like reality, you’re hoping to be sa. And so I can’t, I can’t remember who said that, but I always liked that because it was a little dark. And as I say, you have to have hope. As an entrepreneur, I’m an optimist, so there’s some of that there, but you can’t sort of hope for these things that you can’t control. So then if you operate, it’s.

0:57:01 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, I think the other framing of that is you have to make sure that everybody is singularly focused on the things they have control over and not. And that is not hope. Right. That is not the economy, that is not the next round of funding. Somebody in their work has some control over the next round of funding. But even then, you can’t get somebody to open their, like, they’re responsible for it. They may have no control over whether or not somebody actually opens their wallet or if the, you know, there’s five other competitors that are more attractive and all the money goes there. But, yeah, I, I can appreciate that. Yeah, any and any, like, not warnings, maybe not even advice, but like any, any. Maybe just words of wisdom generally, or things that you might pass on to somebody where they say, hey, I’m thinking about, I’m thinking about quitting my job where I have a lot of comfort and I’m going to boot trap, I’m going to try and raise. I’m going to try and go do this crazy thing. I’m kind of where you were at when you were on the beach, you know, any, any words of wisdom or any, like, warnings, you know, from ahead that just Say, hey, look out for this. Don’t do this. Or, or do this faster than you think you should or whatever. It might be any, any kind of key takeaways that you think might be universal.

0:58:13 – (Travis Boatman): Oh, man. It’s a tough one because games is, Is so different from other businesses. But I still think the framework of when you’re old and gray and you look back on your life, like, why did you do it? And I think having those fundamentals for whatever your business is, like, let’s say you do it and you’re like, I really want to make something new. Like, yeah, truly different. Let’s say that’s the I want to do. I want to break the mold. I want to do something great.

0:58:34 – (Travis Boatman): And then you, yeah, then you start the company and it’s. It’s easier for you to do something that’s not new, right? It’s easier for you to take a different path. But the reason you started the company was because you wanted to break the mold. You really want to do something different and to change the world and do something special. I think holding on to that super important with a caveat, which is that, like, even our history was, you know, we did that work for hire stuff for a couple of years because we wanted to get good before we could do the dream game.

0:59:01 – (Travis Boatman): But we never lost that goal in our mind. And I can’t remember which entrepreneur told me this, but he said entrepreneurial life is a bit like Tarzan swinging through the jungle. You know? You know, you’re trying to get across the jungle from point A to point B, but the vines that you grab are momentum or you swing. You just got to grab the next vine to keep swinging, and you’ll zigzag across the jungle grabbing this vine, this vine, this vine. But if you stop swinging on the vines, right, you’re going to fall down and get eaten by animals in the, in the, in the jungle.

0:59:29 – (Travis Boatman): And I always like that because you got to keep the momentum. You had to keep going to the next thing and grabbing the next vine. Maybe that next vine is of funding that you wanted. Maybe the next vine is a product you didn’t necessarily want to do. Maybe the next vine is. You have to lay off some team members or whatever that those things are. But in your mind, you’re making your way across the jungle to your destination, which is the reason why you started the company in the first place.

0:59:49 – (Matt Widdoes): I like that analogy because it also just speaks to the iteration, right, and the speed and the, not the, I mean, somewhat the time pressure, but just the sense of urgency that says like we can’t just hang around here. Like it’s all in pursuit of something and like which direction are we swinging and are we swinging? And if we’re not swinging, how do we get swinging again? Because otherwise we’re just.

1:00:12 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, you’re, you’re just like falling down.

1:00:14 – (Travis Boatman): This, you’re hanging there and you slide down the vine and the Jaguar gets you whatever the, whatever the right analogies. Yeah, I like that one because, because yeah, in the early days we’re, we’re taking deals and doing stuff to keep, to keep the momentum going. And then I think the goal of where we were going, we had this idea of this, this game in mind. And so all of those deals we were doing, we were building the building blocks of that game. The technology, the, the team, the capability, tools. We have a live ops platform.

1:00:42 – (Travis Boatman): We were building all those pieces through those zigzagging, vine grabbing deals. But all those pieces that we were building were in service of the ultimate goal, you know, and that’s this game and the capability of the studio. And now what’s fun is whether our game is super successful or not. Hopefully we think it’s super successful. We’ll see. Games is a hard business. I’m an optimist, but I’m also a realist.

1:01:06 – (Travis Boatman): We know it’s tough, but the capabilities of the team, when we go past this game to a game two, we take all that with us, all the capabilities, all the learning, all the platform, the AI, the game mechanics, the skills of the team, the capability of the team, all that stuff moves forward and then that means we’re even that much stronger and that much separating ourselves from quotes, the rest of the pack because we’ve survived this long and, and we’re building capability as we go. We’re like. And that’s one of the reasons why I think, when I think it’s great to take tools off the shelf and use them.

1:01:40 – (Travis Boatman): But if you’re not building a differentiation or capability as you go after five years, if you just have all the same tech that a brand new startup can have, what did you, how did you build value for the last five years? So imagine you’re a studio, you’ve worked for five years, you’ve shipped one or two games, you’ve worked really hard for all this time. And when it’s all said and done, a new team that starts tomorrow can match everything you have because they can just get same engine off the shelf.

1:02:06 – (Matt Widdoes): Or just copy paste six months.

1:02:08 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, you have no differentiation. So Building capability over time, you know, matters. It’s hard in games because technology moves so fast that sometimes you can bet on something you think you’re going to be building capability, and then some new technology kind of wipes it out. Like, yeah, yes, that happens, but you have to at least try.

1:02:26 – (Matt Widdoes): Well, and again, that’s. Otherwise, you’re just not swinging on the vine. So. And you take those learnings, you say, okay, well, given that new change in technology, these are the things we can keep. This is stuff that falls away or is outdated or no longer relevant, and therefore, this is how we’ll do it. I think one thing that comes to mind on that, I think relates to what you were talking about is.

1:02:45 – (Matt Widdoes): And it’s kind of in the same vein as the swing from the vines. I was told a long time ago, and it was as it relates to, like, your career. But I think the same would be true. And I’m just realizing it in a venture is that it doesn’t make sense in the moment. It only makes sense looking back. So you can have, like, some really big hiccup that seems like the worst thing that could have happened to you. And then that led to a layoff and that led to this other thing. And then you’re like, oh, but then that led to this and this and this. And you go back and you look back and you’re like, well, God, none of that would have happened if it weren’t for, like, these three really bad events that in the moment seemed awful and were, like, the worst thing that could have happened to the business.

1:03:25 – (Matt Widdoes): And we thought we were dead, but looking back, those had to have happened to get this thing to happen that actually led to our success, because whatever. And, like, so you have to kind of let go of the premise of, I know exactly what I’m doing all the time, and I am 99% confident in this move and that move, in this move. And it’s more just like, yeah, it’s. This is the. This is the jumping off the cliff, though, right? Where it’s like. And, yeah, you look back at all the vines and you’re like, yeah, that, like, actually all makes sense now. But in the moment, it felt like I could die every single time I put my hand out, which may have also been true.

1:03:58 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. And it goes back to that. Just being able to survive. Right. Because there’s a little bit of survivor sort of confirmation bias. Right. The companies that all survive can look back and say, we had all these bad experiences that we got through. All the companies that are dead. Can’t say that, right. They look back and they go, well that killed us. So I do this when I talk to people about seatbelts, that’s a similar thing. They go, oh, I grew up, we didn’t wear seatbelts. And I’m like, yeah, because you lived. Like you’re one of the people live, right. All the people that died by not wearing the seatbelt, they’re not here arguing for no seatbelts like they’re dead.

1:04:27 – (Matt Widdoes): So graveyards are filled with people that didn’t believe.

1:04:29 – (Travis Boatman): That’s right. I think there’s some truth in startups that same way, like there’s a survivor bias which is like all the startups that survived look back and have those experiences but what they all have in common is they, they didn’t give up. They, they got through it, they survived. Right? So you’re right, surviving and getting through those things is kind of everything. You got to find a way.

1:04:48 – (Matt Widdoes): I’m curious, one last kind of question for you. As we look forward and you think about gaming and all the evolutions we’ve had. Although when you think about gaming in like a five or ten year cycle, let’s think about five year cycle. I mean you can go back to Pong and you just see how those clips change every five years. But if you focus in on mobile where we’ve had far less cycles there, right. If you. In five year chunks. And I remember back in like, you know, probably like the last five year cycle I was really involved in, it’s like 2018, kind of maybe 2019, 2017 where there was this period where everybody, I remember, I think it was like 2017, everybody was 100, sure, AR was gonna like take over the world and it was all going to he AR and VR was going to have a role but.

1:05:34 – (Matt Widdoes): And VR might be really big, but AR, I mean it’s mobile, it’s here and Pokemon, come on Go has just been crushing it. And it’s like, who knows you’ll be able to change your oil and you know, all these other AR applications and it’s gone nowhere. It’s basically not even talked about anymore. Now we are obviously there’s. And there’s always some soup du jour but, but you know, there’s talks obviously AR or AI, there’s stuff like secondary platforms for mobile where we’re just getting off the app stores or maybe Apple, Google finally are like, all right, we’ll do like 10%, how about that?

1:06:09 – (Matt Widdoes): Because they’re forced to because of other, you know, Forces or players in the market. Here’s anything that you, you know, feel like is kind of. It doesn’t have to be a bold prediction. I don’t want to like put too much weight on it. But anything where you look at the market and you say, like, if I was shooting for like, where’s the intersection five years from now and where we’ll wake up? Or I click a button, I wake up in five years. What does mobile gaming look like? Do you have any.

1:06:32 – (Matt Widdoes): Do you think it’ll be more of the same? Do you think it’ll be drastically different? Any kind of specifics there that you think might be excited about?

1:06:38 – (Travis Boatman): No, it’s a good question. I think about this a lot. I think it looks from the hardware perspective, I think it looks very similar to what it does now because you’re just against the laws of physics at some level. You know, there’s only so many ways you can hold a device with your, with your ten fingers. You’re a human, you’re not going to change your hands. So there’s some of that limiting. There’s some limit to what fits in your pocket. There’s some limit to how much battery you can carry with you, to the physics of battery. Like, there’s just certain limitations. And I think phones have essentially nearly mastered that. Like, there’s not a lot else you can get what they get thinner and more powerful, you know, like faster network. Like they’re sort of there.

1:07:14 – (Travis Boatman): So I don’t think the hardware changes too much. And I think even if a new hardware show, let’s see the most amazing new ar, VR, whatever, even if it showed up today to make a built 2 billion of those pieces of hardware and distribute them all over the world, have the market switch over to them. Like how long it took mobile phones to use.

1:07:32 – (Matt Widdoes): You’re saying even just the production, not, not even if ignoring sales. Right. Somebody says, I want to produce 2 million of these, we’ll figure out sales later. Like that’s going to be difficult.

1:07:40 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, I mean the plants, the capability, the size, the scale distribution, all that stuff, like it’s just not going to happen. So there’s zero chance that a new hardware disrupts mobile in the next five years. There’s zero chance. And I’ll, you know, put, put my, put my life on that. That doesn’t mean something shows up and starts to begin the disruption process a couple years from now fully baked in your hand.

1:08:00 – (Matt Widdoes): Not going to happen.

1:08:01 – (Travis Boatman): Not at scale, not at like a billion people. Like there’s just, there’s no way. Now, that said, what I do think happens is with AI and the ability for. For content and tools, essentially to go to zero, we call it the stack. At least I call it the stack. But it’s like if you think of a customer who comes in through the App Store or whatever and they want to play a game, you know, they got to download the game. The game’s got, you know, Unity or Unreal Engine. You’ve got a back end. You have to go to the App Store. There’s monetization. There’s. There’s like a stack of technology that makes it very difficult for that customer to get the content from. The creative games have a relatively thick stack of technology and stuff in the middle. But what’s happening is that stack of technology is getting compressed and getting cheaper and freer and faster and easier to make.

1:08:45 – (Travis Boatman): And what that does is it has the byproduct of getting the customer really close to the content creator. So let me simplify it by saying this. It’s kind of like YouTube, right? Like, customers can go direct to. I’ll use, say, Joe Rogan as an example. They’re able to go direct to Joe Rogan, right? He can put an episode up, and it’s up in minutes.

1:09:04 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

1:09:05 – (Travis Boatman): He can react to the customers. If they don’t like his episode, he can do one tomorrow. And we’re doing a live podcast right now, right? Like, this is going to go direct to customers. And what’s interesting is as that turnaround cycle gets shorter and shorter and shorter, the customers get closer and closer to the content maker, the Joe Rogans, or you. And when that bond gets tighter and tighter, there’s a relationship there between the customer and the content.

1:09:27 – (Travis Boatman): Because there’s no technology stack in the middle. You can go direct to them or go live. There’s very, very little.

1:09:33 – (Matt Widdoes): Ask questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

1:09:35 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. So that relationship becomes. This is what LiveOps really is. LiveOps is a version of bringing that content closer to the customer. And so what happens is then you can. The creatives can super serve their customers and build that tight bond. And I think what that means is games are going to, over time, look more and more and more like, like YouTube podcasts or like live channels. And you may go like, what does he mean? Like, imagine you’re a guy and you’re like, oh, I’ve got a cool idea for a game that targets truckers in Oklahoma, and I’m gonna do new cool levels for them every Friday.

1:10:11 – (Matt Widdoes): Okay.

1:10:12 – (Travis Boatman): And you have the tools, whether it’s AI or engines or whatever that you can do that. And so you as the studio, the content creator, can make new content every Friday for that, that trucker guy and he’s going to come back to your game every Friday. And when you super serve that, you lock Those customers through LiveOps to that game content. And what I think is going to happen in technology is that’s going to collapse that stack and it’s going to become very easy for anybody to make a game and go right after a customer.

1:10:37 – (Matt Widdoes): Anybody? Anybody. Like anybody off the street. Anybody?

1:10:40 – (Travis Boatman): Yep, anybody. Anybody. And if you, for, for those guys in the audience, you know, I’m sure you’ve used Cursor, but like I use Cursor like, like all the time. And for those of you that use Cursor, there’s a cool tool called Cursor AI and you can basically, particularly if you hook a microphone up to it, you can just talk to the AI and you say, you could say to it like, I want you to Write Me an iOS app that is like Angry Birds meets whatever and I want these menus and it’ll like write the app for you. You can compile it and send it to the App Store and you don’t have to write a line of code. And that’s today.

1:11:09 – (Matt Widdoes): Is it good? I’ve never used it. I’ve heard of it before.

1:11:12 – (Travis Boatman): Check it out. It’s pretty, it’s pretty cool. It’s for small apps. It’s. It’s pretty amazing.

1:11:18 – (Matt Widdoes): Like a big app number generator app.

1:11:20 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, I mean I, I actually made my co founder and I ride one wheels from time to time and say.

1:11:26 – (Matt Widdoes): That one more time.

1:11:27 – (Travis Boatman): One wheels. They’re like electric skateboards.

1:11:29 – (Matt Widdoes): Oh sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:11:31 – (Travis Boatman): So he and I both are into one wheels and we ride them when we visit each other and, and go around. Very nerdy thing to ride one wheels.

1:11:38 – (Matt Widdoes): But anyway, you’re terrorizing the world.

1:11:40 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah. And so when I was experimenting with Cursor, I basically sat down one day with a microphone and sat at my desk and talked to Cursor and basically said, make me Angry Birds meets a one wheel writer. And I didn’t write a single line of code and it made the entire app. I was able to compile it and submit it to the App Store.

1:11:59 – (Matt Widdoes): And you didn’t edit any of it? You didn’t, you were just like tested it. And what about art?

1:12:05 – (Travis Boatman): Art I was pulling down from, you know, mid journey and I was making some pretty janky stuff. But yeah, I just handed it to told it. I want the sprite to move this and do this and you just talk to it it write the whole, wrote the whole thing. Look, was it a good game? No, it’s janky. But the point is you can five.

1:12:19 – (Matt Widdoes): Years, it’s gonna be way better, right? Yeah.

1:12:22 – (Travis Boatman): And they might right now it’s small apps but.

1:12:24 – (Matt Widdoes): And they might have died. They might not make it five years because they ran out of money and someone else is like, cool, I’ll take all that, I’ll take all these learnings and here’s mine that I built for. You know, who knows, Maybe they’ve raised 150 million for all I know know it sounds like the kind of thing you’d have 150 million for. But then somebody and they just die and somebody else is like, well I can redo what they did for 50 and then with this extra hundred I’ve got, we’re gonna make it like way better. So I think yeah, I agree. We’re very much at this infancy. I it’s still mind boggling to me that people are kind of like brushing off AI is like it’s not that big of a deal. It’s whatever. I’m like guys, you’re crazy. Like it sure, yeah, the app that you made kind of sucked that that took you almost no effort and like whatever.

1:13:13 – (Matt Widdoes): It’s not going to always be that way. Like it will get better. It’s the incentives are there financially, the technology is there. We’re already seeing incredible strides. I think from my perspective, from what ChatGPT even put out just a year ago and you’re like, oh, it’s demonstrably better. And like, like I, I saw this thing I thought was interesting. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but I, I, I, I guess I’ll share it.

1:13:35 – (Matt Widdoes): Which they were talking about how with these models internally they actually want it to be crazy 15 of the time. That’s why you get these like weird extra fingers or you get like these things that are essentially hallucinations where you’re like that doesn’t make any sense. None of that logic makes sense. And they have it structured in a way where because if they’re like it doesn’t make any mistakes, not learn it.

1:13:58 – (Matt Widdoes): And then if it’s, if it’s wrong, if it’s crazy more than 15 of the time it’s not helpful. So they’re actually like dialing it in and measuring it because and I think that’s such a great lesson for people who are like, especially for kids where it’s like, you have to fail. Like, if you’re not failing, you’ve got.

1:14:15 – (Travis Boatman): To be a little crazy and hallucinate something.

1:14:17 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah. It really is true, right? It’s like. And if you’re not, if you’re not like making pretty grave errors 15 of the time, you’re. You’re not learning very fast, right? And you gotta learn faster. So I just thought that was interesting. And so, yes, these things are messing up now because they’re learning. Like every time you see it mess up, it’s like it’s gonna learn from that over a very short period of time. So it’s exciting to see what will come. And I’ll have to go, I have to go use Cursor. Hopefully you have an affiliate link I can, I can, I can use.

1:14:48 – (Travis Boatman): You know, it’s funny. It’s, it’s. What’s so great about the Cursor stuff is it’s like everyone said like, like rappers are going to be useless rapping in AI. All the values in the AI. And it turns out it might be the opposite of that. Like, there’s obvious, of course it’d be value in the guys who own the AI. But it turns out the AIs are becoming more and more sort of alike and commoditized and the wrappers that sit on top of them that solve real problems like coding, you know, are becoming really valuable. I think there’s some crazy story, and I may get this wrong, but I think Cursor is responsible for like all of anthropic clods, traffic, or some crazy, like, because you can plug any LLM into Cursor to have it be the coding environment.

1:15:24 – (Travis Boatman): And I think most people use Anthropics Claude, and it writes better code. I guess for the most part it’s a default one. But apparently Cursor is sucking up all of their usage because so many people are writing code with it all over the world that it’s demanding so much from Anthropics Claude, which is pretty wild. And of course, they’re the customer, they’re the front end. So they’re disintermediating anthropic from the customers. Right? They’re like, oh, no, we’ll get you in the middle. Like you’ll use Cursor and some value in between.

1:15:54 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, it’s pretty wild. So who knows where this all goes? But, you know, again, I’m not prophesizing anything. I’m more talking about what’s happening today. Like, that’s right now. So, yeah, it’s crazy.

1:16:04 – (Matt Widdoes): Cool. Well, Travis, thank you so much for the time and the extra time today. Always a pleasure speaking with you, and I look forward to the next one and seeing you probably here shortly at gdc.

1:16:15 – (Travis Boatman): That’s right. Yeah. Thank you for having me here. And I just love talking about the business. It’s been my life. I’ve literally done nothing but video games my whole life. And you can tell I’m passionate about it, and I’m optimistic, and I love the space more than anything. And I’m going to be a lifer in this. I’m going to probably, hopefully when I die one day. And I said I had a great life making weird stuff and playing with cool technology because the technology keeps getting old. One last thing I’ll say is keep learning and keep using new technology, because when I started, you know, I started in the early Sega Genesis era, and if I had stayed with the Sega Genesis, I’d be out of this business.

1:16:43 – (Matt Widdoes): Or if I had stayed with Flash.

1:16:45 – (Travis Boatman): Yeah, anything. So you got to keep learning. It’s why, like, I. I’m always all over the, like, cursor, or I’m all over, like, the latest models, and I’m playing with all that stuff because you got it. You got to keep learning.

1:16:55 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. Yeah. And if you’re not everybody else, the best people are. Right. So I 100 agree with that and appreciate that. Cool. Well, thank you again, Travis. Great chatting with you, as always.

1:17:06 – (Travis Boatman): Awesome.