Aadil Mamujee

There has been a movement towards decentralization of content creation in many industries (Youtube for video, WordPress for writing, Podcasting for radio). These creators and storytellers now have the tools to deliver high quality experiences (without massive budgets) and have access to distribution platforms to find and grow audiences, which was very hard to do in the past. I think there will be a movement towards the decentralization of game development next.

The power of games is in the mechanics, the stories and the world. Even for large game studios, the visionary is usually one or two people (also true for Pixar Movies – see Creativity Inc for more). However, most of the cost and the time for games is spent in the ‘production phase’ for AAA studios which means many independent game makers cannot compete with large franchises.

If small, independent teams had access to free/cheap and high quality game engines, remix-able off the shelf content (entire rule based worlds + logic), asset libraries (textures, photogrammetry, user generated) and common game mechanic libraries (leaderboard, ELO) then their focus can be on the story, the world, the core gameplay.

Flexible, cross platform game engines like Unreal and Unity are not quite good enough yet to realize this vision although I think we will get there very soon. I spent some time in 2017 making a VR film entirely in Unity and was really impressed by the power and flexibility of the platform.

My mind was blown when I learned that The Mandalorian was made in a single room and all the worlds were created in Unreal and rendered in real time during filming on massive LED screens (short video below).

Game distribution platforms like Steam, Google and Apple App Stores (and communities like Discord) are going to become even more powerful and influential for creators to find players and engage with them (and each other). Franchises will still be very powerful, but independents will be able to access (niche) audiences much more easily than ever before. I think there will be a lot of pressure on app stores to reduce their take rate as 30% feels much too high. Epic and Unreal have the most developer friendly agreement I know (free to use and then 5% after $1M in sales)

I’m particularly excited for young people (even children) to be able to have access to the tools that will allow them to conceive, create and publish games the same way we publish a blog, podcast or youtube video today. Roblox is a great example of a game creation tool that embodies these principles (30M DAU, 7M Active Developers & $600M Revenue) and has exploded in popularity over the last few years, especially with young people. It still lacks the power of Unity and Lua is not that easy to learn for non-technical folks.

There is a lot of innovation on both creation and distribution that will continue to empower creators. Combined with the general trend in ‘no code development’, this will democratize game development which, I hope, will continue to become more mainstream. The game engines and distribution platforms are very well placed to both create and capture value over the next decade if they build for the long tail of creators.

Finally, more of our social lives are now lived online and combined with lasting effects of physical distancing (from Covid-19) this will accelerate the development of games where people can have meaningful, deeper interaction online. For example, I play Fortnite with my nephew in Paris (he’s 9), from America and it’s a really nice way for us to have fun together and hang out.

My family and friends live all over the world, and I’m rarely physically present with them. If we had more options to socialize over games (both simple as well as immersive) maybe even made by us together, that would be pretty dope.